Kosmopolis opens with a unique session that brings together four fundamental figures who have revolutionized the language of comics in recent decades. With his work, Chris Ware has reimagined the expressive limits of the comics format, opening unexplored paths in the graphic novel; but the author of Building Stories has not been alone in this artistic adventure. In the early 1990s, Art Spiegelman changed the history of comics with his monumental work on the Holocaust and family memoir, Maus. Françoise Mouly, art editor for The New Yorker, strengthened and modernized the magazine’s illustrations to the point of turning its covers into events. And before that, Spiegelman and Mouly edited the seminal magazine for modern avant-garde comics, Raw, which published the early works of Chris Ware and other cartoonists, like Charles Burns, a poet of existential horror who used bodily mutations as a metaphor for an ailing American society. 

Jordi Costa, critic and curator of the exhibition Chris Ware: Drawing Is Thinking, moderates this unique conversation between these four giants of comics and contemporary illustration.