Week 3: Matt Madden 99X

A look at all the ways you can tell the same story!

Sharing this in anticipation of tomorrow's class, we'll be taking a moment to look at Matt's 99X: Exercises in Style, a formalist project he started as an Exercise In Style and ended up publishing as a book as well as using as a teaching tool. Below you'll find a few examples posted from his first 99 page project, there are more than 99 now thanks to his inviting others to try their hand at it. As well as other Exercises In Style. Bit it all starts with this page...

A super simple done in one comic, it's not much of a story but that's not the point. You can do what he does here with any story but the formalist exercise in style is to look at the functions here not the content. How the moments are depicted, what changing context or beats or other aspects does to the reading. 

So, here's some of the variations from his book, if you hover over the images you'll get the constraint that's been used as a label...

Pretty impressive eh? Again this applies to any story you want to tell, there's always many many many ways to execute it. The point of the experiences here is to think about this and consider it when you're laying out a story. After my first pass I always sit back and contemplate the alternatives.

To follow that up here's a short doc about how he used a variation on this, another exercise in style in a class. We might try this in our class I think. Watch and enjoy!

Matt Madden: Teaching with Exercises in Style from Matt Madden on Vimeo.

Screencast based on a live recording of me presenting a talk at the symposium "Drawing as Language and How Comic Artists Teach It" in Lucerne, Switzerland on April 22, 2016. In the first half I give some background about Raymond Queneau's "Exercices de style" and my own "99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style." In the second half I show work by students from a four-day workshop we had just concluded the day before.

more information at mattmadden.com and exercisesinstyle.com

Fumetto International Comics Festival: fumetto.ch

Lucerne School of Art & Design: hslu.ch