Rusty Brown

‘The week after I finished the last page of Jimmy Corrigan I immediately started a new long story based on characters who had originated as parodies but whom now I wanted to humanize... amidst a setting of memories of my Omaha childhood and Nebraska upbringing.’ (Chris Ware Monograph). Now twenty years later Ware is publishing Rusty Brown in book form. It is he says ‘a fully interactive full-colour articulation of the time-space interrelationships of six complete consciousnesses on a single Midwestern American day and the tiny piece of human grit about which they involuntarily orbit.’ The six characters are Rusty Brown himself a shy schoolkid obsessed with superheroes his father ‘Woody’ Brown an eccentric teacher at Rusty’s school Chalky White another schoolboy Alison White Chalky’s sister Jason Lint an older boy who bullies Rusty and Chalky and fancies Alison and the boys’ teacher Joanne Cole. Ware tells each of their stories in minute detail (or as he puts it ‘From childhood to old age no frozen plotline is left unthawed’) producing another masterwork of the comics form that is at once achingly beautiful heartbreakingly sad and painfully funny.