Chris Ware

Presents an illustrated tale, told in various books and folded sheets, about the residents in a three-storey Chicago apartment building, including a lonely single woman, a couple who are growing to despise each other, and an elderly landlady.

Building Stories

Dimitris Papastergiou

Great stories and amazingly unique artwork. The art is like what you see in instruction boxes, in safety instructions in planes or something, but in a good way, it reminds me such a specific kind that you won't find anywhere in comics. 

Fun stories, sad stories, and all around a good read, not great, but good, that I'd definitely recommend to someone who wants to read something different and something that's out of the ordinary and out of the usual in the comics medium, art wise, the story as I said was hit or miss.

Gavin

Enormous, 3 kilo, 150-piece jigsaw-comic about ordinary desperation at varying physical scales (from anthropomorphised insect up to anthropomorphised house). 

I actually resented the format at first - it's a unwieldy doorstop that cannot be read outside - but by the end it's a pleasing experiment: that Ware has succeeded in making the order of reading more or less irrelevant is of course incredible.

Jeannette Ordas

It's been almost a decade since I read any Chris Ware and that's clearly way too long to be away from my favourite graphic novelist. I picked up this amazing box set from the library and didn't check to read the order in which all the pieces should be read, but it doesn't matter, because each little book or pamphlet or sheet can stand alone. If you've ever wondered who lives in and what happens in that old apartment block down the street and you want to be a peeping tom for a while, read this. My favourite storyline is about the failed art student with a prosthetic leg. It's dense and heavy and it's probably something to own rather than borrow, just so that you can sit alone in your own box, take your time and dig in. 4.5 stars.

Darren S. Layne

This is life in a box - many lives, in fact, sliding around within the container as it is carried from room to room. A different story each day, perhaps, read in a different atmosphere to force different perspectives, though none of that is really needed. Each folio inside is unique, but the tales intertwine as one with all of the beauty and bitterness and mixed-bag-bounty that our own soft packages can hold. Gentle, terrible, empathic, cruel, banal, ironic, and softly humorous, Chris Ware captures it all. His Building Stories are ours, each one an organ within an imperfect, turbulent, clawing, beautiful system. It's no longer a box but a lifetime - many lifetimes, and the pictorial treasures it holds make these words flaccid and unnecessary.

Building Stories

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