BIOGRAPHY:

"...the most versatile and innovative artist the medium has ever known."
New York Times Book Review

"The Acme Novelty Library allows Ware to explore themes introduced in RAW: childhood alienation, cheap advertising gimmicks, relentless disappointment, ageing and death, the casual cruelty of ordinary people, and perhaps most important, the sheer visual joy of comic books and strips pitted against their false messages of happiness and ultimately empty promises."
Chip Kidd

"The ambivalence and the cruelty of life. I think if you had to put his comics in a nutshell, that would be it... But it's not necessarily a negative outlook, just the truth. Life is ambivalent. Seems like we can't have the good without the bad. One thing that Ware said that really struck me was this. He said that in Jimmy Corrigan he was trying to say, mainly, that life is beautiful. The thing is, he felt like he couldn't say that life is beautiful, because it's too corny, so he tried to say it by drawing the story the way he did and using the amazing colours he did. The beautiful book itself was a sort of argument against all the sadness described in it. That's a really good way of putting it, I think, and you could apply that to all of his work."
Daniel Raeburn

Franklin Christenson Ware (1967- ) is originally from Omaha, Nebraska, but moved to San Antonio, Texas at the age of 16. In 1986 his first published comic work, Floyd Farland, appeared in The Daily Texan, the campus newspaper of the University of Texas (later published in a collected format by Eclipse Comics - if you happen to own a copy Chris Ware will exchange it for a piece of original artwork, such is his desire to eradicate all traces of it from the planet).

In 1991 he moved to Chicago, Illinois, to attend the Chicago Art Institute. He was invited by Art Spiegelman to appear in the influential RAW magazine and from 1992 his weekly comic strip has featured in the Chicago local alternative newspaper, New City.

Since 1993 he has been producing his own comic, The ACME Novelty Library, which features a cast of hapless characters such as Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby The Mouse, Rusty Brown, Big Tex, and Rocket Sam, but is noted as much for its immaculate design and packaging as for the stories themselves.

Interviews:
POV (2006)
MCA Chicago (2006)
Open Source Radio (2005)
BBC Collective (2005)
The Comics Journal Special Edition #4 (2004)
Comic Art #3 (2003)
The Guardian (2001)
The Onion (2001)
Brave New Waves (2001)
CNN.com (2000)
Time.com (2000)
The Comics Journal #200 (1997)

Resources:
Recommended by... Chris Ware
Chris Ware at Drawn & Quarterly
Chris Ware at Fantagraphics
Chris Ware at Pantheon
The Rag-Time Ephemeralist
The Acme Novelty Toy Gallery
Lambiek Virtual Exhibition

On-Line Comics:
'I Guess' from RAW vol 2 #3

Reviews:
Indy Magazine: Chris Ware by D. Raeburn
Time.com: McSweeney's Quarterly #13
Time.com: Quimby The Mouse
Time.com: Acme Novelty Library #15
Raymond Briggs: Jimmy Corrigan

Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid On Earth
Pantheon, 2000
Winner of the Guardian 2001 First Book Award, Jimmy Corrigan is a 380 page intricate tale of four generations of the Corrigan family spanning 100 years. Jimmy visits his father who had previously abandoned him as a child. Among airport bars, convenience stores and modular housing Jimmy becomes involved in the lives of his father, his black adopted sister, Amy, and his grandfather, also named Jimmy.

"Jimmy Corrigan may be the most physically beautiful book ever written about loneliness."
Daniel Reaburn

"Jimmy Corrigan pushes the form of comics into unexpected formal and emotional territory."
The Chicago Tribune

"Mostly, I don't know what I'm doing, but I guess at some point I realised that the basic tools inherited as a cartoonist just seemed inadequate to express a real sense of what it feels like to be alive, that there's a sort of a 'volume level' always set at 'ten' in most comics that reads and feels like shouting or screaming, and has a sort of intensity to me that doesn't feel 'real' in a way a good and carefully considered novel strives to feel. I guess I consciously tried to tone down, or quiet down - or even essentially sterilize - the approach that I was taking so that the surface of the comic strip, or the drawing of it, would have very little effect on the reader at all. I wanted the cartoon to be a transparent structure that one would simply look through, rather than look at... I found that the simpler the picture, the quieter the picture, the better it worked as something that was read, or, more importantly, something that seemed, once one was reading it, to happen before your eyes."
Chris Ware, interviewed in The Comics Journal Special Edition #4

The ACME Novelty Date Book
Drawn & Quarterly, 2003
Chris Ware is one of the most influential cartoonists of his generation and The Acme Novelty Sketchbook contains over 100 pages from his sketchbooks. Its a fascinating look into the mind of one of America's top cartoonists. He reveals the outtakes of his genius in these intimate, imaginative, and whimsical sketches. Architectural drawings from Chicago and interplanetary robot comics collide with cruelly doodled human figures and quietly troubling studies of the still life. A must for people with a passion for modern design and old-fashioned style.

Quimby The Mouse
Fantagraphics, 2003
Cleverly appropriated old-fashioned animation imagery and advertising styles of the 1920s and 1930s are put to use in Quimby at the service of modern vignettes of angst and existentialism. As this cartoon silhouette of a mouse ignominiously suffers at every turn, the spaces between the panels create despair and a Beckett-like rhythm of hope deceived and deferred (but never quite extinguished), buoying Quimby from page to page. Like Ware's first book, Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby is saturated with Ware's genius, including consistently amazing graphics, insanely perfectionist production values, cut-out-and-assemble paper projects, and the formal complexity of his narratives that have earned him the reputation as one of the most prodigious artists of his generation.

Lost Buildings: DVD & Booklet
by Ira Glass, Tim Samuelson & Chris Ware
WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, 2004
A 22 minute DVD cartoon/radio-documentary about the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960's and 70's when they were being torn down, and how that passion turned to tragedy. It's a very sad story, illustrated with beautiful pictures by Chris Ware, and was first presented in May 2003 in Los Angeles, as part of a stage production of This American Life, an award-winning radio program in the USA. To accompany the DVD, Chris designed a 96-page book, full of never-before-published photographs of Louis Sullivan buildings, in their glory and in various states of demolition. Also, there are DVD extras: audio outtakes, a look at Chris's pencil sketches, a high-resolution version of the movie that plays on PCs and Macs.
Further reading:
 •   Lost Buildings
 •   Animating Historic Architecture

"Whenever he walks in Chicago, Tim not only sees the buildings that are there, he sees the buildings that used to be there. The whole skyline is haunted for him."
Ira Glass, from Lost Buildings

"Ira Glass first approached me about the idea of doing a collaboration in the Spring of 2003 as an antidote to my continual complaining to him that I never got out of the house. Seeing him out in the world, meeting new people and experiencing new things, my life as a cartoonist seemed silly by comparison - even though staying home and drawing little stories about whatever one wants probably sounds pretty great to most people with real jobs. Anyway he was planning a second live stage show of his award-winning radio program This American Life, and wanted to add something specifically visual to the program, like a slide show of some kind, which is where he thought I might come in."
Chris Ware, from the DVD Booklet introduction

Chris Ware
by Daniel Raeburn
Yale University Press, 2004
A book devoted to the life and work of Chris Ware. Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware's career, work methods, and graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble-paper projects that require construction by readers. Based on many hours of interviews with the artist, Raeburn offers fascinating insights into the connections between Jimmy Corrigan's biography and that of his creator. In addition, the book encompasses Ware's many other works and examines his place in the world of literature, graphic art, and popular culture.

Graphic Novels:
Quimby The Mouse (2003)
The ACME Novelty Date Book - Sketchbook 1986 to 1995 (2003)
Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth (2000)
Floyd Farlane, Citizen Of The Future (1987)

Other:
Lost Buildings: DVD & Booklet (2004) with Ira Glass
McSweeney's 13: The Comics Issue (2004) edited by Chris Ware
Chris Ware (2004) by Daniel Reaburn

Periodicals:
The ACME Novelty Library #1-19 (1993-2007)

Design Work:
Gasoline Alley by Frank King
Krazy & Ignatz : The Komplete Kat Komics by George Herriman
Drawn & Quarterly Vol 3 edited by Chris Oliveros
The Imp #3 by Daniel Reaburn