THE COMICS SESTINA
Looking for a challenge for your next comic? Why not try a "comics sestina"? The Sestina Page (link below) offers this description: "The sestina is an old fixed form of poetry, dating as far back as the twelfth century. It consists of six six-line stanzas and a three-line concluding stanza. The ending words of the first stanza are repeated throughout each subsequent stanza in a set pattern. The same six words appear in the concluding three-line stanza, two in each line."
How It Works:
The trick to the
sestina is that in each stanza the end words are repeated but in a different
order. The changing order is determined by an algorithm that works on
a sort of zigzag or spiral principle: if the first stanza has end words
123456, the second stanza starts with the last end word of the previous
stanza and then alternates the remaining words from the outside in, yielding
:
- stanza two: 615243,
followed by:
- stanza three: 364125
- stanza four: 532614
- stanza five: 451362
- stanza six: 246531
A seventh stanza would
bring you back to 123456, but the sestina ends
instead on a three-line stanza, known as the envoy, which incorporates
all six words following a variety of possible options, the most common
being that three appear in the middle and three at the end of the three
lines, with the specific order left to the poet's judgement.
You can read a lot
more about the sestina, including explanations, variations, and examples
on the Sestina Page:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Villa/8287/sestina.htm
The Sestina As a Comics Constraint:
There are a number
of ways this form can be adapted to comics, and we
leave individual artists to decide how they want to do it. To get you
started, here are two possible versions of a comics sestina. One, proposed
by Tad Suiter, is based on repeated keywords, while another, proposed
by Matt Madden, is based on six repeated panels.
Tad Suiter's COMICS SESTINA
This version creates
a seven page comic of 6-panel grids. Choose six keywords" and incorporate
them into the panels of a seven page comic
in the following order:
pg 1
1 2
3 4
5 6
pg 2
6 1
5 2
4 3
pg 3
3 6
4 1
2 5
pg 4
5 3
2 6
1 4
pg 5
4 5
1 3
6 2
pg 6
2 4
6 5
3 1
pg 7
1 2
3 4
5 6
Tad favors randomly
generated words (one possible source being the website http://www.randomword.com).
Other more deliberate methods are
also possible. The panels you draw on each page should be somehow determined
or suggested by the corresponding keywords in the sestina series above.
Matt Madden's COMICS SESTINA
This version produces a thirteen page comic.
The sestina, as its name implies, is based on a six-line stanza. We can consider the tier like a line of poetry, so I propose we consider the analog of the "stanza" in this case to be a two page spread, where each page has three tiers, thus producing six "end-panels" which correspond to the end words of each line. This sestina comic would thus be thirteen (six spreads plus the final "envoy" page) pages long, where each page would observe one of the algorithms for moving the end-panels around. As for the last page there are a number of ways you could incorporate the six end-panels following the various traditional methods. if you want to really challenge yourself you could make all your pages six-panel grids and have the last page be nothing but the end panels. Otherwise, you could incorporate them with more panels.
An alternative would be to use a six-tiered comics page to create a six-and-a-half page comic. This sounds a bit unwieldy, but think about old Sunday pages or Chris Ware's Quimby Mouse comics. It seems to me that part of the challenge will be coming up with six panels that are simple yet rich enough to be used repeatedly in different orders and contexts. You could do a Dada Dice-like random word generator, or draw from photo reference, or what about choosing six panels by cartoonists you like and trying incorporate them (redrawn or not)?
***CLICK HERE FOR SILENT RUNNING SOLUTIONS***
Persons should also feel free to send descriptions of new
constraints to challenges@oubapo-america.com.
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