Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware ISBN: 0-375-40453-8 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.64 (72 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Sadly beautiful
Comment: Chris Ware deserves a lot of admiration for writing and illustrating this graphic novel. It took him years to finish this 400-page tale of an unhappy, withdrawn man. The story wanders a bit, forcing you to really pay attention. (Honestly, you'll like it better the second time.) At first, his artwork seems to contradict the mood of the story --- everything is drawn with the color and lines of logos, street signs, and architectural diagrams. Everything is rendered in flat pastels. But as you continue, the panels start to look empty, with a false cheer to it. It's a style that underscores the plot.
Chris Ware could have spent years writing a big graphic novel about superheroes, wizards, or vampires --- you know, something easy. But he didn't. Instead, he stuck his neck out and created this, one of the best graphic novels ever written, but also one that challenges the reader. Chris Ware makes it clear what a real graphic novel is. It's an expert use of the comic book medium that deserves a much larger audience.
Rating: 4
Summary: The smartest kid
Comment: In the first few pages of JIMMY CORRIGAN, the reader is introduced to the Super-Man, dressed in a red and yellow suit and wearing a cheap costume mask. He tells bad jokes and ends up seducing Jimmy's mother. The stage is set for a comic without heroes (or with only pathetic ones), confused children with lonely parents, and a humor that fails to conceal the underlying sadness.
There's a strange two dimensionality to the images, which makes it more illustration than drawing. Buildings tend to be drawn in elevation, interiors are in orthographic views, and simple shapes predominate. The effect is an abstraction of the environment that crosses temporal bounds, enters fantasies and nightmares, and recollects cruel memories.
Like Spiegelman and Clowes, Chris Ware takes his comic into areas that are usually considered to be the territory of literature, but it would require immense effort to imagine JIMMY CORRIGAN in novel form. The content and the form are inseparable. The story may be a downer, but ultimately it isn't depressing because it is well-told, well-illustrated, and somewhere within it is an awful truth about misogyny, race, childhood trauma, and isolation that we'd just rather not face.
Rating: 1
Summary: Masturbatory exercise
Comment: Ware certainly knows how to throw panels around, but when it comes to creating compelling characters or dialogue he's as bad as the worst entries in a college writing contest.
Jimmy appears at first as some kind of a caricature of the timid modern urban office worker. But then he's thrown into some kind of reunion with lost family members - let's just say it's not a successful experiment.
Ware admits in the introduction that he was improvising as he went along. The result is predictably incoherent, but for some reason critics insist on giving him a pass.
 |
Title: Quimby the Mouse (ACME Novelty Library) by Chris Ware ISBN: 1560974850 Publisher: Fantagraphics Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: Ghost World by Daniel Clowes ISBN: 1560974273 Publisher: Fantagraphics Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: David Boring by Daniel Clowes ISBN: 0375406921 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
 |
Title: Blankets: An Illustrated Novel by Craig Thompson ISBN: 1891830430 Publisher: Top Shelf Productions Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
 |
Title: Maus : A Survivor's Tale : My Father Bleeds History/Here My Troubles Began/Boxed by Art Spiegelman ISBN: 0679748407 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 19 October, 1993 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
