Chris Ware

Our final installment in the Building Stories essays.

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.

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.