In 1990, Chris Ware, then a twenty-two-year-old student at the very beginning of his career, made a pilgrimage to Monument Valley, Arizona, in order to investigate the life of George Herriman. Author of the classic strip Krazy Kat, which ran in a variety of newspapers from 1913 until the cartoonist’s death in 1944, Herriman used the otherworldly desert landscape of the region as the ever-shifting backdrop to his comics. Along with the adjacent area of Coconino County, Monument Valley inspired the dream-like lunar landscape that made Krazy Kat a rare example of cartoon modernism. Eager to learn more about the sources of Herriman’s artistry, Ware felt he had to see the landscape of jutting buttes and flat-topped mesas that the earlier cartoonist had so creatively incorporated into his work. This hajj to the Southwest was an early manifestation of Ware’s interest in the history of cartooning, a persistent fascination that has been much more than an antiquarian passion and has had a profound influence on Ware’s body of work.1
Throughout his career Ware has constantly evoked cartoonists from the past, particularly the newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century and the pioneering superhero artists of the 1930s and 1940s.2 These references have taken many forms, ranging from sly visual allusions to outright declaratory celebrations. A quick inventory would include the early Ware story “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess” from 1991, done in a style closely mimicking that of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster; the cat/mouse dynamic of the Quimby the Mouse stories, borrowed from the anthropomorphic love triangle at the heart of Krazy Kat (where the feline lead character has an unrequited passion for an irascible rodent); the many ironic references to Superman, sprinkled throughout Jimmy Corrigan, that serve as a fantasy counterpart to the bleakness of the main story; and the unusually oversized dimensions of some of Ware’s books, such as the Quimby the Mouse volume and The ACME Report, which recall the full newspaper-size Sunday pages by cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King in the first decades of the twentieth century.3
Ware’s deep and abiding love of old comics is also evident in his numerous reprint projects, where he has used his own strong sense of book design to bring new attention to works like Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley.4 To date, Ware has designed and co-edited four volumes of Gasoline Alley (under the umbrella title Walt and Skeezix) as well as ten volumes devoted to Krazy Kat (under the title Krazy and Ignatz). Aside from this editing and design work, he has also written extensively about the history of comics in a variety of venues, ranging from Bookforum to a museum catalogue published by the Library of Congress.5
On one level, Ware’s engagement with the history of comics shouldn’t be surprising. One would expect poets, novelists, and painters to be similarly connected with the traditions of their respective art forms. Yet there is a significant difference between how a cartoonist relates to the history of his or her craft and how practitioners of more traditional arts are shaped by their aesthetic heritage. If poets, novelists, or painters try to educate themselves in the history of their respective genres, they can draw on a vast repository of institutional knowledge housed in libraries, universities, and museums. Until very recently, cartoonists didn’t have access to anything comparable in the history of comics: monographs, library collections, museum holdings, and reprints were few, haphazard, scattered, or incomplete. The Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose passion for old comics matches that of his friend Chris Ware, once noted that most cartoonists have to educate themselves in the history of comics by scrounging through used book stores or gleaning whatever information they can from the few general histories of the art that are available.6
This essay will examine Ware’s work as a comics historian, paying particular attention to his book designs. My contention is that in restoring artists like King and Herriman to the public spotlight, Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work. In other words, Ware’s book designs are a form of canon formation, a way of filling in the gap of missing archival and historical material and creating for comics a sense of a continuous tradition and lineage. Before going further, I should note that I’ve worked closely with Ware on many of these reprint projects, co-editing three of the Walt and Skeezix books and writing introductions to four of the Krazy and Ignatz books. Therefore, although I am not speaking on behalf of Ware, my account is informed by my many conversations with him on these topics.
Ware’s work as a historian and designer significantly overlaps with his thematic concerns as an artist. In Jimmy Corrigan, the hapless protagonist goes on a search for his missing father, and in the course of the narrative, a larger family history is revealed. In Ware’s historical research, he has sought artistic forebears and in doing so has created a kind of artistic genealogy. Rusty Brown, the main character in Ware’s novel-in-progress, is an avid collector whose narrow-minded acquisitiveness often takes on a pathological intensity.7 Ware’s knowledge of collectors comes from first-hand experience since he has become a major collector and interacted with other collectors in the course of his self-education as a comics historian.
In trying to understand the role that the history of comics has played in Ware’s work, it is important to bear in mind that he is following a familiar pattern. Innovative artists often invent their own ancestors as a way of giving a pedigree to their work. There is a sense in which Franz Kafka invented Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot invented John Donne.8 Prior to Kafka, Dickens was read as a popular entertainer who specialized in heart-warming picturesque tales. Kafka’s fictions and comments on Dickens recast the Victorian novelist as the dark writer of claustrophobic allegories such as Bleak House. Similarly, Eliot remade John Donne, largely relegated to the status of a literary curiosity, into a major precursor to modernism. In the field of comics, Ware has engaged in a comparable rewriting of history by offering a new reading of past masters. Challenging the standard view of comics history, which has highlighted the work of realist illustrators such as Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, and Jack Kirby, Ware offers an alternative canon that prizes cartoonists who practice either formal experimentation or focus on everyday life, such as Rodolphe Töpffer, George Herriman, Frank King, and Gluyas Williams.
What these artists have in common is that they can all be understood as significant precursors to Ware’s own artistic practice. Of course, artistic influence is always a complex, reflexive relationship: an artist is shaped by the past and in turn creates new work that throws the past into a fresh, unexpected perspective, and Ware’s initial attraction to particular artists sprang out of aesthetic interest rather than identity creation. Yet it’s not entirely accidental that the artists Ware loves the most are the ones who most closely mirror his own practices. For example, Ware’s belief that cartoonists should aim to draw images that are iconic in their simplicity rather than possessing illustrational density can be linked to Töpffer’s theories. For Töpffer as for Ware, comics are not a form of drawing that tries to mimic reality but rather a form of visual shorthand that uses images to tell stories, with narrative speed favored over representational accuracy.9 Ware’s use of the full comics page as a cohesive unit owes much to the Sunday page designs of Winsor McCay as well as Herriman and King. Ware’s affinity with King’s Gasoline Alley is best described as a matter of tone and mood. Unlike the broad burlesque gag humor or melodramatic bluster of other newspaper comics, King’s strip had a gentle, reflective, nostalgic tone as it followed the daily lives of a Midwestern family over many decades.10 This focus on the quotidian has strongly influenced Ware’s own attempts to register minute, commonplace events in his comics. Gluyas Williams, another largely forgotten cartoonist that Ware cherishes and wishes to bring back into print, worked in the same vein of quiet domestic humor as King.11
Thus, Ware’s archival and revisionist design work seeks to change how his favorite comics are perceived. Before Ware, Krazy Kat was celebrated largely on literary rather than visual grounds, and Gasoline Alley was generally regarded as a dated and sentimental comic strip. By lavishing his attentions on them, Ware is trying to change their status as cultural artifacts, making them precursors to works like Quimby the Mouse and Jimmy Corrigan and linking these earlier creators with the cadre of alternative cartoonists who have emerged in recent years, such as Seth, Dan Clowes, and Ivan Brunetti. This linkage between the past and present can be seen clearly in the issue of McSweeney’s Ware edited, which includes a photo of Frank King, an article about George Herriman, and other gems from the past nestled amid a bevy of modern cartoonists.12
In searching for ancestors in earlier comics and recasting the history of comics to highlight work that is similar to his own, Ware is part of a larger effort by like-minded cartoonists of his generation. Art Spiegelman, a mentor who offered Ware an early national venue in RAW, has often written on comics from the past and sought to resurrect selected masters, notably Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Cole.13 The Canadian cartoonist Seth staked out a claim to the tradition of New Yorker cartooning, Canadian comics, and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (in the last case, designing a multivolume series that parallels what Ware has done with King and Herriman).14 Chester Brown, another Canadian cartoonist, creatively appropriated the style of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.15 In effect, Ware belongs to a cohort of contemporary cartoonists who are doing innovative work in the present while rewriting and re-mapping the history of comics.
To understand why Ware and his fellow cartoonists are rewriting comics history, it is important to put their work in a historical context. While cartooning has a history that goes back to the earliest days of print (if not further), the main tradition of mass-market comics only coalesced in the late nineteenth century when American newspapers, borrowing from European traditions of illustrated satire, started publishing cartoons with a recurring cast of characters as a regular feature. These early comic strips, notably the Yellow Kid and the Katzenjammer Kids, often featured rambunctious children engaged in near fatal violence. With their broad physical comedy, these comics owed much to vaudeville and the popular stage. The first newspapers that published comics, put out by press barons like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, were widely despised as sensationalistic and vulgar by polite society. Because of their contents and their venue, the early comics were immensely popular but also disreputable.16
To a large extent, this legacy of mass-market popularity and concomitant social disdain applied to comics for much of the twentieth century, even as they became a fixture in most daily newspapers. Consider the fate of the most artistically accomplished of the early comics, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (which ran from 1905 to 1913 and was revived from 1924 to 1926). While McCay’s strip was loved by millions and earned him a regal salary, it rarely received any critical attention at the time and was quickly forgotten after it stopped appearing in newspapers. This oblivion was so complete that McCay’s family was willing to allow the original art to be destroyed and scattered after the cartoonist’s death in 1934.17 In his lifetime, there were a few haphazard collections of McCay’s comics but these reprinted only a small fraction of his work and quickly fell out of print. In effect, McCay, although a key figure in the development of comics as an art form, created work that was as ephemeral as the newsprint on which it was printed.
What was true of McCay could be said of many other lesser cartoonists. For decades, newspaper comics remained an evanescent art form: even when strips were republished in book form, these reprints were invariably incomplete, often without dates, or published in cheap comic books or paperbacks that were only slightly more substantial than their original newspaper incarnation. These reprints were occasionally augmented by popular histories, often written by cartoonists themselves, which tended to be informal and anecdotal.18 The inherent impermanence of newsprint was reinforced by social snobbery. In his controversial book Double Fold, novelist Nicholson Baker shows that American librarians, disdainful of the type of vulgar publications and indifferent to the artefactual value of visual forms like comic strips, systematically destroyed their physical holdings of newspapers, preferring to preserve these documents as microfilm.19
In opposition to the disdain of comics by the official custodians of culture, a group of amateur historians (or, more colloquially, “comic strip fans”) emerged in the 1960s. Working under the banner of nostalgia, these fans sought to preserve the yellowing newspaper pages that libraries were destroying. Chief among these comic strip preservationists was Bill Blackbeard. Born in 1926, Blackbeard grew up reading the adventure comic strips of the 1930s, notably Mickey Mouse, Terry and the Pirates, and Dick Tracy. In 1968, horrified by what he would one day describe as a “holocaust of national newsprint archives,” Blackbeard established the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a nonprofit organization that would take from libraries any newspapers they wished to discard.20 Blackbeard quickly acquired a massive and extensive collection that would include more than 2.5 million clippings and tear sheets as well as more than 75 tons of newsprint. Without the effort of amateur historians and collectors like Blackbeard, almost all the old newspaper comics of the early twentieth century would have been lost or, at best, available in the imperfect form of microfilm.
Starting in the 1970s, Blackbeard used this collection as the raw material for his extensive editorial activities, resulting in the reprinting of more than two hundred books of such old comic strips such as Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, and Tarzan. Perhaps the most significant book that Blackbeard had a hand in producing was The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, co-edited with Martin Williams and released in 1977.21 A significant early example of comics canon formation, this book would influence how a new generation of readers saw the history of comics. Its virtues included the fact that it was extensive and well selected; almost all the major American newspaper comics were represented, and the excerpts were some of the best examples of the comics medium.
Among the many young readers who were impacted by this book was the teenage Chris Ware, who read it in the mid-1980s as he was trying to educate himself on comics history. Particularly important for Ware was the fact that he first encountered Frank King’s Gasoline Alley Sunday pages in the Smithsonian Collection, which led him to start searching for other examples of King’s work. Because King had only been featured in a few out-of-print volumes that contained only a fraction of his production, Ware started collecting newspaper clippings, thus beginning the path that would lead him to co-edit the Walt and Skeezix volumes. In retrospect, the books Blackbeard was editing in the 1970s and 1980s can be understood as a halfway house between the earlier period of haphazard reprintings and the more extensive reprint volumes that Ware would undertake in the early twenty-first century. Blackbeard’s volumes aspired toward archival completeness, often covering the entire run of a strip, and he would provide historical background in his erudite introductions. In that sense, his books served as a model for the volumes that Ware would later edit.
But there are significant differences between Blackbeard’s projects and subsequent work by Ware and others. Before the rise of easy digital reproduction, in the 1970s and 1980s, Blackbeard wasn’t always able to restore his old newsprint comics to a perfectly readable condition. Moreover, the production and design values on these books were sometimes slapdash, perhaps due to the fact that some of the publishers came out of amateur fan publishing. Finally, there was the selection of comics to reprint. Motivated in part by nostalgia, Blackbeard gravitated toward the adventure strips he loved as a boy (Terry and the Pirates, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Tarzan) and gave less attention to the cartoonists who dealt in domestic themes (notably, Frank King, Clare Briggs, and Gluyas Williams). To be sure, Blackbeard did edit a series of Krazy Kat books in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but these were the exception to his general preference for adventure strips drawn in a realistic illustrational style. In his choice of strips to reprint, Blackbeard was also responding to market conditions: most of his books were sold in comic book specialty stores, which catered to fans of adventure and fantasy comics.
When Ware started investigating the history of comics in the mid-1980s, he was inevitably influenced by Blackbeard’s pioneering research. But Ware also approached these old comics with a different sensibility. Since he had no nostalgic memories of reading these strips when they were first published, he looked at them with an artist’s eye as a source for inspiration and ideas. The importance of the Smithsonian Collection in shaping Ware’s sense of the past can’t be overstated. By the 1970s, Frank King was a virtually forgotten figure. Much more so than Blackbeard, comic strip fans of the 1970s had a somewhat one-sided sense of history: they tended to be aging nostalgia buffs who wanted to reread the adventure stories of their youth. They doted on Hal Foster’s anatomical accuracy in Prince Valiant, Milton Caniff’s cinematic storytelling in Terry and the Pirates, and Alex Raymond’s flowing drapery in Flash Gordon. What these fans tended to dislike and ignore were the cartoony artists who told stories that were funny, warm, and human: E. C. Segar’s Popeye, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, and Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Because it was eclectic and wide-ranging, the Smithsonian Collection challenged this narrow view of history.
In reading the Smithsonian Collection, Ware was taken by a Gasoline Alley Sunday page comic where the main characters Walt and Skeezix, a father and his adopted son, go for a walk in the woods (see plate 5).22 This page is a mood piece in comics form, wistful with autumnal emotions. Ware would often pay homage to this page in many of his own compositions where he used the imagery of fall and falling leaves to evoke the transience of human life (see plate 6).23 Readers of Jimmy Corrigan won’t be surprised that Ware was attracted to Gasoline Alley. Just as Jimmy Corrigan tells the story of a son’s search for his father, Gasoline Alley presents the other side of the coin: a father’s fear of losing his son. As I discuss in the introductions to the first two volumes of the Walt and Skeezix series, cartoonist Frank King was deeply anxious about his relationship with his son because he and his wife had experienced a stillbirth during her first pregnancy.24 For this and other reasons, Gasoline Alley in its early decades was a comic strip thematically focused on the relationship between a father and son. In the strip, bachelor Walt Wallett adopts a foundling he names “Skeezix.” Yet throughout the course of the serial, Walt worries about losing his son. The dominant mood is tender apprehension, a tone that Ware himself would borrow in his own work especially when representing domestic life. It’s this quiet tone and focus on ordinary life that made Gasoline Alley such an appealing model for Ware.
Aside from the resonant father/son theme, Gasoline Alley taught Ware much about narrative. During the course of the strip, Skeezix and the other characters grow older. This real-time aging distinguished Gasoline Alley from other comic strips and comic books, which tended to be set in an eternal present, as Umberto Eco notes.25 Skeezix is discovered as an infant in 1921, becomes a school boy by 1925, goes on his first dates by 1935, lives on his own by 1939, and finally becomes a soldier by 1942. The dimension of time, especially as it unfolds in a growing family life, would become a recurring concern for Ware, becoming visible in the multi-generational sagas of Jimmy Corrigan and “Rusty Brown.”
In 2002, Chris Oliveros, head of the publishing house Drawn & Quarterly, approached Chris Ware and myself to work on a series of books reprinting King’s work. In the summer of 2003, I went on a trip with Ware and Oliveros to meet Drewanna King, the grand-daughter of the cartoonist. Fortunately for us, it turned out Drewanna was devoted to her family’s history. She was an avid genealogist and pack rat, and her basement was jammed with King memorabilia: original art, photos, diaries, and letters. Among other things, Drewanna owned the original woodcut-style Sunday page that Ware had been so fascinated by when he first read the Smithsonian Collection. With great generosity, Drewanna shared not only her family treasures but also her memories. Meeting her convinced us that we could write about King’s life at length in a way that would enrich the reading of his comic strips. King was essentially an autobiographical artist, so facts about his life deepen our appreciation of his art.
Because of the abundance of family material provided by Drewanna King, Ware decided to organize the introductory editorial material in a way that captured the cartoonist’s domestic life. King had been an avid photographer and often used his family photos as inspiration for his published drawings. The family theme of the strip suggested that it might make sense to present the introductory material as a family album. Our goal for each Walt and Skeezix volume is to create an integrated whole. My introductory material is woven in seamlessly with the other elements of the book: the design, the photos, the comic strips, and the historical notes are provided by Tim Samuelson, a distinguished architectural historian.26 The effect we’re hoping to achieve is something like a house of mirrors. Ideally, readers should be engaged by the story of Walt and Skeezix, and then see how the tale reflects aspects of King’s life as seen in family photos and diaries. Tim Samuelson’s historical notes provide another angle of reflection and place Walt and Skeezix in the context of King’s era.
Once, while talking about what he hoped to do with the series, Chris and I came up with the idea that one way to describe the Walt and Skeezix books is to compare them to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.27 This novel is comprised of a long poem (written by a fictional poet), a introduction by an untrustworthy narrator, and an even stranger explication of the poem, concluding with a sly index. The glory of Pale Fire is that all these elements play off each other to create a disorienting whole. While the Walt and Skeezix books are much more sober than Pale Fire, the aim is to make each book as multi-layered as a modernist novel. Pale Fire, as Ware once suggested to me, is an ideal book for a cartoonist to study because cartooning is a hybrid art, and Nabokov was a master of mixing disparate elements into a single book. The Walt and Skeezix books are very much a collaborative project, but the idea of creating the book as an integrated whole came from Ware.
Aside from the editorial material, the design elements of the Walt and Skeezix books deserve attention. First of all, these books have a similar look and feel to the first Jimmy Corrigan hardcover. Placed next to each other on a bookshelf, the design of these volumes bears a striking resemblance to the Jimmy Corrigan cover: all of these books are oblong, with dust jackets in muted colors (highlighting pink and yellow); in each book, the space on dust jacket is thoroughly exploited, displaying art on both the inside and outside. The various sections of the book (the introduction, the reprint of the daily strips, and the historical notes at the end) are distinguished by their paper stock: white paper for the editorial material and an evocative yellow, suggestive of old newspapers, for the reprint sections.
While the Walt and Skeezix books are designed to elevate an unfairly neglected comic strip, the Krazy and Ignatz series has the more specialized task of getting readers to take a closer look at a much celebrated artist. Since at least the early 1920s, when critic Gilbert Seldes singled out Krazy Kat for praise, George Herriman’s work has been unique among comics in having an audience among intellectuals, writers, and fine artists. Prominent fans of Krazy Kat include Joan Miró, Jack Kerouac, e. e. cummings, and Umberto Eco.28 Prior to Ware’s work, Krazy Kat had been sporadically reprinted: Henry Holt released an early selection in 1946, distinguished by an exuberant essay by e. e. cummings.29 In 1969, during the nostalgia boom, Grosset & Dunlap issued another selection that was heavily steeped in the pop art aesthetic of the period, with Krazy Kat presented as a Jazz Age precursor to psychedelic posters.30 More substantially, Abrams published a third selection in 1986 that was augmented by a lengthy and well-researched biographical essay by Patrick McDonnell, Karen O’Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon.31
Bill Blackbeard made the first systematic attempt to reprint Krazy Kat in its entirety between 1988 and 1992. Working with designer Dennis Gallagher, Blackbeard released nine volumes that gave readers a chance to read nearly a decade’s worth of Herriman’s early full-page strips. The design for these books was simple but elegant, with scenes of the main characters on each cover. Each volume was augmented with biographical introductions and historical annotations. Unfortunately, this series ended well before all of Herriman’s full-page Krazy Kat work was reissued.32
In 2002, Blackbeard revived the Krazy and Ignatz series in collaboration with Ware as the designer through the publisher Fantagraphics. In designing the new series, Ware made a number of significant changes: instead of having a uniform logo, he uses a new typeface on each cover. Rather than reprinting images from Herriman’s strips on the covers, he chose to foreground bold shapes and colors (because the strip revolves around a love triangle between a dog, a cat, and a mouse, Ware often uses triangular shapes on his covers). And thanks to the wider availability of digital technology, Ware included many more photographs and examples of Herriman’s original art in this series than in prior versions. Because Herriman was a collector of Navaho rugs, Ware also used design elements inspired by Navaho art in the five volumes reprinting the Krazy Kat serial from 1935 to 1944.
Compared to Dennis Gallager’s earlier series of covers and, indeed, even Ware’s own work on Walt and Skeezix, the covers on the Krazy and Ignatz books don’t emphasize the characters as much. Although Krazy, Ignatz, and the other denizens of Coconino County do appear in Ware’s covers, they are often very small, rather like the figures in many of Ware’s own Quimby the Mouse strips. In an interview with Todd Hignite, Ware explained why he was willing to mimic Frank King’s art style but took a very different approach when designing the books that reprint George Herriman: “I tried to make it look as much like King’s typography as I could (as opposed to the Krazy and Ignatz books with Fantagraphics where I’m applying a different design sense to every cover), because I want [the Walt and Skeezix] series as much as possible to appear as if it was of King’s own devising; I think this sensibility applies more readily to King’s work than to Herriman’s. Besides, I’d never presume to pass off a mark of my hand as one of George Herriman’s. I think King, however, who used countless assistants, wouldn’t mind in the least; his concern was for readability and story, I believe.”33
Ware’s comments on the different approaches he took to the two series reveal his thoughtful approach to design. In both cases, he considers what makes the artist unique and how the design can best highlight those aspects of the work. In King’s case, the design calls attention to Gasoline Alley as a family chronicle. In Herriman’s case, Ware emphasizes an underappreciated aspect of Krazy Kat: the bold design of these full-page strips. While Krazy Kat has often been celebrated as a literary work, Ware’s book designs focus attention on Herriman as a visual artist, again subtly re-writing comics history by making it clear that the narrative energies of comics can’t be separated from graphics.
Aside from these differences, there are a few similarities between the two series. In both cases, Ware is trying to present old comic strips in a dignified format that resembles literary book publishing, while paying tribute to the origins of newspaper strips as ephemeral printed matter by including yellowed paper in the hardback editions. In both series, he tries to situate the comics in a historical and biographical context, although this is easier to do in the case of Walt and Skeezix thanks to the existence of an extensive family archive. And in both cases, he is dealing, as an artist, with strips that speak to his own thematic and formal concerns as well as to those of many of his cartooning contemporaries.
In surveying Ware’s engagement with comics history, it is clear that this is more than a hobby or a form of moonlighting for him. As is the case for artists such as Art Spiegelman, Seth, and Chester Brown, Ware’s effort to retrieve and recuperate earlier comics is a pursuit intimately connected to his own artistic practice and should be appreciated within this larger historical context. Connected with the work of these artists are the activities of fan historians like Bill Blackbeard and the rising generation of academics who study comics. As graphic novels like Jimmy Corrigan have gained a foothold in the larger culture, there is also an increasing awareness of the historical tradition from which they emerged. Chris Ware represents not just the future of comics but also its past; indeed, the burden of his work is to show that the past and future are tightly bound together.
1. For Ware’s account of this trip to Monument Valley see Dylan Williams, “An Interview with Chris Ware,” Destroy All Comics, November 1, 1994, 11–12.
2. For earlier accounts of Ware’s engagement with the comics history see Daniel Raeburn, Chris Ware (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 5; and John Carlin, “Masters of American Comics: An Art History of Twentieth-Century American Comic Strips and Books,” in Masters of American Comics, ed. John Carlin, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 158.
3. Chris Ware, “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess,” in RAW 2.3 (New York: Penguin, 1991); Chris Ware, Quimby the Mouse (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003); Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book (New York: Pantheon, 2005).
4. Gasoline Alley, which like Krazy Kat is both a daily and Sunday newspaper strip, was created by King in 1918 and continues to this day, although the original cartoonist retired in the late 1950s and died in 1969.
5. Chris Ware, “Strip Mind,” Bookforum, April/May 2008, 45, 58; Chris Ware, “Frank King’s Gasoline Alley,” in Cartoon America: Comic Art in the Library of America, ed. Harry Katz (New York: Abrams, 2006), 162–67.
6. Seth, in conversation November 22, 2008. Among the books that are frequently cited by cartoonists as providing a sense of history for their craft are David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973) and History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Maurice Horn, ed., World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1976); as well as various books by Thomas Craven, Coulton Waugh, Bill Blackbeard, and Martin Williams cited below.
7. Rusty Brown’s antics as a collector are a recurring theme in many pages of Chris Ware’s The ACME Report. See particularly pages 15, 63, 85.
8. On Kafka and Dickens, see Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 291; on Eliot and Donne see Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003), 28–29.
9. Töpffer’s aesthetic theories are extensively discussed in David Kunzle’s Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
10. For Gasoline Alley as a reflection of everyday life see my introduction to Frank King, Walt and Skeezix: 1921–1922, ed. Chris Ware, Jeet Heer, and Chris Oliveros (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005).
11. Gluyas Williams (1888–1982) was a prominent early twentieth-century American cartoonist. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine, he also did a long-running (1922-1947) newspaper panel about the daily life of a suburban family; it ran under a variety of rotating titles like Suburban Heights, Difficult Decisions, and The World at Its Worst.
12. Chris Ware, ed., McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2004).
13. For Spiegelman on Kurtzman, see Art Spiegelman, “H. K. (R.I.P.),” in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, ed. Ivan Brunetti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 57–59; for Spiegelman on Cole, see Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits! (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001). In his strips about the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, Spiegelman frequently mimicked old comics such as Krazy Kat and Little Nemo and reprinted samples of these earlier works. See Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
14. The Complete Peanuts series, published by Fantagraphics and designed by Seth, was started in 2004 and will eventually encompass twenty-five volumes. See Seth’s comments in Todd Hignite, In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 213–14.
15. Chester Brown, Louis Riel (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2003). See also Jeet Heer, “Little Orphan Louis,” National Post, November 6, 2003.
16. On the controversial nature of early comic strips, see the essays by Sidney Fairfield, Annie Russell Marble, and Ralph Bergengren, rpt. in Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 4–13.
17. John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art, rev. ed. (New York: Abrams, 2005), 253–54.
18. Among these popular histories were Thomas Craven, Cartoon Cavalcade (New York: Simon, 1943); and Coulton Waugh, The Comics (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
19. Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001). As Baker acknowledges, the destruction of newsprint had many motives, including the desire to limit storage space.
20. Bill Blackbeard, “The Four Color Paper Trail: A Look Back,” International Journal of Comic Art 5.2 (2003): 209.
21. Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (New York: Abrams, 1977).
22. Ibid., 109. This page originally ran in the Chicago Tribune and many other newspapers on November 11, 1930.
23. See the “Rusty Brown” page in Ware, The ACME Report, 60. Also see the additional final pages in the paperback edition of Jimmy Corrigan.
24. For the family dynamics of the King family, see my introduction to Frank King, Walt and Skeezix: 1923–1924, ed. Chris Ware, Jeet Heer, and Chris Oliveros (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2006), 31–44.
25. Eco discusses how at the beginning of each new adventure Superman starts at the same place as the opening of the previous story. See Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” in Heer and Worcester, Arguing Comics, 146–64.
26. Tim Samuelson is the subject of the Lost Buildings DVD and book that Ware created with radio host Ira Glass in 2004.
27. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Putnam, 1962).
28. See Jeet Heer, “The Kolors of Krazy Kat,” in Krazy and Ignatz: A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy: 1935–1936, by George Herriman, ed. Bill Blackbeard (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005), 8.
29. George Herriman, Krazy Kat, intro. by e. e. cummings (New York: Henry Holt, 1946).
30. George Herriman, Krazy Kat, intro. by e. e. cummings (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969).
31. George Herriman, Krazy Kat, ed. Patrick McDonnell, Karen O’Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon (New York: Abrams, 1986).
32. The main cause of the Krazy and Ignatz series faltering was that the publisher ran into financial difficulties in the early 1990s and eventually went out of business.
33. Chris Ware quoted in Hignite, In the Studio, 238.