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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
This is a "'joke' format"? What's most obviously missing from Ware's "gag strips" are gags -- they have all the bitterness of pitch-black comedy without the actual comedy, and the playful visual style of his favorite old newspaper strips without their sense of fun. They're always impressively constructed, but Ware always plays his form against his content in precisely the same way: Hey, kids! Torment!
"It's just punchlines," Ware draws himself explaining in his "Apology." "I don't trust them ... They don't exist in the real world, so why should I accommodate them in ART?" That's a specious argument: perfectly geometrical forms don't exist in nature either, but that doesn't stop Ware from constructing most of his "finished" work from them. In fact, one reason why Ware's comics often seem so frigid is that the vulnerability and liveliness of the sketchbook drawings seen in "The Acme Novelty Datebook" are ruthlessly boiled out of them until they conform to the clean-lined symmetry he considers iconic. It works for his purposes -- he can convey a mountain of information with two or three lines -- but his version of "iconic" often suggests the sneering remoteness of "ironic."
Ware's a formalist and a historian: not a single element of his book's design has been taken for granted or left untweaked (even its Library of Congress information is the occasion for an extended riff in tiny type). Every line he draws carries behind it the weight of his ideas about comics and their history. In a tiny "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!"-style box, he explains that "cartooning is not really DRAWING at all, but a complicated pictographic language intended to be READ, not really SEEN! ALSO, its strongest roots are NOT in the Academic tradition, but in an arcane system of 19th century PHYSIOGNOMY and RACIAL CARICATURE!" He goes on to present a history of cartooning (in the form of 25 minuscule strips on a single page), beginning with a caveman having his head bashed in as he makes a tiny dirty drawing on a cave wall, and touching on significant early figures like proto-cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer and publisher William Randolph Hearst, and also taking a few red-clawed swipes at modern "Cheerleaders for the Cause": "I think they're wonderful, because they get people interested in REAL reading!"
Ware's also an incorrigible nostalgic -- one of his favorite topics is the decline of the sort of personal craft he pours into everything his pen touches. A tiny strip called "The Letterer in 'Final Insult'" shows a retired widower who was once a hand-letterer buying a bag of chips marked "New Look -- Same Great Taste!" and realizing that the last vestige of his work has been "usurped by digital vector graphics, bitmap brickwork, and insolent little computer hobbyists who don't know a goddamned thing about ascenders and descenders." Then he goes home and stuffs himself with chips, sitting in front of the TV. The title panel, naturally, shows him as a young man at his easel, tipping his visor and grinning.
Ware's world is a fallen world, and his contribution to the struggle against the void is aestheticism and decoration. In one strip, a father has a screaming fight with his wife, drags their son outside for a babbling lecture about fall colors and "the glory of NATURE in all its wondrous BOUNTY," then breaks down coughing and sobbing. We see the scene from overhead, through branches and delicately hued leaves that really are as gorgeous as the father's describing.
Still, Ware can't get away from the idea of the artificial pleasures of childhood for even a few pages at a time. The "Rainy Day Saturday Afternoon Fun Book" in the new volume's title isn't entirely sarcastic -- there are cut-out-and-assemble booklets (along with a little cabinet to put them on), a "picture scroll," and a "magic moving picture theatre" to put together. (This last is listed on a "Project Page" along with "Birth Control Fashioned from the Leavings of the Weekly Slaughter" and "A Profitable Office Building.")
Ware clearly despises Rusty Brown for lusting after a collectible "Looney Lemon" figurine to complete his set of Pillsbury premiums, but he draws the vintage toys with the genuine tenderness of someone who's bought more than a few himself. And in the title panels of the "Rusty" strips, he often draws Rusty himself as a cheerful-looking toy character. It's hard to think of any other artist, in any medium, who's both so obsessed with whimsy and entertainment and so teeth-grittingly resistant to pleasure in his own work. Ware's mastery of his form and style just makes his hammering at a single note of despair as frustrating as it is compelling.
