talks of his obsession with the past—his own childhood and earlier eras—either through dialogue with friends or in captions as he wanders the streets. Seth's interpersonal encounters tend to be one-sided, revealing his reactions to and judgments of those around him. Critic Dominick Grace interprets the fictional Seth as an unreliable narrator whose comments often undercut his own imaginings of the past. Seth navigates the city on foot—cars, bicycles, and public transportation rarely even appear–as he talks with friends or rifles through used book shops. For literary theorist Barbara Postema, the character fits the archetype of Walter Benjamin's flâneur—the wandering urban pedestrian out of touch with his own time and obsessed with the past. Seth pines for a past not his own and obsessively collects consumer items from earlier in the 20th century. His focus is primarily on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, a time he feels particularly "Canadian". He goes as far as to wear an old-fashioned overcoat and broad-rimmed hat, for which passing teenagers taunt him, saying he looks like Clark Kent or Dick Tracy. He declares to Chester: "I do think life was simpler then ... easier for people to find personal happiness." Brown disagrees, saying, "I think it's always been difficult for people to be happy." Seth dreads the future and allows his memories of childhood to dominate his thoughts, but recognizes and criticizes his own obsessions: "There's something in the decay of old things that provokes an evocative sadness for the vanished past. If those buildings were perfectly preserved it wouldn't be the same." Despite this consciousness, he continues to pursue his collecting. Photographs recur as a motif, such as family portraits in Kalo's scrapbooks or wedding shots in a diner on which the focus dwells. Another motif is an old apartment building, the image of which appears at moments when Seth questions his search for Kalo. For Postema, Kalo's neglected work is similarly "unpreserved, unnoticed, and left to decay". A male-centred viewpoint dominated English-language comic books throughout the 20th century and, with few exceptions, placed women in subordinate roles as victims, helpers, or sex objects. To academic Katie Mullins, Seth's narrative viewpoint follows from this tradition, though the book superficially has little in common with the masculine adventuring generally associated with mainstream comic books. The author's female characters play peripheral roles, and the character's obsessive collecting and self-absorption alienate him from