Big Bang and Blackhole

cannot imagine two people whose public personas and art differ more from one another's than Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware's. The two interviews were back-to-back at Salle Nemo on Sunday afternoon - and it was an interesting contrast of energy fields. Marjane took the packed auditorium by storm (my prediction is that she is going to age just like her grandmother in Persepolis), Chris sat huddled behind his Macbookpro for five minutes before he said to the technician, "Uh, can you turn down the lights so people don't have to look at my ugly pink head."

Satrapi's powerpoint presentation (not turned on until halfway through her talk) was a ragtag collection of images which she did not refer to at all. Ware's powerpoint presentation was as painstaking and methodical as any of the dizzying layouts of his Acme Novelty Library pages. Satrapi had the audience continually in splits with her pitch-perfect delivery and timing; there was a palpable lack of oxygen in the auditorium by the time Ware was done ("It feels like being a parent is really all about losing your child one day at a time").

With his flat colors and deliberate blueprint-ish artifice - Ware's mission is to keep comic books far from turning into proxy-cinema. Satrapi's easy form and handlettering are but the optimum means to a livewire storyteller's ends. Peoples' brushstrokes, clothes, storylines, personalities - they are all really just various projections of the same single truth about their selves.