Ware is Everywhere
by Jeet Heer
Saturday, November 7, 2009
In a recent Inkstuds interview, Seth said that that three most influential contemporary cartoonists are Crumb, Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. For Seth, what sets these three apart is not so much the quality of their work, as the fact that they’ve changed the syntax of comics, greatly expanding the range and depth of stories that can be told in the medium. I agree with Seth, with the proviso that Gary Panter and Lynda Barry also belong on this list.
Will Staehle cover of Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs
The type of influence Seth was talking about is fairly subtle: in the case of Ware it means making other cartoonists aware that comics can have minutely delicate shades of emotional meaning hitherto unexplored in the medium. But Ware’s influence on some artists is also more blatant in the sense that he’s clearly informed their style and design sense. Recent examples of Ware-inflected design include the cover for the new Michael Chabon essay collection, an art catalogue designed by Ellen Gould, and a illustration by Mark Matcho from the August 24, 2009 issue of Time Magazine.
Ellen Gould’s design for Imaginative Feats art catalogue
Certainly Ware has raised the bar in terms of design, just as he has done for comics, but it is odd to see Ware pastiches popping up all over the place. I’m divided on how I feel about this phenomenon. On the one hand, most of the Ware-influenced art is quite good: if you’re going to steal a style you might as well do it from the best. On the other hand, in Ware’s work his style isn’t just for show but is integral to the total artistic package. To take use his style for other purposes almost seems like your missing the point of what it is that he’s doing.
Mark Matcho illustration for Time
Labels: Chris Ware, graphic design, influence
Yeah, those book covers are a lot like Chris Ware's own dust jackets (so was the cover for Chabon's previous novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union). Still, it's not like the Chris Ware design style sprang fully-formed from his forehead. His designs, and these, owe quite a bit to 1890s-1930s sign painting. Probably these book designers could have done more research and found their own inspirations in the source material instead of stopping at what they saw as the hip-ly old-fashioned Ware aesthetic. Seth was up here at CCS just this week, and he said that meeting Chris Ware was what turned him on to Art Deco hand lettering. He certainly did his homework and found his own influences after that epiphany.
But, I honestly don't see any Chris Ware in that illustration. It just looks like golden age comics to me.
Mark Matcho's been working a retro/vintage illustration style for something like 20 years. His stuff's terrific.
But yeah, the Ware-esque book designs…sure, anyone can work from the ye olde school, but these are so dead-on Ware-like that everyone I know who knows his work stops and looks at these books, flips to the credit, and is surprised to not see his name. It's too close to how he distills the past for the present, it's almost a forged signature. And it always seems like a case of an art director calling Ware, getting turned down, and getting someone else to "do a Ware", not necessarily do an old style design job. Or they're getting a Ware-like bit out of someone more affordable. I think everyone knows how that goes.
It's possible that I'm being unfair to Mark Matcho. That illustration looked more Ware-like than Matcho's other work, in part because of the Peanut-shaped heads and also the way the classic 1930s Shuster-style is so cooly stylized. But that could just be me and I apologize if I'm wrong.
In any case, to re-iterate what I wrote above: I'm genuinely divided about this because the designs & illustrations I've noted here are all very good. So if they are Ware-influenced, that's not a wholly bad thing.
I love how you can take a little quote and get so much out of that. It should also be added that we discussed how it is hard to pinpoint on a select group of folks and it wasn't to cannonize, and folks like Clowes would obviously be important, its just that those three have a particular legacy.
I would argue your point about Barry though. maybe its a reference to my own personal tastes, but I Gloeckner and Doucet have both had a lot of resonance on other creators, but i dont feel the same can be said about Barry. Once again, that could be my own particular tastes.
Doucet's name comes up quite often as an important influence, and i would say that she is a game changer.
Well, the question of influence is difficult to prove and I would'nt gainsay the impact of Doucet and Gloeckner. But my feeling is that Barry had a huge impact which continues to this day.
This might be a matter of generational experience. But what I distinctly remember is that in the 1980s and early 1990s Barry had a huge impact on many cartoonists, notably the then Toronto trio of Seth, Chester Brown and Joe Matt. What Barry did was re-invent autobiographical comics (or rather autobiographical-seeming comics) so that the goal was no longer to tell a story that actually happened to you (in the mode of Harvey Pekar) but rather to recapture an earlier mental state. Barry has an amazing gift for capturing the voice of children, and also the drawing style of kids. Her stories put you back to where you were when you were 7 or 9 or 11 or 15. Because of her, cartoonists became much more attentive to the issue of voice, hitherto largely a matter of capturing dialect.
Also, Barry's art came from outside the comics world. Although she read some comics as a kid, including Mad, her art really came more out of children's books. This really enlarged the range of comics.
Finally, Barry had and has a way of disarming readers, so that drawing seems natural. When you look at her art, you want to draw yourself. Crumb and Panter have a similiar impact, so I tend to classify them all in the camp of major inspirations.
"Barry has an amazing gift for capturing the voice of children, "
I met a woman tonite who said that "Cruddy" was an epiphany for her. She spoke alot about Barry's ability to channel this "voice" of teens.
I love how "peanuts shaped heads" somehow reflects a Warian influence and not that of Shutlz himself.
Jeet, you should stop writing about your pals. It's transparent and dumb.
John
Shultz didn't draw the heads of his characters in a peanut shape though. You'd have a better argument with Segar.
Or Frank King.
Schulz
Get it right. You've only been staring at his name your whole life.
Well, now I'm depressed.
The Psychiatrist is IN
Five cents
Jesus, this got grim.
Obviously, Ware's been a big influence on the younger generation of designers. But, also obviously, he's a conduit for his own influences — and, in a sense, he creatively 'misses the point' of his own inspirations, by making them his own. Isn't there some literary-critic term for that?
Yeah, I'm sure some literary critic — probably Harold Bloom or one of his disciples — has maped out all the different ways an artist can be influenced by other artists. I think it's pretty obvious that Ware has creatively synthesized his influences into a personal approach. This is very different than artists who merely copy a surface style, for example the way Rich Buckler and others artists did inferior versions of Kirby, or the host of Neal Adams wannabes that once infected mainstream comics.
As R. Fiore once said, there is a difference between the way Herman Melville was influenced by his reading of Shakespeare and the way a counterfeiter is influenced by the Federal Mint.
The examples of Ware's influence I've cited above fall into an interesting gray area which is worth exploring: clearly strongly influenced by Ware's style but I wouldn't put them in the counterfeit camp either. Which is why I wrote this post: to raise the issue of how we think about such things.
I should add that by "Peanut-shaped heads" I meant a head that looks like the beloved legume, the peanut and not a head that resembles a character drawn by Charles Schulz, the cherished cartoonist whose name is frequently mangled. I shouldn't have capitalized peanut, which is the cause of the confusion.
Years ago I used to try and convince anyone who ever had an inkling to draw to try their hand at comics. It wasn't a very good idea except from an observational standpoint. The comics that they produced were almost always Barry-esque, in that they were usually some kind of reminiscence of childhood written in the voice of the child. There is, of course, more to Lynda's approach than just that simplification but like Chris Ware's work, once you see it, you never forget it and it colors the way you approach the act of making comics and possibly even the way you see the world.
To Pat: Chris Ware didn't invent the art deco lettering and design but his reclamation of it was so thorough and complete that it is clearly the touchstone that modern designers are using. Sure the designers could look back at the originals but Jeet's not arguing that, he's arguing the pervasiveness of Chris' design approach.
On Matcho: I think there is something to Jeet's argument here especially because of the mirrored panels. That is a very formal and Wareian device. There are certainly many more clearer examples but it illustrates Jeet's point pretty well.
Interesting post, Jeet… raises a lot of questions.
Some thoughts:
As time passes, my view of cartoonists such as Ware (meaning those that overtly utilize graphic styles from a previous era) has changed considerably… and it's led me to a lot of head scratching of late.
Perhaps its the recent aggressive critical pairing of fine art or conceptual art with cartooning that's shining a different light on the work of Ware, Crumb, Clowes, Seth, Rick Altergott, Xaime and Beto Hernandez for me?
Many of these cartoonists strike me now as conceptual artists concerned with narrative or storytelling (I would find such a thought 10 years ago repulsive). They all present picture making sensibilities reminiscent of a graphic "house style" from a bygone era, something from the pop-collective unconscious, and slam it up against a personal, sometimes pleasurable sense of Dramatic Irony… yet another collective experience. By no means do I think this is a blueprint for the art of their work – but it might be a start.
Based on principal, I don't mind there being a lot of Ware influenced art because I think "Ware" has been everywhere, long before our time.
Spiegelman being one of the most influential? Maybe as an editor (and Raw's influence is a tad overrated, methinks), but outside one obvious hit GN I don't really see it. Even the comics we now get based on historical events/catastrophes had forbears way before Maus (especially outside the US).
The Hernandez Bros are by far the biggest artistic influence after Crumb – a much more sustainable 'industry' than the Zap generation was built on what they began. And they still produce work of a much higher standard than Spiegelman's past two decades. Lynda Barry's influence has also been huge on a broader graphic scale – maybe not as trumpeted as the usual Raw suspects, but no less powerful.
Guber
Jason: I think you're on to something, but it would require a much longer essay than my blog post to deal with. There is a sense in which the present moment does involve a fusion of comics with conceptual art (as much as cartoonists might hate the term). You really should expand on this in a posting of your own.
Guber: to look at Spieglman's impact you'd have to go back to not just Maus and Raw but really the experiments collected in Breakdown, which have been the fountain for virtually every formalits experiment of the last 30 years. I'm thinking here not just of McGuire, Ware, Kaz, etc but even Alan Moore's work (Moore himself has talked about how these strips made him think deeper about the language of comics).
I think the Spiegelman work appearing in undergrounds first should also be recognized. It would have been alot easier to find a copy of Short Order Comix than Breakdowns, which had a pretty limited print run. His work in series like that, would have a really strong impact when compared with some of the weaker work in the same books.
A serious question that won't sound serious: Could someone explain Crumb's influence to me on the current comics world?
Obviously he's one of the handful of great cartoonists who ever lived. I get that he invented the autobiographical comic beyond Al Capp style self-reference. Given how ubiquitous that form is now, I sometimes feel crediting him with influencing cartoonists who use it is a little like citing DW Griffith as an influence on modern filmmakers because they use close-ups. Yes, because of him we know it, but MAUS took autobiography beyond Crumb, as do Joe Matt or Lynda Barry's storylines. In watching Crumb put out his GENESIS book, I see him now looking at the current long form storytellers more than I see them taking directly from him.
I'd also like to second that comment about Spiegelman's singular influence on comics today: design, narrative range, chapter by chapter storytelling, bringing history and non-fiction to the forefront, conceiving of the comics page as (his words) "boxes within boxes" and the awareness he brought to that for lay readers as well as arch-historians/critics/ubernerds, (us) … in this current literary age of comics, I tend to see him as a central and visionary figure.
Btw, please don't take away from all this that I have a dim view of Crumb. I don't. Spiegelman once referred to him as an "elemental force" in comics, and I totally agree. I just see comics storytelling going in one direction, and Crumb, almost without exception, going on his own as he always does. I look at him more the way a Robert Altman operated in movies, unrelated to much of what goes on around him commercially or aesthetically, and equally inimitable by others.
Have you seen Winshluss' PINOCCHIO? First time I saw it, I thought it was something by Ware:
http://lesconcepts.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1_pincover.jpg
http://www.lesrequinsmarteaux.org/article-22343754.html
OK – 'Maus' aside (and even that was rated past the point of reasonable judgement), I guess Speigelman's other stuff just leaves me cold – especially in the past two decades. In that stupid 'Masters of American Comics' exhibit/book, I could think of twenty guys who were ahead of him in 'mastery'.
As for Crumb, its been the way that he's been so singular and uncompromising that's been the real influence on following generations (and he has far better quality control than his Zap peers). But you could say the same for Kim Deitch – who's highly respected and admired, but still kinda underrated beyong 'those in the know'.
Guber
The difference between Crumb and Dietch is that Dietch himself has loads of respect and admiration for Crumbs work and is influenced by him, even though they are peers.
No Crumb, no Moebius. No Moebius, no CF. No CF, no CF imitators.
It's all Crumb's fault there are "art comics", haha.
I've been too busy to post here but, belatedly and clumsily, I need to say that this is a great post to point out how Ware can be seen influencing the climate of graphic design. But I can't see how being influenced by the graphic design side of Ware indicates anything about (or is really even relevant to) whether a person "gets" what he's doing in comics. They're two different things, however much Ware has mastered using the one to such meaningful effect in the other. Largely I just see these comparisons as influence, which is inevitable.
Like comics, graphic design (née "commercial art") is a ghettoized craft that is mostly only now being fetishized for the good and (much) bad of the craft. So you're going to see things like Alex Camlin's design for Douglas Wolk's "Reading Comics" that are self-consciously (and smartly) referencing Chris Ware and you're going to see things like Gould's "Imaginative Feats" that inexplicably and perhaps uncomfortably mimic him. And you're going to see work from Will Staehle who obviously has some awareness of Ware but I'm confounded by anyone who would confuse the work. (And I happen to think "Yiddish Policemen's Union" is brilliantly done and is influenced more by film titles and Saul Bass than by comics and Chris Ware.)
I'm a big believer in genius being of its time and a lot of us were bound to dig into the evocative qualities of those bygone aesthetics in response to this technological time we live in. I know for myself I was exploring a lot of Victorian and Deco elements in my college classes ten years ago, before I ever heard of Ware but there can be no question that his trail-blazing makes my work possible in a lot of cases.
I'm just unnerved by the tendency to make giants out of a few men and treat the accomplishments of all others as inferior and derivative because of those giants' benchmarks. Not everyone's genius, but a lot of people make really good work.
And in case I wasn't clear: yeah, Chris Ware is a genius and a giant.
Hi Jacob,
Thanks for your comments which are very smart and absolutely on-target. When I was writing my post I was struggling with some ambivalence because while I liked many of these designs, they did seem too Ware-esque. But you are right to introduce some nuances — I agree that part of what what we're dealing with is a zeitgeist effect with many artists being attracted to a similiar set of styles. The issues involved can only be dealt with on a case by case basis: whether a particular design brings enough cleverness to the table to be seen as something more than a reflection of the zeitgeist.