the excellent foppery of the world

Illus: Chris Ware for Fortune Magazine
Chris Ware designed the cover for Fortune Magazine, and then they rejected it.

From Fishbowl NY:

Tiny figures celebrating with wine and music on top of the golden skyscraper. One helicopter shovels money out of the Treasury building while another dumps bills on the rooftop revelers. Greece's Treasury, meanwhile, is empty; orange-clad prisoners sit in Guantanamo Bay; and in Mexico, workers sit cramped in a "Fabrica de Exploitacion."

Don't forget to embiggen »

today's post in which my illustrative hero, Chris Ware, single-handedly saves print media by creating remarkable cover art

Illus: New Yorker 2 Nov 2009 by Chris Ware via @scottknaster
Two lovely covers by Chris Ware are currently on the newsstands. I explained to mr. hoo that Granta's measly $17 price tag will easily be recouped years from now when I sell my pristine copy (except for the spine breaks at the Stu Dybek short story) on eBay for hundreds -- nay, thousands -- of dollars.

Or maybe I'll just read the rest and keep my copy close.

I had the chance to see Chris Ware and Lynda Barry on a panel at the Printers Row Book Fair this last summer. (Forgive me: it's the Lit Fest now. still feels unnatural.) Would have blogged about watching the two of them alive in their friendship and their love of what they do if I hadn't received some bad news just as the session wrapped up that took the wind out of my sails.

Suffice it to say: I'm convinced that each is doing the best kind of service to the world, setting their imaginations loose to bravely make stuff up that, on contact with paper, ink and air, transmogrifies into that lovely thing called art that catches in the soft spot between the ribs, and cracks the heart open like an oyster to the ache and wonder and pearly stuff of life.

Thanks, guys. You rock.

p.s. They're coming back -- you can catch Chris Ware and Lynda Barry at the Chicago Humanities Fest. (Matt Groening will be there too.)

Illus: Granta 108 Chicago by Chris Ware

being ware, part 2.

Video: Chris Ware on making stuff

p.s. Being Ware, part 1 »

being ware

chris ware at the mca
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

1. As a child, you were
a. sort of happy. b. not so happy.

2. To occupy your time, you like to
a. watch television. b. go to movies. c. draw. d. play video games. e. talk in weird voices into a tape recorder. f. read comic books.

3. The presence of members of the opposite and/or attractive sex makes you feel
a. weird. b. awful. c. terrified. d. hopeless. e. like killing yourself.

4. If you don’t like a comic strip, it’s because
a. it sucks. b. the cartoonist is an idiot.

5. If you don’t like a painting, it’s because
a. you don’t understand it. b. you’re ignorant of the history of art theory and art in general.

If any of these questions made any sense at all to you, you are now welcome to enter the exhibit. Please do not speak loudly, carry beverages, or scratch your initials into the plexiglass.

A «Quick Preparatory Quiz» from the poster-size brochure accompanying «The Public Exhibition of Original Cartoon Drawings, Preparatory Doodles and Printed Ephemera Selected From the Life Output Thus Far of the Juvenile Book Artist, Typographical Stylist, and Comic Strip Lobbyist Mr. F.C. Ware» now running at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

Chris Ware is the Flemish Master of comic art. Not only because he executes a scene the way they did -– by painting achingly small and vulnerable players against the big sweeping backdrop of the city in which they live –- but also because he gets that thimbleful of grief just right -– the thing that Auden wrote about --

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Ware builds a scene with exacting details and then occasionally telescopes it forward, back and sideways in time in Run Lola Run style. It’s wonderfully engaging, hard on the eyes, and takes hours to devour. Tough going for a museum show like the one that’s running at the MCA through (nearly) the end of August; better that you pick up one of his books and sit awhile.

so many splendid sundays

little nemo
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Right around Christmas time Sunday Press issued -- well here, let me let them tell you:

“Winsor McCay’s masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, as it has never been reproduced before. A magnificent hardbound volume of Nemo's best Sunday pages from 1905-1910, in FULL original size.”

This is no small thing -- full original size comes out to be 16x21 inches. I picked one up, chiefly on the recommendation of Chris Ware, one of my local heros (although now that the New York Times has picked him up for their Sunday Magazine he may well have moved, like his buddy Ira Glass, to New York, where they’ll love him less but pay him more. But let me check my facts on that before you quote me.)

About the book: it’s eye candy for the soul. It’s awkward, of course. It’s difficult to find a spot on the shelf for a book of that size -- I finally had to relent and display it on a small bookstand. (But that makes me nervous because I don’t want it to fade, sitting out in the light.)

The book itself is a piece of work -- the large-format puts it over the top -- but it’s McCay’s artistry that swallows you up when you peel back the pages -- both the detail of each individual panel and the flow of each panel into the next to create the entire strip. He's a master. And, as I understand it, one of the first to really nail this genre. (see: Understanding Comics for more about that -- the genre, I mean.)

If you have an interest in these things -- graphic novels, the way comics work, American artists -- run, don’t walk. Do this for yourself.

(Still on the fence? View some sample pages. And p.s.: The color fidelity of the pages shown online? Not even close to what you're gonna see in print. These shots are a little bit blurry, too. Doesn't do it justice.)