Chris Ware (for thursday)

I recently wrote a feature article about the new DePaul Art Museum. When I came across the name Chris Ware on our syllabus, I all of the sudden vividly remembered his piece in the exhibit, and how his take on a traditional cartoon managed to catch my eye and make me think. His colors are subtle and carefully chosen, and his characters are quite animated. Despite this, his messages are remain tangible. It is clear, from the very start, that his works convey something larger about the human condition.

What I adore about the Comics Journal interview, especially from the perspective of an aspiring journalist, is how it precisely captures Ware's humanity and characteristics much like his quick scenes do for his characters. There are comedic aspects of his responses, neighbored by very serious, personal details about his life.

"I'm just trying to get a sense of reality and the sort of rhythms that dominate or define human conversation," he responds at one point. This is quite a heavy task, especially when working with animated drawings; but there's something about Ware's sympathy, about his keen eye for detail, that makes him extraordinarily successful.

Earlier in the interview, Ware also provides an interesting take on the use of text:

"The drawing is as much of the writing, if not more of the writing, as the actual words themselves."

This quote opened my eyes for the first time to the idea that, for a cartoonist, the lines between image and text can be very blurry. They seem to run parallel, heading towards the same goal, telling the story side-by-side. They meld together eventually, creating one big idea taken away from a simple turn of events. This interpretation of text and image is one that carries some similarities and some sharp differences from the methods used by the earlier artists we've studied.

In Rusty Brown--Rusty and Chalky on the Playground (2003), Ware clearly uses this blurry relationship between text and image to tell the story. This is one of my all time favorites of Ware's pieces. I love how it plays with children's superhero dreams and ideas. I also feel a sense of seriousness about it, mainly because of his color choices. He deliberately chooses not to make it light and cheerful. Instead the characters are accented by pale blue, and you can almost feel the freezing weather looking at the kids on the playground. The snow can be felt, regardless of its only representation existing in the "crunch" underneath Chalky's shoes.