Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

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Find sources: "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( July 2009) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) SL: A big theme of your work seems to be human connection (and its failure). Is that why you weave stories in and out of each other? 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. 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.

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?Elements of the novel appear to be autobiographical, particularly Jimmy's relationship with his father. Ware met his father only once in adulthood – while he was working on this book – and has remarked that his father's attempts at humor and casualness were not unlike those he'd already created for Jimmy's father in the book. However, the author states it is not an account of his personal life. 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. The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001

Jimmy Corrigan has been lauded by critics. [2] [3] The New Yorker cited it as "the first formal masterpiece of (the) medium." [4] It has received numerous awards, including: 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 dominationWhen he guest edited a comics issue for McSweeney’s in 2004, Ware called comics “not a genre, but a developing language”. Ahead of the publication of the print instalment of Rusty Brown, we discussed his way of working – and where that developing language is now. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Although the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif loved Ware's visual elan, she found the storytelling "self-conscious and rather self-indulgent". 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.

Jimmy Corrigan was born to Mrs. Corrigan. Jimmy Corrigan had no relationship with his father when he was growing up, considering his mother kept Jimmy's father's identity a secret for most of his life. Creation Claire Armitstead, the Guardian literary editor, who chaired the judges, said: "Jimmy Corrigan is a fantastic winner, because it so clearly shows what the Guardian award is about - it is about originality and energy and star quality, both in imagination and in execution. Chris Ware has produced a book as beautiful as any published this year, but also one which challenges us to think again about what literature is and where it is going." 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 ] The Jimmy of the title is a prematurely aged office dogsbody, blowing around Chicago with only fantasies to keep him company. He is shrunken in on himself, round-shouldered and hunched as if to present the smallest possible target. He has tiny, droopy eyes, never meets a gaze, has no small talk or social graces. The only person who even tries to connect with him is his mother, and Jimmy finds her such a burden that he buys an answering machine to keep her at bay. 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.”

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 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. James Lord Corrigan (left) and his wife Betty with Louis Armstrong at Batley Variety Club (Image: handout)

The Guardian First Book Award, 2001, "the first time a graphic novel has won a major UK book award," according to the Guardian. [5] SL: You – or someone with your name – figures in the book as a character (though, at the time in which the book is set, I’m guessing you would have been closer to Rusty’s age than his). How autobiographical is the book and in which way? What does it do to introduce “Chris Ware” as a character? Jimmy Corrigan was created by Chris Ware. He has written many highly acclaimed graphic novels, including Acme Novelty Library. Major Story ArcsCW: We’re all connected in ways we don’t and can’t ever completely understand. The chain of causality that links us from the subatomic level up through the sphere of thought and how that thought, though it apparently still arises from the interactions of particles, somehow also seems to have an effect on the physical world, is simply unfathomable in its complexity. I find this immense incomprehensibility greatly reassuring, especially its seeming meaninglessness. I very much 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, with the ultimate aim of understanding and empathising with everyone we possibly can. We already do this unconsciously when we dream, or consciously when some jerk cuts us off on the highway, but fiction can act as an assisting rudder; books can’t tell us how to live, but they can help us get better at imagining how to live.