ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY HC

Artist, writer and ink pundit F. C. Ware returns to the high-stakes, hard-hitting pageantry of the American comic bookThis new, unasked-for number of the late 20th century experiment The ACME Novelty Library continues its winning run as the time-tested vehicle for delivering sheer disappointment, disgorging wedges of several in progress stories possibly cogent in their completed forms but here rendered disorienting and dissatisfying as fragmentary, incoherent excerpts. Mirroring the disintegrating nation which coddled both the artist's preadolescent delusions if not the very 20th century fashion for cartooning itself, the 21st volume of The ACME Novelty Library comes of age just in time to stress-test the 250th anniversary of America's ongoing indulgence of humanity's most venal appetites behind a threadbare scrim of lofty and perfidious constitutional ideals. A remedy for those weary of regular stage-four cultural botox injections and a last hurrah for sensitive bipeds who have fallen through the cracks of life and who would prefer to stay home with a booklet of cheerfully colored picture stories, it's what all the kids are talking about.Three (3) securely bound and unaccountably legible 24-page saddle-stitched comic books accompany a large foldout comic strip newspaper section, the whole conveniently compacted into an attractively designed keepsake folio allowing for easy disposal and/or tindering in the event of sudden societal collapse. Alice White, The Last Saturday, and a cast of unnamed and almost completely unfamiliar protagonists are all here in little hand-drawn boxes to keep you company on that upcoming rainy afternoon when you watch your hopes, dreams and perhaps even your country go up in smoke.Onboarding everything Mr. Ware and his team of vendors and their internationally-recognized brand have honed for years to esthetic lethality, The ACME Novelty Library 21 is certain to be this season's biggest hit, should the season last long enough. Chris Ware is a writer and artist and has contributed graphic fiction and thirty-two covers to The New Yorker since 1999. He is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001; Building Stories, which was chosen as a Top 10 fiction book by both the Times and Time in 2012; and Rusty Brown which was a 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.