MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Buzzati, Dino. Poem Strip [1969]. Translated by Marina Harss. NYRB, 2009. ISBN: 9781590173237. New York Review Books publishes quite a number of excellent novels, including one of my favorites Witch Grass by Raymond Queneau. This Italian comic from the 1969 is certainly a bit of an odd choice for them. Outside of the works themselves, [...]

The number of comics in the “to blog” pile in my office is a little overwhelming. Some are slated for longer appreciations, but many, I suspect would benefit just as well from a quicker look at the highlights or just whatever caught my interest in the work. Or maybe, as happened in this case, a [...]

I don’t think I’d call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction “anti-intellectualism.” Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can’t be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It’s more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it [...]

…”graphic novel” is an odd and imperfect term, I admit, since it sounds — to those unfamiliar with the medium — like it refers to a type of novel. But it’s the term we have — the “wrong and only name for it” (to borrow a phrase from David Hartwell in referring to another publishing [...]

From Chris Tamarri’s review of Beg the Question by Bob Fingerman at his blog, Crisis/Boring Change: So many of what we call graphic novels aren’t novels, not really. You can usually discount those books that are collections of previously printed materials. Sure, serialization doesn’t necessarily render the ultimate collection a bastardization of form, yes, right, [...]