A New Kind of Comic

Pow! Boom! Zap! Those are the kinds of sounds that come to my mind when I think of comic books. I’ve never actually read a comic book, and the majority of what I know about comic books comes from fawning over the “adorkable” Seth Cohen of the TV series, The OC. And I never appreciated “the funnies” as a kid. I never found the stories being told interesting or meaningful, and I thought the “art” was cheap looking (even though I can’t draw to save my life). To be honest, the minute I read Matthias Wivel’s introduction to the interview with Chris Ware that explained that Ware is a cartoonist; I contemplated not even reading the article.

But I’m definitely glad I did. Wivel’s interview with Ware is my favorite text we have had to read in this class for a few reasons. The first is because Ware seems like an interesting, funny, and very “real” guy. I couldn’t help but smile when he cracked his lame jokes or talked about how his characters start our as “joke characters”. I couldn’t help but like him when he related his the cartoon to himself as “emotionally impaired”. I think this is the first time that I have felt sympathetic to an artist that we have read about in the way that I am to Ware.

Speaking of sympathy, that emotion is key for Ware. He talks of how he first felt sympathetic for Charlie Brown, and how he feels that you need to feel sympathetic to a character, even if this character is a cartoon. This is the reason why his characters have time, or space, rather, in his panels—so these characters can go through emotions and so the reader can feel these emotions.

Ware has made me look at cartoons in a new way. While he does not discredit “regular”, film-like cartoons completely, he sheds new light on what a cartoon should be. By using limited text or no text in his panels, Ware lets us hear our own sounds, our own music. He allows us to relate his drawings, his stories, to our own personal experiences and memories. He lets us create our own story. That’s what is beautiful about his work. He doesn’t limit our emotions. When cartoons are not drawn in the typical post- 40s and 50s fashion, they become three-dimensional characters as opposed to two-dimensional cartoon drawings.

I've included a still from Disney and Pixar's "Up". While I have not yet watched the movie because (although all of my friends say it is not like a typical cartoon) I hate cartoon drawing and movies with animation. However, after viewing some of Ware's work, and actually seeing the value and reality to it, I am thinking of even giving movies like "Up" a whirl. I know it's not typical artwork, but I wouldn't have remembered that cartoons are actually art until reading the text on Ware either!