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annasellheim:

ourcomicsourselves:

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

After only consuming manga from the grades 4-8, when I turned 13 I rebelled HARD and decided that I was sick of the stuff and I needed to broaden my comic horizons. So, for my 14th birthday, I walked into @bigplanetcomics​ and was greeted with Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware. 

This image only begins to scratch the surface of the beauty of this oversized gold foil book. Chris Ware is a master draftsman, and his work can be both incredibly intricate regardless of the size. 

This book collects comics that Ware did in the early 90s and was released after his 2003 classic Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which was seen as a break through of what graphic novels are capable of. Ware actually says in the first page of Quimby not to buy the book because it doesn’t reflect his current strength as a cartoonist. Ware is known for being self deprecating and I’m writing this so he doesn’t get a say in this case. 

I bought the book and was blown away.

Ware id known for playing with layout. One of the pages in Quimby has 128 panels in it. The pages mimic old school animation (he’s a mouse- get it???). While I picked up and bought the book because of the art, I stayed for the stories the pages told (I am very much someone that only gets invested in comics if the stories are compelling and wary of people that like a comic solely for it’s art). Quimby is a collection of individual strips dealing with different themes, the two most common being a depiction of a toxic relationship Quimby has with a disembodied crying cat head Sparky and a conjoined twin mouse pair where one of them is in rapidly deteriorating health. 

Showing both the mix of emotions that comes with having a sick relative is what was compelling to me. You see here one of the twins resenting his brother (?) but there are moments where you see the healthy mouse coming to terms with his twin’s inevitable death. The strips are mostly very sad, which appealed to depressed 14 year old me. Most of Ware’s work is pretty somber and melancholy, his newest work Building Stories being the most positive (which isn’t saying much, but it’s an AMAZING piece of work).

Quimby the Mouse was really my first foray into reading indie comics, which are the kind of comics I now create. While our work is very different, the somber aesthetic my work sometimes has is a direct influence of Chris Ware. I would say that he and Lynda Barry are the two biggest influences.

Chris Ware is another cartoonist I picked who does not really have a social media presence but you can find out more about him here. You can follow me @annasellheim and my website is here.  This is the second book I’ve written about that’s out of print, but unlike Deep Girl you can actually buy Quimby the Mouse used for as cheap as $7 on amazon.

WELP! I have no idea what I’m writing about tomorrow.What an exciting time to be alive! Come back tomorrow to see what I can come up with!

Here’s a picture of Sparky to portray my current emotional state for not having planned this out in advance!.

I feel like previous contributor’s write ups for this tumblr were a lot less casual than mine, but I have to make this at least somewhat palatable for myself. 

TUNE IN TOMORROW WHO KNOWS WHAT’S GONNA HAPPEN!