Cartoonist Matt Madden Master Artist Outreach

Click here to listen to “Your Creative Push” podcast with Matt Madden on the importance of constraints and rules and the life of a middle-aged artist

Matt Madden started self-publishing minicomics while living in Ann Arbor MI in the early 90s.  In 1996 Madden began writing reviews for The Comics Journal and other publications, a practice he has come back to over the years, most recently reviewing comics and graphic novels for Bookforum.  He also translates from French and Spanish.  His translation from the French of Aristophane’s The Zabîme Sisters (First Second) was published in the fall of 2010 and he is a regular contributor to Words Without Borders.

His first graphic novel, Black Candy, was published by Black Eye Books in 1998; his second, Odds Off, was published by Highwater Books in 2001. His book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Penguin), a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, which has numerous foreign editions including Japan, France, Italy, and Spain, cemented his position as a leading figure in experimental comics. In 2002, he was named foreign correspondent of the French avant-garde comics group, OuBaPo (the Workshop for Potential Comics) and in 2013 he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.

He has been teaching comics for over ten years—primarily at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan but also at schools, libraries and museums all around the world—and he has collaborated with his wife, Jessica Abel, on two comics textbooks, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, and Mastering Comics, published by First Second. From 2008 to 2013 the couple were also co-series editors of The Best American Comics from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Madden recently finished a four-year residency in Angoulême, France, where he collaborated on publishing and performance projects with Oubapo and taught workshops all over Europe. He and his family are now living in Philadelphia.  You’ll find recent news at www.mattmadden.com.