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 agree, but don’t you think that anything involving Superman is a bit of a cliche by now? This was actually my biggest gripe with JC–by far the most obvious commentary, awkwardly transparent….
I agree so torrently that I had no idea what the superman t-shirt was for at all. I saw no value or meaning from it other than Ware wanted JC to seem like a character who was familiar with comics or liked the hero (who doesn’t…?); the t-shirt was as abstract and loose as the novel.
I thought the opposite. I found it kind of appropriate that Jimmy would like a “washed up,” overused superhero type. He’s constantly behind where he should be for his age; so when the world has moved away from Superman; I find it fitting that he should be stuck rehashing what he means over…and over…and over…
I felt a connection between the Superman imagery and the idea of fatherhood. That is, considering the context of the story, it’s tied to how kids tend to idolize the fathers. More specifically, how kids who grew up without a dad imagine what their father might be like and exaggerate their hypothetical parent to ridiculous levels.
You see this most clearly in the opening vignette, where the fatherless Jimmy stands in awe of his idol, an actor who portrays a TV superman. That this guy has just slept with Jimmy’s Mom makes this connection between Jimmy’s idealized Superman-Father and the actor highly ironic. The little image on the “The End” page with the superman carrying Jimmy as a child really pounds this association home. That the man dressed as superman jumps to his death in front of Jimmy’s eyes is a reflection of the trauma associated with the absence of Jimmy’s father and possibly even the disillusionment of any idealized conceptions he may have once constructed around his father. Under this reading, the bit with the giant superman crushing the house again reflects how this trauma has affected Jimmy’s life and how it may continue to haunt him down the line.
But, like the many other motifs in the book (birds, peaches, robots, etc.), the superman imagery doesn’t always play the same role in every situation. Several characters refer to Jimmy as “Superman,” on account of his shirt or his actions (jumping in front of a truck, and so on). In this context, it’s an ironic device that lays bare Jimmy’s ineptitude and maladjustment, often with a hint of pathos. He’s wearing the shirt when the doctor tells him his father has died, which emphasizes his helplessness and inability to change what’s happened. Also, it goes along with the book’s snarky self-consciousness of itself as a comic book. Asides throughout the book, on the back of the cover, and in the introduction criticize how comics are still not thought of as a literary medium. The frequent superhero imagery is a constant reminder that this book IS a comic, and that it belongs in the literature section nonetheless, rather than “somewhere near science fiction and role-playing games” (Back cover).