|
CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
|
 PLEASE SUPPORT COMIC BOOK GALAXY BY VISITING OUR SPONSORS
Acme Novelty Library Report To Shareholders
Chris Ware is inarguably damaged with the same iconography. His is a psyche haunted by comics of yesteryear. Flipping through his sketchbook, or the excerpts of which were reprinted by Drawn And Quarterly as The Acme Novelty Datebook, shows the hold these images hold on his mind: Sluggo's head on a penis, about to enter Nancy's head as vagina. Or, alternately, there's the Quimby The Mouse strips where Mickey Mouse images are juxtaposed with R. Crumb thought processes. Or you could look at the Acme Novelty Library Report To Shareholders, the work I'm referring to when I say "the best comic of 2005." In these pages, God and Superman are conflated into a single, cold, indifferent, form.
For all the talk of being literary, and the approval Ware gets from the likes of Dave Eggers, Chris Ware is very much a child of comics. He's unable to get past the things; they possess him. God is envisioned as Superman, and this is what turns Superman into such a mean bastard. Ware is working with a lot of things, and comics imagery serves as the dominant language of metaphor. Still, there's more to the roots of Ware's depression than just comics. There's a great deal of neuroses on display here: Abandonment is a recurrent theme. So is a more general emotional distance, depression, trauma, and the inability to connect with other people. It all adds up to a mean old world, which most would call godless. I almost did, but no, there is a god here, drawn with the same acuity as any other human character, and possessed with the same problems. God hates you. He hates everyone. And everyone else? They also hate you. There is little love to be found, little that is pure. Comics are a device of escape for Ware's characters, as it's a coping technique the author understands, but because of this, there is no escape to be found for the reader.
There's a voice at work here, perfectly defined. It's a literary voice, yes, but with art attached too, and the art style mirrors the writing's content. And Ware is a cartoonist, he both writes and draws, and the style and substance are really inseparable, even in their creation: The drawings lead to the writing which in turn steers the drawing, etc. There's also, especially in the latest book, a comedic voice at work. It's funny-sad, yes, but it rarely seems secondary to the drama. The two are as linked as writing and drawing. Everything in Ware is linked, there's a whole package at work.
Not only is the voice well-developed in terms of how it refers to itself, it's delineated plainly and intelligently enough to be applied to anything Ware wants to speak about. And, unlike many of his contemporaries, Ware can talk about more than just himself. And in The Acme Novelty Library Report To Shareholders, he talks about quite a bit.
It is a book that kicks off with six pages of fake ads that act as social commentary. This is before God creates the universe. The book ends with all life on Earth dead, and all the stars extinguishing themselves. This is a collection that, for its posited slightness compared to Jimmy Corrigan, has the same scope as the Bible. Pages seven and eight are a two page glow-in-the-dark spread of the cosmos being created, with Ware's characters taking the form of constellations.
Following that, there's several pages of strips looking at the history of western civilization, with an emphasis on art creation and, latterly, criticism. Images of the same blank-faced artist's face reoccur throughout different backdrops. We are brought up to the world of modern art, which will later be brought up in more of Ware's advertisements. And then we are brought into the future, the same blank-faced man in a new setting, one that reoccurs throughout the book in the Tales Of Tomorrow strips.
With this, we're brought into the bulk of the book. Most of it is made up of strips with reoccurring characters and bits -- there's Big Tex, the cowboy with a cruel father, whose life we glimpse from early until death in a short series of strips, spread throughout. There's Rocket Sam, whose strips don't add up to a life story. Rocket Sam is closer to something purer in comics and cartoons, a reoccurring character who never develops, but has a shtick with variations. Rocket Sam's shtick finds him a close relative to much of Ware's themes: He creates robots for his own amusement, and then cruelly abandons them or hurts them. Or he drives around in robots on distant planets, killing and eating animals. Things of that sort.
This more cartoonish approach is the opposite of the more "literary" approach found in the Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel, but it's a major part of what Ware does. Frequently characters are presented under a single name, with sometimes shifting character designs, and varying characterization. The character of Quimby The Mouse, as presented in the book Quimby The Mouse, is subject to almost as many variations as there are strips in the book. Sometimes the character is a sad and nostalgic everyman, sometimes he has psychic powers, sometimes he has two heads, one of which is dying, sometimes he's an indifferent millionaire, and sometimes he speaks in a voice that is rather clearly Ware's own.
For Jimmy Corrigan, "the smartest kid on Earth" is mostly an ironic moniker bestowed upon a depressed man-child. But, at least once, in the now out-of-print Acme Novelty Library #1, it was meant almost in earnest, taking a kid genius and plopping him into a world of cartoon logic not dissimilar to what your mind might imagine, only crueler. Not everything from the Acme Novelty Library uncollected by the Jimmy Corrigan and Quimby The Mouse books is reprinted here. Issues 1, 3, and 10 are represented only by a few ads, with all of the comics content left unreprinted.
This leads to a certain consistency: There's only one Jimmy Corrigan strip here, and it's the same Jimmy we know and pity from the Pantheon collection. Quimby The Mouse, too, is only represented by a few strips, but these are all similar in both tone and art style, presenting some internal consistency other than "these are comics about a character named Quimby The Mouse," as one would find in the Quimby The Mouse collection.
Nonetheless, there are variations. Or, at least, there's one: A frequently occurring strip in the Acme Novelty Library Report To Stockholders is called Tales Of Tomorrow, depicting a certain blank-faced individual in a world of consumer technology. Also frequently appearing are the strips documenting the lives of Rusty Brown and Chalky White. There's a one-panel gag, entitled Tales Of Tomorrow starring Rusty Brown and Chalky White, a continuity-busting thing presenting the two foraging a bombed out landscape, one caused by the politics of the world in which we currently live, scavenging for collectibles. This one-off gag lends a greater consistency to the book as a whole, bringing together not only those reoccuring bits, but also the brief glimpses at political commentary glimpsed in the ads.
And there's a further unity: The Rusty Brown and Chalky White characters are used in the advertisements found at the beginning of the book, prior to creation.
I feel like all I'm doing is cataloging the book's content, but I'm trying to get at how dense the book is. This book is probably the purest evocation of artistic voice I've ever found documented in one place. The switching from strip to strip brings to mind a stand-up comedian, riffing on sex, politics, relationships and pop culture, only it's much more high-minded and much bleaker.
This wins out for me as being the most ranging and accessible piece of Ware work. I feel like there's more notes being hit than in Jimmy Corrigan, although the cumulative emotional effect might be lesser here, with all the intercutting of strips, and the abundance of punchlines, which, sad as they are, provide clear endings. There are more strips that follow those endings, but this is more of a collection of self-contained singles than a novel would be. That said, there is an effect that comes from reading all these things, powered by reoccurring characters.
The characters that show up the most are Rusty Brown and Chalky White, who meet as children and grow up collectors of pop culture ephemera. I don't want to detail everything they do, every variance in the language of comics that Ware employs to express their lives and friendship in dense manner. I want to talk about the strips in which they are obstructed by images of nature, looming in the foreground with beauty, while they go on with their own obsessions in the background. I also want to mention that life progresses for these characters much as it does for Big Tex, and that Rusty Brown, the focus of Ware's next long-form and literary work, ends up sad and alone while Chalky gets married and has a daughter.
In the last pages of the book, Ware stems from the male collectors and shut-in depressives to another alt-comix standby: The angry punk rock teenage girl, as depicted by Chalky's daughter, Brittany. The attitude stays the same: Ware knows teenage rage like he knows depression, and yet, he seems opposed. The character, Brittany White, hates her father, Chalky White. Chalky's been characterized throughout the book, chronicling his childhood, as being hated, and is now a married conservative Christian. Brittany's opposed to such things, and Ware is opposed to the political beliefs such a character possesses. But Ware sees through the false-binary, and Brittany isn't a character we're supposed to agree with. She's a self-absorbed Randian, whose hatred for her father places her as just the latest in a string of people.
Oh, satire.
Ware has a singular approach for the characterization of all of his reoccurring characters. It's this combination of pity, scorn, and empathy. Ware knows and relates to elements of Rusty Brown, Chalky White, Brittany White, and Jimmy Corrigan. They are frequently having cruel things happen to them, and they are frequently guilty of their own cruelty. If they're not cruel, they have other flaws. Still, the reader empathizes with these characters, even as he sees their flaws, which they might also see in themselves. This adds up, in many ways, to a corrective.
Ware wants a better world. He wants people to care about each other. People caring about each other is a rare thing in Ware's work, and can really only be found in the more autobiographical Quimby The Mouse strips, the ones not reprinted here.
There's just so much sympathy here, couched in all self-deprecation and dark humor. I even feel there's something to the book's joint dedication, to Chip Kidd and Ivan Brunetti, found buried in the middle of the book, in the thick of its contents. Chip Kidd works for Pantheon, and led to this book's publication, but he's also a world-renowned designer, and Ware's got the design instincts to appreciate such things. Ivan Brunetti is a cartoonist, and a friend of Ware's. However, Brunetti's work is quite different from Ware's. Brunetti's work is self-absorbed and vulgar, self-eviscerating, all too aware of his faults, but at the same time, a noted misogynist who occasionally depicts himself ripping off and raping someone's head. In a letter published in Brunetti's Schizo, Ware says something along the lines of "reading your work made me feel like I'm not such a bad guy, after all." I feel this dedication to someone so honest about their flaws speaks volumes as to the nature of the empathy of this book. Brunetti wallows in id, and Ware outstretches a hand, because dude's not without his strong points as well.
Ware presents a loveless fictional world so that we as readers might create a nicer real one. And there's no dividing line between the political gestures of caring and those found in interpersonal interaction.
I have thought, in the past, that if I were ever to meet Chris Ware, I would give him a hug, as such a gesture seems like something he needs. But not necessarily because he's depressed. That theoretical gesture, to me, seems like it would express a greater understanding of his work and what he's trying to do than any essay I might attempt to write.
|
It's funny-sad that both the best and the worst comics of 2005 are guilty of the same thing. The worst comics of 2005, consensus would find, are these mainstream superhero comics made by arrested adolescents, who have iconography implanted in their brains that hasn't kept up with their growing view of the real world. Now, in an attempt to present more mature art to their sad and damaged brethren, they dish out the iconography in a form perverted to make sense to seemingly adult sensibilities.