Chris Ware

Ware resurfaced again in the early '90s as a contributor to Art Spiegelman's influential comics anthology Raw, at around the same time he moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at the Chicago Art Institute. ACME Novelty Library was launched in 1993, and with it a cast of hapless characters including Quimby the Mouse and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, whose glorified moniker does little to mask his status as a worst-case-scenario everyman. The issues also featured detailed, retro-styled paper models and advertisements for items such as irony. ("Strange way of seeing the world which is completely alien to animals, insects, and all other forms of life.") In 2000, Ware released Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, a novel-length Corrigan story that helped cast his talent in new light. Gathered together, the multigenerational saga - inspired in part by Ware's own relationship with the father he first met in his late 20s - revealed a writer adept at handling grand themes of history, family, and thwarted hopes.

Q: You received a lot more press for the Jimmy Corrigan book than for anything else you've done. How was that experience?

Chris Ware: I guess mostly it just confirms that there really are people I don't know reading my stuff. Mostly, I try not to think about such things, as it's rather paralyzing. I prefer to imagine that my wife, a few friends, and occasionally my mom are the only ones who read what I do, though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic.

Q: What do you think is the most common misconception about your work?

Chris Ware: I guess I've read once or twice that people think I'm "trying to bum them out," which certainly isn't the case. I'm only trying to present as honest a portrayal of the grimness of human ambition as I can. I'd hope it's rather uplifting, actually, since I find the sort of blind optimism and empty laughter of a great deal of "contemporary culture" to be more depressing than something that admits to a potential for disappointment and a gnawing sense of existential mockery. I don't trust art that promises a 24-hour joyride. In fact, there seems to be a modern sense of entitlement for such constant "ups," which is a repugnant attitude any way one chooses to look at it. I definitely believe in the possibility of happiness, though; it's just something that I think, rightfully, is rare in its genuine form, and that it can't be counterfeited.

Q: You first surfaced nationally with Floyd Farland in 1987. When you reappeared in Raw in the '90s, your style was completely reworked and much closer to what you do now. What happened in the meantime?

Chris Ware: I will send a letter of thanks and a drawing to anyone who mails me their copy of the aforementioned "early work," as I'd like to eradicate any trace of its ever existing, if possible. Anyway, during my Austin years, I was drawing a regular strip for the University Of Texas newspaper, going to school, delivering blood, and trying to change my approach and "style" as much as I could, since I knew that I'd calcify as I got older. Sometimes I'd improvise a story directly in ink, other times I'd carefully plan, script, and pencil. Just yesterday, I cleaned out my closet of a bunch of this juvenilia, willing it to the City Of Chicago Waste Management Department. It was a thoroughly humbling experience.

Q: You were in college from 1985 to '93. Why so long?

Chris Ware: The "second half" of the years you mention was taken up by graduate school, which I didn't, embarrassingly enough, finish.

Q: How was the transition from Texas to Chicago?

Chris Ware: Fairly pleasant for the first two or three weeks, until I realized I'd made a terrible personal mistake by leaving behind a very nice and much-too-tolerant woman, who then, wisely, saw how much better things were without me around.

Q: How much did that move affect your shift in style?

Chris Ware: I seem to have a limitless capacity for self-pity, so I began, naturally, to do stories about how lonely I felt, which became the beginnings of the Jimmy Corrigan story.

Q: How long does a single strip of ACME Novelty Library take to create?

Chris Ware: The weekly strip, which is generally two pages of story stacked on top of each other, takes about 20 hours to write (draw), between eight and ten to ink, and about four to color. I work on it from Monday through Thursday, and the strip, once finished, takes about 12 seconds to read. I guess that's about an hour and a half of work per second of reading time, and the story, being broken up into such small pieces over many weeks, is likely impossible to follow as a result. I've heard comments that lead me to believe that readers may think I'm being deliberately obtuse, or "haiku-like," when actually I'm simply working ridiculously slowly.

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 think this is one of the (many) reasons Charles Schulz warned that "cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart."

Q: Your style is, obviously, influenced by old magazines and old comics. How many of these did you encounter as a kid, and how much did you research as an adult?

Chris Ware: Mostly, I was only interested in television as a kid, and the majority of reading material I collected was an adjunct to that central concern, comic books and magazines included. Since 1985, though, I've given up that youthful diversion. I like the implicit respect and dignity that older periodicals, writing, and art seem to extend to the reader/viewer, rather than the "erotic challenge" that modern culture offers, as if it's an exclusive dance club to which only a few attractive people are admitted.

Q: As someone deeply immersed in the culture of the past, do you feel alienated from contemporary culture? If so, does your alienation stem from your immersion in the past, or is it the other way around?

Chris Ware: I don't know if I'm alienated, really, or even immersed. It's all nonsense, anyway - new or old - just stuff to amuse us while time passes, to "pretty things up," or to lend a dead sympathetic ear here and there. Sometimes I really wonder about the efficacy of any art at all, but that's probably because we live such privileged, genuinely rich lives as Americans. If I were imprisoned for any amount of time, I'm sure it would all become much clearer. The thing I don't understand is why so often one hears discussion of the fruits of human labor as if it's all the creation of some alien race. I grind my teeth flat when I hear someone on the radio hypothesizing about the stock market as if it were some lumbering animal with its own will. It's just an outgrowth of the unsightly, spiteful desires endemic to us all, and nothing more. It didn't just spring out of nowhere. Same thing with the "adult" view of adolescence: Researchers try to "establish a dialogue" to "understand teenage frustrations," but don't these researchers remember that they were teenagers, too? I'm likely just missing something fundamental about it all, though. I certainly don't have any answers.

Q: As a somewhat famously shy person, is it difficult to answer questions about the relationship of your personal life to your work?

Chris Ware: I guess I just don't like being physically in front of people I don't know very well, because I expect to be "seen through," or, even worse, instantly hated. Luckily, though, my wife is very encouraging.

Q: Do you get along well with other comic artists?

Chris Ware: It depends about whom you're speaking. There seem to be a few I've never met who don't like me at all, calling me all manner of names, yet I have no idea what I've done to them. I find it deeply upsetting, actually, and sometimes even start letters to them, since it makes my legs feel weak and my chest hurt to think of people whom I've never met out there, hating me. It reminds me of walking down the school hallway and hoping that I won't be yelled at or jumped on by the "big kids." I thought I'd be over all that by now, but I guess I'm not. I don't think there's any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don't like or respect in at least some way or another. We're all marginal laborers - we're practically medical oddities - so I don't see why we can't all be nice to each other.

Q: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth was published almost simultaneously with Daniel Clowes' David Boring. Both received a good deal of attention in outlets that don't normally cover comics. Do you feel that comics have come to be taken more seriously, or are moments of acclaim like that still aberrations?

Chris Ware: Most likely, I'm sad to think, it's the latter. I thought that the one big hurdle for comics was getting out of the embarrassing arena of the comic-book shop - which is really just one step away from a pornographic bookstore to a lot of people. But I didn't realize that all the junk that companies like DC and Marvel have been selling under the rubric of "graphic novels" has created a new shelf in bookstores, and that's where our stuff ends up: torn and soiled, next to Batman: Firestorm At Midnight. Recently, I was in Barnes & Noble here in Chicago, and found a copy of my book in the role-playing-games section. I had to choke back a sob. It's a reminder of how little respect this sort of endeavor garners.