If you’re not familiar, Chris Ware is a graphic novelist living in Chicago. He’s known for his Acme Novelty Library collection among other massive timeless bodies of work. His books are something to behold, I collect as many as I can afford because when I read them they invoke that feeling of intensely pouring over a huge picture book as a kid, getting enveloped in everything the world on the page has to offer.

So yea… I dig his stuff. But whatever. Let’s get to it here. I picked up a copy of the “Best American Comics of 2007” from my local library and am enjoying it thoroughly. Now I’ve been searching for an eloquent way to express my feelings about the IGF and its growing controversy and lo and behold I found it in the most unlikely of places. Within an anthology of comics.

First of all, the title: it’s misleading. Though I haven’t taken a survey, I’d imagine that a good number of the guest editors of all the Best American series have felt compelled to take issue with it, too. To presume that my personal taste defines an objective by which all living cartoonists should be judged is absurd. On top of that, any public competition is antithetical to the spirit of real art, and labeling a widely disseminated collection of artwork as “the best” veers perilously close to suggesting that artists should gauge what they do against some sort of popularity contest for an ancillary reward –notoriety, money, or even inclusion in an anthology– other than the artwork itself. So while I suppose it’s probably obvious to the reader that my name as guest editor essentially acts as a sort of aesthetic loophole for the overall series title, it still seems polite and proper to acknowledge it here. In some cases I’ve chosen stories or excerpts of stories that fulfill what I think I’m regularly looking for from art and literature (which, when boiled down past all the things that don’t really matter like a snazzy style and clever writing and accomplished drawing, means “telling the truth”). I’ve also included work that has truck in my craw to such a degree that the best I can do is to say that it’s interesting, or, in a more conversation way, that it’s made me feel really, really old.

~ Chris Ware

He goes on to express some of the history and growing criticism within the medium of comics and graphic novels.

As a cartoonist myself, I’ve been quite heartened at the veritable explosion of intriguing work in a medium that as recently as a decade ago seemed marginal and embarrassing. In fact, it has almost gotten to the point now where a cartoonist doesn’t have to explain or qualify what he or she does, let alone not have to launch into a thumbnail history of comics as a commercial-cum-artistic medium to family members at Christmastime. Comics are appearing in bookstores as novels and in museums as art. Even more amazing is that this is all because there really does appear to be a concomitant general increase in interest by the public, one of the most tangible bits of the evidence being the very book you now hold…

…But for all this general and encouraging bonhomie, the opinions expressed are not always rah-rah; in a June 2006 roundup of various recent comics in the Times, the reviewer expressed a certain weariness at the “creeping sameness” to much of what he was leafing through, “semi- or wholly autobiographical sketches of drifting daily life and its quiet epiphanies.” Admittedly, as comics have entered their late adolescence as art/literature, a preponderance of autobiographical work has accrued, beginning with the 1960s and 1970s comics of Just Green, Aline Kominsky (now Kominsky-Crumb), Harvey Pekar, and, of course, Robert Crumb himself. Art Speigelman has eloquently expressed the difficulty of understanding both the value of and the means to approaching fiction in his recent “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@#*!” and the three generations of artists C. Tyler, Joe Matt, and Jeffrey Brown have, at least up until now, devoted their oeuvres almost solely to soul-searching self-analysis. I genuinely think that this is a necessity, however, both for the artists and the medium. As cartoonists and comics still attempt to acquaint themselves with not only how to express real human emotion but also try to decide exactly what human emotions are worth expressing, the most facile and immediate way to do it is to write about oneself. Charges of self-indulgence and navel-gazing are inevitable, especially for an artist maturing within an insulated and comparatively worry-free culture such as America’s, but isn’t art at least partly a means of finding a way out of oneself and then reporting back? The value of trying to see and feel one’s own experience is a necessary step toward understanding what communicates and works in a medium, as well as important bridge to cross toward completely synthetic, or imaginary, storytelling, should any artist want to cross it.

~ Chris Ware

Phew. That was a lot of transcription there. But it was worth it, hopefully… When I read Ware’s introductory thoughts on comics, I immediately drew the parallel between comics and video games. Both are in their varying incubation stages of New Media in hopes [imminent] of becoming full fledged artistic mediums within mainstream culture.

Ware mentions an influx of autobiographical work in comics, so I look to the early autobiographers in Video Games. I can only really refer to a few off the top of my head. Edmund McMillen [Aether], Rod Humble [The Marriage] and Jason Rohrer [Gravitation]. Much of these games are dubbed “Art House” and perhaps rightly so. The difference being that comics have been through this phase of their development and are even getting a little sick of the routine. To Video Games, an insightful autobiographical [or its equivalent] game would be a complete and utter breakthrough.

In a previous post I mentioned how Video Games are in their adolescence but now I’m wondering if we’re going through puberty… Is that the same?