Chris Ware in "Chicago" - Season 8 | Art21

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]