SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1990. A lady named Clara lies dying in a nursing home. As she declines, she has strange dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of her life come back to her in snatches. She sees herself in her old house in Omaha, Nebraska. All the furniture is gone. She sees rain falling through a hatch in the ceiling and freezing into icicles. One day she sees a newspaper unroll on a screen above her, and all the news is of tiny fleeting moments—someone finding a penny, or doing the dishes, or picking up a coaster from a table. “I thought there was something so strangely beautiful about that,” Chris Ware says. “There’s no telling what one will remember. It makes no sense, but there will be these moments that glow in our memories.” Clara was his grandmother, and he has been thinking about this ever since. Ware is America’s most subtle and original graphic novelist, but for the sake of simplicity he often calls himself a cartoonist.
more from Simon Willis at More Intelligent Life here.