Matt Madden

comics, education, translation, oubapo

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Teaching

Teaching is an important part of my work as an artist. I learn a lot from my interactions with students and fellow teachers and I’m constantly bring these inspirations and challenges back to my drawing table. I’m always developing my theory and practice of teaching and over the years I’ve found that the best classrooms, regardless of the level or age, are student-directed. As a teacher I try to stay out of the way. I give my students projects to work on from the first hour of a workshop or class and I ask them to regularly interact and collaborate with one another. In the best classes I find myself simply cheering from the sidelines by the end as the class collectively brings the project to the finish line.

Matt TAW 2013
Teaching at the Animation Workshop, Denmark, in 2013

Here are some of the workshops I have to offer:

99 Ways to Tell a Story

My book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) is used in all kinds of classrooms around the world to teach the fundamentals of comics, editing, style and storytelling.
length: I have a flexible workshop structure that can be done in 3 hours or up to a week, depending on how deep a dive you want to make.
syllabus: I share examples from my book and other exercises in variations on a theme, then we do a writing-based warm-up before beginning a comics exercise. This can mean:
  • a very simple 3-4 panel comic strip (I have even done this with kids)
  • students make their own variations of my “template”
  • students create a full page comic (based on a simple script of mine) and make multiple variations.
outcomes: The 99 Ways workshop is dynamic and flexible; its strength is that students learn a lot about comics, storytelling, and visual rhetoric at the same time as they try their hands at a classic artistic exercise that can be traced back through Raymond Queneau to Johann Sebastian Bach.
 

Build Your Own Labyrinth

Lately I’ve been teaching really rewarding workshops around the theme of creative constraints. I’ve become passionate about using constraints ever since creating 99 Ways and discovering (and delving deeply into) the worlds of Oulipo, Oubapo, and other fellow travelers.
length: These workshops very modular and can adapted to almost any context or length.
syllabus: I share examples of “constrained” art in various media and have my students create their own works using constraints. I often teach these workshops in combination with a public lecture I’ve been developing that’s all about creativity, comics and constraints. Some of the exercises we do include:
outcomes: Students experience the challenge and triumphant joy of wrestling with self-imposed rules to create art. This is a fundamental approach to creativity yet many people have never given it a shot. I particularly enjoy working with artists from different media as the principles I’m sharing are applicable to creativity in general.
 

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

Jessica Abel and I have written two highly-regarded comics textbooks, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures (2007) and Mastering Comics (2010). There is a website dedicated to those two books which is chockfull of resources. She and I still teach workshops for any level of cartoonists which draws from those books. We teach in tandem or separately.
length: anything from a 50 minute classroom visit to a half-day workshop to a multiple-day residency.
syllabus: One look at the textbooks will show you there is plenty of material. We tend to teach a beginner class based largely on the first book but Jessica has done workshops on writing comics and I have taught many classes on workshops on topics from the book, most of which was developed from our own teaching experience.
outcomes: the goal of the DWWP workshops is to familiarize students (especially “non artists”) with the basics of how comics work and how to start making them. We are less interested in mastery or in teaching a particular style or genre, the point is to demystify comics practice and, above all, to learn by doing.
 
Matt Spain 2014
At Festival ÑAM in Spain, 2014

I’m always looking for new opportunities to teach at schools, libraries, museums or festivals so get in touch with me via my contact page if you’d like to work with me. I taught comics and ink drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 2000-2012 and I have simultaneously maintained a practice of teaching workshops ranging from a few hours to five days in a variety of settings all around the western (so far!) world. I’ve taught mainly university-level students and adults but I’ll occasionally work with secondary school students. I teach in French and Spanish in addition to my native English. You can see more of my teaching experience by looking at my CV.

Posts about comics teaching #comicsedu

Haiku Comics

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I recently taught a workshop to comics Master’s students at the École Européene Supérieure de l’Image in Angoulême, France. The subject of the four-day workshop was comics based on fixed forms borrowed from poetry such as the sestina, the villanelle, or the sonnet. (If you follow my work or this blog at all you know […]

Check out examples of my students’ constraint-based comics

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a “word ladder” comic by Kevin Raganit (SVA 2010) Over on the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures Flickr photostream (new link coming soon! —MM) I just posted a whole bunch of weird and excellent comics done by School of Visual Arts cartooning majors over the last few years in a class of mine called Obstacle […]

ROYGBIV: a one-page comic challenge

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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.

The Pictureless Horseman

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An example of a comic made without images, an on-the-go collaboration with Jessica Abel while on book tour for our textbook Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.

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