Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid On Earth, by Chris Ware

It's easy to pan a book, easy to disparage it or trivialize it or dismiss it, but sometimes very, very hard to accurately express my feelings about a book I liked as much as this one. I could tell you that it made me cry not once but several times, or that, while reading it, I had to jump up and email the friend who recommended it to me, mostly to thank him, but even that wouldn't convey, I don't think, the way this book affected me.

So let's talk about how this book affected me: deeply. And depressingly. While I don't have a list of every book I've ever read (my list starts when I was 16, something I will always regret), I declared to a friend, once I had finished this book, that it was by far and away the most depressing thing I've ever read. The story of Jimmy Corrigan, an emotionally stunted, lonely man in his thirties, and his meeting his absent father for the first time, as well as the parallel story of Jimmy's grandfather being abandoned by his own father, this work touched me deeply with its brutally honest look at loneliness, family, and social bonds, from the perspective of a main character who has plenty of the first and too little of the last two. This was a hero who can't do anything right or get anything right, a pathetic and frustrated man who, by his very existence, begs for the sympathy it will be so hard for him to get. This is tragedy on a small scale, and, to me at least, is far more affecting for only encompassing the lives of this one small, unsuccessful family. I will never again trivialize comics as a medium: how could I, having read this book, which is so clearly and undeniably a masterpiece?