Cartoonist Chris Ware invites readers inside his personal sketchbooks
Ware discussed his latest book, Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, on Bookends with Mattea Roach
American cartoonist Chris Ware provides a window into his ideas, obsessions and insecurities with his latest installment of the Acme Novelty Datebook series, featuring pages from his personal sketchbooks.
Ware, who always wanted to be a cartoonist, was pulled by the medium's ability to bring writing and drawing together, and started keeping sketchbooks in his late teens.
"I was just trying to learn how to draw," said Ware on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "A pretty kind of simple tool, I guess, just something to look at and use as a way of looking out at the world and looking back at myself."
Eventually, he started publishing those intimate looks into his process — and has just released the final installment, Acme Novelty Datebook: Volume Three, which covers the last 20 years and tells of his journey into fatherhood and the rise of social media.
Ware is the author and illustrator of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, Building Stories and Rusty Brown, which was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein award. He has designed 32 covers for The New Yorker and his work has been exhibited in many museums worldwide.
Ware joined Roach on Bookends to chat about why he decided to share his sketchbooks and why his daughter is the star of this volume.
Mattea Roach: Thinking back to that first volume, what compelled you to publish it?
Chris Ware: Just pure flattery on the part of a crazy Dutch publisher who had actually published Robert Crumb's sketchbooks or his sketch drawings. Basically, it just taught me I could be flattered into anything.
But it was a crucially poor decision to make because the real utility of a sketchbook to an artist is a place where you can mortify and embarrass yourself in a very private way, which was completely torpedoed and diffused then by my publishing it — it became something completely different.
The real utility of a sketchbook to an artist is a place where you can mortify and embarrass yourself in a very private way.- Chris Ware
So when I first published that initial volume, then I immediately started keeping a different sketchbook that was more private. It's more of a diary sort of thing.
I love facsimile sketchbooks, for the few that have been published. So I tried to make something that maybe would contribute to that very small shelf of literature.
MR: There's an "Explanation and Apologia to the Reader" at the beginning of the latest volume and you kind of outline some ongoing nagging fears about publishing this kind of work. And yet you have pushed past that and are putting it out anyway. Can you talk a bit about the tension in that and what it's like to have to do interviews where you're promoting this kind of book as opposed to a fictional work?
CW: I actually wasn't going to do anything about this because like, even though, first of all, the word promotion just makes my body tense up. It just seems so dishonest and awful. I don't want to promote anything. I would just advise people not to buy it. I don't know what it could bring or provide to anyone but at the same time, I really like other people's sketchbooks. So I really just feel that drawing is a really important thing to do.
You don't have to be good. I don't even know what being a good artist or learning how to draw with that even necessarily means — other than it means that you see better. That's what I try to do and I think it's something that anybody and everybody should do, not just because it's something you want to learn how to do, but it's because you can see better and it gives you a better sense of the world and your place in it.
MR: When you're talking about seeing better, understanding one's place in the world, how do you feel drawing can help even an amateur artist see?
CW: Well, it short circuits the sort of language systems that we live within that mitigate the reality that we see. Every day when we think we're seeing something, we're actually kind of reading it in a way, like this lamp that's in front of me here on your table, I look at it and say 'lamp,' and I'm done with it. But I'm not actually looking at it and thinking about it and looking at the reflections on the lamp itself. The way that we learned to navigate the world and the way we learned to remember the world is through language.
Language is both a way of understanding the world, but it also can destroy your memories and your perceptions of the world. In drawing and looking out at the world the way painters and artists do, it allows you to exist in a moment and to see things that aren't part of that sort of language-based perception, if that makes any sense at all.
Language is both a way of understanding the world, but it also can destroy your memories and your perceptions of the world.- Chris Ware
And that's really to me, what comics are about, looking out into the world. There are these sort of invisible templates that get in between our vision and the world itself, and prevent us from actually seeing it. And you can break through that just by simply looking in, just the act of drawing, going through your hand.
MR: One of the things that's so interesting about this third edition of the Date Book is we see this major shift in your life where you've become a father, and I think that that leads to a different level of understanding [of] you as a person. We see these cartoons about your daughter Clara, covering the years from her birth to her leaving to go to college. What inspired you to draw these comics featuring your daughter, and these sort of short little exchanges between the two of you?
CW: Mostly that she's just really funny and really smart and just a delight to be around. I just hit the lottery as a dad. I don't know how this happened, but I mean, pretty early on, she was already funnier than I was, which was kind of annoying because I'm the cartoonist here. I should be better at these jokes, but she was quite sharp and could really needle me pretty quickly.
MR: How does she feel about being one of the centrepieces of your work and having some of these childhood memories that you both share being out there in the world?
CW: Well, I didn't actually know until last night. We did a small book event at the Toronto Public Library and she agreed to come up on stage and talk a little bit about it, and I was shocked to discover not only had she read the book carefully, she'd read a lot of my other books carefully and was very, very able to discourse on them with great texture and at great length. It was quite heartening. I didn't realize that she had had so many thoughts about it all and at least according to her, she was happy to be a part of it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.