Free Show Prep
Friday, December 02, 2005
exercisesinstyle.com
exercisesinstyle.com
Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.
The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.
One additional variation on the project is that a group of cartoonists have been given a brief script of the one-page piece and asked to create their own version of the comic.
While the project has been floating around as an idea for years, it was galvanized into being committed to paper by the founding in 1992 of OuBaPo, Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Comics), a comics-oriented offshoot of OuLiPo (Workshop for Potential Literature), an experimental forum co-founded by Queneau himself in 1960.
Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.
The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.
One additional variation on the project is that a group of cartoonists have been given a brief script of the one-page piece and asked to create their own version of the comic.
While the project has been floating around as an idea for years, it was galvanized into being committed to paper by the founding in 1992 of OuBaPo, Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Comics), a comics-oriented offshoot of OuLiPo (Workshop for Potential Literature), an experimental forum co-founded by Queneau himself in 1960.
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