MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Satisfactory Comics #6 by Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe (2005). 28p., b+w, 5.5″ x 8.5″, with a mini-mini (18p., 2.75″ X 2″) and 8 cards (2.75″ x 2.25″). $3.50ppd from Isaac.Cates AT liu.edu Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe love to collaborate and experiment. They do all their work together and often they include ideas, art, [...]

Revelations by Christian Hill. 2003. 24p., b+w, $3.50. Available from Kameleo Comics. In the wake of the ongoing “pictureless comics” investigation, I was made aware of Christian Hill’s mini “Revelations”. While the whole comic is not “pictureless” it is, for the most part (18 pages), a comic that takes place in total darkness with only [...]

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden Chamberlain Brothers, 2005. 208 p. (black and white with 8 color pages). $16.95. I first found Matt Madden’s Exercises in Style (sample pages through that link) online a couple years ago and now finally there is a complete book under the title 99 [...]

After I posted somewhere about rhyme in comics, Matt Madden sent me his version of how to construct a pantoum in comics. A traditional pantoum is made of quatrains with a rhyme scheme of abab. In the second quatrain the first line is the same as the second line of the previous quatrain, and the [...]

In this post I quoted Raymond Queneau on his novel Le Chiendent: I gave a form, a rhythm to what I was writing. I fixed for myself rules as strict as those of the sonnet. The characters didn’t appear and disappear by chance, the same way for the places and the different modes of expression [...]

Oubapo. Oupus 1 (L’Association, 1997). The Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle’s (Oubapo) first Oupus book is a combination of essays and examples (see my review of Oupus 3). The biggest part of the book is Thierry Groensteen’s “Un premier bouquet de contraintes” (A First Bouquet/Bunch of Constraints), an enumeration (with examples cited and occasionally pictured) [...]

Having read more about comics constraints in the past week (thanks to my Oupus spending spree) and having been reading a lot more comics lately, I’ve been thinking about new constraints. Most of the comics constraints I’ve seen or read about are based on either the words or the pictures in a comics. They isolate [...]

Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée. Oupus 3: Les Vacances de l’Oubapo. L’Association, 2000. After a long time, I finally got ahold of one of the Oubapo’s books. This volume of their Oupus collects 36 strips published in the French newspaper Liberation during the summer of 2000. Six artists (Lewis Trondheim, Killoffer, Jean-Chistophe Menu, Francois Ayroles, Lécroart, [...]

After reading two of his novels (Never Again and Negativeland), I contacted Doug Nufer, and he agreed to answer a few questions. Thankfully, he had no trouble going on in depth and even managed to answer a few of my questions previous to me asking them. My questions and comments are in bold. (This is [...]

I’ve mentioned Matt Madden’s comic work a number of the times in the past, including his 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (my post on it) and A Fine Mess #2. He made a comment one of my posts, and we ended up exchanging a few emails. He agreed to answer some [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Exercises in Style (1947). Translated by Barbara Wright (1958). New Directions, 1981. (A French version is available at ubu.com.) In one of her two introductions (1958 and 1981) to this book Barbara Wright notes that Exercises in Style (EiS) is one of Raymond Queneau’s best-selling volumes in France. This comes as a bit [...]

As I am putting up a brief review of Queneau’s Exercises in Style soon, I decided to (presumptiously) write my own using Queneau’s story as an example for the unfamiliar reader. Thus, I hearby humbly submit: “Recipe” 1 young man with long neck1 hat with encircling cord1 older man, who steps on toes when possibleliberal [...]

Nufer, Doug. Never Again. New York: Black Square Editions, 2004. Also available online at ubu.com. I think it’s safe to say that there is no novel like this one. This is a constrained novel on the level of Perec’s La Disparition in its level of ambition and difficulty. Doug Nufer (also author of the novel [...]

Nufer, Doug. Negativeland. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. I first heard of Doug Nufer online. He wrote an article in Seattle’s “The Stranger” about the Oulipo Compendium. Following some links and searches I discovered his novel Never Again at ubu.com and then this novel, Negativeland. With glowing blurbs by Harry Mathews and Gilbert Sorrentino, the gold standard [...]

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Oulipo Factor: the Procedural Poetics of Christan Bök and Caroline Bergvall.” Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 23-45. I rarely delve into poetry here. It’s not a form of literature I am very familiar with. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to really appreciate a lot of poetry, and I’ve always been more into [...]

Jan Baetens. “Comic Strips and Constrainted Writing.” Image & Narrative (October 2003). This short essay feels more like the precis of a longer work. It offers a lot of ideas but fails to back them up with anything concrete. Baetens, who has written a lot on both comics and constraint separately, here brings the two [...]

I’m currently reading The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema edited by Paul Hammond. In his introduction Hammond discusses the classic Surrealist film experience where they entered theatres randomly, watched a bit of a movie, and then moved on to another theater. Breton and company would move from one theater to the [...]