Thursday, May 01, 2008

Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware artist talk

Last night was awesome, I went to the JCC for another one of their amazing talks. It was Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, 2 amazing graphic novelists.


Art Spiegelman's work

Art Spiegelman is well known for his 2 "Maus" books, graphic novels depicting the Holocaust. It is a brilliant style, and a very strong, accessible method for many people of many ages to read about the Holocaust. It's a brilliant book and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.


Chris Ware's work

Chris Ware has some amazingly, insanely intricate artwork. His style is very different, and he can literally have pages and pages of text on his work in small blocks of text all over the place. It's very interesting and I like it too.

It was funny to see how different the 2 men were, Art was so chill and so on, and just talked about living beneath the shadow of his parent's past (and also of his own past successes with the "Maus" books) and that was really interesting. Chris Ware was very self-conscious and self-deprecating, he was so overly humble for his work, it was almost funny. He was a bit of a strange, pessimistic fellow, but it sounds like you need to be that much of a harsh critic of your own work if you want to produce art as well as he does.



Me telling Art Spiegelman about how my Grade 6 Art teacher gave me the Maus books for my Bar-Mitzvah!!


More book signing


Greg from work talking to Chris Ware


Matt and Orion, we met up later on for some food

1 comment:

Nigel J W said...

Hey Mike,
Sounds like a cool talk! What an awesome premise for a graphic novel. I find that graphic novels always tend to have a darker theme. They have been branded in a way, but it was also an industry that allowed for a lot more controversial work. I am sure their novel must be a classic. It sounds incredibly interesting.