Noah Berlatsky reviews Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics.

The key to the anthology’s continued success has been flexibility regarding its mission.

(See final ¶.)

Jordan Crane has never particularly interested me.  It’s not an insult.  I recognize his great talent, and over the years his work has only gotten more impressive.  Nothing of his I’ve seen has really struck my particular fancy is all.  But I may have to buy this just for the cover.  That is one killer design.  Look at the negative space.  Look at the color.  God damn!  I luv it.

Here’s a brief rundown of Chris Ware’s major published works, mainly for the benefit of @jaredparker who “wept” at Jimmy Corrigan but doesnt know where to start with newer works—which, as I mentiond to him, are a big step forward from Ware’s flawed masterpiece.

For years Ware drew a full tabloid page in each edition of Chicago’s weekly paper New City.  At some point the strip moved to the Chicago Reader. Not sure if he is still doing the strip at all.  Pretty sure he at least took a sabbatical a few years back, maybe quit altogether?  Anyway, most of his work originally appeared there.  The same work, usually after being revised heavily, would later appear in the pages of Ware’s comic-book series Acme Novelty Library.  Then the big book collections would offer überperfectionist Ware an opportunity to worry his material further.

The publication dates of the Acme issues don’t tell much about when the material was originally conceived, as most of it appeared years earlier in the weekly, and it wasnt collected chronologically in Acme.

Evrything listed here is worth reading.  Chris ware is a genius in every sense of the word.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth
Ware’s acclaimed novel.

Acme 5–6, 8–9, & 11–14 (Fantagraphix 1995–2000).
Publisht in one volume, revised with supplementary material, by Pantheon in 2000.

Quimby/Sparky
Horrifying strips about a neurotic mouse and a disembodied cat head.

Ware’s formal innovations appear here at their most extreme.  The strips are nonetheless just as emotionally heavy as anything else in his body of work.  How does he squeeze so much pathos out of these tiny images?

Acme 2 & 4 (Fanta 1994, 1995).
Collected by Fanta in 2003 as Quimby The Mouse.  The dimensions (not page count) of this book are huge.

Rusty Brown
Novel in progress about another dysfunctional family.

3 installments so far: Acme 16 (Fanta 2005), 17 (D&Q 2006), & 19 (D&Q 2008).
This thing gets better and better. Jared, you’d love it.  The story is progressing in a linear way thru successive issues of Acme, and these later issues are easy to get hold of.  So it’s easy to keep up with.  It will be a very long time before this novel is completed and publishd as a whole, so start following it now!  It’s worth it.

Building Stories
Another novel in progress.  What its final shape will be is hard to tell at this point.

This might end up being Ware’s greatest work.  I’m told it will be a set of interrelated stories about the residents of an aging apartment house.  Looks more complex (at least graphicly) than Rusty Brown and quite a bit harder to keep track of.  Scraps of it have appeared in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, The Independent On Sunday, prestigious avant-gard anthology Kramer’s Ergot (#s 5 & 7), 8 pages in the back of Acme 16, the whole of Acme 18 (D&Q 2007), and probably others.  So far we have seen amazing illustrations of the interior life of a lonely, handicapped young woman, and tiresome strips about the bees that pollinate the flowers outside the building.  Flowers are gonna figure big into this book.  They’re probably symbolic or something.  (Fruit too.  It’s almost obscene.)

Kramers Ergot is the only forum in which this story has been presented at a size where it can be appreciated properly.  It was frustrating to try to read pages of this enormous work shoved into the format of the Times mag.  The glossy paper did not flatter the art, and I had to squint to read it.  It’s even difficult to read in Acme itself.  In #16 it was printed across the fold and way too small.  #18 gave us a satisfying chunk of story but was still a strain to read at the size.  I hope Ware and I both live to see the complete novel in a single volume of the proper dimensions.

Other

Acme 1 & 10 (Fanta 1993/4, 1998):
Jimmy Corrigan strips not appearing in the big book. (I think parts of #1 appear in the book in a different form.) Some feature young Jimmy as a superhero (“the smartest kid on earth”).

Acme 3 (Fanta 1994):
Sketchy strips about a potato man (possibly modeled after Ware’s own potato-shaped head) whose eyes keep falling out.  These originally appeared in the Daily Texan, student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin.

Short subjects featuring Big Tex, Superman, Tales of Tomorrow, Rocket Sam, etc, etc:
Acme 7 & 15 (Fanta 1996, 2001), entitled “Acme Novelty Library Book Of Jokes”, were filled with miserable gag strips in the style of the early Sunday funnies.  Collected by Fanta along with a plethora of new/uncollected material in The Acme Novelty Library (confusing title).  The dimensions of this book are mega-huge.  It doesnt fit on my tallest shelf, which is very tall.  It lies sideways atop the bookshelf with Frank Santoro’s Storeyville.

The Acme Novelty Library Datebook:
2 attractive volumes from Drawn and Quarterly collecting selections from years and years worth of sketchbooks.  Dense, mind-blowing.

Jordan W. Lint:
The life, in brief, of a minor character from Rusty Brown.

The first chapter is found in the fiction anthology The Book Of Other People (Penguin 2007).  Subsequent chapters (4 so far) appearing in the Virginia Quarterly Review (2008–9).

Almost evry issue of Acme Novelty library contains hilarious filler material.

From Dynamite #4 drawn by Pete Morisi, ©1953 Comics Media (…maybe)

This is why they burned comic books.

For some reason I just love this lurid, misogynistic Hammer rip off.  Pappy has an 8-page strip.

Oh, by th way, here’s another one.

Maki Sasaki via Pink Tentacle.

By Cliff Sterrett, ©1936 King Features

It’s that Victorian kind of gay—how pure and noble is the love between fellows…until those nasty women ruin it.

By the way, Cliff Sterrett is brilliant, and the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive is a treasure trove.

From Mike Lynch comes this original by Walker.  Please click to biggify. Walker was tapped, along with other big-time strippers including Schulz, to draw a feature in a 1964 Mad magazine—“Comic Strips They’d Really Like To Do”.  Schulz’s portion is a scream.  Excellent self-parody.

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By miriam beetle from The Hooded Utilitarian.