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Matt Madden Interview

Conducted By Ed Mathews

"Matt Madden's comics can generate surprising perspectives. His apparently naturalistic comics can evoke a vivid sense of a generation lingering in a pleasant social limbo, suspended eternally between renting and owning... And while his drawings can be simple and direct, engaging the reader with telling social details, they can also be sly stylistic appropriations that squeeze fresh emotional or satirical meaning out of conventional comics tropes and graphic forms. Strategically and semiotically elastic, Madden's comics can offer the reader a sense of comic irony, a surprising, often moving poignancy and a playful, thoughtful rearrangement of the elements of comics style."
- Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly

That's right, here today we have a special sit down with Editor in Chief Ed Mathews and cartoonist Matt Madden, fresh off his recently released new book ODDS OFF. For the uninitiated ODDS OFF details the 'complexities of a dissolving relationship between an easy-going Francophile named Morgan and his world-weary pre-med girlfriend Shirin, Odds Off is framed by the three-month period between New Year's Eve and Now Rooz, the Iranian New Year. Enter grad student Lance whose infatuation with Morgan and increasing writer's block sets the stage for Madden's surehanded mixture of traditional realism with formalist "tricks". Never allowing his dedication to experimentation to interfere with his storytelling, Madden has created a work that is multi-layered, dense, moving and funny.' So read on and see exactly what these two intellectuals come up with while slumming in the east village. Enjoy.

Ed: I'm here with Matt Madden in a little café called Des Moines here in the East Village. And we're going to talk about his new book. Did it just come out? Is it out in the bookstores now?

Matt: It is officially out now and should be reaching most stores.

Very good. It's a book called ODDS OFF.

Not "Odds On", which is what they call it in CBG recently...

Did they?

Yeah, they ran a nice review, but they called it "Odds On."

Which, of course, is going to confuse everybody looking for it. "Hey, you know that "Odds On?" "No, I don't know anything about that, actually."

Today's modern comic book store clerk should be able to handle that.

One could hope. You'd be surprised. I walked into one shop a long while back and asked for Joe Sacco's SAFE AREA GORAZDE... they looked at me like I was, like, from Venus. But that's another story for another day. Now before we get into this new book, I want to ask you a little bit about your background and what brought you into sequential art. Where you hail from, and where have you been in the world? I bring that up because after reading ODDS OFF, there's a lot of cosmopolitan themes going around there.

I've done a fair amount of moving around. I was born in New York. My dad was a lawyer, and he got transferred to a job in Paris for five years, so as a kid I was in Paris for 5 years, then my family moved to suburban Connecticut. But after that I went to boarding school in New Hampshire. I went to college first in upstate New York and then to Ann Arbor, to the University of Michigan. Then I moved down to Austin, Texas, which is where ODDS OFF is set, and went to the University of Texas for a while and generally hung around. Then I spent two years in Mexico City with Jessica [Abel] before moving here last year.

What brought you here?

Work, in a word. I mean, we had always sort of wanted to live in New York, and insanely enough we were actually visiting about two years ago, staying at a friend's house -especially given the fact that at the time we were living in Mexico City where everything is relatively really cheap - with the amount we were spending each day on just food and taxis and drinks and stuff, we just agreed that there was no way we were going to move to New York City until we were rich and well-established. And here we are, one year later, coming here with nothing but clothes and our Mexico City savings, so, we're crazy. But basically, we decided it would be worth it, me especially, I've been concentrating on doing freelance illustration as a full-time job. Most magazines are based here, so basically just to be close to everyone, and meet people and be able to schmooze and be at the center of where it's happening, which has definitely paid off although it is still not easy in the current market of magazines, everything is depressed, so there's not a whole lot of work. But it's been going well. It's definitely been a good move in terms of people I've met and new jobs I've ended up getting pretty much just from being in New York.

So aside from the sequential art that you do, you are an illustrator then? You work for different magazines?

It's not really aside from comics because it really arose out of it... I wouldn't be doing illustration if I didn't do comics. I mean, I never thought about it when I was younger, but in'94 or so I did a strip for Pulse! Magazine, the Tower Records Magazine, which had a back page comics feature called "Flipside." And the editor who used to be there, Marc Weidenbaum, really liked my work and he's like, "Why don't you do some illustrations for us?" He hooked me up with a person there who went on to hire me pretty regularly for the last four or five years until she just left last year. So that got me in. Pretty soon I had a portfolio of stuff and realized I could make money off of it and it was actually possible. So it's really a direct result of comics that I'm even doing illustration.

So it's not the other way around. Some people do it the other way around.

Right. Although at the same time now I've doing illustration enough that I'm starting to think of it a bit differently and look around more at the history of illustration and looking at what other people are doing as opposed to just cartoonist friends who are doing illustrations, which is a lot.

What's your educational background when it comes to cartooning... being a cartoonist? Were you self-taught, autodidactic?

Totally self-taught. I took basic art classes. I always liked drawing but had been easily discouraged by bad teachers. So I didn't really pursue it at all in school and basically learned how to draw in my class notebooks, doodling in the margins. It was like a graduate program in doodles. I studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, some German, and other world literature. And then I got a master's degree in teaching English as a second language, which I did so that I could travel. That's why I ended up in Mexico. So learning comics I did pretty much all my own. I knew how to draw a little, but like I said, without any real training. When I was in high school I found in the storage room of a dormitory a big stack of old Heavy Metals from the early '80s, when they were publishing a lot of Moebius and Enki Bilal and a lot of great European artists. Some of whom are now being printed in English again by Humanoids. So that got me really into stuff and then at some point I discovered RAW and started buying those. That got me all excited to try to start doing stuff, and around this time, which is when I was in Ann Arbor, I met Terry LaBan, who was doing a comic called UNSUPERVISED EXISTENCE and later did CUD for Fantagraphics. I don't know if you've seen it, it's been a few years since it stopped coming out. He's actually working on a daily syndicated strip now. Apparently, he just got syndication.

Oh, wow.

I don't know what it's called. But he was in Ann Arbor and so was Matt Feazell, who does THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF CYNICAL MAN, his stick figure mini-comics. So those guys would hang out once a week, drink coffee, and draw comics, and talk about comics. I started hanging out with them, and I learned a lot about cartooning just by hanging out with those guys. They were already mini-comics veterans. That was kind of like at the crest of the whole fanzine/mini-comics/small press wave that peaked in the early '90s. So I started corresponding with people, trading stuff in the mail, things like that.

I guess you've answered my question that I had for later, which is "Why French?" in the ODDS OFF book. But I'm just curious, does it have to do with your personal experience from living in Paris, or is there something else to this that I'm not getting?

Yeah, certainly a lot of it is just the fact that I lived in Paris. I've always had a connection to Paris really, I can't say France as a country because I really haven't traveled much there. But when I was a kid and living there, I spoke French fluently, although I forgot it all pretty much on purpose when I got back. I was 8 years old and my brother and I wanted to be just like American kids. We managed to forget all French we knew because we just wanted to fit in. But I started studying it again in junior high school and all through college I was taking classes. At the same time, when I discovered the Heavy Metal stuff, I realized that that stuff, a lot of it was originally in French and started to look for some of the original books in French. I already knew about Tintin and things that like that, but that were children's comics. And then, going back a few times to my family and more recently I've gone to Angoulême to the great comics convention they have in January every year. And in a more directly autobiographical sense, the TV show in ODDS OFF is based on a real TV show that they show on cable access around the country. It's actually a really good educational program but it has this weird sense of being part of a movie or a soap opera that's somehow avant-garde. You never really know what's going on because the story is so oblique because, of course, they're trying to repeat stuff so that you remember it. The result, especially if you're just flipping through the channels and you watch this thing for a few minutes, is this weird alien kind of narrative where you can't really figure out what the hell it's about, or you read all this stuff into it, and there seems to be all this sexual tension; just by the fact that the lead characters are male and female, you automatically start to develop a kind of romance, romantic tension, although nothing ever happens as far as I know. Come to think of it, it's a version of closure in the sense that Scott McCloud talks about. So that's where that whole idea came from, that's what I was trying to create with those French TV show segments. I know it was a bit of a gamble to put something actually in French in the book. In fact, there's a little transcript in the back of the book.

I was going to ask about that. Some people wouldn't put the transcript in the back of the book. They'd say, "You know what? Go find out." I'm curious as to why you made that choice.

I had to be more or less talked into it by my publisher. We talked about it a lot, and he was pretty skeptical about putting French stuff in there at first. I convinced him that, I mean part of the thing is that I want the reader to work at it a little and not necessarily figure out the French. I mean, the whole point is that you don't really know what's going on anyway. These things are taken out of context and you're supposed to make up your own story out of it. But I also know at the same time, people are going to be annoyed by the fact that it's in a foreign language that they can't read. So the transcript in the back was kind of a compromise, where I refused to actually translate on the page because it would ruin the effect. But having no explanation in there at all might leave people with a bitter taste that I don't really want them to have. I'm not trying to rub it in people's faces if they don't know French. The truth is, if you know French, you're not going to get much more out of it. It's still these weird chunks of decontextualized, vaguely repetitive fragments that you're supposed to deduce - I'm trying to create Morgan's sense of fascination for this show. And I'm also trying to suggest that Morgan's French isn't actually very good. I think even not knowing French, you can sort of tell through the course of the book that he's not very good at it. He's mainly just really fascinated with this show. So the transcript, it's a bit of a compromise. Part of me would prefer to not have anything in there at all. It's sort of tucked in the back, and it's there if people want it.

No, it's fine. It's not in the text, but it feels like there are very few books, alternative comics that I've experienced, it's certainly not mainstream comics where there's, like, footnotes. I think that interested me, certainly as a former academic, well, a current academic. What am I talking about? I teach college. That's not the point. It's interesting to see that in art books.

It's actually something I'd like to do a lot more of and make it more deliberately part of the work. Especially the idea of doing comics as footnotes. There's no reason you couldn't have a story going up on the top two tiers of a book and have a little asterisk or some kind of indication, and have some plot point or some flashback or whatever filled out in a little miniature comics. Like in Tony Millionaire's Maakies or a lot of old Popeye strips or old cartoon strips, old newspaper strips where you have a main comic and at the bottom, mainly a space filler, there's like a little miniature horizontal strip. It's just there kind of for decoration and often doesn't even counterpoint what's going on in the main story. But you could also do that, that kind of format and actually have it like little footnotes or separate adds that's outside the main narrative but weaved into the story.

I noticed when I was reading through, there's sort of a very cinematic feel to this last book. More storyboard-ish than other comics I've seen. Do you feel that cinema has influenced your artwork in any sense?

Cinema definitely has influenced me. And it's directly signaled in ODDS OFF in the scene when they're watching Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" (1934) on TV. Film has been a big influence on me, and I kind of discovered film and comics more or less at the same time. For a while I was pursuing both simultaneously, and ended up deciding I had to choose one or the other, and stuck with comics for a large number of reasons. To be honest, I have a mixed reaction to being told that the book is cinematic. I agree, I think it is. And I think I'm still trying to work out what elements of cinema I want to incorporate into my comic storytelling without just having it look like, "Oh this would have been better done as a film or something." I think there is stuff in the way, like for example, changing the drawing styles or something.

But there's also something to be said about trying to figure out what kind of storytelling tricks are native to comics and which ones are applied to both comics and film because a lot of them really do. Just like establishing shots and your basic dialogue scenes, you're going to do the same way as you'd do a film more or less, with the shot/countershot, three-quarter angle, and stuff like that. It just makes sense visually, but I wonder if there's stuff that borrows too heavily from film. I'm not sure what, like doing panning sequences and stuff where it's like you're deliberately adapting techniques from film but doing them in a drawn form.

This is something cartoonists argue and agonize over a lot. I met Gary Panter recently and we were talking about teaching comics, which he is doing for the first time in a while (at SVA, along with me and Jessica), and he said something I thought was pretty funny. He said, "Yeah, I've taught comics before, but I stopped because I got sick of hearing the kids talk about movies all the time..."

What drove it home for me, and this is of course afterwards when I read the book, before I had a chance to read the book I saw you do a reading for a Comix De-code event, and you had a soundtrack. Did you have that in mind when you were doing the piece? Do you have background music in your head? We're talking for a particular scene. That really worked well live.

Thanks. You're talking about a particular scene which is where Morgan's leaving work and he's at the café and he's playing the Serge Gainsbourg song, "Comic Strip." And that's actually kind of a good example because in a way that is very cinematic because I'm using a music soundtrack in a very film-like way. But at the same time, the whole point of it was to make it a quintessentially comics rendition of the song, which is about a comic. It's about the singer inviting a girl to come into his comic strip world with him. And it has all these sound effects that Brigitte Bardot sings in the original, "Zip" "Bang" "Pow"... you know. And I just thought it was a cool opportunity to play with that. Instead of the usual thing of people taking comics references into pop music or film or whatever, and kind of go the other way. I wanted to take a song that originally took notions from the Batman TV shows, things like that, and work it back into a comic in sort of a novel way. I drew all of those sound effects as very cartoony sound effects, in a way that I don't really use elsewhere in the book. I don't really use that many sound effects, in general. The punch line of the whole scene is that at the end, the second to last panel when Morgan leaves his coworkers, the first thing they do is turn off the tape deck, which of course makes the sound effect, "click!" So you've got the seven panels of "Pop," "Shebang," "Plop," "Whiizz," and the last sound is followed by a "click", which is not a sound in the song, it's a sound effect in the "reality" of the comic.

Sometimes you don't necessarily need to understand the footnote to get something out of the scene. It would be nice. It certainly enhances it. Who do you feel, aside from the folks we were taking about earlier, influenced you as a cartoonist. Certainly nowadays - let's forget influence. Who do you feel is an interesting contemporary?

Interesting contemporaries? They are pretty innumerable right now. It's a really good time to be doing comics I think. There's just so much great stuff happening at several different levels. You've got the obvious big names: Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Joe Sacco, Seth, Chester Brown, all those guys. You've got a lot of good people, people who've been around who are really coming into full force now. Someone like Dave Cooper, who's been doing stuff for a long time at Fantagraphics, with his new WEASEL series and the RIPPLE story is just breaking new ground. Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE is fantastic... Jessica Abel, of course, who happens to be my wife, is also one of my favorite cartoonists, and her new story "La Perdida" also breaks new ground. A lot of people are pushing themselves further than they have before. And we're starting to see some even newer talent, like these two guys, twin brothers Tomer and Assaf Hanuka, who had a book called BIPOLAR that came out on SPX last year. The second issue just came out. They're like a wholly formed talent that just seemed to appear out of nowhere. They're a bunch of young Israeli brothers, but one of them is living here in Brooklyn. There's a lot of great stuff going on in Europe that is starting to get known over here, partly through translation, partly because there are a number of bookstores, Big Planet in DC, Chicago Comics, Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, that are making a real effort to carry European comics. Anything that's wordless, of course, but also some stuff not in translation for people who can read the language or just want to have it anyway. So you get a lot of stuff from the publisher L'Association, that's sort of a French combination of Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly. Some of my favorite current European artists are Blutch, Baudoin, Joann Sfar, Dupuy & Berberian... It's also cool that American publishers like D&Q and Fantagraphics are publishing artists in English, like Trondheim, Jason, and Blutch. So that's one of the really exciting things for me about the current comics scene, is that there's generally so much good stuff going on and there's a lot more awareness and communication internationally - more than there has been ever. In the past, the Europeans have generally followed the American underground, and they've known about LOVE AND ROCKETS or whatever, but there hasn't been a lot of contact, and there really is now. It's really cool.

Let's go back to ODDS OFF for a second because after all, this is why we're here, right? It's a rather large book, and it looks like you might be concentrating on the chapters that are in there. How long did it take for this book to be made?

Way too long.

Okay...

A lot of it was just stuff in my life that was outside the book. I started the first notes about it when I was still living in Austin. Then I was living in Chicago for six months and didn't work on it at all. I didn't really start working on it until we moved to Mexico City, but then we were living in a new country and trying to find our way and learn the language and stuff, so I couldn't devote that much time to it for a while. I worked on it the whole two years we were in Mexico, and in the last six months in Mexico, I hit a real wall in the work. I had written about two-thirds of it -and I don't write from beginning to end. I write different stuff as it comes up and kind of fit it together as I go along, and I hit a real block with the work, it was missing some crucial pieces and some structure to make it all work. So I took almost a year break on it. There was like six months in Mexico where I was struggling with it and it just wasn't coming out and I had to give it up for a while. Then, on top of that, we moved back to the US, first we were homeless for about four months, staying with family. Jessica (and I) got married last summer, and then two weeks later moved to New York and tried to start a new life. And then I had to sit down and really hunker down and finish the book, so it took like three-and-a-half years in total time. And it's 120 pages, it's a substantial work, but I don't think it should have taken that long in other conditions. I certainly hope my next book won't take that long. BLACK CANDY, my last book came out in '98. It was three years without much of a peep from me.

Hopefully you'll get back in there.

Yeah, but it is hard... I'm thinking about whether I want to serialize my next work in a pamphlet comic form or something like that. But I've been reluctant to do that in the past because I don't write in that form. I don't start in the first chapter and do the last chapter last. The last scene of the book is one of the first things I wrote, and I went back and tried to write back up to it. And of course when I got back to it, it didn't fit and I had to change all that stuff around, which was part of the challenge of finishing this thing. So I much prefer having the whole thing in front of me at the same time and working on it until it feel done and release it as a complete work.

Not to throw this at you, but it sounds a lot like a film director, where you don't necessarily shoot the scenes in order. You may even throw out a scene that you really like.

Right, yeah that's true. But I think that novelists will do that, too. One example is Nabakov, who apparently would write a lot of stuff on index cards and he'd have all these different scenes and he'd kind of build up a little box of index cards with different scenes which he'd shuffle around and throw out and rearrange until it started to take real form. That's definitely similar to the way I write...

I have to ask you a question. It's something, that's almost a pet peeve but not necessarily a pet peeve because so many people use the term. But you referred to the serialized thirty-two-page format as a pamphlet. Why so? There are some people that take sort of offence to that who are cartoonists because it sounds disposable.

Well, it is disposable.

Fair enough.

I don't say that with any kind of agenda. I mean, it's the word that I just understand being the industry standard for that format. I mean, you can call it a comic book. It doesn't make too much difference to me. But I do think the pamphlet is a disposable, small format, and I'm not particularly fond of it. And it's another reason I haven't serialized because it's not something I'm really wild about to start with. I'd much prefer to see books come out as books. But there is something to be said about pamphlets and the very fact that they are disposable, because you can have stuff that's cheap and you can get your work out there. A lot of people see it, and maybe they won't keep it in a double-poly-whatever bag. They might just leave it on their toilet or take it to a friend's house, leave it on the coffee table, use it as a coaster. It will get read a few times and then, someday later if the work sticks with them, they'll buy the book and put it on a bookshelf. So, no. I have no problem with the idea of pamphlets being disposable, and it's the main reason why I'm actually considering doing it for my next project, because my next book, about Mexico City, will probably be made up of a collage of short stories rather than one straight narrative. So I want to make a lot of pieces and when it's all done, put it together. Basically I'm talking about a short story collection, but I want to weave the stories together somehow. So I could put these out in a 24 or 32 page pamphlet with a couple stories in it, and it would give me a deadline to get stuff done. It would keep my name out there and people would read it, and I could get feedback back on stuff, but it also would get me to produce all the raw material for this book, because if I try to do this Mexico book as one whole work, I might be inhibited by the feeling that everything I do will effect the final product, whereas if I'm doing a pamphlet, I can just do the stories for that, and I could change stuff later on if I need to. I can re-draw stuff, I can restructure stories, so I kind of like that idea.

You work through Highwater Books... it's a book publisher company. Other people go through the traditional routes of the different comic book companies. Do you find that to be a better situation, working through an established book company? Do you get better distribution?

Different distribution. I mean Highwater has a particular situation because they don't go through Diamond, and most other comic book publishers, even more book-oriented publishers like Drawn and Quarterly or Fantagraphics at this point still go through Previews and Highwater doesn't do that. Its main distribution is through comic channels, like Last Gasp, FM, Cold Cut... things like that, with also the addition of LPC, which is a distributor to regular book stores, it handles all kind of books. They started out doing Marvel, actually, and brought in a bunch of alternative titles. I think Top Shelf and Alternative Press, maybe just Alternative Press, Slab-o-Concrete, which was a British publisher that has gone under, and a couple of other more alternative comic type of things. I believe Marvel is not with LPC anymore...

No, they're not. They actually started up a relationship with Diamond, but that's another story for another day. We don't need any more Marvel this month (smiles). Do you feel that alternative comics can reach a wider audience than, say, the mainstream (comics). The industry is in sort of a freefall, even though the best work of many creators is out there now. Do you feel that alternative comics can reach a broader audience outside of the direct market than, say, "Spiderman?"

I basically think so, since superhero comics, let's say, are already well enough known in the culture that people who they would appeal to probably already know about them or else they get that urge satisfied by video games or action movies or whatever else they're into. The more literary alternative comics are a different beast. It's the same medium, but it's totally different content. It's like foreign films and Schwartzenegger films, they have totally different concerns. There's an audience that's always looking for deeper, more thoughtful, creative stuff that's more 'literary', for lack of a better word. The same people who are interested in independent foreign film and read contemporary novels, things like that, and most of those people don't even realize that these comics exist, which I think is a big difference from superheroes. If you're into video games and action movies, you probably know that there are also superhero comics or different action comics that cross over with your interests. But if you're someone who is into independent film, which might include animation and even anime and stuff like that, you might still not realize that there's this world of graphic novels that ranges from really obscure kind of literary experimental stuff to pretty mainstream action or historical kind of things. Jessica talked to a bunch of retailers and distributors for an article she wrote about selling graphic novels for Publishers Weekly, and she found that basically, when you put these books out for people, they sell. When they get into the real book stores, if people make nice displays, and they put up SAFE AREA GORAZDE and GHOST WORLD and JIMMY CORRIGAN and those last two especially are going gangbusters. They sell quite well. And with the new Ghost World movie out, that's opening a whole new window on the world of comics. In those terms, it's a great time to be putting out a book like mine, because between JIMMY CORRIGAN and GHOST WORLD, especially, there's just much more interest in serious, literary comics than there ever has been. Which isn't to say there's a lot, but it's a relatively good time to be doing it.

I won't give you the proper citation, but somebody else I interviewed once said that in order for the medium to survive, the industry must die.

I basically am not even interested in that argument. I've had so little experience with the mainstream in the industry that it's something I feel very marginally related to, and I don't really think about it much. I basically think that might be the case for genre comics. It might be that superheroes need the industry to totally die and rise like a phoenix out of the ashes. But I think alternative and underground comics, at this point, have enough of their own world that if the comics industry dies, including all the special stores and whatever, I think publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly and Highwater Books will manage to find new ways to, and already are, finding more and more ways to sell stuff to regular book stores and things like that.

Is there anything that you would like to say to your audience from the past as this new work comes out, just to wrap this up. About your new work versus the any of the old works like "Black Candy?"

Well, there's not much to say really except that I think that this is a lot better. One big difference is that I got a lot of feedback in the process with this book, which I didn't with "Black Candy," and I think "Black Candy" could have been a better book if I'd had more work on the editorial feedback and I'd talked it over with people a bit more. I think this is something that is generally true of independent comics as a medium and industry. With this book, my publisher and also some peers of mine reviewed scenes I was working on, especially the last chapter. I had to really defend what I'd done and in some cases I made changes and in others I stuck to my guns. In the end though, the process made me feel confident in the final work, that it really achieves the various things I set out to do.

Very good. Thanks Matt.

For all those in need, ODDS OFF is currently available from High Water Books, the same publisher who brought you books like James Kochalka's KISSERS, Jason Shiga's DOUBLE HAPPINESS and any others. Be sure to check out Matt's page at Matt Madden.com. You can also check out our special five page PopPreview of ODDS OFF HERE

Ed Mathews is Editor in Chief for PopImage. Special thanks to Nancy Benecki for the transcription job.

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