When this New Yorker cover by cartoonist Chris Ware first appeared, it sparked a lot of online agitation.
While some viewers saw it as an attractive representation of a scene that Ware, as a father himself, might have witnessed, many were deeply offended, convinced it portrayed a retrograde message about children and technology: “Kids should be playing outside, not inside on those computers!” Though the cover appeared some time ago, the negative commentary on it stayed with me because it perfectly represents a widespread (then and now) reductive approach to image interpretation. It treats the cover as if it’s a visual allegory, an image in which each element stands in for its general category and together work to communicate a moral message. Taking this approach toward Ware’s cover, its critics implicitly interpreted its main elements in the following way: each girl represents “the child today” who lazily prefers fake worlds to real ones; Minecraft (the game the children depicted are playing) stands for “technology” and the threat of progress; and the space outside the window embodies “nature” and the inherent value of old-fashioned outdoor activities as represented by a ball and swing set. Though not depicted, Ware also fits easily into this moral story as its backwards-looking author. He’s “the nostalgic adult” who believes kids should unplug and head outside.
This kind of reading ignores the possibility that we can find multiple, even contradictory ways to interpret the image. It simply turns Ware’s art into a “meaning.” This kind of approach often relies on viewers’ unexamined biases, especially assumptions about genre conventions and image formats. Magazine covers have often been treated as a form of advertising, as attention-getting visuals intended to sell product, not as art that demands slow and careful interpretive attention. Those critical of Ware defaulted to an expectation for covers of magazines like The New Yorker, whose images regularly make a visual joke or offer a cultural critique that we seem to “get” when we convert it into a verbal punchline. Other publication contexts may similarly affect our interpretations. Readers familiar with the many New Yorker cartoons that satirize our interactions with digital technology, for example, might assume that Ware’s cover is simply doing the same.
Reading Ware’s art through the lens of ‘visual allegory’ ignores what makes the drawing attractive, interesting, even strange. With dozens of carefully arranged objects, thematic color patterns, related geometrical shapes, and other unusual design choices, the cover resists (as much as that is possible) a viewer’s desire to make an easy or definitive conversion from image to meaning. Instead, the scene that “Playdate” (the cover’s title) presents, invites readers to think about play within contemporary childhood’s complex worlds.
Frames and Worlds.
Perhaps no comics form is more important to a cartoonist like Ware than the rectangular panel, the shape countless comics use on the printed page or computer screen (both of which are typically rectangular “panels”). Ware designs the cover image with three central panels/frames:
1. The window frame — contains the outside world.
2. The computer screen — contains the video game world.
3. The cover border frame — contains the indoor world the outside world.
The contents of these frames carefully parallel and echo each other. Appearing within the window frame, the world outside the room recalls what’s on each computer screen: grass, tree, sky. Each computer screen reflects what is in the window frame and within the cover border frame: both feature girls and outfits with matching colors. And finally, each framed world is a space with multiple play objects inside of it. This clear mirroring encourages us to investigate the relationships among these narrative worlds and the ways that “Playdate”’ depicts several kinds of childhood play. Since traditional allegorical fables often want us to take sides (we can’t side with the industrious ant and the lazy grasshopper), a fable-like reading inevitably ranks the framed worlds, or at least elevates one to the top of the hierarchy. The frame that holds the outside world — the natural world — is at the image’s center, and the “kids should be playing outside” reading assumes Ware views this location allegorically, as the center of the cover’s meaning: ignored by the technology-entranced children, the outside frame is the one that should be occupied by the children. Maybe, though, Ware endorses children spending time in virtual worlds. One reason to consider this possibility is how he represents “outside.” The cover’s uniformly designed buildings and manicured lawns give off an aura of suburban blandness and conformity, one at odds with the room’s sense of activity. In other words, inside looks like more fun.
For me, both readings feel too restrictive. Ware’s art doesn’t judge. It describes and explores. Since each world/frame is designed to recall the others, Ware asks us not to elevate one world over the other, but to contemplate their similarities and differences, to observe how they compete for children’s attention. The cover offers a complex image that looks at the relationship between indoors and outdoors, analog and digital, and the natural and the manufactured. In doing so, Ware highlights the ways that all kinds of technology, both new and old, continually seek our attention.
Play and Time.
To realize this, we need to slow down and look at Ware’s complicated staging of the scene and explore the way Ware thinks about play through the lens of time, a notion encoded in the “date” of the image’s title “Playdate.” The image’s sense of arrested time — a single moment — is all we have, and some might argue we should limit our interpretation of an image to what’s shown. But what happens if we think about the cover as representing a moment extracted from a larger continuity that exists outside of its border? Since comic-book panels and many representational works of art often implicitly ask viewers to imagine a “before” and “after,” we can ask questions about time that complicate allegory: The girls are playing a videogame, but what were they doing prior to this moment? Had they been interacting with other objects in the room?
What are they about to do? In terms of a possible “before,” they may have been playing “tea party.” Saucers are strewn about, cups and cake knocked over, three of the dolls’ four shoes removed. It looks like the children left this conventional, old-fashioned, adult-imitative play-world behind in a hurry. Perhaps in the moments or hours “after,” they’ll leave the room to go outside and play with the ball. Seeing the cover as an implied narrative or as semi-narrative weakens allegorical interpretations because we recognize the presence of ambiguity, implication, and uncertainty, three foes of the classic allegory.
Just as the image has a “before” and “after” outside of the frame, we can read it as having a “past” and “present” depicted within the frame. Ware sets up a physical-temporal relationship between the girls and the room’s objects, which suggests “past” modes of play and “present” ones.
Ware is known for creating inventive illustrations and comics that reject conventional “left to right, top to bottom” reading order, and if we read this image from bottom to top, the sense of activity toward the bottom slows into an impression of order as we move toward the screens. Perhaps we can interpret this design chronologically: the cover depicts the trend of analog realities giving way to digital ones. The girls may be separating from the childhood things they once identified with, leaving dolls behind for a type of play whose imaginative scope is drastically larger than games like “tea party”: Minecraft’s invention of whole worlds.
Play, Gender, and Creativity.
The focus on girls and dolls suggests that Ware’s primary interest may not be technology, as his agitated critics suggested, but gender. The cover is a male-free zone, with girls, girl-surrogates (female dolls), and their screen avatars. Note the differences between the poses of the girls’ bodies and those of their doll counterparts and the mobility of their avatars. The girls, comfortable and creative, appear to be implicitly negating those restrictive positions. Lying prone on the floor (with arms flailing), the stiff, un-bendable Barbie can never relax. She must forever pose and can’t stand upright unless held.
All of this highlights another fundamental problem with the “kids should be outside playing!” interpretation. By claiming the cover is about “kids,” it ignores the image’s specificity. Its focus is girls.
We can also make interesting connections between the girls playing Minecraft and Ware cartooning his covers and comics. In Minecraft, users are demi-urges who invent worlds out of shapes and forms, just as cartoonists do. Ware typically uses a geometric, regularized approach in which his lines and shapes exhibit heightened care and control. His aesthetic, therefore, aligns a bit with Minecraft’s look and bold color choices. In Ware’s art, a shrub visible through room’s window is a surprising powder-puff blue, a color relatively uncommon in nature. But within comics and Minecraft, oddly colored shrubs make perfect sense. Such coloring decisions remind us that imaginary realities, whether videogames or drawings, can deviate from, and perhaps improve upon, our world.
When Ware creates his virtual worlds on paper, he, like the girls playing Minecraft, spends a lot of time indoors. Though other cartoonists have gone fully digital by drawing on a screen with a stylus, Ware remains largely a traditional pen-and-ink cartoonist, using analog drafting tools to create his art. Yet his post-drawing creative process relies on computers. He scans the artwork, makes minor corrections, digitally colors pages, and prepares files for printing. Since Minecraft aligns visually and technologically with aspects of Ware’s work and process, we have reasons to suspect that his view of it — and of the girls playing it — might be positive.
Objects and Feelings.
Ware’s cartooning mode reflects his profound emotional investment in physical objects, what he has called “his devotion to stuff.” As a collector of American material culture c. 1890-1940 (books, toys, sheet music, newspaper comic strips, and more), Ware might identify with the girls’ object-filled room and prefer it to the fenced-in, nearly empty outside yard. Throughout his comics and graphic novels, Ware obsesses over things and what they mean to us. He knows that we, especially throughout our childhoods, project emotions onto objects that then become magical repositories of our memories. We see a thing and it our triggers our memory: for that moment, the inanimate object controls us. He often gives objects a life of their own, animating them with an affect that blends the comforts of nostalgia and the grief of mourning. Ware frequently leaves human characters out of a comic’s panels to direct our attention toward a single thing. An image of a toy, clock, ketchup bottle, razor, toaster, or lamp will momentarily stop the narrative’s plot.
Time becomes elusive — does such a panel represent a moment, an eternity, or just the time a reader spends looking at it? In Ware’s “pathos of objects,” things seem to feel — and we feel for them. In “Playdate,” the ball at the center looks a little forlorn, as if it’s waiting for someone to remember it’s there, waiting to be played with. Does Ware wonder if its presence in his image will trigger in viewers a memory of their childhood play?
Though several books sit neatly arranged on the shelf, others are scattered about, perhaps tossed aside (as the dolls might have been) for Minecraft’s more engaging play. Is Ware, one of the most thoughtful and innovative book creators and designers in contemporary comics, OK with this? Or are books artifacts of the fading material/analog world that the cover eulogizes? Would he rather the girls read books than play with dolls, or Minecraft, or the swing set? Though I’m not suggesting we should, if we “need” to translate the cover into a critique of children’s behavior, perhaps we could decode it as “today’s kids shouldn’t be indoors playing with computers, they should be reading printed books.” It’s easy to imagine a book designer worrying about a present and future in which people read only on screens, missing out on the natural, tactile experience of holding a paper book in their hands. Unlike a computer, every book is a world dedicated only to itself; it will not accept other content. (Ware has created online comics but says he always “prefers the print version.”) Though books seem to play a minor role in “Playdate,” perhaps the book is the cover's most important form of imaginative play, its most important rectangular world. I can’t imagine a book-centric materialist like Ware not thinking deliberately about the role books play within this scene and within his child’s and viewers’ lives.
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If after reading the above interpretations you were to say to me, “OK, but it still looks to me that Ware is saying he doesn’t like kids playing indoors,” I might reply that if Ware wanted readers to take from the cover a simple message about childhood, he likely would have created a simpler image, one that would constrain interpretive possibility. Removing the dolls and tea-party items, for example, might encourage a binary allegorical reading by making a stark contrast between videogames and outdoor play. I don’t know what Ware had on his mind, but I do know that the cover is attractive, dense, and thoughtfully designed.
Ultimately, approaching Ware’s cover through the lens of visual allegory feels a little defeatist to me. It’s another way of submitting to the culture of immediacy, to the forces that ask us to interact with art and media quickly, if not almost instantaneously: after a glance, we find there what we like or don’t, what we already know or believe, and then move on. Ware’s cover cannot escape such a mode of reading, but I think it encourages the opposite. It believes in engagement and rewards our sustained attention by offering so much to look at and think about.
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Note: At NewYorker.com, Ware talks about the cover, focusing on his daughter’s relationship with Minecraft and their discussions of the game.
The post Chris Ware’s ‘Playdate’ and Visual Allegory appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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