Biography

Chris Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1967. He began his career in the late eighties after meeting Art Spiegelman, who gave him a few pages in RAW magazine.
In 1992 he moved to Chicago, where he collaborated with newspapers New City and Chicago Reader. Part of the work that has been made in those years formed the The ACME Novelty Library series (published by Fantagraphics in 1993 and later, from 2006, by Drawn & Quarterly), which collects stories, illustrations and periodical narratives in the making.
On ACME pages was also born his first graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Coconino / Fandango, 2016). Published in episodes in 1993 and later edited into novel format by Pantheon in 2000, it’s one of the fundamental works of the contemporary comics, winner of the American Book Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the award for best album at the Angoulême Festival. His last complete work, Building Stories, soon to be released in Italy by Bao Publishing, is a box containing fourteen volumes and files of different sizes, a "multi-book" that goes beyond the boundaries of the graphic novel canon.
Ware was a co-editor of McSweeney's 13 (2004) and Best American Comics (Houghton-Mifflin, 2007), oversaw reissues of classic cartoon as Gasoline Alley and Krazy Kat, and has designed several covers for the New Yorker. Now he is continuing the work on the series Rusty Brown, a choral opera set in his hometown.
His works have been exhibited in numerous museums of contemporary art in the United States and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.