by Jessie Roberts
Simon Willis profiles Chris Ware, getting to the root of the graphic novelist’s talent:
He has a theory that crystallised on the page in “Jimmy Corrigan“. Comics, he says, are meant to be read and not, like fine-art drawings, looked
at. He wants his drawings to tell stories, “like typography on a page”. It’s about visual clarity but also emotional clarity. “Jimmy Corrigan” was planned as a short exercise in emotional truth-telling, to see if he could make pictures that meant what they said without “the taint of irony”. And never having met his father, he hoped, as he wrote later, that once the story was finished “I would have ‘prepared’ myself to meet the real man”. That short exercise turned into a 380-page graphic novel which took seven years. …
The book combined emotional subtlety with a complex structure. Ware reduced his characters to simple dots, dashes and smooth lines. At art school he’d been ridiculed by classmates for taking a life-drawing class each semester, but it paid off. With a stroke or two, he could show how emotions disclose themselves on the face or in the sag of a shoulder. Then there was the layout. He worked with a strict grid of squares, varying from a few centimetres to whole pages. “I thought of it musically,” he told me. “I was listening to a lot of Brahms at the time—sorry, this sounds so pretentious, but it’s true—and I remember feeling that I wanted to produce that sensation on the page, with a large image, and then something much more lyrical and textural, and then into a sweeping passage, and then focusing down into a point. I feel that music does that better than anything; it captures that weird sensation of writing one’s thoughts, that course of consciousness.”
(Photo of Ware’s work by Flickr user annulla)
The Dish 