This Paper Consists of Two Sections. TODAY’S FORECAST. Flat and gray sky over flat and SECTION ONE — News, Conjecture, Hyper- gray concrete. Life-threatening heat bole, Authorial Intention. and showers turning later to deadly COLORED INSERT — Reason for Purchase. cold and snow, with continued blowing, drifting newspapers. Our Circulation: Six Copies Daily. THE IMP. Cooler by the lake. Fitting the “alternative” cartoonist Chicago’s trusted source for VOLUME I.–NO. 3. for tights, cape, and mask since 1997. SUNDAY, JULY 4, 1999— TWENTY PAGES & “ FUNNIES.” encomia, scholia, and balderdash. PRICE FOUR DOLLARS. THE SMARTEST CARTOONIST ON EARTH. AND HIS STORY OF PUBLISHED sheepishly ONCE PER ANNUM by: BLIZZARD OF PRINT ALMOST INVENTS REAL SUPERHERO. DANIEL K. RAEBURN, EDITOR. “THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH.” 1454 WEST SUMMERDALE STREET, CHICAGO, ILL. 60640 BURIES CARTOONIST ALIVE. DEITY WATCHES TELEVISION, STEALS Reportage herein is copyright ©1999 Dan Raeburn and 380-Page Comic Book artwork is copyright Chris Ware and Fantagraphics Books, Enables Readers to Travel AUTOMOBILE, URINATES ON DUMPSTER. except where noted otherwise. Printed in Canada. in Fourth Dimension, “WARE REVIEW” GENRE HITS MIDWEST. ~ AS ALWAYS, OBTAIN CONSENT BEFORE REPRODUCING.~ Hear Silent Music, and A “God” Made in Our Own Image. CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS. Read Ghostly Language. Cartoonist Paralyzed, Mortified.

Archer Prewitt ...... “MR. WARE.” Ivan Brunetti . . . . “THE LAST GREAT CARTOONIST.” WITNESSES REPORT SEEING CHICAGO. — A comic book critic Jessica Abel ...... UNTITLED COMIC STRIP. U.S. CIVIL WAR, 1893 WORLD’S writing about The Acme Novelty Library Terry LaBan ...... “THE CHRIS WARE EXPERIENCE.” once remarked, “Man, what can you Daniel Clowes . . . “FRANKLIN CHRISTENSON WARE.” FAIR, SUPER-MAN, AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD. say about this comic that hasn’t already CONTRIBUTING WRITER. been said?” Rev. Daniel Kelly ...... FIRST CHURCH OF BUSINESS YET—“NOTHING” HAPPENS. Tons. Since that remark five years ACHIEVEMENT, CHICAGO. The beleagured subject of the investigation. ago a veritable blizzard of printed SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE. A Hoax, Cry Critics. paeans to Mr. Ware continues unabated, Bharathi Jayaram, M.S. . . . PERSONAL AFFIRMATIONS. this latest IMP being only one, solitary William Siegel, M.S...... WEATHER REPORTS. body and looming behind spectacles, it Ben & Kirsten A Hoax, Cries Author. flake among the multitude swirling Southworth, M.A., M.S. . ANDERSONVILLE GLEE CLUB. is a head that can only be described as owlish. from official and ivory towers. Now VENDORS & WHOLESALERS. OUR EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION. that the flakes have piled neck-high in “Hey Dan,” Chris chirped. He THE BEGUILING. 601 Markham St., Toronto, Ont. Chicago it is easy to see their mutual CHICAGO. — If The Acme Novelty M6G 2L7, CANADA. poured coffee, shooed the cats slinking BIG BRAIN. 81 S. Tenth St., Minneapolis, Minn. 55403. Find a writer whom is indubitably an drift. Conventions have crystallized in Library has a mascot, the Super-Man is BIZARRO-WUXTRY. 225 College Ave., Athens, Geo. 30601. American in every pulse-beat, who has around my ankles, and saw his affable writing about Chris, forming a new it. An increasingly obese, balding, BOOK BEAT. 2601 Greenfield, Oak Park, Mich. 48237. something new and peculiarly American wife, Marnie, off on errands. I sat on BRIES. Kaamenstraat 41, B-2000 Antwerpen, BELGIUM. to say and says it in an unmistakably genre entirely devoted to writing about masked man, Super-Man hovers in CHICAGO COMICS. 3244 N. Clark St., Chicago, Ill. 60657. the davenport with my sheaves of ques- CODY’S BOOKS. 2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94704. American way, and nine times out of ten him and his wares (a lame pun which each issue’s introductory frame, COMICS DUNGEON. 1622 1/2 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA 98103. you will find that he has some sort of con- tions and made myself comfortable. bestowing laurels and upholding the DISINFOTAINMENT. P.O. Box 664, London E3 4QR, nection with the gigantic and inordinate reoccurs, of course, with predictable UNITED KINGDOM. Anyone familiar with Chris’s work orb of Truth. He floats throughout the DREAM HAVEN. 912 W. Lake St., Minneapolis, Minn. abattoir by Lake Michigan—that he was frequency.) 55408. bred there or passed through there in the would also feel at home in the real-life The reviews all share one pattern: margins of the book in one-shot strips, FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS. 7563 Lake City Way Northeast, days when he was young and tender. Novelty Library. Like Chris’s comic Seattle, Wash. 98115. Order through catalog. this comic is the “hottest” comic and dashing and restoring people’s hopes. FM INTERNATIONAL. 913 Stewart St., Madison, Wisc. —H.L. Mencken. book, his home is a dense, elaborate 53713. Our prompt WHOLESALER. the “coldest” comic, the most “depress- He appears as both a bum and a FRINGEWARE. 2716 Guadalupe St., Austin, Texas. 78705. amalgamation of massive, solid, pol- celebrity, your murderer and your sav- GREEN NOISE. 537 Willamette St., Eugene, Oregon 97401. ing” comic and the most “hilarious” GALERIE LAMBIEK. Kerkstraat 78, 1017 GN Amsterdam, ished stuff, all well-crafted and orna- comic; its author is the most “cynical” iour. Chris Ware says that his Super- THE NETHERLANDS. Man is “all things at once.” LAST GASP ECO-FUNNIES. 777 Florida St., San Francisco, mented. A piano and at least two vic- and the most “sincere.” Most of all, to Calif. 94110. Our prompt WHOLESALER. See note below. That is as good a definition of “God” LEFT BANK BOOKS. 92 Pike St., Seattle, Wash. 98101. trolas were squared away amid knick- put it in lingo that will no doubt make MADIZINE. P.O. Box 8284, Madison, Wisc. 53708-8284. knacks, gewgaws, and whatnots tucked as any. Super-Man is real because He is MAG DADDY. 2235 2nd Ave., Seattle, Wash. 98121. Chris Ware flinch, he is the most. MELTDOWN COMICS & COLLECTIBLES. 7529 Sunset Blvd, into curio cabinets and cubbyholes, The foremost convention of this more human than many humans. At Los Angeles, Calif. 90046. THE MILLION-YEAR PICNIC. 99 Mt. Auburn St., Cam- which were filled with banjos, magic writing-about-Ware genre is to crown times He shoplifts, burns churches, and bridge, Mass. 02138-4945. NAKED EYE. 533 Haight St., San Francisco, Calif. 94117. lanterns, stereopticons, edison rolls, him with a superlative—a word defined brains innocent bystanders before jack- PISTIL BOOKS & NEWS. 1013 E. Pike St., Seattle, Wash. 98122. sheet music, books, handmade toys in by The American Heritage Dictionary as ing their car. In one strip He sinks so QUIMBY’S “QVEER” STORE. 1854 W. North Ave., low as to make Hollywood movies. But Chicago, Ill. 60622. hand colored boxes, yellowing comic “the highest degree, or acme.” A babel- READING FRENZY. 921 SW Oak St., Portland, Ore. 97205. strips, antique postcards, and of course at other times He gives his loot to the SEE HEAR. 59 E. 7th St., New York, New York, 10003. CHICAGO.— On a gray day at the end Chris’s cat and mice sculptures that BLIZZARD continued on page 2. homeless, rescues a nose-diving air- Note: You may also buy wholesale (50% off the cover price) directly of 1998 I rode the elevated train to from the eager Mr. Raeburn. sing and dance when you turn their plane, strums His banjo and contem- Chris Ware’s house. The el roared tiny brass crank. plates a sunrise. He is our “inner child,” above rows of wet, bleating cars and INVENTS ROBOTS as capable of kindness as of torturing us rumbled across the only river man WITH FEELINGS. for His sport, and for this reason I do forced to run backward. As we clat- not worship Him but I do believe in tered past a shit-brown jumble of shat- ROBOTS MADE IN OUR OWN IMAGE. Him. tered warehouses, housing projects, Are They More Human Chris told Moxie magazine that rusted water towers, and pork-repro- Than Humans? when he was a boy, he believed he cessing plants, my thoughts rose high would grow up to be the first real and distant as the black skyscrapers superhero. “I was sure that all I had to that fringe Lake Michigan’s long, Chris unwrapped a 78 r.p.m. record do was either study really hard or watery eye. I was already composing my from the day’s mail—“An old banjo involve myself in some sort of indus- opening paragraph for this story, one I tune I bid on,” he said sheepishly—and trial accident, and then I would acquire hoped would capture the appalling slid it away in a record closet lined superhero powers,” he said. “I firmly panorama of the town built on a swamp edge-to-edge with manila sleeves. I thought that something like that was and named for the swamp’s stinking, spotted a honeycomb of cassette tapes, going to happen to me.” wild fruit: the Chakawga onion. each spine bearing an intricate, hand- REAL SUPERHERO continued on page 16. lettered logo. (“Did you see his tapes?” one cartoonist later asked me in a near- whisper. “Those labels alone made me realize that I have wasted my entire life.”) Comics: A Matter Of CHICAGO.—At one point in the vast, Life And Death? illimitable cosmos of the writing- The oddest thought popped into my about-Ware genre, an interviewer head as I gawked at Chris’s stuff: asked Chris why Jimmy Corrigan I alighted from the train above I would never kill myself if I lived in this dreamed that he was a robot. Chris Damen Avenue and plopped my way apartment. Beethoven rose and fell shrugged; it seemed like an obvious way through oily puddles toward Hoyne from a stereo and mingled with the to depict somebody who called his Street, home of Mr. Ware and his mother every day. Acme Novelty Library. The top win- Robots are such a recurring theme in dow of the stone home glowed in the Chris’s world that I did not bother to midday gloom. With a squawk and a ask him about them. Chris’s outer space buzz I was inside and ascending the explorer, Rocket Sam, builds robots to groaning steps. keep him company in his solitude on Chris Ware is of average height, Planet X; likewise, Chris laid out a average weight, and wears unassuming purring of the potbellied cat that had paper robot for his lonely readers to cut clothing chosen for just that reason. settled like a buddha in my lap. I out and assemble on wintry evenings at This early thirty-something’s nonde- stroked the cat and mulled my sweet home. When asked by a magazine for a scriptness supports, however, a most and sour thought. picture of himself, Chris submitted the outstanding head. Perched atop his “Hey,” Chris called from the self-portrait above. kitchen. “I wanted to thank you very, What is funny about these robots is very much for your letter and especially their humanity. We often justify a feel- your, um, enclosure of last week.” The ing by saying that it is “only human,” week before I had mailed Chris my meaning that it is a natural, unavoid- thanks for consenting to the interview able reaction to life. It is automatic, we and enclosed a 1930s Tijuana Bible as a imply, and this reflex is partly what A gargantuan pop-art emporium lovingly tendered by Gaston Dominguez and his wife, Ilia Carson herald of my appreciation. This eight- makes us human. It is also partly what Flying Saucer. In just minutes a day this miraculous invention will turn -- a family business with family values, offering Angelenos only the page, pornographic comic tract, Hot makes us an automaton. An automa- your scrawny arms into iron girders, slap thick, rippling slabs of muscle finest in comix, japanese robots, toy guns, pornographic stickers, and onto your chest and give you dynamic, tireless legs. I don’t care if you own the flabbiest, skinniest, most wimpy body--this saucer will make a new, freakish ephemera particular to late 20th-century culture. “Baby ton, derived from the Greek neutral for Nuts, was gracefully illustrated by the virile, he-man or she-woman out of you. Put an end to your weak, pathetic Melt” has all your infant’s needs as well. existence by visiting Chicago Comics, 3244 N. Clark St., Chicago, 7529 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Calif. 90046 . . . (323) 851-7223 SMARTEST KID continued on page 2. HUMAN ROBOTS continued on page 3. Illinois. This offer is NOT available by mail-order ...... $7.95 ~2~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. overarching generalizations for which always seemed to me that what I do THE WARE GENRE. THE IMP is justly renowned. Even if the could be excused as poetry, rather than BLIZZARD OF PRINT. Continued from page 1. story were not going to mutate, its thought of as a coherent story line.” He Continued from page 1. anonymous “Mr. Prolific” and As Always, With Apologies complexity is such that a twenty page chuckled. WHAT FOLLOWS is a smidgen of the Ware reviews I like tower of superlative crowns described the Fuller Brush Man’s easy- newspaper can only capture a whiff of read before writing this newspaper. Special thanks teeters atop Chris’s skull, courtesy of come, in-and-out sales technique at a to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics, who had one of its essence. We will look at what the his poor interns amass the bulk of this reading for not just comic fandom but even the welcoming, “New Woman” nudist me. Not surprisingly, this dazed and abused intern book is about, more than the book gray, mainstream papers as well. The camp. I spotted Hot Nuts in a curio neglected to include bibliographical information itself, to make this paper slightly less with many of her hastily-made photocopies; as a more considered media coronations cabinet across the room, enshrined result, this bibliography is peppered throughout ephemeral and, I hope, not spoil the with questionable omissions. to date consist of largely unimpeach- behind glass like a yellow butterfly. ending for non-Chicagoans who have Blurb sheet. Fantagraphics Books. Thrust magazine able titles such as, “the most talked- “Actually,” Chris said, returning to not yet reached the end. called The Acme Novelty Library “the most fasci- about cartoonist,” “the most electrify- the living room with his coffee, “it nating read in comics”; The Stranger called Ware Perhaps my greatest problem in dis- “the most astounding and idiosyncratic crafts- ing new cartoonist,” and, “the most arrived on a day when I was contem- cussing this book arises from the fact man,” etc.; and Indy magazine rightly noted, astounding and idiosyncratic crafts- plating suicide, and it pulled me right “Man, what can you say about this comic that that it is a comic. Comics are an intu- hasn’t already been said?” man working in comics.” After this out of it.” itively understood, yet strangely elusive On a similar note, the genius of Bulka, Michael. “Ware on Earth.” World Art, Nov. trio of sensate pronouncements, how- 1994, pp. 96–99. art. Their words and pictures work Ware’s comics may also lie in their ever, the litany of Mostness grows Eds. “Chris Ware Gets His Own Comic.” The apart but they also work together, both deliberate similarity to music. There is Comics Journal, issue 164, p. 128. longer and more seriocomic. in harmony and in counterpoint. The a rhythm and a timbre not only to the Eds. “Seattle’s Own Fantagraphics Is Garnering “The most fascinating read in Much Praise.” Seattle Times, date? The infamous possibility born from this union of words in a comic, but also to the pan- “Costner” quote deserves to die a dateless death. comics” is sadly typical of the vast prose and visuals is a third thing, trick- els. The panels form a string of notes, Eds. “The Acme Comics Library (sic),” Philadelphia majority of the Ware genre’s bland- Weekly, Nov. 6, 1996, p. 21. ier than its respected parents, and per- or beats, that we “hear” or “feel” as our ishments: it is the wimpiest, least Eds. “The Door To An Unvisited Room.” Crash, haps for this trickiness comics are still eyes travel across the page. The timbre Winter 1995, pp. 56–57. The Acme Novelty interesting superlative possible, short Library is “the first existentialist comic book.” A called a bastard child. Anybody can of each panel is shaped by its relative good essay otherwise. of actually calling it “the most inter- A comic book similar to the one that saved Ware’s life. read the comic language, but almost size and its relatively cartoony or real- Eds. “The ‘It’ Cartoonist.” Entertainment Weekly, esting read in comics”—a title no issue ? They called Ware an “illustrator” and the nobody, myself included, can easily istic style. doubt already being prepared in the We settled down for the interview. “king of the indie comic-book world.” explain it. Chris Ware’s comics are “That sounds about right,” Chris Edwards, Gavin. “Graphic Material.” Details, Sept. regal offices of a well-respected, A copy of Daniel Clowes’s just-pub- more undefinable than most because said. “That’s kind of what I was trying 1997, p. 131. God is not in these Details. “men’s” or “women’s” magazine. lished book, Caricature, lay on the Gehr, Richard. “Read The Fine Print.” Spin, issue they are the most comic: he uses to do with that Quimby the Mouse ?. Ware’s work has “1990s bad attitude.” Spin has These dull, “consumer-oriented” table between us. “I just got it in the comics’ weird alchemy to write with stuff. But after a while I felt like it 1990s bad writing. magazines—the kind which like to mail,” Chris said, “and I was like….” Gilbert, Scott A. “He Said To Tell You He Had A pictures and draw with words far more wasn’t working. I look at those strips remind us once a year, with one or He cocked his index finger against his Real Good Time: Acme Novelty Library Volumes than most, “illustrated storyboard” now and I still don’t know what the 1–3.” The Comics Journal, issue 174, pp. 47–48. two sentences, that comics are not yet temple and pantomimed a silent pow. This is the guy who said that Chris’s comics lack comic artists. Nobody’s comics play hell they were about.” soul. dead—tend also toward titles such as “There is no way I will ever be able to with space, time, and your head quite These earlier Quimby comics, done Glenn, Joshua. “Artists of The Year.” City Pages “the king of the indie-comic world.” write at Dan’s level,” bobbing his head (Minneapolis), Dec. 27, 1995, p. 10. like Chris Ware’s. He is clearly a mostly when Chris was in Texas and in This title is technically true only if in confirmation and enjoying his self- Groth, Gary, ed. “Chris Ware Interview.” The genius, as even his harshest critics art school, were incredibly compli- Comics Journal, issue 200, pp. 119–178. The you consider the phalanx of trophies abasing awe. “I’d almost forgotten how will admit. cated, almost algebraic proofs of love, Ware interview to end all Ware interviews. the wheezing, bean-counting, comic incredibly dense and compact Dan’s Exhaustive, definitive. loss, hope and despair. I would need an Huang, Francis. “Comic Madness.” A&E, Oct. 19, book industry thrusts at Chris every stuff is.” entire IMP to do justice to even a dozen 1995, p. 5. year, and if you also accept such So Caricature sparked a depression Huestis, Peter. “Chris Ware: Comics’ Acme.” of them. Their tiny panels played tinny assembly-line flummery as “Best Ink- from which Hot Nuts saved him? Hypno, vol. 4, issue 8, 6 pages. tunes like little player pianos, animated Juno, Andrea, ed. “Chris Ware.” Dangerous Draw- ing,” “Best Lettering,” and “Best Page Chris seemed distracted for a by some human ghost hiding in their ings: Interviews With Comix and Graphix Artists. Numbering” as your numeric index of moment. “No,” he New York: Juno Books, 1997, pp. 32–53. machine-like construction. The ghost Katz, Alyssa. “Lost Horizons: Chris Ware’s Vintage an artist’s merit. Even a thoughtful said, gently dismis- in that machine is what gives Chris’s Point.” Voice Literary Supplement, June 1998, p. essay on Ware’s comics failed to cap- sive. “Oh no. That 19. comics such life, and as we shall see, he ture the essence of Chris’s superlative happens every cou- Kelly, Dan. “Of Mice and Men and Cat Heads is not sure what exactly makes his Too.” Chum, vol. 1, issue 1, pp. 14–21. work when it stated that The Acme ple of weeks or so. Kidd, Chip. “Please Don’t Hate Him.” Print, issue A panel from the strip comics come to life. Novelty Library was “the first existen- That’s just a normal ?, pp. 42–49. Kidd is The Acme Novelty Library’s Chris was working on at And so this story of mine is really a resident poultry advisor and the graphic tialist comic,” a horsefeathers phrase part of working.” the time of our interview. designer currently working with Ware on the ghost story. Imagine, if you will, that if ever there was one. Leaving obvious They are called deadlines for that Pantheon Corrigan book. we are creeping through the phantom Kreiner, Rich. “Number 17” in “The 100 Best names such as Crumb and Herriman reason. Chris’s mother was an editor universe of Chris Ware’s comics, with Comics of The Century.” The Comics Journal, aside, do not even “Cathy,” “Dilbert,” and reporter for the Omaha World-Her- issue 210, p. 81. The editors were drunk with The genius of Ware’s comics may lie his voice as our guide, searching for his power and seeing double: empirical evidence and “Garfield” serve as adequate ald; her father had been the paper’s proves that The Acme Novelty Library is number in their deliberate similarity to poetry. anima, his work’s soul. proof—perhaps the greatest proof— managing editor. With such black ink eight and a half. “Poetry” is one of the most abused Menu, Jean-Christophe. “Le Prodigieux Projet de that we live in an indifferent universe running through his blood it is fitting words in the language, but the analogy Chris Ware.” Neuvième Art, issue ?. pp. 45–57. that attacks us every day? that Chris Ware is first and foremost a O’Hara, Gail, and Sutter, Dawn. “Chris Ware and between a poem and a comic is Archer Prewitt.” Moxie, issue 1, pp. 4–12. Chris You cannot capture Chris with newspaper cartoonist. Each week he inevitable. In a poem the physical wants to design pajamas with a rocketship adjectives, statistics, or vague com- sweats out an original, full-page, full- pattern. I would wear them. properties of a sentence—its length, parisons to vague, angsty philoso- color strip for the weekly Chicago Only, Members. “The Chris Ware Backlash.” intonation, and punctuation—mean as comix@ email discussion forum, Feb. 11–19, phies—which is why some Ware tabloid, New City. One to three years 1999. “’Nuff said,” as the Members would say. much as the literal meaning of the sen- genre writers, myself included—have after their newsprint appearance, Chris Pratt, Sam. “Big Draw.” Esquire, March 1996, p. 3. tence. That is why onomatopoeia, when Pruian, Todd. “Notes From The Underground.” sidestepped the direct superlative and collects the strips in volumes and prints a word sounds just like what it means, Chicago, Feb. 1998, pp. 69–71. compared Chris to other, superlative them in his more widely known, peri- Römpötti, Harri. “Uudistuksellisen Sarjakuvan is so prized in a poem. Chris’s comics artists. The results are better for their odic comic book, The Acme Novelty Keulakuva: Yhdysvaltalainen Chris Ware Kuvaa are onomatopoetic because he has sim- Muistin Virtaa.” Helsingen Sanomat, May 26, specificity: they run from good and Library. The last six years of these 1998. Essential. A must-read for every Ware fan. plified his cartoon panels to near-icons predictable (“The Samuel Beckett of newspaper strips will be the basis for an Ryan, Mo. “Chris Ware: Purveyor of Comics, Jokes, that we can read rapidly, in sequence, Tricks, Novelties and Assorted Laff-Getting comics” is by far the most frequent)* approximately 380-page “graphic Sundries.” Steve Albini Thinks We Suck, issue 8, just like words; he has, in effect, to charmingly quirky (“The Emily novel,” that is, a big comic book, Jimmy pp. 6–9. reduced pictures to the level of words. Shahum, Leah. “Media! Picks.” Mother Jones, Dickinson of comics,” quips a Yale Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. He has also done the reverse: made July/August 1997, p. 72. Mother does know best: poet), all the way to jackass, as when This book will be published by Pantheon Ware’s comics are “among the very best graphic, words into pictures that visually bridge comic, illustrative, and fine artwork being pro- the Seattle Times brayed that Chris sometime early in the next century. duced in the world right now.” panels, moods, and places in space and Ware was the “Kevin Costner” of Chris showed me the fold-out, two- Spiegler, Mark. “Ware’s World.” Chicago Tribune, time. The problem with my pseudo- July 19, 1994. Chris hates himself and the van- comics. sided, quintessentially Wareian dust ity inherent in producing “Art”; eerily similar to poetic definition is that these multiple Reading the last of these appella- jacket he has designed for the hard- IS THOUGHT COMIC? Flaubert’s swamp of despair quoted in this issue. functions can all harmonize or clash, Tolentino, Noël. “Chris Ware of The Acme Novelty tions, it is no wonder that Chris back. “Originally I wanted to make it on both the visual and verbal level, Library.” Bunnyhop, issue 9, pp. 93–95, 126. dreads media attention. These well- look like a regular book,” he said, “or a The Smartest Kid on Earth is a synthesis Chris counters goofy questions with very good simultaneously, for an infinite range of answers, including a banjo history lesson. intended, if not always well-aimed, regular ‘novel.’ But then I decided, No. of the poetry and music described possibilities. Verbal-visual poetry is a Williams, Dylan. “An Interview With Chris attempts to pinpoint Ware only point I want it to look like a comic book. I above, and still something more: Ware.” Destroy All Comics, issue 1, pp. 8–19. rather weak, not to mention unpoetic, out our own, ever-shortening atten- want it to have comics all over it, so it thought itself. Our thoughts, if you definition. tion span. They are hyperbole and screams the word comics.” think about them, seem to be oddly “No, it isn’t dumb,” Chris said. “I’ve hype and they inherently miss the composed of words and shifting pic- What Is This Book? always secretly thought that myself, artist’s body of work. Nevertheless I tures at once, but they also carry a The obstacles in defining this book are although I’m loathe to say it because I enjoy them all, particularly the lame myriad. To begin with, it is a newsprint don’t really understand poetry. But it’s SMARTEST KID continued on page 3. ones, and list a smattering because “CHICAGO’S FANCIEST NEWS & ARTS WEEKLY.” comic strip, then a comic book pam- they do show an appreciation of The best way for non-Chicagoans to stay current with phlet, and finally a comic book book. Chris Ware’s work is by subscribing to New City, novelty, however un-novel their For posterity’s sake I will refer to it as Chicago’s only comics-literate newspaper. Or, as Chris expression. put it, the “only weekly news & arts bulletin dumb the book. For simplicity’s sake I will enough to devote this much space to the coarse and It is impossible to nail such a sin- indecorous children’s entertainment of the funny refer to it by its subtitle, The Smartest Kid gular artist in thirty thousand words, pages.” Each week New City prints Chris’s latest strip on Earth, in order to minimize any con- (some of which never appear in The Acme Novelty let alone a dozen, and it is in this Library) as well as Ben Katchor’s Cardboard Valise. fusion with Jimmy Corrigan himself, New City also carries cartoon reportage by the dynamic spirit of inspired, hypocritical failure the ostensible main character. duo of Patrick Welch and Carrie Golus, as well as that I offer up this newspaper, head- weekly strips by other local cartoonists. Subscribe by I also need to add that Chris makes sending your name and address and $30 to New City; lined with a glib superlative and laced not-always-slight changes to the story send $75 if you want “first class” delivery. In addition with relentless and vague compar- to the comics you will receive loquacious meditations every time it enters its next incarna- on film, comics, and life by future IMP contributor Ray isons of Ware to Gustave Flaubert. Pride. Be sophisticated. Be “now.” Subscribe now. tion—so the newspaper and Acme My headline is just a dumbass play New City 770 N. Halsted Suite 306 Chicago, IL 60622 reproductions you see in this paper may off the title of Chris’s latest book, but well not match their final form in the Chris Ware really is a genius, as Pantheon book. Add to this the fact everyone but he has noticed. Of that the original, newspaper story is not course, we would expect nothing less yet finished—10 weeks to go at IMP from The Most Self-effacing Car- press time—and it is obviously futile to toonist on Earth. ■ The best way to enjoy Ware’s comics in a sturdy for- try to be definitive about the book. It mat is to order every issue of The Acme Novelty *This comparison is the most popular because there is will change twice even after it is “com- Library directly from Fantagraphics Books. Write some merit to it, as anyone who has sat through one them at 7563 Lake City Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, of Beckett’s excruciating, eventless plays, filled with pleted,” and with this uncertainty, it is or call 1.800.657.1000 and ask for their free catalog. minimal, repetitive, banal, yet deeply moving dia- best that we approach the constantly The music in the machine is evident in this Ware illustration reminiscent of The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Operators are dozing by the phones. At press time all logue will probably attest. Butts, by Rube Goldberg. This illustration is taken from the album “Manhattan Minuet,” a collection of Raymond 12 issues of the Library were still in print. Prices and transforming story with the vague, Scott compositions performed ebulliently by The Beau Hunks Sextette. ©1996 Basta Records. sizes vary; some assembly required. ~3~

HUMAN ROBOTS. get him home again? The big day The Smartest Kid on Earth. arrives. The metal man and his new Continued from page 1. Continued from page 2. mate fall immediately in love, and the automatos—meaning a man who acts silent “sound” in a vague but undeni- metal man leads an expectant Sam spontaneously, on his own free will—is able way. This vagueness is what Chris through frozen woods to see the gift he one who behaves in a mechanical or has now captured precisely, and that has made for Sam: a giant picture of a automatic manner. capture is one of the miracles of this flower, traced into the snowy side of a Humans naturally recoil at the sug- mountain. Sam is crushed by the book. It is not a novel of ideas but of gestion that they are machines, and ephemeral nature of this artful gift. thought itself; it is the evanescence of this may be one reason why some read- Heartbroken, he smashes both his cre- everyday intelligence made concrete. ers find Ware’s comics “cold,” “emo- ations to pieces and sobs his way Rather than summarize the Corrigan COMIC ART 101. tionless,” or “single-gear.” If there’s a through the snow back to his crumpled family’s experience or depict it with a metaphor for this syndrome, the robot ship, once again alone. presumed authority, the book recreates In comics, fantasies are usually indicated with devices is it. such as cloudy panel borders, a muted color scheme, or In following strips Sam rebuilds this their experience as they actually live it. thought balloons. The Smartest Kid on Earth uses all metal man only to finally banish it to Just as our capricious, largely uncon- of these devices but, more importantly, it also ignores them. When a Corrigan feels something, the reader sees the wilderness. Of course Sam grows to trollable mind races from reality to day- it. When a Corrigan wishes for something to happen, it eventually regret this. In “I Never dream, between yesterday, now, and appears to happen. Ware’s omniscient narration is a tri- umph of subjectivity, and this is why the Corrigan’s emo- Stopped Loving You,” a gray and tomorrow, Ware’s panels discriminate tions are built into the book, telling the true story of sex, wheelchair bound Sam instructs his little or not at all between the real and violence, and heroism hidden in their otherwise latest and last robot to go out and pick humdrum existence. Below are five examples of this the imagined, between now and then. objectively-rendered subjectivity. flowers for him, flowers which remind Chris gathers over one hundred years him of his long gone first love. The lit- of his subjects’ thoughts, holds them in tle robot dutifully does its best to find his own head, and imprints that mir- flowers but erroneously brings back rored mosaic on the page. Panels mushrooms, then rocks, to the disap- reflect, refract, and echo each other, pointed Sam. One day the robot brings At a signing, Ware embellished his comics with these forming a mind-boggling polyphony of nebbish self-portraits. back a basket full of rusted sprockets space-time hallucinations and emo- which Sam recognizes as belonging to I once speculated that Chris’s tional associations. This emotional Ware. “This book is a rambling mess the metal man he banished. Overcome comics were too sophisticated, at least logic, coupled with the clear pictures with no organizing ideas,” he told me. with emotion, Sam demands the robot on their surface, for some readers to see Chris draws, makes The Smartest Kid on “It’s the lankiest, most meandering sort tow him to the site, where he sees the the emotion in them. Now I see that I Earth a coherent stream of conscious- of…” His voice, and his face, disap- rusted robot, standing like a scarecrow, was wrong: the emotion in Chris’s peared into his hands. As Terry LaBan’s amid a field of flowers. The robot is ness. The book mirrors thought, and strips is too apparent for some people’s like thought, it is difficult to define but cartoon in this issue’s comics page taste. A certain type of person recoils easy to follow. shows, Chris will talk fairly objectively We see what James Reed Corrigan “sees” in 1892 when he wishes he were a grown man. from a naked display of emotion in “Human thought is so incredibly about his comics until you make the art—a human enough reaction, I sup- important to storytelling in a comic mistake of paying him a compliment. pose—and for all their picto-linguistic book,” Chris said, “and yet it’s one of Ware’s paroxysms of self-loathing are complexity, Chris’s stories are direct at the most unused elements. Usually it’s now legendary, mainly because depict- heart. Chris’s spoof of the lost-in-space just a bubble with some word balloons ing them with anthropological curios- genre, Rocket Sam, is an example. in it. That’s not what thoughts are ity is a hallmark of the writing-about- Crash-landed and stranded on vari- Ware genre to which I now contribute. ous planets named X, Rocket Sam really like. I’d hoped to organize this I attempted to count the times and builds robots to keep him company. In stupid Jimmy Corrigan story in a way ways in which Chris called himself an “Sam Makes an Acquaintance,” Sam that would allow for thought and its fashions a tiny robot and gives the various subspecies, such as memory, idiot, but I finally quit after tallying newborn a pair of freshly picked flow- prediction, dreaming, ambition, and words like moron, retard, dolt, num- ers as a symbol of their love. metaphorical association, to shape the skull, imbecile, and simpleton, along with corollary descriptors such as crass The robot “asks” Sam (in a wordless ‘story’ rather than a traditional plot We see how Jimmy Corrigan “feels” when he tries to write strip) if he killed the flowers by pick- might’ve shaped it. Thought affects and brain-damaged babbler. Baffled by a letter to his father. ing them. Sam justifies his picking by experience and perception, and I’ve my admittedly nebulous questions and long “dead,” of course, and Sam dies on explaining that he plucked them from tried to simulate this in the story with in obvious pain, Chris said, “I should the spot of a broken heart. Just then a meadow filled with millions more intrusions that probably seem to most just off myself.” He cried, “I’m sorry I’m the new robot’s light bulb turns on: just like them. The metal imp is nev- people like ‘postmodern noodling,’ not more intelligent.” flowers, it finally sees. The robot begins though that wasn’t my intent, just my You get the point. I have edited out dutifully picking them all and piling fumbling, juvenile result. I dunno. It’s most of the barbs and run through them next to Sam’s flyblown corpse. them here because this self-flagellation The hard ironies in this cycle of hard to tell a serious story with a dumb makes for a giggle at first. After six stories is clear. The servotron’s con- main character. I think my big mistake hours of interviewing it grew over- stant desire to please their master is was approaching it as fiction.” whelming, and finally enlightening. every bit as human as Sam’s constant disappointment in them, as human as Deaf and Dumb. What the hell, I thought, maybe there Sam’s “inhuman” treatment of them. The autobiography in this fiction is is some truth to this supposed stupidity. If Sam’s creations had hearts, Sam obvious, as we will see; Chris’s cartoon And I saw that there is. It is simple. If made them—but that doesn’t stop him the greatest knowledge is the acknowl- ertheless heartbroken at being the universe is composed of characters We see how Jimmy Corrigan “feels” when he looks out the from stomping them when they “fail” edgment of your own ignorance, Chris window at a cardinal flying past. cause of their death and commits sui- from every figment of his imagination, him. Sam is breaking his own heart is the smartest cartoonist on earth. He cide. The last panel shows a grieving all of them always playing out some when he breaks his tin men. To me, the may not know anything, but he knows Sam bury his creation in that same eternal war inside his head, a war with spirit of this little equation is one wisp he does not know anything, and this meadow and place a single flower atop its own, weird, harmony. Knowing that of the ghost in Chris Ware’s tragic, makes him smart. the grave. Chris has tried to organize this story in comic machine. ■ If I am making easy irony, forgive This simple fable permeates Sam’s a “musical” style, I asked the amateur me, for ironies abound in Mr. Ware’s long life on Planet X. In “Tis The Sea- pianist about his favorite piece of son of Giving on Planet X-38,” Sam music. wise cranium. One look at his work and instructs a new and improved robot “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” you can see immediately that he is a progeny in the ways of Christmas and Chris said. “To me, good music should perfectionist; he also has an unshakable belief that his comics must be impro- the custom of giving reciprocal gifts. be the perfect and irrefutable analogy vised. He is a satirist who repeatedly As Sam builds his gift, a she-bot to of thought—and not necessarily con- stabs our society with fiendish, hilari- keep his metal man company, he won- scious thought, either. It should hon- ous glee; he also insists that his art has ders what he will get in return. A laser estly reflect the shifting and wrenching no point and certainly no “message.” pistol? A jet pack? A working rocket to of the ‘soul’ as intuitively as possible. A We see what Jimmy Corrigan fears his father might do. Emotion is everything in his work, he life can be read in music because, to stressed; an hour later he mimicked sound ridiculously pompous about it, paring his fingernails and caricatured the moods shift and wrestle with each himself as “a namby-pamby æsthete,” a other, like a soul undecided. For this “spoiled-rotten Little Lord Faunterloy” reason I almost can’t listen to whining and pining for the long-lost Beethoven’s Ninth. I find it so moving, days of lace doilies and triple-mitered and so true, that it is overwhelming. It woodwork. I raise my white flag: you isn’t even ‘music’ in the traditional are not going to understand this guy sense. Themes rise and fall and inter- from reading this newspaper. Not a twine and change in ways that are so ghost of a chance. undeniably human that only someone Fortunately, Chris is one of the who was deaf, and trapped within the nicest people I have met. As I struggled music of his own mind, could have visibly with these contradictions and written it. I can’t think of any art that my suspicion that the soul of his art is better than that symphony.” lurks somewhere between them, Chris This then seems the best analogy for Even when Chris shows thoughts using the old-fashioned methods, he uses them in a novel way. The Smartest Kid on Earth. It is a sym- SMARTEST KID continued on page 4. phony composed of words and pictures, and just as Beethoven “heard” his final masterpiece when he was completely deaf, Chris Ware is playing a silent, comic music composed totally, and THE BEST COMIC-BOOK DISTRIBUTOR ON EARTH. tonally, of his own thoughts. If Chris is reading this, he is recoil- AND NOT JUST BECAUSE THEY CARRY THIS DUMB FANZINE. 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The Smartest Kid on Earth. edge cities with comically Whitman- esque fervor. The degradation of Amer- Continued from page 3. ican architectural aims is evident in leaned forward in his chair to soothe this book, but it is certainly not the me. “All you’re going to come up with point, if there is one. Chris may point in writing about this,” he said, “is that out our culture’s fault lines but his I fill in a space for the paper every point, for lack of a better word, seems week. That’s all I do. I fill in the space.” to be that humans are the same as they In this too, he was right. were one hundred years ago, even if the A Book About Everything. architecture framing modern lives no The Smartest Kid on Earth gives us four longer admits of human dignity. The generations of Chicago Irish: Jimmy; sterility of our commercial world high- his dad, Jim; Jim’s dad, James; and the lights the real story, Jimmy’s search for great-granddaddy of them all, the nine- his father. That is the point of Ware’s fingered, boar-whiskered William Cor- satire: to frame sincerity. The sincerity, rigan. Add to this lineage the surprise in turn, sharpens the satire. appearance of Amy Corrigan, Jimmy’s “I think a lot of people make the Black sister, and we have what chest- mistake of thinking that culture forms thumpers like to call “The American people,” Chris said. “It’s the other way Century,” from its embryo to its end. around. I like writing about that kind William Corrigan’s story begins with of stuff, and I stick it in there, but I the Civil War; his son James’s story don’t want it to be the subject matter. runs through the Columbian Exposi- This sounds smarmy and arrogant, but tion of 1893, which was called “Man’s honestly, the subject is the human Greatest Achievement” and celebrated heart. Everything else surrounds that— the emergence of America’s central which is an inversion of the actual city, Chicago. The book ends today truth.” with these forefathers dead or near Everything surrounds the human death. Their children, Jimmy and Amy, heart—or the human heart surrounds live in a land where “man’s great everything. This is the kind of inductive- achievement” is “the broad sweep of deductive question that haunts my power lines, the delicate articulation of reading of The Smartest Kid on Earth. poles, signs, and warning lights, and A Book About Nothing. the deep forest of advertisements.” If this sounds like a Great American What seems beautiful to me, what I should Novel, the author never intended it as like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, such. “Honestly, I don’t understand which would be held together by the things from a social level,” Chris said. strength of its style, just as the earth, sus- “I can only talk about them in a per- pended in the void, depends on nothing sonal way. An Irish friend of mine external for its support; a book which understands the world in such a differ- would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invis- ent way than I do. He’ll say things like, ible… No lyricism, no comments, the ‘These people are middle-class descen- author’s personality absent. It will make dants of Dutch merchants; therefore, sad reading… Nowhere in my book must they will obviously always purchase the author express his emotions or his opin- ions…The entire value of my book, if it this certain type of drywall screw.’ I has any, will consist of my having known cannot understand the world in that how to walk straight ahead on a hair, bal- way. That’s a European way of looking anced above the twin abysses of lyricism at the world; it’s not an American way.” and vulgarity (which I seek to fuse in ana- Chris is steeped in the American lytical narrative). Never in my life have I written anything more difficult than what I Way, born in the grain belt and trans- am doing now—trivial dialogue. posed as a teen to a Texas public high —Gustave Flaubert, letters to Louise school named after Robert E. Lee, the Colet, 1852. man who led the charge to keep slavery legal (or for “state’s rights” if you are a Like Madame Bovary, the 19th century politically correct southerner.) The masterpiece by Gustave Flaubert, The horrible facts about our Black and Smartest Kid on Earth is largely an White history are hinted at early in the omniscient depiction of boredom and book and they grow into the context daydreaming. And as with Madame that imbues Jimmy’s relationship with Bovary, the characters’ exquisitely ren- Amy with more significance than it dered thoughts do not necessarily tell might otherwise have. us what the author thinks about them. The “White City” of the 1893 Composed of such airy stuff, The World’s Columbian Exposition looms Smartest Kid on Earth is nevertheless a throughout James Corrigan’s tragic book of substance, weight, and conse- childhood story. Built on the swamp of quence, held together by the gravity of Chicago’s south side, the White City its center: the bond—or lack of one— housed the most important world’s fair between fathers and sons. ever held on American swamp. With a One hundred years ago, James Corri- total attendance of nearly 28 million— gan was abandoned by his father; now in a young nation of only 63 million— old and near death, James silently the Exposition contained exhibits on watches his grandson Jimmy’s contra- nearly every subject imaginable, all puntal struggle to find and regain his housed in a palatial, neoclassical, father, Jim Corrigan. Everyone is acting lagooned city designed by Chicago’s out of their abandonment, their void— most prestigious architect, Daniel that is one of the major criticisms made Burnham, and built with a white, tem- of The Smartest Kid on Earth—and porary plaster called staff. It is here, nothing is somehow at the core of the standing atop the largest building on book. Its numerous champions and earth and the first disposable architec- critics might both agree: Ware’s book tural masterpiece, that William Corri- has made nothing meaningful. gan runs away from his son, on James’s Jimmy Corrigan is essentially a birthday, no less—a primal abandon- nobody living a life of acute loneliness. ment that sets the tone for the rest of Finally Jimmy’s agony overcomes his the Corrigan lineage. inertia, and with a mysteriously hob- “It was such an incredible human bled foot he sets out one Thanksgiving achievement,” Chris said of the White weekend on an odyssey—and I use that City. “The modern world was forming world carefully—to Waukosha, Mich- at that time: the technology and the igan, to meet the father he has never culture that defines our world today. known. As Jimmy limps along in search Music, movies, everything that I like. I of filial love, he keeps one eye out for get so tired of people dismissing the the woman of his romantic dreams. In Exposition because it was disposable. page after excruciating page, comprised That’s ridiculous—everything we live almost entirely of false starts and trivial in now is disposable.” dialogue, Jimmy’s search for kinship Much of the contemporary drama of results in anticlimax after anticlimax. the story takes place in a prefab, mock It is, as Ware writes, “A series of adven- Tudor box of an apartment—“The tures which will attempt to accurately Coves at Honey Farm”—and in “Pam’s counterfeit the mechanism of mundan- Wagon Wheel,” a hokey, white-bread ity.” It is, as Ware elsewhere says, a diner. Chris’s feelings about modern book that provides nothing “in the way This page, clockwise from top: the 1893 Columbian Expo- of excitement, interest, or what con- sition; William Corrigan; James Corrigan and wife holding architecture are clear in the postcards Jim; 1890s “Chicago” poster; James Corrigan as a boy; the framing his sixth chapter, postcards temporary connoisseurs refer to as “Century of Progress” World’s Fair; Jim on a model T; Berenice, keeper of the Corrigan family secret; and James’s which describe the concrete plain of SMARTEST KID continued on page 5. mother, who died giving birth to James. ~5~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. Apparently some of Chris’s peers still agree with that quintessential Continued from page 4. Ware self-assessment. By far the most ‘character development.’ Students of consistently made criticism of Ware’s the ‘cartoon language’ may nonetheless work, and The Smartest Kid on Earth in savour the many subtle shifts in tone, particular, is that it lacks emotion, or pattern, and dreariness which this that it presents only one emotion: sad- number affords, and bask in the ness, alternately described as hopeless- renewal of nature’s beauty while they ness, heartlessness, even cruelty. In this wonder after the gentle touch of new sense the primary reservation about love, watching the squirrels and birds Chris is that he is too cold, too frolic about upon the moist earth below reserved. The critical litany growing the dormitory window, the tear-wrin- from this central complaint—flat, kled tissues of our quarto crushed repetitive, pointless, single-gear—is between their quaking fingers.” growing longer and longer. Stop me before I quote again. Chris The bunch most anxious to nail is a gifted writer, and I could make this Chris as a pretender on this point are, an anthology of his own words. There unfortunately, a private lot. Their self- is something funny about Jimmy’s lone- titled “Chris Ware Backlash” is not fair liness, and there is something funny game for quoted reportage, having about the book’s structure as well. taken place in a private, e-mail discus- Somebody once said that there are two sion forum open to “Members Only”— plots in life: someone leaves town or no doubt the actual brand of haber- someone comes to town. Jimmy does dashery worn by some of the club’s both by leaving Chicago and coming to more dyspeptic contributors. And so Waukosha. Chris advances this almost you will have to take my word on what ridiculously simple plot with ineffably the Members Only say about Ware. thin action and yet, with a—dare I say Since “controversy” sells newspapers, I it?—kaleidoscopic complexity. politely invite the Members Only to Perhaps I am being lazy, but clichés step outside of their clubhouse and seem the plainest way to capture the onto the more public letters page of brilliantly simple paradoxes of this this newspaper. book. The face-to-face meeting be- In order to maintain the appearance tween Jimmy and his father, Jim, is like of playing fair with the other children, looking into both sides of a mirror at I must hang my head and admit that I once; we must search as they do for was once a Member. Until their com- clues about each other in their side- prehensive debates about “The Fantas- ways glances and ashamed pauses, tic Four” and marvelous inkers inspired pauses that hint at the unspeakable me to resign my membership, I was truths the two strangers mask with privy to the “substance,” if you can call their awkward conversation. The Cor- it that, of their arguments against rigans’ body language and their silences Ware. And I will admit the half-truths tell the invisible story of this book. in their argument, if only to more thor- A Brilliant Hoax, Cry Critics. oughly and politely trounce them. I must also admit that the Members Perhaps that is why some people just do Only intended the title of their Back- not “get” the story; or perhaps they do lash with some irony. Every itemization get it and say, “So what?” The Smartest of Ware’s “failures” as a writer and artist Kid on Earth does not “connect,” says a inevitably ended with a statement surprisingly large number of comics along the lines of, “Don’t get me readers. Although the chorus of Comic wrong—I still think he’s one of the best Fandom has prostrated itself before cartoonists ever!” The style is brilliant, Ware and proclaimed him the latest in all admitted, but the substance they a long line of comics messiahs, already found lacking. you can hear the critics crowing and These were of course the very heralding Ware’s inevitable crucifixion. charges brought against Gustave A certain kind of art critic secretly loves Flaubert, the one writer Ware has to be disappointed, and a certain bunch named again and again as his exem- of them can wait no longer for the plary inspiration. Flaubert’s critics, like greatest disappointment of their lives. Ware’s, found his greatest failure in They have voiced much of it in the what the author considered his greatest dependably acerbic Comics Journal— achievement. Leaving aside for now when Chris drew a Journal cover he the tricky distinction between style titled it “The Magazine of News, and substance—a particularly tricky Reviews, and Mean-Spirited Back- distinction in comics—let us investi- Stabbing.” As we noted earlier, Chris gate the half-truths in these emotional wrote deliberately wordless strips for points. Granted, Jimmy Corrigan has years to harness the unheard, “musical” no emotional connection in his life, power of the comics language. Pre- save for the tortured one with his dom- dictably, in its first review of these ineering Mother. But that is why he comics, the Journal declared, “Ware’s hobbles off on his odyssey: to make an works are never graceful: to borrow a emotional connection. Jimmy is term from jazz, they don’t ‘swing,’ they obsessed with finding love, and if he don’t even come close.” The reviewer had one motive, that would be it. Per- then excoriated Ware’s comics for a haps Chris’s critics are more involved host of failings, chief among them a perceived lack of “soul,” with this pen- by the book than they remembered to dant—“Although that very lack is the admit: perhaps they want so badly for real theme of Ware’s work.” Remember Jimmy to find love that they cannot this critic’s koan, for later it will return wait any longer and for that reason find to haunt my own argument. the story disappointing. What is weird about this is the way This paradox is also perhaps why in which the critic, with uncanny accu- Chris told me, “I very much want to racy, honed in and criticized Ware for express emotion. Since I was 15 years the very things he was working hardest old, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do in to achieve. Other cartoonists in their comics. As far as I’m concerned, that’s Journal interviews have also voiced what it’s all about.” similar reservations about Chris’s I cannot doubt Chris’s sincerity on comics. This might be expected from this point, having heard the tenor of Chris’s peers, of course, as cartoonists his voice strain every time the subject are a competitive bunch of hardasses, of this missing “emotional center” clawing and pinching each other like arose. lobsters in the proverbial barrel. What “It really frightens me when I read is strange about their disappointment is other cartoonists saying that my work the way in which they too fault Ware’s has no ‘emotional center,’” he said. “I comics for lacking the very quality don’t know what that phrase means, Ware says he most passionately wants but it means that I’m not communicat- to convey: emotion. ing something.” Throughout our six- Chris began the “famous” phase of hour interview Chris maintained a his career in comics obscurity with this painfully funny state of jocular statement in The Comics Journal: “I’d despair—what we might call his “good like to be like Chopin or Brahms and grief” frame of mind—and yet this This page, clockwise from top: Jimmy, Jim, and James alleged lack of emotion seemed to meet today; Leatherneck Jim; Jimmy, his mom, and the rip create something that makes you want in his life; Amy and her Dad; Amy and her Mom; Jimmy to weep, but I’m not anywhere near haunt him with a deep sense of personal with a bloody nose and a bleeding heart; 1980s “Chicago” poster; Jim and Amy’s mom; Jim and Jimmy’s mom. that.” SMARTEST KID continued on page 6. ~6~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. gan is about find it too dark down there. Or maybe they find it too shallow. Continued from page 5. failure. He literally sagged in his chair What can we say about Jimmy? If every time the topic came up. there is a tangible center to this book it This riddle is the gravity that either could be him—he is the main charac- holds the book together or makes it ter, after all. But he is an odd character. seem hollow. The absurd irony of this A doughy, balding, descendant of emotional issue finally forced me to potato-eaters, Jimmy is the kind of admit—as much as I hated to—that lumpen we see every day on the bus but the Members Only are on to some- never remember. He meekly lives his thing. I do not agree with them, but life of perpetual discomfiture and they do bring up a point worth fighting anonymity in a big, ugly city in the about. There is something strange Middle West. He is middle-aged (36 about their criticisms, and reading years old in the 1980 “now” of the story) about Chris and interviewing him only but he always looks like an infant and bolstered my strange suspicions. an old man, even when he is a kid. Other than this outstanding middling quality, and those ridiculous knickers he wears, Jimmy’s most distinguishing characteristic is the ease with which 9 inch tall cloth figure with silkscreen printed everybody overlooks him. Even his face. Sof’ Boy in 3-D! Seems to come to life, stutter is so timid that it fails to distin- walk, talk! Anything you want! Completely guish him. Jimmy Corrigan is a nobody. washable 100% cotton doll. Fun toy. Comes That is why many readers feel he is in bright package. not a character at all. This is the start- ing point for those who are trying to understand the book, and the final point made by those who do not care to melt. Each and every one of those Why did I say those things? I’m such an Our Search For nobodies has at times, just like me, an idiot. I didn’t mean what I said, they An Emotional Center. understand it. Members Only have described Jimmy as a “one-dimensional inner life filled with almost suicidal didn’t understand what I said, blah Chris may put his entire heart and character,” a “two-dimensional charac- stakes. Jimmy may be a zero, but he is blah blah, I’m a failure. It didn’t work mind into the book but he is obviously ter” (literally true of course), and a far from worthless in my eyes. I see out.” Three white balloons with Sof’ Boy split in his feelings about emotional design. Amusing sound effects. “cardboard character” (literally true if myself in him. Chris sank and murmured, “Even Quality latex rubber. Easy to inflate. connections in real life. Just as the Be the hit of the party. Bright you count the card stock covers he is And that is intentional on Ware’s right now I’m saying all sorts of dumb packaging. human brain is split into two halves, part. Chris has drawn the male Corrig- stuff I know I’m going to regret.” Set of three ...... 75¢ printed on). I wonder: is it possible for Chris seems to be of two different a passive character to provide a book’s ans as bald, and with dots for eyes, for a I laughed at that last statement, a minds about this vague, but ardently center? Is it possible that a nobody is reason: to draw a blanker slate, so to laugh that later returned to haunt me. demanded “emotional connection.” In really best suited for the role of Every- speak, on which the reader can project The blackness of Chris’s situation is his landmark interview with Gary man? Is it possible that nothing, not his own image. (As always, refer to humorous because it is clear that he All cotton charcoal gray shirt Groth in the 200th issue of The Comics even grief, is more emotional than Scott McCloud’s essential book, wants to be understood. There is no with fun black and white Journal—hereafter referred to as the Understanding Comics: The Invisible design. Great casual wear. loneliness? visibly smug superiority to his alien- Be the envy of your friends. Grothasaurus—Groth told Chris that, Art, for a coherent exegesis of this and ation—and I think he is not so much Completely washable. in his reading of the book, human con- Ciphers. other theories.) S, M, L, XL. alienated as he is isolated, mainly out nection was confirmed as impossible. A cipher is the literary equivalent of a of a sense of inferiority. His characters Post paid ...... $11.00 “Well, I think that’s sort of true,” zero; a cipher lies at the center of a certainly feel inferior. As a boy, James Chris replied. “Sometimes I feel like book in the same way that a zero lies at Corrigan describes himself as a “failed I’m really close to people, and at other the center of a number line, and the ghost.” This prophecy sadly comes true times I feel completely distant from other characters in the book gain their one hundred years later when James those same people… So I probably negative or positive value in relation to impassively watches Jimmy Corrigan have some brain damage or some- the big Zero. I suggested to Chris that break down and weep, “It’s all my thing.” perhaps we ought to see Corrigan as fault… I-I… I-I always mess everything I told Chris that, in my reading of this Zero. up… (snf!)” Either scene ought to sat- his book, human connection was con- “I don’t see Jimmy as a cipher at all,” isfy—or repel—all those emotional Packaged firmed as essential. Chris said. “He’s sort of a type, and set of four postal readers who cannot empathize with cards. Letterpress- Chris almost leapt from his chair. “If there’s a little bit of the general to him, printed in cheery Jimmy’s situation. These self-character- colors. Funny designs. Great to send to you were a girl I’d jump up right now but I see him as a fairly real person.” izations also point out that these two Parents, Friends, Relatives, etc. Card set includes: “Sof’ Boy Out for a Stroll”/“Sof’Boy with and give you a big kiss,” he said. “I I am of two minds about this last Corrigans see themselves as zeros as Drunk”/“Sof’ Boy Greets the Day”/“Sof’ Boy with Rat.” Postage not included. really appreciate that because I’ve tried statement of Ware’s. Half of me sees much as any reader. to capture that feeling.” Jimmy as a dud, one more boring than Since Chris Ware is undoubtedly the Set of four ...... $4.50 “I only started to think about the The genius of this book—we might any person could ever be. I look out my Most Self-Effacing Cartoonist on baldness thing a few years back,” Chris say the soul of this book—may then lie window, however, and I see a city Earth, many of his interviewers have said. “I noticed that and thought, Wait in a hollow center. Perhaps it is a void smack dab in the middle of a featureless concluded that Jimmy Corrigan is a minute. I did it just by default. that we as readers fill with our own prairie, peopled almost entirely by mil- Chris Ware, and vice versa. When I There’s a strange wall between the emotion. Like the dark waters at the lions of nobodies, has-beens, and brought this up Chris squinted, pained artist and the reader in comics, and I Full color 20 page midget bottom of a well, perhaps it is the pro- never-weres. And I am sure my fellow by the obvious, and said, “Who else comic booklet. Funny story. think that the less information you Independent printing. Lim- verbial artistic mirror. Maybe the peo- Chicagoans see me as Nobody when I would he be? That’s such a dingbat ited supply. Bargain. provide about a character’s external ple who do not see what Jimmy Corri- haltingly order my root beer and tuna question.” Wonder softened his focus, appearance in a comic strip, the more Post paid ...... $1.50 and he asked me, “Why do people ask apt a reader is to identify with that questions like that?” character. Anyone who draws cartoons long enough will start to realize this Dingbats. relationship intuitively.” Perhaps they ask for technical reasons. Given the Everyman face of Jimmy Jimmy Corrigan has been dozens of dif- Free Sof’ Boy Button with purchase Corrigan, it is odd that the word “alien- ferent personas throughout the years. of $8.00 or more. Shiny 1 inch button with black, ation” gets bandied about so much in Although in the novel Jimmy is only white, red design. Easily fastened to t-shirt, sweatshirt, the voluminous writings about Ware. etc. Sorry! The small rubber figurine advertised in the frump described above, he has also the mini-comic is no longer available. I am not sure “alienation” is the right appeared in many different guises ALL ITEMS REAL!! DON’T DELAY, SEND TODAY! word to use to describe Ware’s world; throughout past newspaper strips. Mail Orders for All Items To: Send check or money order. alienation is related to, but different Archer Prewitt If cash, wrap well (no tape Jimmy originated years ago as a 1723 W. Julian 2R or glue please). No C.O.D. than, loneliness. Alienated people are Chicago, IL 60622 Canada & Foreign add $2.00. dwarfling kid wizard, the “Smartest Kid often lonely, but are lonely people on Earth,” in a series of rocket-ship and often alienated? If we could fit Chris chemistry-experiment adventures paro- Ware neatly into the icebox of alien- dying the detective adventure comics ation, then it would preserve this idea of the 30s and 40s: “Secret Agent [Cor- that his comics are cold and unemo- rigan] X-9”, by Dashiell Hammett and tional. Alex Raymond, and “Detective Jim In the Grothasaurus Chris men- Corrigan,” by Superman’s half-creator, tioned the Ingmar Bergman movie, Jerry Siegel. After his gee-whiz joke of Persona, in which an actor withdraws a birth, the Jimmy Corrigan character from social intercourse because she then became Ware’s all-encompassing cannot stand the pretensions and prat- but humble brainchild, a man of many tling conventions of society. Real-life ages who stood in for the cartoonist’s acting drives her nuts—so she avoids it many moods. to keep her sanity, and gets put away as “Originally I’d conceived of the idea a consequence. I asked Chris if he had of a character being so malleable that I that Persona syndrome in mind when could present him one week as a bitter he created Jimmy Corrigan. old man, then the next week as a regret- “A little bit,” Chris said. “Actually, I ful, warm old man, and it wouldn’t mat- By Jessica Abel. Volume 1, issue 5, and Volume 2, issues feel that way most of the time. I really 1Ð4 of the comic book are still available—five slices of ter,” Chris said, referring to the early don’t like going out that much. I always life, shipped right to your door in a plain brown wrapper. years of Jimmy Corrigan strips. “I really To order, write Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City regret what I say in public circum- Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, call their toll-free hotline at do see the idea of ‘character’ as being so Imagine original artwork by this celebrated cartoonist hanging stances, whether it’s a party or a talk or (800) 657-1100, or go to www.fantagraphics.com. in your home — imagine this celebrated cartoonist hanging himself in your home. Now your dream can come true. unreal that I thought, Why should I Artbabe posters and minicomics are available from Not only is Mr. Brunetti selling his original artwork to the public, he is offering his services as a caricaturist for a conversation. I’ve rarely talked to Highwater Books, POB 1956, Cambridge MA 02238, or hire—the perfect way to liven up your next retirement party or bat mitzvah. He will amuse your guests and draw them adhere to a naturalistic continuum?” go to www.highwaterbooks.com. all a portrait they will cherish forever. For a higher fee, Mr. Brunetti is also willing to perform acts of freelance people that I honestly connected with. Lithographs can be ordered from www.artbabe.com. illustration. Call or write for particulars. I always feel regret and despair: I think, SMARTEST KID continued on page 7. ~7~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. said that Flaubert’s book was a brilliant exercise in style but lacked what they Continued from page 6. called a “moral center.” He sighed. “Of course, this brought me “That’s so weird,” Chris said. “That’s no end of problems. “ the weirdest thing to say about a Including, no doubt, the problem of book.” reading him as a real character. This Back then people thought that malleable, almost nonexistent concep- books should tell the reader how to tion of character is why Corrigan (like feel, I offered. They were not used to all of Chris’s characters) eventually making up their own minds. turned into him. The brilliant little kid “They still want that today,” Chris and the mercurial old man—an apt sighed. “That’s why there’s so many enough summation of the twin poles of bad movies.” Chris’s character in real life—have The critics pestered Flaubert inces- now met halfway in the middle-aged santly about the implications and Jimmy Corrigan of the novel. This inspiration for Madame Bovary until Jimmy is the middleman lookalike of he finally turned away from the win- his rotund father and his gnomish dow to face them, and floored them grandfather—whom we see only in his with his obvious answer: “Madame childhood and near-senile “second Bovary, c’est moi.” childhood.” “I could see Flaubert as Madame Over the years the Corrigan joke, far When the modern world was form- Bovary,” Chris mused. “He seemed like more than any of Ware’s other charac- ing in 1902, Jules de Gaultier coined a passionate guy who’d had his heart ters, has turned into an incredibly com- the word Bovarysme. Taken from the stomped a couple of times.” plex, lyrical, pictogrammic rumination heroine of Flaubert’s novel, Bovarysme This phrase—having your heart on identity. Chris has taken Jimmy’s is the daydreaming with which we sup- stomped—comes up again and again in character farther than the rest because offered picture of detachment, a cruel plement our humdrum existence. Chris’s conversations with interview- Jimmy’s roots are the most personal, detachment itself, or both—that is the Madame Bovary was the quintessential ers. It is almost impossible to underesti- and the most painful. It is clear from puzzle. It is as puzzling as our culture in bored housewife: stuck with a clump- mate the importance of heart-stomping following Chris’s comics and past inter- general, a culture that has babbled ish, doofus husband and her dispiriting in Ware’s work, particularly his earlier views that when Chris first moved to about the subject of loneliness end- chores, she occupied her emptiness Sparky the Cat and Quimby the Mouse Chicago he went through a period of lessly and yet will not face up to it; one with romantic novels, frivolous pur- stories. Betrayal and abandonment are hellish, heartbroken isolation. Here in that sympathizes with loneliness but chases, and endless mooning out her as integral to these animals’ love lives the city of slaughterhouses, he ate recoils at an unsparing depiction of it; window. She became a symbol of the as Ignatz’s brick repeatedly beaning alone every day for a year. It was then one that defines it, and diagnoses it, as modern malaise because she embodied love-struck Krazy Kat was to George that the lonely, “real-life” Jimmy Corri- “depression” so that doctors can pre- the biggest question: now that we have Herriman’s world. Jimmy’s love life is gan character was born. scribe a pill to make it go away. Lone- everything we need, what do we want? another invisible, intensely personal “Yup,” Chris said. “Exactly. My liness is both ever-present and deter- We want action, romance, and subject of The Smartest Kid on Earth. sketchbooks from that time are filled minedly absent in the modern world. adventure, of course, just like Walter “Well, I hope it’s an underlying with strips where, basically, I am him.” Perhaps for this reason, Chris chose Mitty. We want what Jimmy Corrigan theme,” Chris said in a rare moment of this subject—a subject he said is The Ghost of Loneliness. imagines as he stands on the poop of self-explication. “I’ve chosen a charac- “beaten into the ground”—to be the his dream yacht, tippling a G&T with ter who is not exactly asexual, but sex- Chris is now married, relatively suc- subject of his life’s work. Chauncey and wondering if they ually inexperienced. I’m more inter- cessful, and well established. Listening “It’s the typical modern subject, in a should wake the ladies sleeping below ested in the relationships between peo- to his thoughts about one of the worst way,” he said. “There are hundreds of deck. We want what James Corrigan ple as a result of sex, not just the bio- times of his life, it was clear that the thousands of people out there who, for wanted in 1893, when he thwarts the logical urge itself. I’m a little frustrated specter of that past loneliness still lurks some reason, never managed to make stagecoach robbery and carries off the by the amount of movies that imply nearby. “I still have a sympathy for that big conquest that our culture cele- little red-haired girl of his dreams on that we’re only a bunch of sex-crazed Jimmy,” Chris said, “but it’s not like…” brates so much: to find a sexual partner. the imaginary horse of his passions. animals. Maybe that’s true, but I also His voice trailed off. “I’ve been work- These are the people with the coats think that there’s a bit more to life after ing on this story for so long that it’s dan- and the hats who get on the bus carry- that.” gerous to carry all that into this part of ing two plastic bags, their newspapers A bit more is a bit of an understate- my life. But maybe it’s good to take it and magazines, their headphones on, ment. All of life comes after sex—that this far. One of the reasons I did the their puzzle books out, and they look is why we exist—and that concept is, as Jimmy Corrigan stuff, and why I’m still like they’re gritting their teeth against Jimmy’s heroics in an imagined World War III. much as anything, the genesis of Jimmy doing it, is not only to recreate those all hope. There’s no guarantee that Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. feelings, but also to create something in you’re ever going to find companion- “Those embarrassing daydreams Why We Exist. which people who were feeling the ship. Sometimes I wonder if that is the seem so obvious and transparent,” same way might find some solace. natural state of humanity, and if a lot of Chris said, “but I still fall for them. Underground comics have always been Loneliness seems to me to be the most anger and rage is due to the fact that They’re naturally human and unavoid- tyrannized by sex, from the ribald Tijuana basic human condition. I’m not saying our culture operates against that.” able. The question is whether culture Bibles of the twenties and thirties to that loneliness is what it’s all about, but recognizes them or not. I find Flaubert Daydreaming Happiness. SMARTEST KID continued on page 8. it’s a part of existence, and to say that inspiring because he tried to embrace Chris once asked a painter friend of his, that is unemotional is ridiculous. For the dullness of life as well as the excite- Why do people always expect to be so me it’s where the big internal struggle ment of life. I’ve tried to do that in this happy? The painter thought for a comes from.” story, which may be a total mistake. moment and replied, “Because there’s Loneliness is almost impossible to Who wants to read about dullness? If pictures of it everywhere, that’s why.” define. To speak of it in a dangerously you’re creating an artifact that’s care- We are all familiar with the rant “existential” way, it is always there at fully crafted, why would you want to against advertising: never has society the center of your being, and though carefully craft the dullness of life? But promised us so much romance, so much you can allay it with wine, building sometimes I find myself thinking that fun, so much fashion, and so much sex. model rocket ships, or incessant forni- there’s some comfort in delineating And never have we felt so dull, no mat- cation, it always returns to haunt you. that dullness.” ter how much we buy. It is an evanescent feeling, an almost Where is the comfort in watching “We’re living in the culture that physical state, that borders on non- Jimmy, isolated in the peepshow frame we’ve been working for millennia to being. You are the most you and the of his living-room window, waiting complete,” Chris told me. “There’s least you when you are lonely. You feel eternally for his phone to ring? It is not nothing we do anymore that is directly weakest when your identity is most surprising that the majority of reviews related to maintaining our life on pronounced. written about Chris’s work call it earth. Sustaining ourselves, finding “Strangely enough,” Chris said, “unremittingly bleak” or some such food, fending off predators, sheltering “during the grimmest times in my life, descriptor. That is true, but there is ourselves—that’s all been taken care of. when I’ve been in that situation…” He more to the truth. Sadness has a We do this indirect thing, called searched for the one, right word. “I strange math: when art adds to it, its “work,” that provides us with this don’t know if I felt more alive…” He sum seems to come out right, as listen- strange currency which allows us to shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not ing to a sad song can make you feel bet- purchase the means of life. Every need the sort of person who would ever want ter. What is more, the vanities with has been met, and I think that’s the to live alone, like Gustave Flaubert which Jimmy enriches his humdrum modern problem. It’s an unrest, an did.” existence are humorous; not always innate dissatisfaction, that I think Loneliness might be the solitary rea- laugh-out-loud funny, perhaps, but cer- everyone feels. At least I feel it.” son for Jimmy’s Everyman nature. “All tainly worth a chuckle or two. They are sorts of other miseries can spring from impossibly romantic, yet they are as relationships,” Chris said, “but the raw “real” as anything else in the book. core of human experience is loneliness. They are satirized with compassion, There’s always that sense of isolation, and that is a comfort. whether you’re with someone or not. Emma Bovary tried to realize her And if you’re not with someone, then impossibly romantic dreams through it becomes undeniable. Razor-edged.” adultery and the looking glass of her This sharp focus on isolation— life shattered. French literary critics whether Jimmy is with someone or (all men) fairly exploded as well. Some not—is the single reason why some sang praise but most, never having seen readers have understood the Corrigan a book from which the author story as cold and even cruel. Jimmy’s remained almost entirely absent, mis- relentlessly lonely existence baffles took Flaubert’s absence for aloofness. readers, including me, because his iso- They could not easily judge the specter Eight-year old James Reed Corrigan sports the debonair lation forms either a sympathetically mustache of his dreams. of his omniscient narration, and thus ~8~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. issue this whisper: “Let’s go someplace learned anything in school. Although where I can really give you an examina- Chris is still close to some of his teach- Continued from page 7. tion.” She whisks Jimmy off in a red ers, his contempt for The School of the scatological explosion of the sixties sports car to a fireplace, an off-panel The Art Institute of Chicago is evident and seventies, and The Smartest Kid on coo or two, then a sunny-side up egg throughout his work. When Chris Earth is no exception to this rule. breakfast followed by the inevitable entered a graduate printmaking pro- Ware’s early work in the seminal, now- ring and finally a cabin, cozied by gram at what he calls “The Art of The legendary anthologies Donut Sissy, mountains, happily ever after. The School Institute,” most of his instruc- European “Naked” Robot, and Pale warm, corny timbre of this fantasy har- tors reacted to his comics as though he Effete Shred of a Man drew an explicit monizes with Jimmy’s grandfather’s fan- were still dabbling in the warm sexual manifesto of sorts. The Corrigan tasies about the little red-haired girl he medium of his infancy. In an anecdote novel, however, goes deeper than falls in love with a century earlier—the told to both Hypno magazine and Gary Ware’s early work. What makes this Charlie Brown overtones of which are Groth, Chris recalled a particularly book different is the phantasmal, so blatant that I will not bore you with arrogant instructor who did “site-spe- almost invisible way sex penetrates the an exegesis. cific installations” and scorned any story. Jimmy is no Lothario; he is a vir- But there is more than just the corn trace of “sentiment” in art. One day, as gin, and sex is therefore ever-present by of midwestern innocence to Jimmy’s Chris was working on a Quimby the virtue of its absence. fantasy life. The seeds of something Mouse strip, this instructor peered over The Smartest Kid on Earth is perhaps nasty—or sad, depending on how you Chris’s shoulder. the least sexy, sex-obsessed comic ever. look at it—crop up in a daydream in “You know,” the instructor warned, As one Acme reader wrote to Chris: “I which Jimmy gets rejected by his dream “that is very American.” have shown my wife various parts of girl. That is part of what makes Jimmy’s Well, Chris replied, that’s what he ‘Jimmy Corrigan’ and now, whenever innocence so comic: he cannot get laid was—an American. we might be about to have sex, we even in his own fantasies. After Jimmy’s “So, you are never going to grow up, stop.” The book follows the line dream girl turns aside and tells him eh?” the instructor sneered. between lust and love—a line that can that she just wants to wait, Jimmy pulls Chris dropped out of The Art of The be as thin as your own skin, or as wide on his pants and huffs, “Cocktease School Institute just a few credits as miles and longer than one hundred whore,” in the coldest, most manly before graduation. years—and leads to its inevitable con- voice he can muster. ingly complex character as the story In my poring through the volumi- sequences. Sex lies at the mystery of Those are the two poles of Jimmy’s progresses. Nevertheless, it is plain that nous writing-about-Ware, I found sev- Jimmy’s lineage: from his great-grand- imaginary love life. His mind wavers Chris was already drawing a more sym- eral anecdotes so illustrative of the father William’s porcine grunting with between teddy-bear wuv and love ‘em pathetic father before he met his real Nebraska urchin’s origin that I repre- prostitutes, lonely widows, and possibly and leave ‘em, attracted and repelled father. Such a weird juncture could sent them here. These stories are the Berenice, his black maid, to the pres- by both as he takes timid steps toward have either reinforced or removed seeds of a myth that is at least partially ent-day, romantic reverie Jimmy proj- finding the real love of his life. The Chris’s inspiration for the book. true: the myth of the artist as an eternal ects onto his every brief encounter poor bastard is, of course, profoundly “That’s part of the problem,” Chris child. with womankind. aware of what can happen when you said. “I found my father, so some of the The first creation myth comes from Most of Jimmy’s daydreams are have sex with someone you do not nec- original reasons for doing this story are no less an authority than Chris’s own embodied in his doctor’s office fantasy. essarily want to spend forever with. gone now, or solved in a way. The fic- mother. She is one of his dearest friends As he is being treated for a bloody It is no coincidence that a cut-away tion of the story has become even more and most unflagging fans, and she nose, he imagines the nurse pressing chart of a woman’s reproductive organs fictional, and it has taken on its own wrote the afterword to his first pub- one polished nail to her lips, which hangs in the aforementioned doctor’s life. This fantasy has mushroomed into lished comic book, Floyd Farland™. office. Before the nurse’s perfumed this long, drawn-out…” Chris was (Farland™ is a largely forgettable spec- entrance, the naked womb looms silent for a moment, weighing an imen of the near-mandatory, allitera- above Jim Corrigan’s denuded head as incredibly heavy subject that is oddly tively named main character phase par- Jimmy haltingly explains to him, “I thin as air. “Ah,” he concluded. “I ticular to U.S. cartoonists.) Chris’s guess just that it was weird that you don’t know.” mom remembered his first doodle, weren’t ever around when I was . . .” made when he was only 18 months old. “What a load of whiny woman talk “It was a weekend morning,” she The Ghost of Old Age. show shit,” Jim harrumphs at his son, wrote. “Chris awakened well before I Like almost every truth, this creation cutting off what he is afraid to hear and chose to get out of bed, but in keeping mythology is a half-truth; more pre- launching into a transparent tirade with his usual early-morning behavior, cisely, it is a whole truth balanced by against all the so-called victims these sang and played in his crib while I went an equal and opposite truth. Baude- days. Jimmy asks his Dad about Amy, back to sleep. Later, he cheerily greeted laire’s oft-forgotten addendum to the the sister whose existence he has me as I entered his room. He pointed to deduced. Jim nods and, noting Jimmy’s memorable dictum quoted earlier is the far end of his crib and said: ‘Look, that only adulthood can make this surprise, says, “What—you thought you look! Picture!’ Sure enough, it was a were the only mistake I ever made?” essential, recovered childhood at all picture; a finger painting, really, on the intelligible. I would be caricaturing Making Mistakes. headboard. He was exceptionally proud Chris if I implied that his genius resides It is no secret that Chris Ware had of it. I don’t recall exactly what it was. only in an inner, snot-nosed imp, the never met his father when he began I do, unfortunately, remember the kind of dandiprat who delights in draw- writing this book six years ago. If medium.” ing himself on every bathroom wall. Jimmy is a bastard, to use society’s From this fecund beginning Chris’s Mr. Ware’s work is much too carefully unkind word, then so is Chris—that is talent grew. During his undergraduate thought through and mature to make one of the painful truths behind The years in Austin, Texas, where he drew him a member of what has been called Smartest Kid on Earth. the aforementioned Floyd Forgettable™ the “Whee!” school of underground (“I would have been a good person if The “Dad” puzzle, (poorly) assembled from The Acme “This story started as a personal fan- cartooning. Novelty Library’s “Great Big Book of Jokes.” tasy,” Chris said. “I wondered, What I’d shot myself for doing that,”) Chris However, if you ever have to wee in would happen if I met my father?” fell in love with a girl. This fall led to the boys room of Chicago’s Lounge Ax In a remarkable case of life imitating what we might call the Second Cre- tavern, take a close look at all the crap art, Chris’s unknown father phoned ation, the blossoming that came when written above the two urinals. Amid him from nowhere as Chris was com- this girl stomped on Chris’s heart. the scribbles you will see a little posing the thick of the book. Unset- Dumped, crushed, and despondent, Sof’Boy, drawn by Archer Prewitt, tling enough, but especially so because The Corrigan odyssey in embryo. Chris cried, “Who cares?” and threw gleefully waving at you. Next to Chris’s father turned out to be a lot like away all his artwork. He went back to Sof’Boy is a woebegone, potato-headed Jimmy’s fictional father: full of bravado The Ghost of Childhood. the drawing board and began drawing homunculus drawn in an unmistakable and bluster. “I was surprised at the directly in ink without worrying about hand. Archer is a good friend of that Genius is nothing more nor less than incredible rage I felt,” Chris told Gary childhood recovered at will. whether it was Art or not, or whether it cranky old man, Mr. Ware, and I sus- Groth. “I almost felt like I was being —Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of was Good or not—and it is then, of pect it is only this loyalty that led Mr. mocked in some way. He was calling Modern Life, 1863. course, that his comics became Good Ware into such a loud, crowded, smoky me things like ‘pardner’ in this overly Art. These autobiographical “potato- bar filled with obnoxious rock music. familiar tone.” “Wow,” Chris said. “That’s great. In art man” strips made Chris the brightest This bit of bathroom humor illus- I asked Chris about this conjunction school I got in touch with what I star in the Lone Star State’s cartooning trates the crux of our subject’s genius, of fantasy and reality and the eerie con- wanted to do by going all the way back firmament. the seesaw between Chris, the inner cordance of the two. “I think that in to being a kid again.” Chris explained the childlike imp, and Mr. Ware, the curmudgeon. If any interaction between a father and a It is easy to see how Chris’s genius essence of this rebirth to The Comics the childlike genius is the progenitor of son who’ve never met—and where, originated in Baudelaire’s intuitive Journal. “It was the first time I actually Chris’s work, the more visible side of obviously, the father feels guilty—the recognition: a childish intelligence is started to really enjoy what I was doing. Mr. Ware’s comics is that of the fin- father would be somewhat defensive embodied in the title of his opus, and it It was the first time in my adult life isher, the painstaking craftsman. Ware and say dingbat things he didn’t really animates his most labyrinthine space- where I reclaimed that feeling I had as orders his every composition for delib- mean to say,” Chris said. “My dad’s time constructions. The primary ele- a kid, where I didn’t care why I was erate, and delicate, effects, and he ridiculous, self-confident comments ment of a child’s genius is not knowing drawing what I was drawing, I was sim- shapes every filigree of his imagination were intended to show that he knew but wonder, and Chris’s comics pro- ply doing it. I realized I’d been robbed with the mettle of a perfectionist’s iron how the world really worked. But really voke wonder. Look no further than any of this urge some time around adoles- will. they illuminated the fact that he had one of his elaborate cover designs. cence. That sense of inspiration is so A similar irony is apparent in The no idea how the world works—just like Their baroque organization dazzles a rarely acknowledged in college, if at all, Smartest Kid on Earth: Jimmy Corrigan everybody else.” reader into the state of diminutive but it’s the only real reason to do any- may be a fuddy-duddy in his middle This confluence of Chris’s art and amazement peculiar to childhood. The thing artistic.” age, but the prelude to the book shows his life illustrates his struggle to solve artwork may be elaborate, but the arti- Anyone who has read Chris’s comics that he was an irrepressible little kid. the book. The problem of the Corrigan fice is in the service of humility: Chris knows that he still hates school, as any The story of Jimmy’s grandpa, James, story’s face-to-face meeting with reality aims mainly to please. By virtue of its good imp should—and, since we are on and his passionate childhood dreams is that it makes the story seem more nearly overpowering complexity, his art the topic of genius, we should recall strikes a sharp counterpoint to the bit- real; it is probably not coincidence that reduces us to that most childish expres- that Albert Einstein attributed his own ter note he sounds when Jimmy meets Jim Corrigan is portrayed as an increas- sion of awe, the syllable Wow. success to the fact that he had never SMARTEST KID continued on page 9. ~9~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. “That’s true, too,” he said. “But Amy’s more real than Jimmy is. She’s Continued from page 8. him as an old grump. Jimmy’s father, more specific. The dads are also more Jim, is the man in the middle of Jimmy specific.” and James, and he seems to swing My argument—that Jimmy Corrigan between hatefulness and hopefulness. is a “real” character—had suddenly Although he abandoned Jimmy he is become fictional. Perhaps Jimmy is not obviously trying to make up for it with a real character after all. At this point I this Thanksgiving weekend; this ambi- must have looked like I had seen a guity is the mystery that puzzles Jimmy ghost, because Chris leaned forward and gives the story part of its emotional and said, “Again, honestly, what passes momentum. We can see the shifting for ‘writing’ in what I do is the act of filling in the space every week. It may clouds of Jimmy’s doubt and wonder “I had to move from Omaha to Ghosting The Book. do everything he wants to within the come out looking very carefully darken and lighten his otherwise Texas when I was sixteen, which is not confines of a measly 400 pages. And How much more worth living did life planned—probably because of the way impassive countenance as he listens to a good time for anyone to move, make no mistake—he has wanted to do appear to me now, now that I seemed to I draw—as a delineated, crystalline, his father. Meanwhile, his father ram- because you think you know every- everything. Late one night, or rather see that this life we live in half-darkness coherent world view, but it’s random bles in an human, humble tone and an thing. I knew that I was the smartest can be illumined, this life that at every early one morning, as I struggled to and mercurial. equally human arrogant tone. moment we distort can be restored to its kid who ever came along, and that I articulate what I feel is the genius of “I’m sorry,” Chris said. “I used that It would be a too-obvious move as was right about everything, and that, true pristine shape, that a life, in short, The Smartest Kid on Earth, it struck me an artist to embody Hope only in the can be realized within the confines of a word again. Mercurial.” more than anything, I didn’t want to book! How happy would he be, I thought, that one of the many measures of this form of a child, and a weary Misan- leave her. So I visited her every sum- the man who had the power to write such book’s worth is the sheer number of thropy in an old man’s stoop. That is mer vacation and every winter vaca- a book! What a task awaited him!…He “unfinished cathedrals” it contains. part of what Chris has done in his would have to prepare his book with metic- tion. Some of my best memories are of Chris has obviously considered hun- book, but there is more to this apparent ulous care, perpetually regrouping his sitting at her kitchen table, listening to dreds of tangents in this book’s con- dichotomy than meets the eye. In fact, forces like a general conducting an offen- her tell stories. She was getting old sive, and he would have also to endure his struction that he has had to eliminate, Chris has a hard time distinguishing at then, so she and I drove to Nebraska book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like or merely hint at, and that is partly all between youth and old age. City and she showed me the homes a discipline, build it up like a church, fol- what makes this book so rich. “I can’t help but look at people and low it like a medical regime, vanquish it she’d grown up in, all of the places Chris laughed. His entire being sur- see them as children and old people at like an obstacle, win it like a friendship, where the stories I’d heard all my life rendered to this laugh, a series of sur- the same time,” Chris said. “That’s cosset it like a little child, create it like a took place. I’m lucky she did that, new world without neglecting those mys- prisingly loud hyuk hyuk hyuks that what life is. That’s what we are. We just because she didn’t live much longer. teries whose explanation is to be found shook him with relief. “You’re saying happen to be at a particular time in our probably in worlds other than our “She definitely had her faults, no that the reason it’s good is because it’s lives right ‘now.’ That’s why I leap own…In long books of this type there are two ways about it, and they came out inarticulate,” he said, “because it’s backwards and forwards in all of the parts which there has been time only to Writing in Thin Air. most strongly when she was dying. sketch, parts which, because of the very failed.” Over my furious protest he character’s lives, and that’s why I draw amplitude of the architect’s plan, will no Most people’s personalities seem to shouted, “Actually, would you write a I am sustained only by a kind of perma- them as adults and children at the same doubt never be completed. How many invert when they die. My grandfather quote for the dust jacket when it’s nent rage, which sometimes makes me point. Even right now, as I’m sitting great cathedrals remain unfinished! was like me: a cantankerous, testy, self- printed?” weep tears of impotence but which never and talking to you, I have to remind —Marcel Proust, Time Regained, 1927. centered bastard, for lack of a better abates. I love my work with a love that is myself that I’m not seven, or seven- Sure, I thought, piping down. You frenzied and perverted… I collapse on my teen, years old.” word. He was a generous man, but I interviewed Chris when he was bet. couch and lie there, bogged in a swamp of The problem, according to Chris, is overall his personality was impatient halfway through cartooning the final “You should write, ‘This is garbage, despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride. that people do comprehend the entire and hot-tempered, traits I unfortu- chapter of The Smartest Kid on Earth, and in this garbage we find the very —Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise cycle of their life; unfortunately, they nately inherited. But in the last weeks bringing six years of his life’s work to a stuff of life.’ I was leading up to the Colet, 1852. focus their dreams almost exclusively of his life, when he was dying, he close, and he seemed ready to explode, World’s Colombian Exposition for on their May, and that fantasy leads to turned into this angelic, translucent or implode, from the pressure. Sources dozens and dozens of pages. Years, actu- “God,” Chris chuckled. “That’s great. a lot of unhappiness. person, full of great love for everyone. close to Mr. Ware reported that things ally. I have stacks of books and I’ve That’s absolutely true, you know. He “When we’re little kids we’re “Conversely, when my grandmother had been thrown. Things had been been collecting photographs, posters, puts it so well. God, it’s embarrassing, encouraged to think of ourselves as died, she became nasty. She lost her broken. Things had been shouted—all reading up on it to decide what to put too. It sounds like the most spoiled rot- young adults, and when we’re older mind, she was hallucinating: it was like at himself, or the four walls, of course. I in and what to leave out, how long it ten, Little Lord Faunterloy whining. we’re still encouraged to think of our- an impostor was lying on her death asked Chris if he was losing his child- was going to be, how I was going to That’s why I like his letters so much; selves as young adults. Our entire cul- bed. Unfortunately, because of the like wonder in working on such a long, structure the pages, how they’d be com- it’s so comforting to see the self-indul- ture seems to focus on this celebration extreme quality of that circumstance, a elaborate story. posed against each other, what image gence of being a so-called artist.” of adolescence and youth: ‘We can lot of my most vivid memories are of “Every few days,” he said. “It’s so would reflect what other image—all Most cartoonists plan their strips keep adolescence going as long as we her in those dying days, being really mercurial. Sometimes I’ll be working on that, and for what: eight pages? God!” ahead of time by preparing thumbnail it and I’ll be done penciling it in one want to! The excitement of rock and cranky.” Chris’s authoritative roar reverted to sketches or a script. Chris, however, hour. Other times it will take four roll!’ Chris did a strip about that experi- a pitched, needling tone he reserves for insists on ignorance. Every week he hours to do one panel.” He sighed. “It’s “It’s embarrassing,” he nearly spat. ence (Self-published in Lonely Comics talking about himself, like a mosquito takes a white sheet of Bristol board, a a horrible position to be in. It’s the “It’s truly embarrassing. That’s our & Stories, 1993), but was never satis- humming in and out of one ear. “Every- blue pencil, and begins drawing in the major source of my rage right now. I guaranteed formula for depression right fied enough with it to reprint it in The thing I’d planned, every photo, all upper left-hand corner of the page with want to be done with it, and yet I have there.” Acme Novelty Library. “I think I’ll try ended in a defeating sense of nothing. I no real idea how he will end the strip. again in more detail,” he said. to finish it. All I can see are the prob- wanted to get at the immensity of that Basically he makes up everything as he In the meantime, he is showing how lems, the mistakes, and the immaturity event and I got nothing. Zero.” goes. Although Chris is careful to add personalities can invert in The Smartest of it.” Before I could tell Mr. Ware that he that he usually has a vague idea of what Kid on Earth. The once-sweet James The relationship an author has with had just made my point for me, albeit is going to happen in each week’s Corrigan teeters bitterly near death It—his life’s work—is one that readers in a perverse way, he said, “Nobody strip—and that he knows how he will after an entire century of life, growing fortunately never have to weather. As cares about an ‘unfinished cathedral.’ I end the entire novel—unknowing is more translucent by the panel. His son, we looked at the printer’s dummy of his wish they did because I’m making one. still the basic way he works. book, Chris said, “Sometimes I’ll look Jim Corrigan, worked on having a If Anna Karenina was an unfinished If he is essentially filling in the at this when I’m pasting in each week’s humane life in the 1970s after he aban- cathedral, it would be in the discard space, it is obviously essential that he page and I’ll think, Yes. This is really doned Jimmy and his mother. Jim bin at the public library. It’s not.” fill in the space. There is almost no what I want to do. This is what I want remarried and was a loving father to his Beaming with schadenfreude, I asked white space at all in the pages of his to do… No—it’s not what I want to do. weekly strips nor in The Acme Novelty Chris’s Grandmother. stepdaughter, Amy. Like his wife, Jim Chris if he really needed such high Fuck it! I should just throw this story in Library, not even in the masthead and Chris’s early embrace of his impending was a chain smoker, and after his wife standards to create his comic books. the trashcan and do what I really want. text frames surrounding each issue. old age comes, I am certain, from his died of lung cancer, Jim began to slide “It’s always bothered me,” Chris said, Then I think, Wait. I am doing what I Chris instinctively crowds out every love of his grandmother. His personal into the not-so-nice guy Jimmy meets. contemplating the locked fingers in his want—aren’t I?” last bit of the blank page and literally experience of childhood and old age Jim advises Jimmy never to tell women lap. “My mom has said that I need to An answer of sorts came to him: “It’s fills the void with a driven intensity. met for him in her person, and he grew he likes them until after he has “done” quit being so hard on myself.” up literally at her feet, looking up to them, and says that the “spicks” should so ridiculously stupid!” For a cartoonist barely over thirty, Stupid or not, Chris is doing what he her. She is dead now, but her presence all shoot each other for all he cares. The Smartest Character? Chris has a huge, dense body of work wants—drawing comics—but he cannot already behind him. is still the greatest influence on Chris’s Need I say where this anger really In the Grothasaurus, Chris said that he “Just start writing,” he said by way of sense of storytelling—more than any comes from? felt his first step toward real maturity as explaining his output. “That’s what other writer, artist, or teacher—and she The Thanksgiving weekend is Jim’s an artist would be creating a character writing is. Writing and drawing are may always be The Most Important most obvious conundrum: to Jimmy, he who is smarter than himself. I suggested thinking. We’re told in school that Person in his life. grunts, “Photo albums, turkey dinners, that Amy Corrigan is becoming that they’re skills but that’s wrong. Drawing “The long and short of it is that ‘family vacations’…all that’s crap as far character. is a way of thinking. It’s a way of seeing. there was something in her personality as I’m concerned.” Pages later, when he “She started out that way,” Chris That’s why my way is improvisatory for that I haven’t found in anybody else,” is talking about Amy, tears well up in said. “She’s a bit more mature than the most part. I may have a vague idea Chris said. “Except for Marnie and my his eyes and he sniffles, “Boy, she’s mere smarts, but so far she’s smarter for the week’s strip, but I personally mom, I’ve never loved anybody as taught me a thing or two. You’ll like than the story itself. It’s almost impos- couldn’t write out a script ahead of much as her. It was an almost transcen- her. Plus… she’s a heckuva cook and I sible to describe, but lately I feel like time and then illustrate it. If I did that, dent affection. She had a way of telling know she’s got a real special turkey din- I’ve almost outgrown my characters in I’d just be illustrating a vaguely-imag- ner planned for us on Thursday.” a way. They’re too limited. Jimmy’s stories that was always engaging, no ined and quickly thought-out thing. Jimmy is as utterly baffled as the almost a foil now, and I feel more of an matter what the topic. My cousin Eric When I draw a picture it always sug- reader by these contradictory displays. empathy for Amy now. I think that referred to her as his ‘magic aunt’ gests a number of possibilities that I When I pressed Chris to explain the she’s the only real character, which because she could make anything fun, never would have thought of if I was way in which the Corrigan men seem may be the biggest mistake of all: to and anything interesting. Every family merely writing out a script. I would to shift between sympathy and bitter- introduce somebody specific, like her, gathering ended with her sitting in a never write, ‘She says, “Um,” looks into a story that’s vaguely allegorical. chair, like the one I’m sitting in now, ness, Chris gave me the most obvious, slightly to the left, and scratches the with people crowded around her, lis- and best answer. But that’s the way it’s going, so I can’t back of her hand.’ But when I’m draw- tening to her tell stories about her “I think people shift back and forth,” stop it now. I’ve been planning it this ing I’ll think, ‘Oh, that will look right childhood, her first marriage, her mid- Chris shrugged. “It depends on the way for a long time.” if she scratches the back of her hand.’ dle marriage—anything. Talking to her person.” I reminded Chris that he had stated, The act of drawing is almost more like was like having a working time Ultimately The Smartest Kid on Earth just one hour earlier, that Jimmy Corri- machine. is as simple, and as baffling, as that. gan was a fairly real character. SMARTEST KID continued on page 12. ~10~ cartoonist travels through time and space.

HIS AMAZING ÆSTHETIC INVENTION. Like rhythm, comics are based on toonist fits in our field of vision, the any cartoonist I have seen. In The the past. And, of course, while you’re divided time. But unlike a cinematic more complex and intricate connec- Smartest Kid on Earth, time is so visible perceiving that ‘present,’ the future has AND ITS “STUPID” GENESIS. moment, seen and then vanished, or a tions—and thus emotions—grow from that we can see through it: as a turning already happened. This struck me as the musical note, heard then gone into thin this simple phenomenon. Chris seems to crystal reflects previous and future facets most logical, scientific proof that we MORE THAN JUST HIJINX. air, a comic panel remains visible. The be more aware of this phenomenon than in the facet before us, Chris’s panels have no will, whatsoever, and that we are OUR IMPLICATION IN HISTORY? chain of panels allows us to almost liter- most cartoonists: he said it was “one of reflect past and future panels. Just as the essentially moving along in this already- ally see time passing; more precisely, the comics’ biggest advantages as well as one Cubists painted a still life from multiple planned world. Even the idea of ‘plan- chain of panels reveals the passing of of its biggest drawbacks.” (A drawback perspectives at once, and as William ning’ has to do with human life, with a Reading The Acme Novelty Library is like time as an illusion—an incredibly impor- because it is more difficult to create sur- Faulkner viewed one funeral from fifteen beginning, a future, and an end. Our having a working time machine. Chris tant illusion. prise.) This ability to flit rapidly back different viewpoints, Chris knows that whole moral structure has to do with the Ware plays with time and its close rela- and forth in time is one reason why den- we do not make meaning from life in a idea of a beginning, a past, a future, and tive, space, in novel ways that make even Comics and Life. sity is the word Chris often uses to straightforward manner. In The Smartest an end.” the most mundane events in his stories “To me,” Chris said, “the act of reading a describe what he is trying to achieve in Kid on Earth we can clearly see how his- Chris laughed. “I started thinking leave us agog. Stupendous as these time comic book is more analogous to the his comics. tory has created the present, how every about this so much that I began to dam- tricks are, however, they are always in experience of life than, say, a film. To me, decision made has led to the present age my personal life. So I realized that I the service of his story. In some of his Chris Is Dense. comics are almost like the way we live panel. Because of this “chain reaction,” was way too self-conscious about it. But strips time itself seems to be the subject. life: it’s all there, our past and our future. In an interview in Destroy All Comics, every single moment that ever hap- at the time it struck me that comics were Even when “nothing” happens, as in the Our life has already happened and it has Chris said, “Cartoons are the perfect pened—and will happen—is brought to the perfect medium—or the closest sequence looking out of Jimmy’s window always happened, even though we can medium for making something so dense bear on Jimmy’s every “present” panel, or equivalent—that one could have to that below, we can see Jimmy’s mysterious lin- only experience it in one direction, in that you have to read it over and over moment, for a cumulative effect in which simultaneity, or the lack of it.” eage and one of The Smartest Kid on one, infinite ‘present’ at all times.” again… If I read something in a book, say time vanishes and yet becomes all- Chris worked out his earliest, most Earth’s first ironies: the window out In his book, Understanding Comics, Faulkner, and a hundred and fifty pages important. self-conscious experiments with the which Jimmy looks, wondering where he Scott McCloud likens the “present” in later the character comes up again, I “Well,” Chris said. “I’ve tried to do fourth dimension in the pages of the came from, was installed by his ghostly comics to a storm front that our eyes think: ‘Wait a minute. I’ve read that that by drawing the same street corner Daily Texan—a collection of strips he great-grandfather. move across the page, pushing the high- name before.’ Then you start going back over and over again.” sheepishly allowed me to flip through Time travel is of course inherent in pressure, “future” panels ahead and leav- and you think: ‘Let’s see, the pages in my He is being modest, as always. That is before he put them away. the forward and backward movements of ing the low-pressure, “past” panels left hand were this thick and I remember the simplest and most obvious example “I don’t really think about time in that any song, story, or film. Marcel behind. No matter how intently we focus reading the name in the upper left-hand of how time is one ghostly subject of his way anymore,” Chris said. “That was just Duchamp, the “Futurist,” even managed on the present panel, however, our eyes corner.’ But in a comic book you imme- book. He also warps time and space by part of my early, self-conscious, teenage to work time into painting when his cannot help but peripherally see the past diately have a recognizable, visual refer- clustering small panels into groups next years, when I thought I knew every- nude descended a staircase. Although and future panels at the same time as we ence, so you can turn back and know to a large panel: the large panel is so big thing.” there can be a beginning, a middle, and read. In this way we cheat time as we exactly where something is.” that the reader’s eye does not have to an end to all of these art forms—and not read, and we cheat more with each re- Almost all comic book writers know Self-Consciousness. leave the smaller, grouped, panels in necessarily in that order—comics are reading of the page, appreciating the this and cartoon with a comic book’s Remembering Chris’s earlier comment— order to read it, in effect allowing the more rooted in the fourth dimension ways in which panels prefigure and echo amplified echo effect in mind, but Chris that trying to deal with the nature of reader to be in two different times, and than any other visual medium. other panels. The more panels the car- has played with this relativity more than “reality” in Art is like trying to bake a two different spaces, simultaneously. cake with a flute and a rock—I asked him “That’s something you can do pretty how he understood the tension, if any, easily in writing prose,” Chris said, between consciously exploring the dizzy- “because as a narrator you’re free to nav- ing formal possibilities in comics and the igate in and out of people’s minds. It’s dif- more traditionally “emotional” aspect of ficult to do in comics because you’re lit- writing—fleshing out the world’s demons erally always at one, fixed point. That’s and angels. why I don’t understand why so many car- “I try to do both,” Chris said. “Even in toonists always stick with a regular panel school, when I was trying to experiment size. Changing the panel’s sizes allows with styles and panel sizes, I would you to group actions together: I try to put always try to get at least some sense of images together so that they make sense emotion about something that had hap- and yet keep the page’s overall sense of pened in my life. More often than not, it space. I’ll put a drawing of a space next to didn’t work. If it didn’t communicate any a series of grouped actions, and the two emotion it was my failure as an artist. together work in the way you were That kind of overly self-conscious exper- describing. I’ve organized the pages in imentation can really get to you after a the whole Corrigan story specifically for while. Obviously, I’ve taken a lot of flak this reason. In next week’s strip I’ve for it.” drawn a six-panel sequence, containing a character’s memory, that blocks out Emotional Connections. much differently than the rest of the In John Donne’s famous phrase, “No man composition, which is open and dry. I is an Iland, intire of it selfe,” and Jimmy tried to compress that memory into a Corrigan is no exception—although, if very small space so that you can also see any man were an island, Jimmy would be. it while you’re looking at the bigger pic- But he is not, as the panels at left, taken tures—so that you can see that charac- from the book’s first chapter, begin to ter’s memory while you’re reading the illustrate. It is as though Chris Ware’s larger panels depicting her in her exterior unconscious has deliberately and per- world.” versely—and I think wisely—led him to draw the most unconnected character The “Stupid” Genesis of Genius. possible, if only to see if everything, and Not surprisingly, this mindbending con- everyone, is connected despite all traction and expansion of space and time appearances to the contrary. Make no is rooted in a silly idea that Chris picked mistake, that is one point The Smartest up as a boy. Kid on Earth draws toward its end, as “You’re the first person who’s ever Black and White Jimmy and Amy come asked me about this,” Chris said. “This is together, more closely related than even the whole reason I started really getting they might realize. It is this sense of his- into comics when I was a kid. Let me tory that makes these little time travels preface this story by saying that these are in Ware’s book far more than clever all very adolescent, fifteen-year old hijinx. They make the emotional story thoughts. possible. “When I was in high school I read this In the Grothasaurus Chris related a dumb book by this idiot Victorian recent incident that pointed at the philosopher. His name was Charles uncomfortable nature of his own connec- Howard Hinton—no, that’s not it, but it tion to a stranger. “I was at the YMCA,” was something like that—anyway, he was Chris said, “waiting to get a photo I.D. a nutty polygamist who claimed that he made, and a Black woman was standing could visualize four-dimensional objects next to me at the counter, waiting along while he was sleeping with as many with me. When the secretary handed my women as he could.” I.D. back to me she said, ‘Hey, you two Hinton’s theories about four-dimen- have the same last name.’ I looked over sional congress swayed the adolescent at the woman next to me and said some- Ware. “I was sitting in Government class thing brilliant like, ‘Hey, cool,’ and one day when it occurred to me that any immediately realized my unintended experience of time as a direction is com- insult; it’s more likely than not that the pletely subjective. As I was sitting there I reason she had the same name as I is realized that, in the amount of time it because my family at one time may have takes for an image to reach your eyes, be owned her relatives.” processed by your brain, and then experi- I asked Chris about this brief but enced as the ‘present’—the speed of light telling concordance between his fiction plus an eighth of a second for your brain and his reality. “It didn’t directly influ- to process it—in that time, what you per- ence the story,” Chris said, “but it did ceive as the present has actually become bolster my confidence to keep running ~11~

with it. You can’t deny that reality. My present, especially if you’re a guy, and it PURELY “FORMAL” INNOVATIONS. mom once maintained that she didn’t seems like that generation just gave in to JIMMY tries to tell his father for the first time how he feels feel any responsibility for the era of slav- that urge.” about having never known him. Despite the vagueness of ery. It might have been her family’s Jimmy’s utterance, his emotions are clearly built into the But Jim Corrigan also embodies the second panel, most obviously by his immediate reversion responsibility but she felt that she didn’t best of the post World War II, “Love” to childhood. Although this grayscale scan does not show it, the background turns bright red, while Jimmy’s body have anything to do with it. Where does generation. Jim fought vehemently and the panel’s border turn bright green; butted against this attitude come from? Many people against his father’s “Colored” percep- each other in this way, the two complementary, opposite colors vibrate with a perceptible tension. If word balloons who say such things would also be the tions—and his own—to adopt and raise are the “quotation marks” of the comics language, Chris first ones to trumpet the heroics of their the foundling Amy Corrigan. Jim Corri- has de-quoted the rest of Jimmy’s utterance by running it below the panel in the space traditionally reserved for great-grandparents.” gan was everything to Amy that he was narration. This is the only point in the entire book that Although Chris’s legendary humility Jimmy’s voice shifts in this way. The shift makes his voice not to Jimmy. Jim is both the best and “feel” more like his thought itself—undeniable, with the often appears to be the face of an inher- the worst in his generation, and some- presumed, timeless authority of a narrator—and yet also ent selflessness, it is also the result of more ephemeral, because it is disembodied. Ware writes where in between those two is the the halting, first words of Jimmy’s utterance above in another, equally valid self, a gigantic one ghostly, “real” Jim Corrigan, a man at war both ways at once, amplifying the silent “sound” of Jimmy’s voice ringing in both his and our heads. that takes in over a century of our coun- with himself—just like everybody in try’s history and feels a personal responsi- every generation. The book shows this bility for its unpleasant truths. In this ambivalence over time, using time to “METAPHYSICAL” IDEAS. sense, history and our unavoidable con- amplify both the “right” and “wrong,” CHRIS MAINTAINS that art is not equipped to deal nection to it, and our implication in it, is the tragic and the comic, the opposites with “metaphysical” ideas about “the nature of the “moral structure” of Ware’s book— reality.” It is odd, then, that his comics travel so from which The Smartest Kid on Earth was although, of course, the most self-effac- dizzyingly through space and time, and suggest so born. The contrapuntal stories in it nei- much about the eternal and transitory nature of ing cartoonist on earth would never, both. It might be more accurate to say that Chris ther damn nor pardon the Corrigan gen- ever, agree with my claim—and for good does not care about “metaphysical” ideas—he just erations, and if the book had a “moral wants to tell a good story. reason. As he has said, Chris does not The panels shown here are taken from a strip that structure” that would be it. understand things on a social level, only allows us to see one tree, or one space, at fifteen dif- “When it comes down to it there’s ferent “spaces” in time. As we read the strip we on a personal level. Paradoxically, that is travel backward in time and see Big Tex, the faith- really no difference at all between the why The Smartest Kid on Earth suggests ful hillbilly dolt, grow younger as he disappoints his generations,” Chris said. “But when I father again and again. By the time we reach the more about the effects of the “patriarchy” end of the strip, we see the tree as a sapling on the think about it, I’m glad that I didn’t grow in our American century than any aca- day Tex planted it, and we realize the comedy and up with a father. I’m thankful that my tragedy in the high hopes Tex’s parents express for demic rant could ever express. their young son. Our eyes pull back and compre- Jimmy’s grandfather, James Reed Cor- mom raised me to be a wimp. Actually, hend the entire tree, and Tex’s entire life, all at once one of my main goals in life is to raise a in one, unified, composition. Chris has literally rigan, is an odious wretch when Jimmy captured the distance between comedy and meets him—thanks in part to the hateful kid who isn’t a football player—that, and tragedy—time—but only to show us a sense of life, and to illustrate a story about human nature. treatment James received at the nine- to have a woodshop.” ■ fingered hands of his own father, William Corrigan. Dads have always been the HEAD-SPLITTING recurring bugaboo in Ware’s work, your MIND FUCK. alpha and your omega, your creator and THE “MUSIC” OF COMICS, ILLUSTRATED. your destroyer. The century-wide com- pass of Ware’s omniscient narration PERHAPS THE MOST MIND-BOGGLING of all Ware’s strips, this little cat-and-mouse humdinger manages shows that Jimmy Corrigan, sad sack to compress all of two lovers’ existence into one, loser that he is, is actually better off, and painful instant, and then re-explodes that instant for our enjoyment, clearly explaining the way in which a better person, than his fathers—mainly the comics language works and expressing a simple by virtue of being separated from them at story of cruelty and regret at the same time. In this head-splitting instant (shown prominently at an early age. While it is apparent that the center left of the composition), Quimby the man- Chris is exploring the void his own father mouse is crushing Sparky, the loyal cat head, for the same reason as always: he both loves and hates him. left in him when he abandoned him, it is (When Quimby is lonely, Sparky meets his need for equally apparent that Chris is exploring companionship; when Quimby is not lonely, he resents the burden imposed on him by the disembod- the benefit of that same void. The ied head.) Smartest Kid on Earth is a true book You can start “deconstructing” this story by looking at a depiction of your very own viewing of this strip because it shows both sides of this appar- in the top left corner, illustrated by the reflected light ent contradiction. from the page reaching your eyes. Follow the solid Jimmy’s father, like Chris’s real father, line, leading down from the lightbulb’s wavelength, and the dotted line, leading down from the picture might be a father but he is not a Dad. In off which the light is reflecting, across the string of a sense, the bloated Jim Corrigan embod- panels atop the composition. The last panel at top right is broken: the break in the panel is exploded ies the worst of the post World War II, downward into a series of panels which illustrate how “boom” generation, the generation that motion and “closure” can be achieved in comics, closure being the means by which you mentally “fill spent more of their—and our—time in” the white space in the gutters between panels and “getting in touch with their feelings” read the divided actions as continuous motion. The “closure” is shown just below the break, below the than any other. The “Me” generation was clock icon, in a ghostly, dotted border. okay, you were okay, and everything was As the further breakdowns show, Ware portrays the head-splitting two ways: using one panel with a so okay that fragile things, including the “motion line,” and using two panels with a gutter. landscape and their own children, were The “motion lines” are analogous to silent “sounds” that we “hear” in our brain, and he uses the book horribly ignored in their seemingly end- icon to compare this to reading. This “reading” less search for I, me, and mine. method primarily involves the brain, with the eyes and heart secondary. “I agree,” Chris said. “Our grand- The two-panel, “closure” method is analogous to parent’s generation built the world that divided time, shown by the clocks, and he uses the stage icon to compare this to theater. This “stage- our parent’s generation destroyed. I truly like” method primarily involves the eyes, with the believe that. I’m not saying that all peo- brain and heart secondary. ple in that generation destroyed it, and, Both methods of depicting motion in comics fuse toward bottom right in the musical note icon—the obviously, I have more of a connection “music” of comics—with yet another breakdown with the cultural ephemera left over from below it, illustrating how music is essentially, like comics, divided time. our grandparent’s generation than from Clusters of equations in the top center of the com- our parent’s, but I do feel that something position break down how the iconography of the comics language works: Man is reduced to an icon, as after World War II went truly, terribly a concept is reduced to a word, then fused with a wrong. mouse. The angles of Quimby’s eyebrows signify emo- tions (anger in this case) where Sparky’s squint reads “My wife, Marnie, could probably tell as pain (shown by the stars). you that I like to sit at the dinner table You can start anywhere in this story: begin with the creation of the earth, at bottom left, reading up and just complain about things and make through the evolution of the species, technology and crass, moral statements like these. In this culture, and the two lovers, respectively. Or begin at the end, at bottom right, when Quimby—now aged, particular story it just comes down to sad, and alone—hears the music that reminds him of that particular generation of people who his cruelty to Sparky. Only Chris Ware could manage to work a little poignancy into this circuit-board, were off, “finding themselves,” or some- algebraic exposition of the universe. Pure genius. thing like that. That’s an urge that is ever ~12~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. fling a cough, picking his nose, or look- ing out the window. This obsessively- Continued from page 9. writing than writing the words them- rendered, nearly imperceptible body selves, if that makes sense.” language is the rhythm of the silent Cartoonists who do not work on the “music” that imbues this book’s trivial superhero assembly lines have often dialogue with such importance. noted the inseparable nature of their If this proposition sounds preten- writing and their drawing. Those who tious and purely formalist, bear with me script out their story ahead of time do for one paragraph. Chris has often speculated that he might be “brain- so with the future task of drawing in damaged,” so let us entertain the valid- mind; likewise, the act of drawing often ity of his claim. There is a disorder of leads them to rework or even abandon the brain’s left temporal lobe called their thought-out script. That is just receptive aphasia. A spot in the gray one of the balancing acts that make matter stops working, and, as a result, cartooning so difficult. aphasics are left unable to understand This belief in perpetual improvisa- spoken language. Direct a statement or tion is, I think, what the “Whee!” question at an aphasic, and he hears school of underground cartooning only gibberish. However, the right lobe advocates. And there is an undeniable of the aphasic’s brain compensates for magic in improvisation. But if you are this disorder by growing hypersensitive trying to create something for the to everything but the content of the ages—and that is what Ware is doing— gibberish. Aphasics hear only nuances, well, you are making life pretty hard for but they hear them well. By listening to yourself by resigning yourself to the emotional tone, timbre, and improvisation. Then you are also a rhythm of every utterance, and by scru- member of the “ShitDamnErase” tinizing every tic, tremor, and wrinkle school of cartooning, and Mr. Ware that shapes your “expression,” aphasics leans farthest toward this end of my grow astonishingly good at understand- admittedly artificial and oversimplified ing character. It is said that you can spectrum. Things get thrown, and never lie to a veteran aphasic. Their things get broken, because of Chris’s built-in lie detector enables them to tortured faith in improvisation. survive in the world of babble. Obvi- “My main problem as a writer is that ously, Chris is not aphasic—but he I never know what end I’m working does have their intuitive gift for listen- toward,” Chris admitted. But when I ing to the unspoken emotion in the jib- asked him if he knew how he will end understand what happened in the arts “When I’m working on a strip I read berjabber of everyday chatter. Our The Smartest Kid on Earth, he said, “Oh at the turn of the century. Musicians, through it a number of times,” Chris omniscient narrator is almost preter- yeah. Definitely.” painters, and sculptors suddenly felt said. “Frequently there’ll be stumbling naturally attuned to minute shifts in The puzzle, then, must be how to they had to deal with the ‘metaphysi- points where the comic just doesn’t verbal and facial expression, and that is build a maze in the few remaining cal’ ideas that were emerging—and the work, and it’s because a character’s eye- why, to me, his characters pulse with pages that will lead us to this definite arts are not equipped to deal with that brow isn’t angled properly. When a ges- such illusive and elusive emotional life. ending. sort of thing. They’re simply not. ture seems wrong it’s not necessarily a If you do not “see” what I am saying, This puzzle shows how relentlessly That’s like trying to bake a cake using a theatrical problem but a rhythmic reread the book with a whisper of apha- revised “improvisation” is no different, flute and a rock. Anyway, Cheever says problem. Sometimes I’ll add another sia in the back of your mind. As you really, than scripting ahead of time. that it was left to literature to carry the panel in there and, all of a sudden, the witness Jimmy’s perpetually dumb- Chris has just narrowed the gap dying ember of the human spirit rhythm seems right and the page works. struck reaction to the ceaselessly between conception and revision; he is through all of this over-intellectualiza- I don’t understand why, but it needs an mutating world around him, maybe my saving time by trying to edit instanta- tion about ‘reality.’ For Cheever to be extra beat. The internal rhythm of the proposition will make some sense. We neously, in true newspaper deadline aware of that, and to be a keeper of that strip is what carries it along—it’s the have all felt aphasic at times: usually at fashion. Spontaneous editing is the way ember—that was such a great codifica- “music” of the strip, as you were saying. a party, when it is late, we are tired, in which Mr. Ware imposes economy tion of all the things that I’d been feel- In this way you get the internal, almost maybe a little drunk, and everybody is and order on his spontaneous imagina- ing since art school. Art schools can intuitive emotion of the strip. Does yammering away in everybody’s ear tion, and to him editing is perhaps the imply that there is an almost mathe- that make sense? It’s the same as film about a million things and we cannot most important part of creating comics. matical way to make art: ‘What is your editing. If you look at early films, they understand the hubbub but we know “You should do an issue of The Imp art about?’ they ask. ‘Pick something were like filmed plays: they’d set up the that we are not really interested in on the topic of editing comics,” Chris and pick the best way to do it.’ camera and people would act as though what they are saying, whatever it is. said. “Editing implies planning, execu- “That’s not what art is about. It’s they were on stage. Directors eventu- We just want to go home. We would tion, and rhythm at the same time, and about intuition. Intuition is thinking. ally realized that they could stop the like to be interested; really, we do want how you edit is intimately linked to I’ve said this about drawing, and I’ve camera, move it to another location, to connect. Then an elbow nudges us how you work. For example, Chester said this about emotions, too. Emotion and move in for a close-up or different and an excited voice in our ear babbles, Brown works panel by panel and pastes is just another way of thinking. It’s a perspective. They noticed that when “WannaplayJumanji?” them up, while Dan Clowes writes and distinctly human way of thinking the zoomed in on someone’s face, it “Uh,” is about all we can stammer at rewrites the story before committing it through your experience. That’s what created a weird emotional effect. Peo- that point. That is when we are Jimmy to paper. I think Gilbert Hernandez art is. Intuition is not just ‘getting mes- ple suddenly realized that editing could Corrigan. begins in the middle of a story and sages from the gods,’ or some sort of gas be used as an emotional tool, to give a The Masked Man. draws it outward.” that afflicts you—it’s an internal logic. film a musical force. And I think that He shook his head in wonder, for a It is the sum total of your human expe- there’s a force like that in comics.” Much has been said about the faceless moment as fannish as I. “I just puke it rience guiding you, and you can’t con- aspect of The Smartest Kid on Earth, and up and color it pretty,” he murmured. sciously be aware of it. You can’t drive The Meaning of Babble. rightly so. Until the end of the book Then he straightened in his chair and your way through art that way—it just This musical force might be the heart the faces of every non-Corrigan, adult apologized. “I’m being facetious. I will doesn’t work. Any time you’re totally of The Smartest Kid on Earth. Without character are cropped out of the panels, go back and redraw and rearrange aware of what you’re doing, you won’t delving too deep into the technicalities turned from the viewer, or obscured by things. That’s my way of editing.” be able to do it. I firmly believe that.” of the comics language, one reason why word balloons and a thousand other There is some truth to the puke the- All this is by way of saying what any Chris’s drawing is like writing is sleights of the artist’s hand. On the sur- ory, as anyone who has seen Chris’s creator already knows, or senses: the because Chris often writes in body lan- face this faceless world reflects Jimmy’s original artwork can attest. A Chris act of writing (or painting, or strum- guage. When a gesture seems wrong almost claustrophobic loneliness: he is Ware page is almost always a mess, a ming) itself teaches you what you want Chris says it is not necessarily a theatri- too plain-looking to merit eye contact, cyclone of cyan scribbles, ghostly blue to write. Writing and drawing are both cal but a rhythmic problem; but that too shy to make it himself. This device bodies in un-inked poses, unused dia- thinking because thinking is a process, necessarily shows that the theatrical also directs the reader’s empathy (and logue, blobs of white-out, eraser smears and like your emotions, they will teach and the rhythmic are almost insepara- not necessarily her sympathy) toward and unarticulated tangents. I call the you what you already know if you listen ble. Just as stage actors frame their Jimmy and the Corrigans alone. But Ware page hanging on my wall a closely enough. Revision gets you utterances with pauses—what they call Chris has hidden so many faces also to palimpsest—a document that has been closer to your original, cloudy intu- “beats”—Chris frames his character’s overcome what he calls the inherent recopied and altered so often that you ition. Your adulthood gives form to dialogue with “silent” panels, pauses in “vulgarity” of the comics language. can see many previous incarnations in your childish wonder. which the Corrigan “speaks” by muf- This vulgarity problem is thoroughly the phantom writing beneath. Each discussed in the Grothasaurus, where panel obviously draws all of Mr. Ware’s Chris explained that comics, because of thoughts, and all his turmoil. their visual nature, are too explicit at “This may be too confessional,” times. The comics reader cannot Chris said, “but last night I was so always participate in reading a comic enraged with myself that I had to leave book as he would a novel by drawing the house and go for a long walk. I his own, mental picture of a scene— ended up at Myopic Books on Division because the artist has already done it Street, looking at the journals of John for him. Comics can be too obvious for Cheever. I’ve been thinking about buy- the reader’s imagination. To overcome ing this book for ten years, and I don’t this and approximate the omniscient know why I never do, but I occasion- narration possible in prose, Chris has ally pick it up. Last night I read one hidden the faces to make blanks for the paragraph in there that struck me as reader to fill with his own imagination. being so true: it’s about how art has Some readers, the Members Only in developed in the last one hundred particular, do not like the sleight. One years. family so alone in a world makes the “To paraphrase badly what Cheever book too claustrophobic, they say, and said: It’s impossible for people today to The focus on Amy Corrigan’s gestures and her breast creates the weird and intimate effect of this passage. SMARTEST KID continued on page 16. ~13~ SMARTEST CARTOONIST ON EARTH CAPTURES ESSENCE OF CHICAGO. SKETCHES UNSUSPECTING while staring pointedly at some safe, Drawing and Cartooning. Life drawing, on the other hand, is is also one of the best drawers on CITIZENS ON ELEVATED TRAIN. faceless spot in space. If you are like Readers who have not had the pleas- an effort to capture a thing exactly as earth, Chris’s friend and mentor, Art me or Jimmy Corrigan that safe spot it is. You do not reduce your subject Spiegelman, complimented Chris’ AN IMP EXTRA. ure of seeing Chris Ware’s sketchbooks often wanders toward the downy nape might be surprised by the “loose” qual- because you invite the viewer to linger sketchbooks when he said that they of a neck or a tightly sheathed thigh. ity of these drawings coming from a on every nuance. In my favorite life were afflicted with “Crumb-itis.” CHICAGO.—Everybody is a nobody Somehow these random sexual fan- cartoonist known for his tight, iconic drawings I can see the lives of both the “To me,” Chris said, “Crumb’s when they ride public transportation. tasies seem almost innocent, perhaps compositions. Here is an important artist and the subject merge and move sketchbooks reveal an insatiable desire Lulled by the rhythmic sway of the car, because the train itself is so dirty and distinction that merits repeating: in the line, a line which can quiver to see the world. There are drawings in trying unsuccessfully to avoid touching abused. The naive imaginings are tran- with the almost imperceptible tension his sketchbooks of trees, and light strangers from side to side, passengers Chris cartoons in his newspaper strip, scendental, almost idealistic, rising as created by their mutual life energies. through windows, that to me are beau- fall almost automatically into the odd, but he draws in his sketchbook. they do above the scummy reality. Chris’s line is like that. It owes its tiful, even heart-wrenching. This kind intimate detachment of train behav- “Drawing comics and cartooning Everybody’s steadfastly avoided tremulous quality as much to the liv- of detail is sometimes in the back- ior. If passengers speak at all they say, are two different things,” Chris stare is what give el rides their imper- ing, shifting subject as it does to the ground of his comic strips, and I “Sorry,” or “Excuse me,” with a down- explained. “When I’m signing books sonal, vacant quality, but also their hand guiding it. In Ware’s drawings we wanted to put detail like that into my ward glance. When they do move they for people, occasionally somebody will meditative quality. When we steal a can sense that the subject is shaping comic strips.” pick their way through the crowd of glance at the face of our fellow day- ask me, ‘Why are you drawing all him as much as he is shaping them. Chris’s drawings appear more often shrinking bodies so gingerly that they dreamers—and we always do—we can scratchy and wiggly?’ I tell them, in his earlier cartoons, usually as real- might be apologizing for their exis- see each one staring into his own, per- ‘Because that’s the way I draw.’” The Best Cartoonist on Earth. istic vignettes and still-lives that tence. In this way we are all Jimmy sonal void. Because each face holds To Chris, making comics is cartoon- The wavering fidelity of these draw- either frame the cartoon or act as a Corrigan when we ride the train. the reflection of that void, public ing; that is, telling a story with pictures ings is more than a little reminiscent small window within it to the “real” Like elevator behavior, the first rule transportation is one of the best places that are simplified almost to the level of the superlative lines on paper drawn world. The sequenced, almost hiero- of train behavior is to never stare to see our lowest common denomi- of symbols. This enables us to rapidly by another, more famous artist. If life glyphic complexity of his cartoon directly at another passenger’s face. nator, which is this: we will always feel “read” his pictures in sequence, just as drawing is a way of thinking and of strips is surrounded by a bare tree in The businesslike passengers are always more than we understand. This hollow we read words. That is just one reason seeing, as Chris says it is, then to him protected by their newspapers and poignance is plain as day or harsh as why cartooning is a language and why there is no better thinker and no bet- the dead of winter, or punctuated books, of course, but the lazy among us fluorescent light on every passenger’s comic strips are written—even if they ter seer than The Best Cartoonist on within by a solitary, faithful drawing of must gaze out the window or dream face. don’t have any words in them. Earth: Robert Crumb. Because Crumb his late grandmother’s home in Nebraska. These painstaking drawings imbue the kinetic, cat-and-mouse action of the cartoon with what Chris has called a “tone,” in the musical sense, as a long, held, solo note can sober a song. R. Crumb’s drawings also often have this timbre. There’s a warmth to his renderings of “The Lonely Guy Tea-Room” and its patrons, and of trails leading into dark forests, that is far, far too often ignored in the pre- dictable brouhaha over his more obvi- ous love of steatopygic, and therefore callipygian, women. This overlooked, emotional quality of Crumb’s work is what inspires Chris. “I’m not copying Crumb’s drawing style,” Chris explained, “but his over- all empathy.” He picked up a sofa-side copy of the R. Crumb letters book and waved it, as a defender might wave a debatable piece of evidence during his passionate plea to the jury. “The title of this book is Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me, but I think Crumb has an incredible vigor for life, in a way that’s almost like Tolstoy’s. Early in his life Tolstoy said that if he could make the readers of following generations live, laugh, love, and fall in love with life, then he would feel his job was accom- plished. It may appear that Crumb has this hateful disregard for human life, but he doesn’t. Just look at the way he draws! Even when he’s just drawing a tree or a house there’s an incredible sense of life there, and of beauty, for lack of a better word.” Chris settled back into his chair and let the book drop with a bump on the bookstand. His eyes retreated behind his spectacles as he turned on himself and reverted to character. “I may be totally wrong,” he said, his voice no longer emanating from his gut but from his nose. “I may be a completely naïve jerk for talking about Crumb in this way.” Then his face and his voice slackened a bit: “But the empathy in his drawings really influ- enced me.” All Aboard. These six drawings, which Chris selected from his sketchbook, capture perfectly the odd community of isola- tion found aboard any train or bus in any city. It is not too much of a metaphoric stretch to say that I have been at one time all of the passengers aboard this train. Suspicious, curious, worried, exhausted, just plain dumb: I have been there. Your fellow passen- gers are almost never a pretty sight, but they are a beautiful sight if you have eyes like Chris, eyes that face the “ugly” truth. Look at the eyes of the man who is wearing the hat and scarf and absently holding one of his gloves. When I ride home at night from work, I am wiped out, anguished, and relieved; my entire being feels both full and hollow, and I know that I am that man. ■ ~14~ THE 1900 SEARS, ROEBUCK & CO. CATALOG. THE ACME OF the Book, yet strangely past. The Cata- of a catalog.” The Acme grounds are AMERICAN BOOKS. log’s plenitude and relentless salesman- sunken gardens of “great ornamental ship seem as elemental and as granted beds of potted green ferns, banana as the air we breathe. trees, and purple heliotropes,” beyond CHICAGO.—Ernest Hemingway once said that all American literature came Anybody who has seen both the which stretches the “azure lake with from one book: Huckleberry Finn. If Catalog and the tiny ads for nugatory the great fountains playing in the sun- that is the case, then everything else in products in The Acme Novelty Library light.” Such splendor is allegedly all for America came from this book—includ- might expect Chris Ware to claim The the lunch time enjoyment of Chris’s Big Book as an influence. I certainly unfortunate workers, a “great healthy ing The Acme Novelty Library. ‘Celebration,’” Chris said. “He even did. When I found my copy of the Cat- army of city men and women, many of Inspired by his cross-town rival, asked me to do some artwork for their alog in a used bookstore I thought I had whom live in flat, squalid, shit-stained Montgomery Ward, and Ward’s “Wish magazine. Can you imagine? It’s the discovered the Acme Rosetta Stone. buildings with neither front nor back Book,” Richard Warren Sears printed most horrifying, artificial, lie of a place. yards and not a spear of green grass or a his first catalog in 1893, the year of the “Yeah, my grandmother had a copy Did you know that residents are sup- flower to greet the eye in any direction.” Columbian Exposition. By the begin- of this when I was a kid,” Chris said as posed to keep a journal?” Chris builds his lumpens this para- ning of this century Sears’s catalog had I lifted the tome into his hands. He In comparison to Pullman’s cruelty honestly like that kind of writing dise then proceeds to treat them like grown to over 1,100 pages. It weighed immediately leafed through the yel- and Disney’s megalomania, the empire because of the consideration of the lowed pages and brought his head the shades condemned to Dante’s inner over four pounds and contained nearly of Richard Sears seems honorable, his words. I wish I could tell you why I down almost to his lap to scrutinize the circles. Unlike the famed Sears net- every single item available for con- Big Book a relic of that rare strain: the write like that, but it’s a pretty uncon- columns of minute type. “I don’t work of pneumatic conveyor tubes, sumption or use, from seven kinds of honest salesman. scious act. But I’m not parodying it, remember what I thought of it the first Chris’s vacuum conveyors carry not Alaskan silverware (“A New Discov- Hefting the Sears Catalog in his honestly I’m not.” time I saw it,” he said. “All I know is only messages but the messengers ery”), to six different models of zithers hands, Chris stressed that Sears’s Chris’s love of magniloquent rheto- that it gave me the creeps.” themselves. Workers and citizens gather (“The Wonder of The Age”), with æsthetics are what impress him most: “I ric is complicated by his admission that He pondered the cyclopædia staring at the exits of the tubes waiting for the thousands of guns, drugs, herbs, fash- love the way it looks, I like its density. he is sometimes frightened by his own up at him. “I don’t know why it was so battered children to emerge, “their ions, talking machines and men’s elec- I like the way they felt they had to do tyrannical bombast. “It’s so easy for me creepy. I had no idea what it was. It had stumbling, bleeding bodies and disori- tric potency belts in between. The the most carefully-done engraving of to affect it,” he explained. Asked if he nothing to do with the world now.” ented dances almost always certain to Catalog proved so popular and so indis- every object, and to write about it in worried that he himself was a flatulent, After a moment more of contempla- provoke a hearty chuckle or guffaw.” pensable that Americans commonly the most elaborate way. More than orotund pontificator, Chris sighed, tion, he concluded, “It didn’t terribly Meanwhile, accidentally amputated, or referred to it as “The Big Book.” anything, I like the writing style.” “Yes. Without a doubt.” Although hundreds of artists worked engage me. It wasn’t like I pored over it “abbreviated” men continue to work The Dry-Goods Æsthetic. Consider just one promise made in year-round on The Big Book, it or anything. I’d occasionally look at it Acme’s great book-trimming machine Sears’s writing style was an unsettling one corner of one issue of The Acme remained in large part Sears’s personal in moments of boredom, but I wouldn’t under the colossal shadow of the mixture of the Latinate and the Amer- Novelty Library—the “catalog” issue: masterpiece: until his retirement he consider it a formative experience.” Money Building, an edifice “a quarter ican, of prevarication—one of Chris’s “Neither attractive, accurate, nor even oversaw the design and composition of Unwilling to relinquish my conceit of a mile long, two blocks wide, and favorite words—and bluntness. “We mildly practical, our hollow taxonomy each issue, ensuring that each and that I had unearthed “It,” I reminded nine thousand stories high,” where commend this catalogue to the careful of artfully fallow products and services every item was described with elabo- Chris that Acme was Sears’s word for armies of women wage-slaves count his consideration of all buyers,” Sears nonetheless promises a crudely prevari- rate language and an accompanying his in-house line of products. “Really?” coinage day and night. wrote. “If lower prices than any other cated literary insurance against the engraving. The Big Book was literally Chris said. He riffled through the pages Although this Xanadu decreed by average American consumer’s incur- the acme of commercial graphic design, and stopped. “Hey, you’re right.” He Chris’s fictive, inner tycoon borrows able quest to find happy times and sol- Acme being the brand name Sears studied a moment more. “I’m such an heavily from Richard Sears’s empire, its ace in the heart of the most freshly- bequeathed to his in-house line of idiot.” He looked guiltily round at the mixture of patronizing, patrician acquired commercial drygood or inti- products. The ubiquitous brand of The dozen instruments leaning about his benevolence and downright inhuman- mate relationship.” Big Book eventually became the quasi- living room. “I think I have one of ity most resembles the Chicago neigh- generic brand name seen in Road Run- those banjos, too.” borhood of Pullman. Now read it again. We should buy this book to protect ourselves from ner cartoons and countless other facets The Big Book’s influence, if any, The Real Factory Town. buying other products? The joke is on of American culture. might be unconscious. “I guess so,” The railroad sleeping car magnate us but on Ware as well. The personal, Chris said. “Yeah. After I saw it in George Pullman conceived Pullman in A Creepy Book. honest irony of this catalog is the childhood I never looked at it again 1881 as America’s first corporate- Today we feel a weird recognition upon æsthetic culmination of all the inter- until I did my third issue. Sears issued a owned utopia. The planned village opening The Big Book’s densely- mittent advertisements Chris has cele- stereopticon set in the ’teens, with a consisted of modest, row cottages quar- packed pages. We sense that we have brated and savaged throughout his still- tour of their facilities, that I borrowed tering Pullman’s workers, or “children,” seen this book before even if we have young history. Though he has often from heavily for my own tour of the as he called them, spread like brick not, perhaps because Sears’s story is adroitly replaced the inconsequential, Acme factory.” cribs before his own palatial quarters. also our story. As his fortunes rose, so tangible object for sale with the impor- The City of Chicago and the Chicago did our nation’s. Sears started with The Imaginary Factory Town. tant emotion or “bandwagon” tech- Tribune trumpeted Pullman as a almost nothing and became the largest Sears’s colored glass slides took his con- nique that is really for sale, the catalog “visionary”; the city even built special mail-order company on Earth, occupy- sumers on an aggrandizing tour of the surrounding Chris’s tenth issue was the trains to convey attendees of the 1893 ing the largest commercial building on Sears buildings at 900 South Homan Columbian Exposition to and from most comprehensive, hilarious, disturb- earth. Sears then rose to the height of Street, then the Largest Supply House Pullman’s magic kingdom. Pullman’s ing compendium yet. It took the giant, power as the largest retailer on earth, on Earth. The prose and pictures com- magic formula was this: raise profits by contemptuous, faux-corporate aspect of occupying the tallest building on Earth, prising Chris’s own tour of the imagined cutting your children’s salaries while Chris’s Acme persona to a zenith that in the most boastful city on earth, Acme grounds is equally aggrandizing, maintaining their monthly rent and disturbed even Chris. before its recent fall to has-been status a bizarre, free-associating elocution utility payments. When his children “It was a little bit too much,” he and accompanying retreat to the low- that faithfully mimics every neoclassi- could not pay, Pullman cut off their admitted. “It amuses me but I do feel lying suburbs. In this sense Sears stands cal pretension of a tycoon’s Elysium. heat. Thousands of men, women, and like the tenth issue is the last one for America, and his 1900 Big Book is Chris imagines the Novelty Library children starved and froze to death in where I’ll do that. After a while it gets our textus receptus, our original Bible itself as “a true reorchestration of cheap their quaint cottages while Pullman a bit tiresome in its irony and its dis- and blueprint for 20th century life. All material; a dialogue of space, light, and fired any worker who protested his tance. I don’t know what I’m going to of our wants and needs are present in money—all ordered up from the pages “enlightened capitalism.” Finally an write to ‘frame’ the next issue. To be unknown organizer named Eugene V. perfectly honest, right now I feel more Debs led a successful sympathy strike. lost than I have in a long time. I really The cogs of national commerce were do. I feel untethered.” frozen, and Pullman appealed in the The Big Book’s cameo appearance in The Smartest Kid The Ghost of “Everything.” national interest to President Grover on Earth. Cleveland. Cleveland promptly sent in As he weighed the 1900 Sears Catalog U.S. troops who, in the time-honored concern can quote are any inducement, in his hands, Chris made one thing Chicago manner, shot and killed the then we say send us your orders. If a clear: his is parodying himself, or bur- protesters. scrupulous and pains-taking honesty, if lesquing himself, as much as any other This concordance between Pull- strictly correct representations, reli- deserving target. “What it comes down man’s true vision and Chris’s fictional gious-like in their fidelity to truth, are to is that acquisitiveness is a part of not dystopia is why I had originally worthy principles, then you need not only American but modern life,” the planned to conduct our interview in hesitate to trust us.” Etcetera, etcetera, bespectacled collector explained. “We the decayed, Queen Anne splendor of etcetera—in six-point type for over seek comfort and meaning in all this Pullman’s Florence Hotel, at whose one thousand pages. At times Sears stuff. All this stuff is what we decorate once-gleaming bar porcine industrial- reached deliberately comic heights in our life with.” He studied the ponder- ists found a spiritual oasis from the oth- his extravagant spiels, as when he used ous volume. “I can’t put my finger on it, erwise dry, teetotal rule of the village. munificent language to describe the really.” Unfortunately, less than a week before wonder of the Sears one-dollar sewing Earnestness, I prompted him. What our interview, a disgruntled Pullmanite machine—a needle and thread. was earnest about Sears? burned down the behemoth Adminis- Though this ostentatious writing “This is everything here,” he said, tration Building, closing the grounds to style—what we might term the “dry- weighing the past century’s omnibus. visitors and making ashes of my plan to goods” æsthetic—was common to “This codifies what is America. This is interview Chris Ware in the only simu- almost all turn-of-the-century writing, everything. Honestly, I cannot tell you lacrum of his imagined Acme town. Chris applies it in a commercial, and why it amuses me. I cannot put my fin- “It’s almost feudal,” Chris mused of comic, manner like Sears. As a pure ger on it.” Pullman’s now nearly-empty village. comic writer Chris is nearly peerless, Chris’s nebulous understanding of “I’ve always wanted to go there and perhaps because he has grasped a curi- The Big Book could just as easily dispel now I feel extra stupid because some ous attitude best described as honest as confirm my notion that it is an nutcase burned it down.” irony. Chris’s writing is not parody but ancestor of The Acme Novelty Library. Pullman is long buried in Graceland burlesque: treating the ridiculous with The lineage must remain uncertain— Cemetery, but the grim, patrician spirit dignity, and treating dignity ridicu- up in the air, so to speak—if only to of his capitalism lives on in one of lously. suggest that an artist’s influence can be today’s more cuddly, “interactive” “There’s an earnestness, a dignity, to one of which he is partly unaware, an utopias: “My downstairs neighbor was that language that is completely miss- invisible one which surrounds him and doing publicity for Walt Disney’s city, ing in today’s world,” Chris said. “I creeps over him. ■ ~15~

of the Catalog is best symbol- THE IDIOCY ized by the Hotcha boy lighter, THE JOHNSON SMITH the “Outstanding Novelty!” of 1938. Hotcha was a fig- urine of an “innocent” Black boy with his pants down. You lighted your cigar or cigarette by sticking it into & COMPANY CATALOG. Hotcha’s glowing red anus and then sucking and puffing away. In his moronically metaphorical style, Johnson Surprising Novelties -- Puzzles --Tricks --Joke Goods -- Useful Articles -- Etc. Smith said, “Hotcha feels that there are two sides to every question and if you will turn him around you will find out why he is received with a warm welcome in SURPRISE SNAKES, HOTCHA GIRLS, Chris said, “I don’t think there’s a thousands of homes.” EXPLODING EVERYTHING & WOW! male cartoonist alive who hasn’t wanted to parody or celebrate Johnson “ONLY CONCERN OF Smith’s peculiar verbiage and the pow- ITS KIND IN AMERICA.” erful idiocy the Catalog promised— from Kurtzman’s Mad parody to DETROIT.—Johnson Smith & Co. were Crumb’s ads in Weirdo to Ben Katchor’s America’s number-one purveyor of first book, Cheap Novelties. After I fin- nonsense, and therein lies their great ished my first issue Dan Clowes wrote importance. If it was hooey, hufty- me to say that he was disappointed magufty, or an outright ripoff Johnson because he’d have to wait for the air to SMARTEST CARTOONIST ON EARTH CAUGHT “SWIPING.” Smith advertised it for decades in clear before he could do his parody of almost every comic book on the stands. it.” Go Out and Steal, I have assembled Ware’s cut-out X-ray specs, gorilla masks, red hot gum, Revenge is doubtless one motive Concludes Investigator. peepshows, robots, and rocket ships hypnosis lessons, 1001 insults and behind so many spoofs of Johnson and placed them on my shelf, right handshake buzzers—if it was silly, they EVERYWHERE.—To paraphrase Pablo Smith’s poppycock. For many boys it next to Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont sold it. The Sears, Roebuck Catalog was also their first fall for the fictive Picasso, good artists copy and great artists driving their bulbous, cardboard may have had everything, but the John- steal. One of many joys in researching Crumb-mobile, which I cut out and son Smith Catalog had everything else. this issue of THE IMP was discovering assembled from the back cover of When I discovered them at the age what, in small part, makes Chris Ware 1971’s Mr. Natural number 2. And I bet of eight, in 1976, their motto was a great artist. I had recognized his most that Crumb got the idea from the “Things You Never Knew Existed.” In obvious swipes before—the Grit ad, the comics that he grew up with, just as he practice this meant that if it exists, it Burpee seeds scam, and other bits of should have a swimsuit beauty and copied many of his lettering styles from frippery endemic to the comics I read “Let’s Make Whoopee” painted on it. It his music collection. That is how all should also squirt water, deliver an growing up in the 1970s—but I was not culture grows—it feeds on itself—and electric shock, and blow up in some prepared for the socio-historical depth comic books are no exception. Chris’s chump’s flustered face. The barely and breadth of Ware’s swiping. I was contribution to comics culture proves repressed sex and violence evident in not even looking to ferret swipes and that it makes sense to steal from the Johnson Smith’s gargantuan Catalog yet deja vu popped up everywhere in my best—and from the worst. ■ makes it the closest thing we have to a cursory examination of 19th and 20th detailed index of The Imp of the century American ephemera. American Perverse. When I opened the first book on The Evil Twin. ragtime that I read, I immediately saw the phrase, “The Present Day Fad” atop You had to get the actual Johnson From the cover of Mad issue 21, featuring the “Smithson Max Hoffman’s 1897 “Rag Medley” Smith Catalog to see the really bad, John & Co, Dept. 98, Wow, Michugan.” sheet music. (Perspicacious Ware fans i.e., good stuff, because the goods euphoria promised by advertising, and will remember that phrase also caps the advertised in the comics were relatively many boys did indeed fall for it. Some- six-foot high Acme Novelty Library dis- tame, mere teasers intended to hook body actually bought those “Sea Mon- the uninitiated lad into the Catalog’s play stand—a work of art that deserves keys,” hoping they would lewdly make infinitely more twisted universe. The an IMP article in and of itself.) I spotted more humanoid babies in a fishbowl. I Catalog offered you shotguns, live five- a 1938 Johnson Smith & Co. catalog at never fell for that scam but I did fall for foot alligators, the confessions of for- an overpriced junk shop and noted a the pocket-sized “Spy Scope.” No mer maidens sold into “White Slavery,” neighbors ever sunbathed or undressed Ware swipe before I even opened the and volume after volume of every in its teeny-weeny “male gaze,” mainly book: the spine read, “Only Concern of “ethnic” joke (to put it politely) in because its magnification power was Its Kind in America,” just like the circulation. barely over nil squared. cover of The Acme Novelty Library’s “My trust in what they promised was catalog issue. crushed when a friend ordered their X- Before I “uncovered” these swipes I ray glasses,” Chris said. “They were feared that Chris was a genius with a cheap cardboard with feathers for unique, originality gene in his brain; ‘bones’ attached. So I went home and once I got the goods on him I felt made my own. I think I still have relieved. Learning from others— them, actually.” through imitation and tribute if appro- priate—is part of what makes him a This ad from the 1900 Sears catalog shows that it might be The Meaning of Nonsense. the father, more than the twin, of Johnson Smith’s catalog. great artist. I confronted Chris with a All those firecrackers, guns, nudies, few of his swipes and blurted, “You’re and “coon” masks prove that kids “It’s sort of the evil twin of the Sears just good at learning from others!” wanted just as much nonsense then as Catalog,” Chris said, “promising you “Right!” Chris exclaimed, equally they do now. But, as recent teen sprees naked women and cigarettes.” Then he relieved by my appropriate praise. have shown, that old nonsense now added, with characteristic Ware taste, A Chicago cartoonist was recently seems quaint in comparison to the crap “Although, as a kid, I always got more accused by many of blatantly aping kids buy into these days. of a charge from the 1900 Sears listings Chris Ware’s style. Without descending for ‘vaginal syringes’ and ‘bust cream’ You cannot really parody the Johnson into that pointless, boring, morass of than anything Johnson Smith offered.” Smith Catalog anymore. The Catalog contention, it is worth noting that the For the generations of boys who was already a parody of human dignity, cartoonist’s use of fake ads in his comic grew up on comic books, Johnson and that is why Chris Ware is not Smith was one of their first glimpses parodying it as much as he is using it to book was one of the many things that into the obsession adults have with sex. remind us of the real nonsense we live raised fandom’s hackles. In fairness to This alone ensured its present, canoni- with now. Our modern nonsense is as all we must ixnay that one point in the cal status in the comic book pantheon. senseless as ever, but with that comes accusers’ arguments—or else we must more consequence than ever before. ■ include Ware himself and a host of great cartoonists in the “guilty” list. Not just any old schmoe but Harvey Kurtzman—the Moses of underground comics—pioneered the faux ad idiom which Chris and his peers are working in today. Kurtzman used bogus ads to demonstrate that ads are inherently bogus, and Chris is standing on Kurtz- man’s giant shoulders along with every- body else. In fact, many of the quirks which appear to make Chris “unique” in comics—the sham ads, the antique hand lettering, the cut-and-assemble toys—he learned from earlier sources. ~16~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. The Super-Man. Jimmy for dawdling. With a wink the sly Super-Man immediately enlists Continued from page 12. The question facing Jimmy is what he JIMMY CORRIGAN & JOSEPH CORNELL. Jimmy’s aid: “Hey hey there, ma’am— rather than opening the book for their will do with his own feelings. He may that’s no way to treat my partner!” he interpretation the facelessness shuts see behind the confident and ugly faces exclaims. “This here slugger’s a real them out. They say it is suffocating his father wears, but will he himself smart kid!” Quick as another wink rather than empathetic; it is dictatorial wear such a mask? This central ques- tion is what makes The Smartest Kid on Super-Man has made a date with Mom, rather than collaborative. Once again Earth a superhero comic book at heart, ushering Miz Corrigan’s plump poste- the critic’s complaint is our author’s and makes Jimmy Corrigan the most rior into the vinyl booths of a decrepit, intent. mainstream superhero in the history of Kountry-Kookin’ restaurant while “I may be—I don’t know—damaged comics. Jimmy watches in awe. Then they go or something,” Chris told Groth, “but If you think I am exaggerating for back to the Corrigan home for late- simply showing every character’s emo- BY HANS NAMUTH. PHOTOGRAPH comic effect, you are only half right. I night coffee while an uneasy Jimmy tional reaction seems to instantly limit Jimmy Corrigan in his garden, 1708 Peachwood Avenue, Joseph Cornell in his garden, 3708 Utopia Parkway, asked Chris about his novel’s first three lays awake in his bed listening. Chicago, Illinois, forever. Flushing, New York, 1969. the potential for any subtlety of feeling. pages, which serve as a prelude to the The next morning Super-Man tip- Adults lie with their faces. The comic “NOBODY SPECIAL.” wood, a feather, an eggshell or a but- first chapter and ensuing “symphony.” toes out of Mom’s bedroom only to find strip language is not yet sophisticated terfly. Cornell arranged these fragile In this prelude we see a day from woebegone Jimmy eating cold cereal enough to deal with that fact.” An IMP Special Report. relics into humble constellations and Jimmy’s enthusiastic childhood and the alone at the kitchen table. Super-Man set them, like our own tiny existence, It is now, and this “sophistication” is way in which a low-rent, imitation whispers, “You tell her I had a real good To his neighbors Joseph I. Cornell was against the abstract infinity of a night one of Ware’s biggest formal and emo- Super-Man seduces and shtups Jimmy’s time, okay?” and bequeaths his famous nobody special. Born on Christmas sky—a sky also spangled with our tional achievements. He has taken mother—using the poor bastard as his mask to Jimmy before slipping out the Eve, 1903, Joe Cornell lived at home imaginary constellations. pains throughout the novel to show uneasy accomplice. back door. Overjoyed by the ‘real’ for his entire life in order to care for his Cornell’s boxes are also toys, built how body language can both reveal and “That’s the allegorical core of the mask, Jimmy tries it on. beloved, handicapped brother and his with trap doors, marbles, and soap- obscure the unspoken truth in a state- book, or something,” Chris blushed. And there ends the childhood of the nagging, smothering mother. Joe was a bubble pipes. They are made to be ment, and when he does show us a face Then he muttered, “Those are the only smartest kid on earth, and begins the private man, by appearance silent and played with. Balls roll down wire it is for a specific, deliberate reason. As good pages in the entire book, anyway.” novel. Although Jimmy does not fully depressed. He never married and tracks, in and out of hoops and drink- we sit and listen like Jimmy to his The Viennese doctor would have realize the implications of this oedipal remained a virgin almost until the day father’s pointless rambling over lunch, quacked about the “symbols” lurking in mindfuck, every element in this prel- ing cups, dinging bells like a celestial he died. He was the sixth man in his we can read, or “feel,” Jim’s real charac- this, the embryo of the novel, between ude, even the wink, will return to game of pachinko. The pedestrian family to bear the name Joseph I. Cor- ter in his mannerisms and ever-shifting puffs on his cigar. Let us leave the haunt his life’s story. complaint about modern art— “Even I nell, a lineage so erased by time that expressions. On the surface we see Jim’s decoding of symbols to others and look could do that,” or “My eight-year old The Emotional Center? he never knew what his middle initial gustatory slurping and too-loud laugh- at the elements in this opening scene kid could do that”—is an essential part The first chapter begins with the adult stood for. ter for what it is: the gluttony of a self- as metonyms: they do not represent of Cornell’s genius. He was entirely Jimmy receiving a letter from the Chris Ware has fashioned in his liv- ish man with a repressed conscience. something else, they are what they are; self-taught, and, perhaps for that rea- father he never had. This letter, if you ing room a shrine of sorts to honor But we can see beyond that repression however, we can begin to sense the son, he never lost a child’s touch for can call it that, contains no introduc- Joseph Cornell and the unique, inven- as well: as Jim averts his eyes from his “meaning” of the masked allegory from playing with life in a novel way. His tion, no explanation, nothing but a tive, private life that Cornell shared abandoned son and pensively chews his this seduction. work deified childhood, and he made request that Jimmy come to Michigan through his art. Like Cornell’s famous dessert, it is clear from his averted gaze many of his boxes as gifts for children. The Allegorical Core, with the enclosed plane ticket. It is the boxes, Chris’s shrine is a box of sorts, a and rounded eyebrows that he is also It was no coincidence that during or Something. sort of direct action male members of wooden bookcase filled with books chewing the reality of his own failures the hour I spent crowded into the Art our species are supposedly known for about Cornell, aging photographs, and as a father and a human being. Ware Little Jimmy fashions a mask for him- Institute of Chicago, taking notes on self and is driven to an automobile taking. Bewildered, Jimmy goes to the Cornell-inspired pieces given Chris by can show a lifetime of curious loss and their Cornell collection, it was the show by his impatient mother so that break room where a coworker brow- fellow admirers. Chris has arranged disappointed wonder in something as youngest tourists with whom I jostled Jimmy can meet his idol, the star of beats him with stereotypical advice these elements so that they touch each small as the clunk of a coffee mug on a for space. The kids pawed the glass teevee’s famous show, the Super-Man. about taking charge, getting the pussy, other, just so, almost as carefully as lunch counter; when Jim Corrigan cages surrounding Cornell’s boxes and The auto show is an orgy of repressed and never letting chicks know that you Cornell arranged the ephemera with glances into his half-full cup it might as fogged them with their breathing, frus- sexuality, from the cars, named Sweet like them until you’ve fucked them at which he composed his own, three- well be his own life. trated, while their bovine, shuffling Thing, Hot Stuff, Pussy Cat, and Lover least six times. “Chicks don’t dig guys dimensional collages. “I’m hoping to indicate hidden emo- parents wearily admonished them to Boy, to the signs overhead which that’re nice!” says Jimmy’s beefy Toward the end of his life Cornell tions by the order of expressions on the keep moving. As the Institute’s cura- scream, “Power Show,” “Muscles!” and coworker. wrote, “Anyone who has shown any… father’s face,” Chris told Groth. tors admit in their notes accompany- “Pumped Up!” A glossy, bodacious We are not at the car show any concern with my work and has not “There’s much less being communi- ing the collection, there is a irony in babe spreads her legs to the ceiling and more, but the atmosphere is every bit as been moved or inspired to become cated in what they’re saying than in placing Cornell’s works beyond the curls her manicured hands around a super-manly, and we begin to see how involved somehow with the humani- ubiquitous this manly mask is. The reach of the hands for which they were how they’re moving, like their gestures, massive tool. Amid this hypertrophied ties in a down-to-earth context has Super-Man and the masks men wear meant. or how they interact… Because essen- tribute to men’s internal combustion not understood its basic import.” raise the question, what does it actually Because Cornell’s art is three- tially what they’re saying to each other we see another kid, sauntering hand in Cornell once described his boxes as mean to be a man? The answer, of dimensional, it has a literal depth that is just junk. Especially the father.” hand with his oafish Pa, who is wearing “peepshows,” and anyone who has cut course, is not to show emotion. It is cannot be captured by a camera’s Reading the trivial dialogue in this a “Number One Dad” tee-shirt. out and assembled Chris Ware’s own okay to have emotions, but you must mechanical eye. In a wink the shutter book is just as easy, and just as impor- Enter the Super-Man. “It’s great to dioramas and peepshows can feel the hide them. That is what the command, would steal Cornell’s soul, and for that tant, as it is in real life. That is why be here,” says the masked man to the inspiration Ware sees in Cornell’s con- “Be a man!” literally means: shut up Ware’s technical sophistication is not indifferent crowd. “I just flew in but structions. reason I have no inclination to include and keep your feelings to yourself. That merely formal or elitist; after all, it is y’know—my arms aren’t tired at all!” It is impossible to categorize Cor- a gray scan of a photograph of Cor- is why this phrase is bellowed at any intuitive. Everybody knows how to Ba-doomp, splash! Oblivious to the nell’s works. They are curios: collage, nell’s work with this article. I have also boy who cries or would rather play read between the lines. It is what we do cheesiness, Jimmy simpers through the diorama, birdhouse, hotel, theatre resisted the temptation to draw house than play football. Be a man is every day, at work and with loved ones, pathetic show—“ha ha ha”—and ten- stage—all of these at once, framed explicit comparisons between Cor- our culture’s way of teaching you how and this universal feeling for unspoken tatively approaches the actor for his behind glass by a handmade, wooden nell’s and Ware’s novelties. Cornell’s to grow up, and every boy and girl tries language is perhaps the smartest thing autograph. The sweating, oleaginous box. Inside the box Cornell directed influence on Chris is easy to see and is on this disguise as they grow. Some about Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid Super-Man intones, “Hello, son.” an ornate but unpretentious array of best grasped wordlessly. Visit the Art eventually grow into the mask, a few on Earth. To borrow Ernest Heming- Reenter Mom, or more specifically, unique and everyday objects. Institute’s Cornell collection (placed discard it permanently, and most take it way’s criterion, this book is a good one her indignant, heaving bosom. It is Peer into Cornell’s looking-glasses in the “Surrealist” room) and see his on or off as the occasion encourages. In because it makes us feel more than we almost all we and the leering Super- and you will see exactly what Ware inner world for yourself. When you do can understand. Man see of Mom as she reprimands SMARTEST KID continued on page 18. values most in art: “a sense of life.” It is you will see exactly what I am not often ossified life: a seashell, drift- talking about. ■

THE FIRST REAL SUPERHERO. (Continued from page 1.) Little Chris prepared for this flick them around a bit. I don’t know if inevitability by making a mask for him- I would be like that if I had that power self. He pulled a tube sock over his in real life, but I think a lot of people head, wrapped his head in masking would be. When there’s no fear of pun- tape, then blacked in the mask with a ishment that seems to be the natural magic marker. human tendency. So maybe I would be. “It was very disappointing,” Chris Maybe for a week or two.” concluded. “If it’s possible for a nine- The funny thing is, that is what hap- year old to feel complete and utter, pened. After his infancy the fickle, debilitating rejection after such a ven- motherfucking Super-Man committed ture, that’s how I felt.” suicide at the beginning of The Smartest Since “God” does not exist, we must Kid on Earth. Now that Jimmy Corri- invent Him, and Chris has continued gan has inherited Super-man’s shirt— to do so. In the beginning of The Acme but not necessarily His mask nor his Novelty Library, the younger, leaner cloak—He is reborn as the harmless Super-Man was all the things Chris Nobody He ought to be, remade in does not have: an Acme corporate Chris’s own image all over again. ■ spokesperson, a boss, a Dad, a God, squeezed into one red, yellow and blue unitard. He was a sadistic prick, the kind we love to hate. “Jeez,” He’d muse in Heaven, pondering your name in His Big Book of Souls. “Man, you sure were a pussy, weren’t you?” As Chris is the God of his own cartoon world, I asked him if creating this world brought out the sadist in him. “Yeah,” Chris said. “I think so, some- what. You can toy with your characters, ~17~

planted in soils somewhat better suited to commerce.” The wilted roses crowning Lamb’s tombstone punctuate the metaphor. While most people’s acquaintance with ragtime music is limited to the Special to The Imp. by DAN KELLY. taxing backbeat and cheesed-out

CHICAGO.—By a bizarre accident of Time Ephemeralist, flew off the shelves melody of Marvin Hamlisch’s arrange- birth, Chris Ware’s wife and my girl- powered more by the Acme Novelty ment of “The Entertainer” (a.k.a. friend became sisters. As a result, the Seal of Quality than by any influx of “The Sting”), the “American Beauty” four of us are thrust together each cakewalk and string band fascination rag is something else entirely. It rises Christmastide for a visit to the girls’ springing from Wicker Park’s hipster up, ghostlike, barely identifying itself parents in Michigan. Once there, population. A potentially fortunate with the ragtime tradition, then bub- Chris and I often leave the wimmens turn of events, perhaps, as ragtime bles over midway with all the brash- to bond with their relatives, while we music provides a terrific vantage point ness and huzzah one expects from a go on half-day jaunts to that state’s from which to appreciate Chris’s work. piece of pre-World War I American splendid antique stores. I suppose music. A charming piece—one won- there are manlier ways to enjoy the ders why its audience is limited to car- wolverine state—but Chris and I are toonists, cartoonists’ hagiographers, delicate lads. Eager we are to buy pop and Dutchmen with bowl haircuts. cultural ephemera and filigreed dain- Metaphor steps in again with the third ties. Eager we are not to toss cabers, meaning of the title: this strip is about build log cabins with naught but a the “American beauty” of ragtime hatchet, and eat thrice our weight in music, and its abandonment on the beef in the neverending barbecue rit- cultural slag heap when it ceased pan- nie.” Given my druthers, I’ll take draws his own stories. There is an ual performed by the girls’ dad each ning out for Tin Pan Alley—refine- Chris’s unsullied, innovative, and essential humanity to Chris’s stories, a visit. But I digress. ment and delicacy be damned. warm depiction of life’s coldness over feeling that we are more than the Watching Chris walk about an Our contemporary culture’s damna- other’s cold-blooded, apathetic, and whole of our parts. In Jimmy Corri- antique store provides a case for spirit tion of delicacy bears closer examina- antipathetic approaches to comics any gan’s social ineptitude, in magpie possession—namely the spirit of a tion. Of particular note is the peculiar day. Rusty Brown’s bathetic attempts to ninety-year-old man inhabiting a backlash emanating from some of As Chris has pointed out elsewhere, recapture childhood, even in the ruth- thirty-one-year-old man’s body. In his Chris’s fellow artists. Ware’s stark illus- comics have difficulty being accepted less sadism of Rocket Sam there is carriage, Chris saunters slowly about, trations, his ritualistic ablutions in as great art because cartoonists are something salvageable, something to hands thrust deeply into pockets, pathos, his involute line work— attempting to tell “richly-detailed be cherished. That is what makes whistling tunes unheard since Thomas recalling not a particular time period, epics through a series of limericks.” Chris Ware’s work so important. Edison first committed them to wax. but many lost time periods—for these And so it was with ragtime. A handful Occasionally on our antique store Occasionally he stops to riffle through Chris has been accused of, among other of Joplins, Lambs, and Scotts tried to jaunts, Chris finds something bright a stack of fin de siècle sheet music, to maladroit descriptions, “coldness.” breathe life and respectability into and sparkly—though you wouldn’t gently shuffle through piles of fragile Chris’s ragtime religiosity is best tes- If Chris’s work is viewed as “cold,” music viewed first as a gutter “colored” know it at first glance. In one particu- shellac 78s, to assay a late nineteenth tified in one of his New City strips, the fault lies in the beholder’s lens, product, and then as silly salon trifle. lar instance, he discovered a magic century minstrel show poster, or to “American Beauty.” The strip recounts undoubtedly scuffed and scraped by Indeed, there are many physical paral- lantern: an early projection device pick out a tune on a circa 1920 banjo a melancholic snatch of ragtime his- that supposed liberator of art: the punk lels between Chris’s work and this powered by lamp oil and imagination. ukulele with an “Oh! You Kid!” car- tory, scored by the delight of rediscov- æsthetic. Almost as overlooked as his strongly idiosyncratic music: the Otto The projector was a safety orange, tin- toon imprinted on the drum. ery, yet saddened by the crass commer- affection for ragtime is Chris’s self- Messmer tempos of Quimby Mouse, looking thing. Its lines were clean: a No matter which store we visit, cialism that ultimately killed the divestment from the past twenty years the gay whorls and eddies of the cover sharply defined collection of cylinders there is one inevitability. If there is a music. Recounting a scene from Rudi of pop culture. Despite reports of neo- art, and the jim-dandy, hot pups, and stacked atop one another, a pinkie fin- piano in the store, Chris will sit down Blesh and Harriet Janis’s seminal his- Luddite behavior, Chris does indeed humdinger archaisms riddling the gag ger of a lens sticking out the middle. and play ragtime. More often than not, tory, They All Played Ragtime, “Ameri- ads. Noting these structural similarities Chris showed it to me, turning it this as I’m tossing Beanie Babies and back can Beauty” recalls the authors’ 1949 is all well and good, but a more astute way and that. “It’s sort of sad, isn’t it?” issues of TV Guide aside in search of meeting with composer Joseph Lamb. observation is this: Chris, like his he said, employing his familiar conver- Freemason miscellany, I’ll hear Chris The event is noteworthy not simply adored ragtime composers, draws his sational phrase. I hadn’t thought about two rooms over, diddling out James because of Lamb’s status as one of the art from the wellspring of humanity. it, but the lantern was haunting in its Scott’s “Grace and Beauty” or Scott three titans of classical ragtime—a dis- In Chris’s other ragtime strip, “Scott simplicity, its smallness, its unjust Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Sometimes tinction shared with Joplin and James Joplin: King of Rag-Time,” we see obsoleteness in a world of laser discs, he’ll cut his sessions short, for fear of Scott—but because Lamb was thought Joplin late in his life, finally given a DAT, and HDTV. Sad, alone, lonely, annoying the store owners. Once upon long deceased, or perhaps even a pseu- chance to record his most celebrated and forgotten, yes—but beautiful— a time, when Chris and cartoonist donym for Joplin himself. Not so. work, the “Maple Leaf Rag”—the looking for all the world like a Chris John Keane staged an impromptu cut- Lamb plays the title rag for Blesh musical piece that sent ragtime sky- Ware cartoon. ting contest at a Texas store, the owner and Janis while explaining where “he’s rocketing and spawned a host of Joplin complained, going so far as to create a been for the past forty years.” Desiring manqués. Hunched over and twitch- magic marker sign that screamed, “NO nothing more than recognition as “a ing, his brain half-melted by tertiary JOPLIN RAGS!” More often, I find great ragtime composer,” Lamb had syphilis, Joplin sits at a piano roll-mak- Chris surrounded by a gaggle of gawk- twelve rags published by Joplin’s pub- ing machine in a daze, unable to con- ers, drawn by the novelty of someone lisher, John Stark, between 1908 and centrate, much less coax out a tune. who knows that a piano isn’t just a 1919. Eventually, ragtime’s popularity As the paper clicks on unmarked, two pretty piece of furniture, and who can flagged, forcing Lamb to vanish into use electricity and has access to an Babbitts stand by, glancing at each coax still more prettiness from it. the private sector. Justifiably rapt, indoor toilet. On the other hand, he other nervously, before one takes the Chris’s merciless self-criticism is leg- Blesh and Janis are bursting to tell has no clue who Silverchair, Monster initiative to turn off the machine. endary. He’s especially unkind where Lamb’s story to the world. However, in Magnet, Korn, or even Britny Spears Joplin stammers out an apology for his playing ability is concerned. While a quintessentially Wareian, resonant are. To give you an idea of how far “wasting” their paper and excuses him- as a fellow ragtime buff I should agree note, Lamb stops playing, turns to his removed Chris is from the pop music self. A scene from Joplin’s twilight with some of his pronouncements, he visitors with “a color of suspicion and continuum: capable of recalling any years—no springtime reveries here— protests too much. What Chris lacks sadness” in his eyes, and asks, “How banjoist active from 1890 to 1925, he stumbles out into a blustery winter’s in virtuosity he makes up for in pas- much is it going to cost me to be in when pressed to name a modern pop day. The Babbitts stare out at him sion. His playing has an easy charm your book?” act, the most recent one Chris can through a window. “King of RAG- and a decided lack of pretension. His Chris mocks his use of metaphor, conjure up is The Hooters. time,” one sniffs. “Just looks like unadulterated devotion to a musical but he’s quite adept at it in “American Antipodally, I’ll wager that many of another old nigger to me.” genre now condemned to ice cream Beauty,” as poetic a history of ragtime Chris’s contemporaries spent those all- At the close of the strip, Chris trucks and B.J. McPudrucker’s theme as I’ve ever encountered. The key lies important art school years drowning in informs us that hundreds of Joplin’s restaurants shines through. Chris in the title—not just the name of a rag the skinny-butted machismo of hard- manuscripts, including a piano con- Ware plays like a man in love. but also of an exquisite strain of rose. core punk (or so they say, though I’m certo, a symphony, and an opera, were Strangely, Chris’s love of ragtime is Chris festoons his strip with roses in sure there’s a Smiths album hiding in discarded by his heirs as “worthless.” often only fleetingly touched upon in various stages of growth. The “Ameri- one or two of their closets). Granted, interviews—a quirky affectation of the can Beauty” rag is lovingly described as the punk rock æsthetic is a necessary boy genius, don’t you know? Even in “delicate melodies which twist around and visceral escape hatch during any- Chris’s extensive Comics Journal twining trellises of chords.” Ragtime one’s formative years, but it is also interview, Gary Groth praises Jeezus itself was “fertilized by the abolition of wont to hang about like an out-of- that Chris’s Emerson, Lake, and slavery,” and it flourished “in clubs and work brother-in-law: consuming vol- Palmer-listening days are behind him so-called ‘hot houses’ across America.” umes of beer, watching a blur of televi- and leaves it at that. Moreover, sources Ragtime, we learn, “was a hybridiza- sion programs, and inundating itself at Quimby’s Bookstore reveal that tion of two diverse cultures”—Euro- with the most witless musical structure Chris’s megalithic mash note, The Rag- pean and African—”though it was imaginable. Punk stresses amateurism above ability, and purports an emo- tional range from petulant anger to…well, that covers it. With its dogged reliance on the sitcom format, punk has contributed few ideas to For those curious about how comic storytelling and mise-en-scène. abysmally inappropriate that last word Whereas Chris employs an entire page is, take the time to listen to Joplin’s to show the falling of a leaf—evoking “Magnetic Rag,” a piece that pays trib- time’s passage and metamorphosis— ute to every major human frailty, most punk-inspired comics are encap- foible, and saving grace in a exhilarat- sulated in the twenty-three minute ing four minute exhalation. This framing technique which reached its song’s lesson Chris has learned well, creative zenith with “I Dream of Jean- and it is the wellspring from which he ~18~

The Smartest Kid on Earth. and emotion are thinking—well then, I think that’s important, as important EVERY READER OF THIS PERIODICAL WILL WANT TO HAVE thinking is everything. With my Continued from page 16. as what people actually say. That This Large, Illustrated, Family Rag-time Periodical of Elevated Character tongue in my cheek I asked Chris per- sounds really formalist or something, Ware’s comics this mask is the tragic “THE RAG-TIME EPHEMERALIST” haps the best, or dumbest, question of but I do believe that, especially in the mask of manhood, or adulthood, itself. all: I asked him for his thoughts about adult world. — Assembled by— “Adults are always masking things,” thought itself. “I want somebody to read this book The Acme Novelty Library and Assorted Scholars. as Chris told Gary Groth. “A superhero “I don’t really know how to answer fifty years from now and get a vague is such a great image because he’s that question,” he said. Then, because HIS POPULAR and convenient rag-time periodical is always hiding behind a mask.” hint of what it’s like to be alive now. Tdedicated to the promulgation and dissemination of he is perhaps the nicest cartoonist on When you read truly good books you’ll printed materials relating to nineteenth and early twenti- It is oddly appropriate that Jimmy’s earth, he offered all of the educated eth century american syncopated music. Comprehensive, sometimes get a sense, just for a silent struggle between sensitivity and guesses you have just finished reading. instructive, and entertaining, it is universally reputed to moment, of a particular place and time. be the The Largest and Most Expensive of the regular cocksureness reflects the very thing rag-time reviews. that Ware’s critics have zeroed in on: a I don’t think movies are the best way to Most histories of “early” American popular music tend perceived coldness or lack of emotion. do this. They’re the easiest way, but I’d to focus on the chronicling of jazz and blues, generally glossing over ragtime as a precursor or “pre-history” of I asked Chris if he had ever considered like to do it with comics. these forms. However, within the pages of “The Rag-time the possibility that this perceived emo- “That’s what’s important in art,” Ephemeralist,” ragtime is treated as a music which exists as an “end in itself,” unique and vital. tionless quality of his comics might be Chris concluded, “to communicate a It is hoped that the Ephemeralist’s adopted, “museum the result of he himself being, on some sense of life.” in a book” sensibility will provide the reader with an level, what most people call a “typical A vague phrase, I thought. So vague overall, though vague, sense of the period under study, with brief passages of text to link topics together, rather male”—afraid to show emotions. it is almost perfect. than the other way around. Even so, this magazine, which “Yeah,” Chris said. “But I think it’s Finally, Chris said, “You’re really was simply begun on a lark, is likely to be full of ridicu- more of an artistic problem, actually.” lous yet unintended mistakes, factual errors, and just plain making an awful lot of tapes here. I’m erroneous information. Secure your postpaid copy today He is too kind. It is a reader’s prob- embarrassed because I honestly don’t by sending $11 payable to Mr. C.Ware, Editor, 1112 North lem, because the Super-Man “subtext,” Hoyne Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60622. have a heck of a lot to say anymore.” for lack of a less pretentious word, is The distant, clockwork passing of an blatant throughout The Smartest Kid on Chris switches from third- to first-person narration at the happiest moment of James Corrigan’s childhood. el train clattered through the gloom. A EVERY READER OF THIS PERIODICAL WILL WANT TO HAVE Earth. Immediately following Jimmy’s streetlight and windows blinked yellow, receipt of the mysterious letter from his This Fine Composition of Real “Rag-time” gilding the outlines of all the gray “Dad,” we see a costumed Super-Man The Haunted House. BY REGINALD R. ROBINSON & FRANK YOUNGWERTH. matter that surrounded us. Chris wave good-bye to Jimmy from a build- — including — The sky, the color of stone houses dur- looked at me through the gray and his ing across the street. In a single bound ing the day, went dark and took the eyes were filled with regret—a regret Two Full-Color Educational Comic Strips and Artistic Decorations. Super-Man leaps to his death, splat, color from Chris’s living room with it. face-flat. This suicide makes sense on that bordered on pain, then became EY, HERE’S ONE FOR THE PIANO. A real “rag-time” piece, composed by Chicagoans Frank Youngwerth and The Beethoven had long since stopped pain, a hollow anguish that emanated HReginald R. Robinson in the classic style, and illustrated by two full-color sentimental comic strips commemorating several levels. First, it is an apt turning on the stereo and the cats had the achievements of Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb, all professionally silkscreened by Dutch artisans in six colors on from his stare and seemed to negate his heavy art paper. This elaborate piece of sheet music is now available in a limited edition of 200 prints. To secure your metaphor for the suicidal comic book grown bored and left the room. The own copy bring 75 dollars to Chicago Comics, 3244 N. Clark St., Chicago, or write directly to Reginald Robinson for industry, bent as it is on producing entire being—and I could only read his ordering information at Post Office Box 2964, Chicago, Illinois, 60690-2964. A real collector’s item and fine art lover’s twin eyes of my tape recorder spun and mind: Why did I say those things? I’m treasure, this one is sure to endure for years to come. more and more insipid rehashes of its spun, taking in only the sigh of an such an idiot. I didn’t mean what I said, he self-congratulatory mythology. More overhead aircraft. Neither Chris nor I importantly this suicide shows that the got up to turn on the light. didn’t understand what I said, blah blah mask of adulthood does not conceal; “All I can hope for when I finally blah, I’m a failure. you may be able to hide from others, finish this meandering, confusing story It didn’t work out, I thought, guiltily. but not from yourself, and perhaps with plot holes,” Chris said, “is that At that moment I did not realize where Super-Man could not face himself any through some accruing of detail, emo- that thought came from. longer. Most obviously, Super-Man is tion, and connections in my own mind, “I really wish I had some amazing, dead, and some kind of real hero must a kernel of sincerity—a sense of life— eye-opening things to say,” Chris said, take his place in the 350 pages follow- will come out of it. Even if you’re only his voice rising to a thin, almost hope- ing. That is why timid Jimmy becomes reading a few pages of it, I want to get ful pitch. Then he came down once a Super-Man different than the breed a sense of space, and of time, and of the again on his refrain: “I’m sorry I’m not that fucked his mother. rhythm of today’s world. I try to get the smarter.”

Our Heroes. rhythms of conversation down because SMARTEST KID concluded on page 19. The Super-Man references fly in and out of the rest of Jimmy’s story, and if Jimmy’s gradual transformation has a catalyst, it is Amy Corrigan. Amy wants to peek behind Jimmy’s mask; she is the open chord, so to speak, that sets the tone for the resolution of Jimmy’s odyssey and the entire, quasi- allegorical symphony of the book. Although Amy grows sharp once or twice in the face of Jimmy’s passive quavering, she is truly kind, in every sense of the word, to her new brother. She confronts their father’s shortcom- ings with an openness and honesty that is reflected in a larger, stylistic shift: the entire novel opens up as the faces of supporting characters are increasingly admitted into the book. As the book nears its wintry end it is unmasked, lit- erally and figuratively, as Jimmy Corri- gan—wearing a red and blue Superman pullover borrowed from his dad—must face up to the life-and-death trauma facing his own flesh and blood. A “Conclusion” of Sorts. Of course I did not ask Chris about any of this Super-Man stuff. I know what he would say: I don’t know. As he has said before, your brain will connect things for you if you will let it. Sensing these interrelations is half the fun of reading The Smartest Kid on Earth, and ARCHITECTURE & ÆSTHETICS. although I have written a few words on

DIGNITY is the word Chris used repeatedly to describe what I feel it is about, where its heart what he appreciates in architecture. I asked the self- lies, I have not said what it means— proclaimed “namby-pamby æsthete” what dignity meant to mainly because, like Chris, I have no him. After a moment, he answered: “An awareness of the earthly idea. As I said, this is a book innate pain and struggle of trying to get by in the world. Things with care put into them.” that makes you feel more than you “It’s the same kind of care that goes into making some- understand. That is what makes it so thing like this,” he said, hefting the 1900 Sears, Roebuck smart, and so haunting. But it does & Co. catalog. “NPR ran a story a few weeks ago on the make you think: if writing is thinking, workers who were restoring the New York Public Library and drawing is thinking, and intuition reading room. The workers were astounded by the crafts- manship. They said, ‘These are triple mitered cuts! Jesus! How did they do this?’ They were astounded because today, nothing is built with that kind of care and intelligence. “I can’t think of a better word to describe modern archi- tecture than insulting. It is the surrounding in which we play out our lives, and yet it doesn’t admit what human life is about. Ornamentation admits a folly and a weakness in people, a folly that’s fundamentally there. Buildings should admit that. If they don’t, why would you want to live your life in them? It’s a terrible arena in which to live your life. It’s off-putting. It’s insulting. Whenever I’m in those horri- ble boxes downtown I feel angry, and I want to lash out.” ~19~

was part of the culture, and it’s no the early, low-class form of comics, “Rag-Time” Records The Smartest Kid on Earth. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. longer that way, in my opinion. I’m not which came out of vaudeville, which Continued from page 18. for your Parlor. saying that every musician now is this DURING THE LENGTHY, roundabout assembly of came from minstrelsy. It has always this issue, FRANKLIN CHRISTENSON WARE proved to be This advertising is reproduced courtesy of the featured artists. CHRIS’S RAG. way, but for the most part, music is an been a low-class form, and I’m guessing perhaps the nicest cartoonist on earth. He politely accompaniment to, or an illustration that to try to elevate that would rightly endured my barrage of sophomoric questions and EVERY READER OF THIS PERIODICAL WILL WANT TO HAVE conjecture, let me see many of the astonishing nov- of, emotion. It’s not emotion itself. It’s elties stored in his personal Library, gave me a gizmo This Dextrous,Sensitive,yet Rousing Performance of This quality of “weirdness” seems to be at go against Crumb’s sensibilities. I’m not presenting the emotion in purely that colors comic strips, demonstrated ragtime on JOSEPH F. LAMB’S the heart of classic ragtime, and it perme- prone to agree with him. On the other his piano, and let me play with his toy sculptures. “The Complete Stark Rags” ates the rags on many levels: structurally, musical terms—and that’s what music hand I think of someone like Scott He even tried to pay for the pizza when it arrived. I melodically, harmonically, rhythmically. It is about. That’s what all art is about. am both humbled and inspired by Chris’s humanity, — 12 piano rags performed by — Joplin, who took a so-called low-class and the fact that this IMP will only embarass him is is this illusive factor that gives ragtime both You don’t want to write a poem about Mr. Guido Nielsen. its complicated intellectual content and its form, which for him represented what but one more proof of his noble humility. being depressed; you want to write a great emotional depth… There is a surface they called ‘Negro culture,’ and ele- GARY GROTH conducted the elephantine, definitive gaiety juxtaposed against an underlying depressing poem. You use the tools of vated it into a composed form. If I’m at Chris Ware interview in the 200th issue of his mag- rigidity and sadness. If it were not for this azine, THE COMICS JOURNAL, and graciously gave your art to recreate the actual experi- all self-conscious about what I’m doing, tension in the music, the mood would be THE IMP full permission to quote liberally from his ence. Ragtime is pure music in that adroit interrogation. The IMP you now hold was light and one-dimensional. Good ragtime I see myself doing something like that.” way. For a popular culture to exist at a written and produced almost entirely in the shadow might be humorous, but it is rarely happy. of this Grothasaurus, and despite my making every certain time, when ‘pure’ music was —Terry Waldo, This Is Ragtime. Coda. effort to properly credit Messrs. Groth & Ware for ‘the big thing,’ is amazing to me. It’s their primary ideas and repartee, a shrewd fact- check will doubtless uncover numerous, unconscious The interview finally over, Chris lit the almost inconceivable now. Ragtime Everything one invents is true, you may be sure. Poetry is as precise as geometry. “appropriations” and other assorted journalistic lamp in his parlor and sat at his piano. fuckups. had real, human emotion built into it Induction is as accurate as deduction; and He began playing the “Grace and and it was actually popular! besides, after reaching a certain point one ARCHER PREWITT, IVAN BRUNETTI, JESSICA ABEL, DANIEL Beauty” rag, by James Scott. The music “Ragtime has a lot of influence on no longer makes any mistake about the CLOWES, and TERRY LABAN are all IMP saints. The was alive, strikingly loud, every note in things of the soul. comics will be everybody’s favorite part of this news- the way I structure my comics because paper, and they are certainly my favorite. It was a the arrangement a bell ringing us it’s the only kind of music I ever think —Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise pleasure to work with these artists and I am honored awake. Chris’s left hand thumped along Colet, 1852. to have their comics in THE IMP. Mr. Brunetti also about, for the most part. Good ragtime made many astute, editorial suggestions which with the regular rhythm boots make on influenced my writing, although he is in no way is honest music. It’s tonally clear music. Later that evening Chris, Marnie, and I the street; his right hand, meanwhile, I liken ragtime to comics because responsible for any of my numerous mistakes, went to a party hosted by a pair of vagaries, and flights of fancy. wove a capricious melody that circled comics are a composed form. They’re cartoonists on the North Side. I drank the beat and spun from it, disappearing not about performance. This is a totally In addition to submitting his own Ware panegyric, a lot and talked a lot and noticed that Oddfellow scholar DANIEL Q. KELLY furnished me with then reappearing a beat later, entwined fey way of putting it, but the cartoonist the single best piece of advice I heard during the According to the liner notes by Galen Wilkes, “Joseph Chris did not. He was polite but quiet, Lamb was a self-made Yankee genius who composed again, as inextricable as lifelong part- is the ‘composer’ and the reader is the writing of this newspaper. When I asked Dan how I some of the most beautiful ragtime of the early part of this preoccupied. Something like regret should try to understand Chris’s comics, Dan said, ners in a dance known by heart. ‘performer.’ You ‘play’ a comic as you “Learn as much about ragtime as you possibly can.” century. Inspired by Scott Joplin’s classic rags, he hung over his head and before long he created a romantic, lyrical, and individual style for the Chords shimmered and cascades of would play an instrument, or read sheet piano which boldly distinguished itself from the widely- went home. The avuncular KIM THOMPSON, Chris’s editor at Fan- imitated Joplin. . . With the appearance of this landmark notes rose, fell, and exploded over and music. As you order the panels, all of a tagraphics Books, gave me the second best piece of A few days later he phoned me. CD, Mr. Guido Nielsen finally gives us faithful and excit- over, reborn each time in sequence yet sudden they come alive in this mysteri- advice I heard during the writing of this newspaper. ing performances of Joseph F. Lamb’s Stark Company- “When I got home that night I was Kim chuckled, “Good luck.” published rags. . . His rhythmic verve harkens back to a tonally different. With a clang, Chris ous way. The best comics are the ones time when the music was played with gusto, following a stopped. where, as soon as you start reading more depressed than I’ve been in ages,” PATRICK JODOIN of QUEBECOR PRINTING was the ideal strict beat, as written, and in appropriate, steady tempi.” printer’s representative, serene and gracious despite Contact Basta Records at Jweg 200, 1161 GE, he said. “I stayed up late writing you “Obviously I can’t play it,” he said, them, they immediately seem real. my repeated failure to meet my own deadlines. Zwanenburg, Holland, or go to www.basta.nl and request this long letter about Texas, about my long-playing CD 30-9087-2. “but I hope you get the basic idea.” That’s what I always liked about Krazy grandmother, about everything, but I Thanks to THE BOOKSELLERS who have taken the time I felt as though I had stepped off a Kat: the way Herriman’s pantomime and care to sell my ridiculous, unprofitable pam- EVERY READER OF THIS PERIODICAL WILL WANT TO HAVE roller coaster, grateful that the room worked. These little scratchy drawings just couldn’t mail it to you. No, I can’t. phlets. Long may we continue to make pennies The New and Affecting Assortment of Concert Rag-time Selections No. It’s too dumb. So anyway, my together. All shopkeepers omitted from the list on had stopped moving. All I could think come to life and dance around, but page one should write me to ensure their inclusion “EUPHONIC SOUNDS.” was, Play it again. only as you’re deliberately reading apologies. I’m sorry. You were an in future issues and “synergistic market strategizing.” 19 Rag-time Piano Solos And Chris did. “What’s called ‘clas- them in sequence. As soon as you stop incredibly well-prepared interviewer — performed by — Thanks to all IMP READERS, especially those who sic’ ragtime goes by so fast,” he reading them and merely look at the and you asked good questions; it’s mailed me encouragement, criticism and sug- Mr. Reginald R. Robinson. explained, “because it’s such a densely- just…” gested topics for future issues. The “Jughead” whole page, everything stops. issue will happen eventually, I assure you. In the composed music, with so much emo- “If there was a language of descrip- Chris paused for a breath. “You just meantime your continued suggestions and submis- tion literally built into it, that you can tion for comics, though, it might ruin caught me on one of those days when sions are always welcome. over-interpret it and make it schmaltzy. them. I personally find myself alter- it’s obvious that I have a hollow soul.” The ADVERTISEMENTS in this issue are not commer- Because it has this perfect, crystalline nately hoping for and wishing against Of course he has. That empty space cials but endorsements intended to make THE IMP look more like a newspaper. I received no form, you can play it happy or you can such a thing. I think Robert Crumb is what allows him to hold an entire compensation whatsoever for their use. play it sad. There’s so many different sees comics as a natural outgrowth of ■ world within him. I would like to take this fine-print opportunity to ways to play it. I’ve heard ‘Grace and state that my choice of FEATURED IMPS to date does Beauty’ played this way, in a wistful and not necessarily imply that I hold these cartoonists in higher esteem than others; that is, I do not put melancholy style. You can also play it Dan Clowes in “first place,” Jack Chick in “second with more of a beat, like this, swinging place,” and so forth. This type of ranking and list- making has its place, of course, but it is a place far it, and it’s a happier music. The in- from this office. (Although I do stand by my asser- between of these extremes is to play it tion that R. Crumb is the Best Cartoonist on Earth.) I have neither the experience nor the incli- as flatly as possibly, like I tried to nation to impose a lengthy pecking order, and I before, in order to get both of those profile cartoonists only on the basis of whimsy. feelings at the same time. You play them against each other. To my ears, SUGGESTED READING. Reginald Robinson does that perfectly. Sources Quoted, Mentioned, He doesn’t play too sentimentally, and Shown, or Unjustly Ignored. This high quality Concert Compact Disc features pieces he doesn’t play too romp-and-stomp, I RECOMMEND ALL OF THESE BOOKS, even though by James Scott, Joseph F. Lamb, and Joe Jordan, as well many of them have nothing at all to do with Chris as three never-before recorded items by Louis Chauvin although both of those elements are Ware. Some of these books have influenced him and Scott Joplin, along with Mr. Robinson’s own directly and would, I am sure, come with his “stamp acclaimed compositions. Expertly played, carefully mas- still present in the way he plays. of approval,” but many have only a ghostly, tan- tered, and fashionably packaged, this is the ragtime item “His song ‘Truly Yours’ is an exam- gential relevance that I alone sensed. that the kids are all talking about. With liner notes by Mr. Trebor Tichenor. Available from your local ragtime shop, ple. This is just a formal point about Adelman, Bob. Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in Amer- ica’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s. New York: or send $18 for a postpaid copy to: Reginald Robinson, Post the song, and I can’t even play it, but Office Box 2964, Chicago, Illinois 60690-2964. Be sure to Simon J. Schuster, 1997. ask for a list of the composer’s original compositions, here goes. That first note that he hits is Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and as well. Other Essays. Jonathan Mayne, ed. and trans. a major triad—the most basic chord in London: Phaidon Press, 1964. EVERY READER OF THIS PERIODICAL WILL WANT TO HAVE the Western scale. So this song is in F Blesh, Rudy, and Janis, Harriet. They All Played Ragtime. New York: Knopf, 1950. The Thrilling Cornucopia of Rag-time Piano Entertainments sharp, this key right here (plink). That’s Clowes, Daniel. Caricature. Seattle: Fantagraphics “VIRGINIA’S FAVORITES.” the basis for the entire song. He plays Books, 1998. 18 Solos and 4 Duets this chord with an opening note at dif- Crumb, Robert, and Crumb, Sophie. R. Crumb — performed by — ferent octaves, here (pling), and here Sketchbook: April 1991 to September 1996. Ger- many: Zweitausendeins, 1997. Mrs. Virginia Tichenor. (plung), so when I play the chord and Crumb, Robert. Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me: this note, all together, I get this. (pli- Robert Crumb Letters 1958–1977. Ilse Thomp- son, ed. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1998. unkg!?) Hear that? He’s got decisive- Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Paul de Man, ness, and yet complete indecisiveness, ed. and trans. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., in the very first note of this piece. 1965. Flaubert, Gustave. The Selected Letters of Gustave That’s what makes Reginald such a Flaubert. Francis Steegmuller, ed. New York: good composer. He did this intuitively, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1953. Katchor, Ben. Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of too. When I asked him about it he said, Urban Decay. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. ‘Hm. Yeah, I didn’t think of it that Kurtzman, Harvey. “Smithson John & Co.”, Mad, way.’” March 1955, front cover. Mencken, H.L. The Vintage Mencken, Alistair “Of course,” Chris shrugged, then Cooke, ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. continued playing the song. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisi- “To me, this is the quintessence of ble Art. Northampton: Tundra Publishing, 1993. ©1999 by Daniel G. Clowes. McShine, Kynaston, ed. Joseph Cornell. New York: ragtime, and of any art, right here. Rag- “Chris Ware’s work has single-handedly restored my faith in humanity,” says IMP correspondent Daniel Clowes. The Museum of Modern Art, 1980. time literally meant something. In Prolific, Mr. Hot Nuts: The Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man. City, publisher, and date unknown. Beethoven, for example, the music, all Proust, Marcel. Time Regained. Andreas Mayor and by itself, means something. You don’t APOLOGY. Terence Kilmartin, trans. New York: The Mod- need somebody howling over the ern Library, 1993. Sears, Richard, ed. Consumers Guide, Fall 1900, music, ‘Oh, what great spiritual empti- Catalogue No. 110. Chicago: Sears, Roebuck & It is not often that such a sparkling variety of syncopated THIS NEWSPAPER SHOULD HAVE BEEN A BOOK. Only a tabloid sized, 400-page book could do justice to the comics Co., 1900. musical items comes along, and here is just such an item. ness I feel. I am searching for some sign of Chris Ware. Selecting Chris’s artwork to illustrate my paragraphs was like selecting a brick from the Smith, Johnson. Catalogue of Surprising Novelties, Filled with nearly two dozen ragtime favorites from the that my time on earth has meaning.’ Taj Mahal, pulling out the brick, holding it up and asking you to see the beauty of the entire building. As Chris Puzzles, Tricks, Joke Goods, Useful Articles, Etc. turn of the century to now, this is the Compact Disc that That’s what popular music is today. You said of his own attempt to capture the Columbian Exposition on paper, “I got nothing. Zero.” Although Detroit: Johnson Smith & Co., 1938. you will want to leave sitting in plain view atop your nothing is exactly what I tried to get, this does not diminish my regret at slighting or omitting Big Tex, Paw, the Smith, Johnson. World Famous Fun-filled Catalog of parlor table, video cassette recorder or high-definition tel- have a guy whanging an electric guitar, Potato Man, Quimby and Sparky, Rusty Brown, the Tales of Tomorrow frump, and Frank Phosphate from this evision to provoke jealous looks and envious questions. Gadgets & Novelties!, Detroit: Johnson Smith & rumination on F.C. Ware’s world. His comics contain everything, and, although I am a fool, I was not foolish Mrs. Tichenor is the daughter of world-famous ragtime an eerie keyboard part, and a guy Co., 1976. enough to try to capture that. historian, performer and composer Trebor J. Tichenor, Solomon, Deborah. Utopia Parkway: The Life and telling you what you’re supposed to It might be possible to read this paper through and not realize that Chris Ware is one of the most earthy, who joins her on four pieces. This new compact disc may Work of Joseph Cornell. New York: Farrar, Straus, be ordered for $17 postpaid by writing to: Virginia feel. Ragtime comes from an age when funny people you could ever hope to meet. It saddened me to leave out almost all of the laffs in this issue, but and Giroux, 1997. Tichenor, P.O. Box 5724, Berkeley, CA 94705-0724. people still knew how to express them- I trust that a reader’s humor would not improve with my speculations. I ruin jokes when I explain them, and I Waldo, Terry. This Is Ragtime. New York: Da Capo hope that the side of Chris I have presented here will only make his more comic side stand in bolder relief. Press, 1976. Order two; supplies are limited. selves, intuitively, through music. It ~~20~ 20 ~ LETTERS to the EDITOR.

Address all Correspondence to: 1454 W. SUMMERDALE, SECOND FLOOR, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 60640. LL LETTERS to THE IMP become the property of Mr. Raeburn and are assumed intended for publication. THE IMP reserves the right to edit your letter for length and clarity. Missives EDITORIAL. Awritten with paper and pen will receive preferential treatment. Send your trivial “e” mail to [email protected]. expectation of this waif’s outrageous, relentless suffer- TWO YEARS AGO I rode my bicycle to Chicago Comics, where THE FALLEN WORLD OF DANIEL CLOWES. I nearly got fired for reading THE IMP on the job. The ing, coupled with a guilty conscience for enjoying it all. faces of the men in the centerfold look like masks of You created a Dan Clowes I would like to believe in. I dug the violence, the cruelty, and the redemptive Chris Ware was signing copies of his booklets that day, to meet tragedy, especially the man with his arm twisted, stand- purity of the message so much that I slipped it into my — MICHELLA RIVERA GRAVAGE, ing next to the screaming, bearded man with his arms pocket and walked off with it. My father later discov- him and ask for his permission to write this newspaper. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA. in the air. It’s almost like Picasso’s mural of the ered the stolen propaganda in my room and called me a Guernica bombing. “Sure,” he said. thief. Here might be the seed of the reaction-formation I knew Dan when he lived in Chicago. (Not well — STEVEN SCHARFF, HENDERSON, NEVADA. though…) He certainly was gloomier then. But even that leads to some kinds of religious faith. Chick’s sto- Before I left the store I witnessed Chris raise his head from the ries, which present the struggle for the spirit as a battle then I was struck by what you brought out so well: a I want to add THE IMP to the permanent collection of between polarized, aggressive tendencies, are the stuff of mess of comics passing beneath his pen, as though—Eureka!—he core of gentle hopefulness in the midst of all that rank, the State Historical Society’s Library. Yours is one of the fairy tales and war yarns, perfectly digestible because spellbinding grimness. most amazing periodicals I have encountered in years, had a revelation. “I have a funny-shaped head,” Chris announced, the fine pitch they do not acknowledge the possibility — or the con- — GREG FRIED, JAMAICA PLAIN, MASSACHUSETTS. and I have been doing my job for over 25 years, adding tradictory, problematic nature — of true mercy. tens of thousands of titles to our collection and scan- of his midwestern voice rising above the buzzing hubub. The crowd quieted. “It’s Those comics also managed to spark in me a dread of ning a great deal more. My only problem is, what is THE my own sexuality, as well as the fear of God. So, yep, too big,” Chris said. “It looks like an overgrown peanut.” The muscle of his formi- THE HOLY WAR OF JACK T. CHICK. IMP about? they did their job. But they also got me thinking about — or — — JAMES DANKY, STATE HISTORICAL dable brow bulged with perplexed amusement. issues of belief, toughened me up, and brought my own SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN As soon as I heard this I thought I had the perfect beginning for my story. HATE MAIL. sense of faith into sharper focus. Now there’s spiritual Jack Chick is a powerful and effective artist, regardless There are people over here who really appreciate all the boot camp for you! I would draw Chris as both the Charles Schulz and the Charlie Brown of “under- of how one feels about his “worldview.” It is this latter slightly insane care and devotion you dedicate to this I greatly admired your sensitivity to Chick’s talent and to his war experience. Your portrait fleshed out this mil- ground” comix, the creator humbler than his own humble subject. I promptly sticking point that prevents most people, myself highly personal critique of comics…Thank you for included, from proclaiming themselves to be true, taking this one-man stand. itary man of God, a man too easy to hate without learn- ing more about him. I still hate Jack Chick, but now I recorded Chris’s description of his cranium in the first page of my new, “Acme” unabashed fans of the man. His comics once shook me — PAUL GRAVETT, CARTOON ART TRUST, LONDON. deeply during a certain low point in my life . . . I don’t know that he’s worthy of my hatred. notebook and pedaled home, confident that I was on the right path. resent him for it, though — au contraire, I admire him What is your background? Are you a chaplain? If so, in — ERIC WILLIAMS, ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. But then came the interview. The “failure” of this interview is detailed else- for it! what religion? What is the Semiramis Society? How do — PETER CHRISTIAN BAGGE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. you support yourself? Soul Story has been reprinted. It was reprinted, believe where in this newspaper because it is the story itself. My questions, which were — CHRIS PROPST, SAN MARCOS, TEXAS. it or not, at my suggestion, with a tract number which I I particularly liked the “spiritual cum-shot” bit — can only assume was provided in homage to my Post admittedly nebulous, swung Chris from the “aw shucks” to the “I suck” end of his of course. Between reading the Torah and Leviticus last week and Box number in Sydney. Poor Bob Fowler! — JIM BLANCHARD™, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. asking those more knowledgeable than myself, I learned I also found a reference to Fred Carter in a book totally ego spectrum, and he disarmed almost every lob in my six-hour barrage with a pro- a lot more about ancient Jewish blood sacrifice. They unconnected with JTC. It seems Carter is a well- fession of ignorance so all-encompassing, and so profound, that it verged on the I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this! When I was in sacrificed for many reasons other than atonement known, Sunday school magazine illustrator. Jack Chick’s office, I casually mentioned that although (praise offerings, for one,) but sacrifices were indeed — JEREMY THOMAS, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. transcendental. And yet amid all of this unknowing Chris was dead certain of one it may seem romantic to be an outsider, it never feels required for quite a few categories of sin, and a full thing: Comics. good to actually be on the outside. With sincere, down- atonement couldn’t take place without them. The cast eyes, Chick replied, “No, it doesn’t feel good at all.” whole thing was close in spirit to paying a fine—that’s WHAT KIND OF MAN READS THE IMP? When the topic of Comics, with the capital C, arose, Chris’s eyes narrowed to — DWAYNE WALKER, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA. the important thing. I’m a queer, ex-junkie, recovering Trotskyist, former But animals have no moral standing in Judaism and so national security reporter currently laboring to com- black periods behind their spectacles, as if to punctuate his answer. “Essentially, cannot be “innocent” in any sense: nowhere in Jewish Just finished the new IMP and am flabbergasted… plete a book about heroin, called Me and My Monkey. thought do you find the notion that by killing an inno- comic strips are obsolete,” he declared. “They were contemporary with movies at Wow!… Are you really dissatisfied with it? Hard — DAVID MORRISON, WASHINGTON, D.C. to imagine… cent, you somehow negate a sin. That’s a wrong notion that’s been used to justify a lot of nastiness over the the turn of the century, but movies outdistanced them almost immediately. There’s — DANIEL CLOWES, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA. I’m a Christian. Even though my parents are atheists— years. This is not at all to say that ancient Judaism isn’t my dad is an erotic fantasy photographer—and I never no reason for them to exist anymore, and yet they do exist. The only reason comics full of all sorts of irrational and (to us) repugnant blood I wish the story had been longer. set foot in a church when I was a kid, I have always sacrifice. But we’ve never sacrificed animals to substi- — STEVE BYNUM, KETCHUM, IDAHO. have survived, and continued to develop, is because they have some sort of inher- tute their “purity” for our own sinfulness. firmly believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, much to my parents’ annoyance. — TERRY LABAN, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. ent, æsthetic power that nothing else has.” My only complaint is that your essay was so short. — KELLY RENEE, LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA. — ERIC REYNOLDS, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. He paused. “I believe that.” Then he chuckled with the jocular despair that had Jack Chick has reprinted Soul Story. The tract number assigned to this reprint is (gasp!) number 069. Why did I’m a 40-year old, queer, HIV-positive, atheist, comix permeated the afternoon: “But very, very few people believe that.” You secular humanist pussy! Chick use the taboo 69 for this Soul rerelease? He could fan living with my family of born-again, fundamentalist The first time I finished writing this newspaper I finally ended it by quoting — T. ARNOLD, RAYLE, GEORGIA. have recycled yet another tract number, or used a 4- Christians, who began giving me Chick tracts when I digit number as he’s done with other, recent rereleases. was young. Chris’s utterance of faith. I needed that faith. For weeks I had forced my pen to As a serious collector of Chick tracts, I cannot thank And six months later, why is Soul Story 069 still not — WAYNE RANELLI, LIVINGSTON, NEW JERSEY. you enough for indulging and ultimately legitimizing listed in his pricelist? Is it possible that some sexually paper, plucked at my whiskers, stubbed out cigarette after cigarette, and pressed my my sick problem. Your Dictionary-Concordance is obvi- naive employee at Chick Publications innocently I work at a Christian punk record company. My favorite chewed fingertips to my furshlugginer noggin in a physical effort to force out some ously the result of a long, losing struggle with obsessive- assigned number 69 to Soul, then sent it to press before Eightball strip is “Why I Hate Christians.” Here is a copy compulsive disorder. Jack realized what had happened? Or is Jack sending of my zine, Hot Ass. kind of conclusion about Chris Ware. I finally concluded that “faith” was the P.S.—A midget with black lacquered hair, wearing a both of us a silent message, saying, “I know about you — CRIS ESTEY, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. powder-blue leisure suit, once approached me. He guys?” Your package with the blue IMP 069 reprint answer. “That’s it,” I said to the empty room. I gathered the black and white mass pressed a Chick tract on me with shaking, sweaty palms, arrived on the same day as did my copies of the Soul I’m a starving, 20-year-old female college student with of everything I had written to date—over one hundred pages of scrawled notes, and whispered, “The human heart is deceptively weak Story 069 reprint . . . Coincidence? a perfect score on the English portion of the SAT. I and deceitfully wicked.” Sounds like the name of a Chick tract, doesn’t it? have a nose ring, nice lips, and I’m quite pleased with exploded diagrams, and joyless explication of Ware’s full-color world—and threw — TAMARA PARIS,SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. — BOB FOWLER, SAN LEANDRO, CALIFORNIA. my ass. All my fingers and toes are intact. I’m also quite a fan of Dan Clowes. So I humbly propose that you it all in the garbage. It was the best point I had made yet. Now I knew where to I went out drinking last night with some people, includ- I first encountered Chick tracts at a Christian barber- allow me to serve as your faithful “intern,” or what have begin: at the proverbial, bitter end. I took out a clean sheet of paper and wrote, ing a Christian friend, Yasmin, who is a true believer in shop in my hometown of Livonia, Michigan. The bar- you. Even if I don’t end up wearing a blue beret and Jack Chick. As we rapidly drank bottles of wine Yasmin ber had transfromed his space into an ersatz temple, calling you “Sir,” I’d still be interested in talking about “Essentially, comic strips are obsolete…” did not say much; to her, the evening must have been with Chick tracts as the operative Word. I was ten or so your work. My pay would be the experience and perhaps like a Chick tract come true. She took a look at THE IMP at the time — nice and impressionable — and was fas- four bucks for public transportation. Many mornings and pages later I gathered the black and white mass of every- and decided that you did not like Chick—but she still cinated by this lamb’s one-man crusade to save his — JENNY ORRICO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. thing new I had written to date and again threw it all in the garbage. This was the wanted a copy. Later I asked Yasmin what she thought patrons. The barber was small and wiry, and a grim good of THE IMP. She said that she was not impressed by your humor pervaded his speech and manner. For your first I’m a Roman Catholic and, sad to say, not terribly second best point I had made yet. Now I truly knew where to begin: with nothing. comparison of Chick tracts to pornography—but she few visits, all talk was strictly shop: how long, tapered or devout. If I’d been devout I wouldn’t have wound up in I took out a clean sheet of paper and copied these words: What seems beautiful to agreed that you at least appreciate Jack’s work, which straight across, and how about those Tigers? After famil- this roach-infested dungeon. Please accept my heartfelt she felt was better than nothing. iarity took root, however, he felt comfortable enough to thanks for sending me a copy of THE IMP. I feel like me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing… — JEREMY THOMAS, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA. share his fire-and-brimstone faith, and even detailed such a leech for having begged you for it. I never the mercy “witnessing” missions he took to Detroit and thought I’d lower myself so far as to beg for anything; And that too did not work as I had planned. The point of this “idiotorial” is Oh boy! Your Chick book is an utter doozy! I am so other predominantly Black locales. The undercurrent but then again, I never thought I’d wind up in here. I’ve this: Chris Ware is beyond words, as is any artist worth my time. I failed. Even if I gratified to be vouchsafed a glimpse into the life and of dread that flowed beneath his vigorously joyful ser- got to go now. We’re not supposed to use this machine mind of such an alien character. The question of why monettes both fascinated and repelled me. My own for personal correspondence and I could get sent to the did know what I was doing with these booklets of mine, they would still be people believe what they believe is of consuming inter- faith — Catholic, of course — went easy on the “eter- hole just for writing this. est to me, and this wee bookeen is loaded with insight. nal damnation” aspect of the afterlife. The threat of — JOSHUA STANCIL #0594801, doomed to failure—and I think I should continue to fail in this manner for as long I haven’t enjoyed anything this much since Kool Man. perpetual suffering gave his narratives a panicky edge MARION, NORTH CAROLINA. as possible. The Imp of my Perverse is not to write what I know, but to write what You’ve done the world a public service by illuminating that I found scary and entertaining. I remember that he the hidden world of this venomous toad. Stay well, and had placed a bumper sticker reading, “Have you I do not know. Unknowing is what keeps me going. If this doggerel credo sounds for Christ’s sake, keep up the good work! accepted Jesus as your Personal Saviour?” on the ceiling, JACK CHICK IN THE NEWS. — JIM WOODRING, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. directly above the sink, so that you would meditate on This Chino-based comic book artist-writer… has suspiciously like Ware’s own artistic philosophy, as I have presented it in this news- it while he was giving you a shampoo. become an alternative comics darling. paper, then I freely admit my imitation. An imp is a mischevious, tiny demon Unlike others, I’ve never cared for the “mystery artist.” While waiting for my turn under the scissors, I hap- — LOS ANGELES “L.A. TO Z—THE HOTTEST FACTS Chick is the man — a nice, cartoony style. pened upon “Somebody Loves Me.” I still remember the ABOUT THE WORLD’S COOLEST CITY.” child, derived from the Latin verb impere, “to graft onto”—and mimicry is an — SETH, TORONTO, ONTARIO. violent reaction the comic aroused in me: a sort of giddy essential part of my learning process. In the words of one infamous Chicago hell- THE IMP IN THE NEWS. Tattoo of raiser, I am nothing but a pale, little, grafted devil. I imp the imp itself. Allegiance . . . .sell 250 copies THE IMP is one of the very best things to come out of comics this year. Some cultural critics might call this approach brown-nosing; they are correct, — THE COMICS JOURNAL.

of course. The imp is like a frantic pup that must sniff every earthly vapor that “Dick” bracelet . . sell 100 copies Anatomy Pens ...... sell 300 It’s a shame that a project of such high-minded copies excites its hyperactive sense. The imp scurries straight up to the most mysterious Inspirational Comic . sell 150 copies aspirations is bound to be seen by only a fraction of the audience that it deserves. hole it can find and sticks its quivering nose straight into the darkness. In these — THE COMICS JOURNAL “ON-LINE.” pages we are sniffing the asshole of Art, with one nostril cocked for the scent of The “crowd” for Dan Raeburn’s signing at Quimby’s can the familiar, amid the fecund mystery of the “shameful”—and therefore sacred— hardly be described as such… “I sold one copy,” says the artistic outlet that is Comics. one-man-band publisher of THE IMP. — THE CHICAGO NEW CITY. ~for sale.~

— ISSUE ONE. — ¡VAMOS A MEXICO! 32 pages of florid and con- Time Cradle fused writing, spiked liber- sell 700 copies N ORDER TO PROMOTE cultural diversity, the global ally with Mr. Clowes’s own economy, and the always-titillating field of gender insight into the fallen world I of EIGHTBALL. Order your studies, the next issue of THE IMP will take an in-depth copy of this glossy publica- look at weekly Mexican comix. These thick, full- tion and join the elect. color booklets, called historietas, cost about thirty — ISSUE TWO. — An inexplicably popular, cents each and sell a combined ten million copies, per expensive, 68-page romp week, throughout the Americas. Wow is right. What through the fallen world of lessons might our own, flaccid superhero industry mainstream superhero car- toonist Jack T. Chick. A few glean from these incredibly popular, mainstream copies of the red “female” Brunetti Ball comics? And what lessons might our insipid porno- Spanker . . . . sell printing remain. Hundreds of 1,000 copies of the blue “male” graphy industry learn from these beautifully sleazy, copies Wallet Good printing are stacked in my Fire Starter? . . . . . sell 4,000 copies yet oddly moral pamphlets? And just what kind of Luck Charm . . . . . sell 2,000 copies Educational Comic sell 400 copies “living” room. Order both, morality are these allegedly cautionary tales espous- place them side by side, and wait in vain for them to mate. ing? Our southern neighbors obviously understand something about popular art, and human nature, that we do not. So please help THE IMP understand histori- etas: address any and all information, opinions, and outrageous examples to the editor of this newspaper. Particularly helpful contributors will receive a free Boys (and Girls) who own their own comics shops can win dandy FREE Prizes and copy of the issue when it is finally printed. Gracias. make as much to $1.00 to $6.00 and even more, selling THE IMP to friends, neighbors, relatives and others. Everyone is eager to buy THE IMP from you because it contains News, Comics, and Children’s Puzzles -- and because it comes in handy atop the toilet! For Each IMP You Sell ...You Keep HALF the Money! Yes, you keep half the cover price of each issue. Sell only 10 copies a week, and you could be making up to $25 in profit each week --- over a thousand dollars in one year, plus FREE valuable prizes substituted for the desirable ones pictured above. We’ll help you get started in this profitable business if you mail in the coupon TODAY! Dept.CW-99-PZ 1454 W. Summerdale 2C Pay only for the Copies You THE IMP PLEASE PRINT 1454 W. Summerdale, Apt. 2C Dept. VB FTZ @! Chicago IL 60640 Sell ...A NO RISK Guarantee! Chicago, IL 60640 We’ll send you your copies of THE IMP right away, Rush me my first bundle of IMPs. ❑ #1--DGC ❑ #2--JTC ❑ #3--FCW PLEASE RUSH me by mail, along with an invoice payable upon receipt or on consignment terms. You pay ONLY for the copies Quantity: ______the imps checked below. I have enclosed you sell. As two dozen comics shops have discovered, cash or check payable to Dan Raeburn. selling THE IMP is easy, fun . . . and profitable! Name ______Name of Comics Shop ______DGC. Clowes ...... $ . 3.00 Street ______JTC. Chick ...... $ . 5.00 If the coupon is already torn out, call this number: City ______State ______ZIP ______FCW. Ware ...... $ . 4.00 (773) 784-0745 Phone number ______

Draw in your SKETCHBOOK regularly and you will improve. What I learned from STEAL I suck. CHRIS FLAGRANTLY

If you use a NON-PHOTO BLUE FROM YOUR

WARE. PENCIL, you don’t have to erase. INFLUENCES.