Comics is a medium founded on constraints. Our very sense of what a comic is-whether a newspaper strip, Sunday page, comic book or web comic-is to a large extent determined by formal characteristics or constraints. Strip length, page size and layout, panel borders, word balloons, decisions about drawing style: these and many other formal considerations are the building blocks from which we create all kinds of work.
The project of the French group Oubapo (Workshop for Potential Comics)
is to identify those constraints that already exist (2 common examples:
using a 9-panel grid, or using a fixed point of view, as in a monologue
comic) and to propose and implement new constraints that can generate
new comics. These might be manipulations of existing comics (on this site,
see our first reduction exercises) or
they might be original works (see Alphabet
City). Oubapo's work is necessarily preliminary, there's a whole medium
out there waiting to be mined and explored. The emphasis of these projects
is on play and experimentation, backed up with a belief that once in a
while someone might create something truly great.
Oubapo is not a movement that you join or follow. Oubapo is an approach
to thinking about and creating comics using constraints as a creative
principle.
This site is devoted to showcasing and discussing various (mostly) English-language
attempts at creating constraint-based comics. We invite you to explore
our site and take a look at some of the experiments
we have done so far; participate in or propose new
projects; read some more about Oubapo and its parent group, Oulipo;
or join our e-mail discussion group (top right).
Please note that this is not an official site of the Oubapo group. Word has it that they are planning an official site and we will announce that link here when it is ready.
SOME OUBAPO LINKS:
Links in English:
MAP>OULIPO
Site about connecting the arts and sciences.
Matt Madden's Exercises in Style
OUBAPO - AMERICA MESSAGE BOARD
Links in French:
place selling Oubapo book#1. offers brief description
Links to other experimental comics sites:
Lewis Trondheim's random gag generator
Scott McCloud, the one-man comics idea factory
USS Catastrophe has, among other cool items, an ongoing add-a-panel jam comic
Two English language links mimicing Raymond Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 Poems:
http://www.wordengineering.net/ticker2.html