24 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 5, 2019
eling’ in the memo line of the check to embarrass me when I
deposited it at the bank. We’ve been very close friends ever
since.”
Rusty Brown, Kidd says, is an epic character story about
ordinary people. It takes place in a Catholic school in Omaha
(where Ware grew up) in the 1970s and charts the inter-
secting lives of several characters, among them protagonist
Rusty Brown, the bullied nerd with a rich fantasy life who
collects action figures; his father Woody, the school’s English
teacher; and Joanne Cole, the black teacher who succeeds
despite poverty and racism. The book is interactive and visu-
ally stunning, but it’s almost impossible to describe Ware’s
work: it has to be seen, to be read. Even the jacket is excep-
tional: a giant folded poster that can be reconfigured several
ways.
“Chris’s narrative is insanely distinctive and iconoclastic,”
Reid says. “Inventive, complex, moving, and heartbreaking.”
Rusty Brown was written in serial form, some of it traditionally
published, some self-published. It’s 350 pages, the last 100 of
which were unpublished, and being the first of two volumes, it
ends with the word intermission in multicolored capital letters
across two pages.
Aragi became Ware’s agent in 2004. She signed a contract
in 2006 for two books—Building Stories and Rusty Brown—
with Dan Frank, editor-in-chief atI
like to get out of my comfort zone, and Chris Ware’s
graphic novel, Rusty Brown, coming from Pantheon
September 24, took me right to the edge. My colleague
Calvin Reid sees comics as a religion, and his devotion is
infectious. So when he came up to me a while back to say,
“I’ve got it for you, Ermelino. This is an event!” I stopped dead
in my tracks. Then I discovered that Chip Kidd is the in-house
editor and Nicole Aragi is the agent, and... have I used the word
trifecta before?
Ware tells me that he drew the first page of Rusty Brown a
week after finishing Jimmy Corrigan, the graphic novel that Kidd
brought to Random House in 1999 (which has gone on to sell
more than 260,000 copies). Meeting with the Pantheon sales
force, Kidd told them, “Chris is the James Joyce of comics, and
Jimmy is the Ulysses.”
Kidd calls Ware the best cartoonist in his field. “With every
book, he challenges himself to see what he can do with the
medium of comics,” Kidd says.
Ware says he met Kidd in 1994: “Chip called me one day
out of nowhere, offering endless and embarrassing words of
kind praise for the first three issues of my comic The Acme
Novelty Library and invited me to design an invitation for a
talk he was giving. He paid me $1,000—at that point more
than I’d ever been paid for anything—and wrote ‘nude mod-A Day in the Life
The first volume of Rusty Brown, Chris Ware’s graphic novel masterpiece,
explores life’s biggest themes and smallest moments
Column|OPEN BOOK
Louisa ErmelinoChris WareNicole Aragi© seth kushner