Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

AUTHOR: Ware, Chris

ARTIST: Chris Ware (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1993-2000

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000

Publication History

Chris Ware’s first full-page comic featuring the Jimmy Corrigan character appeared in the Chicago arts weekly New City in 1992. Between 1993 and 2000, Ware chose selections of these comics and published them with Fantagraphics as the Acme Novelty Library, issues 1-14. The Jimmy Corrigan episodes from Acme Novelty Library and New City were revised, omitted, or included as they originally appeared to create the 380-page graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, published by Pantheon in 2000. In 2003, Pantheon released a paperback version that includes two additional pages about Amy Corrigan, after the “Corrigenda” on the endpapers. In 2005, Ware began publishing his comics out of Chicago under his own Acme Novelty Library imprint.

Plot

Two main story lines interrupt and inform each other: One takes place in the present and concerns the trials and tribulations of Jimmy Corrigan in 1980’s Chicago; the other is set at the turn of the twentieth century and follows Jimmy’s grandfather, James Reed Corrigan, and great-grandfather, William Corrigan, against the backdrop of preparations for the World’s Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) of 1893.

In the dominant, framing story line, the protagonist, Jimmy Corrigan, is a thirty-six-year-old bachelor who lives alone and is wasting his life in an office cubicle at an unfulfilling job. Jimmy’s main preoccupations are dodging phone calls from his overbearing mother; staring out the window; attempting to ingratiate himself to Peggy, the unreceptive mail clerk; and daydreaming. His life takes a dramatic turn when his estranged father, James William Corrigan, who left his mother when Jimmy was still a toddler, unexpectedly sends him a letter inviting him to visit. Without telling his mother where he is going, he accepts this unusual invitation and flies to Waukosha, Michigan, to see the father he never knew. During his visit, Jimmy discovers that he has an adopted African American sister, Amy Corrigan, whom he meets for the first time. The possibility of a familial reconciliation and a happy ending is dashed when James Corrigan is fatally injured in a car crash, and Jimmy returns home to Chicago.

A second story line concerns the father-son relationship between William Corrigan, a second generation Irish immigrant and a veteran of the Civil War, and his son, James Reed Corrigan. William, who must raise James alone because his wife died in childbirth, proves to be a stern and unsympathetic father. The only other member of the household is May, the African American maid, who is revealed to be Amy Corrigan’s ancestor. While William is at work as a glazier, James is left to defend himself against the taunts of school bullies. James’s fleeting moments of happiness are continually overshadowed by his father’s disapproval and neglect. Ultimately their troubled relationship comes to a dramatic end when William abandons James at the World’s Columbian Exposition on his ninth birthday.

Characters

•Jimmy Corrigan, the protagonist, whose simple, potato-shaped head and naïve expression recalls both an infant and an old man, is a timid, unassuming thirty-six-year-old man with a nondescript office job. Painfully shy and awkward, he yearns for romance, but his efforts to attract any female attention are dismally unsuccessful. He lives alone in a modest Chicago apartment and has no social life.

•James William Corrigan, who refers to himself as “Jim,” lives in Waukosha, Michigan, and works as a bartender in the Landing Field, an airport bar. Although father and son resemble each other physically, their personalities are completely different. Jim is full of masculine bluster and confidence. Nonetheless, in his own clichéd and awkward manner, he tries to make amends with Jimmy and feels some remorse for abandoning him. A more sympathetic side of his character emerges when it is revealed that he remarried and adopted an African American girl, Amy Corrigan.

•James Reed Corrigan, born in 1884, is Jim’s father and Jimmy’s grandfather. His mother died in childbirth, a tragedy for which his father, William Corrigan, has not forgiven the boy. In one of the main story lines, the young James is at the mercy of his stern and unloving father, who punishes him for the smallest infraction. He is depicted both as a child growing up in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and during the 1980’s, when he is an old man, thus providing the link between the two intersecting story lines.

•William Corrigan, whose father was an Irish immigrant, fought for the Union army in the Civil War. Despite the fact that he enjoys boasting about his war exploits to his son, the truth is that he shot off one of his fingers in order to be discharged from the army. He becomes a glazier and works on various construction jobs in Chicago, the most important of which is the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.

•J. Corrigan, originally Irish, is a physician who immigrates to the United States in the nineteenth century. Although he initially can find only construction jobs, he eventually is able to practice as a doctor. His son, William Corrigan, is Jimmy Corrigan’s great grandfather.

•Amy Corrigan, an African American teenager, is Jim’s adopted daughter and Jimmy Corrigan’s stepsister. Jimmy and Amy are distant blood relations because William Corrigan fathered a child with his African American maid, May. One of the central ironies in the book is that only the reader has knowledge of this connection.

Artistic Style

Like the two interwoven time frames that comprise Jimmy Corrigan, Ware’s meticulous craftsmanship and intricate aesthetic paradoxically manage to be simultaneously contemporary and old-fashioned, recalling both Sears Roebuck’s catalogs from the early twentieth century and the nonlinear acrobatics of hypertext. The graphic design of fake advertisements and the ornate lettering found in Jimmy Corrigan are often painstakingly hand copied from original newspapers and advertisements. Along with Art Spiegelman, Ware is part of a group of artists who are inspired by early twentieth -century newspaper cartoonists Winsor McCay, Frank King, and George Herriman.

Narrative time in Jimmy Corrigan is measured in discreet moments of everyday life that ordinarily escape notice, and it frequently shifts between dream and reality with little warning. A telephone ringing, subtle gradations of color in the changing dawn sky, or the awkward wait in a doctor’s examining room can occupy several panels and establish the mood or feeling surrounding a particular character. Ware typically uses vivid primary colors as the background when Jimmy is experiencing a particularly strong emotion—most often fear, embarrassment, or panic. Page layouts are intricate structures based on grids of varying dimensions.

To describe the principles behind his panel compositions, Ware invokes analogies from music and architecture. He explains that just as sheet music comes alive when the notes are played aloud, a comic strip comes alive when it is read. Similarly, Ware suggests that a comic strip can be viewed as one would a façade of a building—turning it around in the mind to see all sides at one time. In Jimmy Corrigan, one can find examples of visual analogies between panels and windows, buildings, and photographs.

The original hardback edition of Jimmy Corrigan includes a dust jacket with an elaborate map that traces the lineages of four generations of the Corrigan family as they intersect in time and space across Ireland, Africa, and the United States. Within the pages of Jimmy Corrigan, one can find cut-out designs for a zoetrope (a cylinder with slits and images in the interior that creates a simple circular animation), a diorama of William Corrigan’s house, and complex diagrams that chart the relationships between generations. These pages may initially seem to be baffling interruptions or digressions, but the careful reader will be able to discern striking connections to themes and revelations concealed in the plot. The cut-out toys function as games and souvenirs from childhood but are also a reflection of the melancholy plight of Jimmy as he limps through life like the robot on crutches depicted in the zoetrope. Maps and diagrams reveal the maid May’s heritage as the descendant of slaves; Amy Corrigan’s biological relationship to William Corrigan and his maid, May; William Corrigan’s discharge from the Union army; and J. Corrigan’s original immigration from Ireland to the United States.

Themes

Above all, Jimmy Corrigan is about missed connections among family members. James William Corrigan attempts to reunite with his son, Jimmy, but the differences between them are too great to develop any meaningful relationship. There is a clear parallel to the second story line set in the nineteenth century that represents the strained relationship between William and James from the perspective of James, the neglected and abused child. This lack of familial bonding is magnified in the context of the World’s Columbian Exposition, which is supposed to signify mankind’s greatest social, cultural, and technological achievements.

Conspicuously absent from the story are sympathetic, positive female characters, with the possible exception of Amy Corrigan. Jimmy’s mother nags her son incessantly and makes him feel guilty. Amy makes an effort get to know Jimmy and befriend him, although this nascent friendship is dashed when she turns him away after their father’s death. The final missed connection, which is available to the reader but not to the characters, is the revelation that Amy and Jimmy are distant blood relations.

Another crucial theme concerns the impossibility of a credible superhero. Jimmy Corrigan begins with a prologue in which the young Jimmy, full of naïve enthusiasm, goes to a car show to get the autograph of a television actor who played Superman. The actor, who seduces Jimmy’s divorced mother for a one-night stand, is not a model hero. Throughout the graphic novel, there are repeated episodes of disillusionment involving images of superheroes that poignantly echo Jimmy’s own search for a father figure. When Jimmy wears a Superman shirt, it only serves to emphasize how absurdly pathetic he is.

Under the heading “Corrigenda” in the endpapers, a third, autobiographical theme emerges. Owing to a bizarre coincidence, Ware was contacted by his estranged father—just like his character Jimmy was—while he was working on the graphic novel. Father and son met briefly once, but their conversation was as strained and awkward as the relationship depicted in the novel; a year later, Ware learned that his father had died. He concludes with the observation that the four or five hours it takes to read Jimmy Corrigan “is almost exactly the total amount of time I ever spent with my father.”

Impact

Jimmy Corrigan has helped to elevate the status of the graphic novel to the attention of the general reading public. Thanks to the American Book Award (2001) and Guardian Book Awards (2001), readers who might never have read a graphic novel before bought Jimmy Corrigan, which helped make it a best seller. Based on its formal complexity and its focus on the humiliations of everyday life, Ware’s work has been compared to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1886) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Since the publication of Jimmy Corrigan, Ware’s aesthetic has been recognized and celebrated in the fields of graphic design and fine art. His artwork has appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, the Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and the Penguin deluxe edition of Voltaire’s Candide. Museums and galleries have begun to display his artwork, most notably when it was part of the Whitney Biennial of American Art (2002) and also in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2006) and the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery (2007).

Ware’s interest in architecture and particular fondness for Louis Sullivan’s buildings is evident in his collaboration with National Public Radio host Ira Glass and cultural historian Tim Samuelson on Lost Buildings (2004), a book and DVD that document the destruction of historic buildings in Chicago. Between 2005 and 2006, his series “Building Stories,” a narrative that recounts the intertwined lives of the residents of one Chicago row house, was published in The New York Times Magazine.

Further Reading

Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (1997).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Twentieth Century Eightball (2002).

Katchor, Ben. Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1996).

Seth. It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (1993-2003).

Ware, Chris, ed. Best American Comics (2007).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13 (2004).

Bibliography

Ball, David M., and Martha Kuhlman, eds. The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Bredehoft, Thomas. “Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter, 2006): 869-890.

Carlin, John, Paul Karasik, and Brian Walker, eds. Masters of American Comics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.

Raeburn, Daniel K. Chris Ware. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.