By Chris Ware
Publisher: Jonathon Cape
ISBN: 978-0224078122
What’s particularly exciting about anything by Chris Ware is that you know you’re going to be entertained for some time. Not just a creative cartoonist and talented writer, Ware also has a keen eye for design and it’s something he considers to be integral to the storytelling process.
I was expecting Building Stories to be another beautifully presented hardback tome, but what arrived was an oversized sturdy box, the sort you’d expect a boardgame to arrive in. Inside sat a multitude of different items (I’ve just had to count ‘em up and it’s 14) ranging from small pamphlets to cloth-bound hardbacks, some concertina-folded, one presented as a newspaper, and every item lovingly presented and finished.
You’re invited to read the contents in any order, which at first strikes you as a little odd, but once you begin it all makes perfect sense. The over-arching story concerns one neurotic, under-confident (Chris Ware’s default character setting) woman, but also bleeds into the lives of those she once shared a building with. We see her at many different stages of her life, exploring her fears, hopes and regrets, which to begin with makes for quite a downbeat tale, but as you read more and more of the enclosed items you’re offered larger and larger slices of her life and you come to realise that in the context of one person’s lifetime many of the worries that are expressed come to nothing and there’s a lot to be said for being grateful for what you’ve got around you.
Ware draws with a very restrained clean style and a very fine line, but despite this he manages to create some wonderfully detailed pages, often using isometric rendering to give depth, cutaways to show an unfolding story within a confined space, and intricately laid out small panel pieces where the reader is constantly having to rotate the page or trace the path of an arrow to follow what happens next. A page may contain the same scene in several panels but with minor changes to the drama therein, but Ware isn’t one to duplicate the panel digitally – he’ll just draw it all again (and again and again).
Ware has a strangely intimate way of telling a story through the subtleties and small things that define us all, and his presentation enhances and enriches this because this is not something you can read in one sitting. You spend a lot of time with the characters, inside their heads and inside their homes, and because of the unconventional manner of the storytelling, where you approach it in the random way you pick out the next item, you are drawn in as more of the detail of the characters’ lives is filled in, offering consequences for past events and explanations for current behaviour.
A genuinely astounding piece of work.
And if you liked that: Then you’ll love Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth, also by Chris Ware
No comments yet.