One of the more interesting characters of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is the landscape the characters exist in. Jimmy and the father move through the rather bleak suburbia of Waukosha and Chicago, conversing in the well-traveled and temporary worlds of an airport lounge, diner, medical office (with plastic plants), and the father’s simple apartment. Even the ubiquitous Golden Arches appear more than a few times as a background behind Pam’s Wagon Wheel Restaurant (open since 1977!)
Chris Ware seems to praise their surroundings with his artwork, drawing the mythical Michigan town and Chicago’s skyline through Jimmy’s window in loving detail and with crisp, sharp lines, and yet damns it as well, poking fun at the blandness of these environs with his text. The modern world comes off as sterile more than anything, offering a sort of bland sameness for the characters to shuffle through.
Ware pulls out all the stops in his 12-panel look at the Waukosha “highlights,” including a famous rock (hidden behind a Dairy Queen), and the modern colorful miracle of vinyl siding! He seems to be poking fun at all this, taking swipes at the larger spheres of advertising and the rapacious beast of modern commercialism and modernization, but is also espousing a lesser brand of vitriol displayed by R. Crumb in Crumb. In the film, Crumb complained bitterly about the modern American architectural aesthete, and one scene shows his artistic rendition of a forested enclave’s descent into suburban sprawl hell (also 12-panels, titled: “A Short History of America”). Here’s a link to that - http://www.zubeworld.com/crumbmuseum/history2.html.
History is also under Ware’s lens. At surface glance, the author seems to reminisce about a beautiful, historical Chicago and the World Fair’s “White City,” (the shift in artwork from the modern world to that always favors the past) and yet shows at the human level an environment very similar if not worse than the modern world, with issues of abandonment, racist behavior, and bullying (the worst human behavior comes out during the Great Fire sequence). The “White City,” although beautiful in its design, is ultimately a temporary and illusory utopia, a fake city designed to attract scores of people to the city, before being torn down (and I found with a little research) also largely burned by fire. Ware’s landscapes, like everything else in the book, have been carefully and deliberately thought out.
Chris Ware seems to praise their surroundings with his artwork, drawing the mythical Michigan town and Chicago’s skyline through Jimmy’s window in loving detail and with crisp, sharp lines, and yet damns it as well, poking fun at the blandness of these environs with his text. The modern world comes off as sterile more than anything, offering a sort of bland sameness for the characters to shuffle through.
Ware pulls out all the stops in his 12-panel look at the Waukosha “highlights,” including a famous rock (hidden behind a Dairy Queen), and the modern colorful miracle of vinyl siding! He seems to be poking fun at all this, taking swipes at the larger spheres of advertising and the rapacious beast of modern commercialism and modernization, but is also espousing a lesser brand of vitriol displayed by R. Crumb in Crumb. In the film, Crumb complained bitterly about the modern American architectural aesthete, and one scene shows his artistic rendition of a forested enclave’s descent into suburban sprawl hell (also 12-panels, titled: “A Short History of America”). Here’s a link to that - http://www.zubeworld.com/crumbmuseum/history2.html.
History is also under Ware’s lens. At surface glance, the author seems to reminisce about a beautiful, historical Chicago and the World Fair’s “White City,” (the shift in artwork from the modern world to that always favors the past) and yet shows at the human level an environment very similar if not worse than the modern world, with issues of abandonment, racist behavior, and bullying (the worst human behavior comes out during the Great Fire sequence). The “White City,” although beautiful in its design, is ultimately a temporary and illusory utopia, a fake city designed to attract scores of people to the city, before being torn down (and I found with a little research) also largely burned by fire. Ware’s landscapes, like everything else in the book, have been carefully and deliberately thought out.
1 comment:
Interesting post!
Here's a video I made about Jimmy Corrigan's Superhero Legacy! Check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74dDaNMRcI
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