MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

David Welsh interviews Alexis Siegel, translator of The Rabbi’s Cat and other graphic novels.

Mister O by Lewis Trondheim (2002). NBM, 2004. 32p., 8.5″ x 11.5″, color hardcover, $13.95. MIster O–a circle with stick arms and legs, two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth–comes to a crevice. He wants to continue on his way, but he must cross the crevice first. He tries using whatever or [...]

Systeme de la bande dessinée by Thierry Groensteen. Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Groensteen is a member of the Oubapo and a prolific comics theorist, or rather theorist of the bande dessinée. This volume is a long look at the form of comics. I can’t imagine easily summarizing it all. Groensteen’s endeavors to show comics [...]

Oubapo. Oupus 1 (L’Association, 1997). The Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle’s (Oubapo) first Oupus book is a combination of essays and examples (see my review of Oupus 3). The biggest part of the book is Thierry Groensteen’s “Un premier bouquet de contraintes” (A First Bouquet/Bunch of Constraints), an enumeration (with examples cited and occasionally pictured) [...]

Hergé. Le Lotus Bleu (1936). Casterman: 1974. The comic book adventures of Tintin are probably as much a part of French culture as those of Superman or Charlie Brown in the United States. Created by the Belgian artist Hergé in 1929, Tintin appeared in comics and books through the mid 70′s (also films and radio [...]

Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée. Oupus 3: Les Vacances de l’Oubapo. L’Association, 2000. After a long time, I finally got ahold of one of the Oubapo’s books. This volume of their Oupus collects 36 strips published in the French newspaper Liberation during the summer of 2000. Six artists (Lewis Trondheim, Killoffer, Jean-Chistophe Menu, Francois Ayroles, Lécroart, [...]

Babel by David B. (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2004). The majority of Andre Breton’s prose works (Nadja, Mad Love, Arcanum 17, etc.) mix autobiography, dream, myth, the everyday, chance — all elements of the Surrealist project: the exploration and exploitation of the unconscious for the purposes of art, culture, and even politics (like Freud the [...]