Who is Chris Ware? A lord that draws 47 flakes of snow in an introduction, and makes them all different, unique. A cartoonist who laughs at himself on display in his latest comic as a character, something obsessive, something, addicted, scorned by someone as “dumb ass”. An author who aims to catch the complexity of life in a few books that devotes long years, and which are generally held as a new visit of Halley’s comet to the Earth. In Rusty Brown (Reservoir books, translated by Rocío de la Maya Retamar, his latest creature published in English, passed all of that.
Are the 47 structures that have been rolled, the self mockery and the density of several biographies that revolve around a character, an excluded child is protected after a super imagination. There is humor, hot flashes, tedium, dreams and melancholy, which are deployed in 360 pages of vivid colors full of twists and turns narrative, dead ends and side roads. Ware has not been born to promote the comfort of his readers: you can offer two stories in parallel on the same page, to express feelings with geometric forms or include 176 bullets in the compressed space that mark 16×32 inches. “I try to produce, with images and words on a page, the intensity the more complex of the human feeling that can, as well as create the feeling of life more overwhelming and immersive as possible,” he says in an email interview.
There is some clue that explains where it comes from Ware (Omaha, Nebraska, 51 years) and this way of narrating that dazzled with Jimmy Corrigan: the guy most ready of the Earth or Fabricate stories. Granted, his talent as a draftsman, which makes his books on words greater is their ambition classic, his eagerness to tease out a biography from the insignificant to the momentous, from the little ant crushed by a child’s obsession with sex, the cupcake (cupcake) to racial discrimination. There is an inheritance that comes from some Russian and French (among others) and that Ware has accommodated its expressive language: “In the past 20 years, I have tried to read what are considered the best works of literature, from Flaubert to Tolstoy, Proust to Angelou, Joyce, Chekhov, and Nabokov, and I guess that I can imagine working in that tradition, but with images instead of words.”
The cartoonist Chris Ware, in Bologna (Italy). ROBERTO SERRA
almost none of them has found an optimistic and reassuring of the existence, without which they reproach a desire to “annoy the reader”. “This seems to be a contemporary problem, perhaps because we have lost the notion of the intense feeling of the passage of life in the attack of all digital distractions, entertainment and nonsense flowing through our minds and eyes for second, every waking hour of every day,” adds Ware.
The protagonists of Rusty Brown come from a small school community of Omaha: a child repudiated that lives and dreams for Supergirl, a professor with so many frustrations professionals as affective, a student who engages in aggressive their scars more intimate and a master black you are looking for in the banjo which is not found in the others. Time scampers across the pages, they come and go stations, chronological jumps, childhoods and vejeces, tontunas and dramas. There is No narrative linearity in a stage drawn with precision architectural. On that halo of sadness, which envelops the atmosphere, Ware reflects: “If there is, is encoded in the points of view frustrated for the characters. The work of art, color and compositions are there to contradict, and offer an argument opposite to that feeling, if I’ve done my job correctly. Life is full of sadness, regret and uncertainty, and if you ignore that truth, I would be lying. Never lie, unless you don’t give me account”.
The first story of Rusty Brown began to be written in 2000. The last was completed in 2018. Perhaps worried, perhaps ironic, Ware adds a small explanatory note at the end of his graphic novel: “The follower compassionate and insightful you will notice that the author has been dedicated to designing other projects and artistic experiments during the past 18 years, not only this single, sad, and inexplicable work”.
—have you ever been concerned with being an author of slow maturation? How are the envy of the prolific?
—of course; my friends writers Zadie Smith, Aleksandar Hemon, Dave Eggers published books almost once a year, which I envy. The comic books are, without doubt, a very laborious and quite inefficient to tell stories. The comics are also a very dense and multi-layered, which operate with mechanisms of reading, and vision to produce an experience, which I think may be closer to the consciousness of the human than any other visual medium existing.
—how are roads to be explored in the comic?
—Sincerely, I always feel like I’m just beginning. Although never experiment formally for the simple fact of doing so; such efforts are always in the service of trying to get a quality experience uncertain which could not otherwise express with words or images, such as what it feels like to be inside a human body, or how a random odor could affect my world view and my memories.
