chris ware – Page 2

THE GHOST OUTLINE OF A FACE

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Really awesome article this morning in the NY Times about artist William Utermohlen, who after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, began drawing/painting self-portraits. The self-portraits, viewed in chronological order, reveal the gradual deterioration of his mind and spirit.

Because Alzheimer affects the “right parietal lobe,” it gets harder and harder to visualize an image and be able to draw it. Art by Alzheimer’s patients becomes “more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic” and “sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”

Looking at these two pieces shoots cold lightning down my spine. It’s so hard to admit to yourself that something you think you do with your heart and soul is really just a bunch of wires connecting your hand to your brain. Maybe it’s for that reason that I find Alzheimer’s to be the most terrifying disease out there.

We’re machines, and machines break down.

I’m also wondering if this Chris Ware quote has any significance:

I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

And I hate to quote Franzen, but he what about this:

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise “Understanding Comics,” argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package.

Even towards the end of his abilities, Utermohlen could still make a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line.

Even if it was the face of a ghost, it was still a face.

The BBC also has an article…

JIMMY CORRIGAN, MEET MADAME BOVARY

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Sunday NYTimes came a day late to Circleville this Easter, so Meg, Mom, and I read it over a breakfast of leftovers. I was reading what looks to be the last installment of Ware’s Building Stories series, and Mom said, “What do you think of that?” And I said, “well, I read it for the technique, but the story lines are pretty boring.” And Mom said, “That’s what I thought, but I was afraid that you liked it.” Then she explained to me that she found it really hard to read, after a lifetime of teaching kids left-to-right, up-and-down. So I told her that I thought everybody who comes to his work basically has to re-teach themselves to read. And she said, “Oh, good. I thought I was the only one.”

THEN I was reading in the Book Review about Flaubert, and I had remembered that somewhere (?) someone had suggested that Jimmy Corrigan would make a great companion to Madame Bovary on a reading list. About Flaubert: “Sentences were laid as carefully as fuses. Progress was excruciatingly slow.” And: “The romantic in him wanted to soar above it all, to write a book of pure music, “a book about nothing,” a book held together only by the “internal force of its style.”

That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to grab my old copy of Madame Bovary to take back to Cleveland for further rumination.

Tonight we’re going to drive straight up to Oberlin to see Lynda Barry. I’m really interested to see what a fiction “reading” by a comics writer looks/sounds like. Since I always bring my sketchbooks to these things, I’m going to use Brandy Agerbeck’s graphic facilitations and Alison Bechdel’s recent renderings of a visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies as inspiration. (Check out the program at CCS, by the way. That’s what I’d like my MFA studies to look like. If only CCS had funding and accrediation…)

If you want some more reading, check out Etgar Keret in the funny pages, and Sammy Harkham’s “Black Death” from CRICKETS #1 as a webcomic.

MEG VS. CHRIS WARE

Thursday, December 15, 2005

As if to counter Meg’s complaint (and mine, too) that so many graphic novels seem to be written by men “who are emotionally still teenagers”, Chris Ware chimes in:

You’re on a time delay as a cartoonist, I think. It takes so long to draw comics that you end up writing about things that happened maybe 15 years or so before. Charles Burns just finished, after 10 years, a book about his teenage years. And he just turned 50. So that’s about the relative spectral red-shift that we’re on as artists.

Well, that’s kind of depressing. Listen to the whole interview.