MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Tatsumi, Yoshihiro. A Drifting Life. Drawn & Quarterly, 2009. 856p. ISBN: 9781897299746. This massive autobiographical manga has been appearing on a lot of the early best of 2009 lists, and while I can, to a point see, why, I’m not in agreement. A Drifting Life is, basically, the story of Tatsumi’s early entry into the [...]

Yoshinaga, Fumi. Ooku: The Inner Chambers v.1. Viz, 2009. ISBN: 9781421527475. I wasn’t convinced I’d keep reading this series after my first reading of volume 1. The concept of the series seems right out of a sociopolitical sci-fi novel like something Joanna Russ would write: a plague kills off only men, leaving Japan with a [...]

Porcellino, John. Map of My Heart. Drawn & Quarterly, 2009. 360p. ISBN: 9781897299937. King-Cat Classix from 2007, the first big collection of King-Cat comics from Drawn & Quarterly, was often a tiring read. John Porcellino’s beautiful minimalism and poetic comics did not appear fully formed. It was only towards the end of that volume that [...]

Deforge, Michael. Lose #1. Koyama, 2009. $5 from http://kingtrash.com/comics.html I’ve read a bunch of lamentations for the almost lost form of the single artist indie comic pamphlet. When I started reading comics in the early 90s my local shop had a surprisingly large section of indie comics of all sort. Slowly they have been dwindling [...]

Anger, Agnes, C. Che Salazar, and Abel Jiminez. The First Transmission of the Minimalist Comics Collective. DIY Jet Comics, 2009. 24p. $3.50. This is a blatantly experimental comic, the title alone should tell you that. With a group name like “Minimalist Comics Collective” I was expecting to find some kind of manifesto within the pages [...]

Taniguchi, Jiro. A Distant Neighborhood v.1. Fanfare/Pontent Mon, 2009. ISBN: 9788492444281. I read the first volume (of two) of Jiro Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood the other night. I am so far not very impressed. At this point the story reads like a partially autobiographical story that indulges in the often wished for desire to “do [...]

A new project, overlapping with my “30 Days of Comics” posts, I’m going to try to post 30 days in a row on 30 different comics. I really need to clear off the desk, floor, shelves that are piling up with “to review” books. I’m not sure how this will go, some will be full [...]

My review of The Complete Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty (Buenaventura, 2009) is now up at du9 in both English and French.

This post originally appeared at The Hooded Utilitarian as part of a roundtable of eurocomics. The comics (or should I say bande dessinee) duo of Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot have made only two appearances in English: a two page spread in Kramer’s Ergot 7 and also a short comic (“The Pharaohs of Egypt”) that [...]

Le Voyage brings on these thoughts. Baudoin is a wonderful visual stylist–his art is dynamic, engaging, lovely to behold–but his writing, or at least the story of this volume, is far less interesting, in fact it seems rather clichéd to me. Simon, the protagonist, one day leaves his wife, child, home, and job and starts off on a voyage. This flight is unplanned, rather at the breakfast table his head strangely opens up and starts showing images above it.

This abstract comic is in L’Association’s “patte de mouche” series of small comics. Like a professionally published minicomic, the book is about the size of a quartered piece of paper, printed in black on off-white paper with a thicker, rougher cover printed in two shades of purple. This series, at least the ones I’ve seen, tend to be short, experimental comics.

In this case, Swiss artist Baladi has drawn a brief abstract comic about a “small line” (that’s the title). The comic amounts to the voyage of a short line through a series of encounters with other lines of various size, shape, and density.

I knew I’d love this manga as soon as I heard about it, a long running series about food, not where food is just part of the setting but rather an integral part of each story. Oishinbo has been running in Japan since 1983 and totals over 100 volumes. Viz is here translating the “A La Carte” series, a repackaging of stories from across the title’s run into thematic volumes. That immediately tells you one thing: you don’t read this for the larger narrative arc or the character development.

When I met Allan Haverholm at this year’s MoCCA festival, I knew he had some new comics for the show from following him on Twitter, but I hadn’t seen much of his work. It’s always a bonus to meet someone in comics and to actually like their work. I bought the full suite of Allan’s comics and I was not disappointed. The works I got from Allan all share conceptual connection to music, providing an intriguing way to think about comics.

Here’s a list of my complete series on Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix (1967-88) (Translation in 11 volumes: Viz, 2003-2008). Starting overview of the series Volume 1: Dawn Volume 2: Future Volume 3: Yamato Volume 3: Space Volume 4: Karma Volume 5: Resurrection Volume 8: Robe of Feathers Volume 6: Nostalgia Volume 7 and 8: Civil War [...]

After a little delay I’ve reached the last Phoenix story: “Sun”. This story was published between 1986 and 1988 with Tezuka dying early in 1989. It was one of his last works, and the last completed in this series. That is not to say this is the ending of the series. It is said Tezuka planned to continue these stories so that the past and future time lines converged at some point in the present. In this regard, “Sun” is an aptly fitting place for the series to stop, as the story incorporates both a past and a future timeline into the same story.