The Comics of Chris Ware

Chris Ware’s Failures

4 5 Chris Ware’s Failures david M. Ball Why bother taking the time to read this? Aren’t there better things you could be spending your money on? Isn’t there something worthwhile you could be doing right now? This is the immediate reaction we might expect from Chris Ware at the thought of a critical volume of essays devoted to his work. Indeed, he had much the same reaction when first informed about the 2007 Modern Language Association roundtable on his comics that served as the origin of this present collection: “I must say, I’m not sure whether to be pleased or terrified that my stuff would fall under the scrutiny of people who are clearly educated enough to know better. I’d imagine that your roundtable will quickly dissolve into topics of much more pressing interest, or that you’ll at least be able to adjourn early for a place in line at lunch, etc.”1 Ware’s readers and fans have come to expect this characteristic selfabnegation in all of his public performances and publications, an insistent rhetoric of failure that imbues everything from Ware’s interviews and critical writings to the layout and packaging of his hardbound, book-length publications . Ware artfully edits the least flattering portions of reviews on the inset pages of paperback editions of Jimmy Corrigan, informing his readers that the volume they hold is both “weighed down by its ambition” and “nearly impossible to read.”2 Ware’s self-written catalogue for his 2007 solo exhibition at Omaha’s Sheldon Memorial Gallery appeared under the title “Apologies, Etc.” and lamented the collection’s “unerringly inexpressive” contents (see plate 4).3 The exterior band of Ware’s hardcover The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book (the title itself devaluing the contents of the book to the realm of the sub-literary) is graced with a prolix apologia promising that readers will be “gravely disappointed by the contents of this volume” and offering a long list of other functions the discarded book might serve: “A Disappointment * A Used Book * Trash * A Cutting Board * Food for Insects and Rodents * A Weapon * Fuel * Attic Insulation * The Focus of an Angry Review * Recycled Wood Pulp in the Paper of a Better Book * Something to Forget about on the Floor of Your Car * A Tax Shelter for the Publishers.”4 Even the very barcodes of Ware’s works rarely appear without a self-flagellant quip or reminder to the book’s purchasers that their time and money could be better invested elsewhere. Both casual and scholarly readers of Ware have puzzled over the prevalence of such expressions of insufficiency and uselessness, examples of which are legion in his work and permeate his entire career, from Ware’s disavowals of his earliest strips to the latest volume in his ongoing serialization of The 4 6 D Av I D M . B A L L ACME Novelty Library. This rhetoric of failure appears both paratextually—in places such as dust jackets, publication information, and author biographies that customarily codify and reinforce the text’s value as a signifying tool—as well as narratively, in stories that routinely revolve around themes of anomie, humiliation, and despair.5 For some, this abnegation is nothing more than the outward manifestation of a self-effacing author, part and parcel of comics artists’ carefully constructed personae as neglected outsiders in a harsh and uncaring world.6 For others, this unrelenting return to narratives of futility and human suffering reveals a morbid fascination with stories of loss and meaninglessness. Douglas Wolk summarized this view in his Reading Comics with a chapter titled “Why Does Chris Ware Hate Fun?” There he writes that Ware’s comics “have an emotional range of one note [. . .] forc[ing] his readers to watch his characters sicken and die slowly, torment (and be humiliated in turn by) their broken families, and lead lives of failure and loneliness.”7 Ware’s rhetoric of failure, according to this unreflective critique, thinly masks the bravura pretensions of a graphic genius, acting as a kind of false consciousness behind which he can shield his genre-defying approach to graphic narrative . While all of these explanations reflect certain truths about Ware—he is in fact exceedingly modest, does focus his creative energies into a worldview indelibly inflected with angst and existential terror, and frequently does disavow the scope of his ambitions behind self-effacing remarks—at the...