Not only does the overall character of Jimmy cause the reader to be detached from his state of being, it makes him a downright alien life form. I don’t think Jimmy is meant to be relatable; I think that the reader is meant to perceive Jimmy with the same disdain that everyone in his world shows towards him. Amy is super-sweet, and considerably innocent (well, as innocent as anyone can ever be in a “raw around the edges ‘cuz that’s how real life is!” indie work…), yet she frequently loses patience with Jimmy, only to subtly reassert patience in order to progress the dialogue. That loss of patience is something I greatly sympathize with; as a reader, I continually realized that everything Jimmy does, I would do differently. Not a little differently, in a “matter of taste” kind of way, but rather in a “I wouldn’t even get myself into that situation, and even if I did, I wouldn’t react to it in a creepy, sexually repressed, yet still completely inert” kind of way. Jimmy simply glides from situation to situation, without truly acting or reacting. His decision to go see his father, which is a rather large deal, is made with a minimum of emotion, reflection, or any kind of thought at all, really. And how does he feel about his father’s revelation of Amy? Well, after lingering on his father’s word choice (“mistake”), his feelings mostly subside. If they are there at all when they meet, he doesn’t act on them in any degree. Like every other dialogue in Jimmy’s life, he mutters semi-incomprehensibly when he does manage to speak, and leaves the other participant to assume what they may about him; Jimmy’s father was left with the assumption that he had a girlfriend, for example.
Either Jimmy is secretly a brilliant yet covert conversationalist who expertly deceives others into a false sense of security, or he’s one concussion short of a coma, if you know what I mean.
My final verdict is that he is detached and unrelatable, as an artistic choice on Chris Ware’s behalf, and it is ultimately up to the reader whether or not it is their cup of tea to read several hundred pages about someone with whom they secretly (or not so secretly) hate.
One thing that confuses the “detached and unrelatable” nature of Jimmy is that in his fantasy-life he is indeed a “brilliant” conversationalist. It seems to me that in order to have this fantasy, he must be aware on some level that in real-life he is NOT such a person. So, his awareness of his own isolated and awkward personality makes him far more self-aware than he’d be if he were really “one concussion short of a coma.” That’s a great phrase, but I don’t think it applies to Jimmy.