Excepting perhaps those of Metallica and Ridley Scott, there are few career arcs in recent American popular culture (an association he would despise) whose plummets have felt as sickeningly steep as that of Chris Ware. Ware more so for me, as a proto-budding comics artist at one point in my life, because he is uniquely responsible for dramatically re-enchanting and subsequently de-enchanting my relationship to the comics medium. I am willing to own my sour grapes. But there is only one reasons, in my mind, to direct aesthetic bile, which is that there is a consensus in support of a creation that deserves but has not received critical questioning. A corollary justification, which applies in this case, is when different portions of an artist’s work are not executed at the same standard, with no apparent effect on his popularity or legacy. This kind of brand-deterioration (or “falling-off”) is familiar in its causes and effects, but bears some contemplation nonetheless.
Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #4 was the first comic book I bought in Chicago in 1996, at a justifiably renowned bookstore dubbed “Quimby’s” in honor of Ware’s mouse character. AN #4 had tiny comic strips within massive comic strips, full of morose, bitter gags without punchlines, conveying mute anguish and casual cruelty. It had backwards comics. It had absurd advertisements in absurdly minute print. It had cut-and-fold sculptures. It had microscopic comics that read like animation filmstrips, and big morphing panormas, and everything rendered in a McCay-esque style that, despite its schematic depthlessness, made a flat page seem like a transdimensional portal rather than a surface. A compact exemplar of Kant’s “mathematical sublime,” it seemed to uniquely exploit everything that made comics different from books, art, or moving pictures of any kind, historically as well as formally.
Clearly I love Acme Novelty Library #4 and Ware deserves to be fondly remembered for it, along with pretty much all of his ‘90s output. No one can take that away from him. The advertisements alone: “Make Mistakes, Get Children, And Forever Alter The Flavor of Life!;” “Large Negro Storage Boxes!” (this an advertisement for prisons); “Sexual Partner Sent To You Within Six to Ten Days!”;” “Irony!;” the list of bleak, brutally sharp promotions goes on and on (all exclamation points implied). Allow me to take one excerpt from a bit more detail, from the staggeringly tongue-in-cheek “Popular Television Programs on Cassette!,” describing the tapes’ content as provided by “your own personal video tutor:” “You’ll trace a summary of major themes, characters, plot lines, and the particular qualities that make each show so appealing to the average Amercan dumbfuck.”
Well put. And it’s not that I only appreciated his work when it was vulgar– it was rarely vulgar. But it was unrelentingly harsh. Compare this with the November 27, 2006 New Yorker cover that featured two Thanksgiving dinner tables in Ware’s trademark orthogonal perspective. One was from America’s temporally-indeterminate innocent past, and featured people having interactions (meaningful ones, to be sure), while, at the contemporary table, everyone was staring at the flatscreen TV. It’s like an edgy version of Norman Rockwell, except that Ware’s blunt nostalgia faithfully emulates Rockwell’s nadirs of treacle and falls short of his occasional glimpses of epic drama. The Thanksgiving scene echoes Ware’s equally drab, generic, competently banal depictions of people staring at cell phones. Instead of, you know, each other. Or, even better, authentically old-timey print media.
The series Ware worked on after the first Acme Novelty books– Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth, Bramford the Best Bee in the World, Rusty Brown, Building Stories, — have gone from grim to dismal to dull. Originally anchoring his stories in surprising juxtapositions of style and content, forcing the reader’s eye to maneuver through dense, clamorous riots of clean, graphic Constructivism, florid Art Nouveau, and moments from throughout the history of humor and fantasy comics, not to mention experimental animation, his mash-up of high and low culture worked much like Beckett’s interpretation of vaudeville in Waiting for Godot. The snarky pathos fed a battery of nihilistic tension, to be released in the searing vitriol of the avant-garde, a pathway to creative freedom in defiance of convention. How did we end up with lame bubble people barely mustering the strength to rehearse thoroughly unfunny but earnestly poignant tropes of modern literary realism? As one might have once imagined Ware himself saying when comparing sensual Art Deco rococo to arid Miesian modernism, “this is progress?”
Ware wasn’t quite a self-made artist, and may not be entirely to blame for disintegrating; he received an early break in Raw from Art Spiegelman (whose dive is only less impressive because of starting lower), but, at the millennium, Ware began networking in earnest with the insufferably ironically sincere elite of the patronizingly-educated-middlebrow culture industry– Dave Eggers, Ira Glass, and Chip Kidd, for starters. His autistic antics in interviews and panels didn’t flag in their ostentatious displays of repression– and in fact, he may have started becoming more of a performance artist (as all celebrities must be) and less of an unequaled craftsman of sequential art. “Twee” describes a current in vulnerable jangly indie-pop music, first British and then American, but came to stand in for the preciousness of a generation that hit on someone by knitting a cozy for their portable toy record player. I think twee killed Chris Ware.
In twee there is neither humor nor horror, neither conviction nor swagger, just feelings. Feelings and nostalgia for feelings. Chris Ware was sucked into this vortex, streamlining himself into a reliable product for easy digestibility by self-styled “nerds” everywhere, and so we ended up with emo comics garbage overflowing the microcosm of craft-fair entrepreneurship and spilling into Michel Gondry, Death Cab for Cutie, and overdetermined bangs (all much to Chris Ware’s chagrin, if he has any left). True, this infantile regression might have happened anyway. Maybe it was September 11th that whetted the American appetite for saccharine melancholia, but I blame Chris Ware. What twee had to offer that was positive– androgyny, sloppiness, magic– was latent but present in his flamboyant early work. He could have made different choices, But it is lost now, lost irrevocably in the sterile, commercially lubricated navel into which his vision has apparently gone to die.
illustration by Bert Stabler
Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
Is it ironic that your seeming favorite Ware work is also the one you read first, evoking the sort of nostalgia that is so problematic in his works?
That’s an interesting point, Derik. To be fair, though, the Ware work Bert’s praising isn’t that old…or at least, Bert was an adult when it appeared, so it’s not nostalgia for childhood, FWIW. (And FWIW, I basically agree with Bert on Ware’s former greatness and current not-so-greatness.)
Has there been much critical discussion (whether con or otherwise) about how different Ware’s work now is from his earlier efforts? It’s a pretty major stylistic shift.
Interesting. I would have preferred a critical dissection of “Jimmy Corrigan”, “Building Stories” or “Rusty Brown” instead of what is perhaps Ware’s weakest recent work, though. As is, the argument stands as so much subjective vitriol obscuring a kernel of validity.
Rusty Brown, which isn’t finished yet, shows some of the old sharpness, I’d avouch.
” the argument stands as so much subjective vitriol ”
It’s beautifully written subjective vitriol, though. And I think the linking of Ware’s problem to tweeness is a palpable hit. I mean…do you really feel that Bert’s points don’t apply to Building Stories? If not, why not?
“Has there been much critical discussion (whether con or otherwise) about how different Ware’s work now is from his earlier efforts? It’s a pretty major stylistic shift.”
I’ve not read the two edited volumes on Ware’s work (one English, one French) so I’m not sure.
“do you really feel that Bert’s points don’t apply to Building Stories? If not, why not?”
Personally, I’d hold off on that until reading the full thing (next month I believe). I’ve enjoyed Building Stories, such as I’ve seen it, much more than Rusty Brown, but I’m not totally clear on how all the pieces fit together (if they fit together at all).
I agree w/AB that there’s some genuine nastiness in Rusty Brown. It’s more Todd Solondz than Michel Gondry (or Wes Anderson, the premier purveyor of North American twee).
I’ve only read building stories in parts, but it seems less twee than it does middlebrow literary fiction. That said, I’d want to take it as a whole before passing judgment.
Wes Anderson for sure– not sure how I forgot to work him in.
I admitted that they’re my personal rotting grapes– nobody has to hate things just because I do.
But yeah, cultural forms change and sometimes decay, which has happened to comics overall maybe (a lot of them sucked in the old days but they were less flashy and pretentious about it)– so I agree with Chris Ware about that.
But the world overall, both aesthetically and in general, is better in some ways and worse in others, so I find nostalgia meaningful but ultimately corrupt.
Though I largely disagree, I’m not saying Bert is necessarily wrong — his criticisms may apply to “Building Stories” or “Rusty Brown” to some extent — only that picking Ware’s Thanksgiving covers is a little too easy. However problematic his nostalgia might be, I think it’s fair to say that there’s considerably *more going on in his work, plus he’s developed a lot since “Jimmy Corrigan,” just as he developed a lot from “Quimby” to finishing that work.
I’ve read those two books on Ware and don’t remember them discussing Ware’s development since his early days at any great length (though one of the best essays in the Ball-edited book is on “Quimby”). However, I found most of the essays so dull that very little of it has stayed with me, so I may be wrong.
Well… we do appear to have a consensus that the Thanksgiving cover is crap, at least.
I would definitely disagree on the quality of Ware’s recent output; I’ve found pieces of both Rusty Brown and Building Stories to be beautiful and moving, with emotional, realistic exploration of incredibly rich characters, along with some dark, bitter humor. But that nostalgic tendency of his is definitely a tiresome turn, like in those Thanksgiving covers, or that one Halloween cover where all the parents are staring at their phones. However, the tiresome “everything was better in the past” nonsense of the Thanksgiving stuff was leavened somewhat by the strip that went along with it (seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jason_whittaker/5323358210/in/photostream/), which was a gorgeous full page cascade of tiny panels that told the life story of the grandfather character. That makes it all worth it, if you ask me.
Also, his rejected Fortune 500 cover (http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/chris-wares-rejected.html) was hilarious too.
You take aim at Chris Ware and the best you can hit is one of his The New Yorker covers? Locked, loaded and misfired.
My misgivings about doing a “hate” piece are that I don’t really enjoy robbing the world of joy, as I sort of say in the intro. Except that Ware has robbed me of joy.
The fundamental shtick of modernism is “flatness as depth”– fracture and simplify an image, punctuate everything with stillness and silence, show the dark side of this and the misunderstood side of that, and you’ve made it complex. How phenomenological.
Chris Ware used to be funny and strange instead of deep. That’s my claim and I’ll stand by it.
Oh, but the Fortune 500 cover is good, sure.
Since ANL#4, Ware has released the Annual Report to Shareholders, which I’d argue is at least as good as the Quimby material; and Lint, which seems to me a serious contender for best single-issue of all time, and at least in the top 10. Even if you think the content of Lint is Updikean middlebrow (and fair enough — although I’d demur), it’s still a formal tour de force. The collected Building Stories also looks mind-blowing as art artifact qua art artifact.
I don’t really have much to say about this article since I think almost all of it is completely wrong, but I did want to say that I thought the comments on the Thanksgiving cover were the most wrong. First, talking about one of five covers in isolation from the other four is, well, just plain weird. Second, I’ve taught those covers at least three or four times now to both undergraduate and graduate students and the near universal reaction is “greatest thing ever” when students finally “get” what he’s done with those.
Even the “Penrod the Pigeon” cover?
Bart – are you able to point me in the right direction to “get” what he’s done with these covers? I’d *love* to think they are more interesting than I do right now.
I was going to say, in isolation those covers have their problems, but taken together especially with the large narrative about the grandfather, it’s something else. I still don’t think it’s anywhere near his best work, but definitely not crap.
The Fortune 500 cover, on the other hand, is pretty trite and uninteresting, in my book.
Not to mess up the whole “hate” vibe but I love the definition of twee as “the preciousness of a generation that hit on someone by knitting a cozy for their portable toy record player.”
Although I love Ware’s current work, I can understand preferring his early stuff. I read Acme #1 soon after it came out, and it was the most stunning comic-book I’d ever come across. Everything, from the opener about Super-Man sleeping with Jimmy’s mom, to the kid’s comic parody with Jimmy in the girl’s underwear drawer, to the Jimmy as a robot dream/fantasy sequences, to the portrayals of Jimmy the lonely old man, just blew me away. As the Comics Journal review at the time pointed out, Ware somehow managed to garner tremendous sympathy for Jimmy (from me, at least) without asking for it. Also, while Mad Magazine and everyone else had been doing comic-book ad parodies for decades, they had never been anywhere near that dark or witty before.
Getting back to what Jones said about “Updikean”–Lint really does share an awful lot of themes with the Rabbit books. “It’s all downhill from high school,” “fear of a gay son,” “self-pitying son blames dad for everything,” “stealing from the family business,” “attraction to daughter-in-law”… My uneducated guess is that Ware has never read those books and would be upset to realize how much overlap there is.
WTF??!!
It’s like I just walked up to the end of a parade route after the procession had long-since passed and the last stragglers were leaving. But in this case, Albert Stabler’s essay filled in the blanks regarding the inevitable question I’d ask one of the melting crowd, “Hey, Buddy, what’d I miss?”
Chris Ware’s career is “disintegrating” and in the throes of a “sickeningly steep” plummet???
Never mind the rest of the essay. That was a news flash to me!
My “career status needle” for Ware hasn’t budged in fives years, but then again, I’m not exactly the go-to guy for news about the current state of the comics industry.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking after reading Stabler’s essay that I either missed out on some big news at some point, or, perhaps, the reports of Ware’s demise may be a tad bit premature.
Jack, why do you assume Ware hasn’t read Updike? He seems quite well read, and interested in literary fiction…I mean, he might not have read them, but I wouldn’t make bets.
Russ, Bert is saying that the quality of Ware’s output has declines. He’s still as central a figure as ever in terms of the comics world.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
It’s beautifully written subjective vitriol, though.
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Too kind for “vitriolic,” I’d think. And much thought-provoking stuff…
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Well… we do appear to have a consensus that the Thanksgiving cover is crap, at least.
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Um, just ’cause something isn’t great, doesn’t mean it’s crap. Sure, the point is obvious, but that doesn’t mean the comment isn’t utterly on-target, the images superbly designed.
And “New Yorker” covers are either charming illustrations or lushly-rendered cartoons. Not the place to find great literary depth.
Well, I actually think he would have tried to avoid some of the overlap if he’d read those books. (I forgot to mention that Lint dies while halucinating about being a teenage rocker again while Harry Angstrom dies from trying to be a teenage basketball player again.) Also, my impression is that most art cartoonists weren’t that influenced by literature and especially not by establishment post-war guys like Updike, Roth, and Mailer. I could be wrong, though!
I think it’s unfair to judge his New Yorker covers against his previous comics work. They’re tame to be sure, but he’s also just completeing assigned work for pay. But back to his comics: ANL #19 had an ad for guantanamo bay and #20 was about an average man trying to find happiness and failing. Not exactly cute or “twee.” Sure his work dabbles in sentiment but it’s also cut with sharp humor. I do miss his goofier stuff from time to time though.
I disagree, I really liked the first work of Ware’s I saw, the 1st oversized Quimby the Mouse Acme and he’s getting better all the time; the last work I read, Lint, was the best yet.
I just looked at some image results from Lint. Woe, how utterly smug and yet drab. God is dumb! Yeah, the Superman stuff was a way better (funnier, scarier) deflator of master narratives.
Quoting myself from Facebook… I would never accuse Ware of shirking details. The ennui of the modern mundane is all about details. And yet it all adds up to “what are we giving thanks for, this empty crap?” You know, Thanksgiving got a lot better for some people AFTER civil rights….
Fortuitous typo. One should always say “woe” instead of “wow” (or “whoa”) in discussing Chris Ware.
Noah — I know what he’s saying. But, as I allude to, I hadn’t noticed Ware’s alleged fall from grace.
I can always go back and look at newer vs. older stuff and reassess, but nothing jumped out at mean. Then again, I’m no Ware expert.
I did go to a gallery exhibit of his work about six or seven years ago in Chicago, along with an exhibit of his work at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, but I wasn’t comparing or measuring his material versus any “quality timeline.” Perhaps that was my bad, but perhaps there was actually no reason to.
The “his/her old stuff was better” argument has bedeviled cartoonists every since I’ve been a serious fan (post-1967), and guys like Wally Wood repeatedly showede their derision towards fans who made such statements.
But, in defense of the critics, there’s often truth in their observations. In Wood’s case, the argument was apples and oranges to a certain degree for, while Wood’s best 1950s work was pretty spectacular, it was also much stiffer and less spontaneous than some of his later material. My guess is that Wood felt he was a much better artist in the 1960s and 1970s than as a young man at EC, so the occasional fan comments expressing more admiration for his EC stuff — particularly after Russ Cochran started reprinting everything — probably mystified him.
generally acknowledge, is that in their entire careers, they may only ring that magnum opus bell once or twice, or NEVER.
Think about it. Siegel and Shuster had exactly one idea that caught on: Superman. And it was an idea that they got even before they turned professional. The rest of their stuff was obscure or only modestly received.
Ditto for Eastman and Laird; Bill Everett; Dave Sim; Bob Kane; and William Marston.
Yet think of all of the thousands of professionals who have drawn comics for decades without every creating a single big hit or noteworthy artistsic triumph.
So if, as Stabler says, Ware’s a fading icon, then if I were Ware, I’d still be pretty damn proud that I was ever an icon at all.
But Ware’s a young guy, so I wouldn’t write him off just yet. After all, if you looked at Jack Kirby’s career in the summer of 1961, when he was just about the same age Ware is right now, you’d have been lamenting how his best co-creation was Captain America more than 20 years earlier, and that he was no longer a serious artist of note anymore.
Then, a few months later, he and Stan began to begat the Marvel Age of Comics…
“Jack, why do you assume Ware hasn’t read Updike? He seems quite well read, and interested in literary fiction”
Perhaps he is. But then again he’s said that he doesn’t read poetry. In my book that’s a major strike against him considering how trite “Rusty Brown” has been. I’ve said it before, but does the world really need another story about a pathetic superhero obsessed loser? Has alt-comics truly come a long way if the superhero genre still casts such a shadow?
“Also, my impression is that most art cartoonists weren’t that influenced by literature and especially not by establishment post-war guys like Updike, Roth, and Mailer. I could be wrong, though!”
I think I agree with that. Though maybe it’s a reflexive-default thing that alt-comics artists in “serious” mode create characters that mirror the characteristics of works from Updike and the like. That is, when they’re not creating comics about self-loathing masochists. Same difference?
It’s probably a tricky to sum up exactly what alt-cartoonists tend to be influenced by. I think in most cases their influences still lean more to the “pop” side of things, even for the ones who’ve been to art school.
Adding to my original request: if the essay had engaged one of the major works, or even the New Yorkers covers as a whole, it would have become apparent that Ware’s penchant for nostalgia has changed over time and that he is actively questioning it in his current work. It remains, but it really isn’t that central, and if one wishes to locate or discuss problems in his current work, I don’t think it’s the natural place to start either.
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Bert Stabler says:
…You know, Thanksgiving got a lot better for some people AFTER civil rights….
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And, gee, instead of loudly subjecting everyone in a public place to the details of their moronically banal cell-phone conversations, people in the 30s used to go into phone booths and shut the doors before yakking away!
So, is appreciation of those old phone booths to be dismissed with “…You know, telephoning got a lot better for some people AFTER penicillin was invented…”?
Ware is perfectly aware that there was plenty of bad stuff going on in “the Good Ol’ Days,” as do other folk (keeping things comics-related) like Crumb or Seth who similarly appreciate many facets of past times.
As one example, in Ware’s satiric “old timey”-fashion advertisements (and this was fairly early in his career) he’d taken acidic jabs at, among other items, the racism which cozily coexisted with more appealing qualities of that era.
That “New Yorker” cover was not an essay asserting that The Past Was Better In Every Way. It simply pointed out that before the intrusion of the idiot box, people gathered for a family dinner actually interacted more.
(You need not go into the past to see this phenomenon in action. I was at a “mini-party” where all were in lively, enjoyable conversation until one of the hosts suddenly switched the TV on. The programming was utterly uninteresting crud; yet conversation instantly came to a halt as all paid attention to the tube. Shortly after, folks started leaving…)
Another Ware critique of modern mores, exquisitely designed: http://www.newyorker.com/images/2009/11/02/091102_warer18964.gif . Remember that 60s bestseller which advised, “Be Here Now”? These days, it’s “No matter what you’re doing, be anywhere but here, now…”
I Google’d “nostalgia chris ware” and ran across this essay-ette, “The Uses of Nostalgia,” by a familiar name: http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/the-uses-of-nostalgia/
Seth and Ware are brought up in “Graphic Nostalgia: Today’s Cartoonists Draw the Past.” Re the latter:
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With an intimate knowledge of the history of cartooning at his disposal, Ware constantly evokes a swelling of nostalgia in his reader with a familiar trope or “retro” look before, inevitably, deflating it. His character Quimby the Mouse looks like a pleasant 20s-era Mickey until you realize he suffers wild lust, incredible violence, and, of course, emotional devastation…
In the hands of contemporary cartoonists…the past isn’t mindlessly sentimentalized, but constantly evoked in order to tell stories about the present.
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http://nicholashunebrown.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/graphic-nostalgia-todays-cartoonists-draw-the-past/
I’m baffled by the association of Fascism and nostalgia by both Heer and Jameson in the above linked essay. There’s surely a mythical dimension to Fascism (the Roman empire was glorified as an example of past Italian glories), but Fascism was an anti decadent political movement. A model, yes, nostalgia for uncle Octavius’ rule?, never!…
Oh and… ahem… I’m not going to resurrect the Crumb discussion…
I think there’s a fascist nostalgia for volk culture, right? It’s tied to futurism, too, but I don’t think that means it’s not nostalgia.
I talked about that a little here.
“It’s probably a tricky to sum up exactly what alt-cartoonists tend to be influenced by. I think in most cases their influences still lean more to the “pop” side of things, even for the ones who’ve been to art school.”
I think this is a key issue with my inability to enjoy a lot of the major “alt-cartoonists” over an extended period, so many of them seem to be exclusively influenced by and drawing on other comics. I guess just in reacting (to a certain) against other comics was important historically (to expand the range of subject matter/genres), but it is also really limiting on so many levels (visually, narratively, thematically).
Concerning the New Yorker cover … the comix artist’s bag of tricks is not quite the same as the illustrator’s (esp. in North America) and Ware’s New Yorker cover demonstrates this problem. A lot of comix artists get overstretched when doing single illos & covers … they forget to please the eye.
And let’s face it, “twee” is the closest that American pop-culture will ever get to simulating tragedy. Back to the 17th-century, that’s my Fascist motto … Après toi, Rubens, le déluge!
Now I’m trying to think of American pop culture that manages tragedy without being twee…. Parts of the Wire? (But Bert really doesn’t like the Wire….) Some PKD is really sad…
“Unforgiven”? The Eastwood film.
Also “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death”, by James Tiptree Jr.
Unforgiven is a good call. I’m not familiar with that Tiptree story…but is she pop culture? On the border, anyway….
Lots of horror and splatter is tragic, lots of documentary (still largely fiction), PKD sure– but that’s still kind of a good point about tragedy, at least for educated white people. I mention that because even noble suffering comes a little easier when widespread suffering is still in recent memory. So, you know, rap music.
Fascism: super modern, super backward-looking. But Ware is really not in that ballpark, even if he has traded in satire for petty anguish.
or perhaps … the only real tragedy of pop culture is its antithesis — the quotidian life of the average human being?
R. Maheras:
“The “his/her old stuff was better” argument has bedeviled cartoonists every since I’ve been a serious fan (post-1967), and guys like Wally Wood repeatedly showed their derision towards fans who made such statements.”
Hey, it’s the old Woody Allen, “I like the earlier, funnier stuff better” comment!
Steven Samuels:
“…But then again he’s said that he doesn’t read poetry. In my book that’s a major strike against him considering how trite “Rusty Brown” has been. I’ve said it before, but does the world really need another story about a pathetic superhero obsessed loser? Has alt-comics truly come a long way if the superhero genre still casts such a shadow?”
If you haven’t read the more recent chapters of Rusty Brown, you should check them out; they’ve almost completely gotten away from the “portrait of a loser” stuff and moved on to explore the lives of other characters in the story. I think they’re some of Ware’s best work. (Sorry to go against the hate vibe)
I actually liked the “portrait of a loser” stuff, too. The middle-aged Rusty isn’t even a loser so much as a monster–the scenes of him wallowing in a dark basement filled with fast-food garbage and leering at Chalky’s prepubescent daughter were genuinely disturbing.
The kind of “American Beauty”/ “Happiness” / “Magnolia” thread in film follows the whole life-too-small-and-venal-for-television vibe. If you all want more of that, I don’t doubt it will keep being proffered by semi-edgy mainstream auteurs.
But this is a hate festival, isn’t it? All this apologia is getting me down.
Matthew wrote: “Hey, it’s the old Woody Allen, ‘I like the earlier, funnier stuff better’ comment!”
Ha, good example!
I’ll bet Woody Allen has heard it a time or two himself. (in a nasely, [f]annoying voice) “Ahhh, Mr Allen, your best films were made in the 1970s, before you became an old, curmudgeonly pervert. Even your early stand-up material was funnier than your older stuff. What the hell happened to you? “
So– everyone thinks that accusing Ware of falling off can be dismissed because “falling-off” is some kind of cliche that doesn’t describe an actual phenomenon? You know what else is a cliche? The cult of genius.
Some artists fall off. Hate to break it to you.
“So– everyone thinks that accusing Ware of falling off can be dismissed because “falling-off” is some kind of cliche that doesn’t describe an actual phenomenon?”
Or maybe we just don’t think he’s falling off… I’d certainly prefer to read what I’ve seen of Building Stories to the early Acme Novelty stuff. At this point, I think I prefer it to Jimmy Corrigan too.
Fair enough. It’s a little too grown-up for me. I like complicated and sad, just not poignant.
I dunno. I just think it’s way too early to tell.
I agree with Bert that many…even most…artists “fall off.” I haven’t read Building Stories or Rusty Brown yet (waiting for them to be finished)…so I can’t really say for sure if I think Ware has fallen… but I do think the best part of Acme Novelty were the incredibly mean spirited and hilarious fake ads. Losing them is kind of disappointing. On the other hand…part of artists “falling off” is that whatever shock, awe and surprise one gets from encountering a unique-ish voice for the first time is lost when you start reading everything they produce over a period of years. Either you get used to the stuff you used to find new/unique/awesome…or they start doing something different which you many not find so enjoyable. It’s great when artists start doing new things…the only problem is, they may be doing new things you like less.
“I think this is a key issue with my inability to enjoy a lot of the major “alt-cartoonists” over an extended period, so many of them seem to be exclusively influenced by and drawing on other comics”
I think it’s especially true for the “old guard.” On the upside, there seems to be more cartoonists coming up with a more varied level of influences. Like this recent discussion pointed out.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
I’m baffled by the association of Fascism and nostalgia by both Heer and Jameson in the above linked essay. There’s surely a mythical dimension to Fascism (the Roman empire was glorified as an example of past Italian glories), but…
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And Futurism comes to mind; hardly an art movement yearning for the “good old days”…
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…Italy’s most famous art movement of modern times was intimately involved with Fascism and indeed that Marinetti, Futurism’s leading exponent, had helped Mussolini found the movement in 1919…
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http://www.historytoday.com/richard-jensen/futurism-and-fascism
(Ah, reading on I see Noah brought up Futurism…)
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Jack says:
…The middle-aged Rusty isn’t even a loser so much as a monster–the scenes of him wallowing in a dark basement filled with fast-food garbage and leering at Chalky’s prepubescent daughter were genuinely disturbing.
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Yes. And, isn’t Ware’s savage attack on the greed, pettiness, emptiness of Rusty’s collector-mania the total opposite of glorifying nostalgia and its fetish-objects?
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eric b. says:
agree with Bert that many…even most…artists “fall off.” I haven’t read Building Stories or Rusty Brown yet (waiting for them to be finished)…so I can’t really say for sure if I think Ware has fallen… but I do think the best part of Acme Novelty were the incredibly mean spirited and hilarious fake ads. Losing them is kind of disappointing…
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Yes, I loved those ads! But how often can one redo that schtick?
And getting older, seeing the grave yawning before you, affects the viewpoints and attitude towards life of artists too, thus often affecting their work.
Should Ware be like the Rolling Stones, where “the band members today range in age from their late 60s to early 70s,” still acting like adolescent badasses?
Falling off is partly just regression to the mean: if an artist makes a work that’s better than, say, 98% of everything else, pure probability would predict that their next work will be at least somewhat closer to the average. When you’re at, or very close to, the very top, there’s nowhere to go but down. Some artists can get to the 98th percentile and stay there, but not a lot of them; even the greatest artists usually have a few pieces that are for die-hards and apologists only. One of the points often made in the recent obits for Joe Kubert was that, unlike so many others in his broad cohort, and unlike most artists, he didn’t peak and then decline so much as he reached a high point and just plateaued there for an impressive couple of decades. His late work looks just as good as his stuff in the 60s, at least to me, unlike e.g. Kirby’s late work or Infantino’s.
But has Ware fallen off? To me the evidence looks weak. The ad parodies — I liked them too! — seem like a younger man’s game, and I’ll also sign on to the view that Rusty is monstrous and therefore at least funny. That strip where he jerks off thinking “oh yeah, Mrs White’s titties” — champagne comedy. At first I thought the character was a step backwards for Ware, but he’s since expanded the whole sequence to a much broader scope of human experience.
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I mean, do we have to discuss the Tolling Stones? They had some decent songs, but were done by “Tattoo You.” They could have sucked just as much after that as a smooth jazz band or experimental string ensemble, but they chose to continue sucking as a rock band.
I have not read every Ware emission since I stopped feeling hopeful (and I’m fine with that), and obviously he is flourishing as a brand (I’m really fine with that– he’s certainly an intelligent and hardworking guy and I wish him well). But growing up has as many traps as staying trapped in childhood– and, oddly, they are sort of the same traps, and, also oddly, they are traps that Chris Ware has chosen to focus on in his work.
And yet, the anal-retentive minutiae of his self-loathing just don’t do it for me. No matter how wonderfully “human” they may be.
Another good typo. The bell tolls for thee, Mick Jagger!
The old ANL books absolutely kicked ass.
That is what is most depressing about Ware and what really merits Bert getting his hate on. That the later, kind of dull, kind of pretentious, fairly sentimental stuff, is critically and commercially successful is barely notable in my book.
Lots of people seem to like kind of dull, kind of pretentious, fairly sentimental art in all genres.
But Ware really had something special in the early days.
Kudos to Bert for taking a hate fest and using it make me remember something I love.
Aw thanks! Love wins!
Yesterday at SPX Chris Ware was asked a question about how much he thinks about the physical look and feel of the book before starting a project. He said he usually doesn’t at all – but then mentioned that he remembered reading an interview with Updike where he said he the first thing he does when starting a new book is picture the spine of the completed book.
I was hoping someone from this comment thread was in the audience and could appreciate the irony of Updike coming up in a discussion of Ware’s influences – but *not* for his writing.
Hey, thanks for this. What could be more modernist than admiring the thickness as flatness? Especially when it’s the thickness of John Updike.
Do excuse any double entendretude.
I’ll bet Woody Allen has heard it a time or two himself. (in a nasely, [f]annoying voice) “Ahhh, Mr Allen, your best films were made in the 1970s, before you became an old, curmudgeonly pervert. Even your early stand-up material was funnier than your older stuff. What the hell happened to you? “
They’re not wrong though. Is there anything he has done since, oh, 1990 to be generous that isn’t self indulgent wankery?
There’s one page of early Chris Ware that at the time I first saw it made me buy everything of his I could find and I think has everything that you need to read of his to get him. If I find it, I’ll post it on my own blog tonight.
Article summary: “I hate the thing I used to like because it got semi-popular”, sincerely, Every Hipster Ever.
Bert likes lots of popular things, though, including but not limited to Peanuts and the Beatles.
Chris Ware also had massive critical cred quite early; the stuff Bert likes is stuff Art Spiegelman liked… and Chris Ware isn’t super popular now, really. He’s a giant critical juggernaut, but he’s not a pop star. I don’t know that the narrative you’ve got there makes much sense, really.
No, I’m a hipster. I am a slender effeminate weirdo who is about to shit on whatever you just started to like last week.
This post is like a healing salve upon my soul. I was unfamiliar with Chris Ware’s work until I had to read Jimmy Corrigan for a class, and I haaaaaaaaaated it. I don’t need art to tell me real life can be petty, venal, and boring; I have real life.
It’s almost comforting to see Ware’s earlier, more satirical stuff, even if (thanks to Jimmy Corrigan) I probably won’t go out looking for it
Aw, that’s nice. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Ambrose Bierce described realism as something like, “things as they really truly actually are, as seen through the eyes of a toad.”
Bert: “I just looked at some image results from Lint…”
Ho ho ho.