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<\/a>Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking<\/p><\/div>Very soon a new Chris Ware book will be hitting the stands, a volume that most people probably haven\u2019t heard of. It is not by Ware, but it\u2019s about him. It\u2019s a collection of essays titled The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking<\/a> (University Press of Mississippi, April 2010), edited by Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball.<\/p>\n I\u2019m in the book so I won\u2019t say too much about it except that the editors are very intelligent and the table of contents (pasted below) looks promising. The book will also have a lovely frontispiece by Ivan Brunetti.<\/p>\n As it turns out, my contribution to the book is relevant to the discussions<\/a> we\u2019ve been having here at Comics Comics<\/em> about book design and reprints of old comics<\/a>. My essay is about Ware\u2019s work on the Walt and Skeezix<\/em> series and the Krazy and Ignatz<\/em> series, which I try to place in the larger context of the history of comic strip reprint projects and also tie to Ware\u2019s thematic concerns in his own comics with family history, the legacy of the past, and the pathology of the collector mentality. My contention is that in restoring artists like King and Herriman to the public spotlight, Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor-creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work. In other words, Ware\u2019s book designs are a form of canon formation, a way of filling in the gap of missing archival and historical material, and creating for comics a sense of a continuous tradition and lineage\u2026.<\/p>\n Innovative artists often invent their own ancestors as a way of giving a pedigree to their work. There is a sense in which Franz Kafka invented Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot invented John Donne. Prior to Kafka, Dickens was read as a popular entertainer who specialized in heart-warming picturesque tales. Kafka\u2019s fictions and comments on Dickens recast the Victorian novelist as the dark writer of claustrophobic allegories such as Bleak House<\/em>. Similarly, Eliot remade John Donne, largely relegated to the status of a literary curiosity, into a major precursor to modernism. In the field of comics, Ware has engaged in a comparable rewriting of the history by offering a new reading of past masters. Challenging the standard view of comics history, which has highlighted the work of realist illustrators such as Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Jack Kirby, Ware offers an alternative canon that prizes cartoonists who practice either formal experimentation or focus on everyday life, such as Rodolphe T\u00f6pffer, George Herriman, Frank King and Gluyas Williams\u2026<\/p>\n In searching for ancestors in earlier comics and trying to recast the history of comics to highlight work that is similar to his own, Ware is part of a larger effort by like-minded cartoonists of generation. Art Spiegelman, a mentor who offered Ware an early national venue in RAW,<\/em> has often written on comics from the past and sought to resurrect selected masters, notably Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Cole. The Canadian cartoonist Seth has staked out a claim to the tradition of New Yorker<\/em> cartooning, Canadian comics, and Charles Schulz\u2019s Peanuts<\/em> (in the last case, designing a multivolume series that parallels what Ware has done with King and Herriman). Chester Brown, another Canadian cartoonist, has creatively appropriated the style of Harold Gray\u2019s Little Orphan Annie<\/em>. In effect, Ware belongs to a cohort of contemporary cartoonists who are both doing innovative work in the present and in the process re-writing and re-mapping the history of comics\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n All of this goes towards explaining why I don\u2019t share \u2013 in fact, I can\u2019t even fathom \u2013 the objections to Chris Ware\u2019s design on several reprint projects; or Seth\u2019s design on the Peanuts <\/em>series, the Doug Wright book, and the John Stanley library; or Adrian Tomine\u2019s work on the Tatsumi series; or Chip Kidd\u2019s various reprint books. In each and every case, we have a talented contemporary artist who is creating a connection between their aesthetic concerns and older classic works.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how art history and literary history gets made: by living artists connecting with the past. Art history is not just a museum full of old paintings of Jesus and the Madonna, it\u2019s the connection between old art and modern visual concerns. Literary history is not just a dusty shelf croaking under the weight of old books, it is the connection between the living literature of the present and old books. By writing Ulysses<\/em>, James Joyce gave us a new way of reading Homer and Shakespeare (Hamlet<\/em> is everywhere in Joyce\u2019s great novel). John Updike did a series of books inspired by The Scarlet Letter<\/em> (A Month of Sundays<\/em>, Roger\u2019s Version<\/em>, S<\/em>); these novels made Hawthorne\u2019s venerable text newly urgent.<\/p>\n In the case of comics, we\u2019re lucky that artists are not just connecting with older works and thereby creating a living tradition, these contemporary cartoonists are designing books that make this connection a felt reality, something we can see and touch and hold in our hands. That\u2019s why the books designed by Ware, Seth, Tomine and Kidd are so great: they make visible and plain how the best work of the past informs the best work of the present.<\/p>\n But enough of my ravings. Here is the table of contents for The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking<\/em>.<\/p>\n Table of Contents:<\/p>\n Introduction<\/p>\n Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball, \u201cChris Ware and the \u2018Cult of<\/p>\n Difficulty\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Contexts and Canons<\/p>\n 1. Jeet Heer, \u201cInventing Cartooning Ancestors: Ware and the Comics Canon\u201d<\/p>\n 2. Jacob Brogan, \u201cMasked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy\u201d<\/p>\n 3. Marc Singer, \u201cThe Limits of Realism: Alternative Comics and Middlebrow Aesthetics in the Anthologies of Chris Ware\u201d<\/p>\n 4. David M. Ball, \u201cChris Ware\u2019s Failures\u201d<\/p>\n Artistic Intersections<\/p>\n 5. Katherine Roeder, \u201cChris Ware and the Burden of Art History\u201d<\/p>\n 6. Martha B. Kuhlman, \u201cIn the Comics Workshop: Chris Ware and the Oubapo\u201d<\/p>\n 7. Isaac Cates, \u201cComics and the Grammar of Diagrams\u201d<\/p>\n The Urban Landscape<\/p>\n 8. Daniel Worden, \u201cOn Modernism\u2019s Ruins: The Architecture of \u2018Building Stories\u2019 and Lost Buildings\u201d<\/p>\n 9. Matt Godbey, \u201cChris Ware\u2019s \u2018Building Stories,\u2019 Gentrification, and the Lives of\/in Houses\u201d<\/p>\n Reading History<\/p>\n 10. Joanna Davis-McElligatt, \u201cConfronting the Intersections of Race, Immigration, and Representation in Chris Ware’s Comics\u201d<\/p>\n 11. Shawn Gilmore, \u201cPublic and Private Histories in Chris Ware\u2019s Jimmy Corrigan\u201d<\/p>\n 12. Benjamin Widiss, \u201cAutobiography with Two Heads: Quimby the Mouse\u201d<\/p>\n Everyday Temporalities<\/p>\n 13. Georgiana Banita, \u201cChris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness\u201d<\/p>\n 14. Margaret Fink Berman, \u201cImagining an Idiosyncratic Belonging: Representing Disability in Chris Ware\u2019s \u2018Building Stories\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 15. Peter R. Sattler, \u201cPast Imperfect: \u2018Building Stories\u2019 and the Art of Memory\u201d<\/p>\n Contributor Biographies<\/p>\n Chris Ware\u2019s Primary Works: A Guide<\/p>\n WORKS CITED<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Very soon a new Chris Ware book will be hitting the stands, a volume that most people probably haven\u2019t heard of. It is not by Ware, but it\u2019s about him. It\u2019s a collection of essays titled The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (University Press of Mississippi, April 2010), edited by Martha B. Kuhlman and David M. Ball. I\u2019m in the book so I won\u2019t say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[22,230,238,1189],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-tomine","tag-kidd","tag-ware","tag-seth"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nHere are a few relevant passages from my essay:<\/p>\n