MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Morlac by Leif Tande. Montreal: La Pasteque, 2006. 152p., 23.95$C. Formal experimentation in comics is often overlooked and under-attempted. While one finds bits and pieces of experimentation in various works, rarely does a comic seem to be produced solely as an ambitious experiment. Leif Tande’s Morlac is such a work, an impressive and well-executed experiment [...]

Mister O by Lewis Trondheim (2002). NBM, 2004. 32p., 8.5″ x 11.5″, color hardcover, $13.95. MIster O–a circle with stick arms and legs, two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth–comes to a crevice. He wants to continue on his way, but he must cross the crevice first. He tries using whatever or [...]

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden Chamberlain Brothers, 2005. 208 p. (black and white with 8 color pages). $16.95. I first found Matt Madden’s Exercises in Style (sample pages through that link) online a couple years ago and now finally there is a complete book under the title 99 [...]

Oubapo. Oupus 1 (L’Association, 1997). The Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle’s (Oubapo) first Oupus book is a combination of essays and examples (see my review of Oupus 3). The biggest part of the book is Thierry Groensteen’s “Un premier bouquet de contraintes” (A First Bouquet/Bunch of Constraints), an enumeration (with examples cited and occasionally pictured) [...]

Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée. Oupus 3: Les Vacances de l’Oubapo. L’Association, 2000. After a long time, I finally got ahold of one of the Oubapo’s books. This volume of their Oupus collects 36 strips published in the French newspaper Liberation during the summer of 2000. Six artists (Lewis Trondheim, Killoffer, Jean-Chistophe Menu, Francois Ayroles, Lécroart, [...]

I’ve mentioned Matt Madden’s comic work a number of the times in the past, including his 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (my post on it) and A Fine Mess #2. He made a comment one of my posts, and we ended up exchanging a few emails. He agreed to answer some [...]

Madden, Matt. A Fine Mess. Issue 2. Alternative Comics, 2004. Matt Madden is one of the only American comic creators I know consciously working within the field of constraint (a few others’ examples can be found at the Oubapo America site such as the Transformative Exercises). As far as I am aware this is the [...]

Matt Madden‘s Exercises in Style is a series of one page comics which repeat the same simple story through numerous styles, constraints, forms, etc. The idea (but not the story) is based on Queneau’s Exercises de style (1947) in which he writes 99 variations on the same simple narrative — a tour-de-force of the author’s [...]