
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). Best-Known Works Graphic Novelsįloyd Farland, Citizen of the Future 1987. Alongside his career as a comic book creator, Ware is also a collector of ragtime memorabilia and publishes The Ragtime Ephemeralist, a magazine devoted to the subject.
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In particular he became a fan of ragtime piano music and was so accomplished as a piano player that for a time he considered becoming a professional musician. And I wasn't good at games-I was about as physical as an inert gas." Besides his interest in comics, as a child Ware also developed an interest in music. I had some friends I talked to on the weekends-but they wouldn't talk to me at school. He told Nissen, for example, that "Kids were threatening to kill me all the time. Much of Ware's work depicts characters who are marginal figures, unable to join in with "normal" social life, and several interviewers have linked this with Ware's own childhood experience. "There's nothing less impressive than a scrawny kid with poofy hair, drawing superheroes." Nissen, "Drawing was the only way I had of distinguishing myself, of trying to impress people-impress people with my one pathetic ability," he said, with a rueful laugh. Known in school as "Albino" because of his pale complexion, Ware has said that he used drawing as a way to avoid being bullied. For a while he studied art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, but he learned about comics primarily by studying and copying them. He often spent hours copying cartoons from back issues of the newspaper while his mother worked on the other side of the desk. Ware did not know his father and grew up living with his mother and maternal grandparents. " Drawing was the only way I had of distinguishing myself, of trying to impress people … with my one pathetic ability." Raised in Nebraskaįranklin Christenson Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on December 28, 1967, the only son of Doris Ann Ware, a single mother who was a reporter on the same newspaper as her father, the Omaha World-Herald. A reviewer for Book magazine wrote that "Ware's are some of the most beautiful pictures ever seen in comic books."


Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware's first full-length graphic novel, took seven years to write, but it won him the prestigious Guardian First Book Award in 2001. He told Beth Nissen of CNN Book News, for example, that "The pictures are ideograms-drawn words, if that makes any sense … the pictures tell the story-I'm a terrible writer." He is famous for his meticulously drawn images, tiny details, and careful colorings. Ware himself shies away from such comparisons, telling interviewers that he is a poor writer and generally playing down his talent and achievements. McClatchey has called him the " Emily Dickinson of comics," referring to the nineteenth-century poet known for her sometimes obscure poems.

Comic book artist Chris Ware is sometimes compared to literary giants Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce.
