Tragicomic strips

A DECADE AGO, Chris Ware was hailed as a genius by a select few, thanks to The Acme Novelty Library, a comic book featuring kaleidoscopic strips about Siamese-twin mice, overweight superheroes, and lonely collectors of action figures. The acclaim became more general in 2000 with the release of "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," which collected eight years' worth of Ware's serial novel of that title, a comic strip that originally ran next to the lonely-hearts ads in a free Chicago newsweekly.

Now, Yale University Press has elected the 37-year-old Chicagoan to the pantheon of all-time great graphic artists with the publication of Daniel Raeburn's "Chris Ware," the latest installment in their "Monographics" series on such design virtuosos as H.N. Werkman and Chip Kidd. It's a gorgeous monograph, crammed with reproductions of Ware's comics, paintings, and kinetic sculptures alongside examples of his influences and even evidence of his creative swipes from sources ranging from mid-1920s Sunday funnies and ragtime sheet music to African-American beauty-product labels. There's just one hitch: The Chicago-based Raeburn, author of "Chris Ware" and publisher of The Imp, a short-lived zine about comics, claims it's pretentious to describe Ware as a "designer" or "artist" instead of a "cartoonist."

"If we hesitate to call someone as talented as Chris a mere cartoonist, it's because unlike other media once thought vulgar -- like film, or the novel -- comic strips have steadily grown worse since their invention," Raeburn said via telephone from a vacation cabin near Bennington, Vt. "Newspaper cartoonists of the 1920s and `30s, like Windsor McCay or George Herriman, were real craftsmen -- and they were also experimentalists. Compare their work to popular strips today, like `Dilbert' or `Boondocks,' and you'll see there's been a near-catastrophic decline in quality." And how does Raeburn feel about the trendy term "graphic novel"? "That's pretentious, too," he said. "Instead, let's call them `comic books."'