In 2001, the cartoonist Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian’s first book award. It was the first time a comic book had won a major UK literary prize. Ware was in that respect, as in others, something of a trailblazer in showing how subtle and complex and serious graphic narratives could be – a first advance in their subsequent storming of mainstream literary culture.

Rusty Brown, Ware’s first graphic novel since 2012’s Building Stories, is anchored by the inconsequential events of a single day in a school in Ware’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, in 1975. It tells the interwoven stories of the titular pre-teen bully magnet and a handful of characters with whom his life, however glancingly, intersects. As readers of Ware will have come to expect, it’s mordantly melancholy and drawn and plotted with extraordinary precision.

When he guest edited a comics issue for McSweeney’s in 2004, Ware called comics “not a genre, but a developing language”. Ahead of the publication of the print instalment of Rusty Brown, we discussed his way of working – and where that developing language is now.

Sam Leith: Rusty Brown collects a number of different storylines written over a number of years. How much do you think of it as a coherent single work?

Chris Ware: I’d always planned it as one volume, but my irresponsible writing methods got out of hand and I decided that rather than produce a book that would be too heavy to hold, it was better to split it into two books. Besides, paper may no longer exist when I finally get done with the thing, though at least I’ll know half of it will actually physically exist somewhere for a little while. Sprawl and complexity are features of my favourite books, from War and Peace to Moby-Dick to Ulysses, and I’m aiming for a similar end – albeit with thousands of little colour pictures instead of just words.

SL: How do the characters in Rusty Brown and their universe relate to the worlds of your other work? Is there a sort of Ware-verse in which they cohabit?

CW: There is a tip-off in the book that it all connects to Jimmy Corrigan, and though it’s not apparent yet, also to both Building Stories and two other books on which I’ve been slowly toiling. This is all very inconsequential to the turning of the planet, however.

The election of Trump has made us aware of the fragility of virtue versus the blunt force of decep­tion and domination

SL: You – or someone with your name – figures in the book as a character (though, at the time in which the book is set, I’m guessing you would have been closer to Rusty’s age than his). How autobiographical is the book and in which way? What does it do to introduce “Chris Ware” as a character?

CW: Well, I needed a jerk and I was available. To portray is not to endorse, of course, though on my private novelistic spectrum of human loathsomeness, the character is probably the most immoral and self‑deceiving of anyone in the book, growing out of my own sublimated venal impulses and the imaginings of those in others. For the reader as well as the artist, comics are already something of a paper mirror. So to have a horrible person staring back at me while I draw him, who looks like me but isn’t, serves as a useful psychological experiment. It is all in the service of trying to understand the world and, most importantly, to be a better person.

Every generation has its immoralities that culture and custom somehow cushion, and we’re seeing a much-overdue reckoning of that now; if there’s any shred of inadvertent good to the election of Donald Trump, it’s that he has made us all keenly aware of the fragility of virtue versus the blunt force of deception and domination. It takes considerable effort to be good and almost none to be bad.

A detail from Rusty Brown by Chris Ware. Photograph: Chris Ware

SL: How do you feel towards your characters? Is to understand all to forgive all?

CW: I try, but don’t always succeed, to somehow love them all, even if that sounds crazy. I genuinely believe there’s a redeeming impulse of goodness in everyone which is heightened by sympathy, if not by art, and in my own mind the two should be synonymous as much as is possible.

SL: Your persona as you present it to readers is extremely shy, and self-deprecating to a fault. Does the fact that your work has been buried under a mountain of prizes and plaudits make it, even just a bit, hard to sustain that?

CW: Maybe it seems disingenuous after receiving such kind words, but it sure doesn’t feel that way in my skull. I kind of envy writers and creators who seem to suffer from no self-doubts, but I’ve also come to decide they might also be a little nutty and that, regardless, we’re probably pretty much pre-wired in this regard anyway; ie, thick skins don’t seem to grow over thin ones. Ultimately, though, my own comfort doesn’t matter. As an art of reproduction, comics always returns to its status as trash, which I think is key to its being seen clearly and read critically; it has none of the innate prestige of writing or painting and so has to earn its stature on its own terms, every time.

SL: Can you say what the germ of this – or any of your cartoons – is? Do you start with a character sketch, or a situation, or a mood? And how do you plan out a comic story? You’re so meticulous and exact in terms of the design of pages and spreads, I’m curious as to how you mesh spatial thinking and narrative thinking.

CW: The apparent meticulousness of my stuff only comes from trying to provide as clear as possible reading experience out of the tangled and knotted experience of life as I’ve come to know it. I have sheaves of notes and ideas of where the story is going to go – or worse, what I might think it’s “about” – nearly all of which get thrown out the moment I sit down to draw. If I pay attention to what occurs to me as my drawings appear on the page, however, it will all eventually connect in ways that would otherwise be impossible to predict or control. I believe it’s the role of the artist not to impose a structure on one’s art but to let the structure build itself – and it always will, if you let it.

The book is largely set in my own memories of the parochial school I attended as a kid, which in my early adulthood I realised I’d spent more time in than at home. The rooms, hallways and kids were almost all certainly more familiar to me than my own family and house, and still reappear in my dreams, even if they’re incongruously populated with the people and details of my life now.

Chris Ware. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images

SL: Why the very very tiny panels and lettering? Is it a way of slowing the reader down?

CW: I don’t mean to strain the limits of legibility, but narratively it’s a way of trying to get at the seemingly infinite tide pools of memory and detail that regularly open and close in our minds, as well as pointing to the ever-finer complexity of the universe as one looks at and into it. Also, I don’t want the reader to feel as if I’ve laid down on the job – and since the universe never disappoints in that regard, I shouldn’t, either.

SL: There’s a dichotomy sometimes made between “grown-up comics” and the superhero/funny-papers/genre type. Your work seems to be an example of the former that’s very interested in the latter, as a fantasy contrast to the humiliating mundanity of ordinary life. Do you feel affectionate towards that sort of storytelling? What does that sort of fantasy offer?

CW: As a kid I was made fun of for reading superhero comics, but once I grew up I lost all interest in them. Which is why I find it a little disquieting, though not necessarily surprising, that such stuff has become mainstream American culture, and one that adults now find a satisfying diversion. Then again, mythologies aren’t going away anytime soon. For me, however, regular human life is already so extra strange, moving and complicated I’m more than happy not plugging it into any amplification.

A detail from Rusty Brown. Photograph: Chris Ware

SL: A big theme of your work seems to be human connection (and its failure). Is that why you weave stories in and out of each other?

CW: We’re all connected in ways we don’t and can’t ever completely understand. The chain of causality that links us from the subatomic level up through the sphere of thought and how that thought, though it apparently still arises from the interactions of particles, somehow also seems to have an effect on the physical world, is simply unfathomable in its complexity. I find this immense incomprehensibility greatly reassuring, especially its seeming meaninglessness.

SL: You (or “Chris Ware”) say in the book that the sense of “weary dislocation” we suffer comes from the thwarted desire to feel like a protagonist. How does that bear on your stuff?

I believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives

CW: Like Building Stories, which was an attempt to write a book with no beginning or end, Rusty Brown is an attempt to write a book with no main character, despite its embarrassing-to-say title. But in another book with an embarrassing-to-say title, Moby-Dick is also not a protagonist but something else about which everyone else in it orbits; Rusty Brown is simply the loathed kid who happens to invisibly bind everyone in this random three-dimensional snapshot of a single day in 1975.

I very much believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives, with the ultimate aim of understanding and empathising with everyone we possibly can. We already do this unconsciously when we dream, or consciously when some jerk cuts us off on the highway, but fiction can act as an assisting rudder; books can’t tell us how to live, but they can help us get better at imagining how to live.

SL: Can you talk a bit about the pull of childhood and period nostalgia in your work?

CW: There is a peculiar lingering redolence for most people’s memories of childhood because those experiences have partly accumulated outside of the structures of language as well as at a time when we least had to have a “plan” and everything was new. So we return to them again and again, little flashes here and there coming through as comforting sensations that remind us who we maybe really are. They are all part of a feeling that as adults we learn to repress, if not completely smother, though which can still resurface at moments of great anguish or confusion, which I think is simply the raw feeling of being alive.

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware Photograph: Chris Ware

SL: When did you start wanting to do what you do – and did you find your distinctive voice/style quickly?

CW: Whatever’s distinctive about my voice is only a combination of all the tricks, ideas and approaches I’ve stolen from the writers, artists and cartoonists I admire, tempered by my own failings as a person and shoved through the keyhole of my own fairly unadventurous life. In college I took literature and art classes with the aim of figuring out what literary comics might look like, and before that I studied the history of comics and essentially learned to draw from copying them, and before that I drew picture stories about having breakfast with my mom and grandmother, so I guess I’ve pretty much always known what I wanted to do with my life.

The exclusive Review cover designed by Ware. Illustration: Chris Ware/The Guardian

SL: What can you do in comics that you can’t do in other storytelling forms?

CW: As far I’m concerned, the form seems to allow for a greater range of simultaneous impressions, memories and thoughts than any other visual language, the possibility of overlaying and overlapping both seen and remembered in a way that most closely approximates real consciousness. We have an extraordinary superpower as humans, which is to see with our eyes closed, redolently experienced when dreaming or when reading a traditional novel, where one ceases to see the words on the page and instead “looks” at the images being prompted in one’s imagination. Comics function at an awkward point between the two, simulating the perception of the present using the tools of memory, and I’m simply trying to harness it, to draw the world from the inside out rather than the outside in.

• Rusty Brown by Chris Ware is published by Cape (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.