{"id":322,"date":"2003-06-20T14:49:53","date_gmt":"2003-06-20T21:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=322"},"modified":"2003-06-20T14:49:53","modified_gmt":"2003-06-20T21:49:53","slug":"jimmy-corrigan-the-smartest-kid-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2003\/06\/jimmy-corrigan-the-smartest-kid-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a familiar story: Boy grows up without dad, dad enters boy&#8217;s life once more, boy must figure out what he thinks about it.<\/p>\n<p>This time, though, the story is told by comics. Chris Ware takes nearly 400 pages to tell the story with comics. I&#8217;ll be honest, this is really an exciting example of a new way to tell a story. Pictures can say things, repeat things, that words cannot do.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, how many times can you write the word &#8216;pathetic&#8217; in a story? Ware seems to write it all over every page, but without the redundancy. You can use the same image, when you can&#8217;t use the same word. And this gives a weight to the story, the sadness of the little boy and the depths of his loserishness, that made it almost repellent.<\/p>\n<p>Except, I wanted to flip the pages and see what the next page had.<\/p>\n<p>In the same way that Faulkner&#8217;s <i>The Sound and the Fury<\/i> was initially impenetrable, <i>Jimmy Corrigan <\/i>is hard to figure out.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;what?&#8217; i felt like asking. &#8220;what just happened here? Who&#8217;s that?&#8221; It becomes more clear as the book progresses, but not so much that all my questions are answered.<\/p>\n<p>I am really thinking, now, about how different mediums communicate different ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a familiar story: Boy grows up without dad, dad enters boy&#8217;s life once more, boy must figure out what he thinks about it. This time, though, the story is told by comics. Chris Ware takes nearly 400 pages to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2003\/06\/jimmy-corrigan-the-smartest-kid-on-earth\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2003\/06\/jimmy-corrigan-the-smartest-kid-on-earth\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}