Jimmy Corrigan was born to Mrs. Corrigan. Jimmy Corrigan had no relationship with his father when he was growing up, considering his mother kept Jimmy's father's identity a secret for most of his life. Creation verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Kirklees Council ought to do something to recognise what he did for the area. It was an amazing piece of social engineering. Batley was a grubby, scruffy little town. James was very brave because he put a lot on the line. Thankfully, it paid off, not just for him but for the whole area.”

SL: A big theme of your work seems to be human connection (and its failure). Is that why you weave stories in and out of each other? However, writer and comedian Charlie Higson, novelist Jonathan Coe and historian Roy Porter were won over by Ware's portrayal of the travails of the bemused and phlegmatic Jimmy, a man adrift in 1980s small town Michigan just like his grandfather was in 1890s Chicago. And AL Kennedy felt it moved "the whole genre forward hugely". Claire Armitstead, the Guardian literary editor, who chaired the judges, said: "Jimmy Corrigan is a fantastic winner, because it so clearly shows what the Guardian award is about - it is about originality and energy and star quality, both in imagination and in execution. Chris Ware has produced a book as beautiful as any published this year, but also one which challenges us to think again about what literature is and where it is going." This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

The Jimmy of the title is a prematurely aged office dogsbody, blowing around Chicago with only fantasies to keep him company. He is shrunken in on himself, round-shouldered and hunched as if to present the smallest possible target. He has tiny, droopy eyes, never meets a gaze, has no small talk or social graces. The only person who even tries to connect with him is his mother, and Jimmy finds her such a burden that he buys an answering machine to keep her at bay. SL: You (or “Chris Ware”) say in the book that the sense of “weary dislocation” we suffer comes from the thwarted desire to feel like a protagonist. How does that bear on your stuff? I believe that one of the most important things we can do is to try as hard as we can to imagine other people’s livesJimmy Corrigan is a meek, lonely thirty-six-year-old man who meets his father for the first time in the fictional town of Waukosha, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is an awkward and cheerless character with an overbearing mother and a very limited social life. After an ill-timed phone call, Jimmy agrees to meet his father without telling his mother. The experience is stressful for him as he can barely communicate with anyone other than his mother, let alone his estranged father. The two do very little together and Jimmy's father, while well-intentioned, comes off to Jimmy as slightly racist and inconsiderate. A parallel story set in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows Jimmy's grandfather as a lonely little boy and his difficult relationship with an abusive father, Jimmy's great-grandfather.