All throughout April and May, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus quarantine comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the isolation. This includes writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s pick comes from writer Deniz Camp…enjoy!

My Quarantine Comics read pick is BUILDING STORIES by Chris Ware. Ware, one of America's greatest living cartoonists, has continually interrogated and challenged the potential of our medium, and BUILDING STORIES is the apotheosis of that life's work. No longer content to work within the boundaries of "the page", BUILDING STORIES tells one huge story by telling many smaller ones in a diverse array of formats; books, pamphlets, game boards, strips. Like Perec's LIFE A USER'S MANUAL, BUILDING STORIES is more than the sum of its parts; it's a living breathing story that requires effort and adjustment from its reader; it requires participation. Each time I take the box out, it feels like the first time; cross legged on the bed, eyes wide as saucers, mind lit up by the dazzling potential for this medium I so love. It is an inspiration, and a challenge, and there has never been anything like it. -Deniz Camp

Deniz Camp is the writer of Maxwell’s Demons from Vault Comics.

Building Stories
Writer/Artist: Chris Ware
Publisher: Pantheon Graphic Library
With the increasing electronic incorporeality of existence, sometimes it’s reassuring—perhaps even necessary—to have something to hold on to. Thus within this colorful keepsake box the purchaser will find a fully-apportioned variety of reading material ready to address virtually any imaginable artistic or poetic taste, from the corrosive sarcasm of youth to the sickening earnestness of maturity—while discovering a protagonist wondering if she’ll ever move from the rented close quarters of lonely young adulthood to the mortgaged expanse of love and marriage. Whether you’re feeling alone by yourself or alone with someone else, this book is sure to sympathize with the crushing sense of life wasted, opportunities missed and creative dreams dashed which afflict the middle- and upper-class literary public (and which can return to them in somewhat damaged form during REM sleep).

Get it from a local comic shop with this directory from the Comics Industry Collective of stores open and doing mail order!

Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!