Chris Ware

Franklin Christenson "Chris" Ware (born December 28, 1967) is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library series (begun 1994) and the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), Building Stories (2012) and Rusty Brown (2019).

His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.

He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail.

His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style.

Ware often refers to himself in the publicity for his work in self-effacing, even withering tones.

He is considered by some critics and fellow notable illustrators and writers, such as Dave Eggers, to be among the best currently working in the medium; Canadian graphic-novelist Seth has said, "Chris really changed the playing field. After him, a lot of [cartoonists] really started to scramble and go, 'Holy [expletive], I think I have to try harder.'"

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ware resides in the Chicago area of Illinois.

His earliest published strips appeared in the late 1980s on the comics page of The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to numerous daily strips under different titles, Ware also had a weekly satirical science fiction serial in the paper titled Floyd Farland - Citizen of the Future.

This was eventually published in 1988 as a prestige format comic book from Eclipse Comics, and its publication even led to a brief correspondence between Ware and Timothy Leary.

While still a sophomore at UT, Ware came to the attention of Art Spiegelman, who invited Ware to contribute to Raw, the influential anthology magazine Spiegelman was co-editing with Françoise Mouly.

Ware has acknowledged that being included in Raw gave him confidence and inspired him to explore printing techniques and self-publishing.

His Fantagraphics series Acme Novelty Library defied comics publishing conventions with every issue.

The series featured a combination of new material as well as reprints of work Ware had done for the Texan (such as Quimby the Mouse) and the Chicago weekly paper Newcity.

Ware's work appeared originally in Newcity before he moved on to his current "home", the Chicago Reader.

He was the editor of The Best American Comics 2007, the second installment devoted to comics in the Best American series.

In 2007, Ware curated an exhibition for the Phoenix Art Museum focused on the non-comic work of five contemporary cartoonists.

The exhibition, titled "UnInked: Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Works by Five Cartoonists", ran from April 21 through August 19.

Ware also edited and designed the catalog for the exhibition.

In recent years he has also been involved in editing (and designing) several books and book series, including the new reprint series of Gasoline Alley from Drawn & Quarterly titled Walt and Skeezix; a reprint series of Krazy Kat by Fantagraphics; and the 13th volume of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, which is devoted to comics.

Beginning with the 16th issue of Acme Novelty Library, Ware began self-publishing his work, while maintaining a relationship with Fantagraphics for distribution and storage.

This was a return to Ware's early career, self-publishing such books as Lonely Comics and Stories as well as miniature digests of stories based on Quimby the Mouse and an unnamed potato-like creature.

In 2017, Ware's book Monograph appeared.

It is a part-memoir, part-scrapbook retrospective of his career to that point.

The New York Review of Books described it as "a grand tomb in the Egyptian mold, whose contents will tell anyone who breaks into it what this person’s life was like," adding that "it seems almost an invasion of privacy to enter this crypt."

Ware's art reflects early 20th-century American styles of cartooning and graphic design, shifting through formats from traditional comic panels to faux advertisements and cut-out toys.

Stylistic influences include advertising graphics from that same era; newspaper strip cartoonists Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland) and Frank King (Gasoline Alley); Charles Schulz's post-WWII strip Peanuts and the cover designs of ragtime-era sheet music.

Ware has spoken about finding inspiration in the work of artist Joseph Cornell and cites Richard McGuire's strip Here as a major influence on his use of non-linear narratives.

Ware has said of his own style:"I arrived at my way of 'working' as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I 'draw', which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the 'essence' of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really 'see' anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can't completely change at the moment."

Although his precise, geometrical layouts may appear to some to be computer-generated, Ware works almost exclusively with manual drawing tools such as paper and ink, rulers and T-squares.

He does, however, sometimes use photocopies and transparencies, and he employs a computer to color his strips.

Quimby the Mouse was an early character for Ware and something of a breakthrough.

Rendered in the style of an early animation character like Felix the Cat, Quimby the Mouse is perhaps Ware's most autobiographical character.

Quimby's relationship with a cat head named Sparky is by turns conflict-ridden and loving, and thus intended to reflect all human relationships.

While Quimby exhibits mobility, Sparky remains immobile and helpless, subject to all the indignities Quimby visits upon him.

Quimby also acts as a narrator for Ware's reminiscences of his youth, in particular his relationship with his grandmother.

Sometimes illustrated as a two-headed mouse, Quimby embodies both Ware and his grandmother, and the duality of a young and old body.

Quimby was presented in a series of smaller panels than most comics, almost providing the illusion of motion à la a zoetrope.

In fact, Ware once designed a zoetrope to be cut out and constructed by the reader in order to watch a Quimby "silent movie".