to each other. I’m sure that if I’d taken a class about this stuff, I’d know
much better why it all works the way it does, and I wouldn’t have to fumble
around in the dark so much.” Yet fumble, fiddle, or fidget, Ware has raised
his lettering beyond mere pastiche into realms of reincarnation. Ware is a
veritable born-again “show card” letterer who, back before computers and
photostats, effortlessly rendered one-of-a-kind lettering for signs, windows,
and displays.
Of course, all comic strip artists worthy of the art must be skilled
letterers. But Ware acquired his skill long after he had been doing a regular
strip for the student newspaper in Austin. “Up to that point, I’d sort of
considered type and lettering secondary to storytelling, some kind of
additive decoration, at best a sort of ‘mood setter,’ at worst, simply titles and
logos,” he explains. But once he began studying early twentieth-century
newspaper strips (as well as later R. Crumb comix) Ware realized that the
older-style lettering radiated what he calls “a warmth and a humanity that
contemporary lettering didn’t, and that it had a potential as a primary
‘expressive element,’ if I can say that without sounding too academic.”
He was smitten by the hand-done quality of the old methods, and
he decided to learn the craft (or what he calls “the disposition, or whatever
it was that made this old lettering so great”) himself. Since he had self-
consciously eliminated all words from his own comics for a number of years
(“to try and communicate everything through gesture and rhythm,” he
explains), Ware was now ready to bring words back into them. “I wanted to
get to the point where my lettering was as or more important than the
pictures were, as second nature as drawing—that a font or a type style
would come to me as naturally as a word would come to a writer; that I
would ‘feel’ the type the same way I did the pictures and the words; i.e.,
that the cartooning would be of a whole, like a writer’s ‘voice.’”
Ware allows that it was a tall order. “But I started to realize that
comics were really more of a visual language rather than simply rows of
pictures with words tacked on top of them,” he says. “And I had an inkling
that perhaps by taking more of a typographic approach to the entire
medium rather than a purely artistic—or even worse, illustrative—one, I
might arrive at something formally that made a more direct emotional hit
than I had up to then.”
Ware lacked formal lettering training, so for many years he’d teach
himself by copying examples from old Speedball manuals, the bibles of
commercial show card writing from the 1920 s through the 1950 s. Yet the
desired effect was elusive. “I always gave up in disgust, sensing that
somehow there was something missing in the instructions,” he says, “I just
couldn’t get the hang of it from those stupid pen-stroke diagrams.” So
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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