This summer, Lynda Barry wrote a little piece about Chris Ware for the U.K.’s Guardian. They changed it around, but here is the original version.
‘LINT’ is the Near-Sighted Monkey’s first pick for “Most Mind Blowing Comic Book Ever Gave”
LYNDA BARRY on CHRIS WARE
July 8, 2011
Chris Ware is an American cartoonist whose work is so unusual that some hesitate to call what he is doing ‘comics’. When I read his work I get a Wright Brothers feeling of being in something big, right as it’s being invented – a new way to shoot through space. Eventually we will know what to call what he does, but for now ‘graphic novel’ is all we have. And it isn’t the right term for what Chris Ware is doing at all. It’s like calling an ambulance a ‘graphic vehicle’.
Some think what is happening in his work might be literature and they think this is a compliment. There are books about how to read comics in a serious way as if they were literature, how to take them apart to find out what makes them go. If you do this with Chris Ware’s comics you’ll find the complicated structure you’ve been told is there, but you’ll miss everything else. Looking at a diagram of an airplane is not the same as being able to glide as one.
LINT, his newest book of comics, was Kitty Hawk for me. It’s like the time machine my nephew once wished for, “It flys and it has a turning knob for future, past and also meanwhile.” And when you turn the ‘meanwhile’ knob on this particular machine you will see through time. You’ll see through to middle of the heartbreaking things and know just how they all came about, and why this is the only way to say it.