Experiencing the Beat of Comics in “Jimmy Corrigan”

Chris Ware has become one of my absolute favorite comics creator – for both his art and his writing – and I’m not sure how many times now I’ve read Jimmy Corrigan.  It’s so dense in meaning and emotion and innovation that I can return to it each year and find a new way to appreciate it and to be depressed by it.  I’m also intrigued by Chris Ware’s theories that comics possess their own, unique forms of storytelling that promise new directions that other forms of communication can’t travel in.   Although many readers find his experimentation with form and visual language get in the way of them actually enjoying or even understanding his stories, I feel that he ultimately joins his innovations with engaging storytelling.

One way Ware explores the possibilities of comics’ unique visual language is through his development of his panels’ “tempo” of panels:

“What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time,” Ware says. “The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…”

Daniel Raeburn, Chris Ware (Monographics)
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 25

Unlike in film, where the director has already decided for us the speed of the events on the screen and the amount of time they’ll allow us to linger on each frame, comics creators have to acknowledge the readers’ autonomy.   As we draw our eyes across each page, we decide how much time we spend on each image or even what part of the image we desire to look at.  Ware strives to influence and manipulate both our subconscious and conscious processes of reading and our experience of the entire page.

Ware composes each page as a whole where the shape and size of each panel, the text between panels, the shape of the gutters, the composition of their subjects, their subjects themselves, and even the color play into the reader’s experience of that page.   His use of color in particular showcases his experimentation with visual storytelling.   Ware combines his relatively realistic color palette with panels where an extremely saturated color – usually red or cyan – partially or fully floods out the background behind the character (the first seems to show up a few pages in when Jimmy spots an answering machine at the store).  These color fields not only reflect the pictured characters current emotion – primal moments of alertness, terror, guilt, or surprise – but provide a clearly accentuated “beat” for the reader like a punch to the stomach.

Ware also manages to land some of these emotional punches in his more dry, analytical sequences that diagram relationship and events between characters, like the two page spread at the story’s climax that reveals how Amy and Jimmy’s family tree folds into itself.   These pages take us the furthest away from his characters, isolating them pulling back visually to show more simple (and sometimes almost featureless) character designs.  He pulls his narrative eye out as well by framing them with a cold and scientific language of magnification and arrows that direct our eye around the page with their own sense of beat.  Ware further separates us from each scene by revealing items hidden or temporarily concealed by the characters experiencing these scenes – like Amy’s birth certificate and the flower her great-great grandmother pressed into a bible as a child – and allowing us to compare them in ways none of their owners are allowed to.

We aren’t allowed inside these scenes in the same way that Ware invites us inside of the mundane moments and fantastical daydreams of Jimmy’s life.  Instead, we stare down at the characters together like gods, watching as Ware lays out the unseen details and coincidences of their lives in a quiet, tidy manner.  But we have just as little control over their lives as they do.

Even though we’ve had the chance to see their lives more fully and can understand them in ways their linear lives won’t allow them to understand, it’s impossible for us to communicate that to them.  By reading Jimmy Corrigan, we help construct the context of the misunderstandings and mistakes of their lives, only to watch helplessly as they stumble on blindly – now closer, now further away….  Whether or not that powerlessness evokes a powerful sympathy that pulls you closer to the characters ultimately depends on the experience of the reader.