Building stories by chris ware5/7/2023 When you read a Chris Ware comic you can be fairly sure that you'll end up with a migraine from the tiny writing, or suicidal from the worldview, and yet he's so damn good you do it anyway. Somewhere in the ancestry of this volume you can detect Will Eisner's tenement stories, but it couldn't be further from the roustabout resilience of Eisner's work. This is ostensibly a book about buildings but it's more quietly, too, a book about women's lives. Given the sexual politics of bees that's a wan Ware joke. Branford, a bee whose hive is outside the apartment building, is the only male point of view we inhabit. That is not to forget, incidentally, the two comics dedicated to "Branford, The Best Bee In The World". She loves her daughter but still pines for her first boyfriend, who abandoned her after an abortion. Having once dreamed of writing and painting, she is staled in domesticity: putting on weight, beset with anxiety, frustrated with her husband. The top floor is home to the main protagonist, who at first lives there on her own but will go on to move out into suburbia as a young mother. The middle floor is home to a youngish woman whose boyfriend is routinely horrible to her. On the ground floor is the lonely old spinster who owns the building and rents out the apartments above, dreaming her way through memories of a life barely lived at all.
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