Wilson always speaks his mind, whether people want to hear it or not. He’s been divorced for a decade, has no children and few friends, but considers himself a “people person” even if most people who speak to him in the street are really only interested in his adorable dog Pepper. Perpetually unemployed and prone to wild swings between sunny optimism and bitter dismay, he is what Clowes describes as a California left-wing (and occasionally libertarian) version of the angry white man that propelled Donald Trump to the presidency.

It’s the sort of unexpected, blunt, and devious answer you might expect from Wilson, the 40-something accidental misanthrope at the center of Clowes’s 2010 book and director Craig Johnson’s movie adaptation. “Because I couldn’t look my own name up on Google without seeing ‘Shia LaBeouf, Shia Labeouf!’”

“I felt weird about that,” Clowes admitted. LaBeouf seemed to undergo some kind of breakdown in the months that followed, which Clowes followed, or at least learned about, from afar. “He’d be like, ‘Hey dude, I love you!’ I don’t want to be his psychiatrist, it wasn’t my problem.” “He tried to, but I was like, ‘I don’t want to have some dude sweet talk me,’” Clowes, who has been drawing comics for 30 years now, explained. It didn’t exactly show traditional contrition, but more privately, Clowes said, LaBeouf did reach out to him. And when he was caught, the actor launched into a long series of public meta stunts meant to convey his regret, including an art installation in Los Angeles, and releasing other plagiarized statements. LaBeouf had just straight up stolen his work. “And I was like, What the fuck? I wrote back and was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He sent me the link and I watched it and was like, ‘Did I write this? Did I have an agreement with him that I don’t remember?’” “That was a day where I had all this stuff to do, and I woke up and early in the morning I had this email from a friend of mine who said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you did that LaBeouf thing,’” Clowes recalled, laughing. At the time, I received a statement from Clowes’s publisher, so an interview this weekend pegged to his new movie Wilson was my first chance to speak with the author/artist about the incident. Damiano” into a short film and passed it off as his own original idea, a baffling decision that triggered a long sequence of confusion and public intrigue. LaBeouf had turned the comic story “Justin M. Just over three years ago, my friend Matt and I caught Shia LaBeouf plagiarizing the work of Eisner award-winning comics author Daniel Clowes.

Wilson by daniel clowes