Last year, I noticed Chris Ware had done a Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker cover but didn’t think much of it, other than “this seems disappointingly simple for a Chris Ware cover.”
Somehow it wasn’t until this week that I found out that Ware had in fact done a series of four alternate New Yorker covers and an online one-page comic strip; the five pieces are strongly interrelated, and the full meanings of the earlier covers in the series can’t be appreciated without reading the later covers and the one-page comic. The first of the series is a single-panel illustration; the second, two panels; the third (which is the one I saw last year) four panels; the fourth, 26; and the online comic page has, I dunno, a hell of a lot of ’em.
There are some really ridiculously large copies of the Ware Thanksgiving on the New Yorker’s site, which is good because “ridicuously large” is probably the only way to read these. First cover; second cover; third cover; fourth cover; and companion one-page comic. And a brief interview with Ware about the covers can be heard here.
The Independent in the UK published Ware’s Building Stories over the course of several weeks last year. It’s still available here.
Great read!
A happy Thanksgiving to you all! I hope this finds you all with family or friends or both.
These are great.
I’ve got a question.
Is there some sort of art in arranging panels in comics so that the reader can’t put them in sequence without reading them? It doesn’t add to my enjoyment of the comics, but it’s so common that I wonder if it’s being done intentionally.
“Huh? Who’s this Choronzon character? …. Oh, I see, I was supposed to read those panels before this column.”
I only mention it because the one-page comic was probably the worst offender I’ve seen in a long time.