One of my favorite holiday presents this year was a copy of comic artist Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library, an anthology of his comic series published by Fantagraphics. And I also just read the latest installment in that series, Acme Novelty Library #16. (Both books are likely available at your local comix shop or from Fantagraphics. Previous BB posts about Ware here, here, and here.) Ware's illustration style, design talent, and the emotion of his narratives is just overwhelmingly beautiful. You don't read his books so much as open them and fall in. In the New York Press review of the anthology, writer Tim Marchman examines why "the best (fiction book) of the season is a collection of comic strips." From the article:
As a stylistic device, Ware's maniacally detailed parodies of the detritus of commercial culture are the rough equivalent of the showy passages in which David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen write in the language of pharmaceutical or advertising bureaucracies, but they and their imitators fail to distinguish between deadening language and the way it deadens the people who use it, mistaking meaning for purpose. They also fail to mark that in satirizing this language, they deaden their readers, who are, even if they are being subjected to clever simulacra of mindless language, being subjected to it nonetheless.Ware avoids doing this largely because of the form in which he's working. One is expected to read a long, parodic Wallace passage in a way one is not expected to read Ware's parodies, which in their unrelieved regularity function as visual noise. The age demands a special kind of commercial parody, and the comic is suited for it in a way the novel isn't. The point to note, though, is that Ware is taking advantage of the specific possibilities offered by his form, and doing something that would be unimaginable in another one. This isn't really true of his novel-writing peers.
Link to New York Press article, Link to Chris Ware's section of the Fantagraphics site
