Parille on Acme Novelty 19
Ken Parille’s post about the red circle in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 is a great example of braiding in comics and a brilliant post in itself. Read, enjoy.
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.
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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 that somehow tell us about him in a way that’s more evocative than definitive.