Working from old photographs and his sharp visual memory, Ware was able to notice quickly all the changes that had been made to the house over the decades. Part of our research took us to the home of the long-dead cartoonist Frank King. When I visited Ware in Chicago a few years ago to work with him on the Walt and Skeezix series reprinting the comic strip Gasoline Alley, I was struck by the depth of his architectural knowledge. And in both drawing comics and imagining homes, you work with grids, rectangles and cubes and need to have mastered perspective. The drawing board of a cartoonist is not unlike the drafting table of an architect. The classic Sunday newspaper comic strip, with many panels on the page laid out on a grid, has obvious parallels with tall many-windowed office buildings, a fact that pioneering cartoonists like Winsor McCay played with when they drew stories that used the New York skyline not just as a backdrop but as a virtual character. The modern skyscraper emerged at the same time as modern narrative cartooning, in the middle of the 19th century, although both forms had prehistories that extend further into the past. This marriage of comics and architecture might sound surprising, but it has a long history, which Ware, deeply knowledgeable about the past, knows well.

One way of defining the genius of Chris Ware is to say that he fuses the disparate forms of comics and architecture, using his nonpareil skills in visual storytelling to show how the buildings we construct are not just empty containers but influence us as much as we shape them. They are constructed at a particular moment, they weather a sometimes hostile environment, they age and need repair, and unless they are looked after, they become ramshackle and ultimately fall apart or are demolished. But buildings exist in time as well as space. Western architecture has never strayed far from its roots in Euclidian geometry, so the drama of our existence is played out on boxy stages defined by straight lines, right angles, squares, cubes, rectangles and other sharp-edged forms.Īrchitecture is not usually thought of as a narrative art form. We are born in boxes, live in boxes and die in boxes: hospitals, incubators, apartment buildings, houses, schools, offices, elevators, cubicles, prisons, shopping malls, big-box stores, nursing homes, caskets, urns. This sentence can be taken as a figurative description of the way life traps us in social roles that are difficult to escape, but it also happens to be literally true.

Chris ware stories