A Tiny Graphic Novel Victory

There's usually an issue of Entertainment Weekly lying around the house, and occasionally, if the cover grabs me, I'll thumb through it, because it can be, for lack of a better descriptor, entertaining; and I do like to keep at least sort of abreast of the goings-on of modern pop culture. This week's (I think it's this week's, I didn't look at the date) proclaimed it was a double-sized issue regarding "The 100 Greatest Characters Of The Last 20 Years!"

Well, I had to take a peek at that. Characters, no matter what medium, are very important to me because it is so frequently characters that truly drive a story and interesting characters that have such a large hand in shaping the pop culture landscape of their times. It was a fun read and I was pleased to see that the characters they selected did indeed span from all points in those 20 years, and that they plucked from a wide variety of entertainment media: characters from movies and TV series, yes, but also from books and even a couple plays...and one surprise entry from a graphic novel that made me grin in absolute delight.

Jimmy Corrigan was their number 62. The number, to me, isn't even important. It's that something like Jimmy Corrigan even made it onto that list, no less as the only purely comic-book entry (Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark and Heath Ledger's Joker also made it on there, but the entries were for the movies rather than the books. Understandable). Jimmy Corrigan is one of my favourite graphic novels ever. If I were to make a list of all the ones I've read and rank them, it would consistently be in the top 3, and I still don't think the Sunday Comics entry of it I did a while back does it true justice. I know hardly anyone who's read it and even fewer people who liked it. Yet there it is, nestled in the pages of a major national entertainment magazine, being hailed as containing one of the greatest characters of the 90s and 00s. They even describe the titular Jimmy as I often have when trying to explain the character to people...that he's sort of like a late-30s Charlie Brown.

Congratulations, Chris Ware, on having your artful novel recognized for something like this!

[Holden Out.]

PS. Also, there will not be a Sunday Comics entry tomorrow, or possibly even the following Sunday. I will be unavoidably distracted.