Building Stories
Chris Ware’s Building Stories is an ambitious, formally inventive graphic novel from Pantheon, released as a boxed set of 14 distinct printed pieces—booklets, broadsheets, and even a child’s board game—that together explore the quiet, interconnected lives of the residents of a single Chicago apartment building. Ware, the singular writer and artist behind the entire project, uses his meticulous, emotionally resonant linework and experimental page layouts to weave a non-linear narrative across decades, capturing moments of loneliness, memory, and unexpected connection. Originally published serially from 2012 onward, this work stands as a landmark in comics storytelling, celebrated for its physical and structural daring as much as its profound human insight.