Thinking on the page

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hinting strongly to everyone that I want a copy of Monograph by Chris Ware for Christmas. I haven’t had a chance to look closely yet at this gargantuan career overview of the man whom I’ve elsewhere called our best novelist, artist, and graphic designer, but I’ve been making up for it by reading a book of his interviews that came out earlier this year. My favorite passage is his response to an interviewer who expressed amazement that he figured out all of his work as he went along:

There’s nothing to wow about because I think it’s much easier that way. I don’t see how anyone could sit down and try to think ahead of themselves. I would create the most boring stuff if I sat down and scripted things because the sort of associations that occur while you’re drawing and the ideas that you get are real ideas. I don’t think it’s possible to have a fundamental idea when you start scripting or laying out a strip. I think that’s silly. What’s the point? You get bored, first of all, drawing it. I never know how any of my strips is going to end at all. I start out with a blank page. I might make some basic decision like “The first row will be three and three-quarter inches. Tall panels and maybe I’ll stick one in that’s taller.” Then as I go along I might draw something in the background and think, “Wow, I’ll use this.” I’ll draw it again or light it up with another image on the page, or I might redraw something…As far as in the long term storytelling, the source of associations that you want to occur in a story can only happen if you let them occur naturally. Your brain is a very organized thing. I think mine is, I hope, because things keep on popping up, and I notice them.

This is at the beginning of Ware’s career, before Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth had even begun, but his approach across the decades has remained consistent. Two years later, he told another interviewer: “I do know where I’m going, the essential outline is there. I don’t write conversations and dialogue unless I have bits and pieces I want to insert. I don’t write scripts or thumbnails. I let it happen. I try to keep it lively and allow it to develop on the page. This of course might be the absolute worst way of working possible…I don’t know.” Six years after that, Ware said to Ira Glass: “It’s totally improvisatory. I know how I want to start and where it’s going to go. I just draw and hope that it works. I really don’t know how to describe it beyond that.” And he offered this account of his process while being interviewed for the documentary Tintin and I:

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it’s going to look, start, or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing, and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it’s a completely different thing than it was before I started.

By now, Ware is probably tired of being asked about this, but I find it objectively fascinating, even staggering. And part of the explanation lies in the contrast between the time that it takes and the relatively compressed period in which it can be absorbed, as Ware stated in a more recent interview: “I think there’s a certain value in spending a lot of time on something and condensing thought into something that maybe only takes two seconds to read but maybe takes forty hours to draw.”

I think that this gets at something fundamental about Ware’s career, which is a testament to how the art of a miniaturist can turn into something profoundly epic, even colossal, when diligently pursued for a lifetime. (In this respect, Ware has a lot in common with Stephin Merritt, a figure to whom I’m surprised he isn’t compared more often.) And his approach on the page is mirrored in his attitude toward storytelling as a whole, which is to disclaim the existence of any larger plan at all. Ware often suggests that his narrative structure emerges almost by accident, saying in his interview with Glass: “I started drawing this character, Jimmy Corrigan, in my sketchbook and did a couple of stories with him, and I realized he’s my only human character so I better hold on to him.” He expanded on this point a few years later:

I was still in art school when I started [Jimmy Corrigan], and I thought this story would only last maybe about three months or so, just a few episodes. Because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at all and I am a terrible writer, it got completely out of hand. It ended up lasting for seven years, which is why when you read the book, the first hundred pages or so are completely insensate. It’s very poorly written, which I apologize for—I didn’t really think of a way to try and fix that, but that’s just the way it is…I did a couple of joke strips with this character Jimmy Corrigan, and I kind of latched onto him as my only contact with humanity on the comics page. Then he became this main character. There’s no planning to this at all; it’s this crazy way of working organically and letting something happen on the page for lack of any better thoughtful literary charter…I think that’s actually the way most of my characters start, as joke characters, and then I become more empathetic or sympathetic towards them.

In other words, Ware’s decisions on the level of the individual panel, which might amount to an hour’s work, effectively reproduce—or anticipate—his approach over the course of years. And while you see this pattern in the life of nearly every artist, it’s particularly evident in Ware, both because he’s been relatively candid about his creative process and because so much of it has unfolded in plain sight.

The trouble is that it can be hard to draw lessons for ourselves from the work of such a singular talent. If nothing else, we can take it as a reminder on the value of small units of work completed on a regular basis, whether or not they involve a fixed deadline. In the earliest interview that I quoted above, Ware said: “I can’t do anything without having some sort of deadline; otherwise, I’m too lazy. I wouldn’t get it done.” A decade later, he modified his view:

As for my workday, I used to sit down and fritter away my time, but now I work within a more compressed schedule because I spend most of the day looking after my daughter. I’ve also given up my weekly deadline to allow the work to happen at a more natural pace, and I think I can say that for these two reasons I’m genuinely happy for the first time in my adult life. I’m glad I put myself through the misery of deadlines for twenty years, but if I can’t do it now for its own sake, then I shouldn’t be doing it at all.

At another talk, he told the audience: “If you simply trust yourself as an artist to allow those things to come out naturally, without your intellect to stop it from going onto the page, you’ll be surprised at how things in your work will connect in very surprising and strange ways. There’re things that you do that you are not even necessarily aware of.” And he’s perfectly right. But it’s equally obvious that Ware has developed strategies and techniques, often at great personal cost, to allow for such themes to emerge “naturally” in a form that can channel and control them, to the point where his cold, almost alienating style serves as a vessel to contain unbearable emotion. Perhaps one approach requires the other. But it’s also easier when you’re the smartest kid on earth.

Tim Conway in a wig

Interviewer: Someone once remarked that you have a repertory company, which you ­reuse in various works. You introduce new characters using short, disconnected strips, as if to get used to them, then you launch into larger narratives that explore their lives and world. What’s the advantage of getting to know characters that way?

Ware: I think the remark you’re referring to is a complaint I made about my limited ability, early on, to draw more than three or four different people. My wife called it my “Carol Burnett complex,” meaning I really only had a handful of basic facial types I was capable of drawing. For example, if I needed an old lady, I’d just have to put Tim Conway or Harvey Korman into a wig and hope that no one would notice. I think I’ve gotten beyond that somewhat now.

Interviewer: Was this a matter of technical limitation?

Ware: It certainly started out that way, but eventually it became a more considered part of my approach, since any cartoonist has to constantly walk a tightrope between the ideal and the specific.

—Chris Ware, to The Paris Review

Quote of the Day

I think of the [comics] page, book, et cetera, as a “perpetually existing” sort of shape that only comes alive when read. The best comics make drawings seem to come alive on the page and make the visual connections between moments across pages and even chapters concretely explicit, which is a very different experience from looking at page after page of gray text. Not to carry this too far, but unlike regular reading, which induces blindness in the reader, comics bring together the half-awake “night and day” of seeing and remembering directly on the page.

—Chris Ware, to The Paris Review

Learning from the masters: Charles Schulz

Note: To celebrate the third anniversary of this blog, I’ll be spending the week reposting some of my favorite pieces from early in its run. This post originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, on March 31, 2011.

The case of Charles M. Schulz is a peculiar one, because there are really two faces to Peanuts. There’s the strip itself, which remains one of the most original, arresting, and entertaining works of art of the twentieth century. And then there’s Peanuts the franchise, the source of Vince Guaraldi albums, television specials, and countless other forms of merchandise, some of which are worthwhile, but which also tend to overshadow the deeper qualities of the strip itself. (Hence the response to the well-meaning but somewhat confused Tumblr blog 3eanuts, which gives readers the impression that the original strips need to be altered to bring out their underlying bleakness.) Which is too bad, because Peanuts, at its best, is the greatest contemporary example of how a uniquely personal work of art can enter the dreamlife of millions.

And its impact has been incalculable. I recently picked up a copy of Todd Hignite’s seductive book In the Studio: Conversations with Contemporary Cartoonists, and if there’s a single underlying theme in its pages, stated or unstated, it’s the massive influence of Peanuts. For cartoonists like Seth and Chris Ware, not to mention Bill Watterson, Schulz is the artist who transformed the mainstream comic strip into a personal, even autobiographical form, at a time when there were nearly no precedents for such an achievement. Even now, it’s hard to think of another artist who managed to write a daily strip that was so funny and so bleak, so personal and so universal. Given the current splintering of the media landscape, we may never see anything like it ever again.

It’s difficult to understand this now, but during the peak years of the strip—which I’d place from roughly 1960 to 1974, although any attempt to define its golden years before 1980 or so is basically arbitrary—it was read avidly on college campuses by the same people who would go on to devour the likes of Jules Feiffer in the Village Voice. With its use of the jargon of psychoanalysis and philosophy, its depictions of depression and failure, and its relentlessly black humor, it felt like a comic strip for grownups, even as kids went nuts for it as well. And as David Michaelis points out in his invaluable Schulz and Peanuts, its adult fans, like Feiffer, reacted with deep suspicion to the commercialization of the strip. How could America’s greatest poet of quiet desperation also be shilling for MetLife?

But the real point is that these two aspects of Schulz’s life shouldn’t be separated. Peanuts was both intensely personal and the biggest marketing phenomenon this side of Disney. It was used to sell cars, insurance, and Easter Egg kits even as the strip itself grew ever sadder and more pessimistic. In some ways, this still feels like the most subversive coup in the history of American popular culture. Not until The Simpsons—which, we’re told, owed much of its early popularity to “all the pretty colors”—was a work of art so ubiquitous and so misunderstood. And both cases speak to the universality of master craftsmanship. For Peanuts and The Simpsons alike, there’s no clear line dividing the popular from the sublime: it’s one seamless work of art.

As with The Simpsons, there’s no denying that Peanuts underwent a decline in its final years, and in particular was never the same after the mid-1980s. But to quibble over the fact that Schulz managed only thirty years of unparalleled excellence is like asking why Beethoven only managed to come up with nine decent symphonies. (Which sounds like something that Lucy might ask Schroeder). Strip by strip, panel by panel, it’s one of the richest bodies of work produced by any American artist, a lens through which the culture of half a century can be glimpsed. As such, it was an essential part of my education, and The Complete Peanuts will be among the first books that my own children will read. I can’t imagine giving them a greater gift.

Chris Ware’s book of dreams

“Can you describe how drawing feels?”
“It feels horrible.”

This exchange occurred last weekend at the Unity Temple in Oak Park between an audience member and the cartoonist Chris Ware, our most gifted visual storyteller. The sentiment it expresses will be familiar to anyone who knows Ware’s work, which lavishes incredible ingenuity, craft, and technical skill on stories of everyday tragedy—and not violent or melodramatic tragedy, either, but carefully observed vignettes of mediocrity and quiet desperation, all of which lead to the inevitable conclusion that we’re all going to die alone. If this makes Ware sound like an introverted depressive, well, maybe he is. But in person, he’s a funny, engaging, self-deprecating guy whose air of discomfort in public is partially offset by what seems to be a contented personal life, as well as the fact that he’s arguably the most acclaimed graphic artist of his generation. As long as Chris Ware lives in my neighborhood, I know I’m never going to be the greatest living writer in Oak Park—but this is one instance in which I’d be happy to come in second.

Ware, in short, is a genius, at a time when the word threatens to become meaningless from overuse. (The fact that he’s never received a MacArthur genius grant is truly startling.) His work is characterized by an obsessive attention to detail, with stories told through elaborate flowcharts, diagrams, and microscopically executed individual panels, all of it rendered by hand. Ware says that it takes him about forty hours of work to finish a single page, and notes elsewhere that the ratio of the time spent creating one of his comics to the time it takes to actually read it is something like 4000:1. Yet he’s incredibly prolific—or, as he puts it, he seems prolific—and he never stops working. Looking at one of his books, the first impression one gets is one of overwhelming density and detail, and this isn’t a superficial reaction: you can zoom in on the tiniest details (like “the world’s smallest comic strip” printed on the edges of one of his book covers) without any loss of resolution.

In other words, his work resembles the impossibly detailed and seductive books one sees in a dream, which Ware has acknowledged is the effect he’s trying to achieve. His magnum opus is the extraordinary graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which has sometimes been dismissed as unreadable. It is dauntingly bleak and dense, but it’s also my favorite novel of any kind published in the last couple of decades. More recently, I’ve been browsing in his large-format Acme Novelty Library collection, which collects Ware’s massive one-page strips. These lack the cumulative power of Jimmy Corrigan, but they offer the best showcase for his talents: these stories engage the whole history of comics, from Little Nemo onward, and they’re both visually staggering and endlessly rereadable, even as they pursue Ware’s characteristic themes of loneliness and disappointment. (My favorite is the strip that follows Quimby the Mouse over the course of an excruciatingly uneventful day, then flashes forward to him in a nursing home fifty years later, crying “Nurse!…Nurse!”)

Ware’s latest work is the collection Building Stories, which I picked up before the reading and lugged home afterward, a little overwhelmed by the prospect of diving into it. It’s actually a large box filled with fourteen different books and leaflets, ranging from a tiny stapled pamphlet to panoramic spreads the size of a large newspaper. The components can be read in any order, and given their inherent density, I suspect that this will be one of those books, like Dictionary of the Khazars, that I’ll own for years without ever really getting to the bottom of it. But just browsing through the materials is an emotionally charged experience: the stories center on the figure of a young mother living in an Oak Park neighborhood not unlike my own, and since my wife and I are currently expecting our first child, it’s hard not to map my own feelings onto the page. Knowing Ware, I suspect that this may turn out to be a mistake—and yet part of me still feels privileged to have been given this strange, indescribable handbook at this point in my life, as if it had been made just for me, like a book in a dream.

A novelist moves to Oak Park

Today my wife and I closed on our first house, a beautiful single-family home in historic Oak Park, Illinois. My original goal, after realizing that we were really going to move, was to become the greatest novelist Oak Park ever produced, which I soon discovered might be difficult, if only on account of this guy. The greatest living novelist, perhaps? Unfortunately, that requires catching up to the extraordinary Chris Ware, perhaps our best living novelist, period, which I’m not sure even I can do. So I might need to settle for being the best novelist on my side of the block. If that. Still, I’m pretty excited.

Learning from the masters: Charles Schulz

The case of Charles M. Schulz is a peculiar one, because there are really two faces to Peanuts. There’s the strip itself, which remains one of the most original, arresting, and entertaining works of art of the twentieth century. And then there’s Peanuts the franchise, the source of Vince Guaraldi albums, television specials, and countless other forms of merchandise, some of which are worthwhile, but which also tend to overshadow the deeper qualities of the strip itself. (Hence the response to the well-meaning but somewhat confused Tumblr blog 3eanuts, which gives readers the impression that the original strips need to be altered to bring out their underlying bleakness.) Which is too bad, because Peanuts, at its best, is the greatest contemporary example of how a uniquely personal work of art can enter the dreamlife of millions.

And its impact has been incalculable. I recently picked up a copy of Todd Hignite’s seductive book In the Studio: Conversations with Contemporary Cartoonists, and if there’s a single underlying theme, stated or unstated, it’s the massive influence of Peanuts. For cartoonists like Seth and Chris Ware, not to mention Bill Watterson, Schulz is the artist who transformed the mainstream comic strip into a personal, even autobiographical form, at a time when there were nearly no precedents for such an achievement. Even now, it’s hard to think of another artist who managed to write a daily strip that was so funny and so bleak, so personal and so universal. Given the current splintering of the media landscape, we may never see anything like it ever again.

It’s difficult to understand this now, but during the peak years of the strip—which I’d place from roughly 1960 to 1974, although any attempt to define its golden years before 1980 or so is basically arbitrary—it was read avidly on college campuses by the same people who would go on to devour the likes of Jules Feiffer in the Village Voice. With its use of the jargon of psychoanalysis and philosophy, its depictions of depression and failure, and its relentlessly black humor, it felt like a comic strip for grownups, even as kids went nuts for it as well. And as David Michaelis points out in his invaluable Schulz and Peanuts, its adult fans, like Feiffer, reacted with deep suspicion to the commercialization of strip. How could America’s greatest poet of quiet desperation also be shilling for MetLife?

But the real point is that these two aspects of Schulz’s life shouldn’t be separated. Peanuts was both intensely personal and the biggest marketing phenomenon this side of Disney. It was used to sell cars, insurance, and Easter Egg kits even as the strip itself grew ever sadder and more pessimistic. In some ways, this still feels like the most subversive coup in the history of American popular culture. Not until The Simpsons—which, we’re told, owed much of its early popularity to “all the pretty colors”—was a work of art so ubiquitous and so misunderstood. And both cases speak to the universality of master craftsmanship. For Peanuts and The Simpsons alike, there’s no clear line dividing the popular from the sublime: it’s one seamless work of art.

As with The Simpsons, there’s no denying that Peanuts underwent a decline in its final years, and in particular was never the same after the mid-1980s. But to quibble over the fact that Schulz managed only thirty years of unparalleled excellence is like asking why Beethoven only managed to come up with nine decent symphonies. (Which sounds like something that Lucy might ask Schroeder). Strip by strip, panel by panel, it’s one of the richest bodies of work produced by any American artist, a lens through which the culture of half a century can be glimpsed. As such, it was an essential part of my education, and The Complete Peanuts will be among the first books that my own children will read. I can’t imagine giving them a greater gift.