A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in downtown Los Angeles to see its exhibit, Masters of American Comics. The exhibit is co-sponsored by MOCA and the Hammer Museum in Westwood. The first half of the exhibit, chronologically, is at the Hammer, and the second is at MOCA.I spent some time looking at the original artwork of Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman's Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, but the real attraction for me was the work of Chris Ware.
Since last fall, the New York Times Sunday magazine has been serializing his Building Stories, which follows the inhabitants of an apartment building over a twenty-four hour period. I read about his other works on the internet before visiting, and afterwards I had a chance to buy a copy of his most famous work, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, at the museum bookstore.
Jimmy Corrigan is a thirty-something Chicago office worker, afraid of social interaction yet deeply craving it. He often retreats to the world of his imagination, where he sometimes interacts with a Superman-type figure. One day he receives correspondence from his father, who long ago abandoned him and his mother. The father's attempts to reconcile with his son have tragic results. In a parallel story, Jimmy's grandfather, lives under the authoritarian rule of his widowed father, who is working on the construction of Chicago's World's Fair.
Before I got married, I was part of a friend's book club for a year or two. We read things like Memoirs of A Geisha, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Even though Jimmy Corrigan is a "graphic novel" (or even "comic book"), it shares some of the complexities of these novels, and affected my outlook on life in a way that truly great literature can.
