Chris Ware: "AI images look like corpses"

BarcelonaThe characters in Chris Ware's (Omaha, 1967) comics exude a devastating sadness, but the most important American cartoonist of his generation is in good spirits: "Yesterday I called home and my wife and daughter said, 'What's wrong? You seem happy.'" The reason for his happiness, apart from the vegetarian restaurants he has discovered in Barcelona, ​​is the magnificent exhibition on his work that opens this Wednesday at the CCCB, the most important ever held in Catalonia on a living international comics artist.

In the image of Ware's work, the exhibition goes beyond the conventions of exhibition language, expanding the pages of the comics with audiovisual essays, interviews, animations and small sculptures created by the author. "We wanted to delve deeper into his contributions to language, not to teach visitors how to read Ware's comics, but to share our fascination with his expressive discoveries," summarizes Jordi Costa, curator of a historical exhibition on the comic book artist who has most influenced his contemporaries and which is also one of the highlights.

What is your best memory related to drawing?

— For me, drawing has always been a struggle, but my best memories are from when I was little, drawing in my grandparents' basement, where they had a big workbench. My grandmother was an amateur photographer who took a lot of family portraits and always saved the negatives and photos. I remember the day I discovered these albums, which chronicled her childhood and our family leading up to my arrival. Looking through them gave me a panoramic view not only of my life, but of my mother's life. And it made me realize that my mother was once a child, and so was Grandma. I suddenly started crying because I realized Grandma was going to die one day, and I went to hug her and tell her I didn't want her to die. I used to sit in front of her while she went through the albums, and I would try to draw something that had happened that day: Grandma making breakfast, me accidentally knocking over the eggs and orange juice... Anything to capture the feeling of that day to try to preserve it. And I still feel that way. I just want to try to stop time, to capture it somehow. But it's impossible, of course.

This idea of the past and future contained in the present moment is, I would say, fundamental to his work.

— I guess so. And that's one of the reasons why I like it so much. Here, by Richard McGuire, because he found a way to transform this idea into a story that's not only beautiful but also captures the concept with almost scientific precision. And this allows you to experience it without any artificial feelings or emotions. You just see that this is how time passes.

Art Spiegelman said that "Chris Ware's work captures the butterflies of our universal emotions, the rhythm of daily life." Is comics the language that best does this?

— In print, certainly. When I was a kid, I never imagined we'd carry around phones with cameras in our pockets. Being able to record everything that happens around us is changing the way we remember the world. It certainly has changed the way I remember things. I often record images and videos of small moments, whereas twenty years ago I would have wasted a lot of time drawing them, which is a less efficient way of remembering something and a completely different one. Because when you draw, you're looking and thinking and using your experience to shape a perception of reality. And when it comes to recreating the texture of reality, comics have the advantage of working with images, words, and color, a sense of rhythm and gesture. I was in Fatbottom's bookstore recently, and there was a book of Hokusai drawings of a man dancing that someone had turned into a flipbook, And if you turn the pages, it moves like it's dancing. It's basically as if Hokusai had made a film hundreds of years ago. With a pen, paper, and a printing press, the possibilities are endless.

He mentioned Fatbottom Bookshop, which is five minutes from the CCCB. Do you know it?

— I just discovered it, and I think it might be the best comic book store I've ever been to. It's truly amazing, impeccably curated. It's like Nico the bookseller; you can sense his intelligence and sensibility by looking at the shelves. And it's not even well organized; it's categorized by subject or interest. Some books are where they are because that's where they fit. But in other cases, it's because the comic covers somehow connect with Nico's mind. He's very interesting. And he knows what he likes. And the fact that Fatbottom is a hub for local authors is very important. I hadn't seen anything like it, and I found it inspiring and impressed.

The fact that the comics that make up Making stories (Reservoir Books, 2014) can be read in any order, which is fascinating because it completely changes the reading experience. How did you come up with it?

— With Making stories (Building stories, in English) wanted to make a comic that had no beginning or end, that you could pick up any of the comics and read it the same way you wake up every day and begin to experience life. And all of this would end up settling into your memory as you read it. Originally, it was supposed to be a story about the inhabitants of a multi-story building inspired by Decalogue, by Krzysztof Kieślowski. I quickly realized I was copying Kieślowski and let it go. But I kept the idea of the building and wrote the story from the head of the woman who lived upstairs. Much of what we know about our neighbors is pure imagination based on small flashes of reality, such as passing each other on the stairs, greeting each other, or what we infer from the sounds that reach our home. And working on the stories, I realized that this is how I've functioned my whole life. What I think about others when I talk to them enters my memory as truth, but it isn't necessarily true. And this can lead us to have a very distorted view of things, even of ourselves, especially if you look back and rethink things so much that you stop remembering them as they were.

One of his best comics is Lint, included in Rusty Brown (Reservoir Books, 2020), which chronologically follows the entire life, one page per year, of one of the boys who bullies Rusty at school. You suffered too bullying in high school. What made you choose this role?

— Precisely this, trying to understand why someone could be so cruel to another child. One of the horrible secrets of humanity is that there's a general inclination for people to step on others to define themselves, which has perpetuated racism for hundreds of years in the United States. As a child, somewhat like Rusty, I was the most miserable kid in school. I was picked last in gym class, made fun of, and walked nervously up and down the halls because I could be jumped at any moment. One year, a kid came to class who was in an even worse social position than me. And my first thought was, "Oh, great, I won't be the outcast anymore, the bully who gets beaten up." It took me a while to realize that was a horrible thought. I guess it's the natural pecking order we see in primates, but as a human being, you have to resist it, not only to live an honest and moral life, but also if we want humanity to ever improve.

I must confess that to read Rusty Brown I had to buy a magnifying glass. And although it was annoying, reading this way made the experience more intimate and intense. What's the point of testing the reader's visual skills with such small panels and words?

— I'm always trying to test visual skills, but not just the reader's, but my own as well. As a child, I spent a lot of time in my grandparents' yard, which was very large and had a few trees, and when I was bored, I would sometimes climb the trees or wander around the yard. And although it sounds corny, sometimes I would pick up a leaf and stare at it. Somehow, the more I looked at it, the more I saw. I feel like we don't look as much as we used to. We've reached a point with all our phones where we've stopped looking at things. So I try to make my pages look, even if not exactly the way we used to, at least a little like they should be. So I try to put as many things as I can on each page. And I also want them to reflect the way we remember the world, which is with a very dense and detailed texture.

The exhibition also includes originals from other authors in his personal collection, such as the last strips drawn by George Herriman of Krazy Kat, which were left unfinished due to his sudden death. When I saw them at an exhibition in Madrid, I felt deeply moved and sad at the same time. What do you feel when you look at them?

— Probably the same as you. It's very emotional when you think that those were his last drawings. He died with those pages. And I still can't believe they were auctioned off and no one else was interested. To me, they're the most important drawings he did, because they prove he lived to publish the comic. Especially after Michael Tisserand's biography of Herriman revealed that he was Black but passed for white his entire life. Knowing this, Krazy Kat comes to life and even more meaningful. If it was previously considered a metaphor for totalitarianism or other things, it's now clear that this isn't what it's about. Herriman poured his entire life into the strip, especially the lies and devious dealings of the United States, and he did it in a way that can only be described as genius. He seems to have suffered from migraines and would sometimes lie on the couch waiting for them to stop. But that day, while he was working on the strips, he didn't wake up. There are many cartoonists who work until the end of their lives. Charles Schultz only lived a few days after drawing his last comic strip. PeanutsIt's strange. There's something about cartoonists, sitting all day at a table creating a world in front of them, that makes them feel trapped, as if they can't stop doing it. I keep a personal diary and write every day, and I want to keep it until my last day, for what it's worth, which I don't think it is.

You not only experiment with the sizes and shapes of the comic, but you reject the classic format of comic bookIn fact, he's said he finds it "singularly repulsive." Why?

— It's just the proportions of the page. Something about it feels off-putting to me. But maybe that's because it reminds me too much of the junk I read as a kid, like superhero comics. And in some ways, I wanted to separate myself as much as possible. It just doesn't weigh down the page. And it's important to consider the feel of an object in your hands if you're looking at it and spending time with it. It affects how you read and experience the story. To ignore it seems to me like ignoring an important aspect of the work.

The covers he makes for the New Yorker are some of your best-known works. Do you consider these works as personal as your comics?

— Yes. Most of the covers I've done for the New Yorker, At least the ones worth writing about are things I've seen or that have happened to me or someone I know. I don't want to do covers about political issues, especially politicians, because I don't know how to draw them; there are people who do it much better. I try to capture how a particular situation, whether political, social, or cultural, affects daily life. A lot of covers about schools or race relations in the United States are based on certain things I see on the street while driving and taking my wife, who's a public school teacher, to work, or things she tells me about her students or things that have happened to her at work.

At a time when comics have ceased to be a popular art form and are increasingly expensive, your comics are reasonably priced considering their production complexity. How important is this aspect to you?

— Thank you for noticing, I'm very grateful. It's very important to me. One of the things I like most about comics is the cultural space they occupy within contemporary life, which is essentially that of waste. This makes it very easy to dispense with; you can throw them away and you won't feel bad. But at the same time, it establishes a very honest relationship between the reader and the artist; you never feel like you're being lectured. If you go to a museum and see a painting and don't understand it, you'll probably attribute it to your ignorance of art history or a lack of understanding of what the artist wanted to do. But if you read a comic and don't understand it, you just think the author is an idiot. This is an honest relationship, and I think it's very important. And it continues with the object itself. So I try to make something so beautiful, thoughtful, and respectful of the reader, but also not so expensive that you can't throw it away if you need to.

What is the last comic that made you cry?

— Oh, wow. That's a good question. Perhaps Carol Tyler's last. It's the book about her father [Soldier's heart, from 2015]. No, it was Jerry Moriarty's. It's called Whatsa paintoonist? [from 2017], which might not be the most poetic title. He grew up in upstate New York and used to paint in the basement as a kid, and his father would come downstairs to watch him. Jerry is now about 80 years old, and he used to do a comic strip called Jack survives in the magazine RawHe taught for many years at a New York art school until he retired and discovered his childhood home was for sale. As soon as he bought it, he moved in and now paints in the basement where he used to paint as a child. And he wrote this book about his parents coming down to talk to him while he was doing it when he was older. It's the last book that made me cry, and I can't recommend it more.

I hope an editor is encouraged to publish it. I cried with the last story of Rusty Brown, about Joanne Cole, a discreet African-American teacher with a hidden secret. In recent years, especially in the United States, there has been a heated debate about who should portray minorities and how. Was it difficult to capture the Black female experience?

— When I published Rusty Brown In 2019, this made me really nervous because I thought, "Here I am, a middle-aged white man writing about an African-American woman." Some people think that life experience can't be shared, either artistically or emotionally. And I believe that too. But I also believe we have much more in common than what separates us. I barely watch television, but I've noticed that most popular shows try to get inside the minds of criminals, mobsters, or people like that. And it would be perfectly acceptable for me to write about those people or a serial killer, but it would be inappropriate for me to write about an African-American school teacher. And it's ridiculous because I have much more in common with a teacher than I do with a serial killer. The point of being alive is to try to understand other people, and try to understand what they're going through. Because otherwise, what's the point of any of it?

You've dedicated your life to a type of extremely personal and retail-based craft. How does the proliferation of generative AI images make you feel?

— I'm not necessarily worried about the arrival of AI. I don't mind AI imitating what I do, because everything I've seen made with AI looks dead. Images made with AI look like corpses. Even videos look like animated corpses, which is still interesting, because it's as if an alien intelligence is trying to understand how we work. They can try to imitate comics, but why should they bother? We're such a small part of the culture... Also, when you sit down with a pen and draw a line to represent something you've experienced or seen, there's a certain sensitivity that comes through on the page that's unique and can perhaps be imitated, but not generated.

This interview will be published in a special newspaper one hundred percent illustrated by cartoonistsComics have a long relationship with newspapers, although it's becoming more sporadic. As a scholar of comics history, what do you think?

— First of all, I love your initiative, especially that the cover is of Nadia Hafid, a cartoonist I really like. And about illustrating an entire newspaper, you made me think of the first images published in newspapers when they had eight columns. A German artist whose name I forget invented a method in Chicago to print drawings on the same day, but they went in the text columns. At that time, photography already existed, but it couldn't be reproduced in newspapers. Back then, journalism was done by an artist and a writer: they would go together wherever they were, talk to people, and the artist would make a quick drawing. They would come back, write the story, and the drawings would be reproduced within the text columns, so the images flowed onto the paper in much the same way they do on our cell phones today. Art Young was one of the first artists to participate in this type of journalism. They even held exhibitions of these drawings in San Francisco and called it Art of Diary.