chris ware

first, i need to get something off my chest: i love graphic novels. i don't mean manga... that's something i've never quite cottoned to. i mean r. crumb, marjane satrapi, alison bechdel, charles burns, matt kindt. i love the idea of telling stories with pictures, maybe partly because it seems a more expressive way to tell them. i also just love the variety and completely original style that graphic novelists display in their work. they have to set themselves apart and they work hard to do so.

chris ware is a graphic novelist/artist who has made several novels and done covers for the new yorker and granta and fortune (although the cover he made for fortune was not published). he is also a chicago-area artist, which makes him even more rad. his art is precise, painstaking, meticulous. you take one look at the infinitesimal size of some of the things he draws and writes and understand immediately that he is fastidious in what he does. that is the exact attraction of his artwork.