Ware devoted increasingly more attention to display lettering, trying to
learn how to use a ruler and a ruling pen. By his own account he struggled
on hopelessly, until one day, shortly after moving to Chicago, he found a
box of original advertising lettering art for a small novelty concern, the
Val-Mor Company, in an old novelty store named Uncle Fun.
The store’s owner, Ted Frankel, had briefly worked for Val-Mor
before it went out of business, and had retained a stack of original sign
drawings that he one day presented to Ware. “I don’t think there was a
greater single effect on me than this one benevolent gift of dusty old
Bristol board,” Ware happily sighs. Meanwhile, from this Holy Grail he
instantly understood exactly how the lettering process worked, what
materials were used—ruling pens and brushes—and how letterers evened
out the bottom of their letters with white ink. The problems he had been
wrestling with in his own strips suddenly “clicked” in his mind. “There was
a clarity, as well as a humanity, to this old type—I thought it was
unbelievably beautiful; it glowed with a care and respect for the reader.
Most importantly, though, it suggested to me how I might approach my
‘drawing,’ or more specifically, cartooning, and I began to refine my
methods to reflect a more typographic approach.”
To this day, Ware equivocates that his cartooning is not drawing
per se: “It’s more like typography, a mechanical sort of ‘picture lettering,’
which is why I guess some people hate it and say that my stuff is
unemotional. I think it’s probably the same sort of approach that Dan
Clowes and Charles Burns have taken—their stuff was a real inspiration,
obviously, along with Ernie Bushmiller—though I doubt they were
anywhere near as ridiculously self-conscious about it.” Self-conscious or
not, describing his drawings as typography underscores the essence of his
unique comic characters. While they do not necessarily have the overt
emotionality of a Clowes (Ghost World) or the satirically goofy personas of a
Crumb, they are imbued with graphic power that makes them mnemonic.
His characters Jimmy and Rusty, for example, are akin to early twentieth-
century trade characters, logos that adhere to the memory and evoke
emotion and recognition. The characters are typographic not simply
because they are geometrically rooted, but because they are vessels for
meaning. Hey, but that’s enough ethereal analysis for now. Technically
speaking, Ware’s typography relies on an incredible facility for achieving
perfection.
What separates Ware’s lettering from that of so many of today’s
typographers and some type designers, too, is fealty to the hand.
Everything is hand-drawn on Bristol board with pen, brush, and ink—
excepting, of course, the blocks of typeset text he occasionally uses, which
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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