Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid one Earth

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid one Earth ( Jimmy Corrigan, the most intelligent kid on Earth ) is a Roman American graph of Chris Ware.

Initially published with the wire of the Years 1990 by a small weekly magazine of Chicago, then more largely by the editor Fantagraphics Books in the form of series, Jimmy Corrigan is then published of only one holding in 2000 by the Pantheon Books (then by Delcourt in France).

Jimmy Corrigan receives an enthusiastic critical reception with the the United States but also throughout the world, as the many rewards show it which are decreed to him: it is the only work at the same time to have received with Angouleme the prestigious Alph' Art of the best album as the Prix of criticism in 2003, as well as the price of the First Book of the British newspaper The Guardian in 2001.

Analyzes

Chris Ware follows the course of its character who, the day before the family festival of Thanksgiving, receives an invitation of his father to come to visit him. However this father absent, and was always replaced in the life of Jimmy by a mother possessive and invading. This invitation thus constitutes a shock for Jimmy, which will be followed other shocks whereas he discovers little by little his family history.

The work of the author interlaces the psychological examination of this oscillating character between the depression and the phantasm, and socio-history of its family analyzes it. By going up the generations, Chris Ware recalls the history of these descendants of Irish immigrants, confronted with hard economic realities, mournings, with violence sometimes, and it focuses especially its glance on the way in which the children, generation after generation, see and undergo the world which surrounds them. Nothing is comprehensible with the first glance: for the reader as for the protagonists, the history is made vacuums which are filled little by little, of bonds which are explained or woven with delayed-action, and not always in a satisfactory way.

The work of Chris Ware, with final, dazzles by the complexity and the smoothness of its construction, as much as by its psychological acuity. Graphically, Jimmy Corrigan is extremely completed, very precise, with in particular an extraordinary work of color application emphasized by the clearness of the feature. One finds in the construction of the boards the complexity of the family ties and the described psychological meanders above: there either, nothing is acquired nor stable, and conventions of the kind are frequently called in question. In the same way, the variety of the typographical choices echoes the various times that the narration crosses.

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