Reviews

In short: Even diehard fans could skip this, this is more for collectors.

I am not proud of giving a 2* rating to my favorite living author. He continues to outdo himself—marriage and childbirth have somehow substantially elevated the ambition and enjoyability of his works. He has an innovative way of using symbols and page layouts to play with how time passes in the narrative, such that memories and daydreams can be followed in parallel to plot events. Like how Woolf, Gaddis and Wallace reinvented the use of paragraphs, dialogue and footnotes to make both the reading and the imagined events more 'fluid', Ware is doing for the comic book panel (just look at the cover for this!) In short, Chris Ware is the biggest proponent (and best example) that comics will soon be sufficiently intricate to be classified as classic literature.

The reason I'm giving this 2*s is because there's nothing really new here.

I thought this would be an autobiography, and it sort of is, but it's much more like Ware's art school portfolio (mainly modelling). You learn that Ware imitated many good artists to find his style, which I'm placing as a mix of Schultz, Spiegelman and Burns. I learned more about Ware's vision of the graphic novel in the opening essay on the inside cover of Jimmy Corrigan, and more about Ware's creative process in the Acme Novelty Datebooks. It's nice to see photos of his family, but it all felt quite emotionally terse when he barely talked in much detail about his personal life. On page 61 there's a photo captioned of his then girlfriend: 'Jon Jeffus endures my inexcusable lack of eye contact while I [work]'. I felt like this photo resembled how I as a reader of this book felt like, with only scant mentions of his feelings among this portfolio that I otherwise can't really connect with. I'm just not entirely sure what was meant to result from reading this, perhaps I don't understand monographs, but I felt this lacked detail despite its unwieldy page size and count.

I think I got more out of Adrian Tomine's New York Drawings, because at least that was focused on a particular part of his work and provided novel insights into his process. I just think Chris Ware has already written about all of this more clearly elsewhere, so as a book I can't really recommend it despite it containing excerpts from exceptional comics.

n8duke's review against another edition

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5.0

A beautiful and awe inspiring collection with lots of surprises. And as a fan it was wonderful to see bits and pieces of the enormous amount of work that goes into all of Chris Ware’s art.

schwalove's review against another edition

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5.0

Portrait of the Artist as an Exercise in Self Doubt

I ❤️ Chris Ware’s work, including Chris Ware’s personal reflections on Chris Ware’s work.

I guess this isn’t really so much a review as a statement of fawning admiration.

nickpalmieri's review

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective relaxing slow-paced

5.0

I've always been fascinated by the idea of creatives returning to the same themes over and over again, and the idea that anyone's work could be compiled chronologically to reveal greater themes that have been present from childhood to the present day. This book does exactly that for Chris Ware, one of the greatest living cartoonists (by my estimation, at least). The text on each page, somewhat akin to the descriptions you'd see in a museum aside each piece of art, could be compiled as a book-length memoir. Likewise, the many pieces of story art, original art, fake ads, designs, wooden dolls, old-timey sculptures, paper replicas, enlarged New Yorker covers, and pasted-in minicomics could stand on their own as an incredible artbook. Yet "Monograph" is simultaneously both artbook and memoir, and neither. By putting them together, he creates something far greater, not unlike the mechanics of putting two panels together when reading a comic, or, as he opines, the third being that is created when two people share a connection.

Ware's personal story is inspiring and tear-jerking without meaning to be. In fact, those are probably, in his infinite self-consciousness, the last things he'd want a reader to get out of the book. The personal details are sparse enough that he seemed to be actively avoiding any easy appeal to the emotions. And yet, I broke down in tears by page 13, and found new meaning in myself as a creator by the end.

Most fascinating are the endless nuggets of wisdom he drops just by sharing his creative process. His ideas about seeing panels as a theatre-influenced "proscenium" as opposed to a film-influenced "camera" were revolutionary to me, revealing an indescribable feeling I've never been able to put to words that his work has, as do pre-film comic strips and the work of other greats like Charles Schulz and Jeff Smith. His thoughts on creating as a form of recreating memory, with all the fickleness of the human brain, also helped me understand why I enjoy so many of his works, and helped me appreciate the strange thing that is consciousness.

I've barely scratched the surface here. The 20+ hours I spent with this giant book (both in dimensions and density of content) were kind of revelatory to me in ways I still can't quite wrap my head around yet, and I'm sure I'll be back to revisit it soon. A grand experiment that works so much better than it had any right to.

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