Chris Ware

Chris Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1967. While attending the University of Texas at Austin, he published a regular comic strip in the student newspaper, which Art Spiegelman happened upon and then subsequently gave the unknown cartoonist four pages in RAW magazine. Ware moved to Chicago in the early 90s and began publishing in the pages of the Chicago alternative weekly New City and then until 2006, The Chicago Reader, which has formed the bulk of material that he's been collecting in his regular periodical, The ACME Novelty Library, since 1994. Offering both serialized stories and short experiments in comics form, a confusing collection of the same name was issued in a large-format hardcover by Pantheon Books in 2005. From both this strip and periodical emerged the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan — the Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000) which received an American Book Award in 2000, the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, and the obscure French comics award "L'Alph Art" in 2003. In 2009 Jimmy Corrigan was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London). Ware is also the author of The Acme Novelty Datebook Volumes 1 and 2 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2003, 2007), Quimby the Mouse (Fantagraphics, 2003), was the editor of the 13th issue of McSweeney’s (2005), and is the guest editor of Houghton-Mifflin's Best American Comics 2007. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, and was the cartoonist chosen to inaugurate the New York Times Magazine’s “Funny Pages” section in late 2005. He is currently at work on two long-form graphic novels, Rusty Brown and Building Stories.

Chris Ware's work has appeared in many national and international art exhibits, including, inexplicably, the Whitney Biennial exhibit in 2002. He continues to publish his strips as he finishes them in the pages of the Virginia Quarterly Review. His ongoing Acme Novelty Library series reaches its 20th issue in 2010. He was recently awarded the Hoi Fellowship by the newly formed United States Artists, a non-profit organization that makes direct grants to working artists. Ware lives in Oak Park, Illinois with his wife, Marnie, a high school science teacher, and their daughter, Clara.