Rating: 
Summary: Moving
Review: This is perhaps the most sad, wrenching and painful piece of human expression I have ever experienced. Reading it is simply dreadful in that it perfectly captures the self-loathing and paralysis that is everyday existence. Ware has chosen the graphic novel as his vehicle for expressing human turmoil and he is a master of the form. Entire volumes of narrative take place over the course of a few cells. The way he frames his compositions, his use of color and the nuances of character expression is breathtaking. I admire Ware for this brutally honest expression of longing, alientation and regret.
Rating:
Summary: Works on So Many Levels...
Review: This is a labor of love. Chris Ware has taken time and his considerable talent and crafted a tale that should be pondered and studied. It is not easy reading, parts are heavy, edgy, sometimes crass, but all of this speaks to and supports the narrative and is not included for shock value, but rather to make the reader THINK. Few people can boil down life, the injustices and the hurts and the monotonous solitude that all of us find ourselves victim to now and again to this polished effect. Chris Ware succeeds brilliantly. You will relate. Jimmy Corrigan is presented and treated in a way that never insults your intelligence, is never trite and is oft surprising. As if that weren't enough, Ware's delightful sense of design, his colors and line and sense of place, are all reproduced exquisitely. High-quality paper and highly-saturated inks. No, I do not know the guy. I don't work for the publisher. I am some random shmo. Rarely is something worth this level of praise. But when it is, credit is due. This is a piece of work that will be discussed many many years hence, on many many levels....
Rating:
Summary: Chris Ware can change your view of comics
Review: I was very happy to see in England that in every bookstore you could see a comic book in a good place for everybody to see. I started dto get curious, what was this thick comic book that everyone liked some much and that bookstore people were not ashamed of putting in their stands? I bought, and boy I didn't regret it, the story is Great, the characters, are sad, but real, you feel sorry for them, the art is great, and kind of depressing, Chris Ware is superb! He defies any kind of rule of the comic book kind there is! And it's about time really. Every good review you read about it, it's true, THIS is a comic book, and yes, it is good.
Rating:
Summary: Equal parts 'comic' and 'book.'
Review: Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan" is a rich, affecting comic (I can't bring myself to write 'graphic novel,' although that is more accurate) with a grand scope that never loses sight of the small problems of small people. I am no great fan of comics, and I started this book with reluctance. About ten pages in, I started kicking myself for not reading it sooner. Exploiting this medium to it's potential, Ware communicates in one page what a talented novelist might in twenty. The sensitive and wrenching portrait of three generations of pathological parenting, sadness, and alienation is always crisp and never overly sentimental. Whether diagramming a family tree as a Mendelian schematic or covering decades of urban decay in four panels, Ware is a master artist and storyteller.
Rating: 
Summary: Truth In Advertising
Review: In the lower right-hand corner of the cover, Chris Ware calls this book "A bold experiment in reader tolerance", and he ain't kidding.....This was one of the most hard-to-follow, dragged-out affairs I've ever read. The book follows three generations of men (All named Jimmy Corrigan)...They're Father, Son, and Grandson, but Ware draws them all exactly the same, so I had a hell of a time figuring out just who we were watching at any given time. I had to use the different lettering styles each characters story is told with to tell them apart. There were times where my tolerance was stretched to the breaking point, and I actually had to get up and walk away from the book, before I picked it up and tossed it out the window. Ware is also enamored of long stretches of tiny blocks of print that contribute nothing to the narrative. I'll never know just what that page of restaurant descriptions was supposed to be about, because I got so bored I skipped right past it. I'll admit that by the end, I was fully drawn in to the sad tale, but getting there was a real struggle. The book is beautifully designed, and is a nice package for the price. It just seemed like a long trip to nowhere, though......
Rating:
Summary: Not bad. But not great, either.
Review: Being serious and depressiong doesn't always equal BRILLIANT, as some people think. It was a good tale though, just not great, and I finished it with a shrug of my shoulders. I was disappointed with the main character's lack of dialogue---some might see this as indication of "character," but I only saw it as a detriment. But still, not that I minded the story being a downer. Just a week earlier I read "Ghost World," and was much more moved by that...
Rating:
Summary: Even without amazon's discount, this is a great deal.
Review: This is the best bang you can ever get for your comic book buck. It has a full 380 pages, the art is very detailed, and after reading this, you get the feeling that Chris Ware has put way more effort into this book than the benefit you could ever hope to receive from it. Warning: start this book from the beginning. I usually browse through the middle of comic books before I start, and I picked this book up multiple times before I really got into it. It also has one of the best beginnings to a comic book ever. Read the first 8 pages, and you'll be hooked. Also, read the apology at the end. It gives a lot of insight into why he wrote the book This was one of the hardest graphic novels to me read, but it was definitely worth my time. And, it also has the best writing of any graphic novel that I have read.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of graphic literature.
Review: If ever there was a title in the comics medium that could attract the attention of the literary world, "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" would be it. Indeed, this meticulously crafted tale of estranged fathers and sons spanning three generations has already won much acclaim from reviewers and readers alike who, until now, would typically have never even considered picking up a work of graphic literature. Originally running in serial form in the Chicago's weekly publication New City, "Jimmy Corrigan" took Ware seven years to create, though just by reading it you would never be able to tell. The artwork maintains a consistency throughout that suggests a vigorous discipline on Ware's part to create a cohesive and uniform story. Although it's true that Ware started the work as a free-form narrative experiment-never fully aware of where the story was headed from one "episode" to the next-eventually, as the tale began to take shape, he was able to rein in all the loose themes and motifs and successfully weave them together into a unified whole. The story opens depicting the title character, Jimmy Corrigan, as a young child living with his mother and already showing signs of an unhealthily introverted personality. His father is noticeably absent from the picture. A one-night-stand his mother brings home becomes a pivotal figure in the development of Corrigan's inner psyche. Moving forward to the present, Corrigan-now a middle-aged man living out a miserable existence still indelibly attached to his mother-is abruptly contacted one day by a man claiming to be his long-lost father. Soon he finds himself on a plane bound for an awkward reunion with his progenitor, and what subsequently follows is a series of events that can only be described as Chekhovian in terms of emotional depth and scope. Interwoven with this line of action is the tale of another member of the Corrigan clan, raised in an earlier era, with his own set of woeful circumstances also pertaining to his relationship with his father. Parallels both broad and intricate are drawn between the two storylines as Ware delicately shifts between past and the present, between the real and the imagined, between the melancholy and, well, the downright tragic. Shades of autobiography can be detected in the story's theme: Ware himself had never met his father until well into his adulthood, and when he did the results were less than joyous. Although the meeting did not occur until work on "Jimmy Corrigan" was well underway, the absence of a paternal figure throughout most of Ware's own life seems to inform the story in a deeply personal way. One cannot discuss "Jimmy Corrigan" without mentioning its exquisite visual artistry. The book is simply stunning to look at. The story is primarily told through illustration-dialogue is sparse and largely informed by the image rather than vice versa-and is a masterful example of storytelling by way of composition and juxtaposition. Its muted color scheme (heavy on the earth tones, light on the pastels) and minimalist line-drawing artwork serves to convey the bleak, desolate state-of-mind of the title character. It's a case of style becoming substance as the aesthetics of its design are as integral to the story as its fractured narrative. Ware borrows heavily from turn-of-the-century newsprint art styles, which he obviously regards with great veneration. There is much in "Jimmy Corrigan" that demonstrates his penchant for the nostalgic; not only in the artwork but also in its storyline (the 1892 Chicago World's Fair is prominently featured as a backdrop for one of the story arcs). He frequently contrasts the old with the new, suggesting that there is a certain splendor and majesty to be found in the pop-cultural artifacts of yesteryear that has been replaced in modern times by a drab tackiness that pervades our artistic, commercial and architectural landscape.
The result of Ware's masterful combination of artwork, design and narrative is nothing short of astonishing. "Jimmy Corrigan" is a masterpiece of graphic literature; a quiet, absorbing tale that evokes the hopelessly sad, the desperately pathetic, and the heartbreakingly beautiful. It is a literary treasure that will hopefully find its way into the hands of those who have ever questioned the potential of the medium, and to those who want to be mesmerized by the talents of a wonderful storyteller.
Rating:
Summary: no contest
Review: this book will change the way you think about graphic novels forever. it's about so many different things - from degrading urban landscapes to the spiritual implosion of america. the primary metaphor is seeing ... jimmy's great-grandfather was a glazier and jimmy spends his time aimlessly staring out his window as we spend our time purposefully staring through the window-frames of ware's art. it's NOT a difficult book, just an intelligent one.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT STUFF, PLEASING TO THE EYE, BUT HARSH ON THE HEART
Review: This is destined to be a classic in the world of comics. Although Mr. Ware is merciless in his treatment of the main character, Jimmy Corrigan, his artwork is something to behold with amazement. I still find it unbelievable that Ware does all this art and lettering on his own. I think he has people helping him with color separations, but that's about it? The story meanders along with interesting storytelling devices to keep it lively - But then again, it's all about the artwork with this epic graphic novel. The reader will remain engrossed just at the process and execution of the entire work. The graphics are in a 'clean' style much like Herge's TINTIN or the work of Dutch illustrator, Joost Swarte. Although a style like Ware's is very inviting and attractive, his subject matter remains gloomy and hopeless. SIDE NOTE: In addition to this FAT collection, the individual issues of the comic, THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY, are just as essential, so get these too! ~ john
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