Ware at Play?

The "multi-faceted" nature of Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth has already been mentioned, but I'd like to dig a little deeper into one facet that has caught my eye since my first experience reading Ware (in The ACME Novelty Library). We first encounter the "cut-out" page on pages 24-25, where Ware exclaims "Well here's a fun thing which is sure to appeal to the young boy, girl, or airship passenger in all of us" (25). At first, the pages made me smile, seeming like a light-hearted break from the grayish Chicago narrative. It spoke to a sense of play, but his description negated that with its ironic tone, as well as the realization that the instructions are on the back of the pieces themselves, thus making the "fun" project considerably more difficult to undertake.

The pages (we've seen three so far) don't seem to fall anywhere in particular--this first is between a scene with Jimmy and his mom and then he and his dad; the second (page 166, if I'm not mistaken), a set of flashcards with places around town on them, falls between the end of a scene with James in bed and another story entirely, not just a scene; and the third, (page 206-207), in the middle of the hide and seek game. So what is Ware's motivation for these placements? He admits that they "truncate [our] experience of an evocative work," and encourages anyone who encounters difficulty to give up immediately.

Though I can't speak to their respective placements, I think that they work to bring together an interesting symbol of "building" in the text--the White City, a relationship between father and son, a relationship with the world at large. Though they look playful and childish at first, the delicate and ultimately impossible nature of their construction speaks to the greater (and equally saddening) failures of the story they intersect.