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samarov's review against another edition
The experience of reading Chris Ware’s Monograph is inextricably tied to what it’s about. Its inordinate size transforms a grownup into a child. One can set the book down on a table or on one’s lap, but it will take up all available space and make it impossible to do anything else but turn its pages, often having to stick one’s face within inches to catch some of the infinitesimal detail or tiny text. It’s a rare accomplishment these days to make a work of art which demands complete physical and mental attention to be appreciated but Ware has done that with this volume. There’s no casually flipping through while checking Twitter and watching a TV show; one reads this book or sets it down and does something else.
Going all the way to back his college days at the University of Texas and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ware was always wrestling with the language of comics. One of his first widely-circulated strips, “I Guess” was published in Art Spiegelman’s Raw in 1991 while he was still in school. In it, the panels show a superhero’s adventures while the word balloons and captions tell a childhood story about a boy’s fraught relationship with his stepfather. His experimentation would evolve and grow as he moved on to longer narratives about Quimby Mouse, Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and scores of other recurring characters.
Ware’s book-length essay serves several functions. It is an introduction to the finished strips, sketches, process drawings, cardboard models, wooden sculptures, and family photographs which fill the lion’s share of page space. It is also a revealing rumination on his childhood, artistic development, and aesthetic philosophy. It is also, at times, a witheringly funny critique of secondary arts education, the art world, and American society as a whole.
One of the more fascinating insights Ware shares into his process is that he works improvisationally, allowing what he draws to suggest the developing narrative rather than planning out the story, then illustrating it. For someone who, as Ira Glass hilariously puts it in his introduction, is a “control enthusiast”, this intuitive method may seem surprising. But since so many of Ware’s stories concern the perils of memory this approach makes sense the more one thinks about it. Scripting the leaps in time and space traversed from panel to gutter, along dotted lines, riding shooting arrows all over any given page of a Ware comic might be too tall an order even for the master himself.
In another revealing passage he talks about comics being a linguistic rather than illustrative art; that rather than just enhancing accompanying words, the drawings themselves must be read to be understood. This is why he works so hard to make them as clean and clear as he possibly can. He doesn’t want the reader to linger over how this or that detail is rendered but rather to register both words and images as parts of the flowing narrative.
Monograph is a rare joy for Ware fans, as it revisits so many of his career highlights while also sharing lesser known work and personal anecdotes. The large reproductions of the automatons, toys, and model houses he builds as a respite from the long hours at the drawing table are a delight to peruse as well.
conorpunchbook's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Worth sticking with though sometimes daunting
leep's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
levitybooks's review against another edition
2.0
In short: Even diehard fans could skip this, this is more for collectors.
I am not proud of giving a 2* rating to my favorite living author. He continues to outdo himself—marriage and childbirth have somehow substantially elevated the ambition and enjoyability of his works. He has an innovative way of using symbols and page layouts to play with how time passes in the narrative, such that memories and daydreams can be followed in parallel to plot events. Like how Woolf, Gaddis and Wallace reinvented the use of paragraphs, dialogue and footnotes to make both the reading and the imagined events more 'fluid', Ware is doing for the comic book panel (just look at the cover for this!) In short, Chris Ware is the biggest proponent (and best example) that comics will soon be sufficiently intricate to be classified as classic literature.
The reason I'm giving this 2*s is because there's nothing really new here.
I thought this would be an autobiography, and it sort of is, but it's much more like Ware's art school portfolio (mainly modelling). You learn that Ware imitated many good artists to find his style, which I'm placing as a mix of Schultz, Spiegelman and Burns. I learned more about Ware's vision of the graphic novel in the opening essay on the inside cover of Jimmy Corrigan, and more about Ware's creative process in the Acme Novelty Datebooks. It's nice to see photos of his family, but it all felt quite emotionally terse when he barely talked in much detail about his personal life. On page 61 there's a photo captioned of his then girlfriend: 'Jon Jeffus endures my inexcusable lack of eye contact while I [work]'. I felt like this photo resembled how I as a reader of this book felt like, with only scant mentions of his feelings among this portfolio that I otherwise can't really connect with. I'm just not entirely sure what was meant to result from reading this, perhaps I don't understand monographs, but I felt this lacked detail despite its unwieldy page size and count.
I think I got more out of Adrian Tomine's New York Drawings, because at least that was focused on a particular part of his work and provided novel insights into his process. I just think Chris Ware has already written about all of this more clearly elsewhere, so as a book I can't really recommend it despite it containing excerpts from exceptional comics.
I am not proud of giving a 2* rating to my favorite living author. He continues to outdo himself—marriage and childbirth have somehow substantially elevated the ambition and enjoyability of his works. He has an innovative way of using symbols and page layouts to play with how time passes in the narrative, such that memories and daydreams can be followed in parallel to plot events. Like how Woolf, Gaddis and Wallace reinvented the use of paragraphs, dialogue and footnotes to make both the reading and the imagined events more 'fluid', Ware is doing for the comic book panel (just look at the cover for this!) In short, Chris Ware is the biggest proponent (and best example) that comics will soon be sufficiently intricate to be classified as classic literature.
The reason I'm giving this 2*s is because there's nothing really new here.
I thought this would be an autobiography, and it sort of is, but it's much more like Ware's art school portfolio (mainly modelling). You learn that Ware imitated many good artists to find his style, which I'm placing as a mix of Schultz, Spiegelman and Burns. I learned more about Ware's vision of the graphic novel in the opening essay on the inside cover of Jimmy Corrigan, and more about Ware's creative process in the Acme Novelty Datebooks. It's nice to see photos of his family, but it all felt quite emotionally terse when he barely talked in much detail about his personal life. On page 61 there's a photo captioned of his then girlfriend: 'Jon Jeffus endures my inexcusable lack of eye contact while I [work]'. I felt like this photo resembled how I as a reader of this book felt like, with only scant mentions of his feelings among this portfolio that I otherwise can't really connect with. I'm just not entirely sure what was meant to result from reading this, perhaps I don't understand monographs, but I felt this lacked detail despite its unwieldy page size and count.
I think I got more out of Adrian Tomine's New York Drawings, because at least that was focused on a particular part of his work and provided novel insights into his process. I just think Chris Ware has already written about all of this more clearly elsewhere, so as a book I can't really recommend it despite it containing excerpts from exceptional comics.
n8duke's review against another edition
5.0
A beautiful and awe inspiring collection with lots of surprises. And as a fan it was wonderful to see bits and pieces of the enormous amount of work that goes into all of Chris Ware’s art.
schwalove's review against another edition
5.0
Portrait of the Artist as an Exercise in Self Doubt
I ❤️ Chris Ware’s work, including Chris Ware’s personal reflections on Chris Ware’s work.
I guess this isn’t really so much a review as a statement of fawning admiration.
I ❤️ Chris Ware’s work, including Chris Ware’s personal reflections on Chris Ware’s work.
I guess this isn’t really so much a review as a statement of fawning admiration.
nickpalmieri's review
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
I've always been fascinated by the idea of creatives returning to the same themes over and over again, and the idea that anyone's work could be compiled chronologically to reveal greater themes that have been present from childhood to the present day. This book does exactly that for Chris Ware, one of the greatest living cartoonists (by my estimation, at least). The text on each page, somewhat akin to the descriptions you'd see in a museum aside each piece of art, could be compiled as a book-length memoir. Likewise, the many pieces of story art, original art, fake ads, designs, wooden dolls, old-timey sculptures, paper replicas, enlarged New Yorker covers, and pasted-in minicomics could stand on their own as an incredible artbook. Yet "Monograph" is simultaneously both artbook and memoir, and neither. By putting them together, he creates something far greater, not unlike the mechanics of putting two panels together when reading a comic, or, as he opines, the third being that is created when two people share a connection.
Ware's personal story is inspiring and tear-jerking without meaning to be. In fact, those are probably, in his infinite self-consciousness, the last things he'd want a reader to get out of the book. The personal details are sparse enough that he seemed to be actively avoiding any easy appeal to the emotions. And yet, I broke down in tears by page 13, and found new meaning in myself as a creator by the end.
Most fascinating are the endless nuggets of wisdom he drops just by sharing his creative process. His ideas about seeing panels as a theatre-influenced "proscenium" as opposed to a film-influenced "camera" were revolutionary to me, revealing an indescribable feeling I've never been able to put to words that his work has, as do pre-film comic strips and the work of other greats like Charles Schulz and Jeff Smith. His thoughts on creating as a form of recreating memory, with all the fickleness of the human brain, also helped me understand why I enjoy so many of his works, and helped me appreciate the strange thing that is consciousness.
I've barely scratched the surface here. The 20+ hours I spent with this giant book (both in dimensions and density of content) were kind of revelatory to me in ways I still can't quite wrap my head around yet, and I'm sure I'll be back to revisit it soon. A grand experiment that works so much better than it had any right to.
Ware's personal story is inspiring and tear-jerking without meaning to be. In fact, those are probably, in his infinite self-consciousness, the last things he'd want a reader to get out of the book. The personal details are sparse enough that he seemed to be actively avoiding any easy appeal to the emotions. And yet, I broke down in tears by page 13, and found new meaning in myself as a creator by the end.
Most fascinating are the endless nuggets of wisdom he drops just by sharing his creative process. His ideas about seeing panels as a theatre-influenced "proscenium" as opposed to a film-influenced "camera" were revolutionary to me, revealing an indescribable feeling I've never been able to put to words that his work has, as do pre-film comic strips and the work of other greats like Charles Schulz and Jeff Smith. His thoughts on creating as a form of recreating memory, with all the fickleness of the human brain, also helped me understand why I enjoy so many of his works, and helped me appreciate the strange thing that is consciousness.
I've barely scratched the surface here. The 20+ hours I spent with this giant book (both in dimensions and density of content) were kind of revelatory to me in ways I still can't quite wrap my head around yet, and I'm sure I'll be back to revisit it soon. A grand experiment that works so much better than it had any right to.
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