ACME Comics Lettering^181
Chris WareChris Ware is a scribe’s scribe
and the producer of such
contemporary illuminated
manuscripts as Jimmy
Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth, Rocket Sam, Big Tex,
and the Rusty Brown comic
strips, as well as the ACME
Novelty Library comic books.
Cloistered away in his Chicago
studio, Brother Ware spends
untold hours meticulously
lettering countless covers,
splash panels, and dialog boxes
with such panache that even
simple conjunctions like “and,”
“thus,” “later,” and “meanwhile” are imbued with the import reserved for
more expressive bon mots. Like most comic artists, Ware is a compulsive
letterer, but unlike most, he is also an artful typographer who, for over a
decade, has refined a unique typographic language that bridges comic art
and graphic design.
During the 1990 s, when a surfeit of stylishly distressed and often
foolishly stylish digital fonts were routinely issued, Ware crafted some of
the most artful alphabets and colorful letterforms seen in print, most of
them for his own comic books, but occasionally for less obvious venues too.
One of these was the 2001 “Summer Reading” special issue of the New York
Times Book Review (under my humble art direction), for which he
redesigned the otherwise immutable masthead, rejecting all traces of the
standard Bookman typeface to conform to the visual character of the comic
strip that began on the cover and continued inside. The only residue on the
cover of official “Times style” was the Old English Timeslogo anchored to
the masthead, which Ware re-lettered to match a much older version of the
logo rather than the contemporary one.
This was not, however, arrogance or hubris on his part. In fact,
Ware is one of the most sincerely unassuming artists I have ever known.
Instead, he is so devoted to the most arcane details of vintage commercial art