Please Don't Hate Him

by Chip Kidd

Comics artist Chris Ware is very sorry. And very talented.

You regret ever calling me in the first place, donıt you? I canıt say as I blame you.

Usually, people who apologize all the time drive me crazy.

Iıve failed you again. Itıs sad.

It always seems like an act.

This article will be a disaster. (Not because of you, though.)

In this case, however, it wonıt be.

During a recent 27-minute phone conversation with Chris Ware, I was exposed five times to the phrase "donıt hate me" (probably his second favorite expression), and eight times to "Iım sorry" (his first). This would be maddening, even under the best of circumstances, except for two things. First, heıs quite sincere. In fact, if heıs reading this right now, heıs mortified. I donıt care. Second, and by far most important, is that in my opinion Chris Ware is one of the best artists (fine, graphic, commercial, comic strip‹all apply) working today. Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus author and illustrator Art Spiegelman agrees with me: "Itıs uncanny that someone so young (Ware is what, 29?) would have such an apparent recollection of the history of comics, and the talent to expand upon it." Or rather, I agree with Spiegelman since he is responsible for the first national publication of Wareıs work in RAW, the magazine that is a worldwide legend among non-mainstream comics artists.

Ware was a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin when Spiegelman saw his work in The Daily Texan, a local newspaper. Impressed, he called the stunned cartoonist ("I almost choked when I realized who it was," Ware says) and gave him four pages in the next issue of RAW, a slot coveted by independent cartoonists everywhere. Another followed.

Published in 1989, that second piece was my first encounter with Ware. Entitled "Thrilling Adventure Stories," the work (which now makes Ware wince with self-disgust) caught my eyebecause it was a flawless example of classic comic-book drawing circa 1940. Reading it, however, I realized that the form was completely divorced from the content. The pictures spun a rather familiar tale of a masked superhero, a hapless-gorgeous babe, a brilliant-insane scientist, diabolical inventions, and so forth. But the prose, fully integrated with the illustrations, was a reminiscnece of a childhood spent coping with small-town racism and a stepfather for whom the protagonist had ambivalent feelings and whom he ultimately rejected. Ware merged these situations into a coherent whole that was really about eluding the nightmare of domestic banality through a comic book fantasy escape hatch. The result was thoroughly surprising.

Franklin Christopher Ware was born in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska ("not a bad place to grow up, actually"), and moved to San Antonio, Texas when he was 16. His mother was a reproter for the Omaha World-Herald, where his grandfather has also worked. Raised in an environment that embraced the traditions of handset type and printerıs ink, Ware decided as a boy to pursue a career in comics rather than fine art. Trips to museums were often puzzling and intimidating. "Paintings were something to show off with. Comics seemed to be something to get lost in." He committed himself to the comics early, but it wasnıt till college, when John Keen, a cartoonist for The Daily Texan, introduced Ware to older strips, that he immersed himself in the history of the medium. "Comics havenıt really developed much since about 1920," Ware says. "If one wants to tell stories that have the richness of life, their vocabulary is extremely limited. Itıs like trying to use limericks to make literature."

Wareıs primary source of income (he avoids commissions as much as possible) is derived from a seamless blend of satire, comic-strip narrative, and calligraphy (yes, calligraphy) entitled The Acme Novely Library. Composed largely of collections of his weekly comic strip appearing in New City, an alternative free weekly newspaper in Chicago, The Acme Novelty Library allows Ware to explore themes introduced in RAW: childhood alienation, cheap advertising gimmicks, relentless disappointment, againg and death, the casual cruelty of ordinary people, and perhaps most important, the sheer visual joy of comic books and strips pitted against their false messages of happiness and ultimately empty promises. ffrom a distance, any of the seven issues released as of this writing appear to be merely happy-go-lucky magazines and pamplets for kids. But when you realize that all is not what it semms. Things can get pretty grim, and though the stuations are often hilarious, they are not for small children.

Ware's influences include Winsor McCay's Little Nemo ("Impeccable draftsmanship. Firmly rooted in the principles of realism and Renaissance perspective, invarialy to stunning effect"); Frank King's Gasolline Alley ("A real-time chronicle of American domesticity"); George Herriman's Krazy Kat ("A masterpiece. A world unto itself, eluding strict explanation.") and Siegel and Shuster's Superman. The Acme Novelty Library speaks to the visual traditions of these and other sources, including Sears catalogues and corporate literature from the turn fo the century, newspaper comic strips from the '10s and '20s, and comic-book ads for novelties from the '40s and '50s. But Ware always transforms his sources to make them his own. "Quimby the Mouse" and "Sparky the Cat," for example, appear to be just cheap knockoffs of the late-'20s-era Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, until you realize that Quimby is anatomically correct, Sparky is just a disembidied head, and truly dreadful things happen to them at the slightest provocation. They also drink, swear, and, like the rest of the Acme Novelty family, expereience Deep Inner Conflict. The running gag in "Big Tex and Okie Joe" is that Joe (not terribly bright) desperately want the friendship of Tex, who plays cruel prctical jokes on him that go horribly awry and leave Joe injured and sometimes near death. Tex is perpetually left feeling remorseful, while all Joe cares about is whether Tex will be his friend. Not exactly Li'l Abner.

All this work is rendered with a level of draftsmanship that almost defies description. I won't attempt it. See for yourself. Everything is done by hand, with the exception of a small portion of text. As a graphic designer, Ware is purely self-trained, a fact that should frighten teachers of the subject everywhere. Nor did he study writing, other than to read obsessively a lot of good books. And yet his texts are thoughtful, clever, and literate. He is also an excellent musician, entranced by ragtime, which be can deftly play on both the piano and banjo. ("It's just a hobby.")

"Chris Ware is the Emily Dickinson of comics," says the distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy, one of the artist's many fans. "He takes all the accoutrments of an ordinary household and . . . first the floorboards dissappear and there's a void. And where you would expect demons, there's your family--familiar, grotesque, and menacing. Then the ceiling rolls back, and where you might expect God is emptiness. A blank bubble of meaning, the meaning of our anxious fears and ravenous desires."

McClatchy's statement goes a long way in describing the tone of "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth," the closest Ware has come to sustained narrative in Acme Novelty's pages. Jimmy appears in several staged from his life--as a desperately lonely middle-aged man, a pathetic rest-home shut-in, a confused and detached eight-year-old. Wild swings of time, place, and situation occur abruptly, leaving the reader to piece together what has happened--which, every now and then, is nothing. The drawing style and impeccable craft hold the work together in the absence of a consistent time frame. Think Charles Schultz vs. Samuel Beckett. But don't think film. Angered by the notion that comics are closely related to cinema, Ware argues that film is a "passive medium requiring primarily from its audience the ability to sit and stare. Comics at thier best engage the viewer in a different manner, allowing readers to control the pacing either by taking in a pageat once or by reading panel by panel.

"Jimmy" dwells on absent fathers and domineering mothers so convincingly that one is led to suspect that the themes are autobiographical, a question the artist sidesteps. Suffice it to say that Jimmy Corrigan bears little resemblance to his creator. Though worried fans often write in to ask whether Chris is depressed, there's a difference between comulsive humility and pathological despair. If I didn't know him better, I myself might say that the chaotic density of his pages reveals a mind in distress. One can spend hours pouring over an issue and not see everything. But I am happy to report that the artist is an unusually well-adjusted young man, who is as comfortable discussing Ivan Turgenev and Scott Joplin as he is the poignant beauty of tawdry novelty shop geegaws.

Said geegaws are elevated to a true art form in his hands, and every issue contains an ingenious "toy" the reader can cut out and put together. The joke is that they are usually far too complicated for an assumed young audience to master; the instructions take stern delight in berating the reader in advance for even attempting to build the object. "This is not . . . an elementary task," warns one text. "and if the instructions are not followed closely, a result will be arrived at which will be considered embarassing and worthy of mockery." Ware once went so far as to print the instructions in French.

He makes sure all of the toys are buildable, however, and a cult of fans is emerging that has assembled every one. In college, Ware found the facilities to realize some of his more ambitious "toys" as stunning constructions of wood, glass, cloth, wire, and many moving parts. A set of plans in vol.3 titled "How to Build Your Own Working Cat Head," became the basis for Sparky. When I first came across the diagram, I dismissed it as an elaborate joke. Then I saaw the actual piece, completed, in Ware's Chicago apartment, ad a whole new level of his craftsmanship and intensity became apparent. Next to it was an even more complex construction depicting Quimby, with his mouse twin sprouting from his own torso.

It is indicative of Ware's flexibility as a craftsman that he reinvents the format of his magazine with each issue. So far it has ranged from conventional comic book size to digest size, tabloid size, horizontal brochure siz, and back to taboid. This is a risk in the world of comics publishing, and bookstores are faced with the problem of how to display back issues, all of which have been reprinted, due to demand. Ware intends to release two issues a year, free of the brutal monthly schedule common in the comic-book industry. And if a particular issue needs more time to perfect, Ware has no scruples about missing deadlines. His fans are willing to wait.

Listen, I've been collecting and reading comics for over a quarter of a century, and I can tell you that nothing this meticulous, this thoughtful has been for a long, long time, if ever. The Acme Novelty Library is a brilliant, gorgeous, groundbreaking acheivement. Chris Ware has nothing to apologize for. His is on one of the great journeys of comis art, and I just hope he has barely begun.  

from PRINT magazine (c) Chip Kidd.


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