Building Stories Essays

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.

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.

Building Stories is in a very primary sense a comic about women and the private lives they lead.

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?

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:.

More than simply an exercise in narrative innovation, Building Stories is a project obsessed with the lived experience of time.

How does this concentrated exploration of failure shape our understanding of these artists’ accomplishments, as well as their relationship to their own work?

Loss means a lot of things in Building Stories, and, in keeping with the text’s complexity, loss is something that Ware’s characters dread, fight against, and fear, yet also something that they occasionally desire.

As I unboxed Building Stories, sitting on the floor and slowly spreading out its wondrous contents, my first thought was of Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise, his “portable museum”.

In Building Stories, the game and the book-as-object are the frameworks through which a multilayered, intricate web of stories and relationships emerge.