Acme Novelty Library Datebook Volume Three

Quimby’s is for sale.

This might mean little to most readers outside of the city of Chicago, and there’s no reason to panic – owner Eric Kirsammer wants to keep the iconic purveyor of comics, books, ‘zines, and other cultural ephemera open and in the same location after he gets out of the business. But it’s hard for locals – especially locals like me – to not think of it as the end of a pretty significant era, both in the life of the city and in the history of comics.

I moved to the city in 1993, and one of my first apartments was just down the street from Quimby’s original location on Damen Avenue. The store was a revelation, exposing me on every short walk from my door to its door to something new, alarming, beautiful, disturbing, sensational. As a comics-loving weirdo in his early 20s who had been born and raised in a literal and a cultural desert, it was exactly the thing I had come to Chicago hoping to find.

What does all this have to do with this year’s release of the third – and, apparently, the last – volume of legendary cartoonist Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library Datebook? I’m getting to that.

Ware wasn’t all that well-known in the mid-‘90s outside of a small (but growing) circle of fanatic comics fans, but for those fans – of which I was one, only two years younger than he was but in awe of his talents the way I might have been of a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare – he was the toast of the town. And the other thing that happened when you walked through the door of the old Quimby’s, before CAKE, before its relocation to North Avenue, before all the Eisners and Harveys and laurels at Angoulême, was that you walked through murals and signage designed by Chris Ware, whose Quimby the Mouse was unrelated to the shop but became its official mascot.

All of this is to say that Quimby’s is tied to Chris Ware, and both are tied to my entire adult history of reading, writing, reviewing, and thinking about comics, and all three of us have been, well, going through some changes. We’ll probably all be fine; Ware has already built a critical reputation that’s likely unsinkable; Quimby’s will likely find a new buyer who will make it as vital to 23-year-old fans of idiosyncratic art as it was to me way back then; and you’ll likely see my reviews on these pages for a long time to come.

But nothing stays the same forever, and The Acme Novelty Library Datebook Volume Three is evidence of that as a concept, a physical object, and a work of art. Ware has said that for a number of reasons, the book will be the last of the series; those reasons make up some of the best as well as the most melancholy bits of it. But there is still a restlessness to it, a lack of satisfaction, an inconclusiveness that tells me that Ware isn’t done, either with accumulating and refining the work that ends up in the datebooks or with remaining a towering figure in the comics medium.

The Datebook is misnamed, of course. It is not some gimmicky calendar or planner sprinkled with Ware’s characters and writing. It is also, frankly, both inadequate and a little insulting to call it a sketchbook; while it does contain many sketches (of everything from his family to visits to hospitals to bits of pop-culture detritus sent to him by fans), it also contains an intentional echo of his first Acme Novelty Library comics, with their microscopic or absurdly oversized pages, endless little jokes in the margins and the indicia, fake advertisements, panel strips, and, of course, constant (and still hilarious) invocations of his own self-doubt, obsession, dissatisfaction, mania, and unnamable frustrations.

One reason that Ware’s work hit home with so many restless Gen Xers (sigh) is that our lives were reflected back at us when we read his work, supercharged as it was by both an arch, brutal irony and a punishing lack of confidence. Who were we, after all? What had we ever done? And if this was a man who was feeling the same way, and illustrating that self-loathing in both huge, precisely angled graphic images and nearly invisible handwritten turn-of-the-century type, well, after all, didn’t that prove some kind of point we were making, whatever it was?

Don’t worry. We understand how particularly obnoxious this all was. So does Chris Ware. (Does he ever!) Our punishment was to live long enough to need reading glasses to make out the savage little jokes he still somehow manages to stick in every open space of the Datebook; his is to become one of the most acclaimed cartoonists in modern history while still being a fussy, nervous wreck who doubts his own self-worth at every turn and wonders who his audience really is and what they expect of him. In one of a series of gag strips on this very subject, he gets a text saying “We can hardly wait to see what you come up with!” and thinks, “Are there any worse words to hear, ever?” (One of the best jokes in the Datebook is one written during the early days of COVID-19, when he reacts by whooping that finally, the whole world has been forced to embrace his lifestyle.)

This is a book filled with everything under the sun – old ads re-created, portraits of near-forgotten musicians, cereal boxes, life drawings, sketches of water bottles and cell phones (his current bugaboo). If there is one constant throughline, though, it is his daughter Clara. The book begins just after her birth and continues until the present-day as she heads off to college. In the intermittent years, she is his joy, his worry, his hope, and his comic foil. Even here, he cannot resist a perfectly Ware-ian dig at himself: in another small gag strip, his wife talks about how Clara may be going away, but they will have college visits to look forward to, and then seeing her have her own career, find love, and hopefully, give them grandchildren to start the beautiful cycle of life and pride all over again. And what does Ware title the strip containing this lovely sentiment? “EVERYTHING MAKES ME SO FUCKING SAD."

The Datebook is Ware’s first major publication in years. It’s not essential, but its rewards are many, and those who have followed him from the start have gone him wherever he has taken us since then. Whether or not this is the end of the series, it’s not the end of his remarkable career, and wherever he goes next, I’ll meet him there.

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