Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

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SL: Your persona as you present it to readers is extremely shy, and self-deprecating to a fault. Does the fact that your work has been buried under a mountain of prizes and plaudits make it, even just a bit, hard to sustain that? Maureen said the club’s demise began once other venues began imitating its formula for success. James died in 2000 having made and lost his fortune. CW: I try, but don’t always succeed, to somehow love them all, even if that sounds crazy. I genuinely believe there’s a redeeming impulse of goodness in everyone which is heightened by sympathy, if not by art, and in my own mind the two should be synonymous as much as is possible. James Lord Corrigan (left) and his wife Betty with Louis Armstrong at Batley Variety Club (Image: handout) SL: There’s a dichotomy sometimes made between “grown-up comics” and the superhero/funny-papers/genre type. Your work seems to be an example of the former that’s very interested in the latter, as a fantasy contrast to the humiliating mundanity of ordinary life. Do you feel affectionate towards that sort of storytelling? What does that sort of fantasy offer?

Jimmy Corrigan is a meek, lonely thirty-six-year-old man who meets his father for the first time in the fictional town of Waukosha, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is an awkward and cheerless character with an overbearing mother and a very limited social life. After an ill-timed phone call, Jimmy agrees to meet his father without telling his mother. The experience is stressful for him as he can barely communicate with anyone other than his mother, let alone his estranged father. The two do very little together and Jimmy's father, while well-intentioned, comes off to Jimmy as slightly racist and inconsiderate. A parallel story set in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows Jimmy's grandfather as a lonely little boy and his difficult relationship with an abusive father, Jimmy's great-grandfather. CW: There is a tip-off in the book that it all connects to Jimmy Corrigan, and though it’s not apparent yet, also to both Building Stories and two other books on which I’ve been slowly toiling. This is all very inconsequential to the turning of the planet, however. The election of Trump has made us aware of the fragility of virtue versus the blunt force of decep­tion and domination However, writer and comedian Charlie Higson, novelist Jonathan Coe and historian Roy Porter were won over by Ware's portrayal of the travails of the bemused and phlegmatic Jimmy, a man adrift in 1980s small town Michigan just like his grandfather was in 1890s Chicago. And AL Kennedy felt it moved "the whole genre forward hugely". The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001 James had charisma, personality and impeccable manners,” said Maureen. “Once he started getting the stars in, they all wanted to be there. It was great to work there because the facilities were first class both for the performers and the audience.”

Creation

One day James and his father visit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, climbing to an observation platform above one of the great halls. As the world stretches out below, the father mutters something and just walks away, never to be seen again. "He'd told me dozens of times that he didn't want me around, and that he'd never asked for a child in the first place," James later recalls. Jimmy's suffering and his father's delinquency suddenly shrink in scale. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ SL: You (or “Chris Ware”) say in the book that the sense of “weary dislocation” we suffer comes from the thwarted desire to feel like a protagonist. How does that bear on your stuff? I believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives The book turns on Jimmy's journey to the city to meet his father for the first time at the age of 36. The trip reveals that his grandfather was just as defeated by the world as he.

SL: How do the characters in Rusty Brown and their universe relate to the worlds of your other work? Is there a sort of Ware-verse in which they cohabit? The Guardian First Book Award, 2001, "the first time a graphic novel has won a major UK book award," according to the Guardian. [5] At its height, the club was drawing capacity audiences of 2,500 and had a membership of 300,000 eager to see international stars such as the Everly Brothers, Gene Pitney, Eartha Kitt and Roy Orbison, as well as home-grown talent including Shirley Bassey, Ken Dodd, Lulu and The Bee Gees. In addition to the graphic novel, the character of Jimmy Corrigan has appeared in other Ware comic strips, sometimes as his imaginary child genius character, sometimes as an adult. Corrigan began as a child genius character in Ware's early work, but as Ware continued, the child genius strips appeared less frequently, and increasingly followed Corrigan's sad, adult existence.Gradually Ware shifts the focus to Jimmy's grandfather James, one of those desiccated old men who are too stubborn to die. He's grouchy, insensitive, vaguely racist. But by the time we know him as an adult, we have met him as a child and it's impossible to despise him. Little James's mother dies in childbirth, he makes enemies like most children make friends, and to his strap-happy father he is a "goddamn little son of a bitch". The story was serialized in the alternative Chicago weekly newspaper Newcity and in Ware's comic book Acme Novelty Library in issues #5–6, 8–9, and 11–14) from 1995 to 2000. [1] Plot summary [ edit ] Jimmy has no memories of the man whose name he bears, and when one day the mail brings an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with him, his head is filled with hope, hate and fear. But what he finds in Michigan is neither a saint nor a devil, nor even a consistently inadequate parent. His father has brought up another child - and pretty well, to judge by the "Number 1 Dad" T-shirts she buys him. He can be unthinking and dull, but who can't? And he wants to make amends. He says it not with flowers, but with bacon: four strips of 100% US grade-A Country Morn that spell out the word "HI" on Jimmy's breakfast plate.