Chris Ware’s New Yorker Covers and American School Shootings

By Ryan Banfi

Introduction¹

Chris Ware’s comics center on themes of isolation and alienation. Ware often addresses his anxieties in his graphic novels by depicting semi-biographical characters enduring bullying and other emotional hardships. Jimmy Corrigan in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Rusty Brown in the eponymous Rusty Brown (2019) are two examples of meek personas representing Ware. While Ware produces comics that discuss anxiety, he also continues to prove that graphic novelists and comic art are not bound to traditional graphic novels. Ware uses his style for other artistic avenues, such as movie posters ² and magazine covers. Fortune magazine asked Ware to create a cover for their 500^th issue. He obliged by drawing a satirical image of the wealthy exploiting the U.S. to gain their fortunes. Ultimately, Fortune rejected Ware’s cover.

Unlike Fortune, The New Yorker commissions and accepts Ware’s art, which critiques social issues in the U.S. Evident from his comics, Ware’s work is rife with anxiety, and those worries translate to his New Yorker magazine covers, which explore subjects such as techno-culture and school shootings. According to Ware, The New Yorker’s covers remain one of the few vital ways for artists to speak truth to power within the mainstream media news cycle. He states, “The one thing that magazine designers and editors just don’t get now is that one of the real powers of a New Yorker cover in and of itself is that there is no type on it. It is an image. Moreover, it has a power to itself that allows the artist to make the image” (Slauter 195). Ware’s covers do not speak in patronizing tones, but rather, they prompt readers to consider what is happening in the foreground and the background of his pictures (among other design decisions) to reflect on the presented issues. Françoise Mouly, the art editor of The New Yorker (whom Ware claims gave him his “first break” as an artist [Healy 220]), states that The New Yorker is “the only magazine that gives the artist his signed image on the cover…. It allows the audience to recognize that it’s a…part of an artist’s body of work. That’s important” (Slauter 195).

This article explores Chris Ware’s depiction of gun violence in the U.S. by analyzing Ware’s school shooting New Yorker covers: “Back to School” (September 17^th, 2012), “Threshold” (January 7^th, 2013), and “Lockdown” (October 17^th, 2022). While Patrick Jagoda and Hillary Chute describe Ware’s New Yorker covers as innovative because he “introduced sequential narrative to The New Yorker” (3), Ware’s covers (such as these three) primarily consist of single images. Since the eighteenth century, single-panel comics “have been not merely a fixture in the medium; they have occupied its forefront” of magazines (Abate 3). In this occupied format, they have been regularly used as “gag panels. They rely on amusing misunderstandings, wordplay, practical jokes, puns, and slapstick—forms of comedy that are commonly regarded as lacking in sophistication and, thus, the need for analysis” (Abate 5). With Ware, however, single-panel cartoons are commonly used to address pressing social and legal issues without humor. This art is a particular form of political intervention using Ware’s individuated style and the media space covered by The New Yorker. They draw on prior political and single-page cartooning conventions, including visual tropes and shorthand on their social and political moments. However, they occupy the prime place in magazines rather than within publications juxtaposed with news items and commentary.

As the U.S. has neglected to solve gun violence (albeit politicians have tried), Ware uses his platform at the New Yorker to convey what has remained on his mind for the past two decades: the urgency of mitigating mass shootings. Ware’s sequence of covers was not pre-planned, as the latter covers directly responded to “Back to School.” In this essay, I argue that Ware’s New Yorker covers can be interpreted collectively to convey a critical message about gun violence and school safety. In doing this, my essay will accomplish two objectives. First, this essay closely reads Ware’s magazine covers related to school shootings, further expanding the academic analysis of Ware’s canon, as comic studies have yet to analyze his New Yorker covers. Second, this article examines how Ware’s comic art operates within the mainstream news cycle, alongside images of mass shootings. The medium of comics (and cartooning/illustrating) allows Ware to critique gun violence abstractly, mainly because he produces emotional depictions of parents and their children. These images do not depend on explicit violence or satire – both are commonly used in cartoons and comics – which displays Ware’s capabilities as an artist.

To begin this essay, I explain the significance of The New Yorker’s covers and their confrontation with gun violence. In this way, I address W.J.T. Mitchell’s question of how comics exist in the media by engaging with his picture theory or “pictorial turn,” as he calls it. Analyzing that scholarship will allow me to address the broader political issues of images and school shootings, as I also reference the Uvalde and Sandy Hook photos and academic studies on American school shootings. I then formally interpret Ware’s New Yorker American school shooting covers. In doing so, I investigate Ware’s reasoning behind generating these images and his stylistic decisions. Such design choices allow us to read his covers alongside his canon. Hopefully, this essay will inspire further investigations into Ware’s work and its impact on the media.

The New Yorker, Gun Violence, and Ware’s School Shooting Covers

Françoise Mouly informs artists that “their image isn’t ready until it can be shown without a caption” (15). The New Yorker’s covers generate discussions without using text to prompt the reader (Fabiano 75). Graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman and cartoonists like Owen Smith have created covers addressing gun control long before Ware. Spiegelman’s “Guns of September” (September 13^th, 1993) ironically shows children exiting a school bus with guns in hand, which means to critique America’s normalization of consuming weapons (figure 1). ³ Smith created “Brace Yourself” (September 13^th, 1999) in reaction to the Columbine school shooting. His cartoon lampoons the solution of installing metal detectors in schools to deter kids from carrying guns (figure 2). “Brace Yourself” suggests that the American denizens should brace themselves for the U.S.’s new security measures. The cartoon satirizes the notion that kids are bringing guns into a learning environment by depicting a security officer checking a teen for firearms by waving a hand-held metal detector over his teeth, which are being set straight by braces – a pun on the word “brace.”

A prominent American approach to handling school shootings is not by banning assault weapons but rather by placing the onus on the teachers and the children to survive. Recently, “Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill…to allow teachers and other school staff members to carry concealed handguns on school campuses” (Cochrane and Rick Rojas). Upon the release of the 2022 Uvalde massacre footage, it became apparent that the same people who signed up to protect the innocent were unable to, even with a large arsenal of weapons at their disposal (Stein & Cardia). While state-level gun advocacy groups have won some victories, like state legislatures passing 130 gun safety bills in 2023 and also heavily blocking the gun lobby’s (NRA) agenda (Greve) in other locations (and at the federal level), ordinances on gun safety have had little effect on school shootings and broader gun control. Since Columbine (1999), there have been 377 school shootings in the U.S. (Beckett). More than 300,000 American students have experienced gun violence since the 1999 massacre (The Nation). After Columbine, it became clear to American citizens that violence was not occurring solely in urban areas, but these concerns began to form around the stability of suburban communities (Burns & Crawford). To amend these concerns, post-Columbine, many school districts hired security officers and installed metal detectors (Lindgren 124), hence Owen Smith’s “Brace Yourself” (September 13^th, 1999).

Unlike Smith’s and Spiegelman’s use of satire, Ware approaches the topic of gun control personally. His illustrations convey melancholy because of the U.S.’s lack of gun control. ⁴ Ware’s critique of gun violence for the New Yorker echoes his graphic novels as his books commonly discuss his angst by using his prominent personas like Jimmy (who Ware featured in his first New Yorker cover (“The Future of American Fiction” [June 21^st, and 28^th, 1999]) withstanding life’s cruelties. In his covers, Ware uses characters not introduced in any of his former works. They stand in for his wife, a high school teacher, his teenage daughter, a high school student, and himself – a powerless observer. For Ware, his child, Clara, is the most important person because she cured his self-loathing. His most recent publication, Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three (Acme Novelty Library) (2024), features drawings of Clara extensively, thus showcasing her importance. Having a child impacted Ware tremendously, and since his daughter’s birth, she has become the center of his life and a focus of his anxiety (Wivel 173). Although the worries in Ware’s covers still pertain to the institution of schools where he was bullied, ⁵ his angst now revolves around his daughter’s well-being as well as his wife’s, who is an educator. In my interview with Ware, I asked him if he foresees doing more work on school shootings and if the subject might find its way into his forthcoming graphic novels. He responded by stating:

I would really, really love not to write or draw about school shootings anymore. The fact that it was both in the news and a source of regular anxiety during Clara’s childhood—and around my wife’s profession, as she’s a public high school teacher and has experienced threats and lockdowns herself—is stunningly damning of our country, as if we need anything more to be stunned and damned about. The ubiquity of guns was a factor in my daughter’s decision to attend college in Canada… Worse, that it’s now considered clichéd or even naïve to say this is a “regular part of daily life in America” is especially shameful. I don’t see how it will ever change at this point. I know of teachers who have considered, or whose family has actually bought, guns. Is this really the world we want to live in? (Banfi).

Journalistic reviews of gun control and academic studies on the matter indicate that Spiegelman, Smith, and Ware are correct to show concern about gun safety in the U.S. After the Newtown Massacre in 2012, politicians and the media described the event as “different” and a “tipping point” (Shultz et al. 65). Post-Sandy Hook, many U.S. gun laws faced a gridlock between gun safety advocates and firearm lobbyists during the ensuing decade (Collins). In that way, Congress “would do nothing…. red-state Democrats and 41 Republicans…successfully block[ed] the background check bill the Sandy Hook families had begged [Congress] to support” (Collins). Regarding the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting (a decade after Sandy Hook), firearms in Texas became more accessible. Months preceding the massacre, Texas lawmakers made it easier for citizens to buy firearms. They changed the age requirement to purchase handguns from 18 to 21, “when a bill that would have raised the age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18” (Sandoval). As a result, “[t]he legislation would possibly have prevented the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde from purchasing the weapon he used in the massacre” (Sandoval).

Benjamin W. Fisher’s data showcases that the Sandy Hook shooting had little effect on Americans’ perceptions of safety. This is to say that the mass murder did not affect students’ perceptions of violence in a school setting, at least for Fisher’s sample, which shows the normalcy of gun violence in U.S. schools (358). Like Fisher’s data, Kevin H. Wozniak’s report also indicates that the “Sandy Hook shooting did not dramatically alter the distribution of support or opposition to gun control among the American people – just as previous mass shootings also failed to alter the overall stability of public opinion on this issue” (270). In the wake of the Uvalde shooting, online conversations about the catastrophe surged (Weitzel et al. 3) as many people shared their condolences and discussed how to fix the issue of school shootings. Post-Uvalde, the community remains traumatized by gun violence, which shows the lasting effects of the massacre. Mohaimenul Islam Jowarder’s research finds that many of the children who experienced the Uvalde shooting experienced insomnia and PTSD (594). School shootings in the U.S. persist in the post-Uvalde era, which is why political illustrations are used to discuss the topic and why it has remained a staple in comic art (Knopf xvi).

The New Yorker covers that address gun violence in schools provoke conversation because they contrast with the photos of school shootings that are burned into America’s memory via the news cycle and social media platforms. Images proliferate on our smartphones; our mobile devices ding incessantly with breaking news from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker to show us photos of elementary school children running away from troubled teens wielding AR-15-style rifles. These photos are further shared on Facebook and Instagram. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, social media platforms produced a “circulation of images in a host of new media [which] ushered [in] a ‘pictorial turn’ into public consciousness (Cloning Terror 2). With the proliferation of images came the need for academic institutions to dissect the “pictorial turn” as “a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” (Mitchell Picture Theory 16).

Photos of the various school shootings in the U.S. are impactful case studies as they create new meanings and scholarly discussions about whether American citizens should be able to own AR-15 rifles (Foster-Frau et al.). The visuality of the photos of dead children can embody, as Mitchell puts it, a “complex interplay between…institutions [and] bodies” quite literally. Institutionally, we are studying how these photos form a new cultural image–an image that argues for school safety. Mitchell’s theory of the pictorial turn also brings us to his investigation of “what do pictures want?” (Mitchell What do Pictures Want?). As a part of Mitchell’s academic rhetoric, he continually asks this question. Part of the pictures’ desire depends on our own. In Mitchell’s words: “We as critics may want pictures to be stronger than they actually are in order to give ourselves a sense of power in opposing, exposing, or praising them” (Mitchell “What do Pictures Really Want?” 74). ⁶ Ware wants us to reflect upon the growing issues of school shootings. In that way, he hopes his covers can speak to the violent media that is ever circulating.

As photographs of school shootings contrast with one another to create a narrative about gun safety, Ware uses his platform at the New Yorker to draw attention to the power of opposing images. Ware is answering, albeit not directly, Mitchell’s question about comics’ intersection with the pictorial turn: “Where do comics fit among the media, and what can the study of media tell us about comics?” (“Comics as Media: Afterword” 255). For Ware, comics can become a medium that speaks to the public. According to Jean Braithwaite, Ware’s New Yorker covers are “accessible,” and the school shooting covers contrast with national narratives. The covers are not graphic depictions of school shootings but artistic critiques of gun safety (Interview by Author). For Scott Bukatman, “the contrast between Ware’s covers and photographs are provocative. The stillness of them is very different from the stillness of photography” (Correspondence with Author). Ware’s art creates a snapshot of violence that explores human emotions. Part of that emotional intensity arises from Ware’s insecurities (regularly explored in his narratives) and safety concerns for his wife and daughter.

To be sure, Ware entered the discussion of gun control when Sandy Hook occurred. Describing “Back to School” (figure 3) after the shooting in Newtown, CT (December 14^th, 2012), Ware states that his cover:

jokingly pointed to the free time that parents would have now that their kids were back in class; it was something I saw every morning, and I thought it would make a sort of funny picture. In the wake of Newtown, it didn’t seem so funny anymore. As parents and citizens, we entrust our children not only to the safety of schools but also to the nurturing and cultivated environment of schools and teachers. Education is the very foundation of civilization and cannot be undermined or undersold. That we now have to somehow consider an unchecked population of firearms as part of this equation seems absolutely ludicrous and terrifying (Ware “Threshold”).

Initially, “Back to School” was intended to be a lighthearted tribute to the start of the school year. The New Yorker magazine populates supermarkets, magazine stands, and bookstores, reminding adults and children of the American ritual of returning to school. Ware’s widely seen covers are thus meant to form an image of solace. However, after Sandy Hook, such imagery can no longer, for Ware, represent the same meaning. The school shooting in Newtown pushed Ware to create “Threshold,” a reaction to “Back to School” (more on this in a bit).

In “Back to School,” a little girl looks back at the adults with worry. Ware later stated that this cover depicted “a real moment: Clara, then in elementary school, looking back at me as I left her at school” (Ware “Lockdown”). While Ware uses his own experiences to form his art, Bukatman notes that Ware’s “characters are schematically designed, minimalist machines that the reader must animate” (155). In this way, Ware’s work can speak to a broader audience as they can identify with these blank-slate personas. Ware’s New Yorker covers echo Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of comics as a cool medium, as they demand participation from the reader to comprehend the cartoon’s message, especially because comic art is low in definition (148). Ware himself states that he agrees with McLuhan’s description of comics as a cool medium – Ware’s covers invite the reader to interpret his images (Bengal 148). Critics often praise Ware for his challenging work as Peter Schjeldahl from The New Yorker “identifies Ware as belonging to a ‘cult of difficulty” (Kuhlman & Ball ix.) This complexity arises from Ware’s layouts in his graphic novels, which commonly contain numerous lines that readers can follow in various orders, hence the “layering” of his images (Kuhlman 83). Consider a two-page layout from Building Stories (2012) (figure 4).

The daughter of the unnamed protagonist is a central component of the comic. Throughout the story, the protagonist faces numerous hardships, including the amputation of a leg and being excluded from social circles at school. She gives birth to a daughter, and, in the right-hand corner of the two-page newspaper-style section of Building Stories, she tells her mother, “Finally…I am happy.” This line connotes a theme central to Ware’s work: the bond between parent and child. Ware jettisons traditional gutters in this part of Building Stories and instead centers the infant. The lack of gutters allows the baby to intersect with the various experiences of the unnamed protagonist, such as her difficulties with listening to her mother’s advice on how to care for her daughter. The nameless protagonist is unhappy for a long time, and finally, she has someone to live for, which parallels Ware’s feelings towards his daughter.

Unlike this text-heavy portion of Building Stories, Ware’s illustrations and books commonly lack language. That absence enables people to read his work in various ways, establishing Ware’s universal appeal. He eliminates “words from his strips [thus] forcing his pictures alone to tell the story” (Kuhlman 84). With “Back to School,” the image can also bring about the idea that it is about a school shooting, as massacres in academic institutions were occurring more regularly after Columbine. Post-Sandy Hook, one can assume that “Back to School” is an image of a child who is worried about being trapped in a classroom during a school shooting rather than a drawing of Ware’s daughter being nervous about the first day of school or anxious about being bullied, like Rusty Brown. More can be inferred about Ware’s color choices as he draws the children with primary colors such as red and blue. He uses this tactic to draw attention to specific subjects and characters (Raeburn 20). The lower half of the cover clashes with the top part as the parents all wear neutral-colored clothing, such as white shirts and tan pants. They hold white paper coffee cups and black phones, whereas the children carry red and blue bags. Moving towards the door in a single file line, the kids also contrast with the adults’ migration in various directions. One group is autonomous, while the other conforms to a single direction. A jungle gym, a representation of play and imagination, on the far left of the image, separates the two groups. Ware’s visual indicators clash to create his iteration of sequential art. While “Back to School” is not one of his diagrams, it does offer visual cues that readers can follow in various ways. Initially, Ware drew this image with positive intentions; the children returned to school to learn, and the parents were ecstatic to receive their respite from parenting. In retrospect, the divide between the two populations and the little girl’s body language can be read as a premonition. The adults walk away from their kids, leaving them with an uncertain future.

In comparison to “Back to School,” “Threshold” (figure 5) conveys an intentionally sad tone. Sandy Hook happened between the releases of Ware’s two covers. Ware’s title, “Threshold,” indicates two meanings of the word. For one, a threshold can mean an “entry point” (Merriam-Webster). Another explanation of the term is: “the point at which a…psychological effect begins to be produced.” Example sentence: “he has a high threshold for pain” (Merriam-Webster). Ware’s cover and title suggest that parents must now have an extreme tolerance for anxiety if their children are to attend school in the U.S. The entryway to the school also produces a double meaning. The school’s front door is an entryway, but it might lead to a death trap, not a place of knowledge. “Back to School” evokes fond memories of reuniting with friends, whereas “Threshold” conveys a new meaning of what returning to school means for many American children and parents in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. It is a far more complex title that suggests the intricacies of secondary education; it is no longer just about learning, but also about surviving.

To create “Threshold,” Ware inverts the point of view from “Back to School.” He shows the vantage point from within the school hallway rather than from outside looking in. In “Threshold,” the parents no longer migrate in various pathways; instead, they stand side by side, worrying about whether their children will return home. Moreover, the adults stand in silence rather than Ware’s depictions of them speaking to one another like they are in “Back to School.” By drawing the parents in deep focus, it becomes clear that the adults in “Threshold” are not the same mothers and fathers as those in “Back to School.” “Threshold” shows adults in an urban area (taxis and skyscrapers in the background), whereas “Back to School” takes place in a suburban school. Such a distinction displays that school shootings can affect any area or state. This is a national problem.

Like the separation within the image of “Back to School,” the doorway (or threshold) separates the children from their parents. Ware continues using primary colors to depict the children in the foreground and muted colors for the adults in the background. In “Threshold,” the children are happy to return to school; a little boy, the last in line, waves at his teacher, thus also inverting the little girl’s anxiety in “Back to School.” The kids migrate in two separate directions rather than one. Their movement contrasts with the parents’ autonomy in “Back to School” as the adults in “Threshold” are nervous about seeing their children return to school. Again, this is a reversal of “Back to School,” where the little girl is uncertain, not the parents. For Ware, this clash of covers conveys that the children are unaware of the risks of attending school, whereas now parents are aware of the dangers their children might face during their school day.

As anxiety is Ware’s impetus for creating art, he describes the exact worries that pushed him to make “Threshold.” In his own words:

My wife is a public-high-school teacher in Chicago, and though there has never been a shooting in her school during her tenure…Shootings have occurred outside and near her school, and one student died last year. A metal detector cowls the single student entrance. Such a safeguard, including two real guards—Chicago police, with guns—have been put in place (as at most Chicago public schools) because of gang unrest from within…Needless to say, rarely does a day pass where I don’t pray to my vague, atheist-default Supreme Ruler of the Universe that everything goes effing well for her (Ware “Threshold”).

While the personas commonly associated with Ware, such as Jimmy and Rusty, are nowhere to be found among the worried parents, Ware places himself in the image by embodying the mothers and fathers watching their children walk to school. The image of the insecure parents contrasts with Ware’s superhero version of himself, which he drew in celebration of his daughter’s birth. On the cover of The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Two: 1995 – 2002 (2007), Ware depicts himself as a superhero father holding his daughter within a multilayered clock. In the bottom portion of the drawing, a date reads, “2005: Daughter Clara Born.” Ware does not know his father, which is a cause for much of his anxiety and a primary reason for Jimmy’s sadness in Jimmy Corrigan. However, he honors his child on the cover of his publication to insinuate her positive influence on his life. Now that Ware is a dad, he sees the potential of losing his daughter. In turn, he feels powerless once she grows up, hence his concern for his daughter entering her school and the parents’ insecurity of being unable to safeguard their offspring in “Threshold.” This image of powerlessness becomes noticeable in Ware’s final cover, “Lockdown” (figure 6).

Unlike the previous covers, “Lockdown” explicitly engages with depicting a school shooting. In this way, Ware zooms in on the tragedy, suggesting the urgency of the violence. Different from traditional cartoon violence, Ware uses the cartoon/comic medium to expand on what brutality can mean. Cartoonists have commonly used violence for comedic entertainment to showcase their creative control over the comic medium. For example, Winsor McCay violently handles his cartoons to show his ability to manipulate his personas. In his earliest cartoon short, Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911), McCay features Little Nemo (who stands in for McCay) “squashing and stretching the characters Flip and Impy” (Sammond 289). Ware’s comics recall McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and other early comics. As early 20^th-century American cartoonists inspired Ware’s art, he notes that they permitted him to create his style (Raeburn 52). The ACME Novelty Library, Ware’s earliest published work, conveys his interpretation of McCay’s cartoons. Quimby the Mouse, for example, displays a similar slapstick comedy (while also updating the humor of past cartoons by displaying self-awareness and comedic profanity) to McCay and other pioneering artists (Widiss 160). To revamp comics and cartoons, Ware refocuses violence on political reasons, and he does so beyond the scope of the graphic novel. I understand that Ware’s New Yorker covers drastically differ from the early cartoons like Krazy Kat and McCay’s art. However, Ware inverses the conventional depictions of cartoon fighting. For Nicholas Sammond, Ware’s illustrations convey “violence pending…What makes those covers powerful to me is their sparseness, their sense of how day-to-day space and the bodies in it are reorganized in the face of violence” (Correspondence with Author). Instead of drawing physical bloodshed, Ware illustrates violence not as an action that is used for comedic content (as his covers are not satirical) but rather to create emotion. ⁷ That raw emotion is evident in “Lockdown”; the cartoon generates a conversation on the current tactics to negate school shootings.

To mitigate casualties in “Lockdown,” the teacher and children remain silent to avoid drawing attention to their classroom. According to Ryan Twomey, silence in Ware’s comics operates via his “employment of alienation…in moments where his characters are alone (physically or metaphorically) in the narrative world…. during these moments of alienation, Ware’s characters’ isolation is enhanced by the manipulation of diegetic sound” (91). In “Lockdown,” the children and the teacher are isolated because of the U.S.’s inability to protect schools from gun violence. We see both the teacher and the kids alienated from the world as they are left alone to survive, and their silence further emphasizes this. While these characters do not appear in multiple panels, which is the focus of Twomey’s assessment of Ware’s work, these personas symbolize American children and are featured on numerous covers. Moreover, they are becoming more vulnerable throughout the decade (2012-2022) due to the increase in school shootings.

For “Lockdown,” Ware drew the cover based on his daughter’s description of what a lockdown drill entails. Via his daughter’s explanation, Ware describes the process as involving
“the teacher turning off all the lights and lining the students up against the wall farthest from the door. Then the teacher sits down closest to the door, acting as a human shield” (Ware “Lockdown”). Ware’s drawing depicts the teacher being closest to the door; she is in front of the children. The kids’ artwork occupies the foreground. Their drawings contrast with the overall sad tone of the magazine cover. To draw attention to the foreground, Ware uses vivid crayon colors to emphasize the child’s drawing of a flower that rests on a desk next to a picture of a house, a collection of cheerful graphics. The primary colors also draw attention to the empty seats. Chairs are designed for sitting, but, in this instance, the children are found on the floor during the lockdown drill to keep them away from windows and remain hidden. Much like how Ware’s diagrams lead readers to various points in the image, the vacant seats draw the readers’ eyes to the people who should be sitting in them. While the teacher and children wear red and blue (primary colors), they occupy only a tiny portion of the picture. The teacher, who sticks out the most in the image per her red sweater, turns her head to face the door as if she anticipates someone coming in. Ware hides the teachers’ faces and expressions in all three covers, contrasting the teachers with those visible facial aspects of the other guardian figures such as the parents. In the first two covers, the teachers are shown as the gatekeepers of the school’s thresholds. However, in “Lockdown,” the teacher hides from the threshold as they fear what might cross it.

For all their practice of locking down the school, Clara describes the irony of the drill by informing her father, Ware, that lockdowns can also put children in harm’s way. During the lockdown process, the school locks “the doors to all the classrooms, and… kids who hadn’t been in a classroom would’ve been stuck out in the hallway. [They] couldn’t have gotten back in” (Ware “Lockdown”). In this way, there is no simple answer to protecting children. The schools are massive buildings with thousands of kids, and if a gunman enters a school to cause harm, then no amount of training and preparation is going to save everyone.

Ware’s covers display a lack of optimism that gun violence will change, and thus, schools, teachers, and their students will become more vulnerable. I have chronologically arranged the covers (figure 7) to show Ware’s pessimism. Throughout the decade, the parents transition from being worried about school shootings to becoming familiar with the training processes for when a shooter enters the institution’s threshold.

One of Ware’s traits as a comic artist is his style of depicting slowness, which is also evident in my manipulation of the covers to form conventional sequential art. Over the sequence of the covers, which equates to a decade of work (2012-2022), there is no change in the characters’ outlook; they remain insecure. Bukatman writes that Ware uses “Moment-to-moment transitions…to an almost parodic degree. Stasis becomes an existential condition” (155). Like Bukatman’s description of Ware’s comics, Ware’s covers also showcase slowness, which is used not for parody but for political commentary. For Georgiana Banita, Ware constructs time in his comics in a unique way through “formal grammar” (Banita 177). Banita writes that “[Ware] renders time conspicuous, inscribing forms of temporal progress (or speed) in its graphic representation” (177). In this way, Ware’s slow “response to these rhythms is shaped by two competing yet related forms of disrupted temporality–incrementalism and fragmentation…[both] converge to generate narrative slowness and critique modern practices of acceleration” (Banita 177). According to McCloud, comic artists can manipulate time in an infinite number of ways (94). McCloud states that when we read single images in comics, we struggle to understand them “as single moments…Perhaps [because] we’ve been too conditioned by photography” (97). These covers are single images, and although they respond to graphic photographs spread across the internet, they are also connected. Ware repeatedly states that they reflect his feelings for his family. We can thus read them alongside his canon, which regularly discusses his angst.

Ware’s comics become connected in one way or another. According to him, “The more I try to connect things, the less it works. But if I just kind of let it come out the way that it wants to, it seems to actually be more connected and make more sense” (Chute 168). In my interview with Ware, I asked about the “Ware Universe” and why the same characters appear and reappear in his work (for example, characters in Jimmy Corrigan are referenced in Rusty Brown). He told me this is

because…everything is interrelated in ways we can’t articulate…The invisible influences we have on each other—whether social, emotional, or biological, from something as simple as noticing a previously dormant word suddenly appearing again in everyone’s conversations to not recognizing a person at an art gallery next to whom you sat on a plane–are incalculable. Again, however, I don’t plan any of this; it just sort of happens because the mind is already a very organized thing. (Banfi)

This is undoubtedly the case for his New Yorker art, and it becomes evident that Ware’s style of slowness from his graphic novels comes through in his covers, especially when I place them next to one another. Through his delayed approach, Ware critiques the lack of modern acceleration in gun control efforts, which, Banita emphasizes, is related to consumerism (177). American citizens are sacrificing safety for weapons. That is to say that because AR-15s are continually manufactured and purchased, the security and well-being of these students and teachers will remain at a standstill. Not much will change, and they will continue to prepare for lockdowns.

While the teacher in “Lockdown” waits for what will come through the gate, the American public knows what will ultimately arrive. In Parkland, it was Nikolas Cruz, and in Uvalde, it was Salvador Ramos, both equipped with an AR-15-style rifle. Ware himself states that he imagined what the teachers were thinking when he drew “Lockdown”: “Perhaps this was the scenario experienced by the children who died in the shootings in Parkland” (Ware “Lockdown”).

Given Ware’s thoughts and the images that circulate in the media, it is evident that “Lockdown” contrasts with the pictures of the Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde shootings. Françoise Mouly states that “Lockdown” is published “by unhappy coincidence [alongside] a series of photographs of children waiting for the school bus in Uvalde, Texas, by Greg Miller” (Ware “Lockdown”). The pictures of the Uvalde massacre are anything but silent. They are loud. Children scream while running for their lives from the school they were once so happy to enter (Los Angeles Times Photograph Staff). Although Ware’s covers convey a form of visual silence, they also speak volumes about the problem of gun safety, especially as they contrast with explicit images of children running for their lives at school.

Conclusion

In this essay, I closely analyzed Ware’s school shooting New Yorker covers that respond to the pictures of mass shootings that have circulated in the media. In doing so, I called attention to the U.S.’s problems securing schools. To return to Mitchell’s question: “Where do comics fit among the media, and what can the study of media tell us about comics?” Ware uses his art to push people to think about gun violence in the U.S. As McLuhan describes comics, and as I have demonstrated in this essay, comic illustrations require participation to form interpretations, especially in the case of Ware’s work, which forces people to engage and think critically. Mouly states that this is the importance of The New Yorker; these images are doing more than gracing the cover of a famous magazine. They also provide a platform for artists to address social issues. Ware’s covers argue that instead of responding to gun violence productively, the U.S. is acquiescing to problematic gun laws, hence why teachers are sitting with their students on the floor to train for an active shooter.

Works Cited

Abate, Michelle Ann. Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, Rutgers University Press, 2024.

Banfi, Ryan. “Ware’s World: An Interview with Chris Ware,” Critical Inquiry, 19 Dec. 2024. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2024/12/19/wares-world-an-interview-with-chris-ware/.

Banita, Georgina. “Chris Ware and the Pursuit of Slowness.” The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, edited by David M. Ball and Ball Martha B. Kuhlman, University Press of Mississippi, 2010., pp. 177–199.

Beckett, Lois. “A Columbine survivor’s tragic battle to reveal the ‘ripple effect’ of gun violence: trauma, addiction, suicide.” The Guardian, 2023.

Bengal, Rebecca. “On Cartooning.” Chris Ware: Conversations, edited by Jean Braithwaite, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 146–155.

Braithwaite, Jean. Personal interview. Conducted by Ryan Banfi, 4 Apr. 2024. Zoom.

Bukatman, Scott. Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins. University of California Press, 2016.

Bukatman, Scott. Received by Ryan Banfi, 20 May 2024. Email.

Burns, Robert & Crawford, Charles. “School Shootings, the Media, and Public Fear: Ingredients for a Moral Panic.” Crime, Law, and Social Change, vol. 32, no. 2, 1999, pp. 147–68.

Collins, Dave. “A Decade after Sandy Hook, Grief Remains but Hope Grows.” AP News, 19 Dec. 2022, apnews.com/article/shootings-violence-school-connecticut-schools-6c172af05a6340942a0bc1f6ba767d64.

Chute, Hillary. “Panel: Graphic Novel Forms Today.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 151–68.

Chute, Hillary, and Patrick Jagoda. “Special Issue: Comics & Media.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–10.

Cochrane, Emily, and Rojas, Rick. “Tennessee Passes Bill to Allow Teachers to Carry Concealed Handguns,” The New York Times, April 23^rd, 2024.

Fabiano, Theodore F. “‘A Perfect Fit for Our Era’: Using ‘New Yorker’ Covers to Generate Curiosity and Provoke Argument in the ELA Classroom.” English Journal, High school edition, vol. 107, no. 1, 2017, pp. 73–77.

Fisher, Benjamin W., et al. “Students’ Perceptions of Safety at School After Sandy Hook.” Journal of School Violence, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, pp. 349–60.

Foster-Frau, Silvia, N. Kirkpatrick, and Arelis R. Hernández, “Terror on Repeat: A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings,” The Washington Post, November 16^th, 2023.

Greve, Joan. “The major tests US gun control activists face in 2024,” The Guardian, 2024.

Healy, Claire Mearie. “States Pop Quiz #26: Chris Ware.” Chris Ware: Conversations, edited by Jean Braithwaite, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 219–223.

Jowarder, Mohaimenul Islam. “Aftermath of Uvalde Shooting: An Account of Psychological Trauma of Survivor Children.” Journal of Loss & Trauma, vol. 28, no. 7, 2023, pp. 588–98.

Knopf, Christina M. Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media. University Press of Mississippi, 2021.

Kuhlman, Martha B., and David M. Ball, “Introduction: Chris Ware and the ‘Cult of Difficulty,’” The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, edited by David M. Ball and Ball Martha B. Kuhlman, University Press of Mississippi, 2010., pp. ix-xiii.

Lindgren, Simon. “YouTube Gunmen? Mapping Participatory Media Discourse on School Shooting Videos.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 33, no. 1, 2011, pp. 123–36.

Los Angeles Times Photograph Staff, “Dramatic New Photos Show Students Fleeing Texas Shooting.” Los Angeles Times, May 27^th, 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Harper Perennial, 1994.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, MIT Press, 1994.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

––– “What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want?” October, vol. 77, 1996, pp. 71–82.

––– What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

––– Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

––– “Comics as Media: Afterword.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 255–65

Mouly, Françoise. Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See, Abrams, 2012.

O’Toole, Megan J., and Mark R. Fondacaro. “When School-Shooting Media Fuels a Retributive Public: An Examination of Psychological Mediators.” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017, pp. 154–71.

Raeburn, Daniel K. Chris Ware, Yale University Press, 2004.

Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, Duke University Press, 2015.

Sammond, Nicholas. Received by Ryan Banfi, 28 May 2024. Email.

Sandoval, Edgar. “A Year After the Uvalde Massacre: Did Anything Change?” The New York Times. May, 24^th, 2023.

Shultz, James M., et al. “The Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting as Tipping Point: ‘This Time Is Different.’” Disaster Health, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, pp. 65–73.

Slauter, Eric. “Talk on Blown Covers Françoise Mouly: Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Chris Ware May 19, 2012.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, pp. 187–97.

Stein, Robin, and Cardia, Alexander. “State Investigation Fueled Flawed Understanding of Delays During Police Response in Uvalde,” The New York Times. October 12^th, 2022.

The Nation. “The Epidemic of School Shootings.” The Nation, 19 Apr. 2023, www.thenation.com/article/society/an-epidemic/.

“Threshold Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/threshold. Accessed 6 Apr. 2025.

Twomey, Ryan. “Graphic Sound and Silence: Chris Ware’s Aural Depiction of Alienation and Isolation.” Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, vol. 15, no. 1, 2024, pp. 90–107.

Ware, Chris. “Threshold,” The New Yorker, 3 Jan. 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-threshold.

Weitzel, Kirsty J., et al. “The Use of Crisis Services Following the Mass School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas: Quasi-Experimental Event Study.” JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, vol. 9, 2023, pp. 1-6.

Wivel, Matthias. “Komiks.dk Interview.” Chris Ware: Conversations, edited by Jean Braithwaite, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 155-174.

Wozniak, Kevin H. “Public Opinion About Gun Control Post–Sandy Hook.” Criminal Justice Policy Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 2017, pp. 255–78.

Footnotes

1. This essay extends upon my formerly published work in Critical Inquiry. Please see “Ware’s World: An Interview with Chris Ware,” and “Chris Ware’s New Yorker Covers: Reading the School Shootings Triptych.”↺
2. See the movie posters for The Savages (2007), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), and Private Life (2018).↺
3. Art Spiegelman used The New Yorker to reflect upon 9/11, for example.↺
4. “Shopping Days” (Dec. 14^th, 2015), and “Uvalde, May 24, 2022” (June 6^th, 2022) by Eric Drooker and David Plunkert’s “October 1, 2017: One Day in a Nation of Guns” are three other New Yorker covers that address gun control.↺
5. In Rusty Brown, for example, Rusty’s classmates call him homophobic epithets and they spit paper straw wrappers at him in the cafeteria. Moreover, Chris Ware includes himself as a character in Rusty Brown.↺
6. It is important to consider the images that school shooters (such as Nikolas Cruz [Parkland, FL]) produce as the killers’ messages about causing mass casualties are usually amplified by media coverage, which raises questions as to whether news channels should identify the shooter and discuss their motives, as that conversation might inspire other shootings (O’Toole & Fondacaro).↺
7. Mitchell notes that the cartoon medium can satirize issues to bring upon political commentary (Cloning Terror 99).↺