Roughly two decades ago, about a week after Chris Ware completed "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," the sprawling graphic novel that cemented the Oak Park artist's reputation as the most ambitious and virtuosic cartoonist on Earth, he started work on "Rusty Brown." It was another sprawling and adventurous novel that, like all of his work, is lonesome, rueful, uncertain about human connection, yet also empathetic, dazzling -- as committed to depicting the overlooked and anonymous as it is innovative.

Still, I would be lying if I said that I looked forward to a new Chris Ware book without reservation. And by that I mean, one reservation: His work demands that you are fully present, and frankly, how often are we fully present, wherever we may be, these days? For instance, now that it's here, "Rusty Brown" (Pantheon 2019), the book itself, is so intricately designed that, like many of Ware's books, the result is an art object. Characters inside spill out across the spine and over end pages; the usual Library of Congress cataloging notice at the front now resembles the check-out page of an elementary school library; and even the dust jacket unfolds into a kind of poster on the themes and places explored inside. You feel protective, anxious about dog-earing anything, worried you'll blink and miss something.

And that's before you reach the story, which was partly serialized in the Chicago Reader and New City. It's set on a snowy day in Ware's hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, focused on nervous children, bullies, teachers, parents, longings and regrets -- Ware's bleak milieu, which can read a little like "Peanuts" as told by James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson. (A recent takedown in Slate called Ware "the Bard of Sadtown.") The book starts in the 1970s, leaps to the future, tells stories within stories, leaves Earth, spans generations. Meanwhile, the least redeemable character in almost 400 pages is Ware himself, cast as a creep of an art teacher. It's all so vast, yet there are winter days here I haven't seen since childhood, and a stillness so evocative and tender you feel like an intruder. Which is the point, a generous act of detailing, and honoring, everyday life.

With this in mind, I asked Ware, 51, to explain and contextualize a handful of images:

(Fold-over flap on the jacket spine) 1 On the jacket spine of "Rusty Brown," Ware uses the classic TV Guide format to provide the usual author info and plot outline found traditionally on an inside flap. Chris Ware image "Though the book is deeply serious and grave, I wanted to redolently capture the feeling of the late 1970s on the dust jacket, and so tried to reproduce both the typography and tone of TV Guide -- but as if TV Guide were presenting life itself. Amazingly, I could find no font of the little television numbers, so I had to make one myself. ... (TV Guide) was a tome I consulted many times a week, if not many times a day. The 'Fall Preview' was like receiving a tablet from God, the first indications of what I'd have to look forward to in the upcoming year and the events around which I'd arrange my life. It's frightening to me now how addicted I was to the serotonin that television would administer. ... The first chapter of 'Rusty Brown' is intentionally written in the tone of a sitcom, with its overwrought and overly pointed phrasing, because when I look back, sitcoms and cruddy TV adventure shows really shaped how I thought about myself as a kid. I imagined I was the star of everything, thinking aloud and responding with wisecracks and asides to perceived slights and obstacles. ... I'm sure everyone of our age group (born in the '60s and '70s) has an emotional attachment to whatever local affiliates carried national broadcasting networks, but I centered mine around channels particular to Omaha and surrounding towns. I could just barely tune in if I shoved a screwdriver in the back of my television and angled the antenna just right. I used to sit in front of the television and gaze at the static/snow -- or kiss the screen if there was a show I especially loved and thought I would never see again. It wasn't until high school that my addiction got so bad -- I was watching anything and everything I could until the American anthem/flag broadcast signoff -- that I realized I needed to go cold turkey."

(About 30 pages in; there are no page numbers) 2 Some of the most evocative images in "Rusty Brown" are still, silent settings. Chris Ware image "I moved back to the Midwest and to Chicago from Texas because Texas did not have snow. Snow is among the most beautiful works of art planet Earth has produced, much better than anything we humans have ever come up with -- and since Earth produced us too, by proxy all the art we create is really the planet's -- millions of miniature snow flowers that silently erase the boundaries between homes, roofs and streets and piss off everyone just trying to get to work."

(About 45 pages in) 3 One of the characters in "Rusty Brown" is Ware himself, playing a high school art teacher. It's not the most flattering self-portrait. Here, he is wondering aloud about how we can ever really know if no two snowflakes have ever been identical. Chris Ware image "The story needed a real jerk, and I was available. I figured the most horrible person in the story should look like me, since the story itself originates within me. It's all in the service of trying to feel through someone who's not up to par, as it takes much less effort to be a bad person than it is to be good."

(About 135 pages in) 4 Another character is Joanne Cole, a lonesome art teacher with a heartbreaking secret. Throughout the story of "Rusty Brown," she becomes a devoted banjo player. Chris Ware image "There's no more concrete cultural object that links more directly to the crime and atrocity of slavery in America than the banjo. Africans who were kidnapped and forcibly brought here with nothing other than their anguish re-created the basic structure of the instrument out of found materials, known in some regions of Africa as an akonting, ngoni or xalam. The re-created instrument caught the ear of their white captors, who stole and modified it, the banjo then becoming a necessary prop of early minstrel shows in which whites imitated African Americans -- its varied styles of playing via parody and theft and shame continues all the way up to contemporary rock music. The banjo embodies pretty much everything astonishing, unspeakable and terrible about our nation. Here, Joanne is playing in what is known as the 'classic' style, a largely melodic approach which was the vogue of recording artists of the early 1900s, toned down by white performers into a polite instrument of the parlor and a playing method which survived as written tutors well into the 1960s, from which Joanne has learned."

(About 60 pages in) 5 Most of "Rusty Brown" is set in Omaha, but there is a digression to Mars, with a colony of earthlings who seemingly can't outrun feelings of alienation. We learn, however, the story is actually a short story written by one of the characters in Nebraska. Chris Ware image "As a kid I read a lot of science fiction, eager to escape a world where I would be made fun of -- at least until my middle school English teacher Mrs. Byers made me read 'Of Mice and Men' and I realized writing could grip your heart and produce tears. The pictorial representation of this (Mars) story is an attempt to get at its writer rereading his own work, with 20 years of life between its writing and his rediscovery of a printed copy in his file cabinet. So it includes imagery that wouldn't have been part of his mental lexicon when he wrote it. (The story was written in 1955; he's reading it in 1975.) I think Jorge Luis Borges has said that the way we read 'Don Quixote' now has little or nothing to do with the way that readers in Cervantes' day experienced it, just as the way we imagine ourselves as adults when we dream of childhood, or when we replace memories of terrible high school haircuts with something less humiliating and revealing."

(Cover) 6 The cover book jacket, like the work inside, is spotted with seemingly prosaic images. Chris Ware image "My whole life as a cartoonist I've tried to imagine what a genuinely literary pictorial novel might look like -- not just a script illustrated in pictures or a memoir accompanied by panels of doodles, but a story genuinely told with/in/through pictures, where the pictures are the story itself. The greatest fiction, like memory, thrives in detail, and comics being an art of memory should follow suit. There are no actual people on the cover, and I set my task to draw all four (book) jackets (there are four different jackets, one for every character in the book) to try and make something that gets, however awkwardly, at that overpowering sense of 'thereness' that we all look for but only briefly experience when the odor of a freshly cut weed or the sight of a bit of typography or a fast-food sign briefly calls back the tangible sensation of a moment -- or, more properly, the feeling of life itself that we are always going out of our ways to tamp down, smother and forget."