Word: comically
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...Best" was a documentary - that its ethos of domestic civility was the overwhelming norm. But I was also exposed to, and invigorated by, lots of what would now be called "transgressive art" - popular works that exceeded or demolished the official standards of probity. I attended horror movies, read vivid comic books, gorged on a diet of rock 'n roll. (And what was the most extreme TV genre of the decade? Wrestling.) Somehow I survived; miraculously, so did my parents, nice conservative Catholics who monitored but chose not to restrict a boy's outlaw tastes...
...each aspect of pop culture marketed in the '50s? Usually, through its own medium. Kids learned about new things where they found the old things. They sampled comic books at the magazine rack in the local pharmacy (a word, and an institution, that vanished long ago); they heard music on the radio or at the record store; they saw previews of coming attractions at the movie theater. Newspapers ran movie ads, but TV networks didn...
...God/father metaphor to the emotionally crippled title character. Then Ware kills Superman too--or at least a man in a Superman suit, who, in a single bound, leaps to his death from a tall building in a scene, witnessed by Jimmy, that sets the tale's poignant, darkly comic tone...
Which is not to say Ware is Jimmy Corrigan. A shy, potato-shaped Untermensch, Corrigan is the 36-year-old correlative (neither smart nor a kid) to comic child-men like Charlie Brown. He works silent hours in a cubicle. He calls his domineering mother every day. Women, not coincidentally, terrify him. One dreary Thanksgiving week, his long-lost father sends him a plane ticket to visit him in Michigan. During the tragicomic, disastrous get-together, Jimmy meets his adopted black sister Amy and his ancient grandfather (also named Jimmy), whose own 1890s Chicago childhood unfolds in a beautiful...
Ware serialized Jimmy's story in The Acme Novelty Library, the idiosyncratic comic series that established Ware as a meticulous artist who reshapes older comic art into a new and expressive form. Like any good Postmodernist, he borrows from the past--the Superman bits, 19th century ads, a touch of Little Nemo and Krazy Kat. But Ware's appropriations all serve his story. The 1890s novella uses sepia tones to depict senior Jimmy's claustrophobic home life; the '50s comics motifs perfectly capture junior Jimmy's state of arrested childhood...