The Comics of Chris Ware

Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness

1 7 7 Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness georgiana Banita To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in “rapid reading.” But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing “within” are slow. one loses one’s time seeking time lost. —Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections onTime In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin gives a vivid impression of how strollersmovedintheshoppingarcadesofnineteenth -centurycities:someofthem, he notes, walked with a tortoise on a lead.1 These flâneurs not only cultivated slowness deliberately, but they ensured that others took note of the fact in order to express their contempt for the machine age and its obsession with speed. Benjamin’s image conjures up a type of person almost unthinkable today, but one that perfectly matches the tenor and rhythm of Chris Ware’s comics. Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth proceeds in small increments on the micro level of its individual panels, in which characters take dazzlingly small steps.2 In a literal sense, this can be explained by the fact that Jimmy Corrigan suffers from a leg wound that forces him to use a crutch and prevents him from moving at normal speed. The implication , however, especially in terms of the text’s layout and composition, is that the modern mechanization of time has reduced our lives to a series of small units that can no longer be experienced as a whole. Indeed, the formal grammar of Ware’s comics renders time conspicuous, inscribing forms of temporal progression (or speed) in its graphic representation. It also calls attention to controlled pace as, among other things, an obstacle to the frenetic temporality of contemporary consumer culture. In an interview, Ware acknowledges his interest in “the craftsmanship and care and humility of design and artifacts ” from earlier eras, explaining his preference as a reactionary response to the rhythm of modern experience: “It seems [there is] this arrogant sexuality to the modern world that I find very annoying, and, I guess, threatening [. . .] Everything has to be cool. Everything has to be sexy and fast-paced and rock-and-roll and I just find it kind of offensive. There seems to be a sort of dignity to the way we were creating the world a hundred years ago that I find much more comforting.”3 Ware’s response to these rhythms is shaped by two competing yet related forms of disrupted temporality—incrementalism and fragmentation. While these do not function identically, they converge to generate narrative slowness and critique modern practices of acceleration. Few graphic narratives resist this fast-paced, rock-and-roll aesthetic as effectively as Jimmy Corrigan. No doubt, the formal difficulties of Ware’s earlier 1 7 8 G E o r G I A N A B A N I TA works also present a formidable challenge to these assumptions. Yet the awkward , labor-intensive rhythms of the graphic novel delay and retrack narrative development, waylaying readers with constant interruptions and slowing their progression. In a brief analysis of Ware aptly entitled “Why Does Chris Ware Hate Fun?” Douglas Wolk remarks that “Ware forces his readers to watch his characters sicken and die slowly, torment (and be humiliated in turn by) their broken families, and lead lives of failure and loneliness.”4 My own analysis focuses on the first part of this assessment—the slow decay and death—which is key to understanding the embarrassment and isolation that Wolk mentions. A reading of slowness in Ware’s comics would not only give a new cast to what we consider to be the speed of comics as a medium, or the rhythm of its unique language, but also establish the slowness of graphic narrative as an essential parameter of making and reading comics. The process of drawing the comics, as described by Ware, entails “about an hour and a half of work per second of reading time.”5 This exceedingly meticulous creative process inevitably results in comics that may indeed be read very quickly but more often than not invite an equally painstaking approach on several temporal levels. This essay draws attention to the intensive and extensive forms of temporality in graphic representation, in particular, to the obsessively uncomfortable slower-than-real time in which the Jimmy Corrigan narrative plays out, with a focus on the agonizing patience and misery of the protagonist’s embarrassment as an existential and profoundly...