Building Stories

American cartoonist Chris Ware’s graphic novel Building Stories (2012) comprises a box containing 14 different books, pamphlets, and other readable objects. Together, they tell the story of a Chicago apartment building, focusing on its female inhabitants, and particularly on an unnamed woman who lives on the third story.

The process of reading Building Stories begins with the box, which is illustrated with stand-alone cartoons and contains guidance from the author about how to approach the box’s contents.

Those contents comprise 14 different elements: two double-sided foldouts, a 52-page pamphlet, four comic books, a hardcover book in the style of the Little Golden Books series for children, an unmarked cloth-bound hardcover book, a newspaper, a poster, a game board, and two broadsheets. They can be read in any order.



All these elements center on a 98-year-old apartment building in Chicago. The building and its inhabitants are explored in loving detail, their rooms unpacked or explored through time in complex sequences of panels. Throughout, the thoughts of the building itself appear in cursive lettering. The building regards its tenants with loving fondness, enjoying their physical presence and the touch of their feet.

The main characters are the building’s elderly landlady, a couple on the second story whose relationship has turned acrimonious, a bee that gets trapped inside the building, and the woman who lives on the third story.

Of these, the woman on the third story receives the most attention. We first meet her (chronologically) as a young woman with a prosthetic leg (she lost part of her leg in a childhood boating accident). We learn that she studied art but has long since given up on artistic work. In a standalone cartoon on the box, she describes herself as “just art curious.” Now she works as a florist.



The Little Golden Book follows the unnamed florist through a day in September 2000. She deals with a plumbing problem in her apartment, only to find that her cat has gone missing. The cat shows up after a while. The florist meets up with a former classmate, and they have an awkward session of making out.

Elsewhere, we re-encounter the florist, now older, married, and living in the suburbs. She and her husband cope with her father’s decline and death. They have a child, and a 52-page wordless pamphlet captures the florist’s love for her daughter.

As time goes on, however, the florist begins to feel stifled by her domesticity. She is sustained by her daughter through long periods of despair and self-disgust. She puts on weight, regrets abandoning her creative impulses, and longs for an ex-boyfriend who left her after she had an abortion. She still frets about the morality of abortion. Meanwhile, her relationship with her husband is stagnating. This process reaches its crescendo in a panel showing the florist disrobing in their bedroom, while her husband stares into his iPad on their bed, unaware of her presence.



A moment of happiness breaks in when the florist has a vivid dream so pleasant, she excitedly recounts it to her daughter. In her dream, she has continued with her art and published the book she always dreamed of. Her description makes it clear that the book of her dreams is Building Stories.

Building Stories also follows the building’s other tenants. In one comic, people from the future watch the second-floor couple fight, using a technology that can read memories from the “consciousness cloud” of the building. It is hinted that the couple finally breaks up.

In the florist’s story, we encounter the building’s landlady as an aging spinster. Elsewhere, her entire life is unpacked in a sequence of 18 panels, laying out not only her sad and empty existence, but also her abandonment to an endless cycle of nostalgia for her past. In another sequence, we follow the landlady as a young woman caring for her own elderly and decrepit mother.



Brandford the bee appears in the florist’s story, trapped in the building until she opens a window to let him out. Elsewhere, the florist tells her daughter about “Branford the Best Bee in the World,” and Branford also has his own comic, detailing his adventure in the building, when he got stuck behind a patch of “hard air,” and his life in the hive. The only male protagonist of the novel, Branford is a mess of sexual neuroses. He loves his wife but cannot stop thinking about fertilizing the queen. He is constantly being beaten up by other bees. He also frequently undergoes spiritual crises and revelations. Each time he is trapped somewhere, he bewails his abandonment, while flowers are the “eyes of god.” He is finally squashed, only to reappear elsewhere as Branford the Benevolent Bacterium.

In chronological terms, our last encounter with the florist shows her driving past the apartment building with her daughter as a wrecking ball destroys her old apartment.