Jessica Abel

Winner of both the Harvey and Lulu Awards for Best New Talent in 1997, Jessica Abel is the author of Soundtrack and Mirror, Window, two comic collections culled from her comic book series, Artbabe. Her La Perdida won the Harvey Award for Best New Series and was excerpted in 2006’s Best American Comics. She resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Matt Madden

Matt Madden is a comics creator and teacher at New York's School of Visual Arts. He is the creator of the graphic novels Black Candy, Odds Off, and A Fine Mess, and of the comics theory book 99 Ways to Tell a Story. He is the co-editor (with Jessica Abel) of the Best American Comics series. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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INTERVIEW

June 20, 2008

Between the two of them, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have created numerous graphic novels and comic series, including MIRROR, WINDOW, SOUNDTRACK, BLACK CANDY and ODDS OFF. Together, they recently published an instructional guide on writing graphic novels called DRAWING WORDS & WRITING PICTURES, based on classes they teach at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts. In this interview with Bookreporter.com's Contributing Editor John Hogan, Abel and Madden explain what inspired them to write this textbook, and highlight what both aspiring cartoonists and artists in general will be able to take away from these lessons. They also describe one of the exercises they conduct with their students that involves creating a comic strip without the use of pictures, share their thoughts on the use of computers over traditional hand-lettering and pen-and-ink techniques, and discuss their future projects --- including what to expect from their next book.

Bookreporter.com: What made you decide to create this book? Why do it now?

Jessica Abel: The immediate inspiration came when Matt was pitching his book, 99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY: Exercises in Style, to publishers. Our agent, Bob Mecoy, found that lots of editors were intrigued, but thought the book was a bit too esoteric. But, if Matt could write a "how to write a graphic novel" book, well, that would be another story. When I heard this, I jumped right in. We didn't want to write the book they were asking for, but we'd already thought of trying to write a real textbook on comics --- someday --- and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Of course, there are longer-standing inspirations, as well. Teaching, and wishing we had such a book available to us, was one. The incredibly enthusiastic response I got to the few tips and tricks I posted in the Do-It-Yourself section of my website was another.

BRC: What kind of training did you each have before creating comics?

Matt Madden: We are both entirely self-taught. We both studied literature in college and pursued comics on our own time. We learned through trial and error, combing through what books there were at the time, and bits of advice from our peers. Obviously we managed to find our way eventually, but we hope this book will help focus and shorten that early development period for our readers. In terms of the industry, we have both followed a trajectory from minicomics up to graphic novels --- and have each had numerous foreign editions.

Although we both come out of the alternative comics scene of the '90s, we've had a very broad experience in the world of comics. We've both done work with mainstream publishers --- Jessica drew a Supergirl and Mary Marvel story for Bizarro Comics #1 and I've done a bunch of coloring for DC and Marvel. We've also worked as editors and, of course, teachers. I've also written reviews for The Comics Journal and Bookforum.

JA: The way all that influenced DRAWING WORDS & WRITING PICTURES, however, is that our frustration at trying to master this incredibly difficult art form all on our own made us that much more eager to share our experiences and help young artists avoid those pitfalls. We both really love teaching and working with young artists, and that also pushed us to share our experiences with more of them via this book.

BRC: Can you share a bit about your past work?

JA: I started out making comics short stories, as short as a single page, and self-publishing them in my omnibus series Artbabe. Later, I formed a relationship with Fantagraphics Books, who published the second volume of Artbabe (four issues), as well as book collections of that work (MIRROR, WINDOW) and my earliest work (SOUNDTRACK). Most of those stories take place in Chicago, among people in their early to mid 20s, and are concerned with the small crises that can really throw a young person off track, like a first date with a crush or a move to a new city. After that, I moved on to a longer narrative, LA PERDIDA, which was published in book form by Pantheon in 2006. Just this year, my first comics collaboration was published by First Second, LIFE SUCKS. My storytelling is on the conventional side. That is, it's based on the real world and the way I observe people to act, though of course I hope to say something interesting and new in that context.

MM: Like Jessica, I started out self-publishing little collections of short comics and trading them in the mail. Eventually I had a few pieces published in anthologies and started work on my first graphic novel, BLACK CANDY, which was followed a few years later by a second one called ODDS OFF. Around the same time, I was getting increasingly interested in experimental comics and started work on 99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY: Exercises in Style, a suite of variations on a one-page comic inspired by the French author Raymond Queneau's EXERCISES IN STYLE (1947). That book was published in 2005 by Chamberlain Brothers, a short-lived imprint of Penguin Books. 99 WAYS has been published in seven countries now. My more recent short stories, collected very occasionally in a comic book called A Fine Mess (Alternative Comics), continue to explore the concept of creativity through constraint that Queneau's work introduced me to.

BRC: While the audience for the book is people who want to create comics, after reading through it, I saw things about the subtleties of the use of words, type and layout that will change how I read comics in the future. Do you think there is a larger audience for this book?

JA & MM: We certainly hope so. We think that understanding comics and how they work is great preparation for all different kinds of visual communication and narrative art, whether you're on the creation end (of film, graphic design, or prose, for example) or on the consumer end. We hope we've written the book in an engaging-enough style that even those who have no plans to make comics at all will be able to enhance their understanding of them as well as enjoy the read. Students of animation, illustration and filmmaking, to name a few, might also find pointers and concepts that apply to their mediums as well.

BRC: You present in the book the idea that anyone can be an artist, whether they consider themselves an artist or not. Do you think this is a radical idea? Why or why not?

JA & MM: Well, we should probably first make a distinction between "artist" --- in the sense of a person who knows how to draw on the one hand, and on the other, "artist" in the more romantic sense of a creative person. We make it clear from the first chapter that drawing skills are great to have, but they are not essential to being a good cartoonist. There are plenty of examples of great cartoonists who might not be great "artists" in the technical sense (mastering anatomy, perspective, and so on). As for the grander sense of "artist," almost any instructional book starts from the premise that anyone can be an artist. So no, the idea doesn't seem at all radical to us, especially in the United States of today, where everyone writes blogs, posts photos on Flickr, makes videos for YouTube and uploads their original songs to MySpace. Why not comics, too? Of course there are a lot of skills to master in order to make good comics, but who are we to decide who has that ability within his or her grasp? We're all about teaching skills, concepts and processes. Talent and the will to work hard are up to the reader (and in our experience, it's the will to work that's the most important factor for cartoonists --- if not all artists).

BRC: Is this a different viewpoint of the artist than has traditionally been held?

JA & MM: If by "traditionally" you mean in the 19th century, sure. But the idea of DIY art --- art made by anyone who cares to try --- is at least 30 or 40 years old. Think of the punk movement, where musical training became optional, and music became more vibrant for the nonprofessionals' contributions. Or zines in the '80s and '90s --- there, also, you had the democratization of art. And today even more so. If anything, the radical thing we propose is not that anyone can be an artist if he or she cares to try, but that art requires --- or maybe it's better to say is assisted by --- training, technical information, and practice in the form of structured activities. This is quite the inverse proposition, and very contrary to the way art is taught in most art schools.

BRC: Do you think it would make for stronger material if more writers drew their own stories and more artists wrote?

JA & MM: It would certainly make for more idiosyncratic work. We teach this way because we want our students to have complete control over their work and their process. If they later choose to collaborate, that's fine. But, they'll know what they're giving up, and they'll also know how to talk to their collaborators so that they're understood. This is the most important factor in a successful collaboration.

BRC: You do an exercise where people write a comic strip with no pictures, thus showing how words, their layout and the emphasis that is given to them can tell a story. Why do you feel it is important for creators to think about that?

JA & MM: The pictureless comic, as we call it, is a great way to get students to really see how the elements of comics form a kind of storytelling language, even discounting the most obviously visual elements. It all comes back to our central thesis, that comics are a language, and that mastering that language requires more than just pretty drawing. At the same time, the activity is designed to get students to concentrate on perfecting their lettering, layout and display-type skills. It's too easy for students to lose track of these essential, but rather dry, skills when working on a comic that has images, which are, of course, what they want to spend their time on.

BRC: In your opinion, are today's comics creators, in general, doing a good job of marrying the correct visual styles with the types of stories they're trying to tell?

JA & MM: I don't think we'd ever assert that there's a "correct" visual style for any given subject matter. I suppose we might find some choices in bad taste, and it's possible that many artists don't do a good job on the story they want to tell, but really just about any style can be used for just about any content when done well.

BRC: In the same vein, do you feel enough importance has been placed on lettering styles (something your book covers in great detail)?

JA & MM: No. Unfortunately, generic computer lettering is taking over comics. We are not opposed to computer lettering on principle, and there are certainly effective examples of it (in fact, it is a topic we're likely to touch on in our second volume). However, we strongly feel that hand lettering, ideally by the artist and not a professional letterer, is a huge aesthetic advantage for comics. It's all in the title of our book: in comics, the drawings need to be read like hieroglyphs, as "words" in a sentence; but just as importantly, the words --- dialogue, narration, sound effects, even store signs in the background --- need to be considered as part of the integral visual whole of the work.

BRC: These days many younger creators have no trepidations about creating on computers as well as with pen and ink, while more established creators are wed to pen/ink. Which mediums do you use? And what are your thoughts on using computers to create work?

JA & MM: We mostly use pen or brush and ink ourselves, but the computer is an integral part of our process. We use it to size up and print thumbnails, do corrections, overlay material and color, among other tasks. A computer is just a tool like any other (well, a bit more complicated than most). An artist can use it well or poorly. And it's not just young cartoonists who are using it, by the way: Art Spiegelman and Brian Bolland are two very different but "pre-computer generation" cartoonists who have switched over to digital cartooning seamlessly. The reason we don't get into computers much in this book is not prejudice; it's just that we feel that everyone should be familiar with the traditional tools and techniques of the medium --- that and lack of space: we'll have more to say about computers and comics in the next book.

BRC: Your book delves into different facets of creating a graphic tale and outlines them over a very detailed 15-week course. Are people surprised at the level of intensity that goes in to making a comic?

JA & MM: I suppose they are, no one more so than the students who actually desperately want to make comics. When it comes down to it, comics are one of the most labor-intensive and skills-intensive art forms there are. That's unfortunate, but it just means there's that much more need for a book like ours to help shorten the training period.

BRC: Tell us a bit about how you will be traveling to promote this book. Will you be at bookstores, schools or a combination of both?

JA & MM: Our first round of publicity is mostly at bookstores, though we are teaching a workshop in Portland at the Pacific Northwest College of Art this month, and Matt will be doing one at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in July. Later, starting in the fall, we expect to do a lot more at schools, and that will probably be the more important kind of venue for us in the future. Of course, even at bookstores, we're teaching short workshops: last week at McNally-Robinson Booksellers in Manhattan, we had about 25 people creating a stripped-down variation of our "pictureless comic" assignment.

BRC: What's next for you two?

JA & MM: Well, we hope to get started on the second volume of this textbook this summer. On top of that and our teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Matt is editing some YA graphic novels for Aladdin Books and the two of us are working as the series editors for The Best American Comics (our first volume, with Lynda Barry as guest editor, is coming out in the fall). And somewhere in there, we're also trying to work on various personal projects (Matt on comics, Jessica on a couple of comics scripts).

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