Writer/Artist: Chris Ware
Price: Hardcover $24.95 / Paperback $14.95
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: HC 156097485 / PB 1560974559

The word genius is one of those words that is so commonly misused that its original meaning has been replaced by its popular connotations. Anyone who is good at what they do is a genius these days. Robin Williams is a 'genius' because he's funny, or used to be, anyway. Bill Belichick is a 'genius' because the Patriots went fifteen wins without a loss and won the most entertaining Super Bowl in at least a decade. Alan Moore is a 'genius' because he writes great comics. You get the idea.

I'm not sure if any of these people are geniuses. You could probably make a strong case for Alan Moore, given that he revolutionized the way comics are made; you might even be able to convince me that Bill Belichick is too, considering his tricky offensive design and crushing defensive coordination, and the fact that I'm a pretty big Pats fan. Robin Williams I'm not so sure about. Do enough coke and you'll be a funny sonofabitch no matter what.

Really, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that anyone is a genius - Kubrick, Vonnegut, Joyce - without showing me an IQ score with an official MENSA seal of approval slathered across the envelope seal. I've become so used to the word genius being thrown around that it has almost no meaning left for me.

I'm pretty sure Chris Ware is a genius, and I blame it all on QUIMBY THE MOUSE.

QUIMBY THE MOUSE is a collection of strips, comics, vignettes, and ephemera reaching back to his days as the cartoonist for his college newspaper, The University of Texas at Austin's The Daily Texan (which also has the distinction of being the first paper to publish Berkeley Breathed), through his tenure at Spiegelman and Mouly's RAW, to his own critically-acclaimed THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY. Much of the material was reprinted in THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY #2 and #4, both of which are extremely hard to find, so for obsessive-compulsive Ware completists, this collection is manna from heaven. Knowing the type of fan who reads Ware, I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of you out there.

While Ware has practically become a household name for his Guardian award-winning novel JIMMY CORRIGAN: THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH, much of his storied career remained inaccessible to the new or casual reader until the publication of QUIMBY THE MOUSE. Anybody concerned with charting his development from college cartoonist to award-winning author was mostly shit out of luck, unless they happened to be lucky enough to come across one his many out-of-print works, and had to satiate themselves with JIMMY CORRIGAN alone, though it satiates pretty nicely, I have to say.

This stunningly-designed collection focuses mainly on the 'Quimby' strips themselves, a series of quiet, dispassionately maudlin adventures following Quimby, a mouse who sometimes has two heads, sometimes not.

Ware's formalistic innovation and profound sense of mood probably began here, in a series of primarily one-page strips, that employ multi-directionalism, '20s and '30s animation techniques, and his formidable sense of page design. These pages are a revelation in the techniques of modern cartooning, each one moving with the mechanics of a Goldberg-invention, and sadder, funnier, and more awkward with every frame.

The Quimby strips are self-contained universes exploring the intricacies of friendship and loss, and all the selfishness, egotism, and fear that rides along, which has really been Ware's idiom all along. Midway through the collection, though, there is a shift from the emotional dystopia of the Quimby strips to the more personal, revelatory stories that marked Ware's greatest creative leap. In 'Sparky's Best Comics and Stories', 'I Guess', 'Every Morning' and several other untitled stories, Ware peels back the curtain to reveal the memories and events that fuel the sadness that seems omnipresent in his work.

Through these stories and the occasional prose vignette, Ware explores his life as a child with many fathers, raised mostly by his grandparents in Omaha, Nebraska (he seems especially fond of his memories of Omaha, and in the prose 'Introduction, and Apologies', admits that he has an "unreasonable, and almost religious devotion to its memory").

These works are the centralising pieces of the book, really, and provide insight into the events that have shaped his creative life, including the death of his grandmother, which seems to be the single most influential moment in his development as a storyteller. It's difficult to judge where these pieces fall in the timeline of his career, but after reading them, the relative fluff of the Quimby stories begin to take greater shape, and exude an emotionalism that can be nearly overwhelming.

The collection, which is offered in hardback and softcover, is of course another miracle of design. The cover itself is a summation of the work therein, with more of Ware's affinity with classic American illustration work and multidirectional storytelling, accented with gold inlays and rococo swirls and flairs. The book is almost worth buying for the cover alone.

It would be impossible to discuss everything in the QUIMBY collection, considering just how much of it there is. It's a book that demands an immersion and attentiveness that most works don't - there isn't an inch of space wasted. Wherever there is room to throw in a small prose piece, a single illustration, or another of Ware's lampoons on classic pulp advertising, the artist puts it in. You could read this book every day for a month, and likely find something new each time.

Though Ware is already recognised as an innovator for his JIMMY CORRIGAN, this collection provides a unique look into the processes that led him to that point, and may even offer a little hope for aspiring cartoonists who worry that Ware just appeared fully formed out of the ether. Ware may or may note be a genius, but this book, alongside JIMMY CORRIGAN, cements his status as perhaps the most important and influential cartoonist since Crumb.

John Parker lives, works, and writes in Kansas City, Missouri.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.