Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
Comics
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Chris Ware. Pantheon Books released the book in 2000 following its serialization in the newspaper Newcity and Ware's Acme Novelty Library series.
Origins and development
The character of Jimmy Corrigan originated in Ware's early comic strips around 1990 as a parody of Depression-era "child genius" comics. In a 2000 Q&A, Ware recalled creating the character as a humorous departure from his ongoing silent strips featuring Quimby the Mouse, before adopting him as the basis for a more sustained narrative:
Back in 1990 or so, I was doing a bunch of [comic] strips with a mouse character, which were silent strips — no words at all, and I was getting pretty tired of it. Occasionally, when I get tired of doing something, I will interject a gag strip to alleviate the tension of doing something over and over again. And I did strip that was called "Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth," that was sort of a parody of a "smart kid" strip in the Depression era. Then, when I ceased doing the dumb mouse stuff, I was stuck for something to do, and I wanted to do a strip that had actually a real human being in it. And since I had done [Jimmy Corrigan], it was something I was familiar with, so I started with that.
As Ware continued developing the character, the early "child genius" conception appeared less frequently, giving way to a more sustained focus on Corrigan's adult life and family history.
Early versions of the character appeared in the Chicago alternative weekly Newcity in December 1991, prior to the strip’s regular serialization, and differed from the later narrative developed in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000).
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This entry incorporates text from “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.