"...the expansion and contraction of this particular timespace..."
October 10, 2014 12:55 PM   Subscribe

The Last Saturday by Chris Ware [The Guardian]
" A brand new graphic novella by the award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware, tracing the lives of six individuals from Sandy Port, Michigan, published in weekly episodes on this page."
The page always shows the latest instalment and a new part appears every Friday. Use the arrows beneath the strip to read previous episodes.
posted by Fizz (11 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've been enjoying the comic, as always, but this interface is possibly the worst interface I have yet seen. I'm not sure what the guardian expects me to do with my cursor but whatever it is its impossible to do properly.
posted by dng at 1:00 PM on October 10, 2014 [9 favorites]


Building Stories.

That is all.
posted by Fizz at 1:03 PM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


It takes a special kind of skill to make something that unusable.
posted by Devonian at 1:10 PM on October 10, 2014 [3 favorites]


I half suspect Chris Ware of intentionally creating something to demonstrate that their are things you can only pull off in print.
posted by nanojath at 1:25 PM on October 10, 2014 [4 favorites]


I haven't read Chris Ware's stuff in a while, does it still leave a person balled up in a fetal position and crying? Because I'm not interested in doing that right now...
posted by Dmenet at 1:38 PM on October 10, 2014 [4 favorites]


This particular story hasn't reached that point yet but yeah, it feels like it's definitely on that trajectory.
posted by jbickers at 1:41 PM on October 10, 2014


Uh, that zoom you guys. Hadn't gotten motion sickness from a webpage before but there's a first time for everything.
posted by selfnoise at 2:10 PM on October 10, 2014


If ever there was an argument for not completely doing away with printing things on paper, Chris Ware's work embodies it. The very idea of trying to read Building Stories on a screen, even with a better interface than this one, is almost absurd.

By the way, Ware was in Portland earlier this year, and the local public radio news magazine devoted pretty much the whole hour to interviewing him. Listen to it -- it's a smart and thoughtful hour of radio (another medium we shouldn't do away with).
posted by vverse23 at 2:18 PM on October 10, 2014 [3 favorites]


In case anyone else gets annoyed by having to zoom in, here are some links that let you view the images in full screen:

1 2 3 4
posted by Green Winnebago at 2:37 PM on October 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


The zoom works really well for me for the first three strips, where you can still see four panels or so at a time. It's almost like reading a page, where your focus is on a small area of the page and then you can zoom out and look at the page as a whole. I kinda like it. Then something seems to happen in #3, I don't know if some coder accidentally put an extra 0 in somewhere but suddenly you can barely get a whole speech bubble in at once. It doesn't look like it was meant to happen. Is everyone else getting the same thing?

I have at least learned from that incredible zoom setting that Chris Ware's lines are not in fact perfect forms but have actually been drawn with a real life pen that makes tiny blotches from time to time, whether that's an intended part of the experience I don't know.
posted by eykal at 3:13 PM on October 10, 2014


Yeah, the first two are at a smaller resolution than the last two.

I had him sign a comic book for me, and that's exactly what his real life writing looks like. It only deviates from perfectly squared-off lines to the extent the paper isn't totally flat. Uncanny valley handwriting.
posted by anazgnos at 4:39 PM on October 10, 2014


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