In driesd 's collection
Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan
Ink
37.5 x 60.3 cm (14.76 x 23.74 in.)
Added on 4/19/25
Link copied to clipboard!
Description
This is the title page of "Jimmy Corrigan" with the "indicia" which are adapted for every edition.
Chris Ware added the "Mister Jones" doll as an acknowledgment to Dan Clowes: someone who had "cut the weeds" of the "trail" before me. (Ware: Conversations p.77).
https://www.tumblr.com/danielclowesreader/62160316113/mr-jones-and-daniel-clowes
Chris Ware talks about this page in an interview with Ira Glass: There's a part in here from the very beginning of the book, that is not necessarily exemplary of the tone of the book. In fact, it's basically sort of a dumb joke. It has some foul language in it, so I'll apologize here. I'll read it really quickly. The main character, Jimmy Corrigan, is in his mid-thirties, he's just gotten off the phone with his mom, and he's also just gotten a letter in the mail from his dad whom he's never met or talked to before, suggesting that they meet.
"I knew it, I knew it! Corrigan, you know what your problem is?"
"What?"
"You're too nice to 'em, you know that? You're too goddamn nice to 'em."
"Too nice?"
"Exactly, Jimbo. Listen, man: chicks don't dig guys that are nice."
"They don't?"
Chris Ware: "This is embarrassing to read. Actually, somebody said this to me once, when I had a job. (Ware: Conversations p.125-126)
Chris Ware added the "Mister Jones" doll as an acknowledgment to Dan Clowes: someone who had "cut the weeds" of the "trail" before me. (Ware: Conversations p.77).
https://www.tumblr.com/danielclowesreader/62160316113/mr-jones-and-daniel-clowes
Chris Ware talks about this page in an interview with Ira Glass: There's a part in here from the very beginning of the book, that is not necessarily exemplary of the tone of the book. In fact, it's basically sort of a dumb joke. It has some foul language in it, so I'll apologize here. I'll read it really quickly. The main character, Jimmy Corrigan, is in his mid-thirties, he's just gotten off the phone with his mom, and he's also just gotten a letter in the mail from his dad whom he's never met or talked to before, suggesting that they meet.
"I knew it, I knew it! Corrigan, you know what your problem is?"
"What?"
"You're too nice to 'em, you know that? You're too goddamn nice to 'em."
"Too nice?"
"Exactly, Jimbo. Listen, man: chicks don't dig guys that are nice."
"They don't?"
Chris Ware: "This is embarrassing to read. Actually, somebody said this to me once, when I had a job. (Ware: Conversations p.125-126)
Comment
The Jimmy Corrigan book has appeared in three different incarnations. Originally, it was a weekly newspaper serial in NewCity, a free Chicago arts weekly. Years later, Ware serialized it in the form of chapter-sized pamphlets in The Acme Novelty Library, and almost a decade after that he compiled it as one book between hard covers. (in Monographics Chris Ware by Daniel Raeburn, Yale University Press 2004).
Chris Ware: "I thought this story would only last maybe about three months or so, just a few episodes. Because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at all and I am a terrible writer, it got completely out of hand. It ended up lasting for seven years, wihich is why when you read the book, the first 100 pages or so are completely insensate. It's very poorly written, which i apologize for - I didn't really think of a way to try and fix that, but that's just the way it is. Then I serialized it in a comic book called The Acme Novelty Library in the 1990s, and it was eventually published in hardcover form in 2000 by Random House and Pantheon Books." (Chris Ware: Conversations p.156).
"For a while I was doing strips that were entirely without words. I was trying to get at how much story I could tell simply by using pictures and the sort of internal music of the characters and how much of their inner emotional states I could communicate just by using gestures and pictures. I got to the point where I was just drawing mice and cat heads all the time - because they were these simple little ideograms - and couldn't draw human beings anymore. I did a couple of joke strips with this character Jimmy Corrigan, and I kind of latched onto him as my only contact with humanity on the comics page. Then he became this main character.
There's no planning to this at all; it's the crazy way of working organically and letting something happen on the page for lack of any any better thoughtful literary charter... I've no idea what's going up behind me here. Is it like pictures of me naked or something? so I think that's actually the way most of my characters start, as joke characters, and then I become more empathetic or sympathetic towards them. They become more true to feel of my stories. that's one of the hardest things to do in comics: to create a character through which the reader can actually feel his or her own emotional memories. It's much easier in a novel, but when you're in a half-blind state of looking at pictures on a page, you're always being bounced back off the page. I really think that that's Charles schulz' greatest achievement as a cartoonist: he really created the first sympathetic cartoon character in Charlie Brown. That was the first cartoon strip with a character that you really, really cared about deeply, so I'll thank him for that." (Chris Ware: Conversations p.156).
NewCity
Chris Ware moved to Chicago in the fall of 1991. "I went from having a weekly deadline in Austin to having no outward compelling reason in Chicago to continue to draw comics, my self-doubt and a concomitant lack of encouragement towards cartooning at the School of the Art Institute colluding towards my doing little more than drawing in my sketchbook and feeling profoundly sorry for myself for months." (Monograph p.67).
"In 1992, following a recommendation to the editor by Art Spiegelman I'd started a strip for the free weekly paper NewCity; buried amongst the personal ads I felt like I'd won the lottery." (Monograph p.75).
"When the first weekly ACME weekly strip appeared in the pages of NewCity, I felt like a character in a Broadway musical who'd just gotten his "big break," literally launching myself into a jumping run on State Street shortly after leaving their offices and having the editorial OK to begin publication the following week. (I did not, however, sing.) Though it sounds seriously pathetic now, I like to keep this humiliating memory of my young optimistic self hydrated, since I don't think I've ever felt that way about anything since, except the birth of our daughter Clara."
Chris Ware: "The weekly strip, which is generally two pages of story stacked on top of each other, takes about twenty hours to write (draw), between eight and ten to ink, and about four to color. I work on it from Monday through Thursday, and the strip, once finished, takes about twelve seconds to read. I guess that's about an hour and a half of work per second of reading time, and the story, being broken up into such small pieces over many weeks, is likely impossible to follow as a result. I've heard comments that led me to believe that readers may think I'm being deliberately obtuse, or "haiku-like," when actually I'm simply working ridiculously slowly. Lately I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last ten years or so; I can't account for most of my twenties, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children. I think this is one of the (many) reasons Charles Schulz warned that "cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart."" (Ware: conversations p.105).
The ACME Novelty library
"I wanted the title for the series to sound both serious and stupid, and knowing I'd already used the "ACME" moniker in Austin, Kim Thompson suggested Chris Ware's ACME-Toons, though I chose the author-less The ACME Novelty library." (Monograph p.88).
Note the stylistic resemblance between the cover of "Acme Novelty Library one" and part of this page.
Jimmy Corrigan
As I accumulated page for Jimmy Corrigan, I pasted them into a series of saddle-stapled signatures which I continued to glue together until the entire mass looked more like the work of a so-called "outsider artist" than that of someone moderately socialized, such as myself. Though according to Chip Kidd, the seasoned and award-winning book designer at Knopf who talked Dan Frank, editor at Pantheon, into publishing the book, it was my presentation of this mass of paper and glue that convinced Frank to take it on. (Monograph p.124).
In the "Apology/Postscript" of Jimmy Corrigan Chris Ware writes: I began this story in 1993 as a weekly comic strip in a very tolerant and forgiving Chicago Newspaper, "NewCity", it was planned purely as an improvisatory exercise to take no more than a summer to complete, an to hopefully provide a semi-autobiographical setting in which I could "work out" some of the more embarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulness I was experiencing as a very immature, and not terribly facile, cartoonist. I'd poked into the subject before - that of meeting an estranged parent - but I wanted to try a more respectable "stab", by shoving my hapless and poorly written "alter-ego" of the moment "Jimmy Corrigan," through the starting gates first. I had spent my entire life avoiding contact with my own father, and I thought that once the story was finished, I would somehow have "prepared" myself to meet the real man, and then be able to go on with my life. Of course real life is much more badly plotted than that.
Roughly five years later, after thoroughly miring myself in the swampy muck of a "story" which now seemed to have no end in sight ... I received a telephone call, without warning, from a man claiming to be my father. ... He called me two or three more times over the next year, always suggesting that we "get together sometime". ... I dreaded the day, having attributed so much importance to it for nearly my entire life. Fundamentally, I guess I was just afraid --the worst fear of all-- that he simply wouldn't like me. But it was easy: we met. I saw him from across the restaurant: a small, large-headed man whom I wouldn't have ever picked out of a criminal line-up of a thousand fathers. He was pleasant, and seemed as humbled by my presence as I was by his. We talked, or tried to do - I was relieved, at the very least, to glean from his remarks that he'd never seen my stuff, the invisible and universally unfashionable world of the comic strip having left me thankfully unread. Gradually the sublime outrageousness of our evening eroded into two people simply running out of things to say to each other. We weren't father and son anymore, just a pair of regretful men. After about three hours, we said goodbye, somewhat affably agreed to meet again, and go on with our lives. ...
In the ensuing months I "finished" the story, shining it up to the best of my ability, genuinely surprised that it might graduate from the exile of newsweeklies and comic books into the "real world" of bookstores, remaindered tables, and rummage sales, despite its awful flaws. I resolved that once it was published as a book I would present it to my father, for better or worse: at least it would be a more preferable means of discovery for him than at a garage sale, or in a nursing home library, unfortunately however, I would not have that opportunity, as he died of a heart attack in January. ...
Regardless, in racing through this story for its final "edit," skidding past all these errors, omissions, and mistakes, it occurred to me upon closing the "manuscript" that the four or five hours it took to read is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the telephone. Additionally, and at risk of sounding melodramatic, its final printed size seems nearly equal in volume to the little black box, or urn, before which I briefly stood this January, beneath a color photo of the man its label claimed to contain.
In the "Dedication" Chris Ware writes: In this semi-autobiographical work of fiction, I fear I may have potentially impugned (at least, perhaps, in a careless reader's comprehension of the book) some 'real-life" alter-egos, most notable of whom might be my mother, who, being a thoughtful, intelligent, and supportive woman thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the miserable wretch who dominates poor Jimmy. as such, this book is dedicated to her, especially as it is wholly characterized by her absence.
You can see my other Jimmy Corrigan art here:
From the first serialized Daily Texan "Jimmy Corrigan" story (predates NewCity):
- Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan - Blab 7 https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-blab-7-128126
First self-published Jimmy Corrigan cover:
- Magic Souvenir Book of Views cover https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-magic-souvenir-book-of-views-cover-242982
From the definitive edition of Jimmy Corrigan:
- Jimmy meets his grandfather https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-45755
- Jimmy and Amy at the hospital https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-208140
Accolades for "Jimmy Corrigan"
- The American Book Award, 2001
- The Guardian First Book Award, 2001
- The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001
- The Eisner Awards' Best Publication Design and Best Graphic Album: Reprint, 2001
- The Angoulême Festival's Prize for Best Comic Book "Fauve d'or" and Prix de la critique, 2003
Chris Ware received the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême in 2021 and was named Chevalier Dans L'Ordres des Arts et des Lettres in 2024.
Chris Ware: "I thought this story would only last maybe about three months or so, just a few episodes. Because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at all and I am a terrible writer, it got completely out of hand. It ended up lasting for seven years, wihich is why when you read the book, the first 100 pages or so are completely insensate. It's very poorly written, which i apologize for - I didn't really think of a way to try and fix that, but that's just the way it is. Then I serialized it in a comic book called The Acme Novelty Library in the 1990s, and it was eventually published in hardcover form in 2000 by Random House and Pantheon Books." (Chris Ware: Conversations p.156).
"For a while I was doing strips that were entirely without words. I was trying to get at how much story I could tell simply by using pictures and the sort of internal music of the characters and how much of their inner emotional states I could communicate just by using gestures and pictures. I got to the point where I was just drawing mice and cat heads all the time - because they were these simple little ideograms - and couldn't draw human beings anymore. I did a couple of joke strips with this character Jimmy Corrigan, and I kind of latched onto him as my only contact with humanity on the comics page. Then he became this main character.
There's no planning to this at all; it's the crazy way of working organically and letting something happen on the page for lack of any any better thoughtful literary charter... I've no idea what's going up behind me here. Is it like pictures of me naked or something? so I think that's actually the way most of my characters start, as joke characters, and then I become more empathetic or sympathetic towards them. They become more true to feel of my stories. that's one of the hardest things to do in comics: to create a character through which the reader can actually feel his or her own emotional memories. It's much easier in a novel, but when you're in a half-blind state of looking at pictures on a page, you're always being bounced back off the page. I really think that that's Charles schulz' greatest achievement as a cartoonist: he really created the first sympathetic cartoon character in Charlie Brown. That was the first cartoon strip with a character that you really, really cared about deeply, so I'll thank him for that." (Chris Ware: Conversations p.156).
NewCity
Chris Ware moved to Chicago in the fall of 1991. "I went from having a weekly deadline in Austin to having no outward compelling reason in Chicago to continue to draw comics, my self-doubt and a concomitant lack of encouragement towards cartooning at the School of the Art Institute colluding towards my doing little more than drawing in my sketchbook and feeling profoundly sorry for myself for months." (Monograph p.67).
"In 1992, following a recommendation to the editor by Art Spiegelman I'd started a strip for the free weekly paper NewCity; buried amongst the personal ads I felt like I'd won the lottery." (Monograph p.75).
"When the first weekly ACME weekly strip appeared in the pages of NewCity, I felt like a character in a Broadway musical who'd just gotten his "big break," literally launching myself into a jumping run on State Street shortly after leaving their offices and having the editorial OK to begin publication the following week. (I did not, however, sing.) Though it sounds seriously pathetic now, I like to keep this humiliating memory of my young optimistic self hydrated, since I don't think I've ever felt that way about anything since, except the birth of our daughter Clara."
Chris Ware: "The weekly strip, which is generally two pages of story stacked on top of each other, takes about twenty hours to write (draw), between eight and ten to ink, and about four to color. I work on it from Monday through Thursday, and the strip, once finished, takes about twelve seconds to read. I guess that's about an hour and a half of work per second of reading time, and the story, being broken up into such small pieces over many weeks, is likely impossible to follow as a result. I've heard comments that led me to believe that readers may think I'm being deliberately obtuse, or "haiku-like," when actually I'm simply working ridiculously slowly. Lately I can't shake the feeling that I've been living a dream for the last ten years or so; I can't account for most of my twenties, and I have to continually remind myself that certain people are dead now and many of my friends have children. I think this is one of the (many) reasons Charles Schulz warned that "cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart."" (Ware: conversations p.105).
The ACME Novelty library
"I wanted the title for the series to sound both serious and stupid, and knowing I'd already used the "ACME" moniker in Austin, Kim Thompson suggested Chris Ware's ACME-Toons, though I chose the author-less The ACME Novelty library." (Monograph p.88).
Note the stylistic resemblance between the cover of "Acme Novelty Library one" and part of this page.
Jimmy Corrigan
As I accumulated page for Jimmy Corrigan, I pasted them into a series of saddle-stapled signatures which I continued to glue together until the entire mass looked more like the work of a so-called "outsider artist" than that of someone moderately socialized, such as myself. Though according to Chip Kidd, the seasoned and award-winning book designer at Knopf who talked Dan Frank, editor at Pantheon, into publishing the book, it was my presentation of this mass of paper and glue that convinced Frank to take it on. (Monograph p.124).
In the "Apology/Postscript" of Jimmy Corrigan Chris Ware writes: I began this story in 1993 as a weekly comic strip in a very tolerant and forgiving Chicago Newspaper, "NewCity", it was planned purely as an improvisatory exercise to take no more than a summer to complete, an to hopefully provide a semi-autobiographical setting in which I could "work out" some of the more embarrassing problems of confidence and emotional truthfulness I was experiencing as a very immature, and not terribly facile, cartoonist. I'd poked into the subject before - that of meeting an estranged parent - but I wanted to try a more respectable "stab", by shoving my hapless and poorly written "alter-ego" of the moment "Jimmy Corrigan," through the starting gates first. I had spent my entire life avoiding contact with my own father, and I thought that once the story was finished, I would somehow have "prepared" myself to meet the real man, and then be able to go on with my life. Of course real life is much more badly plotted than that.
Roughly five years later, after thoroughly miring myself in the swampy muck of a "story" which now seemed to have no end in sight ... I received a telephone call, without warning, from a man claiming to be my father. ... He called me two or three more times over the next year, always suggesting that we "get together sometime". ... I dreaded the day, having attributed so much importance to it for nearly my entire life. Fundamentally, I guess I was just afraid --the worst fear of all-- that he simply wouldn't like me. But it was easy: we met. I saw him from across the restaurant: a small, large-headed man whom I wouldn't have ever picked out of a criminal line-up of a thousand fathers. He was pleasant, and seemed as humbled by my presence as I was by his. We talked, or tried to do - I was relieved, at the very least, to glean from his remarks that he'd never seen my stuff, the invisible and universally unfashionable world of the comic strip having left me thankfully unread. Gradually the sublime outrageousness of our evening eroded into two people simply running out of things to say to each other. We weren't father and son anymore, just a pair of regretful men. After about three hours, we said goodbye, somewhat affably agreed to meet again, and go on with our lives. ...
In the ensuing months I "finished" the story, shining it up to the best of my ability, genuinely surprised that it might graduate from the exile of newsweeklies and comic books into the "real world" of bookstores, remaindered tables, and rummage sales, despite its awful flaws. I resolved that once it was published as a book I would present it to my father, for better or worse: at least it would be a more preferable means of discovery for him than at a garage sale, or in a nursing home library, unfortunately however, I would not have that opportunity, as he died of a heart attack in January. ...
Regardless, in racing through this story for its final "edit," skidding past all these errors, omissions, and mistakes, it occurred to me upon closing the "manuscript" that the four or five hours it took to read is almost exactly the total time I ever spent with my father, either in person or on the telephone. Additionally, and at risk of sounding melodramatic, its final printed size seems nearly equal in volume to the little black box, or urn, before which I briefly stood this January, beneath a color photo of the man its label claimed to contain.
In the "Dedication" Chris Ware writes: In this semi-autobiographical work of fiction, I fear I may have potentially impugned (at least, perhaps, in a careless reader's comprehension of the book) some 'real-life" alter-egos, most notable of whom might be my mother, who, being a thoughtful, intelligent, and supportive woman thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the miserable wretch who dominates poor Jimmy. as such, this book is dedicated to her, especially as it is wholly characterized by her absence.
You can see my other Jimmy Corrigan art here:
From the first serialized Daily Texan "Jimmy Corrigan" story (predates NewCity):
- Chris Ware - Jimmy Corrigan - Blab 7 https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-blab-7-128126
First self-published Jimmy Corrigan cover:
- Magic Souvenir Book of Views cover https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-magic-souvenir-book-of-views-cover-242982
From the definitive edition of Jimmy Corrigan:
- Jimmy meets his grandfather https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-45755
- Jimmy and Amy at the hospital https://www.2dgalleries.com/art/chris-ware-jimmy-corrigan-208140
Accolades for "Jimmy Corrigan"
- The American Book Award, 2001
- The Guardian First Book Award, 2001
- The Harvey Awards' Special Award for Excellence in Presentation and Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work, 2001
- The Eisner Awards' Best Publication Design and Best Graphic Album: Reprint, 2001
- The Angoulême Festival's Prize for Best Comic Book "Fauve d'or" and Prix de la critique, 2003
Chris Ware received the Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême in 2021 and was named Chevalier Dans L'Ordres des Arts et des Lettres in 2024.
Publications
- Jimmy Corrigan
- Pantheon Books
- 11/2000
- Interior page
-
- Jimmy Corrigan
- Delcourt
- 11/2002
- Interior page
-
- Jimmy Corrigan
- Fantagraphics Books
- 04/1995
- Interior page
14 comments
To leave a comment on that piece, please log in
About Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson Ware, known as Chris Ware, is an American comic book writer. Since 1993 he has published the Acme Novelty Library, a series with an irregular format and periodicity. Jimmy Corrigan, his main work (1995-2000), has won him numerous awards in the English-speaking world (several Ignatz, Harved and Eisner awards, as well as an American Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award) as well as in the French-speaking world ("Prix du meilleur album" at the Angoulême Festival and the Prix de la critique).
