This is an amazing interview. I always like reading and hearing Chris Ware speaking in his own voice rather than through the multitude of characters he has created to hyperbolize and diffuse his personality through. There is something deep in me that loves Ware’s humility and bleak outlook about the earth. It isn’t nihilitic, and he rarely looks back with any kind of serious nostalgia. For instance, what I got out of Jimmy Corrigan is that the world is kind of shit and it has always been that way, so the best thing you can do in life is to be nice. Also, everything you do will be forgotten and lost. That’s my kind of bleak–pragmatic, smart, introverted, even if I am none of those things.

So watch this ten minute interview. You get a good feeling about how Ware lives in the world.

A pull quote that I liked:

One of things I like about comics is that its…I know that whoever is going to read it, if anyone reads it, it’ll just be one person, its not going to be a lot of people at once and that its a very solitary kind of private experience, because comics are about the only medium that a reader could expect to go to to get a very particular emotional reaction for decades. That was one of my aims as a young cartoonist, to try to bring other emotions to comics rather than just laughing or derision.

I would add “white muscled dudes punching one another” to that list. Also, remarkably similar to Warren Ellis’ idea that you “come in alone” when you read comics.