Ex Libris revolves around a character who is holed up in a room with nothing but a futon and a bookcase full of comics. As they peruse covers, read stories and fragments of stories, they start to feel that the comics contain some kind of message and possibly a threat. Lines between fiction and reality, sanity and madness, begin to blur as the reader becomes convinced they need to solve the mystery of these books before they can leave the room.

You’ll see lots of different drawing styles and types of stories (all invented by me, though many wink at existing traditions) and in that sense this book continues the line of exploration and play that Matt Madden initiated with 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. At the same time this book is also a tribute to the meta-fictional tradition of authors that were among Madden’s formative influences as an artist: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino (whose novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler was in many ways the inspiration for this book).