Jimmy Corrigan - The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Jimmy Corrigan - The Smartest Kid on Earth

Chris Ware

This novel is graphic in more ways than one. The drawing is the key to the atmosphere and the feeling; it provides compassion, humour and pathos unlike any words. Dashed hopes, daily tragedies, petty cruelties and forlorn hopes are the stuff of the humour. All things every reader will recognise. Work your way through in episodes and give yourself pauses for thought. And if you want the essence of this book, have a peek at page 17.

Extract
Most of the purchasers of this book are likely to be sexually confident, attractive go-getters for whom grief is merely an abstraction ... hence they are hoping to find something which will briefly titillate or amuse them, fashionably enhance their 'look', or add to their 'nowness', and they have certainly made the right choice, for the comic strip medium which it employs holds no hope of ever expressing anything but the meanest and most shallow of sentiments. Indeed the book need not be read at all, but simply placed on display as a symbol of one's youthful exuberance, like a flashy motorcar, or the music of the American South, performed by an aristocrat.


Parallels
  • Life A User's Manual by Georg Perec
  • City of Hope - the film