indefinite articles

What is a B-Side? Originally, on vinyl, the b-side was just the second side of an album. Quite simply, a record producer would sift through an artist’s songs and decide which ones were worthy to be pressed on the A-Side – placing them on the fast-track to radio and living rooms across America – and which would endure the fate of becoming a B-Side. For the latter, an eternity condemned to obscurity and stale stoner rooms was pretty much guaranteed. That is until the freaks and stoners crawled out from under their parents’ basements and dominated the dialogue on what’s “cool.” Now, B-Sides have become the icing, or maybe even the cream filling.

It seems that an artist can only put out B-Sides if they have already contributed a magnum opus. Not only that, but the B-Sides somehow welcome a greater intimacy between the fan and the artist(s), as if by owning the B-Sides you know the band or singer better than those chumps who never scoured the record isles. Basically, you’re not a real fan until you have the B-Sides. Well then, today I am a real fan because I have no way of describing Acme Novelty Library, Issue No. 7: The Big Book of Jokes other than Chris Ware’s B-Sides.

An example of Ware’s fake ads, in this case ripped straight from the pages of Boy’s Life. Most of his ads, which densely litter his comics, are of the Sears & Roebucks variety.

In this true collection of non sequiturs Chris Ware introduces and reintroduces characters and stories, all while navigating between beauty and sorrow with the grace of a swan (whose abusive father and absentee mother left it orphaned with a litter of amputated puppies). One thing is for certain though: Ware dispels the myth that comics are supposed to be funny, but he doesn’t stop there. He continues to drive this point over and over and over again. It’s almost as if Ware decided that there should be no room for humor in his comics, only bitter tragic irony. To this end, Ware is a master and an insane genius.

Rocket Sam bags a space deer on some surreal alien world.

Upon opening the issue, one catches a glimpse into Ware’s madness. Every line of text, every image, every splash of color, every intention is surgically executed. Four pages of faux advertisements, all skillfully drawn without a shred of carelessness. I can’t even fill in a multiple-choice test bubble without getting impatient; but Ware proves to everyone that he is a true artist. Actually, he doesn’t just prove it, he says it and shows it. In the first few strips, Ware takes on the history of the artist – a talented being whose works and worth are underappreciated. The artist never gets invited to the orgies in Acient Greece, nor do his Jewish-skewed political cartoons get appreciated by the Egyptians. However, I wouldn’t describe this work as self-pitying but somewhere in between pity and self-loathing, which is where most of his works seem to exist.

Big Tex gets abandoned in the woods.

For example, other works in No. 7 include Big Tex and Rocket Sam, strips that conclude tragically. In Big Tex, the protagonist, Tex, is a person with slight mental retardation (at least that’s how I interpreted the character’s slow wittedness) whose father loathes his existence. In one story, after Tex’s mother had passed away, his father takes him out for ice cream, but once they arrive to the middle of the woods, he tells Tex to never come back home. How can anyone feel anything but pity for this character? As for the other extreme, Ware’s character Rocket Sam is a royal dick. For the most part Sam’s stories revolve around abandonment; they start with Rocket Sam creating a companion and they end with him leaving it.

Whether Ware empathizes with his main characters or whether they personify things he hates about himself is unclear. What is clear though is that Ware truly believes that comic books are art. And you know what? He’s right.