Mindless Ones

You can tell I’m not the real me from the fact that I didn’t know this book existed until I tripped over Tegan O’Neil’s review in The Comics Journal. As a lifelong Eddie Campbell enthusiast and someone who enjoys Tegan’s criticism, I would have been anticipating the book’s publication and would have read Tegan’s review the day it went up.

The fact that it took almost two weeks to catch up can only mean one thing: I’m not me. The author of this blogpost has been replaced.

The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell comes packaged together with 2006’s The Fate of The Artist, another autobiographical comic in which the author has gone missing. Back when it came out The Fate of the Artist felt like a big development in Campbell’s artistic style, with its watercolour textures and shifting art styles. Here’s Dirk Deppey writing for The Comics Journal at the time:

Campbell’s latest work, The Fate of the Artist, is a logical step forward. Using a moment of artistic doubt suffered by Campbell as a springboard, Fate weaves the lives of forgotten artists and artisans, autobiographical anecdotes in which the author is portrayed by an actor, faux comic strips, fumetti, and concludes with a faithfully adapted O. Henry short story starring Campbell himself. The work is as collage-like as Snakes and Ladders, but here the juxtapositions are between scenes rather than images. None of the individual parts ever fully connect to their surroundings; instead, each segment slyly comments on the implied message of others, building thematic inferences rather than a narrative storyline. Graphically The Fate of the Artist is more subdued than Snakes and Ladders, yet its conceptual underpinnings are more daring than anything its creator has ever before attempted.

In 2023, The Fate of the Artist looks like a work from the traditional side of Campbell’s career. An artist with a classically appealing style, all hand-scratched lines and careful depictions of light and posture, Campbell has spent the past couple of decades restlessly experimenting, often with the aid of his computer. In the past ten years he’s added digital colouring to the immaculate Victorian picture making of From Hell, written a book about sports cartoonists, and put together an anthology of odd romance stories with his wife Audrey Niffenegger.

The autobiographical work that followed Fate, 2012’s The Lovely Horrible Stuff, saw Campbell integrating photography into his hand drawn and painted art to uncanny effect. In keeping with Campbell’s experimental impulses, the book’s style wasn’t always as pleasant to look at as the artist’s earlier work, but none of that discomfort was wasted. The Lovely Horrible Stuff‘s subjects – the bonds of cash, the bonds of family, the power of abstraction – demanded an approach that constantly disturbed the reader’s sense of what was familiar and what was strange.

High on this sense of uncertainty, in my review of the book I speculated that nothing in the story was true:

Once the illusion of Yap fell away from eyes, I started to see everything else more clearly.  You see, there’s no “Eddie Campbell” either, that’s just a pseudonym Alan Moore uses when he wants to get away from ideaspace for a while, a secondary life he pretends to have lived, inky li(n)es trailing off into nothing like the hair on his face. The people you see in the book, claiming to be Campbell’s friends and family? Actors, all actors, and as such there’s no reason to worry about their drama being traded in for the cold taste of coins.

If you think that seems a little too giddy you might be on to something. In the end, this feeling was so intoxicating that I started to doubt my own existence along the way:

Me? I don’t exist either.  All of my financial worries are fake – did you really think it possible that I could propose to live off my thoughts alone if I lose my job?  Thankfully, Illogical Volume is just a work-in-progress, a computer programme designed to vent words and neurosis on an irregular basis. This blog is a dry run for deliberately useless AI; thank you for participating in the beta test.

Which brings us to Campbell’s most recent autobiographical novel, which I would have known about in advance if I was really here. The qualities that were uncanny in The Lovely Horrible Stuff are now the baseline of Campbell’s reality, worn proudly on the artist’s face in one sequence:

Campbell has Niffenegger comment on this shift in style in the body of the comic (“It’s like he’s trying to find a way of faking it. He’s even sneaking photos into his drawings, hoping no one will notice”), and discusses it in his afterword in the dazed tones of a man who has only just remembered his crimes (“But on casting my eyes over aforegoing pages, I see the laptop everywhere in them”). The absence of Campbell’s hand-scratched letters provides an opening note of dismay in O’Neil’s TCJ review (“I have now felt that same shock of utter betrayal. I have cracked the spine on Eddie Campbell’s latest and found computer lettering staring back”), but her later comment on where she places the book is more revealing:

Ugly as sin, yes, but so is a great deal of Chris Onstad and Jerry Moriarty. Which is sort of where I’d place Campbell right now: halfway between Jack Survives and Achewood, as far away as possible from the meticulous penmanship of From Hell. Never sitting still, our boy.

Like O’Neil, I suspect, I’d rather be frustrated by a favourite artist than bored, so while I find myself missing certain effects of light that Campbell used to conjure from a haze of ink, there are moments where I find new pleasure in his work. Like this bit of business with a cat:

Or this sleepy fantasia, the first in a series of dream sequences that punctuate the story, and the first in a series of scenes depicting some sort of covert skulduggery:

This second image is a bridge back to Campbell’s past: its looseness is new, but in conception it winks at the “Honeybee” newspaper strips that cut through The Fate of The Artist. The sequence where Campbell wrestles the cat has a different feel to it, or rather, it gives fresh form to something Campbell’s long been after. It doesn’t have the sense of the air he’s traditionally sought through painterly effects, but it conveys the same sense of life in the moment as some of his earliest work in The King Canute Crowd. I’m thinking of the way Campbell catches the soft bends of the body in this bar scene:

If that seems too restrained in comparison to what the cat’s doing in the new book, consider those moments in the earlier work where Campbell tried to catch the movement of a pub brawl:

Of course, the world in which Campbell made his earlier works no longer exists, so maybe a shift of technique was required. The Second Fake Death is, as its subtitle points out, “a pandemic graphic novel”, and when I read the new book for a second time down the pub, a comics artist of my acquaintance expressed equal surprise at the change in art style (“It’s like looking at David Hockney’s iPhone drawings!”) as he did at the way Campbell was drawing himself (“Does he look like that now?”). He does, as this video interview will attest!

This shift in technique isn’t limited to line, lettering and colour, any more than the new haircut represents the limits of how much “Eddie Campbell” has changed in this story. From The King Canute Crowd to The Lovely Horrible Stuff, Campbell’s autobiographical work has shown a tendency to the poetic and the anecdotal. Chapters that trace the way people move around in moment-to-moment detail have tended to be matched to sequences where the text provides the through-line of a tall tale, with the images highlighting key moments or providing literary or humorous counterpoints. The hand lettering Tegan O’Neil mentions is one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of Campbell’s work, and the accompanying narrative voice is right there with it, from “Alec MacGarry never forgets things said” to “And then he’ll replace the old maxim with a new one: MONEY is TIME”.

The Second Fake Death is unbothered by such narration. Its dreamtime fantasies, trouser-related misadventures, pop art detective stories and tales of pandemic life are all drawn in their own unique way and dominated by different voices, but they share the same real time rhythm. There’s a sense of shrinking scope here, the ultimate expression of which comes in scenes where characters sit and talk to each other through carefully individualised masks:

The above example is particularly extreme, but the overall effect is to create “real world” discussions that feel a lot like blether between social media avatars. “I see the laptop everywhere,” you might say. I worry that my description risks making it sound like the book is an anti-lockdown rant, when part of Campbell’s technique here is to track the way that physical constraints of lockdown living are matched by an increased sense of futility, a sense that railing against the forces that allow the pandemic to thrive is a hopeless task.

Campbell’s skill for arrangement is a clear point of continuity between The Second Fake Death and his earlier work – as O’Neil puts it in her review, “Campbell is clearly trying to draw lines between diagrams” – and it’s in the way the different layers of the story interact that 2023’s Eddie Campbell can be found. The Fate of the Artist was constructed as a paradox, mocking Campbell’s tendency to search for some grand unifying principle while also fulfilling it through grand, playful collage. If its many detours often seemed to lead the reader down the garden path, the digressions in The Second Fake Death hit roadblocks from the get go. The story about the wife commissioning an investigation of her husband – an echo of an earlier Campbell/Niffenegger collaboration – is presented as being one of Campbell’s stories within the text, and even then it’s called off halfway through the book. The dream comics are entertaining diversions, but we see Campbell declaring that “the idea of a book of them isn’t going to work” a mere two panels after they’re introduced. As for the “Covid’s-19” strips, the Eddie Campbell of the main plot is even more scathing about those, calling it “another one of my failures”.

In the end, it all adds up to something though. The light never quite goes out on the “Royler Boom” detective strip, and its hunt for a missing artist (the real Eddie Campbell) and climactic chase through traffic have their corresponding parts in the top level of the story. There’s also a punchline in there about what happens when the years no longer have pants, heavily trailed throughout the book, but it’s better to let you trip over that one yourself. The bit of real world detective work, in which Campbell, Niffenegger and @BarnaclePress work out the identity of the artist behind “Lucy and Sophie Say Goodbye”, reminded me of the way Campbell changed the ending of How to be an Artist for the Alec omnibus. In the updated version of that story, The Comics Journal printing another artist’s work in its obituary of Stan Drake is used to suggest that posterity might not have much interest in your grand artistic journeys. The Second Fake Death is less depressing: despite ending with the “real” Campbell meeting death after he’s been uncovered, there’s more weight to the idea of another artist being uncovered after his death.

Which brings me to a question: given that it’s the story of creative and social life that has been scunnered by circumstance, why does The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell end up feeling more cheerful than the book it’s coupled with? Well, to get there, we’ll need to get lost on another of our wild tangents.

One thing that stuck me while rereading The Fate of the Artist is that the photograph of Campbell walking Monty is no longer waiting for you at the end of the book.

If memory serves – and it rarely does – Campbell once claimed that this author photo was the last panel of The Fate of the Artist. In this light, the book had a happy ending. Campbell was home and happy, out walking the dog, perhaps even cured of his need to turn life into story. Of course, given that we read this in the form of a story… well, perhaps it wasn’t quite as settled as all that, even with that lovely picture of Monty at the end. This note of disharmony brings me to Chloe Maveal’s typically excellent interview with Campbell for Gutter Review, during which the artist looked back on his earlier work:

But you know, sometimes I look through some of my older books, or like The Lovely Horrible Stuff or Cul-de-Sac, which I did for a Humanoids anthology, and I think “This is monstrous! Is that really who I was? Who I used to be?”

That’s a pretty intense way of describing it! Monstrous? What’s monstrous to you about it?

The acceptance of— well…hm…I guess the anger. There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”

Somehow it all comes right in The Second Fake Death in a way it doesn’t in either version of The Fate of the Artist. To quote a recent “anti-memoir”, M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, “All anxieties contain their own mirrors, and you’re always looking for some space to inhabit between the two.” The Second Fake Death exists between anxieties: that Eddie Campbell is still here but in a reduced form, or that he has been replaced. This sounds like a downer but by playfully tracing the flux between these possibilities, Campbell finds a strange freedom. His hybrid aesthetic creates a space where jokes, daft ideas and family members can all breathe easily. If there’s a better description of a comfort in the current moment I’ve yet to hear it, and it’s as good an argument for Campbell’s ever-shifting style as you could ask for.

I would say that though. After all, I’m just another digital phantom.

Resistance: A Graphic Novel – Kathryn Briggs and Val McDermid (Profile Books, 2021)

You didn’t need to be a prophet to write about a globe-fucking pandemic back in the pre-Covid era, as Val McDermid did when she presented Resistance as a radio play back in 2017.  All you had to do was tune into the information in a way our government would find inconvenient at best and absurd at worst, implying as it must that photographs of the queen will not grant us dominion over all creatures great and small.

The timeliness of the story – written before we knew what a ball of Covid looked like, partially drawn during the first year of the pandemic, released in the second year – makes for a natural hook, but I suspect that some aspects will find their true resonance later on, when questions about antimicrobial resistance stop seeming even remotely distant or academic.

Val McDermid’s script wears its ambitions plainly – the dialogue is thick with research and the narrative progresses like a tightly controlled experiment.   It falls to artist Kathryn Briggs, then, to provide visuals that make this science fiction vivid on the page.  Thankfully Briggs is a restless and ambitious talent who works up a graphic language that shifts even faster than the situation described in the story.  One minute we’re looking at medical science as thought it’s a cute, distant concept, something that dances around the edges of our lives…

…and then before we know it we are living in a plague-era fresco, trying to work out how and when we started to taste that grit in our mouths that might be sand and might be ashes:

It’s another phenomenal performance from Briggs, who we have praised before on this website, down the pub, and in the pages of the collected edition of Triskelion.  Briggs’ art is alive with texture, but more than that it’s alive to life in all of its aspects.  Her carefully observed figure-work and portraiture is of a piece with her information rich layouts and use of collage.  In being attuned to what’s going on – in a way people will work very hard to convince our governments not to be, mind – Briggs takes us back to that prophetic feeling we may encounter when hearing about Resistance for the first time.

It’s a rush, of course.  Seeing how things connect generally is, no matter how much money gets thrown at telling you otherwise.  Still, it’s a double edged thing, this sensation.  This sort awareness can’t help but prompt a fresh reckoning with our own vulnerability, a reckoning that is at once humbling and painfully necessary.

Dan McDaid – DEGA (self-published, 2021)

First up, the snappy review!  Our very own Botswana Beast has already provided a handy back-cover blurb (“Beautiful… Valerian meets RONIN”), and I won’t pretend that I can disagree or top it because the Lynn Varley 1985 feel of the colours was definitely what kept my eye working through these pages at first.   These colours step out beyond the literal in a way that is alien to many Western genre comics in 2021, creating an emotional palette that operates in tandem with the other narrative elements on the page without ever quite feeling like it’s totally determined by them.  This colour scheme is established in the transition between the loveless blue-greys of space on the first page, and the spark-lit orange glow of the second.  Where colour occurs in the rest of the story, this contrast is played out again and again, always in a slightly different configuration.   This description makes every sound overdetermined, with the harshness of the environment DEGA plays out on being illuminated by the sparse scraps of technology our protagonist has about them, but you generally get the sense that McDaid is more willing to go with what feels right in the moment.

The resulting approach is subtle and varied, finding alien intelligence in the pale tones…

…and unfathomable danger in the warm ones:

Abhay has already talked about the way the colour comes in and out of the story, an “awkward” element which he nevertheless flags up as being a big part of the fun of the book.  I think I can relate – as you might already have guessed, my stupid, structure-obsessed brain definitely spent its first reading focusing on what resonances came out of where and when colour was used in the book.  This wasn’t entirely fruitless – those colours never stop echoing the shifting tone of the first couple of pages – but in the end I think the approach Abhay takes is the more rewarding one.  Sometimes it’s fun to be given the opportunity to question what you’re reacting to and why even when you’re still in the process of reacting, you know?

McDaid’s line has always had a robust edge to it, and there’s a reason that his art lends itself so handily to drawing big lads with chins built for action – wherever they come from, whatever era or milieu they inhabit, his characters tend look like they’ve been summoned into existence to scrap it out with the blank space on the page.    There’s another quality to his images in DEGA though.  Everything McDaid draws here feels like it’s mere seconds from flying apart, and while this effect is given dramatic expression in the coloured pages, the effect is no less striking when it’s conveyed in by the variation in the thickness of the line on the black and white sections:

Either one of these approaches would be magnificent.  Having both of them playing out in front of you at the same time is sublime, and adds to the sense of this book as a journey where all your certainties are slowly blasted away.

It’s a genuinely beautiful book, DEGA.  “Valerian meets Ronin” they’re saying, and they’re right.  It might make you feel like you’re just about to die on your arse in space, but without that feeling it’s not much of an adventure, right?

Short and to the pointless, here are a few comics you might want to check out online if you haven’t done so already…

Erika Price – Disorder

A series of experiments in unmaking, Disorder doesn’t need me laying it on thick, a quick glance at a couple of pages will tell you that you need to read more.

What impressed me most my second time through the series as it currently stands was the range of approaches Price adopts from a strip-to-strip basis.  Episode 2 achieves a sense of real vulnerability by showing us a figure in motion, its shifts in mood and physicality tracked in great detail panel-to-panel:

Episode 3, meanwhile, plays out a similar drama in a totally different format.  Here, whatever pain happens is framed by a writhing, corporeal, semi-expressive landscape, inner space projected outward until the difference between self and world is obliviated:

The next six strips see Price trying out a variety of different approaches to narrative, image making and panel layout without every blurring her vision of what Disorder is.  It’s remarkable work.  It’ll get under your skin.  You’ll want it there.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

PRELUDE

In times like these as in all other times, you are allowed to be relieved when someone else has done the heavy lifting for you.  As such, it’s comforting to find that Clark has put together not only a series of thoughtful posts on the immediate impacts of Covid-19 on the comics industry, but also a run of weekly link blogs to keep folk up-to-date on what’s going on in this little corner of the world.

Free from any delusions of being thorough, I figured I’d write a short post drawing attention to a few free comics / comics related videos closer to home, and maybe highlight a couple of ways you can help the artists involved along the way if you’ve got the cash to do so.

PART 1 – FREE COMICS!

Lockdown has seen a number of comics artists giving away their work for free, or at a discount.  Here are a few such works that we’ve reviewed before, if you’re stuck in the house and want a sense of what you might want to amuse and enervate yourself without splurging your last few iso-bucks!

Sarah Broadhurst, Jules Scheele and an army of sharp feminist voices – Identity: An Anthology (One Beat Zines, originally reviewed November 2015)

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE HERE

This is not only a truly beautiful object but a useful one too.  From Sabba Khan‘s elegant self-reflections to Alia Wilhelm‘s too-close photography by way of Sammy Boras‘ more traditional use of the comic book form to explore difficult questions of sexuality, Identity always makes intersectional feminism feel as natural as it really is, despite what some commentators might have you believe, arranging all of these disparate voices and means of expression together in one powerful volume.

This might sound like damning with faint praise but it’s meant sincerely.   Seemingly taking its cue from the punchy, “here’s my point and I dare you not to take it” expressiveness of Scheele’s cover design, this collection of comics and essays transforms lived experience into a rallying cry against complacency, against the possibility of mistaking your own experience for the only one worth listening to.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Sophie B – Last Orders (self published, picked up at Thought Bubble comic con, 2019)

A confident comic book debut from the talent behind 2018’s You Can Be Anything™, Last Orders gives you attractive characters in an attractive setting then works to show you how much flavour can be achieved with just the right combination of ingredients.

Those elements being “Gays, Ghosts and Grub”, obviously.

Even a passing glance will tell you that every aspect of this comic has style to spare, but a more attentive eye will reveal a sense of purpose underpinning the design. After all, it’s not just the info boxes that tell us who Robin and Esther are.  The way their outfits reflect each other’s haircuts, the way their conversations move from friendly sparring to sparkling monologue by way of shared glances, the way that those info boxes drop down into the story itself as it progresses – all of this tells us the same story, with no single aspect overpowering the light feast of narrative detail.

That it manages all this and plot about unfinished business almost seems like too much to ask from a first issue…

Esther McManus – Windows (See You at the Potluck, 2018)

This one comes from what my partner calls the “They Saw You Coming” side of the comic/zine world.  Every time I visit a comics festival or zine fair I come back home with at least 2-3 books full of pictures of buildings, or parts of buildings, or spaces where buildings used to be.  I rarely regret it.

Esther McManus’ Windows is an excellent example of the form, a series of portals that have been removed from any supporting context in a way that serves as startling prompt to the imagination:

The work demanded by this zine doesn’t just come in the form of having to reconstruct the urban environment – that’s the most immediately striking element, of course, a natural by-product of the composition of the piece, but it’s the start of a process rather than its final conclusion.

In its gradual blurring of the distinction between windows and the shapes that frame them, its removal of the human from the urban environment, and its finding of new ways to recombine familiar shapes, Windows is ultimately more Ballardian in its effects than it may initially appear.

Moving beyond brutalist cliches, this is a work that re-imagines the city as something that is no longer for us – a space that exists on the other side of the portal, where there is nothing to be reflected except windows looking on windows looking on windows all the way down.

It is March 2020.  I suspect that this scene is more familiar to many of us now than it would have been at any previous point in my lifetime.

Suds McKenna – Bunged (O Panda Gordo, 2018)

True to its origins as ‘an ongoing series of urban sketches’, Bunged looks like something that you might encounter in scraps, as a series of drawings that had been left around the house, flat share fragments that tell the story of a busy mind in a busy world. Thankfully for your future prospects of cohabitation, this mind seems to be a little bit scared of what it sees, but not to the point where the idea of humour has been made to seem miraculous:

You would feel puzzled but not deeply perturbed by these portraits.  You wouldn’t mention them to anyone, wouldn’t deem them any more necessary of commentary than the fact that a bar was crowded on a Friday.  Or indeed, that some of the streets pictured here – like Buchanan Street, above – were filled with bodies at the weekend.

It’s the distortions of the human form that give this work its non-banal aspect, suggestive as they are of both a deep subjectivity (as drawn into the page by your mystery flatmate/as read into the page by you) and of the fact that these people have more going on than you can fathom (as drawn into the page by your flatmate/as recognised from the world you’ve seen with your own damn eyes). This is itself is hardly a startling realisation, of course, but it’s vividly expressed here and comforting in context.

Monstrous as we are, it’s good to know that we’re not alone.

Because everything is entropy right? It’s always all downhill. Part of our ten-year challenge has been to find old posts that we like and can bear to  bring up and choke on again.

This is where I realised that the first post I wrote for the site was my best and favourite, and also offers an excellent opportunity to rededicate myself to John [E.] Smith –  comics greatest lostest poet, who even pops up in the comments on the original because blogs make dreams come true.

Apologies for my bad writing and any broken 10 y.o. pic links or whatever. “Enjoy.”

Dee do dough don’t dee dough? or why Hellblazer #51 is the title’s best issue

If I have to make up a bloggy reason why this post was written, it’s recent noise from the Factual Opinion that Andy Diggle’s current run on Hellblazer is the best it’s been in years. I picked one up, saw with relish that the colour palette they’re using still contains every conceivable shade of mud, put it down. To say it’s currently firing on all cylinders isn’t saying much, as Vertigo’s old horror warhorse is a perpetual disappointment, which it shouldn’t, because the basic ingredients are so solid. It’s about the street-sorcerer John Constantine, magic, and a bit of London grime, all mixed together with a quip and a crafty fag. Despite these perfect alchemical elements something inevitably goes wrong with the final potion, which rarely drips the creep and splatter I hunger for from anything so keen to proclaim itself a horror comic.

More after the jump