Longer subsequent sections strike across this and expand the characters: we watch Woody’s youthful sexual misadventures and disaffected midlife; we follow Jordan’s whole life from his birth via a disturbed childhood through to his deathbed agonies of remorse; we are taken through kindly, ill-used Joanne’s story too. Knowing Chris Ware as intimately as we do - I mean, he was in RAW some thirty-odd years ago, for goodness sakes, the man’s proclivities are well known at this late date - I felt the mild annoyance of seeing the deck stacked ever so slightly.

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware: 9780375424328 | PenguinRandomHouse

As awful as that might be it’s a judgment against himself, and it feels as honest as anything else here. I saw a bird in my garden it was eating from the feeders it was similar size and look to a starling but it had a cream under belly and brown cream and black markings on its head. He has also designed covers and posters for non-ragtime performers such as Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire and 5ive Style.He can draw a pitch-perfect replica of a 1950s science-fiction cover, just like he can do the kind of throwaway gag panels that used to be printed in such magazines, just like he can do abstract pictographic diagrams to represent the way a baby organizes the world around them into discrete categories of “mama” and “not mama. Comprised of fourteen books of different sizes and housed in a giant box (itself part of the story), Building Stories dared readers to put together a narrative themselves. A few times I have seen a bird on my outdoor feeders, it is sparrow size but it has very dark feathers, not like a tree or house sparrow plumage. Rendered in the style of an early animation character like Felix the Cat, Quimby the Mouse is perhaps Ware's most autobiographical character. Rusty Brownis indeed a novel-in-progress, and it's a testament to Ware's prowess that the first entry, with its emphasis on fragmentation, elision, and lapse, holds together with such emotional and aesthetic coherence.

Chris Ware - Wikipedia

Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown depicts life the way it is: jam packed with details, the closer you look the ever more there is. But Rusty isn’t really the hero; he is more – as Ware expresses it unimprovably – “the tiny piece of human grit about which [the other characters] involuntarily orbit”. Ware also smokes weed with Jordan in the parking lot in a scene that is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic. There’s only one moment of stagy exposition, when Joanne Cole, the school administrator who provides the focus for the final 90 pages, announces: “What a blustery night I picked for a musical recital” to the art teacher Mr Ware (an amusingly unflattering self-portrait of the author as a Lichtenstein pasticheur and theory-spouting poseur). Starling sized, dark brown like a juvenile blackbird but with outstanding orange/yellow shoulders, as it were.Quimby also acts as a narrator for Ware's reminiscences of his youth, in particular his relationship with his grandmother.