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.