20 Lines

I recently finished a one-year drawing project called "20 Lines"



The initial inspiration was a prose book by the American Oulipo author Harry Mathews called 20 Lines a Day, which is a partial document of a period where he wrote 20 lines of prose every morning he was at his desk as a warm-up exercise. He was inspired by a quote by Stendhal to the effect of "20 lines a day, genius or not". He took that notion literally in a somewhat wry way and I did the same kind of thing: well, 20 drawn lines, how is that so different from 20 lines of writing? (It's faster for one thing, most of the time.)



I took it on once we moved to France because one of my goals here is to work on my drawing, which lags behind my writing and my structural/linguistic thinking about comics. My goal was to concentrate on the most basic elements of drawing--lines on a ground--to reflect on how lines fill space, how they fit together. Maybe not so much "reflect" as simply to put my drawing hand, my brain, and my eyes to work to see what would come out of it. How all that will translate back into my comics I don't really know, but I see it as part of a process of taking more conscious control of my drawing both at a physical as well as conceptual level.



I've been really pleased with the reaction I've had from friends and from my Tumblr and Facebook postings of these pages. I expect you'll be seeing some printed versions and maybe even some exhibits of this work in the future.

For starters, I was flattered and more than a bit surprised to receive an offer to publish a limited-run selection by No Press, a micro publisher of visual poetry and conceptual writing run by Derek Beaulieu. That should be published in the not-too-distant future, though to judge by his website I can't say it will be easy to get your hands on.

Here are a few more selections from the 80 or so drawings I have done so far:







A Sol Lewitt homage series:


You can find the whole series browsing back through my Maddn Tumblr

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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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Angoulême: first report

"So, are you scared?"

I knew exactly what Lewis Trondheim was asking me, even though he said it out of the blue during a dinner at our house in Brooklyn last August. I was about to take a year's sabbatical leave from SVA and move to France to do a residency at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême. A year-plus of theoretically open schedule to work on whatever I want and the only thing I have to do is: not screw it up or, worse still, fail to produce anything. The pressure has been on as of August 29 when we (Jessica and I and our two children, Aldara and Jasper) arrived—barely intact—at the Angoulême train station to start this new phase of our lives. (You can read Jessica's account of the adventure here.)

So: yes, I'm scared.

And to lead with the discouraging news, I've been quite unproductive these first four months, at least when it comes to producing any new comics. The nadir came when I recently backed out of an anthology project I'd said I'd contribute to. I wasn't finding enough time to work on it (though it was only a page) and when I did I was creatively stumped to a point where I just had to cut it loose because it was depressing me as well as distracting me from other projects. All of which is particularly humiliating because I thought it would be a quick amuse-bouche to get myself geared up for longer, more ambitious work.

It's a rude way to begin this residency since in fact I've produced very little of my personal work in recent years and there are all kinds of muscles and reflexes that have become dull and stiff. So the small set-backs that happen in every artistic endeavor feel more devastating right now because I feel like an awkward combination of has-been and rank beginner, trying to find a foothold.

I was fully expecting to lose a month or so to paperwork and getting the kids set up in school and that sort of thing but everything got compounded and time flew by as it tends to. All that said, here we are in early January 2013 and an end (not THE end, no, never) is in sight. So rather than linger on my failures thus far I'm planning for the open swaths of time in the coming months when I'll achieve some real momentum. (And you can bet I'll be posting about it here.)

I've had a lot of encouragement: from Jessica of course, as always, but also from friends here like Lewis, who despite his impish pleasure in making me squirm has prodded me regularly, going so far as to make me and Jessica sit down with him over the course of an afternoon (New Year's Eve, in fact) to crank out a book of drawings (about which more some other time) just to show that it could be done (well, and also because Lewis Trondheim can't help but draw and create things all day long).

I also got to have dinner recently with one of my heroes, Edmond Baudoin, and he reminded me that he didn't start drawing comics until he was 30 and had his first book published at 40—which puts me 2 books ahead of him at the same age. Now if I can keep up with him and make 60 more books in the years to come... (Not incidentally, this is one of the many reasons I wanted to live in France and in Angoulême in particular: comics luminaries come through town regularly and you get a chance to spend real time with them, not just shake hands at a festival or big city bookstore opening).

Last but not least: I love my new life in Angoulême at la Maison des Auteurs! Here's a shot of my studio, where I would happily lay down a futon and spend most of my time if I wasn't a good family man:

The MdA (as everyone calls it here)is an amazing resource, something that I'm not sure anyone could pull off in the US unless it was some kind of for-profit venture or lottery-winner indulgence. Pili and Brigitte, the director and administrator of the MdA, have done an amazing job in facilitating our move. We were both able to get well-appointed individual studios (there are also group studios for anywhere from two to six artists) and I'm relishing private space and the quiet—or the noise—in which to draw, write, and get lost in reverie. Jessica has a bit of a different take on the new set-up here. I haven't gotten to know my fellow residents well for the most part and I hope they don't think me too antisocial but with the kids to run home to all the time I have neither been able to go out for drinks much nor willing to spend much time hanging out while I'm at the studio. There's a nice camaraderie, though, and I'm forging friendships one at a time.

So I'll end with a photo I took in a moment of optimism but which now taunts me a bit. It's an empty art box I'm planning to fill with new pages in the year(s) to come. Well, it is hungry and I am going to feed it:

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

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.

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An Improvised Comic Activity

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.
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Our Latest and Greatest Collaboration: Aldara Madden

Aldara Juliet Abel Madden was born Sunday, December 16 at 8:27 PM. She's bound to become a familiar face on this blog... Read more...