Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective. is Design Matters with Debbie Melman from Design Observer.com.

On this program, Debbie Melman talks with graphic novelist Chris Ware

about how Charles Schultz, George Harriman, and Art Spiegelman figured into his life and career and why empathy is fundamental to his work.

When I was in school, some of my teachers told me, like, oh, you can't write about women because then

you're colonizing them with your eyes or whatever.

And that seems ridiculous to me.

I mean, that's what writing is about trying to understand other people.

Here's Debbie Milman.

Chris Ware has a new book out.

Or kind of.

The book, Building Stories, is really a box.

It opens up to reveal 14 beautiful little objects, sort of like the future relics of the printing

industry. There are broad cheap newspapers, a comic

strip, a pamphlet, a magazine, a hard cover, a board game, even a little golden book with that shiny binding.

Each object contains a story about the inhabitants of the same three-story Chicago Brownstone, from an amputee on the third floor to a B in the window box.

There's no real chronological order to the series, no beginning and no end. It's an ambitious book, more than a

decades worth of work, and it's already being called a classic. Chris Ware,

welcome to Design Matters.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me.

So is it true that when you were a child,

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