The Decade's Best Cover

The cover of Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan" does considerably more than it needs to. It unfolds like a roadmap and sprawls across time, space and genealogy as it stretches out to cover three generations of Corrigans.

Ware's breathtakingly crisp and balanced illustrations are bound up by a net of arrows and evolving timelines, and the collective mass takes a long time to decipher. But his illustrations, which range from iconic to deeply personal, tell dozens of stories. They weave together births, deaths, abandonments, immigrations, enslavements and emancipations to create a beautifully detailed thumbnail of "Jimmy Corrigan" itself.

That "Jimmy Corrigan" can be judged by its cover does no discredit to the book, the cover or the author.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)