THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

So Demanding of Purity?: ReReading Binky Brown

In articles and books published over the last three decades, R.C. Harvey has argued that the essence of the comics medium lies in the interdependent juxtaposition of words and pictures. As Harvey writes in The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, "One litmus test of good comics art is to ascertain to what extent the sense of the words depends on the pictures and vice versa [...] when words and pictures blend in mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that neither the verbal nor the visual can achieve without the other, then the storyteller is using to the fullest the resources the medium offers him" (4).

Like lots of folks, I have problems with Harvey's juxtaposition theory. Harvey's tastes, for instance, are radically different from mine. In Comic Book, he cites a Bud Blake Tiger strip as an example of an outstanding combination of words and pictures, while comics I consider more valuable--like "American Splendor Assaults the Media," with its massive word balloon hovering over Robert Crumb's portrait of a feverish Harvey Pekar--would probably be too talky and not blendy enough for R.C.

I think that comics--like other texts--are multi-voiced and multi-faceted, and refuse to be reduced to an aesthetic prescription like word-picture interdependence.

ReREADING: Odds Off

by Matt Madden. Highwater Books, 2001. $14.95. Available from Bodega Distribution.

Matt Madden is probably best known for his 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005), a book of Raymond Queneau-inspired Oulipian formalist exercises that all riff on a single mundane incident, told and retold in single-page comic strip form. 99 Ways is dizzying fun, and also very smart, a primer in what comics can do and how stories can be variously (re)constructed, Rashomon-style, from a multiplicity of perspectives. A well-traveled book, 99 Ways has served as Madden's passport to international publication: besides the UK edition, Madden's blog shows versions in French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian, and reports that a Japanese edition is out and a South Korean one forthcoming. It's his flagship, whether promoted as a how-to creative writing book (as in the USA) or, more straightforwardly, as a book of experimental comics (as seems to be the case with some of the European editions).

Madden has done and is doing other things too, among them the comic book A Fine Mess (two issues to date), which extends his interest in Oulipian constrained comics; the forthcoming textbook Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, co-authored with his wife, frequent collaborator and fellow cartoonist Jessica Abel (based on their shared teaching at the School of Visual Arts); and the co-editorship, again with Abel, of Houghton Mifflin's now three-year-old anthology series The Best American Comics. (Abel and Madden are also the parents of a newborn daughter, whom Madden describes as their greatest collaboration.)

99 Ways is not quite the breakthrough project I would have predicted for Madden back in 2001, when his graphic novel Odds Off put him squarely on my radar. Published by the (now-defunct) Highwater Books, Odds Off came after a spate of other work from Madden, including minicomics, sporadic writings for The Comic Journal, and his first book, the novella Black Candy (1998). On the heels of this other work, Odds Off came as a bit of a surprise to me; "the pleasant shock of an announcement" is how I would have put it back then. The book showed more clearly than anything else he'd done that Madden was not only a clever experimenter but a cartoonist with a feeling for character and a gift for social observation.

To my surprise, Odds Off remains Madden's major work of fiction to date; 99 Ways and other projects have led him elsewhere. I think of Odds Off as a neglected book (despite a number of reviews still out there), so I thought I'd pull it down from the Thought Balloonists bookshelf and give it a fresh look: