Product Description

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, buoying Quimby from page to page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49117 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 56 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The casual reader can be forgiven if, after reading cartoonist Chris Ware's introduction to his collection of early work, Quimby the Mouse, they experience a twinge of consumer regret. Ware--the artist behind the graphic novel sensation Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth--is almost pathological in his attempts to downplay these early strips. Indeed, he goes so far as to offer a caveat on the back cover: "Inside, you'll find unnavigable compositions, awkward metaphors, ill-chosen subjects."

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

From the Publisher
A new book by the author of Jimmy Corrigan, widely acknowledged as the greatest graphic novel ever.

About the Author
Chris Ware was born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska, and currently lives in Chicago. Mr Ware is married but has not reproduced.

Customer Reviews

A truly fantastic book
Chris Ware has followed up "Jimmy Corrigan" with a superb collection of his earlier work featuring the eponymous anthropomorphic mouse. Quimby The Mouse is a downtrodden soul who echoes the author himself in some strips - such as the page where Quimby is a child miserably struggling through school and escaping into a fantasy world, or the truly heartbreaking moment where Quimby walks through a deserted house that once belonged to his now-deceased grandmother. (Ware's own grandmother was dying during the production of the work featured here.)

Other times Quimby is more obviously a character invented by Ware, and it's here a kind of grim humour is achieved, with Quimby frequently abusing his only companion, a disembodied cat head called Sparky, and then becoming overcome with remorse and subsequently lavishing love and attention onto the hapless cat. This happens again and again throughout the second half of the book - the characters trapped in their misery and unable to break out, rather like Jimmy Corrigan.

The book is topped and tailed with utterly gorgeous design from Ware, a brief essay on his grandmother, a complex cut-out-and-assemble project as featured in Ware's ACME Novelty Library comic book, letters pages from ACME, and viciously funny fake advertisements (the "Giant Frogs" one is particularly good).

If there is one problem with the book, it is that the panels are frequently too small for those with poorer eyesight to read comfortably - while I had no real trouble myself, I would imagine older readers getting out the magnifying glass quite a few times during the reading of this book. Apart from that quibble, this is an essential work of comic art.