MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Here’s the slidecast of the presentation I did in Second Life today at the “Mini-Morph: A Second Life Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference.” Presentations were focused on comics in the classroom and comics courses. So I made this presentation about using transformative constraint to get non-drawing students creating comics. I recorded this audio the evening before the presentation as a practice session, so it differs from whatever I said at the actual event.

I’m going to be presenting in Second Life again (see my presentation from October). Here’s the official announcement, though my presentation topic has been changed: Mini-Morph: A Second Life Web Comics Comic-Con and Conference. March 18, 2009, 9:00 – 1:00 SL/PST We’re proud to present a special half-day conference devoted to discussing the comics survey [...]

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 [...]

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now [...]

Every task involves constraint, Solve the thing without complaint; There are magic links and chains Forged to loose our rigid brains. Strictures, structures, though they bind, Strangely liberate the mind. James E. Falen. Quoted in Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (p. 272) by Douglas Hofstadter. (Thanks to Stephen [...]

As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of [...]

Those of you who know who E. Gary Gygax is have surely already heard, and those who don’t know wouldn’t care, that he died the other day. Gygax is forever linked to the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons as one of the co-creators (the most famous and recognized of them). I owe a lot to [...]

Some introductory examples of constraint in comics.

While I haven’t been posting here much, I have been working on some projects. One of them is an idea I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I’ve tentatively called it the “Stolen Birthday Present” constraint. As I read more and more archives of comic strips (so many excellent ones to choose from [...]

[This is a preliminary definition.] 0. I will attempt to define my conception of a constraint as used in relation to artistic works, focusing on the literary, though there are certainly applications for film, music, painting, etc. Contrary to what much literary criticism and theory has tried to assert, I don’t believe literature or the [...]

All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. City Lights, 2007. 178 p, color, hardcover. $24.95. View the online archive. I like to think I keep up on what’s new in comics, so I wonder how it is that I found this book by happenstance on the shelf of Million Year Picnic in Cambridge while vacationing in [...]

Writings for the Oulipo by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 68p. Famiy Archaeology and Other Poems by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 80p. Ian Monk is an English member of the Oulipo, mostly known as a translator. In these two books we find some of his non-translated work, mostly poems. Both are highly [...]

The Best of Dinosaur Comics 2003-2005 A.D.: Your whole family is made of meat by Ryan North. Quack!Media, 2006. $14.99, 250p. If there’s any webcomic that fits into a Oubapo mold, it is Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. North decided to do a webcomic, but he couldn’t draw. Instead of following the Trondheim path of learning [...]

I wrote a few months ago about Matt Madden’s idea for a comics pantoum. I finally decided to take on the challenge for an episode of Maroon. While this episode is not due to be published for a few weeks in the sequence of Maroon, I’m offering it here, early. Maroon, Episode 32, Pantoum [Edit: [...]

Mister O by Lewis Trondheim (2002). NBM, 2004. 32p., 8.5″ x 11.5″, color hardcover, $13.95. MIster O–a circle with stick arms and legs, two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth–comes to a crevice. He wants to continue on his way, but he must cross the crevice first. He tries using whatever or [...]