Isaac's review of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
So many panels! So much mid-west history! It's a beautiful book. I love comics in part because you get to choose which images or instances in the plot you want to linger over and which ones you want to quickly incorporate into the narrative. In film the artists do it for you since they determine how long to spend on a specific shot, but in comics you get to do it yourself. More participatory, I guess you would say. Chris Ware is a master at creating images to linger over in the midst of his narrative, using stereotypically boring images like a drab building or a stoplight or a McDonalds and giving them enough weight through coloring and placement to stand on their own. Since comics are such a perfect medium for warping reality and most comic readers are usually conditioned to expect it (even when R. Crumb is just going around living his daily life he's prone to start twisting his legs around women like pretzels), the idea of keeping a reader enthralled with a very quiet story f...more
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