A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel December 20, 2012 Gabriel Winslow-Yost Font Size: a a a Building Stories by Chris Ware Pantheon, 260 Pp

A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel December 20, 2012 Gabriel Winslow-Yost Font Size: A A A Building Stories by Chris Ware Pantheon, 260 pp. boxed set, $50.00 Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware Pantheon, 380 pp., $35.00 The ACME Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware Drawn and Quarterly/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 80 pp., $15.95 The ACME Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware Drawn and Quarterly/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 72 pp., $23.95 The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book by Chris Ware Pantheon, 108 pp., $27.50 Quimby the Mouse or, Comic Strips, 1990–1991 by Chris Ware Fantagraphics, 69 pp., $14.95 (paper) Detail from a page of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, showing the ‘girl’ in red at bottom left and the ‘married couple’ on the steps of the building. The top and right of the image show the ‘old lady’ who owns the building, both in the present and in her memories of her younger days. In 1988, Gore Vidal predicted that by 2015 “The New York Review of Comic Books will doubtless replace the old NYR.” It was a joke, of course, and a warning (Vidal preferred “book books,” as he called them), but we’re just a couple of years short now, and he wasn’t all wrong. The past decades have seen an unprecedented amount of serious attention paid to comics, and for good reason: they’re better—stranger, subtler, more ambitious—than ever before. A medium that had spent most of its existence being mocked, ignored, and denounced, its books shoddily printed and sold only in specialty shops that, as one artist recalled, were “really just one step away from a pornographic bookstore to a lot of people,” began winning the awards meant for “book books,” and showing up on the walls at MoMA and the Whitney Biennial (The New Yorker called this “pant[ing] after the youth market”). Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Holocaust comic Maus was nearing completion even as Vidal wrote, and there has been no shortage of successors, from the politically minded reportage and memoirs of Joe Sacco and Marjane Satrapi to the acid, unnerving fictions of Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns—to, above all, the intricately bleak work of Chris Ware. Ware’s first book, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, was published twelve years ago to acclaim that hadn’t been seen since Maus. It won the Guardian First Book Award and the American Book Award, and Ware was called everything from “a genius” and “the most versatile and innovative artist the medium has known” to “the Emily Dickinson of comics.” It was a dense, experimental, maniacally thorough exploration of familial estrangement, self-deception, and sheer human awkwardness, as revealed in four generations of the Corrigan family. The titular Jimmy is neither smart nor, in most of the book, a kid, but instead an almost supernaturally meek Chicagoan in his mid-thirties who travels to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with the father he’s never met; this is interspersed with scenes from the brutal, lonely childhood of Jimmy’s grandfather, James Corrigan, who is abandoned by his own father during Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Ware’s drawings are meticulous, even chilly, with flat, muted colors and the straight lines and perfect curves of an architectural rendering. The panels follow an orderly horizontal grid, but have a discomfiting tendency to occasionally shrink to near illegibility; or they might suddenly demand to be read from right to left, or even disappear entirely, to be replaced by pretty but unhelpful typography (“Thus,” “And so”), complicated diagrams, or plans for a paper model of one of the stories’ locations. Dreams and fantasies invade the story without warning—when Jimmy first meets his father, we see him brutally murdering the sheepishly friendly man, while their desultory small talk struggles on. Corrigan begins with a set of “General Instructions” to the reader, the kind of thing a worried publisher, trying to sell a long, complex comic book to the general public, might have insisted on. But Ware’s instructions are flamboyantly unhelpful, a dense little maze of minute type, multiple-choice quizzes, and intricate diagrams, all written in a pompously gloomy style (“As such, the thinking person would have to conclude that, in general, the seeking of emotional empathy in art is essentially a foolhardy pursuit, better left to the intellectually weak, or to the ugly”). Readers can fail the “Exam” just by admitting they are female. Much of this is simply self-mockery, a constant in Ware’s work—a later collection of shorts came packaged with suggested alternate uses, including “Food for Insects and Rodents” and “Recycled Wood Pulp in the Paper of a Better Book”—but beneath that is something more sincere, even a little old-fashioned: a slyly ambitious artistic manifesto, in which Ware declares the two beliefs that underlie his work. The first is a particular vision of how comics function. For Ware, they are not, contrary to what one might think, a form of visual art or drawing. Cartooning, as he put it in a later essay (in the “Instructions” this argument is part of a large wordless diagram, a flurry of arrows, equations, and subpanels around a single image of a mouse hitting a disembodied cat head with a hammer), is “a language of abbreviated ‘visual words’ having its own grammar, syntax, and punctuation.” The simplified, geometric forms of Ware’s comics are not his natural drawing style. His sketchbooks, two volumes of which have been published, are filled with detailed drawings of people and the natural world, done with a scratchy, organic line clearly indebted to the work of R. Crumb, and utterly dissimilar to what is found in his comics work. The smooth, geometric forms in his comics are icons and symbols as much as pictures, “a sort of symbolic typography” meant to be read and understood, “not scrutinized individually as one might carefully peruse a painting or a drawing.” This minimalist, even prim style lets Ware depict body language and gesture with great subtlety and clarity. There is a page early in Corrigan that shows Jimmy’s father, Jim, delivering a vain, blustery little monologue while they wait in a doctor’s office (Jimmy has been hit, rather gently, by a truck, after wandering absent-mindedly into the street). In a dozen almost identical square panels, showing him from a three-quarters angle on an almost blank background, Jim chatters away about talkative neighbors (“I just cut ’em off, y’know? I don’t have time for that kinda thing…”) and a needy ex-girlfriend (“I’m like whoah…I’ve been down that road, lady…I already did kids…”—a particularly thoughtless story to tell the abandoned son with whom he’s trying to reconnect). All the while, he rubs at his nose, knifes his hand through the air, pushes away an invisible wall, aims his thumbs back at himself with a smug smile, coughs uneasily into his fist—a display of loneliness, obliviousness, and a peculiarly masculine insecurity so exactly rendered, so viscerally recognizable that it feels almost indecent to read. The second conviction declared at the outset of Corrigan is a surprising one, given the formal experimentation Ware is known for: a broad, powerful belief in realism as the highest goal of art. In the pompous language of the “Instructions”: “It is commonly undisputed that the paramount end of all aesthetic pursuit is the securing of a method for reproducing human experience in all of its complexity, richness, and comparable mundanity.” The book is deeply affecting, and at times quite beautiful—all the more so for the pain and uncertainty out of which that beauty arises. Midway through the book James sneaks into the World’s Columbian Exhibition’s Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building with an attractive redheaded classmate (a nod to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts). The enormous structure, then the largest building in the world, is still under construction, its array of windows and girders dazzling, almost abstract in its vastness. The pair make their way up to the roof, James trembling with fear (“I’ll make her leave I’ll make her”)—and suddenly they’ve made it, and the panels expand, only two per page, to show the city and the water stretching away beneath them, and we find ourselves in the middle of the sort of perfect moment a child might remember for the rest of his life. James goes silent, awestruck and infatuated. Ware strings narration within and between the panels, breaking up the sentences like the lines of a poem: She’s right He can see his house He can see just about everyone’s house In fact it seems as if he can see the whole world from up here But for him The whole world is for that moment The single strand of red hair which dances silently around his nose & eyelashes. Ware is often accused of miserabilism, of having “an emotional range of one note,” as one reviewer put it. The rapturous moments in Corrigan are indeed rare and short-lived. Ware cuts immediately from this moment on the roof to the redheaded girl calling James a bastard and knocking him to the ground as they return home (to the funeral of James’s grandmother, no less). But they linger in your mind, and carry you through the rest—the missed opportunities, failed encounters, everyday cruelties—as they might in life.

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