Chris Ware (Monographics Series) [Paperback]

Daniel Raeburn (Author)

Book Description

Series: Monographics | Publication Date: October 11, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This title pairs the most talented postmodern comic artist alive (Chris Ware, author of the justly lauded Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth with perhaps the best writer on contemporary comics, Daniel Raeburn. So little decent writing exists on comics that Raeburn, editor of the fanzine The Imp,has to go back to the very birth of the form to get started, and his writing is always fluent and accessible (with the exception of his insistence on using silly terms like "comixscenti"). Raeburn clearly loves Ware's work with an infectious intensity and it's not bothersome that he is obviously close pals with the subject. To adhere to the strictures of the series, the book seems at times forced to emphasize Ware's graphic design. Ware is first and foremost an insanely adept pillager of early 20th century advertising and comics forms; but it's as a story-teller that Ware is known and celebrated. Raeburn emphasizes Ware's "emotional" use of color and form and decries an art museum's placement of a single page of comic art taken from a larger work on its walls as tantamount to "cutting a paragraph from a short story and framing it." But his book does the very same thing throughout. The book is excellent, although slightly maddening. If only there were more illustrations and Raeburn did not feel such an insistence on staking claims on the very tired highbrow vs. lowbrow divide, this would be a perfect work. --Mike McGonigal

From Booklist

More proof that artist Ware, best known for Jimmy Corrigan (2000), has escaped the comic-book ghetto comes in this entry in Yale's series on eminent graphic designers, Monographics. Raeburn celebrates Ware's versatility by reproducing some 70 examples of his strikingly innovative work: comics pages, of course, but also paintings, posters, sketchbook pages, kinetic sculptures, toys, and even a sign for a bookstore and a lunchbox. Impressively knowledgeable about the comics medium, Raeburn contributes an invaluable essay revealing the autobiographical elements in Ware's work and demonstrating the influences on it of old-time newspaper strips and turn-of-the-century graphic design. Raeburn also insightfully annotates the individual works, explaining Ware's visually complex, postmodern style and his experimentation with narrative and graphic forms. The only fault of Raeburn's commentary is that there isn't enough of it. And while Ware's work itself is brilliant, the book's relatively small pages don't do it justice (much of the comic-strip dialogue is nearly illegible).Still, as a concise introduction to an important artist, it is ideal, especially for comics nonenthusiasts. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (October 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300102917
• ISBN-13: 978-0300102918
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lacking somewhat in depth and imagery, February 3, 2005

By 

Mark Mauer (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chris Ware (Monographics Series) (Paperback)

I am a big fan of the work of Chris Ware, so I thought this book would really give me a greater depth of understanding of his work.
What is there is quite good, but it is also very short. Only the first 30 or so pages have text that discusses Ware. The rest of the book features images of Ware's work; the great majority of it has already been published in his semi-regular comic, and is familiar to anyone who buys that regularly.
Many of the images try to fit a full huge Ware piece of art, often 11 x 17 inches or so onto the size of this book's page, much smaller, so you can't even read the words or make out the details. Also, the book uses huge white margins, so the images could have easily been made larger and more legible.
There are some unusual images of Ware's work, including a remarkable wedding invitation he designed for friends of his. But again, it's rather small, and details are lost.
Ware's own hardcover datebook does a better job at looking behind the scenes of Ware's published work.
This is by no means a bad book, and it has worth, but I wish it had been longer and designed with a little more care.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must for Chris Ware fans!, September 12, 2005

By 

Donivan Coltrane Alley (Albuquerque, NM USofA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Chris Ware (Monographics Series) (Paperback)

This monograph was chock full of finely reproduced Ware art not just stuff from his comics, including some photos of his sculptures I had not seen before. The copy the author included as a comentary on the art helped translate the pathos of Chis Ware's art. I think you will enjoy this monograph if you are a Chis Ware enthusist or just a casual fan.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elevating the Medium, April 3, 2005

By 

Waldo McSheepington "and his bowl of turds" (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chris Ware (Monographics Series) (Paperback)

This book focuses on the evolution of comics, where Chris Ware fits into that evolution, and especially Ware's proficiency as a graphic designer. Working with a medium still ignored by most and cast off as a childish one, Raeburn gives us a view of Chris Ware's work from a professional design standpoint, and proves that it is well-deserving of such an analysis.