Parenting & Family Quote by Chris Ware

Ware’s admission lands like a quiet rebuke to the myth of the naturally “bookish” artist. He’s not laundering his origin story into literature and prestige; he’s pointing to television as the gravitational center of childhood attention, with reading demoted to a kind of supporting technology. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Mostly” and “only” undercut any romantic narrative about early genius. “Collected” sounds deliberate, even archivally minded, yet what he’s collecting isn’t canon but “adjunct” material: comics and magazines as peripherals orbiting the screen.

The intent feels twofold: confession and calibration. Ware is an artist famously associated with meticulous, literary graphic novels, but he frames his formative media diet as fundamentally audiovisual and commercial. That’s not self-deprecation so much as a map of influence. Television teaches pacing, episodic structure, cliffhangers, and the hypnotic loop of repetition - all elements Ware later folds into comics that often feel like rewinding a life, rewatching moments until they bruise.

The subtext is class and era as much as taste. For a kid growing up in late-70s/80s America, TV wasn’t just entertainment; it was infrastructure - cheap, ubiquitous, socially shared. “Adjunct” reading reads like a workaround for boredom, or an extension of fandom and advertising ecosystems (magazines, tie-ins, comic universes) rather than a school-approved relationship to books.

In the context of Ware’s career, the line also defends comics’ legitimacy without pleading for it. He’s saying: my gateway wasn’t high culture, and that’s the point. The work can still be exacting, devastating, and formally radical - even if it started as an accessory to the glow of the tube.