MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

I was up in the stacks looking for books on sumi-e, when I discovered Haiku and Haiga: Moments in Word and Image (Hotei, 2006; ISBN: 9789074822862). I wasn’t familiar with the term haiga. Turns out it is a haikai poem accompanied by an image. In this catalog of haiga, the works are usually haiku accompanied [...]

Abbott’s article from 1986 seems to be one of the earlier examples in English that takes a more formal approach to discussing comics. Most of what I have that pre-dates this is in French (with a few exceptions). I did a citation search in a few places to see if there was much discussion about this article, but I found little. It’s cited a few times, mostly, I think, because it was a scholarly source that could be cited on comics for some common sense elements of comics (words affect the pictures, pictures affect the words).

Besides all the other things I do, I also am a member of a group librarian blog called In the Library with the Lead Pipe. My post today makes a connection between slide-speech interaction in presentations and image-text interaction in comics: “Presentation = Speech + Slides.” It might be of interest to readers of this [...]

A few notes from Edward Branigan’s Point of View in the Cinema (Mouton, 1984) Gerard Genette has observed that a dissymmetry exists within verbal narration. A story may very well be told in words without specifying the place where it happens and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where it [...]

When you look at people reading manga on the train for instance, you can see that when there is dialog on a page, they read them, but when a page is without text, they just breeze through it. And yet, the author’s intention is just the opposite: if there’s a page without text, it’s because [...]

During a panel at the American Library Association conference this summer about wordless books/comics, Charles Hatfield mentioned the term anchoring in relation to text/image interaction. I questioned him about it later and he sent me to Barthes’ Image, Music, Text (Hill & Wang, 1977), a collection of essays translated by Stephen Heath, where is found [...]

By way of a column by Jennifer de Guzman where she is lamenting the lack of depth and breadth in comics criticism/blogs, I was lead to Katherine Farmar’s two part (part one, part two) comparison of a page from Gaiman’s Sandman and a page from Matt Fraction’s Thor. She is mostly concerned with the text, [...]

Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button. Fantagraphics, 2008. 9781560979159. $29.99, 720p. If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then [...]

An interesting film still that not only shows three separate shots at once, but also shows a rather comics-like use of text making a visual path across the image from one character to another. (Image from David Bordwell‘s post “Lucky ’13″.)

Austin Kleon must have been channeling each other, as we both posted yesterday about “show v tell” and text labels. Check out his post. I love his two panel example on yellow paper. It’s a great example words saying what images cannot say in as easy a manner.

My previous post about using words instead of images (borrowing an example from Ben Towle) was a bit of a throwaway post, a brief thought that I did not elaborate. Thanks to some of my insightful commenters, I am forced to give more thought to my post. The point of my original post (almost completely [...]

This week’s All Over Coffee is a great use of indirect image/text interaction. Each image and it’s caption work together, metaphorically, and as a total the panels come together with a meaning in lack of meaning. The text smoothly flows, while the images jump and swerve. McCloud might call those non-sequitur transitions yet, the text [...]

I recently read both The Art of the Funnies and The Art of the Comic Book (both subtitled “An Aesthetic History”) by R.C. Harvey. I heartily recommend both volumes for those interested in the history of comics from the “Yellow Kid” to recent alt-comics. Both books are collections of essays molded into book form. As [...]