MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

DuBois, Gaylord (writer) and Jesse Marsh (artist). Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Volumes 1-3. Dark Horse, 2009. If you’d told me a couple years ago that I would be reading and enjoying a Tarzan comic from the 50s, I would have scoffed. But, this stuff is good. After reading a few convincing articles on Jesse [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This week’s All Over Coffee is a great use of indirect image/text interaction. Each image and it’s caption work together, metaphorically, and as a total the panels come together with a meaning in lack of meaning. The text smoothly flows, while the images jump and swerve. McCloud might call those non-sequitur transitions yet, the text [...]

[Back to Part 4.] If you didn’t see it last time, Neil Cohn clarified one or two things in a comment to part 4. I’m not sure where I’m going with all this, but I was rereading Jaime Hernandez’s “Flies on the Ceiling” and the first page offers an interest example of non-linear panel transitions. [...]

[Parts 1, 2, and 3] I’ve been rereading more of Neil Cohn’s essays on visual language, which provide much food for thought. “Time Frames… Or Not” looks at the idea of space=time in comics. Neil does a fine job on that account, though on the most simple level it seems obvious that space does not [...]

[Part 1, Part 2] More comments on the last part. Neil is pointing me towards his more recent writings, which I will reread, and disagrees with my assessment of what I’m thinking about in re what he is. Maybe I’m reinventing the comics wheel. I’m not that concerned, as I found this interesting, and useful [...]

[Part one is here.] In the comments on part one, Tim Godek noted how Neil Cohn had done some work thinking about and abandoning the idea of panel transitions. I went back and reread Neil’s writings (his book Early Writings on Visual Language). While I won’t argue with Neil’s points in the context he makes [...]

[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 [...]

Somewhere I read about (playwright, screenwriter, director) David Mamet’s book On Directing Film (Viking, 1991) in relation to comics: a brief quote that intrigued me. I no longer remember where I read this, but I did get the book from the library. It’s a slim collection based on lectures Mamet gave at Columbia in 1987. [...]

CHRZ by Stefan J.H. Van Dinther. Belgium: Bries, 2005. 64p. 18 Euros (I paid $19 at MOCCA). I’ve read Van Dinther’s album CHRZ a few times now and I can’t tell you what it’s all about. That I keep rereading it despite my confusion is a testament to the visual invention and graphic force of [...]

Brown, Jeffrey. Clumsy (2002); Unlikely (2003); AEIOU: Any Easy Intimacy (2004) (Top Shelf). Also: Be a Man (Top Shelf, 2004); Miniature Sulk (Top Shelf, 2005); These Things These Things (self-published, 2005). Oddly, after starting this piece, I read a review of AEIOU (the most recent book here) that mentioned how reviewing an artist’s work en [...]

Having read more about comics constraints in the past week (thanks to my Oupus spending spree) and having been reading a lot more comics lately, I’ve been thinking about new constraints. Most of the comics constraints I’ve seen or read about are based on either the words or the pictures in a comics. They isolate [...]