MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

A continuum all these works vacillate on is Drama vs Poetry. Drama is the manipulation of characters and events in opposition with each other. In its most extreme, it is superficial and distancing: tired action movies about good guys and bad guys. In it’s best examples, characters are deeply drawn and communicate, questioning and exploring [...]

The French language site Topfferiana has a post up showing the surprising similarity of a comic page from 1886 and McCay’s first Little Nemo strip from 1905. You don’t need to be able to read it to get the point.

Two strips from the 1967-1968 volume of The Complete Peanuts by Charles Schulz (Fantagraphics, 2008). These panels from the February 14, 1967 strip have a certain manic energy to them that contrasts with Schulz’s usually calm images. Even images such as Charlie Brown getting knocked out of his clothes by another well hit baseball does [...]

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long [...]

Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”. Issac also commented: It’d [...]

Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto. Introduction by Max Allan Collins. Kitchen Sink Press, 1991. ISBN: 0878161457. Baseball month starts with this classic comic strip from the 1950′s, Cotton Woods, in an out of print collection from Kitchen Sink which covers a selection of the strips from it’s start in the summer of 1955 through the [...]

Yesterday, Craig Yoe noted the 56th anniversary of the first Sunday Peanuts page. What a wonderful, simple use of composition and page layouts. Schulz uses a basic nine panel grid altered by 2 symmetrically placed wide panels: at the beginning for the title (which is seen in all the Sundays) and at the end. Charlie [...]

On Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007) and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007). I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I [...]

I wonder what it says about my taste or possibly comics publishing that in the last 2 weeks or so my regular monthly order of comics (from the fine folks at Mile High Comics) was almost exclusively reprints of old comic strips. (Edit: I started this post in October and just found it again.) One [...]

My new favorite Peanuts strip (taken from “Schulz and Peanuts” by David Michaels (you’ve heard of that one already, I’m sure)): Yes, that is a talking wall. Awesome.

The Early Years of Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher. Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt. NBM, 2007. 192p., $24.95. A few years back, in an attempt to broaden my literary knowledge (which at the time was fairly limited to the twentieth century), I read my way through a selection of titles from Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. [...]

While I haven’t been posting here much, I have been working on some projects. One of them is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve tentatively called it the “Stolen Birthday Present” constraint. As I read more and more archives of comic strips (so many excellent ones to choose from [...]

All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. City Lights, 2007. 178 p, color, hardcover. $24.95. View the online archive. I like to think I keep up on what’s new in comics, so I wonder how it is that I found this book by happenstance on the shelf of Million Year Picnic in Cambridge while vacationing in [...]

American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kolchalka Book Two January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005 by James Kolchalks. Top Shelf, 2007. $19.95. Daily at http://americanelf.com/ American Elf is the only work of Kolchalka I’ve really enjoyed over the years. Something about the strip that maintains my interest and attention is lacking from [...]

Sometimes I read someone else’s post about a topic I’m interested in, and I see a different post that could have been. I’m not always sure my criticism of the post is a product of the content or my reading of it (I’ll often get stuck on one thing and not see past it). But [...]

Ed Champion interviewed Alison Bechdel for his Bat Segundo show (listen to it here) and among other interesting statements is this (slightly edited, mostly for excess verbiage from thinking on her feet) during a discussion of comics and the everyday: “The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it [...]

Mary Perkins, On Stage by Leonard Starr. Volume 1: February 10, 1957 – January 11, 1958. Classic Comics Press, 2006. 160 p., $19.95. Comic strip reprints are coming fast and furious lately. Years of classics are being reprinted in high quality editions by a number of publishers: the formally adventurous strips like Little Nemo and [...]