It’s supposed to kind of hint at the ideas and imaginings that one might have about one’s neighbors.” The building, an anthropomorphized character in its own right, is an amalgamation of ones in which Ware lived in Chicago, where he moved to attend grad school in printmaking at the Art Institute and has stayed ever since. “It was sort of a petri dish or incubation setting. The interweaving, chronologically inventive (there is, very intentionally, no official start or end to the story) narrative follows the inhabitants of a three-story apartment building. “It just sort of grew unreasonably from that point.” “I did three more to complete the seasons and from there got interested in the characters,” he says. “I wanted the box to be a beautiful thing and to have that promise to it that a gift has on Christmas morning.”īuilding Stories began as a single comic strip-the “Winter” page, printed here on a foldout piece of cardboard-which Ware drew in 2001 for a Swiss magazine. “The whole book is supposed to be a dream object,” explains Ware. “It’s got a certain degree of chutzpah and pretension to it,” says cartoonist Chris Ware of his latest work, Building Stories, a complex, multipart graphic novel whose contents fill an entire box and wind their way through fourteen different elements, including pamphlets, mini-comics, magazines, newspapers, and a Little Golden Book.
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