The Father, The Son and their unholy ghosts: Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth”

In a promotional event from nearly a decade ago, American cartoonist Chris Ware, the author of the 2000 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth could well have been mistaken for his most famous character; an oddly shapeless face, scared-looking eyes, severely receding hairline, and in his late thirties (Corrigan is 36), showing every possible outward sign of premature ageing. Jimmy Corrigan, who first appeared in Acme Novelty Library (Ware’s comic book series) in a serialized comic strip between 1995 and 2000, also struggles to come to terms with the sudden appearance of an absentee father in his life, mirroring Ware’s own experience with his own biological father, from whom he received a phone call one day, out of the cold. The aforementioned father then stood Ware up for what would have been only their second meeting in person, soon after which he died of a coronary. In the searing, heartfelt postscript to Jimmy Corrigan, Ware reflected that he began writing and drawing the comic partially in order to “work out” his issues with his absconding father, en route to maybe getting to really know him, only to realize that “Real life, of course, is much more badly plotted than that”. Ware goes on to note that the time taken by the average reader to read this novel would be “four or five hours” which "is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the phone".

Bleakly funny, even (dare I say it?) Kafkaesque reflections like these are very often the bulwark of Ware’s novel, which chronicles paternal neglect, existential angst and societal alienation across three generations of the fictional Corrigans, an Irish-American immigrant family. Determinedly non-linear, with a structural and narrative intricacy which would give most postmodern prose writers a run for their money, Jimmy Corrigan marked a watershed in the “alternative comics” movement which has been gaining momentum rapidly in recent years, with the likes of Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Jason Lutes, Chester Brown, Paul Hornschmeier, the Hernandez Brothers and others proving that for followers of graphic literature, there’s life beyond Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman or Neil Gaiman.

Jimmy Corrigan, the 36 year old protagonist of the novel, lives shackled both by his mind-numbingly dull desk job and his over-protective, overbearing mother. Jimmy has all the self-confidence of a lifelong wallflower.  Having never known his real father, Jimmy collects father figures as he meekly goes through the motions of his banal existence. (The most notable of these is “The Super-Man” Ware’s washed-out, deadbeat take on the world’s favorite superhero, whose one-night stand with young Jimmy’s mother, and subsequent suicide in front of an adult Jimmy set the grim tone of the book in the first dozen or so pages) Following a letter he receives out of the blue, Jimmy goes on to meet his real father; only it isn’t merely his father he meets, but also his grandfather (also named James Corrigan) and an African-American stepsister he never knew he had.

Chris Ware’s artwork has quite a few things which are immediately distinctive; his use of sheer, block colours (he uses a computer for colouring, and as such this practice can feel a lot like a child colouring by numbers), a high degree of ambiguity or deliberate obfuscation in facial detailing, circuit-diagram like full page-panels etc. (Ware also peppers the book with elaborate, detailed plans for making miniature paper cut-outs of Jimmy and other related paraphernalia)  However, the one feature of his art which lingers in the mind is the incredible detailing and the geometrical precision of his panels, lending a very Arabic miniature-like feel to the work. A lot of his panels are less than half an inch length and breadth-wise, which makes the use of a magnifying glass very plausible advice indeed. (As Ware once explained himself, this is quite deliberate; the size of the actual drawings is about twice of what we see on the pages of Jimmy Corrigan.) Ware also heavily employs the stream-of-consciousness technique to bring out some of the more macabre and disturbing aspects of Jimmy’s inner life.

Chris Ware the writer is no lightweight either: The understandably awkward initial exchanges between Jimmy and his father are handled with a surety of purpose and a lightness of touch which elevates these portions of the book above their firmly formulaic content. This is even more apparent whenever the narrative shifts to James Corrigan the elder, another awkward, socially insecure living under the thumb of a domineering single parent, in this case the father, who very obviously has no great affection for his only child. In a particularly touching passage, young James witnesses his generally stern father’s forbidding exterior crumbling; when faced the death of his own mother, James’ grandmother. (Line breaks indicate change of panel)

“And while
he might have readied himself for harsh words, rough handling or even a slap
nothing prepared this boy
for the unchecked sobs
of a child
anticipating
the imminent loss of his mother”

Or when James seeks solace in the kindly father of a newfound friend from school; and with all the innocence of his age, secretly hopes that they adopt him into their already burgeoning family. (“Although this hyperbolic praise was subsequently spread amongst all the participants with the judiciousness one might expect from a parent of many, I reveled in his acclaim, and shortly concluded that he had singled me out as his favorite”)

A recurring obsession with Ware is the nature of memory, and the mechanism of fashioning a story out of real-life experiences. For instance, when James is narrating the story of how his father took him to Chicago’s famous Columbian Exhibition of 1893, he is, in fact, wearing a nightshirt, lying in his bed. But in the narrative, it is the young James who is drawn wearing an appropriately tiny nightshirt. Pretty soon, he “realizes” his mistake, exclaiming “But I couldn’t have been running around dressed like that… I have to constantly remind myself to keep details like these straight!” From the next panel on, the young James is drawn dressed normally, as he observes “One’s memory likes to play tricks, after years of cold storage”. This interplay of a plausibly unreliable narrator’s account, where the roles the father and the son as the oppressor and the oppressed are swapped; (Jimmy’s father is quite blunt with the octogenarian James and rebukes him frequently) gives rise to the Father as a sort of looming, ghostly presence throughout the novel; no father in the book is what he seems to be, let alone what he should be, in a decent world.

The Columbian Exhibition or the World’s Fair of 1893 is depicted with virtuosic skill, as Ware lovingly renders architectural and other period details. These panels are among the strongest of the novel, as Ware showcases the scale and the depth of his vision, keeping several balls in the air, with James realizing the hard-to-swallow truth about his own father even as he, along with the reader is utterly mesmerized by the stunning visuals all around him. Whether it’s a typically featureless African-American in the corner of a panel, playing an old six-string with a “Rag Time” board next to him; (Ware is a ragtime enthusiast himself, and occasionally publishes a 200 page journal dedicated to the same) or a page-length panel depicting hundreds of children in red, blue and white forming the U.S. flag in formation, Ware raises the game to dizzying levels.

The World’s Fair is also a convenient way for Ware to indulge in another, much broader theme: the power of the comics medium itself, and the idea of comics as a sort of “fourth dimension”, given its unique powers of simulating motion or the passage of time. James’ father, i.e. Jimmy’s great-grandfather, is helping a certain “Mister E. Muybridge” to construct the “Zoopraxographical Hall” for his exhibit at the Fair. The real-life Eadweard Muybridge was an early pioneer of cinematic techniques, and the “Zoopraxography” being talked about was one such method, where rapidly rotating glass discs were used to create the illusion of motion, in particular, the illusion of a galloping horse, something which is depicted faithfully and accurately later on in the book. The parallels are not difficult to draw here; a profusion of gradually varying drawings being used in animation since a long time. This is also slyly hinted at in the preface of the book, where a tongue-in-cheek Ware describes the “New Pictorial Language” (with an illustrated example) which is supposed to be “Good for Showing Stuff. Leaving out Big Words” and is “superior to the zoetrope” and could even be “the culmination of over two thousand years of civilized endeavour, and the highest expression of man’s achievement yet to appear.”

Jimmy Corrigan can be a little taxing on the reader sometimes, not least because of the sheer amount of information being conveyed out of every square inch of every page, right down to the front and back covers, filled with little jokes in faux-grandiose, archaic language. However, this is a small criticism to make of a novel which packs a big punch, and has an ever bigger heart. Chris Ware, on the strength of this work alone has written himself into the pantheon of comic world greats like Robert Crumb, Harvey Kurtzmann, or Charles Schultz. Jimmy Corrigan is a sort of spiritual successor to Schultz and his iconic Peanuts strip in particular, in terms of communicating emotions in a highly compressed, subtle progression of panels. Despite the rather lovingly drawn curlicues which form the words “The End” at the end of Jimmy’s story, there is definite scope for a sequel here, and one can only hope that Ware obliges all of us once again. 

Bittersweet mythologies in rural Pennsylvania: Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home"

“My graphic memoir Fun Home could be anywhere from the LGBT shelf to “Lesbian Fiction” (even though it’s all true) to “Memoir” to “Biography” to “Graphic Novels.” Once I stopped in a bookstore to sign copies, and the clerk found it in “Lesbian Mystery,” which was a mystery indeed.”

American cartoonist Alison Bechdel (creator of the cult comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For) had this to say, in an NY Times interview, when asked where she typically spotted Fun Home, her 2006 memoir, inside an average bookstore. One is inclined to chuckle, and agree with Ms. Bechdel, for her memoir does indeed defy classification, and rather impressively at that.  Fun Home revolves around the dual themes of the author’s difficult relationship with her father, a repressed closeted gay man who committed suicide when Ms. Bechdel was almost twenty; and Ms. Bechdel’s discovery of her own homosexuality. Because of the book’s decidedly non-linear narrative (all of this is revealed in the first twenty-odd pages itself), the above statement does not qualify as a spoiler.

The “confessional” novel or memoir has proven to be fertile imaginative ground for the alternative/underground comix (deliberately misspelled to differentiate them from ordinary comics) movement in America; from the pioneers, the old-timers like Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar and Art Spiegelman to more recent luminaries like Craig Thompson, James Kochalka and Jeffrey Brown. Spiegelman’s memoir Maus, (which was serialized in the seminal alternative comics magazine RAW) had its characters drawn as anthropomorphic animals, as did Crumb’s most famous series Fritz the Cat, while Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor  had a signature realist, gritty appearance which suited its closely autobiographical storylines. Ms. Bechdel was one of the many artists on American Splendor, who would make a mark later on with their own autobiographical books, including, of course Robert Crumb himself, who was beginning to be seen as the de facto spokesperson for the movement.

Although Ms. Bechdel’s exquisite attention to the finer points of a panel, and her obvious technical proficiency bring to mind some of Crumb’s finest works, Fun Home ultimately owes more of a debt to Pekar’s writing style, with its searing, no-holds barred honesty as it delves deep into the emotional lives of its subjects with clarity, wit and erudition. Alison Bechdel was born and brought up in Beech Creek in rural Pennsylvania, which had, as of the 2000 census, a population of 717. The title of the book itself comes from the family’s ironic moniker for the town’s Funeral Home run by Bruce Bechdel. As such, themes of sexual identity are constantly dovetailed with bleak, oddly funny homilies about death, suicide in particular.

Fun Home  bursts at the seams with literary allusions; as well as other pop cultural references from movies, music and politics. In the first chapter itself, the author’s father Bruce Bechdel is likened to the mythical Daedalus, the artisan who built the labyrinth which housed the beast Minotaur. In a flurry of quick-footed, fluid panels, the parallels between Bechdel (who had a monomaniacal passion for elaborate restorations of old houses) and Daedalus are established. (“He could transfigure a room with the smallest offhand flourish. He could conjure an entire, finished period interior from a single paint chip. He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor.”)

The page above is a good example of Ms. Bechdel’s style in Fun Home, and why it works. Juxtaposition, when executed well, is particularly effective in the graphic medium, something which she demonstrates here. Images bridge the gap between what is explicit in the text, and what is left unsaid or suggested via context; and one can’t help but get the feeling that no set of words, however cleverly or meticulously crafted, would have served the purpose of the story better (which is the ultimate acid test for any narrative device). In the first panel, Alison Bechdel the author/narrator is talking (in the text) about Minotaur, “the half-bull, half-man monster”; while Alison the character is faced with the looming shadow of her father, cleverly drawn to appear scepter-like, menacing. In the following panels, young Alison does manage to escape the house temporarily (as opposed to the unlucky youths trapped in Daedalus’ labyrinth) but we the readers know it to be a hollow victory: Alison must inevitably return to her antiquated, maze-like house and her father. Finally, Alison’s feelings of abandonment directed at her father are inverted back onto the original myth itself, as the author wonders aloud if, perhaps, Daedalus wasn’t similarly indifferent towards “the human cost of his projects”, as a reflective Alison is drawn walking quietly against the backdrop of her father’s Christmas decorations. This is narrative art at its finest, most elemental. 

Bruce Bechdel is shown to have been obsessed with Jay Gatsby, the eponymous hero of Fitzgerald’s classic novel, and his ultimate suicide is discussed in the light of A Happy Death (the third chapter shares its name with this book, which Bruce was reading in the days leading up to his suicide) and The Myth Of Sisyphus by Camus. The Addams Family house, with its “ironic reversal of suburban conformity, its familiar dark, lofty ceilings, peeling wallpaper, and menacing horsehair furnishings” cuts a little too close to the bone for young Alison. Ms. Bechdel compares her father’s lifelong dilemma about being a closeted gay man to Proust’s metaphor of the diverging paths in A la recherché du temps Perdue. She also channelizes Baudrillard in parts, where she refers to her house as “not a real home at all, but a simulacrum of one, a museum.” (The "simulacrum" part is also slyly hinted at with the profusion of photographs, letters, maps etc. which are featured in the book; and also with the fact that the author’s mother is a stage actress) Never once do these references and comparisons sound contrived, because, as the author puts it, “My parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the arctic climate of our family than any literary comparison.” Consider this masterful passage, where Ms. Bechdel turns the Proust word “invert” around (Proust used it to describe his explicitly homosexual characters)

Ms. Bechdel can be very, very funny when she wants to. We’re in splits when we see the author’s mother running lines with her; the play being The Importance of Being Earnest by that prince of scandal, Oscar Wilde. ("An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.") The book is also strewn with period details which are not always apparent. For instance, when Alison goes to college and attends a gay rights group meeting, in a small corner of the panel, one can see a derogatory slogan directed at Anita Bryant, the former Oklahoma beauty queen, singer and vociferous advocate for discrimination against homosexuals. In this context, it has to be said that Ms. Bechdel’s account in the book, of her own sexual awakening, is, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (the book Didion wrote about coping with the death of her husband of nearly forty years, writer John Dunne), “an act of literary courage”. A stirring scene comes to mind, in which Alison and her father try (very awkwardly) to convey their true feelings to each other, during the course of a drive to the theater. Notice how the artwork conveys the moments of silence, and the overall rhythm of an uneasy conversation like this one.

Ms. Bechdel’s joke about finding Fun Home in the “Lesbian Mystery” section of a bookstore notwithstanding, it is heartening to note that her book made more of a splash than comic books typically do. TIME magazine was sufficiently moved to call Fun Home its book of the year, and it featured on several other year-end lists for 2006. But then, an important aspect of Ms. Bechdel’s work in Dykes to Watch Out For has always been about challenging existing stereotypes about women, whether it’s books, magazines or Hollywood. In a strip titled “The Rule” (1985), Ms. Bechdel coined her own little nugget of pop cultural immortality, the Bechdel test. In the strip, a character says she only watches a film if it satisfies the following rules:

1.      It has to have at least two women in it,

2.      Who talk to each other,

3.      About something other than a man.

 

The late and much-lamented American writer David Foster Wallace once said that the point of reading fiction was “to feel less lonely inside”. Fun Home, while not being fiction at all, possesses this quality by the bagful, and is an essential read for readers across gender, age or, indeed, sexual orientation.