Ware has proven himself to be a tactical cartoonist, perhaps the most doggedly innovative practitioner since funnies froze into form. Each volume in the carefully and lavishly appointed Library represents a supremely rational invention or appropriation of forms. As excruciatingly apt crystallisations, they suggest what Joseph Cornell's exquisite boxes might have looked like had they intended to tell stories. Individual issue subvert nostalgia (childhood toys and comic book ads), quaint neutral backdrops (isolated, beautifully-drawn panels and scenes), and appropriate innocent visual formats and languages (cartoonish characters and animation-like sequences). They reveal a sensitivity to period architecture and to the role of music as catalyst. Invariably they co-opt cheery design elements, darken the claire-ligne, and generally shutter up any ray of hope of optimism. Each is a singular provocative, mordantly humorous, utterly wrenching read, cunningly executed, as cleanly and irrefutably rendered as an electrician's blue-print.
Ware's exploration of the medium's properties spans the visual spectrum and reconstructs its borders. At an iconic level - drawing's atomic scale - cartoon quanta acquire abstracted strangeness and charm. At eye level, mechanical manipulations produce amazing narrative rebuses. At the relatively "cosmic" scale, Ware fashions whole universes in uniquely propertied packaged where alternative laws of narrative physics operate side by side with traditional artistic flourishes. "It's like reading in three dimensions", said Journal critic Andrew Arnold (TCJ #200). No need to be so Newtonian. With topographical warping and expanded horizons, Ware now has us traversing the fourth dimension of visual time.
The series format-busting instalments depict thematic stumbles through childish nightmare (where eyeballs repeatedly pop from heads), psychologically resonant images (abandoned homes are returned to and, locked, broken into), modern woes of alienation and emotional paralysis (being encased in a crude, bulky robotic shell), and fears that defy common taxonomy (a suicidal pistol shot to the head that has little effect). A slate of significant and intermittent characters dream their pathetic fantasies, embody their perverse and ruinous romanticism, and play out their sad repertoire of conditioned responses accordingly. "Characters grind dryly off each other, sliding into blank, isolated holes of disappointment and loss... The comics proceed without the usual cushioning of denial and self-delusions which allow most human beings to continue living without going mad." (Scott Gilbert, TCJ #174)
The most lovingly ground down and uncushioned is Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth. His extended story has taken on new dimensions of generational misery, particularly the impossibility of compensating for a lack of parental affection and oversight. His airless and ineluctable domestic tortures, blunt spiritual trauma, and bleak social terrain are so ghastly that Aeschylus would have shied from levelling them on the House of Atreus.
Remarkable talents force the rest of us - especially critics - to keep up. Some have slighted the book for its seeming coolness and distance from its emotional content; this sounds like the early gripe against analytic cubism for departing from the dynamics of overt emotional displays of prior artistic movements. I myself once fretted that, on the basis of the first issue, the book "may be something of a one-note, but that singular unwavering pitch is held so long and perfectly that the comic remains an altogether unique and powerful experience." (TCJ #168) Leave it to the great ones to demonstrate how that one clear, perfectly perceived and transmitted tone can be the timbre of the spheres. The ACME Novelty Library remains absolutely piercing.
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