BY ADAM PARKER
The pictograph, or ancient cartoon,
served as a means of communication that transcended time and tribe. It
conveyed profound meaning about the way early humans lived and died, about the
natural world and its challenges and about the relationships between the two.
When language eventually came along, it
did not replace the image. If anything, it enhanced it. For illustration had
evolved enormously and remained a primary method of communication.
Illuminations lit up the parchments of ancient texts, and words were added to
pictures to ensure clarity.
Modern-day comics really are an
extension of this long tradition. Comic strips were a regular feature of
newspapers (and still are). In 1933, the first comic book appeared, along with
a significant new entertainment industry.
The funnies started getting more serious
in the 1960s and 1970s with the appearance of “alternative comics” such as
Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” and R. Crumb’s “Zap Comix” and “Fritz the
Cat.” The evolution continued with the introduction of the “graphic novel,”
extended comics that assumed many of the characteristics of traditional
long-form fiction or storytelling, presented with cinematic flair.
With exceptions, most of this stuff
wasn’t particularly good. But when Art Spiegelman published his remarkable
“Maus” books, beginning in 1986, public perception of the graphic novel’s
potential irrevocably changed. “Maus” treated a serious subject — the Holocaust
— with grace, wit, intelligence and heart. Soon, other artists were permitting
their graphic-storytelling ambitions to take form.
Chris Ware, the 45-year-old,
Nebraska-born Spiegelman protégé, has taken the graphic novel to an unexpected
new level. His “Building Stories” is presented as a box set of 14 separate
items ranging from a fold-out game board-like panel, to accordion foldouts, to
broadsheets, to hardcover books. They can be read in any order, which means the
life of the unnamed female protagonist is pieced together slowly by the reader.
Make no mistake, this is a novel first
and foremost, though it relies on storytelling that is surprisingly cinematic
in its use of visual cues, lighting, perspective and “camera shots.” Ware’s
sense of timing — the rhythm of the frames — is impeccable. And he presents
them in sequences (not only horizontal) that keep the storytelling front and
center, but engage movie techniques like occasional close-up shots interspersed
among medium and wide shots. He does this in an effort to place us within the
mind of his character, to perceive the world as she does, and to perceive her
in ways that are intimate, respectful and fully realized.
What’s more, this expert visual
technique serves to set Ware’s protagonist in a clear Chicago context that
spans time and folds in various relationships and interactions — with parents,
a boyfriend, a husband, a daughter, colleagues and schoolmates, space,
structures, patterns, ideas and nature.
The language (dialogue, thoughts) is
straight-forward, but the images are complex, and though they are drawn in
stark perspective as if with protractor and compass, they somehow provide Ware
with the objectified context he needs for getting so expertly into the head of
his lead character. He does not stop short, portraying her emotional, physical
and sexual life with a brutal honesty and a degree of sensitivity. She grows
older before our eyes, coping with all that aging implies.
The narrative is unrelentingly honest,
even bleak, portraying an urban woman with a physical disability struggle with
her body, her dreams and her heart. In her ordinariness, she is presented as
extraordinary: a person with suburban ambitions and a vague sense of history.
Ware introduces us to, among others, her
aged landlady who is desperately holding onto her building, renting its
apartments to tenant after tenant. The landlady has a history of her own, of
course, and Ware brings it to light as if to show us how we misperceive the
world and the people who inhabit it.
The building itself takes on a life of
its own. It thinks and feels, stimulated by the activities within — the
fighting couple, the family life, the lonely landlady eating her apple slices
and thinking of all that’s lost to her.
A subplot is offered in the form of “Branford
the Best Bee in the World,” a thinking creature who flits about searching for the
unreachable. Branford serves to emphasize the existential questions presented
by “Building Stories” even as his own struggles (with love, family, colony,
food) playing out in colorful miniature and providing the reader a small
distraction from the main character’s daily efforts.
Visually, Ware has taken his geometric
style, interest in bold colors, skillful use of light and shade and amazing
compositional approach to create something very large and very profound from
its many respective parts. The stories not only build as the reader moves from
one item to the next, they are about
building — memories, landscapes, relationships, whole lives.
Parts of his “book,” 10 years in the making,
have appeared previously in magazines, which suggests that he has approached
this project incrementally, perhaps without fully knowing what the final result
would be. The package of 14 distinct pieces certainly has no clear beginning,
middle and end. It is a deconstruction of sorts, a narrative conceived in the
mind then pulled apart and distributed. Yet, miraculously, there is reason and
order and depth and logic to it all.
The drawings may be pristinely
architectural, but the story is about as moving and humane as you can get.
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