Ware has earned the right to make demands of his readers, though. it’s also slow, demanding and melancholy.
He rejects the possibility of showing his hand in his (notably handmade) artwork, but that watertight visual surface lets him get away with vast billows of existential torment. Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything. Elaborate strings of micro-panels explode scenes’ components outward through time or through a character’s thought patterns mandala-ish page compositions arrange associative chains of text and pictures around a central image. Every visual observation of bodies or nature is ruthlessly adjusted to the level of symbol, rendered in a minimal number of hard, perfectly even, perfectly straight or curved lines. Ware has an extraordinary command of time and pacing: one bravura page depicts the florist and her husband dealing with her father’s decline over several months, every panel a perfectly composed little square. Ware lets his readers follow the gnarled paths memory takes as it builds and rebuilds stories.
0 kommentar(er)
