THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Our Eddie: The Fate of the Artist

   

When we launched our Eddie Campbell series, I observed that Campbell "approaches cartooning as handwriting” and praised 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 [...], 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 [...]. 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.

I stand by the above (hell, I just quoted myself), but the problem of pronouncements like this is that artists like Eddie Campbell don’t sit still.

Our Eddie: After the Snooter

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2002. $14.95.

This is the latest installment in our series on Eddie Campbell's autobiographical comics. Previous posts are here, here, here, here and here. Whew!    

At first, After the Snooter reads as a straight-forward collection of domestic vignettes and memories from Campbell's childhood and adolescence. (The first thing you notice is that in Snooter Campbell finally abandons his "Alec MacGarry" alias and calls himself by his real name.) As ever, one of Campbell's primary virtues as an artist is his skill in choosing funny and/or poignant stories from his life. A single pager titled "Grooming Yocky's Arse" features Campbell's long-suffering wife Anne, who makes the alarming discovery that the family cat has grass sticking out of its ass. Anne gradually cuts the grass "until the problem works itself out," and the strip ends with Yocky breaking the fourth wall like this:

Our Eddie: How to Be an Artist (Craig Responds)

Hey, go read Charles first.

Re-reading and writing about Eddie Campbell's graphic novels reminds me how dense and complicated the books are. In my post on The King Canute Crowd, I mentioned a panel where Campbell drew himself arm-wresting with Alan Moore, with both men spouting their primary influences:

While writing that post, I remembered that panel from Campbell's interview in The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991), but I forgot about that panel's subsequent appearance in How to Be an Artist, page 38, where it represents Campbell's deepening  friendship and artistic collaboration with Moore (and  captures an occasion where both men "tape a conversation for Escape"). I've learned to never underestimate Eddie. His art is shot through with details, reoccurrences, motifs, characters and themes that rise above individual books and cut across his entire oeuvre; maybe Campbell's life is the work of art, and the books are the tracks of his passage (Garooga!), and it's a stupid critic who reaches conclusions before the life and art are done.

Still, though, let me be stupid for a bit and address one of Charles' observations.

Our Eddie: How to Be an Artist

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001. $13.95 US.

Welcome to the third installment of our series on the comics of Eddie Campbell, in particular his autobiographical "Alec MacGarry" graphic novels. (Previous episodes can be found here, then here.) Today our subject is Alec: How to Be an Artist.

How to Be an Artist is a book I've considered, and am still considering, using in my comics classes as a critical text as well as a “graphic novel” in its own right. A personal, not to say biased, life-and-times account of the comics and graphic novel revolution of the 1980s, the book serves as a historical/critical study as well as a memoir. Inevitably, it’s partly fictive in manner (Campbell’s memoirs always own up to their use of organizing and distancing devices), but, still, How to Be an Artist looks like an attempt to get down the facts of the time in a scrupulous if idiosyncratic way. I’d say one of the book’s many virtues is that it completely destabilizes the putative distinction between primary and secondary texts.

In other words, How to Be an Artist manages to be, all at once, literary autobiography, autofiction, history from the ground up, the biography of a scene (that is, the British small-press comics scene), an acidic commentary on the passage from scene to pop culture fad, a too-hasty postmortem on a movement that in fact has not died (the graphic novel movement), an anthology of Campbell’s influences and critical opinions, a constellation of character studies (some of them stiletto-sharp and quietly devastating), and a protean, unpredictable, often barbed yet delightful, and still somehow very sad, cartoon narrative. It’s one of several books in Campbell’s catalog to play hob with generic distinctions, and, like a lot of Campbell’s stuff, its tone is tough to place.

Our Eddie: The King Canute Crowd

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2000. $14.50.

I'm not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It's unbelievably exciting.

-- Eddie Campbell, The Comics Journal #145

Welcome to the second installment of our series on Eddie Campbell's Alec MacGarry/autobiographical graphic novels. (Our first episode, mostly a dialogue on Campbell's collaborations with Alan Moore, is here.) Today our subject is Alec: the King Canute Crowd.

Our Eddie: From Hell Redux

Craig here, interrupting our usual weekend silence to note an excellent response to our Eddie Campbell post of April 1:

http://blog.kobek.com/2008/04/02/thoughts-on-the-visual-style-of-from-hell

Go and read, please. Jarett Kobek has some fascinating things to say about From Hell: he compares its visual style to Victorian newspaper engravings, and argues that the book is less a contemporary graphic novel than a "Victorian Novel done graphically," following the storytelling and visual tropes of the era.

Thanks for the smart commentary, Jarett. I'll try to reply in more detail soon, and I encourage everyone else to chime in on the comments thread.

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...