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.