Acme Novelty Library #18 (No. 18)
Interrupting the ongoing saga of pathetic man-child Rusty Brown, subject of the previous two Acme Novelty Library volumes, Ware essays a gentler, bordering-on-sentimental tale about a lonely young woman with a prosthetic leg. In exhaustive, excruciating detail, Ware recounts her painful early adulthood: her sole love affair, which ended badly; her unfulfilling stint as a nanny; her failed attempts at becoming an artist or writer; her current dead-end job as a florist. Self-reflective to a fault, the nameless protagonist relates her story and reveals her character through extensive first-person voice-over narration, making this the most text-heavy of Ware’s works. Even if the prose does most of the heavy lifting, Ware’s characteristic graphic approach—icy-clear drawings, meticulous compositions, and geometrically varied panels—conjures the hard-edged atmosphere offsetting the story’s potential mawkishness. Applying the formal rigor of the landmark Jimmy Corrigan (2000) to a more naturalistic narrative, Ware creates a sympathetic heroine who, despite the slim book’s somewhat daunting denseness, may appeal to more readers than the off-puttingly doltish Jimmy and Rusty. --Gordon Flagg