The Acme Novelty Library, Number 18

In keeping with his athletic goal of issuing a volume of his occasionally lauded ACME series once every new autumn, volume 18 finds cartoonist Chris Ware abandoning the engaging serialization of his "Rusty Brown" and instead focusing upon his ongoing and more experimentally grim narrative "Building Stories."

Collecting pages unseen except in obscure alternative weekly periodicals and sophisticated expensive coffee-table magazines, ACME Novelty Library #18 reintroduces the characters that New York Times readers found "dry" and "deeply depressing" when one chapter of the work (not included here) was presented in its pages during 2005 and 2006. Set in a Chicago apartment building more or less in the year 2000, the stories move from the straightforward to the mnemonically complex, invading characters' memories and personal ambitions with a text point size likely unreadable to human beings over the age of forty-five. Reformatted to accommodate this different material, readers will be pleased by the volume's vertical shape and tasteful design, which, unlike Ware's earlier volumes, should discreetly blend into any stack or shelf of real books.

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.