Chris Ware is clearly a little shy. The comic artist, who is about to open a big show of his work at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, has been evading my efforts to talk to him. I wonder if it’s because he reveals so much of himself in the pages of his sprawling, complex, often disorienting books. He imbues those pages with enough pathos, unfulfilled hope and regret, interspersed with the briefest moments of happiness, that I wonder if there is not much left to say.
If contemporary culture seems to have been captured by comic books, from the inescapable superhero fantasies of Hollywood to the leeching of manga into global popular culture, Ware is somewhere else. He seems able to concentrate all of the affect of the movies, of fleeting memory and nostalgia, of cartoons and literary novels into his dense, funny, moving, sometimes difficult pages. He has refined the comic book into the most all-embracing of art forms and, in remarkable works including Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (1995) and Rusty Brown (2019), has created unforgettable illustrated narratives.
I’d been wanting to talk to Ware ever since I unboxed his remarkable Building Stories when it appeared in 2012. The work of a decade, the book appears as a set of 14 printed works in various formats: clothbound books, loose leaves, pamphlets, newspapers and posters, all based around the story of an unnamed woman and the Chicago building in which she lives. It encompasses neighbouring residents and their intersections but also the building itself, a repository of memory and history (its voice is in italics).
Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1967, but built his career in Oak Park, Illinois, a village outside Chicago famous as the site of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house. His widest exposure came through his designs for New Yorker covers which exquisitely encapsulate contemporary moments, from a family at a dinner table all absorbed in their phone screens to a group on their suburban lawn, socially isolated in Covid-era masks.
After some back and forth, we settle on the slightly unconventional interview method of an email correspondence. I begin by asking Ware about the relationship between the contents of the page and the contents of the mind, the way in which he appears to be able to map that familiar incoherence of our mental landscapes.
“Well, first of all,” he replies, “thank you for noticing. Vladimir Nabokov suggested in his lecture notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses that we think as much in pictures as we do in words, and I think comics are at least one language which allows for the two to conveniently coexist. Each page can potentially arrange experiences, spaces and images in a way that’s sort of analogous to how our brains interconnect memories, and with this as a guiding principle, I try to allow the pictures to write the story as much as the words . . . The end result, hopefully, is something that allows a sort of ‘step back’ from experience and gets at a sense of seeing something a little bigger — though sometimes it just also ends up being really confusing. (Though that is never my aim.)”
One striking thing about Ware’s work has always been his facility with the portrayal of home, the physical space of domesticity and how he uses it to supplement the story. “As a kid,” he says, “I used to sit across from my grandmother in her basement at a long table while she organised family photos or paid bills or wrote letters, and even then I can remember trying to capture the sense of comfort I felt just being there with her; I’d try to pin it down it by drawing a picture of her or listing out what she’d made for breakfast or really anything I could think of that would produce a similar feeling within me. I wanted those moments to last forever, and in some way regardless of what I do I think I’m always trying to start from that same impulse.”
He continues: “Everyone’s homes, especially one’s childhood home, form part of the structure of one’s memory and self; the corners, doors, drawers and floors all add up to a space which is instantly recallable both specifically but also ineffably, impregnated with associated feelings and sensations which can shift over time, but also somehow still always seem to make perfect sense, uniquely, to oneself.” Ware’s work captures the strangeness of inner lives and dreams, “where,” he says, “we revise and repopulate and reimagine these places with new people and dead people and hopes and regrets. I sort of think that comics capture this almost fugitive sixth sense of space.”
Building Stories, with its concentration on a particular structure and the lives within it, contains hints of other works, notably Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which takes place in a Paris apartment block, and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, recently made into a movie with Tom Hanks. Here tells the stories of the people and the nature that precede them in a New Jersey house.
Ware’s stories too seem to revel in a sense of place, using buildings as an armature for stories. “Richard McGuire has been such a profound influence ever since I first read his short story version of Here,’’ he says. It “seemed to provide a model not only for how one can think about the world, but also for all the disappointment, regret and longing that I’ve felt about specific places to which I keep returning both in person and in memory, places which can become so imbued with meaning they can be almost unbearable to visit.”
The way in which Ware peels back layers from buildings, exposing the lives inside, evokes Hitchcock at his voyeuristic best, the mise en abyme of gazes in Rear Window for instance. I ask him if his work is voyeuristic in this way?
“Sure, who doesn’t like to see people at their most vulnerable and unselfconscious of moments?” he replies breezily. “It seems one of the core reasons that art exists, or at least it’s something we all crave, since it gives us some sense of how to live our own lives. Most human friendships take the path of slowly trusting someone to the point that one can then introduce them to one’s own increasingly embarrassing and private secrets. At least that’s what I most look for in books and movies and films.”
In putting the pages in a museum, the images transition from, page to wall, from literature to art. Or were they always art?
“Comics can be considered closer to typography than to drawing in some ways,” he responds, “just as words on this page are meant to be read, but not really seen, the drawings in comics are sort of transitory and translucent; serviceable, but not worthy of lingering upon. While reading prose, we cease to see the type and instead see the pictures they produce in our minds, but comics exist in a sort of half-sleep, keeping the reader’s eyes open and, if the cartoonist is good, making it seem as if the pictures come alive on the page.
“I fear this may be the most pretentious-sounding interview I’ve ever given,” he says. “My apologies!” There is something in that anxiety, a Midwestern modesty that permeates his work so that even at its most ambitious it never seems inaccessible. “I should add,” he says, “that comics require nothing more than paper, pencil and patience, and it’s possible for anyone and everyone to take a stab at it, limited only by one’s heart and mind and, of course, time.”
Ware may often doubt himself but he has faith in the richness of the apparently mundane lives of his characters. He is an artist of the unfulfilled. “At its core,” he says, “human life is never, ever boring, no matter how you take it apart and put it all back together.”
April 3-November 9, cccb.org