Acme Novelty Datebook, Volume 3: 2002-2023

By Chris Ware. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Hardcover, 208 pages, Colour and B&W, 2024. 

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.