Great Moments in 2008: Chris Ware’s Red Leitmotif

This is the first panel of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library 19:

Although it’s not apparent until around a dozen panels later, the red circle with a black outline represents the small round cap that holds in place the blade and cover of a metal safety razor. [All images can be enlarged by clicking.]

It eventually becomes clear that we are reading a story within a story, a science fiction tale written by William Brown, the main character of ANL 19. The adventure/romance plot of Brown’s “The Seeing-Eye Dogs of Mars” replays its author’s own unfulfilled romantic longings, his alienation, and his youth as a reader of escapist sci-fi pulps.

Ware has often compared comics to music, and in ANL 19 Ware uses this red circle as a kind of visual leitmotif, a "musical theme" connected to Brown and threaded throughout the entire volume. It first appears in Brown’s pulp fantasy as part of a razor, then as a pushpin that holds up photos of the young Brown and his ‘first and only true love,’

a part of a space helmet, an entry button to a spaceship’s “shower tube,”

colony locations on a map of Mars, etc . . . . It then moves outside of this fiction and into Brown’s life, as, for example, the earrings that his ‘true love’ wore:

This pattern links numerous mundane and erotic objects to each other and to Brown’s life and his fantasy story’s protagonist, and it encourages us to recall the patterns of Brown’s life (read the text above about the shower tube panel and look at the two frames together . . .). It would be wrong, I think, to see these red circular objects as strict symbols; they don’t really symbolize anything in the sense of “this stands for that.” They generate a web of objects associated with Brown, a web that tells us about him in a way that's more evocative than definitive.

Along with providing a sense of thematic consistency, they create a sense of visual continuity and deliberate design. You can look at the pages without ‘reading’ them, following a kind of narrative based on the versions and transformations of this red “character.” More so than any other artist, Ware’s pages work both as comic narratives and as abstract non-narrative compositions. On this page, the red circle becomes a part of other circles, which in turn seem to transform into other circles, set against the rectangles that frame them -- a simple, comics geometry that reflects the primal, almost irreducible nature of Brown's emotions:

Perhaps the most important iteration of the red circle comes on a page where Ware shows us five covers of the pulps that young William often reads often and always responds to deeply. Four have a conspicuous red circle

and all of them flaunt an overdetermined ‘subtext.’ These kind of pulp images are transparent allegories of sexual aggression and domination -- the romantically and sexually frustrated (male) reader identifies with the non-human character as it/he controls, not unearthly power or scientific knowledge, but an earthly and carnal knowledge, while seemingly free from the anxieties that the possibility of such knowledge provokes in readers like William Brown. Science provides these pulps with the most thinly veiled of intellectual trappings; they are really about something less scientific, a desire that can’t be expressed directly but must be dressed up in terms of a fantasy about other planets, other worlds. The physical distance between earth and these planets, between reality and fantasy, becomes an unintentional and ironic metaphor for the emotional distance that the reader feels between himself and others. This distance is also reflected in an intentional contradiction between the text and image in this panel:

(Brown often changes the hair color on the manuscript pages we see in the book.) The contraction in the above panel implies that the first part of ANL 19 may not be an accurate visual retelling of Brown’s story, but a subjective 're-seeing' of it through Brown’s revisionist imagination -- when the story ends, we see Brown reading the last page of it. Interestingly, the hair color of the woman who adopted him (he was an orphan) was also red.

As ANL 19 closes, Brown, long since married to a woman he finds far less compelling than the one he ‘dated’ in his 20s, is shaving in the suburban home where they and their son live, a sturdy middleclass dwelling that has none of the Spartan romance of the cabin on Mars where ANL 19 began, and where we first saw “Rusty” shaving. Brown has just masturbated while fantasizing about his lost love; he had found a picture of the two of them in a copy of a sci-fi anthology in which his story was reprinted. Does he shave his moustache so that he can remember the younger Brown, and evoke the feelings he had during the time they were involved?

Almost a sign of his humiliation, the red circle appears here, not as something like a location on a map of Mars colonies, but as a dog’s nose on the ‘70s kitschy art that hangs on the bathroom wall:

The last panel of the shaving sequence, and of Acme Novelty Library 19 itself, has 1000s of red circles (the ultimate sign of his sense of his humiliation and alienation?), a series of them forming his pale red circle of a nose. The image is fuzzy and fragmented, like a page of old newspaper comics examined up close, revealing the dots that build the fields of color. Here we see Brown deconstructed, as he sees himself -- not through the genre lens of sci-fi fantasy, but through his own weakened eyesight after he removes his glasses:

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Bonus sequence -- A telling moment of misreading related to his failing eyesight and some of things discussed above: