Brainy Fun with Comics
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Sept. 27, 2005
Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 9/27/2005
A formalist trickster and comix bon vivant, cartoonist Matt Madden will publish 99 Ways To Tell a Story, a visual parody of comics style and syntax, due from Penguin in late October. He teaches comics storytelling at the School of Visual Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his wife cartoonist Jessica Abel.
PW Comics Week: What's going on in 99 Ways To Tell a Story?
Matt Madden: Its inspired by the novelist Raymond Queneau. You take a page for each drawing and a single non-story and spin out as many variations on it as possible. You come up with different styles and formal aspects of comics, along with different shades of meaning. There's a comic with no pictures, a comic that's a map, the comic manga style. It's a way to explore the language of comics and the history of comics with tongue in cheek.
PWCW: Here's Madden's non-story. You walk downstairs, a voice calls down asking the time, and you respond and then you forget why you're staring intently into the refrigerator. Why so banal?
MM: You need something undramatic, a blank slate. The drama and interest in 99 Ways is generated from the style rather than the content. It makes you realize how much meaning there is in the drawing style, the point of view and the rhythm of the storytelling.
PWCW: It's an idiosyncratic book filled with funny and clever drawings. Yet the cover is all type, like a textbook, and seems to cast itself as a learning aid for would-be writers.
MM: I didn't want it to look like a graphic novel so the publisher and I settled on a textbook look. I teach and the kids in my classes were attracted to the book. We want to get it the classroom. I consider it a work of art but it does have a practical angle.
PWCW: You are among the group of comics artists that have migrated from an indie comics publisher to a New York trade book house. Talk about the differences.
MM: The differences are striking. It's been good being at a major house. Of course, there's a bureaucracy to deal with which leads to miscommunication and compromises. At an indie house you have a direct line to the publisher. If you want to do something, even if its financial suicide, you can probably do it. At Penguin I have many more distribution resources, a larger print run and academic sales. That's great.
