MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long [...]

Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto. Introduction by Max Allan Collins. Kitchen Sink Press, 1991. ISBN: 0878161457. Baseball month starts with this classic comic strip from the 1950′s, Cotton Woods, in an out of print collection from Kitchen Sink which covers a selection of the strips from it’s start in the summer of 1955 through the [...]

On Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007) and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007). I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I [...]

I wonder what it says about my taste or possibly comics publishing that in the last 2 weeks or so my regular monthly order of comics (from the fine folks at Mile High Comics) was almost exclusively reprints of old comic strips. (Edit: I started this post in October and just found it again.) One [...]

My new favorite Peanuts strip (taken from “Schulz and Peanuts” by David Michaels (you’ve heard of that one already, I’m sure)): Yes, that is a talking wall. Awesome.

The Early Years of Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher. Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt. NBM, 2007. 192p., $24.95. A few years back, in an attempt to broaden my literary knowledge (which at the time was fairly limited to the twentieth century), I read my way through a selection of titles from Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. [...]

Looking at how comic strips can be ordered.

Most readers when they think of the way a narrative (novel, comic, tv show) is ordered will think about plot: what Brian Richardson, in his “Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses,” describes as “a teleological sequence of events linked by some principle of causation; that [...]

This is a week late, but I’m still without internet at home and adjusting to my new housing: 1. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978, Translated by David Bellos, 1987): This large novel alone took up a week of reading time. After all my reading of Oulipian works, I decided it was time [...]

Sometimes I read someone else’s post about a topic I’m interested in, and I see a different post that could have been. I’m not always sure my criticism of the post is a product of the content or my reading of it (I’ll often get stuck on one thing and not see past it). But [...]

Ed Champion interviewed Alison Bechdel for his Bat Segundo show (listen to it here) and among other interesting statements is this (slightly edited, mostly for excess verbiage from thinking on her feet) during a discussion of comics and the everyday: “The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it [...]

Mary Perkins, On Stage by Leonard Starr. Volume 1: February 10, 1957 – January 11, 1958. Classic Comics Press, 2006. 160 p., $19.95. Comic strip reprints are coming fast and furious lately. Years of classics are being reprinted in high quality editions by a number of publishers: the formally adventurous strips like Little Nemo and [...]

Krazy & Ignatz 1935-36: A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy and Krazy & Ignatz 1937-38: Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheek in Powdered Beauty by George Herriman. Fantagraphics, 2005-2006. 120 p., $19.95 each. I’ve already reviewed one of the earlier volumes in this reprint series and I don’t have a lot to add to what I [...]