Comic artist Chris Ware stands next to a page of his work, which is now on view in "Comics, Heroes and American Visual Culture" at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.

The Smartest Kid On Earth
Omaha native's comic art selected for prestigious Whitney Biennial

When Chris Ware was growing up in Omaha in the 1970s, he spent much of his time hanging around the Dragon's Lair comic book shop. One day, he discovered the shop's stash of underground comics by R. Crumb and others, and Ware's course was set.

Today, Ware's one of the leading figures in the comic world, drawing a weekly strip that runs in New City, a Chicago paper.

Those strips have been compiled into a pair of hardcover graphic novels, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," which was published in 2000 and the forthcoming "Quimby The Mouse."

On March 27, Ware will see his work among that of 112 other artists and collaborative teams in the Whitney Biennial at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, the most prestigious and often most controversial contemporary art showcase in the country.

Among the objects on display in Ware's portion of the exhibition will be an original page from "Jimmy Corrigan" that is part of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection.

Ware was in Lincoln earlier this month to take part in a Sheldon symposium accompanying "Comics, Heroes and American Visual Culture," the exhibition now on view which features his work.

After his panel discussion, the shy, self-effacing Ware sat down for a rare face-to-face interview. He prefers communicating with the press by e-mail and was thrilled when he thought the recorder taping the conversation had stopped working.

Technology, however, triumphed, and we spoke at length about Ware's Nebraska background, his work and the place of comics in the fine-art world.

The grandson of longtime Omaha World Herald managing editor Frederick Ware, Chris was born in Omaha in 1967 and lived there until 1983. He attended Brownell Talbot and Central high schools before moving to Texas.

Ware went to school at the University of Texas in Austin, where he drew his first comic strip, then in the early '90s moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at the Chicago Art Institute.

There he became a contributor to Art Spiegelman's influential comics anthology "Raw" before establishing the ACME Novelty Library in 1993.

Ware still lives in Chicago with his wife and continues to draw his comic strip. He is preparing a new story set in the Midwest and returned to Omaha during his Nebraska trip to photograph locations there.

Here's part of our conversation:

The idea of comics as an art form is interesting to me, particularly the way comics are seen by the fine-art world.... Do you think much about that?

"Part of the problem is that it's an art of reproduction. Artwork done for reproduction is basically, by definition, not artwork in the fine-art world. Anything that's reproduced is inherently less valuable than an original thing, a painting or a drawing or something. Given the fact that there are 10,000 of something as opposed to one makes perfect sense.

I think also it's a given that comics aren't necessarily a completely visual art. They're a read art. I can't think of anything else that combines the two things like that. You read the pictures. You don't look at the pictures. You don't scrutinize the pictures. If you do, you start to understand they're pretty bad pictures, actually. They're not even satisfying pictures. They have a sort of visual counterpoint, but not a specific counterpoint. They fill in in your mind. They're almost like a template you're sort of looking at half asleep. So in that sense, they're not really a visual art. But it is a visual art."

On the other hand, the reading is all in the eyes. And it's not actually that much different than interpreting a Jackson Pollock painting.

"That's true somewhat, but I don't know if you read a Jackson Pollock painting."

You don't read it, but you're still going to interpret it. You're not going to say, literally, it's silver here and black here.

"I've said this before and it's kind of a dumb metaphor. But the only thing I could think of it as is sheet music. Because sheet music, you basically play it in your mind, it doesn't exist as music. If you can actually read sheet music and hear the music in your mind, it might actually become an emotional experience. You play through the music. In a way, in a comic strip, you play the comic strip in your mind."

So you have work going to the Whitney for the Biennial, which is ...

"Totally unjustified. I still don't understand it. But I'm not going to complain."

That's THE art showcase, so somebody in the art world has decided that they're going to take at least you and your comic art seriously.

"It actually has happened a number of times before, it just never catches, really. And I don't even know if it ever will. There have been exhibitions of comic art before, there's this one. I know that Art Spiegelman's "Maus" pages were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art.

"You can see the originals and you can see the work that goes into them and go 'Wow, that person spent a long time sitting at a table drawing.' But fundamentally, it still comes down to being a printed book or a printed page, something like that."

On the converse of that, more people are going to pick up New City and look at your strip in there in one week than will ever come in here and see this exhibition.

"Absolutely, that's the thing I like most about it, actually. It's ideally democratic, which sounds really snobby. But fundamentally, it should be. Anybody could read it. It's a free paper. Nobody will really want to read it. I've only ever seen one person read it in my entire life when I was on a train once. I usually see people flip past it angrily. I actually saw some woman sit down and read the entire thing once with no reaction whatsoever."

You still do the strip every week. Is that a full week's work?

"Unfortunately, it is. It takes about 40 hours to do, and it takes about four seconds to read."

When did you decide to do this?

"I have no idea."

Was there some point where you said, 'I want to do this?'

"Most of my friends who are cartoonists, who are all fantastic artists, did lengthy comic stories as children. I never did that. I could never sustain an interest, which I still think of now. Maybe that means really I'm not a cartoonist, just a terrible writer and artist.

"But I wanted to do it all through high school and to try to do something good, whatever that means. When I went to college, I specifically took classes with that in mind. I don't know why, it was crazy."

But you've managed to make it pay the bills, at least?

"Yeah. I had no expectation about it. I still don't expect anything from it. I'm really surprised I've been able to make a living doing this. I still don't understand how it happened."

You've said the first strip you did is horrible?

"Oh God, I don't even want to talk about it. It's very embarrassing."

Do you see any connection with Omaha in your work?

"I don't know, all my memories of Omaha and knowledge of Omaha is highly steeped in sort of an inexcusable nostalgia. Anything that I'd put into any story would probably seem completely ludicrous to anybody who lives there now. I don't know, maybe not."

This story (Jimmy Corrigan) says it's semi-autobiographical. Do you come up with the whole story line before you start, or is it an organic thing that just kind of happens?

"It's extremely organic, to use a word that makes it sound like it's actually got some justification. Basically, I have a weekly deadline, and I just tried to do something that would be hopefully interesting to myself and then maybe to other people. It was just sort of an improvisatory attempt to put a fictional character through a certain set of obstacles I saw I was going to face at some point."

Then you took the strips and reworked them for the book?

"It's actually pretty straightforward. It's just page-by-page drawn. It would be like building a building with no plans. That's perfectly obvious for the first 100 pages at least. The whole thing is extremely flawed. You hope for the best. You can't continually go back and revise things because you run out of time."

As part of the tradition (of doing personal stories in comics), you've taken this genre vehicle and done something that's not necessarily repeating the same story. Is that where you find the challenge or the appeal, to make this form yours?

"I guess, but not entirely. It's just to try to tell something human and real, as arrogant as that sounds, that's the goal that you never really reach. I just want it to feel as much like a real experience as possible. As a kid, I read a whole bunch of genre fiction. I don't understand why anybody would do anything later in life with a genre in mind. It seems ridiculous to do something that would fulfill a certain set of expectations. I didn't really answer your question."

But you're getting at the idea - you pick up a comic and you want to see Superman, and Jimmy Corrigan has nothing to do with Superman whatsoever. So it kind of confounds expectations, at least on one level.

"That's true. There's a certain advantage to anybody trying to do something a little more personal in comics. I think it's the only art form, if I can generously refer to it as such, where people come to it expecting a specific content or emotional reaction. If you read a comic strip, you expect to laugh, if you don't, it's a bad comic strip. I can't think any other art form you come to where you expect a specific emotional payoff like that or you expect a very specific content.

"In a way, it's good to have that because then you can work against it. But working against something doesn't give you instant meaning, necessarily, other than you're confounding expectations."