All PostsAbout Madinkbeard:
I started MadInkBeard (the title is an anagram of my name) in 2001 or 2002 for some purpose that I have forgotten. Over time pages on Kenneth Rexroth, David Markson, the Oulipo, and the Buffy Bibliography were added. In April of 2004 I started a blog for the purposes of writing about constraint and the Oulipo.
The blog has grown in scope over its life, and it now focuses on comics. I publish webcomics and write reviews and other posts on an irregular schedule. I’m particularly interested in the formal elements of comics.
In August of 2005 I started publishing the webcomic “Maroon,” which ran for a year. Then, I published the webcomic “Things Change: The Metamorphoses Comic” for three years. Now I post other occasional comics as they are made.
Personal:
Derik A Badman is a web developer and comics artist/critic living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA with his wife and two cats.
He first started reading comics in 1989 when he discovered a comic book on a bookstore comic rack that was set in the Dungeons & Dragons world of Dragonlance (it was issue three). As a long time D&D player, this caught his interest, and soon he was reading lots of comics. Early favorites included the Uncanny X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but he quickly moved onto a wide variety of works: comic strips, manga, bande dessinee, indie comics, art comics, etc.
He started making his own comics early on with a short TMNT story drawn on comics backing boards followed by unfinished series of semi-supernatural, semi-mystery stories too influenced by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. In 1995 he started a minicomic called “The Partial Truth” which ran for thirty-some issues during his time as an undergraduate at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He stopped making comics for a number of years at the beginning of the century, focusing instead on writing and literature. In 2005 he returned to making comics with the 52 part webcomic “Maroon”, a series of experiments about a man stuck on a desert island. In 2006, he started serializing Things Change: The Metamorphoses Comic, which ran until 2009. His recent comics are often abstract or poetic in nature, often drawing from appropriated sources of text.
He’ll readily admit that if he could afford it he’d stay home and drawrite every day.
Reading interests include: French literature, Oulipo, Metaphysical Detective Stories, Surrealism, and Punk. Raymond Queneau holds the place as the single most owned author on his shelves. Some of his favorite books include: Le Chiendent by Queneau, Bouvard et Pecuchet by Flaubert, This Is Not a Novel by David Markson, Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, The Odyssey, A Void by Georges Perec, Love and Rockets by Jaime Hernandez, and others comics by the likes of Tezuka, Lewis Trondheim, Frank Santoro, Kevin Huizenga, George Herriman, Dave Sim, and John Porcellino.
Musical interests: Top 5 musicians/bands with the most albums in his iTunes: Sonic Youth, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, J Church.
Some of his favorite movies are: Bande a Part (Godard), The Green Ray (and many others by Rohmer), Vertigo, Out of the Past, Stranger Than Paradise, Chinatown, The Big Sleep, and many by Yasujirō Ozu. His favorite television shows include: Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, Buffy, Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights, The Wire, The West Wing, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad, In Treatment, and Mad Men.
Professional:
Derik A Badman is a web developer for Springshare, Inc, creator of LibGuides and LibAnswers. He formerly worked as a librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and had been working in libraries non-stop since he was 16.
