by Jean Braithwaite (Editor)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was the first major UK literary prize awarded for a graphic novel. In 2002 Ware was the first cartoonist included in the Whitney Biennial.
Like Art Spiegelman or Alison Bechdel, Ware thus stands out as an important crossover artist who has made the wider public aware of comics as literature. His regular New Yorker covers give him a central place in our national cultural conversation. Since the earliest issues of ACME Novelty Library in the 1990s, cartoonist peers have acclaimed Ware's distinctive, meticulous visual style and technical innovations to the medium. Ware also remains a literary author of the highest caliber, spending many years to create thematically complex graphic masterworks such as Building Stories and the ongoing Rusty Brown.
Author Biography
Jean Braithwaite is associate professor of English at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, where she teaches comics among other courses. Braithwaite is comics editor at riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature. Her previous book was a literary memoir, FAT: The Story of My Life with My Body, and she has published in periodicals including the Sun, the New York Times, North American Review, and the Henry James Review.