Acme Novelty Library – serie

The third and final installment of the artist's facsimile sketchbook series.After over fifteen years deferral, delay and dawdling, the ink-and-paper cheerleader F. C. Ware finally succumbs to imaginary public pressure by concluding his tiresome experiment in reader trust with the third and final volume of secret notebooks and sketches spanning over thirty-seven years of bus rides, airport delays and telephone hold music. Exquisitely crafted fine art doodles, hand-selected meanderings and artisanal rewritings of personal conflict are scattered throughout comic strips unconsciously revealing private hostilities and unflattering portraits of public transportation riders, the whole carefully cleansed of any impugnable or litigious tracery. As a professional adult-picture-book drawer and regular contributor to the New Yorker, Le Monde and the Illinois Cook County Assessor’s office, Mr. Ware’s work in these pages secures his reputation as an reliably unreliable self-narrator, willing to say or write anything to win petty disputes and imagined squabbles.208 full-color pages augmented by annotations, introduction and a professional apology, with paper boards and cloth spine of misleading demureness to conceal its native prurience.

Artist, writer and ink pundit F. C. Ware returns to the high-stakes, hard-hitting pageantry of the American comic book. This 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.