A review by levitybooks
Monograph by Chris Ware by Chris Ware
2.0
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.
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.