The World According to Chris Ware
On the eve of a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Oak Park cartoonist (along with some of his contemporaries) offers an introduction to a genre that is successfully blurring the line between literature and art.
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Commenting on Two PanelsBuilding Stories; Anatomy, I, 2002
h"This is the first page of a three-page story I originally did for nest magazine in 2003. Though this first page is comparatively mild in its content, it is one of the only stories I've ever written about sex, and which was a lot more fun to write than I thought it would be, which is sort of an accomplishment as a repressed, nervous cartoonist."
Chris Ware
"Why is it that we like these characters that represent fragments of a depressed society? We do, I guess, because they represent the survival attitude of the soul, within a society or an historical moment that has put its soul at stake. Chris Ware's characters represent the America we fear and love at the same time. . . . These individuals are weak but alive, they are miserable but deep."
Francesco Bonami
Senior curator-at-large, MCA
"I had in mind when beginning it those acetate overlay anatomy images which were bound into old encyclopedias and which I found secretly rather smutty as a kid."
"All three of the story pages are arranged . . . with the main character in the center, although the two pages that follow present her stripped of her clothing, and then, on the last page, of her skin . . . though I didn't really know what this strip would be "about" when I began, it ended up focusing on the dwindling emotion and increasing sexual distance between her and her college boyfriend as their relationship became less and less intimate."
"It's not told as a direct narrative but as a jumble of memories and associations, the main character peeling back the layers of herself in her mind to try to get to the bottom of why this one relationship ended so badly."
Chris Ware
excerpt from
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth; Intro, 2000
"Once I decided I did want to set part of [Jimmy Corrigan, Ware's breakout novel] in Chicago at the time of the [1893 World's Columbian] Exposition (as a contrast to the rather grim blahness of the Chicago of "today") I spent months and years researching. . . . I spent time at the Harold Washington Library looking through their unique documentary archives of the Fair's construction, bought up or borrowed pretty much every picture or book I could find about the subject, and even work-avoidingly spent a couple of days down in Jackson Park with an antique map trying to determine the relative scale of the grounds. . . . Stupid! Of course, after all this preparation, the final section ended up being little more than ten quick pages, culminating with this selection."
Chris Ware
"Jimmy Corrigan's sad eyes are looking at the Expo and at the world with pre-melancholic gaze. He looks as if he already knows that to be a real person means to give up any kind of idealism or utopia."
Francesco Bonami
Senior curator-at-large, MCA
"The panel to the left is halved in size to form the top panel and that panel is halved to yield the text and image panel that reads, "So I just stood there, watching the sky and the people below," which is halved to yield the image panel of the distant crowds, which is halved to yield the text panel "waiting for him to return." In what should be an utterly expansive moment, Jimmy's world constricts and constricts and finally turns black."
"I am always amazed at the emotion he draws on the little cartoony faces, such as [Jimmy] Corrigan's wonder at being at the World's Columbian Exposition with his Dad, even as he senses something is terribly wrong, and he is in fact about to be abandoned."
"He seems to be attending the fair in his nightgown . . . remembering it as a semi-hallucinogenic experience."
Lynne Warren
Curator, MCA
"The manufacturer's building, at that point the largest building in the world. I happily found out later that the World's Fairs were actually quite convenient places to abandon children."
Chris Ware
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