Ware lets his readers follow the gnarled paths memory takes as it builds and rebuilds stories ... Ware has an extraordinary command of time and pacing: one bravura page depicts the florist and her husband dealing with her father’s decline over several months, every panel a perfectly composed little square ... Every visual observation of bodies or nature is ruthlessly adjusted to the level of symbol, rendered in a minimal number of hard, perfectly even, perfectly straight or curved lines. Elaborate strings of micro-panels explode scenes’ components outward through time or through a character’s thought patterns; mandala-ish page compositions arrange associative chains of text and pictures around a central image ... Ware is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those of storytelling, where emotion is everything. He rejects the possibility of showing his hand in his (notably handmade) artwork, but that watertight visual surface lets him get away with vast billows of existential torment ... it’s also slow, demanding and melancholy. Ware has earned the right to make demands of his readers, though.

It's impossible to overstate how meticulously his work hangs together: the symmetries on a single page; the motifs that worm through it; the multiple counterpointed stories ... through this almost diagrammatic style, he manages to achieve something like documentary realism ... These panels are crammed with everyday truth ... he is so attuned to the possibilities of the medium, so completely in control of what he's doing, that he finds expressive potential in it that you simply couldn't have anticipated ... There's nobody else doing anything in this medium that remotely approaches Ware for originality, plangency, complexity and exactitude. Astonishment is an entirely appropriate response.

Ware fills his pages with meticulous architectural detail and diagrammatic flourishes, producing what amount to cross-sections of sadness, floor plans of the broken heart ... The medium allows us to adopt a perspective that is not merely omniscient but truly godlike: Ware's characters remain trapped in their tiny panels, but we are above them, looking in, and can see what they can't—the travails that await them—with a simple flick of our eyes across the page ... It's not subtle, but it is ruthlessly effective, and...it gets at something essential and truthful about our tendency to self-obsess ... [a] precise, colorful, intricate and ultimately beautiful book[.]

Chris Ware’s Building Stories...takes Ware’s approach to visual storytelling to a new level of game-changing ... The mathematical elements of the design and layout, coupled with iconographic forms, make the reader a formal collaborator in the work, drawing us in to let us be the ones to realize this is life, and someday all of this will be gone. Chris Ware’s stories are the sheet music that we read to hear music in our hearts.

The landscape and the 'set' where all this unfolds...moved me a great deal ... I appreciate the way Ware is using the center of the page and sometimes the spread to focus the eye ... because of the assembly of Building Stories, the contrasting use of the center in each format really came through. The 'all at once' reading of the spread feels more approachable within the framework of the whole ... What struck me though about Building Stories was how the collection of pamphlets and papers and books reinforced this 'random' or 'personal choice' reading style often on the page itself. I guess I'm trying to say that it felt liberating ... It's a stunning work. A masterpiece of the highest order—like a cathedral—but made by one builder.

Ware's newest work does not simply pose questions about print and digital, but also the variability of form within print. The range of works contained in Building Stories touch on different moments in the history of publishing comics, from 19th century newspaper strips to the modern long form works, 'graphic novels,' that Ware himself is widely known for. The collection of bookish items that constitutes Building Stories also effectively deconstructs the divide between serialized comics and singular works, not only by mixing books with pamphlets, strips, and broadsheets, but also by presenting a narrative that can be read as individual pieces or as a coherent whole ... One of the achievements of Building Stories is how the work calls attention to this relationship in a manner that is playful and accessible and that emphasizes possibilities rather than limitations. Ware's book is a reminder that the only questions that really matter are what kind of story, or stories, does a creator want to tell and how do they want to tell them.

The work of Chris Ware is deeply sad ... What keeps me coming back, and what makes this work so remarkable, is the soul running through it: in characters’ wizened faces, in their faintly plump bodies, and in the all-too-believable nuances of their dialogues and monologues. This is humanity ... And yet, by virtue of its sheer size and expansiveness, this collection of strips is a leap forward from the species of sadness Ware has explored before. Viewed in retrospect, the work reads as if Ware were painting a mural in illustration of a series of philosophical issues: what it means to love, what it means to be alone, what it means to be part of a social construct, what it means to be an inanimate object, what it means to be a city, and even, at certain particularly poignant moments, what it means to be a color. And as such, the title is an understatement: the real story told here is the story of the world, and how we live in it.

It’s all about the grind and folly of everyday life but presented in an exhilarating fashion, each composition an obsessively perfect alignment of line, shape, color, and perspective. More than anything, though, this graphic novel (if it can even be called that) mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own.

Ware provides one of the year’s best arguments for the survival of print ... [a] visually stunning story ... Ware’s artwork consistently overshadows his creation’s anxieties, her frets and worries made even smaller and pettier by Ware’s intricate and expansive art. But the spectacular, breathtaking visual splendor make this one of the year’s standout graphic novels.