Chris Ware - Rusty Brown

Rusty Brown — Stephanie and Alice in Class. 28" x 20"
The Acme Novelty Library 17

First published in Newcity (29th March 2001)




https://lit.newcity.com/2019/09/19/fall-arts-preview-the-monumental-life-and-inconsequential-times-of-rusty-brown-as-told-by-chris-ware/
Comment
"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)

Chris Ware already used the characters of Rusty Brown and Chalky White (and himself) in a series of gags published in Newcity (in 1998) and the ACME Novelty Library #10.

"Because I am a terrible writer, almost all of my stories seem to start this way, i.e. as a satire or gag which then somehow metastasizes into something serious, grave and depressing — sort of like saying "just kidding" to someone when you really mean what you're saying. I’m not sure if this working method is due to my lack of innate confidence or some other psychological problem, but then again it seems to have worked for other authors, like Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary and Melville‘s Moby-Dick, both of which were, I believe, born of satire but ended up at very different finish lines."
https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/chris-ware-rusty-brown?utm_source=chatgpt.com


The school is inspired on Chris Ware's high school...
"'Rusty Brown' is a graphic novel I began many years ago and am serializing chapter by chapter in my regular comic book, 'The ACME Novelty Library.' It concerns the doings of a group of seven people all either employed by or attending a private high school in Omaha, Neb., which bears a striking, affectionate and hopefully non-litigious resemblance to the 1970s version of my own high school, Brownell-Talbot, though all of the main characters and situations are completely invented."
http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/2007/02/01/Chris+Ware+exhibition's+focus+is+artist's+graphic+novel+based+in+Omah

"The book is largely set in my own memories of the parochial school I attended as a kid, which in my early adulthood I realised I’d spent more time in than at home. The rooms, hallways and kids were almost all certainly more familiar to me than my own family and house, and still reappear in my dreams, even if they’re incongruously populated with the people and details of my life now."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/28/i-envy-writers-who-suffer-from-no-self-doubts-inside-the-world-of-graphic-novelist-chris-ware



Chris Ware about Peanuts:
"Peanuts really changed my life more than anything; I looked at superhero comics, but I read Peanuts. Those characters seemed so real to me, like real friends. Every time I entered that world of Charles Schulz, those little drawings came to life on the page for me in a way that almost nothing else did. It made me really want to become a cartoonist."
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/chris-ware-on-how-peanuts-his-mother-and-being-bullied-in-school-made-him-a-cartoonist-1.5479805

My first Chris Ware. Bought at the Carl Hammer Chris Ware expo in 2008.

Exhibited in Antwerps at Grafixx (2023).