Jonathan Cape, 26 September 2019

Hb, 356 pp

‘The week after I finished the last page of Jimmy Corrigan I immediately started a new long story based on characters who had originated as parodies, but whom now I wanted to humanize... amidst a setting of memories of my Omaha childhood and Nebraska upbringing.’ (Chris Ware, Monograph )

Now, twenty years later, Ware is publishing Rusty Brown in book form. It is, he says, ‘a fully interactive, full-colour articulation of the time-space interrelationships of six complete consciousnesses on a single Midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit.’ The six characters are Rusty Brown himself, a shy schoolkid obsessed with superheroes, his father ‘Woody’ Brown, an eccentric teacher at Rusty’s school, Chalky White, another schoolboy, Alison White, Chalky’s sister, Jason Lint, an older boy who bullies Rusty and Chalky and fancies Alison, and the boys’ teacher, Joanne Cole. Ware tells each of their stories in minute detail (or as he puts it, ‘From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed’), producing another masterwork of the comics form that is at once achingly beautiful, heartbreakingly sad and painfully funny.

Chris Ware is one of the great writers of our generation whose graphic novels make most novels (both the graphic and the regular kind) seem thin and simplistic. I spent 20 minutes reading the cover of Rusty Brown . Buy it. Buy all his work. Make your life larger. -- Mark Haddon, Observer, *Books of the Year*

The biggest story in graphic novels this year was the return of Chris Ware… the epically inventive Rusty Brown is a single day at a Nebraska school in the mid-1970s, from which Ware spins the life stories of a shy nerd, his frustrated father, the privileged class jerk and a thoughtful, banjo-playing teacher. -- James Smart, Guardian *Books of the Year*

Chris Ware's adventurous, sprawling, dazzling book [ Rusty Brown ]...is so intricately designed that, like many of Ware’s books, the result is an art object… You feel protective, anxious about dog-earing anything, worried you’ll blink and miss something. And that’s before you reach the story… there are winter days here I haven’t seen since childhood, and a stillness so evocative and tender you feel like an intruder. Which is the point, a generous act of detailing, and honoring, everyday life. - Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune