Ware introduced the character Jimmy Corrigan in a full-page strip he began writing for the Chicago tabloid New City. Combining six years’ worth of the strips, Ware created the best-selling novel named after Jimmy that spans an Irish-American family’s life in Chicago from the Civil War to the present. For its experiments in graphic form—including pull-out, three-dimensional inserts—and its non-chronological narrative, the novel earned numerous honors, among them the Guardian First Book Award, presented for the first time to a comic book.
At first glance his detailed geometrical layouts look like they were computer-generated using Adobe Illustrator but Ware works is almost exclusively by hand using t-squares, pencils, and rulers. He only uses a computer to apply color.
