The Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Two
1995 - Present
- Hardcover
208 pages
- Release Date
10 December 2007
Summary
Straggling behind the mild 2003 success of cartoonist Chris Ware’s first facsimile collection of his miscellaneous sketches, notes, and adolescent fantasies arrives this second volume, updating weary readers with Ware’s clichéd and outmoded insights from the late twentieth century.
Working directly in pen and ink, watercolor, and white-out whenever he makes a mistake, Ware has cannily edited out all legally sensitive and personally incriminating material from his private journals, carefully recomposing each page to simulate the appearance of an ordered mind and established aesthetic directive. All phone numbers, references to ex-girlfriends, “false starts,” and embarrassing experiments with unfamiliar drawing media have been generously excised to present the reader with the most pleasant and colorful sketchbook reading experience available. Included are Ware’s frustrated doodles for his book covers, angry personal assaults on friends, half-finished comic strips, and lengthy and tiresome fulminations of personal disappointments both social and sexual, as well as his now-beloved drawings of the generally miserable inhabitants of the city of Chicago. All in all, a necessary volume for fans of fine art, water-based media, and personal diatribe. This hardcover is attractively designed and easy to resell.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781897299180 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1897299184 |
| Author: | Chris Ware |
| Publisher: | Drawn and Quarterly |
| Imprint: | Drawn and Quarterly |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 208 |
| Release Date: | 10 December 2007 |
| Weight: | 930g |
| Dimensions: | 173mm x 238mm |
| Series: | The Acme Novelty Library |
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Critics Review
Praise for the Acme Novelty Datebook series:
“A completely unique kind of comics memoir… Ware’s work is always formally diverse but here that’s even more true than in his fiction, to the reader’s great benefit.” —Sam Thielman, The New York Times Book Review, Best Graphic Novels of 2024
“A beautifully constructed collection of his sketchbooks.” —Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post
“A gorgeously printed, lovingly curated exhibition of Ware’s short-form work and sketches.” —Chris Barsanti, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Genius unplugged… a refreshing and illuminating departure.” —Rob Salkowitz, Forbes
“A must-have for fans [and] a rare chance to get to know the artist behind such an incredible body of work.” —Steven Heller, Print Magazine
“Spanning 2002 to 2023, [Acme Datebook Volume 3] is filled with illustrations of his daughter as she grows from infancy to college age, sketches of subway riders, renderings of children’s toys and stately foyers, pandemic musings, concepts for New Yorker covers, watercolor experiments, intricate schematics, and several notes about his own hopelessness. [His work is] exacting, tender, vulnerable, and punctuated with his trademark self-deprecation.” —Kristen Radtke, The Verge
Chris Ware
Chris Ware is a writer and artist and has contributed graphic fiction and thirty-two covers to The New Yorker since 1999. The author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, and Building Stories, which was chosen as a Top 10 fiction book by both the Times and Time in 2012, his most recent Rusty Brown was finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein award and named among the New York Times’ top 100 Books of 2019.
His work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York and the Galerie Martel in Paris. In 2021, Ware received the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême and a solo retrospective of his work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2022, traveling on to venues in Switzerland, Italy, Holland and Spain, before making its only US appearance in May 2026 at the Billy Ireland Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio.
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