Published at: March 14, 2002, 5:32 a.m. CST by staff
Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I've got a full metric assload of stories to put up tonight, so I'm going to tone down the whole Chatty Cathy routine and just get right to it. Here's an interview provided to us by the fine folks over at GrayHaven Magazine.com Enjoy!!
Matt Madden: The GrayHaven Interview
By Barry Wolborsky
My first exposure to Matt Madden's work was through a signing at Jim Hanley's Universe in New York City with his wife, Jessica Abel of Artbabe fame, and several other Indy cartoonists. I purchased and soon read Sayonara, one of his many mini-comics; Black Candy, his first graphic novel, published in 1998 and Odds Off, his latest graphic novel, published in 2001. In Matt's work I found a cerebral and experimental approach that was both refreshing and thought provoking, which you will no doubt discover as you read our following interview.
GHM: Your style of storytelling, notably in Black Candy and Odds Off, mixes a realistic, character-based approach with some rather surreal elements. What is the appeal for you in using this method and do you find it difficult to make it work?
To answer the second part of your question, no, it's not hard in the sense that that's the way I like to tell stories, but yes, it is incredibly hard to make any successful work of comics and I probably do make it harder for myself in that I'm juggling different concerns. I'm not simply concerned with getting the story across or making believable characters or adhering to genre rules but trying to tackle a bunch of that stuff at the same time.
GHM: Speaking of Odds Off, you have a pretty interesting trio of main characters in Morgan, Shirin and Lance. Do you have a favorite amongst the three?
MM: It kind of changes over time. I think probably in the end Lance ends up being my favorite character. Among readers I talk to he ends up being the most popular I think, in general. But he's also much more of an extreme character and a bit more of a type than Morgan and Shirin. Morgan and Shirin are much more everyday characters and are based on one step closer to the way people really are. Lance kind of pushes the boundary a little bit further into being a bit more of a caricature. His personality is pushed a bit more to the extreme.
GHM: Morgan is continually watching a French TV show throughout the story, which I interpreted as a representation of his slowly disintegrating relationship with Shirin. Was this your intention or does the TV show represent something else?
MM: That's the kind of thing I like to leave open for the reader to decide. That said, I think there clearly is an element that his obsession with the TV shows and with French language and culture is on some level mixed up with the dissolution of his relationship with Shirin. I'm not sure how much more there is to say about it. When I was developing the story, one thing I think drew that aspect of the story into the book was the idea of culture, language, and communication emerged as themes and I liked the notion of learning a new language, a new form of communication, becoming at the same time a source of alienation.
GHM: It seems that Shirin is pretty aware of the fact that they're growing apart, while Morgan on some level seems to be, but won't really admit it. Why do you think he's so clueless in that way?
MM: (Laughs) I dunno. That's just kind of the way he is.
GHM: Shirin seems to be more of a thinker while Morgan seems to go through life with a much more carefree attitude.
MM: Yeah, he's definitely more of a daydreamer, that I think has its charming side, where he's obviously a very nice, likeable guy and has friends and obviously Shirin loves him. But there's a sense that he's also kind of oblivious to what's actually going on in his life and to some extent either honestly doesn't even realize it or else is blocking it out on some unconscious level.
GHM: Do you think Lance's writer's block is the writer's biggest fear?
MM: There's really not much of a story behind it. It's kind of a space filler title. I didn't really want to have a title that would influence the reader in any way. I wanted to have a neutral title that would just kind of bring the reader in and be catchy enough to intrigue people but not really say much at all. Although, that said, I guess it does have a fairly equivocal and maybe negative connotation with being the opposite of 'odds on.'
GHM: Has Odds Off attracted new readers to you and your works?
MM: It definitely has because it's three years since Black Candy came out and I really haven't had any new comics out in the meantime. As it turned out, I've had various other short comics that I drew while I was doing Odds Off, which either came out after Odds Off, like my story "Aranda's Coat" in the SPX Expo 2001book. That's a story I actually drew in 1998 and it's just been bouncing around from one anthology to another. Either they fold or run out of room or whatever. So that's just appearing now; I've got another story called "Night of the Grossinator" that I wrote in that period before I started Odds Off and which still hasn't been published, although I plan to get it published this year. It actually came out in Italian this year, you can see the cover at my website The one other thing that's kept me out there a little bit is my Exercises in Style. That's the one project I've done between Black Candy and Odds Off coming out that's brought me some new readers and that's actually got some really good responses.
GHM: Black Candy and Odds Off have been immediately published in the long form graphic novel format, rather than first coming out as pamphlets and being collected into a trade paperback. What are the advantages and disadvantages for you by taking this approach?
MM: Yeah, it was a very conscious decision in both cases. I'm not a fan of the pamphlet form for a number of reasons, a lot of them just based on personal taste. But also, it's not really economically viable in independent comics unless you're lucky enough to get the high circulation of something like Eightball or Acme Novelty Library, and I think that even those books aren't major moneymakers. Another drawback that I've seen in my trying to get my non-comics-fan friends to read comics, is that if you give someone an issue of the Jimmy Corrigan story that's just one chapter, it might be a good tease but your average non-comics fan (and I'm really concerned with trying to get a large audience not usually based in the comics world, because fans will find what I'm doing anyway) I think most people will see a pamphlet book and think "Wow, this is cool, I'd like to get another!" but they won't know where to go and they won't have enough of a complete work for it to stick in their mind either. It's not going to stick with you if you can't have a book to read, like a real chunk of it.
GHM: How did you come to publish Odds Off through Highwater Books?
MM: Black Candy was with a publisher called Black Eye Books, which was the third to last book that Michel Vrána published before he decided to stop publishing and just move into design. So when I was working on this next book, I drew the first few scenes and made a little pack and sent it around to (Highwater Publisher) Tom Devlin, Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly. I already knew Tom and he told me from the time Black Candy was out he would be interested in my next project, whatever it was.
GHM: Will you be publishing anything else through Highwater?
MM: It's too soon to say. My immediate plans, and this is nothing definite, but I'm planning to do-- now that I just said what I dislike about pamphlets, I'll go into what I do like about pamphlets. Like I said, between Black Candy and Odds off it was three years of not really having any exposure and not having any stuff out there. I'm glad for the sake of those books that I just did them all together and released them as single works. My newer stuff that I'm working on is a lot of shorter pieces, though, which I will eventually collect but I don't really need to work on the whole thing as one piece. I can put them out in parcels. So considering that, one thing I think is good about pamphlets is that it keeps your name out there and it is a way for people to sample your work. I think there are people who might look at Odds Off and think it looks interesting but it's fifteen bucks and they don't know my work and might pass on it. I am planning on doing a twice a year comic book that will collect Exercises In Style and new short stories and things like that starting sometime this year.
GHM: What is Oubapo and how is it related to your Exercises in Style project?
MM: Exercises in Style is adapted from a prose literary work that was originally done in the late 1940's by Raymond Queneau; there's a little thing about him on the Indy web page. About 20 years later, in the early sixties, Raymond Queneau along with some other writers started up a group called Oulipo. The English name is The Workshop for Potential Literature, which started as kind of a secret society and still exists now. Eventually it's become a more public thing and they do workshops and go to schools and put out books. Basically it's a workshop whose main goal is to play around with how you can produce, in their case, literature, poetry and prose, by using different kinds of rules, different kinds of limiting rules. So Exercises in Style was created before that group was started but it's one of the works that lead to its creation. There's a very simple rule: you have one page and you have to make as many versions as you possibly can and you have to come at it from every different approach you can think of. That's the kind of limiting rule or constraint that led Queneau and some other writers to get together and try and systematically explore that mode of creation
GHM: How long will Exercises in Style will go on for?
MM: My goal is to do about seventy. I'm up to about thirty now, so I've got a long way to go. My plan is to publish that in book form, although I'm not sure who's going to publish it at this point. On the one hand it's a bit of a tough sell. On the other hand I've been surprised at the enthusiasm of the response I've gotten from it. I get regular e-mails from people who've stumbled across it, even some literary people. I've had a person doing research on Raymond Queneau come across it.
GHM: Do you think that the experiment has worked?
MM: Yeah, I do. I find the more that I work on it the more that I learn. That's what makes it continue to be exciting. The fear of an experiment like this is it soon becomes something by rote. It's just like; "Well you're just doing it on the principle." I said I was going to do seventy so I'll do seventy. I find that really banging my head against it and forcing myself to come up with new solutions is really education and really inspiring. And that's kind of the idea behind the Oubapo stuff, is that by creating limits for yourself that are really challenging and to some extent kind of absurd. Why should you have a whole comic where every panel has to correspond with to a letter of the alphabet? They're kind of random in that way. But because of that you really have to work hard and tax your imagination to come up with solutions and can come up with some really interesting stuff.
GHM: How did you develop an interest in French and other non-American comics and cartoonists?
MM: Probably the main reason is that when I was a kid, my family lived in Paris for five years. I was exposed to French kid comics, mainly a lot of stuff that I haven't followed up on and other things that are available in the U.S. that I continued to read as a kid like Tintin and Asterix and things like that. Beyond that it's more a matter of predilection. I'm not sure why, but I never really read many superhero comics and then when I was in High School I started to discover some of the Heavy Metal from the early 80's when they were still publishing really good stuff like Moebius and Bilal and the big stars of the 70's French comics, the mainstream stuff, but really good. Then I discovered Raw, which was, of course, half-European and half-American so it was just more in line with a kind of drawing and story style that I already liked.
GHM: What other web comics have you done?
MM: I've had a few things, appear on some websites and stuff on my own website on the comics section of mattmadden.com. I'm planning to put some older comics that I'm not planning to reprint on paper any time soon or a few things that haven't been published. Though I don't really consider Exercises in Style a web comic in the sense that there's nothing about it that is inherent to the web-no hypertext, animation, mouse-overs, things like that. I'm really just using the web for easy distribution in this case. I might try some specifically web-based comics later on, especially through my experiments for Oubapo.
GHM: You've also written about comics for various publications. What works have you done in this particular area?
MM: Well, I'm not writing too much these days, mainly because I want to concentrate all of my activity on creating comics, more than writing about them. Although I am doing some writing for the Oubapo page. There's a bunch of text on the Oubapo site, sort of an introduction and a history of the group. I wrote most of that. I plan on writing some short essays for the website in the coming months.
I wrote a bunch of reviews for The Comics Journal over the last five or six years but that's largely tapered off. I've written about some of the earlier issues of the Drawn and Quarterly anthology, I wrote about Hicksville when it was still being serialized as a pamphlet. Carol Swain's Way Out Strips, which was a favorite strip of mine, that is no longer appearing, unfortunately.
GHM: It seems that you have a strong knowledge of not just American cartooning and comics, but their international counterparts as well. Would you ever consider teaching a class about the practical applications or comic theory in the future?
MM: Definitely. Actually Jessica and I are co-teaching a comics class at SVA (School of Visual Arts) right now. We started this last semester in September. It's a studio class. It's a comics storytelling class with sophomore students and we're really enjoying it and hope the do more classes soon. My main interest would be teaching actual comics, doing studio classes, although I would certainly be open to and interested in more theory/reading/history type of classes. We're trying to find ways to incorporate that in the course we're teaching now.
GHM: Other than the class that you're teaching, do you have any other plans to collaborate with Jessica in the future?
MM: Yeah, we generally don't collaborate too much on our actual comics, but the we did do a comic together recently for the comics section of Pulse! magazine, which is the Tower Records magazine, it's a great comics showcase that Marc Weidenbaum has been editing for ten years now and doing a really great job of finding young artists and people doing really interesting stuff. He gives really free reign, there has to be some vague reference to music in there, that's the only kind of guideline. So Jessica and I actually collaborated on a comic, which is going to appear in the February issue of Pulse!. We traded off the writing and drawing and I think it came out pretty well.
GHM: What's your feeling about collaborations in general? Do you prefer to write or illustrate?
MM: I prefer not to collaborate myself for the most part. I'm not opposed to collaboration; I think it can work really well when you get two talents together that are well matched. It's really just a matter of time. I feel like whatever time I have for comics I should devote to my own stuff. I have enough stuff I want to write and draw by myself that I don't want to lose the time working with other people. It's not something I write off completely. It's something that maybe further down the line when I reach some point where I feel like I can take a breather and have some leisure time in comics, maybe I'll try that out.
For the time being I'm doing coloring now for Marvel and DC and that's kind of a level of collaboration that's more in the traditional mainstream assembly line of comics. I treat that work very differently; it's work for hire. I'm a hired gun coming in there, putting in the colors. It's creative in the sense that I want to make it look really good, but I don't really have too much personally vested in it. I'm helping someone else with a project, rather than really contributing creatively. For those who are interested: I am currently coloring a Captain America miniseries called Dead Men Running, written by Darko Macan and drawn by Danijel Zezelj, and I am about to start work on an issue of Muties drawn by my friend Dean Haspiel.
GHM: Do you do illustration work for any other publications besides Pulse or have work displayed in art galleries?
MM: I haven't done any stuff in art galleries yet but I've been doing illustrations for a lot of different magazines, most recently The New Yorker and in The New York Times, where I do stuff regularly for the Book Review and other sections. If you look through the illustration portfolio on my website it says what magazine each one comes from. Those are the big ones, The New Yorker, PC Magazine, Forbes, a variety of mainstream magazines.
GHM: What would you personally like to see happen with the medium of comics?
MM: Like I mentioned before, the broad answer is I want to see comics obviously get a larger audience and broader audience. I think the comics fandom knows how to take care of itself at this point. I think there are enough resources and good stores and mail order venues, anyone who is a real comics fan or even starts to be a comics fan can find their way and find what they like and figure out what they like. So I'm really interested. My interest is in getting comics into bookstores and getting serious comics and more literary comics like I do a broader public and get them something like the status that independent film has or something like that. Which isn't even a huge amount to ask but it's still a long way off, I know.
GHM: Are there any other upcoming projects you can talk about?
MM: I don't want to say anything definite about it, but like I said, I'm working on putting together a series which will collect new short works of mine. Otherwise keep an eye out on the Oubapo site. There's going to be a lot of new stuff on there by me and by a lot of other artists. I'm also doing a story for an anthology that should be really interesting called Rosetta. It's being put together in Singapore by a guy named Ng Suat Tong, who's name you might recognize from The Comics Journal, he's written reviews there for years. He's self-publishing this thing and it's going to have about 25 artists, it's pretty substantial. He's also really pushing people to produce experimental work, stuff that really pushes the envelope, both in comics and their own work. So I'm working on that. It's got a mix of American, European and Asian artists. I'm not sure when that that'll be coming out, probably not until the end of the year.
GHM: Is there anything else you'd like to mention to the readers?
MM: Remember to pick up the February issue of Pulse! Magazine, it's free!
