MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

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.

An interesting, though not unique, case of point of view/perspective in comics. Here we have Snowy getting a drink of Captain Haddock’s whiskey. In doing so, he ends up seeing double. We are effectively seeing what Snowy sees, but we are not seeing it from his point of view. We are both outside and inside the character at the same time.

My review of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey) last week was primarily a broader discussion of the series. I didn’t get into any particular images or pages. I did have two pages marked that I wanted to return to, because they offer some examples that I thought were worth sharing.

[This was originally intended for publication elsewhere, thus the attempt at a more formal academic style.] Introduction At some point most students are taught about “point of view”[1] in literature using the tripartite scheme of first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient [2]. While this schema has pedagogical uses, it is not robust [...]

Matthew Brady posted these panels from a Golgo 13 manga. He decided that the meaning of the ellipses in thought balloons means “this character is thinking very hard about the situation, but we’re not privy to his thoughts.” I wonder if it could be an obscuring tactic which foregrounds the idea that we don’t know [...]