Chris Ware - Adventures of the G.I. Jim Action Club

Chris Ware started Rusty Brown the week after he finished Jimmy Corrigan but he already used the characters of Rusty Brown and Chalky White in this page.
"The week after I finished the last page of Jimmy Corrigan I immediately started a new long story based on characters who had originated as parodies, but whom now I wanted to humanize… amidst a setting of memories of my Omaha childhood and Nebraska upbringing." (Chris Ware, Monograph)


Because I am a terrible writer, almost all of my stories seem to start this way, i.e. as a satire or gag which then somehow metastasizes into something serious, grave and depressing — sort of like saying "just kidding" to someone when you really mean what you're saying. I’m not sure if this working method is due to my lack of innate confidence or some other psychological problem, but then again it seems to have worked for other authors, like Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary and Melville‘s Moby-Dick, both of which were, I believe, born of satire but ended up at very different finish lines.
https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/chris-ware-rusty-brown?utm_source=chatgpt.com


This page also features a Chris Ware cameo...

First published in the weekly newspaper Newcity on the 19th of March 1998.
Published in ACME Novelty Library 10 (1998).
Reprinted in The Acme Novelty Library Annual Report to Shareholders (2005).

Exhibited in Basel at the expo "Chris Ware: Paper Life" (2023).