MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

I have a change of heart about the comic after reading it a second time. Some discussion of Gfrörer’s use of the page.

I finished up my reading of Lone Wolf and Cub. I’m not going to post about the whole series, it’s just too much to deal with right now. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed the series, and do recommend it highly. It is both narratively and visually engaging with strong historical and thematic material too. [...]

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 [...]

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now [...]

Tomine, Adrian. Shortcoming. Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. Hardcover, black and white, 108p. $19.95, ISBN: 9781897299166. Adrian Tomine is a bit of an anomaly in comics. Shortcomings, his latest book, is a work of psychological realism that I cannot avoid referring to as “literary fiction” with a bit of a negative subtext. Pulling apart my feelings [...]

Write sounds into the background of scenes, setting them up for fuller presence later. If a train becomes important late in the story, mention the wail of a distant train early in the screenplay. This sort of auditory planting quietly strengthens the structure of the story in your reader’s mind. -David Bordwell summarizing Amos Poe. [...]

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 [...]

The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as “rational.” The everyday implies on the one hand cycles, nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction, desire and its fulfillment, life and death, [...]

The Early Years of Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher. Edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt. NBM, 2007. 192p., $24.95. A few years back, in an attempt to broaden my literary knowledge (which at the time was fairly limited to the twentieth century), I read my way through a selection of titles from Harold Bloom’s Western Canon. [...]

The Mother’s Mouth by Dash Shaw. Alternative Comics, 2006. 128p., $12.95. Dash Shaw’s previous book Goddess Head was an ambitious and inconsistent collection of formal experiments that were often too oblique to make much sense. The Mother’s Mouth is a graphic novel that tells a rather straightforward narrative in a rich, experimental montage of comics [...]

The Best of Dinosaur Comics 2003-2005 A.D.: Your whole family is made of meat by Ryan North. Quack!Media, 2006. $14.99, 250p. If there’s any webcomic that fits into a Oubapo mold, it is Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics. North decided to do a webcomic, but he couldn’t draw. Instead of following the Trondheim path of learning [...]