Chris Ware acostumbra a que cada trabajo que realiza sea una obra maestra. Jimmy Corrigan no es una excepción, ni mucho menos.

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This graphic novel makes great use of different design styles to depict time passing and to reference comic strip styles. The book conveys as much information as possible visually and the effects are interesting. The tone of the story is cynical, and this, paired with the simplistic drawings, the pathetic of the character, and the playfulness of the graphic novel, makes for a quality tragicomedy that tells us about Jimmy meeting his father for the first time.
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L’usage que fait ce roman graphique de différents concepts stylistiques montre le passage du temps du récit et fait référence à l’histoire de la bande-dessinée. L’oeuvre fait l’effort de communiquer l’information de façon visuelle autant que possible avec des résultats intéressants. Le ton est cynique et avec les dessins simplistes, le pathétique du personnage et le ludique du roman graphique donnent une tragicomédie de qualité qui raconte l’histoire de Jimmy qui rencontre son père pour la première fois.
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El uso de multiples conceptos estilísticos en esta novela gráfica muestran el paso del tiempo y hacen referencia a la historia del cómic. El libro trata de comunicar tanta información cómo puede de manera visual con efectos interesantes. El tono es cínico y junto con los dibujos simplistas, el patético del personaje y el aspecto juguetón de la novela gráfica resultan en un a tragicomedia de cualidad que cuenta el primer encuentro de Jimmy con su padre.

I’ve never felt so enticed by a book that focuses so much on minutiae. Chris Ware spectacularly selects the small details of life that give us the most valuable insight into the characters motivations, emotions, and movements. The character and plot arcs are traditionally bland, with no major character changing themselves and the only large plot point occurring near the end of the novel. This means that so much nothing happens, and I mean that as a compliment. I’ve never been so enticed by boring diner conversations and awkward interactions. Ware makes you feel like you’re sitting in a room with two awkward older men who don’t know how to not ruin the vibe by making some weird sexist or racist remark (both of which occur unforgivingly in this book). And yet Ware makes obvious how the subtleties of these awkward interactions are manifestations of past lives, of horrible and societal traumas.

Ware paints every character in the light of mundane horror. His book reads like an instruction manual for understanding others. The art style lends itself to portraying complex concepts and ideas, often using this complex form and style to showcase what is often simplified. Anger is no longer just, “anger,” but a full-art pictograph of the interactions between two characters that led to outburst. It comes with details and meaning often left out of graphic novels. Pages fill not only with art but with prose.

This book is intense to read. It suffocates you with the bland, mundane, and minute details. But this book is also beautiful. It shows us that what makes us human is our often boring, dull lives.

I only give it 2 stars cause it depressed the shit out of me.
It's actually a really good novel with cool art and great writing just that I simply cannot read it without contemplating if life is really worth living.

This is why it took me over a year to finish the damn thing.

Essential reading for anyone who enjoys the comicbook medium. The story is very depressing,like most of Ware's work that I've read. But I think the monotone emotional drone of misery is rather beautiful.

There is a point in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, about a third of the way through, when the author provides a summary of the story so far. Until then, I was disoriented, a bit unclear what was real and what was dream/fantasy. Sometimes, that kind of ambiguity can feel like a puzzle - I'm drawn in by the desire to figure it all out. But not so here, I was bored and frustrated. I didn't trust the author enough yet to feel confident there was a puzzle to solve. Maybe it would just muddle on without resolution.

The summary helped keep me going in two ways: (1) I now felt clear that this was a realist book with interspersed dream/fantasy rather than a surrealist or poetic work, and (2) I had confidence that the author wasn't going to leave me with an inscrutable narrative. I began to have faith that the mysterious puzzles contained in the text were actually worth puzzling over.

And yet, it took me another good chunk of story before I cared one whit about any of the characters. Jimmy was just such a sad sack of a man, allowing the whole world to trample him, and seemingly incapable of exercising any basic human agency at all. And yet the narrative was fixated on him: every other character got lost in his all-encompassing self-pity. It wasn't just the woman in the cubicle next to him that Jimmy failed to notice, it was the whole world of people surrounding him. He saw them only in relation to himself, and thus they remained distant and one-dimensional. I couldn't make myself care about them either. Every woman was "girlfriendzoned" even his (biologically distant cousin) sister when they finally met. At the very least, we see his sister's face, which is more than we see for any other (non-corpse) female character in the book. This is intentional, no doubt. You can see it as a reflection of Jimmy's incredibly low self-esteem and shame at looking women in the face. You can also see it as a reflection of Jimmy's inability to see woman as anything other than one-dimensional sexual objects. These two points of view can also be held simultaneously.

If I had not been reading this book for book club, I would have put it down within the first 200 pages.

About halfway through the book, though, I started to find some emotional resonance, some depth to pull me into the story. Jimmy's grandfather's story of social isolation and bullying as child got me. Here, the grandfather character bullies another child, an Italian boy who eventually becomes popular. The grandfather chooses to be a bully in the hopes of fitting in but instead becomes a pariah, while the other boy ends up fitting in by taking up a hobby and inviting others to join him. By the time the child-grandfather character realizes his mistake, it's too late. He is an outcast. The child-grandfather character makes clear choices, makes mistakes, and engages in complex ways with the other people in his life. That is interesting. I don't particularly like the child-grandfather character, but I care about him, and that makes the final scene at the Chicago World's Fair powerful.

It is so powerful, in fact, that I was now more interested in the story of his son, his grandson, and his adoptive grand-daughter when we returned to them. More interested and yet still less invested. When Jimmy finally is approached by the new woman sitting in the cubicle next to him, all I can hope is that she does not get involved with this emotional sink-hole of a man.

So then there is the visual component to the story... Generally speaking, I liked Chris Ware's style. I particularly liked the way the "unreliable narrator" is visually represented - most memorably, when the grandfather remembers himself wearing a nightgown to the World's Fair, then corrects his own memory. Jimmy's pants change in length and style between pages and frames. Hospital wall decor changes scene to scene. I loved the moments when people anticipated meeting someone they'd never met before and speculated on the many possible faces they might encounter. The visual representation was both crisp and concise.

That being said, I wish that fantasies and dreams were more clearly distinguished from reality. Generally speaking, the only way to distinguish a dream was that the story ventured into the surreal or violent. When Jimmy's imagination was less fantastical, the only way to recognize an imagined event was that the narrative later contradicted a previous scene. I'm guessing this visual ambiguity was intentional, but it just didn't work for me.

In the end, I'm glad I got through the book, which I'm certain I would not have were I picking it up on my own. Since the story improved over time, I bet I'd more impressed by Ware's more recent work.

A multi award winning gem by Chris Ware as he tells two stories across, in-between and around one another. The main story looks at awkward, middle aged social recluse, mummy's boy Jimmy Corrigan as he travels across America to see a father he has never met or seen before. The supporting tale recounts his grandfather, also called Jimmy Corrigan growing up under the abusive patronage of a single father in late nineteenth century Chicago. A truly amazing and maybe semi-biographical book that pulls few punches and richly deserves the many awards that it has received.

However from a graphic novel perspective it has two rather major failings. 1.The use of italics to narrate a lot of the story makes the text extremely hard to read for people (like me) without 20-20 vision; and 2. For me, the art has to help tell the story, and in this case it doesn't, it does the opposite and I struggled to see the story that the art was trying to tell. So this book drops a point on my less than 20-20 vision reread of this book to 7 out of 12.
Seriously.. can you read the text on this page?:

2021 read

I initially struggled with the experimental aspects of this novel (as well as Ware's tiny handwriting), but it all paid off in the end really. It's worth persevering with the utterly miserable world of this book. The constant abjections, corrections, contradictions and mistakes allow the reader to forge their own chronology and make their own assumptions about Jimmy Corrigan, which is a pretty special thing.

Additionally, it's worth reading this essay about graphic whiteness, which looks at how Ware dececentres and challenges the comic book's pale relationship with race: http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/arch...

I've read my fair share of graphic novels (though less than I should), and Chris Ware is still the one who touches me deepest. I haven't read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," which has piled up the accolades, but for my money nothing can beat Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth" for sheer beautiful misery. Published in 2000, one year before our national tragedy, it chronicled the awkward, lonely life of the titular loser who must deal with father issues in the bleak midwinter of his life. Imagine Richard Yates' characters trapped in the panels of a comic strip and you'll have some inkling about the depth of wallow in "Jimmy Corrigan."

3.5 stars. A sad, depressing, overly long graphic novel about Jimmy Corrigan and his grandfather, also named Jimmy Corrigan. The main story about the present day Jimmy Corrigan, is about an awkward, middle aged, social recluse, a mummy’s boy. Jimmy was bullied as a kid. He had no friends and grew up without a father. Out of the blue, Jimmy receives a phone call from his father, who Jimmy had never seen. Jimmy sneaks off to see his father without telling his mother, who is in a nursing home.

The other story thread is about Jimmy’s grandfather, who grows up under the abusive, unloving patronage of a single father in the late nineteenth century Chicago.

There are lots of beautiful pictures. I found the small italic font a little hard to read at times, depending on the picture coloring used.

The faces of the two Jimmy’s always look grim and sad. An okay reading experience but not a particularly pleasant book to read.

This book was first published in 2001.

I am not into reading graphic novels, so the format of the book was something I had to get used to. I did realize however how much I enjoy graphic novels from reading this one. Images provide emotions that can't be as easily described in words. The first third of this book was very depressing and confusing for me. As I read more and got to the portion of the flashback to his grandfathers childhood, it became much more enjoyable. I perceived it this way because lonely childhood emotions are more interesting and sentimental to me. This is because as a child I feel like we have less control over our circumstances and emotions in reaction to them. As an adult I have found consistent ways to obtain joy in nature and connections with other people. It it more relatable for me to connect with a lonely child character than a middle aged man. This book most likely touches a lot of people because many people can relate to having an estranged or strained relationship with a parent. It was a shock to me that the overall tone of the story is so negative. From previous experience reading comic strips I expect a more lighthearted approach than a tragedy as in Jimmy Corrigan. While reading I kept expecting the story to change its demeanor and I think thats what kept the suspense going for me. There is a lot to learn from this book about the effects of abuse on peoples lives long term. In spite of the gripping turning of pages to discover the fate of Jimmy, I didn't find the ending or pretty much any particular part of the story to be a happily added aspect to my day. I read it an hour at a time and felt as though it put me into a negative mood. I am a pretty optimistic person and don't think much about the sexist, racist and abusive circumstances we all have experienced (some of us more than others). I don't think I would recommend this book to people like me. I do see how it would be more touching to people who can appreciate the raw display of their reality and the impending loneliness they may experience. As an incredibly adventurous and social person I found it hard to relate to the adult loneliness portrayed. I think I struggled more with loneliness and family troubles when I was younger and have worked daily for years not to allow the abuse of my childhood to define me as it does in Jimmy's adult life. People should seek relationships outside of their immediate family if they do not connect well with them. Luckily for most people I know these days, they go through this transition in their twenties and don't have the fate of Mr. Corrigan.

Ufff… kde začít? Po dočtení téhle knihy toho mám v hlavě tolik, co bych k ní chtěl říct a zároveň se obávám, že na něco z toho zapomenu. Jimmyho Corrigana můžu směle zařadit k nejpodivnějším knihám, jaké jsem kdy četl. V prvé řadě pro mě vůbec nebylo jednoduché se do ní začíst. Když jsem ji začal číst poprvé, tak jsem ji po určité době v záchvatu zoufalství odložil s tím, že na tohle prostě nemám. Že jsem vyhodil peníze za něco, čemu zkrátka nerozumím. Při druhém pokusu jsem zatnul zuby, nadopoval jsem se kofeinem a navzdory návalům zoufalství jsem se prokousal přes první třetinu (asi) knihy, která je příšerně matoucí. Je v ní plno zmatených snů a představ, které se nedají odlišit od vzpomínek či odlišných časových rovin příběhu. Taky ještě nejste zvyklí na to, že do normálního toku vyprávění jsou vložené momentální představy, aniž by byly nějak vizuálně odlišené. Nechápu, že toto mohlo vycházet jako novinové stripy a lidi, ani vydavatelé, s tím neposlali Chrise Warea k šípku.

Jakmile se však dostanete přes první třetinu knihy, tak vyprávění začne být souvislejší a stravitelnější. Stane se z toho čistá existenciální deprese, která vás sice drtí, ale alespoň víte kde jste a co se děje. Sledujete historii jednoho rodu, ale optika, kterou to sledujete, je značně pokřivená. Možná je to tím, jak jsou hlavní postavy nakreslené a nebo je to tím, jak se scénář vyžívá v trapných momentech, trapném tichu a trapnosti obecně. Například zrovna Jimmy Corrigan - má práci v kanceláři a žije zcela samostatně, ale podle jeho chování a výrazu v obličeji byste řekli, že je zcela nesvéprávný a že utekl z ústavu pro mentálně zaostalé. Podobné je to s jeho předky. Bylo mi zpočátku velmi nepříjemné sledovat takovéto postavy a jejich trapné dialogy. A to není moje kritika scénáře, ony jsou opravdu napsané tak, aby byly trapné. Celkově je to vyprávění velmi absurdní. Často jenom sledujete postavy, jak zmateně sedí, čumí a neví co říct. Doslova celé stránky koncentrované trapnosti.

Když se na to ale podívám z jiného úhlu, tak tohle je naprosto upřímný popis života. Takový život bohužel často je. Jdeme z trapnosti do trapnosti a v hlavě si tajně přehráváme teoretické scénáře situací, které mohou nastat.

Zmínit musím samozřejmě výtvarné zpracování, které je úzce propojené se scénářem. Chris Ware rozbíjí stránky na kvanta malých panelů, ve kterých úspěšně rozkresluje a prodlužuje trapné chvíle ticha, či se pomocí nich v rychlosti posouvá dopředu s tím, že zároveň načrtne, co se všechno stalo. Naprosto unikátní jsou vysvětlující diagramy, které když se naučíte číst, tak vás zkrátka pobaví. Zajímavé je také to, že všechny texty v knize jsou psané velmi malým písmem. Tak malým, že by ke knize měl BBart dávat i lupu.

A vůbec, celý tento můj komentář je úplně trapný…