The Comics of Chris Ware

Introduction: Chris Ware and the “Cult of Difficulty"

I x 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 experience . 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 unfold 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 endpapers 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 multidisciplinary 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, disability 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 Picasso and Braque to the obscure erudition of Eliot and Pound.2 These comparisons would undoubtedly embarrass Ware, but Schjeldahl and McGrath are x I N T r o D U C T I o N not alone; Ware’s work has also been likened to the fiction of Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, John Barth, and the “high modernism of [Franz] Kafka.”3 In interviews and critical essays, Ware himself has a decidedly literary bent, including references to Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gustave Flaubert in his explanations of the tone and structure of his comics .4 There are also marked similarities between Ware’s work and the contemporary experimental fiction of Dave Eggers, whose memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published the same year as Jimmy Corrigan, begins with front matter that contains a scale rating the author’s sexual orientation and a preface to the preface titled “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book.”5 In the field of literary studies, Ware’s work has already made a powerful claim for scholarly consideration and inclusion in course syllabi. Yet literary references alone fail to account fully for the multidisciplinary reach of comics generally and Ware’s work in particular, which draws significantly from the fields of fine art, architecture, design, and entertainment culture. Among his artistic influences, Ware cites Philip Guston, who championed a representational style late in his career contrary to the fashion of abstract expressionism, much in the same way that Ware resisted Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics when he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago .6 Joseph Cornell, the solitary surrealist of Astoria, Queens, is another of Ware’s favorite artists.7 The melancholy charm of Cornell’s idiosyncratic shadow boxes and his nineteenth-century aesthetic of the penny arcade are felt keenly in the meticulously orchestrated panels of...