The most ambitious, beautiful, moving 'comic book' ever produced- an astonishing tour de force that won the Guardian First Book Award 2001
Chris Ware lives in Oak Park, Chicago, Illinois. His books include Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, Building Stories and most recently Monograph, which is part memoir, part retrospective of his career to date. He has won countless awards for his work and has been the subject of several museum exhibitions and scholarly monographs. His work appears regularly in the New Yorker.
A mesmerising and heartbreaking tale of a heavily burdened and
desperately unhappy individual, and the lasting influence of toxic
family ties.
*Evening Standard*
A bona fide masterpiece.
*Strong Words*
Jimmy Corrigan is certainly the greatest thing in strip cartoons
since Krazy Kat and Little Nemo
*Raymond Briggs*
Ware is the most versatile and innovative artist the medium has
known - arguably the greatest achievement of the form ever
*New York Times Book Review*
This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of
what comics can be
*Art Spiegelman, author of Maus*
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
*Guardian*
Perhaps best read in a single sitting, Jimmy Corrigan is
perceptive, poetic, and sometimes profound, generously rewarding
the absorption it requires
*Independent*
Jimmy Corrigan is a dazzlingly handsome book with every detail
lovingly attended to. The book is demanding, disturbing, funny and
exciting. Oh yes, and essential
*Time Out*
A work of genius
*Zadie Smith*
Ware's graphically inventive, wonderfully realized novel-in-comics follows the sad fortunes of four generations of phlegmatic, defeated men while touching on themes of abandonment, social isolation and despair within the sweeping depiction of Chicago's urban transformation over the course of a century. Ware uses Chicago's World's Colombian Exposition of 1893, the great world's fair that signaled America's march into 20th-century modernity, as a symbolic anchor to the city's development and to the narrative arc of a melancholic family as haplessly connected as are Chicago's random sprawl of streets and neighborhoods. In 1893, nine-year-old Jimmy Corrigan is abandoned atop a magnificent fair building by his sullen, brutish father ("I just stood there, watching the sky and the people below, waiting for him to return. Of course he never did"). Nearly a century later, another Jimmy CorriganDthe absurdly ineffectual, friendless grandson of that abandoned childDreceives a letter from his own long-absent, feckless father, blithely and inexplicably requesting him to come and visit. Ware's surprisingly touching story recounts their strange and pathetically funny reunion, invoking the emotional legacy of the great-grandfather's original act of desertion while presenting a succession of Corrigan men far more comfortable fantasizing about life than living it. The book is wonderfully illustrated in full color, and Ware's spare, iconic drawing style can render vivid architectural complexity or movingly capture the stark despondency of an unloved child. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
A bona fide masterpiece. * Strong Words *
Jimmy Corrigan is certainly the greatest thing in strip
cartoons since Krazy Kat and Little Nemo -- Raymond
Briggs
Ware is the most versatile and innovative artist the medium has
known - arguably the greatest achievement of the form ever -- Dave
Eggers * New York Times Book Review *
This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of
what comics can be -- Art Spiegelman, author of Maus
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 -- Claire Armitstead * Guardian
*
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