From Loose to Boxed Fragments (and Back Again). Seriality, the Graphic Novel, and Chris Ware’s "Building Stories"

While comics have consistently explored modes of seriality for the past century, serialization has been drastically dwindling. Under the aegis of the graphic novel, North-American comics production has been increasingly redefined around the self-contained one-shot, published in book format. While many alternative cartoonists have abandoned periodical publication, Chris Ware nonetheless keeps holding on to this practice and has redefined it in interesting ways. Yet, this aspect is frequently overlooked by critics and scholars. After situating Ware's "Building Stories" with respect to these recent changes in the comics field, I will argue that seriality is central to the heterogeneous structure of Ware's box-of-comics. Its highly dispersed and fragmentary publication history indeed feeds into the physicality of the box, on both material and narrative levels, replicating a discontinuous and open-ended reading experience. "Building Stories" foregrounds its status as a collection of fragments: in doing so, it reclaims the serial heritage of comics and the reading practices that, according to Jared Gardner, have made comics particularly relevant for twenty-first-century storytelling.