The book turns on Jimmy's journey to the city to meet his father for the first time at the age of 36. The trip reveals that his grandfather was just as defeated by the world as he.

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? The Jimmy of the title is a prematurely aged office dogsbody, blowing around Chicago with only fantasies to keep him company. He is shrunken in on himself, round-shouldered and hunched as if to present the smallest possible target. He has tiny, droopy eyes, never meets a gaze, has no small talk or social graces. The only person who even tries to connect with him is his mother, and Jimmy finds her such a burden that he buys an answering machine to keep her at bay.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 The Guardian First Book Award, 2001, "the first time a graphic novel has won a major UK book award," according to the Guardian. [5]

Although the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif loved Ware's visual elan, she found the storytelling "self-conscious and rather self-indulgent". 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? Gradually Ware shifts the focus to Jimmy's grandfather James, one of those desiccated old men who are too stubborn to die. He's grouchy, insensitive, vaguely racist. But by the time we know him as an adult, we have met him as a child and it's impossible to despise him. Little James's mother dies in childbirth, he makes enemies like most children make friends, and to his strap-happy father he is a "goddamn little son of a bitch". 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

The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001 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? 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: 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? Jimmy Corrigan is a meek, lonely thirty-six-year-old man who meets his father for the first time in the fictional town of Waukosha, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is an awkward and cheerless character with an overbearing mother and a very limited social life. After an ill-timed phone call, Jimmy agrees to meet his father without telling his mother. The experience is stressful for him as he can barely communicate with anyone other than his mother, let alone his estranged father. The two do very little together and Jimmy's father, while well-intentioned, comes off to Jimmy as slightly racist and inconsiderate. A parallel story set in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows Jimmy's grandfather as a lonely little boy and his difficult relationship with an abusive father, Jimmy's great-grandfather.