by Chris Ware and, presumably, the great god of mischief.
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Genius. There is no other word for this, except "Genius". It's as difficult to know where to start, as it will be when to stop. However...
1. This is ludicrously cheap whilst being monstrously huge (same size as the QUIMBY volume: 15" x 9")...
2. It is absurdly beautiful with intricate panel structures, colours to make your heart sigh, and perfectly placed "BUTS" "LATER"s, "AND SO"s ...
3. The packaging is ridiculously lavish, from the gold ink overlay and the double-page, mock astral chart inside which is embossed... right down to strip of card which binds the book and which you think you can remove but you can't because it's glued to the inside cover...
4. It's everything that the original comic has always been: playful, irreverent, self-referential, self-deprecating, and psychotically detailed.
Every edition of ACME NOVELTY was packed full of naughtiness, even in places where most other books held perfunctory information, like the index, publication details and pricing. You could spend half an hour merely taking that in. So here's that band of card I mentioned earlier, with the not-so-traditional small print, although I cannot possibly match the exquisite type-setting of the original:
FANS OF LITERATURE, POETRY and ART
- not to mention Music, Theatre, Cinema, Gastronomy, and Puppetry
will be gravely disappointed by the contents of this volume
as it assembles only the most puerile, foolish and insensitive dregs of the remaining uncollected contents
of the once marginally successful comic strip periodical
THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY
while offering nothing of the trademark warm hearted, expansive, and humanistic
"up with people" bonhomie of the author's more sophisticated stage act.
PERUSE THE FOLLOWING TESTIMONIALS,
requisite in a culture where trust in one's own perceptions is demoted in favour of the speculations of daily
newspapers, trade journals, and embittered ex-undergraduates who, failing to attain graduate-level status, appoint
themselves electronically published critics of an art form in which they have rarely, or hardly ever, dabbled
and then decide, as a citizen, how to continue.
"The ACME Novelty Library is my favourite comic book." - Jack Black, actor
"The colours are dreadful, it's like looking at a bottle of Domestos or Harpic or Ajax.
Awful, bleak colours, revolting to look at; it's on its way to the Oxfam shop.
Disgusting look to it. Really horrible"
- Poet Tom Paulin, BBC Newsnight, December 8th, 2001, discussing the author's previous book.
"They exalt the little, and lower the great; nothing is more imbecilic, nor more immoral" - Gustave Flaubert, novelist
"Food, to the indolent lounger, is poison, not sustenance."
- Frederick Douglas, abolitionist.
"Skilled[,] but self-absorbed." - Peter schjeldahl, discussing the author in The New Yorker
"Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour, for a subject
which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest
which will not bear serious examination is false wit." - Aristotle, philosopher.
"Nearly impossible to read." - The L.A. Times Book Review.
Note now that there is little more than one quarter of an inch left to you, the potential client, to enter into an economic
dialogue with this book, which, if the publisher's publicists were permitted absolute 100% free reign, would gladly lie to
you and describe as "a framework for innovation through the fusion of business design, customer experience creation,
and technological integration, catalyzing the creation of high-volume, high-value transactions and innovative solutions in
a fun, positive energy-filled environment: outstandingly communicative, networked, 24/7." And, now, the price:
£16-99
is the amount of currency you are asked to relinquish in the United Kingdom,
the International Space Station, and select Tube kiosks.
9/2005. Printed in Singapore, where it's cheaper, and they own the
better part of America now, anyway, so waht difference does it make?
I should point out that "waht" was almost certainly misspelled deliberately, and the "one quarter of an inch left" occurs about a quarter of an inch above the price. I might also mention that the above represents a mere half of what you'll get before you even open the book, and I can't resist turning the who thing over for two more paragraphs, whilst wishing I had time to type the lot (don't worry, we're pressed for time, so the rest of this mailshot will be unusually truncated):
In addition to the aforementioned features of this volume, it is widely believed that, with slight
adjustment, the whole might also function as
* A Disappointment * A Used Book * 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 * A Puzzling Shard of Our Civilisation for Future Cultures to Find *
Note: should the reader have any interest whatsoever in instantly
(and possibly permanently) compromising his or her sexual magnetism, or "Mojo,"
the purchase and consequent public comportment of his "Acme Novelty Library"
volume is also a practical guarantee towards the speedy dispatch of that goal.
Do you think it's about time I actually looked inside? Well, as it mentioned above, this is all the stuff left out of the two previous collections, QUIMBY THE MOUSE and the JIMMY CORRIGAN book which won The Guardian's First Book prize (said newspaper thereby proving themselves decidedly more enlightened than blind, blinkered and conservative - yes, "conservative", you disappointingly reactionary little wretch - Tom Paulin who may or may not have been one of my old lecturers but what do you think the odds are when the venom I'm emitting is this potent?), and as such features everything from mock advertisements (some featuring Rusty Brown and Chalky White in sequential art form), legal notices, glossaries, Subjects of an Instructional Nature, tables of content, several pages of cut-out-and-fold handicraft material... the whole thing bears the whiff of a lost American age, whilst parodying any nostalgia it successfully evokes.
And then, of course, there are the comics themselves. As I mentioned a month ago, ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY #16 is just around the corner, and one customer wrote to ask me if I thought it was a good starting point. At that juncture I'd assumed that the previous Rusty Brown material would be joining #16 in a future book, but it's all here instead - revealing snap-shots from across the years - a mere appetiser on the character, it seems, in spite of the wealth of strips on offer. So, yes, by all means do kick in with #16 then work your way back through these books. Although when I say "appetiser", nothing could be further from the truth, for Rusty Brown is quite the most physically and spiritually repulsive comicbook creation ever to sully our shelves. Like Jimmy Corrigan, he's a Mummy's Boy, a product of poor parenting, a middle-aged man whose emotional development has been arrested in childhood But unlike Jimmy, it hasn't just turned him into a mouse of man, it's something a little more icky than that, a little more sexual, and it's just Not Nice. He's a balding, bloated whale of a "man" with a miniscule penis and an indescribably unsettling propensity for taking his clothes off to squat around the panels, naked. Also (also), in spite of the fact that you just know this epitome of self-delusion would never, ever make a single other friend than quiet and kind, fellow comic and plastic figure collector, Chalky White, he's systematically disloyal to him - lying, swindling and sponging his way through their friendship for his own selfish gain. Brown is perhaps an even more masterful creation than Corrigan, but there's plenty more Jimmy on offer too, as well as Quimby, Frank Phosphate and Doctor Science. I really should move on to reviewing something else now, shouldn't I? It's so difficult to look away.
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