MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Lindon asked me, one day, if I knew what this new literary movement could be called. Back then, I had dodged the question, but now, eighteen years later, I think I can answer it. It took me quite some time, about twenty years of reflection, but I found the answer. The answer is in the [...]

I’ve been following Tym Godek’s blog for quite awhile now, and I’m finally getting around to mentioning a few interesting comics he’s put up. This post features a number of autobiographical/diary strips from late October. I always enjoy Tym’s clear and simple style, but it’s his penchant for formal play that makes some of the [...]

On the one hand, everyday life is to be castigated for its relentless monotony and deathly tedium. For instance in Nadja, Breton envisages everyday life as the vortex that will obliterate the marvellous: “She was sucked back into the whirlwind of ordinary life continuing around her and eager to force her, among other concessions, to [...]

All these are but memories that delude and inflame, all are desires of the night, but Georgette had understood that, to be beautiful and desired, she must identify herself with the night, with the quotidian mystery. Soupault, Philippe. Translated by William Carlos Williams. Last Nights of Paris. Exact Change, 1992. p.50. (my emphasis) Bonus quote: [...]

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long [...]

The latest Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary authors (though I seem to have only posted about him once): MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae? [...]

Chippendale, Brian. Maggots. Picturebox Inc, 2007. 4″ x 6″, 344 p. $21.95. ISBN: 9780978972264. I listed Brian Chippendale’s Ninja as one of my favorite comics of 2006. It was my first reading of a long work by Chippendale, my experience up to that point a few brief pages in an anthology here or there. Long [...]

On Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007) and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007). I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I [...]

How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless [...]

The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as “rational.” The everyday implies on the one hand cycles, nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction, desire and its fulfillment, life and death, [...]

Aqua v.1 (of 2) by Kozue Amano (2003). Tokyopop, 2007. ~180p, $9.99. Over two years ago (times flies!) I reviewed three volumes of Kozue Amano’s Aria as translated and published by ADV. Those three were the only volumes released before ADV temporarily stopped publishing. Now Tokyopop has picked up the license for Aria as well [...]

American Elf: The Collected Sketchbook Diaries of James Kolchalka Book Two January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2005 by James Kolchalks. Top Shelf, 2007. $19.95. Daily at http://americanelf.com/ American Elf is the only work of Kolchalka I’ve really enjoyed over the years. Something about the strip that maintains my interest and attention is lacking from [...]

Ed Champion interviewed Alison Bechdel for his Bat Segundo show (listen to it here) and among other interesting statements is this (slightly edited, mostly for excess verbiage from thinking on her feet) during a discussion of comics and the everyday: “The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it [...]

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1986). Vintage, 1990 (latest edition). 144 p., $11.95. Sometimes I buy books at used bookstore and then forget I have them. I forgot I even owned this book until I read something about in online and realized it was on my shelf. Am I glad I read this? Yes. What [...]