Still, Ware’s recently released work goes beyond telling stories and reveals what he believes in as a writer.

“Cartooning is not a very efficient way of spending one’s time, I’ve learned,” he wrote.

He’s published a handful of other work and said he’s currently 250 pages into another. Ware, who moved to the Chicago area in the early 90s, has been published in numerous magazines and has designed covers for The New Yorker magazine, among others, and is best known for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which received an American Book Award, along with other honors. He also compares writing a book to raising children. “bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and it can harbor secrets,” as Ware once said in another interview. For him, the structure of a book is constructed like a body: i.e. “It also hopefully points to how the book (which is a comic book) grows from panel, to pages, to books to, finally, a box - which is not unlike a building, as a house is really just a cabinet in which one can sleep.”Īlthough Ware’s work is meticulously constructed, he compares it to real-life situations about human development. “The somewhat rebus-like cover alludes to the fragmentary nature of the book itself and how concrete images, ideas and characters co-exist in one’s mind with arraying degrees of personal importance, as represented by scale,” he wrote. The pieces of the book, he says, fit together like a puzzle. It’s not always the simplest explanation, but the stories behind the characters reflect what so many people feel but don’t often express, and that provides the depth in Ware’s work.

The work is satirical in nature and leads the reader through a complex exploration of characters and life themes that are embedded within the design of the cover of the book itself. “Beginning with a single strip about the single woman living on the top floor of the apartment building, the story grew and changed as she married, moved into a house, had a child, and gave up on pursing her own creative life.”

“Like everything I do, it simply developed as I worked on it,” the Oak Parker said. Like the construction of the project itself, the characters in Building Stories started like his other works, but expanded beyond just one piece. The 260-page, 14-piece collection offers a look into the creative mind that has found order in a colorful and poetic rendition of life and how a person is developed through life’s experiences - albeit not always in the way one wants.

Chris ware building stories puzzle