Comics Spotlight: Chris Ware on Rusty Brown, in Conversation with Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd  is one of the most prolific book cover designers in American design history. Educated at Penn State, he started designing covers for Knopf in 1986, where he was responsible for 75 book covers a year. He is a three-time Eisner Award-winning author, art director, and designer of Batman Collected, Batman: Animated (co-author), Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, the graphic novel Batman: Death by Design andMarvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross.  He is also the author of two novels, The Cheese Monkeys, which became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Learners, which picked up where the first left off. Kidd is the recipient of the National Design Award for Communications and the Lifetime Achievement medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Cartoonist Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award and one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade according to The Times (London) in 2009. His Building Stories was named a Top Ten Fiction Book of the Year in 2012 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. Ware is a contributor to The New Yorker, and his original drawings have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, and in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. A sprawling, special snowflake accumulation of the biggest themes and the smallest moments of life, Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown (Pantheon) literately and literally aims at nothing less than coalescing one half of all of existence into a single museum-quality picture story.  From childhood to old age, no frozen plotline is left unthawed in the entangled stories of a child who awakens without superpowers, a teen who matures into a paternal despot, a father who stores his emotional regrets on the surface of Mars and a late-middle-aged woman who seeks the love of only one other person on planet Earth. Publishers Weekly said that “Ware delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time as it charts the intersecting lives of characters that revolve around an Omaha, Neb., parochial school in the 1970s . . . Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true.”