This is because reaction is also a pattern a nobler pattern, but a pattern all the same. Yet what it means is these works are subject to the same dice-rolls that plagues all pabulum. None of this determines that the products be mediocre, as Art sometimes has a way of slipping past intentions. In the most lucrative, and most besieged mediums, that of comics, video games, and animation, reaction creates a mirror-world of seriousness, clutches at ‘the grown-ups table’, an aesthetic to counteract the frivolities, the ‘sell-outs’, that is consciously unfun, unentertaining, uninteresting, and bloated with consciousness itself. And, as much contemporary media is infantile, democratic in the basest sense, and abusive of well-rooted psychological patterns, alternatives are almost destined to crawl out of the margins of the mainstream. Now, let’s excise all narrow political connotations and deal with the essence of the term: that any swing too much in one direction necessarily begets a counterforce, less because it has value than simply that it must exist, as uniqueness is a perennial human want, though little understood. See below for images of some of the things that inspired Ware, “from Duchamp’s “Museum in a Box” to a 1920s French set of games, to some early art school experiments from the late 1980s, including a little box of comics…And a sketch of how I envisioned the whole thing early on…” and, last but not least, a fully realized “false” New Yorker cover.In reading the comics of Chris Ware again, long after the dazzle of his formal novelty had dimmered, a word came to mind: ‘reaction’. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep). Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity-while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage.

With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring-perhaps even necessary-to have something to hold on to.

Chris ware building stories puzzle