{{Original research, date=September 2007
Constrained comics is a form of comics that places some fundamental constraint on form beyond those inherent to the medium. By adding a constraint, the artist is attempting to produce original art within tightly defined boundaries.
A conceptually similar movement is the
constrained writing
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.
Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form.
...
Poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings ...
is sometimes constrained into specific rhyme and meter categories such as
haiku
is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, ...
or
sonnet
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's inventio ...
.
Examples
Notable examples of constrained comics:
*
Gustave Verbeek
Gustave Verbeek (August 29, 1867 – December 5, 1937) was a Dutch-American illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his newspaper cartoons in the early 1900s featuring an inventive use of word play and visual storytelling tricks.
Biography
V ...
's ''The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo'', a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels.
* '' The Angriest Dog in the World'' a comic strip by
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, visual artist and actor. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Be ...
. Each four-panel comic has identical artwork. The only change between each comic is the dialogue in the first three panels.
* ''
Dinosaur Comics
''Dinosaur Comics'' is a constrained webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz", after the site's domain name, "qwantz.com". The first comic was posted on February 1, 2003, although there were earlier prototypes. ''Di ...
'' which uses the same artwork, with only dialogue changing.
* ''
Watchmen
''Watchmen'' is an American comic book maxiseries by the British creative team of writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins. It was published monthly by DC Comics in 1986 and 1987 before being collected in a single-vo ...
'' is created with a number of formal constraints; issue #5 in particular, entitled "Fearful Symmetry", follows a palindromic structure.
* '' Partially Clips'' which uses three identical panels based on clipart.
* The many works of the
Oubapo Oubapo (, short for french: Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential comic book art"'') is a comics movement which believes in the use of formal constraints to push the boundaries of the medium. OuBaPo ...
group.
*
Matt Madden
Matt Madden (born 1968 in New York City) is a U.S. comic book writer and artist. He is best known for original alternative comics, for his coloring work in traditional comics, and for the experimental work '' 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in ...
's ''
99 Ways to Tell a Story
99 may refer to:
* 99 (number), the natural number following 98 and preceding 100
* one of the years 99 BC, AD 99, 1999, 2099, etc.
Art, entertainment, and media
* '' The 99'', a comic series based on Islamic culture
Film, television and radio ...
Jon Arbuckle
Jonathan Q. Arbuckle is a fictional character from the '' Garfield'' comic strip by Jim Davis. He also appears in the animated television series '' Garfield and Friends'' and ''The Garfield Show'', two live-action/ CGI feature films, and thre ...
without the titular cat, who has been digitally removed from the otherwise untouched comic.
See also
*
Infinite canvas
The infinite canvas refers to the potentially limitless space that is available to webcomics presented on the World Wide Web. The term was introduced by Scott McCloud in his 2000 book '' Reinventing Comics'', in which he suggested that webcomic cre ...
, a movement in comics in a sense opposite to that of constrained comics