According to underground historian Patrick Rosenkranz, Green represents a break with past convention by being "the first to openly render his personal demons and emotional conflicts within the confines of a comic". Green denied credit, calling confessional autobiography "a "fait accompli", a low fruit ripe for the plucking", examples of which abounded in literary works he had read by James Joyce, James T. Farrell, and Philip Roth. He has accepted credit for "anticipat the groundswell in literature about obsessive compulsive disorder by almost two decades", for which he knew of no precedent. Chute sees major themes of isolation and coping with OCD recurring in autobiographical works such as Howard Cruse's "Stuck Rubber Baby" (1995) and Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home" (2006). Hatfield sees echoes of Green's unrestrained approach to dealing with a mental condition in Madison Clell's "Cuckoo" (2002)—about Clell's dissociative identity disorder—and in David B.'s "Epileptic" (2003).