Chris Ware is one of the most unusual writers in the comic industry so far, who experiments with forms and panels in order to convey his personal emotions and feelings (well, at least it seems on the first glance). His works do follow a comic standard, ignoring or deconstructing its patterns, thus some researchers called this genre of strategy as a “meta-comic”. However, it is significant that Ware is always open and honest with the reader, using the huge potential of subjective narration for exploring his emotions, experience, and specific philosophical ideas. In this regard, the subjective narrative of Ware requires breaking the classical structures of panels, expanding the limits of this genre. Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is a great example of subjective narrative where Ware tells the dramatic and sad story of a boy, who is searching for his father in this lonely world.

Ware tries to convey a sense of loneliness and isolation due to the minimal design of buildings and interiors, creating a contrast between Jimmy’s world and the surrounding reality. In this context, Jimmy differs from superheroes since he cannot change the world in which he lives. He has no super power and skills, thereby has to rely only on himself in searching of his father. Ware needs to change the design of reality in order to transfer Jimmy’s existential isolation. For example, the author shows that is always difficult to be in one’s interior for Jimmy, designing the surrounding space as an isolate cage. It seems that all the surrounding objects are hostile to Jimmy, disturbing and throwing him in frustration.

The innovation of Ware’s subjective narration is that he designs the panels with different objects accordingly to the main theme, changing their usual functions and meanings. Ware often isolates these objects in the small frames, without combining into a single narrative, but “throwing” them into the same discourse of Jimmy’s alienated identity. The biggest paradox is that Ware uses the rational and thought-mesh panels, depicting the theme of despair and disorientation within them. In this regard, the subjective narrative may include the panels without verbalisation as it often happens during the story. Hence, cold rooms, big houses, food, clothing, and cities are the elements of subjective narrative, where the main task is to express Jimmy in both space and time.

Following this, things and objects reveal the vulnerable world of Jimmy as a “footsteps” of his tragedy as an individual, encouraging the reader to reconstruct their meaning independently. For example, Ware often uses different types of sections, ignoring the linear structure of storytelling, when parallel panels can develop the same story from opposite focuses, uniting both present and past, real and imaginative settings (p. 61). This principle breaks the classical type of storytelling, but also activates McCloud's of closure, giving more freedom for imagination. Following this, Ware does not limit the reader in the process of interpretation, when everyone can add mentally frames inside the panel. At the same time, Ware isolates Jimmy from the world by the specific design of panels and interior, showing that the things have lost its logical connectivity, thus cannot express a certain order. This idea refers to Jimmy, who also cannot bind and identify himself with the world, and it processes "as an ongoing process filled with errors and corrections” (Bennett and Jackson). In this regard, the reader should design and shape Jimmy’s story on his/her own as well as the character’s identity, involving both verbal and visual patterns.

I also would like to add that Ware perfectly uses the visual potential of text, creating additional comments about the main replicas in the form of a meta-textual game. This strategy allows not only to extend a comic, but also to transfer the subjective narrative though both verbal and non-verbal components. The most popular method is a game with text on different spatial surfaces (p. 188), when Ware breaks the classical textual replicas according to his visual pattern. For example, the author often places his text on the walls and ceiling, commenting the specific elements of narrative. On the one hand, it refers to the narrator's voice, which helps to deal with Jimmy’s broken identity. It means that Ware’s meta-text does not only tell a story, but also visualizes it, creating different associations and emotions. The text mainly plays an aesthetic function, expressing joy or depression. Thus, Ware creates a collection of fonts, which design the subjective narrative, strengthening and directing it from point to point.

Following this, Ware’s use of meta-textual game also allows him to reflect the subjective narrative in the context of signs and symbols. Accordingly, the narrative scripts are placed on the street panels, boards, screens, and traffic signs. In this regard, Ware through reveals different levels of Jimmy’s life though the meta-textual discourse, creating a series of comments and images. Cook refers to McHale’s idea of double content, being "both about the story and being about the process storytelling" (p. 258), mixing both the real world and the subjective narrative. Consequently, the reader should not only combine such statements, but also select the most appropriate type of narrative for understanding Jimmy's life. This practice may be the complicate one for the reader, because these signs may have different interpretations. However, Ware always enters them in a certain context that shapes one's interpretation. For instance, the most notable meta-textual game an extensive scheme of family history includes a large ball in the center and a complex series of different buildings, ships, European immigrants, and African slaves (p. 119). All these images are interconnected by a series of arrows and lines, directing the reader into one direction. It means the process of reading reflects the main principle of a meta-textual game, where one should decode a story, involving both personal experience and cultural background.

To summing up, Ware tells the dramatic and emotive story of Jimmy Corrigan, visualizing his personal experience of searching his father due to the subjective narrative. Hence, the comic deals with the principles of fiction since explores a linear story. However, Ware also uses the uncommon and even experimental techniques in order to transfer Jimmy’s feeling of loneliness in the big world. He practices a minimalist design in different variations, where the main goal is to show the idea of disorder and alienation.

I have read this 3-4 times but never felt ready to review it in the manner it deserves. . . and am still not quite ready. This is a great work, maybe the very work that catapulted Ware into the upper reaches of the comics hierarchy. Ware, one of the 4-5 most influential and greatest comics writers in the world, started this graphic novel with the intention of doing a summer of strips in 1995 for an alternative mag here in Chicago, New City, where it was buried where comics are still usually buried, in the want ads section. The work is framed by insightful and snarky and hilarious notes about comics and literature written as if they might in part be addressed to a decades ago audience, but they are appropriate for today.

The afterward is also amazing, making it clear that this work is his attempt to move beyond the alt comics he had been doing to venture into semi-autobiographical fiction touching on issues regarding his absent father, who after decades, finally met with him. His account of the writing and meeting with his actually father is terrific and insightful and typically, for Ware, self-deprecating. But he doth protest too much, of course (his sort of mentee friend Seth does this, too, this apologizing for his work as crappy. We, the unwashed, are wanting because we fail to see the flaws in the work, and maybe they are there, but there is so so much more that is unflawed and brilliant, trust me).

This is a pretty bleak multigenerational work that mostly deals with the effects of emotional loss and abuse for a series of men and their sons--great grandfather, grandfather, father, son. The mothers play supporting roles and a daughter figures in later. There's the always Mondrian-like exquisitely drawn lines of buildings and furniture, and the repetition of things like broken legs and sniffing and sad faces, year after generation, all bespeaking a kind of sad progression, a kind of sadsack Charle Brown world, but for adults, and sans jokes. And grim accounts of terrible fathers who beget terrible fathers, sexist men, racist men, from the late 1890's through 1990's. Hard to read in places, but fascinating in its Theodore Dreiserian way, its depiction of how lost and damaged so many people are. Sister Carrie's got nothing on this book for sheer sadness and depiction of the deep loneliness of life for so many people.

But the effect is epic, and powerful, if sad. And there are surprising moments of redemption, and some deep emotion after so much silence and silencing and constraints. Emotion comes out of all the constraints, all the orderly neatly constructed repetition, I think, the limits, the neatly and careful drawn limits on lives he depicts so meticulously. Highly recommended, a classic, One of the greats as a kind of pair with Building Stories, also by Ware; that one deals with (also sad) women instead of men. Seth, Chet Brown, his friends, all sadsack storytellers, help us see the lives of people we don't read about in much fiction. The people who pass us on the street, usually unnoticed.

I purchased this book after a professor of mine said that she read it, didn’t understand it, and hated it. Another student in the class said that she too had read it, and hated it but also that I would probably like it. I am proud to report that she was correct, I did like this book quite a bit.
Ware’s page layouts are absolutely remarkable and the focus on quotidian minutiae is remarkable in that it doesn’t get boring. The protagonist is a completely unremarkable man, someone who the reader is meant to hate. A passive misogynist, he is symbolic of the many American man-children that walk among us. Yet, his relationships with his parents are remarkably moving despite our contempt for him.
The lengthy flashback sections are at times tedious but they unfold beautifully and the way the ending ties everything together is impressive. In fact, the ending made my jaw drop in its amazing linking of the various narrative tracts. The book explores toxic masculinity as a hereditary trait, passed through four generations of unremarkable men.
I won’t say any more about the book, as it is better to let its serendipitous twists and turns unfold for yourself. I will say two more things: 1.) you need to come to this book armed with a magnifying glass as Ware fills multiple pages to the absolute brim with words and images. 2.) the prof that hated this book said that it was “300 pages of a guy watching tv.” A puzzling statement as I don’t believe the protagonist watches TV even once during the rather lengthy book.

This is a five star graphic novel , so I am giving it five stars. However, I hated it. Well, no, I didn’t hate it, I hated reading it. So I am abandoning it with relief.

The great thing about this book is the brilliant graphic concepts which dazzle and delight on every other page. They are really stunning.

The unreadable thing about this book is its subject matter, which is the life of a miserable loner with a bullying father examined in very great painful detail. Rarely has a book been so original in its presentation and so painfully banal in what it's talking about. Moreover, Jimmy is saddled with this horrible face with a single woebegone expression in every panel. I don’t think he is allowed to smile in the whole 380 pages. I would reproduce Jimmy’s visage here so you could see what I mean but then my review would have the painful balding cringing circular kisser looking out at me and frankly if I never see Jimmy Corrigan again in this life it will be a blessing.

This book is so going to Oxfam, as fast as its little feet will carry it.

Chris Ware se debe de querer muy poco para haber inventado a su alter ego Jimmy Corrigan y contarnos una historia tan patética. De todos modos, se agradecen las notas de humor (negro, por supuesto) y no es difícil sentir ternura por el Jimmy niño, y por esos personajes tan solos y desamparados. Incluso en las últimas páginas nos endulza la narración con un mínimo esbozo de esperanza.

La composición es uno de los aspectos más llamativos del cómic, a pesar de que es difícil seguir la secuencia de la narración y de que el uso de una letra y viñetas tan minúsculas dificultan la lectura. Sin embargo, creo que el dibujo y los colores son preciosos, y Chris Ware juega poéticamente con el espacio (los espacios abiertos y solitarios de Norteamérica, como en los cuadros de Edward Hopper) y el tiempo (melancólicas lluvias y nevadas, que potencian la soledad de los personajes-) sirviendo de marco emocional para las ensoñaciones y recuerdos del pasado de Jimmy Corrigan.

The art gets six stars, but the content deserves less than zero stars. Hence, a generous 3.

Chris Ware is the Johann Sebastian Bach of drawing graphic novels pages, but when it comes to the stories he chooses to tell - the HORROR, the HORROR! Someone else should have written the script for him, and let the author do only the drawings.

This semi-autobiographical story about a character who is the caricature of insecurity is not endearing, not warm-hearted, not empathetic, not interesting, not inspirational, and not even "sad" or "depressing", like many reviewers say it is, because that would imply that this work is able to elicit some kind of emotion or empathy. Instead, it's only atrociously frustrating and boring.

The reader is made into a psychiatrist who has to listen to this guy (not the character, mind you, the author!) whine about the total lack of joy in his life. God help us!

Flipping through the magnificent panels, amazed by the breath-taking minimalist beauty of each page, you are in awe at the visual marvels while at the same time you literally cannot wait for this guy to shut up. Just. Stop. Whining.

Despite the sophistication of the surface, I also found this work very superficial. There is great depth only in how the appearance of things is analyzed.

I very much preferred the content of the more recent "Building Stories" by the same author, where the main character, despite being another sad sack, is presented in much more depth.

In this interview, we get a glimpse of the author's convoluted and woodyallenish personality:

"I grew up as an only child, emotionally impaired; I hated myself, everybody hated me, etc. etc. I had never met my real father and it kind of lodged in my brain like this weakness, this emotional weakness; I thought, “Someday I’ll meet him,” you know. We Americans are really weak people. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but we like to whine about ourselves and feel like we’re put upon, even though we are destroying half the world just so that we can be comfortable. But anyway, I’ve grown up in America, so I guess I got that mental trauma. I did this story as sort of an experiment: “What would it be like if I had my real father?” And of course in the middle of working on the story, he actually called me up. So one day I was suddenly talking to my real father and I got to meet him once, briefly, before he died right before I finished the book. So that was the initial emphasis for the story. And in working on it I thought about how families and lives interact in ways that we are both aware of and unaware of, so… but as far as a theme to the book, I didn’t really have any specific idea or anything that I was trying to communicate — I was just trying to get at this sort of possible richness of life as I’ve experienced it on the page."

1. His statement about Americans being really weak and whiny people might be (I don’t know) a projection of himself.

2. Unsurprisingly, for this book he had NO plan in mind or subtext. He just said / wrote what he felt about himself as he went along. Just like when you sit in front of your psychiatrist. Not good. Not good at all.

Here is another interview:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

Numbers 14:18 t
‘The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation."

This is a devastatingly heart-breaking read.
A book about generations of men in a family who have been abandoned, psychologically abused, neglected, overlooked, forgotten, all with parents who should never have bred. The result is Jimmy, emotionally stunted, a fabulist who dreams of escape, suicide or homicide and who is a nowhere man living a nowhere life.

Jimmy, at 36 is going to meet his father for the first time. This awkward meeting soon morphs into a tragedy but in the meantime, he gets to meet his grandfather and half-sister whose lives are almost as stagnant and lonely as Jimmy's. All the while, Jimmy is being tormented by daily calls from his possessive and weird mother. There is no one, except the sister Amy, who we can like.

Chris Ware says that this story is semi-autobiographical and I feel so sad that that is true. He paints a family history of broken, neglected men leading hauntingly hollow and lonely lives. Woah, not for the faint-hearted.

Reading and seeing what happened to these men as children is like having someone stick a knife in your heart and twist it. Jimmy, his father William, and his grandfather James all look the same as little boys and as they grow up into men. And their history of abandonment and abuse is similar, the cycle repeating itself. What happens to those little boys who are unloved and un-nurtured, well, we see it all around us, don't we? Some grow up bitter and nasty, some grow up lonely and pathetic.

The artwork is fabulous. The text, at least in my copy of the book, was so tiny that I had to get a magnifying glass to read it, but it is brilliantly, realistically poignant.

I have read Schopenhauer, Ligotti, Michelstaedter, Zaffe, Benatar, Perry, Gray, as many of the pessimist philosophers as I can. No one has illustrated more brilliantly than Chris Ware why life is just not alright, and no one has so clearly made the argument (although I don't think Ware was mounting this argument) for why people should stop breeding.

Storia di rara cupezza e disperazione, raccontata in maniera oggettiva ma non distaccata e con grande approfondimento contestuale e storico (soprattutto nei salti nel passato). Il disegno di Ware è unico per la cura e l'attenzione dei dettagli. Proprio in relazione a questi ultimi, una nota idealmente rivolta all'editore (forse anche all'autore, in quanto non conosco l'edizione originale): sarebbe stato bello poter leggere il libro in un formato un po' più grande.

An aimless tale about the world's meekest fellow. Its true crime is how depressing it is, almost until it becomes a weapon against all beauty.

I couldn't handle a lot of the topics that came up in this, but the ending did tie things together well for me

horribly boring.

A work of genius. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I was blown away. It's a slice-of-life tragedy streaked with tentative hope and a fundamental understanding that we all sort just have to get on with it. I definitely shed a tear or two at the ending.

To me this is a story about how trauma trickles down through generations of a family. Starting with Jimmy's great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, the pain each father passes on to his son leaves the next one to follow in as bad or worse shape. This pattern eventually leads us to our hero, Jimmy Corrigan, a pathetic man in his late 30's living in modern day Chicago. Jimmy is a painfully passive protagonist, and his insecurities paralyze him from social interaction. Though I struggled with his inability to express himself, he became a rich emotional lens through which I watched the real story unfold.

For me, the real triumph of this novel was the interwoven history of Jimmy's grandfather growing up during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It is an honest, bittersweet depiction of childhood where you see Jimmy's grandfather grapple with his abusive dad, first love, bullying, and grief. I connected to his character is such a deep way. I was seriously speeding through the real time plot just to get see what happened to him next.

Highly recommend, especially if you're at all interested in comics and illustrated narratives. There is no one that surpasses the artistic talent of Chris Ware.