A Puzzling Drawing Decision

The drive of Jimmy Corrigan’s narrative is the estranged relationship between Jimmy and his father, drawn against the childhood story of James, Jimmy’s grandfather.  Chris Ware’s notes at the very end of the book (his “corrigenda,” defined as “a list of errors with their corrections, in a book;” one cannot help but notice the similarity between “corrigenda” and “Corrigan”) helped to enlighten the narrative.  Ware was estranged from his father during the initial writing of Jimmy Corrigan’s character, briefly regaining contact with his father only to have him die before Ware was able to complete and publish Jimmy Corrigan.  There are obvious parallels between this real-life story and the narrative of Jimmy Corrigan, although Ware admits to being unable to “knit together” his life with his fiction.  Alternately, in his dedication to his mother, Ware says that Jimmy’s mother in no way resembles his own “thoughtful, intelligent, and supportive” mother. 

It interested me that Ware has a positive relationship with his mother, because one of the aspects of his illustrations that I became fixated on was his choice to often obscure the faces of women in the story.  At first this choice is not immediately noticed – it is possible that it is just how the figures are situated – but when speech bubbles begin directly obscuring women’s faces, it becomes obvious that Ware is making a conscious choice with his illustrations.  Why does he choose to hide women’s faces?  And then, perhaps more importantly, why does Ware choose to illustrate certain women’s faces?  Most specifically, the red-haired girl (although, is she a girl?), Amy (Jimmy’s sister), and the grandmother are the only ones with extended face-illustrations beyond some women in photographs.    

The red-haired girl (perhaps a nod to Charlie Brown and his little red-headed love interest?) is a confusing character.  Is she a girl, or is she a boy?  The subject comes up when James asks “How come you came out of the boy’s door?” to which she responds “Because I’m not really a girl!” but the subject is pretty much dropped at that point.  Ware draws her towering over all the other boys and directly illustrates her face while she is interacting with James, but she moves into the realm of “obscured women” after they fight and their friendship is ended.  Is she illustrated because there is confusion about her gender?  Because of her relationship with James?

None of this explains the most heavily illustrated female face in the book: Amy, Jimmy’s half-sister.  There is certainly no ambiguity about her gender, although she does occupy a strange space in relation to the leading Corrigan.  They are only half-siblings, Amy raised by the father that Jimmy barely knew, and there are clearly physical differences between the siblings.  Even after Amy’s severe reaction toward Jimmy after their father’s death, Amy’s face is still illustrated, even occupying the “epilogue” of sorts at the end of the book.  Yet the face of Jimmy’s mother, the woman with whom he seems to have the strongest relationship, is never seen.

Jimmy Corrigan was a challenging read, moving in and out of bizarre dream sequences with no real warning, occasionally making it difficult to distinguish between the real and the imagined.  The “Summary of Our Story Thus Far” found about a fourth of the way through the book was critical to understanding the unique style of Ware’s narrative structure.  I ultimately had to suspend disbelief when reading, allowing strange and at times frightening panels to exist simultaneously with the more “normal” elements of the plot.