In an interview with Stephen Heller you mention that you have no interest in being a graphic designer, though you have done some graphic design (album covers, book jackets, et al.) Yet your comics work looks incredibly well-designed and has an aesthetic that resonates with graphic designers. Can you talk about your
impressions/thoughts about the relationship your work has to graphic design, and what inspires your distinctive style?
Whatever work I’ve done as a graphic designer sort of follows a graph that roughly plots my need to pay my rent versus the time/tolerance I have available for it, with that curve rolling off over the past few years only into projects for friends (the occasional CD cover) graphic-design-as necessity (my own weird periodical The Rag Time Ephemeralist) and projects which I am happy to be involved with (the book and record set for the Paragon Ragtime
50 Orchestra’s orchestration of Scott Joplin’s
“Treemonisha.”) None of them have anything to do with comics-writing, however, which, as an art of composition and nearly always reproduction, inevitably involves graphic design as an integral approach and component, but not as an end in itself.
You mentioned in several interviews how much you love 19th century typography, particularly for its human, expressive character—
something which often lies in contrast to the controlled, clean linework of your illustrations.
Can you discuss the reasons you choose to use typography in this way?
Even if my artwork appears to be clean and controlled, it’s still hand-drawn and nowhere near as clean and controlled as the hand-drawn typography of the 19th century. I hand draw typography in my comics because it’s an expressive part of the comics themselves, and I want it as much as possible to be an unconscious part of the writing, as well; i.e. to be “born”
at the same time as the drawing and the writing, not applied apart from it.
51 Chris Ware’s
record label design for Sub-Pop records. Previous spread: detail from Ware’s illustration for the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival held in 2012.
I was just recently at a book fair in Germany and spent a good part of the time looking at modern publisher’s booths and their pleasantly-designed covers, but discovered a section of book dealers which left me astonished anew at the superiority of the work of one hundred years ago, especially the clarity, fineness and beauty it embodied and which our time period almost entirely ignores, or more properly, lacks the facility to any longer fully understand.
52
53
Some of the lettering in your work is so small I need a magnifying glass to read it, and I have 20/20 vision! Can you talk about this intriguing and amusing design choice?
This is going to sound pretentious, but in a leaf of a tree one can see the structure, shape and growth of the tree itself, and
I guess I’m in some way trying to model the same recursiveness in the structure of my panel, pages and ultimately the books themselves. (I also don’t like to waste space.)
Much of your work references ads, signage and branding from previous decades, incorporating these ordinary and often beautifully kitschy things into your narrative in a lyrical way. Can you talk about the relationship that advertising and branding has to your storytelling methods?
Well, aside form the fact that I loathe advertising, it’s also an integral, living part of my memories and my consciousness, just as it is for nearly everyone in the “developed” world.
It’s so difficult in any urban area to not be free of something to read, or to compare oneself
54 to, or to wonder about what it is exactly that these people who make these ads think will appeal to or sell something to a stranger.
These images, phrases, typefaces, music and films linger in the consciousness, fester, take roots and infect real memories, leeching what should be honest nostalgia for people and places and then replacing it with a jingle or a clever camera trick. YouTube is full of television commercials that remind
me of my parents and my grandparents, a whole relationship which is sinister and sickening. At the same time, I fondly and deeply remember so many of these ads, and few experiences other than opening the cabinet in which I’ve kept all the objects I collected from my grandmother’s house and inhaling the collective odor take me back to that time more fully. Lastly, the designers who work in advertising make fabulously serious amounts of money, so they assume
“If I’ve potentially got all the graphic tools of expression at my fingertips, I should make use of as many of them as possible.”
what they do must be important. And it is, 55
ironically. Maybe it’s even the real art of our time, in a way. James Joyce employed the repeated banal phrase threading through the thoughts of Leopold Bloom in “Ulysses”
to suggest advertising’s insidious infiltration of experience, and that book is only set in 1904; imagine how poisoned and bilge-choked our minds are now.
You employ the use of infographic charts in your work—most recently in Building Stories.
Can you talk about your reasons for using this technique as a narrative device?
It’s simply one way out of many to present relationships (whether between people, places, ideas or falsehoods) in a manner that is non-verbal; it’s another way of writing in pictures that’s not theatrical, but spatial and relative. I figure that if I’ve potentially got all the graphic tools of expression at my fingertips I should make use of as many of them as possible.
56
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Acknowledgements
This book is a thesis publication as part of the undergraduate program in Graphic Design at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington D.C.
Greatest thanks to Mr. Chris Ware, who graciously gave of his time for the interview.
Much gratitude for the invaluable editorial and stylistic guidance of Antonio Alcalá and Alice Powers, my thesis advisors for this book and its accompanying exhibition.