276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

£10£20.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

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 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.”

Jimmy Corrigan was created by Chris Ware. He has written many highly acclaimed graphic novels, including Acme Novelty Library. Major Story Arcs Sam Leith: Rusty Brown collects a number of different storylines written over a number of years. How much do you think of it as a coherent single work? 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? 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?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. 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". 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)

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. 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? 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. CW: 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. The Guardian First Book Award, 2001, "the first time a graphic novel has won a major UK book award," according to the Guardian. [5]

13/7/21 – Press Release

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.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment