Chris Ware is an American comic book artist and cartoonist. He is best-known for a series of comics called the "Acme Novelty Library" and the graphic novel, "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth."
His art has many influences and largely reflects his love of early twentieth century aesthetics. His designs transition through many artistic styles from traditional comic bok panels to advertisements and even toys. His precise, geometric layouts appear to be computer generated but in fact he works almost always with drawing tools such as pencil and paper. Sometimes he uses the computer for colour strips and also uses photocopies and transparencies.

He works by learning from artists he admires and who he thought came the closes to getting the "essence" of comics, which is really the process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. He sees the black outline of cartoons as "visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas" and trys to use naturalistic colour underneath to "simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience" which he believes is more or less the way we experience the world as adults.

Chris Ware has developed a language of simple graphics focusing on timelessly simple life experiences and transforming them into "profound and understandable declarations about the human condition." His uniquely appealing work is characterized by ceaseless experimentation with narrative and graphic forms.

His graphic novel "Jimmy Corrigan; The Smartest kid on Earth" started in a strip Ware was writing for the Chicago tabloid "New City." He combined six years of these strips and produced this best selling graphic novel. The novel gained numerous awards for its experiments in graphics such as non-chronological narratives, pull-outs and 3D inserts.




A scene from Jimmy Corrigan; the
Smartest Kid on Earth




I like the way Ware constantly changes and experiments with his narrative techniques. I have been experimenting with such techniques and it it helping me to construct a better storyboard.