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Warren Ellis, though I'm not proud to say it, tipped me off about the magic of Eddie Campbell's autobiographical comics in this Come In Alone column. I bought The King Canute Crowd shortly afterwards and that was it for me. If memory serves, it's the first autobio comic I ever read and it's probably still the best. It's the diary you kept when you were young and drank too much and everything seemed significant, every party worthy of a permanent record.
Since those dissolute days spent between a Southend pub and a sheet metal factory, Eddie's chronicled the small-press comics scene in 1980s London in How To Be An Artist, followed his wife and his life to Australia in Three Piece Suit, and written about his own mid-life crisis in After The Snooter, where he finally dropped the Alec MacGarry name he'd used as a pseudonym since the early days and came out as Eddie.
In his last published work Eddie seems to have got tired of being Eddie. The Fate of the Artist, published last year, is a strange book. Part comics, part newspaper strip, part fumetti, part text, it's killing off and sending up everything that came before it at one and the same time. Eddie is played, visually, by one of his buddies throughout who also take other roles in the cast. The wonderful little family anecdotes and stories of eccentricity which made up the last books are sandwiched between a load of other stuff. The author - the artist - seems to be laying himself to rest in order to be free of himself. It's beautiful to look at but I can't say I entirely understand it and certainly I've not enjoyed it as honestly and completely as I did his other work. The charm has gone. Deliberately, it seems. Anyone else read it, or get it?
If you're new to Eddie Campbell, you could do much worse than spend a morning checking out his absorbing blog which includes extracts from the original From Hell scripts. |
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