Return to Austin TX

This weekend, from May 29-31, Jessica and I will be in Austin, Texas, my old stomping ground.
Thursday night, Jessica will be signing the paperback edition of La Perdida and Life Sucks at BookPeople. Saturday the two of us will be signing at Austin Books. In fact, it will be the first event where we are selling Drawing Words & Writing Pictures so if you're around it's a chance to be the first person to ever buy a copy!

(image from one of my Austin-based stories, "Night of the Grossinator," published in A Fine Mess #1 (Alternative Comics), which I'm sure you can still find out there somewhere) Read more...

Sketchbook Exercise: Memory Film Stills

Recently I started drawing images from films in my sketchbook. I draw them from memory, at almost thumbnail size, within a day or two of seeing the movie. I'm finding it a good way to keep a dialogue going with a film, recording images that struck me in some way. It's part film diary, part swipe file... As a drawing exercise, in its modest way it follows the tenet of DaVinci among other artists that images should be created from memory--the emphasis thus placed on alertness and recall over direct observation and recording.

The first one is from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt), which I saw at Film Forum recently. I drew these with very little penciling in my Moleskine. The first still is a statue of Poseidon which appears against a shocking blue sky throughout the film as a kind of silent chorus. The second still is what I consider to be a classic Godard composition: a complicated interior space with lots of frames and vertical barriers separating the alienated characters (the figure directly facing Michel Piccoli is in fact a statue).

You can come across some beautiful shots in otherwise mediocre films. For example: Santo Contra el Rey del Crímen. As much affection as I have for masked wrestlers and their loony, surrealist aura, the truth is that most Santo movies are really turgid affairs. But they always have a few memorable scenes and images. The first one here shows "young" Santo about to don the mask for the first time. The figure in the mirror is his Alfred-like butler/assistant Matías. I really like the mannered framing, meant to conceal Santo's true identity from us. The second image is more typical of the kind of cool, Orson Welles/Alex Toth chiaroscuro you'll sometimes see. Read more...

TCJ interview excerpt

I'm going back-to-back in the Comics Journal this spring. Following the preview of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures in #289, the new issue features a career-spanning interview with me conducted by poet/cartoonist Gary Sullivan. TCJ has posted a brief excerpt on their website. You can read it here.

Some of the work we discuss:
"Off the Road" from Terrifying Steamboat Stories #3
Odds Off
Sayonara and other Mexico City tales
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
"U.S. Post Modern Office Homes, Inc." from Rosetta #2
(and here's a nice compliment I just found in the Booklist review of that anthology: "an American worthy of greater recognition is Matt Madden, whose story of workplace life is formally rigorous and narratively lucid.")
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

Finally, Greg McElhatton has written a nice review of 99 Ways on his website.
Read more...

Gearing up for the Textbook

I'll be posting information here soon about upcoming appearances to promote Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (along with Jessica's books Life Sucks and the paperback of La Perdida). Currently we are hard at work getting the official website ready, but in the meantime, Jessica has compiled some information about the book on her website.

(the comic strip is from a promotional pamphlet :01 sent to booksellers) Read more...