Quotes by Chris Ware

Chris Ware

“Real” drawing is about specifics. It’s about describing an object as accurately as possible. In a comic strip you have to draw a picture of the idea of the object. You have to draw the word that you are picturing, then you have to mix in specifics with it for it to work as a story. But you are still working with drawn words.

Drawing

Ideas

Real

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn’t actually have.

Book

Lines

Real

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

Children

Past

Thinking

As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it’s going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it’s a completely different thing than it was before I started.

Different

Thinking

Writing

As I’ve gotten older I’ve occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that’s also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

Mean

Nostalgia

Solitude

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

Book

Commitment

Passion

Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.

Language

Comics are not illustration, any more than fiction is copywriting. Illustration is essentially the application of artistic technique or style to suit a commercial or ancillary purpose; not that cartooning can’t be this (see any restaurant giveaway comic book or superhero media property as an example), but comics written and produced by a cartoonist sitting alone by him- or herself are not illustrations. They don’t illustrate anything at all, they literally tell a story.

Book

Style

Superhero

Drawing on a computer doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not intuitive.

Computer

Drawing

Intuitive

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don’t think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can’t, but it’s the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

Art

Long

Thinking

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Action

Adults

Age

Aim

Aliens

Alive

Ambition

Art

Artist

Attitude

Believe

Benefits

Black

Book

Character

Children

Cities

Commitment

Computer

Couple

Depressing

Development

Different

Disappointment

Done

Drawing

Dream

Empathy

Exercise

Friends

Fruit

Fun

Giving

Glasses

Grandmother

Ham

Hated

Honesty

Ideas

Innate

Intuitive

Language

Lines

Long

Looks

Mean

Might

Mom

Mother

Nostalgia

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Quotes by Chris Ware

Chris Ware

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn’t actually have.

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that’s also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.

Drawing on a computer doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not intuitive.

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The Future Blueprint

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