Matt Streets writes for Bleeding Cool;

Editor's Note: We asked Chicago based Matt Streets to give Bleeding Cool a first look at fellow Chicagoan Chris Ware's Building Stories – due to hit retailers on October 2nd. After conveying to us that this was "no ordinary comic book," he's kindly provided us (and you) with a reading guide for this epic project. Enjoy.

Who is this Chris Ware guy and why should I care what he does?

Chris Ware is an award-winning, Chicago-based cartoonist most well known for his Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth graphic novel, and the Acme Novelty Library series in which it was originally serialized. His books are often dark and deal with difficult subject matters, his stories unfold in non-linear fashions, and his artwork challenges every logical notion of how a "comic book" should be. Yet he has won pretty much every single major artistic award that can be given to a cartoonist. In my opinion, Chris Ware is one of the best artists working in comics today.

What exactly is this Building Stories thing?

Building Stories is the sum total of ten years worth of graphic literature by Chris Ware about the inhabitants of a modest three-story apartment building in Chicago. It comes in the form of a gigantic box, which includes 14 different pamphlets, comics, newspapers and booklets. The majority of these have been published elsewhere in places such as The New Yorker or the Chicago Reader, while one is just a much needed reprint of the long out-of-print Acme Novelty Library #18. Other elements have been changed or altered, like the last four pages of Acme #16, which have been reformatted into a huge cardboard fold out, similar to a board game.

Wow. Where do you start?

It's designed to have to no beginning or end. Opening the box releases that intoxicating smell of newsprint mixed with the scent of cardboard, similar to digging into a jigsaw puzzle for the first time. Indeed, one can blindly plunge their hand into the box, pull out the first item they find, and start reading. Personally, I started with "The Daily Bee", a newspaper detailing the exploits of a bumblebee named Branford ("The Best Bee in the World"), and the complicated world of the beehive in which he lives, located in a tree right outside the building. His tragic story is masterfully interwoven with those of the people within, showing that Branford's world is not only a microcosm of the renter's lives, but also directly involved, as he ends up getting locked in the basement of the building.

Wait, this whole thing is about a bee?

Yes and no. It's about Branford – but it's also about the old landlady that owns the building and has spent her entire life living in the first floor apartment. It's about the couple that lives on the second floor and constantly argues about everything. It's also about the epic saga of the one-legged woman who lives alone on the third floor. And it's about they way they interact and have to deal with each other, in that way that only city people understand from living in buildings with total strangers. Heck, even the building itself has a story: In incredibly exacting detail it (he?) examines the lives of it's (his?) inhabitants over the course of a single 24-hour period (September 23rd, 2000). What is so ground-breaking and original about the work of Chris Ware is that by interweaving all of these stories together into one cohesive, century-spanning narrative he gives the reader such a complete picture of these people's lives that they feel absolutely real and true.

Yeah, so what's the deal with the woman with one leg?

If there is a main character in these stories it's the one-legged woman, who as far as I can tell, is unnamed. The majority of comics in Building Stories deal with her life, her fears, dreams, anxieties, her college days, her jobs and boyfriends, her parents and her childhood, her eating habits and sex life, her cats and her friends, her husband and child. Like many of Ware's characters, she deals with debilitating loneliness, depression and apprehension about the state of modern society. After watching a documentary on Netflix, she becomes increasingly concerned with dwindling oil supplies in America; yet later on, as the boredom and tedium of motherhood settles in, she bemoans the lack of the "serious" atmosphere that pervaded America after 9/11. She is constantly in a state of self-examination, self-doubt and personal analysis. Through extensive interior monologues, Ware gives us a complete psychological profile of this woman.

Sounds kinda heavy….

Well, it is, these are stories dealing with societal alienation, abortion, adultery, cancer and suicidal despair. Characters cheat on each other and fight about money. They obsess over lost loves, failed dreams, and squandered opportunities. They drink too much and make bad decisions and say hurtful things to their loved ones.

Basically they act like humans.

Ware has been accused of being cold or indifferent to his characters, perhaps due in part to the exacting, clinical nature of his artwork. But the truth is, more than any other living cartoonist, Ware manages to capture the true essence of what is means to be human – flaws and all. One scene has the woman all set to go to the funeral of her best friend, when her cat suddenly collapses and she is forced to rush him to the veterinarian. As she is sitting in the doctor's office, agonizing over the horrible decision she soon will have to make, she still can't help but think what her friends will think of her for missing the funeral. The entire scene has such a true-to-life feel to it, with misery piled upon misery, the bizarre coincidences of everyday life and those strange thoughts that float through our minds at the weirdest times. No one other than Chris Ware has ever been able to capture these difficult and abstract feelings so well in comics before, and with Building Stories, he seems to have honed his craft to a state of near perfection.

And how is the artwork?

As usual, Ware is creating comic art that is miles ahead of what anybody else is doing in the medium today. Each page is another overwhelming masterpiece of incredible detail, subtle nuance and quiet restraint. For instance, in one full page cut-away spread of the building, Ware shows the landlady on the top floor as a young child and as she swings and sweeps her way down the stairs she gets progressively older until she finds herself on the bottom floor, elderly and alone, sitting in her apartment. An entire lifetime has been brilliantly illustrated in a single page. The effect is breathtaking and awe-inspiring and also showcases Ware's ability to bend time for his stories. Decades roll forwards and backwards between panels, memories and flashbacks occur in medias res, then snap back to the present.

One stunning scene even jumps forward to show us a frightening glimpse of mass transit in the year 2156. Ware has taken the inherent nature of sequential storytelling and thrown it in the air like so much confetti letting the pieces of story fall where they may. Even the title Building Stories can be read in this context, as if Ware has given us the parts to build our own stories, in the order we choose. As readers, we are richer for having this choice and for be able to experience what is surely one of the greatest achievements in comics literature in recent memory.

Would you call this a graphic novel or a comic or something like illustrated stories? And is this the comics publishing event of the year? The decade? Ever?? And, what happens to Branford!?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, perhaps, maybe and I can't say unfortunately. You'll just have to pick it up when it comes out on October 2nd and find out for yourself.

Building Stories (from Pantheon Press) retails for $50 – but, I'll bet that this gargantuan piece of comics history is going to be under a lot of Christmas trees this year. If you've never read Chris Ware before (or stories about something other than people punching other people) do yourself a favor, take the plunge into Building Stories and see what the power of comics can really bring to our world.

By day, Matt Streets is the mild-mannered manager of Chicago's busiest comic book store, Graham Crackers Comics. By night, he lives in a third floor walk-up somewhere on Chicago's north side (and enjoyed considering the existential and metaphysical implications of such as he perused Building Stories for this review – though, to the best of our knowledge, he has both legs). You can check out more of Matt's writing on Keeping It Reel, where, as the "Criterion Completist", he has undertaken the weighty task of watching every single movie in the Criterion Collection. (He figures he'll finish in about 27 years.)