Jimmy Corrigan
by Chris Ware
Fantagraphics Books

Fathers hurt sons who grow up to be fathers who hurt sons, who grow up and have sons of their own. At the heart of Chris Ware's cartoon epic, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," are wounded men, and the reader is never allowed to forget the sadness and inhumanity that parental cruelty can breed.

Artist Chris Ware maps out three generations of Corrigans, from grandfather, to father, to son, all abandoned, with poor, lonely Jimmy left as the only Corrigan man yet to procreate and flee. Cold, cruel, confused and eventually absent fathers inhabit the book from early 20th-century Chicago to its conclusion, which is set firmly in the mall-ridden suburbia of modern America.

Chris Ware does not cut corners. "Jimmy Corrigan" had to have hurt like hell to have created, but the end result is worth it. Every panel bleeds craft and care — every crisp dot of ink on the pages is meant to be durable, revisited, explored and preserved. Ware's fine, clean lines and amazing sense of color balance mean that every page of "Jimmy Corrigan" is a microcosm — the detail is painstaking, breathtaking and overwhelming. In short, Chris Ware is an anachronism — a living, breathing resident of the 21st century with the craftsmanship instinct of a 19th-century Quaker artisan and the imagination of Picasso crossed with Charles Dickens.

What Ware's amazing sense of control and vision adds up to is an ideal vehicle for the conveyance of emotion and setting. When Ware wants us to feel like we're in turn-of-the-century Chicago, feeling warmth and love toward a friend's gentle, immigrant father, he is able to use his gifts for illustration to bring us there. The emotional immediacy afforded by cartoons is constantly exploited by Ware in his quest to take us through three generations of confusion and failed adaptation.

The emotional center of "Jimmy Corrigan" is a cartoon analogue of Radiohead's strongest disc, OK Computer — it's a book that catalogues and meditates upon the overwhelming sadness of a lonely, ordinary life in the context of a complicated world of strife and rich, poetic beauty. "Jimmy Corrigan" doesn't draw its emotional momentum from a single, romanticized artist's concept of a tragedy; rather, it swells up from a foundation of hundreds of tiny slights, embarassments, snubs, unpleasant surprises and everyday humiliations that add up to an overwhelming burden of sorrow and isolation.

Painfully personal, breathtakingly illustrated and deftly written, "Jimmy Corrigan" has a soul-crushing grandeur and attention to minute detail that demands a second, third and fourth reading.

Some pieces of art, literature and music survive into the decades and centuries to come. Among the bits of 20th-century knowledge that may make the leap are two collections of cartoons. One is Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a breathtakingly engaging and nuanced cartoon document of the Holocaust. Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan" is the other.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)