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Where do we start? What do we do next? How do we make sense out of all this? With Chris Ware’s Building Stories, as with life, the answer seems to be, “Just keep going. It will all come together, probably.”Building Stories is a challenging, rewarding reading experience. I can’t say book; I can’t say graphic novel; I can’t say comic. None of those words quite fit Building Stories. Chris Ware’s newest work is the story of a woman’s life, and it comes in what looks like a game box, similar to Monop...
A recent, happy holiday in Germany alone with my wife afforded me both a cheap copy of Building Stories (discovered, by some fluke, in a spa-town fleamarket) and the chance to read it, in collusion with my wife, over three quiet evenings with the various pieces of Chris Ware’s puzzle spread across the loungeroom floor. It was quite an experience. Some readers (my wife included) have suggested that Ware’s opus is depressing – Goodreader Eddie Watkins referred to Ware’s “Asperger’s of sadness” and...
Check out that photo above that I stole from Amazon. Isn't it pretty? It's a whole bunch of reading devices that fit into a colorful box. There's a hardbound book, there's a Little Golden Books-style book, a couple newspaper-sized comics, and several doodads and even two or three various whatchamajigs. It weighs in at six pounds.This is the incredibly creative Building Stories by Chris Ware. In it, the reader discovers the lives of (mainly) four characters who share the same building. They're al...
This book gets all the stars.Wow! Not only a crazy-innovative, unconventional format for telling stories with sequential art, but the actual stories are substantive and brilliantly insightful, AND the art is simplistically fantastic.Each story adds so much color, fleshing out the history of a woman's life. And Chris Ware uses the graphic format to penetrate life on the surface and get into this woman's head in a way that is unique to the medium he is using. I LOVE BOOKS THAT RAISE THE BAR OF WHA...
Total genius. Anyone giving this less than 5* is obviously confused.
A collection of interwoven graphic stories meant to be shuffled and read in random order, Ware's Building Stories has gotten a lot of attention in 2013 as comic writing continues to sidle awkwardly past puberty like a wimpy kid hoping to get past a group of dicks with their hats backwards before they notice him and take his lunch money. Metaphors, bitch!It's reasonably effective. The lead story here, about a young woman who's convinced her life is awful and then later is convinced it's awful in
6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant "book" (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and shapes of books and magazines and flyers and a children's book and a game board. Why a game box, with a game board? To resuscitate, in part, the idea of reading as game, even if not exclusively for "fun" (though it is also about that). I think the publication of Building Stories is one of the most important events in the history of graphic literature,...
Beautiful box. Beautiful books and newspapers and foldout strips. An epic of the everyday. The graphic novel response to Ulysses, with all the humour and ebullience removed. Like B.S. Johnson’s book-in-a-box The Unfortunates, each of the separate components can be read in either order, and like that fine novel, each deal in part with loss and devastation and loneliness (and devastating loneliness). The protagonist of this novel is a miserable neurotic woman with an artificial shank whose entire
[Note: this review looks much better on the site from which it comes. And has more pictures.][There are an unexpected number of grocery shots in this book.]Back in March 2011, during that year's Tournament of Books, I was introduced to what might be best described as a concept book. Nox is Anne Carson's literary project to unearth the identity of her recently-departed, long-estranged brother. Instead of pages of text bound between a front and back cover, Nox is a box containing a robust accordio...
I remember my high school art teacher telling me a story once about when Bob Dylan met the Beatles for the first time at a party. According to my art teacher, Dylan saw the Four from across a room and sneered, "You guys have so much power, and you could do anything....and you choose to make this."And in no way, obviously, could anything Chris Ware does be worthy of such vitriol. It's too smart, too intricate, too multi-faceted -- a monument to what craft, focus, and workmanship can create. And w...
The positive: I enjoy Chris Ware's artwork style. I also appreciate his typography talents, and his use of some very beautiful cursive style lettering (I like the cursive capitals he uses in some of the text passages). I liked the architectural style of the exploded view of the apartment building- it reminded me of lego assembly instructions, and you could see sort of the mapping of the rooms of each floor. Also the fruit (in tidy rows and very uniform) pictures are great. More of that, please!T...
Maybe it's deliberately provocative to give a low rating to such a technically accomplished feat of storytelling, I don't know, but no amount of visual novelty can disguise the hollowness and cynicism of Chris Ware's worldview. So we're all white and we're all sad and we all have some job and we're all repulsed by the ageing bodies of our spouses. So we're all afflicted with some amorphous melancholy and we all have to confront the dying faces of our fathers and we all have humiliating memories
Inspiration, insanity, and sadness in one big box.In essence: Life.
I finally got my hands on BUILDING STORIES and was disappointed to discover that all of the reviews that called it a "ground-breaking new format where the reader connects the pieces to assemble an apartment building full of interlocking stories" weren't literal. Guys, I really thought this book was a kit to build an actual model building! I'm so bummed!
2020 Update: enough time has passed for me to correct my rating, because for now Ware's big works are really the 5* standard for indie comics, despite the criticisms mentioned below.I think this has to be Chris Ware's magnum opus. Yes, Lint is a better story. Yes, Rusty Brown might be a better collection. But Building Stories as a work has redefined the novel entirely. It comes in a box and can be read in any order!! Can we take another minute to appreciate the importance of this? The book has b...
The title Ware chose for this wonderful assemblage of art work and words makes me think about the many ways in which authors tell their tales. It also prompts thoughts on how we size people up. Ware’s creation gives us plenty to say about story-building and profiling. Context, the narrative arc, appeals to our emotions, structuring, and connections among characters and to our empathetic selves all enter into it. You’ve no doubt seen the box that houses the contents. In it are 14 individual bookl...
While I comport myself in a solid even-keeled way, topped by a serious face, inside I ride waves of turbulent emotions. My inner moods pendulum between absolute cosmic bleakness and star-hopping ecstasy, with an occasional glide through stretches of dull unspecified sadness. The rest is routine involvement in those things I enjoy doing, and so could be called happiness I suppose, though looking at me few would know. The stretches of dull unspecified sadness are the least interesting to me, thoug...
The problem with Building Stories is that while Ware is still a skilled and intelligent cartoonist, in context of his own work it doesn't really represent any kind of move forward. It's really more of the same, with razzle dazzle in the form of packaging. The characters are moribund and whiny, endlessly going on their gloomy, bitter monologues to the point where the whole venture becomes tiresome. Part of this is due to the fact that Ware relies less on his visuals and presentation to tell a sto...
As someone who handles the printing and manufacturing of high production value illustrated books for a living, I have to say I was not at all impressed by this package. (No offense to the legendary Andy Hughes who handled the production on this -- quality is lovely, just not all that impressive.) So apparently this artful jumble of 14 supposedly varied and unique pieces are meant to be a celebration of the lost art of printed matter, a return to the tactile ur-wonders of comics art, a paean to t...
4.5 starsThis work contains, in a beautiful carton, fourteen discrete pieces: one that looks like a Little Golden Book; another as large and colorful as the Sunday comics; and another with print so small I had to take off my glasses to read it, same for the few small illustrations along the inner side of the bottom part of the box. I read somewhere that the creator of this work says it can be read in any order and I'm sure that's true, as the work is anything but linear. I read it in the order t...