indefinite articles

This week: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Editor’s note: Marco is a relative neophyte to the world of art comics, and this Long Haul serves as an experiment, a chance to see Chris Ware’s comics with a set of fresh eyes. But some context here for the similarly uninitiated: perhaps the most important graphic novel of the past ten years, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is the generational successor to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Hailed by The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl as the “first formal masterpiece” of the medium, Jimmy Corrigan is sure to be a touchstone in the discussion of comics as the artform continues to develop in the coming years. And now, Marco digs in …

I love Chris Ware’s art style and storytelling. This isn’t the superficial love of an adolescent with his first girlfriend - my acne has long since cleared up and my voice hasn’t cracked in over a week! Rather, this is a mature love, filled with complex emotions, respect, and—like any true relationship—criticisms.

But, of course, this is not real love, because there is no true reciprocity. There’s no two-way communication. The pages I read don’t find me the least bit interesting, nor do they want to get to know me. They don’t say, “enough about me, what about you?” But to say we don’t have a conversation isn’t quite true. Indeed, the pages seem to ask, “enough about me, what do you think about me?”

There aren’t too many pieces of art or literature that can engage my sensibilities quite like The Acme Novelty Library, especially Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (originally printed in issues #5, 6, 8-14). Call me dense, but when I go to a museum, I wonder how long I have to stare at a painting before I can move on without being judged. But when I look at Jimmy, something gets stirred. I feel his crushing depression, his anger, his guilt towards his mother, his anger, his anxiety, his lust, his anger, and his disappointment in an unfulfilled life. I feel all this because in order to know what is going in the story, I have to feel.

Self-projection is a necessity in Ware’s novels thus far. As I have said in my last entry, the reader is left to fill in the blanks in order to give life to the drawings on the page. If the book in the reader’s hands is the work’s body and mind, than the reader him/herself is the soul of this narrative.

Right from the start, Jimmy feels like a person. As a child, he idolizes Superman. His excitement is almost uncontainable when his mother drives him to an auto show where he finally meets his hero—or at least the actor who plays the superhero on television. And we soon find out that Superman is indeed a man when he meets Jimmy’s mother. The next morning, Jimmy encounters Superman in the kitchen as he is making his exit.

Young Jimmy meets his childhood idle.

Later in Jimmy’s life, he will be witness to a second exit from his beloved caped superhero, as a suicide jumper dressed in the signature costume leaps off a tall building in a single bound. The ideal figure’s death is poetic, coming almost immediately after Jimmy is contacted by his father. The resulting feelings of shock mixed with anxiety, and who knows what else, from this double whammy causes Jimmy to disassociate from his consciousness and take on the form of an alien robot. Weirder yet, later he has violent, homicidal dreams, as well as daydreams of killing his father after picturing Father mounting Mother.

An older Jimmy talks to his mother on the phone after witnessing Superman plunge to his death across from his office window.

How do I know all this? Some of it was pretty straightforward. There’s no other way to interpret a bloody violent scene. However, the motivation, emotions, and psyche are mine. I interpreted the actions as Oedipal, not just because that’s how my brain works, but also because of the subtle techniques employed by Ware to drive my interpretations.

For example, Ware only shows you Jimmy’s face or the face of father figures. Women, his mother, fictitious brothers, onlookers, and passerby’s are always concealed. This does two things: 1. Create the feeling of isolation. 2. Identifies the relationship Jimmy longs for the most. Another method used to make the reader experience Jimmy’s psyche are jarring transitions between fantasy and reality. This is especially effective when Jimmy’s fantasy involves him being in love, only to wake up to a reality where the object of his affection has nothing but contempt for him.

Brief glimpses of Jimmy sporadically meeting his father over the years.

These methods, and Ware’s distinctive style are designed to evoke. There are no paragraphs describing in fine detail how isolated Jimmy is, nor are there caricatured expressions meant to articulate emotion. Instead, emotional and psychological peaks and valleys are reflective of the reader’s own internal topography. This begs the question, how would someone emotionally inexperienced interpret Jimmy Corrigan? Although I probably won’t get an answer any time soon, I figured the important thing was to ask.

Next time: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth continued.