This is a satisfying survey of the artists who’re still actively turning the graphic novel into a new kind of literature.
The pun in the title is that the reader very literally builds the story as he or she goes through it, piecing together something larger from the booklets.
A question for the history of the graphic novel: Will anyone ever write a cartoon equivalent of Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or For Whom the Bell Tolls?
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell which sort of minimalism is brilliant, the writing that’s the tip of an iceberg, and which sort is lazy, the writing that’s just a few crumbs and nothing more.
The inside covers of the books are marked with a pair of maps, essentially bookending history with cartography.