#as well as jimmy corrigan the smartest kid on earth

[thingsifindonthegroundsometimes]

falling falling falling falling now i hit the window falling falling falling falling now i hit the ground, dying dying dying dying now i hit the window, dying dying dying dying now i hit the ground

alive alive alive alive (HOME SWEET HOME)

[jkottke]

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far)

The Guardian recently compiled a list of the best books of the century (with a British bent). Here are a few of the picks that caught my eye:

87. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood -- "This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God's Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the "poet laureate of Twitter"; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind."

82. Coraline by Neil Gaiman -- "From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children's novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her "Other Mother" is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires."

78. The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin -- "Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. 'As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,' she said in her acceptance speech, 'so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)'"

71. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware -- "At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless 36-year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad."

42. Moneyball by Michael Lewis -- "The author of The Big Short has made a career out of rendering the most opaque subject matter entertaining and comprehensible: Moneyball tells the story of how geeks outsmarted jocks to revolutionise baseball using maths. But you do not need to know or care about the sport, because -- as with all Lewis's best writing -- it's all about how the story is told."

32. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee -- "'Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.' In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey."

13. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich -- "In this modern classic of reportage, Ehrenreich chronicled her attempts to live on the minimum wage in three American states. Working first as a waitress, then a cleaner and a nursing home aide, she still struggled to survive, and the stories of her co-workers are shocking. The US economy as she experienced it is full of routine humiliation, with demands as high as the rewards are low. Two decades on, this still reads like urgent news."

11. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante -- "Powerfully intimate and unashamedly domestic, the first in Ferrante's Neapolitan series established her as a literary sensation. This and the three novels that followed documented the ways misogyny and violence could determine lives, as well as the history of Italy in the late 20th century."

Ok, that ended up being more than a few, but there's so much good stuff on that list! You'll have to click through to see the #1 choice but needless to say, I was pleased.

[justfinishedreading]

I first picked up Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, when I was a teenager. I used to hang out at the school library a lot, but back then it wasn’t to actually read, more to just chat with friends while they tried to eat crisps without the angry librarian catching them…

Anyway I picked up Jimmy Corrigan and read a few pages, the following scene made a strong impact on me: Jimmy, an awkward, balding man reads a note left on the desk of his cubicle “I sat across from you for six months and you never once notice me! Good bye”. Jimmy looks out the window and sees a man dressed as a superhero standing on the roof of a tall six floor building. He waves, Jimmy waves back. Then the man jumps and plummets to the ground. He isn’t moving. Some people gather round the body but as it starts to rain they eventually leave, leaving the body alone in the middle of the road, until much later an ambulance arrives.

This was not like a regular comic book.

At the time I didn’t continue reading but a few years later when I spotted it in a bookshop I bought it, and now - about 14 years later, I’ve read all of it.

In a nutshell the book is manly about father-son relationships; Jimmy Corrigan’s father abandoned Jimmy and his mother when he was a boy, now when he’s an adult his father reaches out to him wanting to reconnect. Jimmy is a quiet, socially-awkward man and the other big aspect of the book is watching him trying to navigate daily life, never sure whether he is doing the right thing or not.

A second storyline looks at the relationship between Jimmy’s grandfather and great grandfather, in which case the mother left (or she died, I can’t remember which) and the boy had to live with an emotionally distance, stern father.

The book can be brutal at times, well it’s brutal MOST of the time. The stories are poignant, even more so when you read the author’s note at the end; author and cartoonist Chris Ware, who, like his protagonist, was raised solely by his mother, was contacted by his absent father when Ware was already an adult.

Apart from its grown-up content the other thing that separates this from other comics (although I have to admit I’m not a big consumer of western comics) is the stunning artwork, so clean, so orderly, structured and detailed. This book has been lavishly produced, every inch of it has been wonderfully designed; the dust jacket folds out to reveal a large sheet of artwork, the end papers are covered with small, humours text which most people won’t read and the rest of the book is sprinkled with interesting diagrams and infographics, and oddities.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is definitely not for everyone because of its depressing narrative, but it does combine strong, mature storytelling with the greatly skilled artwork… it is the essence of the words ‘Graphic Novel’.

Side Note: There’s a graphic novel by Chris Ware called Building Stories which I’m keen to get my hands on.

Review by Book Hamster

[ourcomicsourselves]

Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

After only consuming manga from the grades 4-8, when I turned 13 I rebelled HARD and decided that I was sick of the stuff and I needed to broaden my comic horizons. So, for my 14th birthday, I walked into @bigplanetcomics​ and was greeted with Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware. 

This image only begins to scratch the surface of the beauty of this oversized gold foil book. Chris Ware is a master draftsman, and his work is incredibly intricate regardless of the size. 

This book collects comics that Ware did in the early 90s and was released after his 2003 classic Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which was seen as a break through of what graphic novels are capable of. Ware actually says in the first page of Quimby not to buy the book because it doesn’t reflect his current strength as a cartoonist. Ware is known for being self deprecating and I’m writing this so he doesn’t get a say in this case. 

I bought the book and was blown away.

Ware is known for playing with layout. One of the pages in Quimby has 128 panels in it. The pages mimic old school animation (he’s a mouse- get it???). While I picked up and bought the book because of the art, I stayed for the stories the pages told (I am very much someone that only gets invested in comics if the stories are compelling and wary of people that like a comic solely for it’s art). Quimby is a collection of individual strips dealing with different themes, the two most common being a depiction of a toxic relationship Quimby has with a disembodied crying cat head Sparky and a conjoined twin mouse pair where one of them is in rapidly deteriorating health. 

 Showing both the mix of emotions that comes with having a sick relative is what was compelling to me. You see here one of the twins resenting his brother (?) but there are moments where you see the healthy mouse coming to terms with his twin’s inevitable death. The strips are mostly very sad, which appealed to depressed 14 year old me. Most of Ware’s work is pretty somber and melancholy, his newest work Building Stories being the most positive (which isn’t saying much, but it’s an AMAZING piece of work).

Quimby the Mouse was really my first foray into reading indie comics, which are the kind of comics I now create. While our work is very different, the somber aesthetic my work sometimes has is a direct influence of Chris Ware. I would say that he and Lynda Barry are the two biggest influences.

Chris Ware is another cartoonist I picked who does not really have a social media presence but you can find out more about him here. You can follow me @annasellheim and my website is here.  This is the second book I’ve written about that’s out of print, but unlike Deep Girl you can actually buy Quimby the Mouse used for as cheap as $7 on amazon.

WELP! I have no idea what I’m writing about tomorrow. What an exciting time to be alive! Come back tomorrow to see what I can come up with!

Here’s a picture of Sparky to portray my current emotional state for not having planned this out in advance!.

[cloudscapecomics]

Chris Ware In Conversation at the VPL

Join respected graphic novelist Chris Ware in his first visit to Vancouver for a free discussion around his latest work, Rusty Brown.

Join Chris Ware in his first visit to Vancouver for a discussion around his latest work, Rusty Brown. The panel will be held on Tuesday November 19th, at 7PM, at the Vancouver Central Library.

Ware is a well respected graphic novelist, most commonly known for his comics Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, and Acme Novelty Library.

A spread from Ware’s latest work, Rusty Brown

[gettinggraphical]

Published at the turn of the millennium, CHRIS WARE's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) has become a defining text of an emerging literary and cultural form. Among the stylistic innovations for which the text is celebrated is its diagrammatic aesthetic. WARE includes diagrams in most of his work—schematic arrays of visual information that supplement his narratives. The diagrams contribute to a larger discourse on comics art that has to do with the disavowing the mass-consumer appeal of the superhero genre. For WARE, however, the significance of diagrams owes less to any pretense of de-pulping comics than to a project that is, I propose, epistemological: WARE's diagrammatic aesthetic opens up formal possibilities from within the history of comics that can function affectively as well as informationally in representing narrative possibility. In its excavation of comic-book history in the guise of personal narrative, Jimmy Corrigan outlines a new theory of knowledge facilitated through the paratexts, schematics, and other quasi-cartographic forms of the diagram.