Monograph By Chris Ware

Virtuoso Chris Ware (b. 1967) has achieved some noteworthy firsts for comics. The Guardian First Book Award for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was the first major UK literary prize awarded for a graphic novel. In 2002 Ware was the first cartoonist included in the Whitney Biennial. Like Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel, Ware thus stands out as an important crossover artist who has made the wider public aware of comics as literature. His regular New Yorker covers give him a central place in our national cultural conversation. Since the earliest issues of ACME Novelty Library in the 1990s, cartoonist peers have acclaimed Ware's distinctive, meticulous visual style and technical innovations to the medium. Ware also remains a literary author of the highest caliber, spending many years to create thematically complex graphic masterworks such as Building Stories and the ongoing Rusty Brown. Editor Jean Braithwaite compiles interviews displaying both Ware's erudition and his quirky self-deprecation. They span Ware's career from 1993 to 2015, creating a time-lapse portrait of the artist as he matures. Several of the earliest talks are reprinted from zines now extremely difficult to locate. Braithwaite has selected the best broadcasts and podcasts featuring the interview-shy Ware for this volume, including new transcriptions. An interview with Marnie Ware from 2000 makes for a delightful change of pace, as she offers a generous, supremely lucid attitude toward her husband and his work. Candidly and humorously, she considers married life with a cartoonist in the house. Brand-new interviews with both Chris and Marnie Ware conclude the volume.

This newest edition features the first serial installment of "Rusty Brown," Ware's first major lengthy "narrative indulgence" since his Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel. Full color.

An assessment of the achievement and aesthetic of one of America's brightest comics innovators

For the first time in his career, Chris Ware presents a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes autobiographical visual monograph, and opens a revealing window into the worlds he inhabits. Similar to Chip Kidd Book One and Shepard Fairey Covert to Overt, this book serves as a personal chronicle of a contemporary iconic illustrator, and is a must-have for those interested in illustration, graphic novels, and pop culture. The first and much-anticipated monograph by multi-award-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist Chris Ware, chronicling his influential twenty-five-year career.

What would happen if William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Eugene O'Neill drew masterful strips for their Sunday comics pages? This volume provides eye-tearingly beautiful depictions of longing, despair, melancholy, disappointment, bleakness, lethargy, abandonment, and relentless parental cruelty.

The first book from the Chicago author of the “stunning” Building Stories (The New York Times) is a pleasantly-decorated view at a lonely and emotionally impaired "everyman," who is provided, at age 36, the opportunity to meet his father for the first time. “This haunting and unshakable book will change the way you look at your world.” —Time magazine “There’s no writer alive whose work I love more than Chris Ware.” —Zadie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Swing Time An improvisatory romance which gingerly deports itself between 1890's Chicago and 1980's small town Michigan, the reader is helped along by thousands of colored illustrations and diagrams, which, when read rapidly in sequence, provide a convincing illusion of life and movement. The bulk of the work is supported by fold-out instructions, an index, paper cut-outs, and a brief apology, all of which concrete to form a rich portrait of a man stunted by a paralyzing fear of being disliked.

This collection from the New York Times–bestselling graphic novelist includes his most beloved illustrations and rare, previously unpublished works. Throughout his decades-long career, alternative cartoonist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes has always been ahead of artistic and cultural movements. The creator of acclaimed graphic novels like Ghost World and David Boring, Clowes is widely praised for his emotionally compelling narratives that reimagine the ways that stories can be told in comics. The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist is the first monograph on this award-winning, New York Times–bestselling creator. It includes all of Clowes’s best-known illustrations, rare and previously unpublished work, as well as interviews and essays by Chip Kidd, Chris Ware, and others.

Boredom and melancholy in the experience of reading Contemporary graphic novels show an interesting shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary in slice-of-life stories in which nothing happens. Present-day graphic accounts are inhabited by melancholic characters whining about the lack of meaning in life. This book examines this intriguing transition and brings a historical, aesthetical and narratological approach to comics in which boredom is not only a topic, but also awakens a deliberate affective response in the very experience of reading. This volume brings together close readings of work by Lewis Trondheim, Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine. With a foreword by Raphäel Baroni (University of Lausanne).