Rating: 
Summary: WOW and again, WOW!
Review: Simply the best graphic novel ever.
So good. Sure there are other graphic novels you should buy, but first, get this one.
I never get tired of reading it. I was upset that I had already read it in the acme novelty library, untill I opened it up, and realized how great it can be the tenth time around.
The new package is unbeliveably perfect as well. worth every cent and more.
Rating:
Summary: the most beautiful book in the world
Review: This is not a comic book. It's great literature. That may sound strange, because it certainly looks like a comic book at first glance. The drawings are beautiful, the colors are great and the story is very sad. You've got to be able to read between the lines, for there's a lot of suggestion and change of scenery and time. There's a whole bunch of stories all told at the same time. I took over a month to read it. Just because I loved it so much. I wanted it to last forever. And it's great to the details and the small print. Every single tiny corner of the book is surprising. You'll never find a more satisfying book in your life, I promise!
Rating: 
Summary: The Saddest Kid on Earth
Review: "Jimmy Corrigan" is a sad, sad comic book about the kind of kid who you'd expect would read comics rather than star in them. He's a 36 year old man who wears old-fashioned knickers, works in an anonymous cubicle equipped with a phone that rings only when his mother calls, and wishes he were a superhero or at least gallant enough or charming enough to secure a date with Peggy from the mailroom. I wouldn't recommend this book for its plot or characters, but the precisely drawn, evocative illustrations sucked me in.I've never before read a book-length comic or a graphical novel, and I was never a voracious reader of comic books. Even to me, though, it's clear that Chris Ware is both paying tribute to and poking fun at comic book culture. The meticulously crafted frames are as clean and crisp as a hospital bed, and his attention to detail suggests this comic-artist has a profound respect for his medium. The title plates and stylized, block-lettered conjunctions - ostensibly transitions in the story - are more likely souvenirs from a childhood spent pouring over classic comics. But the "superheroes" of Ware's imagination aren't the type you'd find beating up Lex Luther. Of the several masked men who make cameo appearances, one commits suicide by leaping off the roof of a tall building near Jimmy's office, and another is a costumed pitch-man at an auto show who seduces Jimmy's mother and skulks off next morning without saying goodbye. In the book's forward, printed on the inside flap of the book binding, Ware's irony is even more direct: His tongue-in-cheek "General Instructions" provide a Dave Eggers-like primer for establishing "a successful linguistic relationship with the pictographic theater" on the pages that follow. These "Instructions" include a quiz of your abilities to interpret the meaning of comic images. The first cell shows a stick-figure mouse holding aloft a stick-figure hammer; the second shows the hammer slammed down on a cat's head. If you think the strip depicts two different mice, each with a hammer, or, worse yet, you don't identify the critter as a mouse at all, Ware discourages further reading. The message, I gather, is that comic books are easy - unless you're a complete idiot. But in reading further, I was amazed at the subtlety of emotion and the complexity of meaning Ware conveys through pictures. When Jimmy's father delivers an unkind comment, Ware merely re-uses an image of Jimmy's face, without captions of any kind, and through this silent pause the reader feels Jimmy's heartbreak. In another sequence, Ware draws a conversation between a laborer and his boss in which the dialogue bubbles contain cartoon images instead of words. Nonetheless, the content of their discussion (dirty jokes included) is perfectly clear. I'd liken my experience with "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" to an afternoon at a museum. While it wasn't easy "reading" the meaning of the pictures, the book reminded me to look more closely at details, facial expressions, gestures, and perspective, and for that alone it's worth it.
Rating:
Summary: an innovative and original approach to a tale of a...loser
Review: I've got this book a week ago, finished it, and I'm already reading it again. The plot is deep and the world is real. A look at the cover and you may have mistakened it for a childs comic book. But the life of Jimmy, trust me, is not one you want your kid to be reading about. Jimmy Orrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth is about love and loniness and growing up the wrong way. This is a beautiful crafted book, told through a comic-like panel system, and I definitely recommend anyone (past the age of 14) to buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliance
Review: Having grown up in the world of comic books, for reasons which other recluses I am sure can understand, I find that this text is one of the finest crafted pieces of graphic literature ever created. Marvellous. Thank you sir for such a magnificent book, and for such a tremendous tale. The voices that come through this text resonate not only for the author, but for readers of similar and parallel backgrounds as well. A breath of clarity. With thanks, Mark Groenewold Ishikawa-ken, Japan
Rating:
Summary: A landmark book. Must-own
Review: Chris Ware is brilliant. The book is amazing. This is one of the most beautiful books you will buy in your lifetime.
Rating: 
Summary: I just don't get it
Review: Why do so many people like this thing? Ware is certainly a talented and even original designer (even if he's way too pseudo-retro for my taste), but his drawing style is uninteresting to the point of being crude and his stories are about nothing at all; they're just an attempt to create vague feelings of nostalgia and dread. I hope I never become so bored that this kind of stuff seems interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and poignant
Review: This collection of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan stories is both brilliat and poignant. The deign work is astonishing and the minimalist art fits the story about its main character a marginal and minimal personality who wants to find love and happiness but is unable to do so until perhaps the very end. The chapter deaig with the Corrigan during the turn o the century Worlds Fair in Chicago is a masterpiece not only in its portrayal of architectural styles of the period but in showing that the Corrrigan family has a long standing problem when it comes to relationships.Itis a comic book masterpiece and is better than most traditional prose novels that will come out this year.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, poignant work
Review: Ever since Art Spiegelman gave mainstream cred to American sequential art in his groundbreaking "Maus" books, artists here have tried to rehash late-20th Century group angst, using, in my opinion, images and themes little removed from the level of Robert Crumb. Credibility notwithstanding, the results are mixed, and frankly, if an artist is just going to kvetch, I'd rather read Japanimé. But Chris Ware has something to say, and he says it: cleanly, viciously, in breathtaking and seemingly facile images. I don't think it's stretching things to say that this book's scope is on the level of Chopin; they both have the same miniaturist claustrophobia yet wide-open feel. Jimmy Corrigan is the sum of his forefather's failings. His inner world offers no relief--it's populated with giant fathers, Kafkaesque in their brutality--and with faceless women who seem tantalizingly out of reach from the depth of his knowledge. He moves through a series of emotional cataclysms remeniscent of Kasinski's "Painted Bird", and yet they're miniaturist in nature, a sort of everyday heartbreak. They've reduced him to a little nubbin of a man, unable to fend off any sorrow. Connection--with anyone, anything--seems a dream, and yet his valiant little heart keeps hoping. What Ware is saying about the anihilation of men is so true, I felt I was being given a blueprint of men's souls. A useful, if odd, thing to bring away from reading a comic. But truth comes in many forms. This is a keeper.
Rating:
Summary: a bleak, brilliant book
Review: This book was given to me as a gift. Normally I dislike being given a book unless I specifically asked for it, but my sister in law gave me Billy Corrigan and I cannot thank her enough. This is the most radical, piercing thing I've read in a long time. The artwork, the dead-on dialogue, the silences, they all add up to an enormously affecting and absorbing book. Give this a look if you're in the mood for something different.
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