MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

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 [...]

The more disciplined among us are able to minimize that self-importance in service of the message we feel compelled to communicate; more often, though, an artist’s favorite subject is himself, and the message he ends up communicating is, “Look how clever/skilled/cool I am!”. This is so common in the world of comics as to be [...]

With all due respect to Nadel (and to Santoro himself, who chose the pseudonym in the first place), I don’t find Storeyville particularly Sirkian. Throughout his career, Douglas Sirk followed dominant Hollywood practices. His films stick close to classical storytelling and to what film scholar David Bordwell calls invisible style, the use of such formal [...]

But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. [...]

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 [...]

The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. Drawn and Quarterly: 2001. 112p, $12.95. Baseball month continues with this comic by James Sturm, the first of two baseball comics by Sturm I’ll be reviewing. Outside of his work with the Center for Cartoon Studies, Sturm is best known for historical fiction comics, included the recent collection [...]

Woah. A new Dave Sim comic (“Glamourpuss”) coming in April that appears to be a photorealist comic strip style fashion magazine parody… I can’t even imagine what this will read like, but the art looks great, very Leonard Starr/Stan Drake. Curious to see how the backgrounds look without Gerhard there to do them. (Link from [...]

Trains Are Mint… by Oliver East. Rolling Stock Press. If the reader takes Oliver East’s comics at their face value (and I do), they are autobiographical accounts of walking. In issues 2, 3, and the forthcoming 5 (of which I have a 12 page preview) he walks around parts of northwestern England following the train [...]

White Rapids [Rapide Blanc] by Pascal Blanchet. Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 156p, $27.95. Pascal Blanchet’s White Rapids is a most unusual book with a sharp visual style and a story that is unlike just about any comic you’ll find. The book tells in brief the history of the town of White Rapids, Quebec. The town [...]

Awhile back, Tom Spurgeon linked to Trains Are Mint #4 by Oliver East. About 100 pages of ink and watercolor wash accompanying text about a narrator camping around Norway. The whole thing’s online so go read it. Despite the lack of much in the way of story, the narrative voice is enough to keep the [...]

Exit (volume 1) by Nabiel Kanan. Caliber Comics, 1996. Out of Print. A long time ago, I used to go to this bookstore in a nearby town that had an extensive magazine collection, bigger than I’d ever seen (which may not say much as this was in the suburbs and before places like Borders were [...]

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations by Joel Smith. Yale UP, 2006. [All Steinberg images © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.] I saw this book in the new books shelf at a bookstore and recalled how I’ve never really looked at Steinberg’s work, despite the praise I’ve heard. So, I grabbed the library’s copy and [...]

Ninja by Brian Chippendale. Picturebox, 2006. 11″ x 17″. 144p. My selection of best comics for the year should be up tomorrow, and a last minute addition to the list is Brian Chippendale’s massive Ninja, an impressive volume from production to content. I read it twice in a row, and I’m sure I’ll be going [...]

Cold Heat 2 by Ben Jones and Frank Santoro. Picturebox, 2006. $5. Issue two of this most unusual 12 issue series (I reviewed issue one here). The story continues as Castle, protagonist, discovers the dangerous side effects of her anti-depressant, and the Senator goes on a rampage trying to find his son’s killer. I don’t [...]

Mary Perkins, On Stage by Leonard Starr. Volume 1: February 10, 1957 – January 11, 1958. Classic Comics Press, 2006. 160 p., $19.95. Comic strip reprints are coming fast and furious lately. Years of classics are being reprinted in high quality editions by a number of publishers: the formally adventurous strips like Little Nemo and [...]