Tag Archives: Building Stories Essays
Building Memories: Mine, Hers, and Ours
Our final installment in the Building Stories essays. Continue reading
The Diagram of a Life
I finished reading Building Stories about an hour ago, and I’m already late on my deadline. Building Stories is big. It takes time to absorb. Even unpacking all the materials from the box requires time and space that I should have been giving to other things. Continue reading
From Comics History to Personal Memory
In Building Stories the narrative past, present, and future come unglued from one another, reminding us that reading itself may also be an issue of memory, of what we recall and when we recall it.
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Formal Disruption and Narrative Progress in Building Stories
Ware’s Building Stories, his new graphic-novel-in-a-box, moves away from the narrative and formal coherence of Jimmy Corrigan, eschewing most of that work’s sense of historical context to focus on the process of individual story-making. Continue reading
Body Schemas
Building Stories is in a very primary sense a comic about women and the private lives they lead. Continue reading
The Silent Sublime
What does silence teach us about the graphic medium, and the perception that we listen to comics as much as we engage in reading them? Continue reading
The Toc Toc of “Nothing, Really”
Rather than encountering a disability that’s visually present but verbally absent, readers meet with very explicit mention of the protagonist’s body at various points in various texts:. Continue reading
At the Still Point of the Turning World: Chris Ware’s Building Stories and the Search for Structure in the Contemporary City
More than simply an exercise in narrative innovation, Building Stories is a project obsessed with the lived experience of time. Continue reading
