Drawn Onward: A Star-Crossed Comic

by Matt Madden

A man and a woman cross paths in a series of chance encounters in the New York City Subway system. As obsessions grow and falter, these characters walk closer and closer to the edge, striking a dangerous balance. With each new panel Drawn Onward adds a layer to the puzzle, using a mirrored structure of time and place to illustrate the fragile nature of love, and how we seek each other in our own reflections.

Matt Madden is a member of the formalist experimental comics group Workshop for Potential Comics (Ouvroir de la bande dessinée Potentielle - Oubapo) which is devoted to discovering and inventing constraints for making comics. Most of Matt's work since 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style has been created using some kind of rule or formal structure as a starting point. In Drawn Onward, he creates a palindrome comic, a "crab canon" or "cancrizan", modeled after one of JS Bach's compositional techniques of a single melody running backwards and forwards simultaneously.

Reading the comic in either direction will give two different experiences of the story, but only together will the complete story be revealed - if either version can be trusted.

Genres: Comics

32 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2013

About the author

Matt Madden is an American cartoonist as well as comics teacher, editor and translator. He is best known for the book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005), an experimental comic based on the idea of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style.
Madden was born in New York City in 1968 and has lived in Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, and abroad in Mexico and France. From 2012 to 2016 he had an extended residency at La Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France. He has also received the title of knight in the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. Since 2016 Madden lives in Philadelphia with his wife, fellow cartoonist Jessica Abel, and children.
As a translator, Madden has translated graphic novels from Spanish and French for American publishers First Second and New York Comics Review. He also teaches comics at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and at Yale University.

Reviews

[Derek Royal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the titles we discussed on our Retrofit Comics/Big Planet Comics publisher spotlight episode of the podcast, http://comicsalternative.com/episode-..., this one truly stands out. I hesitate to say that this was the best of the bunch...but really, it was. At least for me, as I tend to gravitate toward experiment in form, metafiction, and a self-aware narrative. This isn't the first time Madden has successfully played around with format and our expectations of an effective story. But this one is nicely contained in a short comic. This is certainly one of my favorites of 2015, so far.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cleverly drawn palindrome comics. You will "discover" the ending.

[Fleece · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously excellent structure. Loved the roughness(? featheryness?) of the inking and enjoyed the narrative.