Since the success of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, the work of cartoonist Chris Ware has been everywhere: in art galleries on the cover of The New Yorker and the pages of The New York Times. Ware edited the 2004 landmark, all-comics edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Number 13 which made the new wave of comics cool (resulting in public radio and alternative arts&culture weekly attention). He was the editor of The Best American Comics 2007. His ongoing series The Acme Novelty Library is contemporary comics' greatest achievement, keeping the flavor of the serialized comic tradition (some complete with hilarious comic book ad parodies) while telling stories that are exquisitely crafted in both narrative and illustration. His latest Lint: The Acme Novelty Library, Number 20 is a life-long look at a mostly uninteresting character that tells an every man's story in its psychology and experience. Picture it...
Ware's tightly drawn stories have always veered towards the lonely, pathetic, Eleanor Rigby side of life. Lint follows in the footsteps of Rusty Brown, Jimmy Corrigan and the half-legged woman from Acme Novelty Library Nineteen. Fathers play the role of heavies in Ware's books, especially Jimmy Corrigan, and the latest takes the father-son role further as the son become father and an offspring claims fatherly harm in a much more dramatic, public way. This betrayal seems to revisit Lint's own exaggeration of his father's faults.
Jordan Lint is a plainly pathetic character, deviant in his normalcy with a psyche littered with the usual psychic traumas of childhood (think potty training). He comes from that most normal of dull places, Nebraska (Full disclosure: Ware himself is from Nebraska. Me, too). Ware doesn’t give the story too many fantastic touches to make his point. God, as he does on the new Paul Simon album, makes an appearance. But only while Lint is a child.
Ware has a way of capsulizing our lives into its most common, most poignant moments (see the illustration at the front of the diary that shows stages of Lint's daughter). There are hints of Piaget and Erickson as Jordan develops from clueless infant to concept-grasping toddler and beyond. The story starts on the molecular level with read and black pixels gathering into recognizable geometric features. Early on, Jordan mirrors his father's outbursts and his mother's tenderness. His mother's funeral and his father remarrying are depicted on opposing pages. The boy's conception of both events are mirrored in dark colors, tears, scab-picking and thumb-sucking. As he struggles for identity and sexual understanding, he changes his name. Alienation of the kind many teens feel sets in. He grasps at that most mighty of teen cliches: he wants to be a rock'n' roll star.
Ware follows Lint's adult life through marriages, financial success and child-rearing. Guilt plays a leading role and deliverance never lives up to promise. His past visits at unseemly moments. He is happiest at his most indulgent, a characteristic represented by his drunken enthusiasm over football (a source of happiness that as all Nebraska football fans know can dissolve in a single play).
Ware's drawing, the art and craft of it, continues to be visually searing. That’s not to mean it's psychedelic in it spontaneity and hallucinatory images (although their starkness and geometry can be hallucinatory at times). But his tireless style burns into our brains. Each page is a mosaic of variously-sized and sequenced panels that speed and slow the story at its creator's whim. The illustration sporting the least technique is by Lint himself, a sheet of lined-notebook paper with a crude Frankenstein portrait drawn by the kid “so sick of everything.” Reoccurring images haunt the pages. The story ends as it begins, the drawings deconstructing into colored molecules, Lint's life-long preoccupations bubbling to the surface of his dissipating consciousness until only a word is left: "am."
Lint is normal in that he does much to generate his own guilt. There's a moral to this story but it's distorted. Like many of us, Lint -- a product of his past as well as his own self-indulgence -- is not a perfect man. There are excuses and there are no excuses. Ultimately, his unhappiness seems anchored in his inability to face the realities of his life. What can we learn?
This is the last of the regular installments of The Illustrated Imagination. Thanks to all those that read and responded. I've greatly enjoyed and learned from the insightful, intelligent and knowledgeable comments that were posted here. I hope to return on an unscheduled basis. Let's keep on picturing the possibilities...in all things.
THE CABBAGE RABBIT REVIEW OF BOOKS AND MUSIC