Ware’s designs bring a Tetris-like addiction to the reading experience. His supreme control over managing the little rhythm of tracking-tension and visual pay-off creates a reading experience that is addictive in a way similar to the shape and pattern negotiation game of Tetris, and as a reader, there’s a comfort to knowing you’re following the path-and making decisions at the forks-of a skilled craftsman. There are a number of layouts in which a different choice would work equally well, which is really just a way of saying that Ware is just as adept at the non-linear layout as he is at the rigorously linear. The reader has to make a decision, and the tension created in these moments pays off in a bit of pleasure when the reader makes a choice and discovers that yes, the chosen panel does work as a continuation of the previous one. Ware does use plenty of standard left to right, top to bottom layouts, but he also creates moments in which, upon finishing one panel, there isn’t an obvious “next” panel. Ware’s layouts are rigorously gridded-they’re often symmetrical, as well-and one of the joys of reading the pieces in Building Stories is the degree to which they involve negotiating a visual puzzle.

Many authors pass on this opportunity-they keep things strictly left to right, top down-but Chris Ware exploits it, and in Building Stories, his new assemblage (or whatever one calls a box that holds fourteen different books or booklets in various sizes and formats, together totaling 260 pages), he again proves himself a master of design. One of the pleasures unique to comics as a form is their potential to inject dramatic tension into the very act of negotiating the page.

Chris ware buildings