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This chapter examines Chris Ware’s relationship(s) with artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell. One of the elements of Ware’s artistic biography is his affinity for the work of Cornell, and this was confirmed by Daniel Raeburn in his 2004 Yale University Press monograph suggesting that Ware “reveres” the older artist. Yet Ware’s comics appear to be almost perfectly opposed to Cornell’s combinatory aesthetic. This chapter looks at autobiography as an ambivalent prospect for Ware by analyzing his comic strips such as Quimby the Mouse and The ACME Novelty Library.

This chapter examines the persistent rhetoric of failure throughout Chris Ware’s comics, locating this impulse in a longer American literary genealogy that valorizes literary prestige over popularity. It argues that Ware’s self-abnegation becomes a cipher for his ambivalence about comics’ newly found role as literature, reviving anxieties around canon formation that have taken place in American literature since as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that Ware uses the rhetoric of failure as a means to negotiate his attempts to place comics in the literary canon and to express his characteristic ambivalence toward the very notion of “graphic literature.” It also considers how he both evinces and performs a dialectic between artistry and commerce in his own role as author, and aligns the tension between mass market and high art within the comics medium to the rhetoric of success and failure, respectively.

Cartoonists are aware of how comics can be easily forgotten, and thus have addressed “memory” as a central trope for discussing how their medium works, not only on the page but also in the minds of readers and creators. For example, Scott McCloud has argued that the power of cartooning stems from a mimetic similarity between the iconography of comic art and the contents of human memory. Chris Ware has also formalized the notion that “comics is about memory.” This chapter examines how memory is constructed in his comic strip “Building Stories,” focusing on the interplay between episodic, experiential, and narrative memory. It argues that memory is central to Ware’s comics, in which it is formally anatomized and re-encoded as a “feeling.” The chapter discusses remembering as a felt experience and how it resonates with Ware’s assertions about his artwork and its relation to readers’ psychological states. It also considers Ware’s central techniques for representing remembering in the 2003 strip titled “Paper Dolls.”

Chris Ware is known for his fascination with modes of representing (and complicating) temporal progress, which can be attributed to his highly self-conscious and theoretical approach to the comics medium. This is evident in two of his works, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Quimby the Mouse. In the latter, Ware amplifies not only its autobiographical content but also the potential of autobiography itself. This chapter offers a reading of Quimby the Mouse to understand the connections between the slapstick antics of the Quimby comics and the autobiographical essay woven throughout the volume. Drawing on the autobiographical criticism of Philippe Lejeune, it argues that Quimby the Mouse is a multilayered disquisition on the interlocking categories of self, artwork, and time.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s comics from a perspective informed by French comics, with emphasis on an experimental collective known as Oubapo. It shows how, for both Ware and Oubapo, the concept of the workshop or factory becomes a key trope as they self-consciously create an avant-garde form of comics that embraces experimentation in the medium and about the medium. To demonstrate how this formal experimentation offers another point of entry into the labyrinth of Ware’s graphic narratives, the chapter looks at parallels between his work in The ACME Novelty Library series, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and Oubapo works. It also considers how the works of Ware and a number of French artists share an ironic edge and specifically critique mass-manufactured comics and consumerism.

This chapter examines how Chris Ware has helped reshape the canon of comics history, paying particular attention to his book designs. It argues that through his work as an editor and book designer, Ware has constantly evoked cartoonists from the past, particularly the newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century and the pioneering superhero artists of the 1930s and 1940s. He has also championed artists who engage in formal experimentation or focus on everyday life, such as George Herriman, Frank King, Rodolphe Töpffer, and Gluyas Williams. To understand why Ware and his fellow cartoonists are rewriting comics history, the chapter places their work in a historical context. By looking at his comics such as Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Lost Buildings, and Quimby the Mouse, it shows that Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s comics version of art history and how it reveals his fundamental ambivalence toward high art and the institution of the museum, even when he has been celebrated by many in these arenas. By analyzing “Our History of Art,” a series of episodes that appears among the opening pages of The ACME Report, it highlights the tension between Ware’s suspicion of the art world and his familiarity and ease with its conventions. The chapter also considers Ware’s advocacy for a greater awareness of comics in relation to his critique of traditional art histories. Furthermore, it discusses the influence of artists such as William Hogarth, René Magritte, and Philip Guston on Ware’s artistic production, along with his skepticism toward both art criticism and art museums.

In the formal grammar of Chris Ware’s comics, time is conspicuous, and forms of temporal progression (or speed) are inscribed in its graphic representation. Ware also emphasizes controlled pace as, among other things, an obstacle to the frenetic temporality of contemporary consumer culture. This chapter examines his oeuvre in terms of its deliberate fascination with slowness. Invoking Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, it argues that the slowness of Ware’s narration is a reflection of his strong resistance to contemporary consumer culture and revolves around the concepts of nostalgia, repetition, and non-hierarchical structures. The chapter highlights the intensive and extensive forms of temporality in Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, focusing on the agonizing patience and misery of the protagonist’s embarrassment as an existential and profoundly temporal leitmotif.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s rejection of realistic figure drawing in his own comics and his promotion of memoir, autobiography, and realistic fiction in his anthologies. It traces Ware’s preference for the realistic to his roots in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s and 1990s, along with the movement’s aspirations to realism as part of its pursuit of the highest artistic ambitions. The chapter also looks at how Ware recapitulates aesthetics in his anthologies, most especially in the introduction to Best American Comics 2007.

In Chris Ware’s comic strip “Building Stories,” the protagonist is a 30-year-old woman who is an amputee and sometimes wears a prosthetic limb. Ware’s description strangely elides disability as a characterization of the woman, relegating it to a de-privileged position in his account of the narrative. This chapter examines the ways in which Ware represents the woman in “Building Stories,” with the goal of demystifying her physical difference by situating her within an aesthetic of the ordinary. After discussing the politics underlying images of bodies and disability as a politicized identity, it considers Ware’s aesthetic of ordinariness and narrative structure. The chapter then argues that Ware imagines the disabled experience to be not radically different from the daily rituals of the other inhabitants of the building, thus opening a space for the protagonist that the chapter refers to as “idiosyncratic belonging.”

This chapter examines sequentiality in comics theory in relation to Chris Ware’s comics and proposes a poetics of the diagram that draws upon information theory. It shows how understanding Ware’s comics as diagrams, including his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, allows us to see how they function as puzzles to be solved. The chapter argues that Ware’s diagrams suggest new possibilities of metaphor, meta-narrative, and other more “poetic” devices for the still-developing language of comics. It also looks at a number of other cartoonists who have exploited the diagrammatic potential of the comics page, including Dan Zettwoch, Peter Blegvad, Posy Simmonds, and Kevin Huizenga.

This chapter examines the prominence of Chicago in Chris Ware’s comics, particularly in Lost Buildings and the “Building Stories” comic strip. It discusses the importance of flânerie, mechanical reproduction, and modernity’s ruins in Ware’s representations of architecture in Lost Buildings. The chapter considers Ware’s critique of the impersonal, homogenous, and stultifying qualities of the International style popularized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and contrasts this with his understanding of architecture as the impetus for a renewed aesthetic sensibility and connection to the outside world. It also explores the presence of melancholy in both “Building Stories” and Lost Buildings, and how Ware remakes it into the imagination of the ruin as whole by engaging with the built environment.

In 2002, the New York Times Magazine began publishing Chris Ware’s serialized comic strip, “Building Stories,” which introduces readers to a three-story row house in the Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. The building is represented as a character that struggles to interpret the motives of a woman who examines it from across the street. Focusing on Humboldt Park, this chapter explores Ware’s concerns about the process of gentrification and the effects it has on Chicago’s architectural and human terrains. It analyzes “Building Stories” in the context of current debates about gentrification in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, arguing that the comic strip is a critique of gentrification and a defense of urban historic preservation. The chapter interprets Ware’s attention to the inner life of the row house as a tribute to historic buildings and an attempt to inculcate in his readers an appreciation for them.

This chapter explores how Chris Ware’s comics, particularly the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, engage questions of caricature and racism in American history in general and in comics history in particular. It looks at Jimmy Corrigan as an incisive critique of the myths of American national identity and highlights the historical and familial connections between European immigrants and black slaves. The chapter argues that the graphic novel is a counter-narrative to traditional and often inaccurate histories of immigration in America.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s graphic narratives in relation to a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation, the institutional maneuvers that sell comics, and Ware’s representation of the connection between comics as art and comics as a popular publishing industry. In particular, it looks at periodization and the ways comics complicate most conventional notions of modernism and postmodernism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. The chapter argues that the characteristic ambivalence of contemporary graphic narratives about their status as productions of popular culture echoes modernist anxieties about literary value that reappear precisely at a time when graphic narratives are struggling to win literary respectability.

A constant concern in Chris Ware’s oeuvre is the role of the superhero in contemporary comics. Ware is troubled by the notion that superheroes are the forefathers of all new comics texts. In his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, he establishes a parodic connection between the figure of the superhero and the eponymous protagonist’s long-absent father. A psychoanalytic investigation of the way fatherhood is represented throughout Jimmy Corrigan shows that superheroes sometimes seem to put oppressive pressure on the comics medium as a whole. This chapter argues that Jimmy Corrigan is an attempt to re-imagine the position of the superhero in American comics without granting it a central or otherwise foundational role. It examines Jimmy Corrigan’s struggle to come to terms with his father, as well as his alienation from his sexuality, as an allegory of the status of comics. The chapter also considers how Ware expresses his resistance to the superheroic legacy through genealogy, with reference to Jimmy Corrigan’s investigation of the real complexities of family history.

This chapter examines the conceptualization of comics in terms of linear sequencing to differentiate it from other narrative media, focusing on the work of Chris Ware, such as his “Big Tex” strip. It shows that linear sequencing props up the comparison between comics and language, and illustrates how Ware’s use of the full-page split panel technique in “Big Tex” plays to the potentially ambiguous connection between text space and story time. The chapter also explains how narrative breakdown—segmentivity, and the simultaneity of those segments on the page—differentiates the comics form from other narrative media. In addition, it comments on Scott McCloud’s definition of comics and suggests that it might be better conceived of as a kind of realism principle. Finally, the chapter contends that sequentiality is key to the reading of Krazy Kat, a comic strip created by cartoonist George Herriman.

This chapter argues that philosophical questions are often born of crisis. They tend to arise when the people engaged in an endeavor like science or art face the possibility, not so much that their endeavor will not succeed, but that they do not really understand what success would consist of. In art, people may struggle to grasp the nature of artworks; or, to understand what methods, forms, and critical frameworks are appropriate to them. The most important examples of ambivalent proto-philosophical reflection on popular art concern the medium of comics, for which Will Eisner's term “sequential art” has served as a rallying point. The chapter cites Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth in examining how artists have, through their works, struggled with the nature and possibilities of the medium.

In his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware employs narrative content that is shaped by a paratextual framework of prose and images, dubbed “General Instructions” and “Corrigenda,” respectively. This chapter examines how these non-narrative pages inform the novel’s narrative structure and argues that the novel draws a sharp distinction between the realms of public and private history. More specifically, it analyzes the complex juxtaposition of the public history of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the private history of the Corrigan family. The chapter demonstrates how Jimmy Corrigan weaves together a distanced, historical perspective that relies primarily on an iconic mode of representation with a more personal register that reflects Jimmy’s subjectivity. It also comments on the reading method prescribed by “General Instructions” and shows that in this version of comics theory, the reader can synthetically understand the entire meaning of the novel.