MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Issue 6 of Elijah Brubaker’s Reich just arrived from Sparkplug. I’ve been reading and enjoying the series since it started–one of the only serialized pamphlets I still get–but haven’t had the time to write about it. Brubaker’s got a great style, geometric, hatched and patterned, with the occasional burst of abstraction and expressionism.

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 [...]

Tom McCarthy in his Tintin and the Secret of Literature refers to this panel from Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald, and I just had to share it. Just another one of those simple but brilliant panels by Hergé.

If you’ve also been following my comic, Things Change, you’ll have noticed my use of the silhouettes of leaves to alter the shapes of my panels (starting in last Wednesday’s strip and continuing today and this week’s forthcoming strip). While the particular use I put these silhouettes to is my own, the visuals came from [...]

Since this is Tintin week, I thought I’d share a few panels from a fantastic sequence in Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald. Calculus, the hard of hearing inventor, has created a color television (seemingly unconcerned that such an item was already invented at the time as one of his friends points out). Hergé’s love of abstract [...]

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 [...]

Via the aforementioned Joe Zabel interview, a scan of an analysis of Bernard Krigstein’s “Master Race” by John Benson, David Kasakove, and Art Spiegelman (from EC fanzine Squa Tront). I’d like to find a better reproduction of the comic as the copies of the art is rather deteriorated after so many generations of new copies [...]

The composition of panels is not something I see discussed much. A few of the books I’ve been reading recently have got thinking about composition, that is, the organization of elements inside the panel. Will Eisner’s compositions in The Spirit (I’m rereading the newly released Best of the Spirit (DC)) are interesting for two main [...]

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 [...]