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The heaviness of the text that I feel throughout the text I think feels more prominent because of the silent, withdrawn, awkward character of Jimmy Corrigan.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.