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Summary: Masturbatory exercise
Review: Ware certainly knows how to throw panels around, but when it comes to creating compelling characters or dialogue he's as bad as the worst entries in a college writing contest.Jimmy appears at first as some kind of a caricature of the timid modern urban office worker. But then he's thrown into some kind of reunion with lost family members - let's just say it's not a successful experiment. Ware admits in the introduction that he was improvising as he went along. The result is predictably incoherent, but for some reason critics insist on giving him a pass.
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Summary: Chris Ware, Smartest Graphic Novelist on Earth
Review: Ware's masterpiece. (So far, at least.) The story follows three generations in the hapless Corrigan family of Chicago. Hilarious, heartbreaking, beatifully-drawn, it's serious art and compelling fiction at the same time. With Art Spiegelman's MAUS, Chris Ware's book seems to me the one that lets graphic novelist's out of the garage and into the art house. He reinvents the genre or cartoon-writing and opens our eyes to the possibilities of the drawn papge.
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Summary: Jimmy Corrigan - The Saddest Kid on Earth
Review: Before I started Ware's book, I thought I would be reading a light hearted story. Instead, the story of Jimmy Corrigan is a very depressing one. This is not to say that the book is in any way bad. In fact, the book makes it's most impact at these moments. At first, the reader may get confused at Ware's imaginative use of dream sequences, but reading further the reader can easily identify the reality from the dream. I do recommend this book, but with caution. This is a tale of loneliness, so read with caution!
Rating:
Summary: Jimmy Corrigan - the saddest kid on earth
Review: When i first started Ware's book, I thought I was in for a light-hearted treat! I quickly learned that Ware's main character, Jimmy, is not the smartest kid on earth, but the saddest fictional character ever written! Ware's imaginative graphics and use of words makes this book a rare find in the literary world. Although, some parts of the book may seem confusing at first, the reader quickly pics up Ware's inventive use of dream sequences and sexual innuendo. I would recommend this book, but caution the reader to be aware that this is a very depressing book.
Rating: 
Summary: Often Brilliant, Very Depressing
Review: Jimmy Corrigan is unlikely to the Smartest Kid on Earth except, briefly, in his own head. He is, though, a magnificent fictional creation by author/artist Chris Ware. This story of generations of Corrigan men is a sad tale as it meanders between the past and present, with only meager hope for the future. It is a quietly transfixing and brilliantly produced tale but it can also be very, very depressing, at time overpowerly so. Even Jimmy Corrigan's fantasies are often quite sad. It can also be gently humourous and breathtaking (particularly the drawings of the Chicago World's Exposition and the White City). A highly recommended piece of literature.
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Summary: Emotionally distant and affecting...
Review: I've never done this before. Buy a book. Can't stand it. Return it a few days later. Buy it back a few hours later. Fall in love with it. Such is my journey with Chris Ware's graphic book, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth". Let me tell you first why I returned it, and what redeemed it. I came across this book after a brief EW mention of it, rating it very high. Intrigued, I purchased a copy, and attempted to delve into its layers. Instead of intrigue, I found frustration, mainly because I simply didn't know how to look at the book. I didn't know where my eyes were supposed to go, so many of the early pages were difficult to read. Plus, the characters constant and sudden lapses into their daydreams made for early confusion. So, I returned it, happy of my decision. And then, I attended a live version of "This American Life" that prominently featured the work of Ware. His artwork captivated me, enough to rebuy the book and try again. What I found was an entralling, captivating tale, multi-layered, and worth all the work to learn the language of his drawings. It's the story of Jimmy Corrigan, an everyman without much of a life at all, who is contacted by his long lost father for a Thanksgiving reunion. Jimmy agrees to attend, which leads him on a retrospective journey of his life and his family. The story is both moving and rich, full of layers upon layers. Once you learn Ware's language, and what he tries to communicate, the story begins to shine like a lighthouse beacon through the pages. I was surprised to find myself crying at certain parts of the book; my brain was telling me this is simply a comic story, but my heart was breaking along with the characters. That alone is impressive. Ware's drawings are incredible. He communicates so much through each drawing, you need to "read" this slowly, and internalize the story. Whereas you tend to want to skip the less important drawings, quite often they will give you the most information. This book is not one to read quickly, but enjoy, like a fine, fine wine. I look forward to more work from Chris Ware. His artist's eye is impressive, but his storytelling is even more so.
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Summary: All in the Details
Review: It's hard to put to words what Chris Ware has done with this book. The sheer amount of energy and dedication alone is overwhelming, the detail is lavish. The story on its surface seems shallow, but the power of this work is in the details. What I loved most about this book is the black humor. I was amazed at tangents Ware arrives at, the little mini-dreams Jimmy Corrigan dreams. The true measure of an artist is his ability to make the difficult look easy, and this must be said of Ware. Some of the art is actually breathtaking. I found myself just staring at the pictures, wondering where it all came from. In his Afterword, Ware calculates that the time it took for him to read his own book (5 hours) to the amount of time he spent with his father. 5 hours well spent, I suppose.
Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Show on Earth
Review: I picked this up on a whim at the college bookstore; apparently a lit class is studying it. As someone formerly somewhat wary of 'graphic novels,' Chris Ware has finally won me over. This book makes full use of the medium's benefits: It brings the bits and pieces of mental images and wanderings that any of us are apt to follow during the course of a day, wanderings that bring the past all too present. Interwoven through the lives of the Corrigan men, the story itself is one that would stand up to any other medium: the story's great, the art work is fantastic. This book is definitely a force in the movement to legitimize graphic novels. Like any great work of any medium, Jimmy Corrigan invites second, third, billionth glances, and has mysteries that are rewarding, not confusing.
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Summary: The Awkward Child Within Us All
Review: Understanding the portions that craft an individual are difficult, and harder still when the life fabricated within the tale is woven from the understandable cloth of sadness and feelings of perpetual loneliness. Still, that is what author Chris Ware painstakingly paints a portrait of for his readers, showing them the dysfunctions of life and the mounting sorrows it breeds through the eyes of Jimmy Corrigan; The Smartest 36-year-old Kid on Earth. Interestingly enough, the intentions of the story weren't that all that grandiose at first but that they would, according to the author "hopefully provide a semi-autobiographical in which (he) could work out some of the more embarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulness" he was experiencing at the time. Still, five years later, the story took a turn that mimicked his own life when, out of the proverbial blue, he received a call from a father he didn't know; something that can be seen in Jimmy's life as well. So, what's to tell in a life that could seem so ordinarily mundane that it is almost always overlooked by a world that seems to set pace against it? Well, the little ins-and-outs of the thought process that inflict someone from the childhood meeting of their then superhero idol and their mother's infectious hostility turn love-affair with said icon, for starters. There are the little turmoils inflicting a young mind, as he is groomed into a man dependent on his mother as he cultivated into a nervous shell of a man, not hanging onto, but hung by, apron strings that have never let go. It also showcases other affairs, like the redundancy of a workplace in which he yearns to know love and is bitterly rejected by the person he finds himself infatuated with, and then takes a turn of its own as Jimmy's father calls him and wants to see him again. This is where we find Jimmy walking through the motions of awkwardness as he finds himself thrust into the lives of people he doesn't know, people that seem to superficially want to know him, as they go through their day-to-day interactions with a world that seems foreign to him. Within these moments you can see Ware's understanding of the silence booming through those clumsy moments that fall like snowflakes on an already whitened world, and we also see the way Jimmy's mind works, vividly depicting the world of surmounting woes that could come at every turn.
While here, the gaze also focuses upon other portions of the Corrigan family as well; looking into his father's life and his father's before him, showing you the emotional transgressions of a family that seems plagued by the inability to either love or to express the love they feel. Within these lives there is also the stumbling of feet and the horrors of life's shadowy moments, telling us that Jimmy isn't alone in these times of turbulence. Instead, he is one of many that suffer the awkward arrows that are fired by a world revolving on a seemingly compassionate axis. In many ways I found the intoxication that Jimmy's mindset allowed him, those birthed by the plateaus of an almost youthful puritanicalness, to be a harrowing yet wonderful tale because, in a sense, I think everyone has known a time when a Corrigan has walked within their shoes. Added to this is the convection of thoughts that are bestowed upon the reader through sometimes prose-like statements that hit like hammers and that sometimes simply punctuate the worlds captured in the illustrations surrounding them, bringing out both the hopes and dreams that are sometimes hidden from everyone save the thinker. To me, this helped portray something fruitful in a book I had first beheld with skeptical glances and would now recommend highly to those looking for something that studies a little plateau called "the past" that is harbored in each and every one of us.
Rating:
Summary: The smartest kid
Review: In the first few pages of JIMMY CORRIGAN, the reader is introduced to the Super-Man, dressed in a red and yellow suit and wearing a cheap costume mask. He tells bad jokes and ends up seducing Jimmy's mother. The stage is set for a comic without heroes (or with only pathetic ones), confused children with lonely parents, and a humor that fails to conceal the underlying sadness. There's a strange two dimensionality to the images, which makes it more illustration than drawing. Buildings tend to be drawn in elevation, interiors are in orthographic views, and simple shapes predominate. The effect is an abstraction of the environment that crosses temporal bounds, enters fantasies and nightmares, and recollects cruel memories. Like Spiegelman and Clowes, Chris Ware takes his comic into areas that are usually considered to be the territory of literature, but it would require immense effort to imagine JIMMY CORRIGAN in novel form. The content and the form are inseparable. The story may be a downer, but ultimately it isn't depressing because it is well-told, well-illustrated, and somewhere within it is an awful truth about misogyny, race, childhood trauma, and isolation that we'd just rather not face.
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