it was sensory overload....too many squares, not enough time to look at them all

God, this is a hassle to read. All that turning and squinting and trying to keep the thing on your lap. Thankfully, this volume collects Ware's most innovative and exciting work and it is immediately clear that no matter how much labor goes into reading it, a lot more was put into making it.

Text and panels were too small, strained my eyes really it. Flavor text was hilarious, silent comics not so much. Don't think I'll be a Ware completionist.

Very, very odd book.

Often the errata is more interesting then the comic strips themselves.

Insanely large format (wider then coffee table book), but still has incredibly small text.

Glad Chris Ware is still bizarre and different, glad his stuff his easier to read now.

For diehards only. Honestly skimmed a lot of it.

Need almost perfect eyesight for some of the print or a magnifying glass.

Just bizarre formatting.

La miglior cosa mai scritta su di me.

pretty random quimby cartoons but i liked the fake ads and the essay about his bio and early life and nostalgia and stuff.

An earlier work from Ware, certainly, and the one-page strip format and the hundreds of words of prose in tiny print can get tiring. However, it is suffused with Ware's trademark melancholy, and great cartooning, so no admirer should be without it.

http://gloriesawaitingme.blogspot.com/

horrifyingly wonderful!

Havent read an absurd amount of his stuff, but it really speaks to my way of moving in a story, or the stories I enjoy. Little details extend and morph off of a fairly simple moment or an exploration of a space or plot or relationship. It is hard to describe, but the way chris ware pushes my visual literacy skills, and in the process my conception of narrative is really fulfilling and in an odd way emotionally gripping. I dunno. I think of things like Amelie, or Y Tu Mama Tambien or moments in certain Truffaut films (Jules et Jim specifically) where we get sidetracked by an object and are told the story of the escaped pigs or something. Chris Ware does that kind of thing constantly... oh, chris ware... swoon.

The essays and fake ads are probably the best part. I didn't get much from many of the strips, although a few are quite good and indicative of Ware's later, better work. Those few strips and a look at Ware's body of early work make it worth a read though.

Quimby The Mouse is the collected indie works of Chris Ware’s early works for The Daily Texan and other small and quirky publications. This piece is misleadingly simple, and the universe requires a quick dive into the early 20th century’s animations, comic strips, and weekly publications. This piece is simple on the surface but involves a striking, heartbreaking, and shocking level of existentialism, loss, death, and disillusionment. The format is tiny cell-based “animations” and extensive, wordy newsprint. The main theme of the piece is that, in the end, we are all terminal, disillusioned, lonely cases. It is an absolutely beautiful book published by Drawn and Quarterly in a very large format I am proud to own. My favorite parts of this collection of the early works was easily the writing – I loved the advice columns and the advertisements. I also love the foil-printed reproduction of the 826 Valencia façade. A beautiful book I look forward to revisiting often. Very happy I picked it up after all of the Chris Ware I have been reading lately.

An easy five stars, and absolutely blown away he achieved this so early in his career.