Copyright ©2005 DC Comics
Copyright ©1986 Marvel Comics
Not Final Art (but Art nonetheless) – 2
Copyright ©2005 DC Comics
Copyright ©1986 Marvel Comics
Category: WARE, Chris
Copyright ©2005 DC Comics
Copyright ©1986 Marvel Comics
“I Guess” by Chris Ware, USA, 1991
I Guess (a.k.a. “Thrilling Adventure Stories”) by Chris Ware (USA) in: RAW Vol 2, #3, High Culture for Lowbrows, Penguin Books, 1991. Via Glad You Asked.
Copyright ©1990 Chris Ware
If words can be drawn, and images written, then the tension between words and images can become quite complex. For example, in “I Guess” (Raw 2:3, 1991, reprinted in Ware, Quimby), alternative cartoonist Chris Ware experiments with a radically disjunctive form of verbal/visual interplay: a six-page story that sustains parallel verbal and pictorial narratives throughout, never quite reconciling one to the other […]. Admittedly, “I Guess” represents a radical questioning of the way comics work […]. Dismantling genre as well as form, Ware’s experiment demonstrates the potential of comics to create challenging, multilayered texts: his simple broadly representational drawings contribute to, rather than mitigate, the suggestive complexity of the narrative, while the blank naive narrational voice both amplifies and undercuts the appeal of the drawings. (Charles Hatfield, “Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature”, The University Press of Mississippi, 2005)
Innovative/Notable Webcomics (I): Memory Lane
THE BLOODY FOOTPRINT by Lilli Carré
In The Bloody Footprint (link) published by The New York Times on February 5, 2015, American multidisciplinary artist, illustrator and cartoonist Lilli Carré explores a personal memory yet later reclaimed by one of her childhood friends. Who experienced the event and who made its recollection her own? An intimate and effective take on the blurred contours of memory through a clever blend of prose, comics and GIF animation.
MIRROR by Chris Ware & John Kuramoto
More animated film than webcomics (yet using comics features), Mirror (link) is the result of a collaboration between The New Yorker and the radio program This American Life. Through a cover for The New Yorker and its expansion as a short animated feature, extraordinary American cartoonist Chris Ware – with the assistance of John Kuramoto -revisits a radio interview (and an interesting reflection) of writer Hanna Rosin and her daugther about parenting, makeup and teenage self-awareness. Published by The New Yorker on November 30, 2015.
ME AND THE UNIVERSE by Anders Nilsen
In Me and the Universe (link), American cartoonist Anders Nilsen cleverly combines diagrammatic storytelling and the infinite canvas feature to explore his place in the Universe, from ancestral past to more-or-less present and distant future. Published by the New York Times on September 24, 2014.
WHY I LOVE COMICS by Chris Ware
Echoing Anders Nilsen‘s Me and the Universe, Chris Ware‘s Why I Love Comics (link) also depicts an artist’s lifetime on Earth. Playing with iconic solidarity and text spatialisation, the first word of each rounded panel spells out an acrostic hidden message. Published by The New York Times on October 16, 2015. Note also the epigraph:
“Cartooning is the art of turning time back into space.” Art Spiegelman.
“Big Tex” by Chris Ware, USA, 1996
Big Tex (one-pager) by Chris Ware (USA) in: Acme Novelty Library Vol VII, #7, Book of Jokes, Fantagraphics Books, Summer 1996.
Copyright ©1996 Chris Ware/Fantagraphics Books
“Like how does something happen, and … how does it reverberate through time? And that act of memory is important, and comics are great for memory. Like even when you have a short comic, like a three-panel comic, you’ve got a past, a present and a future as soon as you look at those three boxes. And that allows you to reflect and compare times.” Art Spiegelman, NPR interview, 2011
“Here” by Richard McGuire, USA, 1989
Here by Richard McGuire (USA) in: RAW Volume 2 #1, USA, 1989.
“It was the first time I had had my mind blown. Sitting on that couch, I felt time extend infinitely backwards and forwards, with a sense of all the biggest of small moments in between. And it wasn’t just my mind: “Here” blew apart the confines of graphic narrative and expanded its universe in one incendiary flash, introducing a new dimension to visual narrative that radically departed from the traditional up-down and left-right reading of comic strips. And the structure was organic, nodding not only to the medium’s past but also hinting at its future.” Chris Ware, The Guardian, December 17, 2014 (see below for link to the article).
Dear students, the 2014 extended version of Here is available @ Kinokuniya bookstores.
Copyright ©1989 Richard McGuire – Reproduced with permission
A few pages from the 2014 version of Here (by Pantheon Books) and Chris Ware on Here by Richard McGuire – a game-changing graphic novel (for The Guardian).
An interesting adaptation of the original six pages of McGuire’s Here into a short film (“about a series of events in time that happen in one point of space: the corner of a room in a normal house”). Student-produced at the RIT Dept. of Film & Video in 1991, by Tim Masick and Bill Trainor for their senior thesis project.
And an interesting GIF of Richard McGuire’s complete original version of Here.
from-dusk-till-drawn.com 