Are you:

-A failure?
-Terminally lonely?
-Miserable?
-A miserable failure?
-Miserably lonely?
-Failing and alone?
-A miserable, terminally lonely failure?
-Depressed?
-Dissatisfied with getting what you always wanted?
-A collector of defunct happy meal toys?
-A collector of vintage advertising?
-Depressed about your dissatisfaction with getting what you'd always wanted?
-Miserable and depressed?
-A depressive, terminally alone failure?
-A completely OCD comic designer?
-All of the above?

If you answered YES to THREE OR MORE of the above, you could ALREADY BE A WINNER of a BRAND NEW collection of TOTALLY MISERABLE LARGE FORMAT COMICS which almost entirely forgo punch lines in favor of PIERCING INSIGHT into the (your?) HUMAN CONDITION and OVERWHELMING SADNESS.

(Chris Ware is scathing and incredible (almost typed "inedible" which may also be true). A little piecemeal here, but there a couple pretty priceless story arcs (and even an endless loop) strung throughout this volume).

A dense, beautifully crafted book that conveys a deep sense of emptiness, while also offering a funny and critical look at consumer culture.

I am really happy Chris Ware stopped with the absurdly overlarge book and micritext, his more recent Acmes are much, much easier to read.

A lot about hopelessness and remembrance here. From several different comics and characters.

Curious to read Jimmy Corrigan, but #20 is still my favorite so far.

Glad my life isn't this dark.

The cover glows in the dark, for crying out loud! That and the microscopic comics found inside, as well as the beautifully written and painstakingly hand-drawn art inside. Chris Ware IS American comics.

covers such a wide swath of miserableness and anxiety in the human experience. the young rusty brown and rocket sam stuff was probably the most depressing. so incredibly detailed especially in the fake ads

Na verdade esse livro é bem triste... Bem triste! No nível de ter advertências de não aconselhável.

.

awesome.. awesome to the max

I have seen people enjoy this book and I found this in the book 100 greatest graphic novels of all time. I didn't get it and I didn't like it. There wasn't anything I enjoyed about this. I am not a fan. This is not for me.

There is no real story. It is a bunch of one page stories with characters that do go through the book. I guess it's like adult Sunday morning comics. They are really bad comics with curse words in them and depressing situations - and nudity. None of that bothers me - cursing, and nudity accept that it was all poor taste and terrible. Blarg!

Chris Ware has way too much time on his hands, and visibly so do I. This book features, along 100 pages of wildly formalist comics collected from various issues of his Acme Novelty Library, a new six page speculative history of the fictional Acme Novelty Company® and its place in American history and the overall ACME brand, as well as a detailed tour of the company headquarters waiting room. Six oversized pages with undersized font laid out in varying reading directions, with a quarter page of footnotes. This man is a masochist and so am I. I enjoyed it way too much though.

The actual comics were hit or miss for me. The one page format leads to even more experimentation than were already seeing him his long form works. He's playing with art styles a lot. The humour is still very much the same. Understated yet very biting. Ware disects life in a capitalist society in *Tales of Tomorrow*, father-son relationships in *Big Tex* and romantic ones in *Rocket Sam*. Among other things, of course. The main throughline remains the same as in all of his works: his main characters are pathetically sad, sometimes despicably so (I've heard great thing about *Rusty Brown* but this book definitely didn't want to make me read it, he's absolutely insufferable). Ware as an uncanny talent for getting to the roots of the human spirit, and I particular the despair and loneliness of what modern culture would call "the incel". It's always been present but Rusty Brown is the embodiment of all the most terrifying part of the archetype. The awkwardness I could deal with in his other works, but the sheer maliciousness emanating from Rusty made me really uncomfortable. There's one bit where [SPOILERS] Rusty has dinner at his "best friend" (who he's constantly trying to do dirty) Chalky White and his wife's place. Chalky's wife starts to nurse their new born at the table. When Rusty gets back to his messy apartment he throws on a porn cassette Chalky gave him, which turns out to be an NFL game, so he goes the bathroom and masturbates while thinking about Chalky's wife's naked boob, the first real naked nipple he's seen. And then he goes back to his living room and cries and curses Chalky while playing with his action figures. Bear in mind, he's well in his thirties at this point. [SPOILERS]. I had to close the book after that lmao

All in all I did enjoy it. There's some really poignant stuff in there, even if it's mostly depressing. And Ware's creativity in his layouts and approches to storytelling never ceases to amaze me.

Also, it's a beauty of a book. It's minimalist and sleek, black edges on a red background with a gold foil design. No title or anything (which made it really hard to know which cover was the front cover every time I opened it up).

Also, in typical fashion, reading a 100 pages of Chris Ware goodness took me a week to get through... This man's comics are DENSE

With the first volume of this seminal series, most about “Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest kid on earth,” Chris Ware made loneliness ache in more color and dimension than the saddest country song. Where Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman taught me that comics could be novels, Chris Ware taught me that they could be literature. Though the series has been anthologized into a book, the printing, graphics, and reproductions are far superior in the original comics.

I don't think I bothered with all of the fine-print ads the last time I read this, but I can't recommend them more. It's unfortunate that they're so visually painful to read.