Oubapo

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

99 More Potential Exercises in Style

What if I were to draw 99 more exercises in style? I’m not planning to, but here’s a list of potential (and in some cases improbable if not impossible) candidates for a hypothetical second batch.

Bridge: a “24+7 hour comic”

At the end of January I hosted and participated in the seventh annual 24-hour Comics Day event at la maison des auteurs. I didn’t finish the whole comic in 24 hours—I only got to page 16—so I devoted another seven hour day to finishing the remaining eight pages. You can learn a bit about it […]

ROYGBIV: a one-page comic challenge

I was recently invited to Belfort, a city in the east of France, to present 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style and to give an Oubapo workshop to art school students. I devised for the workshop, very much at the last minute, a brand new constraint which I call ROYGBIV.