MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Trains Are… Mint by Oliver East. Blank Slate Books, 2008. Hardcover, color, 122p, $24.99. (You can order from here.) Trains Are… Mint #5 by Oliver East. Rolling Stock Press, 2008. 52p. color mini, 5 pounds. Oliver East walks around England (Manchester and its environs), from train station to train station, trying to follow the tracks [...]

Jon Vermilyea and Frank Santoro. Cold Heat Special #1. 11″ x 16″, 16 p. $3. Dash Shaw and Frank Santoro. Cold Heat Special #3. 5″ x 8.5″, 16 p. $3. Chris Cornwell. The Chunky Gnars: A Chocolate Gun Tribute. 7.125″ x 5.5″, 16p. $3. Posts following up on my best of 2007 list seems to [...]

Baseball month isn’t over yet, but due to other obligations, my post on H2 is delayed a bit. In the meantime here’s something I found recently. This is piece by Raymond Pettibon from Raymond Pettibon: Plots Laid Thick (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona : Distributed by Actar, 2002). This one’s for Andrei.

Awhile back, Tom Spurgeon linked to Trains Are Mint #4 by Oliver East. About 100 pages of ink and watercolor wash accompanying text about a narrator camping around Norway. The whole thing’s online so go read it. Despite the lack of much in the way of story, the narrative voice is enough to keep the [...]

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations by Joel Smith. Yale UP, 2006. [All Steinberg images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.] I saw this book in the new books shelf at a bookstore and recalled how I’ve never really looked at Steinberg’s work, despite the praise I’ve heard. So, I grabbed the library’s copy and [...]

Ninja by Brian Chippendale. Picturebox, 2006. 11″ x 17″. 144p. My selection of best comics for the year should be up tomorrow, and a last minute addition to the list is Brian Chippendale’s massive Ninja, an impressive volume from production to content. I read it twice in a row, and I’m sure I’ll be going [...]

Sorry for the lack of quality posting lately… I should my review of Brian Chippendale’s Ninja up Friday. In the meantimes go check out Andrei Molotiu’s Blotcomics blog, where’s he’s been posting a slew of beautiful abstract comics in the last week.

Since this is Tintin week, I thought I’d share a few panels from a fantastic sequence in Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald. Calculus, the hard of hearing inventor, has created a color television (seemingly unconcerned that such an item was already invented at the time as one of his friends points out). Hergé’s love of abstract [...]

Andrei Molotiu pointed me towards the works of Pierre Alechinsky, a painter I was not familiar with, though I have heard of the group he was associated with, COBRA (some of whom later went on to join with parts of the Lettrist group to form the Situationist International). A quick Google Image search will bring [...]

I posted previously about Cy Twombly’s work. As I was returning the monograph on him I had back to the library, I scanned two images to share. The first is a “polyptych in 9 parts” called “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963). I’d imagine my interest in it is obvious. Layed out as it is on [...]

Alcoholalia: a remix of Tony Millionaire’s “Maakies” no. 35 by Andrei Molotiu. 2004. 24 pages with cardstock cover. $4. (Available from the Poopsheet Shop.) Andrei Molotiu is best known for his abstract comics. This particular comic is, as the subtitle states, a remix of a Tony Millionaire Maakies strip. Molotiu reprints the original strip on [...]

King-Cat #65: Places by John Porcellino. Spit and a Half, Oct 2005. $3. A new issue of King-Cat is always a cause for celebration. John Porcellino’s stories are filled with a sense of wonder in the everyday. His comics are composed with a beautiful simplicity that is either very carefully considered or the product of [...]

In light of this week’s experiment with iconography and reading Neil Cohn’s list of “Conventional Representation in VL” I was thinking about levels of abstraction in comics. Conventional iconographic elements (such as hearts, arrows, skulls, etc.) are really just an extreme level of representational abstraction. Comics are no stranger to different levels of abstraction across [...]