With the lid removed, three vignettes gracing the outside edges of the inner box (above) reveal her partner, child, florist’s job, left prosthetic lower leg and worried worldview. Ware introduces this woman from the start on the front lid, sleeping in an appropriate foetal position and in a half a close-up. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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