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.