MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

What do I look for in a comic?

My selections from the judging.

I’ve got a post up at The Hooded Utilitarian today as part of their “Blog vs. Professor” roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature.

I was over at the Digital Comics Museum, grabbing some Jesse Marsh comics. While, checking out some of the most downloaded comics at the site, I found these examples of the classic visual trope of the narrating head, in Phantom Lady #22 (Fox, 1949) (I assume the draw of this issue is the Matt Baker [...]

David Bordwell is the kind of critic we need in comics. His brand of poetics overlaps quite a bit with Ken Parille’s analytical criticism”. If you’re not reading his (and Kristin Thompson’s, his wife and also a prominent film scholar) blog, you’re missing out on some great essays (always well illustrated) on film, that often [...]

There’s a roundtable going on at The Comics Journal, about the Best American Comics Criticism anthology. I wrote a little bit about it a few weeks ago. So far, the entries (six at this point), are oddly divided into contributors (Ben Schwartz, Jeet Heer, and Brian Doherty), who are mostly positive about the book, and [...]

Over at The Comics Journal, Kent Worcester offers some commentary on the Abstract Comics discussion from the other week. I should clarify that the Trondheim piece in question (from La Nouvelle Pornographie) was not necessarily a candidate for the book (I have no idea). It is a book of its own published by L’Association. I’d [...]