Chris Ware is an American cartoonist, born Franklin Christenson Ware in 1967, best known for the Acme Novelty Library series he began in 1994 and the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building Stories and Rusty Brown. His work explores social isolation, emotional torment and depression, rendered in a vivid palette and meticulously detailed drawings that often recall the ragtime era and early twentieth-century American design. Some critics and fellow cartoonists, Dave Eggers among them, consider him one of the best working in the medium.
