Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

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Somewhere, right now, sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard, Jimmy Corrigan is alive, and suffering terribly.

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When Jimmy finally is approached by the new woman sitting in the cubicle next to him, all I can hope is that she does not get involved with this emotional sink-hole of a man. For example, the author shows that is always difficult to be in one’s interior for Jimmy, designing the surrounding space as an isolate cage. The child-grandfather character makes clear choices, makes mistakes, and engages in complex ways with the other people in his life. The influence of the music and the graphics of its era can be seen in Ware's work, especially in regard to logos and layout. Dave Eggers, one of Ware's most enthusiastic cheerleaders, hails him as "the most versatile and innovative artist the field has known" and this book as "arguably the greatest achievement of the form".George Herriman, Will Eisner, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and the Hernandez Brothers have already demonstrated that there is no reason why comics cannot attain this stature.

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan - Cambridge Scholars Publishing

This being a poster, however—and even worse, me not really being a designer—I realized it also had to be somewhat punchy and strange, so as to draw viewers in and pique their curiosity without, hopefully, insulting their intelligence. I really hoped whomever might happen to come across it would find something that showed a respect for their intelligence, and didn’t force-feed them any 'message'. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2006 and at the University of Nebraska's Sheldon Museum of Art, in 2007. Sister Carrie's got nothing on this book for sheer sadness and depiction of the deep loneliness of life for so many people. One shot of a character writing in a journal does a good enough job conveying that he's writing in a journal.

I loved the moments when people anticipated meeting someone they'd never met before and speculated on the many possible faces they might encounter. Jimmy Corrigan, or The Smartest Kid On Earth - a tragi-comic tale of familial misery set in the American midwest spanning four generations of the downtrodden Corrigan clan - has won the Guardian First Book Award for Chris Ware, the second American to take the prize in its three years.