MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Tom Spurgeon linked over to Francois Avril’s website the other day. My main exposure to his work is the story “63 Rue de la Grange Aux Belles” which was published in Drawn & Quarterly vol. 2 no. 1 (1994), a collaboration with Phillipe Petit-Roulet, which is most notable for its wordlessness and use of images [...]

I first heard about the Spanish cartoonist Calpurnio from a discussion by Thierry Groensteen in his La Bande Dessinée: mode d’emploi (more on that in the future). Calpurnio uses stick figures and minimalist backgrounds, a very clean and iconic style. Unfortunately, his work is in Spanish so I can only vaguely make out the text [...]

This page, from the third issue of Concrete by Paul Chadwick (or the first volume of the collected edition), came up on the Comix Scholars list this evening. In it we see 150 panels of Concrete swimming in the ocean, part of a story where he endeavors to swim the length of the Atlantic. Click [...]

Thoreau at Walden by John Porcellino. Hyperion, 2008. 102p., hardcover, 2 color, $16.99. ISBN: 9781423100386. I’m like a broken record when it comes to John Porcellino’s work: I love its beautiful minimalism and quiet, thoughtful narratives. A new long work by him is cause for celebration, and this volume does not disappoint. Thoreau at Walden [...]

The other day, Scott pointed to an article on Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I was in need of something to read on the train, so I pulled down my copy of his The Sound of the Mountain (1954), which I had read a few years ago. I had gone through a period of reading some [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. La Television (1997). Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002. English Translation by Jordan Stump forthcoming in November 2004 from Dalkey Archive. Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a Belgian author who has published 6 novels up to the present, La Television being his fifth. Warren Motte calls Toussaint’s body of work an “epic of the trivial” (179), [...]