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Make no mistake about it, in the hardback edition of this book the quality of the art work and overall presentation is yet again exquisite. It’s all clean lines, eye-popping colour and just a delight to take in, which is the standard of which we have come to expect of Ware. But what of the story itself?...After all visually speaking, “Jimmy Corrigan” was beautiful, but the story was nothing more than mediocre.This is a dark, weird and twisted story, which again is no surprise. The first thing wh...
At 350 pages, one could be forgiven for wishing that Chris Ware's dense, macro/micro-scopic graphic novel take on 20th C. American life was... um, complete, but it ends with an "intermission". So there is more yet to come, however, more of Ware's work should always be welcomed, and Rusty Brown is only really incomplete in the way that Proust's Swann's Way is part of the larger In Search of Lost Time. And that comparison is not too elevated: Ware makes the richest, deepest, most humane, and visua...
I've sampled Chris Ware here and there over the years, but I think this is the first full book of his that I have read, and frankly, I just don't get all the acclaim heaped on him. Pathetic and awful people live pathetic and awful lives in teeny tiny little panels.I guess we can never have enough stories about toxic white males?
Technically astounding as always, at times truly beautiful and with streaks of genius, but unrelentingly depressing. The best of it, Lint, was published as a self-contained story as ACME Novelty Library 20, although Joanne Cole's sequence is lovely and has a real emotional hit at its denouement.When Ware turns his pen to depicting sympathetic characters who we can really care about (generally female), the misery is tempered by loveliness and even some kind of peace - that's why Building Stories
This gets 20,000 stars from me. There is no artist whose work I look forward to more than Chris Ware. He was instrumental in my interest and eventual career in comics with early issues of The Acme Novelty Library, and he continues to be the apex of cartooning (for me, anyway). There's no disputing his pure artistic ability, obviously honed by years and years of unceasing practice. Every single page, every single panel, hell even the slip cover is a work of art worth pouring over. Possibly more i...
For the uninitiated, Rusty Brown is a continuous series of comics, Chris Ware has been working on since 2001. This particular volume collects all the comics so far. I assume that there will be a second tome in the future.As Chris Ware likes to experiment with the comics medium, I did not expect Rusty Brown to be a conventional story and I was right. The whole thing is divided into four parts.The first part consists of two narratives happening at the same time. One is of the titular Rusty Brown a...
I am a great admirer of the work of Chris Ware. I consider him a brilliant illustrator and storyteller. Of course I have already read most of this thick, heavy, 350-page hardcover in Acme Novelty Library # 16, 17, 19 and 20. I even saw 'Lint' (Acme Novelty Library # 20) being performed as an opera in Brussels. To my surprise this collection contains a new chapter of 100 pages. This time he puts teacher Joanne Cole at the center of an extremely moving story. Chris Ware presents quality on lonely
Walk don't run.I've never experienced a book (graphic novel or otherwise) that feels like it's happening in real time. The pacing, the sounds, the details. It is, by any measurement, a masterpiece. I'm overjoyed that it's only the first part (half?) of the story.
I feel like my review is problematic right out of the gate because the fact that this just wasn't a book for me has nothing to do with Chris Ware's artistic talent (astounding), writing (witty, world weary, and downright lovely), or storytelling (solid). Its just so goddamn depressing I couldn't wade through it after awhile.Ware examines, in minute fucking detail, a day in the life of several different characters at a midwestern school. All of them are in one way or another outsiders in their ow...
Great to read this collected, a book I actually found hopeful in the end, and full of human moments both sad and funny. I also probably relate to Rusty and Chalky as kids far more than is normal...
In the past year, we've gotten Lutes's Berlin, Seth's Clyde Fans, and we're now blessed with Ware's Rusty Brown. What other epic years-long projects are still ongoing at this point?
There are not one but several achingly-beautiful stories told in this book. The intersection may be billed as a single day at school, but it soon emerges that the real commonality in these pages is the complicated nature of the human condition. Just a gorgeous work.
Awed again as always by Ware. For some reason I had lower expectations for this, maybe from some exposure about ten years ago to Rusty Brown pages that didn't quite do the trick for me, or maybe from mixed reviews on here and not much on my radar raving about it elsewhere online. After the first twenty pages into it I actually considered putting it down. Text in the dialogue bubbles in the parallel-story panels along the bottom margin was nearly indecipherable even with reading glasses. It remin...
A new work from Chris Ware is always an event. No one does comics quite like him, and he seems to enjoy stretching the limits of the medium further with each story.Surprisingly, despite being literally the name of the book, Rusty Brown is barely in it. He’s there as a child at the beginning, but about a third of the way through the book, Ware shifts focus to the lives of various significant figures in Rusty’s life (father, teacher, etc.) Since the book ends with the phrase “Intermission”, and we...
If I could choose only one book to recommend my GoodReads friends to read, it would be Rusty Brown.It would be this book because it is the most underappreciated and originally constructed work from my Favorites list on GoodReads. On September 26th 2019 I emailed my university library:Please add this masterpiece, even if I have to read it in [the university library's special collections room for books too valuable to loan].No spoilers, but if you've got four minutes for a trailer, click here to h...
Chris Ware specialises in lives of quiet desperation and excels himself with this set of 4 interlinked stories. My favourite being the life story (literally from birth to death) of Jordan Lint
“I wonder why other people couldn’t see the virtues of an innately democratic pictographic poetry, grounded in a transdimensional metaphysic, anyway?”—Chris WareRusty Brown is, like Jimmy Corrigan, and Building Stories (his three main books), epic in scope and length, exhibiting astonishing technical skill, humor and empathy, largely focused on the grimly sad lives of every day people. “Why does every ‘great book’ have to always be about criminals or perverts? Can’t I just find one that’s about
I hated the first half of this book.I'm not a huge Chris Ware fan, but I liked the experience of Building Stories and I gave a good review to the third portion of this volume (Jordan Lint). But the first two stories in this tome (Introduction and William Brown) delve deeply into the personas of stunted man-children obsessed with things sexual, super-hero, and science-fictiony, and I found them deeply painful to read. I understand that the development of independent comics in the 80's, 90's, and
Brutal, beautiful, magnificent. If you don't like comics let this change your mind.
great art, great deconstruction of the comic form, but geez if the plot (as it were) isn’t an unending (perhaps occasionally relenting i.e. the last page) stream of misery and depression and (3 out of 4 sections) damaged male horniness. often the pages look beautiful with Ware’s geometries and solid lines, but it’s just so fucking hard (emotionally) to read and for what? what does this share about the human condition beyond that life’s fucking miserable? even authors like DFW, who worked in a si...