Here, the style is the substance

THE plot of Matt Madden’s “99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style” is as pointless as they come. The first page is a comic strip in which Madden, typing at his desk late one night, closes his computer and wanders into the kitchen. His wife, cartoonist Jessica Abel, calls down from upstairs to ask him what time it is. He tells her it’s 1:15, opens the fridge and stares into it, thinking, “What the hell was I looking for, anyway?” The rest of the book is Madden redrawing the same story 98 more times.

As the title suggests, though, the point of this book isn’t the story itself, it’s style, and Madden presents his narrative in a different style every time. He draws homages to some of his favorite cartoonists (Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Herge, Jack Kirby); he adapts the story into the visual and verbal cliches of romances, westerns, sword-and-sorcery fantasies; he presents it as a series of flashbacks, then as one of Jack Chick’s frothing-at-the-mouth religious tracts, then as a version of Charles Atlas’ iconic “The Incident That Made a Man Out of ‘Mac’ ” ad.

The cover of “99 Ways,” oddly, bills the book as inspiration for “your own creative work -- your novel, your comic, even your film.” In fact, it’s very specifically about comics, and it takes on a huge question about the medium: the distinction between content and form. Good comics are more dominated by their creators’ style than good work in almost any other medium (except contemporary visual art, whose content is usually just a pretext for its form); a single panel by any significant cartoonist is enough to identify who drew it. So the inspiration “99 Ways” offers has to do with discovering a cartoonist’s voice, not the work that voice can be applied to. And the inspiration for “99 Ways” itself was a book that did the same thing in prose almost 60 years ago.

Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style,” first published in French in 1947, is also built around a nonincident: Queneau sees a man on a bus accuse the guy next to him of bumping him and two hours later sees the same man with a friend who tells him he should have a button added to his coat. Queneau presents his story in 99 styles too: as passive speech, as onomatopoeia, as a sonnet, as homonyms.

In the early ‘60s, Queneau and other French writers formed a group called Oulipo -- which stands for “ouvroir de litterature potentielle,” or “workshop for potential literature.” The (half-joking) point of Oulipo was to make experimental literature more scientific by writing with specific constraints or arbitrary rules. Georges Perec wrote the most famous Oulipian work “La Disparition,” a mystery novel that doesn’t use the letter E.

Madden discovered Queneau’s “Exercises in Style” and Oulipo when he was working in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich., after college, and just starting his cartooning career. “It occurred to me that Queneau’s concept could be applied really well to comics,” he says. As it turned out, other cartoonists were getting the same idea. The Oulipo concept had already spread to similar organizations like Oupeinpo (for painting) and Oumupo (for music), and in the early ‘90s, a group of French cartoonists formed Oubapo -- the “ba” stands for “bande dessinee,” the preferred French term for comics.

Along with fellow Brooklyn cartoonists Tom Hart and Jason Little, Madden created Oubapo-America in 2002; it hasn’t been terribly active, but its website -- www.newhatstories.com/oubapo/ -- features a handful of experimental Oubapian comics. (One form they’ve devised is “Alphabet City,” in which each panel prominently alludes to successive letters of the alphabet; Madden’s Alphabet City story, “Prisoner of Zembla,” ran in L.A. Weekly last year.)

The most prominent Oubapo-America project, though, has been Madden’s own “Exercises in Style,” which he serialized online over a few years. “I liked the idea of balancing my more conventional work with this smaller, purely formalist thing,” he says.

“Style” and “formalism” aren’t quite the same thing, although Queneau’s book is an argument that they’re linked. In any case, they overlap much more closely in comics than they do in prose and poetry, partly because “style” can mean prose style or storytelling style or drawing style, and the last of those is something a viewer can see without reading.

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Formal constraints

THE most striking exercises of Madden’s book, in fact, are the ones in which he alters the formal constraints of the way he naturally draws instead of imitating particular cartoonists or genres. In two consecutive pieces, Madden presents his story as short, wide horizontal panels, then as long, narrow vertical panels; their visual rhythm couldn’t be more different. “No Line” is thick, lush chiaroscuro, without outlines; “Minimalist” reduces each panel to a few gestural lines of uniform thickness; “Maximalist” loads each panel with details, dots and cross-hatched shading -- and Madden’s obvious discomfort with maximalism makes it clear how much his default style deliberately omits.

Madden singles out “Maximalist” as one of the pages of “99 Ways” that was trickiest for him to draw. He also mentions that he labored for a long time over one of the book’s few full-color pages, “A Newly Discovered Fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry” -- drawn in the style of a narrative embroidery from the 11th century. “I’m a bit chauvinistic about comics,” he says. “I generally think that they’re what’s traditionally referred to as comics -- word balloons, sound effects, that sort of thing. The Bayeux Tapestry, for instance, is not a comic, so that piece was a wink at that kind of overly inclusive historical take.”

Even so, one project of almost every artistic discipline -- especially experimental movements -- is trying to find its own ancestors. One of Oulipo’s wittiest ideas was calling its forebears “anticipatory plagiarists” -- writers who’d worked with self-imposed constraints before Oulipo defined the idea. As Madden points out, cartoonists have worked with formal constraints almost since the beginning of American comics-as-we-know-them. Gustave Verbeek, for instance, drew a weekly comic strip from 1903 to 1905, “The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo,” in which the second half of each episode was the first half turned upside-down.

In fact, formal constraints have arguably driven a lot of comics’ artistic innovations. The greatest comics projects aren’t the ones with the most riveting plots -- from “Krazy Kat” to “Watchmen” to “Black Hole,” they’re the ones with indelible, personal and often deliberately limited styles.

Take “Peanuts,” for instance -- not what you’d think of as avant-garde or experimental. Still, the rigid four-panel grid the daily “Peanuts” maintained for most of its run (so that it could be run horizontally, vertically or as a square) was one kind of constraint; the more complicated grid of its Sunday strips was another.

Charles Schulz spent 50 years drawing his characters’ faces exclusively either in profile or in a modified three-quarter view (one ear visible, the other mostly hidden) -- a constraint so enormous and bold that most readers never noticed it. But if you draw Lucy from another perspective, she suddenly doesn’t look like a “Peanuts” character anymore.

Madden and Abel are now taking their interest in comics formalism to the next step -- they’re working on a cartooning textbook, to be published sometime next year.

And Madden is continuing to work on stories driven by constraints. The next issue of his comics series, “A Fine Mess,” will feature a 32-page story in a palindromic form inspired by J.S. Bach’s “crab canon.”

“The challenge is going to be to get the reader to get to the end and then read it backward,” he says, “but I think I’ve figured out how it’s going to work.”