Michael Workman

Patrons move through a room at "Comix Chicago"'s opening night, picking out the familiar lemon-shaped head of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the marshmallow of Archer Prewitt's Sof' Boy, and the Ivan Brunetti figure, possibly a ventriloquist's doll, laying on its back in a Plexiglas cabinet.

Annie Morse, exhibitions coordinator for the Hyde Park Art Center, attempts to juggle questions while serving drinks. Kavi Gupta, director of Vedanta Gallery, wonders aloud if Ware is in the house. In fact, he is. The cartoonist behind Quimby the Mouse and Rusty Brown, effusing his trademark reserve, sails through the crowd, slightly hunched over as he meanders from friend to fan to curious patron.

Curator Britton Bertran organized this overview of the talent that makes Chicago a comix-drawing mecca, including work by the aforementioned artists as well as Jessica Abel, Dan Clowes, David Heatley and Erik Wenzel. The experience of living in Chicago connects the comix Bertran displays, even after some of the artists have moved away. Chicago's crowded expressways, tree-lined university campus sidewalks, airy lofts, El stations, garbage-strewn streets, diners and skyline vistas are crowded with hair-salon signs, skyscrapers, telephone poles and drooping wires. Snow, when present, covers everything. Evidence of a perspective trick borrowed here, a shading technique or way of rendering texture stolen there, resides in the details of the Bristol board. A tight-knit community, these cartoonists know and emulate each others' styles.

More than a brick-and-mortar presence, these comix all radiate an eerie chill, conveyed in the loneliness of aging dog-walkers in Prewitt's panels, children watching out windows for never-returning parents in Ware's world, or a motionless, empty interior space that weighs palpably on the isolation of cluttered apartment dwellings in all the work. A still cartoon of Abel's conveys the loneliness of a woman drenched in shadow, arms crossed, her head raised in attentiveness. Ware's character is joined by a boozehound in a leather jacket, a mod girl in black eyeglass frames or a smiling figure in a cape as they explode across the sky in the poster for "Comix Chicago"--urban voices made tangible in the unending variation of drawings on paper.

On a panel a few years back at Art Chicago, an audience member assailed Ware with the perennial question: "Are comix art?" Piqued, Ware squinted, fidgeted with his words, and shot back: "Who cares?" Here's the answer.

(2003-08-27)

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