Your first exposure to comics may have been limited to the mainstream superhero genre, and as such, you may have been unwilling to dig deeper into what the medium has to offer. While it can be quite exhausting to rifle through stacks of celluloid depicting hyper-masculine beefcakes, there are gems to be found. This series of reading recommendations aims to find those gems for you. In the previous installment of this series, I picked a couple of my favorite "comics of the weird". For this week, the category is...
Postmodern Comics
This category of comics is dominated by the presences of graphic novelist Chris
Ware. Contributor to The New Yorker and author of the recent Monograph
and Building Stories experiments with the medium, consistently pushing
the medium, trying to find the places where the comics are unique - places
where they can do things that film, literature, and video-games can’t. Nowhere
is this more apparent in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.
Corrigan tells the parallel stories of two men named James Corrigan, one
a boy living under the thumb of an rough and cold father in 1893 Chicago, the
other his grandson, living in late 20th-century Chicago. The latter Corrigan,
the titular Jimmy, meets his father for the first time and we experience his
thoughts, his fears, and his fantasies through stream of consciousness
non-linear narration told through some of the greatest innovations in visual
storytelling, all of which builds to an emotionally devastating climax.
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| Image from Jimmy Corrigan courtesy of The Guardian |
Also
Worth Noting: “I
Guess” by Ware, which Charles Hatfield called “a radical questioning
of the way comics work”. Ware recognizes the creative potential of dissonance between word and image and uses it to brutal affect.
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| Image from "I Guess" courtesy of From Dusk Till Drawn |
Runner Up: Here by Richard McGuire. The
non-linear story of a place and all the people who interact with it. Absolutely
one of my favorite graphic novels, but because I find myself thinking about and
rereading Corrigan more often, Here is relegated to a runner up.
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| Image from Here courtesy of Harpers |
See you next time as we explore another exciting genre of graphic novels!
Images in banner collage courtesy of amazon.com
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