Creativity Quote by Chris Ware

Ware’s complaint lands like a quiet indictment of a culture that loves “innovation” but hates the messy fact of people. He’s pointing at a reflex in public talk - in politics, in tech, in management-speak - where roads, books, vaccines, comics, even a functioning workplace get treated as if they simply appear. The “fruits of human labor” become weather: inevitable, impersonal, free. Calling it “some alien race” is Ware’s sly way of showing how bizarre that erasure is. Aliens are the only beings we might plausibly imagine producing abundance without exhaustion, paychecks, injuries, boredom, or the need to be recognized.

The intent isn’t just pro-worker piety; it’s a critique of distance. When labor is abstracted into “the economy” or “the market,” responsibility dissolves. If nobody made this, then nobody owes anybody anything: not fair wages, not benefits, not even basic gratitude. Ware’s line exposes how that rhetorical trick props up inequality. You can celebrate the product while ignoring the producer, because you’ve rhetorically made the producer disappear.

Coming from a comics artist, the context sharpens. Ware’s medium is built on obsessive, time-intensive craft that readers consume in minutes and industries undervalue as “content.” His work often lingers on invisible effort and private discouragement; here he’s widening that lens to society at large. It’s not just that we forget labor. We talk as if forgetting it is normal, even sophisticated - which is exactly the problem.