Books like McSweeney's #13

I would like to congratulate Dave Eggers for letting Chris Ware ruin what could have been one of the most memorable issues of McSweeney’s ever. Ware hates humanity and likes to force the reader to hate it too by making his texts completely inaccessible both emotionally and (sometimes) visually. The essays interspersed between the comics might be insightful, poignant, or (typical of Ware) absurdly humorous but printing them in four point font sort of spoils the entire deal. I get the joke but the joke is over.Those are my grumps. My grumps! my grumps! My gnarly manly grumps! There is some wizened wisdom to Ware’s overall structure of the book. Case in point: closing the volume with contrasting biographic sketches; 1) David Heatley’s loving, complex, vulnerable father (the kind of person me on a good day wishes there was more of in the world) and 2) the pitifully self-loathing masochist Soren Kierkegaard - whose true life biography mirrors the shame factory efficiency of one of Ware’s fictional characters. (Is it necessary I indicate a biography as “true life?”) [Was it as necessary to do that in the past as it is now?]It would appear too that most American underground comics creators are as neurotic and self-obsessed as Ware. There are a handful though that have the bravery, talent, and vision to deal with issues bigger than themselves even when working in an autobiographical mode; namely, Joe Sacco (war), Debbie Drechsler (abortion), and Chester Brown (minority rights).