By Gabriel Roth

IN THE COMICS world, Chris Ware is universally acclaimed as one of the most talented cartoonists ever to practice the art. When his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth was published by Doubleday three years ago, the literary and art worlds fell for Ware as well: he received rave reviews in mainstream publications, along with the Guardian First Book Award and a spot in the Whitney Biennial. But much of his work's appeal is limited to the misunderstood minority of the comics-literate: he's like a world-class novelist writing in a language that only a few thousand people can read.

Jimmy Corrigan was accessible to readers with little experience of comics, perhaps because it resembles a literary novel. It tells the story of four generations of Corrigan men, all abusive, neglectful, or emotionally isolated. Ware uses the devices of literary modernism – sudden shifts from one era to another, close scrutiny of the minutiae of daily life – but never withholds the satisfactions of character, suspense, and pathos.

Readers who are new to comics will have a harder time with Ware's recent collection, Quimby the Mouse. Unlike Jimmy Corrigan, Quimby (which contains work from early in Ware's career) is dense and formalistic: it consists of apprentice pieces by a young genius determined to try everything that can be done in a page of comics. The result lacks the narrative depth of a novel but serves instead as a kind of field guide to pure comics, demonstrating expressive techniques that have no equivalent in any other medium. To a reader who's high on the form's possibilities, they're mind-blowing. To a reader whose experience with comics doesn't extend beyond Jimmy Corrigan, Ghost World, and Maus, they may serve as an immersion class in a brand-new language.

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There is something like a grammar of comics – a body of ways that pictures in a row can be made to signify. The fundamental rule of a comics page is that in comics, space equals time: pictures that are physically adjacent to each other are understood to follow one another chronologically. (The standard text on this is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.)

Starting from this principle, cartoonists have developed a rich formal vocabulary, making artistic use not only of the techniques of drawing and dialogue but also of the unique properties of panel-to-panel storytelling. Early filmmakers signaled changes of scene with slow dissolves and title screens; their contemporary successors employ jarring cuts and juxtapositions, confident that viewers will be stimulated rather than confused. Similarly, today's cartoonists have access to a sophisticated formal language. What they don't have is a broad audience that knows how to read that language. A reader with little comics experience who picks up a copy of Quimby the Mouse may feel like a 1930s moviegoer wandering into a screening of The Matrix.

Quimby apes the look of newspaper comic strips from the first few decades of the 20th century. Behind a baroque cover, it includes florid text pages, meticulous scissors-and-glue activities, and fake magazine ads. (Ware's old-fashioned prose voice and the attention he lavishes on such marginalia may remind readers of Dave Eggers, who has championed Ware's work – reviewing Jimmy Corrigan glowingly in the New York Times Book Review and commissioning the artist to design a mural outside the 826 Valencia tutoring center and to edit an upcoming issue of McSweeney's.)

The heart of the book is a series of full-page comic strips about an anthropomorphic mouse. Originally published in newspapers and in Ware's comic, The ACME Novelty Library, they're illustrated in a startling array of styles, from slick Disneyisms to spartan pencil scratches. (On one page, drawings and words have been crammed into tiny boxes with what appears to be a thick-nibbed felt-tip pen, as if Ware were trying to see how much he could disadvantage himself and still tell a story.) They're often wordless and almost always sad.

Sometimes Quimby the Mouse is locked out of his house; sometimes he remembers his dead grandmother. In some strips he consists of two mice joined together like Siamese twins, who struggle with age, sickness, and their unbreakable bond. In others Quimby keeps Sparky the Cat – a bodiless cat head – in a cupboard in his home. Sometimes he takes the cat head out for a picnic; sometimes he neglects it; sometimes he attacks it with an axe.

Each strip is a little scene of loneliness and disappointment, of kindness failing and narcissism triumphant. Ware's essentially tragic worldview, which in Jimmy Corrigan was expressed through fully drawn characters and family relationships, is here reduced to hieroglyphic stick figures and survives the translation undiminished.

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Ware uses these sad little fables as launchpads for explorations of technique and form. Here's a simple example, a brief sequence in which Sparky falls out of a window and bounces down a hill, from a much longer strip:

The background consists of a single curved line representing the hill. The line is continuous from panel to panel, suggesting that the frames are adjacent in space as well as in time. The reader's eye is both reading (one frame after another, left to right) and watching (following Sparky's trajectory). From the orientation of the cat's face, we can see him spinning. His position in successive panels indicates that he's picking up speed: each upward bounce carries him closer to the upper-right corner of the frame. These eight images contain nothing but a few lines and a sketched face, and yet, arranged in sequence, they convey acceleration and momentum and terror.

Another example, from a different strip. In his sleep Quimby has taken Sparky out of the cupboard and buried him in the yard. In the morning, having forgotten this nocturnal interment, he wakes, eats breakfast, and looks for Sparky. He can't find him. In this sequence we see his mounting anxiety as he searches the house for his companion.

Quimby's growing terror is conveyed by his body language, of course – contrast his posture as he checks the cereal box to the drawing of him standing next to the bed, balancing on his heels and bent at an angle. When he's really freaked, his feet leave the ground altogether, something Ware indicates with the suggestion of a shadow.

But that's just illustration. What's comics is the pacing – the way the scene accelerates as Quimby's panic rises. At the start he spends four panels at the breakfast table. By the time he gets to the bathroom, though, he's flinging aside the shower curtain in a single panel and then rushing on to the bedroom. Quimby's speed seems to increase because there's more activity for the reader to imagine between one frame and the next.

This imagining – this filling in the space between the panels – is a particularly intimate collaboration between artist and audience, of a kind that occurs only in comics. And our participation in that collaboration makes us susceptible to the strip's strange emotional power. Reading the page as a whole, it's impossible not to empathize with Quimby's mounting fear and guilt and Sparky's helplessness. Ware's mastery of these effects makes his work a powerful aesthetic experience, and one reserved for enthusiasts of this wonderful, marginal art form.

Gabriel Roth is a writer who lives in San Francisco.