CHRIS WARE
To say that cartoonist Chris Ware has changed the way we read comic books today would be grossly underplaying it.
Inspired by the european clear line artists of the Nineteen Thirties and Forties; Ware takes the american classical newspaper strip narrative and turns it on it’s head.
Literally.
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself spiralling his books around; twisting them this way and that, to make some sense of his intricate, close-packed panel structures and wonderfully complex narratives, that don’t always tend to fall in chronological order.
“Panels will unfold into these weird loops; you can’t really tell where a story begins and ends,” said Bill Wrigley, a Columbia University Art History student who stood in line for nearly an hour at last years book signing of ‘Jimmy Corrigan:The Smartest Kid On Earth’ in which Ware outlines the tale of a luckless everyman, who works in a boxed-in cubicle and lives a boxed-in life.
It looks (with its beautiful embossed faux leather cover) like an antiquated family album; and in a way, it sort of is (albeit a fictional one). Inside are 380 pages of hand-drawn picture book images (some of which take him many hours to create) of a cartoon portrait of four generations of the fictional Corrigan family.
Studying the book is like finding hundreds of bygone advertising illustrations from Holland, placed in arbitrary piles that the artist encourages us, the reader to make sense of.
And this is what makes Ware’s work so engaging. He has become particularly noted for his ‘Miniature Workings’; Do-It-Yourself kits amalgamated in his comics, like his brilliant ‘The Acme Comic Library’, in which we are invited to construct and assemble a cardbord bookshelf and the books to put in it.
In this comic, we meet ‘Rusty Brown’ another off-beat kid who keeps a Super-girl doll in his school desk and ‘Chalky White’ the new kid, who commandeers Rusty’s desk. Much to Rusty’s horror. The storytelling may not be for everyone, but anyone with a sense of uninhibited curiosity or a slightly crooked sense of humour should give these a go.
A growing multitude of Acme enthusiasts are obsessed with these stylish and fascinating little comic book kits and I for one can totally see why.
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