MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

My selections from the judging.

There’s a roundtable going on at The Comics Journal, about the Best American Comics Criticism anthology. I wrote a little bit about it a few weeks ago. So far, the entries (six at this point), are oddly divided into contributors (Ben Schwartz, Jeet Heer, and Brian Doherty), who are mostly positive about the book, and [...]

After a rather than long period of minimal content on this blog, it seems indecent that I write a piece about a book of comics criticism. But, part of the silence was a renewed effort in making comics, and part of it is an indecision about my writing about comics: what are my goals, how [...]

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 [...]

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk. Da Capo, 2007. 406p, $22.95. I hope the title of Douglas Wolk’s book was forced on him by the publisher, because not only is it a misnomer for what is contained within but it is kind of pretentious to boot. I am [...]

Everyone’s A Critic: The Best Criticism of 2007 round-up that I participated in is now up. You can see my runners-up here. The choices by the other participants are disappointing to me. Some of them seem to have a strange idea of what constitutes “criticism,” which is a post for another day. There are a [...]

Chris Mautner asked a bunch of comics critics/reviewers/bloggers to select their favorite piece of comics criticism for his “Everyone’s A Critic” column at Newsarama. Once I started looking around, I found a few pieces that I enjoyed over the past year. They skew towards the longer or recent, as my memory fails me, and I [...]

Chris Mautner’s latest “Everybody’s Critic” column at Newsarama is called “There is no language in our lungs” and concerns the issue of critical vocabulary/terminology in comics. It includes a (rather long) response from me. Worth the read. Matthew Brady offers the idea of some kind of wiki dictionary for comics terms, which is an idea [...]

Tintin and the Secret of Literature by Tom McCarthy. Granta, 2006. 14.99 pounds (UK only as far as I can tell) A rare book about Tintin in English, Tom McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature so far is a UK only publication (you can order it from Granta’s website though), a 200 page hardcover [...]

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 [...]

A couple bloggers have started a new blog called Graphic Language focused on comics related interview. They start off with a bang interviewing Douglas Wolk who writes monthly comics reviews for Salon (excellent stuff) and wrote the long Cerebus article in a recent issue of The Believer. He gets asked about criticism in general and [...]

Kelly Cooper’s latest column It’s All In The Timing is up at Comixpedia, wherein she takes up R.C. Harvey’s books (on my recommendation, it seems (I’m mentioned in the first paragraph)). She addresses the issue of looking at comics criticism instead of other types of criticism, and is looking for more examples of comics criticism. [...]

Kelly J Cooper’s latest “Webcomic Reader” column at Comixpedia is titled Themes are Cool and takes a look at the concepts of theme, leitmotif, and motif. Go read.