Against his own better judgment, the so-shy-he's-practically-mute Corrigan sneaks off to get reacquainted with Daddy. In the masterfully illustrated novel, Jimmy, a round, fat, clumsy almost-man utterly dominated by his mother, receives an invitation from the father who abandoned them to get reacquainted. Jimmy Corrigan, described in the Village Voice as 'a quietly brutal portrait of a friendless loser,' tells the story of an entire family of friendless losers including Jimmy, his estranged parents and his grandfather. A kind of double nostalgia is at work in the imaginations of graphic novelists working today - nostalgia for the thirties and forties and a nostalgia for childhoods in the sixties and seventies, when the young would-be comic artists themselves longed for a purer time when nerdy adolescents could and did create, in the confines of their suburban homes, enduring pop archetypes).ĭavid Boring contain elements of this sensibility, best described as a nostalgia for a time when we still believed in nostalgia (thus a a nostalgia for the nostalgic kids we were). Which is to say that graphic novels aren't just about nostalgia for that simpler, purer time. Indeed, when our new crop of graphic novelists juxtaposes its cast of present-day losers with the glorious comic-book heroes of yesteryear, they are actually pitting themselves against the heroic comic-book creators found in Chabon's novel.

Chabon's novel is an evocation of the dawn of the comic age, that era between the late thirties and early fifties that all those who draw comics today can't help but long for.

In no time at all, they're rolling in cash, their book, as Chabon writes, tapping into a generational optimism. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, two plucky young Jews come up with a character called The Escapist, a master of eluding dastardly traps and kicking Nazi butt. A fusion of styles and fascinations has facilitated the maturation of the comic book into a smart, funny, haunting work of literature with effects. Thus, the ascendancy of the graphic novel becomes less about economics and more about the intertwined abstractions of demographics and esthetics. Okay, an armful of books does not a movement make, but consider this: More than a few of these works not only tap into a burgeoning post-20th-century self-referential nostalgia, they also manage brilliantly to bridge the ever-widening chasm between visual and print generations.

Jimmy corrigan book