Exercises in Style in the classroom

2015 marks the ten year anniversary of the first publication of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. It's never been a huge bestseller but it has slowly built an international and diverse audience made up of comics fans, designers, readers of experimental literature, and educators.

Teachers in particular have been real champions of the book. I have visited many classrooms to talk about it and I occasionally receive links to projects students have done based on my book. In a recent Twitter conversation a teacher asked me how I use my book when I'm teaching. After the jump I'll share a few ideas.


This will be a bit of a long post so here's a table of contents of what's up ahead:
I. Further variations on my template
II. Make your own template
III. Build an extended project
IV. For non-artists

The photo at the top of the page is from a project by students of the Lycée Pierre Lescot, a trade-oriented high school in Paris (which I point out only to underscore the fact that these activities are by no means only interesting to literature or art students). I visited them in 2009 only to find that they had done a whole series of activities on 99X (that's how I've taken to abbreviating it recently) including an exhibit of variations on my template page. The photo is from a series of Powerpoint photocomics (a new genre?) that told short stories based on a series of elements from my book and stuff the students came up with.

(Note: I credited students where possible but I don't have everyone's names. Happy to update if anyone wants to send info. Also, you can click on all of the images below to enlarge.)

I. To infinity and beyond
I want to share a few more photos of the French students' work because here we find an example of the most straightforward way to use 99X as the basis of a classroom activity: simply have your students make new variations of my "template" comic. It helps to show them my book first, of course, and to have them read my initial inspiration, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style or some of the short texts I list at the bottom before asking them to come up with their own approaches to retelling the story. It can help to do this as a class brainstorming exercise which can also serve as an opportunity to further identify different classes of constraints (POV, parodies, graphic approaches, etc.) or to discuss which constraints might be more productive than others (for example: what's more interesting, copying my template page on tracing paper or attempting to redraw it from memory?). It doesn't matter if they're "artists" or not, part of the fun is finding a way to make a visual response (through tracing, collage, copying and pasting, etc.).

A Roy Lichtenstein version (with a bit of Mondrian thrown in for good measure) next to a "robo-optical" version

This "fragmentary" version shows that you can do a lot with just a little bit of drawing ability and some color.

I still hear from teachers doing this kind of activity with their students. For instance, Derek Beaulieu just sent me this new set of variations from his students at the Alberta College of Art + Design. A few excerpts"


a soundtrack version


LOLcats FTW


Spot on Keith Haring version

A very simple twist, throwing kids into the mix, works very well to explain the confusion of the protagonist (and describes my current daily life quite accurately)

II. Make your own template
Another approach is to come up with a new template comic or text for your students to riff on. This has the advantage of being easily customizable for different age or skill levels. For example, I did an afternoon workshop with young French kids, between about 8 and 12 years old, at the CIBDI here in Angoulême. I wanted a very simple story for them to work with so I came up with a four panel sequence that wouldn't require a lot of drawing or sophisticated writing:

1. Mom puts food on table, calling child to come eat dinner.
2. A cat climbs up on the table.
3. The cat eats up all the food.
4. The child enters to find the dinner gone, looks disappointed.

We talked about possible approaches you could take and the kids were on their way. Not all of them entirely grasped the concept but even if they just drew a little comic roughly following my script they were having fun and probably learning something. In the end we put together a little minicomic of all the finished (and near-finished) pages. Here are some interesting ones:

This telling of the story is full of anthropomorphism. The cat talks (or "thinks" aloud) and so does the dinner.

A caveman version, why not?



This one is clever: the roles have all been mixed up


III. Build an extended project
If you're working cartooning or art students you can us 99X as the basis for an extended project. You can start with either approach I've laid out above (working from my template or making up a new one) and assign as many variations as you like. (You could also choose a one-page comic they have drawn for a previous assignment as your "template" comic.) You can have students choose their own constraints to work with or you can have them do the same ones, which has the advantage of letting you compare and discuss the results.

In 2013 I spent a week in Viborg, Denmark with the first group of cartooning students they've had at The Animation Workshop. I came up with a 6-panel sequence which we did variations on over the next five days. Here's the script:

1. Student 1 working on comic in classroom.
2. Enter Student 2.
3. S2 sits down next to S1.
4. S1 slides his/her comic to S2.
5. S1 "She's all yours."
6. S1 leaves, S2 starts drawing.

i. template
First I had them draw a "straightforward" version of the story. Of course, right there you start to see that there is no single way to tell the story "straight"—everyone already brings their own tools of drawing style, pacing, framing, and so on:

Here's a relatively straightforward, classic take on the script by Cathrin Peterslund.

This template by Jacob Thomas Canepa is already imposing its own series of formal choices: repetition, geometric shapes, grayscale...

ii. Genre
The first variation I asked them to do was to retell the story in a genre. Not just any genre though: I talked with each student and we selected genres they had never worked in before—even ones they didn't like. I thought it would be interesting to see how they overcame their dislike and their self-professed ignorance (I knew they would prove themselves wrong, as the results prove):

This war comic by Jam Aden adds a touch of tragedy to the script.

I encourage students to blend more than one genre. Here's a superhero romance comic by Julie Hauge with a healthy dose of comics self-referentiality.

iii. POV/Framing
The next assignment I gave was to play with framing or point of view. I think this might have worked better as the first variation in order to get students focused on the mechanics of storytelling...


Seat's eye view by Bob Lundgreen Kristiansen. Not very glamorous!

The framing on this page by Aske Schmidt Rose focuses tightly on the tip of the pencil, making for an elegant, quasi-abstract comic.

iv. Art forgery
Hommage, parody, counterfeit... I told the students that the goal here was to draw such a convincing copy of an artist's style (not just their drawing style but their way of framing and pacing stories) that we could go sell it on ebay afterwards for a lot of money.

Cathrin Peterslund creates an excellent evocation of Jason's drawing style but note that you can also recognize his characterstic framing, slow pacing, and low-key humor.

If Paul Klee made comics... by Clara Lucie Jetsmark Bjerre.


v. Collaborative extension: 5 obstructions
The last collaboration added the dimension of collaboration to the mix and points to various other directions you could go with this assignment. The logistics of this are worthy of a separate blog post which I will attempt to do sometime (and being a wise blogger I will neither promise anything, nor will I apologize if it takes me three years to do it). For now I'll just say that each student is given the task of coming up with 5 constraints (or "obstructions" to use the terminology proposed by Lars Von Trier, whose playful documentary is the basis of this assignment) that one of their classmates will have to use to make a final variation on their initial "template" pages. The trick to this assignment (as with all constraint-based work, I would argue) is to really encourage the students to come up with tough, even perverse constraints and no softballs. It's not about being mean, of course (and depending on your group you can monitor your students more or less), it's about getting to observe, together, that a-ha! moment when, invariably, every student comes up with an ingenious solution to a tricky constraint.

Three constraints: show only the characters' eyes, use "widescreen" horizontal panels, use only shades of blue — no black.

Just look at Emil Friis Ernst's beautiful solution.The cool blues suggest the glow of the tablet (a lot of these students work digitally) and the horizontal panels adapt easily to the one and then two-eyed framing. The cleverest part to me is the way he uses the reflection in the eyeball and then in the eyeglasses to convey narrative information. (Note two how by giving one character glasses you easily understand that their are two characters in the story despite the tight close-ups.

Now here's a set of constraints that at first glance seems unwieldy if not impossible: characters can't touch the ground? no pants? Silhouettes? Must feature Spiderman??

Yet look at Mathilde Garreau's masterful response. The silhouettes keep the "no pants" rule G-rated while of course Spiderman never touches the ground anyway!

IV. For non-artists
If you don't have time to draw comics or if you are working in a text-only context there's still plenty of stuff you can do with 99X. Recently a group of junior high school students around the city of Poitiers were assigned my book and wrote responses in the form of "exercises in criticism." There was an acronym version, an emoticon version, and even an audio soundscape.

And of course you can always go back to the source and read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style in Barbara Wright's translation (an exercise in style of its own). I find it useful to look at a series of even shorter takes on this theme that have been done over the years by various members of Oulipo. This is great because you can find this in English, French, and Spanish at the very least. The English one is by Harry Mathews and it's called "35 Variations on a Theme by Shakespeare" (scroll down to find it among many other gems here); There's a French version by Georges Perec using a line from Proust, and more recently the newest Oulipo member Eduardo Berti made a Spanish version.

I have typically used these texts as a warm up to the comics assignment. I ask my students to come up with ten variations on a saying or famous quote of their choice. I blogged about it and gave examples here.

If you have any questions or additional activities to share I'll hope you'll comment below.

You can purchase the US edition of Matt's book here. There are also UK, French, Spanish, Flemish, Italian (out of print) and Japanese versions available and Matt's always searching for new audiences. In addition, you can find the whole work being serialized online in German and Hungarian.
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Angoulême: report #2

Let me start this post by reassuring those of you who read my first report from Angoulême that things are going much better for me now, and I thank those of you that sent notes (or made comments) of encouragement. I didn't want to wallow in negativity but I did want to share frankly the frustrations I was feeling a few months ago.

Those frustrations—primarily the distractions of family life, my teaching and public speaking obligations, and the never-ending cycle of French paperwork related to setting up shop here—are still present but I have found a workable rhythm and am increasingly able to devote decent chunks of my day to drawing, writing, and reading.

I had a breakthrough of sorts shortly after that last post: the 24 hours comics day hosted by the Maison des Auteurs every year in the days leading up to the FIBD. This year I was the MC, tasked with coming up with a starter constraint that all participants were obliged to base their comics on. The constraint I finally worked up was well-received (I still run into people at festivals who mention it approvingly--I really appreciate it) and although I didn't finish my own comic in the 24 hour period I was able to do so in another seven hours a few weeks later and I was very happy with the results. You can read more about the whole experience here. What was particularly satisfying is that I quickly came up with a story concept I liked and then dove into the work (if not quite quickly or efficiently enough to finish in 24 hours). As I worked I found solutions to story problems and leitmotifs in the course of drawing and writing the pages. You can read the finished comic, Bridge, online for free here.



Though I was rather over-booked this spring I can't say it wasn't often enjoyable and even exciting: in the past two months I've been all over: In Madrid we celebrated the reprinting of 99 ejercicios de estilo with a barrage of interviews and an event at the excellent Librería El Central. I was invited to three comics festivals, in Corsica, Aix-en-Provence, and Amiens, and the latter two I was able to attend with Jessica and our kids. And I was in Paris multiple times—once even just for pleasure!

lunch with Bob Sikoryak and Jasper in Amiens

At the FIBD 2013 we inaugurated the OubapoShow and have gone on to repeat it in various forms and plan to develop it further in the time to come. It's been fun and very gratifying collaborating with my Oubapo co-members: Though I've been associated with them for years I hadn't spent time with any of them besides Trondheim and Lécroart until I arrived here last fall. I didn't know what to expect dropping in this late in the game but I've found everyone to be generous and welcoming and I feel very much part of the group, now. A highlight so far was our presentation of the OubapoShow in Paris for les Jeudis de L'Oulipo at the Bibliotheque Nationale de la France. This is a fairly long-running and popular evening event where Oulipo does readings on different themes; occasionally they invite one of the "ou-x-po"—as the associated "workshops for potential X" are collectively named—to take the stage and this was the first time Oubapo has been invited in 10 years. There was a big and receptive crowd including most of the senior members of Oulipo and the show went off without a hitch (you can watch the video here).




My initial push of public events and Oubapo-related stuff culminated in May with an overlapping series of events: the Musée de la Bande Dessinée hung a modest Oubapo exhibit from April to June and in May they featured the original art for my "History of American Comics in Six Panels" as their highlighted "page of the month". During the national "Nuit des Musées" I hosted a sort of mini-OubapoShow with Killoffer and Alex and Pierre from our occasional partners-in-crime, Éditions Polystyrène, which culminated in a diverse, all-ages game of giant Scroubabble which the museum had produced for an earlier Oubapo exhibit. I taught a 4-day masters workshop on comics and poetry forms which yielded a blogpost here about haiku comics that has caught on a bit online and even been translated by Thierry Groensteen for 9eme Art 2.0. Somewhere in there I also managed to program an evening of constrained film, including Lars Von Trier's Five Obstructions, at the Cinéma de la Cité… you can see how sometimes it's hard to get any actual comics done.

Jean-Pierre Mercier leads a game of massive Scroubabble at la Nuit des Musées in May.

But I find that the basic balance has shifted for now and I am devoting more and more time to simply drawing and writing (and editing and scanning and inking and correcting) comics. As circumstances have it, I have been able to ramp up incrementally over the last six months: I did two short strips (for the Swiss magazine Strapazin and Chicago-based Trubble Club's on-line jam comic Infinite Corpse) followed by a one-pager for Etienne Lécroart's issue of Mon Lapin, the reboot of L'Assocation's anthology title, then a TWO-pager for Josh Neufeld and Sari Wilson's Flashed! anthology of flash fiction and comics. Just now I am finishing up a 10-page comic for an Oubapo project at l'Association dreamed up by Lewis Trondheim: four of us (LT and I plus Jochen Gerner and Alex Baladi) made comics based on redrawing all the photos and illustrations (ads not included) in a single issue of the French newspaper Libération.

I'll never be a lightning-fast cartoonist but I'm feeling happy about the pace I've hit and plan to maintain it if not speed it up in the years to come.

page-in-progress for Mon Lapin

So, what does the future hold? First of all, Jessica and I were recently accepted for another two years of residency at the Maison des Auteurs (is that burying the lead?) which means things are going well here for all of us and we want to keep going. My "project" for the next two years is to produce a book—not a graphic novel but a "novella" or classic French album. I have a few different ideas for book-length works that I'll be developing and reporting on here when the time is right.
Most of the comics I finished this year won't be available for a while, especially not in the US.

One comic that has been published twice is my "Pantoum for Hiram" which debuted internationally in Colombia's Revista Larva (as "Una Madeja para Hugo" and in English in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art



And here's what's coming up in the next year, so far:

Most significantly, there's my first long comic since 99 Ways, a 32-page comic called Drawn Onward. I don't have a release date yet but I'm excited to say that it's going to be the inaugural comic issue of the prestigious short story subscription-only magazine, OneStory (another buried lead!). 2013? Could be... Also forthcoming: news about how to get your hands on it even if you're not a subscriber.

a page from Drawn Onward

September will see the release of Best American Comics 2013 our final volume as series editors. It's been a fun ride and I'm proud of the work Jessica and I have done there.

My strip for Strapazin should be out in the fall and at that time I will post the English version here and/or on my Tumblr.

a panel from my TV show-themed strip for Strapazin 112

I did a 2-page comic called "Winter Villanelle," based on a flash fiction piece by Aimee Bender for and interesting book project called Flashed! that is due in 2014, sometime.

And early 2014 should see three publications of mine at L'Association:
Cavalcade Surprise, a short "patte de mouche" booklet done with Jessica and Lewis Trondheim
"La Fuite" my story for Etienne's Mon Lapin
"Le Coeur du Roi", my story for Journal Directeur

pages-in-progress for the Oubapo project, Journal Directeur

It's a good start, I think.
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Angouleme photos

I'm just back from a great trip to France, where I attended the Angoulême International Comics Festival and also spent a few days in Paris with an overnight visit to Lyon in the middle. This post features photos from the Angoulême portion of the trip.


Even as you arrive in the city of Angoulême you start to see signs of comics' presence all over, including the street signs.


As documented elsewhere (check out The Comics Reporter or Journalista for links to other photo reports and reviews), Delcourt, who published La Perdida, also recently published Sunday Press's giant Little Nemo book. This is a view of their booth with a giant Nemo bed towering above.


For a change of scale, here is the L'Association booth, where I spent a bunch of my time signing 99 Exercices de Style. From left to right you can see L'Asso staff members Céline (who did the amazing re-lettering of my book), Fanny, the artist Caroline Sury, and Charlotte (who translated my book).


Alvin Buenaventura, Jordan Rae, and Dan Zettwoch at the Buenaventura Press. I was disappointed with how out-of-the-way the fanzine tent was, it was kind of off to your right as you navigate the throngs of fans lined up for dédicaces seated in their little folding chairs. Alvin seemed to have the best spot though: as you were walking past you could make out Kramers Ergot and other goodies in the distance, pulling you toward the fanzine area.


Jessica and I stayed in a funny little hotel converted out of old farm houses and situated by a golf course on a hill overlooking the city. That's Jeff Smith you can just make out in the photo. He and his wife Vijaya stopped by for one day on their way to India.


Here I am at one of my moments of glory: signing books next to Edmond Baudoin! Baudoin was a marvel to watch, he would do a leisurely fifteen minute sketch while he held forth on his philosophy of drawing. He also started to talk up my book to his fans and got me a bunch of sales--merci Edmond, je te dois quelques verres!


The Woodring family at the awards ceremony. Woodring père flanked by Max and Mary. Jim's show of originals at the CNBDI (Angoulême's comics museum) was stunning. One afternoon Peter Kuper and I spent a good long while with our noses pressed to the glass trying to figure out how he does it. When you see some art in real life you instantly notice all the imperfections, patches, and smudges that don't show up in reproduction (not necessarily a bad thing, I should point out)--not so in Jim Woodring's case.


At dinner after the Saturday evening awards ceremony with, on the left, Monsieur le Président Lewis Trondheim, an amazing dynamo of energy and charisma, and recent award winner Charles Burns.


The day at Angoulême is not complete until you have stumbled over to the Chat Noir or the bar of the Hotel Mercure to drink and chatter until the wee hours. This is me at the Mercure with cartoonist and Ignatz series publisher Igort on the right and, in the middle, our mutual Spanish publisher, Jesús Moreno of Ediciones Sins Entido. (Ejercicios de Estilo will be debuting this summer at La Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias, by the way.)


It's Sunday morning and things are winding down. On a last trip through the fanzine tent I find Amanda Vähämäki (of Campo di Babá fame) and Alessandro Tota at the Canicola booth. Congratulations to all of them for winning the Angoulême fanzine prize.


In the front courtyard of the CNBDI there are a bunch of maybe 20" square cement slabs that have been drawn in by a wide variety of artists, including my good friend Tom Hart, whose slab was quite prominently featured.

Up next, photos from Paris and Lyon. I'm not as meticulous as some more journalistically-minded bloggers when it comes to details, links, and context, so feel free to ask questions in the comments field. Read more...

99 Ways chez L'Association!

I guess I can retire from comics now: I've been published by L'Association, one of THE great comics publishers ever. This is the definitive edition of my book: much nicer paper stock, flaps, and an expanded color section. I just got my copy from the printer; the book goes on sale in France in mid-November. Read more...