Life, Jim, but not as we know it

Welcome to the strange world of Chris Ware's anti-hero, Jimmy Corrigan. It's a world where reality is painful and dreams are the only escape. Not bad for a comic book, says David Thompson

The Chicago cartoonist Chris Ware is in danger of becoming famous. His meticulous, emotive artwork has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and recently graced the cover of the New Yorker magazine. The publication of his first book has drawn uncommon and widespread critical praise, with CNN hailing it as "Unlike any comic book you have ever seen", and Art Spiegelman, creator of the Holocaust comic Maus, announcing: "This new book seems to be another milestone in the demonstration of what comics can be." Ironically, the reason for this unassuming 34-year-old's imminent celebrity status is his long-running tale of a character who is defined by being entirely unremarkable.

Gestated over seven years, Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth was originally published as a comic strip in Chicago's alternative New City paper and in Ware's own self-published periodical The Acme Novelty Library. In keeping with its nostalgic tone, the book takes the form of an old-fashioned photo album, its extraordinary dust jacket ­ reminiscent of both early 20th-century Russian graphic design and an electronic circuit diagram ­ unfolding into a double-sided poster that includes, among other things, the lineage of the characters, a cut-out 3-D model of Jimmy, a pictorial history of the Great Chicago Fire, comic book storage instructions and a shopping list. As the collection's deluxe format (and 25,000 initial print run) will introduce Ware's work to the wider audience it deserves, one perhaps unaccustomed to the comic strip's formal conventions, the inside cover thoughtfully offers instructions on how to set about reading the pages that follow.

Essentially, a story of stillness and inhibition, the book's non-linear narrative moves between dreams and reality, through past, present and anticipated future, its various scenarios linked by a thematic counterpoint of sadness and magic whose patterns repeat across four generations. We join Jimmy's quest for love and connection when, at the age of 36, the tedium of his life (in which the purchase of an answering machine is an event of monumental proportions) is interrupted by the arrival of a letter from his unknown father. Against a backdrop of airport bars, convenience stores and anonymous, modular housing, Jimmy becomes involved in the lives of his father, an adopted sister, Amy, and an eponymous grandfather. As the history of Jimmy's forebears is uncovered, their tangled family lines reveal symmetries that span a century of American culture.

Despite its visual charm and notes of unhinged whimsy, Jimmy's cartoon world is one in which fathers abandon children, brutality is routine and loneliness remains insoluble. A fear of being disliked leaves Jimmy paralysed, alienated by grim urban surroundings that mock his hopes at every turn. While others find comfort in cruelty, indifference and sabotage, for Jimmy, joy is rare and almost always found in dreams; there, he is a precocious child and the world is full of mystery and promise. (The light from a bedside lamp takes the form of a luminous thread that floats through the open window and stretches out into the night. When the lamp is turned off, its thread is severed, the golden strand drifting free into the darkness.)

The chronicle of Jimmy's longing for an irretrievable past is occasionally punctuated by instructions for small and fiendishly complicated self-assembly toys ­ "for the friendless, the weak of heart and the ignored". One cut-and-paste diversion, a scale model of the Corrigan homestead, comes complete with trees, outhouse and two "imaginary giant grasshoppers". (Ware's Acme Novelty Library is peppered with sets of similarly elaborate plans, their titles including "How to Build Your Own Working Cat Head".) That these improbable paper devices look like they would actually work ­ were anyone sufficiently insane to construct them ­ serves to underline Ware's singularly exacting approach to his medium. Indeed, these incidental features perhaps best illuminate Ware's devotional, almost obsessive, craftsmanship ­ a rigour, commitment and mastery of form that stands in pointed contrast with the notional flummery of much modern institutional art.

Whereas comic book narratives typically compress all events into action, their frames truncating the passage of time, Ware prefers to linger, depicting thoughtful interludes and long, awkward silences of excruciating emptiness. (With nothing to say and so much unsaid, Jimmy sits on a couch as his new-found father prepares their first "family" breakfast. Looking at his plate, he discovers the strips of bacon have, pathetically, been arranged to spell out the word "Hi".)

While languorous in pace, the book is also dense in nuance and detail, from painstaking architectural renderings and intricate causal diagrams to subtle, shifting colour schemes of sepias and greys. Although Charles Burns, George Herriman and Winsor McCay are discernible points of inspiration, one might equally note the influence of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Islamic miniatures and Western roadside ideograms. Ware's experiments with the graphic form ­ in terms of size, framing, perspective and time ­ articulate inhibition, heightening the stifling banality of Jimmy's familial encounters and inviting plausible comparisons with the textual innovations of James Joyce.

Perhaps best read in a single sitting, Jimmy Corrigan is perceptive, poetic and sometimes profound, generously rewarding the absorption it requires.

'Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth' by Chris Ware will be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 14 June, £18.

Chris Ware Resources: http://quimby.gnus.org/warehouse/resources/resources.html