Plate 1. This map, on the inside cover of the hardbound edition of Jimmy Corrigan, charts transatlantic connections between Irish immigration and the Middle Passage. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), reverse cover jacket.
Plate 2. Ware appropriates the early superhero style of comics to relate an autobiographical anecdote from his early childhood. Chris Ware, “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess,” RAW 2.3 (1991): 81.
Plate 3. Jordan Lint reminisces about his college days. Chris Ware, “May 15th 1989: Jordon Lint to the age of 35,” Virginia Quarterly Review 84.4 (2008): 183.
Plate 4. Chris Ware’s solo exhibition at the Sheldon Art Memorial Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Chris Ware, Exhibition Catalogue, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, February 16–April 29, 2007.
Plate 5. This Gasoline Alley Sunday page by Frank King shows the main characters Walt and Skeezix amid an autumn scene. Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1927. Reprinted with permission from Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007).
Plate 6. Chris Ware’s “Rusty Brown” composition echoes King’s bird’s-eye view of a father and son walking through the woods on a fall day. Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 60.
Plate 7. The opening page of “Our History of Art” charts the dawn of the aesthetic impulse from cave art through to the Renaissance. Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book (New York: Pantheon, 2005),
Plate 8. “The Comix Factory,” by Joost Swarte, represents comics as a constructed medium. Image courtesy of Joost Swarte. Joost Swarte, Read Yourself RAW, ed. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 31.
Plate 9. A two-page diagram reveals Amy’s otherwise unknowable ancestry. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 357.
Plate 10. Second page of Amy’s ancestry. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 358.
Plate 11. Residents of an early twentieth-century apartment building are comforted by their dreams in “Building Stories.” Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library 18 (Chicago: The ACME Novelty Library, 2007), 23.
Plate 12. Residents of the same apartment building, now in the late twentieth century, fantasize about the past in “Building Stories.” Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library 18 (Chicago: The ACME Novelty Library, 2007), 25.
Plate 13. Now silenced and empty, the building is conspicuously out of step with the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Chris Ware, “Building Stories: Epilogue,” New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2006, 37.
Plate 14. Jim Crow Magic Lantern slide. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 70.
Plate 15. Amy Corrigan’s racial imagining. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 293.
Plate 16. Slow motion, subjective time. Exceedingly brief time spans are expanded over multiple panels. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 5.
Plate 17. Ware exploits moment-to-moment panel transitions in order to create the dilated sense of time that is central to his ordinariness aesthetic. Chris Ware, “Building Stories: Part 13,” New York Times Magazine, December 18, 2005, 35.
Plate 18. The protagonist’s confession of a “life-injury” is acknowledged and then transformed by other significant moments related to her sexual being and the plumber’s familial loss. Chris Ware, “Building Stories: Part 22,” New York Times Magazine, February 19, 2006, 43.
Plate 19. Memory as an interaction of text, image, and reading experience. Chris Ware, “Paper Dolls [detail],” Chicago Reader, March 21, 2003.
Plate 20. Memory as a comic strip within a comic strip. Chris Ware, “Building Stories: Part 5,” New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2006, 31.
