There is a sad irreverence to these comics that remind me of a Bright Eyes’ lyric: “the sound of loneliness makes me happier.”

A very interesting work of art, almost deliberately peculiar and humorously miserable. I honestly don't know how else to describe it. It was memorable, which is mostly a good thing. The actual book itself was quite unique, abnormally large with intricate designs. The images throughout are beautifully abstract and the text makes you smile and ruminate the various proposed declarations or suggestions. I enjoyed it.

Magnificent

Too much of a downer for me

The design work is beautiful, superior, every superlative you can imagine, but the how miserable we all are attitude of the content I can do without. Todd Solondz, David Foster Wallace, and Chris Ware all walk into a bar... the joke is on them. Mark Twain had more hope for humanity than this. I love myself. I love being alive. The R. Crumb worshipping, self loathing, misanthropic, stunted adolescent comics auteur crowd has wore itself thin with me.

Chris Ware has a very intriguing sense of humor. Luxury printed for brazilian standards, the graphics are amazing and the text is intense. Almost meant to be read with a magnifiyng glass, each page has tons of graphic information to be digested. Must read.

I really started to enjoy this once I skipped over some of the full pages of tiny writing and got into the main strips. They were miserable but funny and quite short, unlike Jimmy Corrigan which went on a bit too long with the misery. Beautifully designed, illustrated and coloured, as per usual.

I have had this out of the library on a few occasions. It's damnably hard to read without a magnifying class sometimes, but the close scrutiny is always worth the time. This is a collection of various cartoons and maps and ads and short comics. Often, these are hilarious. Ware's rep is to Charlie Brown level sadness and misery, but here you see how funny he can be. And always, the best artist, just amazing. I guess this isn't "readable" in the way of his other works, it's not a novel, but it's great to have around, a pleasure.

More ware brilliance. Some crazy logorrhea in 4pt font on some of his old timy adverts/text that after a bit I glazed over, but the "rusty and chalky white" series was worth the library checkout alone. Not the first Ware book I'd recommend (Jimmy Corrigan or lint gets that vote) but brilliant and I'm thankful I have met Mr. Ware, my current number 1 author.

This one-off collects a few of Chris Ware's most self-reflective characters: Big Tex, Rocket Sam, and Rusty Brown. I mean, absolutely beautiful drawings and heart-breaking development. The only thing this book has going against it is the dimension of the page. The thing is like two stories tall [ba dum bum]. But seriously, this book is a bitch to read in bed.

I don’t know why I bothered finishing this. Chris Ware’s stories are good when he lets his characters actually be people, i.e. complex instead of two-dimensional caricatures of horny misery. Only the White family get to be people here and they sadly feature very little

I guess I like it better when Ware sustains a narrative, like in Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth (one of my all-time favorite books) or the "Building Stories" series he did for the New York Times Magazine. So this collection of works doesn't quite have the same emotional resonance for me that some of his other work has.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a ton to like here. Ware is often funny, and some of the false advertisements are laugh-out loud hilarious, if you can work your way through the tiny type. And the way he builds frames to show the passage of time or relationships in space is not only fascinating, it is also often in service of a melancholy mood.