Chris Ware: My day is entirely predicated on the schedule of the Oak Park school system.
In the morning, I get up fairly early before my wife and daughter
and sit and write in my diary for a little while
and then make breakfast for my daughter.
And then my daughter and I ride the bike to school.
[gentle music]
And then I come back and I work between the hours of 8:00 and about 2:45 or so,
and then I have to go pick up my daughter from school, so...
I used to work all day and all night long in my 20s or so,
but as I've gotten older and as a daddy,
I just can't do that.
[scratching of pencil on paper]
Being called an artist is certainly extremely flattering.
And it's not anything I necessarily ever expected.
There's something about being a cartoonist that seems like
an inherently humble sort of activity that I kind of like.
It's just me sitting at a table, and I do what I do.
So, I mean, I guess that's one possible route to making what might be called art.
[piano music]
I was kind of, you know, not the most athletic or popular kid.
So I started drawing comics, I think,
because it was a way of both defining myself amongst my peers
and also a way of disappearing into myself
and me sort of protecting myself from them--
so, um, and avoiding, uh, and avoiding physical... [laughs] combat or--or whatever.
That's really the only thing I've ever been able to do, is kind of draw.
It seemed to me like a miraculous sort of ability.
♪ ♪
I start every page generally on a piece of board that's approximately about 2-by-3 feet or so.
I draw everything in non-photo blue pencil,
try to find where the figures are in space in the blue.
And then when that is done,
I go over those particular emphasized lines in black ink.
And when this page is photographed,
the blue pencil will not appear at all.
It will drop away.
And all that's left will be the black line.
From there, I add in a layer of colors.
♪ ♪
Generally each page takes around 40 hours, strangely enough.
It's not like I chose 40 hours because it's the workweek or something.
But it really averages out to about that.
And a lot of that is just me getting up and walking around,
hating myself, and feeling uncertain
and giving into dread or feeling that it doesn't work
or rereading or trying to avoid work or any number of things.
[violin strumming]
Man: I mean, have you ever just woke up one day and thought...
"God...What am I doing? Is this me?"
[Chris Ware] Every strip, all the lettering that you see is all a product of my hand.
But I realize that the real process that goes into comics,
it's not pictures with accompanying text.
It's a psychological process of reading pictures.
It's a symbol system.
[energetic music]
For a while, I completely quit using words in my comics.
I was telling what happened rather than making it happen on the page.
Then I became more attuned to the internal rhythms and the sounds that
are created in the mind when one reads pictures only.
There's a certain kind of weird invisible soundless music that's created.
And then when I started reintroducing words into the comic strip,
I tried to do it in a more careful way.
[piano music]
As far as I'm concerned,
the page composition is more important than the individual panels.
When I'm composing my pages,
the way that the individual panels line up and inform each other is extemporaneous.
But there are always things that happen on the page that actually add meaning to the overall
structure of the story.
When you spend a week on a page, it takes maybe 15 seconds to read.
This is the page from a chapter of a very long book I've been working
on for a very long time titled "Rusty Brown."
I started this in 2001, and I've been working on it more or less steadily ever since
with interruptions for other stories and books and projects, so...
This first half of the book will be in excess of 300 pages.
I like long books.
You know, there's something interesting about sitting at a table for a couple of decades
working on a book that takes 3 or 4 hours to read.
[clock ticking]
[lively piano music]
My daughter said recently,
"We're weird, Daddy.
We don't have anything modern in our house.
What's wrong with us?"
I tend to arrange and collect things.
Maybe that's part of being a cartoonist is ordering and arranging things.
I guess I started getting interested in old toys,
um, when I got interested in old comics.
And there is certainly a relationship there between the two.
And I like looking at the stuff.
♪ ♪
[clock ticking]
It was "Peanuts" that really got to my heart.
I feel like "Peanuts" is the point at which
comics really became a medium of emotional connection to readers.
Charlie Brown is the first cartoon character for whom you really feel something.
Not only do you feel through Charlie Brown,
but you feel for him.
He's the first empathetic cartoon character.
The fact that Charles Schulz was able to put that empathy and sense of connection into a character
allowed for my generation, then,
to try to write stories about actual human feelings
as opposed to the superhero kind of stuff that we'd grown up with.
[soft electronic music]
The whole idea of a serialized comic strip, really,
is endemic to Chicago,
starting here with the "Tribune."
The publishers there very specifically came up with
the idea of telling a regular story
that readers would get involved in on a-- on a daily basis.
Everybody paid attention to "The Gumps" or "Gasoline Alley"
or "Little Orphan Annie" or something.
I sort of feel like I'm kind of part of a tradition.
The sort of hominess of the Chicago cartooning at that time appealed to me early on.
And I think I kind of now I understand why.
There's a real unpretentiousness to the city of Chicago.
Especially as New York has kind of become the city of the 1%,
Chicago has stayed steadfastly the city of the 99%.
There's an American honesty to it that I like.
— Woohoo! Got two panels drawn.
Time for lunch.
[indistinct conversation]
I never expected in any way to make a living doing what I'm doing.
I thought I would just be the weird guy working in the arts supply store
or the frame shop or the bakery that people would point to and say,
"He's the crazy guy working on that long graphic novel for, you know, the past 30 years or so."
Which they still very easily could do.
I just don't work in a bakery.
But, I'm certainly grateful for it,
but it wasn't what I in any way expected.
[strumming guitar music]
Well, I certainly can't pretend that it's not a
very lucky thing to occasionally get to do a "New Yorker" cover.
In fact, I frequently think "I can't believe this is happening."
It's really the only periodical publication in America,
if not in the world, that respects its artists as artists.
You are not told what to do unless you want to be told what to do or you want guidance.
Otherwise your drawing is treated as a single image.
All you have to do is make sure that the title of "The New Yorker" is on there somewhere.
♪ ♪
"Building Stories" was a book that I worked on for 11 years.
The story itself revolves around a woman who goes to art school,
gives up on art, and then has a family in Oak Park,
which is literally the neighborhood that we are in.
♪ ♪
Woman: Is it really too much to ask for just one hour
of not being a mom every once in a while?
She's his daughter, too, for Chrissakes.
[Chris Ware] So that's kind of what the book is about,
about the exchanging of one life for the other and the sort of guilt that's associated with that.
It came out serendipitously at a time when everybody thought that
books were gonna disappear and we'd all be reading on little glowing screens everywhere,
which, fortunately, doesn't seem to be the case.
People still seem to like books.
So this is a box that contains 14 individual pamphlets, books, foldouts, et cetera,
that can be read in any order--designed that way
because I think that's more the way that we experience life and remember life.
This particular book here is about one day in the main character's life.
It's designed like a Little Golden Book.
This is represents the memories of her when she's kind of given up on art and art school,
living alone in her 20s in the city of Chicago.
A book itself isis sort of the perfect metaphor for
It's got a front and a back.
It's got a spine, and it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
[strumming music]
I think that there's a lot of inner turmoil and conflict.
And that's what stories are supposed to be about,
is to try to understand that.
Way early on, I wanted to try to create stories that got at emotions that felt real,
a strip that you weren't sure whether it was supposed to be funny or sad.
♪ ♪
I'm not trying to depress anybody.
I'm just trying to portray what I think it feels like to be alive.
That's really the stuff that lasts,
whether it's a sense of what it feels like to be alive in a room talking to somebody
or alone in a room awash in your own uncertain thoughts.
That's really what it comes down to.
And I think that as human beings, we can't really be any better or hope for anything better
until you can empathize with other people and to try to feel not only for them but,
hopefully, in a sense even maybe through them a little bit.
There's so much storytelling that's not like that
that it feels like comics are a good place to do it.
♪ ♪
[soft electronic music]