MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Matthey, Pascal. “A la plage.” Grandpapier.org, 2009. 15 p. –. “Greenfield Village.” Grandpapier.org, 2007. 10 p. These are two similar works by the artist Pascal Matthey from the Belgian webcomics site Grandpapier. Over ten four-panel pages “Greenfield Village” does not so much tell a story as create a space. I am tempted to call it [...]

DuBois, Gaylord (writer) and Jesse Marsh (artist). Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Volumes 1-3. Dark Horse, 2009. If you’d told me a couple years ago that I would be reading and enjoying a Tarzan comic from the 50s, I would have scoffed. But, this stuff is good. After reading a few convincing articles on Jesse [...]

I’ve had the two volumes of Alex Toth: Edge of Genius on my “to review” shelf/pile for quite awhile. I finally decided that I’ll just write about one of the stories, the last one in volume 2 (theoretically the most recent of all the stories in these volumes[1]) and one of the most refined looking of these stories from the earlier part of Toth’s career.

This is a bit of a ramble, as I read/write my way through the story. I didn’t want to reproduce the whole story here, but I have included a lot of images to keep my commentary comprehensible.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 8: Civil War (Part Two) and Robe of Feathers (1980, 1971). Viz, 2006. ISBN: 9781421505183. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 5: Resurrection. It may seem I’m posting out of order, skipping from Volume 5 to Volume 8, but this disorder is created by Viz, not me. The story in Phoenix [...]

Day Four of the Panel Madness Week blogaround arrives. The previous post is up at The Fortress of Fortitude where the Keeper writes about a panel from Challengers of the Unknown #2 by Dave Wood and Jack Kirby. Mazzucchelli, David. “Discovering America.” Rubber Blanket 2 (1992). p. 38. Certain works have had lasting impact on [...]

There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the [...]

Mykx pointed over to this comic by Joseph Lambert. Of particular interest to me are two pages where Lambert forces the reader to follow a right to left path through the page/panels. This can be a tricky endeavor for readers trained to go left-right, left-right, left-right down a page. Lambert uses an reverse-L shaped panel [...]

This week I spent an autumn afternoon watching Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (Criterion, 2008). Then I spent an autumn evening watching it a second time with the excellent commentary by David Bordwell (whose blog I highly recommend). His is one of those rare commentaries by someone who has interesting and intellingent things to say [...]

This panel/page from Shannon Gerard‘s Unspent Love (found at Top Shelf 2.0, another one of their best offerings) is a slightly surreal at first but then subtly brilliant composition. Gerard has overlapped two moments in time, showing us the protagonist waiting for the subway. We see the train approaching, the woman looking forward, and then [...]

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino. Hyperion, 2008. 102p., hardcover, 2 color, $16.99. ISBN: 9781423100386. I’m like a broken record when it comes to John Porcellino’s work: I love its beautiful minimalism and quiet, thoughtful narratives. A new long work by him is cause for celebration, and this volume does not disappoint. Thoreau at Walden [...]

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 [...]

Over the weekend I watched Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds, a 1959 remake of his own earlier A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) (both available on a 2 disc set from Criterion). The story involves a wandering acting troupe, whose master takes them to a seaside town where his former lover and illegitimate son live. The [...]

Yesterday, Craig Yoe noted the 56th anniversary of the first Sunday Peanuts page. What a wonderful, simple use of composition and page layouts. Schulz uses a basic nine panel grid altered by 2 symmetrically placed wide panels: at the beginning for the title (which is seen in all the Sundays) and at the end. Charlie [...]

From Tarzan #4 (Dell, 1948), art by Jesse Marsh. (Read the full issue.) This panel jumped out at me for its simple geometric composition. A few colored planes, one in front of the other, in a cascade from left to right off the page (this is the last panel on the page). The exception to [...]

White Rapids [Rapide Blanc] by Pascal Blanchet. Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 156p, $27.95. Pascal Blanchet’s White Rapids is a most unusual book with a sharp visual style and a story that is unlike just about any comic you’ll find. The book tells in brief the history of the town of White Rapids, Quebec. The town [...]

I found this Louise Bourgeois drawing from 1944 in “Drawing from the Modern: 1880-1945″ (Museum of Modern Art, 2004): Click for larger. Something about it appeals to me. The repeated lines are likes waves, the ocean, sound, an ekg, abstract mountains, or a topographic map. The peaks travel across the page, down and to the [...]

This page struck me as I was reading Volume One of Rye Mitsuke’s and Keiko Takemiya’s Andromeda Stories (Vertical): The layout of the page and composition of the panels directly lead the eye around the page. The first panel (this is unflipped manga so read right to left) uses multiples of the same character to [...]