Quimby the Mouse Quimby the Mouse was one of Ware's earliest recurring characters and an important early breakthrough. Rendered in a style reminiscent of early animation and newspaper comics, the largely wordless Quimby strips marked an early turn toward autobiographical themes and formal experimentation in Ware’s work. The character appeared throughout the early 1990s in periodicals and later in
Acme Novelty Library, before being collected in the hardcover
Quimby the Mouse (Fantagraphics, 2003).
Jimmy Corrigan Jimmy Corrigan is one of Ware's most frequently recurring characters, appearing across multiple comic strips and projects in varying forms. The character originated 1990, in Ware's early gag strips as a parody of
Depression-era "child genius" comics, sometimes depicted as an imaginary prodigy. Over time, Ware gradually deemphasized this version of the character, instead reimagining Corrigan as a socially isolated adult whose life and family history became the focus of later narratives. This evolution culminated in the graphic novel
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2000). Alternate versions of the character — for example, the anonymous male figures in Ware's
Tales of Tomorrow strips — closely resemble Jimmy Corrigan in both appearance and temperament, continued to appear intermittently in Ware's serialized work.
God / Super-Man Ware’s work features a recurring godlike figure, often referred to as "God" or "Super-Man" (distinct from the
DC Comics superhero), appearing in various strips, including
Acme Novelty Library and
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The character, typically depicted as pudgy, middle-aged, and masked, subverts conventional heroic morality: he walks among mortals yet cannot or will not intervene to save anyone, embodying a "simple, cruel premise" functioning as a "failed God-character" and a critique of the absence of moral rescue or redemptive power in the narrative.
Rusty Brown Ware's
Rusty Brown is an ongoing, multi-part narrative centered on a group of interconnected characters associated with a private school in
Omaha, Nebraska, with storylines spanning from childhood into adulthood. Although named for its title character — a socially isolated boy with a fixation on collecting pop-cultural memorabilia — the work expands to follow a wider cast, including his father W.K. "Woody" Brown, his classmate Chalky White, the teacher Joanne Cole, and the bully Jordan Lint, each of whom is the focus of extended narrative sections. Ware began developing the project in the late 1990s and expanded it in the early 2000s following the completion of
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. The first part of
Rusty Brown was published in book form in 2019 by Pantheon Books.
Building Stories Ware's
Building Stories was serialized in a host of different venues. It first appeared as a monthly strip in
Nest Magazine. Instalments later appeared in a number of publications, including
The New Yorker, ''Kramer's Ergot
, and most notably, the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Building Stories
appeared weekly in the New York Times Magazine
from September 18, 2005, until April 16, 2006. A full chapter was published in Acme Novelty Library'', number 18. Another instalment was published under the title "Touch Sensitive" as a digital app released through
McSweeney's. The entire narrative was published as a boxed set of books by Pantheon in October 2012. The boxed set holds 14 different works, in various sizes and forms, weaving through the life of an unnamed brown haired woman.
The Last Saturday The Last Saturday is a graphic novella by Ware that was serialized in weekly installments on the website of the British newspaper
The Guardian beginning in September 2014. (The strip was also featured in the newspaper's
Weekend magazine.) The story follows a few people in the fictional Midwestern town of Sandy Port, Michigan: Putnam Gray, a young boy caught up in science fiction fantasies; Sandy Grains, a classmate who is interested in Putnam; Rosie Gentry, a classmate with whom Putnam is infatuated; Putnam's parents; and Sandy's mother. Exploring typical Ware themes of imagination and social isolation, the series ran for 54 installments before concluding in 2015 with the note, "End, Part One." Scholars have discussed the work as an example of digital comics that retain the page-based design of print graphic novels, reflecting Ware’s emphasis on complex page layouts and visual structure. As of the mid-2020s,
The Last Saturday had not been collected in book form, though excerpts appeared in
The Best American Comics 2016. ==Design, illustration, and other projects ==