MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix (12 volumes). Viz, 2003-2008. I’ve read a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s work over the years, from early Viz issues of Black Jack through to most of the releases from Vertical (Buddha, Dororo, MW, Kirohito) and even a French translation of one of his shorter series (Ayako). I’d rank many of them very [...]

Mike Wenthe has been blogging about a volume of Lone Wolf and Cub everyday in February (there are 28 volumes of the series) over at the Satisfactory Comics blog. It’s well worth spending some time reading and then following for the rest of the month.

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.

Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi. 10 volumes in Japanese. 6 volumes in English to date. Del Rey, 2007-. I looked around for reviews of this manga series. Six volumes have come out from Del Rey, yet I can only find reviews of the first (with some minor exceptions where the reviewer just summarizes plot). People seem to [...]

Looking back at this post about a thought balloon with two vertical rows of ellipses in a manga. I found this quote: Some English-style punctuation, such as exclamation points and question marks, are fairly common but none matches the frequency of the ubiquitous ellipses marks (typically rendered as a vertical row of dots), which further [...]

Something I’ve noted before and was reminded of as I read Inio Asano’s Solanin (Viz, 2008) this week. A lot of manga seems to use a certain layout of panels as seen in this randomly selected spread (142-143). The panels in the lower right and upper left are laid out using a similar structure. In [...]

There’s an analysis of some Akira pages by Josiah Leighton over at his blog Consequentialart’s Sequential Art Class (what a title), which is worth a read. He talks about the use of angled panels to increase the sense of action/movement/chaos and the way eyelines contribute to the effect. As I’ve been reading about and watching [...]

When you look at people reading manga on the train for instance, you can see that when there is dialog on a page, they read them, but when a page is without text, they just breeze through it. And yet, the author’s intention is just the opposite: if there’s a page without text, it’s because [...]

Hayashi, Seiichi. Red Colored Elegy. Trans. by Taro Nettleton. Drawn & Quarterly, 2008. Hardcover. 236 p. $24.95. 9781897299401. By nature comics are elliptical, an art of omission: from iconic art styles to the gaps in time and space created by the panel breakdowns. For the majority of comics, the reader’s work at filling in the [...]

H2 by Mitsuru Adachi. 34 volumes 1992-1999. Scanlation by Mangascreamer (vol 1-29 (so far)). H2 is the only baseball manga I could find scanlations of which weren’t stuck in an annoying online interface. Mangascreamer has done an admirable job in getting out 29 of the 34 total volumes of this series. I’m eagerly awaiting the [...]

The principle technique of storytelling is “analytical montage” (Groensteen L’Univers des Mangas (1991)) in which the sequencing of plates [panels] is very resourceful in comparison with a rather constrained Euro-American montage and page layout. In manga, there is no textual interference. Analytical montage entails the “scattering” of a story event over different frames. A scene [...]

Last week I reread Phoenix Volume 10 by Osamu Tezuka (Viz, 2007) and followed it up with the newly arrived Phoenix Volume 11. These two volumes make up the last story in the series. Last not because it is the ending, but because Tezuka died before finishing (a twelth volume will be published by Viz [...]

Aqua v.1 (of 2) by Kozue Amano (2003). Tokyopop, 2007. ~180p, $9.99. Over two years ago (times flies!) I reviewed three volumes of Kozue Amano’s Aria as translated and published by ADV. Those three were the only volumes released before ADV temporarily stopped publishing. Now Tokyopop has picked up the license for Aria as well [...]

This page struck me as I was reading Volume One of Rye Mitsuke’s and Keiko Takemiya’s Andromeda Stories (Vertical): The layout of the page and composition of the panels directly lead the eye around the page. The first panel (this is unflipped manga so read right to left) uses multiples of the same character to [...]

Yukiko’s Spinach by Frederic Boilet (2001). Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 2006. $18.99. The opening scene in Frederic Boilet’s nouvelle manga Yukiko’s Spinach consists of seven pages, each divided into three vertical panels. They show bright lights, buildings, and gaudy signs but not people. The lights are blurry white circles. In one sequence at the end, a hotel [...]

The Times of Botchan Vol. 3 by Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa (1987). Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 2007. $19.99. Way back in February of last year I wrote a review of the first two volumes of The Times of Botchan. This past month Fanfare/Ponent Mon finally realized volume 3 of the 10 volume series. Why not go [...]

I’ve been meaning to reread all the volumes of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix (Viz Comics) available in English and write something about the series as a whole, but having just rest the most recent two, volumes 7 and 8 (comprising two long parts of “Civil War” and the short “Robe of Feathers”) I decided to just [...]

The other day, Scott pointed to an article on Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I was in need of something to read on the train, so I pulled down my copy of his The Sound of the Mountain (1954), which I had read a few years ago. I had gone through a period of reading some [...]