MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

I was over at the Digital Comics Museum, grabbing some Jesse Marsh comics. While, checking out some of the most downloaded comics at the site, I found these examples of the classic visual trope of the narrating head, in Phantom Lady #22 (Fox, 1949) (I assume the draw of this issue is the Matt Baker [...]

David Bordwell is the kind of critic we need in comics. His brand of poetics overlaps quite a bit with Ken Parille’s analytical criticism”. If you’re not reading his (and Kristin Thompson’s, his wife and also a prominent film scholar) blog, you’re missing out on some great essays (always well illustrated) on film, that often [...]

Somehow I missed this book when it came out. It’s a kind of textbook for students and general readers on reading comics and the history of bande dessinée in particular. The book as a whole is quite good, covering a wide area though, because of this, occasionally lacking in depth. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole book. There were sections I skimmed. Miller covers history, followed by a variety of approaches to comics: formal analysis, cultural studies, nationalism, gender, autobiography, psychoanalysis. I read the parts I’m interested in and skimmed the others.

A quote from Darwyn Cooke, in an interview with Tom Spurgeon, about shifting narrative modes in this latest book.

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, [...]

My review of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey) last week was primarily a broader discussion of the series. I didn’t get into any particular images or pages. I did have two pages marked that I wanted to return to, because they offer some examples that I thought were worth sharing.

Apollo and Lewis Trondheim. Bourbon Island 1730. First Second, 2008. 288 p., $17.95. ISBN: 9781596432581. I’ve felt hit or miss with First Second’s releases to this point. But they’ve got two great releases this season, one of them is Alan’s War (which I’ve had since July and haven’t managed to write about yet) and the [...]

…schemata… are cognitive frameworks for the meaningful organisation of various interrelated concepts based on previous experiences… The schema expresses typical information, not the unique features of a specific thing… There are a lot of basic conditions (schemata) needed to read a comic. A crucial schema to understand a comic is the elliptic and fragmented nature [...]

According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image [...]