Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth

Author: Chris Ware

The graphic novel format can be approached three ways. The first as simply as a collection of issues of a comic book, which is actually the most popular way to go as it requires no new content creation. You can also tell a longer story as a single original story, but still within the basic idea of the comic book conceptual framework. The third is to re-imagine the entire format and turn it into something new and exciting. Artist and writer Chris Ware took the strips that had been appearing in the newspaper Newcity and made a graphic novel out of them, added new material, and presented them in a way that made it more of an album than a graphic novel, with pages without any written content, merely art, and strange, surrealist moments of dream, fantasy, and the strange. To read Jimmy Corrigan is to dig into the parts of Ware's brain that are darkest in conceptual narative, but also brightest in the light of day. To read Jimmy Corrigan is to discover an entire new set of potentialities for the graphic novel. Why it's on the list: A literary masterpiece that steps across many genre borders without fear.