Since 1993, Chris Ware has been producing his own comic, The ACME Novelty Library, exploring themes such as childhood alienation, cheap advertising gimmicks, relentless disappointment, ageing and death, while being noted as much for its immaculate design and packaging as for the stories themselves. More details here.

If you know of any other comic-related reading recommendations made by Chris Ware in interviews or articles we would love to hear from you. Please provide a scan and/or link if possible.
Email: recommended [at] readyourselfraw [dot] com

Clumsy
by Jeffrey Brown
"An extremely impressive debut, full of all the things that make a story good - doomed relationships, embarrassing personal details, and the insatiable need to put it all down on paper. This was one of my favorite books to come out in the past year."
From the back cover blurb

"... I think Jeff Brown's cartoons are really great. He gets closer to the feeling of real experience better than most cartoonists, yet he works in a very unaffected, diary-like style... In fact, his work is at its best when it's not drawn at all, when you can actually feel him trying to just find the figures on the page; he's not trying to be fancy or anything."
From an interview in The Comics Journal Special Edition #4

Schizo
by Ivan Brunetti
"After reading your comic book, I had the overall impression that maybe I wasn't such a bad guy overall. I can identify with your mind-wrenching desire to simply be honest with yourself and to desperately SEE every part of yourself exactly as you are, to dig as deeply as possible and to debase yourself to the ground and then rebuild (?) your own self-image... but boy it's difficult to do, difficult to write, and difficult to read. Trust me, you're not as worthless as you seem to think you are."
From a letter in Schizo #2

Just The Facts
by David Collier
"I'm grateful that a collection of Collier's stuff is finally being published - his widely unpredictable range of interests always makes fertile ground for a rich crop of real art. An obsessive observer who makes me fascinated by things I never thought I would be, I feel like a nancy-boy faker when I read Collier."
From the back cover blurb.

The Complete Crumb Comics
by Robert Crumb
"I think he's the greatest artist in the world... without him, real comics even might have ceased to exist... and what he does, there's just not words for it. He's a genius, as far as I'm concerned."
From an interview in The Comics Journal Special Edition #4

R. Crumb Sketchbook
by Robert Crumb
"… I genuinely tried to use my sketchbook as a way of practicing stuff, of trying to improve, and to learn to 'see' better, even though it doesn't really seemed to have helped much, now that I look it… I started keeping one regularly in 1986, not really knowing what I was doing until I discovered the hardcover reproductions of Robert Crumb's sketchbooks in 1987 and I was, as the kids say, completely 'blown away'… the book practically exuded life to me, unlike most of the 'art' which I was being introduced to in school… Simply knowing that Robert Crumb was alive and filling up sketchbooks with incredible drawings I think rescued my otherwise too easily influenced mind from being sucked into a world of theory-based, message-laden nonsense… but it also influenced the way I started keeping my own sketchbook, probably irrevocably - but what the heck - I'm such an unfathomable lesser intellect and talent, what difference does it make."
From the introduction to The Acme Novelty Date Book Vol 1

Krazy Kat
by George Herriman
"I think George Herriman's Krazy Kat may be the only comic strip that has a genuine internal life to it. To me, I never feel like I'm looking at drawings 'of' things in Krazy Kat., I feel like I'm seeing the things themselves. It feels like the most inevitable work I've ever seen in comics. I believe his characters in a way that I don't believe any other characters."
From an interview in The Comics Journal Special Edition #4

Gasoline Alley: Walt & Skeezix
by Frank King
"...I'd finally found the example of what I'd been looking for in comics - something that tried to capture the texture and feeling of life as it slowly, inextricably, and hopelessly passed by... I am convinced that after all these books are published, Gasoline Alley will stand as one of the most individual, human, and genuinely great works in the history of comics."
Chris Ware, from the introduction to Walt & Skeezix Vol 1

"Frank King was born in 1883 in Cashton, Wisconsin, and was one of the great pioneers of the early comic strip. His most famous creation, Gasoline Alley, was a peculiar, understated masterpiece... an unpretentious newsprint mirror of life, to be read once and then thrown away. Beginning in the 1918 Chicago Tribune as a gag panel about the new fad of the automobile, it shifted focus in 1921 when the main character, Walt, found an abandoned child on his doorstep. This new character, Skeezix (based in part on King's own son) soon took over the strip - and Gasoline Alley began its career as a modest chronicle of everyday middle-class American life. Reserving his five daily strips for more complicated storylines, King's full-color Sunday pages often presented Walt and Skeezix simply wandering the countryside of America, idly remarking about natural landmarks, the quality of the sky, or the colors of the seasons. Frequently these pages were richly textured experiments in form and style, often having no joke or punchline at all, only a quiet, sustained tone of serenity and gentleness. However, the most unusual feature of the strip was that the characters aged... Skeezix grew up and had his own family, and Walt became an old man. And as the supply of paper shrank with World War II, so did Frank King's canvas. The giant poster-sized Sunday pages of the 1920s and 1930s withering to the cocktail napkin-sized scraps that they remain today. Gradually passing off the responsibilities of the strip to various assistants over the years, King died in 1969, leaving his entire world entirely in the hands of a new generation of artists. Today, Gasoline Alley continues to be produced, but the Chicago Tribune, the paper where it began, ceased running it in 1993 without notice."
From a tribute to Frank King in Drawn & Quarterly Vol 3

Jar Of Fools
by Jason Lutes
"Reading Jar of Fools is like getting a slow motion punch in the face. There's plenty of time to get out of the way, but something compels you to wait and find out of it's actually going to hurt as much when it hits. And, of course, it does."
From the back cover blurb

Little Nemo In Slumberland (HC)
by Winsor McCay
"After this book, it just seems unacceptable and a disservice to the artist's memory to do it any other way."
From the advertising blurb

Skibber Bee-Bye
by Ron Regé Jr
"Ron Rege Jr. is probably the greatest 'new' cartoonist (whatever that is) I can think of in the tradition of 'pioneers' like Herriman, Sterrett, McCay, et al, in that he has wholly reinvented the comic strip language to suit his own idiosyncratic vision. His apparently simple yet beautifully complex little line drawings seem to spring from the very essence of 'the form'; they're warm, funny, sad, smart, stupid--and, best of all, alive. His stuff should shut every idiot up who thinks that the comic strip is 'dead.'"
From the Highwater Books website

Peanuts
by Charles M. Schulz
"Charles Schulz is the only author I've been continually reading since I was a kid. The warmth and inviting quality I found in his work then is tempered by an ever-deepening complexity and richness when I read it now. I never met either of them, but as a child, Charlie Brown was my friend; and as an adult, Charles Schulz is my hero."
From the advertising blurb for The Complete Peanuts

"Charles Schulz inaugurated the modern comic strip by creating the first (and still, really only) sympathetic cartoon character, which must be due in part to his work ethic: Schulz probably drew Charlie Brown as many times as he signed his own name. Throughout the course of over 17,000 strips read by hundreds of millions of people Schulz refined, developed and codified the figures of his imagination to such a degree that they became an extension of himself - a handwriting that literally was Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and Snoopy. And while a few other artists might claim to work as hard, no other cartoonist ever imbued their characters with so much of his own heart: Charles Schulz couldn't publicly talk about Charlie Brown in the last year of his life without crying. Maybe the only person who cared more about Charlie Brown than the rest of the world was Charles Schulz himself."
From the cover flap blurb to The Complete Peanuts Vol 3

Vernacular Drawings
by Seth
"This book doesn't need any quotes - open it up and you'll immediately see why Seth is one of the greatest cartoonists working today."
From the back cover blurb

Vellevision
by Maurice Vellekoop
"Where else are you going to go for so much color, glitz, and an almost iridescent sense of human fickleness."
From the advertising blurb.