***FINALIST FOR THE 2020 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD***
***A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR ***
***A NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR***
***ONE OF LIT HUB'S MOST HIGHLY ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019***
“Feverishly inventive and intimately told, drawn with empathy, architectural rigor and a spooky sense of a divine eye . . . [Rusty Brown] is the most audacious and inspiring fiction I’ve read this year.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Ware’s trademark excruciating beauty and meticulously crafted, gloriously intricate despair.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Nobody chronicles lives of quiet desperation with the exacting meticulousness of Chris Ware. His singular style provides him, and us, with direct access to the primal emotions we collectively repress. . . Precision that will take your breath away.”—NPR (Best Books of the Year)
“Nearly two decades in the making, Ware’s latest book, Rusty Brown . . . is shaping up to be Ware’s epic, a kind of comic-book Ulysses full of unreliable narrators and occasional forays into stream of consciousness. Take that, Stan Lee.”—Esquire
“Chris Ware’s design sensibility is masterfully claustrophobic . . . the ambition of his storytelling, the scope of his vision, and his absolute control over his medium are astonishing. A generational achievement, presented in a gorgeous edition.”—Forbes
“Remarkable . . . Masterfully illustrated, brilliantly designed, and bursting with compassion . . . This is without a doubt one of the most exciting releases of the year.”—Library Journal (starred Editor’s Pick)
“Showcase[s] Ware’s sublime artistic vision, blending his trademark drawings with a lyrical exploration of weighty themes.”—The Washington Post
“Awe-inspiring . . . A treasure trove of insight and invention . . . Ware’s sensibility is gloriously mixed . . . Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness – infinitely sad, intimately attuned to desolation and disappointment, but never closed to the possibility of a breakthrough . . . Impassioned and ineffable.”—The Guardian
“Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown depicts life the way it is: jam packed with details, the closer you look the ever more there is.” — Bookworm
“He is one of the most celebrated living cartoonists . . . His artistry is surgically precise, his lettering a finely-calibrated wonder . . . Ware’s prose is bleak but beautiful, and often grapples with devastatingly relatable themes . . . Exceptional . . . As a whole, Rusty Brown is going to be spectacular, but for now, this first volume is a great and promising start.”—Run Spot Run
“Ware’s dazzling geometric art has never been better. Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating normal lives to something profound, unforgettable, and true.”—Publisher’s Weekly (Holiday Gift Guide)
“Another sprawling and adventurous novel that, like all of his work, is lonesome, rueful, uncertain about human connection, yet also empathetic, dazzling—as committed to depicting the overlooked and anonymous as it is innovative.”—Chicago Tribune
“Ware is a master of finding the sublime in the mundane . . . a deep exploration of the essence of being human. You’ll admire the extraordinary artwork and attention to such details, but you’ll also be moved to your core by the writing.”—New City
“Ware is well known for his expansive, introspective, depth-plumbing works of graphic fiction, and his latest, featuring a series of interconnected, decade-spanning narratives spiraling outward from an Omaha school, is no different . . . There are only brief moments of warmth and affection, but the wider picture, depicting a complex matrix of aching loneliness; long-simmering, acidic resentment; and a desperation for human connection and fulfillment, is rich with pathos and powerfully stirring.”—Booklist (starred)
“Rusty Brown is a towering achievement, a hefty, hardback graphic novel that examines, in meticulous and sumptuous detail, the lives of six intertwined characters on a single wintry day in an anonymous Midwestern town . . . There is an underlying melancholy to many of the characters’ lives, but with flickers of hope and redemption threaded through the narrative and the beautiful, precise illustrations . . . A powerful and sometimes heartbreaking book.”—AV Club THE BIG ISSUE
“Ware delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time as it charts the intersecting lives of characters that revolve around an Omaha, Neb., parochial school in the 1970s . . . Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Ware fans rejoice . . . Curious and compelling . . . As with Ware's other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice . . . a beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“There's little in Chris Ware's comics that goes unexplored; sadness, disappointment, joy, love, among others are all represented . . . Ware's talent as a cartoon storyteller is never in question, regardless of subject matter, but Rusty Brown still stands out as among his most affecting stories . . . Yet another unmissable Chris Ware release.”—Pop Matters
“Intimate and feverishly inventive, it follows multiple characters to reveal moments large and small . . . Ware’s true gift is not the density of his books but in how he compels us to feel amid such bounty.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Emotionally and visually, Ware’s books are often sprawling and messy, but they are never unclear. His panels, small and detailed, are often part of meticulously designed pages, some of which unfold into larger configurations. And yet, there’s a spontaneity to Ware’s work . . . To work through a Chris Ware graphic novel is, in a way, to work through life—its joys, disappointments, exhilarations, and uncertainties.”—The Millions
★ 08/01/2019
Ware (Monograph) presents the first half of his magnum opus exploring the profoundly entangled lives of a group of characters all attending or employed by a Midwestern parochial school in the 1970s. On his first day of third grade in his new school, Chalky White attempts to bond with bullied outcast Rusty Brown, who is more anxious about being separated from a prized action figure than he is interested in making friends. Meanwhile, Chalky's sister, Alice, charms her new classmates, includinfg toxic jerk Jordan Lint, as well as her English teacher, Woody, who happens to be Rusty's father. After a digression into the romantic disappointment and abandoned dreams in Woody's background, the focus shifts to a remarkable sequence tracking Jordan's entire life, from the moment of his birth until his death as a lonesome old man, before concluding with a fractured narrative highlighting the solitary life of Chalky and Rusty's teacher, Ms. Cole. VERDICT Masterfully illustrated, brilliantly designed, and bursting with compassion for characters united by time and space who nonetheless feel isolated owing to fear and shame, this is without a doubt one of the most exciting releases of the year. [an editor's pick, see "Fall Fireworks," p. 23.]
★ 2019-07-01
Ware (Building Stories, 2012, etc.) fans rejoice: The long-rumored and hinted-at adventures of Rusty Brown finally come to the page after years in the making.
If Ware's Jimmy Corrigan is indeed the smartest kid in the world, Rusty Brown is perhaps among the least comfortable inside his own skin: He lives a life of quiet desperation in a snowy Midwestern suburb, obsessed with comic heroes such as Supergirl, who he's sure would melt away the snow with her heat vision ("maybe she has problems shutting it off sometimes"); for his part, he wonders whether, in the quiet after a snowfall, he might have developed superhearing. Rusty's dad, Woody, is no more content: A sci-fi escapist, he teaches English alongside an art teacher who just happens to be named Mr. Ware but seems happy only when he's smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee in the teachers' lounge even if Mr. Ware is given to bewildering him there with talk of Lacan, Baudrillard, and ennui. Joanne Cole, an African American third grade language teacher, gently empathizes with her angst-y little charges while nursing an impulse to learn how to play the banjo; it being the civil rights era, the music store owner who sells her an instrument asks, without malice, "So how'd you get interested in the banjo, anyway? Folk music? ‘Protest' songs?" The lives of all these characters and others intersect in curious and compelling ways. As with Ware's other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice. Joanne's story is perhaps the best developed, but the picked-on if aspirational Rusty ("I appear as a mortal, but…I may not be…"), the dweeby Woody, the beleaguered Chalky, and other players are seldom far from view.
An overstuffed, beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.
