MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. Hill and Wang, 2006. 118p. I’ll admit to skepticism about this comics adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report, but I saw it start to appear on some Best of 2006 (already?) lists so I got a copy from the library. Having not read [...]

I’ve been meaning to reread all the volumes of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix (Viz Comics) available in English and write something about the series as a whole, but having just rest the most recent two, volumes 7 and 8 (comprising two long parts of “Civil War” and the short “Robe of Feathers”) I decided to just [...]

Often the writers and artists I hold in the highest esteem are the ones that I find myself least able to write about, particularly novelists like Queneau, Markson, or Gaddis, but also comics artists like Jaime Hernandez. Hernandez has consummate skill with both storytelling and image-making in a minimal yet deceptive rich style. The decades [...]

CHRZ by Stefan J.H. Van Dinther. Belgium: Bries, 2005. 64p. 18 Euros (I paid $19 at MOCCA). I’ve read Van Dinther’s album CHRZ a few times now and I can’t tell you what it’s all about. That I keep rereading it despite my confusion is a testament to the visual invention and graphic force of [...]

Systeme de la bande dessinée by Thierry Groensteen. Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. Groensteen is a member of the Oubapo and a prolific comics theorist, or rather theorist of the bande dessinée. This volume is a long look at the form of comics. I can’t imagine easily summarizing it all. Groensteen’s endeavors to show comics [...]

In the first paragraph of this essay on McCloud’s Reinventing Comics and Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Belgian theorist Jan Baetens writes: For many readers, the analysis of the medium proposed by the first book has always seemed a little simplistic, and not really up-to-date. McCloud’s work had already been accomplished by several other theoreticians, for example [...]