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Chicago-based Chris Ware is the only cartoonist to have won the Guardian First Book Award -- an award, he joked, "normally reserved for writers who are too lazy to draw" -- received in 2001 for his innovative graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Ware's new book, The Acme Novelty Library, is a compendium of previously uncollected short strips and writing. The New York Times Magazine's Funny Pages is currently serializing Building Stories, comic vignettes that take place in a single building, and he recently edited the all-comics issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

You pay homage to the great comic artists of the past, both in your own strips and by designing the reprint projects of works like George Herriman's Krazy Kat. Much of the current attention paid to comics is focused on the graphic novel, but as one of the medium's most lauded authors, you seem more influenced by comic-strip history than by comic books.

Personally, I just believe that the form sort of calcified in the 1930s when comics became more of a cheap children's stand-in for adventure-type motion pictures, absorbing the developing language of cinema, with close-ups, crosscutting, camera angles, etc. The first 30 years of comics, which appeared almost exclusively in newspapers, were much more interesting, personal and experimental because nobody was really sure what comics were yet. Comics held more of an interest to the general public and, I'm guessing, probably felt more real before motion pictures became ubiquitous.

Even at its most cutting, pathetic and acerbic, The Acme Novelty Library has a more humorous tone than much of your other work. Since the pieces were created as a break from longer narrative projects, how are they meant to be read?

Like most artists, I greatly admire Nabokov's Pale Fire, and so tried to structure this rather silly book around the idea of a footnote that sucks the reader out of what appears to be the book's overall structure and into another story.

The book is essentially based around the ideas of light and dark, with a model of the planets and the stars at its core -- since that's where light, of course, comes from -- with the parallel idea of seeing things that aren't really there, like pictures and patterns in the heavens, or a face in the moon, which is really the essential idea behind what drives cartooning.

This all sounds outrageously pretentious because it is. I don't believe in letting ideas get the better of me, generally, but in this book's case, being a collection of dumb gags, I figured I could go hog-wild and get it out of my system. I think I was in college for a year or two too long.

Unlike Dickens's day, it's not often

today that novels are serialized, but much of your work has been, both in newspapers and chapbooks. Do you prefer this mode, or if it were possible would you only want to unveil your finished works?

I actually recently quit my weekly strip for this reason, though I do need some kind of deadline to keep me going, otherwise I simply sit around and waste time. So now I'm aiming at the medium-sized goal of simply putting out an issue of my dumb comic book every year. As a stay-at-home Dad -- the acronym, I was recently dismayed to discover, is SAHD -- the pressure would simply be too much to keep up a weekly strip. Of course, this explanation is all pretty much a lie right now, because I'm doing a weekly strip for The New York Times until the middle of next year.

You self-publish a rather elaborate, scholarly music zine, The Ragtime Ephemeralist, and your comics also have a rhythmic, musical quality. What is it about ragtime that speaks to you?

I guess that it's about the only popular American music that's inherently an art of composition and not of performance -- the emotion and feeling of the music are coded into it, rather than drawn out exclusively by how it's played. It can be played on virtually any instrument, and the odd, contradictory sensations of happiness and sadness are still there. I think that comics are basically the same things, except that they're, in a way, played by the reader. Though this sounds ridiculously pretentious, too.

Architecture features prominently in your work -- the World's Fair sequence in Jimmy Corrigan, or a building as a central character in Building Stories. What is the link for you

between architecture and comics?

It's a way of containing a set of characters and settings in a way that's appealing to me, like a dollhouse. On top of that, as Art Speigelman has pointed out, a building's windows and stories sort of array themselves in a way that's not unlike the fundamental idea of a comics page, though I try not to avail myself of that metaphor too readily. I guess it is at the basis of one of the stories I'm working on, Building Stories, in a probably much too pun-ish way.

You know a couple of Canada's major cartoonists, Seth and Chester Brown, both as peers and as friends. Do you see any characteristic that distinguishes Canadian cartoonists from their counterparts to the south?

There seems to be something about the Canadian cartoonist's temperament that allows one to ignore the rather childish need to keep freaking people out the way that American cartoonists all seem to want to do when young. I think it has something to do with the youth culture of America and the feelings of individualism that all of its citizens sense, filtered through an adolescent sensibility.

What influence do you draw from your peers?

Pretty much everything, which I think is good because I feel like it proves my possibly much too optimistic idea that comics are a living language that's trying to get at reproducing some real feeling and sense of life the way that painting and sculpture used to 100 years ago, but [that we]don't seem to be so interested in of late -- though this isn't absolutely true, of course, it's more what critics would like us to think.

I believe we all influence each other, which is fundamentally reassuring and simultaneously maddening. I guess it's the closest we as cartoonists come to playing sports.

Ware joins cartoonists Seth, Charles Burns and Chip Kidd tomorrow at the International Festival of Authors for a signing and round-table discussion on graphic novels; 4 p.m., the Brigantine Room. At 8 p.m., Ware holds a book signing at The Beguiling, 601 Markham St., 416-533-9168.

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