“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”
Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic.
Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.
“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about—not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.
“ ‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.
I was reminded of his 2009(!) cover for the New Yorker‘s from Halloween edition in which parents all look at their phones while their kids trick-or-treat. It’s an interesting contrast…
The New York Review of Bookshas an essay by cartoonist Chris Ware on George Herriman the creator Krazy Kat, one of the most beautiful, poetic and inventive comic strips ever created:
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.
But imagine knowing something about yourself that’s considered so damning, so dire, so disgusting, that you must, at all cost, never tell anyone. Imagine leaving behind a life to which you cannot claim allegiance or affection. Imagine suddenly gaining advantages and opportunity while you see others like you, who have not followed in the footsteps of your deception, suffering. Herriman, once he was considered white, didn’t even have a way of voicing this identity. Until he started drawing Krazy Kat.
Krazy, the new biography of Herriman by Michael Tisserand that Chris Ware mentions, was also recently reviewed for New York Times Book Review by Nelson George:
Though Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip was admired in his lifetime, it wasn’t until years after his death in 1944 that his vast influence received widespread critical respect. Herriman’s depiction of the tangled relationships among the black cat Krazy, his white mouse tormentor and sometime love interest Ignatz and the bulldog Officer Pupp, set against a desert backdrop in fictional Coconino County (taken from a real area of Arizona), inspired several generations of cartoonists. Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts,” Ralph Bakshi’s “Fritz the Cat” and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” all owe a debt to Herriman’s draftsmanship and poetic sense.
Schulz got turned on to “Krazy Kat” right after World War II, he said, and it “did much to inspire me to create a feature that went beyond the mere actions of ordinary children.” Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), whose animal characters strongly resemble Herriman’s, told a biographer, “At its best, the comic strip is an art form of such terrific wumpf! that I’d much rather spend any evening of any week rereading the beautifully insane sanities of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat than to sit myself down in some opera house to hear some smiling Irish tenor murdering Pagliacci.” The iconoclastic Robert Crumb called Herriman the “Leonardo da Vinci of comics,” while the ambitious Spiegelman argued that “Krazy Kat” “crossed all kinds of boundaries, between high and low, between vulgar and genteel.” All this alone would have made Herriman worth serious study.
But then in the early 1970s, a quarter-century after his death, a birth certificate was found stating that Herriman was born “colored” to Creole parents in that 19th-century hotbed of miscegenation, New Orleans. Clearly his work had to be re-examined. Not to question its genius, but to see how much of it dealt with hiding a huge part of himself in plain sight.
If you haven’t read any Krazy Kat, seek it out. The strange language, the small, inky art, and the repetitiousness of the strips — collected together into numerous, beautifully designed, paperbacks by Fantagraphics — can seem a little intimidating at first, but it really pays off if you stick with it.
I have to confess that I frequently find This American Life kind of irritating, but this collaboration with Chris Ware and The New Yorker to create an animated magazine cover is neat:
The animation was done by Ware and John Kuramoto. You can read more about how it came about on The New Yorker culture blog.
Juxtapoz contributing editor Kristin Farr talks to Chris Ware, the magazine’s May 2015 cover artist, for their Beyond the Cover site:
Beyond setting a very specific mood, tone or feeling of a time of day or era, color in my stuff sometimes acts as a separate, countervailing story, connecting elements and images in ways that I sometimes hadn’t even predicted when I was simply drawing the page, reflecting more the way we see the world than how we define it. At the same time, the page compositions are also an attempt to get a glimpse at the way we edit, remember, and clean up our own experiences into “stories”…
…Comics best approximate how I remember and think about the world and how I also think many other people do; I believe even Nabokov at some point expressed frustration at not being able to induce a non-verbal image-based sort of page-memory (but he still did it better than anyone, except Joyce). I find myself thinking about my stories at odd times during the day, almost as if they’re an alternate reality; I can’t liken the experience to anything other than the psychosis of false or self-induced memories. Then again, any memories are always going to have some falseness, all of which add up to a fairly unreliable sense of one’s life and experience.
Cartoonist Chris Ware is interviewed by Canadian journalist Jeet Heer in the latest issue of The Paris Review as part of the magazine’s ongoing ‘The Art of Comics’ series. You can read a short excerpt online:
It was the Peanuts collections in my grandfather’s basement office that really stayed with me through childhood and into college. Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Lucy all felt like real people to me… I’ve said it many times before, but Charles Schulz is the only writer I’ve continually been reading since I was a kid. And I know I’m not alone. He touched millions of people and introduced empathy to comics, an important step in their transition from a mass medium to an artistic and literary one.
Following his appearance at the Edinburgh international book fair, Cartoonist Chris Ware spoke with Stuart Kelly of The Guardianabout his recent work Building Stories:
“As soon as a screen can produce something that can move, it becomes a passive medium, whereas I feel that comics are a very active medium. The appeal is they masquerade as a passive medium, but they’re not at all. It takes a lot of effort to read comics, even though it seems like they’re easy. It seems like they need to be fixed on paper to have a certain power – my wife always tells me never to use the word magic, but I can’t help it, there is no other word: there is a magic when you read an image that you know doesn’t move but you have a sense that something is moving, if not on the page then in your mind.”
The September/October issue ofIntelligent Life includes an extensive profile of cartoonist Chris Ware by Simon Willis:
As he worked on “Building Stories”, [Ware] decided he needed a form that allowed the past and the present to co-exist in a jumble, as in our own heads. “Like something you’d see in a dream.” A book wouldn’t do. The answer came to him: lots of little books, in a box.
Ware is not the first artist to use a box to explore memory. The writer B.S. Johnson, “the great lost British novelist of the 1960s” in Jonathan Coe’s view, published a novel, “The Unfortunates”, in 27 fragments of prose about the memories that assail a sports reporter at a football match. But the biggest influence on Ware was the American artist Joseph Cornell, who made artworks out of found objects arranged in small cabinets. Ware fell in love with his work in 1989, and when he got to Chicago he discovered the Bergman collection at the Art Institute, which has several of Cornell’s boxes. One of them, “Ann— In Memory” (1954), contains a few faded photographs and ads for hotels. The box is a physical and metaphorical container. “It’s certainly a good image of the way we recall things,” Ware says. “It has an organisation to it, but also a sort of chaos.”
Folklore — Mike Mignola talks about drawing Hellboy again, at ComicsAlliance:
I do have a library. Very little of it is leather-bound. The folklore and mythology library, which is in my studio, is pretty tacky looking since it’s all picked out of used bookstores. I am a book guy but more and more I do use a computer to do certain research things. But there are 30-40, 50, maybe 100 books of folklore in there, most of which haven’t been read. I’ll look at a table of contents and go, “Wow there’s 30 to 40 different Hellboy stories in there.” It’s very comforting to know there’s a million stories to tell that I can pluck off the shelf for those days where it’s like, “Well, I got nothing!”
Ware is essentially a poet of solitude. He uses language and images to capture the private torments of unfulfilled lives. His characters drift in a sea of self-recrimination and unmet desire (not unlike the rest of us). They rarely find love, or resolution.
This bleak approach does yield a curious dividend, though. The occasional moments of grace explode off the page. At one point, we see his heroine cavorting with her daughter on their front lawn. “I remember Lucy landing on top of me, laughing…with the sun shining behind her suddenly life came into perfect focus,” she muses. “This was what it was all about … this very moment … the joyful reality of my daughter.” The girl’s lovely face, nearly life-size, beams at us from the middle of the page.
Of course, this idyll is shattered by the news that one of her friends has committed suicide. If Ware has one flaw, it’s his obvious discomfort with the notion that people—at least his people—might ever find an enduring happiness.
And, while were on the subject of comics…
Hannah Berry, author of the enjoyable Britten & Brülightly, writes about the independent comics scene in the Britain at the New Statesman. Berry’s second graphic novel Adamtine was published earlier this year in the UK by Jonathan Cape.
Meanwhile, back in the world of big grown-up publishing…
The Telegraph profiles Liz Mohn, “the woman behind media giant Bertelsmann” and, therefore, the monster that is Penguin Random House.
And finally…
Lubricated — Hunter Oatman-Stanford (how’s that for a moniker?) examines the nautical past of popular tattoos at Collectors Weekly:
“Many sailors are extremely superstitious,” says [C.W] Eldridge [founder of the Tattoo Archive], “so they would get specific tattoos to relieve this anxiety over their beliefs. There are stories of guys in the old, wooden-ship days who would get Christ’s head tattooed on their backs so if they got into trouble and had to take lashes, the person wielding the lash would be more sympathetic.”
The variety of designs matched each and every danger aboard a ship. “Sailors would get things like a pig and rooster on their feet to keep them from drowning,” Eldridge says. “They would have ‘Hold Fast’ tattooed on their knuckles so that when they were in the riggings, their hands would stay strong. They would get hinges on their elbows to keep them from having rheumatism and arthritis, and sometimes they would even get a little oil can tattooed above the hinge so that the hinges would stay lubricated.”
Marvel is this narrative tapestry that all of these people have worked on and passed on. It’s sort of like television soap operas, but there’s something about that creative ownership that somebody has that’s not lasting, and the proprietary feeling that they have when something that they are a collaborator on doesn’t belong to them at all. It’s due to the way that Marvel ’s storytelling worked — Marvel Comics was this river that rushed by all these people, and they would throw their ideas into this river, and the river would just keep going on without them, it was bigger than any of them. And I think that Marvel is just an extreme example of that kind of thing which exists in the comic book industry.
And on a semi-related note… Chris Ware interviewed by Tavi Gevinson for Rookie Magazine. It’s a little different from all the other interviews I’ve read with Ware recently:
Our memories are all we have, and even those we think of as “real” are made up. Art can condense experience into something greater than reality, and it can also give us permission to do or think certain things that otherwise we’ve avoided or felt ashamed of. The imagination is where reality lives; it’s the instant lie of backwash from the prow of that boat that we think of as cutting the present moment, everything following it becoming less and less “factual” but no less real than what we think of as having actually occurred.
Dead Comrades — D. J. Taylor on the writer Julian Mclaren-Ross, for The Guardian:
In strict category terms, the author of Bitten by the Tarantula (Maclaren-Ross’s titles nearly always leap up at you from the library catalogue) is a classic English literary bohemian in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Marlowe: one of those people who really do live their lives out of suitcases, whose books are ground out in a procession of rented rooms with the landlord’s boots resounding on the carpetless stair and whose best work appears in a brief window of opportunity before the milieu in which they operate rises up and drowns them. Certainly the form of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction seems intimately connected to the circumstances in which it was composed: written at night, Benzedrine tablets (“My pills”) to hand, in seedy west London hotels after a day spent bar-propping in the Soho drinking dens.
The brief was: ‘read this amazing book and please give it an interesting cover’. I’m really lucky in that Jim Stoddart, the art director, gave me pretty much free-reign. .. I thought that there was something appealing in the big yellow ball. Rather like Olafur Eliasson’s giant sun at Tate Modern a few years back. It’s warming and comforting on the eye. I also thought it would stand out against other books and without type would make you want to pick it up and find out more.
It’s Complicated — Gabriel Winslow-Yost surveys the work of Chris Ware for the New York Review of Books:
Ware’s drawings are meticulous, even chilly, with flat, muted colors and the straight lines and perfect curves of an architectural rendering. The panels follow an orderly horizontal grid, but have a discomfiting tendency to occasionally shrink to near illegibility; or they might suddenly demand to be read from right to left, or even disappear entirely, to be replaced by pretty but unhelpful typography (“Thus,” “And so”), complicated diagrams, or plans for a paper model of one of the stories’ locations. Dreams and fantasies invade the story without warning—when Jimmy [Corrigan] first meets his father, we see him brutally murdering the sheepishly friendly man, while their desultory small talk struggles on.
Chance Art — Rick Poynor on the photography of designer Herbert Spencer, at Design Observer:
As a photographer, Spencer seemed to delight in unraveling the order he spent his days as a designer attempting to create. His most telling and memorable images, those that seem most fully his own, show a world in which things fall apart, signs of official communication fray into visual poetry, and ordinary people assert their presence by inscribing streets, buildings and land with unofficial messages and marks.
And finally…
The Shadow Line — Sean O’Hagan interviews avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Film Culture magazine Jonas Mekas for The Guardian:
At the end of our talk, I ask him what he thinks of contemporary culture and how it compares to the creative iconoclasm that he was part of in 50s and 60s New York. He thinks about his answer for some time. “When the old forms began collapsing and falling away though exhaustion and repetition, a new sensibility is born. That is what happened back then and may be happening now.” He tells me how taken he is with the Joseph Conrad notion of the shadow line: a moment of great cultural change that occurs every so often, sweeping all that is old and exhausted out of the way. “It is overdue.”
