MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Domingos Isabelinho wrote about Frans Masereel the other month at The Hooded Utilitarian, and it got me pulling my copy of Passionate Journey (1918) of the shelf. I have a nice little hardcover from City Lights Books, which I got at the store on a trip there (perhaps in spring of 2000). This edition seems [...]

Abbott’s article from 1986 seems to be one of the earlier examples in English that takes a more formal approach to discussing comics. Most of what I have that pre-dates this is in French (with a few exceptions). I did a citation search in a few places to see if there was much discussion about this article, but I found little. It’s cited a few times, mostly, I think, because it was a scholarly source that could be cited on comics for some common sense elements of comics (words affect the pictures, pictures affect the words).

This panel/page from Shannon Gerard‘s Unspent Love (found at Top Shelf 2.0, another one of their best offerings) is a slightly surreal at first but then subtly brilliant composition. Gerard has overlapped two moments in time, showing us the protagonist waiting for the subway. We see the train approaching, the woman looking forward, and then [...]

The other day, Scott pointed to an article on Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. I was in need of something to read on the train, so I pulled down my copy of his The Sound of the Mountain (1954), which I had read a few years ago. I had gone through a period of reading some [...]

Or Else #1 by Kevin Huizenga (Drawn & Quarterly, 2004). Missed out on this the first time around, but after reading issue 2 I was excited to get this. The issue features a few short stories. The first and best one is “NST ’04″ which features Glenn Ganges and his wife/girlfriend Wendy. Huizenga does interesting [...]

(1962) Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Criterion recently released this dvd of Bertolucci’s first film. He co-wrote the screenplay from a story by Pier Pasolini. It’s a Rashomon structured story involving the police interviewing a number of individuals about a murdered prostitute. The movie is divided into segments showing us (with sometime contradictory voiceover) what the [...]