Chris Ware recently launched The Acme Novelty Datebook, Volume Three.Elia Falaschi/Phocus Agency
In the comic-arts world, Chris Ware – best known for intricate graphic novels such as Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown and Building Stories – is royalty.
But the Chicago-based artist hasn’t let that go to his head. Quite the opposite, as the third, and final, volume in Ware’s series of intricate sketchbooks – collectively titled the Acme Novelty Datebooks – shows.
Despite widespread international recognition, including a 2022 exhibition of his work at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, Ware has never shed his tendency toward nihilism, insecurity and self-loathing, expressed in various scribbled notes in his characteristic miniscule handwriting.
The notes, indeed, are so small that you could easily skip them and focus, instead, on Ware’s glorious sketches of interior spaces and random characters (a change in this volume, which begins in 2002, versus previous ones: nearly all are staring at the cellphones in their hands), reproductions of nostalgic ephemera (music, ads and comics figure prominently) and brief, vignette-like strips about Ware’s life. Movingly, the book also depicts the coming of age of Ware’s daughter, Clara, from birth through to adulthood.
Ware responded to The Globe’s questions by e-mail after launching The Acme Novelty Datebook, Volume Three in Toronto.
The periods covered by these datebooks have gotten longer and longer. This one encompasses 20, more than double the nine years of the first one. Is this to do with changing levels output? Life phases?
Sort of all of the above, especially since in 2002 when I agreed to start publishing my sketchbooks I immediately torpedoed their utility as a place to experiment and embarrass myself.
Realizing my mistake, I then started a different, more private comic strip diary, which is completely unpublishable, as it contains personal anecdotes and family stories, though I suppose someday it might prove useful for my daughter in case she’s ever curious about where and when she had a playdate when she was, like, six years old, or what we talked about on the phone when she was in college.
The published datebooks are all very heavily edited, leaving out more than they include – and the diary ended up taking a fair amount of time away from them (as it is, needless to say, a daily requirement).
Just as a public service, I would recommend to anyone who might be as easily flattered as I clearly was into publishing their notebooks that they politely decline until after they’re long dead. (Unless, of course, they’re an artist whose private ramblings I’d love to read, in which case they should immediately accept.)
Your daughter, Clara, is a strong presence in this volume. What’s parenthood been like for you?
Being a dad has counted as the best time of my life. Not only because it put everything else in its proper context and scale – parenthood, like a lot of life events, is a lens through which to view the world – but for the presence of my daughter, who’s one of the kindest and funniest people I’ve ever known.
I think back to the moments where Clara, from her earliest days, would calmly put me in my place (”Dad, you’re not going upstairs to draw, you’re just going upstairs to blame yourself”) and to now, where as a companion and confidante I trust her judgment as much as anyone’s. She’s got a sharp sense of humour balanced by great sensitivity and kindness.
As someone who dwells so much in the past – its objects, aesthetics etc. – do you worry about your kid navigating the endless perils of this digital world?
Not really – Clara’s cultivated a disquietingly measured approach to it all, self-regulating her “online time,” which I wish I could take credit for, but she figured out how to navigate and reject the stupid parts of it herself. Most of her friends have done the same, resisting the most recent attempts by the tech companies to conquer the last remaining territory of their minds – especially given she and her friends use their phones to actually navigate the real world rather than the other way around.
As for your question about the past, it’s all we’ve got, so I try to hang onto it in memory, drawings, photos, movies – however I can. Sometimes I realize I spend more time trying to remember things than I do actually experiencing them. But I don’t know how else to live.
What, if anything, is your own relationship to that world?
I’ve never had a website or joined any social media, because if I did I’d look at it incessantly, playing directly into my childhood fears about whether other kids liked me or not. I can’t even look at artist friends’ Instagram pages because I find the comments so upsetting and antithetical to what art should be about.
The idea of making art a popularity contest fills me with such a sense of despair that if I could measure such a thing 24/7 it would do me in. The incessant ranking and opining of our culture directly interferes with and corrodes one’s inner voice, which is a private centre to which no one else should ever have access.
Besides, books – the original social media – are more than enough of arrogant, needy things in and of themselves.
Artists have forever copied other artists. What do you personally get out of that process, by reproducing old ads, flyers, photos, packaging?
Copying images or designs I find compelling helps me get out of ruts I didn’t even realize I was stuck in – from avoiding certain shaped lines or colour palettes to trying to get a sense of what a particular time period might have felt like before I was born.
For example, most of the simple packaging of the pre-Second World War years feels more human and warm than the sexualized and “sophisticated” stuff that surrounds us today. I’m definitely not a fan of treating design as its own pursuit, or as a way to sell something – or worst of all, as a “brand,” which must count as one of the most unimaginative and repellant ways of living in the world.
I see your publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, is selling a slipcase for the three datebook volumes you’ve published so far. Does this mean the project is finished?
The three datebooks stretch from when I was 18 years old to when my daughter turned 18, so this last one indeed seemed a convenient moment for me to stop. The slipcase contains all of them, inspired by a similar box produced decades ago by Golden Books which had movable clock hands, and for which I’m very grateful to Drawn & Quarterly for making a reality, as well. So, no, this is it! No need to expand. There are plenty of other books in the world.
In case you change your mind, maybe consider – for the sake of us codgers trying to make out your miniscule type with failing eyesight – creating a slipcase with a magnifying-glass drawer, like the one that used to come with the old Compact Oxford Dictionary?
Yes, I’m very sorry for this; my wife had to buy a magnifying glass just so she could read this most recent volume, which is a very upsetting thing for a spouse to have to do, on both counts. I’m not sure from where my micrographia comes from; at the very least I don’t want any reader to feel that I’m not making good use of the page, though I certainly don’t mean to induce ocular pain. Maybe the book should have an age warning sticker on the cover.
