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…
I managed to keep my book on life support, but it’s in dire condition. It wasn’t easy to keep track of Jimmy’s dreams, but I think it’s fair to say his father died. Typically, in the dreams things are either way too perfect (him and his dad get along just fine with no awkwardness) or way too wrong (his dad calls him over just to murder him). I think one reason we get this strange dream-like effect throughout the whole book (not just the dream sequences) is that Ware had “avoided his own father” for much of his life, as he says in the back section. So to some extent, Ware was going through much of this himself as he wrote the comic for the Chicago newspaper. Once I got the feeling for how Ware wanted us to read (always the small ones, clockwise from top left then the big one next to them), I didn’t get too distracted with the reading. And oddly enough, I was pretty impressed that even if you read out of order, the story still seemed to flow. Almost like Ware knew people wouldn’t always get it right, and so set up panels to work in different orders while still conveying the needed information.
Travis,
While I either understand or agree with much of what you wrote, part of my thinks Ware intended “Jimmy Corrigan” (the story, not the physical text) to function at this level — most lives aren’t “worthy” of stories (the idea of worth, both for stories and for human beings, probably deserves its own debate, to be honest), many of them are lonely and awkward, some of the could easily be said to be “falling apart” or “in shambles.”
I think Ware is trying to demonstrate the near-unbelievable complexity of anyone’s life/history/story, using two Jimmy Corrigans to do so. Even the loneliest person is engaged in a complex web of life and history, though they may not know it — here I’m thinking of the idea of Jimmy looking out the same window his great-grandfather once did, unknowingly occupying the same space as his ancestors, as noted in the supplemental essay.
Ware seems to be believe (if we ourselves believe his introductory notes) that life is lonely and confusing — “Jimmy Corrigan” captures this, perhaps almost too well. I don’t think this is all Ware does or is trying to do — the recurring symbolic imagery, the grandfather’s story, and so on suggest at a grander scheme — but I think your frustrations may have been intentional. Ware wants us to question the “worth” of his story, his characters, narrative conventions, and so on, perhaps so we understand them better or differently or add a few extra layers of knowledge to our understandings and expectations.