Chris Ware: The ACME Novelty Library

Chris Ware. I like his stuff a lot. ACME Novelty Library. I like this comic a lot.

The ACME Novelty Library (red hardcover, pictured) is a great feast of material from Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library comic, collecting just about everything that isn't already collected in Jimmy Corrigan or Quimby the Mouse, along with strips that ran in The New Yorker and other periodicals. This includes the Big Tex, Tales of Tomorrow, Rocket Sam strips, preliminary strips for Rusty Brown, his next graphic novel, and the fat naked Super-Man, which is truly bizarre. Also included is all the impossible to read text pieces, fake ads and a selection of mini papercraft models from the comic. These have all be resized and re-laid-out over 114 oversized (15" x 8.5") pages.

At first glance his detailed geometrical layouts look like they were computer-generated using Adobe Illustrator but Ware works is almost exclusively old school, employing actual drawing tools (remember those?) such as paper and pencil, rulers and T-squares. He does use a computer for coloring however. He's definitely in a class of his own, not just a comic artist, he is an amazing graphic designer w/ a truly eclectic style reflecting his love of early 20th century American aesthetics. And a pretty warped sense of humor to boot.

If you just thumb through this book, you can't really get a sense of his true genius, you have to drink this book intensely. Once you start getting into this book, it's incredibly intense. I'd say you definitely can't read this in one sitting. I know the ads and text are hard to read, but they are well worth the effort. Some of them are pretty hilarious. Chris Ware has hit a new level of depravity with this stuff. You don't just merely read one of his graphic novels, you are inhabiting his unique world as soon as you lay your hands on the book. Some of the fake ad pages will take you almost 10 minutes to read 1 page because the text is so small.

If you're new to Chris Ware, this would be a perfect pace to start. It's a bit of a here-and-there assortment with the general themes being tragedy, pointlessness, hopelessness, despair, quiet horror, nostalgia, self-loathing and obsession with a healthy dose of self-depreciation throughout. If you are suffering from depression, I seriously wouldn't recommend this book. This is probably not bedtime reading either, this one needs to be just nibbled at, a few pages a day is enough.

I also recommend the Quimby the Mouse and Jimmy Corrigan collections. This book is highly recommended for people who are seeking something different in a comic rather than the usual Superman / X-Men fare. You should be able to find in most decent bookshops as it's published by Jonathan Cape with the ISBN 0224077023. Or, of course, discounted at Amazon. The other pictures are just some cover shots from some of the original Acme Library graphic novels.

Enjoy!