The inimitable Chris Ware

The author of "Jimmy Corrigan" explores a fallen world in this new installment of breathtakingly intricate comic strips.

By Douglas Wolk

Read more: Books, Douglas Wolk, Comics, graphic novels, Reviews, Book reviews

Sept. 2, 2005 | F.C. Ware draws as if he would instantly die if anyone accused him of cutting corners. His first graphic novel, 2000's "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth" -- published under the name Chris Ware, which he still uses for his weekly strip in the Chicago Reader -- was a brilliant and exhausting book: a history of a family's pathetic fantasies and painful realities, rendered in a style whose maniacally precise, composed, geometrical frostiness counterbalanced the story's emotional brutality. He followed it up with "Quimby the Mouse," a collection of earlier strips, and "The Acme Novelty Datebook," a hefty selection from his remarkable sketchbook. In the meantime, he's been serializing two extended narratives, "Rusty Brown" and "Building Stories," over the past few years.

Ware's new book, which bears the unwieldy title "The Acme Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book," isn't quite his long-awaited second graphic novel either. Instead, as Ware explains in an "Apology and Souvenir Comic 'Strip'" on the inside of the paper band wrapped around the "Final Report's" cover, it's mostly a set of one-page "gag strips" he's done as a diversion from his longer stories. "When I drew these strips," he writes, "I was still so deeply dubious of my ability to do 'emotionally resonant' comics that I had to occasionally return to a 'joke' format just so I was able to find the confidence to keep going in a more 'serious' direction."

The apology's a little disingenuous, given the gobsmacking level of craft on display here. Start with the cover: a gilt-embossed design that features "the world's smallest comic strip," 110 tiny panels about love, death and heartbreak, printed not on the front or back cover -- or even the spine -- but the edge of the hard cover itself. Turn the first few pages -- past a series of ingeniously vicious parodies of old comic books' ads for Grit and Charles Atlas -- and you'll hit a spectacular two-page map of the heavens and the traditional constellations, à la Ware. View it in the dark, and it becomes an entirely different celestial map -- the constellations this time are Ware's characters, printed in glow-in-the-dark ink. That's followed by a brief history of visual art (presented as a series of tiny newspaper-style comic strips), then another grand two-page scheme described as "Our Blueprint of the Universe, as Seen through its Four Physical Types, Principles, and the Opposing Forces of Nature."

It's staggering -- the sort of work that would singlehandedly establish another artist's career -- and Ware's only started showing off. The centerpiece of "The Acme Novelty Library" is a long, wordless story about the pudgy, masked, omnipotent character that Ware sometimes calls "God" or "Superman" in his comics. (He's not named here, and the story isn't mentioned in the otherwise detailed table of contents.) It occupies 12 pages in the middle of the book, and fragments of other pages. Near the story's end, the character is in a prison cell, scraping little drawings onto the cinder blocks with a nail. Then Ware pulls back, so we can see hundreds of stick figures on the wall. If you're willing to stare at the panel hard and long enough to risk eye damage, you'll see that he's drawn a microscopic stick-figure version of the entire story up to that point. We are not worthy.

The recurring one-page comic strips that fill most of the rest of the book are more or less in the manner of Sunday color newspaper comics, back in the days when each strip occupied an entire tabloid page. Most of them have a simple, cruel premise. "Big Tex" is a dimwitted comedy cowboy character whose father despises and tortures him; in "Tales of Tomorrow," a pudgy man of the future, wearing a '50s-style space outfit, spends his life alone in front of a TV set that keeps trying to sell him things, as he sucks food from a tube in the wall.

The nastiest of Ware's gibes are reserved for his "Rusty Brown and Chalky White" strips -- possibly outtakes from the forthcoming graphic novel. Rusty and Chalky are childhood friends, social outcasts who bond over collectibles and action figures (a world with which Ware seems painfully familiar). As they grow older, Rusty makes collecting his life, to the exclusion of human contact and hygiene; Chalky gets married, has a daughter who grows to despise him, drifts into simple-minded Christianity, and mostly puts aside the childish things that his old friend still fanatically covets. In a typical sequence, Rusty, at a flea market, buys the "Colonial Warrior in VG or VG+ condition with cloth vest" that Chalky's been looking for, briefly fantasizes about the woman who sells it to him, hears her say that her boyfriend "found it in a dumpster last week," and goes outside and stomps on it: "FUCK YOU! You can't have it! I won't let you have it! Fuck YOU Chalky White!"

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