Chris Ware
Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware, is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library seriesand the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earthand Building Stories. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth28 December 1967
CountryUnited States of America
As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.
Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done.
The real power of comics is writing as you draw.
Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.
One of the things that appealed to me most about comics was that you can pick the ones you like and build your own personal pantheon.
I don't think there's any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don't like or respect in at least some way or another. We're all marginal laborers - we're practically medical oddities - so I don't see why we can't all be nice to each other.
A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.
"Real" drawing is about specifics. It's about describing an object as accurately as possible. In a comic strip you have to draw a picture of the idea of the object. You have to draw the word that you are picturing, then you have to mix in specifics with it for it to work as a story. But you are still working with drawn words.
Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.
Drawing on a computer doesn't make any sense to me. It's not intuitive.
I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.
The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.
My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.
My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.