By Chris Ware
Fantagraphics, NZ$63 | Reviewed by David Levinson

SEEMS like this might be another one of those conversational mirror-checks best saved for party situations: Casually name-drop the title and you're certain to get a response concerning just how awesome it is, delivered with a steely matter-of-factness that makes it feel like you're exchanging secret handshakes or something. Which is a pretty fucking fair analogy considering the only way it even managed to smear my pop cult radar in the end was through accidentally stumbling across its inclusion in a 2002 Biennale catalogue. I try not to live my life in a bubble, but seems I must be if something so tailor-made to the more emotionally unthreaded side of me has managed to play sitting duck for the past three years.

There's a certain social hostility that goes hand-in-hand with the whole new-wave of "contemporary" "adult" graphic novels, which it probably doesn't take a genealogist to pin on its origins in people who were eternally picked last during football tryouts. Though that doesn't really explain why that social hostility repeatedly finds itself infesting their work at surface-level. Writer&illustrator deity-complex perhaps? Obviously crying solipsism! as a blanket-charge is utter heresy; it's just that w/r/t graphic novels, repeated self-excavation too often ends up in caricature, turning a body of work into a signposted flagship for the author's psyche.

And in that sense the greatest compliment I can lay on Chris Ware is that you're not even remotely aware of his presence while reading Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Despite the liner notes' revelation that a considerable amount of it's autobiographical, he does away entirely with the in-your-face flourishes of his contemporaries: There's no shotgun-blasted misanthropy, no breaking-of-the-fourth-wall as a way of relieving tension, no misaligned heroes of new-age sensitivity. Any author/protag connective tissue has been willfully abstracted into a shuffle deck of infomercial-ready anxieties, as Jimmy is balding, overweight, a social write-off, and still bound by the umbilical cord. And in an awesome bit of expectation-reversal, when one character – his half-sister Amy – challenges him to a conversation composed of more than his usual repertoire of "uh"s and "um"s, he bores her to sleep, puncturing the myth of the forgotten wunderkind. In the end, he may be obvious in his affliction, but it's become rare to see that affliction allowed to play itself out without becoming a mechanism for self-love/hate; Jimmy, like a schlubby, alternate-world Hulot, is all alone, resigned to writhe inside Ware's staggeringly pristine compositions.

In his compulsive attention to detail, Ware manages to graft a semi-epic structure onto his story without compromising its graphic pull; drafted along twin tales of father/son alienation, things flit between Chicago 1893 (circa the World's Colombian Exposition) and present-day, contrasting a lineage that has settled into a bathetic, stilted tradition of abuse with the headstrong shuffle of urban industrialization. Yet Ware unleashes it all with a kind of mock-expansiveness; and within the drastic time leaps and schematic lensing, he manages to locate a cavity of awkwardness that's painfully minutiae in composure. Meanwhile, formal qualities play snap and demonstrates the elasticity of an IE browser, whether blowing up to encompass chrome-canyon architecture, closely hugging unwanted silences, or trailing off into out-of-the-frame anecdotes, like scrawls in the margins of a high school notebook. It's that constant collision of bigness and smallness which becomes the bloodline of Jimmy Corrigan, turning loneliness into a condition that's at once cosmic and meaningless, because while structural simultaneity may reveal its universality, Jimmy never has a chance to connect with his grandfather's past. Nothing comes of his encounter with his father either, and he almost seems worse off for it, the nursing blanket of routine shredded in his absence. But after hitting the same note again and again and making it sound new each time, Ware finally changes key for an ending that's perfect in its have-it-either-way reader self-revelation.