Acme Novelty Datebook, Volume One: Volume One

by Chris Ware

Overview

Acclaimed cartoonist Chris Ware reveals the outtakes of his genius in these intimate, imaginative, and whimsical sketches collected from the years during which he completed his award-winning graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon). His novel not only won the Manchester Guardian First Novel prize in 2001 but it has sold over 100,000 copies. This book is as much a companion volume to Jimmy Corrigan —one of the great crossover success stories— as a tremendous art collection from of one of America's most interesting and popular graphic artist.

Chris Ware has a passion for drawing that is surprisingly wide-ranging in style and subject. This book surprises the reader on every page with its sense of spontaneous vision. Architectural drawings from Chicago and interplanetary robot comics collide with cruelly doodled human figures and quietly troubling studies of the still life. A must for people with a passion for modern design and old-fashioned style.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781896597669
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	11/26/2013
Series:	Acme Novelty Library , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	510,987
Product dimensions:	6.98(w) x 9.57(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

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 and Holland; it will conclude at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2025.

Editorial Reviews

The Eisner and Harvey Award-winning creator of the highly celebrated Jimmy Corrigan, Ware here presents selections from the sketchbooks he kept during the time that he was conceiving and working on Corrigan and his regular comic anthology series, The Acme Novelty Library. Ware experiments with a great variety of styles in both black and white and full color, from simply drawn cartoon animals to detailed sketches from life of people and buildings. He also copies other cartoonists (including one of his major inspirations, Robert Crumb), draws excellent Buck Rogers-esque spaceships, and includes famous characters such as Superman and Krazy Kat. There are many strips featuring Corrigan and other characters (including a masked flying superhero called God), along with preliminary sketches and notes for Ware's published work. Ware's artistic crises and lack of confidence in his work are laid bare, with the pages containing a variety of exhortations to himself, sometimes intended to be constructive -e.g., "respect your obsessions"-but more often along the lines of "your drawing sucks." With many nudes and explicit sex included, this is one for adult collections, and it's recommended anywhere Jimmy Corrigan has proven popular. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal