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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth is a graphic novel by Chris Ware that has generated enthusiastic attention from critics and reviewers over the last ten years. Published in 2000, it has been hailed by the media for representing “the Great American novel in comic book form.” This chapter analyzes Jimmy Corrigan’s projection of racism in America as a personal and national tragedy, and its success in relation to the creation of comics as graphic novels by critics and reviewers. It discusses the model proposed by Francophone scholars André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion for situating Jimmy Corrigan’s reception in the history of North American comics and argues that the novel has been aligned with the Great American Novel.

A constant concern in Chris Ware’s oeuvre is the role of the superhero in contemporary comics. Ware is troubled by the notion that superheroes are the forefathers of all new comics texts. In his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, he establishes a parodic connection between the figure of the superhero and the eponymous protagonist’s long-absent father. A psychoanalytic investigation of the way fatherhood is represented throughout Jimmy Corrigan shows that superheroes sometimes seem to put oppressive pressure on the comics medium as a whole. This chapter argues that Jimmy Corrigan is an attempt to re-imagine the position of the superhero in American comics without granting it a central or otherwise foundational role. It examines Jimmy Corrigan’s struggle to come to terms with his father, as well as his alienation from his sexuality, as an allegory of the status of comics. The chapter also considers how Ware expresses his resistance to the superheroic legacy through genealogy, with reference to Jimmy Corrigan’s investigation of the real complexities of family history.

In his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware employs narrative content that is shaped by a paratextual framework of prose and images, dubbed “General Instructions” and “Corrigenda,” respectively. This chapter examines how these non-narrative pages inform the novel’s narrative structure and argues that the novel draws a sharp distinction between the realms of public and private history. More specifically, it analyzes the complex juxtaposition of the public history of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the private history of the Corrigan family. The chapter demonstrates how Jimmy Corrigan weaves together a distanced, historical perspective that relies primarily on an iconic mode of representation with a more personal register that reflects Jimmy’s subjectivity. It also comments on the reading method prescribed by “General Instructions” and shows that in this version of comics theory, the reader can synthetically understand the entire meaning of the novel.

This chapter examines sequentiality in comics theory in relation to Chris Ware’s comics and proposes a poetics of the diagram that draws upon information theory. It shows how understanding Ware’s comics as diagrams, including his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, allows us to see how they function as puzzles to be solved. The chapter argues that Ware’s diagrams suggest new possibilities of metaphor, meta-narrative, and other more “poetic” devices for the still-developing language of comics. It also looks at a number of other cartoonists who have exploited the diagrammatic potential of the comics page, including Dan Zettwoch, Peter Blegvad, Posy Simmonds, and Kevin Huizenga.

In the formal grammar of Chris Ware’s comics, time is conspicuous, and forms of temporal progression (or speed) are inscribed in its graphic representation. Ware also emphasizes controlled pace as, among other things, an obstacle to the frenetic temporality of contemporary consumer culture. This chapter examines his oeuvre in terms of its deliberate fascination with slowness. Invoking Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, it argues that the slowness of Ware’s narration is a reflection of his strong resistance to contemporary consumer culture and revolves around the concepts of nostalgia, repetition, and non-hierarchical structures. The chapter highlights the intensive and extensive forms of temporality in Ware’s graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, focusing on the agonizing patience and misery of the protagonist’s embarrassment as an existential and profoundly temporal leitmotif.

This chapter explores how Chris Ware’s comics, particularly the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, engage questions of caricature and racism in American history in general and in comics history in particular. It looks at Jimmy Corrigan as an incisive critique of the myths of American national identity and highlights the historical and familial connections between European immigrants and black slaves. The chapter argues that the graphic novel is a counter-narrative to traditional and often inaccurate histories of immigration in America.

This chapter examines Chris Ware’s comics from a perspective informed by French comics, with emphasis on an experimental collective known as Oubapo. It shows how, for both Ware and Oubapo, the concept of the workshop or factory becomes a key trope as they self-consciously create an avant-garde form of comics that embraces experimentation in the medium and about the medium. To demonstrate how this formal experimentation offers another point of entry into the labyrinth of Ware’s graphic narratives, the chapter looks at parallels between his work in The ACME Novelty Library series, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, and Oubapo works. It also considers how the works of Ware and a number of French artists share an ironic edge and specifically critique mass-manufactured comics and consumerism.

This chapter examines how Chris Ware has helped reshape the canon of comics history, paying particular attention to his book designs. It argues that through his work as an editor and book designer, Ware has constantly evoked cartoonists from the past, particularly the newspaper cartoonists of the early twentieth century and the pioneering superhero artists of the 1930s and 1940s. He has also championed artists who engage in formal experimentation or focus on everyday life, such as George Herriman, Frank King, Rodolphe Töpffer, and Gluyas Williams. To understand why Ware and his fellow cartoonists are rewriting comics history, the chapter places their work in a historical context. By looking at his comics such as Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Lost Buildings, and Quimby the Mouse, it shows that Ware is engaged in an act of ancestor creation, of giving a pedigree and lineage to his own work.