relationships with females, who at times encourage him to find meaning in life outside comics—advice he ignores. The book highlights the overwhelmingly masculine homosociality of the collector's world, which Seth hints at with the name of the "Book Brothers" book store the character frequents. In one panel, the store sign is obscured so that only "Book Brothe" is visible, suggesting a "Book Brothel", and thus evoking the fetishism inherent in collecting. The intelligent Ruthie provides a love interest that nevertheless manages only to feed Seth's self-absorption: he is attracted to her physically and also to her bookishness, but she takes second place in his life to his obsession with Kalo, whose real name she discovers for him. Seth finds he does not know her well enough to give a satisfactory answer to Chester's "So what's she like?" Whenever she leads the conversation to her own thoughts and interests, Seth changes the subject. She ends by leaving him. In every event and conversation, the protagonist draws parallels to something he has read in comics. He has a withdrawn personality averse to risk-taking; he declares himself a "true adherent of avoidism", and quotes the character Linus from Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Peanuts: "No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from." His mother's home, which he calls "sealed in amber" as it never changes, provides him a safe berth from the ever-changing modern world. To comics scholar Bart Beaty, Kalo's giving up cartooning for familial duties provides the protagonist an opportunity to evaluate his own life: his failed romances, his obsessive collecting, and his relationship with his family—in particular his mother, whose home is an emotional safety zone for him. The Seth character declares, "I used to like to get inside cardboard boxes and close them up behind me. I enjoyed being in that safe, confined space. My mother's place is a lot like those boxes." Seth finds it hard to understand the fact that the cartoonist he admires could give up a cartooning career and still find happiness in the last twenty years of his life; he come to accept it after a visit to Kalo's mother in a nursing home. He discovers that his Kalo collection may always remain incomplete—though the family once had a scrapbook filled with Kalo's cartoons, they long ago threw it away. By the end of the story, Seth