MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Amano, Kozue. Aria v.5. Tokyopop, 2009. ISBN: 9781427805140. This just arrived the other day, and I read it straight through that same night. Light fare, yet refreshing. I can’t think of another comic that is so resolutely non-dramatic and non-comedic while maintaining a fairly standard narrative setting. It is a narrative without any guile. I [...]

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

Hayashi, Seiichi. Red Colored Elegy. Trans. by Taro Nettleton. Drawn & Quarterly, 2008. Hardcover. 236 p. $24.95. 9781897299401. By nature comics are elliptical, an art of omission: from iconic art styles to the gaps in time and space created by the panel breakdowns. For the majority of comics, the reader’s work at filling in the [...]

The publication histories of both A Thousand Cranes and Sound of the Mountain resemble the erratic, scattered pattern Kawabata set with Snow Country, though they do not stretch over as long a period of time or undergo as many major revisions. But the technique of evolving narration–with one segment suggesting, through the “remnant of feeling” [...]

Ken Parille (the most interesting writer at Blog Flume) writes about David Chelsea, autobiography, and point of view (p.o.v.). He summarizes Chelsea’s comments in 24×2: He argues that that well-known autobiographical comic creators like Crumb, Pekar, Paley, and Spiegelman “get it wrong.” They falsify experience by employing what could be called an “objective camera” point [...]

…nous nous placons dans la lignée de David Kunzle et de Francois Garnier, écrivant, le premier sur la bande dessinée ancienne, le second sur l’image médiévale. Une image isolée est narrative si elle contient des liens de causalité et de consécution. Kunzle note que: “To narrate is, first of all, to polarize a sequence of [...]

I don’t think I’d call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction “anti-intellectualism.” Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can’t be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It’s more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it [...]

As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of [...]

Cotton Woods by Ray Gotto. Introduction by Max Allan Collins. Kitchen Sink Press, 1991. ISBN: 0878161457. Baseball month starts with this classic comic strip from the 1950′s, Cotton Woods, in an out of print collection from Kitchen Sink which covers a selection of the strips from it’s start in the summer of 1955 through the [...]

But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in [...]

Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters (2001). Translated by Anjali Singh. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 192p, $18.95. The comics that get the most attention in the wider press seem to be those with the most socio-political relevance, those that deal with certain “issues” (think Maus, think Persepolis). Houghton Mifflin’s hit from 2006, Fun [...]

Another reason [The Wire] may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters [...]

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of [...]

On Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007) and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007). I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I [...]

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 [...]