JIMMY CORRIGAN: THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH 323
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Th e story of the lonely Jimmy Corrigan reveals itself
to be a multi-generational saga of poor fathers and their traumatized sons, pondering in
form and content (with the past echoing in the present) how a cycle of emotional abuse
repeats itself. Often, as well, the tedium of Jimmy’s life is off set by his imagination,
depicted for the reader through fantasies of revenge and rescue, the latter embodied by
a paunchy substitute for the defi nitive comic book superhero, Superman, who weaves
his way through the story as another ultimately disappointing father fi gure, and even
perhaps a fl awed stand-in for God.
While the sad story of Jimmy Corrigan is itself moving, Ware’s text achieves its impact
through the juxtaposition of its consistently elaborate form and its often emphatically
mundane and un-dramatic content; while some readers have found that the formal vir-
tuosity of the work overwhelms the story, the praise heaped upon Ware’s graphic novel
seems to acknowledge that it eff ectively employs devices unique to comics to achieve its
meanings. Among other techniques, Ware continually uses writing as both language
and image, and draws upon unexpected graphic models, ranging from architectural
drawings (associating the grid of comic panels to the facade of a modern offi ce building)
to industrial fl ow charts, to affi liate his comics with a larger context of spatial and tem-
poral representations. What would be minor moments in a conventional narrative thus
become occasions for tour-de-force visual sequences in Ware’s text.
While it includes mordant humor, for some readers Jimmy Corrigan is too relent-
lessly grim to enjoy, and Ware seems to purposely withhold easy sympathy for the
pathetic Jimmy, whose extreme passivity can become frustrating. However, one of the
work’s singular achievements is to treat with unusual precision the quiet emotions of
a deeply wounded family in a form that is consistently visually dazzling. As in Ware’s
other work, the meticulous design of the comic extends to all the features of the book
itself, including the hilarious but self-lacerating notes that require a magnifying glass
to read. Th e original hardback edition of the book also includes an elaborate dust
jacket, designed by Ware, that unfolds to provide a virtual cosmology of the book it
was meant to protect.
Th ough it is rarely noted, Jimmy Corrigan also honestly addresses the uncomfort-
able role racial diff erence continues to play in contemporary America, when Jimmy
discovers his African American half-sister. Unlike the relatively rare comics that tackle
American racism directly, Jimmy Corrigan eff ectively demonstrates the confusion that
racial identity poses when it intersects with the identity provided by family.
Notes at the end of the book confi rm that the story resonates with Ware’s own: in an
astonishing link to the reader’s own experience, he notes that the time it takes us to read
his book approximates the full time he spent with his own father in their single meeting
as adults, and Ware even suggests that the shape of the book he has crafted resembles
the box that held his father’s ashes after he died shortly after Ware had chronicled the
death of Jimmy’s father. Ultimately, Jimmy Corrigan is one of the few comics that, despite
Ware’s persistent self-deprecation, fully deserves its prestigious identifi cation as a
graphic novel, given its full attention to typography, color, drawing, and design elements,
