Free show ‘Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life’ at the Cultural Center is 82 jam-packed walls by Chris Ware and pal

On the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center, before you enter the Venetian-inspired Sidney Yates Gallery with its Tiffany finishes and reading-room hush, before you stumble across the latest exhibition in the space, “Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life (1880-1960),” there is a long, claustrophobic hallway like the airlock on a spaceship, only made of plaster and marble, and before the doors to the gallery, there’s a red placard of exhibition credits. At the top of the bill, it reads: “Curated and Designed by Chris Ware.” And just below it: “With help from his pal Tim Samuelson.”

On a recent weekday morning, Ware waited beside the placard.

“Hi,” he said, hand extended, “I’m not vaccinated.”

Then a beat later: “No, no — I am!”

Beside him stood Samuelson, who nodded towards the credits: “You know, I was listed as ‘co-curator’ in the original materials, so I told the city, this show, it’s really all Chris — ”

“Except ...,” Ware winced.

The truth is much fuzzier. When you spend time with Chris Ware and Tim Samuelson, it can be hard to know where one of them ends and the other begins. “No, Chris, I told them,” Samuelson said. " I said ‘I helped Chris, I provided things. But I’m just his pal.’”

Ware wore the plaid and tan casuals of the J. Crew professional. Samuelson sported the oversized, untucked short sleeves of the freshly retired. Both are bald, excessively knowledgeable, exhaustively thoughtful and self-consciously obsessive. Both can, they warn you often, go on and on and on. They feel cut from the same cloth. Ware, 53, looks half a decade younger. Samuelson, newly 70, appears a smidge older. For more than 25 years, theirs has been one of the more extraordinary friendships in Chicago.

“My wife is planning a party in October,” Ware said. “So I wouldn’t be around for the party, she said, ‘I really need you to take another trip somewhere with Tim at that time.’”

He says it with a flat expression of comic wariness, the look of someone guilty of one too many dinner-party conversations on a topic no one else relates to. They both have that expression. The good news is they are not usually the people who corner you at a party. They are usually the people who get cornered by the people who go on and on.

Ware is arguably the most celebrated cartoonist of the past 20 years, an Oak Park resident and New Yorker illustrator whose intricate stories of regret, lonesomeness and childhood nod to architecture, the interconnectedness of everyday existence and the history of comics. Samuelson, who retired at the end of 2020, was longtime official historian of the city of Chicago. When he says he is just a pal, it sounds like a benign dodge, a wish to look more retired than he actually is. When it comes to architect Louis Sullivan, ragtime music and the earliest comic strips — the pair often fanboy as a team.

“How we met is this,” Samuelson said. “My wife (artist Barbara Koenen) knew Chris from the School of the Art Institute. I had always admired Chris’ work in the Chicago Reader — his ‘Jimmy Corrigan’ comics. Barbara said ‘You would like him, you’re both interested in the same things. She also said, ‘You’re both equally (expletive) up.’ She meant that in the nicest way. I said I didn’t want to bother him. So she arranged we go to an opening at (Wicker Park bookstore) Quimby’s that she knew Chris would attend. She takes me knowing I would never initiate a friendship. We meet and start talking obscure stuff. And talking. Next thing, we’re having dinner at Chris’ house. And we’re talking even more obscure stuff. I look up: Our wives are sort of plastered against a wall in fear.”

Ware shuffled his feet and laughed.

Friendship aside, they have worked together on so many projects in past two decades, they throw the silent looks of shared history and smiles too inside to be understood by outsiders. “Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life” is not even their only show this summer. There is also their exhibit on Louis Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, opening soon at the Wrightwood 659 in Lincoln Park. At the end of summer, a long-gestating catalog for another of their Sullivan shows (created a decade ago for the Cultural Center) will finally be published. Meanwhile, Ware is designing a permanent exhibit about Samuelson and his legendary archives, to be installed at the Cultural Center maybe as early as this fall.

You might say, their actual interest is not buildings or music but an urgency to hold on to what’s already gone. As we enter the comic show, Ware pauses at a glass case holding a single drawing, an unfinished “Krazy Kat” strip from influential early cartoonist George Herriman. “I was going to fill this (case) with a blank piece of paper and the tools of the cartoonist — ink, pens, papers. But I realized, why waste the space? Tim and I bought the last three drawings of Herriman — the ones on his drawing table the night he died.”

“When they were put up for sale, we became worried that someone would buy them and split them up,” Samuelson said, “so we pooled our resources and we bought them together. We still get calls: Can’t you sell one of them? No, we can’t sell one of them.”

“Herriman is one of the few cartoonists in this show with nothing to do with Chicago,” Ware said, “other than everything we think about with comics was codified in his work.”

“Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life” was conceived initially as a part of that other big exhibit on Chicago comics going on right now, “Chicago Comics” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which covers 1960 to the present. But the history here was too rich (and too old) for a contemporary art museum. So Ware and Samuelson developed their own exhibit on the flowering of comics in Chicago in the first half of the 20th century, when the medium itself was being shaped. They put an emphasis on the Chicago Tribune’s innovative early Sunday comic section, an evolutionary step for comics that premiered, among many others, “Gasoline Alley,” “Dick Tracy,” “Brenda Starr,” “Little Orphan Annie.” That said, being a Ware-Samuelson Production, the exhibit also ventures far beyond Chicago, and art itself, stopping at the railroads, French art, the merchandising of comics, newspaper production, early illustrated news stories.

Ware stopped before the first of the 82 walls he filled for the show, with rivers of history and artifacts and blown-up images of newspaper milestones. “This here is essentially a history of comics on a single wall. We start with (Swiss schoolteacher) Rodolphe Topffer, who realized his students weren’t paying attention because they were doodling so he turned the tables and made his own doodles into a tool of education and got their attention back then he started drawing his own picture stories, which became so popular he printed clandestine editions under a pseudonym since he was afraid he’d be fired. Topffer was really the first to grasp the power of comics and show the potential for an image to come alive on the page. But he was predated, you see here, by (16th century English artist William) Hogarth. These are original prints from his ‘Analysis of Beauty’ which essentially has all the elements of what comics are, in two prints.”

Before we continued, Ware stopped again. “OK, we can go this way through the exhibit or” — pointing in the other direction — “this way. It’s designed like that. Which will it be?”

You decide, I said.

No, no, he said.

No, really, I said.

No, you, he said.

OK, this way then, I said, leading us to a deep dive into the work of Charles Lederer, a pioneering cartoonist for the Tribune; followed by even a deeper dive into a generation of artists who illustrated the news; then the comics of the Chicago Inter Ocean — “which was the first newspaper in America to publish color comics,” Ware said. “They started at the Columbian Exposition (of 1893), though see, rather than focus on the splendor ...”

“They focused on the tired visitors,” Samuelson said, “not the buildings or exhibits.”

A theme throughout the show (as well as in the forlorn images on its walls) is the impermanence of life, the awful march of time, as rendered by an inherently impermanent medium (as Ware describes it). Some of the earliest Chicago comics he pointed to were so strange to newspaper readers, an explanation of what was happening ran on the bottom of the strips. “Which would seem ridiculous now, like someone telling you how to watch a movie, yet our psychological mechanism for comprehension was not developed yet. But then comics are a rat maze. Look here, don’t look here, go here, go there. So I designed this show to act as a comic strip itself.”

Step into the gallery, you’re greeted by a perplexing Tetris of mini-exhibits, calling back, sideways, forward. As if reading a comic strip, Ware noted, you’re aware of the larger picture, you’re glancing behind and ahead simultaneously. Like Ware’s own comics, the show is designed so densely and geometrically, every nook looks employed. Even the comic strip panels that greet you in the hallway leading into the exhibit are arranged to mimic a comic strip trope — they’re black and white for the first two thirds, like on weekdays, then color right at end, like on weekends. “We went over the designs for this so much I was dreaming it,” Samuelson said. “On Zoom, for weeks — ‘Chris, how about we move this?’ He would point out, ‘No, you spoil this relation to that.’ He thinks in three dimensions.”

Indeed, with notable exceptions (Art Spiegelman loaned one major work), much of the comics and ephemera on display come right out of Ware and Samuelson’s vast collections. “When I was a kid growing up in Rogers Park,” Samuelson said, “we had an old garage and I found out the walls were insulated with newspaper comics from the ’20s. To my dad’s chagrin, I began peeling and peeling every one of the comics away and saving them.”

Nearly as much as Ware, Samuelson doubles as a kind of living encyclopedia of early comics. “Tim is much better on the early, early stuff,” Ware said, “and so I didn’t know much about many of these artists in this show. You don’t necessarily do this much work to tell people something. You want to find out something, and by proxy, you tell them.”

He returned to tour-guide mode.

Over here, an early strip about a lesbian relationship that ran in the Chicago Tribune in 1905. Over there, the earliest Black cartoonists in Chicago, often drawing for the Chicago Defender. Over here, the comics of Lyonel Feininger, later synonymous with the German Bauhaus movement, hired as part of a (deeply unpopular) Tribune initiative to hire German artists (and serve a German-American readership). Over there, the early illustrated stories of John T. McCutcheon, whose sense of irony seems contemporary and prescient. “This McCutcheon here,” Samuelson said, “it’s from a story about a change in the neighborhood on the West Side and a family had an estate then real estate development happens and they’re surrounded by apartment buildings so they have one last lawn party and the picture is the people in the neighborhood who show up and stand at the gates to watch and police are called and this one guy tells the police officer he can do what he wants, it’s a public sidewalk, and so then the cop beats the man and that’s the end of the story.”

Samuelson has a playful, rounded Chicago voice.

Ware, a son of Nebraska, speaks in a tight clip.

About a third of the exhibit is dedicated to the genius of Frank King, whose “Gasoline Alley,” as Ware put it, “recognized that newspaper are ephemeral and so he took ‘Gasoline Alley,’ which started out as a strip about this new fad the automobile, and put it into reality, having the characters age at the same rate as the readers — suddenly a comic becomes a mirror on the human tragedy that our lives are always disappearing behind us.” He gathered hours of King’s home movies (including a lot of footage from King’s home in Glencoe), he bought old diaries; he also included one of King’s typewriters and a personal drafting desk spotted thick with ink.

“This is essentially a cemetery of cartoonists,” Ware said, looking across the room. “I want to dignify them. It’s the people I think about and I want to honor what they did.”

Ware and Samuelson have a shared melancholy for old things. For vacations, they take road trips and visit Prairie School architects; for presents, Ware gives Samuelson original art, and Samuelson gives Ware the pieces of old Louis Sullivan buildings he’s been collecting.

“I don’t think there are many days where we don’t talk, text or email,” Ware said.

“Didn’t you make some calculation ...” Samuelson said.

“I’ve been archiving our correspondence,” Ware said. “I do this obsessively with everyone I know. But our correspondence, last I checked, is nearly one million words.”

“I mean, who else can I talk to about William Schmedtgen?” Samuelson said.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, just ask them. They’ll tell you.

“Chicago: Where Comics Came to Life (1880-1960)” runs through Oct. 3 in the Sidney Yates Gallery at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.; free, www.chicago.gov

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com