RUSTY BROWN - CHRIS WARE

So much despair. So much YT male sorrow. This book is about the shape and weight of two bricks, taped together. It’s understandably, given its beauty and price, in not a small amount of  demand with the Seattle Public Library system. It’s made up of a few comics, some of which I own and treasure, stitched together, and purport to only be half of some larger work, since it ends with INTERMISSION. It follows a handful of characters, who initially meet in a 70s Omaha religious school, across a few decades. It gets bleak. We get a sad teacher/sci-fi writer/father of the titular Rusty Brown (who doesn’t feature too much in this but is in other Ware stuff and also ends up sad). We get a sad bully. Ware doesn’t spare himself from his bleak cold (it appears to only ever be winter in this Omaha) world, we get a character named Chris Ware who is a sad creep. The section about the bully, Jason Lint, is god-level. We see-saw back and forth between pitying him and despising him but we feel like we both understand him and understand the ways he’s lying to himself. The way it’s formatted, from a baby’s perspective to that of a dying man and death itself, is a perfect jewel. Ware’s exploration of how trauma is passed down and how this doesn’t let people off the hook is something I’ll think about for years. Ware’s style is on full display. We get his distinctive formatting and drawing. We get tiny, meticulously rendered panels, novel lay-outs and these panels where everything is represented so cleanly and economically. The cumulative effect makes lives seem very preordained and neat, even, and maybe especially, when they seem meaningless, or like they’re falling apart. One feels like Dr. Manhattan reading this stuff. The last section is the most surprising and was the most rewarding. Earlier I wrote about how this book is really distilled YT male misery. That wasn’t fair. For what I believe is the first time in his work (and I’ve read a reasonable amount of the Chris Ware stuff) Ware centers a Black woman, Joanne Cole. Cole also faces incredible sorrows (there’s some plot about a missing daughter that gets sort of dropped right at the end and will presumably be picked up after the INTERMISSION) but she’s resilient in a way the other characters aren’t. She has hobbies she sticks with. She doesn’t ever exploit those around her the way everyone else does. Ware’s meticulous layouts allow the range of racial aggression, from micro to macro, historical to personal, to be very present but not the point. The formatting allows for us to feel their cumulative weight over time, how it would feel when all of this adds up. Joanne’s story also gives crucial background that helps to explain the socio-economic underpinnings of the earlier sections. The YT characters are largely the beneficiaries of these forces and are oblivious to and uninterested in them. I was born in Omaha, my earliest memories are from there but I haven’t been there since we left some day in 1993. This makes a strong case to never return, lest I get stuck in the gloom vortex. An amazing work. 1 pit of despair.