Chris Ware: Monographics

As one of today’s most renowned cartoonists, Chris Ware is widely considered an artist of genius. Combining innovative comic book art, hand lettering, and graphic design, Ware’s uniquely appealing work is characterized by ceaseless experimentation with narrative and graphic forms. The publication of his novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth in 2000 inspired a near avalanche of praise from critics and general readers alike. This book is the first to explore the life and work of Chris Ware.
Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware’s career, work methods, and artistic innovations. Born in Omaha in 1967, Ware introduced the character Jimmy Corrigan in a full-page strip he began writing for the Chicago tabloid New City. Combining six years’ worth of the strips, Ware created the best-selling novel named after Jimmy that spans an Irish-American family’s life in Chicago from the Civil War to the present. For its experiments in graphic form—including pull-out, three-dimensional inserts—and its non-chronological narrative, the novel earned numerous honors, among them the Guardian First Book Award, presented for the first time to a comic book.
For this volume Raeburn interviewed Chris Ware for many hours to make fascinating connections between Jimmy Corrigan’s fictional life and the life of his creator. Raeburn discusses the scope of Ware’s career, including his drawings for New City, the New Yorker, and his own comic book, The Acme Novelty Library. As Raeburn shows, Ware’s unique art form extends beyond the world of graphic novels into the broader worlds of literature, graphic art, and popular culture, and challenges traditional definitions of all three.

As one of today’s most renowned cartoonists, Chris Ware is widely considered an artist of genius. Combining innovative comic book art, hand lettering, and graphic design, Ware’s uniquely appealing work is characterized by ceaseless experimentation with narrative and graphic forms. The publication of his novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth in 2000 inspired a near avalanche of praise from critics and general readers alike. This book is the first to explore the life and work of Chris Ware.
Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware’s career, work methods, and artistic innovations. Born in Omaha in 1967, Ware introduced the character Jimmy Corrigan in a full-page strip he began writing for the Chicago tabloid New City. Combining six years’ worth of the strips, Ware created the best-selling novel named after Jimmy that spans an Irish-American family’s life in Chicago from the Civil War to the present. For its experiments in graphic form—including pull-out, three-dimensional inserts—and its non-chronological narrative, the novel earned numerous honors, among them the Guardian First Book Award, presented for the first time to a comic book.
For this volume Raeburn interviewed Chris Ware for many hours to make fascinating connections between Jimmy Corrigan’s fictional life and the life of his creator. Raeburn discusses the scope of Ware’s career, including his drawings for New City, the New Yorker, and his own comic book, The Acme Novelty Library. As Raeburn shows, Ware’s unique art form extends beyond the world of graphic novels into the broader worlds of literature, graphic art, and popular culture, and challenges traditional definitions of all three.

The New York Times - John Hodgman

Ware's painstaking draftsmanship, beautiful hand lettering, virtuosic absorption of prewar graphic design and comics history and Rube Goldbergian paneling inspire awe, gratitude and fear. Raeburn reviews Ware's best known work, the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth, and previews his work-in-progress ''Rusty Brown.'' But he also draws the curtain back on almost two decades' worth of posters and newspaper illustrations, sketchbooks and antique-seeming contraptions. I think it was when I saw the ''Professional Futuristic 3-D Picture Viewer'' -- an operating, hand-crank-powered stereoscope that Ware designed as a cutout and build-it-yourself prize in an issue of his ''Acme Novelty Library'' pamphlets that I quailed. Never mind the ingenuity and physical beauty of his work; the long physical labor clearly required to produce it makes it seem beyond human ken -- the work of a strange alien visitor to our world.

Daniel Raeburn self-publishes The Imp, an irregular series of booklets about comics. His writings have appeared in The Baffler and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Rick Poyner is series editor of Monographics. He founded Eye, the international review of graphic design and was its editor from 1990 to 1997. His books include Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), Typographica (2001), and No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (Yale University Press, 2003).