Chris Ware

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 series 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 drawings were given two walls and a table at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the US and has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker.