Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time:

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Thomas A. Bredehoft

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2006, pp.
869-890 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2007.0001

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v052/52.4bredehoft.html

Access provided by Universidad Complutense de Madrid (22 Feb 2016 22:55 GMT)
 Bredehoft 869

comics architecture,

f multidimensionality, and

time: chris ware's jimmy

corrigan: the smartest

kid on earth

Thomas A. Bredehoft

In an early passage of Chris Ware's graphic novel, Jimmy Cor-

rigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, the more-or-less conventional
sequence of panels and pages that the book presents to its readers
is interrupted by a page that shows a series of cut-outs: complicated
shapes that can be literally cut from the pages of the book and as-
sembled into a working zoetrope, a cylinder with a series of images
on the inside (visible from the outside through vertical slits) that can
be seen as a moving picture when the cylinder spins. The robot on
crutches that would be seen inside this particular zoetrope, as the
preceding pages make clear, is a figuration of one of the novel's title
characters, and the cut-out itself, as the instructions printed on the
reverse of the page indicate, is to be understood as a project or toy
that Jimmy himself attempts to construct while traveling on the plane
to meet the father he has never known. The inclusion of the zoetrope
at this point in the narrative, I believe, functions on several levels,
thematizing issues of narrative linearity, circularity, two-dimensional-
ity, and three-dimensionality that the book will return to at various
points and in various ways throughout.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 52 number 4, Winter 2006. Copyright for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
870 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
Specifically, of course, the cut-outs literally interrupt the se-
quence of panels; where the ordinary comics panels that precede the
cut-outs function normatively as images or representations of the
events narrated, the zoetrope (at least potentially) stands as the thing
itself: the reader can literally cut it out, construct it, spin it, and even
watch the proto-film that would result. At one level, then, the zoe-
trope represents a literalization of reader-character identification: the
reader who cuts out and assembles the zoetrope is literally engaged
in the same activity as Jimmy. But such an act of construction, even
if only accomplished in the imagination, also raises powerful ques-
tions about the relation between what I will call the architecture of
narration and the narration itself. Present in two-dimensions in Ware's
book, the three-dimensional zoetrope, if constructed, is capable only
of presenting a literally circular narrative of the robot on crutches,
as he takes the same two steps, over and over. The architecture of
the narrative device (in this case, the zoetrope) constrains the form
of the narrative that it can contain.
Jimmy Corrigan concerns the experiences of a grandson and
grandfather; both are named Jimmy Corrigan. In the primary nar-
rative, the younger Jimmy, abandoned by his father as an infant,
agrees as an adult to meet with his father, with the father eventually
dying during his visit. Interwoven with that narrative is the story of
the elder Jimmy, who is ultimately abandoned by his father on a visit
to Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. The location of that defin-
ing act of abandonment is surely intentional: on the rear endpaper
of the hardback edition of the book, the word "exposition" is itself
defined as "The main body of a work, esp. that which explicates a
main theme, or introduces a fundamental motif"and the definition
accompanies a drawing of the Columbian buildings. As even this
brief bit of word-play indicates, the novel frequently interrogates the
relationships between the architecture of the narrative and the nar-
rative itself. The metaphor of architecture is one that Ware himself
is clearly invested in:

In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by

experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music.
So that's one way to aesthetically experience comics. An-
other way is to pull back and consider the composition all
at once, as you would the faade of a building. You can
look at a comic as you would look at a structure that you
could turn around in your mind and see all sides of at once.
(qtd. in Raeburn 25)

The interchange here between the metaphors of music and archi-

tecture invokes the structural practice in comics of using space to
 Bredehoft 871
represent time, but Ware's ultimate recourse to the idea of a three-
dimensional structure in this passage marks a startling departure
from conventional associations between linear space and linear time.
Specifically, the notion of a musical beat invokes linear time, which
is usually expressed in comics in two-dimensional pages that are,
in turn, analogous to "the faade of a building." But Ware's compo-
sitional "structure," his final comment suggests, operates in a third
dimension, and in this essay, I explore just how the architecture of
comics negotiates the relationships between time, two-dimensional,
and three-dimensional space in the service of narrative, using Jimmy
Corrigan as my central example.
The functioning of the zoetrope itself can stand as an intro-
duction to some of the key issues. Because of its presentation of a
seemingly "moving picture," the zoetrope has often been identified
as a precursor to the technology of film. In a discussion of an image
of a zoetrope used in Max Ernst's A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the
Veil (1930), Rosalind Krauss notes that the users of such devices
necessarily have a "double vantage," seeing the apparent moving
picture while simultaneously seeing the entire apparatus, with its
multiple pictures (58). "Uniting the experience of both inside and
outside," she writes, "is the beat or pulse that flickers through the
zootropic field" (59). Krauss's notion of a visual "beat or pulse" recalls
Ware's musical analogy, and her suggestion that this pulse positions
the viewer "both within the scene as its active viewer and outside it
as its passive witness" recalls how readers of Jimmy Corrigan both
see the zoetrope cut-outs as two-dimensional images and (at least
potentially or imaginatively) see it as a working zoetrope (60).1 The
"double vantage" implied by the two- and three-dimensional struc-
tures at this early point in the novel sets the stage for a number of
the book's narrative concerns.
Importantly, however, for our consideration of the narrative,
we must note that the three-dimensional screen of the zoetrope (in
contrast to the two-dimensional screen of the cinema) cannot readily
accommodate a narrative that escapes the essential circularity of its
mechanism. Conversely, the two-dimensional screen of the cinematic
film, while also presenting a sequence of two-dimensional images
to the viewer, is powerfully constrained by the logic of sequentiality:
if filmic images cease to be presented in time-sequence, the image
freezes or the film itself stops. In this sense, the time-sequencing of
images appears to be an unavoidable characteristic of the architecture
of film itself.2 As these divergent architectures constrain their respec-
tive narratives' relationship to time and sequence, Jimmy's zoetrope
implicitly raises the question of how the particular architecture of
comics does and does not constrain comics narratives in terms of
time and sequence.
872 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
Sequentiality, of course, appears to be virtually definitive of
narrative, at some level, and surely the simplest narratives take the
form "X happened, then Y." In practice, however, the sequentiality
or ordering of the events being narrated and the sequentiality of the
narration may have little or nothing in common: "Y happened after
X." As such examples suggest, then, all but the simplest narratives
have some fairly complicated relationship between two kinds of se-
quentiality: the sequence of events happening (chronology) and the
sequence in which they are narrated (narrative line). These examples,
of course, also serve as a reminder that narration is often accom-
plished entirely within the realm of language, in which the narrative
line corresponds (at some level) to the sequence of words.3
In the architectures of language and the cinema, then, the
narrative line in both modes involves the crucial element of time-
sequencing, especially if we understand written narratives as being
time-sequenced by the actions of our eyes, hands, or vocal apparatus
in the reading process.4 The nature of time-sequencing itself, however,
whether in chronology or narrative line, is that time is uni-directional
and irreversible: time passes, or we pass through time. The underly-
ing metaphor, of course, is that time functions like one dimension of
space: the narrative line is linear, precisely because language itself
(or the procession of images that we see in film) is sequenced uni-
directionally in time. In contrast to film or language-based narration,
however, the medium of comics offers the possibility of a narrative
mode that disrupts time-sequencing itself, and it appears to be the
case that it is the specifically two-dimensional architecture of the
comics page that allows comics narration to break the linearity of a
time-sequenced narrative line. The crucial two-dimensionality of the
comics page is, of course, often commented on, but it is equally clear
that much important critical work still needs to be done.5 In particular,
thinking about the two-dimensionality of comics and its narrative
possibilities has sometimes been more enthusiastic than rigorous:
in 2001, for example, the editors of a collection of critical essays on
comics made the following claim: "The second key difference between
words and images was noted by Gotthold Lessing in the eighteenth
century. It is that while words must be spoken or written one after
the other in time and are apprehended sequentially, the elements of
an image are arranged side by side in space and are apprehended
all at once" (Varnum and Gibbons xi).6 Such a claim may have made
sense in the eighteenth century, but as Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and
others remind us, while images may form on the retina in more-or-
less fully-formed and instantaneous completeness, the apprehension
of vision is anything but a straightforward and natural process, but
rather one which is both constructed and contingent.7
 Bredehoft 873
Importantly, the two-dimensionality of the comics page operates
differently from the two-dimensionality of individual panels that are
intended to be read sequentially, because individual pages generally
feature multiple panels. Thus, the two-dimensionality of the comics
page also differs from the two-dimensionality of the cinematic screen,
which is more properly analogous to the single comics panel. While
films can mimic some of the effects of the comics page by employing
split screens and other devices, this crucial architectural difference is
nevertheless very real. In this context, it is useful to consider Figure
1, a simple visual joke that McCloud uses to make a similar point in
his important book Understanding Comics. Here, in a six-panel page
made up of two tiers of three panels each, Matt Feazell's Incred-
ible Mr. Spot finds he is broke and uses a fishing line to pull money
from his own wallet in a later (and lower) panel. In this comic, the
vertical juxtaposition of two panels that readers understand to be
sequenced in time (via the conventional left-to-right, top-to-bottom
ordering of comics panels) allows the joke to function. Specifically,
the two-dimensionality of the page allows panels that represent dif-
ferent moments in time (according to the narrative line) to be verti-
cally juxtaposed (raising the possibility that they are contiguous in
time). The fishing line, which crosses the boundary between panels,
stands out as the very image of the way in which this joke operates
by toying with conventional interpretive rules.
But it is crucial to be more specific here, as a third type of time-
sequencing is at issue: the logic of causality, in which causes always
precede effects. Except in cases like the one at hand (or, for example,
in time-travel narratives), causality usually overlaps chronology: the
order of events is hardly separable from the logic of cause and effect.
But in the case of Feazell's page, the page layout and fishing line serve
to disrupt causality (thus allowing effects to precede causes) precisely
because the vertical juxtaposition of two panels clashes with the use
of horizontal space to indicate time-sequencing.8 The two-dimensional
architecture of the comics page allows the simultaneous presence on
the page of panels depicting various points within a chronological or
narrative sequence; Mr. Spot's fishing line offers one image of how
such two-dimensionality can be mobilized to challenge at least some
familiar interpretive rules.
A different aspect of two-dimensionality, however, can be seen
in Figure 2, from Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jos Marza n,
Jr.'s Y: The Last ManUnmanned, a recent comics text that depicts
a fictional earth devastated by a plague that kills all terrestrial males
except the protagonist Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand.9 En-
countering pages 30 and 31, a two-page spread or opening, readers
must negotiate ten panels simultaneously in two dimensions. At one
874 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time

Figure 1

The Incredible Mr. Spot, by Matt Feazell. Used by permission of Matt Feazel.

Figure 2

The "NOW" Moment. From Y: The Last ManUnmanned Brian K. Vaughan

& Pia Guerra. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission of DC Comics.
 Bredehoft 875
level, the narrative here is explicitly, almost mechanically, linear in
terms of its time-sequencing, as the panel captions on page 30 literally
count down the seconds one-by-one until the "NOW" moment at the
top of page 31, and with succeeding panels seemingly continuing to
occur at one-second intervals. But the middle three tiers of panels, it
is important to notice, feature horizontally juxtaposed images involv-
ing identical scenes and characters: these panels ask to also be read
(or sequenced by readers) horizontally. Here the unit of composition
is the two-page opening, rather than the single page, but the logic
of juxtaposition clearly operates in both dimensions: vertically and
horizontally. And, importantly, neither dimension has clear precedence
over the other. While we might think that the logic of chronology, so
explicitly invoked in the captions on page 30, urges us to read both
pages vertically, the horizontal juxtapositions in the middle panels
(and that of Yorick, in the first panel of page 30, with the "NOW"
panel at the top of page 31) serve to indicate an alternative narrative
logic and to identify Yorick as the character on which the narrative
(and its "NOW") are focused.10 This sort of two-dimensionality, it
must be noted, is quite different from the two-dimensionality of a
single image or film frame: the Unmanned opening is simultaneously
sequenced in both dimensions, and readers are expected to perceive
both sequences.11
The two-dimensionality of this opening might call to mind the
dual functioning of Latin magic squares, which date back at least to the
Middle Ages and are preserved as magical formulas or curiosities. One
such example is printed by Gunnar Liestl, in his discussion of narra-
tive, linearity, and the multiple linearities at issue in hypertext:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
R O T A S.

Liestl discusses such examples in the context of the limited sorts of

"bidirectional linearity" available in non-hypertextual writing (109).
The textual example and the comics example, however, operate
somewhat differently. While the magic square can be read (and, in
some sense, demands to be read) in multiple directions, its function-
ing almost certainly lies outside the realm of language entirely: at the
least, no reading of the magic square can be understood as narrative.
Indeed, the association of such puzzles with magica heightened
realm of linguistic alterityreminds us that the very import of such
puzzles lies in their failure to adhere to normal linguistic expectations,
precisely by so powerfully disrupting the (mono)linearity normally
876 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
inherent in language. To put it in other terms, the magic square lies
outside of language precisely because language is so powerfully
time-sequenced, and the multidirectional readability of the square
is virtually irreconcilable with that time-sequencing. Thus, while the
magic square and the example from Y: The Last ManUnmanned
both serve to enforce a two-dimensional reading protocol, the magic
square is radically disruptive, while the comics example, conversely,
is constructive, adding to the narrative effect of the ongoing narra-
tion. Even here, however, we should probably understand the effect
of the Unmanned opening as invoking two different narrative lines,
operating in two dimensions (horizontal and vertical), a kind of bi-
linearity or dual sequencing.12
Ware's comics, as his comments above about two- and three-
dimensional metaphors for reading comics suggest, are frequently
characterized by complex and intricate structures; his works often
utilize the space available on the comics page to especially power-
ful effect. Ware is widely seen as one of the most influential comics
artists working, and his book Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth is at one level a narrative meditation on the twentieth-century
American family. Several of the book's most crucial narrative se-
quences significantly depend on Ware's two- and three-dimensional
interventions. A close reading of an example of each sort of strategy
will clarify what is at stake.
Some fifteen or so pages after the zoetrope example discussed
above, Ware uses a particularly interesting example of a two-dimen-
sional narrative structure (Figure 3).13 Here, the page as a whole
narrates the history of a photograph in a drawer beside Jimmy's
chair.14 At the beginning of the page (that is, the upper left corner;
Ware begins by assuming or invoking the usual spatial conventions),
we see a sequence of panels that corresponds to a filmic zoom: a
cityscape in the first panel becomes a view from a window, which in
turn is revealed as the window in Jimmy's apartment. These three
panels, sequenced across the top of the page and down the right-
hand side, are linked (in an almost Escher-esque fashion) across the
panel boundaries by elements of the panels that are both continuous
and discontinuous: drawn as one element, but clearly representing
different things in the various panels, as a billboard frame becomes
a window frame and so on. Importantly, these continuous elements
demand that readers abandon the left-to-right, top-to-bottom con-
vention, as they cause readers to turn a corner and begin reading
down the right-hand side of the page. Following this sequence leads
readers to a second sequence of smaller panels, connected to one
another by lines of background color, in a fashion similar to the con-
nections seen in the first three panels: we see first a drawer, a flat-
 Bredehoft 877

Figure 3

The view from Jimmy's window. From Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, copyright
2000, 2003 by Mr. Chris Ware. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc.

tened photograph that (we conclude) lies in the drawer, and then a
series of increasingly clear drawings of the photograph, completed by
a double panel that shows that the photograph in Jimmy's frame has
been torn to remove the image of his father, with an arrow connecting
the drawing of the missing part to its current location in a garbage
dump. The torn picture appears to be largely included within the space
marked out by a set of dotted lines labeled "Now," spanning upward
to reach to the lower corners of the very first panel on the page: the
entire sequence of panels so far discussed, then, is probably to be
interpreted as representing a single point in time.
But the "Now" moment, through its associated dotted lines,
also stands connected to a series of three tiny vignettes: Jimmy, his
mother, and his father. Each of these vignettes falls within a horizon-
tal series of tiny panels, reading chronologically right to left, like the
panels immediately above dealing with the photograph. These three
right-to-left sequences summarize the lives of the three characters,
878 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
referencing the moment of the torn photograph, Jimmy's conception,
and even Jimmy's paternal grandparents. Specifically, arrows call to
our attention that the vignettes of the three characters at an earlier
point in time show them as they appear in the photograph itself: the
"now" captured and frozen by the photograph marks an earlier stage
in the lives of the three characters. A drawing of a second photograph,
showing the grandparents, appears at the bottom right of the page,
unconnected to any other panel on this page.
At least four narrative lines, then, are clearly indicated on
this page: the timeless narration of placewhich takes us from the
cityscape to the photo in Jimmy's drawer to the depiction of the photo
as torn, with one half in the frame and the other in the dumpand
the three time-lines that show the lives of Jimmy, his mother, and
his father. Importantly, however, there is clearly a fifth narrative line:
while the life-line of Jimmy's father must be understood as reading
right-to-left to narrate his history from birth to death, Ware's page-
layout, which on one level enforces the right-to-left reading, also
demands a left-to-right reading of the same sequence of panels for
a different narrative line: the left-to-right reading serves to introduce
Jimmy's paternal grandparents and their house, which will be taken
up on the next page as the primary subject of Ware's narration. The
images of Jimmy's grandparents at the right-hand end of his time
line are drawn to correspond precisely with how they appear in the
photograph in the corner, although here no arrows appear to make
the link quite as explicit.
Ultimately, the narrative effect of the page demands that we
read all of these narrative lines simultaneously: to read this page
effectively does not depend on choosing a correct sequence for the
juxtaposed images or a correct sequence of narrative lines, but to
recognize that each individual sequence and line is insufficient to the
narrative purposes of the page as a whole.15 The photograph stands
at the center of a variety of narrative lines here, involving various
characters and pointing both forward and backward in time. Crucially,
however, it is the two-dimensional layout of the page and its disrup-
tion of a linear reading convention that allows the multiple narrative
lines and directions to function simultaneously.
When the context of the photograph of Jimmy's grandparents
that stands at the lower right corner of this page is wordlessly nar-
rated on the following page, we see Jimmy's grandparents entering
their home, on the wall of which hangs yet another photograph. In a
series of panels that move (again) right-to-left, we see that this lat-
ter photograph shows Jimmy's great-grandfather, William Corrigan,
on the day that he glazes the windows at a particular address, 1708
Peachwood, as we learn from a series of panels showing the invoice
 Bredehoft 879
for the work in his hand. A further series of panels shows William
Corrigan glazing the windows at that address, wrapping up with a
reversal of perspective, in which we see his work from the inside,
culminating with a view out of the window, a view recognizable as the
view from Jimmy's own window at the beginning of the previous page.
The two-page sequence, then, begins and ends with the view from the
same window (though decades apart). The circularity of the narrative
of these two photographs is echoed by the way Jimmy unknowingly
looks through a window installed by his own great-grandfather, liter-
ally inhabiting a space once filled by his ancestor. The generational
connections that are hidden from Jimmy but revealed to readers in
these pages serve as a central theme of the novel.
Ware's three-dimensional narrative interventions also function
to thematize issues of time, knowledge, and space, although the
introduction of the third dimension alters the relationships among
these issues. Pages 206207, featuring a set of cut-outs reminiscent
of the zoetrope at the beginning of the book, can serve as a focal
point for discussing Ware's use of the third dimension.16 Here the
cut-outs represent models of the elder Jimmy Corrigan's childhood
home (that is, the home of William Corrigan, the glazier of 1708
Peachwood), complete with horse, coach, coffin, trees and shrubs,
andperhaps most surprising of all"imaginary giant grasshoppers"
(207). As with the zoetrope, the presence of these cut-outs ideally
offers readers the opportunity to literally construct a part of the scene
of the narrative in three dimensions.
The page immediately preceding the cut-outs of Jimmy's home
(Figure 4) stands as a different example of the complex relationship
between narrative line and chronology in the two-dimensional comics
page: here, a sequence of twelve panels appears in three tiers of four
panels each and the page as a whole depicts a game of hide-and-
seek that takes place around the house, all twelve panels from the
same viewpoint and all twelve working together without overlap to
show the house's entire lot.17 This use of multiple panels to show a
single large scene in which characters appear repeatedly at different
moments of time is also a comics convention; generally, each panel
serves as an individual place and time that, in the context of a page
or multi-panel sequence, appears visually as a single space or scene.
The panels on this particular page are accompanied by an explicit
narration in cursive script, the syntax of which indicates a normative
linear narrative sequence for the panels: left to right, then top to bot-
tom. But the first two panels of the second tier are explicitly labeled,
within that narration, as representing a point in time "A half century
earlier," with the third panel showing an intermediate moment, when
Jimmy's home was literally under construction, beams and joists
880 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time

Figure 4

A game of hide-and-seek. From Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, copyright

2000, 2003 by Mr. Chris Ware. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a
division of Random House, Inc.

still exposed. In the terms I used above, this page exemplifies the
tension between narrative line and chronological line: the narrative
line here easily breaks with chronological sequencing, while remain-
ing relentlessly linear. But the characters, Jimmy and a childhood
friend, appear within the panels from earlier points in time: the logic
of chronology and causality are both explicitly contradicted, and we
must read these panels as literally representing only the narrative
line, and failing to represent chronology.18 In short, although this
page plays tricks with perspective, time, and chronology, it never-
theless continues to depend powerfully on linearity: in this case, the
unbroken linearity of the narrative line, which here overrules other
possible organizing linearities.
Coming immediately after this page, the cut-outs of Jimmy's
house, which pick up on the theme of the construction of the house
from the intermediate panel of the second tier, offer a response to
that page's two-dimensional linearity by invoking the third spatial
 Bredehoft 881
dimension (Figure 5). In part, this shift is accomplished because the
presentation of the cut-outs implicitly suggests a change of genre:
from comics, a narrative genre, to paper toy, a non-narrative genre.
Both genres, however, employ a crucially similar architecture: two-
dimensional drawings accompanied by text. It is this architectural
similarity that allows Ware to subsume the paper toy within his own
comics architecture and to allow it to function within the narrative
of the book as a whole. But despite this subordination of genres,
the use of text on these pages operates somewhat differently from
Jimmy Corrigan's otherwise typical mode of narration, and a reading
of these cut-outs demands attention to two separate but intertwined
aspects of these pages: the function and content of the text (including
a "Note" and "Instructions" as well as two introductory paragraphs)
and the implicit three-dimensionality of the toys.
Because the cut-outs appear on both sides of a single leaf of
the book, it is actually impossible to cut them out and build them, at
least without employing some method of reproduction or cutting up
two copies of the book. And since (as will be seen below) the type-
set notes and instructions on page 206 are explicitly presented as
instructions and commentary directed towards the reader of Jimmy
Corrigan, they are probably to be interpreted as being presented in
the voice of the narrator, as are the "General Instructions" appear-
ing on the front endpapers of the hardback edition. These various
instructions, however, contrast with Ware's hand-lettered copyright
and printing information on the title page, which clearly open the
door for a compromised or collapsed distinction between author/artist
and narrator: the title page and numerous other narratorial inter-
ventions are clearly drawn, like the transitional word "Fortunately"
which begins page 205. Such drawing and hand-lettering more or
less explicitly links the activities of the narrator to the artist's own
hand, as in the use of cursive script in the bulk of the narration on
page 205. The typeset instructions on page 206, then, generate a
mechanical sort of distancing effect that is aligned with the shift to
the paper toy genre. This distancing is hindered, however, because
pages 206207 are so obviously impractical as a paper toy, being
printed on a single leaf.
The instructions that accompany the cut-outs on page 206,
however, note a different difficulty: "Though admittedly printed too
small to be constructed with any degree of satisfaction or pluck,
pantographic or electrostatic enlargement of all primary shapes and
careful study of the construction principia will potentially reward the
concerted craftsman with models of relative usefulness." Here the
instructions' references to obsolete technologiesalong with the
fulsome prose itself, complete with apparent malapropismsencour-
882 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time

Figure 5

Page 206. From Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, copyright 2000, 2003 by
Mr. Chris Ware. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc.

age us to interpret these instructions as themselves deriving from

the turn of the century: another distancing effect. But the text also
announces that the cut-outs' only context is the novel: "It should
be readily apparent to even the most casual reader of this novella
that supplied with it are a handful of piquant and diverting 'cut-out'
reference guides." But where the model zoetrope at the beginning
of the book served to open up the possibility of reader-character
identification (as readers could construct the same model as Jimmy),
no such identification is possible here, as none of the characters en-
gage in building these models. Indeed neither does the reader need
to build them, as the instructions also note, "It is, needless to say,
not entirely necessary to complete [the models] to fully appreciate
the story in question," although no doubt rewarding to those who
do. This disclaimer, of course, serves to invoke its opposite: failing
to build the models is indeed failing to read the narrative with all the
"rivulets and tributaries" of its broader scope (206).
 Bredehoft 883
A further disclaimer, however, calls attention to a different is-
sue that concerns this three-dimensional excursus: "Any student of
the history of the neighborhood in question will note that the recon-
struction presented here is not without its inconsistencies; based,
as it is, on reminiscence and fragmentary recollection, some details
reproduced may possibly contradict and/or overlap one another"
(206). Through the invocation of "reminiscence and fragmentary
recollection," the construction of the models here is compared to the
(re)construction of the story itself: through the models, the reader is
implicated in the act of reconstruction itself. Instead of encouraging
identification between Jimmy and the reader, these models suggest
a mode of identification that operates to link the reader and Ware,
especially as the models printed on pages 206207 correspond to
models actually built by Ware and shown in Raeburn's book.19 But
in suggesting that reading Jimmy Corrigan corresponds to an act of
reconstruction, these cut-outs remind readers that the entire enter-
prise of comicsindeed of much two-dimensional art itselfinvolves
a mode of representation in which the three-dimensional world as
it exists is pictorially presented in only two dimensions and that the
three-dimensional world thus represented is available only through
reconstruction. The invitation to reconstruct Jimmy's home into three
dimensions thus offers just such an opportunity for readers to at least
partially reclaim some aspect of three-dimensionality. But, as the
note also warns, "some details reproduced may possibly contradict
and/or overlap one another."20
The printing of the two pages of cut-outs on a single leaf guar-
antees that there are, indeed, overlapping and contradictory details:
the models can only be built in the imagination, or if we read (and
cut up) not one book but two (or one book and a photocopy). But the
comment about overlapping details should not be read at a merely
literal level; it is certainly intended to function at least as powerfully
as a comment on the problems inherent in the construction not of
a model, but of a narrative, or a book. It may be the case that such
issues could, in fact, be raised without the use of a three-dimensional
narrative intervention, but in Jimmy Corrigan, there is a thematic
link between the three-dimensionality of the models and the narra-
tively thematized issues of construction and recollection. The fullest
expression of this link may, in fact, lie in the seemingly problematic
"imaginary giant grasshoppers" that are included in the model sche-
matics on page 207.
The problem with the grasshoppers on page 207 is that they
serve to introduce a third mode of reconstruction to the explicitly
invoked modes of reminiscence and recollection: imaginary recon-
struction. In the context of pages 206 and 207, the imagination in
question appears to belong to the author or narrator, although readers
884 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
may well imagine placing the giant grasshoppers in various places
on or within their finished model. But some twenty or thirty pages
further on in the book, the giant grasshoppers make an unexpected
appearance, in a dream that the elder Jimmy Corrigan has about his
dead grandmother: the "imaginary giant grasshoppers," it seems,
belong to Jimmy's imagination, and retrospectively, we understand
the reminiscence and recollection that underlie the construction of
the narrative and the reconstruction of the house to be, at least in
part, his.
The oddness of this moment should not be understated. The
constant visual depiction of the main characters in most comics works
(including Jimmy Corrigan), especially when combined with a general
absence of viewpoint drawing, in which we see through a character's
eyes, encourages readers to interpret the visual dimension of comics
as functioning as a variety of third-person narration.21 The appear-
ance of the giant imaginary grasshoppers in the elder Jimmy's dream,
however, serves to collapse the implied distance between the implied
narrator and Jimmy because it becomes unclear if the imagination
invoked belongs to the character or the author. The dream in which
the grasshoppers appear is drawn with Jimmy himself visually pres-
ent, and we see both grasshoppers and grandmother over Jimmy's
shoulder. Either it is a dream in which Jimmy dreams of seeing himself,
or we conclude that Jimmy's imagination/dream is in fact an artifact
of the narrator's imagination. Just as the cut-out models invite a
collapsing of the distinction between author or narrator and reader
as they invite participation in the construction/reconstruction of the
scene, Ware also uses the models to collapse the distance between
narrator and character.22
On the one hand, then, Ware uses such three-dimensional ir-
ruptions into his two-dimensional comics in order to challenge a fa-
miliar set of boundary lines: the ones conventionally drawn between
author and character, author and reader, reader and character. In
this sense, Ware's two- and three-dimensional narrative interventions
are put to the same kinds of ends as other contemporary challenges
or responses to traditional narrative linearity. But the reclamation
of three dimensions operative in these examples does even more,
presenting a challenge to the pervasive metaphor that links time to
space in the first place.
As my discussions of two-dimensionality in the examples from
Feazell, Vaughan, and Ware suggest, the two-dimensional architec-
ture of the comics page readily accommodates itself to being read or
interpreted as embodying or employing one, two, or even multiple
simultaneous narrative lines. Our perception of the comics page,
apparently, remains primarily linear or multilinear, and even Ware's
 Bredehoft 885
contorted and complex visual narrative of the history of Jimmy's
photograph and apartment can only, as discussed above, lead to a
complex (though simultaneous) multilinearity in our reading. Nev-
ertheless, such multilinearity can be used to remarkable effect, and
it clearly represents a crucial structural aspect of the peculiar archi-
tecture of comics in general.
In Jimmy Corrigan's cut-out pages, however, our experience of
three-dimensional space allows the comic to operate on a different
basis. Implicit in the architecture of most comics is our tendency to
interpret a two-dimensional image (a comics panel, say, or the pho-
tograph kept in Jimmy's drawer) as representing a moment in time,
a "now," and that perception underlies both linear and multilinear
readings of comics panels and pages. A three-dimensional object,
on the other hand, feelssubjectively, at leastenduring, virtually
incapable of representing only a moment in time, precisely because
it occupies space.23 In a book deeply preoccupied with the passing
of time, Ware's three-dimensional models, even if constructed only
in the imagination, hint at the possibility of altering or even halt-
ing the flow of narrative time-sequence, precisely by virtue of their
three-dimensionality.24 At least in this sense, they seem to offer a
new take on narrative's very relationship to linearity and chronology,
and the extensive and detailed notes, comments, and instructions
that accompany these models seem to acknowledge the centrality
of these pages within the book as a whole. Jimmy Corrigan's themes
include not only the passing of time and the recurrence or circularity
of events within the passage of time, but also endurance and lack of
change as well, and the three-dimensional cut-outs seem especially
operative in the expression of that theme, as they seem to (briefly,
at least) halt the flow of narrative time.
The medium of comics clearly has the potential to employ
two- and three-dimensional structures in order to defamiliarize or
challenge our habit of understanding the narrative line as pervasively
linear and sequenced in time. And as the examples I have discussed
demonstrate, the architecture of the comics pageand that of the
comic bookopens the door for new configurations of the relationship
between chronology, narrative line, and time-sequence. The two-di-
mensionality of the comics page can be used to allow a single group
of panels to be read simultaneously in more than one linear sequence,
calling into question the very idea of a single narrative line. Jimmy
Corrigan uses images of circularity and repetition to echo narrative
themes in the work, but those images often partake of complex visual
and narrative structures that simply cannot be contained within a
single narrative line, or within the two dimensions of a single page.
Whether through their participation in multilinear and two-dimensional
886 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
narrative or through their invocation of the third spatial dimension,
Ware's pages demonstrate how the unique architecture of comics
enables these specific challenges to narrative linearity.

Notes
I want to thank the numerous friends and colleagues who supported
and helped shape this essay, especially Mark Berrettini, Michael
Kramp, John Loftis, Erin Jordan, Ann Little, and Brian Luskey.
1. See Crary's "Techniques of the Observer" for a fascinating discus-
sion of zoetropes and other, related devices: "A crucial feature of
these optical devices," he writes, "is the undisguised nature of their
operational structure and the form of subjection they entail" (132).
As Krauss's notes indicate, her remarks on the zoetrope are informed
by Crary's essay.
2. This is not to say, of course, that individual films cannot make use
of freeze frames or time spans without the projection of any image;
rather I am suggesting that such interventions work precisely by
shiftingperhaps only temporarilythe form of the work into another
realm, such as still photography or sound.
3. For a fascinating discussion of some of these issues in a different
context, see the beginning chapters of White's The Content of the
Form. As a historian, White is concerned to discuss "the fantasy that
real events are properly represented when they can be shown to
display the formal coherency of a story" (4). Narration and sequence,
for White, stand in a particular relationship; he describes one of the
central understandings of contemporary historiography as suggest-
ing that "events must be not only registered within the chronological
framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is
to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that
they do not possess as mere sequence" (5). It is precisely the dif-
ference between narrative and chronological sequence ("the formal
coherence of a story" that narrative seemingly possesses) that com-
municates an order of meaning for White, as opposed to an order of
mere sequentiality.
4. It is important to note that a reader/viewer can also always choose to
disrupt the time-sequencing of both film and written language through
a variety of means: by simply pausing; by rereading or rewinding/
reviewing; by skipping back or ahead; by putting the book aside,
leaving the theater, and so forth. My point about the architecture
of these forms, however, is that readers engaging in such activities
are clearly working against the grain of the forms themselves, which
have a normative time-sequenced basis.
5. Interestingly, Pascal Lefvre's comment on this topic, "the page as a
whole (a typical unit of a comic's conventional format) invites us to
 Bredehoft 887
contemplate non-linear relations between the panels," appears within
the section of his essay titled "Nonnarrative aspects." As I hope my
arguments in this essay make clear, I believe that linearity and nar-
rative are very much at issue in the two-dimensionality of the comics
page. In the context of Ware in particular, it may be appropriate to
note one of Scott McCloud's comments on the unity of the page:
"[with more abstract drawing styles] it's the unifying properties of
design that make us more aware of the page as a whole, rather than
its individual components, the panels" (91). Ware's unique style,
of course, is frequently attributed in part to "his skill as a graphic
designer" (Raeburn 11), and his interest in the page in particular as
a compositional unit is clearly a central one.
6. Later in their Introduction, discussing Kannenberg's essay on Ware,
Varnum and Gibbons make the cryptic comment "Kannenberg shows
that sequence, if present, may not be linear" (xvi). It is difficult for
me to see how sequence can be anything but linear.
7. See Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," Crary, "Modernizing Vision,"
and the other essays in the collection edited by Foster.
8. To be precise, it is not only horizontal space that is implicated in
the time-sequencing of comics panels, but the left-to-right, (then)
top-to-bottom ordering that is borrowed from the conventions of
Western prose writing. In this system, the right hand boundary of
the page, which causes us to drop down a line and begin again at the
left, is understood as essentially standing in for the space between
two horizontally juxtaposed words or panels, with no other implicit
meaning or significance.
9. I want to thank my former student, Ed Day, for calling this particular
example to my attention.
10. Likewise, an attempt to give higher priority to the horizontal juxta-
positions in this opening must also fail, as the sequence shown in
the middle panels of page 31, in which the various male characters
progressively grab their throats, begin to spit, and then to vomit
blood, must be read vertically, as demonstrating the progression of
the deadly plague that has attacked them.
11. It is important to point out, as McCloud makes clear, that many
single comics panels do involve or demand a sequenced linear read-
ing, especially when they include speech or thought balloons, which
superimpose the time-based linearity of language over the otherwise
seemingly static quality of an image. In panels with multiple speakers,
then, readers sometimes find a single image accompanying a quite
extensive time-sequenced narration. See McCloud's Chapter 4.
12. A different kind of textual bilinearity is exemplified by the acrostic
poem, in which the first letters of each line (and sometimes the
last letters as well) can be read vertically as spelling out words. But
again, while reading clearly happens in two directions in such texts,
the narratives of such poems do not demand or invoke simultaneous
bilinearity, as does the comics example.
888 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
13. Ware's book is almost entirely unpaginated (for the exception, see
below), and I take this feature to be one of the book's many chal-
lenges to the traditional architecture of the book, a topic that deserves
fuller treatment in its own right.
14. In his discussion of this page, Brad Prager describes it as a "map
strip," one of "Ware's quasi-mathematical diagrams and flow-charts"
depicting "the genesis of Jimmy and others in the text." Prager sug-
gests that these "map strips" are like Mobius strips, writing of this
one in particular, "At first this seems like an 'origin' story, but there
is neither beginning nor end to speak of" (206). As my reading will
suggest, I think this page and the one that follows it have a purpose-
ful, rather than merely unending, circularity.
15. Indeed, it is important to note that only Jimmy's father's chrono-
logical timeline ends (with a gravestone) on the page in question,
foreshadowing his death at the end of the novel, while Jimmy and
his mother survive. The right-to-left reading of Jimmy's father's life
line is therefore as necessary to the meaning of the page as the left-
to-right reading.
16. As noted above, the book itself is almost entirely unpaginated, and
so when readers reach pages 206207 (which are explicitly labeled
"Pages 206207" on page 206) this labeling itself serves as a kind of
reminder or invocation of this aspect of the book's physical existence.
Crucially, however, if we understand pages 206207 as being the two
pages of cut-outs (which seems to be the clear implication), page 206
is a recto and 207 is a verso, in contradiction of the regular pagina-
tion convention, which associates odd numbers with rectos. Here,
too, Ware challenges the typical architecture of the book form.
17. Raeburn suggests that Ware is especially influenced by the comics
of Frank King for this technique, reprinting a 1930 page of "Gasoline
Alley" for comparison. The King page that Raeburn reprints, how-
ever, operates in the typical fashion: the reappearance of the main
character in each panel indicates the sequencing of panels in time
unambiguously.
18. As Raeburn puts it in his comments on this page, the characters have
"time-travelled back along with the narrator" (73).
19. Note Raeburn's explanation of Ware's motive in building these models:
"In prose a writer can describe one setting in infinite ways, but in
naturalistic comics a writer has to ensure that he draws his setting
exactly the same, time after time. Ware built this model to help him
keep his facts straight" (73).
20. It is worth noting that the root sense of "recollection" (from Latin
"legere") means "to draw together." The same Latin root, of course,
also means "to read," suggesting another link between the act of
reconstruction, the building of these models, and the act of read-
ing.
 Bredehoft 889
21. To be sure, there are moments in Jimmy Corrigan when we see
through a character's eyes, but the book presents Jimmy before our
eyes with an almost obsessive regularity. He is often drawn a dozen
or more times on a page, and sometimes appears in twenty-five or
more panels on a single page, reinforcing the feeling of a predomi-
nantly third-person narrative format.
22. It seems clear that blurring such boundaries is, in fact, one of Ware's
abiding concerns in this novel. The directions for constructing the
zoetrope that Jimmy attempts to build while he flies to meet his
father, for example, read (in part): "Don't use any more glue than
necessary and keep your hands and clothing clean. Don't touch the
person next to you, or yourself, or Mom. No! Pay close attention to
the woman's instructioningback to business. Class passengerscut
outcut out of paper like before." Here the zoetrope directions, which
are hand-lettered by Ware in a style intended to visually recall the
printed instructions of this sort of paper toy, turn out to be interlinked
with Jimmy's own internal monologue and the speech of the flight
attendant. Although visually presented as construction instructions,
the text serves to collapse at least the distance between narrative
voice and character voice. Again, the problem of distinguishing be-
tween Ware as author on the one hand and the narrator of Jimmy
Corrigan on the other is made especially difficult because Ware not
only draws all the images but hand-letters virtually all of the text,
and the constant visual evidence of the author's hand at work seems
to minimize the distance between author and narrator. This dynamic
of comics clearly deserves fuller consideration.
23. Interestingly, McCloud makes a similar point about the nature of the
comics panel: "Most of us are so used to the standard rectangular
format that a 'borderless' panel . . . can take on a timeless qual-
ity" (102). The architecture of the panel itself, apparently, is thus
implicated in the logic of time-sequencing, and the sequence can be
partially interrupted by the borderless panel (which, of course, is
still a variety of panel) or more radically by the intrusion of the third
dimension.
24. While the construction of the zoetrope (since, for Jimmy itself, it is but
a paper toy) appears to offer readers the opportunity to encounter
"the thing itself" (as opposed to a mere representation), it is crucial to
note that the cut-outs of Jimmy's boyhood home operate on another
level. The model of the house patently remains a representation,
but (perhaps because we rarely see juxtaposed three-dimensional
representations, intended to represent moments in time), the recon-
structed structures come to feel timeless, capable of representing
multiple moments, as we imagine the hearse driving away, or as we
place the giant grasshoppers in various positions.
890 Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time
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. "Techniques of the Observer." Techniques of the Observer.
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Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay, 1988.
Kannenberg, Gene, Jr. "The Comics of Chris Ware: Text, Image, and
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Image. Ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson, MS:
U of Mississippi P, 2001. 17497.
Krauss, Rosalind. "The Im/Pulse to See." Foster 5175.
Jay, Martin. "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." Foster 327.
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Raeburn, Daniel. Chris Ware. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004.
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Vaughan, Brian K., Pia Guerra, and Jos Marzn, Jr. Y: The Last ManUn-
manned. New York: DC Comics, 2003.
Ware, Chris. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. New York:
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