eddie campbell (or, "the mission and the meaning of the mission (is comix)")

Has always been an influence on me, before I even knew who he was.  I knew Bacchus, first, as a teenage reader of Dark Horse Presents, and only cottoned onto the artist behind that mad saga much, much later, on the far side of a chasm where my teen years are housed, half-recalled & water damaged...  and even further, realize that I had seen Eddie's LINE in cognito, in collaboration, endlessly, with other artists hither & yon, from when he was doing the 80s indy scene.  I still pick up scraps from those years today.  I'm probably the only Eddie Campbell reader in Chicago with a copy of the Ace Rock'N'Roll Club.

Chi's a pretty cool town.  A few months ago my husband, who's only read what Eddie Campbell I've shown him*

* Single page strips that endlessly amuse me from his Alec archive of self-reflection, mainly to do with home life, anecdotes & Real Life stuff, which is about as far from Bacchus as it gets.  I was into Eddie first for his fantasy, but in the long view the only Bacchus I have these days is the colour special he did with Teddy Kristensen painting the whole thing, and it's SIGNED by Eddie, which wasn't even a thing I sought; I got it by accident, off an ebay purchase 10 years ago that I only permitted myself--

(the control on my addiction to comix, y'see, was only letting myself buy comix i found In The Wild, in stores or in random nooks in bookshops, little free libraries, library book sales, yard sales, etc--  NO INTERNET PURCHASES, was the hard line up until covid came knocking.  now i control my addiction with an ingrained sense of poverty & the fragility of life & the Transience of All Things, since i have rebuilt my entire comix collection Three Separate Times in my life and have had three near-death experiences.  this, the third collection, is the last one.  the final cut, if you like, the hard edit on what i think the best & most influential comix of my life.  this is the library that survived, and i will pass on, as an inheritance, to someone whom i hope shall not squander the precious knowledge entombed therein.  if you can grok these books you have everything you will ever need to put lines to paper for yourself, guaranteed)

--an ebay purchase which I only permitted myself because my last copy of the Bacchus Colour Special, aka 'The Bottle' got lost, somehow, in my move to the 405 4th studio, where I undertook teaching myself how to make comix all over again as I sweated it out night after night in a dirt bar that also happened to have the best damn pool tables in Atlanta.

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell, and comix, and how Eddie's comix have guided me as a person about as much as Grant Morrison influenced my pop cultural adoration of metafiction & the intellectual, literary gameplay comix could result in, etc, insert endless name-dropping cocklobbering daisy chain of hero worship here [goatse.cx]

Short version is, Eddie influenced me as an Ahhhrtist as much as on the human, literary, level as any scots bastard ever.  Eddie is a player in the comix marketplace on the level of the heavies, has been his whole life (even when he thinks / thought otherwise) and his sense of line & his bravery as a scribbler are second to bloody none.  I love him for his abstraction, his carefully chaotic swings at using two values to represent kalaidoscopes of colour; for being a Colour Artist & fine painter who learned how to do every bit of that in Black & White, in minute abstracted & rigorously swiftly & beautifully resolved experiments in what an artist can do with tiny boxes, lines on paper, & the interaction of word / image.  

He's the real goddamned goods, and better at Talkin' Art than Scott bloody McCloud & Eisner & who else is there, really, when you're talking heavies, because Eddie Campbell is also old as fuck and I express this as someone freshly old as fuck, and at least as experienced with the ups & downs of bar life, hanging with total poolroom genius wasters...  Minus, perhaps, the extra 30,000 miles of wear on SOMEbody's liver.  Who were we talking about again?

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell.  But then I'd have to apologize for biting his style, above.  And I do like that picture, despite all the terribly critical biting things I might could venture--  the fact that I can't mimic Eddie's lettering b/c it's mostly done w/ crowquill nib & i am not lettering with anything other than a felt tip, fuck ya'll very much, i DID my time cleaning nibs & lettering with them and eff all that fine motor control, son, because i possess it no longer  --I do think it's a good likeness, Eddie Campbell to the life, and I was barely trying.

The zip-a-tone really makes it.  Letraset, little black sticky dotty things, whatever you gotta call it.  My favoured brand was Letraset.  They went outta business in the states; I think they merged with a Japanese backer & in some form persist there today, largely kept afloat by the manga industry.  But enough anecdotal, shoppy meanders.  The zip-a-tone is what makes it. 

 

The zip-a-tone is mainly why I thought to post this, today.  This zip-a-tone was given to me by my mother, and may date to her stock from pasting up newspaper adverts for the [Dogwater] Star, her hometown newspaper.

This stuff aged like finest vinegar, as you can see-- it's brittle & doesn't want to stay adhesed to anything other than other acetate; it's gotten that lovely yellow you get from decayed spirit gum that's had exposure to a surface easily affected by humidity (such as xerox paper).  It's fascinating stuff.  You can get lovely moire patterns from it by layering, as demonstrated here.  You can scratchboard it with an exacto to create nifty photorealist gradiants...  Zip-a-tone is the BOMB.  Eddie was, to me, the expert with this shit; at a certain point in an artist's life you collect these obscure scraps & they become precious.  I think Eddie ran out a few years ago; like, within the last administration.  He had that much!

I gave my collection of my mother's letratone... 

--gathered over the decades & only slightly supplied by me, as when I first ran away from home I bought up all the stock there was to be had in Auburn, and their people didn't even know they HAD it:  tucked away on shelves only accessibly by footstool.  I recognized the logo and had to ask someone to get it down.  They sold me the entire batch for two twenties.

Girl at the counter didn't even know what it was.  She asked why I would spend so much money.

Most of that letratone got used by me & my art partner, Josiah, over the late 90s & early 2000s as we both tried & flailed to get noticed / published / do it ourselves, a la Sim, in fucking Auburn, Alabama, then Richmond, Virginia.  We probably picked the wrong time to do any of this, because clearly we caused 9/11.

Anyway, after all the carcinogens died down and nobody knew who or what we were bombing or who we were putting bags over the heads of, the art partnership came to a mutually conciliatory divorce and I was on my own, in Atlanta, and after 4am I would finish cleaning up the daily spills and leave my coworkers to the afterparty, go home & practice making comix.

"...instead of bitching" (#41) was a simple exercise in grinding out a windowpane.  I figured, three panels, three art styles as near as can be imitated, using only felt-tip & ink & a blunt / rough brush.  No laming out with markers on the shading like I had been, where the graytones had almost become a crutch & my linework was suffering.  I think that was the motivation, as near as I can recall.  Eddie's not the panel I'm most proud of-- that would be the Brandon Graham pastiche, where I got his line DOWN; the Carla Speed McNeil imitation is half-rate & too busy, and I don't care for my bald spot in panel 1 at all; it's a terrible composition & unless you knew from previous strips you'd have no idea that there was a bare lightbulb on a weird articulated arm of entwined plastic lei flowers on my desk, nor that that was what that was meant to be.  

Anyway, yeah:  for a while my desk just had a fucking light bulb directly over my head.  Which would be ironic because during this phase of my life I was not particularly creative nor bright.  I knew why I & Josiah had failed, and it wasn't because of Jo.  It was probably because of the unresolved homosexual attraction, unrecognized on my part, happily, because if I'd known I'd had a thing for him we wouldn't have partnered up to make comix in the first place.  We weren't very good at it, generally, we were enthusiastic amateurs.

I mean, my enthusiasm had to be pretty boundless, in those days, because I ran away from home to Make Comix, the way some idiots run away from home to become Rock Stars, or Join Circuses, or Go L.A.-- I mean, there's me, Al Columbia & Brandon Graham, there's gotta be other malformed idiots who started this way.  There I was--  holy shit, there I still am, in my memory palace: the comic shop I used to brazenly steal from back in 97, the one that got burned out for the insurance money; there I am, idly nudging the char from a roof support with my duct-taped jump boot  --rifling through quarter bins back when there .25 bins were a thing, bruh, and there was Eddie Campbell, this fuckin' internationally recognized comix artist whose rep I mainly knew anecdotally, through copies of Amazing Heroes or 'From Hell' hitting Taboo, or... 

Wait, this Campbell cat, didn't he do Bacchus, in Dark Horse Presents?  Did I already say that?

Hey, I think I forgot to finish a sentence, back there.  I gave my mother's collection of letratone, to which I'd also contributed, to my husband.  Kind-of not-really as an engagement present.  It's an heirloom.  Y'know.

Since this endlessly nested reverie has (at last!) reached the weed-fogged borders of Old Beardy's Ideaspace, I suppose it's appropriate to re-visit this cameo by Moore, whom I dreamt dropped into my first "apartment".  (really just a single room, converted motor hotel space that flooded annually; an apartment I inherited from the only other terminal nerd I knew in Auburn, a total loser named Shakin' Blake who creeped on teen girls & eventually got kicked out for not being able to pay rent on that shithole because he'd lost his job at KFC, so him & his Billy Idol cds and his reeking mildewed collection of longboxes--  Shakin' Blake, James, in case you're still reading, is who I blame for my knowledge of 90s GL  --got chucked into the street, so I inherited: a fridge that did a cool imitation of a block of ice; an air conditioner which drooled, loudly; a disgusting sink; and an oven that never worked)  First "apartment" i ever paid rent on, the first lease to ever bear my name.  Bulldozed immediately after I moved out, December 31st of 1999.

That was the first studio I made comix in, and that's where Josiah made his first comix.  You can see it in the first panel:

Not terribly well-drawn, but the compositions work.  It's early in the Greetings from Crooked Corner run of autobio comix that I shan't bore you further with, as they are crap.  But yeah.  Eddie fuckin' Cambell figured heavily in my appreciation of the form, as much as this beardy ol' fucker with his lugubrious Northampton drawl.  I first experienced their work together in that apartment.  It's in some annex of the memory palace, maybe a hallway over from the Big Wreck that rattled my chronology.  Pretty sure I must have been listening to Moore's spoken word performances around the time I had this dream.  The Birth Caul is my favourite thing either Campbell or Moore have done, collaboratively, after From Hell.  It's a magnificent bit of work, especially as a Single Issue of Comix, which is most definitely not what it began as.

Eddie MADE that thing, two-handedly wrestling Moore's marijuana free-associative flight into such robost, sculptural shape.  It's a massive bit of comix-as-art and it's philosophically chewy in a way I find only Eddie Campbell really delivers, for me, at the end of the day.  He gets how people think, and talk, and how it all sort-of ties together.  "Memory is a big ol' plate of soup," as Campbell once endearingly put it.

I'm starting to get what he means.

So it was a pretty wild thing when my husband--  hey, did you remember where originally I left off?  half of fuckin' Anna Karenina ago?  blitherin' in my infuriatingly dissociated way about showing Siegfried some of Campbell's Alec comix?  --my husband attended CAKE, two months ago (the altcomix expo here in Chi, apologies for all the stumbly parantheticals, it's just my style, which is why I don't make autobio comix, it's the sorta thing only works in standup or blogging) because he's scouting for next year & our table there.  Did I mention we're doing that?  We're doing that.  And who does he stumble into?

Siegfried comes home & asks, "Eddie Campbell makes comics."  And I'm like "That's not a question."

Sig says, "Yeah.  He was just walking around, chilling."  And I'm like "Apropos of being fucking cool."

Anyway.  Eddie.  Man.  Don't get me started.

We could have a conversation.