...[a] moving, sourly funny and virtuosically drawn book ... It’s hard to express in prose how imaginatively and effectively Ware marries words to images, how expressive his almost diagrammatically minimalist style can be, how he juxtaposes banality and trauma, how he sketches the passing of time and the sense of nowhereness in blank wide shots ... Amid all this bathos and desolation, there are little acts of kindness or connection, and memories of happiness or hope that the characters return to. It’s awful, but amid the awfulness there’s a tender attention to the individuality of each character.

...heartbreaking [work], as they say, of staggering genius: feverishly inventive and intimately told, drawn with empathy, architectural rigor and a spooky sense of a divine eye. Opening in Ware’s native Omaha circa 1975, Rusty Brown is at least four books in one, with a sum much greater than all the parts, expanding not just the possibilities of the form but also the mental space of his reader. Along with David Bowman’s Big Bang, it’s the most audacious and inspiring fiction I’ve read this year ... Ware’s superpower is to view characters through time, to chart their thickening bodies as well as the children they were ... Rusty Brown is also playful and funny ... All of Ware’s books gesture to infinity: With their microscopic paratextual matter, it’s likely that no one aside from Ware himself has ever definitively finished one of them. Of course, Ware’s true gift is not the density of his books but in how he compels us to feel amid such bounty.

...a lovingly executed piece of work, the product of an implacable mind, deserving of sustained and repeated attention. If one feels any resistance to calling it a 'novel', it comes not from the presence of graphics...but from the piecemeal narrative method. Even the moments of overlap between the book’s four sections convey the spirit of an in-joke or nudge. The overall result feels closer to a linked collection of stories, a treasure trove of insight and invention, rather than an organic whole ... Ware’s literary project has been to move comics away from superhero mythology to the realm of the heroic everyday, on the model of Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts, but with a more self-conscious sense of artistry and ambition ... Every one of his frames...is used to bring us closer to his people and their world. There’s nothing that he isn’t interested in trying to render at least once, from genitalia of various hues to snowflakes to every kind of living space. It’s as if he sees the essential challenge of graphic novels as being to invest the page with as much meaning and detail as humanly possible ... Ware’s sensibility is gloriously mixed ... he is thinking all the time about impact and effect and comprehension, and it’s difficult for his reader to avoid doing the same, stopping at frequent intervals to register, with gratitude verging on awe, just how much one has been subliminally noting – the store of visual information in every frame ... Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness – infinitely sad, intimately attuned to desolation and disappointment, but never closed to the possibility of a breakthrough, of someone transcending a dead-end, sad-sack fate. Though pain is germinal, love and hope exist ... [an] impassioned and ineffable piece of work...

Ware's vision of storytelling is display. His gift for jumping between narratives and through time while still maintaining a coherent overall story is not easy to achieve, yet he does so with inventive panels and thoughtful shifts in artistic style ... Ware's talent as a cartoon storyteller is never in question, regardless of subject matter, but Rusty Brown still stands out as among his most affecting stories. Though much of the book's content had previously been published, the larger Joanne story is new. Regardless, it's the compilation of stories into one larger narrative that makes Rusty Brown yet another unmissable Chris Ware release.

...the Pulitzer Prize has [never] been a hallmark guarantee of greatness in American fiction, or formal excellence or even forward-thinking. The Pulitzer, like any other award, signifies what the award committee want to honor and elevate, nothing more. Sometimes it intersects with good, occasionally even great, but like any other award the most frequently intersecting virtue remain consensus. I could see Rusty Brown winning the Pulitzer this year. It’s that kind of book ... Do I sound skeptical? ... after all, Rusty Brown is an excellent book. Should we get that away up front? This isn’t a hatchet job on one of of our greatest living cartoonists’ magnum opus. As fun as that might be to write, it would be dishonest, because I can’t tell you this is a bad book in any way. On the contrary, it’s definitely excellent. ... The reason why, perhaps, Chris Ware rubs so many people the wrong way in 2019 is that his artistic goals and aesthetic prerogatives are not simply apart from the run of contemporary comics, but totally alien. He’s not even playing in the same sandbox anymore, really ...The problem with in 2019 is not that the book isn’t “good,” whatever the hell that means, but that it’s doing something not a lot of people in this field are going to find natural sympathy for in 2019 - this is, translating the idiom of mid-to-late century American realist fiction into the comics medium ... There’s a part of me that wishes this book wasn’t what it was - that is, despite its flaws, a masterpiece, all 3.6 pounds you can use to stun a burglar in a pinch - but it fucking well is and it would be churlish of me not to recognize that. Look past the author’s reputation and the poisonous overpraise heaped by a literary establishment who perhaps treats Ware with the eager condescension of a trained dancing bear. Maybe he’ll win that Pulitzer this year, or the next. He deserves it, if anyone does, but don’t let that get in the way of actually appreciating the work. He may be a master, but he’s our master. Long may he wave.

Ware’s appreciation of the radical horror of being — the sheer dread that comes with existing at all, the guilt and sorrow that comes with living a life you can’t take back — reaches an absolute pinnacle in [later] pages, which easily could have been published on their own as a short novella. The sheer artistic achievement of this spellbinding sequence is matched only by its totalizing cosmic pessimism: we are born to suffer; we become monsters before we are even aware enough to choose or to know better; we are incapable of growing or changing, much less ever being happy. The true enormity of our failures and our crimes against each other and against ourselves is always at the edge of our consciousness, simply waiting for the moment of terrible and final revelation. If, for a certain type of reader, this all feels absolutely and unalterably true, whether we’d like it to be or not, for another type of reader it is, I imagine, a biting portrait of human misery that could seem genuinely unbearable to endure. Me? It made me so incredibly sad. I loved it.

...page after page of childhood trauma and the creative, professional, and sexual frustrations of adults. The subject matter is far from fun but the creative choices are invigorating, driving the book’s momentum to prevent it from becoming a miserable slog ... The thrill of Ware’s innovative graphic storytelling always has a comedown, typically via a gut punch that reinforces a character’s isolation or despair. This feeling in the reader echoes what these characters experience as they are enthused by life’s opportunities and crushed by inevitable failure ... For Ware, the high of graphic experimentation hooks people, then he drags them through the dirt of existence. The narrative content on its own is heavy, but when paired with Ware’s intricately designed artwork, Rusty Brown becomes flat-out overwhelming. Reading a 351-page Chris Ware graphic novel won’t take me as long as reading a prose novel of the same length, but it can feel like an even bigger commitment because there’s so much happening on each page ... There’s always a reorientation that occurs when you turn the page and immediately encounter new visual information. And with Chris Ware, you are getting a lot of information ... It’s this interior excavation that makes Ware’s comics so powerful and so draining.

...a stress-inducing yet cathartic examination of American brokenness ... It’s an exercise in empathy with the author hoping to express the arc of heartbreak and disappointment that makes people who they are, neither good nor bad but a mass of flawed humanity. This thesis crumbles by the end after the explorations of Brown and Lint, awful men doomed to awful fates of their own making, but the book is an astounding work of art with Ware again challenging our assumptions of his limits, comics as a form and the direction of tales of redemption ... This is more a book of open endings than happy endings for its mostly unlikeable characters, but Ware achieves the empathy he desires from our innate conditioning about how stories are structured ... Ware constantly ups the pressure on each of these characters and you find yourself rooting for them to make the right choices when they are so clearly doing the opposite. Rusty Brown took 16 years to make, during an era of war, isolating social media and a crumbling world. He might be afraid we’d forget to how to care for one another, so he bound an experience together as an emotional instruction manual. If you can care about these characters by the end then there’s hope for them. By extension there’s hope for any of us, no matter how awful we may be.

Ware’s faces register for us the wounds of his characters’ lives, and in his books wounds come on almost every page. In Ware’s new graphic novel Rusty Brown, Rusty and dozens of other major and minor souls might be surprised by those wounds, but anyone familiar with Ware sure won’t ... Ware’s work after Jimmy Corrigan has shown occasional glimpses that he might stop plowing this particular furrow. But Rusty Brown demonstrates that he may not be capable of doing so ... There’s nothing wrong with writing a book about the futility of life—just ask whoever wrote Ecclesiastes—but Ware has gone to this well so many times that the thumb he’s placed on the scale is clearly visible ... There’s little compassion to be found in Rusty Brown, because compassion requires curiosity, and Ware has worked out everything too carefully for that. The schematic lifelessness that results creates a kind of numbing effect. You may not know the story in advance, but you know where it’s headed: straight to Sadtown, Population: Everyone ... This is a shame because, while Ware’s gifts as a storyteller may be suspect, he really does bring astounding formal invention to the page. Rusty Brown’s ambitions on that front are immense ... the formal gambits Ware engages in to tell this story are extraordinary ... It’s a masterpiece of artistic invention, yet it shares, like all the immaculately detailed, soulless pages in Rusty Brown, a fundamental emptiness ... Chris Ware can do seemingly anything with a comics page. Anything, that is, except portray a recognizable human being.

The lives of all these characters and others intersect in curious and compelling ways. As with Ware’s other works of graphic art, the narrative arc wobbles into backstory and tangent: Each page is a bustle of small and large frames, sometimes telling several stories at once in the way that things buzz around us all the time, demanding notice. Joanne’s story is perhaps the best developed, but the picked-on if aspirational Rusty...the dweeby Woody, the beleaguered Chalky, and other players are seldom far from view. An overstuffed, beguiling masterwork of visual storytelling from the George Herriman of his time.

Ware is well known for his expansive, introspective, depth-plumbing works of graphic fiction, and his latest, featuring a series of interconnected, decade-spanning narratives spiraling outward from an Omaha school, is no different ... In his precise lines and shapes, Ware makes masterful work of both the architecturally exact spaces and the hunched shoulders, furrowed brows, and quivering chins of his deeply expressive characters. There are only brief moments of warmth and affection, but the wider picture, depicting a complex matrix of aching loneliness; long-simmering, acidic resentment; and a desperation for human connection and fulfillment, is rich with pathos and powerfully stirring.

Ware...delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time ... Ware’s dazzling geometric art...has never been better. Through this winding narrative, resonant echoes are drawn between characters inside their loneliness, adversity, and frustrations ... Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true.