MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

The Spring semester has started, and I’m taking a class. Dr John Lent (publisher of the International Journal of Comic Art and author of numerous books and articles) was teaching a graduate course on comic art at my University, so I signed up. Why do you care, dear reader? Well, this class, and more specifically [...]

Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”. Issac also commented: It’d [...]

I spoke in Second Life at Met@Morph, the first annual Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference, on Friday October 3rd (today). My presentation was called “Freedom within Boundaries: the Theory and Practice of Constraint in Comics.” I only had 20 minutes so it’s a fairly shallow look at the topic. You can see the slides here [...]

A s’en tenir à cette analyse, une narration en images est tout à fait possible (elle repose sur la monstration et est permise par le caractère d’énonçable de l’image). Paradoxalement, c’est l’opération de description qui est impossible dans le récit en images. Tous les éléments de l’image sont rendus avec le même degré de précision [...]

Awhile back I made a list of ways to depict music in comics. This strip from Gordo by Gus Arriola makes a good addendum. Love those abstractions.

Austin linked to this screencast by Dave Gray “Forms, fields and flows”. Watching it, I realized how little comics take advantage of “fields” that are not or a kind of pictorial perspective type nature. That is, you don’t see many charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, etc. I guess that type of image/panel would step outside the [...]

But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. [...]

This idea of “analytical montage” (see previous post) is, as I see it, a variation on McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions. In describing this concept it works better to think of it as a narrative method than a simple matter of panel transitions. This style of narration in comics is becoming more and more prominent as manga [...]

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 [...]

“I also think a comic, because of repeated images, can create an atmosphere of a place. There are certain things going on in the background that you don’t have to mention over and over again. If you’re writing about how much graffiti was on the wall in prose, you write it once, you don’t write [...]

Two quotes from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Penguin, 2006). Lynch discusses transcendental meditation and a lot about artistic process in short chapters. Most interesting for the insight offered onto his films and how they come together in different ways, and how their meanings are sometimes planned, sometimes aleatory, and [...]

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 [...]

Finder Volume 8: Five Crazy Women by Carla Speed McNeil. Lightspeed Press. 2006. 128 p., $15.95. The latest volume of Finder is the eighth. I’ve only read three of the other volumes, but I’ve been following along online for the past months (almost a year now). As far as I can tell, the series is [...]

Comics Comics issue 1, edited by Timothy Hodler and Dan Nadel. Lime/Picturebox, 2006. Free ($5 for paper, free from the website). 16 p., color. The debut issue of Comics Comics the new comics periodical offers great promise for the future. It’s probably easiest for me to just go through it in order, rather than try [...]

I managed to spend about 3.5 hours at the MOCCA festival in New York on Sunday. I wandered the exhibit hall for over an hour, browsing and buying. There were more tables than I expected but the majority of it looked either really bad or really boring (it’s hard walking by all those lonely faces [...]

From Chris Tamarri’s review of Beg the Question by Bob Fingerman at his blog, Crisis/Boring Change: So many of what we call graphic novels aren’t novels, not really. You can usually discount those books that are collections of previously printed materials. Sure, serialization doesn’t necessarily render the ultimate collection a bastardization of form, yes, right, [...]