The Acme Novelty Library - Tapa blanda

"Ware's genius lies in the detail...beautifully drawn." (Esquire Magazine)

"Belongs as much to an art gallery as to a bookshelf. Produced with the kind of attention, love, care and copiousness of detail that one finds in a Rennaissance masterpiece, it is a sort of cartoon miscellany." (Neel Mukherjee The Times)

What would happen if William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Eugene O'Neill drew masterful strips for their Sunday comics pages? Frankly, we'll never know. But in the meantime we'll have The Acme Novelty Library and its eye-tearingly beautiful depictions of longing, despair, melancholy, disappointment, bleakness, lethargy, abandonment, and relentless parental cruelty. Not since Tosca has such utter emotional collapse been so ravishingly depicted.

All of Ware's extraordinary cast of characters are here: Jimmy Corrigan, the put-upon sad sack of the space age in Tales of Tomorrow, Rocket Sam, Quimby the Mouse, the Super-man, Sparky the cat, Big Tex, and introducing . . . Rusty Brown - the world's most pathetic over-grown adolescent toy collector and the star of Ware's next magnum opus (which won't be finished for years). Also included are Ware's trademark ingenious make-it-yourself paper toys, including: Rocket Sam's rocket ship, a Victorian 'library' cabinet, and an actual, working stereopticon picture movie viewer!