Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon, 2003)«What kind of man walks out on his own child? Weak? Unhappy? Heartless? It's a question that nags away at the deserted kid. Was Dad really an out-and-out shit? Perhaps he just wasn't ready for responsibility. Perhaps Mum drove him away. Perhaps he thought everyone would be better off without him. Perhaps...
Chris Ware knew the question, but only part of the answer. His father disappeared for 30 years, blipped back into his life with a few phone calls and one uneasy dinner, then stood him up at what would have been their second meeting. Before he could get in touch again - assuming that was even in his mind - he died of a heart attack. As Ware notes here in his postscript, the four or five hours the book takes to read "is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the phone".
During the first, 30-year separation, Ware began to work out his anger and longing in a weekly comic strip, now brought together as a beautifully produced hardback. Two interleaved narratives, separated by convoluted dream sequences and forbiddingly detailed plans for cut-and-fold paper toys, depict the awkward meeting between a thirtysomething loser and the father he has never known; and, more than 80 years before, the abandonment of the father's own father by his father. The stories are simply drawn, without the gothic shadows and mad clutter of so many graphic novels, but the multiple timelines and digressions twist and slot together to form a structure as complex and improbable as any of Ware's paper toys "for the friendless, the weak of heart and the ignored".
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.
Jimmy has no memories of the man whose name he bears, and when one day the mail brings an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with him, his head is filled with hope, hate and fear. But what he finds in Michigan is neither a saint nor a devil, nor even a consistently inadequate parent. His father has brought up another child - and pretty well, to judge by the "Number 1 Dad" T-shirts she buys him. He can be unthinking and dull, but who can't? And he wants to make amends. He says it not with flowers, but with bacon: four strips of 100% US grade-A Country Morn that spell out the word "HI" on Jimmy's breakfast plate.
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".
One day James and his father visit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, climbing to an observation platform above one of the great halls. As the world stretches out below, the father mutters something and just walks away, never to be seen again. "He'd told me dozens of times that he didn't want me around, and that he'd never asked for a child in the first place," James later recalls. Jimmy's suffering and his father's delinquency suddenly shrink in scale.
This is a finely crafted, complex book that gets better with every chapter: Ware seems to have matured both as an artist and a person in the years it took to complete. While so many similar projects are little more than strings of striking images, Jimmy Corrigan forces you to pause, flick back a few pages and read again, rewarding you with another insight, another overdue connection. It is a rare and uplifting example of an artistic vision pushed to the limits.» - Phil Daoust
«Fathers hurt sons who grow up to be fathers who hurt sons, who grow up and have sons of their own. At the heart of Chris Ware's cartoon epic, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, are wounded men, and the reader is never allowed to forget the sadness and inhumanity that parental cruelty can breed.
Artist Chris Ware maps out three generations of Corrigans, from grandfather, to father, to son, all abandoned, with poor, lonely Jimmy left as the only Corrigan man yet to procreate and flee. Cold, cruel, confused and eventually absent fathers inhabit the book from early 20th-century Chicago to its conclusion, which is set firmly in the mall-ridden suburbia of modern America.
Chris Ware does not cut corners. "Jimmy Corrigan" had to have hurt like hell to have created, but the end result is worth it. Every panel bleeds craft and care — every crisp dot of ink on the pages is meant to be durable, revisited, explored and preserved. Ware's fine, clean lines and amazing sense of color balance mean that every page of "Jimmy Corrigan" is a microcosm — the detail is painstaking, breathtaking and overwhelming. In short, Chris Ware is an anachronism — a living, breathing resident of the 21st century with the craftsmanship instinct of a 19th-century Quaker artisan and the imagination of Picasso crossed with Charles Dickens.
What Ware's amazing sense of control and vision adds up to is an ideal vehicle for the conveyance of emotion and setting. When Ware wants us to feel like we're in turn-of-the-century Chicago, feeling warmth and love toward a friend's gentle, immigrant father, he is able to use his gifts for illustration to bring us there. The emotional immediacy afforded by cartoons is constantly exploited by Ware in his quest to take us through three generations of confusion and failed adaptation.
The emotional center of "Jimmy Corrigan" is a cartoon analogue of Radiohead's strongest disc, OK Computer — it's a book that catalogues and meditates upon the overwhelming sadness of a lonely, ordinary life in the context of a complicated world of strife and rich, poetic beauty. "Jimmy Corrigan" doesn't draw its emotional momentum from a single, romanticized artist's concept of a tragedy; rather, it swells up from a foundation of hundreds of tiny slights, embarassments, snubs, unpleasant surprises and everyday humiliations that add up to an overwhelming burden of sorrow and isolation.
Painfully personal, breathtakingly illustrated and deftly written, "Jimmy Corrigan" has a soul-crushing grandeur and attention to minute detail that demands a second, third and fourth reading.
Some pieces of art, literature and music survive into the decades and centuries to come. Among the bits of 20th-century knowledge that may make the leap are two collections of cartoons. One is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a breathtakingly engaging and nuanced cartoon document of the Holocaust. Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan is the other.» - James Norton
«Jimmy Corrigan, the protagonist of cartoonist Chris Ware's epic monument to communication breakdown and the mundane surrealism of ordinary life, is neither smart nor a kid, though he is indubitably on earth. Wispy-haired, pear-shaped, potato-faced and prematurely middle-aged at 38, he is a quintessential nebbish, the barren butt-end of a dysfunctional dynasty of cowed, confused men, lost in America.
While the comic book has been dominated ever since its inception in the 1930s by superheroes, its ancestor, the newspaper strip, was always a far more eclectic beast. Though Superman or as close to Superman as Ware can get without provoking Time Warner's regiments of copyright lawyers appears as a recurring motif of Jimmy's inner landscape, Chris Ware's creative roots reach all the way back to the late 19th century, where, indeed, crucial sections of his story are set.
This exquisitely packaged graphic-novel edition of the strip, which ran in Ware's own Acme Novelty Library for most of the 1990s, has been hailed as a masterpiece, and rightly so. Ware has been praised for the acute psychological insight of his writing, for the crisp, pellucid elegance of his art and design, and for his formal innovations, not least the dizzying variety of graphic idioms and narrative through-lines set in different time-periods, which he juggles with awesome self-assurance.
Dave Eggers, one of Ware's most enthusiastic cheerleaders, hails him as "the most versatile and innovative artist the field has known" and this book as "arguably the greatest achievement of the form". This should come as no surprise, since much of the attention attracted by Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was attributable to the elaborate conceptual machinery with which he scaffolded what was a fairly conventional, and highly approachable, narrative.
By contrast, Ware's own conceptual machinery manifested most ostentatiously in a blizzard of text pieces, diagrams and self-assembly models and dioramas is far from being a delightful bolt-on extra. It is organically as much part of the work as his lustrous, crystalline colours and haiku-like narration: "And while he might have readied himself for harsh words, rough handling or even a slap nothing prepared this boy for the unchecked sobs of a child anticipating the imminent loss of his mother."
Reduced to plot outline, Jimmy Corrigan could scarcely be simpler. Child-man wage-slave Jimmy, working in a generic cubicle job in Chicago, living with his tyrannical mother and fantasising about a never- happen relationship with the mailroom girl, receives an air ticket from his estranged father, absent since childhood. He flies to Michigan and meets not only his dad Billy, but his grandfather, also Jimmy, who was himself abandoned as a child by his father during the Chicago Columbian Exhibition of 1893. He also meets Amy, the black adoptive stepsister of whose existence he had previously been unaware.
Swamped by a succession of tragicomic disasters, a man who has never quite come to terms with his own humanity must recognise the humanity of an Other (black, female) in order to cope with the humanity of the father whose absence had blighted his life. Not surprisingly, the strip began in part as an attempt by Ware to work out his feelings towards his own estranged father.
So far so plain, and so soapy. Except that it isn't. In Ware's world, lost boys grow up (or fail to do so), turning into lost men. Grey waves of depression cascade endlessly down though lost generations. No feel- good endings here: what prevents the bleakness of Ware's vision from overwhelming the reader in a flood of cosmic pessimism is the sheer craftsmanship, imagination, inventiveness and compassion with which it is realised.
Periodically, a new graphic novel or strip is lauded as helping to transform comics into literature. George Herriman, Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and the Hernandez Brothers have already demonstrated that there is no reason why comics cannot attain this stature. Chris Ware now joins this select company, and Jimmy Corrigan merits the fullest and most immediate attention of comics aficionados and sceptics alike.» - Charles Shaar Murray
«The art of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is deceptively simple at a glance, but the book contains a surprising amount of emotional depth. It's hard to believe that something featuring such cute artwork could be so insanely depressing, but Chris Ware's autobiographically inspired story is one of the saddest things I've read all year. And it's not that there's a sappy, tear-jerker ending or anything like that - it's just that the lives of the two central characters are so depressingly horrible that it's hard not to feel empty upon completing the book.
I'm not trying to scare you away from reading it, because it's one of the best comics I've ever encountered, but I'm giving you a disclaimer so you don't look at the art and approach it with the wrong expectations. Ware's style may be minimalistic, but his simple little faces convey more emotion than many "realistic" art styles I've seen. He gives the design of the book plenty of visual flair with his inventive layouts and page design. The only complaint I have about it is that sometimes his page layouts can be hard to follow (sometimes he includes helpful arrows, sometimes not) - even I, an avid comic reader for 25 years, had trouble figuring out the panel order on some pages, so novice readers may find themselves adrift in the pages here and there.
Also, the first time we jumped back in time to the grandfather's childhood, it took me a while to figure out that this was a different character--primarily because Jimmy-the-youngest has an active fantasy life, often escaping his miserable existence by imagining himself in all manner of different situations. Once you get the hang of it though, the story is easy enough to follow, and it's impressive that Ware managed to turn it into a cohesive story when, according to the afterword, he started it off as a sporadic serial and didn't know where the story was going to end up initially. It's also interesting to note that while the story is not directly autobiographical, there are some rather strange unplanned similarities (all explained in the afterword) between the author's life and Jimmy's.
At times, flashing back and forth, it's hard to decide which Jimmy had the worse life--they were both homely, unpopular children who had the appearance of baldness at a very early age--one had an abusive, neglectful father, and the other had no father figure present in his life at all. In the end I think that the elder Jimmy's childhood was crappiest, but younger Jimmy's adult life is about as cheerless as it could get. But both depressing lives bear about the same emotional weight. This is not a fun book by any measure, but it's the kind of thing that after reading it, you'll be damn glad that you did.» - Protoclown
«Imagine a cultural landscape where cinema is considered nothing more than a medium to display sensationalistic visual effects: from the onrushing train of the Lumière brothers to Imax; where prose fiction is seen as nothing more than a vehicle for romantic fantasies of haute société; where no one can be convinced that television is good for anything but live transmissions of grand events and glorifications of consumer culture. Imagine a world where the worst exemplars of a medium are de facto considered the best that medium can achieve. Imagine no one taking Polanski's Chinatown seriously because of Verhoeven's Robocop. Imagine J.G. Ballard being ridiculed because his chosen medium is the same as Danielle Steel's. Imagine Joss Whedon's subversive and hip Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Michael Moore's irreverently angry The Awful Truth being treated like nothing more than clones of Beverly Hills 90210 or The Price Is Right.
Imagine that no one believed that comics could spawn anything but infantile talking animals, crude jokes and badly written superheroes. Imagine that no one recognized the staggering and prolific imagination of Jack Kirby, the bizarrely hilarious science fiction of Matt Howarth, the disturbingly ambiguous sexual musings of Dave Cooper, the anthropologically savvy speculations of Carla Speed McNeil, the unflinching reportage of Joe Sacco, the formal achievements of Alan Moore, the excitement of -- Oops. I forgot. That's this world. No one but comics geeks cares about any of these people and their work. To paraphrase John Lennon: Comics is the nigger of the art world. But every once in a while something happens (for example the success of Art Spiegelman's Maus) that threatens to free comics from its ghetto. The latest such event is the publication of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth.
In 1993, Fantagraphics - an American comics publisher dedicated to presenting works by a variety of visionary cartoonists - released the first issue of Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library. The cover copy included blurbs such as "An Indefensible Attempt to Justify the Despair of Those Who Have Never Known Real Tragedy" and "A Guaranteed Solace for the Economically Privileged" and "Where Art & Avarice Share the Same Telephone Line." The comic book featured a character called "Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth" who was neither a kid nor very smart.
The visual style evoked classic American comics strips from the early 20th century, creating a nostalgic aura of simplicity that lulled readers into a false sense of security. What followed was a mosaic of despair, loneliness and pathos, of hurtful memories and risible daydreams. And far from simple, the narrative techniques demanded that readers pay close attention, lest they be lost in a murky zone between reality and fancy or between panels with no idea where to go next. Chris Ware's work is widely considered to be the state-of-the-art in modern comics. He strives to create deeply layered stories in which irony and pain clash in every scene to result in a multiplicity of meanings and textures. Ware's comics are at least as rewarding as they are demanding.
Ware's reputation among the cognoscenti has been growing from year to year, as evidenced by the growing number of awards he's been reaping. For example, at the 2000 Harvey Awards (named after Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad), Ware was nominated in eight categories and won in an impressive total of six: Best Cover Artist, Special Award for Excellence in Presentation, Best Letterer, Best Colorist, Best Continuing or Limited Series and Best Single Issue or Story. It's important to note that Ware has earned the Special Award for Excellence in Presentation for six consecutive years now. Indeed, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of his comics, and certainly the one that prompts potential readers to browse through his comics, is Ware's innovative and -- I must emphasize - jaw-droppingly gorgeous use of design techniques not only for exterior and interior presentation but also imbedded into his narrative style. More than anything, it is Ware's sophisticated and synergetic use of design that makes his work fascinating comics and also one of the most arresting artistic achievements in recent years.
Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth is yet another Ware design triumph. It collects, along with a few other related tidbits, the long saga serialized in eight issues of The Acme Novelty Library from 1995 to 2000. It's the latest in a select series of comics albums from Random House/Pantheon (publishers of Art Spiegelman's Maus and of Ben Katchor's The Jew of New York). Jimmy Corrigan is the eponymous full-color, 380-page tale of a sad, socially inept man who visits his father after years of estrangement. The story that unfolds is an intricate mosaic that, with artful use of flashbacks, spans generations. The main protagonist is the current-day Jimmy Corrigan, but there's a secondary storyline, featuring Jimmy's grandfather -- also called Jimmy Corrigan -- set in late 19th-century Chicago.
Both Jimmys have a tendency to indulge in spiteful daydreams laced with absurd elements. Both are social pariahs greatly oppressed by their respective parents. Both are unsympathetic losers forever poisoned by fear, anger and -- most of all -- parental betrayal. They are so wrapped up in their own lives that they are incapable of any true feeling for anyone else, save spite and hatred and envy. Ware's story navigates with dreamlike logic between the two Jimmys and their respective fantasy lives.
On the one hand Ware ridicules his unsympathetic protagonists' shortcomings, but he also explicitly details some of the cruel and difficult circumstances which shaped them into what they are. Ware makes us laugh while pointedly underlining that this is no laughing matter.
Ware's meticulously slow pacing emphasizes his characters' social ineptitude. The book's social interactions are filled with long, uncomfortable silences. Jimmy Corrigan the younger, for example, is devastatingly bored and boring. He barely exists. He feels excluded from the pageant of life and it feeds his unexpressed and repressed bitterness. He could be a potential serial killer, except that he lacks the will for any kind of expression or action. He lets life push him around. He feels powerless to do anything about anything: his domineering mother, his obnoxious father, his abusive coworkers, his dull, dull, empty life.
Before the release of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware was mostly known by a core of die-hard comics aficionados who saw in his work a serious, dedicated, and -- above all -- visionary devotion to the art form. Now, with this handsome and hefty volume distributed in bookstores by one of the world's largest publishers, perhaps Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth will expand not only Ware's audience but also the perception of what comics can be and, as a result, the audience for comics. Dare I hope that the walls of the ghetto may finally come crashing down?» - Claude Lalumière
«James Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that his protagonist/alter ego’s aesthetics sought to create an art that neither attracted the audience nor repelled them. He sought, in some sense of the words, aesthetic arrest, a transcendent moment when the art would present itself unalloyed by emotion or even rationality and one’s true self would behold deep to the core the nature of Truth in Art.
As a reviewer, I am often touched by this notion. It sometimes seems to me unfair to review a piece I absolutely love or absolutely loathe prior to writing about it. Not that I don’t swallow this idealized piece of ethics and go ahead and write the review anyway, as reviewing is primarily about one’s own personal feelings and judgments about a piece. And there is, no doubt about this, a certain gleeful pleasure that you can take in getting behind a heap big wrecking ball to tear something up. Yet, having a love or hate for something, then reading or listening or watching it again with an eye toward writing a review feels a bit like cheating. I already know how I feel.
And perhaps that’s the biggest issue: feelings. When you have strong feelings one way or another for a piece, it can often interfere with your ability to deal out strong, honest critical analysis. At the same time, the duty of a critic is to say, “Oh yes, you absolutely must” or “Good heavens no” or even some sentiment in between. There just seems to be something inherently dishonest or less than honest perhaps about knowing long before finishing the second run of a work that I’m going to sit down and right a “Oh yes, you absolutely must” review.
All of that said, the moment you get done reading this review, turn off your computer, go outside, get in your car or on your bike, go to the nearest book store and buy Chris Ware’s innovative, moving, stunning, and powerful graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth.
Ware’s style, honed while writing and drawing strips for his college paper and for Chicago’s New City takes a bit to get used to. Often there are a multitude of very small panels crowding one page broken up by larger panels and the flow of these panels is idiosyncratic and rarely the same path twice. Your initial reaction to follow a standard top to bottom, left to right reading will be of use for most pages, but occasionally you will be forced to adjust. (This page from Random House’s online preview demonstrates this tactic alarmingly well.)
There are no less than three generations of Jimmy Corrigans in the course of this 380 page sprawling history of both the men sharing that name and the city, Chicago, they call home. Our main protagonist is the third such Jimmy. He is a shy man with, like most of us, a far more interesting fantasy life than real one. He lives alone in Chicago, harried by his domineering mother, when one surprising day his long absent and estranged father who he never knew calls him and invites him to come and visit. In the course of his visit, Jimmy will meet his father James and his grandfather as well. It is the first and the third Jimmy Corrigan who make up the bulk of the novel, while the second Jimmy plays a rather limited role, instigating the events without fully participating in them.
Through the eyes of Jimmy the grandfather, we see the Chicago of the late 1890s as the Great Columbian Fair is being constructed. He lives with his abusive father, William, a glazier, and his dying grandmother. The intrusion of this earlier plotline jars you out of an incredibly small cliffhanger from the story already underway of Jimmy the third alone in his father’s apartment in the small town of Waukosha. It is this turn-of-the-century story of abuse and abandonment that is the most touching of all the tales that fills this book.
What makes the work all the more remarkable is that Ware began writing it as a meandering reminisce on his own absent father in the pages of the New City before launching it as its own digest sized comic, and he began writing it with no clear story that he intended to follow. Improvisatory work often suffers from its own inability to shake or fully inhabit its shapelessness, leading a work to be either striving for form or uncomfortable in its own formlessness. Jimmy Corrigan is remarkably well structured and paced, perhaps more by the help of later tidying and editing, and each turn in the story feels perfectly like the outgrowth of what came before. As you see Jimmy’s relationships with his various parents, you understand why Jimmy the grandfather became the man he did and how that led his son to become the man he did and how James' divorce of Jimmy the third's mother and abandonment of his son led our protagonist into becoming the man we follow. There is an organic nature of each relationship being a progression from the earlier ones. These graphic characters become more real and three dimensional with fewer words than most novels use.
Ware’s work in all its various permutations is laced through with a terrible sadness and isolation. Jimmy Corrigan remains one of the saddest works I’ve read and it does it without the characters being knowingly self-conscious of their suffering, without ever once there being a tacit admission that one is unhappy in the greater scheme of things. This rather restrained acceptance of one’s misery is a far more moving testament to that misery than all the melodramas of self-pity many melancholic writers dole out.
Then there is the art itself. With such simple lines, Ware is able to tease out the finest nuance of loneliness, worry, anxiety, rage, and helplessness. The panels often have the heavy and brooding lines of woodcuts and the color palette underscores such fine grades of emotional shift. A sudden realization is punctuated by all background details dropping from the panel and a garish shock of red illuminating the characters. Memories from either long ago or only moments before are sketched out in a ghostly overlay, tweaked as memory often is by emotional highlighting. In one scene, while Jimmy the third sits in the hospital with his father and discovers he also has a sister, his father perhaps inappropriately jokes, “What… you thought you were the only mistake I ever made? Ha ha.” Minutes later, when his father steps out of the room, Jimmy sees him as a monochromatic outline, pointing at him and accusing: “You’re a mistake the only mistake I ever made, you mistake.” In this same earlier exchange, in the midst of answering one of his father’s almost badgering questions, Jimmy momentarily is rendered as a child, cringing in fear from a louder, older man.
Ware’s panels can go from almost bereft of any detail, just the silhouette of a shoe moving down the silhouette of a stair, to a full page breathtaking rendering of a giant exposition hall from the 1890s. One scene of Jimmy the third waiting in his father’s apartment is a triumph of free floating dread and discomfort rendered in the most mundane of markers: a digital clock face relentlessly ticking forward. In another, we are given a deprived child’s eye view of entertaining yourself.
Ware’s novel is hopefully a harbinger of things to come, a sign of life in the graphic novel industry that enjoyed a brief flourishing Renaissance in the late eighties and early nineties before the burgeoning market’s bottom dropped out. Innovative, intelligent graphic work for adults arrived farther and farther apart, while the bedrock of the American comics industry, adenoidal cases in ballet costumes fighting crime, regained their dominance. Between Ware and Daniel Clowes, the graphic novel in a serious, experimental, and literary form may possibly prove the vanguard into a sizable adult market. What Ware will do in the future I look forward to expectantly.» - latereviews.blogspot.com
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