Comics: Comics: Right Way, Corrigan

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Jimmy Corrigan requires a similar intensity from the reader. Ware's work is languorous but dense, interspersed with tiny print and pictures that force one to crane over it, literally trying to enter the book. Many of the spreads, including the fold-open dust jacket, are crazy quilts, stitched with dotted lines and arrows, as if the very seams were straining to contain the story. "You have to keep turning the book," says New Yorker cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who first nationally published Ware in Raw magazine. "It's a dizzy-making, Oz-like tornado that takes you out of Kansas and into his world."

In exchange for your efforts, this haunting and unshakable book will change the way you look at your world. Ware captures landscapes made to flatten emotion--a clinic shrouded in snow, a sterile apartment complex--and yet shows the reader the meaning and even beauty in every glimpse from a highway, every snippet of small talk. His is a graphic version of the anomie found in a Raymond Carver short story, with a social-historic sweep and unexpected, if fleeting, grace notes. And that may be this melancholy book's uplifting message: even in the most emotionally barren settings, there is still something not to deaden us but to make us stronger.

--Reported by Andrew Arnold/New York

TIME.com ON AOL To read the complete transcript of our interview with Chris Ware, visit time.com