Frozen Moments. Database Logic and Narrative Drawing in Chris Ware’s "Building Stories"

As a box of fourteen separate comics with no fixed reading order, Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) clearly epitomizes an apparent paradox that seems valid for a large part of contemporary comics production: it foregrounds a clever reliance on print materiality, while encouraging multimodal reading practices that are readily associated with digital media. Taking my cue from Lev Manovich’s description of the database logic in The Language of New Media and from Jared Gardner’s compelling argument in Projections about the importance of comics for twenty-first-century storytelling, I will argue that the random-access structure of Building Stories hones the affinities that comics share with the database logic. While non-chronological page layouts are a well-known feature of Ware’s comics, the database perspective offers fresh insights on overlooked page compositions and on the experimental structure of Building Stories. Furthermore, by looking at intermedial references to photography in Ware’s work, I will argue that drawing and style take a central role in articulating this nonlinearity, posing a challenge to the overbearing emphasis on narrative sequentiality still pervasive in comics theory.