Matt Madden's blog

Sign up now for spring continuing ed classes at SVA

2012-01-12T10:23:00.001-05:00

French author Ludovic Debeurme (Lucille) visited my Tuesday class last year.

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm going to be getting back into the swing of blogging soon, but for now a quickie just to remind you that Continuing Education classes start January 23 at the School of Visual Arts and I will be teaching my two usual classes:

Comics Storytelling on Tuesday nights from 6-9PM for 12 weeks (starts January 24)
Independent Projects Seminar: Comics (co-taught with Nick Bertozzi) meeting on three Saturdays (2/4,2/25, 4/21) from 11-5PM

Information on both classes, including how to sign up, here.

Nick Bertozzi talks story during last semester's seminar

This is the last semester I'll be teaching either of these classes for a while. I'll explain the reason why in blog posts to come...

GB Tran (Vietnamerica) visited the seminar last semester.

Panels, Pages & Balloons: The Graphic Novel Book Club

2011-10-14T10:54:00.000-04:00

from Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Just a quick post in case you New Yorkers haven't heard that Jessica and I are leading a comics book club at the Central Library in Brooklyn and it starts tomorrow, Saturday October 15, with Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Details here.
If you see this too late to take advantage, don't worry: first of all, we will do some kind of follow-up post about Fun Home on the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website; second of all there are three more meetings including Dan Clowes's Ice Haven, Ludovic Debeurme's Lucille, and David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. Details here.

Fall semester at SVA continuing education

2011-09-05T14:19:00.002-04:00


Me and Tom Hart teaching last fall at SVA (photo ©Elinor Carucci)

Fall semester begins in a few weeks for the Continuing Education division of SVA and I'll be offering my two usual classes.

Comics Storytelling, starting September 20 on Tuesday nights, is a 12-week class where we explore the language and tradition of comics narrative. I assign a few short assignments, then you work on a longer comic of your own. This tends to be a low-key but very productive class. Each semester is unique since so much depends on the chemistry of all the students together, but its always engaging and most of my students keep in touch, some of them taking other classes or going on to apply to art school.
Register here.

I'm very sorry to say good-bye to my friend and colleague Tom Hart, who has headed down to Gainesville FL to open his own comics school. But I'm also very excited about his replacement as my co-teacher for Independent Projects: Comics. Nick Bertozzi is taking on that duty and I know this semester is going to be full of great conversation with a whole new dynamic.
The seminar, which starts Saturday, September 24, is a great opportunity to get occasional feedback on a project you are working at on your own: graphic novel, short story, webcomic, whatever. We meet three times throughout the semester for full-day Saturday critique sessions which always generate thoughtful feedback and enlightening discussions from the whole group. We've had multiple repeat students in this class as it is well suited to artists who are basically working on their own but want to come in from the cold occasionally.
Register here.

There will be an open house/info session TOMORROW, Tuesday, September 6, where you can learn more about these and other classes. I'll be there as will a bunch of other teachers. In recent semesters, this info session has become something of a happening, with MC Keith Mayerson setting the mood, Stanley Martucci reminiscing about being an SVA student in the 60s, and Jerry Moriarty free-associating about art, comics, and life in general.

Details:
Illustration and Cartooning Information Session
Tuesday, September 6
6:30 pm-8:30 pm
209 East 23 Street, room 311, 3rd floor
Moderator: Keith Mayerson, cartoonist, illustrator, fine artist

Colombiano

2011-09-01T19:15:00.002-04:00

From September 14 to 17 I'll be in Colombia for their second annual comics festival, Entreviñetas.

I'm flying down to the city of Armenia on Wednesday, September 14 and diving straight into a series of lectures and round tables as the one American (by which of course I mean estadounidense) and probably the only non-native Spanish speaker at the show.

Be sure to spend some time exploring the links on the guest artists page, it'll give you a snapshot of a rich world that we barely have a sense of here, stateside. I'll do my best to put my reporter's hat on and send reports about the comics scene in Latin America. (If you don't follow me on Twitter, that's the place to get my moment-to-moment observations: http://twitter.com/mmaddencomics)

FOLLOW UP: Entreviñetas now has a blog.

SVA Cartooning grads to watch out for, 2011

2011-07-07T14:56:00.003-04:00

This spring a new crop of cartooning students graduated from the School of Visual Arts with BFAs from the Department of Illustration & Cartooning. In this post I'm going to link to a few of these talented rookies for your approval and edification. Editors, art directors, agents, and Hollywood moguls take note!!

Note that this is not a definitive best-of, just a few links to artists that I particularly like and who for the most part were students of mine at some point (also a few interns, which makes them extra-awesome).

Maggie Siegel-Berele's art is featured at the top of this post

Philip Bubbeo

Megan Brennan

Rel Finkelstein
**former intern bonus shout-out!!**

Megan and Rel also collaborate and have a studio together under the name of Best Pest.

Mike Luckas

Henry Fernau

Da Young Jung
**former intern bonus shout-out!!**

Not on the internet (or at least too hard to find), boo!

Robert Richburg

Jean Calderone

all art © copyright the respective artists

Sean Bieri's "Exercise in Rage"

2011-06-27T14:53:00.002-04:00

A small but significant news item: the first new "guest" variation on my Exercises in Style story in a good long while (5 years or so?). Unfortunately I can't make heads or tails of it, but the artist, my good friend Sean Bieri, assures me that it's a trenchant, spot-on satire of some currernt internet trend that I need to look up on Know Your Meme.

Update: over on Twitter, @segrim provided a link (indeed, from Know Your Meme) putting the comic in the context of "rage comics".

Just in case you didn't already know, Sean is actually a very gifted draftsman who is also one of the funniest and least appreciated cartoonists out there. Even Scott McCloud says so.

The Woods Transmissions: Report 01

2011-06-26T21:46:00.002-04:00

99 Ways on the Daily Heller blog

2011-06-16T10:54:00.001-04:00

Over on his design blog The Daily Heller, Steve Heller interviewed me and said some nice things about 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Read it here.

I really like how the four pages he pulled as examples are, at first, almost indistinguishable!

If The Daily Heller brought you here to look around, note that you can see a preview of the book as well as some amazing guest artist exercises here.

"Dugin Izazov": ROYGBIV comics from Croatia

2011-06-15T11:50:00.000-04:00

Marko Jačan's ROYGBIV comic

Darko Macan recently sent out a call for entries to his Croatian cartooning friends to do versions of my ROYGBIV comics constraint, where you assign one of the colors of the rainbow to each panel. He named it Dugin izazov ("Rainbow challenge") and you can see the results—several of them wordless or in English—here.

Macho Man Memorial Comic: wi-fi explained

2011-05-25T13:04:00.001-04:00

In 2004 I was hired to illustrate this really random comic for a really random tech magazine (whose name I can't remember) and whose really random protagonist was Macho Man Randy Savage, R.I.P.

(click to enlarge)

DW&WP: My comics-making process, part I

2011-05-25T12:40:00.001-04:00

Over at the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website, I have posted in detail about my work process, from thumbnails to final pencils. I'll follow up with inks in a while

The page I'm using as a sample is the first page of a four-page comic I've written about here a few times called "Hiram's Pantoum".

All the art on my studio wall

2011-05-19T15:12:00.002-04:00

A postcard announcing Joe Brainard's Nancy Book

Here's a gallery of all the postcards, photos, and drawings that currently adorn my studio wall. (It may take a while to load.)
Read more...

Tsuge Yoshiharu's Screw Style (postcard for NYC Garo exhibit)

character studies for "Drawn Onward"

Duane Michals' Things Are Queer (1973) mounted on foamcore for 99 Ways exhibit

preview page from Aristophane's Zabîme Sisters

Blutch's poster for Alain Resnais very odd film, Les Herbes Folles

a fun illustration I did for Drawing Words & Writing Pictures book 2

Aldara hones her fine motor skills at daycare, 2010.

Fantastic poster for a surely mediocre film

drawing by Lilli Dwyer, then age 10 or so.

post card of my "black page" drawing for a Laurence Sterne tribute/fundraiser project

Aldara at about 2

birthday card from Hiroshi and Irene

etching/aquatint by Jakob Klemencic

gocco print by Sean Bieri

birthday watercolor by Bishakh Som

Birthday drawing by Hilary Allison

postcard for re-issue of Keith Mayerson & Dennis Cooper's Horror Hospital

Summer comics seminar at SVA

2011-05-17T14:02:00.004-04:00

As usual, I will be offering my Saturday comics seminar class during summer semester, but this one's special: it's your last chance to take it with Tom Hart!

Independent Projects Seminar: Comics
This is one of my favorite classes because there's such a high amount of passion, engagement, and interaction among the whole group. The set up is very simple: Once a month on a Saturday (Jun 11, Jul 16, Aug 20) we meet from 11-5. During the first class we set goals for the semester and discuss working methods and time management strategies to help you move forge ahead. Over the next two meetings we follow each others progress, offer feedback, suggest strategies and solutions. During the second class we also have a guest artist so you can can yet another insiders view on the creative and professional life of a cartoonist.

Nick Abadzis (Laika) visited the class one day last semester

It's a great opportunity to get occasional feedback on a project you are working at on your own: graphic novel, short story, webcomic, whatever. We've had multiple repeat students in this class as it is well suited to artists who are basicaly working on their own but want to come in from the cold occasionally.

I wrote a blog post, from the teacher's point of view, about this class here.

You can find more info and register here.

***

As I said above, Tom Hart, who developed this course with me and with whom I've co-taught it most semesters, is leaving NYC at the end of the summer. Why? To open up his own comics school! Please take a look at his website and fundraising video and consider helping The Sequential Artists Workshop get off the ground.

Sayonara: Limited e-dition

2011-04-21T13:42:00.002-04:00

For the next month (let's say until June 1), you can read my 1999 story Sayonara for free on this blog or on ISSUU.com.

[UPDATE--this comic is no longer available for viewing, but it will be back someday! Meanwhile, read on for some background and history of this favorite story of mine:]

Sayonara is a wordless comic I wrote and drew while Jessica and I were living in Mexico City for the last two years of the millennium. I drew it all in a sketchbook as I walked around my neighborhood, Colonia Roma. My idea was to do an "on-location" comic with a very simple story, something that would capture a bit of the flavor of that wonderful neighborhood as well as the mostly pleasant dislocation of the expat's life. I was watching a lot of Wong Kar-Wai movies at the time (how I miss my moviegoing days) but excepting perhaps the night market scene, I don't feel I channeled him with any particular success. We happened to be friends with a bunch of Japanese students whom Jessica met at her language school and I very loosely adapted some of their likenesses for my comics.All the locations are real except for the Cervecería El Volcán (a nod to Malcolm Lowry*), which is a composite of a certain type of overlit Mexico City bar.

Sayonara was my contribution to a series of small comics called La Corneta that I developed with some fellow artists in Mexico City. Most of tem were then sharing a studio called Taller del Perro (The Dog's Workshop), then there was my friend Jazmin Velasco (signing as Jotavé) and her roommate Sayri Karp, who worked in publishing and was the main force in making this project see the light of day. The books turned out great--there were about 10 of them in the end, all with matching silkscreened covers on silver cardstock. If you scour (really scour) Mexico City bookshops you may be able to track most of them down. Unfortunately, the project basically lost steam after the books were printed, for no one particular reason, though the Kafka-esque bureaucracy involved in getting your books sold, even on consignment, in bookstores in Mexico certainly had a lot to do with it. I remember a few dispiriting tours with Jazmin around Roma and La Condesa trying with little luck to place a few of these books here and there.
I sometimes wonder if some Mexican teenager didn't find some of these lying around and got inspired to make comics. I would love to know...

Open publication - Free publishing - More comics

This is an experiment in digital self-publishing. I'm curious to see if people actually read comics this way and would love to hear what you think or if you want to suggest other options or platforms. I chose this because it was brought to my attention by Adhouse books, who is featuring Afrodisiac for a short while using this embedded reader, which I thought worked pretty well. It's at least a step up (I believe) from what I've been doing up to now, linking to Picasa or Flickr albums. What I'm least happy about so far is the "glow" effect on the recto pages, the novelty wears off quickly to reveal a cheap 3D gimmick and I can't figure out how to disable that feature (anyone?). I do like the ease of page turning and the art looks good if you read this in full screen view.

*I had an idea for a story about an expat living above this bar which I would have titled "Arriba del Volcán"/"Above the Volcano". I may yet use that title someday...

Bonus comic: cartooning over my students' shoulders

2011-04-13T12:20:00.000-04:00

As a "bonus feature" to my recent post about doing improv comics from live models, here's my comic based on the four poses from last summer's session:

I snuck quick pencils sketches of each pose in between circulating among the students. A few months later I inked it and added some text taken at random from the newspaper.

Me at MoCCA

2011-04-07T15:43:00.000-04:00

poster by Peter Kuper

I'll be at MoCCA Fest on Sunday only. I'll be signing Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, The Zabîme Sisters, and 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style at the First Second booth from about 3:30 to 4PM. Otherwise I'll be walking around looking for submissions for Best American Comics 2012 (there will also be a drop box at SVA's Cartoon Alliance table L1).

Also, on Saturday at 11:30AM in room 1, Jessica will be on a panel with Tom Hart, Bill Kartalopolous, and Karen Green, talking about teaching comics.

And be sure to check out all the SVA talent at the show, starting with the Cartoon Alliance table and using this handy color-coded map as a guide:

La Mulata de Córdoba

2011-04-06T14:46:00.001-04:00

I've uploaded an old comic of mine that has rarely been seen in its color version.

It's comic based on a Mexican legend from colonial times that I heard while visiting an old prison in Veracruz call San Juan de Ulúa. A grayscale version of this comic appeared in A Fine Mess #2. This color version was a limited edition art book I printed on my inkjet and bound with office clips. I printed about 25 and sent most to art directors back when I was doing illustration work. It paid off: this is the book that got me into the New Yorker.

Here's the link.

NECAC this weekend in Providence

2011-03-23T15:28:00.001-04:00

This Saturday at 1 PM I'll be giving a workshop on teaching comics (making them but also understanding them) using our "Panel Lottery" activity. The occasion is the first ever New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference.

The conference is sold out but if you have already registered I hope to see you there!

You can read more about the Panel Lottery here and its antecedent and inspiration, 5-Card Nancy, here.

And if your new to my work, please take a gander at our comics education website, dw-wp.com, a lively companion to the book I co-authored with Jessica Abel, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (First Second)

[Follow-up note: see my post-NECAC comments on dw-wp.com here.]

Famous Artists Cartoun Pantoum

2011-03-20T16:37:00.002-04:00

My comics pantoum experiments continue with this appropriated pantoum using instructional panels by an uncredited artist.

If anyone can identify the artist on this I would appreciate it. It's Segar-esque yet clearly not him. Perhaps a later Popeye artist? Someone mentioned Rube Goldberg, who was indeed won of the artists working on the Famous Artist Cartoon Course from which this is drawn. Could that be it? (Interestingly, if you look around online you'll find these same panels redrawn in a much less graceful style by some later artist. Who knows why.)

[update: Jason Little figured out that it's Segar's former assistant Bud Sagendorf, who went on to take over Popeye when Segar died (a collection of his Popeye work was published recently)--thanks Jason!]

I used a slightly altered Helvetica Neue for the font to approximate the look of the original worksheets. I would appreciate it if anyone could let me know which typefaces were actually used.

For more about pantoums see here and here.

Obstacle Course gets the Alison Bechdel stamp of approval!

2011-02-26T00:04:00.000-05:00

(panel from a comic by SVA senior Maggie Siegel-Berele)

Alison just blogged about my Obstacle Course and about a comic I sent her by one of my students who mashed up Dykes to Watch Out For and The Flash.
The MoCCA 4-session version of this course begins this Monday, February 28. Please note that there have been some technical glitches with payments so if you have any trouble please try again or get in touch with me or MoCCA.

Full information here.

And thanks, Alison!

10 Variations: an Obstacle Course preview

2011-02-20T15:38:00.001-05:00

I had great success trying out a classic Oulipian exercise with my cartooning students at SVA, and I'll likely do some version of it at my upcoming MoCCA Obstacle Course workshop:

My own entrée into the world of Oulipo and writing under constraint came about because I fell in love with Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and decided to adapt it into comics. The premise was inspired by Bach's Art of the Fugue: take a short, simple theme and create a series of variations. In Queneau's and my case, it's 99. Harry Mathews (and, I believe, Georges Perec before him) did a more concise variation called "35 Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare" where he took "to be or not to be, that is the question" and submits it to 35 different constraints or formal variations. For example, here are an antonym version:

Nothing and something: this was an answer

a lipogram in i:

To be or not to be, that's the problem

and "in another meter":

So should I be, or should I not?
This question keeps me on the trot

You can find the full text in the excellent Oulipo Compendium or on the Oulipo site if you scroll down or do a find here. Or you can hear a bunch of the members of Oulipo reading them on Bookworm (at about the 6 minute point).

And here's another take on the procedure by poet Matt Fallaize
(from a recent issue of the webzine Ekleksographia devoted to Oulipo which I have not had the chance to spend time with yet).

I decided to do a shorter version of the exercise to get my cartooning/illustration students to do a bit of writing and also to see through doing the way constraints of various sort change, renew or make silly classic texts. Without further ado, here are two of my favorite exercises from this semester's Obstacle Course. The first one announces its constraints while the second leaves it to the reader to discern the process behind each variation.

10 Variations on "Killing Two Birds With One Stone"

synonyms:
Murdering Twain Fowl With Lone Rock

Antonyms:
Creating Two Birds With Multiple Rocks

No “O”:
Killing Tw Birds With Ne Stne

Words Alphabetical Order:
Birds Killing One Stone Two With

PETA :
Picking Two Vegetables With One Hand

Switch Numbers:
Killing One Bird With Two Stones

Origin:
“Bet you can’t hit these birds with two stones!”
“I can do it with one baby!”

Reduced:
Stone killing birds

Anagram:
This Newt being wooed NOT this Sir Kill!

Inner Monologue:
What do I accomplish by killing two birds with one stone?

Letters Alphabetical Order:
Beeghiiikllnooossttww

--Melissa Matos (SVA '11)

10 Variations on "That's what she said"

1. That's what he said.

2. That's where she said.

3. That's not what she said.

4. Why did she say that?

5. She said what?

6. Who cares what she said.

7. Wha' she sayin?

8. The young lady has discussed this topic before.

9. Hats what she said.

10. Hats hat she said.

--Amy Lorenz (SVA '11)

Coming Soon: Obstacle Course workshop at MoCCA, Feb 28

2011-02-10T16:50:00.003-05:00

a "word ladder" comic by Kevin Raganit, SVA 2010

I'm excited to announce that I will be offering a four-session workshop at MoCCA devoted to using constraints and creative games to create comics. Details after the jump.

A "word ladder" comic by Maggie Siegel-Berele, SVA 2011 (note the teasing use of "verse")

Do you think you could make a comic where each panel could only show an extreme close-up of a hand? Or where each panel zooms in closer to a single object? A comic that you can read in more than one direction? Many great works of art begin from these kinds of rules or constraints—and often willfully perverse ones. In the Obstacle Course, l'll challenge students with a series of such oddball rules and in wrestling with them you will find that they will take your work—as well as your ideas about creativity—n new directions.

We'll do a bunch of short assignments and then choose a constraint as the basis of a final comic. Along the way we'll discuss examples of creative constraint in film, literature, fine art, and music.

The class meets four times, Monday nights from 6:30-9PM starting February 28th and costs $245 ($225 for MoCCA members). You can find details here and also on this Facebook page.

A comic by Matt following a content constraint: must include interior, natural and urban exterior, 2 human and 1 animal character, and use the theme of "exchange" in one page

Belles Étrangères, the documentary

2011-01-26T12:16:00.001-05:00

Back in November 2009 I was invited to France to tour with 11 other American authors for a few weeks as guests of an annual festival called Belles Étrangères. (I blogged about it here and here.) Part of the program was a documentary they filmed about all of us in the US during the summer of 2009. You can now watch that video streaming for free.

This is an hour-long documentary featuring interiews with each of the 12 authors talking about the writer's life, creativity, and influences. There's some wisdom and quite a bit of humor. Watch the video here. There is no time code but I'm the fourth interview in, just after Hannah Tinti.

The other authors (not necessarily in order of appearance) are:
Colson Whitehead
John Haskell
Hannah Tinti
Andrew Sean Greer
Percival Everett
Forrest Gander
Charles D'Ambrosio
Jack O'Connell
Eleni Sikelanios
Yuri Slezkine
Richard White

An article about Oubapo on WSJ.com

2011-01-21T17:21:00.003-05:00

Etienne Lécroart interviewed about Oubapo

The Wall Street Journal online edition did an article about Oubapo here.

It's a little dishy, I guess they felt like they needed the hook of the internal strife between Jean-Christophe Menu and other Oubapo members (also other L'Assocations memebers, employees, and most of the French-speaking comics world!) to justify running a piece about the group but other than that it's pretty decent and accurate as far as I can tell. The highlight is this short video profile of Etienne Lécroart (also embedded in the article and you might want to watch it there in the pop-up screen since I'm once again having cropping issues here):

Enroll in a class with me this spring.

2011-01-04T16:25:00.002-05:00

I'll be teaching three very different classes this spring, two at the School of Visual Arts and one at MoCCA, all three open to the general public.

Comics Storytelling, starting January 25 on Tuesday nights, is a 12-week class where we explore the language and tradition of comics narrative. I assign a few short assignments, then you work on a longer comic of your own.
Register here.

Independent Projects Seminar: Comics, co-taught with Tom Hart, is a great opportunity to get occasional feedback on a project you are working at on your own: graphic novel, short story, webcomic, whatever. We meet three times throughout the semester for full-day Saturday critique sessions which always generate thoughtful feedback and enlightening discussions from the whole group. We've had multiple repeat students in this class as it is well suited to artists who are basicaly working on their own but want to come in from the cold occasionally.
Register here.

There will be an open house/info session next Tuesday, January 11, where you can learn more about these and other classes. I'll be there as will a bunch of other teachers. Details below.

Looking ahead a bit, I'm also excited to be offering a special 4-week Oubapo/constrained comics workshop as part of MoCCA's Education Program on Monday nights starting February 28. I'll have more details here and at the MoCCA website soon.

***

Here's the information about the SVA Cartooning and Illustration Open House:

ILLUSTRATION AND CARTOONING
INFORMATION SESSION
One night: Tues., Jan. 11
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC, FREE OF CHARGE
What is illustration? What is cartooning? What do you need to begin working as an illustrator or cartoonist? Spend an evening with some of our continuing education illustration and cartooning faculty and see their work and their students' work.
NOTE: This information session will be held at 209 East 23rd Street, room 311, 3rd floor. Seating is given on a first-come, first-served basis. Session begins promptly at 6:30 PM.
MODERATOR: KEITH MAYERSON, cartoonist, illustrator, fine artist.

NEED ADVICE ON COURSES? Please call 212.592.2251

ROYGBIV: a one-page comic challenge

2010-12-15T21:07:00.002-05:00

I was recently invited to Belfort, a city in the east of France, to present 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style and to give an Oubapo workshop to art school students. I devised for the workshop, very much at the last minute, a brand new constraint which I call ROYGBIV.

The ROYGBIV constraint is straightforward but fairly difficult to pull off. Once I realized how challenging it was I felt a little bad for throwing my unsuspecting students off the deep end but they rose to the challenge.

Here's how it goes: draw a comic of 7 panels, each one corresponding to a color of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. No color allowed (that would be too easy!), black & white only. You need to find non-direct ways to reference each of the seven colors. This could be an associated object, as in a banana for yellow; a textual reference; an emotion represented (red for anger), or any other analogy you can think of. In addition to the sequence of colors, you might also consider the image of the arc, the movement between warm (red) and cool (blue) colors, as well as cultural associations with rainbows (pot of gold, LGBT, etc).

For this class we had about two hours to work so I only had the students produce rough thumbnails. A few examples follow (I apologize for the crappy iPhone pix. No time for proper scans.)

This simple yet pleasing solution made a little story of a little round creature traversing a world of fruits and vegetables: strawberry, carrot, egg, peas, (bottled) water, blueberries, finally going to sleep in a violet.

In this comic, a grad student in economics put the rainbow in the service of a narrative of the worldwide economic meltdown: a pot of gold leads to piles of green dollars floating out the window into the blue sky. Meanwhile the profit line on the graph goes into the red as the stock market symbols (commonly displayed in orange LCD) registers the crash. And we end, perhaps hopefully, with the flashing red and blue alternating lights of the NYPD coming to arrest the criminal bankers. I like how this student—in his first comic ever—used graphic elements to guide the eye through the page: the drifting dollars, the banker's laser pointer. I also like how the window and the graph function as panel borders as well as images.

In this comic there's a hidden arc in each panel in addition to the colors. Here we get a tragic life story of potential (that word!) cut short, from rosy cheeks and heart mobile to the icy violet ice floe of a frozen corpse. This is one of the few comics to make a real distinction between blue (water) and indigo (night sky)--the hardest color to indicate, we all agreed.

The kids (well, mostly teens, one 20-something grad student and two middle-aged women) were almost all energized by the challenge and most of them asked for my e-mail, promising to finish up and e-mail me their inked pages (au boulot, les enfants, j'attends toujours ces planches!).

Incidentally, on the way home from Belfort (in the midst of the nationwide strikes that paralyzed the country that October weekend) I spent the night in Montreuil, outside Paris, with my fellow-oubapian, Etienne Lécroart, who shared with me a few constraints Oubapo has been using or planning to use in France. I'll try to post about those later, possibly with examples from me and Tom Hart.

Tic Tac Toe Jam--a new jam comic constraint, for two players

2010-12-05T20:52:00.001-05:00

I'd been kicking around an idea for a jam comic based on the game of tic tac toe. Recently I invited Tom Hart to meet up with me at a café before class at SVA and give it a try.

I posted about an earlier aborted comics project that led to this idea here. The idea is fairly simple: one cartoonist is X the other is O. You lay out a 9-panel tic tac toe grid on a page and play tic tac toe, only instead of simply putting an X you need to draw a comics panel that incorporates the X in some creative way. The game proceeds alternating players until the comic is finished. (Keeping track of who wins is optional.)

Tom Xs and Os...

...while Matt Os and Xs

What appeals to me about the idea is that the constraint works at a few different levels: there's visual play and word play and there's also an unsual storytelling challenge since you're not telling a story in a linear fashion, instead you're jumping from panel to panel, alternating with someone else, and trying to mold it all into some kind of coherent narrative.

game record of the above comic

In the comic above I started with the top right panel: I drew a bald guy because that seemed O-like and had him say ""Oh" as he opened and read a letter--that seemed like a story starter. Tom did the next panel and made an X out of a stack of envelopes, deciding they were summonses. We talked back and forth as we worked but didn't always know what the other had in mind. So when he wrote "24 weeks" I couldn't for the life of me figure out the reference. I decided that six more would make 30 which is XXX--a winning game in tic tac toe. It turns out he was thinking of X being the 24th letter of the alphabet. And so it goes. With the bald guy and all those X's Tom found it irresistable not to end up filling this strip with X-Men references, though we barely even know the characters (yes, we know Johnny Storm isn't really one of them).

Our other strip took a totally different direction, as you can see. In conclusion: a bit of a silly game but the results are not bad and we had a lot of fun doing it and talking about the process. This would make a great minicomic anthology. If anyone out there ends up doing this kind of comic, please send it my way and who knows, maybe I'll get enough to put a mini together.

PS As Tom points out in the comments, what we did to save time (and ensure a nicer looking final comic) was to pencil only during the jam session (as in the pix above), then we each took one home to finish up and ink.

Check out examples of my students' constraint-based comics

2010-11-20T17:00:00.001-05:00

a "word ladder" comic by Kevin Raganit (SVA 2010)

Over on the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures Flickr photostream I just posted a whole bunch of weird and excellent comics done by School of Visual Arts cartooning majors over the last few years in a class of mine called Obstacle Course. In the class I present them with a series of assignments based on creative rules or constraints.

If you follow this blog or my work you already know this is approach—closely associated with the French literary group Oulipo—is key to my own work.

The first part of the set consists of one-page assignments, the second part consists of longer pieces delving deeper into a particular constraint. Each new comic has a description and, if necessary, explanation (with links) of the rule used to generate that work.

If you like what you see and live in the NYC area, I will be offering a several-week workshop on this topic at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in the spring. Details to follow. (Of course, if you are an SVA student and are reading this you an sign up from my class this spring or next year!)

Brooklyn-Belfort

2010-10-13T10:56:00.000-04:00

I'm hopping over the pond tonight, strikes be damned, to Belfort in eastern France, where I'll be doing a talk about my work as well as an Oubapo workshop for high school students. If you're in the area, drop by...
vendredi 15 octobre: atélier oubapien, école d'Art Gérard Jacot, 14h
samedi 16 octobre: présentation, Bibliothèque Belfort, 15h

Neil Gaiman & Aristophane

2010-10-06T11:19:00.004-04:00

I'll be appearing twice later this week: on Thursday night in the company of Neil Gaiman, Gabrielle Bell, Bryan Lee O'Malley and Jessica Abel at the Union Square Barnes & Noble (details here) to celebrate the launch of the Best American Comics 2010. (update: the B&N website was briefly showing this event as being cancelled but that was a web error which appears to have been fixed.)

And on Sunday morning (only) I'll be at the New York Comicon, signing at the First Second booth and appearing on a panel.

If all goes well I"ll have some advance copies of my translation of Aristophane's The Zabîme Sisters to hand out. Here are the details:

Book Signing
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
Location: First Second Table, booth 2314

A Day in the Studio
Time: 10:45 am - 11:45 am
Location: Room 1A24
Description: Join cartoonists Jane Yolen, Dave Roman, Tracy White, and Matt Madden as they talk about process and their current projects.

And if you happen to be in Belfort, France, the following weekend, I will be flying in to talk about 99 Exercices de Style and lead an Oubapo workshop there on Friday & Saturday.

Shine or rain

2010-09-17T14:17:00.022-04:00

The view from the stage about halfway through our panel at BKBF

Thanks on behalf of Jessica, Josh, Nick and myself, to any and all of you who sat through our lively and increasingly rainy panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend!

This was my second panel as moderator on the International Stage and it's a task I I think I'll stick with for a while. And who knows, maybe next year we'll get an actual fur'ner! (I have my hopes set on Jacques Tardi...)

There have been at least two write-ups of our panel. Here's one that offers a very thorough, you-are-there account of our talk (and yes, it would be great if we could show images but that's tough on the outdoor stage), and here's a more equivocal overview (be sure to read the dialogue between me and the blogger in the comments).

Moderating Josh Neufeld, Nick Abadzis, and Jessica Abel at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Sept. 12

2010-09-07T18:32:00.004-04:00

from A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld

The Brooklyn Book Festival is this coming Sunday, September 12, and I'll be moderating a panel starting at 2PM on the International stage featuring Nick Abadzis, Josh Neufeld, and a very talented lady named Jessica Abel.

Here's the description from the program:
The International Graphic Novel: Drawing from Life: Three acclaimed cartoonists, whose work takes on social and political themes, talk about the on-the-ground research and background work they have all done in preparation for creating their books: Nick Abadzis (Laika), Josh Neufeld (AD: New Orleans After The Deluge) and Jessica Abel (La Perdida). Moderated by Matt Madden (99 Ways To Tell a Story).

And at 4PM be sure to catch the other comics talk on the program:
Comics and Form: Is the Medium Still the Message?: Do comics change when they are released from their traditional print medium? And how? Creators, publishers and developers will combine to discuss the expanding boundaries of the comics format. Robert Berry (Ulysses Seen), Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer), Jillian Tamaki (Skim). Moderated by Columibia University librarian Karen Green.

If you watch the gif slide show on the BKBF home page you can catch a slide of me with Peter Kuper, Sarah Glidden, and Guy Delisle.

fall semester is almost here

2010-09-01T17:13:00.000-04:00

Students at this summer's Comics Seminar

The new school year is about to start. I'll be at SVA teaching my undergrad ink drawing class and co-teaching a sophomore Storytelling class with Jessica. I'll also, as usual, be teaching my two continuing education classes: Comics Storytelling and, with Tom Hart, Independent Projects Seminar: Comics. Tom and I will be at an open house THIS Thursday evening, Sept 2 if you want to learn more.

On Tuesday nights I'll be offering my Comics Storytelling Class. It's really a catch-all class, not really for rank beginners but a little experience is all you need. We do some short comics that are a little experimental and then spend the second half of the 12-week course working on short comics.
Three Saturdays during the semester (9/25, 10/23, 12/04), Tom Hart and I will be offering our Seminar class, a chance to work independently on comics and bring in work for periodic feedback. (Note that the October date has been changed from 10/16 to 10/23 since I have been invited to France that former weekend. More on that here soon.)
There are lots of other great classes on offer including a few new ones I've never heard of. I would particularly point you to Tom's comics class, Sequential Art: Expanding Your Vision and also Lauren Weinstein's new class, Design & Build Comics, which deals with making comics for specific formats like broadsheets, cubes, and so on.

There will be an Open House Thursday night

Illustration and Cartooning
Thursday, September 2
6:30 pm-8:30 pm
209 East 23 Street, room 311, 3rd floor
Moderator: Keith Mayerson

>more info here.

A preview of The Zabîme Sisters

2010-08-13T15:45:00.000-04:00

I'm finally able to share a preview of The Zabîme Sisters, my translation of Aristophane's comic, Les Soeurs Zabîme!

It's a good-sized scene but art and lettering (very faithfully rendered by Nic Breutzman) suffer at such a small screen size (I'm looking into whether they can be re-posted larger). No worries, though: the book is going to be printed at the original European album size (First Second Books is finally able to print books larger than their standard paperback format). Here's a larger jpeg of one of the pages in the preview, introducing Tito and Rodrigues, two incidental characters:

click image to enlarge

The kids are all right: New blog post: SVA's pre-college intensive

2010-08-03T16:57:00.004-04:00

Over at the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures blog I just posted about a summer class I co-taught with a bunch of excellent colleagues.

Remember to check dw-wp.com regularly, we've got a lot of cool stuff coming up over there.

Sketchbook post

2010-07-21T14:40:00.000-04:00

Here are some recent sketches of mine. I just went through and typed up notes about all of them, then I went to add a link, Blogger decided to delete everything, even though I had saved. Very annoying and I'm afraid I can't justify taking the time to re-type everything. Enjoy!

Unhappy Catalog Living

2010-07-14T11:55:00.001-04:00

Though hard to explain to visitors, their dedication to minimalism precluded ablutions and eliminations, so the bath was moved to the basement.

(photo and caption from Unhappy Hipsters; Photo: Uncredited; Dwell)

There are now two blogs out there that add narrative captions to catalog or magazine photos. An early (1995) comic of mine did something similar—you can read it after the jump.

Catalog Living takes catalog photos and adds inane captions that lean towards a silly satire of consumer culture and the Martha Stewart Era. Unhappy Hipsters, applies the same idea exclusively to photos from Dwell magazine, exposing a Ballardian architecture of alienation.

I based "Don't Wait for a Sale!" on a Sunday newspaper ad for a department store. I redrew the images, partly to learn how to control ink wash, and added new text to the copy, though I preserved as much of the original as possible. It was published in my old minicomics series, Terrifying Steamboat Stories. #4, I think.

Status Report, summer 2010

2010-06-18T22:26:00.006-04:00

While I almost forget at times amidst the teaching, parenting, textbook writing, translating, and book editing--I am, in fact, a cartoonist. And sometimes I work on my comics. Here's an overview of what's cooking (slowly, at very low heat, like a succulent pork shoulder).
My Comics
Drawn Onward is a 32-page I have been working on for longer than I care to say. The date on this early sketch post will give you some idea. It was meant to be a palate cleanser but has ended up being my main project these last years, partly because it is more difficult than I had anticipated but mainly because I have had precious little time to work on personal creative (as opposed to procreative) projects these last few years.

This is a page from towards the end and it's about 90% finished.

I've posted a few times about Hiram's Pantoum, a 4-page comic derived from a repeating, interlocking poetry form. I've been working extra-methodically on this one since I am using the page below (in tight pencils, with lettering and borders inked) as a demonstration of my cartooning process for volume 2 of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.

For another example of a pantoum comic that I reverse-engineered from a Tom Hart comic, click here.

The Vestibule is a new project I've described here, one of a number of relatively portable comics projects I have underway. I've drawn about 25 panels and I'm happy with the progress, even if I feel like the character designs are still evolving.

Here's a test layout as a 6-panel grid. I've tried 4 panels and 12 but I like this the best so far. It also works panel by panel, and if you've run into me recently I may have shown you a little slideshow version on my iPhone. I'll be looking into phone/e-reader platforms for this comic once I'm a bit further along. Not yet sure if it's a short story or a book length work.

Faraway Beach is an earlier attempt at a portable, sketchbook comic. I've been working on it very occasionally for a few years and only have 40 pages done. (I did a minicomic of the first 20 which you may have picked up at MoCCA Art Festival a few years back.) I follow a bunch of little rules here: 2-4 panels per page, minimal penciling with brush inking... I also have a little table of inter-combining characters, props, and locations whose appearances on a given page are determined by the toss of a 12-sided die. It's Oulipo meets John Cage via Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a loose, probably over-rambling narrative but I think it might add up to something as a whole. It also might generate enough ideas and situations (it already has, in fact) to sketch out a more rigorously structured and drawn book.

Publishing plans

Other than The Zabîme Sisters (below) I don't have any books in the pipeline (well, I do have a Brazilian edition of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style underway, and I'm excited about that) but I do have some plans for the not-too-distant future:

1. A book reprinting Black Candy (1998) along with all my other major work up until about 2000.

1-page remix of Black Candy

2. A reprint of Odds Off (2001), probably as a digital edition. (Meanwhile, you can buy the out of print book edition on Amazon for either $65.26. or $0.01)

3. A collection, tentatively titled Six Treasures of the Spiral & Other Stories, gathering all my experimental/oubapian/constraint-based comics of the last 10 years.

Translation

I translated the late francophone cartoonist Aristophane's The Zabîme Sisters and it will be pulished by First Second Books in November. I'm very eager to hear what people think about it and I hope it becomes a perennial. First Second will be posting some preview pages soon and I will link to them here.

I have a few notions rolling around for future translation work from French and Spanish but nothing I'm ready to talk about yet...

Best American Comics 2010, 2011
We've all just finished looking through the proofs of the 2010 edition and it looks great. Guest editor Neil Gaiman is quite pleased with the results, which makes me and Jessica very happy. If you haven't seen the cover by Michael Cho yet, well, feast your eyes:

As always, it will hit the shelves in October. All four previous editions are still in print and available. Meanwhile, we are reading comics furiously for our next ultra-top-secret guest editor.

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures
Finally, Jessica and I are forging along with the as-yet-untitled second volume of Drawing Words & Writing Pictures while also blogging and maintaining the revamped website, which I hope you will all visit and send your friends to.

***

When I write all of this down I suddenly feel very productive! That was actually one of my reasons for doing this: when you're in the thick of cranking out lots of slow-moving work it can be very discouraging. Comics takes a long time. And I have that from a good source: I read a quote of me saying that over at my friend Paulo Patricio's Quotes on Comics site.

Summer Continuing Education classes at SVA

2010-06-04T12:03:00.002-04:00

from the comic "Sweets Street" by Billy Burkert, written and drawn in my spring Storytelling class.

Read the whole story here.

Summer is almost here and next week begins the summer session of the School of Visual Arts' Continuing Education department. I'll be teaching a Comics Seminar with Tom Hart and I'd like to draw your attention to a few other classes after the jump.

My Independent Projects Seminar: Comics with Tom Hart begins Saturday, June 12. This class is an independent study where advanced students work on a project to be defined during the first meeting: a chapter of a graphic novel, an entire short story, a certain number of webcomics, etc. We meet for three whole Saturdays, 11-5PM, spaced out over a semester. The group energy and feedback level of this class is something to see, several students have taken it multiple times and many already know each other from previous classes together.

I'm taking a break from my other CE class, Comics Storytelling, but I have a very able replacement in Tom Hart. The class is definitely running but I think there's still some space.

If you just want to dip your toes into cartooning, Tom Motley's Cartooning Basics class is for you. He covers all the essential knowledge you need to make comics. You may have seen Tom's handsome mug gracing the MTA for the last 6 months or so...

Finally, Lauren Weinstein had a new class called Design and Build Comics which sounds really great. As I understand it, the goal is to make a comic design for a specific format (minicomic, origami, map, etc.) with the goal of exploring the interrelation of content and form and also to create a cool little art book. She'll also be taking back the helm on the inking class.

For general inquiries about all this, check out the Continuing Ed home page.

The New and Expanded DW&WP Blog

2010-05-28T14:28:00.001-04:00

We have just launched a redesign of the website for our textbook, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. We had added a blog and other new features to make the site an essential resource for comics learners and especially for teachers and librarians who use comics in any number of contexts.

We'll posting new material regularly so be sure to add us to your RSS feeder. You can also follow us on Twitter to get updates, links, and news.
This is very much a beta version so have a look around and send us comments at dwandwp(a)gmail.com. We are particularly interested in hearing from teachers: how can we make the site more useful for you, whether or not you use our textbook?

Covered by Charlie Orr

2010-05-14T14:18:00.003-04:00

My pal and frequent collaborator Charlie Orr has been making a splash on the internet lately with his new blog The Hypothetical Library, where he designs covers for books by real authors that will never exist. This week he is also guest-blogging about book design over at the Best American Poetry blog. One of his posts is about our numerous collaborations on my comics, such as A Fine Mess #2, above. Read the post here.

FRESH MEAT, the SVA student comics convention

2010-04-29T14:34:00.008-04:00

minicomics from my sophomore-level Storytelling class at SVA

Come to the School of Visual Arts tomorrow night, Friday April 30 for Fresh Meat, the annual student comics convention. Details after the jump.

Fresh Meat is an informal, jam-packed, frantic affair organized for the last few years by teacher Keith Mayerson and Cartoon Allies, the SVA student cartooning group. Undergrad students can sign up for a table and sell/swap minicomics they have made in class or on their own. You'll also find prints and objets d'art, and if you're lucky you'll get a handful of candy to boot.

In addition to all the great students you'll find much of the illustrious SVA faculty lurking around (I aim to be there the first hour, with my family) as well as the occasional surprise celebrity visitor--past years have seen Scott McCloud, Dean Haspiel, and Chris Staros drop by, among many others.

Fresh Meat Comics Convention
Friday, April 30
6-10pm
Monkey Bar Lounge
217 E 23 St (btw 3/2Ave)
NYC

Video piece about me and Jessica at the Huntington Musuem of Art

2010-03-04T16:11:00.007-05:00

We had a great long weekend down in West Virginia as guests of the Walter Gropius Master Artists series. We taught an intensive workshop and gave gallery talks at the very impressive show they put together of our work to accompany the LitGraphic show.

I'm trying to embed a video the musuem put together about our visit but on my browser at least it's showing up cropped. If you know what I'm doing wrong please let me know:
[UPDATE: resized thanks to help from technodork at deBug Boi--many thanks!]

Workshop and exhibit in Huntington WV, February 25-28

2010-02-12T11:50:00.005-05:00

Jessica and I will next be in Huntington, West Virginia, February 25-28 as Walter Gropius Master Artists, giving a three-day workshop and gallery talk. Jessica will also be giving a public lecture at Marshall University (link is a pdf), all in conjunction with the traveling exhibit Litgraphic: the World of the Graphic Novel.

Litgraphic was organized at the Norman Rockwell Museum, and includes work from a number of excellent cartoonists, as well as Jessica and me. At the Huntington Museum, we'll have a smaller side exhibition of our work, primarily earlier work, as well as minicomics and ephemera. We'll be leading a three-day workshop using our book Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, culminating with a gallery walk and discussion of the two exhibitions. The workshop is open to registration by the public, but it's got a very small cap, so call now!

At Marshall, Jessica will be giving a lecture the evening of Thursday Feb 25 in a visiting artist series, more details to come on her website. It is open to the public as well.

XXOO

2010-02-11T11:00:00.000-05:00

I was sorting through my flat file and came across this mostly-inked page from a short project I set aside a few years ago. There's an oubapian constraint which is pretty obvious I think. More about it after the jump.
The idea of the story, which was going to be 5 or 6 pages, was to use a Tic tac toe board as the basis of a 9-panel grid and then to use a series of real or made-up games to act as story starters: each panel which had an X or O would need to feature that shape prominently. In this case the marks became leitmotifs for a male and female characters. (In fact, I do have a friend who has an O tattooed on her arm. I can't remember if she told me once about meeting a guy with an X or if I made that up.) If a box remained empty I couldn't draw them. The idea was to do a story of a brief barroom romance in a series of one page "games"—the one you see here is a draw (the game itself is sketched on the napkin in the last panel.)
In the end I didn't find the story engaging enough to continue but I was happy with how the drawings were coming along.
Recently I was talking to Tom Hart about constrained jam comics structures and we decided we would try a tic tac toe jam comic where you have a 9 panel grid, each artist is assigned X or O and you "play" the game by drawing a panel featuring your mark somehow. I guess if there are blank boxes at the end we would work together to link up the panels into some semblance of narrative. But then Tom had a baby and now I'm expecting a second one, so I'm not sure when we're going to get around to it.

My Continuing Ed comics classes at SVA start January 26

2010-01-08T11:27:00.016-05:00

(a spread from a comic by Rick Ritter from my fall 2009 Comics Storytelling class)

A new semester is beginning at the School of Visual Arts and as usual I am offering two classes for the general public.

On Tuesday nights I'm offering my Comics Storytelling class. This is a 12-week workshop where I teach the formal aspects of storytelling, from combining panels, words, and images to thinking about story structure and varieties of narrative. We begin with some short, experimental assignments and then spend the second half of the class working on a longer project. I've taught this class for several years and it always yields and engaged and intelligent bunch of people. Half the fun is the conversation and sharing of interests and passions among classmates.

(a page-in-progress from a comic by Tommy Hansen from my fall 2009 Comics Storytelling class)

Tom Hart and I will also be running our one-of-a-kind Independent Seminar on comics. We meet on three full Saturdays spread throughout the semester (late Jan., early March, late April) and each class is a combination of crit session and dialogue/information session about time management and creative problem-solving. This class is already getting pretty full but keep in mind that we offer it every semester including summer.
[**Please note that the second meeting of this class is on Saturday, March 6 and NOT February 27 as listed on the SVA website.]

You can read about other classes and about how registrations works, etc., here.

Small Haul, Long Post

2010-01-05T22:38:00.003-05:00

Back from Strip Turnhout and Paris. Not a lot of room for books (too many diapers in the suitcases) but I thought I'd share with you what I picked up in Belgium and Paris.

I wish I had more time to browse the artists' and publishers' tables at Strip Turnhout, in the end I got just two books from the small press area:

My Boy by Olivier Schrauwen (Bries).
This one's been out for a while and I finally shelled out for it. If you haven't seen this book you may have seen Schrauwen's oddball, old-fashioned looking comics in Mome.

Mr. B. the Bird and Mr C. the Cat, by Wasco (Microbe).
Can't find any images on line, but Wasco cranks out these little full color books that appear to have done on a home inkjet printer or something. This one is a series of wordless, minimimalist one pagers about a bird moving through space. some are gags but most just exist as pure comics. Paul Gravett was really intrigued by Wasco's stuff and so may be writing about him sometime soon...

While in Paris I was introduced by my friend to a small but excellent bookstore specializing mainly in independent comics. It's called Philippe le Libraire (Philippe the bookseller, so-called because in an earlier life he had a different profession: Philippe the baker) and it's on rue des Vinaigriers in the 10th Arrondissement, just off the Canal St. Martin.

It was all too brief a visit but I managed to snag:

Tout Peut Arriver (Anything Can Happen) Anna Sommer (Buchet-Chastel)
Autobiographical vignettes from one of my favorite visual storytellers, interspersed with prints and drawings. So far it doesn't feel like a major work but I'm always happy to see new stuff from her.

Irène et les Clochards by Ruppert et Mulot (L'Asso)

I just watched Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 and this new album (which may or may not be the first in a series) seems to owe a debt to that film--it's about a young woman living in dread of breast cancer--and maybe to Varda's work in general in that it deals to some extent with Paris street people.

I then asked Philippe to load me up with a few recommendations, which I have been reading and enjoying:

Mademoiselle Else by Manuele Fior (Delcourt).
This is a full-color (watercolor and pencil) adaptation of an Arthur Schnitzler story and reads, to be honest, like a parody of decadent fin-de-siècle literature, though I think it's meant to be taken seriously. The artwork, by a talented young Italian, is striking throughout showing a debt to Schiele and Munch, and, in its more monochromatic, minimalist pages, evoking Frank Santoro's work.

Le Petit Rien Tout Neuf avec un Ventre Jeune by Rabaté (Futuropolis)
This is a kind of scrappy, kitchen sink comic in which I saw a certain kinship of sensibility and narrative approach to my own Odds Off... You can see a photo set about it here.

Rébétiko (La Mauvaise Herbe) by David Prudhomme (Futuropolis)
Haven't read this one a lot but it's getting some buzz. A biography of a famous and troubled gypsy singer ("Rébétiko" was his stage name and it apparently means crazy in Romany).

The last title was also recommended to us highly by our friend (and Jessica's editor at Dargaud) Thomas Ragon, who also slipped a copy of Sfar and Blain's latest installment in the as-yet-untranslated "Socrate le Demi-Chien" series, Oedipe en Corinthe. Thomas also proudly showed of the lesser of his two new babies (first place goes to Max, born in October), Sfar's 500+ page book of sketches, studies, storyboards, and miscellanea from his Gainsbourg biopic, which is coming out soon and apparently getting some good advance reviews.

***

When I got home I found the first two minicomics of a three minicomic series by Pierre Maurel, a French cartoonist with whom I've been corresponding for a few years and who has been quietly honing his drawing and storytelling from one deceptively low-key work
to the next. You can see some of his work along with a lot of other great stuff on GrandPapier.org

This story starts like countless autobio comics as a chronicle of young cartoonists making fanzines and trying to get their work seen, but it takes a turn toward paranoid speculative fiction when the TV news announces that all self-publishing is illegal effective immediately. Kids can't sell their comics on consignment at the record store anymore so they go to increasing extremes to get their work out into the world.

Belles Etrangères wrap-up

2009-12-03T14:31:00.004-05:00

As you may know I recently went to France for two weeks as a visiting author for the Centre National du Livre's annual Belles Etrangères festival.

I would love to do a detailed travelogue about the whole experience but I don't see having the time in the near future. In short, it was a great trip where I met a lot of French readers, made some new friends and contacts, and ate some amazing food. And it was a lot more exhausting than I was expecting. So what I do have to offer are a few links. Of most interest might be my photo album--which I'm still editing but take a look--chronicling most of my voyages within France (Paris, Nancy, L'Aude, Corsica).

One of my fellow Beautiful Strangers, the novelist Andrew Sean Greer, put together a list where you can follow the tweets of a handful of the authors (me, Andy, Hannah Tinti, Colson Whitehead, and occasionally John Haskell). That said, one problem with Twitter's lists is that I don't know that you can make them time sensitive so you'll need to scroll through a few screens of post-BE tweets from me and Colson before you reach the tour reports, but they are fun.

Sometime soon the CNL will be posting the hour-long documentary they made featuring brief interviews with all 12 authors. I'll let you know when it's live but you will be able to find it here.

Otherwise, here's a radio show on Culture France where I talk briefly here about being a cartoonist invited to a literary festival (at about 6 minutes).

And here's a video of me talking about Oulipo, Oubapo, and Jack Kirby in French:

Matt Madden : 99 Exercices de style
Uploaded by booksmag. - News videos hot off the press.

Maybe later on I can post about some details of my evening as guest of honor at one of the Oulipo's monthly dinners (almost 50 years' worth and going strong) but for now I'll have to leave you with this photo from the end of the evening:

Oulipo dinner, November 17 2009. L-R: Jacques Roubaud, Paul Fournel, Daniel Levin Becker, Michelle Grangaud, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Jouet, moi, our host Mireille Cardot, Frédéric Forte.

Matt in Belgium: Strip Turnhout Dec 11-13

2009-11-30T10:26:00.005-05:00

Jessica and I will be in Turnhout, Belgium, this December for the bi-annual comics festival, Strip Turnhout.

I was originally invited to this festival two years ago but the dates fell quite literally on the birthday of my daughter, Aldara. They have graciously invited me again and this time all three of us will be attending the festival.

Back in 2007, as followers of this blog may remember, the festival published a lovely hardcover edition (the only one) of my "must-have boek" (Stripelmagazine), Stijloefeningen:

In the intervening years, an educational group called Kunst in Zicht has put together an educators' pack devoted to my book and its applications in secondary school classrooms. (I'm hoping to get it translated into English soon--details to follow here of course.) The day before the festival, Thursday December 11, Jessica and I will be talking at an educational symposium the group has organized in conjunction with Strip Turnhout.

Jessica and I will then be having a chat with the amazing Paul Gravett on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon we'll be looking at art by young, aspiring cartoonists.

Very brief update from France

2009-11-17T10:48:00.003-05:00

This is just to say I will not be posting anything until after I get back. I'm too busy and anyway I can't seem to d/l photos from my camera. In the meantime follow me (better yet, the whole group) on Twitter or periodically check the feed to the right.

Nov. 8-21: touring France with Belles Etrangères

2009-11-06T20:35:00.006-05:00

For the next two weeks, I'll be touring France with 11 other American authors as part of the Centre National du Livre's annual Belles Etrangères festival.

A film crew came to my house over the summer and shot a bunch of footage for an hour-long documentary which will be screened in Paris on Monday night. It will be posted on line later and I'll post the link here. We're based in Paris and do various short trips with one other artist where we'll be doing readings and talking to the public at libraries and schools. I'll be in Nancy on my own, in the Pyrenées with novelist John Haskell and finally in Corsica with would-be U.S. Secretary of Postracial Affairs, Colson Whitehead. You can see the full itinerary here.

And I guess you could call this burying the lead: I've been invited to be a guest of honor at one of Oulipo's legendary monthly dinners. I'm a bit more excited than I am intimidated!

Digital Inking

2009-10-28T18:50:00.006-04:00

Today I dashed off a few attempts at digital inking.

I'm doing research for DWWP vol. 2 and tried out two ways of doing digital inking in Photoshop, using a Wacom tablet, for a small section about it I am writing.

For the first drawing, I scanned a panel I had already penciled for "Drawn OnwarD", reduced the layer opacity to about 30%, then made a new layer where I "inked" the pencils with the Pencil tool and one of the brush presets that gave a slightly charcoal-y (though too uniform, I think) line.

For this second drawing I did a very quick, simplified copy of the method Brian Bolland describes in some detail here: I "penciled" directly in Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. Then reduced the opacity to 20% and made a second pencil layer where I refined the drawing a bit. I faded that one too (reducing the first layers opacity to 10%--I should probably have just turned it off) and made an "ink" layer. I inked following Bolland's specs, using the Pencil tool with a brush size of 5 or 9. I did a background sketch but didn't finish it. I may go back and do that later in order to play with using the Pen tool to make perspective lines and so on.

In both cases I have deleted the pencil layers to make these finished jpegs.

I have to say I am pleased with how these turned out and also with how relatively easy it was to get a hang of the method(s). More to come...?

Best American Comics 2009 event in Brooklyn, Thursday October 22

2009-10-20T17:22:00.005-04:00

Come to powerHouse Arena in DUMBO this Thursday, October 22, at 7PM for a reading and signing event for Best American Comics 2009.

A bunch of contributors are going to be there as well as Jessica and me. There will be a slideshow reading featuring Michael Kupperman, Ben Katchor and other TBA. Then there will be mingling, drinking, and signing. Guest editor Charles Burns can't make it due to prior commitments but you can count on a lot of cartoonists being there, including, possibly, some big surprises.

A few Matt-related links

2009-10-09T12:18:00.004-04:00

A new interview, a magazine debuts comics, and my first iPhone comic, all after the jump.

Many of you are already know about the Graphic NYC cartoonist portrait project.(I posted about the photo shoot here.) Writer Chris Irving has been following up with interviews and they have been posting all of it on their blog. We met for coffee and then a beer a few weeks ago and the piece went up earlier this week.

My comic "Je vais encore sortir ce soir" (I still don't have an English title for it) appears in English on the back page ofthe current issue BOMB. It's an honor since it's a cool magazine based on artists interviewing other artists; plus I believe this is the first comic they have printed.

Finally, I know have a comic you can download on iTunes. It's my story "The Others" and you can download it for $.99 and read it in Panelfly. There are still a few zoom issues in the horizontal view as of this posting but they are working on it. Not all of my comics make sense read on an iPhone or similar small screen but I think "The Others" works pretty well. I have a few others that might work--"Prisoner of Zembla" or "Six Treasures of the Spiral" for example. I'm thinking about offering those too, through Panelfly or another app.

Setting up a new comic project

2009-10-02T16:36:00.009-04:00

I'm in the planning stages of a new comic. I'm trying to set it up so that I can make it as portable as possible.

I had this idea a while back to do a very simple comic riffing on a quote I've heard from Samuel Beckett to the effect that drama is simply a matter of characters entering and exiting through doors (NOTE/PLEA: I haven't been able to track down the original quote; if you know the one I'm talking about please post it in comments, thanks!). I decided I would try a comic where each panel was the same vestibule with a door on the back wall and doors on the side walls. I would develop a wordless story told entirely by the order and combination by which a set of characters entered and exited those doors. A visual influence for this comic was the grid-based minimalist humor comics of Lewis Trondheim (Mister O, etc) and also similar work by the still unknown-in-the-US François Ayroles. I came up with some simple characters based loosely on archetypes from my youth and started doing thumbnails, putting them in various situations, but with a general theme of a protagonist against a group that seems to be aligned against him.

I realized early on that this is a comic I might be able to "automate" more than most because of its repetitive structure. A few cartoonists I know--Jason Little and Pascal Dizin--have been printing their pencils in blue inkjet ink directly onto bristol board. It occurred to me that I could do something similar, with the added advantage that, since every panel is the same shape and size, I could print out a big pile of them, cut them into small cards (about 4" x 5") and carry them around with me to work on in my ever-scant spare time. Recently I mapped out the perspective of the room and made a very precise pencil diagram, which I scanned and made blue (Pascal taught me to convert the art into duotone, assign cyan to the whole image, and then lighten the color using curves). I'm still experimenting, but my plan is to print a whole bunch directly on bristol, then I can just pencil the figures based on my thumbnails, ink, scan, and clean up on Photoshop.

Here's a photo of what I'll be carrying around in my shoulder bag in the months to come. I'll post more about this later.

Busy, Busy Matt

2009-09-21T21:58:00.007-04:00

Sorry for the lack of new posts. I've been starting up new classes and reading comics furiously for Best American Comics 2010. Best American Comics 2009 is just now hitting bookstores and is getting great reviews. We'll be doing at least one big event in NYC in October, details to follow. We'll also be announcing very soon the new guest editor so stay tuned!

Otherwise, cranking away on DWWP book 2, writing, editing, doing illustrations, planning a staged re-launch of the website... an endless to-do list. Thanks very much to all of you who send us nice mails or tell us in person that you have enjoyed the first book, we need all the moral support we can get to get through this next one.

I'm slowly seeing an end point to Drawn OnwarD, my first major story (32 pages) in several years.

Some interesting travel in coming months which I'll post about later.

And so on and so forth.

Oh, and I am involved in a really exciting book deal which I'm itching to talk about but can't quite yet.
I can however mention that I recently made a book deal for a Brazilian edition of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. That will be published by a house called Cosac Naify, a literary and art book publisher--notably, the Brazilian publisher of Queneau's Exercises in Style.

Meantime, follow me on Twitter for updates, off the cuff observations about comics, music, fatherhood, cocktails, and life in NYC. I promise I'm trying to keep the babbling to a minimum.

Brooklyn Book Festival Appearances

2009-09-08T18:43:00.007-04:00

I'll be moderating a panel and hosting a comics jam at this Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival.
Also: a special talk with Guy Delisle for SVA students next Monday.

I'll be hanging around the BBF most of the mid-day and I also plan to hit the Gala mingle on Saturday evening, followed by Drawn & Quarterly's anniversary party at Rocketship. Here are the details for Sunday:

International Stage (Borough Hall Plaza)

11:00 a.m. The International Graphic Novel. Three acclaimed graphic novelists who tackle big social and political themes in their work discuss what the form can accomplish, from an international and domestic perspective. Featuring Guy Delisle (The Burma Chronicles), Peter Kuper (Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico) and Sarah Glidden (How To Understand Israel In 60 Days Or Less). Moderated by Matt Madden.

Borough Hall Conference Room

1:00 p.m. Comics Jam with Jessica Abel and Matt Madden A jam comic is an improvised collaborative comic. One person draws a single panel and then passes it on to the next person, who draws a new panel that continues the story. Get ready to draw and collaborate! For teens and adults. Participation limited to 25.

More details about the Brooklyn Book Festival here, where you'll find lots of other comics programming.

If you are an SVA student and are free Monday evening, I hope you'll come see Guy Delisle talk about his work an career:

Monday, September 14 at 7:00 p.m. in 310 E. 22nd St. 703G, Matt Madden presents
guest speaker Guy Delisle. Guy publishes here with Drawn & Quarterly
and has done a few travel/memoir comics about time he spent in
Shenzhen, China and in Pyongyang, North Korea. He's a French Canadian living in
France.

Open to students and faculty, no charge.

Two Fall Continuing Ed. Classes at SVA

2009-09-05T13:50:00.002-04:00

I'm teaching two continuing education comics classes at SVA this fall (and spring), both starting mid-late September. One's a 12-week class and the other is a once-a-month seminar I'll be teaching with Nick Bertozzi.

The first class is called Comics Storytelling & it meets Tuesday evenings from 6-9PM starting Sept. 22. We read a variety of comics and do a series of short assignemnts to learn about visual storytelling, then work on longer (4-6 page) stories. The second class is a comics seminar Tom Hart and I have developed over the last year. This is for people already making comics who are looking for feedback on their work and advice on time management. It meets all day on three Saturdays spread out from Sepember to November. It starts September 26.

DW&WP theme now available for iGoogle!

2009-07-23T09:47:00.002-04:00

New DW&WP theme available at iGoogle.

Studies for Hiram Pantoum

2009-07-21T23:47:00.003-04:00

I've been working for a while—where I can find the time—on a series of comics based on the poetry form called the pantoum. You can read about the form and see an example I did using a comic by Tom Hart here.

I'm at the point of inking an original 4-page comic called "Hiram Pantoum" and thought I'd share a few preparatory sketches for the final art.

Since this is a short comic (although it's four pages long, because of the rules of the pantoum it is actually only two pages which I will trace and ink two times) it seems a good opportunity to refine some aspects of my drawing for comics. Mainly I am always looking to simplify, stylize, and use more solid blacks. I rediscovered Felix Vallotton's woodcuts recently and have been using him as one of my models. (See Derik Badman's illustrated appreciations here and here.) His very black compositions are what first attracted me but I also like his dynamic composition and his detailed but flattened spaces as you can see in this copy I drew of his print "L'Assassinat" (see the original here):

Here's the first drawing I did in my sketchbook, copying freehand from my pencils and inking entirely with a brush:

I like the backgrounds but I'm not happy with the old woman. Too many lines—but that comes with the territory, I suppose.

Here's the next sketch, traced (somewhat awkwardly) from my (still loose) pencils into my sketchbook:

This might be pushing the blacks too far, but I like how it looks overall. Inked with a nib and then brush for the blacks. Still not happy with the old woman.

Here's her apartment, based on memories of my two grandmothers' apartments in the 80s. Traced quickly in pencil and inked entirely with brush. I drew this before the Vallotton image above but I think you can see what I would like about his somewhat off-kilter, flattened perspective. I might push the angles a bit more into Cézanne territory.

Although the individual images were coming together, I still didn't have a sense for how this will fit together as a page, so I layed a piece of tracing paper over my pencils and did this very quick (about 15-20 minutes) study all in brush:

It's coming along, but I'm still not confident about it. I'm going to tighten up the pencils, keep working on grandma, and try a few more studies. I've been looking at ways which artists draw old people (mostly, they don't).

Variations on my improvised comic activity

2009-07-18T22:14:00.003-04:00

Thanks to all of you who commented on my improvised comic activity. If you explore the comments you will find several links, including one that was just sent to me a few hours ago. After the jump, two variations on the activity that I found to be particularly fruitful.

Isaac Cates and Michael Wenthe to my activity in the direction of collaboration and jam comics, with each artist drawing plots for the other to turn into coherent shapes. Then they exchange two more times to end up with a finished comics. What's nice about this is the way it ensures spontaneity: you can't help yourself in advance by tailoring your "random" blobs to some kind of narrative you may see developing. You can see two results here.

Instead of doing ink blots, Austin Kleon made marks by dropping a teabag on his page and then turned it into a comic using ink, resulting in a comic that is both two-toned but also where you can clearly see the original marks even after they've been transformed. You can see several examples here.

A few Matt-related links

2009-07-11T12:05:00.002-04:00

I've been away from the blog for a while so I thought I'd post a few links related to my work that I've accumulated recently.

Me n' Elvis are big in Belgium. Here's a book show featuring a segment on the Belgian ed. of 99 Ways... which features my publisher Toon Horsten filmed in the renowned comics shop, Het Besoten Land. My segment starts around 4:25.

I didn't get around do posting about this in May when it would have been more timely: Wim Lockefeer has a great website of comics-related ephemera (and who is coincidentally also the translator of the Belgian Dutch edition), and a few months back he did a series of posts called Matt Madden Mondays in May where he posted a variety of Maddenana I sent him a while back.

Finally, here's a French film student's project inspired, as it declares in the opening, by Queneau... and Madden. I know there are other student projects out there, in a variety of media, based on Queneau's book and mine and I'm always interesting in seeing the results so please feel free to contact me if you are a student or teacher.

Summer Intensive 2009 Meta-post

2009-06-25T12:32:00.007-04:00

One thing about blogs is that it's a real pain to read a series of posts because you have to navigate backwards. So I have compiled links in order to all of my Summer Intensive 09 posts for your ease of reading. And here are the links, in order starting from Day one:

Day one: getting started and jam comics
Day one: comics recommendations from the students
Day two: the wrong planet and Gary Panter
Day three: layout
Day four, part one: thumbs and lettering
Day four, part two: Tom Hart
Day five: work day
Day six: pencils
Day seven, part one: inking
Day seven, part two: Kim Deitch
Day eight: planning minis
Day nine, part one: finishing up
Day nine, part two: David Mazzucchelli
MoCCA Art Festival

Summer Intensive, Day the Last, Part 2: MoCCA visit with David Mazzucchelli

2009-06-17T21:24:00.024-04:00

The Friday afternoon before MoCCA Art Festival our students were scrambling to get their comics finished up. Still, we made time to meet up at MoCCA after lunch, where David Mazzucchelli himself met us to give us a tour of his just-opened retrospective show, "Sounds and Pauses, the Comic Art of David Mazzucchelli," curated by Dan Nadel.

What follows is an annotated selection of some photos we took that afternoon.

[reposted and slightly edited... and now featuring a jump!]

David introduces the show to the class, Jessica, and, on the right, Nick Bertozzi, who happened to be around that day. One thing worth passing along if you are going to see the show is that you can move clockwise or counter-clockwise, both ways lead you to the most recent work, the instant classic Asterios Polyp. (Heading to the right takes you via superheroes and to the left via Rubber Blanket and the Kodansha period. More or less.)

The blown-up panel that serves as the entrance to the show was painted by David himself after an elaborate transfer project involving a puzzle of 8 1/2" x 11" sheets of paper with little pieces of the blown-up image on them.

These four drawings are framed four-up because they are small, maybe 5" x 3". These drawings were used for the cover images of Batman: Year One, for which they were blown-up and colored--see the next photo:

This is an acetate overlay of the blown-up image, now something more like 10 x 15", with painted color by Richmond Lewis underneath [correction courtesy Signor Mazzucchelli: Richmond colored all the interiors; David colored the covers himself--MM]. I asked and now forget if it's gouache or acrylic. I think it's the former. David loved the effect of these covers: the simplified, gestural inking which went on to become a hallmark of his later style. You can see the progression from the earlier to later pages from that series.

For example, David pointed out how you could see increasing amounts of white ink on the later pages where he had "undrawn" detail he had put in through habit. (Click the photo to enlarge.)

Just a shot of David talking about his work with various sketches and studies in the background.

A spread and one of the vellum overlays which enabled David to work in two Pantone colors on a story which changed a lot of cartoonists' (myself included--see "Night of the Grossinator") ideas about the potential of color and printing in comics, "Discovering America" from Rubber Blanket #2 (by the way there are copies of Rubber Blanket on sale at the show and I recommend you snatch them up before they're all gone).

The final, printed spread (the red plate of the page on the left appears in the previous photo). David reiterated numerous times that the original pages are of little value to him; what counts—what is the real comic—is the printed book.

Kind of an illegible photo, but just to give you a shot of the two flat cases full of David's notes, index cards, studies, and lettering samples for Asterios Polyp. He worked out the story on index cards, then sketched small thumbs in spreads (keeping the reading flow always in mind), and only then worked up final pencils and inks.

David did a lot of "post-production" in Photoshop. Here's an example of a bunch of drawings (showing a strong, if semi-unconscious, Saul Steinberg influence) that he drew on a big sheet of bristol board and later pasted in to a page:

The printed page, in two colors.

There's tons more to say about this amazing show from one of our favorite artists but I need to leave off here. We videoed most of the tour and with David's blessing maybe some of that will make it on line at some point, maybe on the upcoming re-launch of the DWWP site.

Whole lotta tracing going on

2009-06-17T18:26:00.005-04:00

page 23 of Drawn Onward
click to enlarge

Thought Balloon show in Dumbo

2009-06-16T16:29:00.006-04:00

ArtLexis has posted some gallery views of the Thought Balloons show on their website. Click on the poster image to see the slide show.

The show is up until September 11 so if you're in Dumbo, stop by and check it out.

Here's an image of the installation of my story "The Others":

Web links for Summer Intensive students

2009-06-13T14:41:00.003-04:00

I've added links to students' websites on my MoCCA post.

Coming soon, a final class post about our visit to MoCCA with David Mazzucchelli acting as docent for his own show. Then I'll make a meta-post where you can click through the class posts chronologically from beginning to end (a major problem of blog organization if you ask me).

An Improvised Comic Activity

2009-06-11T20:31:00.002-04:00

Here's a tryout for an activity we're considering including in volume 2 of DWWP. It's a warm-up exercise whose goal is to activate your drawing and storytelling muscles at the same time. I'm not entirely sure how well it works so I would appreciate and comments on what follows. Better yet, if anyone is inspired I would love to see a few more attempts at this exercise. I'll make the instructions as clear as possible. The copy in bold is what I have written for the textbook draft.

Materials:

Office paper

Brush and india ink (or a brush pen)

penciling and inking tools

Instructions:

Draw a six-panel grid on your piece of paper (in this case I'm drawing in a small sketchbook about 5" x 6"):

Get out your brush, ink it up, and, without thinking too hard or planning in advance, quickly make a single mark in each panel: a line, a squiggle, a blot, in different sizes and densities.

Rinse out your brush and let your marks dry.

Look at each panel and try to see shapes or parts of outlines in the marks you’ve made: the curve of a nose, for example, or the drape of a coat, a tree, whatever. Take a pencil (or inking tool) and add to the marks, drawing what you see in your mind’s eye. Do this for each panel.

You might notice that I decided panel 5 was too sparse so I made a few more brush strokes.

Now hold the page back and read the six panels in sequence. Is there a story implied there? Look for suggestions of a narrative thread and tease it out by adding to each panel: backgrounds, new figures, dialogue, sound effects. One of your marks may lead to the creation of a character who becomes your protagonist. In that case you may choose to re-draw him in other panels to give the story better continuity and flow.

The spot in the third panel and the general barren-ness suggested by the scant marks led to me sketching a figure standing alone in a sun-bleached desert. My earliest doodles (not recorded) had the mark in the last panel as a bushy eyebrow of a full-panel face (The influence of that brow can be seen in panel 2). After a while—and looking for some kind of narrative development—I realized that mark could also be a storm cloud, suggesting an opposition to the sun dominating the other panels. The squiggles I added to the fifth panel, a zig-zaggy sort of movement, then began to suggest a rain dance of some sort.

I started to ink in my outlines with a pen (Rapidograph, but it shouldn't matter for this exercise) and to embellish with a brush pen. The backwards C shape in panel 4 eventually led me to give the character a mohawk.

This being a warm up exercise, I tried to do it as quickly as possible and as you can see noted below, I did all of this in about half an hour. I had a correction pen (a really neat one I got a Muji which I'm afraid they might not stock in NYC anymore) that I used for corrections but I tried not to be obsessive about it.

Here's a scan of the finished comic. I adjusted the levels for crisp blacks but I don't think I did much if any correction to the image:

If you decide to do your own take on this exercise I hope you'll e-mail it to me or post a link in the comments field.

Summer Intensive: MoCCA Art Festival

2009-06-08T11:38:00.009-04:00

MoCCA Art Festival was this weekend and the six students who finished the class all showed up with completed—and highly polished-looking—minicomics (I should add that the two who had to drop the class are still planning on finishing theirs, too):

clockwise from top left: "Adamantly Amorous" by Brian Lam, "Acetate vol. 1" by Jack Sjögren, "Wife Hunter" by Lisa Lim, "Men Flu" by Mie Lee (Ya Ting), "Danger Mom" by Kelly Wonder, & "Sheila The Zombie Cheerleader in: Chickens!" by Stephanie Ruble

Jessica and I were in and out both days but it seemed like the SVA table had a pretty steady flow of visitors and the book sales were solid, not to mention lots of trading. A few of you mentioned you had been following my reports on the blog so a special thanks to all of you for reading and for taking the time to go see the the results. I hope we'll be seeing some reviews of these comics in post-MoCCA coverage. Let me know if you see any mentions.

Charles Hatfield and Gene Kannenberg stepping up to be the first customers of the weekend.

I'll try and do more posts like this about classes in the future if I can make the time. I'm taking a break from teaching until the fall, then I'll play it by ear. And incidentally Jessica and I are working on a relaunch of the DWWP website which will eventually feature more content like this from us and other educators.

Finally, we will definitely be offering Summer Intensive 2010 so stay tuned...

MoCCA Art Festival Notes

2009-06-05T21:13:00.002-04:00

The SVA Continuing Ed gang (Summer Intensive class plus any students of mine and other CE teachers who show up) will be selling their minis at table #904 or 903—it doesn't matter because the other number is mine and Jessica's. And in the same row will be Cartoon Allies, the SVA undergrad cartooning group, which will also have a lot of cool stuff to sell and give away.

Jessica and I are juggling schedules to take care of our daughter so tomorrow I'll be there all day and Jessica will show up with Aldara around 3. On Sunday we'll swap roles. We'll be using the table as a home base and will be selling copies of Best American Comics 2008 (Lynda Barry), 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, and La Perdida along with a few minicomics. (DWWP and Life Sucks will be on sale at the First Second booth.) As usual we will be happy to sign and doodle in your books (the ones we wrote anyway).

We will have a few current and former students helping/hanging out at our table, notably Jude Killory, who has a couple great minicomics; Lydia Roberts (Sunday only) who is trying to finish up a mini in time (she has older stuff as well, all worth checking out); and Nic Breutzman who should have his first honest to gosh book, Yearbooks, just out from 2D Cloud, a new publisher out of Minnesota, who is also going to be at the show (you may have seen their anthology, Good Minnesotan, for which Nic has done covers).

Finally, I'll be tweeting my whereabouts as well as any interesting stuff I come across.

Summer Intensive, Day the Last, part one

2009-06-05T20:50:00.007-04:00

So Summer Intensive has come to an end and tomorrow you can see (and buy!) the results.

For now, just a few snapshots of students putting the final touches on their artwork...

...and trimming their printed copies...

...and getting feedback from David Mazzucchelli.

We had a great visit to David's show at MoCCA which I will post about next week when the dust settles.

Summer Intensive, Day Eight

2009-06-05T08:23:00.004-04:00

Quiet day in the classroom on Thursday as students plowed away through their inks. A few stayed at home or only came in for part of the day so the room looked pretty deserted at times.

Here are a few pages we haven't seen much of yet since Stephanie has been doing a lot of work at home. Her story—which ended up being 12 pages long—is about a zombie cheerleader character of hers (the cover threatens copyright violators with having their brains eaten), who find herself being followed around by a pack of... chickens? Read the mini and you'll find out why!
What we see below are her pencils on the top left which she has traced and inked on the right. (By the way, brain eating aside, her art as well as all the other art on this blog are copyright their respective authors.)

Jessica got students thinking about the last major step of this class: making a minicomic. First she reviewed the minicomics appendix in DWWP and had everyone make imposition guides (which help you figure out what order to paste up your pages). Some people will be doing their layout on computer but it still helps to do this part manually so you can visualize what your book will look and feel like.

We also have a large pile of minicomics spread around the room which people have been studying for format ideas, materials, cover designs, and so on.

Tomorrow's the last day! Jessica will show up in the morning and I'll join her at mid-day for a wrap up of the class. Then as a special treat, David Mazzucchelli will be giving us a quick tour of his new show at MoCCA and then will do a final critique of everyone's stories and minicomics layouts.

Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part two

2009-06-04T14:43:00.010-04:00

Wednesday afternoon Kim Deitch came to class to talk about his work. He started with a brief but entertaining overview of his career. He left no doubt that he and his peers were very aware of the importance of what they were doing in the 60s. He seemed genuinely annoyed that people dwelled on the sexual content of UG comics to the detriment of the leap forward they represented for our medium. He also says none of this would have happened—at least not to the degree it did—if it weren't for the influence and example of Robert Crumb.

Kim brought along a big portfolio full of all kinds of documentation of his creative process for a particular work, "No Midgets in Midgetville." He read about Midgetville in the New York Times years ago and saved the clipping. Eventually he went to the town in New Jersey and took some polaroids. Slowly a story developed featuring Waldo the Cat. The biggest non sequitur of the day came when Kim revealed that he got the idea to make it a romance after seeing the movie Shakespeare in Love (he said he's into Shakespeare and love but he hated the movie).

He also had all kinds of sketches and stages of his work, as in this penciled opening page which he traced and inked (on the right):

He also told us about a interesting and unusual creative habit he has: he'll often pencil entire one-page comics about a character or and idea he's developing. These are unplanned, improvised vignettes (though as you can see they achieve a significant level of polish) which help him understand his characters and expand the creative universe they live in. Usually these stories don't even end up in the final work, though he often comes up with panels or new characters which he later incorporates:

Kim was eager to see what everyone was working on and graciously took the time to read almost everyone's comics and give them thoughtful—and frank—feedback. At least twice I heard him remarking (kindly) something to the effect of "yeah, do a 100 more pages like this and you might turn out pretty good!"

This is just a sampling of what he talked about (see my Twitter feed for a few more tidbits). He's got a ton of great ideas and observations to share and his passion for the medium impressed the class (and me, once again) deeply.

Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part one

2009-06-04T09:29:00.005-04:00

We spent the first part of Wednesday inking. Most people were at least started on inks so we went down to the library on the 2nd floor and photocopied reductions of a few pages. There are two reasons to do this and I think they're a crucial step in the process of finalizing your pages:

You get an idea of how your work is going to look reduced to print size. Often you'll see that you need a heavier line but you might also find that drawings that looked wonky while big sit nicely on the page once they're reduced a bit
If you have your lettering and your basic line art done, now is a great time to make copies and test out details like spotting blacks and adding tones.

That's what we see in these first two photos: a reduced photocopy of one of Kelly's pages with blacks roughed in with a brush...

...and Kelly more carefully transferring those ideas onto the bristol board. (She's planning to draw those stars in panel three in white ink.)

Ya Ting had been drawing with a thin pen line but after looking at her photocopies she switched to a brush for a slightly thicker line and solid (rather than scribbled in) blacks:

Richard had finished a complete pass on his inking and was working on refining and clarifying some drawings as well as making corrections here and there:

A few students are still working on their pencils—inevitably everyone has their own pace and working style even disregarding external factors that might come into play—but they are determined to finish in time to make their minis and I believe they'll pull it off.

Summer Intensive, Day Six

2009-06-02T21:20:00.018-04:00

Today's class was mainly me moving from table to table and looking over people's progress, trying to solve drawing problems, making sure everything reads smoothly, and looking ahead to inking. I did a very quick demo of nibs and brushes toward the end of class but I would have liked to have had much more time to talk about inking before everyone dives into it. Most students are well into their pencils and will be ready to ink this evening or tomorrow morning and a couple (as you'll see below) have already gotten started. All the stories are really shaping up, though. Let's take a look, it's time to start whetting your appetites for this weekend:

Here you can see one of Jack's pages with the thumbnails taped for reference to the top of the drawing board. His story is a kind of fable about a character on a two-seater bicycle who is looking for the right person to sit on his second seat. It will be laid out horizontally--oddly, two students out of eight in the class have chosen this atypical format.

Yating's story is a riff on the hysteria over swine flu. In her comic, the disease is contracted by kissing pigs and the main symptom is that when you kiss someone, their noses turn into pig snouts. As you can see, her pencils are very confident and polished. This led to a discussion of how many comics are now printed in pencils, with no inks at all. We looked at some slides of Amanda Vähämäki and CF. The class talked about it and decided that "Man Flu" might be a more mellifluous title.

Brian is working on a comic about a guy who becomes so stressed out with his life that he develops migraines and shingles. He therefore decides that he needs a girlfriend to make him relaxed again. Sound a little ass-backward? Read the comic and find out! Above you can see Brian's extensive revisions, which include dialogue written out in script format, numerous passes of thumbnails drawn in lined notebooks, and pencils/inks which he is drawing on office paper. He had a nice description of the art style he is aiming for: "somewhere between stick figures and Calvin and Hobbes."

Kelly is doing a story about two sisters teasing their mom about how over-protective she was, only to reveal (to the reader, NOT the mother) the kinds of outrageous behavior the two have enacted over the years. You can see here that Kelly is taking advantage of tracing paper and the big light box we have in the classroom to trace photos and refine her drawings.

Lisa is the one student who has already done some comics before, having taken classes with me, Tom Hart, and Lauren Weinstein at SVA. She's using this class as a way to produce a new comic quickly and it's coming along wonderfully. This one's about a guy she met in Japan who would regularly have sex with lonely housewives--a "wife hunter". Lisa's style is non-linear in every sense of that word (I was teasing her the other day about her constitutional inability to draw a straight line) so the inking and especially her increasingly bold use of black go a long way towards guiding the reader's eye through the story.
Lisa was thinking about a full black bleed for her minicomic but I suggested a 1/2" black border for now since bleeds are a real pain in the butt to deal with when you're dealing with photocopies. With minicomics, it's good to keep it simple.

Richard did something here that I always recommend: it's a labeled, orthographic view of the child's bedroom where most of his story takes place.

Finally, an array of nibs and holders that these guys are going to get quite familiar with in the next few days. (Note the excellent nib suggestions on the Post-It!)

I should point out that not everyone is using nibs and fancy brushes. Several students are inking with Microns or other more disposable tools, and that's fine. When you are making a mini, time and efficiency are important, so do what works. However, our larger ambition for this class is that students will produce whatever kind of mini they can come up with given the time constraints while at the same time taking a first pass through all the basic skills you should know to bekome a Klassik Kartoonist.

And tomorrow, we've got none other than KIM DEITCH coming in to share his wisdom! I'm very excited about it.

Boy, this is a long post. If any of my more blog-savvy readers want to explain to me how to do that "after the jump" stuff, I'd appreciate it.

Summer Intensive, Day Five

2009-06-01T23:13:00.006-04:00

A couple photos from Monday's drafting tables:

Show at ArtLexis in Dumbo

2009-05-31T02:00:00.006-04:00

The original pages of my story "The Others" will be featured in a group show of artists from the Blurred Vision anthology (it ran in BV4) at ArtLexis, the gallery wing of the Pod empire starting Monday June 8, the day after MoCCA. People who have read the story there may be surprised to see that the story was drawn as 16 smallish pages. It is not taken from my sketchbooks, as one review surmised, but it's meant to look that way (and one drawing IS in fact pasted in from a sketchbook).

The reception is also Monday night so if you're still in town, come on by, it's not far from the York stop on the F train.

And Thursday before MoCCA is the closing reception for Andrei Molotiu's show of abstract comics prints. They are large and quite lovely. Andrei's Abstract Comics anthology (which has a great blog) is sure to make a splash when it comes out.

I have been provisionally commissioned to create a "Molotiu Cocktail" for the event per the request of some wise guy on the TCJ.com message board but I'm not sure I'll have time before Thursday...

Summer Intensive: Day Four, part II

2009-05-30T12:19:00.011-04:00

Here are some photos from Tom Hart's afternoon workshop. Using a Power Point presentation and having all the students do a series of sketches and notes on index cards, Tom laid out his ideas about story generation and developing accumulations of images and ideas into all kinds of stories. The ideas and activities come out of his work-in-progress, How to Say Everything, his take on a What It Is kind of book (he's said to me that the closest model is probably John Gardner's Art of Fiction). You can read portions of the work as he develops it here.

Two index cards juxtaposed after having been created in different activities.

Tom talking to Kelly about the six-panel comics we did in class based on the index card activities.

One of Tom's index card boxes that he uses to store and organize all his ideas and images--story ideas, notions, scraps of drawings, and so on. This particular boxes is devoted to a new book length comic he has been developing. I can't wait to see some new long-form Hart!

Discussing the finished one-page comics. They were all quite good and I can definitely see a couple of them getting developed in to longer works.

Over the weekend the students are trying to make a dent in their pencils. Jessica will troubleshoot and critique them on Monday and we hope to get them inking by Tuesday.

Stay tuned.

Summer Intensive: Day Four, part I

2009-05-30T07:45:00.009-04:00

Photos from Friday's morning session.

I arrived to find the students already looking over each other's work, always the sign of a good class: the teacher should ideally start a dialogue that the students continue.

These two show Ya Ting's revised thumbs. She decided yesterday to make her story 8 rather than 7 pages so she has cut out all the panels and spread them out, filling in the gaps with new panels we discussed in the crit.

Richard's working on some character sketches.

We spent part of the class learning how to use the Ames lettering guide, shown here in a slide from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (being the others, of course, we have convenient pdfs of the entire book. This is something we're considering making available at a later date on our website.)

Summer Intensive: Day Three

2009-05-28T20:19:00.003-04:00

Quick report after a busy day: I aimed to teach laying out a sheet of bristol board for penciling AND teaching the basics of lettering with the Ames guide as well as the basic drafting ink tools. I probably spent too much time rambling on about a quick slide show of short comics I did featuring:
Bill Griffiths' The Plot Thickens
Gabrielle Bell's The Hole
Kurtzman's Corpse on the Imjin
Dash Shaw's Cartoon Symbolia
As I tweeted, layout is simple but full of pitfalls from slipping Tsquares to absent-minded measuring--not to mention dividing up a 15" tall page into three equally sized tiers with two 1/4" gutters!

Laying out a 9-panel grid. The T-square is a life saver.

I decided to save lettering for tomorrow.
Instead four of the students put their work up for critique and all four were in good shape, no major re-writes except maybe whittling down from excessive length. The other three (one absent) were making good progress on their thumbs. I predict everyone in the class will finish their minis for MoCCA Art Festival.

Richard's thumbs. The three pages up top are a revision he is doing where he is trying to condense the 11-page version below to 8 or 9 pages. Thumbnails are crucial because it's so easy to rework stuff this way.

Summer Intensive: Day Two

2009-05-27T22:13:00.004-04:00

Jessica taught the class today and spent the time consulting each student on their story ideas for the minicomic. She also talked about how comics combine panels to tell stories. After talking about the Panel Lottery activity she had them do Pahl Hluchan's activity The Wrong Planet, which we included in chapter 3 of DWWP. Students are given a short wordless narrative and break into teams to break the story down in to panels using Post-It notes. They then add and subtract panels to see how it affects the reading of the story.

Here are a few pictures of today's exercise:

After lunch, Gary Panter came in and talked about his art, about minicomics, and about the challenges of making a living as an artist. Jessica shot some video of the talk and I am having trouble getting a screen capture. I'll try to get one up later in the interest of posting all this now.

Summer Intensive 09 comics recommendations

2009-05-27T12:26:00.004-04:00

What follows is not a definitive list but a collection of answers to the question "what's a good comic you've read recently?" It's an impressive list, both wide and broad. As a teacher I can state that five years ago a class like this would not have had such a diverse selection.

I'm typing the titles from our notes so I apologize if any spellings are wrong. I'm not going to link everything either since most of this you can find with a google search. Feel free to contribute corrections or additions in the comments field.

Blankets, Craig Thompson
Black Hole, Ch. Burns
Americanelf.com, J. Kochalka
Fart Party, Julia Wertz
Tonoharu, Lars Martinson
works of Julie Doucet (come back to comics, Julie, we miss you!)
Lost at Sea (YA)
Amulet/Flight/Flight Explorer
Robot Dreams, Sara Varon
Professor's Daughter, Sfar and Guibert
works of Dr. Seuss
Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli (apparently it's in stores!!!!!!!!!)
Bone, Jeff Smith
Best American Comics series
What It Is, Lynda Barry
Love and Rockets, Los Bros Hernandez
Achewood, Chris Onstad
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Nana and Paradise Kiss, Ai Yazawa
Mars and Eternal Sabbath, Fuyumi Soryo
Breakdowns, Art Spiegelman
Bitterkomix (!!)
Yoshitosho Abe
Amano (?)

Summer Intensive: Day One

2009-05-26T20:18:00.008-04:00

Today was the first day of our two-week intensive comics class in SVA's Continuing Education division. The class will have a table at MoCCA Art Festival where they will be selling and trading the minicomics (their first) they will have made in this class. We have 8 students with a variety of interests and backgrounds and it looks like it's going to be a great group. I'll be posting photos and updates about the class here every few days as well as tweeting regularly (notice I have put a Twitter module in the righthand menu).

Here's the group (minus one) with Jessica at about 10AM Tuesday. Let's see how haggard they look at the end of all this!

We started the class by having everyone introduce themselves and talk about comics they've read recently (list to follow). Then we dove straight into cartooning by having everyone do jam comics (page 13 in DWWP). The basic idea is that everyone draws a panel and then hands the comic off to someone else, who tries to continue the story. We make it more challenging and productive by providing a list of rules, at least one of which each jam has to follow. "Backwards" is easily the most popular (start the story at the end (the last panel) and work your way back the the beginning)) but variations on one word/one syllable per panel rules also turn up frequently.

The dreaded blank page! Actually, once you have the 9-panel grid you're already headed towards making comics. (Notice she is drawing the last panel first: "backwards" rule.)

Making a swap.

In the end we had 8 one-page comics to look at. I start almost every class I teach with a jam comic. It's a great ice breaker and it's just fun to do (especially when you're fearing some long-winded lecture about what a great comic Jack Survives is (for better or worse they got that too)), plus you create instant comics by the students to critique and discuss. Last but not least, the jam rules introduce my favorite topic of the creative usefulness of constraints and games.

Here are two widely admired panels from today's jam comics:

(That's a kid inside the belly of a dinosaur-type creature inside a painting in a museum.)

(This is the brilliant "first" panel of one of the backwards jams. The open night table drawer is the coup de grâce.)

DWWP review and Summer Intensive hype!

2009-05-20T19:13:00.003-04:00

...from SVA's new continuing education blogger Mike Bilsborough, here.

The Summer Intensive Class still has spots left so if you've been on the fence: give it a shot! Two weeks and you're on your way to being a cartoonist.

And once again: Gary Panter! Tom Hart! Becky Cloonan! Kim Deitch! David Mazzucchelli!

A page from an abandoned project

2009-05-20T12:46:00.000-04:00

This is a sample page I inked a few years ago while trying to figure out the look for a story set in Mexico City (the La Condesa neighborhood in this page). I've abandoned the story, probably permanently, but you never know....

Pre-MoCCA Art Festival Class: Summer Intensive Comics Workshop at SVA

2009-05-05T15:07:00.007-04:00

Starting the day after Memorial Day, Jessica and I are offering an intensive 2-week class at SVA, the goal of which is to learn how to make comics by writing, drawing, and printing a minicomic in time for the MoCCA Art Festival the weekend of June 6-7. We'll teach in the mornings and afternoons will alternate between open studio time and visits from a group of stellar guest cartoonists: David Mazzucchelli, Becky Cloonan, Tom Hart, Gary Panter, and Kim Deitch! Each will have a three hour session that will be a combination workshop/craft talk/crit.

The roster's filling up fast so sign up sooner rather than later. Info below, registration info here.

Summer Intensive Comics Workshop
CIC-3012-A
Mon.–Fri., May 26–June 5
(begins Tuesday, May 26)
Instructional Hours: Mon.—Fri., 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Studio Hours: Mon.–Fri., 5:00 pm–10:00 pm;
Sat., May 30, 9:00 am–10:00 pm
9 sessions; 6 CEUs; $950

Comics, graphic novels, manga: it seems everyone wants to be a cartoonist these days. Yet comics is a complex medium that requires a grasp of drawing and storytelling as well as an understanding of the various tools and technology to prepare artwork for print. A great way to learn how to make comics is to jump in and make a short, printed comic in only two weeks. This intensive comics workshop is geared toward those intrepid students ready to make the plunge. In daily sessions, we will guide students through the process of making a comic, by presenting activities and short assignments on the basics of cartooning and storytelling as well as advanced topics like inking and reproduction. In addition, several afternoons will feature lectures and critiques with visiting professional cartoonists. The workshop will also include participation in the annual art festival of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) held June 6–7; students will have the opportunity to sell and trade their comics at the premier gathering of independent comic artists and small publishers, literally the day after their comics are finished.

PS If you're looking for other options there are a number of other great classes at SVA this summer, among them two taught by Tom Hart which he talks about here.

Oulipo in NYC, part II

2009-04-28T20:51:00.002-04:00

I haven't scoured the web for reports but I would love to hear a bit about the other Oulipo events that happened that week. Other than Tom Motley's sketches I have only come across reports here and here.

On Sunday, April 5, I showed up at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on 79th St. and 5th Ave., checked my coat, and made my way up the grand stairs to the invitation-only brunch. The group was much smaller than I had expected, maybe 40 people snacking on (quite decent) cheese and charcuterie on the second floor landing of that very impressive building (I felt like I was on the set of a Resnais/Robbe-Grillet feature, or, more precisely, the decadent French consulate in India in Duras's India Song). I filled myself with St. Albray, Morbier, and soppressata and a few glasses of white wine as I tried to figure out how to approach the members of Oulipo, these semi-mythical figures who were standing right next to me. I had been counting on Harry Mathews being there to show me around. We still haven't met in person, to my regret, but we have at least corresponded a fair amount. Rescue came in the form of Claire B., one of the hosts from the embassy (with whom I bonded about food and drink—she does a quite impressive food blog that is well worth a visit). I told her of my plight and she introduced me to the nearest Oulipian, Hervé Le Tellier, who, to my great surprise, said "Matt Madden, I have all of your books!" and revealed himself to be something of a comics geek. We talked about Oubapo's activities and he showed me on his iPhone some illustrated poems he does for Le Monde. As for Oubapo, Le Tellier is particularly impressed by the work of Etiènne Lecroart, whose Bandes de Sonnets (comics following the sonnet form to various degrees) was reviewed by Dr. Bart Beaty a while back on The Comics Reporter and is indeed and impressive achivievement.

Not without some logistical difficulty, I managed to get another attendee to snap a few shots of us:

me and Hervé Le Tellier at the Oulipo brunch

We milled around a while longer and Hervé made a quick introduction to Marcel Bénabou, then we all moved to the adjacent room for a fairly brief reading. In the course of the getting settled I managed to meet Jean-Jacques Poucel, a Yale professor and editor of the Drunken Boat Oulipo issue which features my comics, and also Lee Berman, founder of an interesting experimental website called UpRightDown which I'll post about here sometime soon. (Lee also posted a report about the week's event's here.) The one person I didn't get to meet was Michael Silverblatt, host of the wonderful LA-based radio show Bookworm. He's a great booster of Oulipo and experimental, formalist writing in general.

The members present did a quick reading, alternating French (sometimes then translated into English, usually not) and English. Jacques Roubaud read an entertaining piece from The Loop dealing with familial confusion about which train station exit young Roubaud was meant to meet up with his grandfather. Next, Le Tellier read a very meta excerpt from a novel where the narrator introduces, with merciless frankness, a protagonist in full-on mid-life crisis mode.

Hervé Le Tellier

Ian Monk then read a few sonnets, whose constraints he declined to reveal and which I wasn't able to pick up on in a single hearing. Later on he read an amusing piece call "The 9 Ages of Man" (expanding Shakespeare's 7 to include pre-birth and death) which in places was quite expeltive-filled, to the scandalized delight of the 12 year old sitting in front of me.

Ian Monk

Then Marcel Bénabou, whom I forgot to photograph, read the also meta, and rather Calvino-esque introduction to his book Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard, published in English as Dump This Book While You Still Can. The intro consists in a narrator trying to convince you not to read the book you are reading but despairing of being able to (because obviously if you're reading his words, you haven't dumped the book yet).

Anne Garréta, about whom I was only able to find this short page in French, talked about some of her earlier constrained work that combined formal constraints with issues of identity politics, such as her novel Sphinx, which is a love story where the genders of the characters are never specified. She then read from a novel (Pas un jour, I believe) with a Roubaud-inspired (it seemed to me) writing schedule constraint: every day for a certain amount of time (a month?) she would write for five hours on her memories of a single instance of love or desire. She then changed all the names, assigning each one a letter of the alphabet and subsequently re-ordered her writings so that they followed the alphabetical order of each character. The excerpt she read was about a light night road trip along the east coast (I remember the Merritt Parkway figuring into it) and didn't mention a particular character, just the sense that the narrator must be heading to see someone important.

Anne Garréta

After the reading I got to meet Roubaud who, it turns out, owned a copy of the French edition of 99 Ways to Tell a Story and was au courant about my association with Oubapo. I gave copies of A Fine Mess #2, featuring my alphabetically constrained "Prisoner of Zembla" and my comics sestina "The Six Treasures of the Spiral" to him and the other Oulipians (though I unfortunately didn't get to meet Garréta). Le Tellier gave me a copy of his book of illustrated poems, Les Opossums Célèbres, signed to me "oulipiennement". I was disappointed not to get a chance to really spend time with any of them but Le Tellier invited me to come to an Oulipo meeting in Paris next time I'm there so that gives me extra motivation to go back asap, as if I needed it!

Fresh Meat this Friday May 1

2009-04-28T08:05:00.003-04:00

(flyer by Jonathan Griffiths SVA '09)

Matt Madden's blog

Sign up now for spring continuing ed classes at SVA

Panels, Pages & Balloons: The Graphic Novel Book Club

Fall semester at SVA continuing education

Colombiano

SVA Cartooning grads to watch out for, 2011

Not on the internet (or at least too hard to find), boo!

Sean Bieri's "Exercise in Rage"

The Woods Transmissions: Report 01

99 Ways on the Daily Heller blog

"Dugin Izazov": ROYGBIV comics from Croatia

Macho Man Memorial Comic: wi-fi explained

DW&WP: My comics-making process, part I

All the art on my studio wall

Summer comics seminar at SVA

Sayonara: Limited e-dition

Bonus comic: cartooning over my students' shoulders

Me at MoCCA

La Mulata de Córdoba

NECAC this weekend in Providence

Famous Artists Cartoun Pantoum

Obstacle Course gets the Alison Bechdel stamp of approval!

10 Variations: an Obstacle Course preview

Coming Soon: Obstacle Course workshop at MoCCA, Feb 28

Belles Étrangères, the documentary

An article about Oubapo on WSJ.com

Enroll in a class with me this spring.

ROYGBIV: a one-page comic challenge

Tic Tac Toe Jam--a new jam comic constraint, for two players

Recent posts at the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures blog

Check out examples of my students' constraint-based comics

Brooklyn-Belfort

Neil Gaiman & Aristophane

Shine or rain

Moderating Josh Neufeld, Nick Abadzis, and Jessica Abel at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Sept. 12

fall semester is almost here

A preview of The Zabîme Sisters

The kids are all right: New blog post: SVA's pre-college intensive

Sketchbook post

Unhappy Catalog Living

Status Report, summer 2010

Summer Continuing Education classes at SVA

The New and Expanded DW&WP Blog

Covered by Charlie Orr

FRESH MEAT, the SVA student comics convention

Video piece about me and Jessica at the Huntington Musuem of Art

Workshop and exhibit in Huntington WV, February 25-28

XXOO

My Continuing Ed comics classes at SVA start January 26

Small Haul, Long Post

Belles Etrangères wrap-up

Matt in Belgium: Strip Turnhout Dec 11-13

Very brief update from France

Nov. 8-21: touring France with Belles Etrangères

Digital Inking

Best American Comics 2009 event in Brooklyn, Thursday October 22

A few Matt-related links

Setting up a new comic project

Busy, Busy Matt

Brooklyn Book Festival Appearances

Two Fall Continuing Ed. Classes at SVA

DW&WP theme now available for iGoogle!

Studies for Hiram Pantoum

Variations on my improvised comic activity

A few Matt-related links

Summer Intensive 2009 Meta-post

Summer Intensive, Day the Last, Part 2: MoCCA visit with David Mazzucchelli

Whole lotta tracing going on

Thought Balloon show in Dumbo

Web links for Summer Intensive students

An Improvised Comic Activity

Materials:

Instructions:

Summer Intensive: MoCCA Art Festival

MoCCA Art Festival Notes

Summer Intensive, Day the Last, part one

Summer Intensive, Day Eight

Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part two

Summer Intensive, Day Seven: part one

Summer Intensive, Day Six