2018 School Spending Survey Report
Talking To ... Cartoonist Couple Jessica Abel & Matt Madden
That led to getting in touch with author Matt Madden, who explained that jam comics are just one part of his and co-author Jessica Abel's new title, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures:Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond (First Second, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59643-131-7). A married couple and new parents, Matt and Jessica stole a few moments of time to talk to SLJTeen about the comics world and DWWP. 
Is a husband/wife comics team all that usual? It must be great to have that much creative juice in the house! Is DWWP your first book together? Oddly, husband/wife collaborations have a bit of a history in comics: Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky have done a lot of comics together. Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly edited Raw: The Graphix Magazine together, and more recently you have couples like Hope Larson (Chiggers, S & S/Aladdin, 2008) and Bryan Lee O'Malley ("Scott Pilgrim"series, Oni Press) who occasionally collaborate on comics. And as there are more women cartoonists, more cartooning couples spring up every year. It's great to share the same geeky passion as your significant other; it means we never get tired of each other's shop talk. We have helped each other out in small ways over the years, coloring each other's work and offering editorial advice, but generally we keep our creative work separate. DWWP is the first book we have done together. Nonetheless, it was a pretty natural evolution in our collaboration since we've taught together at the School for Visual Arts for seven yea rs now and have also done many workshops and talks together. Jessica, your contemplation on the word "comics" in the Building Blocks section of DWWP is a little history lesson in itself. Are you still wearing the comics badge proudly? Absolutely. We really have no other good word to replace comics, anyway. The most accurate I've hit on is "graphic narrative," but it's unnecessarily fancy for most occasions. I have hope that eventually the world will come around. Many readers will find your section on "Can't draw? Read this" reassuring. Is this something you hear a lot when you go out and speak to teens and adults? We really wanted to make this book accessible to all kinds of readers and creative people. And yes, many people in classes and workshops point out the "Can't Draw?" sidebar and thank us for placing it right in the first chapter. We don't want to downplay the importance of drawing, but the main principles of successful comics involve clarity, good design, and strong storytelling--all of which can be achieved with stick figures or clip art if that's how you want to do it. We do expect that many readers hope to learn how to draw well eventually, so another point of that sidebar (reiterated in our introduction) is to encourage people to dive right into making comics regardless of whether they feel their art is "good enough" yet. They can learn to draw and learn to make comics simultaneously. The DWWP Web site is an incredible resource for anyone trying to learn about drawing comics or teaching art. And even how to read comics. Was a Web site companion to the book part of the plan all along? Yes. From the beginning of this project we wanted to have a substantial and interactive Web component. What you see there now is just the basic structure: student and teacher guides, sample syllabi, examples of student work. Over time we will be adding new features and expanding what is there now. For example, we are planning to put up a section geared toward younger readers and their teachers suggesting ways they might find the book productive. DWWP is nominally geared toward university students and older readers but much of it is certainly useful to precocious and motivated younger readers. We welcome suggestions for this section or for ways that the Web site might be useful for librarians. What are jam comics? Jam comics are a longstanding tradition in comics. When a group of cartoonists gets together it's quite common for someone to produce a sheet of paper, draw a single comics panel on it and pass it on to someone else who then adds a second panel and passes it along until you have a one-page comic or more. It's a fun, low-pressure way to interact creatively with your peers. But, traditionally, jam comics are more fun to create than to read - the results tend to be funny but pretty incoherent. Years ago, my friend Tom Motley started compiling "jam rules," little constraints that challenge the participants creatively. For example, a rule may require the cartoonists to use only a single, monosyllabic word in each panel, or build the comic backwards starting from the last panel. For many years, Jessica and I have been using our own versions of this list of jam rules in classrooms with great success. It's a great way to begin a course because it's fun and interactive, plus it gets people making comics together on the first day of class--it's gratifying to congratulate students for completing, say, 20 one-page comics in under an hour. The rules further help to ensure that participants are engaging with storytelling and the formal rules of the medium in an inductive and entertaining way. This means that when the jam comics are done you can stick them on the wall and find lots of interesting points to talk about. The rules also tend to push the comics in the direction of coherence and readability; instead of trying to one-up one another as in traditional, rule-less jam comics, students are given the task of working together, or at least in concert, to grapple with the constraints. Any plans on working with libraries this year? And are there any new books in the pipeline? Our fall is pretty busy with book fairs and the like: the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco on Halloween weekend and then the Miami Book Fair two weeks later. In addition to Jessica's talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on November 6, Matt will be on a panel about alternative comics at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on December 17. Looking ahead, Matt will be at the Gainesville, FL, public library in March, and Jessica will be appearing at the Michigan Library Association conference for youth librarians in April. We'll post complete details about these events as they get closer on our Websites, www.jessicaabel.com, and www.mattmadden.com, with news at mattmadden.blogspot.com. We're beginning work on a second volume of DWWP, but publication is a few years down the road! Meanwhile, we plan to continue adding to the DWWP Web site, probably starting in earnest around the middle of next year. 
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