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 head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.
There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.
I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?
My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.
One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.
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 was used to being disliked as a kid. Not that I didn't deserve it: I was a pretty sad and unappealing creature, and still am, I guess. It's sort of simplistic to think that one tries to make stuff that accounts for one's repulsiveness as a person, but there's some truth to it. So, when I read something unfavorable, I always take it deeply personally. It's as if my efforts have been in vain, and I should just quit.
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 prefer to imagine that my wife, a few friends, and occasionally my mom are the only ones who read what I do, though I realize that this is somewhat unrealistic.