MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

While I haven’t been posting here much, I have been working on some projects. One of them is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve tentatively called it the “Stolen Birthday Present” constraint. As I read more and more archives of comic strips (so many excellent ones to choose from [...]

Papercutter #2 (2006) and #4 (2007). Tugboat Press. 28p and 32p, respectively. $3.00. Issue 2 features Becca Taylor, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover, and Liz Prince. Issue 4 features Sarah Oleksyk, John Porcellino, and Vanessa Davis. Papercutter is a short anthology that features one longer story and two shorter ones by different artists. Somewhere along [...]

The latest issue of the excellent online lit journal The Quarterly Conversation is now up for your reading enjoyment and edification. Among other interviews, articles, and reviews it includes my review of David Markson’s The Last Novel. Markson is one of my favorite authors, and for some reason this is the first time I’ve written [...]

American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kolchalka Book Two January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005 by James Kolchalks. Top Shelf, 2007. $19.95. Daily at http://americanelf.com/ American Elf is the only work of Kolchalka I’ve really enjoyed over the years. Something about the strip that maintains my interest and attention is lacking from [...]

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 [...]

Metcalf, Paul. Genoa (1965). In Collected Works 1956-1976. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1996. I first learned of Paul Metcalf when I was searching for a Poe quote and found it in an interview with Metcalf on the Center for Book Culture site. What I read was enough to interest me, so I put his name [...]

Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Marc Saporta’s book in a box Composition No. 1 is one of those books that people like to refer to in an off-hand-”it’s a book in a box where the pages can be read randomly”-way, but almost no one reads it [...]