In 1993, Fantagraphics - an American comics publisher dedicated to presenting works by a variety of visionary cartoonists - released the first issue of Chris Ware's The Acme Novelty Library. The latest such event is the publication of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth.

But every once in a while something happens (for example the success of Art Spiegelman's Maus) that threatens to free comics from its ghetto. To paraphrase John Lennon: Comics is the nigger of the art world. No one but comics geeks cares about any of these people and their work. Imagine that no one recognized the staggering and prolific imagination of Jack Kirby, the bizarrely hilarious science fiction of Matt Howarth, the disturbingly ambiguous sexual musings of Dave Cooper, the anthropologically savvy speculations of Carla Speed McNeil, the unflinching reportage of Joe Sacco, the formal achievements of Alan Moore, the excitement of - Oops. Imagine that no one believed that comics could spawn anything but infantile talking animals, crude jokes and badly written superheroes. Imagine Joss Whedon's subversive and hip Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Michael Moore's irreverently angry The Awful Truth being treated like nothing more than clones of Beverly Hills 90210 or The Price Is Right. Ballard being ridiculed because his chosen medium is the same as Danielle Steel's. Imagine no one taking Polanski's Chinatown seriously because of Verhoeven's Robocop.

Imagine a world where the worst exemplars of a medium are de facto considered the best that medium can achieve. Imagine a cultural landscape where cinema is considered nothing more than a medium to display sensationalistic visual effects: from the onrushing train of the Lumière brothers to Imax where prose fiction is seen as nothing more than a vehicle for romantic fantasies of haute société where no one can be convinced that television is good for anything but live transmissions of grand events and glorifications of consumer culture. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on EarthĬhris Ware: The Smartest Cartoonist on Earth Review | Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Jimmy corrigan