Chris Ware’s 2005 collection The ACME Report contains some of the most forceful and clearly articulated critiques of American cultural identity and national policy in the history of comics. Alongside his own strips and short tales, Ware incorporates a deeply ironic and satirical hodgepodge of turn-of-the-century newspaper and magazine adverts, 1950s-era catalogue spreads and prize giveaways, in which his ACME Novelty Company is cast as a metaphorical stand-in for the American nation-state, with special emphasis on its imperialistic endeavors abroad and nativistic policies at home. In this volume, Ware interweaves both historical and contemporary aesthetics, styles, and modes of representation in an effort to “expand the possibilities for the [comics] form, just to get in a little more sense of a real experience.”1 In so doing, he employs both visual and textual comics tropes as a means to sharply criticize the treatment and perception of foreign nationals who immigrate to the United States. On the inside cover of The ACME Report, a space typically reserved for ads in traditional comic books, one finds an antiquated ticket granting the bearer admittance to “the world’s greatest entertainment facility [. . .] AMERICA” via the required “port of entry center, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” (see fig. 10.1).2
By choosing to present his critique of twenty-first-century American foreign and domestic policy in an early twentieth-century idiom, Ware offers an interesting historical contrast. Though the ticket’s visual clues imply that immigration to America is as easy and joyful an experience as a trip to an amusement park, the ticket’s textual subject matter urges readers to re-examine the mythos of historically lenient American immigration policies in light of the recent detainment at Guantanamo Bay of numerous peoples of Arab descent by the American government. The ticket bearer is likewise provided with two waivers, one requiring the relinquishment of “all rights of citizenship of your incubation country, now and forever” and another compelling the surrender “of all legal rights, beliefs, affiliations, membership in organizations or fan clubs, plus forever and ever and ever your claim to what used to be called due process.”3 While these waivers are clearly parodies of present-day American foreign and domestic policies that disregard the rights of “illegal aliens” who cross the border from Mexico and the detainees who are being held indefinitely in Cuba, they are also reminders of the historical treatment of many immigrants to the United States, who were met with scorn and derision upon arrival, refused proper protection under state and federal law, and denied access to citizenship.
The following blurb, which is printed on the ticket itself, makes particularly manifest Ware’s evaluation of American attitudes regarding immigrants:
TIRED of waiting for your backwoods homeland to secure democracy and get all of the neat stuff that was supposed to come along with it? [. . .] Well, why not just come VISIT the world’s richest constitutional republic and allow all the luxurious perks of a capitalist consciousness like self-centeredness, entitlement, and a sanguine apathy towards the rest of the planet color your every thought, action, and romantic conquest? Really—cast aside any sense of debt to society, begin developing your own personal mythology, and get that “freedom feeling” RIGHT NOW [. . .] Maybe someday you’ll even be accepted as a genuine AMERICAN CITIZEN!4
According to Ware, America—founded on and forged out of racist, nativistic, capitalistic, and imperialistic policies and ideologies, a nation that has been steeped in notions of its own exceptionalism and superiority—was never structured to support the myth of racial, ethnic, and political inclusion. Rather, he argues, America has always taken for granted the means by which it achieved its development, insistently disregarded the value of domestic and international immigrant Others, and continually romanticized its own ceaseless “conquest.” All of this has been made possible by the creation of numerous individual and national mythologies that support and promulgate the fiction of the American dream. These “personal mythologies,” Ware argues, must be deconstructed and re-interpreted in order to come to any solvent comprehension of the past, present, and future.
Though this work is particularly manifest in The ACME Report, it is also a structuring motif throughout Ware’s most extended project, the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. Ware’s novel, which follows four generations of Corrigan men from their early days in 1840s Ireland to postmodern 1980s America, is a detailed exploration of the history, treatment, and engagement of immigrants across twentieth-century America. In Jimmy Corrigan, as in The ACME Report, Ware deconstructs familiar histories of immigration and race relations by first disrupting the “personal mythology” of the seamless passage of the non-white, foreign immigrant on his way to becoming a white American. Ware additionally brings to bear the relationship between African Americans, who were brought to the United States against their will and have never been fully integrated into American society, and those same white immigrants. In this text, Ware constructs an incredibly complex family drama, in which racial, ethnic, and national identity are investigated in tandem with one another.
For those well versed in comics history, it should come as no surprise that Ware chooses to situate his critique of America around the representation and treatment of immigrant Others. Comics historian David Hajdu reminds us that Richard Felton Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, the 1890s comic strip featuring “the Yellow Kid,” now widely regarded as the first American comics “sensation,”
was set in the gutters of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and depicted the rowdy antics of a gang of young scruffs. The Kid himself [. . .] was a crude but strangely endearing caricature of the immigrant poor—barefoot, ugly, inarticulate, concerned only with base pleasures, and disposed to violence. He rarely spoke, and then did so in a marginally intelligible pidgin jumble of ethnic clichés. [. . .] His pals, much the same, were all vulgar stereotypes: oil-smeared Italians throwing tomatoes; Negroes with gum-bubble lips, snoozing or cowering in fear; scowling Middle Easterners in fezzes, waving scimitars— comrades in egalitarian minstrelsy.5
The ever-expanding immigrant populations of major American cities immediately took to the Yellow Kid and other newspaper comic strip characters like him. Far from being offended by the racial (and what one might now call racist) caricatures, they instead felt as though these comics were written about their experiences and presented in a format they could all easily comprehend. This was largely because, as Hajdu explains, the first American comic books were often written by “immigrants and children of immigrants, women, Jews, Italians, Negroes, Latinos, Asians, and myriad social outcasts,” who understood their audiences well and knew how to entertain them.6 Indeed, one of Chris Ware’s comic forbears, George Herriman, the inventor of Krazy Kat, was a “‘colored Creole’ from New Orleans who allowed others to mistake him for Greek.”7 Cheap and readily accessible comics offered minorities an escape from the rigors and reality of their lives. Comic strips and comic books, then, have always been attuned to the experiences of immigrant Others and, by extension, of non-white Others who similarly found themselves outside of the American cultural and social mainstream. Given that the first major American comic strip character, the Yellow Kid, and the first American superhero, Superman, were both constructed as immigrants, there is no doubt that the comics language was not merely concerned with the experiences of immigrants, but was likewise attuned to their perception and representation.8
However, modern readers cannot escape the fact that despite earlier efforts to render the immigrant experience in a way that immigrants themselves could recognize and appreciate, the images comics artists employed were often racist and contained crass stereotypes. According to Ware’s tongue-in-cheek history of art, this is because comic art has “its strongest roots [. . .] not in the Academic tradition, but in an arcane system of 19th century physiognomy and racial caricature!”9 Art Spiegelman, in an essay regarding racial representation and the comics form, echoes Ware’s sentiment: “Cartoon language is mostly limited to deploying a handful of recognizable visual symbols and clichés. It makes use of the discredited pseudo-scientific principles of physiognomy to portray character through a few physical attributes and facial expressions. It takes skill to use such clichés in ways that expand or subvert this impoverished vocabulary.”10
Spiegelman and Ware both look back to Rodolphe Töpffer, regarded by many as the first comics artist, who in his tract Essay on Physiognomy explains the art of deciphering or divining the moral and intellectual makeup of an individual based upon a careful study of their facial features.11 While Töpffer expresses a degree of anxiety about employing the practice of physiognomy to determine a person’s actual moral or intellectual capabilities in any sort of real-world context, he is nonetheless an advocate of the “science” as it pertains to the exercise of writing successful comics. According to Töpffer, the comic artist must first ascertain the meaning of certain facial features (for example, eyes, ears, noses, or lips), establish which precise combination of features corresponds to which specific characters, personality, or type, and subsequently determine in advance what precise conclusions readers will reach upon examining those eyes or ears or lips on a character’s face. Töpffer’s language is dependent upon the artist’s rendering a caricature so successfully that the meaning of the image is fixed within the context of the comic itself and in the world outside of the comic. Töpffer’s language, it seems, only works when it has effectively preyed upon and realized the reader’s instinctual judgments and invited him to come to an immediate assumption about the type of character he is encountering.
Despite the fact that Töpffer’s comics language has proven indispensable for his own work, Ware nonetheless acknowledges that “the flavor of caricature that Töpffer regularly employs—jutting chin and squarish, bulbous, protruding nose [. . .] feels somewhat outmoded today. Like the elongated s in eighteenth-century documents that reads as an f to modern eyes, Töpffer’s archaic style potentially trips up the possibility for empathy with his characters.”12 This is because, as Ware acknowledges, the artist and reader are subject to very specific socioeconomic, racial, cultural, and historical contexts which serve to overdetermine their engagement with the images. As a result, the ways in which comics artists create and comics readers interpret the images have everything to do with their own particular ideologies, identities, and histories, which may or may not be in close alignment with each other. Given that the principles of comics art are dependent upon both cliché and physiognomic logic, it can be difficult for the comics artist to find a way of accurately representing racial difference while still working with and around the “impoverished vocabulary” of the comics language.
Ware describes, in the following passage, just how difficult this process can be for artists:
When I was in college at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, I was doing a strip for the student newspaper. At the bottom of the strip, I drew two characters (trying to do a sort of emblematic “Mutt and Jeff” thing) where I wouldn’t show anything but their faces floating in space. Entirely unconsciously, I designed these characters as people or “non-animals” with black heads and big white mouths, like Mickey Mouse without ears. Before I knew it, the Black Student Alliance was writing these nasty letters to the student newspaper demanding big apologies, as well as demanding that my strip be pulled from the paper. They were going to seek me out and set my house on fire, that kind of thing. Suddenly, I realized that I actually had done these horrible racist caricatures, and that I wasn’t even aware of it. I felt terrible, and when I examined it, I realized a great part of the “visual rush” of comics is at least partially, if not almost entirely, founded in racist caricature. If you look at many early comic strips, they’re endemically “ethnic.” Abie the Agent is obviously a Jewish caricature. Happy Hooligan is an Irish caricature. And black caricatures obviously go back to the minstrel days and earlier. Even Mickey Mouse . . . what is he doing with white gloves? Gee, I wonder where that comes from. The simplification of the face comes out of an effort to distill a particular identity down to a few simple features, and that includes racial identity. It’s creepy when you think about it.13
As the above anecdote evidences, the images used in comics are unavoidably loaded with a cultural meaning that is never static or fixed, but rather dependent upon personal, historical, and narratological context. As Ware learned, the success of the comics form in the latter half of the twentieth century depends upon the artist’s ability to “distill a particular identity”—including racial identity—in a simple way without pandering to or indulging in racial misrepresentation and racist caricature. But given that the most basic components of the comics language are steeped in physiognomic logic, it becomes incredibly difficult to separate that which is “emblematic” in the comics from that which is racist. Even though it was not Ware’s intention to produce “horrible racist caricatures,” he unthinkingly had, and this, he discovered, had everything to do with the uneasy slippage between the language of comics and the long history of racial representation both within and outside the comics world. The job of the comics artist, Ware suggests, is to enable the reader to not only instantaneously comprehend the meaning of the image itself, but to understand the meaning of that image in the context of both the narrative and the “real” world. Since his experiences at the University of Texas, Ware has consistently labored to make plain the relationship between the comics form and racial imagery by both employing and challenging modes of racial representation within contemporary contexts and conceptions of history and identity. By appealing to the reader’s ability to judge and come to conclusions about Others very quickly, Ware’s comics can alter those initial responses by recontextualizing and reformulating conventionally racialized images.
In Jimmy Corrigan, Ware expands upon the physiognomic foundations of the comics form by representing racial difference and racial caricature over the course of the century as two distinct, though uncomfortably related phenomena. The present moment of the comic, set in 1980s Illinois and Michigan, is spliced through with myriad flashbacks, dreams, memories, fantasies, and historical records as the protagonist, Jimmy, travels to visit his father, James William Corrigan, for the first time in his recent memory. While there for a long weekend, Jimmy meets his adopted African American sister Amy who, the reader eventually learns, is his second cousin—Jimmy and Amy share the same great-grandfather, William Corrigan. Throughout the course of the comic, the present moment of Jimmy’s visit to his father is explicated in tandem with the life and times of his grandfather, the grandson of Irish immigrants, as a young boy living in 1890s Chicago.
Because Ware is invested in addressing racial representation in the comics form, he chooses to organize his narrative around the experiences of Irish immigrants and the descendants of African slaves—two groups which have been viciously stereotyped and caricatured throughout the history of twentieth-century America. As a result, Ware’s obsessive attention to historical detail in Jimmy Corrigan renders a far more complicated and involved picture of the relationship between immigrants and African Americans than most traditional histories of American identity, Irish American identity, or African American identity would ever likely evince. To that end, Ware’s text complicates American identity in three ways: by addressing the real experiences of non-white immigrants upon their arrival to the United States, by troubling the racial purity of immigrant family bloodlines, and by conflating the experiences of slaves and immigrants in the construction of those bloodlines. Furthermore, by exploring the ways in which slaves, immigrants, and their descendants have been racially and culturally enmeshed in America, Ware’s text suggests that race is not only an illusion, but a grand false memory, the product of a collective refusal to engage with or concede a greater human involvement which is not racial, but familial. In this way, Ware’s text is an excellent example of the ways in which the comics form can be employed to challenge traditional histories and to recast them in more complicated ways.
The family narrative begins with Jimmy Corrigan’s great-great-grandfather, a physician in a small village in Ireland, who, along with his pregnant wife, sets sail for New York in the mid-1840s. Once there, Jimmy’s great-great-grandmother gives birth to a son, William, the first native-born American Corrigan.14 Jimmy’s great-great-grandparents would not have been alone in making this voyage; approximately 1.3 million Irish immigrants arrived on American shores between the years of 1846 and 1855, each expecting better wages, decent work, access to property, and unbridled cultural and religious freedom. However, the experiences of those who came from Ireland, like the Corrigans, and from Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe were made exceedingly difficult because these “New Immigrants,” as they were called (to distinguish them from the preceding waves of immigration from Western Europe), were not considered to be white. Due to accelerated levels of immigration to American shores at the time of Jimmy’s great-great-grandparents’ arrival, the nation-state had begun to enter a new stage in its development, marked by rampant nativism and accelerated racism that was infused in, and produced out of, the fear that the presence of millions of immigrants would fundamentally and irrevocably alter the national, racial, and cultural character of the American. The American character, it was argued, had its origins and basis in the white, European, Anglo-Saxon tradition. As a result, whiteness, which had heretofore been conceived of as a vast monolithic racial identity, was restructured, as Matthew Frye Jacobson notes, into a “fragmented, hierarchically arranged series of distinct ‘white races.’”15 If the Irish immigrants were to be considered Americans and either continued to have children amongst themselves or “inter-breed” with putatively “real” white Americans, they would, with time, mongrelize Americanness and destroy whiteness.
While such intra-white divisions would anneal with time, African Americans faced a much steeper barrier to cultural assimilation. As one contemporary scholar put it, whereas “‘Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, etc., come here, settle down, become citizens, and their offspring born and raised on American soil differ in no appreciable or perceptible manner from other Americans [ . . . the Negro is] as absolutely and specifically unlike the American as when the race first touched the soil and first breathed the air of the New World.’”16 Unlike, he argues, the African’s dark skin which remains a permanent stain, “‘the coarse skin, big hands and feet, the broad teeth, pug nose etc. of the Irish and German laborer pass away in a generation or two,’” rendering them, for all intents and purposes, as white as the Anglo-Saxon.17 As we see here, in addition to their cultural, moral, and intellectual inferiority, immigrants and Africans were also considered to be physically inferior to Anglo-Saxons, who were beautiful not only because they were white, but because of their fine facial features and strong, graceful bodies. By degrees, and particularly in postbellum America, it was argued that the Irish immigrant, already a type of lower-order white man, would lose his unseemly physical and moral characteristics and would appear and behave more and more American and less and less Irish within but a few generations. The African, on the other hand, whose dark skin was inimical to white beauty, would never become white, no matter how many generations passed him by. As a comics artist, Ware is deeply attuned to the ways in which racial representation has been historically attached to racist perceptions of the subject’s inferiority. By examining the ways in which the Corrigans became white and lost their Irish and African heritages, he draws attention to the ways in which Americans have historically obfuscated blood relations by filtering them through rigid racial identities.
Ware begins this exploration in a scene in which William Corrigan takes his son, James, to see a Jim Crow magic-lantern film (see plate 14).18 The first two images show a woman—a perfect Irish caricature with her slight pug nose, red hair, and freckles—placing a pie in an oven and setting it gently on the window sill. In the third image, the well-known nineteenth-century minstrel Jim Crow peeks his ink-black head in the window. His hands, donned in the traditional white minstrel gloves, reach for the pie, his absurdly large lips rounded in anticipation. In the fourth and final slide, the window has come down on Jim Crow’s head, and the pie has slipped out of his grasp, headed for the floor. The Irishwoman’s face can be seen in the upper-right-hand corner, but rather than outrage, she is shown laughing loudly and maliciously. The slide serves a dual function in this scene. As a historical reproduction, it draws attention to the ways in which racist caricatures of both African and Irish Americans were used to amuse and titillate turn-of-the-century audiences; indeed, after the viewing, William remarks to his son that the Jim Crow slide was his favorite and chuckles in pity for “poor old ‘Jim Crow’” (70). But this slide also provides the reader with a way of reading race in the comic itself. Because William Corrigan and his son are viewing the slide in the narrative, the reader must make a distinction between racist caricature and racial representation; in other words, William and James are characters who have been rendered according to the physiognomic principles of the comics language, but they are not racist caricatures. By juxtaposing these two constructs—the images on the slide and William’s reaction to the images on the slide—Ware is able to comment on the history of racial representation and at the same time work within and outside it. What is most significant about this scene, however, is that William Corrigan does not register any awareness that the Irishwoman in the slide serves the same function as Jim Crow—to exaggerate the perceived unattractive physical characteristics of the Irish and peoples of African descent for the amusement of largely white American audiences. Because William does not conceive of himself as Irish, he ignores the caricature of the Irishwoman and instead places his focus on the image of Jim Crow.
William’s refusal to engage with his own ethno-racial particularity has a profoundly negative effect on his son, James, who is fundamentally unaware that he has Irish ancestors. In one extended scene in the novel, James meets a young Italian immigrant, and while we sense that the two play well together, James is nonetheless desperately afraid that anyone should discover their friendship while in school. One day, the young boy brings James a gift of a small metal sculpture of a horse; while at home, James shows his gift to his own horse, telling him: “That weird Italian kid gave it to me. I hate him, though. [. . .] He’s a little ‘wop’” (227). James knows that the boy is “weird” because he speaks in the thickly accented and broken English of the new immigrant. Because James will only shun the boy when they are in school, it seems that James is afraid that the young immigrant’s difference will somehow become his difference, that his identity will be irrevocably altered by associating with this young boy. The next day, however, the young Italian boy invites all of the schoolboys over to his house to make sculptures of their own, and James, who is now afraid that the young boy will despise him because of his earlier effrontery, tentatively walks to their home to join them.
Upon arriving at their home, James discovers that everything about this young boy is different. The pages, which are rendered in a sepia tone, call to mind the “Old World,” and it is obvious that the boy’s family does not live in America in a manner appreciably different than they did in Italy. Having been raised in a home with no one but his father and his servant, who was in no way an accepted part of the family, James is stunned and overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle and by the welcome invitation he receives to be a part of their family for the evening. The boy eventually brings James to his father’s workshop, where there are already young boys huddled together busily sculpting. Though the entire family is drawn with dark black hair and thick heavy eyebrows, the boy’s father, with his moustache and work apron, calls to mind Pinocchio’s father, Geppetto, tinkering in his workshop. This is an apt visual and literary reference, for not only is his studio full of handmade toys, ornaments, and religious iconography, but James also powerfully responds to him as a father figure. During this visit, James challenges his father’s authority for the first time, for not only is he denying his will by going to this boy’s house before heading home, he is also openly cavorting with a people for whom his father has nothing but contempt. James learns that the young boy’s difference is not strange or terrible, as he had always assumed, but familiar and comforting. As a result of his time with this family, James is able to humanize them, even desiring to become one of them, to be converted into the “wop” he, only a matter of hours before, had so violently berated. The boy’s father is well aware of the fact that James is in desperate need of care, and he assumes he is “un orfano,” or an orphan boy (241). In some ways, this is true; compared to the immigrant family, who have held fast to old customs and habits in America, James’s life is ascetic, cold, and without any sense of itself.
At home that night, James is beaten and forbidden to ever return, but still fantasizes about his sculpture, believing that it will impress a girl at school, secure him popularity, and eradicate all of his problems. When he receives his piece, however, it is missing its two front legs, ears and tail—the lead, the young boy tells him, did not fill the cast completely. All of a sudden, James finds himself at the receiving end of ridicule, as everyone, including the immigrant boy and the girl he fancies, crowds around him, pointing fingers and laughing hysterically. At one point, a child in the crowd calls him “little micky leprechaun” and goes on to ask him, “Is this yer ‘pot o’ gold’ micky?” (248). It is, of course, deeply ironic that James’s initial reaction to the immigrant child, and the words he used to describe him, are being visited upon him in the end. But what is most interesting here is that James was entirely unaware of his own difference, of his own ethno-racial particularity. William Corrigan, who had existed in the world of white privilege for some time, had actively worked to erase any notion of that particularity from the family memory, and, as a result, James suffers incredibly for it. As we see, in their efforts to become white, the Corrigans must not only endure prejudice, but pretend, when they encounter it, that it does not pertain to them; in other words, the Corrigan men must pass as Americans in order to be considered Americans.
While William actively works to repress the memory of his own immigrant past, he likewise refuses to recognize his own mixed-race progeny. When James is a young boy, William has an affair with his African American maid, May, and sires a child. He eventually dismisses her, without ever acknowledging their child as his own, and subsequently abandons James at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (280–81). In the scene immediately following James’s abandonment, we meet Amy Corrigan—William and May’s descendant—as a young girl, interviewing James, now an old man, for a school project in which she has been charged to devise and complete a family tree (283–88). Amy, we learn, was adopted by a young woman who married Jim Corrigan, the father of Jimmy, son of James and grandson of William. Amy’s task is riddled with irony, for her grandfather, James, is also her granduncle, and her father, Jim, is her first cousin once removed. However, because no one remembers or could possibly recall the complexity of their relationship, in part because May’s place in this genealogy is conspicuously refused, and because they read the bonds they have forged as superficial, the emphasis is placed not on their family relationship or on attempts to recover the past, but on their racial differences. Despite the fact that Amy has been adopted by James Corrigan, because she is African American, not only do the Corrigan men have difficulty envisioning her as one of them, they also never suspect that she might actually be their blood relation.
Though it was Amy who requested that Jim invite his long-lost son, Jimmy, for the Thanksgiving holiday, their first meeting takes place in a hospital, where their father has been taken after a car accident. The nurse who meets Amy suggests that she wait for Jimmy to return from the restroom, referring to him as her “husband” (293). Because Amy is African American, or, rather, because she looks black, the nurse automatically assumes that Amy and Jimmy are not siblings, or related by blood, but rather assumes that any possible familial bond between them must be marital. While Amy is obviously disquieted by the confusion as she prepares to meet her brother for the first time, she nonetheless sits down and begins to anxiously imagine his face (293) (see plate 15). In a Töpfferian style, Ware renders Amy’s racial imagining of Jimmy as a sequence of white faces, each one representing different men possessed of varying personalities, dispositions, and intelligences. Though Amy is very much aware of the potential for physical differences among whites, which is why, in her anticipation, she cycles through so many different types of men, her racial imagination does tend to run in stock types: the overweight guy with glasses and bad hair, the clean-cut young man, the balding middle-ager.
It is here that the context of racialized images becomes of tantamount importance. Because the reader knows what Jimmy actually looks like, Amy’s racial imagining is ironic, in some cases, and humorous in others. As Amy’s face frames her imaginative construction of Jimmy’s white maleness, the reader is at the same time made aware of her decidedly African American facial features: her dark brown skin, wide nose, full lips, and thick, black hair. But because Amy and Jimmy are related by blood, despite the fact that their racial difference masks that relationship, the reader is forced to engage with Amy’s racial difference in terms of the history of the Corrigan family, in terms of a comics language bound by caricature, and in terms of the present moment of the narrative itself. In this way, Ware challenges the reader to become simultaneously aware of racial difference and racial representation without having to filter the reader’s awareness of that difference and representation through racist logic and imagery. After their evening at the hospital, Amy shows Jimmy photographs of their family. While examining a photo of their father as a young man, Amy, jokingly, remarks that Jimmy “obviously [. . .] look[s] more like him than I do, though” (325). As Jimmy scrutinizes the photograph, apparently unaware of the fact that Amy was calling attention to her racial difference in an effort to lighten the mood, she tries once again to draw Jimmy out, noting, “We’re practically related, right?” (328). There is something painfully ironic in this moment; as Amy and Jimmy examine their joint family history and as they attempt to come to terms with the other’s existence, neither one of them could possibly, and will never, come to understand the complexity of their being “practically related.” The next morning, Amy and Jimmy travel back to the hospital, where they learn that their father has passed away, leading Amy in a moment of extraordinary grief to reject Jimmy and order him to leave.
This, Ware seems to suggest at the end of his comic, is the real tragedy; the development of the American nation-state has required nothing less than the absolute disavowal of important and foundational family relationships that have been, and forever will be, lost to view. Race and racial difference, Ware suggests, were intended to deliberately conceal family relations, and the recovery of them is attainable only through difficult acts of imagination. However, because the reader is required to engage with racial difference, racial representation, and family relations through Ware’s blending of the histories of Irish immigrants and African slaves, both of whom struggled tremendously in their efforts to be considered American and to participate as citizen-subjects, the reader is made aware of the ways in which both groups came to be identified as both racial and national subjects. Through a careful reconsideration of the powerful potential of racial imagery, Ware likewise makes room for cautious exploration of racial difference in the comics form, expanding upon Töpffer’s original explication of the power of the comics language while working solidly within it. Ultimately, Ware’s project remains one of the most vibrant and compelling American considerations of race and immigration in the twenty-first century.
1. Chris Ware, The ACME Novelty Library Final Report to Shareholders and Saturday Afternoon Rainy Day Fun Book (New York: Pantheon, 2005); Chris Ware, qtd. in Gene Kannenberg, “The Comics of Chris Ware: Text, Image, and Visual Narrative Strategies,” in The Language of Comics: Word and Image, ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 174. To find the original quote, see Andrea Juno, Dangerous Drawings (New York: Juno, 1997), 93.
2. Ware, The ACME Report, i.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, 2008), 10.
6. Ibid., 25.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Superman, born Kal-El on the planet Krypton, is rocketed to Earth by his father, Jor-El, and subsequently adopted by a farmer and his wife. I am, in this way, reading him as an immigrant figure.
9. Ware, The ACME Report, 8.
10. Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2006): 45.
11. Rodolphe Töpffer, Enter: The Comics, trans. E. Wiese (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
12. Chris Ware, “Strip Mind,” Bookforum (April/May 2008): 45.
13. Chris Ware, interview with Juno, Dangerous Drawings, 58.
14. Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (New York: Pantheon, 2000), dust jacket. Much of the information concerning the Corrigan family history is included on an intricate family tree located on the inside cover of the dust jacket. For an analysis of Ware’s use of such diagrams, see Isaac Cates’s essay is this volume.
15. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43.
16. Ibid., 44. See also J. H. Van Evrie, The Negro and Negro Slavery (New York: Van Evrie and Horton, 1987), 103–28.
17. Ibid.
18. Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, 70. All further references to this text will be indicated in parentheses.