Reading Chris Ware’s Building Stories / Untitled Wordless Loop

Continuing this project:

I’ve thus far titled the pieces I’ve been reading of Chris Ware’s Building Stories in a rather ad hoc fashion, but this entry is a wordless affair.

It continues the story of the “lonely girl,” the “cripple” who is the primary narrator of September 23rd, 2000.

Here, we see her raising her daughter in a series of wordless, precise panels that span roughly a decade.

Building Stories’s brilliance derives in large part from its precision and economy—Ware tells a story on every page, a chapter in every small panel:

I’m a parent (my daughter is five, my son is two), and so much of this untitled piece struck me as utterly real and authentic—so true in the details.

There’s a moment when our mother looks up to see her daughter reading—silently, to herself—that is bittersweet, a kind of gentle heartbreak:

There’s a fine line between the precise evocation of emotion and sentimental schlock, but Ware never comes close to treading it here—he’s always firmly on the side of the real.

And yet this doesn’t come at the expense of evocations of wonder, as we can see in the panels below:

As I’ve suggested a few times already, Building Stories is a sort of  Möbius strip; this particular comic nearly literalizes this metaphor.

It begins with our mother drifting from sleep to waking memory, and ends thusly, a strange loop documenting how fast and how slow life changes.