The Museum of Miniature Found Objects is a great admirer of Chris Ware's work, from Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, to Quimby the Mouse. Ware marries the pictorial and narrative aspects of cartooning to great effect. He creates tautly rendered surfaces with an economy of line, and his narratives describe a world in which desperation is about the best anyone can hope for. It's the rift between the expectation of warmth and humour, an expectation created by the stylish deftness of the cartoons, and the bleakness pervading these beautifully rendered sequences that make this work spark. Quimby the Mouse's world is pervaded with slapstick, as the mouse attempts again and again, and fails again and again, to connect with others. Quimby is destined never to understand the futility of his endeavours, or his own agency in this futility.

Interestingly, Fred Quimby was the producer of MGM's Tom and Jerry cartoons from 1940 to 1955, and was noted for his lack of humour.

Here's another splendid cartoon by Berger & Wyse. According to their publisher Absolute Press, Joe Berger and Pascal Wyse met in a lift. Overcome by disappointment, they'd both stormed out of separate meetings with their respective agents who'd been struggling to find publishers for their cookery books. These ground-breaking works contained a thoughtful selection of condition-specific recipes (Wyse's Zimmer Gently: Recipes for the Elderly and Berger's Strain into a Bowl: Colonic Gastronomy). To see more of their work, click here.

The American cartoonist Saul Steinberg used a sparing two-dimensional line to observe the world around him and the artist within it. As well as producing many covers for the New Yorker over a sixty-year period, he created an elegant but illegible calligraphy, which he used to manufacture 'important' documents: certificates, passports, diplomas and licences. All were fake, and as a form of mockery of the self-importance of officialdom, they are superb, and as artworks quite beautiful. To see examples of these, click here.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects has admired André François, the graphic artist, for many years. His simple style belies a great skill, the kind that comes through many thousands of days spent drawing and drawing. This image was one of a series of four he produced for Citroën in 1960. What was so novel about these images is that it was almost unheard of at the time to advertise cars without actually having a car in the advertisement.

He produced many lovely images over a long working life. At the age of 87, in 2002, fire destroyed his studio, along with all his original work not held in public or private collections. Despite experiencing one of the worst things that can happen to an artist, he began again, and within a short period of time produced two major Paris exhibitions — Ordeal by Fire at the Centre Pompidou and a retrospective of posters and book-jacket designs at the Bibliothéque Forney. He died in 2005.