Masculinity, Incorporated: Diagrammatic Epistemology in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan

Published at the turn of the millennium, chris ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) has become a defining text of an emerging literary and cultural form. Among the stylistic innovations for which the text is celebrated is its diagrammatic aesthetic. ware includes diagrams in most of his work—schematic arrays of visual information that supplement his narratives. The diagrams contribute to a larger discourse on comics art that has to do with the disavowing the mass-consumer appeal of the superhero genre. For ware, however, the significance of diagrams owes less to any pretense of de-pulping comics than to a project that is, I propose, epistemological: ware's diagrammatic aesthetic opens up formal possibilities from within the history of comics that can function affectively as well as informationally in representing narrative possibility. In its excavation of comic-book history in the guise of personal narrative, Jimmy Corrigan outlines a new theory of knowledge facilitated through the paratexts, schematics, and other quasi-cartographic forms of the diagram.

Jimmy Corrigan is about the process that produces the product that could be described as the contemporary "art comic." At first glance, the novel's gaze seems to be directed inward, intradiegetically: a narrative of the titular boy's abjection and the Freudian dynamics of his family relations, particularly his relationship with his father. Ware's "The Super-Man" character—as both an index of superheroic hypermasculinity and as a figure for comic-book history—has long haunted Jimmy and has caused him to be anxious and frantic. Jimmy finds himself feeling immobilized in the face of filial connection, which is dramatized early in the narrative, when Jimmy receives a note from his estranged father. After reading this message, Jimmy immediately witnesses The Super-Man kill himself by jumping off a tall building (Figure 1). The effect is at once shocking and liberating. The Super-Man himself is accorded no tragic grandeur, and the clinical depiction of his suicide partakes of what is so disarming about Ware's aesthetic. It is absent of primary colors, save the telltale blue,

Figure 1.

"The Death of The Super-Man." Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 16. Image courtesy of the artist.

yellow, and red of the Super-Man costume. Massive buildings dominate. And the narrative potential is constricted by an apparatus—that is, The Super-Man himself, both in his immediate narrative function and metatextually as an industrial product of the 1930s.

Ware constructs a psychodrama that plays out through his Super-Man character and the ballast of cultural paternity he represents; not only does Ware directly thematize Freudian problems as the Corrigan father and son attempt to rekindle their relationship, but so too does Jimmy Corrigan dispatch Oedipal narratives of comic-book history in a single bound.¹ To write comics realism, Ware suggests, is less to depart from genre conventions than to defy the anxiety of influence itself, in its notoriously paternalistic Bloomian guise. Thus, while a decidedly Freudian agon characterizes the narrative through-line of the novel, what remains central are the non-narrative devices that persistently redirect it. The diagrams' schematic design resembles architectural blueprints, but they are so dense with narrative information that they are almost unreadable. Ware's diagrams may emerge from the psychoanalytic in a way analogous to, say, Alison Bechdel's maps in Fun Home (2006) and her multilinear narration in Are You My Mother? (2012), but this does not mean that the theory of knowledge they enable is necessarily limited to reproducing psychoanalytic analysis. The diagrammatic form can convey what is unrepresentable in a visual medium: although it appears to be an information aesthetic, the diagrams can express a subjective response—a focalizer's auditory and sensory perception and even thoughts and feelings. Yes, Jimmy Corrigan has to do with The Super-Man's death—which is both a semi-autobiographical gesture, a crisis in patriarchy, and a kind of allegory about comics history more generally...