I Guess by Chris Ware
Connor Moran (whose webcomic is an example of a iconic iteration) left a comment on my post about Pictureless Comics. He sent me a link for a Chris Ware comic called “I Guess” that Connor thought of when I mentioned Godard’s films with image/sound incongruence.
The 6 page comic dates back to 1991. It a bit less formally inventive than Ware’s more recent work. The images tell a rather ordinary superhero story with a masked superman fighting a criminal and rescuing a woman. The words are a narration by a man or boy (hard to tell how far he is looking back) about his boyhood, grandfather, racist step-dad, reading comics, etc. The narration is very much what I think of as a Chris Ware story, realistic, mostly depressing.
Reading the comic is a little difficult as you have to keep track of the stories simultaneous or else ignore one and concentrate on the other. The words are put into narrative blocks, word balloons, sound effects, newspaper headlines, etc. While at first the two stories seem inrelated, there are moments where the two are tangentially connected, for example: the narrator talks about pretending to be a superhero called “The Hurricane” while the superhero in the images fights something that looks like a hurricane/tornado. The end of the story ends with the narrator telling us he was happier with just his mom (rather than his stepdad) while the images show us a close-up of the superhero flying away with the woman he rescued in his arms.
At its heart the comic illustrates the escapist nature of superhero comics for children (and others I imagine). It’s an interesting example of work where both the words and the pictures can stand on their own, but together they gain a new meaning.
Thanks for pointing this out Connor!
Tags: mastersofcomics, ware
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