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Reading lists

8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

Building Stories

Twelve years after he changed the history of comics with Jimmy Corrigan, a new graphic novel masterpiece by Chris Ware.

There's nobody else doing anything in this medium that remotely approaches Ware for originality, plangency, complexity and exactitude. Astonishment is an entirely appropriate response.

A major moment in British cultural history.

Just occasionally, a writer or artist – or both in one – emerges who is so astoundingly original that everything else suddenly seems like a facsimile of what has come before. Chris Ware, the 45-year-old American comics artist, is one of these. Widely hailed as one of the foremost practitioners working in the medium today, his new book, if one can call it that without being reductionist, is a work of such startling genius that it is difficult to know where to begin.

This is the first book which I have finished and immediately started again, wanting to experience each of the stories with full knowledge of what happens in the rest... The number of narrative techniques Ware uses in the novel is giddying... Building Stories is a stunning piece of work, proving yet again why Ware is so frequently included in lists of the greatest living cartoonists.

The book-length comic strip, with one or two exceptions, has never been taken very seriously in literary circles. Ware’s new work may change all that.

2012’s strongest case for setting aside your kindle.

One of the most remarkable, thrilling and possibly important books of the year.

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius. The perfect gift for book lovers and design geeks… [A] beautiful testimony to the still-untapped potential of print and paper.

A wonderful achievement. It’s not only that it is so beautifully and attentively made – though in the age of the Kindle, and of all things disposable, Ware is certainly making a powerful statement. No, it’s the sense of belief that gets to you, the absolute commitment to the form. Building Stories does things no traditional novel can, or not without much lumbering effort; and it does things no comic has hitherto pulled off. No wonder, then, that opening it for the first time makes you feel like a child at Christmas. It’s a thing to be treasured, a box of delights.

Even without the astonishing formal experimentation, this is one of the best books about regular people I have ever read.

Prizes will no doubt descend on his new work, which comes in a huge, gorgeous box. There are 14 comics inside, which tell discrete stories of life in a turn of the century Chicago apartment building. Not like anything else you’ll read this year. Brilliant.

This is more than a book: it’s a profusion of printed paper: a box full of pamphlets, comic books, newspapers, hardcovers, and even a folding screen. Together they present the tale of the occupants of a three-story building in Chicago, told in Ware’s instantly recognizable style, with panels so silent and perfectly composed they’re reminiscent of stained-glass windows.

Magnificent... It’s so far ahead of the game that it tempts you to find fault just to prove that a human made it.

Ware writes and draws with immense compassion... Building Stories is a thing to be experienced.

The houses are blocks of black studded with burning orange windows. It’s just a street with buildings on it with normal people living in them. But what Ware has told us about buildings turned each orange window into a frame.

Building Stories may be the most concerted and apparently counter-intuitive attempt in any graphic novel to take us inside the life, thoughts and emotions of one fictional, unnamed character and make us care. That he succeeds, without the manipulative heartstring-tugging of cinema or theatre but with comics, is all the more remarkable.

Masterful, beautifully constructed, beautifully drawn tales of domestic boredom, agony and bliss.

Ware's graphic restraint has impressive emotional force; this is a work to pore over, from an artist like no other.

Moving and indescribably accomplished graphic novel...sent my jaw south and my eyebrows north.

The sadness of the narrative is fractured by the fizziness of its construction: a gorgeous book full of overlapping stories.

So bleak, observant and meticulously crafted that it merits that usually empty old word: masterpiece.

Ten years of intricate, ingenious work captured in one hefty box packed with graphic novels, pamphlets and a cartoon newspaper. Ware brilliantly charts the everyday experiences of the various inhabitants of a three-storey Chicago building in forensic, melancholic detail.

A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.

This is long worth the wait ... sumptuously printed and lovingly presented.

Both a beautiful object and a work of tremendous power, that sets new standards for the graphic novel form. I can't stop talking about it.

In both imagination and execution, his artistry is faultless. A song to lettering, line, ink, Chicago, hope, regret and the history of comics, the emotions he arouses will stay with you long after closing the box it came in.

Chris Ware lives in Oak Park, Chicago, Illinois. His books include Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, Building Stories and most recently Monograph, which is part memoir, part retrospective of his career to date. He has won countless awards for his work and has been the subject of several museum exhibitions and scholarly monographs. His work appears regularly in the New Yorker.

In Chris Ware's own words, 'Building Stories follows the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a thirty-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple who wonder if they can bear each other's company for another minute; and finally an elderly woman who never married and is the building's landlady...' 
 
The scope, the ambition, the artistry and emotional heft of this project are beyond anything even Chris Ware has achieved before.

The Smartest Kid on Earth

Jimmy Corrigan

The most ambitious, beautiful, moving 'comic book' ever produced: an astonishing tour de force that won the Guardian First Book Award 2001 and The American Book Award 2001.

A mesmerising and heartbreaking tale of a heavily burdened and desperately unhappy individual, and the lasting influence of toxic family ties.

Jimmy Corrigan is certainly the greatest thing in strip cartoons since Krazy Kat and Little Nemo

Ware is the most versatile and innovative artist the medium has known - arguably the greatest achievement of the form ever

This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of what comics can be

Chris Ware has produced a book as beautiful as any published this year, but also one which challenges us to think again about what literature is and where it is going

Perhaps best read in a single sitting, Jimmy Corrigan is perceptive, poetic, and sometimes profound, generously rewarding the absorption it requires

Jimmy Corrigan is a dazzlingly handsome book with every detail lovingly attended to. The book is demanding, disturbing, funny and exciting. Oh yes, and essential

Jimmy Corrigan has rightly been hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever to be published. It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize. 
 
It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who abandoned him as a child. With a subtle, complex and moving story and the drawings that are as simple and original as they are strikingly beautiful, Jimmy Corrigan is a book unlike any other and certainly not to be missed. 
 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

Chris Ware

Chris Ware is one of the great writers of our generation whose graphic novels make most novels (both the graphic and the regular kind) seem thin and simplistic. I spent 20 minutes reading the cover of Rusty Brown. Buy it. Buy all his work. Make your life larger.

The biggest story in graphic novels this year was the return of Chris Ware… the epically inventive Rusty Brown is a single day at a Nebraska school in the mid-1970s, from which Ware spins the life stories of a shy nerd, his frustrated father, the privileged class jerk and a thoughtful, banjo-playing teacher.

Chris Ware's adventurous, sprawling, dazzling book [Rusty Brown]...is so intricately designed that, like many of Ware’s books, the result is an art object… You feel protective, anxious about dog-earing anything, worried you’ll blink and miss something. And that’s before you reach the story… there are winter days here I haven’t seen since childhood, and a stillness so evocative and tender you feel like an intruder. Which is the point, a generous act of detailing, and honoring, everyday life.

A treasure trove of invention… With its awe-inspiring exploration of regret and ageing, anxiety and ennui…Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness.

Moving, sourly funny and virtuosically drawn… It’s hard to express in prose how imaginatively and effectively Ware marries words to images, how expressive his almost diagrammatically minimalist style can be, how he juxtaposes banality and trauma, how he sketches the passing of time and the sense of nowhereness in blank wide shots.

Rusty Brown is a towering achievement… a powerful and sometimes heartbreaking book.

An astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time... Ware's dazzling geometric art – pointillism for Woody's eyesight sans glasses; close-ups of Joanne's face through the decades – has never been better... Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true.

Once seen, the Ware technique is compelling and unmistakeable… those who loved Jimmy Corrigan are going to faint with delight at Rusty Brown… the combination of a hypnotic drawing stlye and the characters rattling around within the doll’s house his technique creates makes for a mesmerising few hours.

Mordantly funny and beautifully drawn.

Charting the lives of Nebraskan outcast Rusty Brown and his family, friends, and enemies, Ware brings his telescoping lens to the large and small details of his characters’ intersecting, brutally human experiences. His dazzling geometric art amply rewards the challenge posed by each puzzle-like page.

Ware's storytelling holds a magnifying glass over their existences, revealing their lives in intricate, miniscule detail. His artwork is evocative and strangely hypnotic – veering between funny, sad and thought provoking.

Rusty Brown… [is] utterly amazing…push[ing] the form [of graphic novels] in new directions.

A huge, elaborate, non-linear work… Chris Ware illuminates our current condition of fragmented alienation and stunted desires.

This is the work of a tremendously gifted cartoonist whose formal brilliance is indisputable, and whose sprawling narratives come to us via endlessly inventive pages. Rusty Brown is another masterpiece from Ware, and is unmissable.

Discover the long-awaited new book from the author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories. 
 
 
'The week after I finished the last page of Jimmy Corrigan I immediately started a new long story based on characters who had originated as parodies, but whom now I wanted to humanize... amidst a setting of memories of my Omaha childhood and Nebraska upbringing.' (Chris Ware, Monograph) 
 
Now, twenty years later, Ware is publishing Rusty Brown in book form. It is, he says, 'a fully interactive, full-colour articulation of the time-space interrelationships of six complete consciousnesses on a single Midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit.' The six characters are Rusty Brown himself, a shy schoolkid obsessed with superheroes, his father 'Woody' Brown, an eccentric teacher at Rusty's school, Chalky White, another schoolboy, Alison White, Chalky's sister, Jason Lint, an older boy who bullies Rusty and Chalky and fancies Alison, and the boys' teacher, Joanne Cole. Ware tells each of their stories in minute detail (or as he puts it, 'From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed'), producing another masterwork of the comics form that is at once achingly beautiful, heartbreakingly sad and painfully funny. 
 
 
'A treasure trove of invention... With its awe-inspiring exploration of regret and ageing, anxiety and ennui... Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness' Guardian 
 
 'Chris Ware is one of the great writers of our generation...I spent 20 minutes reading the cover of Rusty Brown. Buy it. Buy all his work. Make your life larger.' Mark Haddon, Observer

Chris Ware

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8 of the most beautiful graphic novels

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