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Chris Ware, Acme Comics #15 – "The Big Book of Jokes Vol. II"

Fantagraphics

Chris Dahlen

Most of Chris Ware's work is marked by sadness. His comics show social failure, parental abandonment, broken relationships, and the wasting of entire lives. He finds the most normal fears of kids and adults and digs out all of the pain. Yet instead of delivering this content like a punch to the gut, Ware gives us one of the most gorgeous, enjoyable styles of modern cartooning: the stunning illustration and exacting sense of craftsmanship, the soft, pudgy men and zany mice that populate his strips, and the innovative narrative techniques that can fit a span of years into a set of panels or explain the origin of a house, a person, or a family through elegant systems of boxes and arrows.

Ware's style—awesome yet immediately likeable, familiar and retro but personal and unique—wins instant converts. The independence of his work makes it easy to forget that if he sold out, he could become as rich and popular as Gary Larson or the estate of Keith Haring. However, the refinement can distance the reader from the melancholy topics—at least, compared to many alternative comics. (Compare Ware's passive Jimmy Corrigan to the explosive, tantrum-prone characters in Terry Brooks' Strangers in Paradise.)

In an interview with Ware, Andrea Juno suggested a comparison to one of Ware's biggest passions, ragtime music. Formal and refined, the best music conveyed several emotions in a single piece. Casual listeners hear ragtime piano as background music—it has a nice pace, and there are no lyrics—but listened to attentively, a piece like Scott Joplin's "Bethena" is both upbeat and sad without a single exaggerated or obvious gesture. Ware's work has the same goal: by demanding attention and participation, it reveals more than it could by being blunt, and the reaction comes entirely from the reader.

This pair of panels is like an introductory seminar on cartooning

The latest issue of Chris Ware's comic book, Acme Comics, is titled "The Big Book of Jokes Vol. II." The comic collects some of the "gag" and one-off stories from Ware's weekly newspaper strip, printing them in a shelf-busting 11x18 issue. With characters like Big Tex the virgin cowboy, Rocket Sam, Quimby the Mouse, and loser toy collector Rusty Brown, these quicker, punchier works have (comparatively) simple layouts and premises—most of them even have punchlines. This is Ware's fifteenth comic book and it may be the best, or at least the most powerful. Ware's stories have never been more acute or shown a better mix of emotions.

In the last collection of Ware's gag strips (1996's "Big Book of Jokes Vol. I"), Ware tended to separate the funny from the sad. The Big Tex strips were depressing as hell: Tex's dad abandons him, tricks him, and tries to kill him, and then finally dies on him. Facing those were the Rocket Sam strips, which had plenty of cheap laughs—like the one where Rocket Sam travels across a barren alien planet just to spraypaint the words "FUCK" and "PUSSY" on a cave wall. That's comedy!

Quimby the Mouse

In the new book, the reader has to decide when to laugh. In the "Tales of Tomorrow" stories, a man of the future wanders through a grey, repetitive city by himself, buying things that promise to make him happy and don't. Ware uses bland purples and repetitive drawings to make the future look boring and claustrophobic: he blunts his own jokes by making the setting oppressive. The same applies to "Quimby the Mouse," an old Ware character who's wasting his life alone in the suburbs. In one story, Quimby rents some movies that he's already watched, because "at least I know I'll like them." In the next panel, we jump ahead fifty years and see him lying in a retirement home, crying for a nurse. See? Punchline.

Not even the worst of the Rusty Brown images in this comic

Then there's Rusty Brown, toy collector, who gets the strongest and most disturbing storyline. "Jokes Vol. II" follows Rusty through his adulthood. He grows up and gets old without moving out of his mom's house or learning to drive. He hangs out with, and cheats and belittles, fellow collector and loser Chucky White. The first few strips are pretty funny—"let's laugh at the fat guy who likes action figures"—and many readers will sympathize as they remember eating lunch alone at school, or hating someone for being the only person who'll hang out with you. But the story gets darker: Rusty descends into madness and decrepitude, like a "Rake's Progress" for nerds. The end of the story is bone-chilling.

No matter how heavy the content gets, Ware keeps an apparent lightness of touch to the drawings. The first few "Rusty Brown" and "Quimby" strips are full of jokes and digs at a life that Ware seemingly knows too well: Ware pokes fun at Rusty's obsessive collecting but demonstrates a complete knowledge of collectors' vocabulary, habits, and priorities. There are also touching moments—the kind that are earned, and aren't schlocky. But more than anything, this comic lays out Ware's anxieties more acutely than ever before. It's clear that he's disturbed by this material—memories of wasting time watching TV, disgust with a world that force-feeds us synthetic experiences, and probably fear of ending up as disturbed and pathetic as Rusty Brown. Ware gives us a chance to feel the same way: readers will find this comic beautiful, sad, funny, cruel and haunting—depending on what they bring to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Related resources

The Fantagraphics web site is Chris Ware's official presence on the web.

Listen to Ware on This American Life (scroll down to February 23, 2001).

Ware expands into merchandising.

The Onion A.V. Club ran a pretty good interview with Ware. But if that's not enough, check out Andrea Juno's Dangerous Drawings, and issue #200 of Comics Journal, which includes great interviews with both Ware and Charles Schulz.

Get in the mood by listening to some ragtime: a not-bad rendition of Scott Joplin's "Bethana".