Matt Madden – författare

A series of engrossing one page comics that tells the same story ninety nine different ways Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story is a series of one-page comics that tell the same story in a variety of waysInspired by Raymond Queneau's 1947 work of the same title, which told a simple story in ninety-nine different styles and genres - haiku, sonnet, book jacket blurb - Madden does the same but in different styles of comics - Marvel superhero, R. Crumb, Hergé, even as a map or the Bayeux Tapestry. Or he uses varying points of view, visual and verbal parodies, even radical reshuffling of the elements of the story. The result is funny, inspiring, and genuinely clever. ‘Delightful, intriguing and compelling. 99 Ways to Tell a Story is a zany masterpiece that reads like a convergence of Robert Louis Stevenson, Italo Calvino and Action Comics’ Harry Mathews

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.

An author struggles to understand an encounter on the subway that has led her to romantic despair. Six characters embark on a dangerous voyage, searching for a mysterious treasure.A cartoon character finds himself in bizarre yet uncannily familiar scenarios.Three characters obsess over the same image and sense that their lives connect across generations.Novelistic worlds in miniature. Hilarious hijinks. The occasional twist ending… The stories in Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure are inventive and wide-ranging, sometimes funny, occasionally sad, and always offbeat.The New York Times called Matt Madden a "stuntman-philosopher" because he creates comics in the crucible of formal constraints — one comic is a visual palindrome, another maps on to the letters of the alphabet, several follow the rules of demanding poetic forms like the villanelle and the haiku. It may seem that strict limitation would stymie creativity; on the contrary, the massive pressure it exerts on the author's process bonds atoms of text and image together into comic diamonds that Booklist has called "formally rigorous and narratively lucid." Madden is an educator and evangelist for experimental comics. This book contains an extensive afterword that walks through all the game-like rules he used in the stories in this collection. He offers insights into how he turned the shackles of these complex constraints into a source of inspiration and ingenuity. If you want to explore new creative challenges, you'll leave this book eager to work on forging your narrative jewels.