MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Somehow I missed this book when it came out. It’s a kind of textbook for students and general readers on reading comics and the history of bande dessinée in particular. The book as a whole is quite good, covering a wide area though, because of this, occasionally lacking in depth. I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole book. There were sections I skimmed. Miller covers history, followed by a variety of approaches to comics: formal analysis, cultural studies, nationalism, gender, autobiography, psychoanalysis. I read the parts I’m interested in and skimmed the others.

An interesting, though not unique, case of point of view/perspective in comics. Here we have Snowy getting a drink of Captain Haddock’s whiskey. In doing so, he ends up seeing double. We are effectively seeing what Snowy sees, but we are not seeing it from his point of view. We are both outside and inside the character at the same time.

Tezuka, Osamu. Phoenix Vol. 5: Resurrection (1971). Viz, 2004. ISBN: 1591165938. See previous post on Phoenix Vol. 4: Karma. And back into a science fiction future, with robots! This isn’t one of my favorite stories in the series, though it has its moments. The narrative rambles a few times. “Resurrection” does offer another variation on [...]

My review of Yuki Urushibara’s Mushishi (Del Rey) last week was primarily a broader discussion of the series. I didn’t get into any particular images or pages. I did have two pages marked that I wanted to return to, because they offer some examples that I thought were worth sharing.

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 [...]

I’ve been enjoying Jed McGowan’s periodically appearing Bluesy Face. The third chapter was published this week on his website. I’m not sure where the story is going, but I love McGowan’s style which uses sparse line work and blocky colors (bright blue and a grey screen-like tone or two). He also creates a number of [...]

There’s an analysis of some Akira pages by Josiah Leighton over at his blog Consequentialart’s Sequential Art Class (what a title), which is worth a read. He talks about the use of angled panels to increase the sense of action/movement/chaos and the way eyelines contribute to the effect. As I’ve been reading about and watching [...]

A few notes from Edward Branigan’s Point of View in the Cinema (Mouton, 1984) Gerard Genette has observed that a dissymmetry exists within verbal narration. A story may very well be told in words without specifying the place where it happens and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where it [...]

[This was originally intended for publication elsewhere, thus the attempt at a more formal academic style.] Introduction At some point most students are taught about “point of view”[1] in literature using the tripartite scheme of first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient [2]. While this schema has pedagogical uses, it is not robust [...]

Ken Parille (the most interesting writer at Blog Flume) writes about David Chelsea, autobiography, and point of view (p.o.v.). He summarizes Chelsea’s comments in 24×2: He argues that that well-known autobiographical comic creators like Crumb, Pekar, Paley, and Spiegelman “get it wrong.” They falsify experience by employing what could be called an “objective camera” point [...]

Yukiko’s Spinach by Frederic Boilet (2001). Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 2006. $18.99. The opening scene in Frederic Boilet’s nouvelle manga Yukiko’s Spinach consists of seven pages, each divided into three vertical panels. They show bright lights, buildings, and gaudy signs but not people. The lights are blurry white circles. In one sequence at the end, a hotel [...]