Ramon Vitral recently interviewed Chris Ware for the Brazilian magazine Galileu. Bleeding Cool have the exclusive original English version that you NEED to read.
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud says an accurate definition for comics would be “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence”. You haven’t deliberated the sequences in Building Stories. Is it possible to say that your work raises doubts about McCloud’s definition? Or that Building Stories goes beyond the usual understanding of comics?
I went to art school so I suppose there’s always some voice in the back of my head prodding me to push beyond or to try and get at something that’s never been done before, but I don’t do so only for the sake of doing it; I do it to try and get at the real textures and structures of reality and memory as I’ve come to know them. I think the potential for comics to capture the ebb and flow of consciousness in both its linguistic and visual complexity is still pretty much untapped, especially since I think comics are by definition an art of memory, and I try with most of what I do to try to expand that a little bit, hopefully without alienating the reader in the process. (The utility of such an exercise is, of course, open to question.)
I genuinely want to make something interesting, compelling and respectful of the reader; there are so many other easily-swallowed media out there that I think we cartoonists have to try ever harder to compete, for lack of a more sporty word. It’s a sort of challenging though ultimately healthy situation, I think.