None of the characters are comic-book beautiful. We also learn the sad story of Jimmy’s great-grandfather whose loses his mother and is abandoned by his father, and of Amy-Jimmy’s adopted, African-American sister. Jimmy has a vivid inner-life and through the graphic medium we see his imaginings running parallel to the actuality of his situation. He has fantasised his whole life about what his father might be like and the reality is bound to disappoint. He has grown up without a father but one day, at the office, he receives a letter from his biological father suggesting that they meet. Jimmy Corrigan himself is an insecure, lonely little man-tied to his mother’s apron strings, desperate to be loved but too fearful to make a move towards his own happiness. Chris Ware calls the book a ‘comic’ not a ‘graphic novel’ and this in itself is disarming the author is not pretentious and the book is unassuming-it’s working-class literary fiction. In style Jimmy Corrigan owes a lot to Tintin and classic broadsheet comic conventions-it is a nostalgic flashback to an earlier time. This was a book designed for hardcover and a great case in point to promote the survival of the book as a physical object. I bought the paperback edition but I think the hardcover would have been even better. Sadly, it’s not a book you can read easily in bed and this is obviously not a book that you can read on a Kindle. Some of the text is really small and printed on a dark background so you have to turn a bright light on to read it. Sometimes the format changes and you have to change the orientation of the book. It takes a lot of effort to read comics, even though it seems like they’re easy.”Įach page of Jimmy Corrigan mires you down in beautifully illustrated detail. The appeal is they masquerade as a passive medium, but they’re not at all. Chris Ware said in an interview in The Guardian: Jimmy Corrigan required me to read differently. I am usually quite a fast reader and I tend to skim along the surface of the page without sinking into the individual words and phrases. What I find frustrating about graphic novels is that the illustrations slow me down. I read a bit of Asterix (which was useful for me when my kids started school in the UK and I was expected to know what a ‘mufti’ day was) and I got into Archie for a while but the endless love-triangle was very annoying-why did no one ever call Archie out for being a two-timing cad? I’m sure Archie comics have a lot to answer for in terms of gender relations… Perhaps this is because I didn’t read a lot of comic books as a child. It seems that as a graphic-designer-turned-writer this should be my ideal medium, but I haven’t read very many. By the end I was weeping, awarding it five stars on Goodreads (and I don’t give five stars lightly) and ready to start reading it all over again-a very satisfactory transformation. Despite myself I became invested in Jimmy somewhere around the middle of the book. This feeling persisted for at least the first half of the book. I picked it up with some interest but within a few pages I was feeling lost, annoyed and depressed. Jimmy Corrigan was on the reading list for the module I’m taking at the moment so I didn’t have a choice-I had to read it. I particularly enjoy reviewing books that I hate at first, but that grow on me as I read.
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