The Graphic Novel

I was  worried about teaching Jimmy Corrigan in the fall class.  I deliberately put it on the calendar after Watchmen and Maus so students would be on a high when we got to the difficult task of Ware’s book.  I was skeptical of the book on my first read (see the earlier post), but gradually was awed by it (see second post).  I thought it was important to read it in the graphic novel course, but was worried that students would find it too confusing or boring.  Though a few did have this reaction initially, we had some of our best discussions of the semester over the 2 weeks we spent with the book.

Part of this is probably because the book is in so many ways literary.  One student did a presentation on the use of peaches and horses as symbols.  Jimmy’s fantasy/dream sequences demand this exploration.  Several students focused on Ware’s use of stream of consciousness in our online discussion, mentioning that comics were an incredible medium for the technique, but they hadn’t seen it used before in the comics they had read.  We used the word postmodern a lot.

But Jimmy Corrigan is not just the most literary graphic novel that I’ve read, it’s also arguably (I am arguing it) the most “comicy” (trying to play off of literary here, but I don’t think it’s working).  While his work is vastly different from the comic books we are accustomed to, Ware seems the artist most aware of the potential of the form in a McCloud sense.  My students picked up on this and ran with it.  They were excited that  they had a book that they could practice applying McCloud’s theories, and reading Jimmy Corrigan again, it seems like a perfect work to do this.  Ware’s use of many panels to show the excruciating tedium of Jimmy’s life is standing out most to me.  We  are given a long series of panels of Jimmy eating cereal or lifting weights not because these specific events are important to the story but because they show that Jimmy leads an empty life. These are the events that make up his day and so Ware stretches them out in a way that beautifully explores some of McCloud’s theories about time frames in Chapter 4.

Like Spiegelman in In the Shadow of No Towers, Moore creates a connect the dots game of conspiracy only to then declare conspiracies bunk.  Both are drawn into the rabbit hole and then come out feeling dirty, but where Spiegelman still seems to want to make meaningful connections while being wary of crossing some undefined but real line, I’m not sure what exactly Moore is doing.  He clearly is compelled to create a coherent story out of a jumble of historical fact and wild speculation and isn’t afraid to fully fabricate to make things come together, but how far does his compulsion go beyond coherence?

When the murder of Elizabeth Stride takes place right outside of a gathering of prominent socialist (8.31-32), I imagine that a point is being made about class division or how the socialists theoretically understood the problems of this class division or how they could not understand the lived reality that was right outside their door or, or ,or. . . But then in the appendix Moore tells us that this is just an historical fact.  Interesting tidbit, but it’s frustrating.  And I assume the purpose here is at least in part to spark the reader’s urge to make connections while pointing out that these connections are being thrust on the simple facts.

I think Spiegelman does something similar, but he then continues to make connections and search for meaning.  What do we do with the similarities between 9/11/1901 and 9/11/2001?  How can the early comics he delves into become a part of his own work?  The connections he makes are forced, but maybe we can learn something or at least be comforted by the meaning that we construct.  I’m not sure that I see this in Moore’s work?