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I'm a designer in Vancouver, Canada. I work at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, am a director of the 221A Artist Run Centre, and a member of Fieldwork design collective. I'm an Emily Carr and University of Victoria graduate and have worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. I'm a cycling advocate and race on the Garneau Evolution team.

Reading, February 26, 2004 12:30 AM 1 comments

Book: Jimmy Corrigan

Finished the agonizing, horribly depressing tale, the miserable life, of Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth (Chris Ware, 2000). A graphic novel compilation tracing the suffocating reunion between a hopelessly lonesome, depressed, looser protagonist and his estranged father.

At first confusing: late 19th C. flashbacks, dreamscapes, schematic family trees, paper cutouts, minute print. The novel, which received glowing to damning press reviews from the likes of Time, Wired, NY Times, Slate, Matt Groening, became hard to put down, like having the flu. Meticulous attention to detail like, I assume, no other in the genre. Eloquent and bitter narrative prose interjected with racists, sexists, misogynists and (all rolled into one) bastard fathers. And then pieces begin to fit, earlier fantasies explained and justified. The 1890s Corrigan segments particularly moving, sepia-toned, cute kid, narrated from his adult (modern?) memory. As a child, waiting dutifully for the school bullies, or his father, to beat him:

The familiar sniff
of his own kneecaps
which always proceeds
any punishment.

Equally touching/depressing: children playing hide and seek among Chicago suburbs, where once a Native village stood:

helps to make their game
much more exciting…
with the inevitable forward march
of progress
come new ways of hiding things

Or the verbose and bitter catalogue descriptions for a small and ignorant town, "its broad sweep of power lines, the delicate articulation of poles, signs, and warning lights, and the deep forest of advertisements all conspire to occasion countless views of complicated beauty…" Yes, it is a heavy of semi-autobiographical existential angst (Ware's end-book page of definitions, "Lonely: The permanent state of being for all humans, despite any efforts to the contrary") and I would find it hard to recommend. For the time being it seems to have done more damage than good, but I would regret it if I hadn't suffered.