Unmasked - Chris Ware

Thèmes abordés

Unmasked, Chris Ware, infidelity, technology, book review

Résumé du document

Unmasked is a short graphic novel written by Chris Ware and published in "The New Yorker" on November 2nd 2009. Unmasked tells the story of a married mother whose husband is always away. After that the grandmother reveals that her father had an affair, she realizes that her husband might cheat on her as well. Chris Ware tells a common story about infidelity and technology with quite simple drawing and uses the potential of comics to pass on his cynical point of view on technology and modern relationships. In this comic, Chris Ware emphasizes the banality of the mother's life and suggests that technology affects our relationships through juxtaposition of panels, page and panel composition and careful use of color.

Extraits

[...] To conclude, Chris Ware juxtaposed detailed and moment-to moment panels to reveal the banality of her life, he used simultaneity to expose his point of view on technology and the masks that we wear in our daily lives and used primary and bright colors to symbolically represent the situation of the family. The emotional content in this comic is very important and only icons could transmit these strong feelings and complex ideas. He could not achieve to transmit so many ideas in only five pages only with words, comics are definitely a powerful medium for storytelling: “I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures,” said Chris Ware. [...]

[...] Red is associated to the little girl as she wears a red dress and yellow may represent the father, or more exactly the absence of the father. Chris Ware will all along refer to these three colors. In fact, the primary colors are first used with the three M&M's frame 13). The candies are separated by the phone. The blue and the red one are on the same side and the yellow one is on the other edge of the phone. [...]

[...] The story is repeating itself. The female protagonist's husband is infidel and her daughter misses a paternal figure. The idea of repetition is emphasized by the cyclic shape of the whole of pages and 4,5. The mother and grandmother are not too mad about Phil's infidelity because the husband's behavior is suspect since the beginning of the story but are actually sad for the daughter, the fact that she will grow up with an absent father. This can be interpreted by the sad look of the grandmother on the child. [...]

[...] Unmasked tells the story of a married mother whose husband is always away. After that the grandmother reveals that her father had an affair, she realizes that her husband might cheat on her as well. Chris Ware tells a common story about infidelity and technology with quite simple drawing and uses the potential of comics to pass on his cynical point of view on technology and modern relationships. In this comic, Chris Ware emphasizes the banality of the mother's life and suggests that technology affects our relationships through juxtaposition of panels, page and panel composition and careful use of color. [...]

[...] Technology and relationships Through his page and panel composition, Chris Ware criticizes technology, describes the feelings of women in their relationships and amplifies the banality of the mother's life. Firstly, the composition of the page cover is very interesting. The children are literally masked. The masks are meaningless, they are costumes for one night. The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, we can see the reflection of the luminosity of their phones as they were wearing a virtual mask. [...]