Broken Frontier

Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.  New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005.  206 pp., mostly black & white, some color.

In 1947, French author Raymond Queneau published a short book called Exercises in Style (Exercises de style).  In it he told a brief, simple story – about a man who encountered a stranger twice in one day – and then retold it 98 more times, in multiple variations: changing its tense, style, mood, form – almost any aspect that prose (or in some cases poetry) could vary.

Over five decades later, cartoonist Matt Madden undertook a parallel project in comics form.  Madden tells a simple, one-page story: in the middle of the night, he gets up from his work to go to the fridge for a snack; on the way he is interrupted by his wife (cartoonist Jessica Able) who asks him the time; and by the time he reaches the refrigerator he can no longer remember what he was looking for.  A simple, even banal story.  But then Madden goes on to retell it 98 different ways – and the result is a rich, marvelous exploration of the many axis along which a comics story can vary: in formal properties, in genre, in point of view, in content.  Indeed, the simplicity of the story here is essential (just like it was for Queneau), for it guides the reader's attention towards the variations rather than the tune.

Portions of Madden's work was originally published in installments on the internet, where it bore the same title as Queneau's – "exercises in style."  At his publisher's request, however, in the move to print Madden relegated that to a subtitle, so that the full published work is entitled 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. (Full disclosure: although we've never met, Madden and I have exchanged friendly emails, in part about this project; I also did a few versions myself which Madden published on his web site along with many other "guest artists".)  As a formal exploration of the comics medium, Madden's work is the most fascinating book since Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics.  It is engrossing, charming, witty, clever – a wonderful book which repays multiple rereadings.

Let me talk about the nature of Madden's variations.  If you, like me, are an obsessive maker of lists and player with categories, it's fun to divide them into groups.  For example, one sub-set of Madden's variations are pastiches of the works of particular artists: he does homages to Rudolphe Töppfer, Jack Kirby, George Herriman, Windsor McKay, photographer Duane Michals, and poet Kenneth Koch..  Broadening out a bit, he also does a number of variations that are modeled after the work, not of a single artist, but of an artistic movement or style: thus he does homages to ligne claire, manga, underground comics and American newspaper dailies.  Even more broadly, Madden tells his story – often much revised – in the manner of various genres: superhero comics, war comics, romance comics, religious tracts, fantasy comics, and many more.

Another and different axis of variation is in the tale's formal properties.  He does many variations which alter the visual point of view, for example: he shows the point of view of his wife, working upstairs; of his own subjective view (what his eyes would see, rather than showing him in frame); of a voyeur from outside; and from inside the refrigerator.  He does a progressive zoom, starting from space and ending with a microscopic view; he uses a constant horizon line even as he moves about his house; he does one with extreme close-ups and another with extremely distant shots.  He also varies narrative as well as visual viewpoints, telling the story in flashbacks, as a monologue, from a single moment in time, and as a critic analyzing his own text.

Madden tells the tale in one panel, and then in thirty; with all horizontal panels, and then all vertical.  He replaces the figure of Matt with a fury animal, with an actor, and with no one.  He keeps the same text but uses wholly different images; he keeps the images and uses a wholly different text.  He does a number of variations pastiching non-narrative forms, redoing the tale as a map, as a series of advertisements and as a how-to guide.  Madden uses various styles, giving us photocomic, minimalist, maximalist and silhouette versions of the story.  He borrows variations from other literary media, and gives us a cento (in which each panel is borrowed from a different creator, modeled after the poetic practice of making new poems with lines from other poets' works) and a palindrome, which reads the same backwards and forwards, among others.

And many, many more, including many that are quirky and share little in common with any other variations, and many that are quite difficult to sum up in mere prose.

Wonderful as Madden's individual variations are, they are, in some sense, not the point: the action of this book takes place not upon any single page but in the relations between them.  Each page is fun to read in and of itself, but far more fun is to compare any two, to contrast any three, to mentally arrange and re-arrange them.  The book expands to give more fun and pleasure the more directions one looks at it from.  If you just zip through this book, you won't enjoy it a fraction as much as you will if you slow down, read it sideways and backwards and from the top, and watch the way the alterations spin inside your head.

There is, however, one flaw in this otherwise extraordinary work – or should I say on this extraordinary work, since I am referring to its cover.  A glance at the cover will tell you what sort of book this is: a fluffy, silly book about creativity of the sort that clogs the writing sections of bookstores, one that can be safely written off as dull and insipid.  Of course, in telling you this, the cover is lying: Madden's book is not that sort of work at all, and indeed could be fairly described with the very opposite of all those crashing adjectives.  I don't know why the publisher decided to market the book in this fashion, and can't say with any certainty that, from a strictly business point of view, they were wrong in doing so: there may well be more buyers for fluffy, silly books about creativity than for genuinely creative explorations of the formal properties of the comics medium.  Nevertheless, never has it been more truly said: don't judge this book by its cover.

I should not leave off without a brief mention of the literary groups that unite Queneau and Madden's works.  Long after he wrote Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau founded a French literary group known as the Oulipo, the name deriving from the acronym of the French phrase "Workshop of Potential Literature."  The group is devoted to literary experimentation of various types, in particular to different forms of the sorts that Queneau featured in his book, from the sonnet to the lipogram.  Queneau's book can thus be seen as a handbook of Oulipian possibility.  On the model of the Oulipo, various parallel groups were founded, including a "Workshop of Potential Comics", the Oubapo.  An unofficial American variation on this theme has been founded by – among others – Matt Madden.  Madden's work can thus serve as a handbook of Oubapian possibility, exploring some of the many forms comics can take, just as Queneau's did for literature.

Anyone who is interested in comics' formal possibilities should do themselves a favor and read Madden's delightful work.