Guttersniper

Jimmy Corrigan (the book and the character) is awkward, pathetic, and depressing—and so is life. Real life is generally devoid of the climaxes and superheroes that fill Golden Age comic books. Real life is small, random, and unfair. In “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” Chris Ware makes no attempt to disguise this; rather, he shows us life in all its ugliness and discomfort. Jimmy Corrigan is not a kid, nor is he particularly smart. The title sounds like something out of a classic superhero comic—or perhaps something a perfect, wholesome father would say to his son in some 1950’s “Leave It to Beaver”-type television show. Perhaps it is the way Jimmy dreams his imagined father would refer to him. But by the end of the book, it seems safe to assume that no one is ever going to refer to Jimmy this way.
Jimmy is the ANTI superhero. He could not be more so. He hunches in on himself as if someone is going to hit him—as if he wishes he were still child-sized, because then he would be a smaller target. His mother calls him constantly, with irritating demands and questions (“put that five dollar check in the bank right now!” “Jimmy—do you LOVE me? Really?”), but Jimmy, though ostensibly a grown man, is powerless to tell her to stop. Jimmy’s character plays out the worst fear of what might happen to young boys without fathers: Without a father to guide him, he has never learned how to be a man, and thus remains a child in a grown man’s body. This childishness is devoid of any charm or boyish pluck; Jimmy Corrigan’s childishness is disgusting, and often painful to observe.
But also human. We are used to our comic books (and other media as well) delivering us larger-than-life stories. The idea of a man meeting his father after a lifetime apart sounds dramatic—perhaps good material for a soap opera, or a made-for-TV movie. That is not what we get in “Jimmy Corrigan.” Time and again, a moment that has the potential to really change a character’s life for the better is thwarted by the ugliness of real life. For instance, during a flashback, in a scene with Jimmy Corrigan’s grandfather, we watch the young boy almost become friends with a schoolmate and his large, loving family—but then the lead horse toy turns out all wrong, and everything is ruined. Or we watch Jimmy and his father have small moments of bonding—but then the father is hit by a car. Quentin Tarantino once explained what he sees as the difference between “movie reality” and “actual reality”: in movie reality, Our Hero runs from the villain, leaps out of a building, lands in a sexy convertible, and drives away. In actual reality, Our Hero runs from the villain, leaps out of a building, lands in a sexy convertible, and realizes…the car is a stick shift, and he can’t drive that.
Jimmy Corrigan cannot drive stick shift. And yet, his story is not close to the average person’s reality at all. Your long-absent father getting hit by a car and DYING the very same weekend you meet him? Suddenly discovering a whole new family, and then just as suddenly having it all taken away again? That’s a bit more dramatic than most of our lives. What feels real about it is the way Jimmy reacts to all of this: rather, he reacts very little at all. No matter what life hands him, he just plods along, mostly speechless. We watch the sad, childish fantasies that play through his head—fantasies that the external Jimmy would never have the courage to act out. Life goes on. Jimmy will never have the courage to turn himself into a superhero.

A lot of people complained about the character of Jimmy Corrigan, finding him to be a frustrating loser. I had a similar sort of block while reading Ghost World; I didn’t find them pitiable, like Jimmy, they just came off as callow jerks. I think it is harder for me to relate to the sorrows of two teenagers when they just come off as angsty, cruel suburbanites. Maybe this story about teenagers inhabiting a “ghost world” in which they don’t belong would have resonated with me 8 years ago, but perhaps then I would not have been able to read it from a distance, to understand the satire, to see how Enid and Rebecca must eventually grow up. Anyway, I feel that I have left those years of my life so far behind that it seems senseless to read about Enid and Rebecca.

Daniel Clowes does make interesting satire about society, and about teenage life. Enid and Rebecca have been thrust into a new world following their high school graduation, a world that is both exciting and terrifying. Like many insecure teens, like to assert that they are not ostracized, that they instead make a conscious choice to be different. It’s true to an extent, but Enid especially shows her vulnerability, her insecurity about men and her appearance. Both characters worry that Josh likes the other one better, and his unlikely relationships with both of them become an important vehicle for them to express their own insecurities – and also to realize the strengths that the other possesses. Both characters are also every bit as shallow, trendy, and stuck up as the people they scorn (and feel scorned by), and that’s one of the crueler ironies, and more hilarious aspects, of the story. Sadly, it is only in opposition to these people that Enid can find her niche and really define herself, her belongings only become valuable to her when she can lord them over other people. Adolescence can be a profoundly difficult period, one which it seems that Clowe remembers all too well, though he is still able to take a step back and satirize it.

It is hard for Enid, especially, to live in such a shallow ghost world, to be constantly surrounded by an ideal which she does not fit. She reacts by scorning this paradigm, but in so doing, she becomes obsessed with everything she detests. It’s a poignant story because so many of us have lived this, have felt this alienation at some point (especially during adolescence). At the same time, it’s hard to be patient with Enid, not seeing any real obstacles to her growing up except for her own self. She clings to the past (her childhood memories, her lifelong best friend, old gifts) and feels genuinely ambivalent and fearful of the future, despite repeatedly affirming her desire to change, to “become a totally different person” (74), but doesn’t feel that the world she lives in is allowing her to realize this.

Of course, Enid and Rebecca do grow up eventually (or, we are at least left with the impression that they will, someday), like most immature adolescents, and the reader knows how important it is for them to develop into adults. Eventually, they have no choice but to join the boring, tedious adult world they are so fearful of. Enid, like many adults, realizes too late all of the pleasures of youth that have been wasted. The ending is ambiguous; does Enid feel defeated, or does she realize that she, too, must grow and evolve now that Rebecca has moved away from her.

The vignettes in this story do a great job of capturing the mood of restless adolescents, drifting in and out of a world in which they can’t seem to find a place. I also loved Clowes’ subtle but emotional drawings, and his subdued use of color, which really did capture the experience for embattled teenagers living in a ghost world.

Ware’s loosely autobiographical and widely acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, is like the Ulysses of graphic novels. Meticulously crafted and as dense as the line at Val come 6:30, Ware’s graphic novel weaves three stories into one mashed up representation of a sad, socially inept man. At times, the complexity of the story telling makes it hard for the reader to make sense of the story. Ware jumps from Jimmy’s present (the plot revolving around his contact with his previously absent father), to flashbacks of Jimmy’s grandfather, James, to moments of Jimmy’s vivid imagination. Worth noting is Ware’s initial estrangement from his father while writing Jimmy’s character, his brief re-contact with his father, and before finishing the novel, his father’s untimely death.

Despite the oftentimes confusing plot threads, Ware does his best to guide the reader through the packed and unconventionally organized panels. The panels are often of varying sizes and shapes, and sometimes we even have to read from right to left. Lucky for us, Ware sometimes includes guiding arrows that direct us from scene to scene. Other times he fills the gutter with big transition words that give us both a sense of tone and time. Finally, he often allows art from one scene to bleed into others, connecting the scenes visually, literally drawing a bridge to guide our eyes.

Because Ware’s choices in his novel all seem so substantive, it’s easy to pick out a couple things to analyze. One aspect that has been discussed in blog posts on our course website is his choice to obscure many characters’ eyes and faces. Perhaps it is meant to put all the focus on Jimmy, but as Emily noted, how do we explain the fully represented face of the red-haired girl and Jimmy’s half-sister? Initially, I felt that obscuring the faces was a visual representation of Jimmy’s social awkwardness—literally unable to look people in the eyes.

In Peter Schjeldahl’s The New Yorker review, he called Jimmy’s father “a figure of crushing banality.” Ware does an incredible job in creating distinct and memorable characters in his novel, but for me, Jimmy’s father stood out. Schjeldahl hit it right on the head when he called him a figure of banality. The onslaught of dribble that pours from his mouth during the doctor’s visit is funny for a bit, but then just utterly annoying. Jimmy’s father seems delusional at points, a man who has convinced himself that his way of life is correct, that his beliefs are right, but so clearly holds no real gravitas (especially when juxtaposed or in conversation with the doctor). Ware brings out the reprehensible characteristics of an “ordinary” man in his drawing of Jimmy’s father. Because of the almost mythic quality Jimmy’s father held before we met him (the same mythic quality all long lost characters inevitably hold), such a lack of personality further indicates the absolutely depressing nature of Jimmy’s life.

Chris Ware has become one of my absolute favorite comics creator – for both his art and his writing – and I’m not sure how many times now I’ve read Jimmy Corrigan.  It’s so dense in meaning and emotion and innovation that I can return to it each year and find a new way to appreciate it and to be depressed by it.  I’m also intrigued by Chris Ware’s theories that comics possess their own, unique forms of storytelling that promise new directions that other forms of communication can’t travel in.   Although many readers find his experimentation with form and visual language get in the way of them actually enjoying or even understanding his stories, I feel that he ultimately joins his innovations with engaging storytelling.

One way Ware explores the possibilities of comics’ unique visual language is through his development of his panels’ “tempo” of panels:

“What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time,” Ware says. “The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…”

Daniel Raeburn, Chris Ware (Monographics)
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 25

Unlike in film, where the director has already decided for us the speed of the events on the screen and the amount of time they’ll allow us to linger on each frame, comics creators have to acknowledge the readers’ autonomy.   As we draw our eyes across each page, we decide how much time we spend on each image or even what part of the image we desire to look at.  Ware strives to influence and manipulate both our subconscious and conscious processes of reading and our experience of the entire page.

Ware composes each page as a whole where the shape and size of each panel, the text between panels, the shape of the gutters, the composition of their subjects, their subjects themselves, and even the color play into the reader’s experience of that page.   His use of color in particular showcases his experimentation with visual storytelling.   Ware combines his relatively realistic color palette with panels where an extremely saturated color – usually red or cyan – partially or fully floods out the background behind the character (the first seems to show up a few pages in when Jimmy spots an answering machine at the store).  These color fields not only reflect the pictured characters current emotion – primal moments of alertness, terror, guilt, or surprise – but provide a clearly accentuated “beat” for the reader like a punch to the stomach.

Ware also manages to land some of these emotional punches in his more dry, analytical sequences that diagram relationship and events between characters, like the two page spread at the story’s climax that reveals how Amy and Jimmy’s family tree folds into itself.   These pages take us the furthest away from his characters, isolating them pulling back visually to show more simple (and sometimes almost featureless) character designs.  He pulls his narrative eye out as well by framing them with a cold and scientific language of magnification and arrows that direct our eye around the page with their own sense of beat.  Ware further separates us from each scene by revealing items hidden or temporarily concealed by the characters experiencing these scenes – like Amy’s birth certificate and the flower her great-great grandmother pressed into a bible as a child – and allowing us to compare them in ways none of their owners are allowed to.

We aren’t allowed inside these scenes in the same way that Ware invites us inside of the mundane moments and fantastical daydreams of Jimmy’s life.  Instead, we stare down at the characters together like gods, watching as Ware lays out the unseen details and coincidences of their lives in a quiet, tidy manner.  But we have just as little control over their lives as they do.

Even though we’ve had the chance to see their lives more fully and can understand them in ways their linear lives won’t allow them to understand, it’s impossible for us to communicate that to them.  By reading Jimmy Corrigan, we help construct the context of the misunderstandings and mistakes of their lives, only to watch helplessly as they stumble on blindly – now closer, now further away….  Whether or not that powerlessness evokes a powerful sympathy that pulls you closer to the characters ultimately depends on the experience of the reader.

At first it can be hard to know what to make of this book. It can be difficult to know where the eyes should move to, where to focus, who is saying what (we saw the same thing with Chris Ware’s comics in McSweeney’s). Even the layout is unusual, but Ware makes great use of space (and not a centimeter seems wasted). Ware does make a lot of his works intentionally opaque, and I can’t say it’s a style that I immediately appreciate, but I think if I had a lot more time with this book, I’m sure could get so much out of it. While I like books that make the reader work a bit, and Ware leaves a lot up to the reader, but the difficulty of this piece almost seemed self-congratulating on Ware’s part, and I don’t think he needed to create such an imposing tome in order to get his points across about alienation and awkwardness. I didn’t find the character Jimmy to be as unappealing as some people did, though, and I really like Ware’s drawing style.

Despite his simple, almost child-like drawings, this is clearly a labor of love, and I actually loved the retro-style drawings, which reminded me of old comic strips. The introduction on the inner cover alone is comprehensive and hilarious – even if the “exam” includes immediate sexist humor, asking women to put the book down. Ware also draws women in a very specific way, generally obscuring their faces right through the very end. He uses obscenity and offensive humor immediately, creating a highly controversial work (and it absolutely looks like he relishes the controversy, judging by the selected reviews copied in the very beginning. It seems like much of his works (though brilliant, and wonderful) are deliberate attempts to cause discomfort and just generally get people talking about Chris Ware.

Jimmy Corrigan, like many of the other stories we’ve read, shows pathetic circumstances, callow people, and dramatic events in a matter-of-fact, very human way. This book focus on strained parent/children relationships, which were interesting to read immediately after Exit Wound- although in this case, the reader is actually privy some of the more abusive, sad moments between father and son, whether dreamed or real.. Again, this book deals with with issues or alienation, social awkwardness, perhaps more poignantly than anything else we have read. Despite how pathetic they were for the most part, the characters still resonated with me, Jimmy is very haunting. Jimmy wants so badly to be liked, to be fully human, and this desire was so touching and pitiable. The story left me searching for reasons about foolish behavior, precisely because Jimmy was so real to me, and so heart-wrenchingly pathetic. Someone mentioned being turned off by the nervous ticks in their speech, the “huff”s and “uh”s. I liked them; those ticks occur so frequently in real dialogue, but hardly ever in written pieces.

It takes Chris Ware a long time to get on with his story here, but I’ve seen him convey incredibly powerful stories in just a few pages. It is as if Ware uses the difficulty of reading this book to prove a point, and while it is a piece that stuck with me, it’s also profoundly frustrating, and I like my books to be pleasurable, too – no matter how important the message is, it needs to be one that people will access. It was hard for me to follow such a long book when the main character barely even attempts to react to life’s circumstances, much less actually make efforts to improve his lot. At the same time, I have to disagree with people who resent Jimmy, or can’t feel any compassion towards him. I think that the scenes of Jimmy as a child (as well as the scenes showing the flawed men who came before him) really cement him as an empathetic character; it is hard not to feel remorse over what has become of a boy who was once so excitable and vibrant. We see Jimmy’s mom hovering over him, stunting him from actually growing up, and it’s hard not to feel any empathy towards him. How can anyone look at Jimmy’s big sad eyes and not feel empathy for him, even if much of his pain has been caused by his own flaws? I also just generally appreciated Jimmy’s snark and overall immature sense of humor, and could relate to his awkwardness and isolation.

Finally: In the front a number of “quotations regarding the hardcover edition” are selecting in order to increase confidence in the purchase. Who but Chris Ware would include “‘Nearly impossible to read’ – The LA Times Book Review” in order to increase purchasing confidence? Another reviewer, Ted Rall from Slate, likens the book to Ulysses, saying “no one’s ever read it, and those who have know that it sucks”. I think it’s an apt comparison, and of course most authors welcome controversy surrounding their art, but still, few would so proudly display how unreadable their works are.

While I was perplexed and interested in the complexity of the story within Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, I was simultaneously interested in the way Chris Ware chose to represent the novel on its cover. The back is its own comic, a disparagement of the novel and a mocking request for you to donate and save an unloved copy of the book. This I attributed to the eccentric character of Mr. Ware that we first viewed on the cover of McSweeney’s 13. The front, despite its seemingly usual introduction of the title character, was more insightful than I had previously thought. What is an “Official Paperbound Apologue?” An apologue is defined as a moral fable, typically having animals or inanimate objects as main characters. In Wikipedia’s definition of apologue, we learn that “an apologue, with its introduction of animals and plants, to which it lends ideas, language and emotions, is necessarily devoid of real truth, and even of all probability.” Jimmy Corrigan has no main plants and animals, but does have strong emotions and excellently crafted dialogue which make the novel a compelling (if confusing) read. Is it devoid of real truth? The majority of the novel portrays Jimmy’s imaginative constructions of parental disapproval and social mistakes, as well as a three-generation explanation of the family Jimmy comes from, although he would have no idea of this. Perhaps it is a novel devoid of reality and filled with imagination and omniscient views of past and present. We can see Jimmy’s imaginings are highly improbable: his father is not a violent man, and we must think it unlikely that the nurse would risk her professional career to become sexually involved with Jimmy in the patient’s room. However, these imaginings are probable to Jimmy- he would not fear meeting his father so much if he didn’t think his imaginings were improbable, and we wouldn’t have run away in the office if he wasn’t already a little unbalanced before his overreaction to his father calling him a “mistake.”  The most interesting part of this quote in connection with the novel is that the novel seems to be lacking in reality while seeming very real, and while we see little probability in Jimmy’s imagination he sees very much.

Another quote from the Wikipedia definition is this: “the apologue seizes on that which man has in common with creatures below him.” Jimmy’s character bugged me throughout the book- was he just socially awkward or is there something else we’re supposed to know about him? Is he autistic? That could explain a lot- his fear of new social situations, his inability to speak with Penny or to understand her lack of interest in him, his desire to not see his mother while also needing her constant support and advice. If so, is this a work meant to show the ways in which autistic people should be seen as people and not as creatures below normal-functioning humans? Jimmy Corrigan may lack a kind of reality but it is so real emotionally and socially. Whether or not a diagnosis is necessary, this novel moves towards a common ground between those of social mobility and those with social incapability.