Watching the apocalyptic photographs and videos released in the wake of Hurricane Harvey this week, the cartoonist Chris Ware singled out moments of grace as inspiration for this week’s cover. Ware, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, reflected on his experience in the Lone Star State:
“I lived in San Antonio in high school, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and attended college in Austin, occasionally driving to Houston with my fellow art students to visit museums, and sometimes alone, just for the change of scenery. I liked Houston for its big buildings, its diversity, and its slack zoning laws, which made neighborhoods unpredictable and surprising. One night, my cartoonist friend John Keen and I stopped at a restaurant-bar that was about halfway to Houston, in the very Texas-sounding town of Winchester. The parking lot was locked and loaded with about two dozen pickup trucks, and, as scrawny liberal Austinites, we braced ourselves and pushed open the saloon doors, only to find black and white farmers talking and laughing, playing poker, and shooting pool together. In a corner, an interracial couple quietly ate barbecue. This Winchester bar, we realized, was more integrated than the University of Texas we’d just left.”
