MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

…”graphic novel” is an odd and imperfect term, I admit, since it sounds — to those unfamiliar with the medium — like it refers to a type of novel. But it’s the term we have — the “wrong and only name for it” (to borrow a phrase from David Hartwell in referring to another publishing [...]

Chris Mautner’s latest “Everybody’s Critic” column at Newsarama is called “There is no language in our lungs” and concerns the issue of critical vocabulary/terminology in comics. It includes a (rather long) response from me. Worth the read. Matthew Brady offers the idea of some kind of wiki dictionary for comics terms, which is an idea [...]

[I'm rambling a bit here folks, as I work through some ideas. This is no finished product and I realize it probably does not make a whole lot of logical, one step-to-the-next sense.] Following up my post on David Mamet’s film book, I’ve been doing some research into montage and film editing. I think there [...]

A couple bloggers have started a new blog called Graphic Language focused on comics related interview. They start off with a bang interviewing Douglas Wolk who writes monthly comics reviews for Salon (excellent stuff) and wrote the long Cerebus article in a recent issue of The Believer. He gets asked about criticism in general and [...]

From Chris Tamarri’s review of Beg the Question by Bob Fingerman at his blog, Crisis/Boring Change: So many of what we call graphic novels aren’t novels, not really. You can usually discount those books that are collections of previously printed materials. Sure, serialization doesn’t necessarily render the ultimate collection a bastardization of form, yes, right, [...]