MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma (1970). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 1591163005. See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Space. If I were to recommend a single volume of Phoenix to a new reader, it would have to be Volume 4: Karma. This story can work well as a stand-alone and showcases a [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato/Space (1969). Viz, 2003. ISBN: 1591161002. See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato. Viz’s Volume 3 continues with “Space,” which oddly enough is called “Universe” in the chart of stories at the back of each volume. Translation issues? Neither are evocative nor apt for the story, [...]

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 3: Yamato/Space (1969). Viz, 2003. ISBN: 1591161002. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 2: Future. Viz’s Phoenix Volume 3 includes two stories, the third and fourth in the series. This is where the volume numbers and the story numbers will stop matching. Later there will be stories that take two volumes [...]

The profusion of “graphic novels” into the regular book market amounts to a full blown publishing fad. I’m often bothered by the publications I see released and the often poor quality of the results (that Howard Zinn adaptation being a great bad example that came my way). The impulse seems to be to create a “graphic novel” without a lot of regard to the appropriateness of the form for the content.

I picked up 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail at a bookstore (kudos to them that I found it in the political section and not the comics section), partially expecting a disaster, partially hoping it would be a really interesting use of the form for non-fictional reporting. At first glance, the visuals in the book are something different, which also piqued my curiosity.

Having read this twice, my first question is: Who is the intended audience?

There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the [...]

Something I’ve noted before and was reminded of as I read Inio Asano’s Solanin (Viz, 2008) this week. A lot of manga seems to use a certain layout of panels as seen in this randomly selected spread (142-143). The panels in the lower right and upper left are laid out using a similar structure. In [...]

There’s an analysis of some Akira pages by Josiah Leighton over at his blog Consequentialart’s Sequential Art Class (what a title), which is worth a read. He talks about the use of angled panels to increase the sense of action/movement/chaos and the way eyelines contribute to the effect. As I’ve been reading about and watching [...]

Mykx pointed over to this comic by Joseph Lambert. Of particular interest to me are two pages where Lambert forces the reader to follow a right to left path through the page/panels. This can be a tricky endeavor for readers trained to go left-right, left-right, left-right down a page. Lambert uses an reverse-L shaped panel [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday, Craig Yoe noted the 56th anniversary of the first Sunday Peanuts page. What a wonderful, simple use of composition and page layouts. Schulz uses a basic nine panel grid altered by 2 symmetrically placed wide panels: at the beginning for the title (which is seen in all the Sundays) and at the end. Charlie [...]

This idea of “analytical montage” (see previous post) is, as I see it, a variation on McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions. In describing this concept it works better to think of it as a narrative method than a simple matter of panel transitions. This style of narration in comics is becoming more and more prominent as manga [...]

The principle technique of storytelling is “analytical montage” (Groensteen L’Univers des Mangas (1991)) in which the sequencing of plates [panels] is very resourceful in comparison with a rather constrained Euro-American montage and page layout. In manga, there is no textual interference. Analytical montage entails the “scattering” of a story event over different frames. A scene [...]

Exit (volume 1) by Nabiel Kanan. Caliber Comics, 1996. Out of Print. A long time ago, I used to go to this bookstore in a nearby town that had an extensive magazine collection, bigger than I’d ever seen (which may not say much as this was in the suburbs and before places like Borders were [...]

This page struck me as I was reading Volume One of Rye Mitsuke’s and Keiko Takemiya’s Andromeda Stories (Vertical): The layout of the page and composition of the panels directly lead the eye around the page. The first panel (this is unflipped manga so read right to left) uses multiples of the same character to [...]