Following up Jimmy Corrigan, named one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by the Times (London), and Building Stories, named one of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by the New York Times and Time magazine, celebrated cartoonist Ware offers a phantasmagorical traversal of time-space boundaries on a Midwestern morning featuring a child losing his superpowers, a teen who becomes a mean paternal presence, a man storing his grief on Mars, and a woman clear about the love she wants. The first part of a saga and 16 years in the making.

Ware (Monograph) presents the first half of his magnum opus exploring the profoundly entangled lives of a group of characters all attending or employed by a Midwestern parochial school in the 1970s. On his first day of third grade in his new school, Chalky White attempts to bond with bullied outcast Rusty Brown, who is more anxious about being separated from a prized action figure than he is interested in making friends. Meanwhile, Chalky's sister, Alice, charms her new classmates, includinfg toxic jerk Jordan Lint, as well as her English teacher, Woody, who happens to be Rusty's father. After a digression into the romantic disappointment and abandoned dreams in Woody's background, the focus shifts to a remarkable sequence tracking Jordan's entire life, from the moment of his birth until his death as a lonesome old man, before concluding with a fractured narrative highlighting the solitary life of Chalky and Rusty's teacher, Ms. Cole. VERDICT Masterfully illustrated, brilliantly designed, and bursting with compassion for characters united by time and space who nonetheless feel isolated owing to fear and shame, this is without a doubt one of the most exciting releases of the year. [an editor's pick, see "Fall Fireworks," p. 23.]

Ware (Building Stories) delivers an astounding graphic novel about nothing less than the nature of life and time as it charts the intersecting lives of characters that revolve around an Omaha, Neb., parochial school in the 1970s. Third-grader Chalky White and his high schooler sister, Alice, are new students. Chalky finds his outcast status concretized when he tries to make friends with the bullied Rusty Brown and gets embroiled in recess humiliation. Alice attracts both friendly attention and leers, including from stoner Jordan Lint and (secretly) from her English teacher, Woody Brown (Rusty's father), and her art teacher, Chris Ware. The narrative then shifts to Woody, dropping into the world of a sci-fi story he publishes in a pulp magazine, about an astronaut who becomes unhinged on Mars, before revealing Woody's own youthful heartbreak. Next, the birth-to-death trajectory of toxic Jordan is intimately portrayed, including profound childhood loss, youthful rebellions, brief redemption, and restless middle age. Finally, Ware focuses on teacher Joanne Cole, a black woman who grows up in poverty, then stoically perseveres as an educator despite racism at the wealthy, predominantly white academy—and loves to play the banjo. Ware's dazzling geometric art—pointillism for Woody's eyesight sans glasses; close-ups of Joanne's face through the decades—has never been better. Through this winding narrative, resonant echoes are drawn between characters inside their loneliness, adversity, and frustrations (such as two different characters, decades apart, placing a flower in a bowl of water). Ware again displays his virtuosic ability to locate the extraordinary within the ordinary, elevating seemingly normal lives into something profound, unforgettable, and true. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi. (Sept.)