Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

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verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Jimmy has no memories of the man whose name he bears, and when one day the mail brings an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with him, his head is filled with hope, hate and fear. But what he finds in Michigan is neither a saint nor a devil, nor even a consistently inadequate parent. His father has brought up another child - and pretty well, to judge by the "Number 1 Dad" T-shirts she buys him. He can be unthinking and dull, but who can't? And he wants to make amends. He says it not with flowers, but with bacon: four strips of 100% US grade-A Country Morn that spell out the word "HI" on Jimmy's breakfast plate. SL: You (or “Chris Ware”) say in the book that the sense of “weary dislocation” we suffer comes from the thwarted desire to feel like a protagonist. How does that bear on your stuff? I believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s lives

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. SL: A big theme of your work seems to be human connection (and its failure). Is that why you weave stories in and out of each other?

Elements of the novel appear to be autobiographical, particularly Jimmy's relationship with his father. Ware met his father only once in adulthood – while he was working on this book – and has remarked that his father's attempts at humor and casualness were not unlike those he'd already created for Jimmy's father in the book. However, the author states it is not an account of his personal life. Although the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif loved Ware's visual elan, she found the storytelling "self-conscious and rather self-indulgent".

The book turns on Jimmy's journey to the city to meet his father for the first time at the age of 36. The trip reveals that his grandfather was just as defeated by the world as he. CW: We’re all connected in ways we don’t and can’t ever completely understand. The chain of causality that links us from the subatomic level up through the sphere of thought and how that thought, though it apparently still arises from the interactions of particles, somehow also seems to have an effect on the physical world, is simply unfathomable in its complexity. I find this immense incomprehensibility greatly reassuring, especially its seeming meaninglessness. CW: There is a tip-off in the book that it all connects to Jimmy Corrigan, and though it’s not apparent yet, also to both Building Stories and two other books on which I’ve been slowly toiling. This is all very inconsequential to the turning of the planet, however. The election of Trump has made us aware of the fragility of virtue versus the blunt force of decep­tion and domination Gradually Ware shifts the focus to Jimmy's grandfather James, one of those desiccated old men who are too stubborn to die. He's grouchy, insensitive, vaguely racist. But by the time we know him as an adult, we have met him as a child and it's impossible to despise him. Little James's mother dies in childbirth, he makes enemies like most children make friends, and to his strap-happy father he is a "goddamn little son of a bitch".

Claire Armitstead, the Guardian literary editor, who chaired the judges, said: "Jimmy Corrigan is a fantastic winner, because it so clearly shows what the Guardian award is about - it is about originality and energy and star quality, both in imagination and in execution. Chris Ware has produced a book as beautiful as any published this year, but also one which challenges us to think again about what literature is and where it is going." Jimmy Corrigan was created by Chris Ware. He has written many highly acclaimed graphic novels, including Acme Novelty Library. Major Story Arcs SL: You – or someone with your name – figures in the book as a character (though, at the time in which the book is set, I’m guessing you would have been closer to Rusty’s age than his). How autobiographical is the book and in which way? What does it do to introduce “Chris Ware” as a character?

The Guardian First Book Award, 2001, "the first time a graphic novel has won a major UK book award," according to the Guardian. [5] James Lord Corrigan (left) and his wife Betty with Louis Armstrong at Batley Variety Club (Image: handout)The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001