I Don’t Understand Why You’re Not Obsessed with Chris Ware

Chris Ware isn’t just a cartoonist — he’s a whole experience, and you’re missing out.

It’s a bright summer day in 2007 before Chris Ware entered my conscience. I’ve just graduated high school, and am puttering around on the boardwalk in Venice Beach, California. Nestled among t-shirt stands, head shops, and tattoo parlors is a book store, Small World Books. I remember it being dark and dusty, but that’s probably only how it seemed in contrast to the brightly lit world of palm trees and beach outside. The floor might have been sandy. There was definitely a cat. 

My Experience Finding Chris Ware

Somewhere in the store, maybe in a dedicated graphic novel section, maybe somewhere else – a small book was displayed with a handwritten note. Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. 

The cover was – I don’t even know how to describe how it made me feel – it was insane and incomprehensible. It was charming. There was a lot to take in. I stood there for a long time squinting at it. 

I think it was $35. I had about $50 in my bank account. I bought the book. 

I’m not sure what I expected from this book with the intricately designed cover. I just wanted it. Inside I discovered an uncomfortable and melancholy story which flashed forward and back across time and space. And it was beautiful. Every panel and spread a work of undeniable art. 

From Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)

Some pages were tightly woven with tiny, inch square panels squished in. Others were more open and expansive, giving you breathing room in a story cutting way too close to the heart. 

You know that feeling when you see somebody across the room waves to you, their face wide and smiling and full of love as they greet you, only they are not greeting you, but somebody standing just behind you? Ware’s work feels sort of like that, but worse. It’s breathtaking and beautiful, like having a panic attack at the Grand Canyon. 

Interspersed in the pages are activities, like this cut out paper dollhouse, tiny coffin included. Comics are fun for children of all ages! 

From Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)

Chris Ware and Chicago

For those who don’t know, Chris Ware is a prominent figure in contemporary art, particularly within the Chicago art scene. His work has been showcased in major art institutions, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The Actual First Time I Discovered Chris Ware’s Work

This wasn’t exactly my first interaction with Ware’s work. I had seen some of his stuff in Best American Comics anthologies. I have a vague memory of reading a long story of his in an old issue of The New Yorker I found in the break room of the library where my mom worked.

But Jimmy Corregan was the first time I read Chris Ware on purpose, and I was hooked. In the late aughts, Amazon had emerged from the basement at the Bezos’ estate, but didn’t yet have its ubiquitous chokehold on commerce. It didn’t even occur to me to look for this stuff online. This was a time when comics were just around in a way that they don’t seem to be anymore. I’d find copies of The Onion or LA Weekly (those had comics, right?) on tables in coffee shops. But the hunt was on, and I started looking for Chris Ware in every bookstore and comic book shop I entered. 

From Rusty Brown (2019)

I quickly discovered that booksellers and comic shops don’t really know how to categorize Ware. Comic book stores rarely carry his stuff. Traditional booksellers put him in the comic book section, but he doesn’t really fit in with the superheroes or the Walking Deads or the Bones of the genre. These days “Graphic Novels” often get their own section, but twenty years ago, not so much. Even alphabetically, his lonely little W relegates him to the bottom shelf.

The other hard sell is how he designs and packages his work. It’s also one of the things I adore about it.

The Acme Novelty Library was the next book I came across. In the photo below, I include a regular sized moleskine notebook for scale. This stupid book doesn’t fit on any shelf in my house. I think I got it on discount because it didn’t fit on any shelf at the bookstore. 

The Acme Novelty Library (2005)

I’ve been dragging it around with me for the last fifteen years anyway, because once picked up, it can’t be put down. Look at this thing. It’s gorgeous. 

Inside is a collection of comics, characters, long form stories, and one shots. Every available inch of space in this massive book is filled. Ware took the time to write fake ads for imaginary products in the vein of classic comic book ads. These ads go on for pages at the front and rear of the book, each one unique, all dark or funny or strange. There’s an astrological map with glow-in-the-dark ink spread across two pages. There’s a “super man” comic threading in and out, coming in for a few panels here and there, then pages at a time, then just kind of fading out again. 

The Acme Novelty Library (2005)

There’s even a teeny, tiny comic printed on the outer binding. This guy is probably insane. I’m probably insane for reading him. 

Detail of The Acme Novelty Library (2005)

It just sucks you in. Every time I move I find myself trying to find someplace to pack this stupid, misshaped book. Then I flip through the pages and end up sitting on the floor reading instead.  

The Acme Novelty Library isn’t even the most inconvenient book of Ware’s I own.

Here’s Monograph. Myself for scale. What the hell, Chris?

Monograph (2017)

Chris Ware Building Stories isn’t even a book, it’s a box of materials: pamphlets, posters, and even something sort of resembling a board game. It’s all the pieces of a story. It’s on the reader to put it all together. Building Stories. Get it? 

Building Stories (2012)

If being into Ware is kind of a hassle, it delivers a high reward. It’s high effort fun, like running a marathon or climbing a mountain. It’s simultaneously low effort fun, because, at the end of the day, they’re just comic books. Ware so expertly introduces you to his visual language you’re barely conscious of the fact you’re reading anything more challenging than Calvin and Hobbes. 

The work can be hard to categorize. Yes, it’s comics. But he’s an impeccable artist, graphic designer, letterer, storyteller. He’s a fantastic observer of human beings, he’s self aware and dryly funny. He’s an absolute master of all things that go into comic making.

The things he makes are just something else. When I discovered him twenty years ago I was getting very into comics, but a shift has happened in the last decade; most things I read are disappointing because they aren’t Chris Ware. 

In Rusty Brown (2019) the opening pages follow two different characters simultaneously through their morning, one in large regular panels on the top 4/5ths of the page, one in little boxes running across the bottom. 

I’m a poor collector, my books are beat up and broken from being moved and interacted with and well-read. I keep losing and rebuying copies because I loan them out and don’t get them back. I don’t own every single thing, because I love finding his stuff out in the world and supporting the shops who make room for Ware on the shelves. I hope somebody somewhere is keeping pristine editions of this work, because it deserves it, but it deserves to be read and totally consumed too. 

Chris Ware for The New Yorker, 2022, Animation by John Kuramoto

Honestly, there’s a little part of my hipster heart that doesn’t want to turn you on to this guy. As huge, full color, out-of-print, hardcover books go, they’re pretty inexpensive in the online used book marketplace – and I greedily want to keep it that way. But Ware’s books deserve better.

I’m honestly surprised how many “comics people” and “art people” and “book people” I’ve spoken to have never heard of him. To be fair, maybe he’s super well known outside my circle and I’ve been kicking it with uncultured swine all these years. Maybe there’s a huge Chris Ware fanclub I’m unaware of (and if so, please, I want to come to the meetings). He wins awards, displays in museums, is featured on “must read” lists. He’s not exactly toiling in obscurity. But I can’t figure out why more people don’t go, “oh yeah, I LOVE his stuff!” when I bring him up.

Superman Suicide, from Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)

Chris Ware and Sadness

It doesn’t surprise me when people return a book to me, screwing up their face and calling it, “The most depressing thing I’ve ever read.” Because it can be that, yeah. But if depression were a total dealbreaker, nobody would read Cormac McCarthy or Sylvia Plath either. 

So, sure, reading Chris Ware makes me kind of sad sometimes, but, like poking at a scab, it’s too satisfying to pass up. Who else captures nostalgia for a childhood toy I never actually owned? The unbearable awkwardness of two strangers trying to pass each other in a hallway, who instead step over and over into the path of the other guy? Of knowing a loved one is dying but still dodging their calls? You just can’t get that kind of action anywhere else. 

The Acme Novelty Library (2005)