eddie campbell's pal, mr j

At Journalista yesterday Dirk showed a four panel caricature of me by my pal mr j, which he lifted from Hayley Campbell's blog, where you will find other examples of his brilliance. And if you scroll down to her oct 30 post you'll see a cut-and-paste of page 45's (the best comic shop in England) review of mr j's 40 page minicomic Hayley Campbell Funnies.
About ten years back I invented a fake cartoonist named Bunny Wilson as a wheeze for something to put on the back of my Bacchus#3. Over the next few years Bunny kept popping up and plays a key role in King Bacchus. Every time I showed an example of his work I got mr j to 'ghost' it. I calculated that mr j's style would be unknown to my readers since his appearances have been confined in the US so far to caricatures in wrestling magazines. The most impressive stroke was this fake cover on the back of Bacchus #58 , of a character invented by j for this purpose:
The only known published photo of mr j occurs in another hoax: the Eddie Campbell All-stars soccer team, a photo of which is on the back cover of Bacchus #14 and the inside back of After the Snooter.
(You may have read the first part of this in my Comics journal interview) My pal, and occasional collaborator, Daren White was an accountant at Coca Cola and played in their soccer eleven at that time. One weekend when it was his turn to wash the team jerseys we rounded up eleven guys for a hoax photo, which I then cut and pasted against another photo, of the crowd at Wembley. White had already washed the shirts and now had to wash them a second time. When Sim caricatured me in a sequence in his Guys, he has me wearing the soccer gear for some reason known only to himself (I only ever had it on for half an hour). At the same time I was drawing him in Bacchus (riffing on Sim's use of the 'injury to eye motif' in his own Cerebus.) Around this time I wrote to the Cerebus letters page under the name of Bunny Wilson saying something like "If you lot stopped pulling each others plonkers you'd sell a lot more comic books," but Sim never printed it.
However, as to mr j, you won't learn a whole lot about him from the soccer photo as he is the player wearing a wrestling mask at far right.
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To Gabriel Villa and Hemlockman: your interest in a complete Bacchus is noted. meanwhile here is something you may not have seen before. I'd forgotten about this until I pulled out the box of old Bacchus to scan a couple of things shown above . It's a cover I made specially for the Spanish edition of Bacchus vol 2: the Gods Of Business
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The covers on these rereleases of the works of Will Eisner look very tasty, but a new didactic work on 'expressive anatomy' causes me to grimace. The histrionics of his figure drawing always made him appear old fashioned. Will a new generation be picking up the habits?
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Hi to Matt, Nathalie, Ryan, Tim , Bissette!!, and other commenters. And to David Cake, Lucy and anyone else who noted technical difficulties, my pal Breach has been tinkering around fixing things. So hopefully it'll be smooth running until the next time. What would Eddie Campbell do without his pals, I asks ya.