Layers of Meaning

Exercises in Style - Matt Madden

What is style?? That is a question that seems to return year after year. We can understand Impressionist style versus the Cubist style. The big swings in style are easy to grasp; stylistic variations that happened years ago seem obvious in hind sight. What is harder to understand are the small variations in style and as well as contemporary stylistic variations.

Matt Madden is a comic artist who investigated differences in contemporary comic style by having himself and several friends execute "Exercises in Style": visual variations on the exact same content. How many ways can you visually express the same 14 words and related actions?? Start with the template, and work your way through some Exercises in Style.

"Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.

The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.

One additional variation on the project is that a group of cartoonists have been given a brief script of the one-page piece and asked to create their own version of the comic." All this and more will be released as a book Chamberlain Brothers, a new imprint of Penguin Books, in 2005.

Style: 3. expressive style, style -- (a way of expressing something (in language or art or music etc.) that is characteristic of a particular person or group of people or period; "all the reporters were expected to adopt the style of the newspaper")