Aside from the beautiful computer-generated color palate, Jimmy Corrigan is dull and morose. It seems as though the book is only a showcase for Chris Ware’s distinctive style. The style is highly engaging, the storyline decidedly not. I guess Ware suffers from a dearth of literary imagination.
One of the better parts of the book is the Columbian Exposition interlude. For most of the graphic novel the title character wallows in his loneliness and misery. The intricacies of the graphics and their highly stylized nature cannot overcome the flatness of the contents of the book.
That given, one must appreciate what is almost the archetype of the genre. Though every indie graphic novel I’ve seen is about as lively as Corrigan, it would seem that one must, old-fashionedly, make something up instead of following the current trend of writing something semi-auto-biographical. Overall, Corrigan is graphically superior to anything out there. But his story is incomparable to anything out there. So I give it a 9……out of 100. LOL!
