English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Acts of Cruelty

Chris Ware.  The Acme Novelty Library.  Pantheon, 2005.  111pp. Hardcover, $27.50.

By J. Andrew Deman, University of Waterloo

With an award-winning graphic novel, a guest-editing stint at McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and an exhibit at the Whitney Museum, Chris Ware has quickly become the critical darling of the American comics art movement. On the heels of this success comes the publication of The Acme Novelty Library, a 'best of' sampling of Ware's shorter comics work.  While somewhat inhibited by the smaller comics forms collected in Acme - as compared to his 380 page Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel - Ware’s early work nonetheless shows the high level of formal complexity, dark humor, and emotional resonance that have endeared him to the second generation of comics literature readers. 

The Acme Novelty Library collects a sampling from ten years of Ware’s previous work across fifteen volumes of his serialized - and still ongoing - comic of the same name.  Included in the anthology are such memorable Ware characters as Rocket Sam, a Buck Rogers sort of hero marooned on a distant planet; Big Tex, a simpleton cowboy abused by an unloving father; Rusty Brown, an obsessive toy collector and lifelong loser; and the already anthologized Quimby the Mouse, a vulgar Mickey Mouse subjected to a realistic world.  The aforementioned Jimmy Corrigan, a shy lonely urbanite, also makes an appearance. 

The majority of the stories collected are told in single page layouts.  Fans of the graphic novel treatment of Jimmy Corrigan will not find the same depth of characterization and internal complexity in The Acme Novelty Library.  What they will find, however – through Ware’s use of innumerable snippets on the same basic thematic material – is a polyphonous text that utilizes abstract cartooning to create a powerful portrayal of the inequities and injustices inherent in the human condition.

Each of the characters in The Acme Novelty Library is made to confront their own social isolation, and their individual incapacity to co-exist with others.  They are all too shy, too self-centered, or simply too much of a loser to be anything other than alone.  The few characters allowed to find some form of companionship are no better off, finding that love, friendship, or basic human empathy are all little more than a veneer.  Chalky White loves his daughter, but does not understand her; Rocket Sam loves his robot creations, but continually destroys them in fits of rage; Jimmy Corrigan loves his mother, but cannot see past the stifling effect that she has on him. 

It is difficult to situate The Acme Novelty Library within a literary context.  The stories that Ware conveys are hardly Sunday funnies, or masked superheroes playing out adolescent power fantasies.  Rather, Ware uses the comics medium as a poignant vehicle for the expression of existential sorrow.  As the central thematic concern of Ware’s comics art, this sense of ennui places a modernist slant on his creations.  Furthermore, with a consistent focus upon existential hopelessness, often expressed through the absurd, Ware's comics bear a striking resemblance to the novels and short stories of Franz Kafka.  As was the case with Kafka, Ware's work pushes the boundaries of human cognition, skillfully analyzing the darker elements of human nature which few authors (or readers for that matter) have dared to explore. 

Despite this modernist sensibility, Ware’s work also demonstrates a consistent sense of the self-referential, and reliance upon the meta-textual effect.  The narrative in this anthology completely transcends the text itself through a fictional account of the Acme Novelty Company, countless fake (and highly satirical) advertisements throughout, and even a number of diorama cut-outs.  Furthermore, the book jacket contains the warning that “fans of literature, poetry, and art – not to mention music, theatre, cinema, gastronomy and puppetry will be gravely disappointed by the content of this volume.”  This externalizing effect is furthered by the blurbs on the outside of the jacket which include positive reviews, negative reviews, and quotes by Aristotle and Frederick Douglas presented as reviews.  While Ware’s thematic concern is modernist in nature, this focus upon the object d’art demonstrates a strong sense of post-modern production.

In utilizing satiric versions of stock comics characters such as Buck Rogers, Superman, George Jetson, and Mickey Mouse, Ware’s work shows affinities with other comics artists who utilize the popular genre of comics as a satirical foundation for both the deconstruction of said popular genres, and also for the expression of a greater diversity of subject material.  Most notable among such artists is Art Spiegelman, the man often credited with “discovering” Ware by publishing his early work in Spiegelman’s co-edited Raw magazine.  In Maus - the first graphic novel to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize - Spiegelman uses a Mickey Mouse style of drawing (complete with anthropomorphic animal characters) to illustrate his father’s horrific Holocaust narrative.  Through such unconventional illustration, Spiegelman is able to subvert the reader's expectations of both Mickey Mouse and the Holocaust narrative in order to create a complex, and complicated work of art.  Ware's approach in this satirical mode is quite similar.  In using comics icons that are familiar fantasy within a harsh but familiar reality, he forces the reader to accept both the humanity of cartoon characters and also the cartoonishness of human beings. 

In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud argues that "comics symbolic static images may cut straight to the heart without the continual mediation of prose's authorial voice" (39).  The Acme Novelty Library demonstrates such intimacy in using visual rhetoric as the dominant mode of narrative construction.  The flexibility of reader interpretation in Ware’s work creates an open text in the semiotic sense.  It is possible to take the comics as realist, to lament the tragedies within, but it is also possible to distance one’s self from the narrative and simply laugh at the dark humor of human tragedy.  Either interpretation, however, only articulates the thematic cruelty that Ware evinces.  The reader can either experience said cruelty vicariously, or externalize it through the cruel act of laughing at a rendered character’s experience of cruelty.  This is the double-bind that Ware creates.

Adding to the effectiveness of Ware's work is the fact that The Acme Novelty Library works as a unified text, and not just an anthology.  The sampling of prior Ware work is as effective as the arrangement.  There is a definite sense of pace in this book which allows the multiple characters and multiple narratives to comment upon one another in a relevant way.  The highly fictionalized Rocket Sam’s relationship with his robot creations, for example, offers commentary upon the more realistic Rusty Brown’s relationship with his geeky best friend, Chalky White.  Where the Rocket Sam stories are highly metaphorical, Rusty Brown is grounded in a certain referential reality – suburban America in the 1970s.  Sam's conception of friendship then becomes a hyperbole for that of Rusty.  Similarly the banality of the Tales of Tomorrow – a future world where exciting technology is treated as dull and isolating - is given permanence through the banality of Quimby the Mouse’s everyday life, while the anti-heroic selfishness of Rocket Sam is taken to an extreme through Ware’s narrative of a corrupt Superman. 

Cotextuality becomes the unifying force of the text.  Ware’s thematic material is fairly consistent, bordering on repetitive.  The artist, however, is able to transcend repetition by consistently finding new ways to tell the same basic story of insular humanity.  The collection of these myriad approaches forms a mosaic through which the most emotionally devastating aspects of the contemporary human experience are articulated.

There is some truly horrific material in Ware’s narratives: A middle-aged loser masturbating alone in a filthy house while picturing the wife of his best friend breast feeding; Superman - mad with power - abducting a small child from a supermarket and later having a child of his own with her only to abandon them both out of boredom; a father who leaves his simple-minded son alone in the forest to die; murder, suicide, mutilation.  The truly disturbing effect is how all of the extreme violence is subsumed into a basic sense of human cruelty which is expressed in significantly smaller tragedies.  Everything interweaves across the metaphorical plane in Ware’s work, and the sunburn suffered by young Chalky White, because he was ridiculed for wearing a t-shirt while swimming in a public pool, is easily more tragic than any of the capital crimes or mortal sins depicted elsewhere in the text. 

It is through this intermingling and equalization of acts of cruelty that The Acme Novelty Library is able to transcend the expectations of a comics anthology by creating a unified, but polyphonous vision of human isolation.  Ultimately, the message that Ware conveys is that the world is unfair, and that it expresses this inequity in infinite variation. 

Works Cited

McCloud, Scott.  Reinventing Comics.  Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000.

Spiegelman, Art.  The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.  New York: Pantheon, 1996.

Ware, Chris.  Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth.  New York: Pantheon, 2000.

---.  Quimby the Mouse.  Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003.