Review by Booklist Review
Prolific alternative-comics artist Ware follows his epic, Jimmy Corrigan (2000), and Quimby the Mouse BKL S 1 03 with a collection of sketchbook pages. Ware owes his lofty reputation largely to his awesome command of the grammar of comics, and this handsome volume showcasing his drawing ability amounts to something of a new revelation. Ware's strips are so meticulous in their rigid perfection that they seem to indicate an obsessive character. Yet these hundreds of life drawings, cityscapes, doodles, preliminary sketches, and other drawings, rendered in an impressive variety of styles, contrarily display unexpected spontaneity and looseness. Particularly revelatory are a handful of actual strips in Ware's familiar multipanel approach, and featuring Jimmy, Quimby, and other characters from his long stories, that are rendered in a rougher, almost crude style. Ware's fans will find his marginal notes fascinating, too, for their revelations about his creative process. Besides showing off Ware's facility and variety, this beautifully designed book demonstrates just how much thought and planning go into his acclaimed graphic novels. --Gordon Flagg Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The Eisner and Harvey Award-winning creator of the highly celebrated Jimmy Corrigan, Ware here presents selections from the sketchbooks he kept during the time that he was conceiving and working on Corrigan and his regular comic anthology series, The Acme Novelty Library. Ware experiments with a great variety of styles in both black and white and full color, from simply drawn cartoon animals to detailed sketches from life of people and buildings. He also copies other cartoonists (including one of his major inspirations, Robert Crumb), draws excellent Buck Rogers-esque spaceships, and includes famous characters such as Superman and Krazy Kat. There are many strips featuring Corrigan and other characters (including a masked flying superhero called God), along with preliminary sketches and notes for Ware's published work. Ware's artistic crises and lack of confidence in his work are laid bare, with the pages containing a variety of exhortations to himself, sometimes intended to be constructive -e.g., "respect your obsessions"-but more often along the lines of "your drawing sucks." With many nudes and explicit sex included, this is one for adult collections, and it's recommended anywhere Jimmy Corrigan has proven popular. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
