'I still have overwhelming doubt about my ability'

Chris Ware won the Guardian First Book Award 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Emma Brockes finds the author endearingly embarrassed by his success
Chris Ware
Blaze of modesty: Chris Ware

Chris Ware lists all the things he can't do. He can't articulate off the cuff; he can't organise his thoughts into grammatical format; he can't transcend self-doubt. He can't do interviews and he can't understand why he is becoming a success. If he had to describe himself in one word, it would be "farce".

"You'd do better to pick someone out in the street and photograph them," he says gloomily. "No one would know the difference. I have a preponderance to look smug in photos; something to do with the way my mouth turns up at the corners." We are in the dingy parlour of a London hotel. The photographer tries to reassure him; Ware remains doubtful. "Get caught at the wrong moment and you look like the biggest jerk in the world."

The 33-year-old American is here to collect the Guardian First Book Award for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. He is flattered beyond belief, he says, although when the news broke last week his first thought was that some kind of "under-the-table type thing" had gone on, be cause who would give a literary prize to a cartoonist? "I mean... comics... it's embarrassing. Who wants to talk about comics?"

Despite its author's reluctance, the book - the story of Corrigan, a crushed, middle-aged man who fortifies his existence through fantasy - was a sensation in US critical circles. Time magazine called it a "haunting and unshakable book that will change the way you look at your world". The New York Times called it "arguably the greatest achievement of the form ever". "Would it be wildly inappropriate to call it a symphony?" asked one American interviewer. "Well it wouldn't necessarily be inappropriate," replied Ware, "but it would sound really pompous."

He remains profoundly unimpressed with himself. Beside the towering reputations of his comic-strip heroes - Art Spiegelman, Frank King, George Herriman - Ware says he feels "like a real hayseed". He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the absolute cultural and geographical middle of America and a place where he says he felt frighteningly at home. He sometimes wonders if this means he's trying to hide from something. Ware's mother and grandfather (he never knew his father, who left when he was a baby) were newspaper editors and he was introduced to comics via a stack of back copies in his grandmother's basement. "My very weak brain latched on to them at a particularly impressionable age when I realised that I wasn't going to develop into any sort of... athletic type." There is a long pause; Ware looks freshly aggrieved. "I made up for it in the fantasy world. Fairly typical sort of story, I guess."

Comic strips, Ware decided, transported their readers more effectively than any other medium. "The thing that distinguishes them from art or writing is the visual language. Films are passive, but in a comic strip you're making it happen. Sometimes I think that's a good state of mind to be in and other times I think it's the worst state of mind to be in, because you're half-looking, half-reading, and the two halves might cancel each other out to a zero."

Ware's enthusiasm for comic strips was ill-received at art school, where they were considered irredeemably adolescent. Ware didn't care. He started writing Jimmy Corrigan out of a deep sense of abandonment (in it, Jimmy meets his father for the first time). It was picked up by a Chicago paper and printed every week for the next six years. "Six years," Ware shudders. "I thought it would be three months' worth of story and then I'd go on to something else. But things kept piling up and I suddenly realised that three years had passed. I have visibly aged during the time I've been working on it."

This is easily imaginable. Ware is assembled like someone older than 33 - he holds his limbs at awkward angles, cringing into himself and hugging one elbow to his chest as he calls his first 100 pages a "mess" and wonders why no one has rumbled him yet. He says he knows he shouldn't say these things but thinks one should always try to be truthful. "The spectre of self-doubt becomes incapacitating," he says, looking forlornly at the floor. "Just trying to concentrate and sit at a table and go from panel to panel is extremely difficult, and then it becomes embarrassing that it's difficult because I think of all these people who have to do jobs that they don't like and I'm sitting at home doing supposedly whatever I want and then I feel guilty about that and then it's harder to draw because of this endless cycle of self-indulgence. I don't mean to whine, though. I feel like one of the luckiest people around."

The success of the book has done nothing to resolve the crisis. "Oh no," says Ware, smiling at himself. "I still have overwhelming self-doubt about my ability to handle any sort of situation with any kind of literary maturity."

But in less self-critical moments he allows that if there is some merit to Jimmy Corrigan, it is to be found in its pacing. Most modern comics are vulgar and brash, what Ware calls "visual reduction". (He extends this to modern culture; with despairing young-fogeyness, Ware hates the "fast-moving, cool, sexy, macho style that's infected the west since the second world war".) Jimmy Corrigan is full of dank silences; a whole page can pass with only a cough from the characters. Ware likens it to writing music. "I reread every strip hundreds of times while I'm working on it. Sometimes it's a matter of inserting an extra panel or a bodily shuffle or a cough. Sometimes it's changing the angle of the drawing. It's trying to get a sense of reality and the passage of time almost in a musical way."

Jimmy, his father and his grandfather are soft and damaged, juggling their illusions. There is no point to them. They are heartbreakingly real. "That's all that matters in art and literature: to create characters that you care about. If you close the book and you're indifferent to them, then I don't think it was successful. I guess it stems from being a kid sitting by myself in school and wondering if anyone was going to talk to me that day or not."

Three-quarters of the way through the book, Ware's father made contact. It was spooky, he says. They met for a few hours, but before they had a chance to meet again Ware's father died of a heart attack. Now he feels like a fool for having hated him all those years. "It's not as though he was a war criminal," he says. If there is a moral to the book - and, as a rule, Ware distrusts art that moralises - it is that passivity doesn't pay. "Just the fact that I did this book over years avoiding contact with my own father is obviously some sort of argument against inaction. I was always struggling against that. I mean, my preferred mode is to sit at a table and stare out the window and work on a story for years and years and not ever talk to anyone about it and feel very uncomfortable even trying to converse about it."

Purposelessness. Ware likes this, the fact that the art-school snobs think his work is trivial. It strengthens his faith in the crooked path, the unorthodox way. For example, in the book, the story is interrupted by cute little sections to cut out and make into 3-D sets. Ware doesn't imagine that anyone will actually do this. But he put them in anyway. "They hold the promise of enjoyment through lonely activity, which I like. And I've always thought there's something very delicate and innocent about paper assemblage."

· Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth is published by Jonathan Cape (priced £18).

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