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
When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.
Comic strip is almost like music on a page that you perform in your mind. It's not just pictures. There's a particular rhythm and structure to it that is unlike anything else. It literally is like music. You hear it in your mind as you read it.
Drawing on a computer doesn't make any sense to me. It's not intuitive.
My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
Every city began as a campsite - pg. 25
Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.
I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the honesty of the story.
The thing I don't understand is why so often one hears discussion of the fruits of human labor as if it's all the creation of some alien race.
I'm only trying to present as honest a portrayal of the grimness of human ambition as I can. I'd hope it's rather uplifting, actually, since I find the sort of blind optimism and empty laughter of a great deal of "contemporary culture" to be more depressing than something that admits to a potential for disappointment and a gnawing sense of existential mockery.
There seems to be such a laziness in - and I hate to use this phrase - the modern world. Everything is pumped out so quickly so that you can read it while passing by, like billboards or those flashcards before movie shows.
The first thing I do when I get up is I look out the window. I've been looking at the same image for six years. It's imprinted in my mind like an afterimage template.