"One of my old girlfriends is getting married today… We went out together for five years… Now the whole world is different and neither of us plays the same records any more…" muses the title character of Glenn Dakin's new comics anthology, in a strip from 1985. Then, after an implied pause for thought, he adds, "Except me—and quite a lot." That casual reversal could pass for a non sequitur or a simple, contrary gag, if it didn't so vividly sum up the whimsical nostalgia and wry, subdued wit that permeates the book. Abe—Wrong For All The Right Reasons is the first collection of Dakin's work in more than a decade, and its appearance immediately prompts the question of what took so long. As part of a loose crowd of underground, independent, and/or self-published British comics writers (including From Hell illustrator Eddie Campbell, who provides Abe's introduction), Dakin drew comics for a wide variety of small-press publications, but his attention returned time after time to a malcontent dreamer named Abraham Rat. Abe—Wrong For All The Right Reasons collects all the Abe Rat stories, which span a roughly decade-long period that began in 1984. In the humorous early strips, Abe is also Captain Oblivion, a superhero so generic that he easily stands in as a metaphor for comic-strip heroes in general. Abe makes a characteristically low-key hero, philosophically pondering his actions before and after coming to the rescue, and frequently concluding that his potential beneficiaries are better off unrescued. But as the book progresses, Abe becomes a conduit for nakedly autobiographical anecdotes, commentaries, and travelogues. In the early Abe strips, Dakin hovers stylistically midway between Jules Feiffer and James Thurber, only at half the size, half the story speed, and twice the graphic density. His claustrophobic scrawls and loose, flowing lines give his characters a minor sense of tension and motion without action, making the ellipses between panels as emotive as the frequent ellipses in the text. As the collection progresses, Dakin's art and text both loosen up and broaden, sometimes to the edge of meaninglessness: His expressionistic blobs and free verse are not entirely compelling, and lack the direction of his fantasy tales. But the linear, plot-oriented early strips solidly establish a character whose yearning, sentimental, slightly insecure voice anchors the stream-of-consciousness prose poems that follow. In both cases, Dakin frequently mixes insight, lyricism, and clever wordplay in a wholly touching way. Abe took 10 years to produce, and nearly as long to appear in collected form, but its contents are sweet, thoughtful, and timeless.