Jimmy has no memories of the man whose name he bears, and when one day the mail brings an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with him, his head is filled with hope, hate and fear. But what he finds in Michigan is neither a saint nor a devil, nor even a consistently inadequate parent. His father has brought up another child - and pretty well, to judge by the "Number 1 Dad" T-shirts she buys him. He can be unthinking and dull, but who can't? And he wants to make amends. He says it not with flowers, but with bacon: four strips of 100% US grade-A Country Morn that spell out the word "HI" on Jimmy's breakfast plate. Sam Leith: Rusty Brown collects a number of different storylines written over a number of years. How much do you think of it as a coherent single work?

However, writer and comedian Charlie Higson, novelist Jonathan Coe and historian Roy Porter were won over by Ware's portrayal of the travails of the bemused and phlegmatic Jimmy, a man adrift in 1980s small town Michigan just like his grandfather was in 1890s Chicago. And AL Kennedy felt it moved "the whole genre forward hugely". In addition to the graphic novel, the character of Jimmy Corrigan has appeared in other Ware comic strips, sometimes as his imaginary child genius character, sometimes as an adult. Corrigan began as a child genius character in Ware's early work, but as Ware continued, the child genius strips appeared less frequently, and increasingly followed Corrigan's sad, adult existence. The story was serialized in the alternative Chicago weekly newspaper Newcity and in Ware's comic book Acme Novelty Library in issues #5–6, 8–9, and 11–14) from 1995 to 2000. [1] Plot summary [ edit ] This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Major Story Arcs

CW: There is a tip-off in the book that it all connects to Jimmy Corrigan, and though it’s not apparent yet, also to both Building Stories and two other books on which I’ve been slowly toiling. This is all very inconsequential to the turning of the planet, however. The election of Trump has made us aware of the fragility of virtue versus the blunt force of decep­tion and domination When he guest edited a comics issue for McSweeney’s in 2004, Ware called comics “not a genre, but a developing language”. Ahead of the publication of the print instalment of Rusty Brown, we discussed his way of working – and where that developing language is now.

CW: I try, but don’t always succeed, to somehow love them all, even if that sounds crazy. I genuinely believe there’s a redeeming impulse of goodness in everyone which is heightened by sympathy, if not by art, and in my own mind the two should be synonymous as much as is possible. I very much believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives, with the ultimate aim of understanding and empathising with everyone we possibly can. We already do this unconsciously when we dream, or consciously when some jerk cuts us off on the highway, but fiction can act as an assisting rudder; books can’t tell us how to live, but they can help us get better at imagining how to live. Claire Armitstead, the Guardian literary editor, who chaired the judges, said: "Jimmy Corrigan is a fantastic winner, because it so clearly shows what the Guardian award is about - it is about originality and energy and star quality, both in imagination and in execution. 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." Maureen said the club’s demise began once other venues began imitating its formula for success. James died in 2000 having made and lost his fortune. SL: How do the characters in Rusty Brown and their universe relate to the worlds of your other work? Is there a sort of Ware-verse in which they cohabit?

SL: There’s a dichotomy sometimes made between “grown-up comics” and the superhero/funny-papers/genre type. Your work seems to be an example of the former that’s very interested in the latter, as a fantasy contrast to the humiliating mundanity of ordinary life. Do you feel affectionate towards that sort of storytelling? What does that sort of fantasy offer?