Our Eddie

Craig: It seems weirdly appropriate that on this most foolish and whimsical of days, Charles and I are launching a series of articles on Eddie Campbell's Alec/autobiographical comics and graphic novels, including The King Canute Crowd (1984-1990), Graffiti Kitchen (1993), The Dance of Lifey Death (1994), How to Be an Artist (2000), After the Snooter (2002) and The Fate of the Artist (2006). Our critical attention to Campbell is designed to get everyone up to speed for Campbell's next book, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, due from First Second in August. Our plan is to present one Campbell article per month until then.

Today, though, we begin with some introductory observations about Campbell and his work, and we're doing it dialogue-style, within a single post, as a back-and-forth between Charles and I. Charles sets the scene with a cogent overview of Eddie the artist...

Charles: Something I love about Campbell's work is the seemingly tossed-off way he approaches cartooning as handwriting: the looseness of his work, the way he sketches and scratches on the knife's-edge between deliberation and happy accident. He brings dignity to the idea of drawing as doodling, as a means of idling, of thinking through one's fingers. Especially in his autobiographical comics (with or without the distancing device of alter ego Alec MacGarry), Campbell works with a raw spontaneity of line and the offhand logic of association.

I should say that he seems to do this; actually, there's a deliberateness, an insinuating narrative logic, behind even his most ragged images. Campbell the designing artist peeks slyly out from behind Campbell the doodler; he's like the recessive, self-effacing chum who, you gradually realize, is the smartest one in your circle, the common denominator of your brightest conversations, and, in truth, a winking ironist who has you and your circle all sized up. Sitting at the doodler's elbow, this ulterior Campbell has larger designs on you as a reader, but lets everything fall into place easily, with a fetching looseness of style and manner. Said looseness belies the craftiness of his images and the well-observed solidity of his world.

Idler, rambler, spectator: all those splendid eighteenth-century job titles well fit Campbell's persona as a first-order doodler and raconteur, a spontaneous though cultivated sensibility who never lets technique waylay his work's disarming intimacy and fragile, calligraphic charm. In his autobio work, Campbell's idle, shuffling manner, along with a surplus of wry humor, allows him unguarded access to the darkest and tenderest spots, spots he often prods to telling effect (pivotal works in this vein, I'd say, include Graffiti Kitchen and After the Snooter). Turns out Campbell is a lancing satirist and an astringent observer of himself and everyone else. The work may go down handily, with the seeming guileness immediacy of cartoons, but the lingering aftertaste is often surprisingly acrid. Good thing it's so funny and wise.

Craig: I'm an impostor, and you shouldn't take anything I say about Eddie Campbell seriously. While Charles' rapturous description of Campbell's art makes it clear that he's a true-blue fan, there are whole swaths of Campbell's oeuvre I'm either ignorant of or don't like. I've read maybe five issues of Bacchus, and though I liked the art (even when other hands were involved, like Pete Mullins'), I couldn't get into either the characters or Campbell's twee version of Lee-Kirby mythos-building. And while it goes against prevailing critical opinion--and makes me feel like a persnickety jerk to boot--I think that Watchmen, superheroes, BEMs and all, is a better book than From Hell, because Dave Gibbons' art perfectly complements Alan Moore's words. In multiple sequences in Watchmen (remember Tales of the Black Freighter?), Moore's writing drifts away from the denotative meaning of the visuals, but Gibbons' pictures are so clear and easily legible that they nail down what's happening in the sequence without any verbal assist. This is also true of the "silent" passages in Watchmen, where Gibbons' art, without words, shows us (for example) that a little girl has been dismembered and fed to dogs [click the thumbnail]:

Campbell's art in From Hell, however, is harder to follow, and less an example of the "guileless immediacy of cartoons." Unlike Gibbons, Campbell doesn't sweat over the details. As Charles points out, Campbell's "calligraphic" style can seem scratchy, rough and off-putting at first glance, and his way of framing the human body inside panels is unorthodox too: he typically stages action in the middle-to-long distance, with a minimum of close-ups, allowing him to emphasize body language instead of faces. In his interview with Dirk Deppey in The Comics Journal #273, Campbell talks about his "10 principles toward a rhetoric of the comic-strip vocabulary" and explains his reasons for middle-distance staging and framing:

Anyway, the last of my rules is that you must show at least one pair of feet on every page. I remember Pete Mullins, he used to find that funny that I had these really complicated rules, but number 10 was that you had to show a pair of feet on every page, from the sublime to the ridiculous. He said to me recently, "You know, Eddie, but you’re right. I've gone into other fields, you know, television animation and everything, and I still remember that. It sticks in my head. It's useful."

Make sure you show a pair of feet. Otherwise, you're creating talking-head situations, and there's no point of reference for the human frame, the human body, and the relative sizes of people, and the relative size of people to their environment. And if you've got this business of remembering to draw one pair of feet a page, you make yourself take it all into account. This reminds you to stand back from the action and judge the balance.

Let's mull over Campbell's rule a bit, and tease out some of its implications. I share Campbell's disdain for "talking-head situations"--I tire of movies and TV shows that follow continuity editing so slavishly that every exchange of dialogue is a ping-pong match between two giant faces--and Campbell's insistence on "one pair of feet a page" and his use of distant framing keeps the audience more removed from narrative events, sometimes to stunning effect. In From Hell, the chapter-long dissection of Mary Kelly is all the more chilling because Campbell's middle-distance framing and Moore's deliberate storytelling pace create a cold, clinical, inhuman mood.

I don't think, though, that one of Campbell's great gifts as an artist is his depiction of the human figure in a fully-realized environment, since backgrounds tend to be indistinct or altogether absent from his panels. Campbell's tour de force of environmental rendering is undoubtedly Chapter Four of From Hell, Gull and Netley's tour of magical London, but even there the pictures don't quite mesh with the torrent of erudition pouring out of Gull's/Moore's mouth. It's a speech about architectural specificity illustrated with drawings that are often too sketchy to represent real places. This big panel, for instance [click]:

The weather is beautifully evoked with slashing pen strokes, but those same strokes hide St. John's from our full view, preventing us from seeing exactly how Hawksmoor (the architect) inscribed the "derangement" of magicians and druids into its stones. To be fair, elsewhere in the chapter Campbell renders other locales with almost photographic precision, but they never seem fully integrated with the people in his world. In the Deppey TCJ interview, Campbell notes that Pete Mullins did many of the architectural backgrounds in From Hell by copying photographs "onto a background," and the results look false to me, the way rear projection in movies looks false as flesh-and-blood actors travel through flattened space.

For me, the climax of the chapter comes on the second-to-last page, when Gull convinces Netley that everything in London is a magical metaphor for patriarchal power [click]:

The environment here is reduced to a horse, a carriage (with "a sun and a moon"!), and a few lines to indicate pavement, but look how Gull confidently straightens his hat in panel one, how Netley holds his throbbing temples in panel four, and how Gull, waving his hand in triumph, hovers over the vomiting Netley in panel eight. Campbell's genius lies in his knowledge of how people move, of how weight shifts in their bodies. Graffiti Kitchen is almost completely stripped of backgrounds, there are only a handful of close-ups, and it's probably my favorite Campbell comic. Why?

In the above Graffiti Kitchen page [click!], the images are highly dependent on the words, and vice versa. In panel one, the words create the expectation that we'll see a nightclub and Alec's group of friends. Without the caption and word balloons, we might be able to identify Alec MacGarry's coat (If we’re lucky), but the rest of the people are nothing more than white-paint squiggles. This is also the case for the rest of the drawings. In panel three, it'd be impossible to figure out that Alec is "bashing the necks off" beer bottles by looking at the image alone. In most of Campbell's autobiographical work, words guide the narrative while the images add another channel of meaning: Campbell's signature talent at capturing body language through doodling. Ironically, the word-bound Alan Moore puts more emphasis on images than Campbell the solo artist does.

And this is why Campbell was born to do comic-book memoirs. Somebody should write an essay devoted to Campbell’s skill as a prose writer—I wish I could write blog entries as charming as Eddie's—and it's that raconteur's voice I hear inside my head as I read The King Canute Crowd or The Fate of the Artist. Further, the protocols of the autobiographical genre keep the narrative tightly focused on Alec/Eddie and the people important to him. Campbell-as-character dominates the panels, and the art doesn't have to stick to realistic portraiture. The consistency of the prose voice, and the "me-me-me" focus of memoir, frees the images up, allowing Campbell to draw comics with unprecedented poetic immediacy. Campbell doesn't have to worry about being "on model"; he can just draw models, most taken from a mirror or from real life, with the spontaneity of a best friend doodling in a sketchbook. The result feels more like life itself caught on the fly rather than a representation of life. It's alive; it breathes.

Charles: Craig, I love your conclusion there! So well put.

I agree that Campbell is most at home as a graphic memoirist, that his comics tend to be text- as well as image-driven, and that's he's a terrific prose stylist (in this last particular he reminds me of Jim Woodring). Further, I've got to concede that fully-realized spaces, in the sense of physical environments, are not Campbell's strength, certainly not compared to his command of body english.

Regarding the last point, it was always obvious to me that the architectural set pieces in From Hell relied on Mullins and/or photocopying, and, yes, there are times when they look disconcertingly detached from Campbell's figure work. Campbell's work in From Hell certainly does not match the spatial precision of Gibbons on Watchmen, or, for that matter, the meticulousness of Gene Ha & Zander Cannon on Top Ten or Jim Williams on Promethea. Campbell has recently made moves in the direction of more spectacular physical settings -- I was startled to see the complex renderings of space and place in The Black Diamond Detective Agency, though there again he relies somewhat on photos -- but the human interaction of figures has always been more important to him than posing the figure against a perspectivally "deep" space. This may have to do with his love of comedy above all else, and may also help explain why his version of "Lee-Kirby mythos-building" is not entirely successful: Kirby's yen for the cyclopean, for that childlike sense of being overawed by the "gods" and the elements, is certainly not much like Campbell's understated comic sense.

That said, Craig, I have to disagree with your take on both Bacchus and From Hell. The first Bacchus stuff I read was Doing the Islands, and that series, which is something of an idyll in the middle of a larger continuity, has these wonderful, backward-looking episodes that serve to point up Campbell's abiding interest in history. To me, the pleasures of Bacchus are mostly by-the-way: what I like about the series has to do with the way the gods' long memories allow Campbell to do same sort of stuff he did in his "History of Humor" -- that is, unearth and put a puckish, ironic spin on some of the more obscure byways of human history. Some of those Bacchus short stories are terrific: troves of near-buried history, given sly Campbellian treatment. There's also an obvious pleasure, throughout, in the sheer pleasure of telling yarns, even if they turn out to be wayward, shambolic, shaggy-dog stories. Granted, I grew less interested in the later serialized Bacchus, in particular the incestuous roman à clef stuff about the self-publishing movement (King Bacchus), but I've always liked Campbell's way of cutting together history and mythology.

As for From Hell, I take your points about how Campbell's middle-distance framing keeps us "more removed" from the narrative. I agree that the results are sometimes stunning, but I would add that the results are often palliative as well. Frankly, a From Hell rendered with Gibbons' meticulousness would probably have been repellent in the extreme; I'm not sure I could abide it. And this I think is the great strength of Campbell's contribution to From Hell: besides having a knowledge of history to rival Moore's own (he may be the only artist collaborator to call Moore more than once on historical inaccuracies), Campbell also brings a cartoon rawness to the proceedings, offsetting to a degree the closely-tended formalism of Moore's script. I think this works wonders, both to remind us that the "London" of the novel is an imaginary, mythic London and, at the same time, to underscore and render more sympathetic the novel's grotty emphasis on the lives of the working-class and the marginalized. Furthermore, I'd say that Campbell's middle-distance staging makes manifest Moore's own tendency to waver between empathy for his characters and cool, dispassionate observation: sure, Moore seems to like his characters, generally, but often he loses them to the byzantine machinations of plot (I made a similar observation in my review of Moore & Gebbie's Lost Girls). Of necessity, he often stands at a remove from the characters. Campbell captures this quality graphically, but, at the same time, the manifestly drawn quality of Campbell's figures lends some relief from Moore's formalism. Those artists who counter Moore's formalism with a lively, scratchy line -- I'm thinking of Steve Bissette here as well as Campbell -- complement Moore's structural brilliance in a refreshingly graphic way. For my money, Campbell's contributions to From Hell, as cartoonist and history buff, are saving graces.

By the way, none of the above is meant as a knock on Watchmen. It may be that Watchmen is a more cohesive novel than From Hell, but, if so, that has to do with Moore getting waylaid by his fascination with Dr. Gull in the latter half of From Hell and losing his grip on the novel's multi-sided depiction of Victorian London. It's not a comment on the effectiveness of the artists.

Whew, that's enough for now (gads, an Alan Moore thread is threatening to break out!). We're looking forward to tackling specific stories by Eddie Campbell in the months ahead, and we hope you'll join us for future installments of this, Thought Balloonists' first creator-centered series!

Comments

[Isaac Cates]

When I've taught From Hell, my students have sometimes been quick to make an analogy (or an equation) between Campbell's scratchy crosshatching (and sketchy portraiture) and the fog and haze of Whitechapel. That's an oversimplification, but there's something about it that I like, and which connects to what Charles is saying about Campbell's counterbalance to Moore's formalism: I think that one of the real benefits of Campbell's cartooning in From Hell is that it's not as clear, not as quickly legible in its details as, say, Dave Gibbons's poised clarity.

My reading experience, with From Hell, has more to do with peering into those panels than with apprehending them immediately. And I suppose I do something similar with Watchmen, studying the backgrounds to look for smiley-faces or whatnot, but I think it's important for From Hell that it sometimes takes me a split-second longer to read the panel at all. If it's not the fog of Whitechapel, it might be the fog of historical guesswork and reconstruction. The images are never "transparent," so we are never encouraged to think of the world of the book as fully present for us: these are notes or sketches about reality, not an attempt to contain a new reality within the page.

Anyway, I'm with Charles on From Hell, and on Bacchus, too. (I think Bacchus is an underestimated or underdiscussed masterpiece, really. I'm looking forward to your coverage of it.)

[CharlesWHatfield]

So, Isaac, are you saying we should expand the scope of this series to include Bacchus as well as the autobiographical stuff? It's specifically the "Alec" stuff that we set out to do, but, well...

It might take us past August to get to Bacchus, but, sure, I think I can get to Bacchus sometime in the coming year. Then Craig can throw brickbats. :)

It will probably be well after Monsieur Leotard, though, when it comes.

BTW, I quite like your point about From Hell as "notes or sketches" toward a history, rather than a putatively objective history. As speculative pseudo-history, the book does need a good dose of self-doubt (Moore and Campbell supply a strong one in the "Dance of the Gull Catchers" epilogue).

Frankly, I think Campbell's skeptical and historically-minded presence works wonders for the book. Campbell is counterweight to Moore's own esoteric interests.

Thematically, Moore is in danger of getting caught in Gull's "derangement"; he tends to aspire toward shamanic oversight, as with the Veidt character in Watchmen (which means that, disconcertingly, he tends to empathize or at least become entranced by the ostensible "villains" of the stories!). Campbell's own learned presence in the book is an important counterpull, which is why I find their collaboration so fascinating.

[Isaac Cates]

Whoops -- I guess I misread or misremembered the thing about Bacchus. If you can get to it, great. If not, I'll just set some time aside to re-read it on my own later this year.

And I agree with you for sure, Charles, about the skeptical / realist Campbell influence (and restraint) on Moore in From Hell. Moore is obviously interested in the mystical perceptions of order that Gull and Veidt achieve; one of the reasons Promethea doesn't interest me as much is that the mystical order in that book is no longer proclaimed by a madman or villain.

In From Hell, it'd be tempting to imagine Moore as Gull and his illustrator as Netley, enabling the mad patterns to emerge according to his master's directions. With a different collaborator, it might have turned out that way. To Moore's credit, he seems to seek out collaborators who can and will add to the work instead of merely completing his instructions. If Campbell is analogous to a character in From Hell, he's certainly no Netley. (Abberline, maybe?) At any rate, he was clearly the right cartoonist for the job.

Anyway, I don't want to derail this post into a discussion of Moore's collaboration. You know that interests me, and you know what I have to say about it. I should only add that the more I look at Campbell's drawing (and the more drawing I do, myself), the more impressed I am with his mastery of gesture and implication. If the "pair of feet" rule means more attention to that sort of thing, I'm all for it.

[Eddie Campbell]

Charles and Craig,

very flattered you should take the time, I must say, I hope my sudden presence does not hamper your critical eye.

re that church. It was the one out of all the Hawksmoor churches we wanted to use that no longer exists. It was hit by a bomb during the second world war. So it was the only one for which we couldn't obtain our own photos and I only had an old dark one of a bombed-out wreck prior to its demolition (with a big hole in the roof). You can see Alan in front of the modern building that stands in its place here:
http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2006/12/alan-moores-london-part-2.html

I chose to fudge the details on that one rather than confidently 'invent' for the same sorts of reasons that it is anathema in modern archaeology to restore ancient artefacts. But nevertheless you're right in observing that my own inclinations don't lean toward correctly depicting those ancient stones which were so important to the philosophy of the work, and that is the principal reason i decided early that I needed an artistic assistant who had the right eye for it.

And for my own part, I work from the impression toward clarity and often I feel I can only go so far before authenticity is at risk and I have to pull up short. Every panel is a wrestling match and many are failures.

Best
Eddie

[Craig Fischer]

But most are successes, Eddie--which is why we're taking the time to look at your work.

I still hate Vince Colletta's inking, though. :)

[CharlesWHatfield]

Ah, good to see you here, Eddie, even if you are WRONG both about Colletta's inking and about the relative unimportance of that earth-rattling issue. Heh.

Thanks for the insight into your creative process on FH. Re: St. John's, actually I learned that only the obelisk on that church was created by Hawksmoor; it was not one of the several churches architected solely by him. And I note that Gull's monologue in that scene stresses the obelisk more than anything else, which is the feature that stands out most prominently in the drawing. So what you did there actually seems quite apt, to me.

When I first read the opening chapters of FH (that would have been in the first of the Tundra/KS squarebound booklets), I kept thinking, "London fog! London fog!" Your bit about working "from the impression toward clarity" is most revealing.

[Patrick Brown]

To me, Campbell's work has a greater sense of reality than Gibbons, whose drawings (while excellent) feel more artificial in their precision. Campbell is one of the few artists I know of who attends to focus - the eye doesn't see everything in as much detail as what it's focusing on, and neither do Campbell's drawings. One of my favourite things is the gestural quality of the background figures, who aren't drawn in as much detail as the characters who are the focus of the scene. I like to do that sort of thing in my own work, and it was largely Campbell that emboldened me to trust my own drawing like that.

Wholehearted agreement about Doing the Islands. The rest of the Bacchus epic, while it has its moments, I can take or leave, but that's a gorgeous book.

[CharlesWHatfield]

We look forward to doing all of BACCHUS here at some point. In the meantime, Patrick, I like how your remarks about focus and detail dovetail with Eddie's own. Thanks for weighing in, and so thoughtfully!