Chris Ware's Building Stories comes in a sturdy box that contains defiantly non-electronic comic strips, pamphlet-sized graphic short stories, a hardbound volume in the dimensions of a Golden Book, a few comic-book sized collections and a large, hard tri-fold piece that would work in a board game. The story readers must build from these disparate parts (without any instruction or obvious hints) reads like a meditation on the nature of memory itself: melancholy, confusing at times, bittersweet and always from the remembering party's perspective.
Building Stories follows the life of an amputee woman as she grows up looking for meaning and love in an indifferent world. Other stories concern a tenement building in Chicago and the elderly woman who owns it, plus an odd little comic about Brandford the Bee. The formats of solidly printed paper comics collected here are ultimately as important as the stories within. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor