Let's Peel
Building Stories
Created by
PERFECT if
Perfect if you want to wander through fragments of existence — stories scattered like rooms, each revealing what happens when emotion becomes architecture.
Style / Atmosphere
Meticulous isolation. Ware’s world looks like a technical drawing that discovered loneliness. The colours are pastel and melancholy, the panels obsessively ordered, the lives inside them quietly falling apart.
Synopsis
“It’s always the same: people say they want to be loved, but really they just want to be understood.”
Building Stories isn’t a book so much as a building you inhabit. Fourteen printed objects — pamphlets, strips, folded boards, a hardcover, all inside a box — tell interwoven stories of the tenants in a Chicago apartment house. There’s no fixed order; you assemble meaning by wandering. Ware’s precision traps yearning inside design — love measured in millimetres, sorrow inked in CMYK grids. It’s a monument to the beauty and burden of noticing too much.
Line Work
Fine ink outlines, cross-hatched restraint, and a cool blue wash give each frame the stillness of archival memory. The geometry comforts and confines — a hand trying to stay steady while remembering trembles.
The pacing
Carefully measured. Each panel holds its breath. Page turns feel like walking through long hallways: you sense the echo before the sound. Time folds in on itself — moments revisited from multiple angles until they align.
The Voice
Bechdel’s narration overlays the images like transparent vellum — analytical, ironic, tender. Text and image never mirror; they negotiate. Where her voice retreats, her drawings lean closer.
From Page
to Screen
Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical (2013, dir. Sam Gold) — a stage adaptation that turns Bechdel’s visual silence into song.
The comic’s symmetrical structure and literary layering influenced how Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino) and The Father (2020, dir. Florian Zeller) visualise memory as architecture — intimate rooms echoing with withheld truths.
Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Building Stories
Created by
Style / Atmosphere
Meticulous isolation. Ware’s world looks like a technical drawing that discovered loneliness. The colours are pastel and melancholy, the panels obsessively ordered, the lives inside them quietly falling apart.
Perfect if
Perfect if you want to wander through fragments of existence — stories scattered like rooms, each revealing what happens when emotion becomes architecture.
Synopsis
“It’s always the same: people say they want to be loved, but really they just want to be understood.”
Building Stories isn’t a book so much as a building you inhabit. Fourteen printed objects — pamphlets, strips, folded boards, a hardcover, all inside a box — tell interwoven stories of the tenants in a Chicago apartment house. There’s no fixed order; you assemble meaning by wandering. Ware’s precision traps yearning inside design — love measured in millimetres, sorrow inked in CMYK grids. It’s a monument to the beauty and burden of noticing too much.
Line Work
Clean, geometric, almost mechanical. Faces are schematic, gestures minimalist, yet emotion seeps through symmetry. The palette — faded reds, blues, and mustards — suggests nostalgia under fluorescent light. Ware’s visual order becomes both comfort and cage.
The pacing
Fragmented, recursive, unpredictable. Reading feels like navigating memory — no sequence guaranteed, no ending certain. The rhythm depends on your hands, your patience, your willingness to lose track. Time, here, is architecture reshuffled.
The Voice
Detached, rueful, painfully self-aware. Ware writes from within the ache of observation — characters narrating themselves as if in post-mortem. The words ache against the perfection of their containers.
From Page
to Screen
Its design logic and emotional precision echo in films like Synecdoche, New York (2008, dir. Charlie Kaufman) and The Truman Show (1998, dir. Peter Weir). Worlds meticulously built to hold one small, desperate heart.