Question for Chris Ware

I would like to know what Ware's creative process is like.  When he sits down to write a strip or story, how much has he planned in advance?  How much does he know about the story beforehand and how much does he create on the spot or instinctually?

The lamp's imaginings

Trying to follow this graphic novel is very difficult. Sometimes, the reader can get a little confused between what is reality and what is imagination. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth uses this switching back and forth between what is going on in Jimmy's mind as to where he came from versus the things he discovers in life to show how Jimmy thinks and what he thinks of himself, and make the reader think about how he thinks as well. The page in which Jimmy's grandfather is imagining playing with a projector lamp and shining it out his window is probably the best example of this theme in the novel. "A seamless stream of predictable pictures pointed at the moon only occasionally cut by the knife edge of a leaf or a chimney, a bird, an aircraft or a man falling, falling, falling from a very tall building" (Ware). This image of a seamless stream of predictable thought is how much of the novel functions, in that Jimmy's mind is constantly thinking, producing images that are more or less predictable, but the reader still has yet to reach the point where all of those thoughts, however dark they may be, hit the ground, like the man falling who never seems to reach earth. "Each successive slice of light revealing one earlier event of the evening's entertainment, but still never quite getting up to the exact moment that the lamp was lit in the first place" (Ware). This image of working in reverse is much like Jimmy's own struggle to understand himself based on the past he should have had had his father been in his life.

The disjointedness of these images, which flash through the beam of light to reveal a moment in time, are connected by that same beam of light. Jimmy's mind works in the same way, in that he is using the beam of light, or the reunion and connection with his father, to try to understand his past, the point of origin of the light. He sees glimpses of where his life came from, but does not yet fully understand truly where it all originates. The beam of light is his existence, both from his own mind and from his experiences. This image of the beam of light makes the reader think about his own past, as to where the light of his existence originates. The images flashing through that beam are the thoughts and ideas that make the reader who he is, but like Jimmy, the reader cannot remember the first thought he had, like the point of origin of the beam.

Dull Imagery in a Dull Book

In Chris Ware’s graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, there is a page approximately halfway in the book that solely depicts a stormy evening in a city in Michigan.  The images are of rain on power lines, with some including water dripping from the lines and the shadow of a McDonalds sign.  The page concludes with the light poles connecting the power lines turning on as the rain continues falling.  This is used to transition from the present day storyline to the one occurring at the time of the Chicago World’s Fair.  This page epitomizes the book’s depressing nature through its bleak imagery and through the parallels it holds with a similar transition.

Jimmy Corrigan is by no means a happy novel, and this sentiment is perfectly captured on the aforementioned page.  A basic example is the page’s coloration; the only colors used are black, white, and dark purple.  This bleakness is something found throughout the novel, as Jimmy is never truly happy.  However, Ware does not limit this dark feeling to just Jimmy.  The McDonald’s logo has long been a symbol of America.  On this page, it is blackened out, faded into the background.  By doing this, Ware demonstrates that America, through this symbol, is just as bleak to the rest of the world as the logo is to the page.  Finally, the actions depicted in the images can be summarized to simply being the following:  The weather is stormy and some lights turn on.  There is no real action on the page.  It is at most a boring footnote, which reflects how Jimmy’s life is boring in a similar sense.  His miserable life stays miserable by the end of Jimmy Corrigan, and the dreariness of his living is exactly what Ware wishes to convey to the reader.

The similarities this page holds with another transitionary page also reveal the novel’s gloomy theme.  The page opposite the one in which Jimmy’s grandfather narrates “Of course he never did…” depicts the same place as the stormy page.  However, instead of raining, snow is falling, showing the onset of winter.  The background is still a dark shade of purple, which signifies how little everything has changed even though time has passed.  This idea of the persistence of a dreary atmosphere ties back to the book’s overall sense of misery.  In fact, the drop in temperatures and the accumulation of snow also present the idea that, in Jimmy’s world, life has become even less bearable.

The melancholy overtones of Jimmy Corrigan are highlighted through a particular page’s bleak imagery and its parallels with another, similar page.  Those subtle hints at an overall absence of excitement and happiness serve to propel the theme of depression in the novel.

Appearances Can Be Deceiving

“Trust not too much in appearances.” Although more than two millenniums have passed since ancient Roman poet Publius Vergil gave this shrewd warning, the idea that appearances can be deceiving still holds true today. The graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware is a brilliant illustration of the idea that every person has a unique perception of the people he or she interacts with and the events that he or she encounters. The suicide of Superman, which only Jimmy seems to be entirely aware of, demonstrates the novel’s overarching theme that appearances can be deceiving.

            The Superman character is introduced on page 4 as a smarmy actor making a guest appearance at a car show that Jimmy and his mother attend during Jimmy’s childhood. Superman ends up sleeping with Jimmy’s mother, unbeknownst to Jimmy, and leaves his mask with Jimmy the next morning. A few pages later, the reader sees Superman on page 17 when now grown-up Jimmy watches him commit suicide by jumping from the top of a building. The death of Superman represents the shattered illusion of Jimmy’s childhood, as Jimmy comes to the horrified realization that no one, not even Superman, is infallible or eternal.

The concept of what a hero is differs for every person, and changes fluidly as the person changes as well. In Daniel Raeburn’s essay, “The Smartest Cartoonist on Earth,” Raeburn comments on how Superman is utilized in the novel: “(Superman) appears as both a bum and a celebrity, your murderer and your saviour. Chris Ware says that his Superman is ‘all things at once.’” With an absentee father, Jimmy looks up to Superman during his childhood as what a man should be. However, when Jimmy reflects on the scene from his childhood when Superman spent the night with his mother, he suddenly and sickeningly understands what was really happening during the one-night-stand. The subsequent suicide of Superman that the reader sees is really all in Jimmy’s head.

The manner in which Superman commits suicide on page 17 is significant as well. In movie and comic book depictions of Superman, he is typically seen jumping from rooftops and flying off to save the world. This time though, when Superman jumps, he fails to take flight, and instead lands face down in the middle of the concrete street below. The fact that few pedestrians take notice of the dead Superman character lying there and the fact that an ambulance is not called furthers the idea that it is all in Jimmy’s head.

The use of color in the suicide is obvious but nevertheless important. Everything—the buildings, the cars, the people—are drawn in varying shades of sepia. Superman, in his brilliant blue suit, red gloves, and yellow cape, is the only part of the scene that is drawn in color. In the Fear No ART video interview conducted by Elysabeth Alfano, Ware comments that he uses color “in a way to connect themes or objects or people on the page.”

Humans have an innate tendency to see what they want to see, and ignore the rest. This theme that appearances can be deceiving is woven throughout the novel, particularly through the Superman character and what his suicide represents for Jimmy. 

Panel variation in Jimmy Corrigan

Contrary to the evenly sized and spaced, linearly progressing comic strips that appear in most comic books, Chris Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth contains an imaginative, varied page design that is perfectly fitting of his story about abandonment and the broken relationships between fathers and sons. This layout, featuring panels of varying sizes that freely shift between time periods, both shows the significance of everyday interactions and seamlessly incorporates the characters’ innermost thoughts into the story.

The effectiveness of Ware’s technique is reflected in the doctor’s office conversations between Jimmy, the novel’s main character, and his father, after Jimmy has been hit by a car. As the reader takes in the one-sided conversation on the page, in which Jimmy’s father rambles on about “fat ‘n ugly” women, it becomes clear that Ware devoted much attention to the placement of each panel on the page.

Jimmy’s father appears in a cluster of small panels whenever he speaks, each one devoted to a close-up of his face and a single awkward comment. As Raeburn points out in “The Smartest Cartoonist on Earth,” Ware has an ability to illustrate “the unspoken emotion in the jibberjabber of everyday chatter” (12), and so he does on this page. The grouping of all of Jimmy’s father’s dialogue together allows the reader to understand how he is feeling throughout this exchange, each “ha ha” he mumbles and the “pk pk pk” as he flicks his soda can revealing that he is deeply uncomfortable with interacting with his grown son, despite the seemingly light topic. Jimmy’s reactions, rather than being shown after every halting comment his father makes, are instead placed at either the beginning or end of each line on larger panels. This allows the reader to focus on elements such as the deep lines under Jimmy’s eyes to understand just how draining it is for him to be faced with a father who has been absent Jimmy’s whole life.

On this page, there are also three larger, green-tinted panels placed periodically throughout the page, their color suggesting that they are Jimmy’s memories, or perhaps daydreams. In these panels, Jimmy thinks about Peggy, the woman he wishes he could tell his father is his girlfriend, but as we see from his memories, Peggy is fonder of calling Jimmy “fat ass” than she is dating him. Ware’s decision to place these larger memory-filled panels next to the smaller ones of Jimmy’s father speaking means that as readers look at Jimmy’s father, their eyes also pick up on Jimmy’s thoughts as he tries to reconcile his experiences with women with what his father expects a “man” should do with women—“[fooling] around with office girls,” for instance. This reveals much more about why his father’s words unnerve Jimmy so much. The way in which Ware varies his panel sizes and content, and even time period, allows the reader to gain a deeper understand of Jimmy’s relationship with his father, from just a simple conversation.

Colorful Emotions

One of the most important consequences of the format of a graphic novel is the lack of clues to a character’s thoughts or feelings. Unlike a novel, wherein the author can bluntly write how his or her characters are feeling, a graphic novel depends much more on visual cues that may or may not be noticed by the reader. Actions are shown in visual novels, not described, so there is no opportunity to clue in the reader with phrases like someone ‘angrily’ replying or ‘timidly’ sitting. Everything is visual, and depends much more heavily on interpretation than words on a page. This problem is compounded in a novel like Jimmy Corrigan, wherein the characters are drawn in a cartoonish style, with very little detail on their small faces. These tiny faces, almost never bigger than a dime, are not as helpful as they could be in trying to determine a character’s mood, since we can see very few of the indicators that would visually signal to us in the real world what a person’s emotional state is.   

            However, that does not mean that the author is completely unable to set out clues indicating a character’s emotional state. For a graphic novel, a very important way for setting the mood and indicating emotions are colors. When certain colors appear repeatedly in situations where a certain emotion is likely to be inferred, one can then begin to link the occurrence of that color with that emotion. This association then helps the reader interpret other scenes, whose emotional contexts are perhaps not as explicitly understandable, by looking for color clues.

            One page I analyzed, wherein some of these color-emotion precedents might be set, is the page where Jimmy is on the red-tinged plane to meet his father and imagining twelve different ways his father might look, and twelve different greetings he would have for Jimmy. Given that we know Jimmy is a timid, immature man looking for acceptance, we can assume that some of the potential fathers he imagines would be much more terrifying than others. This fear is reflected in the red of those panels. The man with a forceful personality who calls him ‘Jimbo’ is entirely red-faced, because that kind of personality would be very intimidating for Jimmy; so too, the father who laughs at Jimmy’s name is dressed in red. Meanwhile, the fathers that are very friendly or accepting of Jimmy, two things Jimmy desperately longs for in his life, are portrayed in a blue background, and the fathers in a kind of emotional middle-ground are surrounded by brown.

            

Meaningful Every Day Life

     In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid in the World, Jimmy and the other characters around him are often depicted as doing simple, mundane, every day tasks.  This would not usually make a very interesting story, but Ware is able to shape each event into just that.  One example I thought really encompassed this was the page where the doctor is examining Jimmy after he is hit by the car.  This is a very routine examination that happens every day and does not have much meaning.  However, Ware has drawn numerous pictures and has more dialogue than some ten page segments.  He provides immaculate detail of everything the doctor does including sounds.  There is nothing special about this event, but the way the page is drawn gives it a sense of importance.

     A similar phenomenon happens when Jimmy and his dad get food after visiting the doctor.  It is a very plain, normal diner; nothing is very special about it.  Again, though there are a lot of detailed pictures and dialogue between Jimmy and his father.  Ware has made this idea of dullness into something complex.  There are other people in pictures that there are words that Jimmy or his dad are saying, which makes the picture confusing and forces the reader to pay attention to who is actually saying the words and follow the conversation.  He makes a point to show the food by itself, which is not anything exciting, just a grilled cheese and a coke.  The face of the waitress is not shown because she is not important to the page and Ware wanted the attention solely on Jimmy and his dad.  

     By making these dull moments more detailed, Ware has forced the focus to the page.  This is why he adds a lot of dialogue, because the reader is already engaged in the page and will pay more attention to the words.  These pages allow us to get a better in depth look at the relationship between Jimmy and his father, though.  By putting them in a low stress normal atmosphere, the reader can concentrate on what they are actually saying to each other and how they interact.  Within the dullness of the mood, the complexity of Jimmy's relationship with his father can be examined more closely.  Especially in the page with the doctor, his father does not stop talking.  Jimmy only answers the doctor to his questions of if something hurts or not.  By getting past all the dull pictures and nothingness, a bond between father and son becomes more apparent.        

The Power of Empathy in a World of Despair

Ware’s novel revolves around a world absent of hope and happiness and packed with despair and emptiness. Throughout the book, disturbingly depressing stories of Jimmy’s life are told, and the reader subconsciously must choose whether to empathize with the pitiful character or not. Moreover, Ware’s characters within the novel are forced to make the same choice. Rarely does empathy come along within the novel -- especially not for Jimmy. However, when it does make an appearance, its influence is immense. The power of empathy is demonstrated when Jimmy does maybe the most embarrassing thing anyone could possibly ever do – spills his urine sample on the floor at the doctor’s office – and the simple act of empathy toward him from the nurse completely erases his depression.

            This page comes right after one of the most dismal pages in the entire book; not only has Jimmy spilled his own pee, but his father has just called him a “mistake:” a label he takes to heart. The nurse enters the room to collect his urine sample and, due to the fact that almost every situation in this novel ends in almost the worst possible outcome, the reader should expect a burst of laughter, a scolding, or at least an insult from the nurse upon seeing the spilled pee. However, instead, the nurse actually apologizes to Jimmy, and reassures him that “these sorts of things happen all the time.” This demonstration of empathy and general niceness is completely unexpected, especially by Jimmy. His immediate reaction is not just to be relieved that someone forgives and understands him, but to fall in love with that person. His life is so utterly despairing that the smallest sign of empathy becomes reason for lust, officially now the best part of his day (even special enough to spark a famous Corrigan day dream).

            This page demonstrates the vast power that empathy holds in Ware’s mind, which is a central theme in the novel. Empathy does not come easily. Even Superman cannot generate it, as demonstrated by the crowd of people that thoughtlessly leaves a dead Superman’s side after his jump from a tall building. Yet, Jimmy Corrigan manages to gather up some empathy toward himself, and this is practically miraculous. Ware seems to put more stock in the value of empathy than in any other aspect of life. His main character, as depressing as he is, has the opportunity for one moment to receive a little empathy toward his miserable life, and suddenly is changed whole-heartedly. Empathy, though not common in Ware’s novel, has complete and total power when it finally presents itself.  

Progress Vs. Change in Jimmy Corrigan

In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, one theme that Chris Ware illustrates is that drastic changes do not necessarily result from progress. One page that exemplifies this concept is the scene where the young James Corrigan is playing hide and seek with a girl.

Upon glancing at the page, it seems that there is only one picture, which is divided into many panels. For example, parts of the larger house on the right are in six different panels. This technique is unusual. Typically, each represented picture would encompass only a single panel. The continuation of a picture into multiple panels ties each of the panels together. As Raeburn states in “The Smartest Cartoonist on Earth,” part of Ware’s style involves “allowing the reader to be in two different times, and two different spaces, simultaneously,” (10). This is what Ware is doing on this page, especially with the portion of panels that connect the large house. While the house is complete in five of the panels, in one the reader views only the frame. The reader sees the progression of the house from beginning to finish. Therefore, progress is evident. However, because Ware’s style forces the reader to be aware of each panel simultaneously, the progress seems unimportant. In these six panels, the evidence of progress does not illustrate any great changes.

Another aspect of Ware’s style is the attention to detail in each of his drawings. Raeburn acknowledges this as “obsessively-rendered, nearly imperceptible body language,” (12) but the details in the novel are not only related to human expression. Ware’s detail in the scenery shows progress on this page, particularly in the contrast between the two panels that take place “A half century earlier” and the rest of the panels. For instance, there are no fallen leaves in these two panels and the grass is a slightly lighter color than in every other panel. The leaves in particular emphasize that it was a different time, because it clearly is not autumn in those two panels as it appears to be in the others. Despite these small details, these two panels fit in well with the rest of the panels, again suggesting that the changes since that time have not been drastic.

Finally, the panels at the top left corner state “A recent planting of trees, telephone poles, and houses on their bleak neighborhood landscape helps to make their game much more exciting.” This suggests that the neighborhood is more interesting and complex than it has been in the past, when it was considered “bleak.” However, the colors that Ware uses to depict this changed neighborhood are primarily dull. The page as a whole still seems rather bleak. This suggests that any progressive attempts made in the neighborhood to make it less bleak failed at bringing about any actual change.

The idea that progress does not lead to drastic change is common in the novel. It is due to various aspects of Ware’s style that this is evident on this particular page of Jimmy Corrigan.

Chris Ware's Waiting Room

            The page of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan that I am choosing to examine is the one that occurs during Jimmy and his father’s visit to the “Medlife Clinicare,” after Jimmy’s accident, just before the nurse enters.  It is on this page that the events of the day come to a sort of climax point, and Jimmy discovers that his father has another child – a daughter, Amy.  Jimmy’s father asks him, “What…you thought you were the only mistake I ever made?”  The page is divided into thirds, with a thin band of roughly one-inch squares containing what Raeburn refers to over the course of his essay as Ware’s simplified, almost iconic imagery.  This imagery allows the reader’s eyes to sweep over and through the small box-like frames, seemingly as they pass before Jimmy’s own eyes and through his mind.  The reader is given a moment to recognize them from the past or his imaginings, or consider the feelings and thoughts they might invoke in Jimmy, as they build up to what comes next.

            Several things about Ware’s use of these small frames is compelling.  Their size, compactness, and relative simplicity cause the reader’s eye to move over them at a faster speed, and suggest that the sequence doesn’t necessarily have a beginning or end, but rather a goal – that is, the frame in which Jimmy asks his father who the voice on the answering machine was, the question that got him into the emergency room in the first place.  The squares, representing things Jimmy sees in the room, things that he saw on his walk, and, in the center, two items from his father’s apartment, form a sort of crescendo to this question and the final frame of the page, which is his father’s answer.  Throughout the episode in the emergency room, frames of a similar size are also used to indicate fantasies, memories, or the halting way in which Jimmy and his father speak to one another.

            The emergency room section of Jimmy Corrigan actually uses many interesting techniques.  While “nothing” happens in the novel’s “real life,” as is discussed in Raeburn’s essay, much is going on below the surface.  The sequence begins with the arrival of the red bird from the past to the present, allowing the reader to cross the centuries with it.  Early in the section, Jimmy’s memories and fantasies (though where the line is drawn between the two is rarely clear) are represented in turquoise color tones, integrated into the story’s flow.  Small squares are used to enter into Jimmy’s thoughts, represented in more vibrant color, as the tries to give a urine sample.  In one red frame, Jimmy is reduced to a childlike state while facing his father over his father’s long absence.  The reader almost struggles to remember that the “real” events for these pages is, in face, “nothing” – that Jimmy and his father are simply sitting in a waiting room, facing down the gap between them and their boredom.