Chris Ware - C or D?

ok i hate stuff now but i really really want that box.

I guess I'm probably wrong. I picked up the giant Quimby the Mouse book after I read Jimmy Corrigan because I wanted to test out other Ware. The Quimby the Mouse book put me off ever trying to read anything else because I didn't like having scattered mini installments all in one book

apparently this is really dope btw. i've only read stray syndications of a couple of them.

With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring—perhaps even necessary—to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity—while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep).

First ever coffee table book that's about the size and weight of a coffee table.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/120507_2012_p465.jpg

Chris told me that's me in the upper right. My mother in law framed it for me for father's day!

i got it in the mail the other day (along with the new installment of Charles Burns' Jonny 23 series) but I haven't had a chance to look at much of it yet. However, this is what it looks like. holy shit:

http://i47.tinypic.com/25utbwo.jpg

stoked, just purchased.

>Chris told me that's me in the upper right. My mother in law framed it for me for father's day!

Josh, that's *great*, a lovely thing to be part of :)

I'm hoping to get the box set for my birthday this week, it looks fantastic laid out like that.

yes that's amazing josh!

you're the one with the baby harness/papoose thing?

looking forward v much to this - ware has been doing a lot of press for this, but wondering if anyone has asked him abt The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson yet

yeah holy shit josh!, that's so lovely. what a lovely way to carry on existing somewhere.

will try to get hold of this somehow, i can't buy it yet but i want it bad. i'm super psyched for the new charles burns, too.

First ever coffee table book that's about the size and weight of a coffee table.

wait, what is?

check z s' pic!

I've held the box though, and it's not even the size of a D&Q Moomin collection

holy fucking shit does that look awesome. this guy really gives you value for your dollar.

(xpost, brain kept firing)

it's not even close to the Quimby or Book Of Jokes collections!

let alone Ninja or So Many Splendid Sundays [or any of Maresca's other books] or George Sprott or Wally Wood's EC Stories [or any of the other IDW Artists Editions] or Wednesday Comics or (to cite something from the new Ware) Kramer's 7 or Paris Soirees or Les Yeux Du Chat.

(or even the Stray Bullets hardcovers or Picturebox's Panter monograph or Fanta's Gahan Wilson Playboy collection, or their Dedini collection for that matter. and that's just comics, not actual coffee table books - half the Taschen line and those LaChappelle semi-boxed volumes are immdiately twice the size of Building Stories....)

http://cdn.publishme.se/cdn/5-2/32622/images/2010/coffee_tables_15_68179312.jpg

http://www.chrisrand.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/smith-and-jones-coffee-table-book.jpg

^ back cover was printed with fitted screw-holes in the corners

xpost Yeah, that's me with the Baby Bjorn. The weird thing is, so many of the subtle details are exactly right, down to the age span between my two daughters, one's blue crocs and blonde hair, etc., ... but exactly right three or four years ago. I wonder if he took a picture? Sketched it up and held onto it until he had a use for it? Very mysterious, the way the guy works. That's genius for you.

I found his knowledge and recall of old school New Yorker covers remarkable:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/04/mothers-day-the-women-cover-artists-of-the-new-yorker.html#slide_ss_0=1

this is fking huge! i'm torn between "can't wait to start" and "where the hell do i start?" and, as a result it has sat in it's massive box untouched. I have to say though that this is a beautiful object and a bargain at amazon prices.

Joe McCullogh posted a suggested reading order if you really want one

yes please. although i may disregard it.

http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/building-stories-suggested-reading-order.html

thanks, sic.

haha, never knew about this:

Fortune 500 cover

In 2010, Ware designed the cover for Fortune magazine's "Fortune 500" issue, but it was rejected.[21] Ware had mentioned the work at a panel at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo on April 16, as first noted in an April 20 blog post by Matthew J. Brady.[22] The cover, featuring the circle-shaped humans common in Ware's more broadly socially satirical comic-strips, turned the numbers 500 into skyscrapers looming over the continental United States. On the roofs, corporate bosses drink, dance, and sun themselves as a helicopter drops a shovelful of money down for them. Below, among signs reading "Credit Default Swap Flea Market," "Greenspan Lube Pro," and "401K Cemetery," a helicopter scoops money out of the US Treasury with a shovel, cars pile up in Detroit, and flag-waving citizens party around a boiling tea kettle in the shape of an elephant. In the Gulf of Mexico, homes are sinking, while hooded prisoners sit in Guantanamo, a "Factory of Exploitation" keeps going in Mexico, China is tossing American dollars into the Pacific, and the roof of bankrupted Greece's Treasury has blown off. A spokesperson for the magazine only said that, as is their practice, they had commissioned a number of possible covers from different artists, including Ware.[23] Brady wrote in his blog that Ware said at the panel he "accepted the job because it would be like doing the [cover for the] 1929 issue of the magazine".[22]

He recently wrote a neat piece on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books... I think it was on The Millions site?