Comics is a medium founded on constraints. Our very sense of what a comic is—whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic—is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints. Strip length, page size and layout, panel borders, word balloons, decisions about drawing style: these and many other formal considerations are the building blocks from which we create all kinds of work.
OuPus 6 (2015)
In 2002 I was named US correspondent for Oubapo, Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Comics), a group founded in France in 1992 under the auspices of Oulipo, Workshop for Potential Literature, founded in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau (if that name sounds familiar to you it’s because his book Exercices de style was the inspiration for my 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style). You can find publications by Oubapo here and learn some more of its history on Wikipedia. I’ll be adding more information on this page bit by bit.
The project of Oubapo is to identify those constraints that already exist (2 common examples: using a 9-panel grid, or using a fixed point of view, as in a monologue comic) and to propose and implement new constraints that can generate new comics. These might be manipulations of existing comics or they might be original works (see Exercises in Style). Oubapo’s work is necessarily preliminary, there’s a whole medium out there waiting to be mined and explored. The emphasis of these projects is on play and experimentation, with a belief in the back of our heads that once in a while we might create something truly great.
Oubapo is not a movement that you join or follow. Oubapo is an approach to thinking about and creating comics using constraints as a creative principle.
Posts about Oubapo
4 x 4: the OubapoShow post
Recently my friends in Oubapo and some invited guests put on the first ever OubapoShow at the Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de L’Image in Angoulême (oh, and up the hill there was also some kind of comics convention going on?). We all did performances, slideshows, and live-drawing events. In my case, I […]
Oulipo in NYC, part II
I haven’t scoured the web for reports but I would love to hear a bit about the other Oulipo events that happened that week. Other than Tom Motley’s sketches I have only come across reports here and here. On Sunday, April 5, I showed up at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on 79th […]
Belles Etrangères wrap-up
As you may know I recently went to France for two weeks as a visiting author for the Centre National du Livre’s annual Belles Etrangères festival. I would love to do a detailed travelogue about the whole experience but I don’t see having the time in the near future. In short, it was a great […]
Recent posts from the Oubapo & Constrained Comics Facebook group
Nice: the President's Committee on the Arts & the Humanities just resigned en masse and in a subtle but powerful oulipian gesture they constructed their letter using an acrostic of RESIST (see the beginning of each paragraph).
(via Karen Green and Kal Penn)
twitter.com
“Dear @realDonaldTrump, attached is our letter of resignation from the President's Committee on the Arts & the Humanities @PCAH_gov”