As a kid, Chris Ware loved collecting and preserving comics. He graduated from buying Batman and Superman at the nearby 7-Eleven to honing his taste at the local comic shop, where he revelled in the walls of comics, the smell of self-destructing woodpulp, and the polypropylene bags that protected his newfound treasures. That love of the physical object led the adult cartoonist to produce his own semi-regular experimental periodical, The Acme Novelty Library, whose serialized stories were later collected in hardcover graphic novels that bookstores were happy to misfile in their children’s sections.
When “Life Is Complicated,” a retrospective of Ware’s original drawings, finished touring museums in Europe and was about to land in Columbus, Ohio, at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum for its only American stop, the artist didn’t want it to arrive without a printed souvenir. He returned to the traditional comic book, an ambition that soon metastasized into three comic books, a Sunday-sized comic section, and a cardboard model of a contemporary office building, all housed in a (compostable) keepsake box. Like “Building Stories” (2012), this twenty-first issue of Acme asks the reader to take the lead. Its three twenty-four-page booklets excerpt longer works that he told me he has been writing since the coronavirus pandemic began. This old-fashioned format delivers a thoroughly modern reading experience, one that parallels the disruptions of those years and the unravelling of reality we’ve endured since 2016. Shifts in scale allude to the fractal nature of the narrative, and characters and story lines make cameo appearances from booklet to booklet. It’s interactive in the truest sense: the reader, aware that she is building her own story, creates her own linearity and discovers her own rhymes, echoes, and harmonies.
The box, and everything in it.
