The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking

279 Pages·2010·10.64 MB·English

by  David M. Ball

The Comics of Chris Ware

The Comics of Chris Ware
Drawing Is a Way of T hinking
Edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman
University Press of Mississippi Jackson
Publication of this volume was made possible in part through grants provided by Dickinson College
and Bryant University. The editors would also like to thank Meredith Milnes, Ellie Cutler, Shannon
Kobran, and Tristan Deveney for their help and hard work and special thanks to Alec Thibodeau, for
keeping us covered.
All images and artwork, unless otherwise noted, are copyright © 2009 Chris Ware. The editors of
this collection would like to thank Chris Ware for generous permission to reproduce his comics
throughout this volume.
Frontis: Portrait of Chris Ware by Ivan Brunetti. © 2010 Ivan Brunetti.
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2010 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The comics of Chris Ware : drawing is a way of thinking / edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhl-
man.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60473-442-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60473-443-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ware, Chris,
1967–—Criticism and interpretation. I. Ball, David M., 1976– II. Kuhlman, Martha B.
PN6727.W285Z63 2010
741.5’973—dc22 2009033755
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
For Cara
For Nicholas
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Contents
Introduction: Chris Ware and the “Cult of Difficulty”
Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball ix
Contexts and Canons
Inventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon
Jeet Heer 3
Masked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy
Jacob Brogan 14
The Limits of Realism: Alternative Comics and Middlebrow Aesthetics
in the Anthologies of Chris Ware
Marc Singer 28
Chris Ware’s Failures
David M. Ball 45
Artistic Intersections
Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History
Katherine Roeder 65
In the Comics Workshop: Chris Ware and the Oubapo
Martha B. Kuhlman 78
Comics and the Grammar of Diagrams
Isaac Cates 90
The Urban Landscape
On Modernism’s Ruins: The Architecture of “Building Stories”
and Lost Buildings
Daniel Worden 107
Chris Ware’s “Building Stories,” Gentrification, and the Lives of/in Houses
Matt Godbey 121
vII
Reading History
Confronting the Intersections of Race, Immigration, and Representation
in Chris Ware’s Comics
Joanna Davis-McElligatt 135
Public and Private Histories in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan
Shawn Gilmore 146
Autobiography with Two Heads: Quimby the Mouse
Benjamin Widiss 159
Everyday Temporalities
Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness
Georgiana Banita 177
Imagining an Idiosyncratic Belonging: Representing Disability
in Chris Ware’s “Building Stories”
Margaret Fink Berman 191
Past Imperfect: “Building Stories” and the Art of Memory
Peter R. Sattler 206
Appendix: A Guide to Chris Ware’s Primary Works 223
Selected Bibliography 225
Contributors 231
Index 235
vIII CoNTENTS
Introduction: Chris Ware and the “Cult of Difficulty”
Martha B. KuhlMan and david M. Ball
Reading Chris Ware’s comics for the first time can be a disorienting experi-
ence. Why does the hardcover edition of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid
on Earth have such an enigmatic and ornate dust jacket? Where exactly are
the author’s name and the title of the work, and what is the purpose of the
cover’s intricate diagrams and cutout instructions? The curious few who un-
fold the cover are rewarded with a map that is comprised of panels of varying
sizes and orientations with abrupt shifts in scale, offering a world-historic
vision of multiple generations and transatlantic connections between Irish
immigration and the Middle Passage (see plate 1). Arrayed on the page with
a dizzying visual intensity, these tiny scenarios are punctuated cryptically by
conjunctions and phrases such as “Thus,” “But,” “And So” and traversed by a
network of arrows and lines (dashed or solid) that operates according to an
initially inscrutable logic. If this seems too daunting, turning to the endpa-
pers reveals “General Instructions,” followed by an “Introduction” and five
sections that culminate in an exam, all rendered in painfully tiny type that
requires preternatural vision or bringing the book so close to your face that it
almost touches your nose.
As the cover warns us, what we have here is definitely “a bold experiment
in reader tolerance,” and many will not have the time, interest, or patience
for it. Put simply, this volume is not for them. But for those readers who,
fascinated and challenged by the worlds that Ware has constructed, seek to
gain new points of entry into his comics, this collection offers a range of mul-
tidisciplinary perspectives that we hope will inspire lively discussions and
open previously unexplored avenues for research. This volume offers the first
such sustained critical analysis of Chris Ware’s already prodigious body of
work, yielding a varied, provocative collection of essays that spans multiple
approaches and orientations—from literary theory to urban studies, disabil-
ity studies to art history, critical race theory to comics history—in order to
better understand and illuminate Ware’s graphic narratives.
In his 2004 cover story for the New York Times Magazine, “Not Funnies,”
Charles McGrath predicts that comics are the next new literary form and
praises Jimmy Corrigan as “easily the most beautiful and most complicated
of all the new graphic novels.”1 Writing one year later in the New Yorker, art
critic Peter Schjeldahl identifies Ware as belonging to a “cult of difficulty” that
has always characterized avant-gardes, from the cubist experiments of Pica-
sso and Braque to the obscure erudition of Eliot and Pound.2 These compari-
sons would undoubtedly embarrass Ware, but Schjeldahl and McGrath are
Ix