Letter

The experience of reading Chris Ware’s Monograph is inextricably tied to what it’s about. Its inordinate size transforms a grownup into a child. One can set the book down on a table or on one’s lap, but it will take up all available space and make it impossible to do anything else but turn its pages, often having to stick one’s face within inches to catch some of the infinitesimal detail or tiny text. It’s a rare accomplishment these days to make a work of art which demands complete physical and mental attention to be appreciated but Ware has done that with this volume. There’s no casually flipping through while checking Twitter and watching a TV show; one reads this book or sets it down and does something else.

Going all the way to back his college days at the University of Texas and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ware was always wrestling with the language of comics. One of his first widely-circulated strips, “I Guess” was published in Art Spiegelman’s Raw in 1991 while he was still in school. In it, the panels show a superhero’s adventures while the word balloons and captions tell a childhood story about a boy’s fraught relationship with his stepfather. His experimentation would evolve and grow as he moved on to longer narratives about Quimby Mouse, Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and scores of other recurring characters.

Ware’s book-length essay serves several functions. It is an introduction to the finished strips, sketches, process drawings, cardboard models, wooden sculptures, and family photographs which fill the lion’s share of page space. It is also a revealing rumination on his childhood, artistic development, and aesthetic philosophy. It is also, at times, a witheringly funny critique of secondary arts education, the art world, and American society as a whole.

One of the more fascinating insights Ware shares into his process is that he works improvisationally, allowing what he draws to suggest the developing narrative rather than planning out the story, then illustrating it. For someone who, as Ira Glass hilariously puts it in his introduction, is a “control enthusiast”, this intuitive method may seem surprising. But since so many of Ware’s stories concern the perils of memory this approach makes sense the more one thinks about it. Scripting the leaps in time and space traversed from panel to gutter, along dotted lines, riding shooting arrows all over any given page of a Ware comic might be too tall an order even for the master himself.

In another revealing passage he talks about comics being a linguistic rather than illustrative art; that rather than just enhancing accompanying words, the drawings themselves must be read to be understood. This is why he works so hard to make them as clean and clear as he possibly can. He doesn’t want the reader to linger over how this or that detail is rendered but rather to register both words and images as parts of the flowing narrative.

Monograph is a rare joy for Ware fans, as it revisits so many of his career highlights while also sharing lesser known work and personal anecdotes. The large reproductions of the automatons, toys, and model houses he builds as a respite from the long hours at the drawing table are a delight to peruse as well.

In all it’s a fitting testament to one of the best artist/writers we have. Read my interview with Ware here.

They were showing La Belle Noiseuse at the Siskel and I couldn’t resist. Four hours of a weird old painter trying to recapture his fire by painting a beautiful young woman and the repercussions her posing for him had on everyone dear to them. This is my idea of good way to spend an afternoon.

When Jacques Rivette’s movie came out in 1991, I was drawing or painting nudes a few times a week in school. It was like a superhero version of my everyday. I think I went to see it three times at least. I loved the real-time slowness of it even while cringing at Frenhoffer’s absurd, pompous pronouncements. I wanted to live in a crumbling French villa with Jane Birkin wandering barefoot through its countless rooms like he did.

Twenty-seven years later I no longer wanna live in a French vila and, as a middle-aged man, the decades-long conflict between Frenhoffer and his wife read very differently than they did when I was in my early twenties. But the artist-model scenes brought back how much I’ve missed drawing and painting naked people. 

So a few days after seeing the movie I found a drop-in figure drawing session online, bought some newsprint and cheap drawing paper and showed up at a loft building on Hubbard at the appointed time. I haven’t drawn in a room full of others drawing in twenty-five years yet it all started coming back to me within minutes of dragging an easel to a spot and glancing around at the other arrivers. There’s a unique ritual thing that every artist does while setting up their gear. They fuss about how far this thing is from that thing, pace around, move things around again, then finally settle in.

From the casual conversation I overheard it was obvious most of the others were regulars. Someone turned on a boombox and the guy in charge said there were PBRs in the fridge for a dollar a pop. He reminded everyone to throw $10 in the pail for the two-and-a-half-hour session. Then a thin blonde walked up to the model stand in the middle of all the easels and chairs, took off her robe, and struck the first of about ten one-minute poses.

It all came back. That thing of reckoning with a body through charcoal marks on newsprint. I was sixteen the first time I did this; now I’m forty-seven but it’s the same as it was back then. There were no masterpieces made this night but it didn’t matter. The girl drawing in a chair to my left turned out to be a bartender at Soho House. She’d gone to SAIC for awhile and was planning to go back to school for medical illustration. She said she loved the Skylark and I invited her to come visit me there some Sunday. Maybe she’ll come by, maybe she won’t. I told her I’d never go to Soho House and she completely understood.

Being in that loft space for a few hours, drawing that girl, brought home how much I’d missed it. I won’t wait another twenty-five years to do it again.

—I wrote about Otto Neumann’s prints and some Roman Egypt mummy portraits for the Reader. 

I met Luc Sante a couple years ago when he came to town on book tour for his amazing Other Paris. A few of us went to Cunneen’s afterwards for drinks and Indian takeout. Bill Savage was our bartender and it felt altogether like a true literary evening. Since then Luc and I have kept up a correspondence via email and the occasional postcard.

I write him after seeing some Lino Ventura flick or when I’ve read something he wrote which grabbed me. Every now and then we write about the same subject, like Vivian Maier, and can compare notes. I’ve been reading his stuff for over twenty-five years, so to now count him as an acquaintance and colleague is really something.

A few weeks ago he wrote saying he and his girlfriend, Mimi Lipson, were taking a tour of places she’d lived and would be in Chicago a couple days. He wanted to know if I’d meet them for a drink. Name the time and place, I quickly wrote back.

Early on a frigid Saturday evening I walked into the Green Mill. The Paper Machete crowd was still milling about, yapping loudly, coming down from the high of putting on a show. Luc, Mimi, and an uncle (or perhaps more distant relation) of hers named Terry, were looking around for a spot to land. I led them back toward the entrance, to a booth further away from the loud talkers. We ordered drinks and took a look around. The Green Mill is a bar I don’t go to much but always appreciate the look of when I do. Especially at that hour when the crowd was thinning, in the short time before it would fill back up again for the evening’s jazz set. “There’s no place left in New York that looks like this,” Luc said. And he’d know. I pointed out the window toward Lawrence and told him the Aragon Ballroom was just half a block down. He’d sent me a great old postcard of it a few months back. In my nearly thirty years in Chicago I’ve never been inside that place. 

Soon the hostess came around to ask if we were staying for the music but we decided to go next door to Fiesta Mexicana for some food. Turns out Luc and Mimi were staying at Terry’s place a block away from the Rainbo Club. Terry looked so familiar and now I could swear I’d seen him there a week or two before.

Talk turned to the publishing world and we all took turns telling our tales of woe. Mimi had a book of short stories published by an indie press the same year my second book came out. Our complaints were so similar as to seem redundant.

En route to Rite Liquors on Division for a nightcap, Mimi remarked how cozy and warm it was in their car. Luc said we could thank Bob Dylan for that. He had wrecked his old one when someone had smashed into him and sped off. Then, like a guardian angel, Dylan had hired him to write some liner notes and he bought this car. I was hoping he was gonna say Dylan was the hit-and-run driver.

At the bar Terry and Mimi were greeted like family. There was immediately a free round of shots. Luc sat back taking it all in. He said there weren’t many places like this in New York either. But I gotta believe there’s still some shitty taprooms left somewhere on the outskirts of the outer boroughs. Maybe near LaGuardia. Then he admitted he wasn’t really much of a drinker. Pot was his bag. I told him I hadn’t had pot in almost twenty years. But truth be told I’m no longer much of a drinker either. I need to be clear to get my work done and, despite what they show in the movies, you can’t really paint drunk.

We spent the rest of our time admiring the wall of aging spirits in front of us. I pointed to a tall dusty Galliano carton up near the ceiling and wondered how long it had been there. I don’t remember the last time I heard anybody order a Harvey Wallbanger in a bar. Bet that bottle’s been up there decades. Luc bought a t-shirt which said RITE LQUORS: CASH ONLY! in bright yellow on a black background. I told him he should wear it to his readings so the audience knows what’s expected of them afterwards.

We said our goodbyes and I wished them luck with the rest of their tour. They were headed to Akron, Ohio, next, then back home. I walked east on Division to take the Blue Line, but when I got to Ashland I put up my hand and hailed a cab. It had been a good night but I was ready to be home.

—RIP Joe Frank. One of the best storytellers ever, who couldn’t keep up with his medical bills toward the end of his life because our country’s fucked.

— I reviewed the show of J. Maloof’s latest discovery. This one’s a third-rate Chicago Imagist.