The Comics of Chris Ware

Inventing Cartooning Ancestors:Ware and the Comics Canon

3 Inventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon Jeet heer In 1990, Chris Ware, then a twenty-two-year-old student at the very beginning of his career, made a pilgrimage to Monument Valley, Arizona, in order to investigate the life of George Herriman. Author of the classic strip Krazy Kat, which ran in a variety of newspapers from 1913 until the cartoonist’s death in 1944, Herriman used the otherworldly desert landscape of the region as the ever-shifting backdrop to his comics. Along with the adjacent area of Coconino County, Monument Valley inspired the dream-like lunar landscape that made Krazy Kat a rare example of cartoon modernism. Eager to learn more about the sources of Herriman’s artistry, Ware felt he had to see the landscape of jutting buttes and flat-topped mesas that the earlier cartoonist had so creatively incorporated into his work. This hajj to the Southwest was an early manifestation of Ware’s interest in the history of cartooning, a persistent fascination that has been much more than an antiquarian passion and has had a profound influence on Ware’s body of work.1 Throughout his career Ware has constantly evoked cartoonists from the past, particularly the newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century and the pioneering superhero artists of the 1930s and 1940s.2 These references have taken many forms, ranging from sly visual allusions to outright declaratory celebrations. A quick inventory would include the early Ware story “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess” from 1991, done in a style closely mimicking that of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster; the cat/mouse dynamic of the Quimby the Mouse stories, borrowed from the anthropomorphic love triangle at the heart of Krazy Kat (where the feline lead character has an unrequited passion for an irascible rodent); the many ironic references to Superman , sprinkled throughout Jimmy Corrigan, that serve as a fantasy counterpart to the bleakness of the main story; and the unusually oversized dimensions of some of Ware’s books, such as the Quimby the Mouse volume and The ACME Report, which recall the full newspaper-size Sunday pages by cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King in the first decades of the twentieth century.3 Ware’s deep and abiding love of old comics is also evident in his numerous reprint projects, where he has used his own strong sense of book design to bring new attention to works like Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley.4 To date, Ware has designed and co-edited four volumes of Gasoline Alley (under the umbrella title Walt and Skeezix) as well as ten vol- 4 J E E T H E E r umes devoted to Krazy Kat (under the title Krazy and Ignatz). Aside from this editing and design work, he has also written extensively about the history of comics in a variety of venues, ranging from Bookforum to a museum catalogue published by the Library of Congress.5 On one level, Ware’s engagement with the history of comics shouldn’t be surprising. One would expect poets, novelists, and painters to be similarly connected with the traditions of their respective art forms. Yet there is a significant difference between how a cartoonist relates to the history of his or her craft and how practitioners of more traditional arts are shaped by their aesthetic heritage. If poets, novelists, or painters try to educate themselves in the history of their respective genres, they can draw on a vast repository of institutional knowledge housed in libraries, universities, and museums. Until very recently, cartoonists didn’t have access to anything comparable in the history of comics: monographs, library collections, museum holdings, and reprints were few, haphazard, scattered, or incomplete. The Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose passion for old comics matches that of his friend Chris Ware, once noted that most cartoonists have to educate themselves in the history of comics by scrounging through used book stores or gleaning whatever information they can from the few general histories of the art that are available .6 This essay will examine Ware’s work as a comics historian, paying particular attention to his book designs. My contention is that in restoring artists like King and Herriman to the public spotlight, Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work. In other words, Ware’s book designs are a form of canon formation, a way of filling in the...