MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

The Spring semester has started, and I’m taking a class. Dr John Lent (publisher of the International Journal of Comic Art and author of numerous books and articles) was teaching a graduate course on comic art at my University, so I signed up. Why do you care, dear reader? Well, this class, and more specifically [...]

Somehow I missed this book when it came out. It’s a kind of textbook for students and general readers on reading comics and the history of bande dessinée in particular. The book as a whole is quite good, covering a wide area though, because of this, occasionally lacking in depth. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole book. There were sections I skimmed. Miller covers history, followed by a variety of approaches to comics: formal analysis, cultural studies, nationalism, gender, autobiography, psychoanalysis. I read the parts I’m interested in and skimmed the others.

Abbott’s article from 1986 seems to be one of the earlier examples in English that takes a more formal approach to discussing comics. Most of what I have that pre-dates this is in French (with a few exceptions). I did a citation search in a few places to see if there was much discussion about this article, but I found little. It’s cited a few times, mostly, I think, because it was a scholarly source that could be cited on comics for some common sense elements of comics (words affect the pictures, pictures affect the words).

Here’s the slidecast of the presentation I did in Second Life today at the “Mini-Morph: A Second Life Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference.” Presentations were focused on comics in the classroom and comics courses. So I made this presentation about using transformative constraint to get non-drawing students creating comics. I recorded this audio the evening before the presentation as a practice session, so it differs from whatever I said at the actual event.

Ken Parille’s post about the red circle in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 is a great example of braiding in comics and a brilliant post in itself. Read, enjoy. Ware has often compared comics to music, and in ANL 19 Ware uses this red circle as a kind of visual leitmotif, a “musical theme” [...]

My review of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey) last week was primarily a broader discussion of the series. I didn’t get into any particular images or pages. I did have two pages marked that I wanted to return to, because they offer some examples that I thought were worth sharing.

Carroll, Noel. On Criticism. Routledge, 2009. 9780415396219. I’ve been trying to read more about criticism lately with some hope of improving my writings for this blog (and potential branch out to writing for other places). What is the purpose of criticism and how is it accomplished? In this short and readable volume Noel Carroll, a [...]

During a panel at the American Library Association conference this summer about wordless books/comics, Charles Hatfield mentioned the term anchoring in relation to text/image interaction. I questioned him about it later and he sent me to Barthes’ Image, Music, Text (Hill & Wang, 1977), a collection of essays translated by Stephen Heath, where is found [...]

By way of a column by Jennifer de Guzman where she is lamenting the lack of depth and breadth in comics criticism/blogs, I was lead to Katherine Farmar’s two part (part one, part two) comparison of a page from Gaiman’s Sandman and a page from Matt Fraction’s Thor. She is mostly concerned with the text, [...]

But the point of having categories like these isn’t to pin labels. In part knowing them allows us simply to notice things in films that might otherwise remain a part of an undifferentiated flow of images. They enable us to see underlying principles that make films into dynamic systems rather than collections of techniques. They [...]

…schemata… are cognitive frameworks for the meaningful organisation of various interrelated concepts based on previous experiences… The schema expresses typical information, not the unique features of a specific thing… There are a lot of basic conditions (schemata) needed to read a comic. A crucial schema to understand a comic is the elliptic and fragmented nature [...]

[This was originally intended for publication elsewhere, thus the attempt at a more formal academic style.] Introduction At some point most students are taught about “point of view”[1] in literature using the tripartite scheme of first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient [2]. While this schema has pedagogical uses, it is not robust [...]

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 [...]

My previous post about using words instead of images (borrowing an example from Ben Towle) was a bit of a throwaway post, a brief thought that I did not elaborate. Thanks to some of my insightful commenters, I am forced to give more thought to my post. The point of my original post (almost completely [...]

What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services: 1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware. 2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them [...]