BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…

IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.

Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.

For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)

This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.

Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.

The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.

That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:

• “Things That Look Like Other Things. The EVER-POPULAR FAD. A Heartless Practical Joke… Plastic that looks like wood. Buses that look like trolley cars. Adults who look like children. It’s all the rage!… Also, new for this season: Little girls who look like prostitutes, little boys who look like killers.”
• “The sexual partner of your choice, sent directly to your door, ready and willing with no reservations… Hurry! Because after three to six months, you’re going to get sick of them and you’ll want a new one all over again. No end to the fun!”
• “CERTAINTY. Wow! Here’s your chance to eliminate doubt forever. Never be wrong again, either in your principles, or in petty arguments with your inferiors. What could be better?”

Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.

But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.

(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)

TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?

ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…