Rhythms and Repetition in Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World”

What I find immediately absorbing about “Ghost World” is Clowes’ pitch-perfect depiction of the rhythms of life for two bored teenagers stuck in a dead-end town.   The gleeful, witty nastiness of their conversations, the way they drift spontaneously from one pointless activity to another, the lack of any real structure in their lives, all work together to capture the precise place they inhabit at this point in their lives.  Enid and Rebecca are suspended in a twilight world that Clowes’ unearthly neon blue shading suggests.   Having escaped from highschool, they have yet to decide how they want to live the rest of their lives, so they retrace the worn tracks of their own lives again and again until they become helplessly disgusted with themselves.

Clowes frequently makes this pacing literal, showing Enid and Rebecca revisiting old environments, activities, and topics of conversation.  An example of this repetition can be found on page twenty-seven, when the two teenagers briefly visit a Zine shop called Zine-O-Phobia before wandering off down the street.  Enid at least seems quite familiar with the store:  she’s shocked to find an acquaintance working there (“fuck you! Since when do you work here?”  “Since always on Tuesday”), and quickly zeroes in on a flier advertizing the store’s Special Appearances despite John Ellis’ attempts to freak her out.  Her bored expression normalizes the scene further, suggesting that this store is another fixture in the pair’s life, just like the Hubba Hubba Diner.

As the two leave the shop and walk down the street together, their conversation keeps the repetition rolling.  “What did John Ellis say about me?” Rebecca asks Enid, continuing her already established habit of grilling Enid about every male character she talks to.  Rebecca’s conversations with her friend are usually fueled by a half-sarcastic sexuality regardless of how appropriate the object of her apparent affection seems to be.   Whether they’re talking about a fellow teenager or a mumbling creeper hanging around diners, Rebecca appears to draw some strange satisfaction from inspiring Enid’s outrage and disgust, as we witness over and over again throughout the comic (for example: Enid responds to Rebecca’s “fuck you! At least I don’t want to fuck John Ellis!” on page 11 with “Ewww! I hate John Ellis!,”  Her “aww, but he’s so cute!” about a young garage sale patron on page 15 is matched with Enid’s brusque “he’s a fruit,” Rebecca declares “he was cute…” about ‘Johnny Apeshit’ on page 25 only to backtrack with “I’m kidding…” when Enid yells “Oh PLEASE, you’re a total moron!”, while her “I want to ‘make love’ to him!” about ‘Weird Al’ on page 44 is met with Enid’s aggressive declaration “I’m going to tell him you said that!” ).

This time, however, Enid doesn’t seem up to mocking Rebecca’s interests, even though she’s made herself an easy target by asking after the creeptastic John Ellis.   Instead, she focuses on Ellis himself, saying “he loves you…it’s so pathetic…” as she walks with her head down and her hands in her pocket.  Because Clowes has put so much effort into repeating and refining the rhythm of the young women’s conversations about men, even small variations like this one stand out to the reader and signal Enid’s preoccupation with another issue.  In this case, Clowes seems to suggest that Enid may be struggling with her own feelings about both the denounced John Ellis (who she does appear to hate) and Dan Clowes himself (who she has claimed, somewhat convincingly, that she’s attracted to and may also admire).    Her feelings of confusion and dissatisfaction with the routine of her life are palpable here and manifest themselves in page 27’s final panel with “the pants.”  “Hey look! It’s the pants!” Rebecca says excitedly, pointing at an abandoned, filthy pair of jeans on the sidewalk that they’ve apparently passed by before, again, and again, and again.  “I can’t believe they’re still here!” Enid says, and her words resonant on a deeper, symbolic level.  She speaks for the both of the teenagers with her incredulity – why the hell are they still here, on this same old street, walking the same old way to the same old places, living the same old life?

Ghost World

If someone ever feels trapped or feels like he needs a change in his life, then this graphic novel is perfect. Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World is a fun read. At first I was a little put off by the character of Enid and her friendship abusing ways, but I really grew to like her and understood her motivation behind her actions. This story told the tale of a big (but peculiar fish) in a small pond and her quest to figure out who she was and where she belonged. Creating strong and interesting relationships between all of the characters (even the minor ones) and using subtlety in the illustrations, this point really gets across. The characters, the colors, and dialogue are all pleasing.

The story seems to cater to teenagers just out of high school or twenty somethings in a small town who want change. Enid and Rebecca are best friends whose friendship seems to thrive off of making fun of  people in town and Enid’s crazy stories and comments about her adventures. Enid and Rebecca’s relationship looks very strong on the surface but if you look beneath, it is very weak. They use each other as a crutch to justify their behaviors and are both afraid of change (although Enid might not be as scared as Rebecca).

Enid wants to become something more but is afraid to do it so she settles on doing small things that aren’t too drastic ( ie dying and cutting her hair). Becky is afraid to be alone so she tags along with Enid andtries to find ways to keep their friendship intact by sometimes suffering through, what I feel, is verbal abuse (ie “okay, maybe…. God you’re such a drag” or “Oh please, you’re a total moron”). They both want to do something to fix or alter their situations but are too afraid to make a move. Enid secretly wants to go to college but she is afraid to tell Rebecca. Instead, she tries to hide her interest but Rebecca can see that her friend is slowly moving away from her. They need to change their lives and the story ends with this realization. Rebecca finally makes a move: she gets a job and gets together with Josh. Enid also realizes that she must change too and gets on a bus to “Somewhere, USA”.

Giving the lives of two angsty teenage girls a deeper meaning is a really cool and creative way to express the idea of change and how things are somewhat inevitable. I also really like the tie in of the title with the end of the book. Enid in some ways becomes a ghost because things move on without her. She sees that Becky doesn’t need her as much anymore which forces her to examine herself and see that it is time for her to change as well. She disappears without telling anyone (like a ghost) and makes a decision to change  her life for the better: to become the person she always wanted.

The artwork was also closely linked to the title. Using light blues, blacks, and whites the artist creates a kind of a ghostly feeling. The colors remind me of a dream and the illustrations look as if they will disappear within the blink of an eye. I also think the way the characters are drawn is really cool. They are all average looking (or little less than average) but not as pathetic as the characters in Jimmy Corrigan. They have something positive going for them and are not as hideous to look at.

Ghost World is a great way to end the semester. It speaks about the anxieties people have when they think about change but does it in a humorous and light-hearted way.

What modern girls are supposedly like…

While I usually never think twice about an author writing in a voice of the opposite sex, I found it significant that Daniel Clowes chose to tell the story of his graphic novel, Ghost World, from the perspective of two teenage girls. The relationship of the protagonist, Enid and Rebecca, is characterized by blunt opinions and harsh language – Enid, in particular, has such a foul mouth, she would make even the swarthiest of sailors blanch with shock. While I’m not going to pretend that all girls are angels who never curse or talk about sex, the extent to which these girls engage in both of the aforementioned activities seems to be an exaggerated version of how two such girls would act in real life. As I read the novel, I was reminded of one of my high school friends who took pride in being loud and abrasive, although she doesn’t hold a candle to Enid and Rebecca. Even more unbelievable is the fact that one of the novel’s make characters, Josh, is the figure to which the girls should model themselves after. Josh is the voice of reason and it seems to be Enid’s mission to capture his attention, using any and every outrageous tactic at her disposal.

Enid’s first questionable run-in with Josh is related through a phone conversation between her and Rebecca. Wearing what appears to be a Catwoman mask, Enid tells her friend that she and Josh went to the adult book and video store, “Adam’s II.” The panels of this sequence progress from subject-to-subject during the phone call, then switch to scene-to-scene to show the encounter, which is conveyed through aspect-to-aspect transgressions. In the flashback, we see Enid asking Josh to go to accompany her to the adult store, saying, “Becky and I are dying to go in there but we can’t get any boys to take us…” I’m assuming this comment is for Josh’s benefit because I don’t see any reason why the girls can’t enter the store by themselves. Josh is understandably reluctant to set foot in the store, although Enid manipulates him into humoring her whim. Once inside, Enid is like a kid in a candy store, picking up various sex toys to show an uncomfortable Josh. Enid appears to be having fun, although her excitement might be embellished in an attempt to get Josh to loosen up. Appealing to Josh like a petulant child to her aggravated father, Enid begs Josh to borrow money to pay for the Catwoman mask; although he doesn’t seem to be enthused by the idea, Josh obviously caves in since Enid is presently wearing the mask. The reason I didn’t much care for this sequence is that Enid shows her immaturity by putting herself and Josh in an awkward situation, not caring that her actions are only making him more uncomfortable by the second.

The next instance in which Enid is portrayed in a negative light in relation to Josh is when she and Rebecca orchestrate a prank on an unsuspecting man. The girls respond to a personal ad in the newspaper, setting up a meeting under false pretenses. To personally witness their cruel joke, Rebecca and Enid ask Josh to drive them to the Hubba Hubba Diner, where the meeting is scheduled to take place. Although Josh tells them, “I don’t want to have anything to do with” the trick that is being played, the girls coerce him into agreeing to go with them. What I want to know is that if Josh knows his reasoning is correct, why doesn’t he attempt to make the girls see that what they’re doing is wrong instead of allowing himself to be taken advantage of? Josh’s allowing himself to be manipulated once again only escalates the problem that Enid and Rebecca have gotten themselves into. Some time into their meal at the diner, Rebecca calls attention to the man she believes to be the target of their prank. Once they are confronted with the reality of the situation, the girls are racked with guilt. They realize that the man caught on to their prank, which makes them feel even more ashamed. While it was necessary to a certain degree for the girls to experience the realization that their actions have consequences, I couldn’t help but think that the situation need never have happened in the first place. Even after going through the act of setting the stage for the joke, the girls didn’t have to make matters worse by being witnesses to their victim’s humiliation.

Ghost World: If You Don’t Like It, You’re Probably A Satanist

It is my fear that we will devote the entire class discussion of Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World” going back and forth between people who didn’t like the book because it was “sad,” and people who liked the book because it was “not sad.” If this happens, there is a good chance I am going to smack somebody in the face.
What makes a book sad? Or happy? “Ghost World” is about growing up, and growing up is painful. So how else should one portray it? Enid and Rebecca hate most everything and everyone—but they’re intelligent and interesting, and they live in a place that has not offered them much in the way of culture. How else should they react? What I like about “Ghost World” is that it’s real. I read it for the first time during the summer before my senior year of high school, and I felt pangs of identification in the way only a seventeen-year-old can. I too lived in a small town where there wasn’t much to do! I too was one of the artsy geeky types in my high school! I too had an intense friendship with my best friend (I too feared people liked her better because she was prettier and less bitchy than me!)! I too was excited to graduate but also terrified to move on! If I wasn’t Enid Coleslaw, I wanted to be. She was intelligent, funny, and daring. She didn’t sugarcoat anything, for anyone.
With so much to identify with in “Ghost World,” the issue of “sad” or “happy” in the book was, to High School Athena, entirely beside the point. The book rang TRUE, and that was reason enough to jump for joy. I have never found another example, in any media, that is so faithful to the way high school girls talk to one another. It was only two years ago, in February of 2008, that DC Comics launched its “Minx” line of comics, aimed at girls. Just a year and a half later, they cancelled it. (Because it was idiotic.) They were looking to create something that might appeal to girls in the same way Manga has; they hoped to draw in the female readers that have traditionally been scarce in the comics world. If they’d wanted more readers like me and my friends, they should’ve just called Daniel Clowes.
I realize that DC, and Manga companies, probably don’t care much about appealing to the small crowd that reads alternative comics. But watching DC launch and quickly retire the Minx line, and, over the years, listening to a number of fellow comics-enthusiasts (mostly males) tell me they hated “Ghost World” because it was “too depressing,” or worse, because they just “can’t stand all that teenage girl talk,” I can’t help but feel that there’s a cultural gap here. Between people who instantly love and identify with “Ghost World,” and people who hate it because it’s a downer.
But maybe that’s just me being a judgmental Enid Coleslaw type. Enid’s kind of humor—judging others, hating everything, but in a way that is witty and smacks of truth (similar to Ben Tanaka’s sense of humor in “Shortcomings,” but with less self-delusion), is dark, but the best humor generally is.

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.

Ghost World

A lot of people complained about the character of Jimmy Corrigan, finding him to be a frustrating loser. I had a similar sort of block while reading Ghost World; I didn’t find them pitiable, like Jimmy, they just came off as callow jerks. I think it is harder for me to relate to the sorrows of two teenagers when they just come off as angsty, cruel suburbanites. Maybe this story about teenagers inhabiting a “ghost world” in which they don’t belong would have resonated with me 8 years ago, but perhaps then I would not have been able to read it from a distance, to understand the satire, to see how Enid and Rebecca must eventually grow up. Anyway, I feel that I have left those years of my life so far behind that it seems senseless to read about Enid and Rebecca.

Daniel Clowes does make interesting satire about society, and about teenage life. Enid and Rebecca have been thrust into a new world following their high school graduation, a world that is both exciting and terrifying. Like many insecure teens, like to assert that they are not ostracized, that they instead make a conscious choice to be different. It’s true to an extent, but Enid especially shows her vulnerability, her insecurity about men and her appearance. Both characters worry that Josh likes the other one better, and his unlikely relationships with both of them become an important vehicle for them to express their own insecurities – and also to realize the strengths that the other possesses. Both characters are also every bit as shallow, trendy, and stuck up as the people they scorn (and feel scorned by), and that’s one of the crueler ironies, and more hilarious aspects, of the story. Sadly, it is only in opposition to these people that Enid can find her niche and really define herself, her belongings only become valuable to her when she can lord them over other people. Adolescence can be a profoundly difficult period, one which it seems that Clowe remembers all too well, though he is still able to take a step back and satirize it.

It is hard for Enid, especially, to live in such a shallow ghost world, to be constantly surrounded by an ideal which she does not fit. She reacts by scorning this paradigm, but in so doing, she becomes obsessed with everything she detests. It’s a poignant story because so many of us have lived this, have felt this alienation at some point (especially during adolescence). At the same time, it’s hard to be patient with Enid, not seeing any real obstacles to her growing up except for her own self. She clings to the past (her childhood memories, her lifelong best friend, old gifts) and feels genuinely ambivalent and fearful of the future, despite repeatedly affirming her desire to change, to “become a totally different person” (74), but doesn’t feel that the world she lives in is allowing her to realize this.

Of course, Enid and Rebecca do grow up eventually (or, we are at least left with the impression that they will, someday), like most immature adolescents, and the reader knows how important it is for them to develop into adults. Eventually, they have no choice but to join the boring, tedious adult world they are so fearful of. Enid, like many adults, realizes too late all of the pleasures of youth that have been wasted. The ending is ambiguous; does Enid feel defeated, or does she realize that she, too, must grow and evolve now that Rebecca has moved away from her.

The vignettes in this story do a great job of capturing the mood of restless adolescents, drifting in and out of a world in which they can’t seem to find a place. I also loved Clowes’ subtle but emotional drawings, and his subdued use of color, which really did capture the experience for embattled teenagers living in a ghost world.

Uncomfortable Empathy: Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth

What the hell is it about “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” that takes a straightforward, but sad story and drives it to the edge of cripplingly depressing?  This question dangled throughout my reading, and it wasn’t until close to the end of the book that I finally got an answer in the form of Jimmy stuttering out “I-I… I-I just want people to li-i–i-ike me…”

As simple as the story is (though maybe not so straightforward) the goal of the main character(s) is just as straightforward too: the Jimmys just want to be liked.  At a basic level, we all just want to be liked – maybe not by everyone, but at least by someone, and Jimmy appears to have no one by the end of the story.  Jimmy Corrigan embodies our fears of loneliness, but again, the question is “how?”  If not because of the fact that it takes more than an author just announcing how a character feels (the old “show vs. tell” argument) then simply because of the fact that I was depressed way before Jimmy vocalized this thought of his.

The basic technique by which Chris Ware crafts his story is by playing up the tiny moments of day to day life.  “If Jimmy just wants to be liked and isn’t, why is that?” in answering that question, or attention is drawn to the elements that make Jimmy’s character: for instance, in the above picture the tag of Jimmy’s shirt is sticking out.  Awkward.  Jimmy is balding, at one point his clothes don’t fit him quite right, his attempts at comforting his newfound sister are not accepted like he’d hoped…  All of these things could just as easily happen to us: clothes get ruined, failure at comfort, balding, etcetera.

Then there are the elements of irony throughout the book, where one of the Jimmys is painfully unaware of what is happening in the world around him.  The young grandfather thinks that his lead horse is beautiful, but it turns out it’s not, and the young Jimmy of the present day doesn’t realize that his hero has just cut and run after sleeping with his mom.  These examples on their own are sad, and were it only for these two instances, perhaps readers could rationalize it away, mumbling something about how innocent or unclear childhood can seem, but no.   On the other end of life, stand, again, grandfather Corrigan and Jimmy’s dad.  In one flashback Jimmy’s dad shoes his dad out the door after he’s made a comment about “colored people.”  This scene serves a dual purpose: first it shows that in old age grandfather Corrigan is still alienated from and awkward around other people, but it also adds the sad element of showing to readers that Jimmy’s dad was once a bit more aware of those around him.  Now, in the present day when he’s met his son, Jimmy’s dad is painfully unaware of Jimmy’s lack of a girlfriend, how uncomfortable the comments he’s made about the women he’s slept with are, and his attempts to connect with Jimmy the way that he was able to connect with his daughter (via the bacon words) is acknowledged, but never quite accepted as a bonding element.  It is by playing on our fears of alienation and awkwardness that Chris Ware gets readers to relate to Jimmy Corrigan and feel quite depressed in doing so.

Crushing banality in Jimmy Corrigan

Ware’s loosely autobiographical and widely acclaimed Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, is like the Ulysses of graphic novels. Meticulously crafted and as dense as the line at Val come 6:30, Ware’s graphic novel weaves three stories into one mashed up representation of a sad, socially inept man. At times, the complexity of the story telling makes it hard for the reader to make sense of the story. Ware jumps from Jimmy’s present (the plot revolving around his contact with his previously absent father), to flashbacks of Jimmy’s grandfather, James, to moments of Jimmy’s vivid imagination. Worth noting is Ware’s initial estrangement from his father while writing Jimmy’s character, his brief re-contact with his father, and before finishing the novel, his father’s untimely death.

Despite the oftentimes confusing plot threads, Ware does his best to guide the reader through the packed and unconventionally organized panels. The panels are often of varying sizes and shapes, and sometimes we even have to read from right to left. Lucky for us, Ware sometimes includes guiding arrows that direct us from scene to scene. Other times he fills the gutter with big transition words that give us both a sense of tone and time. Finally, he often allows art from one scene to bleed into others, connecting the scenes visually, literally drawing a bridge to guide our eyes.

Because Ware’s choices in his novel all seem so substantive, it’s easy to pick out a couple things to analyze. One aspect that has been discussed in blog posts on our course website is his choice to obscure many characters’ eyes and faces. Perhaps it is meant to put all the focus on Jimmy, but as Emily noted, how do we explain the fully represented face of the red-haired girl and Jimmy’s half-sister? Initially, I felt that obscuring the faces was a visual representation of Jimmy’s social awkwardness—literally unable to look people in the eyes.

In Peter Schjeldahl’s The New Yorker review, he called Jimmy’s father “a figure of crushing banality.” Ware does an incredible job in creating distinct and memorable characters in his novel, but for me, Jimmy’s father stood out. Schjeldahl hit it right on the head when he called him a figure of banality. The onslaught of dribble that pours from his mouth during the doctor’s visit is funny for a bit, but then just utterly annoying. Jimmy’s father seems delusional at points, a man who has convinced himself that his way of life is correct, that his beliefs are right, but so clearly holds no real gravitas (especially when juxtaposed or in conversation with the doctor). Ware brings out the reprehensible characteristics of an “ordinary” man in his drawing of Jimmy’s father. Because of the almost mythic quality Jimmy’s father held before we met him (the same mythic quality all long lost characters inevitably hold), such a lack of personality further indicates the absolutely depressing nature of Jimmy’s life.

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.

Jimmy Corrigan: The Saddest Kid on Earth

At first it can be hard to know what to make of this book. It can be difficult to know where the eyes should move to, where to focus, who is saying what (we saw the same thing with Chris Ware’s comics in McSweeney’s). Even the layout is unusual, but Ware makes great use of space (and not a centimeter seems wasted). Ware does make a lot of his works intentionally opaque, and I can’t say it’s a style that I immediately appreciate, but I think if I had a lot more time with this book, I’m sure could get so much out of it. While I like books that make the reader work a bit, and Ware leaves a lot up to the reader, but the difficulty of this piece almost seemed self-congratulating on Ware’s part, and I don’t think he needed to create such an imposing tome in order to get his points across about alienation and awkwardness. I didn’t find the character Jimmy to be as unappealing as some people did, though, and I really like Ware’s drawing style.

Despite his simple, almost child-like drawings, this is clearly a labor of love, and I actually loved the retro-style drawings, which reminded me of old comic strips. The introduction on the inner cover alone is comprehensive and hilarious – even if the “exam” includes immediate sexist humor, asking women to put the book down. Ware also draws women in a very specific way, generally obscuring their faces right through the very end. He uses obscenity and offensive humor immediately, creating a highly controversial work (and it absolutely looks like he relishes the controversy, judging by the selected reviews copied in the very beginning. It seems like much of his works (though brilliant, and wonderful) are deliberate attempts to cause discomfort and just generally get people talking about Chris Ware.

Jimmy Corrigan, like many of the other stories we’ve read, shows pathetic circumstances, callow people, and dramatic events in a matter-of-fact, very human way. This book focus on strained parent/children relationships, which were interesting to read immediately after Exit Wound- although in this case, the reader is actually privy some of the more abusive, sad moments between father and son, whether dreamed or real.. Again, this book deals with with issues or alienation, social awkwardness, perhaps more poignantly than anything else we have read. Despite how pathetic they were for the most part, the characters still resonated with me, Jimmy is very haunting. Jimmy wants so badly to be liked, to be fully human, and this desire was so touching and pitiable. The story left me searching for reasons about foolish behavior, precisely because Jimmy was so real to me, and so heart-wrenchingly pathetic. Someone mentioned being turned off by the nervous ticks in their speech, the “huff”s and “uh”s. I liked them; those ticks occur so frequently in real dialogue, but hardly ever in written pieces.

It takes Chris Ware a long time to get on with his story here, but I’ve seen him convey incredibly powerful stories in just a few pages. It is as if Ware uses the difficulty of reading this book to prove a point, and while it is a piece that stuck with me, it’s also profoundly frustrating, and I like my books to be pleasurable, too – no matter how important the message is, it needs to be one that people will access. It was hard for me to follow such a long book when the main character barely even attempts to react to life’s circumstances, much less actually make efforts to improve his lot. At the same time, I have to disagree with people who resent Jimmy, or can’t feel any compassion towards him. I think that the scenes of Jimmy as a child (as well as the scenes showing the flawed men who came before him) really cement him as an empathetic character; it is hard not to feel remorse over what has become of a boy who was once so excitable and vibrant. We see Jimmy’s mom hovering over him, stunting him from actually growing up, and it’s hard not to feel any empathy towards him. How can anyone look at Jimmy’s big sad eyes and not feel empathy for him, even if much of his pain has been caused by his own flaws? I also just generally appreciated Jimmy’s snark and overall immature sense of humor, and could relate to his awkwardness and isolation.

Finally: In the front a number of “quotations regarding the hardcover edition” are selecting in order to increase confidence in the purchase. Who but Chris Ware would include “‘Nearly impossible to read’ – The LA Times Book Review” in order to increase purchasing confidence? Another reviewer, Ted Rall from Slate, likens the book to Ulysses, saying “no one’s ever read it, and those who have know that it sucks”. I think it’s an apt comparison, and of course most authors welcome controversy surrounding their art, but still, few would so proudly display how unreadable their works are.