Tag Archives: Chris Ware

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Matthias Wivel on Ware and Rembrandt

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Matthias Wivel wrote an extended response to Caro’s post on Chris Ware and criticism. I hated to see it buried at the end of that long comment thread, so I thought I’d give it it’s own post. Hopefully Matthias won’t take it amiss. So here it is:

Wow, great discussion! I’m not sure where to pick up, but let’s see…

Your basic criticism of Ware seems to me somewhat beside the mark and fairly typical of a ‘literary’ point of view. But comics is a visual medium too, if not first and foremost, and there’s nothing ‘merely’ about concentrating one’s efforts, if that’s indeed what Ware does, in the ‘drawings’ — by his own rather sophisticated, if unacademic, analysis of cartooning, that’s precisely what cartooning is about; a visual language that one reads, rather than looks at.

At a more fundamental level, the whole idea of separating form from content in the way you suggest — in order to locate some intellectual premise — is false. It strikes me as a more advanced iteration of the familiar “the drawings are good, but the story sucks”-type criticism one reads so often in comics reviews. Form and content are one, and attempting to separate them is an abstraction that does not necessarily tell us much of anything about the work.

And even if you could separate them, why is it that works that have an intellectual premise are inherently better than ones that concentrate on emotion, as you say Ware’s do? And, by extension, why does the ability of the artist to articulate this premise independently of the work make it greater? I like Cocteau and Jeff Wall fine (Rushdie less so), but they strike me precisely as the kind of intellectual, ‘literary’ artists, whose work gains from this kind of intellectual parsing, while that of, say, Rembrandt doesn’t. And there is no doubt in my mind whose work is greater.

As to whether Ware has written a text like Wall’s very interesting one (thanks for calling attention to it!) — no, I’m not sure, but he has written and talked at length about his medium of choice, addressing as does Wall both his precursors and his practice. One may well disagree with his take on it, which as mentioned carries a non-academic bias in favor of his own approach, but it is hard to deny that it is an intensely analytical, not to mention sophisticated, one — clearly formulated by a highly experienced and self-critical practitioner.

Regardless, therefore, of whether Ware thumbs his nose at ‘criticism’ — and I agree that the Imp letter is dumb — he practices it himself. The Comics Journal cover tells us as much, it being a commentary precisely on the history and reception of his chosen medium. Reading it straight, as you did in your piece, seems to me to be missing its point; that he places criticism at the bottom of the ladder, along with pornography, is (besides being a dig at Fantagraphics’ livelihood) only natural: what else could he do when covering the a magazine whose stated purpose it has been to drag the still fledgling, and frankly impoverished, discipline out of its primordial state?

The reason I’m engaging your criticism, is because I’m struggling with some of the same aspects of Ware’s work that you seem to. I don’t think the emotional truthfulness of his work is quite as advanced or true to life as he would wish it to be — pace the tenor of his Datebooks — but at the same time I admire him for trying so hard to arrive at it. In this regard, he has matured considerably as an artist, and I find his latest work — especially the “Building Stories” series — promising in terms of presenting a more fully human point of view.

I disagree that he is unwilling to make a mess — I think that’s largely what he’s been doing, by hacking away at the same set of emotions for so long — it’s just that the mess he makes is so neat that one doesn’t immediately notice.

Ware seems to me to be using comics to convey a specific perception of time and space — a kind of visual epistemology that reflects his own inner life and that of his characters, and ultimately speaks to our experience of the world. The ‘premise’ is precisely the creation of ‘a sympathetic world for the mind to go to’ that you deride in your post, ‘however stupid that sounds’, and I believe that we are the richer for it.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Cocteau against Ware

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The Criterion Collection DVD of Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet contains a transcript of a lecture given by Cocteau in January of 1932 at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, on the occasion of the film’s premiere there. Cocteau begins by talking about critics.

First of all, I will give you an example of praise and of reprimand that I received. Here is the praise. It comes from a woman who works for me. She asked me for tickets to the film, and I was foolish enough to fear her presence. I said to myself: “After she has seen the film, she won’t want to work for me.” But this is how she thanked me: “I saw your film. It’s an hour spent in another world.” That’s good praise, isn’t it?

And now the reprimand, from an American critic. He reproaches me for using film as a sacred and lasting medium, like a painting or a book. He does not believe that filmmaking is an inferior art, but he believes, and quite rightly, that a reel goes quickly, that the public are looking above all for relaxation, that film is fragile and that it is pretentious to express the power of one’s soul by such ephemeral and delicate means, that Charlie Chaplin’s or Buster Keaton’s first films can only be seen on very rare and badly spoiled prints. I add that the cinema is making daily progress and that eventually films that we consider marvelous today will soon be forgotten because of new dimensions and color. This is true. But for four weeks this film has been shown to audiences who have been so attentive, so eager, and so warm, that I wonder after all if there is not an anonymous public who are looking for more than relaxation in the cinema. (This is followed by several hundred words about the film, demonstrating that it is more than relaxation. )

Contrast Cocteau’s response with Chris Ware’s letter about the issue of Imp devoted to his work (published in the subsequent issue).

You’ve done what most critics, I think, find the most difficult – writing about something you don’t seem to hate, which, to me, is the only useful service that “writing about writing” can perform. You write from the vista of someone who knows what art is “for” – that it’s not a means of “expressing ideas,” or explicating “theories,” but a way of creating a life or a sympathetic world for the mind to go to, however stupid that sounds. Fortunately you’re too good a writer to be a critic; in other words, you seem to have a real sense of what it is to be alive and desperate (one and the same, I think.)

Both reactions are, at root, comparisons of praise with reprimand. Yet, unlike Ware, Cocteau apparently finds the reprimand more interesting than the praise. It is noteworthy that the praise Cocteau receives from his female colleague – and mostly dismisses as a kind compliment – is virtually identical to Ware’s stated purpose for art. It is even more noteworthy that Ware’s ideal is so limited in scope that it is entirely inadequate to describe Cocteau’s proto-Surrealist film, which he indicated was created as “a vehicle for poetry – whether it is used as such or not.”

Of course, perhaps Ware was only trying to be nice to the guy who devoted a whole issue of a magazine to him. There is something a little over-the-top about his phrasing. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt even though that letter put such a bad taste in my mouth that I think of it every single time I see the name ‘Chris Ware,’ and it casts a shadow over my appreciation of his work. I’m almost convinced that deep down he actually does agree with himself – is it possible that he really is actually as insecure as his self-presentation? – but I’m willing to be dissuaded.

As published, though, Ware’s letter voices incredibly facile positions on the purpose and value of criticism and art, stating (in opposition not only to Cocteau but even to Gerry Alanguilan) that “writing about writing” can serve no useful purpose other than to praise. (He at least has the sense not to use the word “criticism” in this context.) The letter implies not only that Ware feels he has nothing to learn from critique but that critics who dissent with the Vision of the Artist are somehow bad, not “good writers,” dry and dessicated and less-than alive. This is an evisceration of the existence of criticism, exiling “writing about writing” to the commodity function of marketing and “Comics Appreciation 101” for books that reviewers like.

Unfortunately, Ware’s cover for TCJ 200, which also touches on this theme, only gives a little evidence in his defense: his library shelf appears to be a stack ranking of comics “genres,” with pornography and criticism at the bottom, and Art at the top – but nothing on the shelf.

The page is at least slightly ambiguous: there’s really nothing that mandates the shelf be read as a hierarchy rather than a pyramid with criticism and pornography as comics’ foundational pillars. It’s a very open depiction with both interpretations in play. Against the letter’s statement that art is not for “expressing ideas,” the cover expresses plenty of ideas: the juxtaposition of the “youth library” with a setting that is obviously adult (the high ladder, the call slips for closed stacks, the pornography); the ambiguous hierarchy/pyramid itself; the absence of anything much on the “art” shelf; the blurring of age – the cartoon characters depicted are all small children, but they’re behaving like adolescent boys, filling out call slips so Nancy will climb the ladder and they can see up her skirt –; and the resultant indictment of comics fandom and subject matter as stunted and age-inappropriate juvenilia. (Irrelevant aside: the periods in the window and on all of the signs really bug me.)

Yet despite that pretty interesting cluster of ideas, the blunt, indiscriminately ironic tone undermines them by flattening any possible value distinctions. That works strongly against any optimistic interpretation of Ware’s point. Gary Groth in the psychiatric help box is the most honest bit of the page, which verges past Ware’s routine self-deprecation into a scathing self-loathing that reaches beyond the individual to the group. This Ware would only join a club that would have him as a member so he could mock them for their bad taste. It is only funny if one has infinite patience with self-awareness as an excuse. Unless one gives Ware the benefit of the doubt to start with, this panel exudes little more than anger and contempt.

So is the letter too just another example of Ware’s incessant clanging self-deprecation? “My art expresses ideas, so it doesn’t quite measure up to the best purpose of art”? I don’t really think that’s the case.

Ideas take many forms, including images and certainly there’s nothing wrong with expression. The use of art by individuals to express themselves is of time-tested value. Ware’s letter elides the fact that his stated purpose, the “creation of a life or a sympathetic world for the mind to go to,” involves almost exclusively the expression of ideas about that life/world, despite his rejection of ideas as fair game. The letter’s point, though, is prioritizing the evocative experience of a visual “place” over the cerebral experience of ideas or theories, and Ware is far better at evocation than he is at ideas and theories.

So I think his art is consistent with his theory of art in the letter. Despite the frequent self-deprecation, he doesn’t really need praise artistically. He is perfectly well aware of what he does well. He rarely sets himself artistic tasks he cannot execute flawlessly.

More often than not, complexity in Ware’s drawing derives from the intricate realization and juxtaposition of ideas on his carefully crafted pages rather than from a complex interplay among the ideas themselves that is then, subsequently, represented on the page in an equally complex way. The repetitiveness of his aesthetic and the relentlessness of his irony further limit the range of conceptual material available to a critic. Although it’s possible to interpret the TCJ cover as ambivalent about criticism, the hint of ambiguity is just that – a hint. Ware does not tackle the layered ways in which the ideas interact. The concepts consequently never mature into a meaningful new insight: the piece is a meaningful representation of very familiar old insights. Overall the cover is smart, but not much more substantive conceptually than the best editorial cartoons. Unfortunately, this is often true for Ware’s other work as well.

Ware’s rejection of “ideas” and “theory” thus feels tactical, veiling the extent to which his art is not well served by analytic criticism, even of the most explicatory ilk. Ideas in Ware’s art lose a great deal when they are articulated. Spelled out in prose, without the grace of his talent for imagery, they lose their “life” and become bland. Since one of criticism’s essential actions is to articulate the interplay of ideas and hold it up to scrutiny, Ware’s work cannot consistently stand up against criticism that does not appreciate it. At the very least the analysis must appreciate his psychological angle – the particular voicing of interior life against exterior pressures that counts as story in much of his work. Praise that “gets” him can serve as explication for less savvy readers, but criticism that rejects him deflates his project entirely.

In the counterexample, Cocteau explained his film by embracing the very transience that had been leveled against him as a criticism. This was axiomatic for Cocteau: “listen carefully to criticisms made of your work,” he advised artists. “Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” Even his stance toward criticism itself stands up to the scrutiny of articulation, as he was surely only half-serious: he wrote criticism himself, he counted among his friends the art critics Andre Salmon and Henri-Pierre Roche, and he was acquainted with Apollinaire (who, alongside Sam Delany, Salman Rushdie and Joan Didion, illuminates why Ware’s phrase “too good a writer to be a critic” is mere ignorance).

Ware’s letter, with its casually passive-aggressive muzzling of critique, is the very opposite of “listening carefully”: it’s a kinder, gentler playground bullying of the class brain. Cocteau’s contrasting approach, rich with confidence, recognizes how the relationship of artist and critic can be that of interlocutors. The conversation may happen in writing and the artist and critic may never actually speak to each other face to face, but criticism as such is inherently fecund. Critics model ways of talking back to art, and talking back increases and vitalizes the relationships among any given art object, the people who engage with it, and the culture in which it operates. It is precisely the thing that moves art beyond being merely the “expression” of an artist, toward a more ambitious function as a site for cultural engagement and debate. Critics and readers are also interlocutors; the critic is thus interfacial, and this triangulated conversation in many ways demarcates the public sphere. Artists who reject this conversation show contempt for their readers. They are, in contrast to Ware’s assertion, far more interested in self-expression than in any other purpose for art.

What I find most disheartening is not this disingenuousness with regards to expression, not that Ware discourages writers from writing criticism (we are a hardy bunch), but that he encourages contempt of writers who do write criticism and contempt of the modes of thought modeled by criticism by any readers and artists who pay attention to the opinions of Chris Ware. Regardless of his motives, Ware’s letter throws his not-inconsiderable weight behind an approach to art – and of engagement with art – that invalidates and forecloses thoughtful, cerebral engagement.

This kind of careless anti-intellectualism is not a philosophy of criticism. It shuts down several questions that are utterly essential for comics criticism: whether the existing critical toolkit, with its heavy emphasis on prose explication of illustrative examples, is in any way sufficient to capture the native complexity of comics, whether viable alternatives exist, and to what extent and in what ways it matters that translation to prose evacuates the complexity of many comics texts. (The fact that explication of Clowes’s work does not evacuate his complexity is an important argument against the knee-jerk assertion that complexity in comics is somehow entirely different in kind from that found in literature and film, but the point is surely open to debate.)

Criticism is the correct place to argue the merits of different ways of making conceptual meaning in comics, and that conversation is not really possible in “writing about writing” that attempts nothing beyond praise. But that conversation is absolutely necessary if comics are ever to respond to the challenge Seth articulated in Jeet Heer’s panel: “I guess it is a failing of the culture not to have recognized anything in comics, but it’s also a failing in comics, to have not presented much for them to recognize.”

I said in the beginning of this essay that Ware does not understand what criticism is for, and his cover art, in its typical bleakness and self-deprecation, dramatizes this limitation of his imagination. Criticism is the thing you need before you can have something on Ware’s top shelf, the one labeled Art. The one that, for Ware, is unsurprisingly empty.

Update by Noah: Matthias Wivel has a thoughtful response here. Also, the thread here was getting unwieldy and has been closed out; if you’d like to respond please do so over on the other thread.

The New Yorker Hearts Luddites

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I found myself reading this essay by Gorjus about Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover recently. In case you missed it, this is the cover:

And here’s what Gorjus has to say about it:

The children are literally masked, yet still engaging the world—going forth into that terrible night, mashing down on the button at the house they don’t know, mumbling and punching each other to you go first. They are open to the world; the masks are meaningless, the toys of children, soon to be ripped off to suck in the sweet Halloween night…..

The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, the reflection of their email and RSS feeds and status updates smear across their features, shutting them off from the world more than any Wolverine® latex ever could. It is, in one still image, a surpassing and comprehensive look at American society in the 21st century: we send our children out with masks to play-act traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young, forcing them to play outside and make friends with the neighbor girls, while shutting down ourselves via 3G and electrons and Cymblata and whiskey more then even our own parents could manage.

That Mr. Ware has evoked this without showing us a single costume, or a single face, or truly, anything other than basic shapes coupled with a flat-matte color palette, again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career.

I’ve been reading a lot of comics criticism recently, as it happens, and one thing I’ve noticed is that writing about super-hero comics is almost invariably better than writing about art comics. That’s because writing about art comics tends to be really unendurably sententious. I mean, “going forth into that terrible night”; “traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young”; “Mr. Ware”; “again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career”…I mean, come on. It’s like we’ve stumbled into the back cover blurb of a volume of contemporary poetry. The stink of reverence is suffocating.

Again, I don’t blame Gorjus personally. This just seems to be how folks write when they write about art comics. It’s particularly unfortunate in this case, though, because…jeez is that cover a drearily cliched piece of crap. I mean, Chris Ware sure goes way out on a limb there, using the pages of the New Yorker to sneer at contemporary technology and those who use it! Boy, I bet that was a hard sell to Francoise Mouly, huh? Imagine…the stodgy old New Yorker being old and stodgy! Really shifts your paradigm, huh?

Obviously, Chris Ware is a talented designer…but I have to say that personally my patience for his antiseptic blocky buildings and antiseptic toy-like people is pretty much exhausted. And, just out of curiosity, where exactly are the Halloween decorations here? Oh, right…if you included those, the picture wouldn’t be quite bland enough. Yes, yes I know that he’s showing the antiseptic emptiness of contemporary life…to which I say “feh,” and also, “yawn.” The bourgeoise literary tradition where you excoriate the bourgeoisie for their empty, lifeless culture by creating empty, lifeless culture — it’s been going on for generations, and I presume it’ll continue as long as two bourgeoisie are alive so that one can sneer at the other, but I don’t see why we (bourgeoise or otherwise) need to pretend that it provides some deep and humane insight.

Because it doesn’t — it’s just glib. Which is what this cover is; overwhelmingly glib, with the self-satisfied glibness that is the inevitable adornment of a real New Yorker cartoon. You could get the same level of insight from the crank at your local bar. “Damn it, cell phones…they’re ruining the world! People just don’t talk anymore like they used to!”

You want to know the technology that actually affects the Halloween ritual? As somebody who went trick-or-treating in the quite affluent neighborhood of Hyde Park, I can tell you that the mechanical device at the end of everyone’s fingers was not the cell phone, but the digital camera — except for the moments when people were using their cell phones as cameras, I guess. Because everyone was taking pictures of their kids in their cute costumes, for even in this soulless, technology-ridden age in which we sadly toil, taking pictures of kids in costumes is still the sort of thing that parents do more or less constantly.

Gorjus finishes his essay by saying, in reference to both the cover and Ware’s interior story, “It’s bleak, this world; it’s rife with cynicism and misanthropy, as can be said of much of Mr. Ware’s work.” But this image, at least, isn’t bleak or cynical. It’s nostalgic and suffused with easy sentiment and easier moralism. It’s a big slab of maudlin hooey concealed under a thin veneer of urbanity. And it, and its critical enablers, deserve to be hooted.

Boredom on Infinite Earths

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This one ran on the now-defunct Bridge Magazine website, was reprinted at Eaten By Ducks, and is reprinted for those readers who missed it the first times round.

“The cliques of artists and writers consist for the most part of a racket selling amusement to people who at all costs must be prevented from thinking themselves vulgar, and a conspiracy to call it not amusement but art.”
— R. G. Colingwood

Since the passing of Charles Schulz in 2000, comicbook scripter Alan Moore has been the greatest English-language writer in the world.

I believe this statement is true, but it’s also somewhat beside the point. “Reputation,” as Moore points out in the recently reissued Writing for Comics, “is a trap that will turn you into a lifeless marble bust of yourself before you’re even dead.” This has probably been the case since the first sycophant shoved his nose in the unsuspecting (but alas, unprotesting) posterior orifice of the first artist and ruined the second cave painting. Things can, however, always get worse, and so they have. Time was when “arts and entertainment” weren’t mutually exclusive categories; when genre fiction was just, well, fiction; when acknowledged literary giants like G. K. Chesterton and Jack London could write nonsense verse and children’s literature; when poetry read less like this:

The shadowy cave we live in extends far out
Over the world. Plato said that. Even Amundsen
And all his dogs couldn’t find the end of it.
(From “Norwegian Grandson,” Robert Bly, 2003)

And more like this:

“Were all my body larded o’er
With darts of love, so thick
That you might find in every pore
A well-stuck standing prick,
Whilst yet my eyes alone were free,
My heart would never doubt,
In amorous rage and ecstasy,
To wish those eyes, to wish those eyes fucked out.”
(From “Mock Song,” Earl of Rochester, 1680)

These days, though, turning into a lifeless marble bust is not merely the result of a literary reputation, but its guarantor. How else explain the astonishing lionization of Ernest Hemingway, a man whose main achievement was to take the adventure out of boy’s adventure stories? Or the enthusiasm for Joyce Carol Oates, Queen of the Really Dull Gothic Romance? Or for Robert Hass, who, I understand, feels deeply? Or for John Ashberry, who, I understand, doesn’t? Or…well, you get the idea. Like the Kantian who knows he’s moral only because he’s miserable, we can identify a masterpiece of prose or poetry solely by its stolid dullness. It’s little wonder, then, that the most talented writers working today —Posdnuos of de la Soul, Judith Martin of “Miss Manners”, David Wilson of the Museum of Jurassic Technology— have chosen to seek fame and fortune outside the confines of literary fiction.

Which brings us back to Alan Moore and the much-maligned medium of comics. Moore is a hugely popular and respected figure, but it is still a little strange to hear him warn of the dangers of reputation, and even more so to hear him inveigh against “Reputation’s immortal big brother, Posterity.” Posterity? For comics creators? Comics may be inexplicably accepted as art in benighted locales like Japan, but in the U.S.A. comics have been viewed by most commentators as colorful cud for the barely literate. Maus-creator Art Spiegelman has stated that he used to be so embarrassed to be seen reading comics that he would hide them in copies of Playboy.

Dangling reputation in front of a cartoonist, in other words, is a bit like waving red meat in front of a starving Chihuahua. And as the professional arbiters of respect have begun to toss one or two scraps towards comics creators, the latter have responded with a frantic and joyful yapping, cheerfully urinating all over their predecessors in order to mark out the fragrant boundaries of their new literary reputations. Chris Ware, for example, has been hailed as a genius for sensitively suggesting that people who read superhero comics are intellectual, emotional, and sexual cripples. Similarly, in his 1991 New Comics Anthology, Bob Callahan sneered, “Prior to this point in history, comic strips were created by often exceptionally talented men and women as a way of entertaining nitwits and kids.” Self-respecting artists, apparently, aim their products only at the crème-de-la-crème: the wise, the thoughtful, and perhaps the occasional literature professor. If Shakespeare wrote for the uneducated rabble and Mark Twain wasted his days on books for boys — well, what of it? That was a long time ago, and we’d know what to do with them if they tried that sort of thing around here. You don’t catch Cormac McCarthy attempting to amuse high-school dropouts, do you? Does Mark Strand write children’s verse? No and no — the literati are for the literati, and as for the rest, let them eat Stephen King. In the meantime, the comics medium, after 60-odd years of over-muscled goombahs and talking cats, is finally ready to bore the pants off innumerable school-children. Dan Clowes, like John Updike, really understand the Souls of Women. Joe Sacco, like Susan Sontag, has visited Serbia. Sincere meaningfulness is in the air, progenitors are being slain, and lavish praise from Harold Bloom cannot be far behind.

Of course, the New Comics gang doesn’t think that it is trampling on the best traditions of the medium. On the contrary, it claims to be upholding comics history; to be pointing out, amidst acres and acres of market-soiled virtue, the few unblemished hymens of artistic vision. Art Spiegelman has been particularly good at this sort of thing, publicly and fulsomely lauding the genius of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad, and — in a massively over-designed coffee-table book— Jack Cole’s Plastic Man.

What Spiegelman doesn’t seem to have quite realized is that his own shockingly conventional musings (“Maybe everyone has to feel guilty. Everyone! Forever!”) and clumsy co-option of comics history (The Holocaust…but with mice! It’s high art! It’s low art! Genius!) bear no resemblance to the work of his purported heroes. Indeed, the pulp crap Spiegelman despises — the issue of Flash in which our hero’s head grows to the size of a watermelon, for example, or the man-eating Christmas elves with ears for armpits in Eric Powell’s The Goon — are much more in ye olde tradition than anything Spiegelman has done. The thing about Herriman or Kurtzman or Cole is that, basically, they’re a blast. Hyper-active plots, surreal transformations, energy, surprise, a pursuit of the preposterous which never feels like slumming, a deliberate flirtation with self-parody, and endless, endless creativity: these guys, whatever their process, always made it look easy — they had the elan of trapeze artists, effortlessly spectacular and light as air. Does any of that describe Maus? No. Bowed under the burden of his press clippings, solemnly staggering from Holocaust to September 11 like some high-concept ambulance chaser, Spiegelman wants you to see him sweat. How else would you know that he’s a serious auteur? And so we’re treated to scenes of the Cartoonist at Work: panel after panel in which he suggests that his ambivalence about celebrity is somehow made more poignant by Auschwitz, or vice versa.

The arbiters of culture would, like Spiegelman, have us believe that canonization is the highest goal to which an artist can aspire. They fail to see — or, perhaps, see all too clearly — that when an artist enters the canon, he or she ceases to be an artist, and becomes instead a promotional device whereby the elites sell themselves to themselves. Da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce — they don’t have audiences anymore, they have worshippers. Once, maybe, they had some ambition to entertain and enlighten their fellows, but now their most revered message is the totemic power of their names, repeated over and over, like television advertisements in a dead language. Indeed, the deadness of the language becomes the point. It is the canonical work’s very inaccessibility and irrelevance which gives it its fetishistic power, and so the initiates dedicate themselves to creating mysteries where none exist. Sacred passwords such as “artistic integrity,” and “enduring human concerns” identify believer to believer, and they smile as they gather in their faculty lounges and gourmet coffee emporiums, confident that their incantations will hold off the sea of drooling peasants which might otherwise engulf them. And for bonus points, why not complain about how oppressed you are by the philistinism of the people who bind your books, clean up your spilled cappuccino, and wipe your fucking ass?

If when you hear “art” you think “lifestyle accessory”, you would have liked the Comix Chicago exhibit at the Hyde Park Arts Center in September 2003. Though the ostensible theme of this show was “Comics About Chicago,” a more accurate description might be “Comics In A Really Important Art Gallery.” No super-heroes here, no sir. Also, no flights of fancy, enthusiasm, childishness, or any idea that would raise the hackles of a tenured radical. Many of the traits that have historically made comics great are incongruously in place, but they’re all viewed through a kind of inverse funhouse mirror, which makes the bizarre and outrageous appear mercilessly bland. So Dan Clowes dabbles in a surrealism stripped of drive and panache. David Heatley borrows Winsor McCay’s idea of dream comics, tosses out the magical juxtapositions and improbable adventure, and gives us Curator, a careerist fantasy in which Heatley pictures himself as a feted art star. Jessica Abel takes the addictive narrative melodrama of Stan Lee, adds a heaping glob of earnestness, and ends up sounding like a bad high school literary magazine. (One of her characters actually says, “I love this record. It makes me ache. It feels like the future.”) And Archer Prewitt makes slapstick okay for the bourgeois by replacing imagination and general goofiness with a smug sneer that says, “We’re all superior to these hi-jinks, aren’t we?” At least Prewitt’s characters, like those of his predecessors, still speak in the bastard Negro dialect of the blackface minstrel. Thank God that, in this age of political correctness, it’s still okay for white art school graduates to laugh at po’ black folks.

You’d think that, even if the writing were a wash, an art gallery would pick comics with a certain level of visual interest. You’d be wrong, though; the art, like the text, is frankly pedestrian. The best drawing in the show is little more than competent; nor does anyone represented here have the flair for cartooning that translates into a recognizable and distinctive style. Forget about Dr. Seuss — we’re not even up to Gary Larson’s standards here. The collage which adorns the reverse side of the show’s promotional poster is, in this regard, particularly damning. Someone chose panels from each artist and mixed them together in a loosely sequential arrangement, presumably to highlight the diversity of skills on display. Instead, all the pieces just melts into one big, drab blur, the artists undifferentiated from one another by either subject matter or talent. In the show itself, there are a couple of pleasant moments; Dan Clowes’ “Nature Boy,” has a nice, filmic movement, and the colors and composition of Deadpan #1 by David Heatley (an acquaintance of mine) are lovely. Even if you throw in a couple of cute cat drawings by Ivan Brunetti, though, that’s pretty slim pickings, especially when balanced against Erik Wenzel, who seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that taking multiple photographs of the same boring cartoon is…what? Vaguely amusing? A half-hearted David Letterman routine?

The big, fat exception to all of this is, of course, Chris Ware. Everybody says Ware is the greatest comic artist of his generation, and it’s pretty hard to argue — his hand-lettered calligraphy alone is reason enough to come out to Comix Chicago. It’s Ware’s compositions, though, that are really sui generis. Nobody but nobody thinks about page layout the way that Chris Ware thinks about page layout. Most artists — especially American artists of recent vintage — tend to design comics pages sequentially; whether you’re reading R. Crumb or Stan Lee, you start more or less at the top left, end more or less at the bottom right, and walk away with a narrative. Chris Ware does this too, sometimes, but he’s just as likely to organize the page around a single drawing of a giant house or machine, or as a gameboard, or as an interlocking series of smaller and larger strips oriented in various directions. The result is breathtaking, especially on something like the Jimmy Corrigan book jacket, where the details spiral down into infinitesimal complexity, arrows point every which way, and you can spend hours just trying to figure out which way is up. And, as if that weren’t enough, Ware also happens to be a fantastic writer, with a style somewhere between Beckett, Schulz, and the language of ’50s marketing. In the “Whitney Prevaricator,” for example, the great men of Western art wander through Ware’s tiny panels like heavily sedated office workers searching for the right cubicle. I think my favorite moment is when an eager Renaissance man-in-training starts spouting lines out of True Romance: “That Goethe, he’s a famous humanist! I’ve got to do something to impress him!”

Which only makes it more depressing to view the aesthetic atrocity that is “Ruin Your Life: Draw Cartoons.” You might think that with television reality shows our society had pretty much sunk as low as it was possible to sink in terms of dishonesty, pandering, and sham self-revelation. But no; Chris Ware has dragged his massive talent to cultural bottom, and he has begun to dig. Everything that’s delightful about the “Whitney Prevaricator” — most noticeably the sense of social realities which makes satire possible — has here gone horribly awry. The “Prevaricator” mocks the anguish of artists as being idiotic and overblown. “Ruin Your Life,” on the other hand, is devoted to the proposition that life is just really, really hard for alternative comics creators in general, and for Chris Ware in particular.
Now, you might think that things were going all right for Ware professionally. He’s been in the Whitney Biennial. He recently became the first comic artist to win a major British literary award. He’s been positively reviewed in People, for Christ’s sake, and he gets to make his living as a cartoonist rather than as, say, a coal miner. But as a college-educated white boy with skills, Ware knows that he is just not getting his due until all of us awaken each morning and genuflect towards his drafting board. And so he feels sorry for himself. Working in comics, apparently, will doom you to “decades of grinding isolation, solipsism and utter social disregard.” (Silly me; I thought that was working at McDonalds — or being unemployed.) Comics are also “inextricably linked to adolescence and puerile power fantasies,” and “If anyone finds you the least bit attractive, you are not a cartoonist.” Comics artists waste their youth in grinding toil, chained to a “reviled pictographic language” which is nevertheless much more demanding and unforgiving than the mere written word . (If only Kafka had known how easy he had it— maybe he would actually have finished one of his novels!)

Of course, like Ware, the intellectual art-viewers who file past his work know the pain of being under-appreciated; the loneliness that comes from sitting almost, but not quite, at the top of the heap; the struggle that results when all your needs are met and you realize that you’re still mildly disturbed by the hideous rending noises as your domestic servants are tortured outside your studio. If you listen carefully in the gallery, you can almost hear the forlorn souls of the privileged crying, “We find you attractive, Chris!” as they make his self-pity their own. And if they don’t get enough there, they can always walk across the room and absorb Ivan Brunetti’s “Cartooning Will Destroy You,” in which Brunetti moans that “no one even gives a shit about comics,” and wonders if instead of cartooning it would be more moral for him to be “mopping the AIDS ward at a county hospital.” Perhaps he’s hoping for sympathy from the terminally ill. After all, “It’s a lonely business, sitting day in and day out alone…writing and drawing books that have little hope of reaching an audience beyond other comics artists….” Quick, who wrote that, Brunetti or Ware? Okay, you caught me; it’s actually from an essay in the promotional booklet. Comics have, at long last, reached that marketing nirvana where art and puff piece are one.

The irony is that alternative comics are supposed to be more personal, or at minimum more idiosyncratic, than their mainstream brethren. Yet Ware and Brunetti, who focus on themselves obsessively, have written comics which are thematically indistinguishable. Meanwhile, in Alan Moore’s Tom Strong, the title hero discovers an alternate timeline in which he is black and in which, perhaps as a result, everybody on earth is happier. The role of race in the story is complicated by the fact that the white Tom Strong has a black wife and daughter (regular characters in the series) and, of course, by comics’ disgraceful history of caricaturing and ignoring minorities. The impact is somewhere between that of Chester Himes’ detective fiction and the Fu Manchu novels: a straightforward adventure story given a queasy resonance by social and political implications which are suggested but never quite worked out. The story isn’t great, necessarily, and it isn’t Moore’s best. But it’s individual and it’s thoughtful, which is more than can be said for the maudlin navel gazing of Jeff Brown — or, wait, I mean Ivan Brunetti.

I’m not saying that all mainstream titles are necessarily better than alternative ones: for the record, they’re not. But I am saying that dismissing qualities supposedly associated with mainstream super-hero comics —popularity, silliness, a desire to entertain — is the surest way to take a young, adventurous medium bursting with potential and transform it into an ossified piece of crap. Art may be about communication, it may be about truth, and it may be about beauty, but it sure as hell is not about impressing a grant committee. If you’re not willing to look ridiculous, be an accountant or something. An artist who wants to be taken seriously is an artist who needs a swift kick in the pants. And if comics aren’t respected by everyone in the academy or in the hip hang-outs — well, frankly, good. As Alan Moore notes, “The only thing that might seriously endanger either your talent or your relationship with your talent is if you suddenly found yourself fashionable.”