Chris Ware - Softcover

Poynor, Rick; Raeburn, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 185669397X ISBN 13: 9781856693974

Publisher: Laurence King Pub, 2004

Synopsis

Chris Ware is widely acknowledged - both within and beyond the comics scene - as an artist of genius. His work is a unique combination of comic book art, hand-lettering and graphic design. In the early 1990s, he attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and began writing a full-page, full-colour strip for the Chicago tabloid NewCity which featured a character named Jimmy Corrigan. Ware periodically collects these comic strips into separate volumes which he publishes as the Acme Novelty Library (the senes launched in 1993 and is currently up to issue 15). Six years of the strips were collected into his best-selling 380-page graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2001) Spanning four generations of Chicago Irish, from the Civil War to the present, Jimmy Corrigan has been described as 'the Great American novel in comic book form'. As well as winning many awards in the comics industry, it made history as the first graphic novel to be awarded the Guardian First Book Award it was described by the New York Times as 'arguably the greatest achievement of the form, ever' Ware's work has recently won recognition from the art world his original comic strip

About this title

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

About the Author

Daniel Raeburn is the author, designer and publisher of The Imp, an irregular series of booklets about comic books that has earned rich praise in the comics industry. He lives in Chicago, where he contributes to The Baffler and other magazines.

About this edition

• Publisher: Laurence King Pub
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 185669397X
• ISBN 13: 9781856693974
• Binding: Paperback