Chris Ware: Conversations

Virtuoso Chris Ware (b. 1967) has achieved some noteworthy firsts for comics. The Guardian First Book Award for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was the first major UK literary prize awarded for a graphic novel. In 2002 Ware was the first cartoonist included in the Whitney Biennial.

Like Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel, Ware thus stands out as an important crossover artist who has made the wider public aware of comics as literature. His regular New Yorker covers give him a central place in our national cultural conversation. Since the earliest issues of ACME Novelty Library in the 1990s, cartoonist peers have acclaimed Ware’s distinctive, meticulous visual style and technical innovations to the medium. Ware also remains a literary author of the highest caliber, spending many years to create thematically complex graphic masterworks such as Building Stories and the ongoing Rusty Brown.

Editor Jean Braithwaite compiles interviews displaying both Ware’s erudition and his quirky self-deprecation. They span Ware’s career from 1993 to 2015, creating a time-lapse portrait of the artist as he matures. Several of the earliest talks are reprinted from zines now extremely difficult to locate. Braithwaite has selected the best broadcasts and podcasts featuring the interview-shy Ware for this volume, including new transcriptions. An interview with Marnie Ware from 2000 makes for a delightful change of pace, as she offers a generous, supremely lucid attitude toward her husband and his work. Candidly and humorously, she considers married life with a cartoonist in the house. Brand-new interviews with both Chris and Marnie Ware conclude the volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Dec 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496809315

Book preview

Of Mice and Men and Cat Heads Too!: An Interview with Cartoonist Chris Ware

DAN KELLY / 1993

Chum Magazine vol. 1, issue 1 (October 1994), pp. 14–15, 20–21. Interview conducted August 1993. Reprinted with permission.

Every man, my friend, is an island. Moreover, sharks are swimming ’round and ’round the perimeter, attracted to the blood issuing from a heart ripped in two. This is what I’ve learned from the work of Chris Ware.

Unlike the usual refrigerator-door fodder tiling mainstream and alternative newspaper funny pages, Chris’s comics come across more as urban myths than cartoons. They resonate with futility, depression, weltschmerz, and despair, stopping short of maudlin weepiness and too-cute-by-half preciousness. Chris’s work has a meanness too, but it is simply a reflection of life’s meanness toward the world’s proles; in particular Ware’s lead prole, Jimmy Corrigan, the purported Smartest Kid on Earth. Through his own personal style (a style combining equal elements of nostalgia and hard-bitten reality) Ware reveals in Jimmy Corrigan that the simpler things in life aren’t gone; they’re hiding, too scared to show their faces. Jimmy isn’t merely a Charlie Brown figure of amiable ridicule, he’s Tantalus and Sisyphus rolled into one, living in one of the most hellish urban environments this side of Dis. Jimmy isn’t just pathetic; he’s damned.

Conversely, Chris Ware himself is a bright-eyed, bespectacled lad of twenty-six, possessed of an amiable demeanor, chirpy voice, and sense of humility almost bordering on shtick. I say that last part only because, considering Chris’s talent as an artist/writer, his claims to uninterestingness during the course of our interview didn’t ring true. Fortunately, with Fantagraphics’s recent release of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth [Acme Novelty Library #1 comic, not the Pantheon book], more folks will be able to see how swellacious Chris is: the resulting public clamor forcing him to admit aloud that, hey, he’s pretty darned good. Anyway, we talked. Here’s what was said.

DK: What were you reading, watching, and listening to [as a child]?

CW: Lots and lots of television, and … anything typically aimed at young kids. Science fiction, Star Trek, all that kind of stuff. Anything you can imagine a kid that age would like during that time period; I was probably brainlessly involved in it some way or another.

DK: Did you have any favorite comics or cartoons?

CW: On TV? I liked Super Friends. I loved that a lot. I liked Warner Brothers stuff…. I don’t know. I was pretty nondiscriminatory of what I liked.

DK: Were you the type of kid who just sat in front of the TV every Saturday morning?

CW: Yes, it was pretty pathetic. I wasn’t an interesting kid at all. I didn’t like Richie Rich or anything like that. I think some of the best cartoonists liked that stuff when they were kids. I ended up liking this sort of fake stuff…. I think it has an effect on what I do now. There’s some level of fakeness to what I do now.

DK: What kind of comics did you read?

CW: Typical … Batman … anything. Anything except for that weird horror stuff. That made me really uncomfortable.

DK: Like EC Comics?

CW: No … [House of] Secrets … Unexpected Tales of whatever … I couldn’t read that stuff. Swamp Thing, I didn’t like that. They were gross. I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like the monster stuff at all. Mostly I liked colorful costumes, secret passages …

DK: There’s a nostalgic angle to your comics. Before I met you, I figured you’d been brought up in an old Victorian house and such.

CW: Yes, see, that’s probably where all of the falseness comes in. I just like old stuff. Older music. People have weird ideas, I guess, of what I like. Someone else told me that too. It seems weird that anyone would care. I’m really a normal guy. I guess I’ve kind of cultivated that [image] now.

DK: What were you listening to when you were growing up?

CW: Classical music. Beethoven, Bach…. My mom bought me a lot of records. I like ragtime a lot, and I played that on the piano. I still like that music.

DK: You can play ragtime?

CW: Yes, I try.

DK: I love ragtime. [I babble about Scott Joplin for a moment.]

CW: Yeah? A lot of it’s really cheesy, but there were a few people that were really good. I like Joplin, Joseph Lamb … James Scott was another one. There really weren’t a whole lot that were great; there are little isolated pieces of things that are really nice.

DK: Are you a good player?

CW: No.

DK: At all?

CW: I forget stuff easily, and my hands don’t respond right to what I want them to do.

DK: When you attended the University of Texas, did you have any influential teachers or mentors?

CW: There was a teacher there named Richard Jordan who was really great. I think he remembered what it was like to be a self-conscious postadolescent. He made you feel better for feeling stupid. There aren’t many teachers who are good at that. He was really good at focusing on students’ strengths and weaknesses, sometimes to detrimental effect, I think.

DK: What did he suggest in your case?

CW: I was feeling really stupid because … I don’t know how to say this exactly, but I guess I’ve always been kind of sentimental. He made me feel all right for feeling that way.

DK: How would you define sentimental?

CW: Kind of cornball … sappy, I guess.

DK: Did you move to Chicago right after finishing school?

CW: No, I took a year off delivering blood. That was my job.

DK: Delivering …?

CW: Blood. I figured you’d like that.

DK: Who were you delivering blood for?

CW: The Central Texas Regional Blood Center.

DK: How could you say you didn’t have anything interesting to say?

CW: I really don’t. It was nice to drive around and deliver stuff to small towns in the middle of the night. I liked that. It paid well, and I didn’t have to work too much.

DK: How long have you been doing Jimmy Corrigan [comic strip published in Chicago weekly NewCity]?

CW: Since May of 1992.

DK: It seems a lot longer, for some reason.

CW: Yes, it does. It’s the same thing over and over again. I’m in a rut right now that I need to get out of. You go up and down; there’s no way to predict it. Sometimes you think you’re doing your best stuff. Then you look at it, and you go, Oh my God, this is the worst stuff I’ve ever done. But then, maybe a year later you might say, Oh! This wasn’t so bad. compared to what I’m doing now, you know?

DK: Was that the reason for that self-parody last week?

CW: Yes, I was feeling really rotten that week. It was sort of like I dared myself to do it. Then when it came out it seemed so tame and stupid and pointless…. Why even bother, you know?

DK: You’re not under contract [with NewCity] to produce only Jimmy Corrigan, are you?

CW: No, not really. I can do whatever I want. The problem is figuring out what you want to do, then, invariably, that’s not what you want to do. The things that you want to do come up at the strangest times. You may not even be aware of the fact that you’ve been wanting to do it. I mean, that sounds really mysterious and art-schooly or something, but …

DK: No, that makes sense. Why? Are you coming up with stuff that you might not be able to get published?

CW: No, no, not at all. I wish I could say, Yes, I’ve got some great stories brewing in my brain! I can only focus on one thing at a time. Every day, at really strange times, something will occur to me and I’ll write it down, but it’s not like, Oh, I’ll use that in my next … whatever. I can’t do that.

DK: Where did you first come up with Jimmy Corrigan?

CW: I was going at [Quimby] mice for a really long time, and I was getting sick of drawing mice … one day when I was in the shower this idea just came to me to do this one stupid strip. So at work that night I just wrote it down fast, and I thought, I don’t care. I’m just going to draw this.

DK: Was that the one with the tuba player?

CW: Yes. So then I did it. That’s kind of funny, that I didn’t think about it for a long time. Then I just decided I really needed to start drawing human beings and using words again, and that was the only human character I had drawn. I thought, Well, why not?

DK: When did Quimby the Mouse come about?

CW: Why?

DK: No, when … and why?

CW: I wish I could answer that question. I have no idea. I think I can say, Well, this is where this character comes from, but they never come fully formed.

DK: Was Quimby inspired by anything else? It has such a 1920s or 1910s look.

CW: Oh, yes. I just liked the way those things looked—the early animated cartoons. That real stark black and white. They seem totally apart from anything that’s going on now. There’s almost sort of a delicacy about them, even though they’re kind of rough and stilted.

DK: [Quimby] sometimes reminds me of Kim Deitch’s work.

CW: Yes, I love his stuff. If I could even come close to one piece or iota of the involvement that he has in his stuff. He’s really great. I’d love to meet him, actually. I don’t know what I’d say to him.

DK: There seem to be base similarities between Quimby and Waldo, that kind of …

CW: I guess there are.

DK: No, no, I’m not saying they’re the same. They seem to be in the same vein.

CW: Oh, yes, he’s a real inspiration! I mean I’m sure there’s … I could point to cases where I’ve directly ripped off his drawing style just trying to get that gray tone that he does. Every cartoonist does that, I think, or … Oh, what am I saying? I’m just trying to make myself feel better.

DK: Nonsense. You’re completely original.

CW: No, no …

DK: You don’t think you’re original?

CW: I wish I could say that I have a specific drawing style. Someone like Dan Clowes: he’s naturally codified more styles of drawing into a way of looking at things—almost unconsciously—in his brain. I can’t do that. Every time I draw something it’s always like, Gee, how do I draw a nose again? I forgot. It’s embarrassing.

DK: By codify, what do you mean?

CW: Just the way that he draws. It’s hard to say. His drawing is convincing and authentic, which very few people can actually claim about their own stuff. You look at his stuff, and it has this…. It’s believable, you know what I mean? It’s so much him. It’s unarguable. You can’t criticize it. You know what I’m saying?

DK: But you don’t think you’re doing the same thing?

CW: No, not at all. Occasionally, it happens to work, but sometimes that’s due more to accidents than actual … I don’t know; it’s silly.

DK: What would you say is the overall theme to your work?

CW: The overall theme? I have no idea.

DK: No idea?

CW: No.

DK: Well, you seem to use words like lonely and depressed frequently.

CW: Just an attempt to make it seem meaningful, that’s all.

DK: But it is.

CW: I just kind of hope that no one will notice that it’s maybe not. [laughs] If I put a word like that on there, maybe they’ll think, "Oh, it’s poignant!"

DK: You’re just being facetious.

CW: No, I could say that, but … I honestly try to put things like that into it, but it always seems to fall short somehow. I find myself thinking I’ve done more than I have. I go, Wait a minute. I didn’t actually do that. I just did this one dumb thing that didn’t quite work. But I keep thinking, "Oh, I know I did this."

DK: What’s an example?

CW: Just doing scripts that seemed more bleak or that honestly captured some feelings that I had. Then I realized, No, I didn’t do that at all. I did some dumb little mouse running around.

DK: Actually, you do communicate a lot more with those simple drawings than you seem to be letting on.

CW: Yes … Your vision of yourself changes so constantly too.

DK: So, what did Jimmy Corrigan do to deserve all these horrible things that happen to him?

CW: I don’t know. He’s turning into this Charlie Brown character, which I hate. The last thing I want to have is a character that you can explain in a couple of words. He’s a SAD guy. You know? But it’s become that.

DK: Was there something that happened between the time when he was the smartest kid on earth and now?

CW: Not anything I can point to. Again, another subconscious attempt to make the characters seem interesting. Sorry.

DK: How about the character of Super-Man/God? How did you develop him? He seems to shift between being a not-real character and a real one.

CW: The first year the Super-Man character was a sort of … another self-conscious appropriation thing, when I thought that was kind of okay to do, or kind of cool, because I didn’t really think too clearly about it. But he sort of stuck with me. I guess he’s kind of like a Dad character or something.

DK: That would make sense. He treats Jimmy horribly sometimes and sometimes he’s this supporting figure. Why did Jimmy see him jump off a building?

CW: Yes, that’s going to be really hard to explain. I wish I could say, Well, just wait and see what THAT means! Basically, I have no idea. I just drew it because it occurred to me that it might make it a little more interesting. Generally speaking, things start connecting in your own brain if you trust your brain. It’s kind of amazing how things interrelate unconsciously. This may not be the best way of working or making stuff but …

DK: I remember earlier strips where he was going to bed with Jimmy’s mom and stuff.

CW: He has been in a lot of stuff, hasn’t he? Vicariously.

DK: But he’s been unchanged. He’ll reappear suddenly, but he’s still the same.

CW: I never thought about it that way. I guess you’re right. Maybe he’s more interesting as a character then.

DK: Are we supposed to take him at face value? He’s really a superhero character?

CW: Yes. I don’t know how to answer that question at all.

DK: Are most of your comics subconscious—train of thought? Do you plot the stories?

CW: No, I write down ideas that might occur to me … something that a character might say to another character. Most of the time I don’t use any of these things anyway. I think I’m going to, but…. Basically, I have no idea how to write, at all. I don’t want to plot out a script because then it’s more like a movie, and I think writing a comic strip or drawing a comic strip is different from writing a play or … I want it to develop at the same