Note to readers: This review contains major spoilers.
I first heard of Matt Madden in the early 90s when I was working for Fantagraphics Books. I was shown a copy of his mysterious minicomic, Terrifying Steamboat Stories (1991-1995), by my coworker, Frank Young. I don’t really remember what it was about, but I recall liking the drawing style. I learned that Madden was an undergrad at the University of Texas. A couple of years later, I met Chicago cartoonist Jessica Abel and became friends. The next book of Madden’s I saw was Black Candy (1998), about which I remember almost nothing. A couple of years after that, Madden and Abel got married in Chicago and I attended their wedding along with a few of my comics nerd friends. At this point, I was much more of a fan of Abel’s comics than Madden’s. Madden wasn’t particularly prolific.
This is Abel and Madden in New York in 2010.
Later, I lived in rural Massachusetts and got to be friends with Tom Devlin, who lived in a suburb of Boston. He started up a small publishing house called Highwater Books. And Devlin published Madden’s next book, Odds Off (2001). With this book, one can see Madden plunging into postmodernist territory. A writer’s book becomes infested with typographical parasites. At some point, Madden and Abel moved to France. Madden got involved with OuLiPo, the French literary movement that sought to provoke creativity by putting arbitrary constraints on writers. This movement was founded by Raymond Queneau and included such notable members as Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Perhaps the most famous Oulipo book is Perec’s A Void, a novel written without the letter “e” (which is the most common letter in French and English). Madden was quite impressed by Queneau’s Exercises in Style, in which Queneau recounted the same banal episode in 99 different styles. This influenced Madden’s next book, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, where he wrote a banal episode, starring himself and Abel, and drew 99 versions of it. In a way, it was an educational book—each of the different versions taught the reader a little about the mechanics of comics.
His new book, Ex Libris, takes off from 99 Ways to Tell a Story but instead of telling the same story over and over again, the protagonist is inexplicably trapped in a room with a bookshelf full of comics—some in the pamphlet form that was the one of the most common ways for comics to exist in the USA from the late 30s until about 2010. The rest of the shelf is full of squarebound comics.
The unnamed protagonist can’t seem to leave the room, which might remind one of The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel, in which the well-bred attendees of a dunner party find that for a surreal reason that they can’t leave the room they are in. Our protagonist has it worse, they are alone. All they can do is read some of the comics. They know nothing about comics and have no interest in them.
The first books she looks at features protagonists who can’t escape the situation they are in. Not the books they want to read.
In these two examples, we can see Madden taking on different creative personas and drawing styles. The protagonist subsequently finds a group of books that have post-it notes in them that seem to be leading the them toward something—perhaps a way out.
But instead it leads the protagonist to a horror comic based around getting trapped in a room—done in the style of class EC Comics horror. Here is an example of Madden drawing a pastiche of a type of comic what is beyond his talents as a draughtsman.
That is part of what’s tricky about this book (as well as his previous one, 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style). Because he’s trying to evoke other comics, he has to adjust his drawing style to match. But the problem is that although Madden is perfectly competent to draw like Madden, he is not competent to draw like, say, “ghastly” Graham Ingels or Naoki Urasawa. This is what’s tricky about doing parodies and pastiches in comics—to do it well requires almost superhuman drawing ability. Think of Wally Wood’s brilliant parodies of comic strips for MAD Magazine.
Eventually the protagonist discovers a sketchbook. A previous occupant had started it as a way of drawing his way out of the room. The protagonist is not an artist, but after reading so many comics decides to draw one for themselves, with them as the protagonist of this comic within a comic. This is where we finally learn that the protagonist is female.
She draws herself finding comics on the bookshelf that guide her out. She draws a door and walks through it. The comic she is drawing becomes the comic we are reading. This infection of the real world with the comics world recalls the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges discovers that the reality of the world has been replaced by the world Tlön, which turns out to have been a prank of sorts perpetrated by various bibliophiles and book collectors in Argentina and Brazil.
Then in the epilogue, another person has been deposited in the room, and he (or she) finds the comics—including the one you are currently reading.
Ex Libris is clever and amusing, but it doesn’t go very deep. We learn that the protagonist is leaving a relationship gone bad, but really there is little humanity here to grab onto. The whole thing feels a little mind-gamey, which I’d say is a fault common in postmodern art (whether literature or film or any other narrative form). But not all postmodernists lack connection with their characters. I mentioned Georges Perec earlier—his most important book, Life: A Users Manual, is another Oulipo experiment, but readers are deeply invested in the character of Bartlebooth. I wish Madden cared as much about the protagonist as Perec cared about Bartlebooth. Ex Libris feels too much like a bloodless experiment.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. It is fun to see Madden assay all the disparate comics styles—indeed that becomes the greatest pleasure the book has to offer. I say this even though Madden seems only partly able to succeed. But the attempt is what is pleasing, knowing that each page may bring you a totally different comic reading experience.
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