Shifting Styles and Blue Moods in the Pages of a Graphic Novel

Shifting Styles And Blue Moods In The Pages Of A Graphic Novel

The New York Times – by Ed Park

Matt Madden is the stuntman-philosopher of American comics. His best-known book, “99 Ways to Tell a Story,” riffed on Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style.” That bible of experimental writing from 1947 retold a mundane scenario — a mild contretemps on a Paris bus — with precision (“In a bus of the S line, 10 meters long, 3 wide, 6 high …”), in Cockney (“A sees vis young Froggy bloke, caw bloimey …”) and so on. Transposing the conceit to the graphic medium, Madden devised his own non-anecdote: Man leaves desk, opens fridge, tells someone the time, then can’t recall why he stood up in the first place. This ball of nothing gets reworked as (among other things) a batch of daily comic strips, a piece of the Bayeux Tapestry and a do-it-yourself kit in which each element (from wristwatch to lettering) is separated as if in a box, ready for assembly. The hilarity mounts, but so does the mystery of what makes a story. In flaunting style over substance, he shows them to be one and the same.

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