Week 1-2 About Chris Ware

“I can’t write... alone with words…And when I’m just drawing I feel like I’m immediately compelled to try to tell a story”. Chris Ware- Thought Catalog. (2016). A 55-Minute Interview With Chris Ware: The Full Transcript. [online] Available at: http://thoughtcatalog.com/tara-wray/2013/06/untitled-chris-ware-interview/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2016].

Figure1. ACME 18 - Rich 1, 2004
Ink, blue colored pencil on paper

It’s hard to shake the associations away comics have with our childhood, as they are not taken as serious forms of communication, yet they remain one of the only forms that ‘ordinary’, people can relate to and understand, as they live ‘somewhere between the world of words and pictures’. People arrive at a comic books expecting certain emotions, humor, to be entertaining or to be thrilled by a superhero plot, but American cartoonist Chris Ware exceeds these expectation and stereotypes in his comics. 

As more films were being created the standard of comics in the 1940-50s began to ‘decay in craft quality and style’, cartoonists became more cinematic by neglecting some unique qualities of traditional comics, the typography, iconography and the page composition resulting in comics behaving ‘less like comics and more like storyboards’. Chris Ware became part of a new wave of comic book artists, he took inspiration from cartoonist before the wrongs of the 1940-50s such as Windsor McCay, George Herrimen and Frank Kind. Ware viewed that the earlier cartoonists each had an individual tale on what they were doing, instead of simply following the fashionable action packed comic, they had a strong structure and composition to their comics, including the use of typography, drawing, painting, music, theatre and architecture, all of which Ware uses in his work today.

Ware’s work is both emotional, illustrative and “very flat and dead mechanical, almost like a pictorial language”. Ware’s language is similar to Toffpfer, he makes pictures work like words, obeying the rules of typography, suggesting that “fundamentally you’re better of using ideograms rather than realistic drawings as it shows something that universally everyone understands. This technique is also depicted by Scott Mccloud in his comic book ‘Understanding Comic’. Mccloud implies that an abstract (cartoon) character is just as recognizable as a more realistic looking figure, but my stripping down the image your able to just focus on the specific detail, meaning its able to describe and relate to more people.   

Figure 1.Scott Mccloud ‘Understanding Comic’

References 

1. 1 "Chris Ware - Building Stories". Adambaumgoldgallery.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Oct. 2016. 
2.  McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print. 

Quotation- 

Thought Catalog. (2016). A 55-Minute Interview With Chris Ware: The Full Transcript. [online] Available at: http://thoughtcatalog.com/tara-wray/2013/06/untitled-chris-ware-interview/ [Accessed 12 Dec. 2016].

Bibliography

Websites 

"Cartoonist Chris Ware Talks About Tragedy And Comics To Aida Edemariam". the Guardian. N.p., 2005. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

"Chris Ware - Building Stories". Adambaumgoldgallery.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Oct. 2016.

"Chris Ware". Drawn & Quarterly. N.p., 2013. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

Jacobs, Dale. "Lettering: Visualizing Sound In Comics". 

Uwindsorcomics.blogspot.co.uk. N.p., 2009. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.

Wivel, Matthias. "Interview With Chris Ware Part 1 Of 2 « The Comics Journal". Classic.tcj.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.

Books

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Print.

Oliveros, Chris. Drawn & Quarterly. Montréal, Quebec: Drawn & Quarterly, 2001. Print.

Raeburn, Daniel K. Chris Ware. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.

Ware, Chris. Mcsweeney's Quarterly Concern. San Francisco: McSweeney's Quarterly, 2004. Print.