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C
hris Ware has been consid-
ered by many to be one of
the greatest living cartoo-
nists since the publication of his
graphic novelsJimmy Corrigan,
the Smartest Kid on Earthand
Building Stories. His latest, the
nearly two-decades-in-the-mak-
ingRusty Brown, a series of inter-
related stories about several
characters living in Ware’s birth-
place of Omaha, Neb., told in the
artist’s trademark emotionally
gutting style, will no doubt ce-
ment that reputation even fur-
ther.
The earliest of these stories was
created almost 20 years ago. Has
your approach to your work and
characters evolved in the interim?
Jeez, I certainly hope so. If I’m
not a more sympathetic person
who’s more attentive to the nu-
ances, uncertainties and strange-
ness of life now than I was two
decades ago, then I’m a failure as
an artist, a writer and especially
as a human being. I hope such a
development is obvious in the
book itself; cartooning is a visual
language, which more than most
allows for an almost palpable
sensing of these slow shifts in the
artist/writer’s temperament
through what we think of as
“style,” which is really just a mel-
ange of influence and convic-
tions that intuitively dispenses
what the artist believes to be im-
portant about him- or herself
and, really, about life itself.
I frequently cite the transmog-
rification of Charlie Brown over
the 50 years that Charles Schulz
drew him as an example of this
phenomenon, from the drafted
disc of the 1950s to the shaky ide-
ogram born of Schulz’s handwrit-
ing when he ceased drawing the
strip in 2000. Although each
seems to embody different prior-
ities, as I’m sure Schulz himself
did at age 28 versus age 78,
they’re all, in both drawn and hu-
man versions, the same Charlie.Novelists often say they find the
writing process painful. I’ve
always assumed, perhaps
misguidedly, that this wasn’t true
of graphic novelists. Is there a
catharsis for you in creating these
stories, or is it just a different
kind of torture?Well, at risk of sounding a little
annoying, drawing a graphic
novel takes an extraordinary
amount of time. To reproduce
the sensation of life on the page
(i.e. of time actually passing at a
rate that’s commensurate with
human experience and memo-
ry), measured in quantities of
time drawing versus time read-
ing, requires roughly 1,000 times
the effort.
In other words, it takes me an
hour to draw just one panel
which the reader will skip
through in a second or two. I’m
not complaining, though: I think
the strange, multivalent richness
of consciousness that Nabokov
envied when he lamented that
memory was as much if not more
a series of images than words is,in the long run, worth it.
I don’t know of a single happy
cartoonist, anywhere. But as far
as I’m concerned, my happiness
isn’t the issue – in fact, it’s beside
the point. The point is getting the
feeling of life on the page as viv-
idly, emotionally and truthfully
as I can, and to try to create char-
acters who are smarter than me,
however weird that might sound
(which in fiction, strangely, it
isn’t).
Finally, all of the people I draw
are just as uncertain about the
outcomes of their own lives as
we all are, but I try to draw the
stories in a way that directly of-
fers an argument to the contrary;
i.e. to show in the accumulation
of the images that life is, funda-
mentally, beautiful.What part of the book-making
process gives you the most
pleasure?Being done with it.I found Joanne Cole in Rusty
Brown to be one of your most
movingly rendered characters.
Given the discussions happening
these days about the politics of
representation, did you have anytrepidation about depicting the
inner life of a black female school-
teacher in the early 1970s?This aspect of the book filled me
with the most doubt. America is
at a moment of a much-deserved
reckoning that’s been boiling for
more than 400 years, and there’s
no question that the election of
Donald Trump and the right-
wing movements metastasizing
in parts of Europe are reactions
to the inevitable (long overdue)
erosion of religion-justified
white supremacy. That I’ve some-
how indirectly benefited from
such a power structure is un-
questionable; the evidence is ev-
erywhere in America. At the mo-
ment, that it’s probably consid-
ered more acceptable for me to
write a story about a murderer
and/or a psychopath (see: pretty
much every mainstream televi-
sion or movie drama of the past
80 years) than an African-Amer-
ican elementary teacher high-
lights a lot that’s wrong with our
country. It’s the role of the artist
to portray experiences as truth-
fully as is possible while admit-
ting whatever benefiting role in
the crime he or she might have
had – but, of course, all withinthe artist’s limitations, experi-
ence and understanding. Other-
wise, it won’t “work.” There’s no
hard-and-fast rule toward that
end; one just has to do one’s best
and be ready to fail. Or, put most
simply, as Malcolm X did, “I’m a
human being, first and fore-
most.”Shame, self-loathing, isolation
and fear of abandonment are
constants in your work. Do you
think of them as the ties that bind
us, or just some of us?The simple fact that we all know
the meanings of those words sug-
gests that they bind us, but for a
child growing up in a comfort-
able neighbourhood versus one
sold into human trafficking, I’m
sure their relevance would be
considerably different. In my
own case, not knowing my father
and feeling “abandoned” was an
ever-present part of my identity
growing up. Once I actually met
him, however, that part of my
identity vanished, as I should
have let it years before. I wish I
had been kinder to him; I can’t
fathom the horror of having a
child and not seeing him or her
grow up. In most ways, the expe-
rience he had was so much worse
than mine, but it took me matur-
ing into a parent myself to realize
it.Which cartoonists do you most
admire these days?All of them, especially those who
push the medium to ever more
finely express the experience of
being alive, the uncertainty of
memory and the fragility of hu-
man relationships. Fortunately,
there are hundreds working at
the top of their form now, but
when I was young there were,
like, 20. I would like to especially
highlight the efforts of Jerry Mo-
riarty, who brought genuine
quiet and poetry to comics, his
most recent book,Whatsa Pain-
toonist?, being the most oddly ti-
tled book that’s ever made me
cry.Special to The Globe and MailEmily Donaldson is the editor of
Canadian Notes & Queries and
Best Canadian Essays, 2019Onbecomingmorehuman,withChrisWare
Celebratedcartoonist
talksaboutthestruggles
ofbeingcreative,and
thejoysoffinally
beingdonewithit
EMILY DONALDSON
Chris Ware’s latest graphic novel is Rusty Brown, a series of interrelated stories about several characters living
in the artist’s birthplace of Omaha, Neb.SETHKUSHNER