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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Article: Chris Ware - Building Stories
Posted: October 14, 2012
When is a book more like a game? When it’s a graphic novel that comes inside a boardgame-sized box and in fourteen different parts, from one-tiered, concertina-folded strips to giant broadsheet supplements. Instead of trying to squeeze a decade’s worth of his story’s diverse serialised formats into a single unified tome, as he did with Jimmy Corrigan (2000),Ware atomises Building Stories into a multi-faceted print object, adding unseen materials to fashion “something to hold onto” in our digital, virtual age. The puzzles start immediately on the box’s lid (above) with the title’s rebuses: the ‘B’ stands next to a bee; the ‘IL’ becomes Chicago’s state of Illinois; the ‘ding’ becomes a doorbell chime, all clues for what awaits within. So is the base of the box, which offers a cutaway drawing of the apartment building, the setting and occasional narrator of these stories mainly about its elderly landlady and her tenants - a couple whose childless marriage is crumbling and a single woman, who quickly emerges as Ware’s principal focus. You can take a look inside the box with me when I first opened it in the video linked above. And you can read the rest of my new Article here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
