The Comics of Chris Ware

Masked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy

1 4 Masked Fathers: Jimmy Corrigan and the Superheroic Legacy JacoB Brogan Throughout Chris Ware’s oeuvre, the role of the superhero in contemporary comics remains a constant concern. Popular discourse tends to construe superheroes as the forefathers of all new comics texts, a belief that clearly troubles Ware. His work sometimes seems to toy with the possibility of effacing the superhero outright, whether through symbolic murders or spectacles of debasement. Ware’s novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth approaches the problem in a subtler way, establishing a parodic connection between the figure of the superhero and the eponymous protagonist’s longabsent father. This parallelism enables Ware to stage the ambiguities inherent in his work’s relationship to its own supposed paternity. A psychoanalytic investigation of the way fatherhood is represented throughout the novel reveals the sometimes oppressive pressure superheroes seem to put on the comics medium as a whole. Ultimately, it also allows Ware to explore alternative genealogies, looking beyond the absolute primacy of the father and rendering ambivalent his work’s relationship with the putative influence of the superhero. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan thus imagines the space between personal and familial history as the ground for new comic historiographies. An Immature Medium? The difficulty is that these new historiographies must come to terms with the relative intractability of the earlier versions of themselves they contest. Ware’s published comments suggest that while he acknowledges the role superheroes play in his work, he is critical of the way these figures characterize perceptions of his chosen medium. In the introduction to the volume of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern that he edited, Ware notes, “Comics are the only art form that many ‘normal’ people still arrive at expecting a specific emotional reaction (laughter) or a specific content (superheroes).”1 Though the universal validity of this claim is increasingly dubious (due in part to the attention paid to graphic novelists such as Art Spiegelman, Ware, and others), it is undoubtedly the case that the ghosts of these prejudices continue to haunt the popular reception of contemporary comics. The title of Dave Eggers’s New York Times review of Jimmy Corrigan—“After Wham! Pow! Shazam!”—testifies to this fact.2 Any progress that comics make toward criti- J I M M Y C O R R I G A N A N D T H E S U P E r H E r o I C L E G A C Y 1 5 cal acceptance is cast as a turn away from the superhero, a movement that is seemingly never complete and that informs the reception of each new graphic narrative. This Sisyphean impasse finds a striking analogue in what might be described as the frozen temporality of many superhero narratives. Umberto Eco has characterized this timeless state as the “oneiric climate” of the superhero, a kind of storytelling in which “what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy.”3 Despite their seventy-odd years of ostensibly continuous narrative history, characters like Superman and Batman never age and always eventually return to a kind of fundamental narrative stasis no matter what happens in a given story. Even as the larger narrative contexts of these characters have gradually transformed, this framework allows them to maintain the illusion of fixity. Histories of change, development , and evolution are thereby suppressed, contributing to the image of the superhero genre—and its readers—as trapped in a perpetual adolescence.4 Ware’s important early text “Thrilling Adventure Stories/I Guess,” first published for RAW in 1991, evidences a simmering irritation with such perceptions (see plate 2). Setting word against image, “Thrilling Adventure Stories/I Guess” superimposes a reflection on the narrator’s mundane childhood experiences over the images of a superheroic action story.5 Noting that the narrator speaks of a youthful passion for superheroes, Gene Kannenberg Jr. suggests that the story is ultimately about the boy’s inability to subsume the subtleties of real experience under the categories of his fantasy life.6 At the same time, “Thrilling Adventure Stories / I Guess” is also a metadiscursive lament on the reading public’s tendency to associate all comics with a single genre. Here, a realistic confessional narrative is subsumed into the image repertoire of the superhero, its beats and revelations co-opted in the service of a wholly different tale. At the level of the visual, the narrator’s recollections are effectively boiled down to the point where only his...