Cartoonist Chris Ware’s work is so precise that you might assume it was illustrated digitally — but it’s all drawn on paper. One of America’s most celebrated graphic artists, Ware’s lines are so meticulous and the geometry is so exacting that it seems impossible a human hand made them. His latest book, the third and final installment of his Acme Novelty Datebook series, collects a wide range of drawing styles. Spanning 2002 to 2023, the book is filled with illustrations of his daughter as she grows from infancy to college age, sketches of subway riders, renderings of children’s toys and stately foyers, pandemic musings, concepts for New Yorker covers, watercolor experiments, intricate schematics, and several notes about his own hopelessness.
The cartoonist’s range is as impressive as it is irritating (how can one person draw perfectly in so many different styles?), and much of his lettering requires a magnifying glass to parse without squinting. Comics are a medium that can often be read quickly, but Ware forces us to slow down.
I spoke with Ware via email at his request, and his answers resemble short essays that bear all the hallmarks of his cartooning: exacting, tender, vulnerable, and punctuated with his trademark self-deprecation.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Someone who is familiar with your books like Jimmy Corrigan or Building Stories may be surprised to see the range of drawing styles in this collection. How do you decide the way you’ll approach a specific drawing? Do you have a “default” mode that comes out most often?
Well, not to start out sounding pretentious, but at least for me, drawing for comics (aka “cartooning”) is different from drawing for a story; such drawings are completely synthetic, i.e., fictional, and so they’re designed to be transparent and clear, almost like typography. Conversely, everything in my sketchbooks actually happened to me somehow, so those drawings are more “traditional,” meaning they’re meant for looking more than reading, if that makes any sense at all.
When I’m drawing from life, I go out of my way to avoid “crosshatching,” i.e., the sort of built-up overlapping of screens of tone that we’re all taught in art school is a professional way of indicating light and shadow. For a few years, I defaulted to this way of drawing but eventually realized I was ignoring the quality and especially the texture of whatever I was trying to draw, whether it was a tree or a table or skin, so I started trying to use all my lines as a means of both communicating shadow and texture, for better or for worse.
Most of the figure drawings in this book are people I’ve seen on public transportation, who, especially since the advent of the iPhone, make perfect subjects, as they hold their poses much more consistently than do people who are engaged by the actual world. Even better, if they suddenly put their phone away and look out the window, all I have to do is wait 30 or 40 seconds and they’ll reach in their pocket and take out the phone again and I can resume drawing. When I’m drawing strangers, I’m always trying to get a solid sense of their presence and their vulnerability, and even the slightest error in judgment can throw a whole drawing off.
Tip to those staring at people on public transportation: if your subject becomes suspicious and suddenly looks at you, simply instantly look at someone else while assuming an expression of intense concentration until the original subject is satisfied / disappointed that it’s not them you’re looking at. Then they’ll go back to looking at their phone and you can go back to looking at them. Works every time, and I have yet to be arrested.
Finally, I will add that I think there’s no better means of seeing and being a part of the world, however briefly, than drawing from life. Nearly everything in contemporary culture now points us away from this. And if you’re someone who draws stories from memory, as I am, you need to “bank” your understanding of humans and how we hold ourselves, gesture, and deceive each other. I know some cartoonists place little currency in this, and their work shows it. This said, I have a strange occasional facial blindness, and I sometimes won’t immediately recognize people I’ve met before, which is a completely different problem.
Did parenthood change the way you make art?
Since I was the stay-at-home parent in our family (my wife is a public high school science teacher), I was lucky enough to get to spend most days with my daughter Clara from the time she was born to the time she went away to school. I wouldn’t trade those years for anything. Not only was it a sort of miraculous anthropological study but it was fun. It was also profoundly exhausting.
Oddly, however, I got more work done during those years than at any time since, I think because I was suddenly aware of how valuable every second is; I did not screw around when Clara took her nap. And for years, my workday exactly matched the schedule of her school day. Now I can waste time like nobody’s business.
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Image: Drawn & Quarterly
Can you talk about the role of self-deprecation in your comics? Is it a primary motivation in creating or an obstacle you have to work around?
My wife has advised me to never talk about this, saying “no one wants to hear you whine.”
But: I was recently asked in an interview if my self-doubt was all a “put-on” or something I was cultivating; it’s not. I’ve struggled for years with despair and doubt and naively thought that if I worked just a little harder or a little longer, I’d suddenly one day bloom into a gloriously radiant self-confident artist. Didn’t happen.
Thus, I’ve learned over the years to simply try to make a pact with my despair, as if it was a terrible roommate — which has mostly worked. But I still always feel it while I’m asleep, when I wake up, and whenever I sit down to work. I’ve written and talked about this because I thought objectifying it on the page might help me somehow, but it didn’t, and also because I thought those artists who feel similarly to me perhaps might take some solace in knowing they weren’t alone. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter how you feel as an artist. What matters is the emotion you put into the work itself, and the two are completely exclusive.
If there’s a slight advantage to doubting oneself, it’s that one is perhaps a little more self-critical of one’s own work, which can’t hurt. Plus, most of the self-confident artists I’ve met are jerks and seem especially interested in cultivating and securing power, which is an aim anathema to art itself.
Where does anxiety come in?
Usually through the fingertips and toes, exiting in involuntary grimaces and moans, especially around 2AM. I was recently anesthetized for a medical procedure with a low dose of fentanyl and then had the best night’s sleep I’d had in decades, waking up not in a panic but grateful for my pillow and in a sort of pink sparkly haze; it felt like Christmas Eve c. 1976.
What does your personal archive look like? How do you maintain it?
If you’re asking about my own stuff, it’s pretty easy to manage, as it’s almost all books, notebooks, and original pages, the latter I either sell or keep in mylar sleeves upright in a cabinet far from my drawing table (since I spilled an entire cup of coffee on the last such cabinet I had, which was right behind my drawing table and which did not count as a good day).
When I was in art school, I made largish paintings — 6 x 9 up to 8 x 12 feet — which I then had to leave behind when I moved and which prompted me to seriously consider the value of smaller, flatter stuff. This said, I’ve started painting again and also make sculptures. But I also don’t want to leave a big mess for my daughter after I cough my last.
