Bleakness becomes him

>> Comic neurosis abounds in Jimmy Corrigan

by JULIET WATERS

It would be a mistake to make too much of the similarities between Chris Ware and his self-described "alter ego" Jimmy Corrigan--though it would be an easy mistake to make. In a postscript to his graphic epic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware tells a tale of life imitating art.

"I began this story in '93 as a weekly comic strip in a very tolerant and forgiving Chicago newspaper, New City. It was planned purely as an improvisatory exercise, to take no more than a summer to complete, and to hopefully provide a semi-autobiographical setting in which I could 'work out' some of the more embarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulness I was experiencing as a very immature, and not terribly facile, cartoonist. I'd poked into the subject before--that of meeting an estranged parent--but I wanted to try a more respectable 'stab,' by shoving my hapless and poorly written 'alter ego' of the moment, Jimmy Corrigan, through the starting gates first. I had spent my entire life avoiding contact with my own father and I guess I thought that once this story was finished, I would somehow have 'prepared' myself to meet the real man and then be able to get on with my life. Of course, real life is much more badly plotted than that."

The postscript goes on to tell how Ware did in fact meet his real father in 1998, how they spent an uncomfortable and disappointing few hours together, and how a year later, just as Ware was about to give his father the recently released, bound and collected Jimmy Corrigan series, his father died of a heart attack. Anyone familiar with the Jimmy Corrigan comics can tell you that this is life at its most "Corriganesque."

That Ware has recently become media-shy, bowing out of anything but e-mail interviews, claiming, "I'm a terribly inarticulate speaker and frequently say stupid things," doesn't help dispel the Ware/Corrigan equation. It deepens the impression that Ware is as he describes Corrigan, "a lonely, emotionally impaired human castaway."

But having spent an afternoon with Chris Ware, five years ago when he was in Montreal to check the proofs of Jimmy Corrigan (which was originally published by Fantagraphics in Seattle and printed here by Quebecor) I can attest that in real life Ware bears little resemblance to Corrigan. Ware, as I remember him, is articulate, intelligent, friendly and easy to talk to, despite a tendency to throw an unexpected hot flash of cynicism or anger into the conversation.

He is, however, a notorious perfectionist and detail addict. And while the fatherless, relentlessly dull and tongue-tied Jimmy Corrigan is hardly "the smartest kid on earth," Chris Ware may very well be one of the planet's smartest cartoonists, albeit one of the blackest. There should probably be a disclaimer on the cover, something like "WARNING: some readers will find the contents empty, hopeless and depressing. Some will be frustrated by the plotlessness and incredibly nasty irony. Many will never finish this, but will still keep it on their shelf as a testament to their hipness."

Still, black has never looked so good. Ware has great gifts as a cartoonist. First, his almost pathological devotion to craft, from which comes the wealth of intricate, ironic and very funny sidebars, which keeps readers rereading. And second, his devotion to history and to the old-fashioned cartoons that he weaves into contemporary settings. But his greatest talent is as a colourist. Jimmy Corrigan's world is as beautifully composed as it is empty. Imagine a middle-aged Charlie Brown captured by Annie Leibowitz and you might get a small sense of how ironic yet poignant Ware's world is. What saves Jimmy Corrigan from glibness is the undeniable amount of hard work that has gone into its 368 pages. For all the lovelessness in Jimmy Corrigan's world, obviously one person loves him enough to draw his world as this incredible tapestry of sublime detail. :

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, Pantheon, hc, 368pp, $41.50