Chris Ware
Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware, is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library seriesand the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earthand Building Stories. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth28 December 1967
CountryUnited States of America
I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the honesty of the story.
No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or "real" art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.
[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.
The real power of comics is writing as you draw.
A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.
"Real" drawing is about specifics. It's about describing an object as accurately as possible. In a comic strip you have to draw a picture of the idea of the object. You have to draw the word that you are picturing, then you have to mix in specifics with it for it to work as a story. But you are still working with drawn words.
Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.
Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.
When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.
When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.
The first thing I do when I get up is I look out the window. I've been looking at the same image for six years. It's imprinted in my mind like an afterimage template.
There seems to be such a laziness in - and I hate to use this phrase - the modern world. Everything is pumped out so quickly so that you can read it while passing by, like billboards or those flashcards before movie shows.
Lately, I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last 10 years or so; I can't account for most of my 20s, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children.
I wanted to make comics that get at feelings that connect to the deepest moments of our lives, reading Tolstoy, Flaubert, Flannery O'Connor, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Carver to help gain the confidence to figure it out. I knew, however, the most doomed approach would be to simply create stories that felt 'literary.'