Category: Week 8 – Jimmy Corrigan

I should have heeded professor Sample’s words; everything I needed to know about Jimmy Corrigan I learned last week when I was informed the book would only literally fall apart in my hands.  Now, here I am: a paperback edition in shambles, my mind in shambles from a story constructed of incoherent shambles and characters that were shambles.  In fact, I’m still trying to pull something of Jimmy Corrigan that was worthy of my time, if for nothing else to illustrate the fact that some author’s only desire to confuse the reader.

Jimmy Corrigan begins as a novel confined in a black page with sparse dots throughout the page and flows to a page with the earth and Jimmy’s house.  I understand the zooming effect, however, it was lost upon me when I had to turn the book sideways to make out the three pictures adjacent to the house.  The novel was riddled with this torturous format that made me want to toss it out of the establishment window.  To add confusion to JC, the NUMEROUS frames that came interspersed on some of the pages also confused me as I could not gather a flow of reading.  Oft times I feel that I engaged the frames out of order as I did not know if I should have been going from upper-left to upper-right and then come down a level, or go from upper-left, straight down and then pan over.  The flow seemed to call for change every time, I can only praise Ware (or perhaps the editor but most likely Ware) for inserting convenient arrows from time to time to provide me some direction but I was already too frustrated at this point.

Jimmy’s ability to transfer between time and space only confused me as I needed a defined frame of reference.  I could not with any great degree of confidence determine what was a dream (Did Jimmy’s dad die?  Was any of it real?) or what was real, nor could I place any solid characteristics to any of the characters.   I read a blog that gave out quite a bit of the mother’s characteristics but I have to wonder, where did the blogger get these ideas of the mother’s character.  I certainly don’t believe we encounter enough of her to make such accusations other than she was a woman that liked to (or at least wanted to) talk to her son.  It was just too loose for me…all of it was just too loose…

1) Clean vs rough

Something that really struck me about Chris Ware’s work was that not only was it incredibly detailed, colored with clarity and taste, and given to unconventional layouts (as I mentioned in the Twitter conversation, the panel configuration gave me fits for some time, as I kept reading left to right, instead of realizing the “small panels in their group first, then the big panel” pattern), but one of the most rigidly clean examples of draftsmanship we’ve seen this semester.

The hyper-normative straightness of the lines, their extremely uniform thickness, the precise angles, curves, and shapes which Ware uses to construct his narrative emphasize the digital nature of his creative process. The razor-edged houses and compass-perfect circular heads and wheels make it obvious that Ware didn’t draw the finished product on a paper and then scan it in and ink it. However, I thought back to last weeks reading, and found the fact that Baker drew Nat Turner similarly entirely digitally (as indicated by the note which mentioned that the one-volume edition was colored directly from the digital files) fascinating. Both Ware and Baker utilize digital capabilities to their limits – Ware to create a seemingly sterile, utterly clean world of lines, angles, and monotone colors (note that there is little to no shading on objects, though often shadows will appear on the ground and walls), and Baker to facilitate the illusion of a rough pencil or charcoal sketch (the nature of his lines makes me wonder how this effect was accomplished) while seamlessly incorporating photographs and other artefacts which he did not draw (most obviously his alteration of the historical image of Nat Turner, and every time a gun appears).

Such a dramatically diverse approach to the same tools makes me wonder the thematic purposes behind such choices. Baker clearly emphasized the violence and uncontrolled nature of his narrative through his chosen methods, while Ware seems to indicate the claustrophobic, disconnected, overly-polished life of his severely damaged main character.

2) Superman

I kept noticing how ugly every appearance of Superman or a Superman figure was. The book opens with Jimmy’s mother being seduced by the seemingly genial Superman actor in a rather sordid vignette. Later, Superman leaps to his (still very clean) death as Jimmy watches from his office, an action Jimmy later contemplates. Part of me wishes Ware had made more of the comic book conventions and fixations on superheros. As it is, I am disturbed by Ware’s use of the figure of a costumed hero, but not terribly enlightened on what insight he has into the idea.

There were many reoccurring themes throughout Jimmy Corrigan, but the image that really seemed to haunt the pages was Super-Man.

We see his first incarnation while Jimmy is a small boy eager to to meet a flawless and skilled male role model. Of course, this ideal goes to shambles when the man behind the mask picks up his mother for a one night stand. In Jimmy’s innocence he doesn’t recognize the morning after awkwardness for what it was. Or how relating  the message of, “he had a read good time” could possibly affect his mother.

The next time Jimmy encounters a real life Super-Man it’s as he watches someone plummet to their death. This keeps unsettling him as he sees reminders in newspapers and such. This perturbation follows him into his fantasies. To balance the weirdness he feels upon meeting his father again he tries to spin a tale in which this meeting acts as fate. In his fantasy he is tucking in his son at bedtime, relating how his visit to his father eventually led to meeting the mother of the child. Their intimate moment is fractured by the appearance of a small version of super-man at the windowsill. This version turns into a monstrous giant that lifts up and destroys the house along with Jimmy’s “son”.

The representation of Super-man at this time begins to act as a portent of horrible things to come. Such as when Jimmy is hit by a truck and instead of seeing the driver check him over, he sees Super-man. Or when Jimmy makes a secret phone call to his mother while at a diner. A kid is playing with a close approximation of Super-man while Jimmy’s father discovers the phone call. Super-man and his likeness becomes a signal to the viewer.

So when we see Jimmy wearing his father’s Super-Man sweatshirt we are basically told two things.

1) his father is probably not going to make it out of the hospital

2) his father is also alligned with the original Super-man we first saw. The man who didn’t stick around.

Back in Chicago we see the Super-man sweatshirt collapsed forgotten in the corner of his room. His father has once again abandoned him, just in a more permanent fashion.

And the last Super-man we see is just before the page that hold, “The End”. A rather whimsical image of Super-man cradling a young Jimmy in his arms as he flies away. A representation of Jimmy’s first hopes and dreams? It’s a bit mysterious considering it is the last thing the reader sees.

I am still not quite sure what I think about Jimmy Corrigan – an uneasiness, confusion, and trying to piece it all together.  Like others posted I was grateful for the summary in the beginning of the book to offer some clarification and a and break from the steady stream of consciousness.  But when looking back through to write the blog the first thing I did was to compare Jimmy Corrigan to Nat Turner and I primarily was struck by the text of Ware’s novel, which offers a great contrast to Baker’s novel.  Nat Turner relied almost entirely on the power of the imagery with only the few blurbs from Turner’s confession, whereas Jimmy Corrigan relies heavily on its text.  Without the text and dialogue of the novel I would have never been able to piece together the story or even come close to the dialogue Ware presents.  Obviously as a graphic novel the images play a vital role in the comprehension and interpretation of the book, but I think that more than any of the other graphic novels we have read thus far Ware’s offers an equal role between the illustration and text.  The heavy reliance of the images upon the text stands out for me in simply following the images.  When there are no arrows to tell me which image to read next I piece it together by piecing together the text.

The heaviness of the text that I feel throughout the text I think feels more prominent because of the silent, withdrawn, awkward character of Jimmy Corrigan.  Plus the images must be read like a sentence more than I felt with the other novels.  The breakdown of the panel into the small squares creates a choppy sentence of pictures that I must read slowly along with the text.  In the other novels I did not feel as if I was ‘reading’ the images exactly but more taking in the elements of the illustrations, this time I feel that I moved slower through the novel because of the intricate interplay between the text and illustrations.

Sorry this is a little jumbled; I am confusing myself now trying to navigate through my navigation.  I hope this makes a little sense.

Well done earlier posters on getting to some of the big issues early. As a result, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Jimmy Corrigan I found fascinating (but probably wouldn’t have blogged on as a first choice): the introduction.

Perhaps it’s better referred to as a primer than an introduction. Or an introduction to reading comics. Either way, Ware’s playfulness in this section actually helps reveal a lot about the text as a whole. His intricate and elegant language (especially in the third section, as Lars mentioned on twitter) help set a tone oft-repeated (and drawn) throughout the book. And just as importantly, his primer to comics, including the “how to read these/do you see a mouse or just lines in the box” section and the short quiz, help reveal his expectations of his readers, and some preconceptions that permeate the comic world.

On a side note, another reason I’m compelled to work with the introduction this week: no page numbers.

Jared’s directions to find the text he’s referencing in this week’s post:

1. Open front cover. 2. Stop.

If you’re like me, maybe you skipped over what looked to be a silly part of the book and just dove right into the text. If you’re like me, you may have found yourself gloriously lost by about page 30 and decided that perhaps returning to the introduction might help sort things out. In my experience, the introduction was not nearly as helpful as the first and only recap when it came to making sense of the multiple threads in JC, but the introduction was still an interesting and informative read that bears heavily on the remainder of the text.

Ware starts by outlining a brief history of visual storytelling, much like we did our first week in class. One thing I think this does is open the table for the possibilities that come with telling stories with pictures. Cavemen did it one way, paintings of the Renaissance another, and “comic books” still another. Looking back on this now, it’s almost as if Ware is spelling out a warning: this will not be like any other “comic book” you have read. And Jimmy Corrigan isn’t like any other comic book I’ve read. Panels only sometimes have a clearly defined direction, thanks to the arrows, and as others have mentioned, dreams, past stories and the present story form an interwoven story that can get really confusing. Like Ulysses confusing.

Moving on to section 2, Ease of Use, we begin to see even more of the funny tone Ware brings. Here the ease of use has nothing to do with reading (which he handles in general instructions), but the ease of portability, and convenience to transport and read the book as you please. But this does not mean this will be an easy book to read, just an easy book to carry around and read as you wait. When it comes to the actual reading experience, it’s best to read the first line of the introduction:

“While it was not the intention of the author of this publication to produce a work which would in any way be considered “difficult,” “obscure,” or, even worse, “impenetrable,” it has come to the attention of our research faculty that some readers, owing to an (entirely excusable) unfamiliarity with certain trends and fads which flow through the tributaries of today’s ” cutting-edge culture,” might not be suitably equipped to sustain a successful linguistic relationship with the pictographic theater it offers.” Again, it’s important to remember the tongue-in-cheek nature of this entire piece, but at the same time to recognize some of the kernals of truth he drops. I’m somewhat familiar with comics, but my ‘linguistic relationship’ with this ‘pictographic theater’ was frequently strained, rarely sustained. Thanks for the warning, Ware. I just wish I’d taken it more to heart. In this sense, JC is easy to use (as a book is used), but not easy to comprehend/follow. At least not without a lot of work.

I will move on to the third section now, then leave sections 4 and 5 open for comments since they also help reveal some of the themes and difficulties presented in JC.

My only note for Section 3, “Role,” is scribbled at the top of the page. It reads: “awesome.” No, this note is not very deep, nor is it very scholarly. In my defense there’s not a lot of room for notes here, and I dislike the notion of writing in any graphic novel, even if it’s just the introduction. This section blew me away. It was more than just hilarious, profound writing as the importance of a line such as: “As such, the thinking person would have to conclude that, in general, the seeking of of emotional empathy in art is essentially a fool-hardy pursuit, better left to the intellectually weak, or to the ugly, for they have nothing else with which to occupy themselves. Besides, it is unsightly to feel sorry for oneself, and such ‘unfortunate times’ eventually pass, anyway, and if they don’t, then mercifully, for the rest of us at least, suicide is, of course, an option.”

This one line is incredibly loaded, and has implications for our entire reading. Is Ware talking about himself here? We know Jimmy is somewhat based on him, and this line seems to directly reference the lonely, sad, pathetic, passive, ugly, intellectually weak main character in the novel. Jimmy frequently feels sorry for himself, or at least that’s how I’ve read his character, and that is unsightly. At least there’s always suicide. At the same time, though, some of my previous tongue-in-cheek questions come back into play in this section. I don’t think it’s complete farce, but I also don’t think Ware intends us to take it as fact. It falls somewhere in between, and I’m still trying to understand how, exactly, I should be reading this.

For example, Ware writes that emotional empathy is a foolhardy pursuit.  Now, as far as Jimmy Corrigan goes, I agree. I can’t empathize with this character, and after a point I stopped trying and just started enjoying the interesting way he goes about creating a comic narrative. But I can’t say this is the case for 99% of the other fiction I’ve read. Any good writer knows that if you don’t have a character people can relate to (think empathize with), then you don’t really have a good story. That’s not to call Ware a bad writer, he just fits into the echelon of folks who buck the rules, and somehow make it work anyway. They’re a class all their own. Does he know this? I feel like he must, and that’s what gets us some of the lines in the introduction.

Only after reading a good amount of JC and returning to the introduction could I really see some of the hints and warnings Ware drops both the experienced and inexperienced comic reader about reading his text. This helps make it hilarious, but also seems to reveal some of the aspects Ware was more than aware of (and there’s a pun)  when constructing the book. So, now I leave it to you as my word count just keeps increasing:

Is Section 4 another warning, but this one for non-comics readers? Or is it just another joke? What else does it tell us about our reading?

Oh Section 5, how I loathed you–or how you made me loathe myself? Anybody else notice the sexism (or at the very least gender bias) that comes after question 1. “Are you male or female? (if b [female], you may stop. Put down your booklet. All others continue”?

Or is he getting at something else here? Like perhaps that a female comic fan wouldn’t have any of these issues of self-hatred and distant daddies that apparently all comic fans (or maybe just Ware himself) have? What does the instruction that women not take the test mean?

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth wonderfully plays on the ideas of perspective, objectivity, and subjectivity, as well as the author’s and audience’s distance to the story and its characters (as Bedehoft argues, using the “cut-outs” in the text as examples), to emphasize how one’s experience of passing time is often interrupted and affected by history, memory, and fantasy. In Jimmy Corrigan, these interruptions make up a significant portion of the text, suggesting that Ware sees time not only as the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and days, but as the moments we daydream staring out the window, thinking back upon our past experiences, worrying about our futures, fantasizing about opportunities that await, wincing at embarrassments from adolescence, dreading horrors lurking in the shadows of an unknowable future, and so on. Time not only passes Jimmy by, but is filtered through him — the minutes can pass slowly and awkwardly, with other characters trying to engage the socially inept Corrigan, or these minutes can seem like hours in which robots watch their younger selves from the deck of airship, only to wake and shed their metal plating (and in this moment between dreaming and waking, being next to a peach tree and under a bird, with peaches and birds being two of the numerous leitmotifs Ware uses throughout Jimmy Corrigan) on an airplane headed towards Michigan to meet an unknown father.

As Bredehoft notes in his essay “Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time…,” the historian Hayden White “describes one of the central understandings of contemporary historiography as suggesting that ‘events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence” (Bredehoft 886).

The actual narrative of the contemporary Jimmy in Jimmy Corrigan could be easily laid out, revealing a tragic tale of a shy, emotionally stunted man meeting his father for the first time in adult life, laying the first tentative foundations of a relationship with his adopted half-sister, only for his father to die as the result of a car accident and his half-sister literally pushing him away in a moment of suffocating grief. But Ware does not present this story alone — instead, Jimmy, who is almost incapable of expressing/presenting himself (or the ‘order of meaning’ of the passing events that make up his life) in his own words, is expressed/presented through his dreams, daydreams, nightmares, and imaginative currents. In many ways, Jimmy Corrigan‘s narrative and pictorial presentation are indebted to works like Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where the present is constantly interrupted, diverted, colored by and juxtaposed to past recollections and daydreams. In these works, time is never transcended, but is presented as subjectively malleable — a watched pot never boils, as my mother used to say to me.

Instead of presenting the passing moments of time between when the oven is turned on the water boils within a pot — be it the life of the younger or older Jimmy Corrigan — Ware allows us a glimpse inside of their imaginations, dreams, and nightmares, the interruptions that fill their heads as the water heats up, and demonstrates, as Bredehoft points out in his essay, how time and history unknowingly connects the characters, as when “Jimmy unknowingly looks through a window installed by his own great-grandfather, literally inhabiting a space once filled by his ancestors” (879), or pictorially represented in the history of the torn photograph Jimmy keeps in a drawer — a page which not only seems to condenses time and history, and demonstrates how the past is always entwined in the present, but interestingly links Jimmy’s window frame with a billboard outside, connecting Jimmy’s (lonely) home and existence with that of the city outside, even as it retreats from the wider shot of the city into the deadening emptiness of Jimmy’s home (877).

Wow – there’s a lot going on in Jimmy Corrigan.  I really enjoyed the text, but with so many different themes, visual motifs, and parallel story lines – I’m sure this is a graphic novel where one constantly discovers new things on subsequent readings.  But one really strong impression the text left with me is the sense that history is all-pervasive, even in the most mundane aspects of life. 

Jimmy’s convoluted family history is at the center of the text, and the sections on Grandpa Jimmy’s childhood give readers a direct view into Chicago’s history and the World’s Fair.  But throughout the story, the more mundane aspects of everyday life also seem to be loaded with history.  The page about halfway through the text, with twelve panels of restaurants, stores, gas stations, etc. seemed to really hit on this idea.  The blurbs on the back of each image provide a roundabout history of Waukosha.  And while the images on the front panel are universally stark and depressing, the titles on the reverse of each panel are comically ironic.  The disconnect between the written words on the back of the page, and the images seems to serve as a commentary from Ware on our ability to distort history to make even the most mundane situations seem note worthy.

The veiled reference to Amy in the blurb on the reverse of the Pam’s Wagon Wheel panel directly connects Jimmy’s own story and familial history with the more general overview of the history of Waukosha.  This connection is seemingly reinforced with the scene directly following the “History of Waukosha” page, in which Jimmy and his father are also dining at Pam’s Wagon Wheel. 

I found this dining sequence between Jimmy and his father to be one of the most fascinating moments of the entire text.  Ware’s tactic of continually returning to the image of the table, with its changing dynamic of food, cups, and discarded wrappers was especially interesting.  The people responsible for creating the changes we see on the table (Jimmy, his dad, the waitress) are never seen in any of these panels.  It’s intriguing that during a moment of such seemingly intense personal drama for Jimmy and his father, Ware always circles back to the mundane image of the table.  The sequence of images for the table is cyclical – it starts with the uneaten food and dirty place setting of the previous customers, then shifts to a clean table, then slowly adds cups and food until it ends where it began, with uneaten food and dirty place settings.  Perhaps the focus on the mundane in this scene is meant to comment on the cyclical nature of history.  In a weird way, by acting as a visual contrast with the awkward conversation between Jimmy and his father, the image seems to reinforce the overall sense of alienation that pervades much of the story, further shattering any idealized notions of family life or father-son relations.

John

I think Ware is commenting generally on the dysfunction that can run in families and that seems, at least to my reading of the book, to be come more pronounced as the generations of Corrigans moves from a simple, rural Illinois to a complex and modern Chicago. Both fathers and mothers seem inept at life.   Desperate, at times needy, and definitely lonely, you don’t wonder why; they all seem self-centered and incapable of sharing themselves with anyone.

We have four generations of non-achieving, not-so-bright men, running the gamut from abusive and sexually maladjusted to quivering, indecisive stutters. Pathetic might be one word to describe Jimmy Corrigan as a whole, but looking at the generations of Corrigan men over time, they are cruel, sadistic, bigoted, and unloving as well as socially maladroit, clumsy, and, ultimately, sad.  Jimmy is so perplexed by genuine emotions that he doesn’t know them when he experiences them; abandoning his step sister as she reacts to her father’s death, he doesn’t realize the sense of loss she feels for what it is until he cries in a cab heading home alone.

Jimmy’s mother seems to be not much better.  Sexually indiscriminate, maybe out of loneliness or desperation, she plays Jimmy throughout the book, taking out her dislike for his father and her own existence by keeping him so attached to her that he has no life of his own.  Until, in the end, when she needs him no longer, she pushes him out to be replaced by a new man. No surprise that Jimmy escapes into fantasy.  One wonders how often this has happened to him in the past.  To the Corrigan men, women in general are as confusing and cruel as the red-headed school girl who taunts his grandfather.

The city of Chicago also undergoes a transformation as we move through this history of Jimmy’s ancestors.  Ware’s flashbacks, at times confusing, take us from a more bucolic and simpler city in the past, to a depressingly dark place where Jimmy goes through the motions.  The rain and snow never seem to end in his life and the dark canyons become a metaphor for the Corrigans.

While Jimmy is the product of this dysfunctional genetic line, Ware shows us, through his adopted step sister Amy, that there are those who do not give up and let the world beat them down.  We don’t see much of her, but she shows compassion for Jimmy and love for his father.  Listening to him talk about his life, she seems to realize that nobody has cared for him before.  She explains to him that spelling “HI” with bacon strips is his fathers way of expressing affection and seems to understand the disconnection he feels.

In the end, one hopes that Jimmy is not successful with his new office mate.  The thought of more Corrigan males is too depressing to contemplate.  While I enjoyed reading Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid On Earth, it is best if this Corrigan is the last of the line.

Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan strikes me as an experiment in self-loathing and an exercise in writing a comic book to make the reader as uneasy as possible.

First, the strange embodiment of time creates uneasiness because we’re constantly going back and forth between the present reality, the present fantasies/nightmares, and the past without any obvious markers for having done so. I was grateful for the first and only summarization of events which I cannot give page numbers for because they are not included in the book and I think it’s contrary to the author’s purpose to try to count them.

Which brings me to a question – why are there no page numbers?  What purpose does it serve to never let the reader know where they are in the book?  I think it adds a layer to the already intricate storyline by leaving the reader always a little uneasy.  We never really know where we are in the story, or even really what the story is until very late in the graphic novel.  In terms of the panel format, it seems that Ware is purposely consistently changing it and on top of that the font also changes size making it very difficult to not pay close attention to where you are on the page.  I was grateful for the little arrows giving me some direction, but it still made me uneasy to have to figure it out anew for every page.

The protagonist was my biggest problem.  Because the protagonist harbors no typical hero quality I found myself constantly looking for some redeeming characteristic.  Although it could be argued that wanting to be liked fits into that category, I would argue that it is specifically this trait that makes Jimmy so unbearable, spineless and empty.  He has no sense of self worth.  But I don’t think we’re really supposed to like him.  He is the alter-ego that nobody wants to admit (and of course I am certainly not doing that here), the victim who cannot be anything other than that.

On a separate, but maybe relevant note, I think the grandfather’s story of physical and emotional abuse could easily be Jimmy’s story and I think Ware is again playing with a sense of time and order.  Although Jimmy did not know his grandfather’s story it seems that he is, personality-wise, a direct descendant of that history.  This places him even more firmly in the victim role, but because it wasn’t him I find it even more difficult to like Jimmy.