Cover of the Pantheon Press Edition.

I remember the first time I encountered the work of Chris Ware.

The timing was very nearly perfect. I was living in Portland, Oregon, at the time, eking out a living as The Guy Who Does The Computer Stuff for a small delivery company.

There was a pretty good comics shop nearby on SE Hawthorne Street. I can't remember the name of the place; that's part and parcel of comics shops. No-one can ever remember the name of a comics shop. All you can remember is that it's a sort of clever pun having vaguely to do with comics, such as “The First Issue,” or “WonderWorld,” or some such. Lincoln and I visited this shop regularly several times a week for the two years we lived in Portland, and I doubt he can remember the name of the place either.

It was a good shop, though, and carried all the great independent stuff, at a time (the early '90s) when there was a lot of great independent stuff, across a lot of genres. Madman, Hellboy, Cud, Crap!, Hate, Eightball, Hectic Planet, Sandman, Monkeyman and O'Brien, Love and Rockets, Bongo Comics... I could spend the rest of the article just listing all the awesome work that was coming out at that point. I know for a fact that I've forgotten some killer titles in here, ones that will cause me to do a total facepalm. I'm so sure that this is the case that I'm going to leave some blank space right here for Lincoln to step in and list some of them. Here you go, Lincoln:

Skeleton Key, Instant Piano, Hutch Owens Working Hard, Strangers in Paradise, The Desert Peach, Jim, Maus, Optic Nerve, Buck Godot, Bitchy Bitch, Ragmop, THB, Bone, Those Annoying Post Bros, Savage Henry, Dirty Plotte, Palookaville, Hepcats, BugHouse. Okay, back to Mustafa:

I had also had my brain pried open by that great text on sequential art, Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud, which was lent to me by a great friend (and, not incidentally, a great artist), Tim Miller. In that book, which it occurs to me also deserves a review, McCloud dissects and deconstructs the style and history of comics, and offers some possible scenarios for the future of the form, including one style in which panel sequence is non-linear, multidirectional, and mutable in size. That's important, and we'll come back to that later. If I remember.

So the three axes of open-mindedness to new comics concepts, availability of high-quality material, and a reasonable amount of disposable income all came together one day when I found this strange, over-sized comic on the “Independent” rack at the comics shop. “Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth,” it proclaimed.

What the hell, it was Fantagraphics. I had no idea who Chris Ware might be, but I bought it.

And I bought the next several issues, until Lincoln and I ultimately got fed up with Portland and moved back to Seattle. For some reason, when we moved back, we got out of comics for a while, and so I lost touch with Jimmy, and never realized how the story resolved itself, or even if it did.

Well, a while ago, I discovered that Pantheon Press had released the collected Jimmy Corrigan stories on their own in a single, rather heavy, volume. (The other storyline, Quimby The Mouse, got a similar treatment.) I picked it up.

An example of Ware's "simple" art.

The first thing that surprised me was that the story actually was a story, with a coherent plot. It's the tale of Jimmy Corrigan, a low-level nebbish of an office worker. He's browbeaten by constant telephone calls from his mother, spurned in his awkward advances towards a female co-worker, and bullied by a male co-worker. Even his fantasy life is weak and febrile, consisting primarily of encounters with “Super-Man,” a masked superhero/father figure who disappoints at every turn.

Jimmy's imitation of life is interrupted by a letter from the father he's never met, inviting him to come and visit for Thanksgiving dinner. His father is likewise a disturbed figure, whose sad attempts to connect emotionally with his son fail miserably.

Jimmy also meets his step-sister, an adopted African-American woman, who is by far the most competent and confident character in the whole book, although that's not saying a great deal.

A large part of the book is also taken up with the story of Jimmy's grandfather and great-grandfather, who play out a sad tale of alienation and abandonment against the backdrop of the Chicago World's Fair of 1892.

Man. Is there a word in English that means “dense” and “simple” at the same time? Because if there is, that's the adjective I'd use to describe this work. (If there is such a word, it's probably German. The Germans are good at those sorts of words.)

But that's what Corrigan is: densimple. (There. I tried for the very first time to create my own portmanteau, and it sucked.)

The story is a basic tale of human interaction, between people in the same family, each with very simple motives for their actions. It is entirely possible to predict what each character will do in a given situation; that's how simple they are.

But the story is also dense. The threads of the individual lives, each one a small bundle of nothing more than basic animal desires, are woven together to form a tapestry full of depth and meaning. The signals heterodyne over, under and through the storyline, these themes of fatherhood, failure, and fantasy, that seem hidden in the noise until they suddenly pop out at you like a Magic Eye picture.

Some of Ware's "complex" work. Note the non-linear sequential design.

The art is simple. Ware's line art is reminiscent of Charles Schulz, and before you snort dismissively, let me just say this: shut up. Schulz and Ware both share an understanding of the basic essential truth of cartooning in their ability to make one line do the work of thousands. It's not stylization and it's not minimalism, it's cartooning, and that's what makes it an art form all its own.

But the art is also dense. Some of this is due to Ware's considerable natural talent as an artist and his love for the subject. His art is always polished and clean, and easy to follow, but here's where we come back to that bit about Scott McCloud's book that I mentioned earlier. Ware uses panel size, placement, and direction to not only direct the pacing of the story, but also the non-linear nature of interpersonal relationships as well. Panels loop back around on themselves, becoming self-referential. Panels grow or shrink in size, changing either their importance or their depth in the reader's eye. Panels are given arrows that refer to a location, or to another person, or to combine a theme. The effect is remarkably similar to some FBI boards I saw once detailing the interconnected relationships in a large Mafia family, with large and small photos connected by a series of different colored lines.

Finally, lest anyone think that this book is some Big Important Tome Rewriting The Rules Of Sequential Art... Well, it is.

But it's also side-splittingly hilarious at times. Ware absolutely refuses to take himself or the story too seriously, even as he is taking on painful subjects. He is a man obviously aware of his own failings as well as those of his characters. If it was merely a story about some screwed-up men who were unable to relate to their fathers or their children, it would still be a good work and well worth reading, and the art would elevate it to the level of literature. The humor ultimately sweetens the bitterness of the story.

And that is the book's redemption.