Rising to the challenge of presenting Ware to New York City's winter gallery crowd on their way along the city's museum mile, Adam Baumgold has brought his admirable grasp of the less-is-more ethic to a finely focused show of Ware's work. 'Chris Ware: Drawings for New York Periodicals' (1 February-15 March 2008) consists of two projects and a few additional drawings that reveal different aspects of Ware's imagination, yet provide great insight into his vision as a whole. Displayed in the gallery, located on Manhattan's upper East Side, are 40 drawings: the complete set of 30 drawings that make up the first chapter of Ware's work-in-progress, Building Stories; the four Thanksgiving 2006 covers that Ware drew for The New Yorker (all four covers issued as part of the total published on 27 November 2006), as well as a fifth cover, 'Thanksgiving-Leftovers', that was released on The New Yorker 'swebsite only; and other drawings that Ware made specifically for The New Yorker.

The exhibit starts with the Thanksgiving covers. As with most of Ware's work, the quality of the visual storytelling in them is impeccable. Taken together, the five covers show average people (and the main course) celebrating a beloved and fiercely-held American tradition as only individuals can - individually - with their own thoughts, hopes, fears and, yes, 'baggage'. Ware's strips resonate on a deeply personal level, allowing viewers just the right amount of distance to enjoy a laugh while recognising some sad truths. Although anticipation of which cover would end up in the mailbox added to the fun, Ware's fans were, naturally, eager to collect all of them. The New Yorker released a limited-edition portfolio in a series of 175 of the covers numbered and signed by the artist that also includes the fifth cover and a facsimile of Ware's notes personalised with a small hand drawing. The portfolio, a double-sided exhibition poster and an online exhibition catalogue can be viewed on the gallery website.³

The mood of Building Stories differs from the Thanksgiving covers. The project is notable in itself, as Ware's selection for a new feature in the New York Times Magazine feature The Funny Pages, which debuted on 18 September 2005. Choosing Ware as the first contributor was, perhaps, inevitable. In 2001, Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth was honoured as the first graphic novel to win the UK's Guardian First Book Award. In 2002, Ware became the first comic artist included in a Whitney Biennial, where his work graced two entire walls. His work has also been shown at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As The Funny Pages were being planned, Ware was making quite an impact on the art world at large; as The New York Times Magazine's first serialised cartoon, Building Stories, made an equally strong impact on readers, not only because of the beauty of Ware's sophisticated layouts and distinctive colour palette, but for its content.⁴

According to the newspaper's press material, The Funny Pages was designed to be a contemporary version of traditional Sunday newspaper funny pages. The strips and the other components of the new section (a humour column and a major offering of serialised fiction) were meant to establish The New York Times as a producer of popular genre fiction. Such genres as mystery, thrillers, fantasy and romance got a boost from 'funny pages' published during the golden age of comics, in the 1930s and 1940s. Ware's link to the great comic artists of the golden age was acknowledged in a 2006 show, Masters of American Comics, a travelling exhibition organised by the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibit featured works by Winsor McCay, Will Eisner, George Herriman, Charles M. Schulz, Lyonel Feininger, R. Crumb and many other celebrated cartoonists, including Ware. Echoes of McCay's style in Ware's work are, perhaps, the most obvious link between him and his illustrious predecessors; more time spent with Ware's comics yield numerous correspondences that point to his many heroes and how he has transformed their influences into a unique style.⁵

Ware's narrative skill aligns him with long-standing traditions of oral, visual and literary storytelling. His way of entering the lives of his characters, expressing their hopes, fears, dreams and mortality with subtle awareness, humour and compassion, is comparable to the most accomplished novelists, while his ability to compress so much expression into a precisely defined space is pure poetry. Ware has an uncanny sense of timing, and he divides his layouts accordingly, leading viewers' eyes towards words and images progressively for maximum effect. In Building Stories, Ware chronicles the hours of one complete day in one place, a Chicago apartment building. The action begins after a three-page introduction and concludes with an epilogue that takes place five years later.

Born Franklin Christenson Ware in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska, the artist evidently has retained a child's attachment to comics, toys and a larger-than-life perspective on daily events. Some critics have noted a cold, distanced narrative voice in Ware's work, but this distance may be the truest form of compassion because it allows the characters to be anxious, fearful, self-absorbed and as self-aware as they can be. Taking the people who dwell on three floors of the building as a microcosm, Ware's investigation of individual lives is a miraculous thing. As the narrative thread narrows and turns in on itself, rooting in the characters' minds, the view from above widens; each comment, confession and hint of self-awareness softening the heart-piercing sadness of their situations. In real life, the small events of our hours can seem like mountains, which we have little strength to consider (never mind climb), but they are worth recording. While the tales told in Building Stories seem bleak, disheartening and full of despair, Ware might be offering some very good news: what we have made of our lives and ourselves matters. Here is the ground from which art materialises.

Cindi Di Marzo

References
1. As a musician, Ware plays banjo and piano, collects ragtime memorabilia and publishes The Rag-Time Ephemeralist. He is also a graphic designer (CD booklets, book covers and posters, including a poster for director Tamara Jenkins's film 'The Savages' [2007], starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman); a building designer (the facade of a writing lab and pirate supply store at the founding San Francisco location of 826 Valencia, a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping children and young adults develop writing skills that has received support and contributions from internationally known writers, artists and musicians); and animator of one of the inaugural episodes of 'This American Life', a cartoon series that began airing in the USA on Showtime in March 2007). A longtime resident of Chicago, Ware moved with his wife and daughter to Oak Park, Illinois in 2007.
2. The Acme Novelty Library first appeared in a winter 1993-94 issue published by Ware. Recent issues have been distributed by Pantheon and Fantagraphics Books in the USA and Jonathan Cape in the UK. The latest issue (2007), number 18, reproduces Building Stories.
3. www.adambaumgoldgallery.com
4. Ware's clean drawing style is not, for the most part, computer generated but done by hand. The colour is scanned in via computer by the artist after the drawing is completed.
5. See Unmasking the Heroes of American Comic Art,  a review of the show on Studio International.