The narrative is interrupted periodically by the story of Jimmy’s great-grandfather and grandfather, which is set in 1893, and this narration focuses on the great-grandfather’s abusive relationship with his young son, whom he beats and eventually abandons at the top of one of the largest buildings in “The White City” at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Though the figure of the Everyman never completely understands himself in the context of a racialized America, the audience is aware of this complicated genealogy. In Waukosha he meets Amy, his father’s adopted African-American daughter and – unbeknownst to them – a distant relation to Jimmy. Contacted by the father he has never met, Jimmy travels from Chicago to a small town in Michigan. Jimmy Corrigan traces the history of the titular character from a childhood characterized by an absent father and overbearing mother to his life as a middle-age white man whose isolation is represented by the cubicle in which he works. The graphic elements of the novel intervene in overdetermined scripts of whiteness, resulting in one of the most challenging texts about national identity and whiteness. 1 However, in its best moments Ware’s graphic novel effectively succeeds in manipulating the form in order to challenge simplistic narratives of whiteness. Scholars of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan have addressed, with great perspicacity, masculinity and heterosexuality, but race and whiteness remain under-examined. In this essay, we examine the unique ways in which the graphic novel, specifically Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, enacts such a critical interrogation.

Hall have argued that “Scholars and activists critically interrogating whiteness seek to decenter rather than recenter whiteness by making performances of whiteness visible” (3). Volume 3, Issue 2: William Blake and Visual CultureĬhris J.Volume 3, Issue 3: Comics and Childhood.Volume 4, Issue 1: The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman.Volume 4, Issue 3: ImageSexT Proceedings.Volume 5, Issue 3: Convergences Proceedings.Volume 5, Issue 4: Alan Moore and Adaptation.Volume 6, Issue 2: ImageNext Proceedings.Volume 6, Issue 3: Shakespeare and Visual Rhetoric.

Volume 7, Issue 1: Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers.

Volume 8, Issue 1: Monsters in the Margins.

Volume 9, Issue 2: Mixing Visual Media in Comics.

Volume 10, Issue 3: Comics and Fine Art Forum.

Jimmy corrigan