MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Le Voyage brings on these thoughts. Baudoin is a wonderful visual stylist–his art is dynamic, engaging, lovely to behold–but his writing, or at least the story of this volume, is far less interesting, in fact it seems rather clichéd to me. Simon, the protagonist, one day leaves his wife, child, home, and job and starts off on a voyage. This flight is unplanned, rather at the breakfast table his head strangely opens up and starts showing images above it.

Besides my ongoing reading/blogging on Tezuka’s Phoenix, I’ve also been making my way through two other “classic” manga series: Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and Otomo’s Akira. These three works are very different creatures on many levels, but primarily for me in my changing and opposite reactions to re/reading them.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma (1970). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 1591163005. See previous post on the first half Phoenix Vol. 3: Space. If I were to recommend a single volume of Phoenix to a new reader, it would have to be Volume 4: Karma. This story can work well as a stand-alone and showcases a [...]

Jones, Ben and Frank Santoro. Cold Heat:: The Series Issues Five and Six. Picturebox, 2009. 48 color pages. $20 (edition of 100). Cold Heat is back! If you’ve been reading this blog at all in the past couple years you know my love for Frank Santoro’s work and for Cold Heat (it’s issues made my [...]

“Bully the Little Stuffed Bull” (?) posted a series of Jack Kirby photomontage panels from some early Fantastic Four issues. You can get a better view over at the Flickr page for them. Kirby’s montages, at least the ones seen here, are primarily outer space and alternate dimension type images. They foreground an alien landscape [...]

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 [...]

Overby, Jason. Solipsist’s Doodles. 2008. 5.5″ x 8.5″ mini, 32 pages, $2.75 from his site. After I wrote about his previous mini, Jessica, Jason Overby was kind enough to send me his most recent publication. While I was impressed by the style and disappointed by the story of Overby’s last work, the three short stories [...]

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 [...]

Overby, Jason. Jessica. 2008. 28 pages. I first heard of Jason Overby through Austin English’s new 20 Questions with Cartoonists blog. Overby’s website is basically an image blog of comics pages posted on Flickr. Images like this one impressed me enough to track down a copy of his latest minicomic Jessica (his website says he’s [...]

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 [...]

[See part one and part two.] III. One of my very favorite books in my collection of “fine” art books is a collection of Erotic Watercolors by Rodin. The stunning images are mostly pencil drawings with watercolor washes. The rendering of the figures is minimal, a few curved pencil lines that look tossed off in [...]

[This was originally written in the summer of 2007 for a print publication. Since it has yet to appear, I'm posting it here. I'm going to post each of the three parts as a separate post during the course of the week. While they are part of one piece, they are also independent.] My enthusiasm [...]

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 [...]

A s’en tenir à cette analyse, une narration en images est tout à fait possible (elle repose sur la monstration et est permise par le caractère d’énonçable de l’image). Paradoxalement, c’est l’opération de description qui est impossible dans le récit en images. Tous les éléments de l’image sont rendus avec le même degré de précision [...]

Trains Are… Mint by Oliver East. Blank Slate Books, 2008. Hardcover, color, 122p, $24.99. (You can order from here.) Trains Are… Mint #5 by Oliver East. Rolling Stock Press, 2008. 52p. color mini, 5 pounds. Oliver East walks around England (Manchester and its environs), from train station to train station, trying to follow the tracks [...]

Chippendale, Brian. Maggots. Picturebox Inc, 2007. 4″ x 6″, 344 p. $21.95. ISBN: 9780978972264. I listed Brian Chippendale’s Ninja as one of my favorite comics of 2006. It was my first reading of a long work by Chippendale, my experience up to that point a few brief pages in an anthology here or there. Long [...]