Chris Ware’s ACME Papercraft

W HEN YOU PICK UP A CHRIS WARE “comic book,” such as his critically acclaimed ACME Novelty Library series, you know you’re about to encounter something extraordinary, even before you crack it open. The covers themselves immediately work to tickle our too frequently jaded fancies. Ware’s books are usually oversized or off-sized and sport evocative art and snazzy embellishments (such as foil stamping, paper banding, and pockets hiding mini-comics) designed to communicate difference: this is not your ordinary comic book.

Peering inside a Ware comic is when the psycho-activity begins to peg your novelty meter. As one reviewer put it, “You don’t read a Chris Ware book so much as open it up and fall into it.” The unique landscape onto which you tumble is populated by a weird and wonderful cast of characters, whose often breathtakingly mundane or tortured lives are meticulously rendered in strips such as Rusty Brown, Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth, Quimby the Mouse, Rocket Sam, and Tales of Tomorrow. The look and feel of the strips are very much a throwback to Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, and other early comic strips. The breathtaking neglect, alienation, existential cravings, and the sense of sensory overload are decidedly modern themes.

There is a profound tension between the pristine virtuosity of Ware’s renderings — which feel like they exist in a kind of Zen garden quiet — and the almost dizzying density of all the content he packs into each of these books. There’s stuff going on everywhere: multiple strips per page, mock comic

76 Make: Volume 08

book advertising, corporate reports from the ACME Novelty Company, bizarre essays (e.g., a field guide to “The Collector”), actual glow-in-the-dark star maps, animated flip book frames. It all seems to beg for interactivity. To consume a Ware book, you end up turning it in every possible direction to not miss a single graphic or buried treasure. On the cover of the ACME Novelty Library anthology, published last year by Pantheon, there was even a comic strip printed on the cardboard-thin leading edges of the cover (billed as the “World’s Smallest Comic Strip”).

One of the most delightful features of Chris Ware’s ACME Novelty Library books has always been the inclusion of do-it-yourself activities, namely the cut-and-fold toy models. Looking at these projects, reading the thoroughly detailed teeny-font instructions, one can’t help the temptation to actually try putting them together. You too can build a model of Rocket Sam’s retro ship, a Lilliputian library of Ware comic books, complete with an ornate book cabinet to store them in, and even a working, hand-cranked 3D movie viewer.

Like everything Ware does, the project plans look so well designed and drawn out that they appear as though they’d really work. Are we supposed to actually put them together? Is this an image of a project — another painstaking put-on, like the fake ads, the fake ACME company histories, the fake coupons and contests — or a real DIY project? While few readers have likely gone beyond questioning the integrity of these models, a handful of hardy souls have actually put scissors to the hallowed pages of ACME Novelty Library in a devoted effort to bring