Jimmy Corrigan: Hey, I Think I Know That Guy

Jimmy Corrigan (the book and the character) is awkward, pathetic, and depressing—and so is life. Real life is generally devoid of the climaxes and superheroes that fill Golden Age comic books. Real life is small, random, and unfair. In “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” Chris Ware makes no attempt to disguise this; rather, he shows us life in all its ugliness and discomfort. Jimmy Corrigan is not a kid, nor is he particularly smart. The title sounds like something out of a classic superhero comic—or perhaps something a perfect, wholesome father would say to his son in some 1950’s “Leave It to Beaver”-type television show. Perhaps it is the way Jimmy dreams his imagined father would refer to him. But by the end of the book, it seems safe to assume that no one is ever going to refer to Jimmy this way.
Jimmy is the ANTI superhero. He could not be more so. He hunches in on himself as if someone is going to hit him—as if he wishes he were still child-sized, because then he would be a smaller target. His mother calls him constantly, with irritating demands and questions (“put that five dollar check in the bank right now!” “Jimmy—do you LOVE me? Really?”), but Jimmy, though ostensibly a grown man, is powerless to tell her to stop. Jimmy’s character plays out the worst fear of what might happen to young boys without fathers: Without a father to guide him, he has never learned how to be a man, and thus remains a child in a grown man’s body. This childishness is devoid of any charm or boyish pluck; Jimmy Corrigan’s childishness is disgusting, and often painful to observe.
But also human. We are used to our comic books (and other media as well) delivering us larger-than-life stories. The idea of a man meeting his father after a lifetime apart sounds dramatic—perhaps good material for a soap opera, or a made-for-TV movie. That is not what we get in “Jimmy Corrigan.” Time and again, a moment that has the potential to really change a character’s life for the better is thwarted by the ugliness of real life. For instance, during a flashback, in a scene with Jimmy Corrigan’s grandfather, we watch the young boy almost become friends with a schoolmate and his large, loving family—but then the lead horse toy turns out all wrong, and everything is ruined. Or we watch Jimmy and his father have small moments of bonding—but then the father is hit by a car. Quentin Tarantino once explained what he sees as the difference between “movie reality” and “actual reality”: in movie reality, Our Hero runs from the villain, leaps out of a building, lands in a sexy convertible, and drives away. In actual reality, Our Hero runs from the villain, leaps out of a building, lands in a sexy convertible, and realizes…the car is a stick shift, and he can’t drive that.
Jimmy Corrigan cannot drive stick shift. And yet, his story is not close to the average person’s reality at all. Your long-absent father getting hit by a car and DYING the very same weekend you meet him? Suddenly discovering a whole new family, and then just as suddenly having it all taken away again? That’s a bit more dramatic than most of our lives. What feels real about it is the way Jimmy reacts to all of this: rather, he reacts very little at all. No matter what life hands him, he just plods along, mostly speechless. We watch the sad, childish fantasies that play through his head—fantasies that the external Jimmy would never have the courage to act out. Life goes on. Jimmy will never have the courage to turn himself into a superhero.