The Los Angeles Times recently interviewed Chris Ware (of Acme Novelty Library & Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth fame) who worked on the poster for the upcoming movie, The Savages. Here’s an excerpt:
Just from your poster, it seems you felt some affinity to the wet, wintry landscapes of the film. It also strikes me that “The Savages,” like your work, is an unlikely mix of funny and sad.
I’m not sure if funny and sad are really so terribly different things; I’ve been to violent films that I find patronizing, dishonest and depressing, yet the people around me are all laughing their heads off. As a half-writer myself, I try not to think of what’s funny and sad in a story but simply to think of what, to the best of my ability, seems truest; whether it’s funny or sad is simply how it settles with the reader. In the wake of any horrible natural disaster some well-known religious figure is inevitably asked, “How can a good God allow something as bad as this to happen?” Really, though, what difference does it make to God whether 10,000 people or 10,000 fish die? Good and bad, like funny and sad, are phenomena relative to the perspective of the organism that’s laughing or dying.
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Chris’s work is available through Fantagraphics and you can read other interesting articles/interviews with him here, here & here.