A Comics Studies Reader

The Comics of Chris Ware

306 The Comics of Chris Ware Gene KannenberG, Jr. Artists like Dan Clowes, Jason Lutes, and myself, are all trying to tell a serious story using the tools of jokes. It’s as though we’re trying to write a powerful, deeply engaging, richly detailed epic with a series of limericks. I’ve just tried to expand the possibilities for the [comics] form, just to get in a little more sense of a real experience. chris ware (qtd. in Juno, Dangerous Drawings 53) Chris Ware stands as a leading contemporary cartoonist, garnering numerous industry awards and receiving glowing reviews in trade publications and popular magazines alike. With work appearing in various comics anthologies, magazines, and his own comic book series, Acme Novelty Library, Ware has worked in a variety of comics genres, from stand-alone gag cartoons to his serialized novel of multi-generational ennui, “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.” Critics have praised Ware’s work for its formal complexity, characterized by dizzyingly intricate pages, while marveling at how deftly Ware manipulates traditional comic-book characters (superheroes, cowboys, spacemen) to tell darkly humorous stories that concern acceptance and loss, pain and longing.1 This narrative complexity manifests itself in Ware’s skilled juxtaposition of disparate narrative and graphic elements, and his sophisticated approach to the use of text plays a vital role in this process. Through deliberate manipulation of the appearance and placement of text within—and surrounding—his comics pages, Ware exploits the graphic nature of printed comics text in ways few other cartoonists have attempted. In so doing , he takes full advantage of comics’ innate ability to create complexity through the multivalent interpretive possibilities engendered by the form’s presentation of structured text/image combinations.2 In this essay I will discuss how Chris Ware’s ingenious use of text in comics relates to theories of visual literature in order to demonstrate Ware’s unique understanding of the comics form’s underpinnings and potential. Text reads as an image in Ware’s comics, conflating two sign systems in ways which question the binary text/image opposition. His comics can present simultaneous narrative strands by combining text and image in Reprinted by permission from Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, eds., The Language of Comics: Word and Image (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 174–97. The comics of chris ware 307 nontraditional designs. In his long narratives, Ware brings together many different strategies of reference between visual elements both within and across comics pages, exploring the narrative potential of the comics form. And his overall book design for his comics shows a kinship with the visual narrative form known as artists’ books. Ware’s careful attention to the appearance and placement of text in his comics—its visual appearance and its placement upon the page—reveals the nature of comics as the union of story and structure, simultaneously tempering levity with gravity to approximate, in his terms, “real experience.” VISUAL LITERATURE The detail in Ware’s artwork itself reveals his careful attention to the appearance of text. Additionally, Ware himself describes his specific approach to text in his comics in numerous interviews. In his interview from Comics Journal 200, Ware notes: The way text is used visually in comics seems to me to be so incredibly limited. It’s the one avenue in comics that seems to have been more or less completely untouched . I mean, when you have all the tools of visual art at your disposal, then why put words in balloons? (Ware, qtd. in Groth 16: 1) Although Ware does not define what “all the tools of visual art” might contain, his practice makes clear his familiarity with both high art history as well as the traditions of American publication design—in which word and image both play important roles. In Ware’s comics, we see echoes of architectural blueprints, electrical diagrams, maps, and catalogs. Unlike the work of some cartoonists whose sole point of artistic reference seems to be old comic books, Ware’s publications reveal an awareness of and appreciation for art and its relation to text in broad terms. Although Ware does not shy from using traditional comics devices like word balloons when it suits him, his work indeed reveals a concerted effort to use text in various, rarely seen fashions. He notes elsewhere: How they [the tools of visual art and design] are patterned and combined is what makes the stuff interesting and emotionally real. By synthesizing the visual mechanics...