MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Ok, I’ve been review silent for too long. To get off to a start I’m going to give a quick paragraph or two to a bunch of comics I got at MoCCA this year. Sorry these are so short, but most of the comics are not really in need of in-depth analysis at this time. [...]

For the second year, I took a trip up to New York City for the MoCCA festival. It was a whirlwind of a 24 hours. My wife and I rode a bus from Pennsylvania, a trip that took so much extra time due to rush hour traffic that I ended up almost finish the book [...]

Sea-man Lamprey: a tale told in five maritime vignettes by Mollie Goldstrom. 2005. 24p., black and white with two color covers. One of my fiancee’s finds from the MOCCA fest was this small mini-comic by a young woman named Mollie Goldstrom. She had a few nice-looking “sea story” mini-comics and a really nice looking artist [...]

I managed to spend about 3.5 hours at the MOCCA festival in New York on Sunday. I wandered the exhibit hall for over an hour, browsing and buying. There were more tables than I expected but the majority of it looked either really bad or really boring (it’s hard walking by all those lonely faces [...]

Alcoholalia: a remix of Tony Millionaire’s “Maakies” no. 35 by Andrei Molotiu. 2004. 24 pages with cardstock cover. $4. (Available from the Poopsheet Shop.) Andrei Molotiu is best known for his abstract comics. This particular comic is, as the subtitle states, a remix of a Tony Millionaire Maakies strip. Molotiu reprints the original strip on [...]

3 Poems About Fog by John Porcellino. King-Cat, 2006. 5.5″ x 8.5″. The Ones that Everybody Knows by John Porcellino. King-Cat, 2006. 4.25″ x 5.5″. I’ve been meaning to learn more constellations. My apartment entrance is up a flight of stairs and across a roof/deck, so coming home in the evenings, I have the sky [...]

Three Very Small Comics, Volume II by Tom Gauld. Cabanon Press, 2004. 4 pounds. 3″ X 4″. Three tiny comics in a small brown envelope require some tiny drawing. I’m delighted by Tom Gauld’s little silhouetted, almost stick, figures. “Invasion”, a 16 page story about a soldier invading a tiny island inhabited by another man, [...]

King-Cat #65: Places by John Porcellino. Spit and a Half, Oct 2005. $3. A new issue of King-Cat is always a cause for celebration. John Porcellino’s stories are filled with a sense of wonder in the everyday. His comics are composed with a beautiful simplicity that is either very carefully considered or the product of [...]

Cut Flowers by Pat Palermo. 2005. 30 p., 8″ x 10.5″, $5. Available from the USS Catastrophe Shop. I’ve been ordering small batches of mini-comics lately, often selected on some random whim or because I’ve seen the creator’s name somewhere or other. Often they are complete letdowns but most often there is something interesting about [...]

Satisfactory Comics #6 by Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe (2005). 28p., b+w, 5.5″ x 8.5″, with a mini-mini (18p., 2.75″ X 2″) and 8 cards (2.75″ x 2.25″). $3.50ppd from Isaac.Cates AT liu.edu Isaac Cates and Mike Wenthe love to collaborate and experiment. They do all their work together and often they include ideas, art, [...]

Phase 7 #4: “Graffiti” by Alec Longstreth. 2003. 44p, b+w, $3.00. Phase 7 #5: “Basewood: Chapter One” by Alec Longstreth. 2004. 28p, b+w, $2.00. Both available from the author. Alex Longstreth’s Phase 7 won the Outstanding Mini-Comics Ignatz award at Small Press Expo this year, so I ordered his two most recent issues. Issue 4 [...]

Revelations by Christian Hill. 2003. 24p., b+w, $3.50. Available from Kameleo Comics. In the wake of the ongoing “pictureless comics” investigation, I was made aware of Christian Hill’s mini “Revelations”. While the whole comic is not “pictureless” it is, for the most part (18 pages), a comic that takes place in total darkness with only [...]

Seafood by Josh Frankel. 2004. Square, b+w with color cover. 44 p., $4. Sample Pages. Sometimes you luck out in ordering mini-comics site unseen (I ordered this from globalhobo based only on a written description). Josh Frankel’s Seafood is a beautiful silent comic about the life of a yellowfin tuna. This is not an anthropomorphized [...]

Couch Tag #2 by Jesse Reklaw, 2005, $2. Available from Global Hobo. This is a quarter size (5.5″ X 4.25″) comic, white pages with a green cardstock cover. The issue comprises one story called “Thirteen Cats of My Childhood”. The story is divided into 1-3 page sections headed by the name of a cat Jesse [...]

Happy Town by Justin Madson. 11 issues (1-3 are collected in “Collection v.1″ and 4-5 in “Collection v.2″). Just Mad Books, 2001-2005. Mini-comics blogger Shawn Hoke made a list of his top 5 desert island mini-comics (towards the bottom of the page). In the company of Kevin Huizenga and John Porcellino (two I already love) [...]

(La Mano, 2005) John Porcellino makes minimal comics that are quite amazing in their simplicity. This book collects stories from King-Cat Comics about his long-running job as a mosquito abatement man. They span from an extremely rough 1989 piece through to new stories from 2004. While not as successful as his A Perfect Example (just [...]