By Mike Rhode
Matt
Madden is one of the defining indy cartoonists of the early 21st century, and he has been coming to
SPX for decades. He has a new book out this year, Six Treasures of the Spiral, so I used that as an
opportunity to ask for an interview.
photo by R. Carter Studios, 2022
When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?
I was born in May of 1968 in New York City, in the midst of student riots at Columbia University and in Paris. My mother was finishing her college degree at Columbia but was pretty oblivious to the student activism—she just remembered the riot police being alarmed at a pregnant young woman showing up to class.
Where do you live?
I've been living in Philadelphia since 2016.
What is your training and/or education in cartooning?
I’m entirely self-taught, though I have benefited from advice and resource-sharing with peers and mentors throughout my career. I learned how to draw and tell stories visually by reading a lot of comics, drawing copies of panels I liked, and above all by making comics before I was “ready” and self-publishing them as photocopied minicomics to sell and (mainly) trade with other artists.
What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?
I would say I'm part of the world of indy comics or alternative comics or maybe literary comics. I love doing one-pagers and short stories, strips more rarely, and I do book-length comics even though I'm very slow. I work on paper and I always have books in mind even if I share a lot of stuff online.
How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?
I do a combination. My final pages are India ink on Bristol board using a combination of different nibs and watercolor brushes. Some correction with Deleter white #2. Then I scan and do more clean up in Photoshop.
Increasingly, I use the computer and my iPad to write and plan my comics: I lay out my stories in InDesign using a technique developed by Alison Bechdel and I do a lot of my pencils on my iPad using Procreate, which I then print out and lightbox on to final pencils on Bristol board.
What's your new book about? How does it build on your previous works?
Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed under Pressure is a collection of short comics I’ve drawn over the last 25 years, all of them made using some kind of formal constraint or conceit: one story uses the letters of the alphabet to generate the art and story; another is a narrative palindrome; some were made by adapting fixed poetry forms like the sestina and the pantoum to the comics page.
These stories weave through my entire career as a cartoonist and show how formal experimentation has been a uniting thread in my work since even before my discovery of the tradition of constrained writing as exemplified Oulipo and Raymond Queneau, which led to my pivotal book, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005)
You're probably best known as a 'constraint' cartoonist. If I have that term right, can you explain it and how you got into it?
Yes, "constraint" is the term I like to use, and what that means for me is a rule or structure that you impose on yourself as a combination of prompt and creative challenge to create a work of art. We use constraints or limitations all the time when we make art, for example you might decide to make a wordless comic or a comic with the exact same panel grid on every page: how do you tell a good story that makes use of those restrictions? Maybe it's an interesting challenge to try to convey a scene of dialogue in a wordless comic, or to try to create a sense of wide open space in a comic with a 12-panel grid on it. These kinds of constraints are kinds of parameters or guidelines, part of the decision-making and planning of any comic (to stick to one medium—these principles apply across the board, though).
What I like to do is add a weird, often arbitrary constraint
on top of whatever pre-existing format constraints there are because I find it
forces me to hone my creative problem solving and discover surprising solutions
for drawings and stories.
For example, the lead story of my new book is called "Prisoner of Zembla" which was created by making drawings for each panel that evoked the letters of the alphabet, in order, meaning there are 26 panels (plus a title panel for 27 total, which makes for a neat 3-page comic using a 9-panel grid). As I doodled shapes of letters and tried to make them into faces, bodies, and spaces, a story started to suggest itself to me which was about alphabets and language.
The short version of how I got into using constraints is that I owe it all to Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which I adapted into comics between 1998-2004. Drawing the same comics 99 times really sensitized me to how significant and how fun these formal decisions are that we often take for granted. It's been my primary creative focus ever since.
For a longer explanation, I invite you to read the afterword to my new book, "Thinking Inside the Box, or: The Method to My Madden-ness," which you can also read on my Substack: https://mattmadd.substack.com/p/thinking-inside-the-box
Who are your comic art influences?
To stick to comics, here are some major formative influences in no particular order:
George Herriman
Winsor McCay
Hergé
Julie Doucet
Carol Swain
Daniel Clowes
Muñoz and Sampayo
Edmond Baudoin
Gary Panter
Art Spiegelman
If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?
A creative career is always a crapshoot full of would-haves and could-haves so I don’t like to dwell on that stuff too much. The two things I sometimes wish (and which are probably incompatible) are that 1) I had committed to regularly and only producing comics instead of branching out into teaching, editing, making textbooks, etc., and 2) that I had gotten a decent day job early on that would have allowed me to separate the desire to make art from the need to make money.
What work are you best-known for?
That's easy: I will probably always be best known for 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, my riff on Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style (1947), where I redrew the same story 99 times using different points of view, different genres, different formal approaches, and so on.
What work are you most proud of?
These days I feel most proud of my short story "Bridge" (first published as a standalone mini by Kuš and collected in Six Treasures). It is an excellent example of how constraints can draw entirely novel and surprising stories out of you: this comic was created and drawn as a 24-hour comic (24 pages conceived, written, and drawn in 24 hours) with the additional constraint that there had to be a 10-year time gap between each page. Despite that straitjacket of a challenge, I was able to summon up a story which I believe is the best single piece of fiction I have ever created.
I’m also happy with the drawing though I’d like to point out that I completely re-drew the story a few years after the 24-hour version.
What would you like to do or work on in the future?
My kids are in high school and the prospect of being an empty nester is on the horizon. I have several older artist friends whom I’ve seen really thrive with that new freedom and I plan to do the same.
I have two book-length projects that I’m already working on (slowly but surely) and several other projects on deck.
Mostly, I want to keep making comics but as time frees up in the coming years I’d also like to devote more time to playing guitar and making music, doing more translation, and doing drawing or printmaking projects.
What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?
I usually have more than one project going on at a time so if I get stuck or disenchanted with one I’ll switch to the other for a while. Often, by the time I get back to the stuck project after a break I can see it with fresh eyes and find a new way to approach it. The creative process is cyclical and any given work is always in a stage between near-finished and near-ruined.
I don’t really get writer’s block, that’s one of the appeals to me of constraints: if I’m not sure what I want to draw or write about, I can set myself an arbitrary constraint (say: make a one-page comic using only triangles and circles) and that puts me in problem-solving mode rather than worrying about whether I have anything to say.
What do you think will be the future of your field?
Overall I think comics have a great future—creatively, at least. So many new artists are bringing all kinds of new energy to the art form all over the world and the combination of the internet and the ever-growing network of small press-focused comics shows means that it's easier than ever to share your work. Then again, that also makes it harder than ever to get your stuff noticed amidst the tsunami of impressive minicomics, graphic novels, translations, and archival reprints that come out every week, but I think that's a healthy problem for an art form to have.
I'm speaking here about author-driven independent or "art" comics, not necessarily mainstream genre stuff.
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| Matt at SPX in 2024 |
What cons do you attend besides The Small Press Expo? Any comments about attending them?
SPX is my main annual con. One addition in recent years has been the Philly Comics Expo (PCX), organized by our amazing local store Partners and Son, which also happens in the fall. The show has a local focus but increasingly brings in out-of-towners like Bubbles Zine or even my tablemate this year, Johnny Damm, who came all the way from California.
I go to MoCCA from time to time and will be there in 2025 but I don't really have a sense of what it's like these days.
I think the vibe of these American indy festivals has evolved over the years to something pretty different from the 90s—which is a good thing. It's a very young scene and much more diverse than it used to be. I admit that I sometimes feel like a bit of an outsider in my own scene as an old grayhair with my books amidst a crowd of risograph zines, t-shirts, and stickers, but I'm happy to see the scene grow and I plan to stick around long enough to see the current youngsters find themselves as befuddled as me in 10-15 years' time.
I was lucky enough to regularly attend the Angoulême Comics Festival four years in a row and again in 2023 and that remains a whole other beast. It's like SDCC if there were no toys or video games (which is to say: it's nothing like SDCC). It's as exciting as everyone says it is, despite its commercialization and the brouhahas that pop up every few years.
You spent time in France as cartoonist invited to live there? How did that come about?
In 2012, my wife Jessica Abel and I were both accepted for
residencies at La Maison des Auteurs, a studio residency for cartoonists in
Angoulême, France. It's not directly associated with the festival, rather it's
part of a whole institution that has grown in parallel called La Cité
Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l'Image. We initially went for a
one-year residency, then renewed for a second year before finally extending to
four years total—the maximum allowed!
Our children were two and four when we moved so we dropped them in the local public school and they quickly became fluent French speakers.
It was an incredible experience to be able to live abroad as a family in a country that places value on the arts (and on families: we received a monthly stipend from the French government simply because we had two children, through a quasi-UBI program called La Caisse d'Allocations Familiales). Angoulême is a quiet, even dull, place but it's great for a young family and it is within hours of Paris and Bordeaux or even Bilbao. We were able to travel all over Europe by car and train, often to comics festivals that invited us: Helsinki, Stockholm, Luzerne, Gijón…
You and Jessica Abel are a long-standing married comics couple. Do you talk about work at home? Share projects? Both teach professionally? Have different views on making comics? Have similar ones?
Jessica and I met through the comics scene and the early years of our relationship in particular were steeped in one long conversation about comics. These days it's more of a background part of our everyday lives (I write that even though tonight we are going out to the closing reception for "Philly Comics Now," an amazing exhibit of local artists that features both of our work). Our comics have always been quite different but complementary: my work is very formally experimental but I love a good story and try to populate my comics with well-rounded and interesting characters, whereas her work is very much focused on people and their relationships above all, yet she has a keen feel for the formal aspects of cartooning and uses experimental techniques regularly.
We have only rarely collaborated on creative projects but we
have taught side-by-side for years, wrote two textbooks together, and we were
also series editors of the Best American Comics for six years. She's a
great editor and problem-solver and she's always my first reader on new comics.
What comic books do you read regularly or recommend? Do you have a local store?
My local store is Partners and Son (https://partnersandson.com/ ) and it is not just a shop but a social and cultural hub for the Philly comics community since it opened in 2020. I don't really read any serialized comics (even with indy comics, I'm a wait-for-the-trade kind of guy) but here are a few more-or-less recent releases I would recommend:
Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen
Blurry by Dash Shaw
Unwholesome Love by Charles Burns (a floppy produced by Partners and Son!)
Processing by Tara Booth
Cutting Season by Bhanu Pratap
The Gull Yettin by Joe Kessler
The Great Beyond by Léa Murawiec
Do you have a website or blog?
I'm mostly concentrating on my new Substack (https://mattmadd.substack.com/ ) these days and I invite all of your readers to subscribe--it's mostly free content and I share a lot of thoughts and resources related to comics and constraints there.
I also maintain my website, mattmadden.com, where you can find information about my books, my comics coaching and other educational work, and other news. It's also an easy way to contact me.
What's your favorite thing about visiting DC?
Unfortunately, I rarely make it down to DC proper during SPX. I have some good friends in Alexandria but we haven't gotten together outside SPX since before the pandemic. I remember a nice trip to Eastern Market…
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| Matt at SPX in 2023 |
How has the COVID-19 outbreak affected you, personally and professionally?
I feel pretty lucky about how the pandemic played out for me and my family. No one close to me got dangerously sick and my kids were at an age where they were old enough to take care of themselves at home yet not so old that they were going to stir crazy. Jessica and I were already mostly working at home already and I spent the lockdown year refining my last book, Ex Libris, and eventually pitching it to Tom Kaczynski, who published it in the fall of 2021, just as the lockdown was easing up.
I would say I definitely took a hit professionally as I had pretty regular gigs traveling to schools to give talks and workshops and all of that is basically gone now. On the other hand, I was forced to finally reckon with how to teach and interact using Zoom and that has led to online opportunities—teaching regularly for SAW, offering one-on-one comics coaching to authors—that I might not have pursued otherwise.
All that said, I feel like it's going to be years before we
fully absorb the weirdness and trauma of that first year in particular. I
remember crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into New Jersey (in search of a
loaf of fresh bread!) and not seeing a single other car for most of the ride.
My heart was pounding as if I was in 28 Days Later or some other
apocalyptic movie…
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