Chris Ware: Loneliness has its merits

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:46:00 +0000

AS HE DEMONSTRATES with every one of his droll, moving, meticulous publications, Chris Ware is one of the most fascinating storytellers we have, one dedicated to extending and elasticizing the medium of cartooning. His new “publishing experiment,” as he calls it, is Building Stories, a book Publishers Weekly declared “one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print.” Building Stories is both a collection and a magnum opus, a mosaic both intimate and epic. Within a large, decorative box are fourteen separate but inter-related “units” of different formats — pamphlets, newspapers, hardcover books, and even a Little Golden Book-style children’s book — across which Ware depicts the stories of a group of apartment dwellers, each of whom develops distinct emotional mechanisms for dealing with loneliness, regret, and memory. Ware spoke to the Los Angeles Review of Books about his process, his ideas, and his belief in the supremacy of the book.

Salon.com > Publishers Weekly

Chris Ware: Loneliness has its merits