A pretentious graphic novel for hipsters to feel intellectual. Not impressed. Boring, depressing and nonsensical. Go read Ulysses.

Una maravilla, tanto en términos técnicos como narrativos. Una historia sobre la opresión familiar, el sabotaje y la angustia. Me provocó ñáñaras — en el mejor de los sentidos: el de Kafka.

A five star book I can't recommend.

It takes 29 - TWENTY NINE - panels to show Jimmy’s dad buy a goddamn grape soda. From a machine.

Greatest graphic novel of all time?

More like most boring, overblown pile of maudlin horse shit of all time.

Eff you, Jimmy Corrigan.

I won't lie to you.

I spent days not liking this book.

Jimmy Corrigan is described by the author as "a lonely, emotionally-impaired human castaway."
You got that right!
He's also possibly the dullest man on Earth and Chris Ware does not skimp on the tedium. Panel after cartoon panel of people sitting in diners, doctors' offices, and hospital waiting rooms.
This is WAY too much like MY life.

Then we meet Jimmy's grandfather, a sad and lonely child, and his great-grandfather, who helped build the White City during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Suddenly, I was happy again. I loved their stories, though they were not always pleasant to read.

What a family of unhappy men.

The artwork in this book is spectacular. The colors are vibrant and contrast well with the sad doings occuring in the novel. The design and layout are creative. It even includes a zoetrope and tiny farm scene to cut out and play with. The little horse, and buggy, and coffin were really tempting, but I refrained as my copy belongs to the library.

The ending was quite satisfying, and ended up bringing a book I started out not liking, very close to five stars.

Prije desetak godina bila sam naišla na izjavu psihologa koji je pojašnjavao kako su traume odrastanja glavni razlog uspjeha stripovskih superjunaka – oni su fantazija koja djeci pomaže da kanaliziraju osjećaj poniženja i stalne podređenosti odraslima ili jačima od sebe, pa maštajući o super-moćima lijeće svoju nemoć i frustracije koje nisu ni trivijalne ni banalne kako smo ih ponekad u stanju doživljavati. To dokazuje i ovaj strip kroz sjajan portret tipičnog čitatelja stripa utjelovljenog u liku Jimmya Corrigana koji, unatoč tome što je odrastao muškarac, i dalje posrće pod teretom vlastite nemoći. Corrigan je stoga magnet za čitav niz glupih i ponižavajućih situacija koje u njemu proizvode predimenzionirane strahove i nelagodu s kojom se ne zna suočiti već ih potiskuje, zbog čega djeluje kao čudak i slabić.

Uz ovakav lik Chris Ware konstantno servira lik Corriganovog omiljenog junaka, Supermana. On se u stripu pojavljuje u liku samoubojice koji skoči s vrha susjedne zgrade odjeven u Supermanov kostim, kao kostimirani glumac koji nastupa na vašaru i zavodi njegovu mamu na jednu noć i kao div i kao letač u njegovim snovima, u svakom slučaju je konstantan statist u pozadini Corriganovih neslavnih avantura i konstantno podcrtava veličinu njegove nesposobnosti da pobijedi čitav niz sitnih neugodnosti za koje, objektivno gledano, nije potrebna preveliko herojstvo.

Jimmy Corrigan također je jedan u nizu od stripovskih junaka kojima je u fokusu problematičan odnos glavnog lika sa svojim ocem (kao što su i Maus, Zemlja otaca, Arapin budućnosti itd) Radnja se vrti oko toga da Corrigan u svojoj odrasloj dobi po prvi puta upoznaje svog oca i iako je ovaj ljubazan i drag, cijeli je događaj obojan notom silne nelagode. No, ne dotiče se samo njegovog odnosa sa ocem već i očevog odnosa s djedom i djedovog s pradjedom, tvoreći neslavan niz okrutnih očevskih figura i traumatičnih djetinjstava iz kojih je teško izrasti u odraslu osobu.

Način na koji je Ware koncipirao likove, stil pripovijedanja i crtanja konstantno nas drži na površini priče i ne dopušta da se zanosimo bilo čime, pa ni patnjom. U mediju koji je sklon građenju iluzija Ware razbija svaku iluziju i drži nas trijeznima, osim kada je u pitanju raskoš njegove kreativnosti, jer ovaj, kao i svi Wareovi stripovi u vizualnom pogledu konstantno izaziva uzdahe oduševljenja i očaranosti. Njegove palete su savršeno zaokružene i usklađene sa hladnim, čistim linijama koje drže kompoziciju svakog kadra i svake table pod apsolutnom kontrolom. Reduciranim crtežom i paletom uspijeva jasno prenijeti izgled arhitekture, pejzaža, interijera i ljudskih likova čak i kada su prikazani iz, primjerice, stražnjih poluprofila (odličan je detalj taj da nikada ne vidimo lice njegove majke s kojom očito ima jednako težak odnos). Zanimljivo je i da ne koristi stripovski prenaglašene gestikulacije niti uobičajenu stilizaciju očiju koja omogućuje velik raspon facijalnih ekspresija, čak i kretnje kojima se služi su vrlo suzdržane i bez velikih pomaka, stoga se govor tijela njegovih likova često prikazuje kroz mikroscene koje ujedno stvaraju sjajan dojam "praznog" vremena, onog u kojemu radnja ne žuri kako bi doživjela svoj vrhunac, već stoji ili se jedva da se pokreće, kao da je zaglavljena u dosadnoj liječničkoj čekaonici (u kojoj se radnja nekoliko puta zaista i odvija). Unatoč visoko stiliziranom okviru, Ware stalno pronalazi načina da uvede nove, kreativne rakurse, da se ne iscrpi i ne ponavlja, naročito kada su u pitanju arhitektonski elementi od kojih stvara izuzetno maštovite kompozicijske cjeline. Kroz cijeli strip očita je i njegova ljubav za ritam i za tipografiju koju uvodi i kroz naslove i podnaslove i u vedutama stripa u kojima rado iscrtava lijepo dizajnirane reklamne panoe restorana ili trgovina i piktograme saobraćajnih znakova.

This is essentially a graphic novel version of Confederacy of Dunces. The main character is a bland two-dimensional simpleton who has a depressing life. There is nothing entertaining about this story, nor informative. It is pointless. I cannot empathise with the character at all.

So essentially, if you thought Dunces was a masterpiece, you'll love this. For everyone else, steer well clear.

This book is the height of masculine arrogance, asking you to work twice as hard to unlock a tired narrative where you are asked to, once again, empathize with awkward misogynistic men. People who love this book will claim “you just didn’t get it” when in actuality it’s just not with the energy it asks you to expend. The way this book is designed from its size, to the cover art, to the text itself is meant to discourage you from continuing. It functions as a dare, only the highest minds will be able to find joy and meaning in this book that is designed to make you uncomfortable. Ware fails to give any compelling reason to keep reading. This book exists and is liked because of systems in place that ask us to give white men the benefit of the doubt. To understand them before we dismiss them—and this book does not deserve that courtesy. This book is only interested in being clever or misunderstood by anyone who doesn’t like it. Read anything else.

This is probably the most peculiar graphic novel I’ve ever read. It’s the story of Jimmy Corrigan, a sad-sack workaholic who, at 36, has no friends apart from his mother, who constantly telephones him. One day he gets a letter from the father he’s never met, asking him to come meet him. And so Jimmy gets on a plane from Chicago out to suburban Michigan.

Corrigan is one of those unfortunate-looking fellows who has a potato for a head and a wispy comb-over, and could be anywhere between 30 and 60; he looked little different as a child in the flashback scenes – somewhat like Charlie Brown, also in his depression, diffidence and inability to speak to women.

I much preferred the historical interludes looking at his grandfather (another Jimmy) and his years growing up in Chicago with the World’s Fair under construction. I also liked the more random additions such as patterns for cutting and folding your own model village or business cards with ‘scenic views’ of today’s Waukosha, MI on them.

Parental (verbal) abuse and neglect is a recurring theme, as are bullying from peers, car accidents, and Superman. There’s also an uncomfortable amount of imagined violence – either homicide or suicide.

(Included in my blog post “Graphic Novels for Newbies.”)

Jimmy Corrigan is one of the most depressing and one of the most esoteric comics I've ever read. Chris Ware is clearly a visual genius, depicting complex ideas on tragedy and the human mind in ways I have never seen done before. He favors tiny panels which often move in confusing directions, encouraging the reader's eye to lace in and out of the chronology in the same way the book slips between Jimmy's dreams, fantasies, and anxious fears. It's disorienting and turgid, like picking up Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow for the first time, and it perfectly suits the narrative content, which follows a 30-something manchild with just as little agency or confidence that he understands his own life.

Whether the experience is rewarding or not depends on your capacity for soul-crushing misery. The world of Jimmy Corrigan is casually cruel. Fathers give their sons advice on how to demean women to ensure they put out. They sneak out on single mothers after one-night stands or fire the maid they've knocked up. In the view from Jimmy's cubicle, a man dressed as a superhero dives to his death. In the story-within-a-story that follows Jimmy's grandfather (a nine year old at the time of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893), adults and children alike are worth practically nothing and behave shamelessly racist: little James refuses to befriend a "wop" boy, while his father recalls with mirth the story of how his own father stole the body of a black man to use as an anatomy model.

This vignette in the childhood of Jimmy's grandfather, while equally concerned with loneliness and abandonment, is still easier to stomach for its remoteness. Sure, little boys were beaten with belts, but it was a time of horse drawn carriages, dead and gone. The modern vistas of the present, however, are almost too horrible for words: desolate Dairy Queens, parking lots, silences, office workers who never speak to one another. Present Jimmy is too close to what we all fear we really are--ugly and awkward, navigating a world that will never need or comfort us--and the whole ordeal left me wanting to follow in that caped crusader's footsteps.

In lieu of an essay, some notes (with spoilers):

1. I both intellectually acknowledge the brilliance of this book and viscerally dislike it.

2. I bought it and began reading it in late 2000; I set it aside after about 100 pages and only took it up again—a library copy; I have no idea where mine is—two days ago. Back in 2000, when I was all of 18, I remember being immensely moved by some of those first 100 pages; Jimmy’s fantasy of being murdered by Superman, in particular, overwhelmed me. But the quality of pastiche—the design and visual storytelling echo early twentieth century comics and commercial art, from Winsor McKay to art deco—put me off, as I myself had no investment in those earlier aesthetics.

3. (Nor did I share Ware’s generational relation to Superman. The Superman of my youth was a sensitive, vulnerable, and humane citizen, a man of impeccable liberal sentiment in a romance of equals with a professional, feminist woman—he was not a punitive patriarch. But this is hardly Chris Ware’s fault; we were simply born in different years and grew up reading different iterations of the Superman character.)

4. Jimmy Corrigan, I thought, was a highly intellectualized exercise in self-pity, its ironic sneer at the past masking its wounded longing. My gut reaction has not changed in 15 years; I hope I have a language for it now.

5. Jimmy is approaching middle age, but looks at once like a baby and like an old man. The book he is caught in is, in its intricate straight-line grids, both puzzle and cage. It is with Jimmy Corrigan as with the other big generational statements by the men of that moment—PTA’s Magnolia, DFW’s Infinite Jest: the elderchild blubbering in the labyrinth of the text.

6. What is Jimmy Corrigan about? It’s about 400 pages. Aside from that, let more impartial observers tell you, in this comprehensive summary that opens an essay by Juda Bennett and Cassandra Jackson that I will quote again later:

Jimmy Corrigan traces the history of the titular character from a childhood characterized by an absent father and overbearing mother to his life as a middle-age white man whose isolation is represented by the cubicle in which he works. He is the novel's Everyman. Contacted by the father he has never met, Jimmy travels from Chicago to a small town in Michigan. In Waukosha he meets Amy, his father's adopted African-American daughter and – unbeknownst to them – a distant relation to Jimmy. Though the figure of the Everyman never completely understands himself in the context of a racialized America, the audience is aware of this complicated genealogy.

The narrative is interrupted periodically by the story of Jimmy's great-grandfather and grandfather, which is set in 1893, and this narration focuses on the great-grandfather's abusive relationship with his young son, whom he beats and eventually abandons at the top of one of the largest buildings in "The White City" at the Chicago World's Fair. This narrative section also reveals that Amy is not only the adopted daughter of Jimmy's father but a blood relation descended from Jimmy's great-grandfather's relationship with his African-American maid. Reduced to its barest bones, the narrative is built upon Jimmy searching for himself through the lost father and finding a much more (racially) complicated family. At the same time, the reader learns of a more complicated backstory to that diverse family (blood, and not just adoption, link Amy to her half brother). Given that the protagonist never discovers this history that the reader is privy to, the novel refuses a simple conclusion in which the protagonist finds or even fully knows himself.

7. I cannot now find it, but I recall that a critic at the time compared Jimmy Corrigan, with its complicated racial genealogy and its aesthetic formalism, to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Absalom, Absalom!, yes, but as adapted by Wes Anderson. Or E. L. Doctorow. Most of my criticism of Jimmy Corrigan would, with allowances for the specificities of graphic storytelling vis-à-vis prose narrative, echo my criticism of Ragtime. Both Doctorow and Ware formally appropriate a past style or ideology, in implied quotation marks; Ware’s use of 1890s advertising and comics iconography is the graphic equivalent of Doctorow’s “There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants.” It is a premature and adolescent disavowal of the past rather than an honest struggle with it. “That’s not me!” you say by way of mocking imitation, like an insult comic. You want to say, “The past is dead. It is even past.” Braver to go forth as the heir to your tradition that you in fact are. Your father’s sins will be visited upon you, yes, but petulant denial in the guise of formal mastery cannot in any case prevent that. Faulkner was not performing a pastiche of Shakespeare or Melville; he was writing as best he could in their tradition about his time and place.

8. Upon their father's death, Amy violently rejects Jimmy; she literally pushes him over when he reaches out to her. This is less a Faulknerian gesture than this graphic novel’s Forsterian “not yet,” as at the conclusion of A Passage to India. Not yet, but when? I recently saw the statement, not made by a cishet white man, that “cishet white men are not necessary.” Well and good, but have cishet white men sent any other message than that very one in their major fictions of the past century? Since Forster ended his final novel with “not yet?” Since Faulkner raveled out Sutpen’s genealogy? Since Joyce, with whatever irony, founded the New Bloomusalem?

9. (Ware, I observe, is a Joycean, as am I. Though we are different kinds of Joycean. I think I am a Proteus or a Hades to his Wandering Rocks or Oxen of the Sun. Sorry to be cryptic, but other Joyceans will catch my drift.)

10. Nobody means a self-canceling statement, though. Nobody who denies their will-to-power should be believed, as their denial is a mere ruse of their will. (I am a Nietzschean as well as a Joycean, you see.) Bennett and Jackson, praising Ware’s formalism from the perspective of critical race theory:

…Ware sets up a reading practice that challenges the ability to read and interpret race through simple chronologies. As the reader attempts to follow both Jimmy and his sister Amy's stories, no simple narratives of racial origins emerge. Instead, the reader is left to actively piece together the narrative, making errors and corrections along the way. Ware reminds us of this reading practice at every step in the novel. For example, the novel withholds page numbers, deemphasizing a traditional narrative sequence and encouraging a reading practice that may move freely backwards and forwards and across the page in numerous directions. As if to complicate this practice even more, Ware's hardback and paperback editions of the novel participate in this notion of errors and corrections in that the latter adds visual material not included in the former edition.

I understand, intellectually, the focus on error, but all the same: Ware tells, the readers learn, the characters never find out. They err, we err—but does Ware ever err? Are not even his corrections obsessive evasions of errancy? (Apologies, like claims to injury, can be assertions of authority.) Who’s in charge here again? To say “error” is to imply that the right way is known. Who is it that knows if Ware flattens time into space to draw us a map?

11. Ware errs, of course. Jimmy Corrigan, by the way, has a little idyll in which Jimmy’s grandfather leaves his loveless household to sojourn with an Italian immigrant family in a house full of warm cooking smells presided over by a gentle, loving, old-world craftsman father. This is silly and mawkish, if I may say as a child of the class and the ethnos specified.

12. Ware’s depiction of black characters does not sink quite so far, though the 1890s maid character is awfully close to an uninterrogated stereotype, i.e., mammy, as I read it. Amy is more complex, which perhaps shows what a crutch—a metaphor the book invites—it can be for the artist to dwell in an aestheticized and flattened-out past rather than dealing with the irreducibly complicated present. Still, Bennett and Jackson observe that, even with Amy, “Ware falls into myths of blackness as a present and secure signifier and whiteness, in contrast, as unstable”—or, to put it with a bit less jargon, he gives us something like the “strong black woman” of well-meaning cliche.

13. But there are the errors the author commits unwittingly—the repetition of cliche is their hallmark, as with Ware’s down-to-earth Italians and his strong black woman—and the errors the author allows himself out of self-trust—of which awkward or embarrassing but undeniable revelations are the sign. Is Jimmy Corrigan not a book suffocatingly without error of the latter kind? Compare Watchmen, which I will be thought a philistine for preferring, though I do prefer it. Watchmen is a similar exercise of the obsessive will to form, a similar conversion of time to space, a similar critique of the Superman archetype. Even a book similarly about race in America, though more subtly, and at the margin. Let us accept for a moment the perhaps dubious psychoanalytic postulate that when men such as Moore and Ware pursue the kind of rigid formal closure that Watchmen and Jimmy Corrigan achieve, a fear of the feminine, construed in the masculine imagination as flesh and disorder, is operating. Jimmy Corrigan is fairly overt about the fear of the feminine, in that sad-sack post-Crumb alternacomics fashion that I have always disliked. Watchmen, by contrast, touchingly seems to understand itself as a feminist statement. And yet Watchmen puts its fears viscerally and and violently and vitally onto the page; it stains its phallocratic grid, so twists its crystalline narrative that Zack Snyder, otherwise immobilized by literalism, had to straighten the thing out for Hollywood. There it is, for all to see, chapter twelve, page six: the vagina dentata that ate New York City. A sublime vision (the sublime, as an aesthetic mode, always expresses the fear that mother [nature] doesn’t love us combined with the confidence that we have something she lacks with which we can best her). Ware, wanting to annul himself, trusts himself too little to give us such a vision. But he doesn’t annul himself in consequence, after all. Here he is, acclaimed a master; here I am, writing about him, wishing I liked his book more.

14. The artist cannot simultaneously annul himself and make and publicize the artwork. No matter how unnecessary you or others find you for whatever local and contingent sociohistorical reason, your compulsion to create and share the creation is a fundamental human drive. So you might as well own up to it.

15. But can any narrative this intelligent, this emotional, really be disparaged or dismissed, even if the intelligence and the emotion seem to be in the wrong proportion, the wrong relation? Maybe that is Ware’s error, of the text if not in it. Maybe I will be writing about again in 15 years. Maybe they will be writing about in 100 years. Neither would surprise me at all.

Poor old Jimmy Corrigan! Not really something I wanted to add to my bedtime reading, it's just too bleak. Reading during a sunny lunch-time certainly made the subject matter more bearable.
Excellent graphic content, although sometimes a little confusing, and needed to review to check if the content was a dream sequence or a journey to the past.
Very interesting reading the afterword. Life imitating art! Although, I was pleased to hear that the author had a much nicer mother.
I'm pleased I got around to reading it but won't be back for more, just too bleak.