# Book recommendation: Jimmy Corrigan *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 15 Mar 2001* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### William Ansley *15 Mar 2001, 23:08* I didn't chime in during the "who's a catholic" discussion. I'm not one, but my tastes in reading are. I know there are some other people on this list who like reading comic books, oops, I mean a graphic novels, so I feel it is appropriate to strongly recommend _Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth_ by Chris Ware, which I have just finished reading. I am mentioning it on this list because I feel there are certain resonances between Gene Wolfe's work and Chris Ware's. They share a certain formality of tone and Ware also makes you do your fair share (or more) of the work in figuring out what is going on in the story. Ware's protagonist is much more dysfunctional than most of Wolfe's characters and his story is more grim tahn many. Ware's book also is not science fiction or fantasy, although it certainly draws on these genres. I think very highly of Scott McCloud's 1993 book _Understanding Comics_, in fact I would go so far as to say that I think it is a work of genius. One of McCloud's themes is that comics can accomplish things that can be done in no other medium. If you want a demonstration that this is true, read _Jimmy Corrigan_. William Ansley ---