Chris Ware - Waking Up Blind, Cut out house

Waking Up Blind, Cut out house, 1988
Ink, red pencil on paper
16 1/2" x 11 5/8"
(41.9cm x 29.5cm)

Early Chris Ware (1988). During that time Chris Ware studied at the University of Texas in Austin and regularly contributed to the "Daily Texan".

Chris Ware's first publication for a larger audience was a "Waking Up Blind" story for Raw 2. Vol 2. "Required Reading for the Post-Literate", from 1990, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. (not this page...).

For a little backstory of how the young Chris Ware came under the attention of Art Spiegelman:
- Excerpt from an article in The Economist:
https://www.economist.com/1843/2013/08/27/chris-ware-everyday-genius

"In 1987, the Daily Texan interviewed Art Spiegelman and sent him a copy of their article. On the back was a fragment of a comic strip. "It was already a re-invention of what comics are," Spiegelman says over coffee at his loft in Lower Manhattan. "There was no signature, as I remember, so I got back in touch with them and asked if they could send me more of this person’s stuff. So they did. Then I had to find him."

When Spiegelman phoned, Ware thought it was a prank call. When he realised it wasn’t, he was terrified. Since discovering Raw back in Omaha, he had often had a copy of the magazine open on his desk while he worked. At 17 he’d begun a "Maus"-like comic of his own. "He said that it was his life's dream to publish in Raw but that he wasn’t ready," Spiegelman says, "that he was just a kid."

For three years Spiegelman tried to persuade Ware to send work to publish. Sometimes he would send comics to show what he was up to. "He had to be coaxed," Spiegelman says. "A letter would arrive which was five times the number of pages as the piece he was making but it would be specifically to say he’s inept and can’t do it. He had to be talked down and talked back into it." Eventually he capitulated, and published strips in the magazine in 1990 and 1991."

- In this video Art Spiegelman talks about this:
https://vimeo.com/143064558

- https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/01/03/being-chris-ware/?lp_txn_id=1554294
His first success for the college newspaper, The Daily Texan, was a loosely drawn potato-shaped creature, inspired, as he says, by “George Herriman, Robert Crumb, Kaz and Charles Burns.” At a certain point, Ware altered the potato’s face by jabbing out its eyes, and the comic strip thus came to be called “Waking Up Blind.”