Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Focusing on the unique architecture of comics, in which panels are both sequenced linearly and meaningfully juxtaposed on a two-dimensional page, this essay explores Chris Ware's use of two- and three-dimensional narrative strategies to complicate linear understandings of narrative structure. In Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware employs such multidimensional narrative strategies to effectively thematize the novel's engagement with issues of narrative time, circularity, and continuity, as well as to call into question the very notion of a "narrative line."