Rainy Day Fun

As I write this, it is pouring down rain outside. How appropriate for an entry devoted in part to the work of Chris Ware, creator the Acme Novelty Library.

Ware fashioned ANL on or about 1987 from within the queasy space once claimed by children’s comics and advsertisements in the marginalia of equally marginal magazines. It’s a place that evokes endless raininess and long interminable Sundays in which there’s nothing on and no one home and nothing to do but this.

Ware's chosen territory includes the preoccupations and amusements that make most of the rest of us, well, sad.

It was Citizen Jane (real name here) who led me to this place again as an adult, by sending me an earlier, addictive volume of Ware’s work. Thanks, Jane. A lot.

Back in the margins, Ware himself probably appreciates his entry in nndb, an “intelligence aggregator” operated by the drolly named Soylent Communications, which modestly claims to be tracking the entire world. Quietly parked under assorted other kinds of biographical information, there’s this: Risk Factors.

Perhaps the lure of Ware's work is the ways in which it perfectly mimics all the broken promises of those rainy-day comics and magazines. The muscle-builders and guaranteed-fun activities, the magic code rings, and, dare we say now, the Internet.

Okay, and life itself. But please don't make me go back there.

And nndb, too, it turns out, can be added to list of false promises. Because contrary to their vaunted claim, they don’t actually track the entire world.

Go ahead. Do what I did to find out. You know you want to.

Anyway, the other grave disappointment here today was that an intelligence aggregator actually won’t gather your scattered marbles for you. Nope. Here’s what nndb claims it will do, though:

"[nndb] mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with."

Like Citizen Jane, for example.

So yesterday when I came across a handsome compendium of Ware's panels at MASS-MoCA (my favorite rainy-day place on my favorite place on earth) I purchased said compendium for Jane. Then put myselfe wonderfully off-balance wandering through the indescribable retrospective of Huang Yong Ping entitled House of Oracles, which is indescribable.

Did I say that?

Anyhoo.

Here's a little something for rainy-day fun. You can thank me later.

But go ahead and thank Jane right now.

[image via the sprightly Osprey Design site]