So some pages in Monograph become nearly vertiginous as one has to rotate the book (on occasion several times) to read the strips’ panels, some of which might have been intended initially for a larger format, the lettering still legible but shrinking precariously, especially when some of those “panels” are themselves comic book pamphlets affixed to the pages of Monograph, asking one to read even smaller pages and panels. While most artist monographs offer plenty to look at, what one is looking at in Monograph are often comics, which, as Ware is well aware, are meant to be read. The book then follows Ware as he moves to Chicago to matriculate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a period of time when he would create strips like “Quimby the Mouse” and “Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth” that would make their way into his innovative comic book The Acme Novelty Library and eventually lead to the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth and to Ware’s more widespread recognition, including his subtly complex New Yorker covers. Monograph is arranged roughly in chronological order, beginning with Ware’s childhood in Omaha before quickly moving to his years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was an art student and would draw his first comic strips for the college paper The Daily Texan-work that would capture the heart of Art Spiegelman, who immediately invited the young artist to contribute to RAW, the venerable comics anthology from the ’80s and ’90s. Though Monograph is not in comics form-it is (as the title suggests) an artist monograph, collecting photos from Ware’s life and of his paintings and sculptures, reproducing pages from his comics, both in rough and finished form, as well as from his sketchbooks and personal journals, all accompanied by Ware’s commentary and reminiscences-it is yet another iteration in his attempt to capture the lingering feeling he experienced in those conversations with his grandmother. The desire for connection, for the reader to be moved, to feel not just emotion but something intangible, something like the rustle of memory, can indeed be found in the virtuosity and formal complexity of Ware’s comics. “The lingering feeling of it,” Ware explains, “is what made me want to become a writer, or an almost-writer.” According to Ware, she did so “with a vibrancy of detail, a firm feeling of reality and a sense of life which I’ve not experienced since in any conversational setting,” forging a powerful connection between them through story. For all its sophistication, cartoonist Chris Ware’s body of work, as Ware relates in his recent, hefty book Monograph, has a humble origin: listening to his grandmother tell stories of her past.
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