Chris Ware comes full circle

Last September, while on a Walt & Skeezix research trip at the home of Frank King's granddaughter, Chris Ware came upon a fascinating discovery. "Imagine my surprise," he writes in the new, just-released volume, "while searching through material about Drewanna King's grandfather, that I should find out something about my own."



It turns out that Chris Ware's keen interest in the work of Frank King can be traced back at least three generations. As part of his role as Managing Editor for the Omaha World-Herald, Frederick Ware was in charge of overseeing the comics section. The elder Ware was, by all accounts, a comic strip enthusiast (apparently the Omaha World-Herald may have been one of the first papers to run Peanuts). In a separate email, Chris writes, "Throughout his managing editorship of the World-Herald (Frederick Ware) maintained fairly close contact with the various comic strip artists he hired, especially Bill Holman and Milton Caniff, to whom my mom remembers speaking on the telephone when she was a little girl. He loved Gasoline Alley, Peanuts, and Pogo, though I don't know of any direct occasion of him ever speaking to Frank King (though Gasoline Alley was always my mom's favorite strip as a kid)."




In the letter above, Frederick Ware seems to be referring to a short-lived policy of the syndicate which used popular comic strips of the day to advertise the then-new television medium. The letter was sent to the syndicate and was evidently at some point forwarded to Frank King himself, which in turn eventually became one of Drewanna King's possessions until it came, full circle, into Chris Ware's hands nearly 59 years later.



Aside from their shared admiration of King's work and their striking physical resemblance (that's Frederick Ware at far right), the similarities between Chris and his grandfather go even further: Frederick Ware "went to college ostensibly to study something respectable," Chris writes, "but secretly took art classes because he really wanted to be a cartoonist."

Chris Ware's impresssive lineage runs even deeper: his great-great uncle, Harvey Newbranch, also worked for the Omaha World-Herald and won a Pulitzer Prize for an anti-lynching essay in 1920; his mother, Doris Ann Ware, worked at the same paper both as a reporter and editor.




Above: drawing by Frederick Ware, circa 1915.

Posted in: