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 erudition, wit, and genius (also available in an amazing translation by Barbara Wright).
Madden has adapted this concept to comics and done an admirable job exploring comics as a versatile art form. He creates versions using constraints generally well known, such as palindromes, and anagrams, as well as stylistic and formal variations: minimalist, photo, inventory, map, ROYGBIV.
The most recent news on the site is that the exercises (with even more variations) will be published as a book in late 2005 by Penguin, another example of the bigger publishers getting into more literary comics.
Matt is also involved with Oubapo-America an american version of the French Oubapo, themselves one of the splinter Ou-X-Po groups that grew from the Oulipo and encompass a number of various topics from cooking to painting to comics (bande dessinée in French, hence the “Ba”). The idea being to apply the concept of constraint to art forms other than writing.
The Oubapo-America site is rather sparse in content, I’m not clear on how much work has been created by any participating members. There are a few constraint exercises up with submissions (kind of like Constrained.org), but no indication of when they were posted.
I’ve not yet gotten any copies of the French Oubapo’s published works (at least three volumes of a compilation called Oupus), but since my French has improved so much over the past year, I’m going to look into getting copies. The only member I am familiar with is Lewis Trondheim [French link] (Fantagraphics has published some of his works in translation) whose work I have much enjoyed for its simple graphic style.
The interesting thing about applying constraints to comics is that there are an even greater number of possible elements that can be affected: the words, the drawings, the layout, the story. Various constraints on one of the elements is rather common in comics (though not really talked about as “constraints”), but those spanning the elements are more rare.
If anyone knows of any other constrained comics, I’d like to hear about them.