“The one thing I don’t want to be is a storyteller.” Detailing his stories in meticulous and carefully crafted artwork, Chris Ware lays out an irresistibly beautiful world of deficits and defects.

While nowadays a seemingly endless archive of superhero comics is shamelessly exploited for bland 3D animated blockbusters, Chris Ware set out to prove the narrative potential of visual writing. In stark contrast to the loud colors and simplistic world of action figures, he proposes a quiet and introverted vision in muted shades of nostalgia, exploring topics of social isolation, emotional pain and personal failure in modern life. And so Chris Ware’s comics are about sad children, lonely outcasts and depressed superheroes. Clearly they are not for fun.