Quimby the Mouse (Acme Novelty Library) (Paperback)

But Ware's attempts to distance himself from this work, most of which first appeared in the University of Texas student newspaper and later in his own ACME Novelty Library, don't jibe with the actual finished product. To begin with, the volume itself is a work of art, from the typically intricate, gold-embossed covers to the pages inside, each of which is a testament to Ware's outside-the-box ability as a designer and artist.

This is a book that does for coffee tables what Frank Gehry buildings do for urban landscapes: arrests the eye and overshadows anything in the vicinity. As for the contents, well, while it's true a few of the strips are hard to follow owing to tiny panels and unorthodox narratives, every detail in this work is worthwhile. This includes the fake ads, which demonstrate Ware's mastery of 20th-century print advertising lingo, the instructions on building one's own "working cat head" and of course the strips themselves.

In the latter part, which comprises the bulk of the book, Ware's main character is the hapless Quimby, a version of a traditional cartoon mouse with a few twists. For instance, sometimes he's "Quimbies the Mouse," a two-headed version of himself. Other strips are elaborate, wordless gags focusing on the relationship between Quimby and a pet cat head that he abuses but can't live without. More crucially, Quimby is a stand-in for the author. This becomes especially apparent in the strips where the little mouse wanders through an empty house, and the narration echoes the book's introduction, in which Ware recalls working on the strips while his grandmother's health deteriorated. At these moments, as in Jimmy Corrigan, the book attains a black humour and poignancy no amount of defensiveness on the part of the author can deny. --Shawn Conner, Amazon.ca

Synopsis
The Long-Awaited Second Book from One of the Finest Graphic Artists in History! Cleverly appropriating old-fashioned animation and imagery and putting it at the service of modern angst and existentialism, Ware's second full-length effort is saturated with all of the astounding qualities that have earned him his reputation as one of the most prodigious artists of his generation. As this cartoon silhouette of a mouse ignominiously suffers at every turn, the spaces between the panels create despair and a Beckett-like rhythm of hope deceived and deferred (but never quite extinguished), buoying Quimby from page to page. With consistently amazing and innovative graphics, formal narrative complexity, insanely perfectionist production values, cut-out-and-assemble paper projects, and countless more examples of Ware's genius, Quimby is a masterful and thoroughly enjoyable achievement, sure to please fans and critics alike.

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• Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Genre
• Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Publishers > Fantagraphics
• Books > Fiction

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