Ex Libris

Ex Libris

by Matt Madden
Ex Libris

Ex Libris

by Matt Madden

Hardcover

$29.95 
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Overview

Ex Libris revolves around a character trapped in a room with nothing but a futon and a bookcase full of comics. As they peruse covers, read stories and fragments of stories, they begin to suspect that the comics contain hidden messages and… a threat. Fiction and reality blur; sanity and madness become increasingly intertwined as the reader becomes convinced the key to their predicament is to be found between the panels of the strange books.
With a dizzying array of inventive visual and narrative styles, Ex Libris continues the line of exploration and play that Madden initiated with 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Ex Libris is a tribute to the meta-fictional tradition of writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino (whose novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, was the inspiration).

MATT MADDEN (NYC 1968) is a cartoonist, teacher, and translator. His best-known book is 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. His recent work includes the comic books Drawn Onward and Bridge. He has been living in Philadelphia since 2016.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781941250440
Publisher: Uncivilized Books
Publication date: 11/23/2021
Pages: 120
Product dimensions: 9.00(w) x 11.25(h) x (d)
Age Range: 16 Years

About the Author

Matt Madden is a cartoonist who has also taught in art schools around the world. His best-known book is 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Penguin), a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style which led to his initiation into Oubapo, The Workshop for Potential Comics, in 2005. In 2013 he was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. He has also done translations from the French and Spanish, including Aristophane's The Zabîme Sisters (First Second) and Edmond Baudoin’s Piero (New York Review Comics). He wrote two comics textbooks in collaboration with his wife, Jessica Abel, and the couple were series editors for The Best American Comics from Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt for six years. From 2012 to 2016, he and his family did a four-year residency in Angoulême, France at La Maison des auteurs. They are currently living in Philadelphia where he is doing translations and finishing up his new comic, Ex Libris, when he’s not looking after his kids or playing guitar. You'll find more at www.mattmadden.com.

Interviews

Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style,” first published in French in 1947, is also built around a nonincident: Queneau sees a man on a bus accuse the guy next to him of bumping him and two hours later sees the same man with a friend who tells him he should have a button added to his coat. Queneau presents his story in 99 styles too: as passive speech, as onomatopoeia, as a sonnet, as homonyms.

In the early ‘60s, Queneau and other French writers formed a group called Oulipo -- which stands for “ouvroir de litterature potentielle,” or “workshop for potential literature.” The (half-joking) point of Oulipo was to make experimental literature more scientific by writing with specific constraints or arbitrary rules. Georges Perec wrote the most famous Oulipian work “La Disparition,” a mystery novel that doesn’t use the letter E.

Madden discovered Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” and Oulipo when he was working in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich., after college, and just starting his cartooning career. “It occurred to me that Queneau’s concept could be applied really well to comics,” he says. As it turned out, other cartoonists were getting the same idea. The Oulipo concept had already spread to similar organizations like Oupeinpo (for painting) and Oumupo (for music), and in the early ‘90s, a group of French cartoonists formed Oubapo -- the “ba” stands for “bande dessinee,” the preferred French term for comics.

Along with fellow Brooklyn cartoonists Tom Hart and Jason Little, Madden created Oubapo-America in 2002; it hasn’t been terribly active, but its website -- www.newhatstories.com/oubapo/ -- features a handful of experimental Oubapian comics. (One form they’ve devised is “Alphabet City,” in which each panel prominently alludes to successive letters of the alphabet; Madden’s Alphabet City story, “Prisoner of Zembla,” ran in L.A. Weekly last year.)

The most prominent Oubapo-America project, though, has been Madden’s own “Exercises in Style,” which he serialized online over a few years. “I liked the idea of balancing my more conventional work with this smaller, purely formalist thing,” he says.

“Style” and “formalism” aren’t quite the same thing, although Queneau’s book is an argument that they’re linked. In any case, they overlap much more closely in comics than they do in prose and poetry, partly because “style” can mean prose style or storytelling style or drawing style, and the last of those is something a viewer can see without reading.

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