MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

I’ve got a post up at The Hooded Utilitarian today as part of their “Blog vs. Professor” roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature.

Somehow I missed this book when it came out. It’s a kind of textbook for students and general readers on reading comics and the history of bande dessinée in particular. The book as a whole is quite good, covering a wide area though, because of this, occasionally lacking in depth. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole book. There were sections I skimmed. Miller covers history, followed by a variety of approaches to comics: formal analysis, cultural studies, nationalism, gender, autobiography, psychoanalysis. I read the parts I’m interested in and skimmed the others.

Abbott’s article from 1986 seems to be one of the earlier examples in English that takes a more formal approach to discussing comics. Most of what I have that pre-dates this is in French (with a few exceptions). I did a citation search in a few places to see if there was much discussion about this article, but I found little. It’s cited a few times, mostly, I think, because it was a scholarly source that could be cited on comics for some common sense elements of comics (words affect the pictures, pictures affect the words).

Nick Mullins writes about David Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics. I have to say, I was excited by the prospect (aesthetics! comics!) of Carrier’s book until I started reading it. The whole aspect of word balloons being a defining aspect of comics discredited Carrier with me. I never did finish the book.

The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen (1999). Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. U of Mississippi Press, 2007. If McCloud’s Understanding Comics has been considered the de facto comics theory book in the United States, it probably stems from the distinct lack of such theoretical/formal examinations of comics in English. While historical approaches [...]

Looking at how comic strips can be ordered.

How are margins used in various comics?

[Back to Part 4.] If you didn’t see it last time, Neil Cohn clarified one or two things in a comment to part 4. I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, but I was rereading Jaime Hernandez’s “Flies on the Ceiling” and the first page offers an interest example of non-linear panel transitions. [...]

[Parts 1, 2, and 3] I’ve been rereading more of Neil Cohn’s essays on visual language, which provide much food for thought. “Time Frames… Or Not” looks at the idea of space=time in comics. Neil does a fine job on that account, though on the most simple level it seems obvious that space does not [...]

[Part 1, Part 2] More comments on the last part. Neil is pointing me towards his more recent writings, which I will reread, and disagrees with my assessment of what I’m thinking about in re what he is. Maybe I’m reinventing the comics wheel. I’m not that concerned, as I found this interesting, and useful [...]

[Part one is here.] In the comments on part one, Tim Godek noted how Neil Cohn had done some work thinking about and abandoning the idea of panel transitions. I went back and reread Neil’s writings (his book Early Writings on Visual Language). While I won’t argue with Neil’s points in the context he makes [...]

[I'm rambling a bit here folks, as I work through some ideas. This is no finished product and I realize it probably does not make a whole lot of logical, one step-to-the-next sense.] Following up my post on David Mamet’s film book, I’ve been doing some research into montage and film editing. I think there [...]

Somewhere I read about (playwright, screenwriter, director) David Mamet’s book On Directing Film (Viking, 1991) in relation to comics: a brief quote that intrigued me. I no longer remember where I read this, but I did get the book from the library. It’s a slim collection based on lectures Mamet gave at Columbia in 1987. [...]

I recently read both The Art of the Funnies and The Art of the Comic Book (both subtitled “An Aesthetic History”) by R.C. Harvey. I heartily recommend both volumes for those interested in the history of comics from the “Yellow Kid” to recent alt-comics. Both books are collections of essays molded into book form. As [...]

Systeme de la bande dessinée by Thierry Groensteen. Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Groensteen is a member of the Oubapo and a prolific comics theorist, or rather theorist of the bande dessinée. This volume is a long look at the form of comics. I can’t imagine easily summarizing it all. Groensteen’s endeavors to show comics [...]

In the first paragraph of this essay on McCloud’s Reinventing Comics and Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Belgian theorist Jan Baetens writes: For many readers, the analysis of the medium proposed by the first book has always seemed a little simplistic, and not really up-to-date. McCloud’s work had already been accomplished by several other theoreticians, for example [...]