He’s certain of every detail of these rooms, and tends to splay their furnishings out diagonally to show how they fit together. The organizing principle of “Building Stories” is architecture, and - even more than he usually does - Ware renders places and events alike as architectural diagrams. (The spiritual crises and sexual neuroses of “Branford, the Best Bee in the World” amount to little more or less than any of the human characters’ in a moment of self-loathing, he concludes that he’s “an impure, disgusting slug who thinks too much of fertilizing the queen.”) A bee who’s trapped inside the building until the florist opens a window turns up again as the star of his own comics, the closest thing to comedic relief here.

In another sequence, we see the landlady age 80 years in 18 panels, with paper-doll tabs extending from her body. Ware has an extraordinary command of time and pacing: one bravura page depicts the florist and her husband dealing with her father’s decline over several months, every panel a perfectly composed little square, the thought balloons doubling as after-the-fact narration, and the whole thing a tribute to the look of Frank King’s old “Gasoline Alley” Sunday pages. The individual elements of the box show us the building and its residents at fraught moments in their lives, or chart aspects of their existence over time. Instead, Ware lets his readers follow the gnarled paths memory takes as it builds and rebuilds stories.

Building Stories by Chris Ware