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 where such is the focus rather than a by-product. If the content of the book is of lesser quality, at least it is well-integrated into the form.

The first pages contain a single panel in the lower middle, approximately one-twelfth of the page. A man finds himself at a corridor offering two options for his path, left or right marked by arrows on the wall. The last panel in the sequence shows the man walking towards the T intersection. On the following page we find two panels to the left and right of where the previous page’s panel would have been. Each of these two panels shows the man following the corridor. With the options for his direction, the man has multiplied, as have the panels in which he exists.

(These two scans show a quarter of two pages just below the halfway mark. The rest of each page is blank.)

The next page still holds two panels showing the man continuing on his course in two directions. When he meets a ladder going down on the left panel, the following page adds a third panel below the left panel showing the man climbing down the ladder. Once again he has multiplied with the options, as have the panels. In this way the panels on the page increase with the man’s options. New panels appear on the page in relation to the direction of the man’s movement. If he climbs up, then he appears in a panel higher on the page. The page always holds the panels within a four rows by three columns grid. Occasionally one of the man’s multiples meets some horrible fate and the panel he is in disappears from the page.

(These two consecutive pages show the way the narrative expands into more panels. Click on each for a larger image.)

One quickly learns to read Morlac in a different way than most comics. Reading left to right, top to bottom becomes difficult and confusing as one jumps from one multiple of the man to another. A few alternate reading methods offer themselves. The first time I read the book I tried to follow each thread of the narrative, which means reading the same panel on each successive page (following the thread of the fourth panel on each page). This involved a lot of backtracking to follow the places where the narrative forked into other panels. It also caused me to miss a few threads where panels appeared in less obvious places. For instance, in one of the threads the man gets into (or doesn’t depending on the panel you follow) an elevator. On the following page he walks out of an elevator one panel higher than where he got in. But a page later he also walks out of an elevator at the top of the page. In this way panels appear in places where one may not immediately notice where their narrative thread originated.

My second time through the book I read it in two page spreads, taking each narrative thread in groups of two panels: read a panel on the left page and then the corresponding panel on the right. I had to juggle a number of narrative threads at once (up to twelve at some points) but it also enabled me to more easily find the interactions amongst the threads. At times some of the threads intersect with each other: a character moving from one panel to the next; a character seeing events happening in an adjacent panel.

The way Tande has layed out the pages of Morlac explicitly uses the space of the page as both visual and narrative space. Panels that sit on the page next to each other also take place in the narrative in adjacent spaces: space is not time here, it is space. Oddly, this use of page layout, combined with the content of the story reminds me of the old video game maps I used to see in friends’ Nintendo Power magazines, where screenshots of games were placed adjacent to each other as a way to map out the lay out of some dungeon, castle, or town. Those maps also had repeating characters (the player’s character appearing in each screenshot) and a sense of forking paths and narrative possibilities. Let me go back to talk about the actual story…

Inside this formal maze is a maze. The protagonist from the beginning of the story travels (in his multiplicity) through a structure that is not unlike a videogame. He follows corridors, climbs ladders, travels in elevators, goes through doors and trapdoors, falls in holes, and meets other obstacles as well as encountering different creatures: a robot, monsters, an alien of some kind, a (mad?) scientist, a ninja, even some kind of devil. He loses and finds objects (mostly sticking with the briefcase that he tries to hold onto); he fights and lives and dies. If Tande was not influenced by video games (like the Fort Thunder artists) he has at least well replicated many aspects of a certain kind of game.

Tande’s art is not particularly noteworthy. Simple abstracted rendering and a thick line with a wavering width give clear renderings but are not aesthetically interesting.

The title, Morlac, is taken from the Oubapo’s “morlaque”, of which you can see Trondheim’s much simpler example in this post. Like Trondheim’s example, Tande’s book can be read as a circular narrative, the last page’s single panel takes us back to the first pages.

In the end, the story itself is not all that interesting. What attracts me to the book and what got me to read it multiple times is the formal play: the way Tande utilizes his structure in different ways. One wonders what could be made of such a structure outside of the multiplying exploring character story. What if the story didn’t follow a particularly character through multiple pathways but followed the pathways to find the characters and their stories?

(While the text in the book is in French that includes only the frontmatter, the comic itself is silent.)

Adding another dimension to the work of Lewis Trondheim is Bleu (for the other dimensions see all my Trondheim posts). Packaged with a plain blue cover with plain blue flaps, the only text in the whole book is hidden beneath the back cover flap giving us a basic indicia. One also notes the Oubapo logo on the page, hinting at some formal constraint to the piece.

The book’s 30 pages are an extreme example of abstracted art in comics form. The whole comic is a sequence of colored blobs and dots passing, intersecting, overlapping, and transforming on a blue background (the paper itself is a bright blue).

Let’s take an examples page:

Click for larger size.

A blue page on which one finds: twenty green blobs at regular intervals, five of which have a vaguely forked end; seven yellow stars in the top half of the page; six blue stars in the middle of the page; two yellow dots accompanied by two blue dots; one yellow-green dot accompanied by one blue-green dot.

That’s the view of the page as a single image. But, while the page contains no panels as such, an experienced comics reader can easily divide the pages up into twenty panels in five rows of four. Trondheim maintains enough of a visual consistency from one “panel” to the next that one can construct a page of 20+ blobs into a timeline, a sequence:

A green blob is approached by a yellow star. The blob splits in the front and the star overlaps the blog. The star stays in place for a few images and then it moves away from the green blob as it once more splits in the front. The yellow star disappears off the page and a little later a blue star appears. It too overlaps the blob, stays for a moment and then leaves. A yellow dot and a blue dot then appear. The blob splits at two points and the two dots overlap the blob. They fade and disappear.

While it’s just a bunch of blob, stars, and dots on page, by applying the reading method for comics, one sees the many elements as repetitions of the same entity. The twenty green blobs are really only one green blob repeated twenty times. The stars and dots too become distinct: one yellow star, one blue star, one yellow dot, one blue dot, each repeated multiple times. After we begin to see those shapes as a repeated individual, we can begin to construct the sequence as I did above.

On this level one can read Bleu. The ever shifting interactions of a number of shapes of different colors. But, one can begin to look at them in another way. The shapes take on life. Not just abstract shapes, they are abstract creatures, amoeba-like. Then we see their interactions in new ways:

A green blob sees a yellow star approaching it. The blob opens its mouth and ingests the yellow star. It mulls over the yellow for a while and then spits it back out. The yellow star flies away. After more time, a blue star appears. Once again the green blob opens its mouth and swallows the star. And, once again after mulling it over, unsatisfied, the green blob spits out the star. The blue star flies away and soon after two dots, one yellow, one blue, appear. The green blob opens itself up and swallows both. These it finds more pleasing, so it aborbs them into itself.

So we have a more narrative reading of these abstract shapes as interactions of entities. We see many of these interactions in the book: attraction, repulsion, joining and unjoining, ingestion, digestion, and more. One could even hazzard a metaphorical level to these abstract interations. At some abstracted narrative level are not these types of interactions the basis of all stories: meeting, parting, attraction, repulsion, taking in, letting go–all of which could apply to people interacting with people or people interacting with ideas.

Trondheim has created a truly abstract comics, both visually and narratively. Surprisingly (and I was skeptical) it’s an enjoyable book to read. I found a lot of amusement in these strange little blobs interacting with each other (though I’m sure much more would get tiring). Trondheim manages to provide enough variations to provide novelty and amusement. Sometimes colors change, sometimes shapes, sometimes numbers of entities. Most often he varies the interactions between the entities. I’m not sure what constraint Trondheim used on this book, but if it isn’t the restriction on representation, it might be some kind of permutation of situation (though it doesn’t seem that systematic).

This is not just abstraction but minimalism. How much does it take to create a comic? Trondheim has taken this perhaps not to the limit, but certainly further than anyone else takes it. Here we have a comic that excludes much of what one expects to find in a comic. No gutters. No balloons. No text. Characters? Not really. Panels? Kind of, but vaguely. What we get down to is comics as a way of reading, comics as a way of looking.

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 whoever is at hand to help. The book Mister O tells this story 30 times, once per page.

Lewis Trondheim, a popular figure in the French comics scene, is well known for his Lapinot series (Fantagraphics translated two volumes a number of years ago), creating the Donjon series with Joann Sfar (in translation from NBM), and being one of the founders of French indie publisher L’Association (no website!). He is perhaps less known as one of the founders of the Oubapo group (Workshop for Potential Comics) where he has participated in a number of comics experiments.

Trondheim’s first book “Psychanalyse” (1990) consisted of a single head (some sort of creature) repeated endlessly in small panels with different word balloons in each panel. He stretched the limit of the single drawing.

In Mister O, Trondheim performs a similar experiment, riffing on a scenario. In sixty small panels he tells a one page story of Mister O trying to cross the crevice. In the first story, for example, Mister O, afraid to try to jump over the crevice, drops a stone into it and hears it hit the bottom. He goes back for another and another. A panel shows us the sun, moon, and a clock. In the following panel, Mister O appears again this time with a white beard. He has finally filled up the crevice with stones; he walks across. Once on the other side he has a heart attack and dies.

You see, Mister O never succeeds. Through a succession of stories with rocks, trees, birds, a rabbit, a bull, various creatures of simple shapes (who all seem to succeed where Mister O fails), chairs, rockets, and even some kind of teleportation device, Mister O tries and fails.

It’s a surprisingly amusing and funny book (well not surprising if you are familiar with Trondheim’s work) that never feels repetitive or boring, regardless of its ever repeating plot. The artwork is extremely simple (Mister O is basically a smiley face with arms and legs) and colored with a mostly dull color scheme (olives, browns, greys, maroons) that fits Mister O’s bleak world.

Trondheim has just put out a kind of companion volume called Mister I about a guy who looks kind of like a pickle (he is a long green oval) and is always trying to satisfy his hunger.

More on Trondheim as time permits.

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 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Matt has let a number of these pages trickle out on the web and in print (his A Fine Mess (Alternative Comics) features some in both issues), but even for someone who’s been following them, there are plenty of surprises.

Back in 1947 French author Raymond Queneau (if you haven’t read him, go, find, read, I place him above all others in my literary pantheon) published an unusual book called Exercises de Style (for more go here). In this book he tells the same banal story about two chance meetings with the same fellow in ninety-nine different ways. Queneau’s variations (as they are translated, that is) include those such as “Abusive”, “Cockney”, “Haiku”,”Mathematical”, and “Antiphrasis.” The whole book is an amazing tour-de-force of the versatility of language and literary expression.

Matt Madden has created his own Exercises in Style in comics form, and I’m here to say that it stands as an equal to Queneau’s linguistic masterpiece. Matt tells a simple story:

Matt gets up from working at his computer. He walks into another room of the apartment. From upstairs his wife Jessica asks for the time, and Matt answers her. He goes to the refrigerator and opens it. He can’t recall what he was looking for.

That’s the story, and we read it ninety-nine times without getting bored.

The first comic in the book is the “Template,” the stylistically generic form of the story, though, as Matt points out in the introduction, after reading the others, even this generic comic begins to show its stylistic decisions.

Though it is futile to try to categorize the 98 variations that follow, it is also an inevitable draw to make some attempt–certainly many of the variations work in linked groups or have similarities in their type of variation. Early on, a group of pages vary the point of view: Matt’s first person view, third person from upstairs in the apartment with Jessica, a view from the refrigerator, a voyeur’s view from outside the building. Matt does an extensive group of generic (as in genre) variations: fantasy, romance, police procedural, horror (a four-color EC Comics pastiche), superhero (one example where Matt’s mimicking skills fail him with the drawing), manga (complete with right-to-left reading, excessive speed lines, and a gratuitous panty shot), political cartoon, and more. Many could be considered as variations on framing both formally and content-wise: reframing the original drawings to all hands and punctuation marks (which is a powerful statement on how much can be said with such a little amount of information), shrinking the original panels and adding absurdist images outside the borders, telling the story as a scene with actors and a director, the story as a flashback, the story as overheard in a bar… A number of pages fall under formal game playing (anagrams, palindromes) or structural variation (one panel, thirty panels).

My favorite group, and one where Matt really shows off his chops, is a sequence I’ll call “Matt Madden’s History of Comics.” Matt pastiches a hall of fame of important historical creators: a “newly discovered” piece of the Bayeax Tapestry, Rodolphe Toppfer, Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay (the emulation of his Rarebit Fiend is amazing), George Herriman, Herge’, and Jack Kirby. This sequence (sadly not all in order, because a few of these appear in the color section of the book) alone is worth the price of the book. As with any other art, I believe it is important to know some of the history, and Matt kindly shows us why.

I could go on and on talking about various variations, but I’ll restrain myself and let the reader find them. In the past couple days, I’ve read this book twice through and browsed a good number of the pages more times than that. So many times reading that same story… yet, it’s never the same.

Narratology, the study of narrative and how it works, is an area ripe for comics exploration, or perhaps an area ripe for comics readers and creators to explore. Narratology, among other endeavors, differentiates between the “story”–the “raw material” of the events in any narrative–and the “plot”–the final arrangement, order, and duration of the narrative as it is conveyed to the audience (I’m simplifying a bit). At a most basic level a story can offer up hundreds of plots; the raw material can be reworked over and over again. The author John Gardner once said that all novels have one of two plots (in a narratological sense he means “story”): someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Think about it a moment: his two stories apply to a great number of cases.

How does this all relate to the comic in front of me? Matt Madden has materialized this concept in comics. The vast range of “plots” he creates from the same “story” is not only fun to read and interesting to contemplate but also a veritable textbook for the comics creator. With this book, he has shown how far the imagination can take us from the simplest of beginnings. Comics is an extremely versatile art form, and there is no need to be stuck with the same old same old. Even a simple autobiographical event doesn’t have to stay a straight realist autobiography.

Looking at all these variations also exposes the choices that are made in each comic. Compare the “Horizontal” variation (all thin panels that stretch across the width of the page) to the “Vertical” variation (all thin panels that stretch across the height of the page). The latter focuses much more on the human figure, probably because the tall thin panel more clearly fits a figure, while no matter how you try, fitting a person into a thin wide panel is a piece meal process. Once we have seen all the variations of viewpoint and distance (longshot, extreme close-up) from which the story can be told, we must reevaluate the viewpoint of the template (a mid-range third person) and wonder: why that view? Why that distance? Each variation in juxtaposition with the others opens a space for questioning and learning.

I’ll leave off here. If there is any justice (or taste) in the comics world this book will be both a big seller and a hot topic of conversation. Read it, laugh, marvel, enjoy, and then put it alongside books like McCloud’s Understanding Comics and start really thinking about comics.

You’ll come to the next comic you read with a keener eye and a sharper appreciation.

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) of constraints found in work predating the Oubapo’s 1992 founding and those created by the group. The other large part of the book is the comic “Le Grabuge galactique” (The Galactic Ruckus) by Étienne Lécroart and J.-C. Menu, which is created with the “tireur a la ligne” (“line stretching” called “larding” in English by Warren Motte) constraint originally theorized by oulipian Jacques Duchateau. A few other shorter constraint examples are included.

The book begins with three introductions. The first two by oulipians Marcel Benabou and Noel Arnaud, respectively, are short and fail to discuss comics or the Oubapo at all. Jean-Christophe Menu follows up with a brief history of the group (first official meeting February 26, 1993).

The most interesting part of the book is Groensteen’s essay. He begins by considering the possibilities for utilizing oulipian constraints in comics. He skips over the issue of defining comics, though does briefly consider the question of the importance of the text (he considers it contingent), and goes on to grammar and syntax in comics. While the idea of finding a finite number of small discrete units like an alphabet for comics s easily dismissed, the syntax of comics is a possibility. Groensteen quotes Hubert Damisch, who is here discussing painting:

Là où le sémiologue s’épuise en vain à mettre au jour les “unités minimales” qui l’autoriseraient à traiter de la peinture comme d’un “système de signes”, la peinture démontre, en sa texture même, que le problème demande à être pris à l’envers, au niveau des relations entre les termes, à celui, non des lignes, mais des noeuds.

[Where the semiologist wears himself out trying to reveal the "minimal units" which would allow him to treat painting as a "system of signs", painting demonstrates, in its very texture, that the problem asks to be taken the other way, at the level of the relation between the terms, in this case, not lines but knots.]

Groensteen follows: “Dans la bande dessinée, ce sont les relations entre les composants d’une même image (niveau morphologique), et les relations entre les vignettes contiguës (niveau syntaxique), qui sont sémantiquement déterminantes.” (15)

[In comics, it is the relations between the components of a single image (morphological level), and the relations between the contiguous drawings (syntactical level), which are semantically determining.]

Groensteen also notes the difference between literature and comics in regards to publication: for instance, the placement of the work on a page. Literature in almost all cases is placed on the page by accident of page size, margins, etc. Comics are created to be placed in a certain way on the page. One can also consider concerns such as page size, color, number of pages, many of which are what Jan Baetens calls “negative constraints”.

It is these areas where I think comics constraint need to be further explored, particular the syntactical level (such as my panel transition constraint) and the layout of pages.

When Groensteen gets into enumerating specific constraints he lists them in two groups: generative (they create new works) and transformative (they re-create from existing works). He writes off the possibility of creating a table (like Queneau’s table or this one at Spineless Books) of constraints based on the elements upon which the constraints act (line, panel, strip, page, book, theme, motif, color, point of view, framing, text, etc). While I’m not sure a table is a good idea, it might be interesting to see what comes from thinking about these elements and constraints.

I’m not going to go into the constraints individually (I’ll save that for another post some other day). He does offer numerous examples of works that use the constraints (a reading list for me) and at least every other page has a panel, a strip, or a whole short story. A lot of the examples are quite interesting, such as Ayroles six panel reduction of Proust, Spiegelman’s “Malpractice Suite”, and Bill Griffith’s “The Plot Thickens”. Even for the non-oubapian Groensteen’s analyses have a lot of worthwhile ideas. (I’m trying to get ahold of some of his books about comics. More later, I hope.)

Following Groensteen’s essay is a collection of strips using the double blind constraint and an accompanying explanation. This constraint involves having scripters and drawers working without knowledge of the others work, generally starting from the same strip (the scripters only see the art, the artists only see the text). Rather in the vein of the Surrealist exquisite corpse, I don’t see this as serious work, more like entertainment.

Killoffer has two pages for a “tripoutre” which is hard to explain without visuals. It’s a form of multi-readability. Anne Baraou writes a couple pages about her “comics dice” which is a set of three dice with 6 comics panels on each. One rolls the dice and gets a three panel strip.

The other long piece in the book is Lécroart and Menu’s “Le Grabuge galactique”. Written with the larding constraint, it starts out with two panels in section A. In section B a panel is added before, between, and after the original two panels, creating a 5 panel sequence. In section C, panels are added before, between, and after the panels in section B, creating an 11 panel sequence. This continues on through section G which covers 16 pages (12 panels each). An additional constraint is placed on the text. The text in the new panels in each section must begin with the corresponding letter of the section. The finished comic concerns a human couple and some aliens. I got bored before finishing the thing, not my style of writing (whacky comedy) or drawing (I dislike Lécroart’s big-nosed cartoony style).

This volume is worth the price for Groensteen’s essay alone. It deserves a translation (if I had the time I would do it) so it can get better recognition in the English speaking comics world. Matt Madden has listed the constraints on the Oubapo America page, but it lacks the analysis and examples. I’ll try to add to that summary in the future with my own excerpts from the essay.

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, Jochen Gerner) each take on six constraints (Pliage, Strips Croisés, Palindrome, Itération, Upside-Down, Morlaque).

In general I’m not a big fan of comic strips. I prefer my comics like my prose, longer, enormous even. That’s my disclaimer before I continue. These strips are all single entities, unconnected to each other with the exception of Menu’s work which all features the same character in the same setting.

The early work of the Oulipo (and often the things you see mentioned on brief summaries of it) mostly consisted of short works that, while providing examples of different constraints, were not very interesting in themselves. It’s only in later stages, particularly with the writings of Perec, that the strictly constrained work was also a work of interest beyond the fact of the constraint. I am, of course, generalizing, but I think it holds true in most cases. The group is/was not conceived of as being about the creation of works. Rather, it was about the creation of constraints and forms.

The Oubapo is still in the early stages in this regard. The works contained in Oupus 3 are most often exercises, examples, lesser works which hold the interest mostly due to the effect of the constraint, the novelty.

Of the artists involved Trondheim is the only one whose comics I’ve read previously. His humorous and whackily fantastical strips were on the whole the most amusing to me. Killoffer offers the most interesting drawing, using a few different styles for his strips. Unlike the others one would be hard pressed to guess that they are by the same hand if it weren’t for the attribution. He also uses the constraints in the most innovative ways, often eschewing the convention rectangular panels. Ayroles’ work also impresses on different levels: his slightly angular line, the use of only black or white with no shading of any kind, and his dark humor. The others failed to impress me much. I am particularly turned off by Lecroart’s bloated characters.

I’ll look at each of the six constraints and the strips herein:

Pliage (Folding/Folded piece of paper): This constraint involves a strip that can be read normally and then folded at certain points to make a new strip out of, for example, the top part of the top row of panels and the bottom part of the bottom row of panels. In the end this creates both compression of the strip as well as a jumble. The words in the strips are organized so that when the strip is folded lines or even words are cut off and mixed with others. For the most part this creates a second reading of the strip that is humorous due to the juxtaposition with and difference from the first reading. Killoffer’s pliage, while drawn in a almost Greek vase fluid line style (or perhaps like a Picasso etching (I’m thinking of those unshaded Minotaur etchings)), is such that I can’t even figure out how it’s supposed to be folded as he uses parallelogram shaped panels organized into a circular flower pattern. Trondheim’s pliage offers three readings which are quite funny thanks to the last panel in which God makes a surprise appearance (Can you go wrong with the punchline “Ciel! J’ai fait le sexe avec dieu!!” [Heavens! I had sex with god!!]).

Strips croisés (Alternate strips): These strips are written so that one can read them different ways: read normally, read down the columns, read diagonally, read across the rows. These strips gain the most humor from the multiple meanings of the image or text in different contexts. Only Killoffer takes a non-gag approach and creates a sparse poetic strip. Ayroles does a lot with a limited set of images and a large number of panels, featuring a boy and his father sitting opposite each other on in a train cabin. His is written so that one can read from each column any panel in any sequence, creating 256 4 panel strips (according to the text, I’m not going to do the math) from the 16 panels that appear on the page.

Palindrome: A strip that is the same when read forward and backwards, in this case by panel (i.e. the first and last panels have the same image and the same text, the second and second last panels have the same… etc.). Like other forms of palindrome these strips are interesting for the novelty and technical feat but not much on their own. I’ll pass on mentioning any of these as I was unimpressed with them all.

Itération (Iteration): This involves using the same image or the same text or the same part of an image for each panel in the strip. Trondheim is known for using this method, as I believe his first comic consisted of the same image repeated for a number of pages with only the dialogue changing. Here he has four strips that all retain the same image (an airplane in the sky) with different, humorous dialogue. Ayroles repeats a character in the same pose, rather than the whole panel. Menu shows the same image of his character thinking and varies the thought balloon in each panel. Killoffer, again, is the innovator in repeating the same image. He varies it by focusing and zooming in at different levels.

Upside-Down: These strips are read normally then turned upside down and read. Naturally there are two sets of text in each panel, but the images are created so as to be different depending on the orientation of the page. These strips offer the most interesting images in the book. The need to create pictures that are readable in two opposing directions calls for unusual methods. Gerner works the turning of the page into part of his gag–an airplane is forced to turn upside down and we see the passengers inside. Killoffer’s images have the air of cubism, collage, and those paintings (the artist’s name escapes me) of the faces composed wholly of vegetables. Menu seems to have planned ahead of time for this one as the character featured in all his strips is already a mirror image of himself on top and bottom.

Morlaque (from “mord-la-queue” (biting the tail)): These strips connect beginning to end so that both disappear and the strip continues endlessly. Depending on the artist these can also be done so that any panel is an entry or exit point to the strip. Killoffer’s is a moebius strip featuring a man spinning off verbally from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” Trondheim’s many panelled strip features, I believe, the same character from his “Mister O” book (which I haven’t yet read) (the same strip that appears in this post). Ayroles pokes at the repetition of the everyday by fixing his strip in the bounds of the continuous work/eat/sleep circle.

Oddly this book was published previous to Oupus 2, so is really the second group publication by the Oubapo (that I am aware of). The strips are of some amusement, but I can’t say I’d be urging anyone to search this out.

(Since starting this review, I’ve gotten copies of Oupuses 1, 2, and 4, so there will be more on the Oubapo coming. Some browsing indicates that the others are more promising.)

1. Can you tell me how you first discovered the Oulipo/Oubapo and how this lead to the formation of Oubapo America as well as the current state of the group (I haven’t seem much by way of the other founders (Tom Hart and Jason Little), have they published any constrained works?).

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Oulipo but it must have been in my early 20s and it would almost certainly have been because of Queneau’s Exercises in Style, which I believe I discovered while working in a book store after college. Exercises in Style led me to Zazie in the Metro and Louis Malle’s film and somewhere in there a co-worker pointed out Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, which had just come in as a remainder (I have to confess I bought it and it sat on a shelf for years before I sold it again during a move. I finally bought and read it last year though!)

I first heard about Oubapo in about 1998 when Tom Devlin who, who was then working at Million Year Picnic (a great comic book store in Cambridge MA) [I was just there last week!] as well as publishing Highwater Books, sent me a copy of Oupus 1, the first book put out by Oubapo, and sort of its manifesto. He thought it looked cool and suggested it would be fun to do something similar in the US. I don’t remember if he realized that I was already working on my “Exercises in Style” or that it was directly related to the Oubapo project. At the time I was too busy finishing Odds Off [from Highwater Books], moving back to the US from Mexico, getting married and getting established in NYC to take on additional projects but I filed the idea away in the back of my head. In January 1999 I went to Angoul�me for the massive comics convention there and introduced myself briefly to Oubapo founders Thierry Groensteen and Jean-Christophe Menu, giving them copies of the few “Exercises in Style” I had finished at that point. I mentioned that I wanted to start something related to Oubapo in the US and both of them seemed enthusiastic about it. I have maintained occasional contact with the two of them and found out recently that a certain point they had voted me in to the group as a “foreign correspondent” along with a Spaniard named Sergio Garcia (they didn’t get around to informing me until a good year later!).

Meanwhile, back in the states, I got settled in to life in Brooklyn and found that Tom Hart and Jason Little, cartoonist friends who I had known for several years, were also really enthusiastic about Oubapo (around this time Oupus 3 came out, their funniest book to date) and the idea of constrained comics. Jason—in addition to being a huge fan of Georges Perec–had used visual constraints in a number of his short works, including “Jack’s Luck Runs Out,” which is draw in the style of playing card art, and “Man Shy,”” an innocuous old romance comic whose images he whited out and then redrew, changing the setting to an insane asylum. Tom, in addition to having done numerous consistently excellent 24-hour comics, had started an anthology comic with James Kochalka and Jason Lewis called Triple Dare, where in each issue each artist chose a rule and then all three artists were required to follow all three rules for three ten-page stories.

In a flurry of activity we decided to start “Oubapo-America” (we ditched the original Oubapo-USA because we wanted to keep it continental and more generically Anglophone). Tom threw together a website and we started an e-mail mailing list and announced our first “challenge:” to create a 26-panel comic where each panel corresponded to a letter in the alphabet. Reaction was widespread and enthusiastic and we got several really good comics out of that first challenge. We did a few more challenges and well-received presentation at ICAF (an academic comics symposium) which led to a workshop the next year. However, the daily realities of being three freelance artists in the big city took their toll and we soon found it hard to keep up momentum on the web page and e-mail list. To make matters more complicated, a bunch of other “oubapo” sites started to appear around Europe and Oubapo started to feel like it needed to stake claim on its territory. After talking it over with Menu, we have decided that there should just be one “Oubapo” and that other groups involved in constrained comics should not claim the title. So at this point Oubapo-America mach one is pretty much laid to rest but the four of us have plans to create blog site —under a different name–that will act as a venue for us to post thoughts and news about constrained comics as well as other areas of experimental comics that we are interested in—meta-comics, jam comics, etc..

I need to back step a bit to explain why there are four of us now: at a certain point we talked about inviting other people to join the group—we don’t consider ourselves all that serious a group and certainly aren’t following any kind of secret ‘pataphysic protocols—and generally leaned towards keeping the group small and local to keep things logistically simple. However, there was one exception who we all unanimously felt should be part of the group: Tom Motley, a cartoonist in Denver who had not only been doing all kinds of constrained and otherwise experimental comics (check out his stuff on the oubapo-america site) for years, he has also been in correspondence with Harry Mathews (having taken one of his writing workshops, I believe) and Warren Motte, who has written about Oulipo.

2. Has the use of constraint affected your work (and if so how)? Has it affected the way you go about your non-constrained works? I’m interested in the way constraint as a process changes the way one thinks about artistic creation even if they are not constrained themselves (which will lead into the next question).

Experimenting with constrained comics has definitely affected the whole of my work, most essentially by making me aware of the number of choices available to me at every stage of creating a work of art. Working with arbitrary constraints really makes you question all the esthetic “default settings” you have acquired over time where their personal habits or received wisdom about what constitutes a “good” comic. Certainly “Exercises in Style” is at one level an extreme exploration of the bewildering array of approaches available to narrate even the most mundane narrative events.

I actually can’t tell you how constraints have affected my non-constrained work since essentially all the comics I have drawn over the last two or three years—from “The Bad Boys of Tinubu Square” to “The Six Treasures of the Spiral”—have been written under constraints. In fact, I’m not sure when I’m going to write a non-constrained work again, partly because I am having such a rewarding time exploring constraints and partly because comics take so long to draw. That said, I already have a vague yearning to tell a “straight story” both to show I can do it, but also to see, as you suggested, to what extent working under constraint shapes the experience. I can certainly say that looking back at work I have done to this point I have mixed feelings about the lack of organized constraint in earlier comics, especially longer works like Odds Off and the story “Night of the Grossinator.” Those comics have a lot of formalist organizational principles (dusk to dawn, New Year to Now Rooz and most of the holidays in between, etc) but in some ways I feel they could have had more deliberate constraints in them—even if ultimately I’m happy with both of those works. The triad of characters in Odds Off at this point seems to beg for the application of Queneau’s “X takes Y for Z” schema or Mathews’ Algorithm. In a way I think the book comes across that way, almost like that constraint where you make a non-constrained work seem constrained! If I can digress a bit further, what I like about those two works I just mentioned is that they follow a more organic and subtle formalism of a sort I admire in the works of Nabokov and Queneau (in his novels) and in a sense I imagine myself coming back to this sort of work later but having more confident control of all the formal elements that make storytelling so interesting to me.

3. You’re teaching a class at the School of Visual Arts called “Experimental Comics: Great Art Through Constraints, Rules, and Games”, in which you seem to be using constraint, rules, and games as kinds of exercises. In a way, a good bit of education, particularly in writing and art is based on imposed rules and exercises, I’m thinking of things like the writing exercises in John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (or similar things used in writing classes) or the kinds of things you would see in a kid’s book about drawing comics. Often these “exercises” are considered to be practice or a way to get a person to improve their skills before making their “real” work. I’m curious about your feelings on this and how you go about teaching (I wish I could take the class, it’d be a good way for me to get drawing again).

When I use a game or constraint as an exercise in class, I always aim to keep the students’ eyes open to the possibility that although what they are doing is an “exercise,” there is no reason they can’t produce a valid, “real” work if they want to. (in fact, sometimes it can happen by accident, such as when doing exercises based on existing works: reducing graphic novels to one page, playing Five Card Nancy, etc. ). The context of the particular class is important, too: in my Experimental Comics class (which I will be offering again in the fall, by the way) I encourage my students to take every exercise and creative game seriously: if the comic they produce is incoherent or simply unremarkable, big deal: it’s still an educational exercise that may give them some insight; however, if they are really interested in experimental narrative, they should consider everything they do as potentially “real” works of art. On the other hand, in my undergraduate “Storytelling” class, which I co-teach with Jessica [Abel, his wife, and a wonderful comic artist], I assign students to make a constrained one-page comic along the line of a word game: anagrams, palindromes, acrostics, upside-downs, etc. In this case I emphasize the playful aspect of the assignment—most of these kids are still learning the basics of comics storytelling and very few are well-versed in narrative outside their immediate experience of mainstream comics, movies, video games, and TV—and let them discover for themselves the expressive potential latent in, say, a circular story. It always impresses me the number of kids—and not always the more apparently sophisticated ones—that come up with interesting comics that not only fulfill the demands of the constraint but also find ways to fuse form to content. Incidentally I wrote an essay about this constrained comic assignment that will appear in a new book edited by Steve Heller and Mike Dooley called Education of a Comics Artist, which should be out soon.

4. From the description of your course: “Our very sense of what a comic is–whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic–is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints such as page size and layout, panel borders, word balloons, decisions about drawing style, and so on.” I’d love to hear you elaborate on this.

This is a general statement intended to make the point that although when I talk about “constrained” comics I am talking about comics that have some kind of constraint that is deliberately imposed on them, in fact any creative work has all kinds of constraints already built into its process of creation. Jan Baetens makes a useful distinction in his article “Comic Strips and Constrained Writing” between deliberate constraints and what he calls “negative constraints” or “obstacles,” that is, constraints that are largely imposed from without such as page dimensions (determined by the printer’s specifications and available paper sizes), deadlines (determined by an editor or self-imposed), even drawing ability or lack thereof (whether this leads an artist to draw stick figures or to feel compelled to draw hyper-realistically). These kinds of constraints rarely affect the content of the final work in a direct way but they certainly play a role in the creative elaboration of a given work. In between these “negative” constraints and the more deliberate, arbitrary constraints of the ou-x-po variety fall things like traditional formats, genres, and drawing styles. It’s no more experimental at this point to create a four-panel gag strip than it is to write a sonnet since these are long-accepted forms that have become almost transparent as such. However, a sonnet—obviously—but also a four-panel gag strip have more or less strict rules that need to be followed in order for them to work successfully. Speaking of Baetens article I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion (if I’m remembering correctly) that because all of these constraints exist along a continuum that the study of “constrained” literature should therefore take all of these constraints into consideration. It seems to me that there is still a valid and useful distinction to be made between these circumstantial “constraints” and the more deliberate, self-consciously imposed constraints that we are talking about here. [I discuss Baetens article here.]

5. Reading your “Exercises in Style”, they touch upon a variety of “styles”: classic constraints on comic form (“Anagram”, “Cento”), genres (“High Noon”), literary devices (“Monologue”), what I would more conventional call “style” (“Manga”), formats (“Dailies”), pastiches (the Herriman one in A Fine Mess 2), etc. Can you talk a little about the project and how you go about coming up with the new “styles”. In completed form, I get the feeling it will be very much like a stylistic reference book.

I do think that the final book can be read as a kind of reference book and it’s funny you say that because that is how Chamberlain Brothers is planning to market the book, as a kind of creative writing handbook. It’s OK with me as long as it remains clear to everyone the book was not created as a prescriptive “how-to” book. Rather it’s a creative and idiosyncratic exploration of comics and storytelling, but one which I do think has a high degree of usefulness to other artists, especially students of comics, narrative, design, and so on.

I approached the project fairly organically at first, simply brainstorming as many variations as I could think of and then drawing the first batch of 15 or so (this would be back in 1998-9). At a certain point, though, I did start to try and classify the exercises I had come up with so far—very much as you did in your question—in hopes of discovering gaps in particular series (for example, I made a checklist out of Thierry Groensteen’s “Premier Bouquet de Contraintes” (a translation of which can be found on the oubapo-america site) and that way came up with a few missing oubapian variations, such as “Plus One,” a favorite of mine which follows the constraint of “regulated distribution.” I think the only constraint I deliberately ignored was N+7, which I consider to be of minimal interest to comics ((although check out Tom Motley’s hilarious Hamlet +7 comic, also on the oubapo-america site)).). I also hoped I might discover some whole new categories, although I can’t say that really happened.

6. Switching gears a bit, in an email to me you wrote that you were interested in: “the everyday in art and how it is different from ‘realism’. Odds Off ended up being more ‘realist’ than I had planned but I have done a number of shorter pieces that are more observational and essayistic, just attempting to capture a mundane moment. Actually, “House Music”, the one-pager in A Fine Mess #1, is an example of that, and in an unexpected way it has become an interesting theme in Exercises in Style.” Could you talk more about the everyday in art, generally, and your work, specifically?

I’ve never been a big fan of straightforward realism in storytelling or in art, but I am interested in art that has a sense of the everyday. I like art that feels made-up and self-aware but at the same time has a kind of familiarity to it, some sense of connection to everyday life. A lot of early short comics I drew were like little sketches of mundane life; things I observed on walks, cooking vegetables, and that sort of thing. An influence at that time—although I can’t say I really understood them all that well—were these short texts by the Swiss author Robert Walser where he would describe an uneventful walk in the country that seemed somehow meaningful and poignant without seeing to try to be more than what they were—there is no symbolism or philosophical or allegorical intent in them as I remember. “Just the facts, ma’am.” In Black Candy I took a mundane world similar to the “autobio” comics a lot of my peers were doing and slowly introduced an element of Cronenbergian horror to it, hoping to create some interesting fractures in both narrative worlds. In Odds Off I tried to find a balance between a pretty straightforward grad student drama and elements of formal experimentation and implausible situations. One of the reasons I made L’Atalante the movie the characters are watching toward the end of the book was to point to Jean Vigo’s (vastly more successful) blending of different modes in that work: lyrical realism of the Michel Carn� variety, Keaton/Chaplin style humor, surrealism, social commentary, along with some achingly beautiful visual sequences. That movie represents an ideal of the kind of fusion I’d like to have in my work. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, now that I think of it, Queneau’s novels share this same quality.) [Probably also not surprising that I also love L'Atalante and Queneau. -derik] I’m not really interested in total abstraction in any medium (I’ve never gotten into abstract painting or free jazz), what excites me is trying to create an imaginary world that is evidently and openly fictional yet which still has recognizable elements of life as we experience it.

7. Any comments on the increasing visibility of comics in mainstream media, from Chris Ware’s Booker to Spiegelman’s widespread reviews of In the Shadows to Jeff Brown’s appearance in USA Today and most recently Rick Moody reviewing David B’s Epileptic in the New York Times (not to mention other stories, columns, and reviews, in the Times, the Post, and Time Magazine). Personally I see the majority of the coverage seeming to go three ways: a) comics aren’t just superheroes or for kids (except when they come in movie form, it seems) b) a tendency to cover works that are fairly traditional literary genres, particularly autobiography (Spiegelman, Satrap, David B, Jeffrey Brown, Pekar) and c) manga manga manga. It’s probably a cliched question, but it seems that the point has yet to be reached where comics are taken as another form that can have a variety of genres and styles with equal validity.

I’m not quite as guarded as you in my optimism about the reception of comics as a serious medium. I agree that there’s still a lot of ignorant and moronic commentary on comics, but the fact that “Zap! Boom! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore!!” is still a frequent headline says as much about the laziness of writing about culture in general as a lack of appreciation of comics. At the same time, there is a marked increase in the number of reviews and articles about serious comics and an increasing ratio of those which are thoughtfully written, even by writers who don’t know much about the medium. A recent example is the review of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in the New York Review of Books: the author was clearly unfamiliar with comics but she read the book without preconceptions and gave a cogent and sensitive reading of the book which addressed the way comics’ word/image juxtaposition creates meaning, plus she never resorted to the usual excuses and disclaimers: sure it’s comics, but don’t worry, it’s good anyway! I’ve also been really pleasantly surprised by number of literary blogs (including yours) that matter-of-factly talk seriously about comics without making a big deal out of it—at this point it’s really just a given, like gay marriage announcements in the New York Times.

8. I’ve posted a few times about chance and constraint in relation to the Oulipo and Surrealism, which you had a few things to say about over at Dan Green’s blog. I quoted you here. Anything more on the use of chance, perhaps in your own work? I’ve been meaning to ask more about John Cage and the I Ching, which you had mentioned.

I think the gist of that discussion was that although Oulipo claims to be anti-chance, in fact it is virtually impossible to avoid some element of chance even in the most controlled works (Take N+7, for example: yes, you are determining a numeric shift that will lead you to new words quasi-mathematically, but the dictionary you happen to use is going to give you drastically different results). My feeling is that there is no problem in embracing that fact, and that one way to incorporate it in constrained work is to set as many parameters as possible to creatively direct where and how chance comes into play. John Cage seems like an artist who worked in that middle territory: he embraced chance but in fact there was a lot of process and constraint that he put in place first before introducing the element of chance.

As far as the use of chance in my own work goes, I’ve tried to figure out ways to incorporate it in a meaningful way but for instance I’m still in the dark as to the specific processes Cage used—I know he used the I-Ching to determine things but I don’t know how he did it. I have a comic I’m doing, a sort of side project that I am trying to have fun with but also explore the use of chance operations. I bought a twelve-sided die (the only time I’ve ventured into the gaming section of a comic book store!) and made a numbered list of twelve items: four characters, four props, four locations. For every page of the comic I role the die three times (or more if I roll the same item more than once) and the rule is that I have to use the corresponding three items from my list in that page. I’ve done about 20 pages of it so far and it’s been fun but it hasn’t really taken a clear form yet. (I printed up those first pages in a minicomic called On Faraway Beach.) I’ve told myself that if a coherent narrative forms I can drop the die for a while until I get stuck. And that reminds me of the other chance-related operation I’ve experimented with, without much result: Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards, which I found on line. I like the idea of pulling a card to help you get out of a creative dead end or problem, but the few times I’ve tried using, I must admit that I haven’t gotten any useful results.

9. Do you have any plans to do other constrained works? Anything you are working on? What’s the constraint behind your story in the second Rosetta Anthology, “U.S. Post Modern Office Homes Inc.” (Alternative Comics)?

“U.S. Post Modern Office Homes Inc.” is a loosely constrained story starting from a simple conceit: I don’t remember why but at some point I was amused by the thought of two store signs put next to each other such that they would form a third phrase and came up with the example US Post Office + Modern Homes Inc = the title of the story. I then decided that the story would be generated by using each word in the phrase as a title of a page, then combinations of two adjacent words (“U.S Post”, “Post Modern,” “Modern Office,” etc), and ending with the full phrase. It was riffing on the connotations of all the phrases and words that brought the story about. That and the fact that I remembered at one point having read that the porn star Harry Reems had found religion and become a successful real estate broker in Florida. Beyond that, I generally tried to have every panel in every page correspond to its title in some way so that, for instance, “U.S.” has only phrases with the initials u.s., “Post” has some kind of “post-“ word or object in each panel, and so on.

I’m excited about a new comic I’m working on, a 32-page as-yet untitled story that will make up the third issue of A Fine Mess. It’s a “crab canon,” a musical form credited to Bach that is basically an overlaid palindrome so that instead of:

ABCDCBA

You get:

ABCD
DCBA

In other words it’s a palindrome for two voices. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a crab canon dialogue in G�del Escher Bach. I realized I could do a similar thing in comics but that not only the dialogue would have to be mirrored but also the panel compositions (specifically the symmetrical placement of the two main characters). I made a few dummy booklets and figured out that it works quite well. To make matters more perverse, the 32-page story (64 if you include reading it backwards—a challenge I’m playing around with) is also a kind of palindrome so that you have a secondary mirror axis at page 16/48, which you might visualize like this:

ABCDCBA
DCBABCD

For such a delirious structure I could only come up with a story of amour fou ["mad love" for you non-francophiles, a Surrealist concept] and suicide—if I pull it off it will be a mixture of Charlie Kaufman and Julio Cort�zar.

10. The Rosetta Anthology also contains your translation of a comic by Edmond Baudoin, “Le Wagram”. Any more translations planned? How did you end up doing that translation and how was the experience? I’ve dabbled in some translating and found a very interesting experience as far as it being a really close reading of a work.

I’ve been interested in translation since college when I was majoring in comparative literature and took a class in it. I’m fluent enough in both French and Spanish to be able to translate passably well in both (I’ve know French longer—off and on since childhood—but I’ve been more thoroughly immersed in Spanish in recent years). Before Baudoin I translated a few short comics from French and Spanish, a few of which were published by the French publisher Stereoscomic (Big Ben’s The Hairdresser and Aur�lia Aurita’s Angora). I even translated a comic from Portuguese, the great mini-comic The Apocalypse According to Dr. Zeug by my friend Fabio Zimbres, which he published (in the original) as part of his “mini-tonto” series in Brazil. That remains unpublished and now that I have some free time I should really dig that up and do something with it. As for future plans, I translated 25 pages of a Spanish comic by an artist named Angel de la Calle called Modotti, a provocative comics biography of the photographer Tina Modotti. We have an agent showing it around right now so if that pans out I will translate the rest of the book (and even get paid for it).

I don’t remember how the Baudoin translation came about but I think I might have offered my services to Suat as he was putting together Rosetta #2. I am always trying to get Baudoin published in English—I think he’s one of the most significant cartoonists alive—and I’m happy to have had the opportunity. Translating that particular story was pretty straightforward since it’s part of a collection of stories that are kind of modern fairy tales, but I did admire his efficiency in telegraphing the story with a minimum of dialogue and narration. I will likely translate some more French stuff for Rosetta #3, but that’s in early planning stages right now.

My most dizzying translation experiment so far was attempting to translate a few pages of Perec’s La Disparition/A Void (without looking at the Gilbert Adair translation)—talk about constraint! It was really fun and I was actually pretty pleased with how my version compared to Adair’s.

11. Can you recommend any other comic artists using constraint or similar experimental forms or processes. While we’re at it, who are your favorite authors/artists/creators in any form, genre, or medium? Who do you think has being most influential on you?

Beyond my immediate Oubapo-America cohorts, some artists that are doing interesting experimental work or one sort or another would include, in no particular order, Marc-Antoine Mathieu (Dark Horse published his book Dead Memory, but that’s his least successful book, unfortunately; virtually everything else I’ve read is great); John Hankiewicz, whose Tepid has some of the most peculiar and beguiling comics out there right now—we have also had a very interesting and encouraging correspondence over the years. Among the French Oubapians I particularly like the work of Fran�ois Ayroles, and Killoffer’s nightmarish, quasi-oubapian fever dream 676 Apparitions of Killoffer is going to be published soon by a new British publisher called Typocrat—a promising new venture which is apparently particularly interested in promoting Oubapo and experimental comics in general.

Rather than try and give a list of influences I think I’ll give myself a constraint and limit myself to three artists in each medium who currently interest me a lot and who I feel some esthetic connection to.

–Comics (not including the Oubapo artists I’ve already covered): Dan Clowes is one of the best cartoonists out there, for my money he’s better than Chris Ware, and Ice Haven (just out from Pantheon) is a new high-water mark in comics; Kevin Huizenga has been blowing my mind with almost everything he’s done recently, especially “Gloriana,” the suite of stories reprinted in Or Else #2. Joann Sfar is a French cartoonist who I adore. His stuff is very different from mine, I’m more inspired by his example: his originality, his energy and his confidence in creating a very idiosyncratic fictional world (Two of his Little Vampire books are available as children’s books from Simon and Schuster, and his more adult-oriented The Rabbi’s Cat is coming soon from Pantheon).

–Film: Alain Resnais, a consistently original and surprising filmmaker, Atom Egoyan in his more experimental mode ( I watched Calendar again recently and it’s great.), Guy Maddin—almost the opposite of “constrained” artist—his films are completely unbridled in fact–but I really like him and his hothouse melodramatics definitely influenced the characters and the general horniness of “Six Treasures of the Spiral.”

–Literature: Queneau (It’s funny how I keep coming back to him, and the more I read the closer I feel to him as an artist); Perec I think sets the gold standard for anyone doing constrained writing of any sort. I’ve been reading a lot of Nabokov in the last few years… sorry those are all obvious choices but I stand by them!

Thanks so much to Matt for the great replies (and the leads to some new reading for me). I hope the readers will read some of his work and keep their eyes open for the forthcoming Exercises in Style book (from Chamberlain Brothers in October).

The included Oubapo members are: Anne Baraou, Lewis Trondheim, Francois Ayroles, Gilles Ciment, Jean-Christophe Menu, Killofer, Etienne Lecoart, and Jochen Gerner. (Trondheim is the only one I’ve read.)

The examples they list include:

Iterations: wherein an element is repeated identically in each panel on the page (i.e. the whole drawing, the text, or a person in the same position).

Multireadability: which allows the reader to choose different readings of the panels, choosing the pathway across different panels. Apparently some of the works also have an element of chance (“when chance also plays a role, one doesn’t hesitate to talk of aleatoric consecution (a touch screen, a throw of the dice, drawing panels like cards, …)” [my trans.]) though it is a limited chance.

The drawing below by Lewis Trondheim is an example of Multireadability.

Restriction: a limiting of image (a certain element must appear in a panel, or only a limited number of certain elements may be used), tools, composition, point of view.

Reduction and Expansion: the former taking a given comic and removing panels until one is left with a predecided number of them, or the latter, taking a given comic and adding panels inbetween the ones that already exist.

Substitution: replacing certain elements in a comic (the words, the images).

Hybridation: mixing two comics together.

Graphical Reinterpretation: changing the style of drawing or the transforming the iconic contents. (I imagine this as for instance taking a Peanuts strip and redrawing it in the realist style, or taking a superhero comic and redrawing it as a Chester Brown/Joe Matt style autobiographical comic.)

Also a few group projects including a kind of comic exquisite corpse and a comic scrabble game (ScrOUBAbble) in which participants have 7 panels instead of letters to play on a board, creating crossing stories. That one sounds really fun.

Anne Baraou has a computerized comic with a touch screen, where touching on the screen brings up a new panel. As far as I can tell the images are selected randomly from a set creating a kind of anagrammatic comic (as in the panels are rearranged like the letters in an anagram).

Most of these don’t seem to be extremely new methods, but it is great to know that the group is getting some recognition.

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 first print publication of his to feature a number of works created under constraint. This issue contains four shorts (from 1 to 14 pages) and five more examples of his “Exercises in Style.”

The first story, “Prisoner of Zembla”, consists of twenty-seven panels across three pages. After the first title panel each of the subsequent panels is saturated visually and linguistically with the successive letters of the alphabet: sentences, sections of dialogue, and/or just a large number of the words begin with the same letter, while the images hold the forms of the letters, both on the macro and micro level. The fifth panel (page 1), for instance, has an image of the profile of a woman’s head drawn so her face is mostly a straight vertical while her chin, the top and the back of her head form the rightward curve of a capital “D”. Within the same panel the frames of her glasses form smaller capital “D”s on her face, and her hand, index finger pointed up, creates a lower case “d”. On the next panel one section of dialogue reads “Her exclamations were even more egregious then I had expected.” (1) The story itself — following Roubaud’s Principle wherein the work under constraint speaks of the constraint — concerns the alphabet of the fictitious Zembla (borrowed from Nabokov) being replaced by a roman transliteration. The comic itself, in its form, already showing the preeminence of the roman alphabet.

The second very short story is a one page gag strip/cocktail recipe called “Happy Hooligan” (the main character and the drink). The character himself is borrowed from an old newspaper strip, and oddly enough was also used in Spiegelman’s In the Shadows of No Towers as “Hapless Hooligan”. I’ve yet to see the charm in most of the old newspaper strips, and found this pastiche no more amusing (though the drink sounds like it might be tasty), though it is another example of Madden’s ability to pastiche other artists (in further evidence in many of the “Exercises in Style”, see below).

The next and longest story is called “The Six Treasures of the Spiral: A Comics Sestina”. This story takes the poetic form of the sestina, wherein six end-words are permutated through six six-line stanzas of a poem. Madden has adapted the form to comics by permutating the end panels of each three panel row across two nine panel pages (i.e. on every two pages the six panels that form the right most panels on the pages are repeated in a different order). The six panels each feature one of the main characters in the story and make use of simple phrases (to lead into other dialogue), exclamations (all around useful), and phrases with the possibilities for multiple meanings. The story itself involves a treasure hunt and a whirlpool with an odd sacrifice. Madden uses the repeating panels to a comic effect that had me laughing out loud. In the last page he manages to put all 6 panels in direct sequence, which is a common way of ending sestinas (in the poetic form all six end-words are used in one two line stanza).

These first three stories’ art is somewhere between realistic and cartoony, iconic but not excessively so. While the art is not amazing, it does the job for the stories, it is neither distractingly good or bad. And this makes the next story all the more different. “La Mulata de Cordoba: A colonial legend” is a 9 page story done with broad expressive strokes in numerous shades of grey (or is just printed in grey and was once in flat colors). It is a striking shift from the previous pages. The layout uses larger panels, at most six a page (compared to the previous pages’ nine panel grid) but frequently just one large image. There is an economy to the telling of the legend that gives enough information but makes one follow more closely. This is the stand out piece in the issue. I hope to see more of this style in the future. It is painterly, and, I think, shows a more individual style, where the other stories are a more generic comic style.

The book ends with five more of Madden’s “Exercises in Style”, which I have posted about previously. Based on the idea of Queneau’s book of the same name, Madden is retelling a banal story in comics using a wide variety of styles, concepts, methods, etc. In this issue we get ones based on manga, Krazy Kat, McCay’s Rarebit Fiends, and Queneau himself (retelling the story from Queneau’s EiS mixed with Madden’s EiS). Like Queneau’s book these are much more interesting in juxtaposition than individually, but I think Madden’s will prove to be a sort of lexicon of comic styles when he finishes it. As mentioned, he is also quite adept at pastiching other artists/styles.

Madden claims there will be some documentation on the constrained works posted at his website (click on the “comics” link), but as of this writing not much has appeared.

In comparison to the previous work I have seen (such as A Fine Mess #1 and his graphic novel Odds Off), this issue drifts away from the slice-of-life/auto-bio-esque/realism that I have seen Madden do. I find this a positive swing and wonder if the use of constraints and the style exercises are opening him up to new vistas. There is another of his constrained comics in the new Rosetta anthology (Amazon link where you can see some of the inside of the book), and I’m looking forward to getting a copy of it. Here’s hoping it won’t be two more years until we see another book from Madden (the Exercises in Style book is projected for late 2005).

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.