"She just didn't want to."

There was some discussion here in comments yesterday of Grinderman, the new album from Nick Cave et al.
It occurred to me that, since I didn't have anywhere to announce things at the time, my regular readers probably missed the 2-colour cover I did for the Oct 2003 issue of Punk Planet, featuring my ink portrait of the man himself. There's a shadowy impression of his younger self in the background, but it's mostly covered with text.
There's an excellent review of the album at Popmatters
'No Pussy Blues' is a killer:
I bought her a dozen snow-white doves,
I did her dishes in rubber gloves,
I called her Honeybee, I called her Love,
But she just still didn't want to.
She just never wants to.
[...]
I thought I'd try another tack,
I drank a litre of cognac,
I threw her down upon her back,
But she just laughed and said
that she just didn't want to.

The Villains in my Home Town- part 13.

Vlad Dracula. Impaled a lot of people on spikes.


You're a nasty piece of work, said the judge.



Actually he was a murdering rapist, sent down for 'the term of his natural life."
Fletcher is his name, and he has a wikipedia entry. They showed film of the taped off stretch of woodland where the body was found.
"Ken Cox, a forensic scientist from Queensland's John Tonge Institute, gave evidence for the Crown that the probability of finding someone in the community with the exact DNA would be about one in 6.4 billion. Fletcher was subsequently convicted and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, plus the nine years left on his Victorian jail sentence when he was extradited, meaning he will most likely die in jail. The Queensland criminal justice system embraced DNA profiling after his 1998 conviction."
It was a big trial and the picture was syndicated all over the place, so I wish I'd done a better one. It was one of those days I couldn't get comfortable. My markers were all drying up on me, which you can see by the scraping marks in the background. The judge is from a different trial. he spoke out the side of his mouth in that peculiar Australian way.

*******

The May issue of The Believer has a colossal 6,000 word essay on the Codex Seraphinianus by Justin Taylor (see here for my own short post on the subject)
"It was the last I heard from him. For whatever reason, Serafini did not answer any of the questions I sent to him or the follow-up letter I sent asking if he would prefer to be contacted in Italian.
With the author himself apparently out of the picture, I decided to try and get some art-historical context for the book and its elusive author. I wrote to Arthur C. Danto, art critic for the Nation, and described the book to him. He was intrigued and invited me to his apartment... “
(link via Charlie Orr)

******

Ashes of Star Trek's Scotty go missing May 10- Reuters.
" Beaming him up was the easy part: the problem was transporting him back to Earth.
A search team continues to look for a rocket carrying ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on "Star Trek," almost two weeks after it hurtled to the edge of space from New Mexico, the company behind the launch said on Thursday.
Remains of the Canadian-born actor, who died two years ago at the age of 85, blasted off from a remote launch site on April 29..."
(link via Michael Evans)

****

Craig Thompson starts a blog and confirms a trend.
"Everyone asks when the new book will be out. I’m aiming for 2009 which sounds forever away, but that’s a tight schedule that requires me working almost every day."
The new comic strip model, The 'Graphic novel' requires that the author put himself out of circulation for anything up to a year or three. Missing contact with his fellow beings, he starts a blog.
He then finds the blog much more interesting than making books, and the publisher... oops, didn't mean to go that far.

the eraser

In 2004 I got a fellow named Stewart McKenny in to work with me for a couple of months. He was good for me because he was a detail maniac. He would put so much more detail than I asked for that I then had to ask him to erase half of it for the sake of the composition, or worse, rub it out myself (Make room for me, Vinnie!). While he was rubbing away furiously, I observed that he appeared to be getting through his erasers at rather an alarming rate. An eraser would be good for a few hours then he'd have to discard it and start a new one. He explained to me that once the corners were worn off the thing was no longer of any use to him. Can't you take a razor blade and cut a new corner? I asked. Oh no, that never works. So, I said, in that case give them to me. And ever since that day, for the last three years, I have been using the erasers he left behind and have not once had to go out and buy one. I haven't seen Stewart in about a year, but today a package arrived in the mail, containing thirty three erasers, all with their little sharp corners worn down.


(The Eraser is one of my favourite old Batman villains. I revived him for DC in the first volume of Bizarro in a story titled Who Erased the Eraser.)


Batman #188 , 1966, © DC comics,

*********

my pal mr j links me to Feiffer's MUNRO, animated short by Kim Deitch, 1960, youtube. This is brilliant, and Feiffer must surely have loved it.
(update... wrote Kim by accident there. should of course have be Gene Dietch... thanks to Connor Moran in comments for kick in the pants)

*******
in comments here yesterday Bob Morales gave some links explaining the origin of the double V that Isaiah Bradley wore on his t-shirt in the Captain America yarn which I referred to here on May 4th.
"Shortly after America’s entrance in to World War II, The Pittsburgh Courier launched "The Double V Campaign" (Double V). Under the theme of "Democracy: Victory at Home, Victory Abroad" The Courier remained patriotic, yet pushed for civil rights for blacks..."
I didn't know that. thanks, Bob.
********

since I last looked at the Groth-Ellison fiasco at PW the Beat, some anonymous has weighed in with the wisest words on the whole affair, a longish post which ends:
"So, seriously, what is the point of this case? It’s only going to make things worse for Ellison. In fact, it demonstrably has: I never would have read a goofy Fantagraphics history of itself, if for no other reason than to avoid Groth’s smarm, and thus would not have read or heard about his digs at Ellison. My life would have been better for it. But now I know exactly the statements Ellison found objectionable, and I know them because Ellison publicized them to a degree previously impossible. Seriously, man, who wants to hear Fantagraphics talk about itself?
I suspect that I am in the same boat as many, many, many others."
Indeed!
**********

The sorry spectacle of Art screwing itself.

Mark Evanier wrote on his blog yesterday: "I've written a kind of rebuttal to Eddie but it's long and since so many who come to this blog will have zero interest in it, I've posted it over on this page."
Then followed the biggest influx of readers to campbell.blogspot since I installed a statcounter over a month back, so either Evanier has a hell of a lot of readers, or he underestimated their interest in the subject of Vinnie Colletta.

Let's not make a running argument out of the matter, but I do want to address a wider subject and raise pertinent questions (and please consider them rhetorical questions unless you have some profound piece of wisdom that you need to share with me). In my piece I sought to get the thing away from Colletta being 'on trial' and offer a description of my early aesthetic experiences with his work. The problem is: can an aesthetic experience be separated from moral indignation? The conventional philosophical conundrum could be trotted out here: If we look upon a certain work of art by Benvenuto Cellini and find it beautiful, should we then feel guilty when we learn that he mistreated the model, and force ourselves to condemn the work in question? All of Cellini's work? Or is it irrelevant?
Or to put it another way, if it is decided that Colletta behaved badly in his treatment of the work of various artists whom comic-book posterity has come to regard with affection, does this 'judgement' affect even those works where he appears to have behaved well?
While allowing me the right to enjoy whatever I please, Evanier did in a subtle way suggest that Colletta's misdeeds might be backdated (no statute of limitations on this stuff):
"Campbell also displays some samples of alleged Colletta romance art from 1954 to defend the guy. I say "alleged" because a lot of what Colletta signed during this period was ghost-pencilled by others — so much so that I'm not sure which examples, if any, actually reflect Vinnie the Artist, as opposed to Vinnie the Guy Who Had Plenty Of Assistants. But even if Campbell's selections are pure Colletta, what does that prove?"
(Campbell wasn't attempting to 'prove' anything. If you weren't picturing yourself judging in some nutty court of law, such a thought would never have occurred to you. Campbell was describing an aesthetic pleasure.)

The other question is why must we always have to navigate through a comic bookish manichean view of the moral universe? If I do not condemn Colletta then I must be exhonerating him and justifying all his acts.

"A turd is a turd," some rude fellow has just added in comments to my original post. Echoing those very words, one Patrick Dean says on the Comics Journal board about another artist:"Bob Kane was a piece of shit ... I mean, the motherfucker couldn't even paint his own clowns after "retiring" from comics. Fuck that guy."

What?

I consider myself an amateur historian of the arts:
"The historian, whose art is a descriptive one, does not move in this world of moral ideas. His materials and his processes, and all his apparatus exist to enable him to show how a given event came to take place. Who is he to jump out of his true office and merely announce to us that it ought never to have happened at all?" (Herbert Butterfield)

Obviously there are fields in which moral indignation serves a purpose, in political philosohy for instance, where there is a hope to affect the world with a view to improvement, as in the writing of Marx: "Moral indignation against the infamies of capitalism is obvious in all chapters of Capital: it is an essential dimension of what gives such an impressive power to the book."

But what on earth can possibly be achieved by calling Colletta 'a turd' and Kane 'a piece of shit'. What lowbrow arena of artistic notions are we parading in? Who can possibly still have a vested interest? Kirby, Kane, Colletta have all done their life's work and passed on. We have no business taking sides in their affairs. The habit of casting heroes and villains in the story of ART is a habit of low minds, of schoolyard punks (in the original sense of the word) and thickheads.

I guess I don't mean you, Mark. You were in a position to change the course of events, and you brought it about. But to still be harping on about erased figures? It's broken. It can't be fixed. A lot worse crap than that has happened in the last thirty years since then. Everybody we thought was somebody eventually dropped their bundle in some way or other. Adams turned into a fathead (Now you've all got me doing it... but i'm just quoting somebody else), Steranko rested on his laurels... Buscema made himself some rubber stamps... Kirby was never as good again after those Fourth World books... a whole bunch of other guys got complacent... ad infinitum. I still love their best work.

It's the sorry spectacle of art continually screwing itself.

It's so funny it should be a comic book.

******

in other news.
two interviews with Campbell about the upcoming Black Diamond Detective Agency:
one at Newsarama.

The other is by Jody MacGregor, a local young writer. I do a bit of talking about my work in progress, The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard, and we were in a pub with my pals White and mr j. Jody described the session on his blog a couple of weeks earlier, where in order to fox my supposed habit of googling my name, he referred to me as Eddie Motherfucking Campbell.

Forgive all the cusswords on this post.

tomfoolery

catch phrases:
"it's not a graphic novel, percy"
"make room for me, Vinnie"
"Thanks for roning" (1)(2)
"truth is strangler than fiction"
Otherwise
You kids keep offa my lawn
"We'll fix that when we get home, Bart"
"This is Sparta"

the bloody English language
the gecko posts
the groper
them other eddie campbells
drinks
goddam computers
stuff
humour

FROM HELL 5/34

Concluding the sequence of the first murder in Alan Moore's gargantuan script for FROM HELL. Polly Nichols now lies dead on the cobbles. Alan had the idea that for the next couple of pages she should occupy the same spot exactly in each panel while people come and go around her corpse. To this end I started the series of repeated panels on the previous page, and altogether there are 28 of them. In retrospect I think this is a cinematic concept that works much better in the movie itself. And after seeing it there, I have difficulty accepting it as a success here. Tip of the hat to the Hughes Brothers. On film the effect is amplified with the characters buzzing around the corpse like bees in some speeded up sequence of a David Attenborough nature documentary, and all the dialogue is dispensed with.

FROM HELL. CHAPTER 5. PAGE 34. ( 666 WORDS) (!?)
PANEL 1
NOW A SEVEN PANEL PAGE, WITH ONE WIDE HORIZONTAL PANEL ON THE TOP TIER AND THEN THREE PANELS ON EACH OF THE TIERS BENEATH THAT. IN THE FIRST WIDE PANEL ALL WE HAVE IS A STILL LIFE SHOT OF POLLY NICHOLS’ BODY AS IT LIES THERE MOTIONLESS UPON THE COBBLES IN THE DARK, THE BONNET BY ITS RIGHT SIDE. I GUESS WHAT THIS PANEL IS SUPPOSED TO BE SAYING IS “SOME TIME PASSES AND POLLY IS STILL DEAD.” THIS WIDE PANEL PROBABLY AFFORDS YOU YOUR BEST CHANCE TO DO A STUDY OF THE MURDERED WOMAN’S BODY IN REPOSE, SO MAKE WHAT YOU CAN OF IT.
No dialogue

PANEL 2
A SIMILAR SHOT HERE TO THE LAST PANEL ON PAGE THIRTY-THREE. POLLY’S BODY LIES IN THE FORGROUND, AND LOOKING PAST IT WE ARE LOOKING UP THE LENGTH OF BUCK’S ROW TO WHERE IT JOINS BRADY STREET. A SOLITARY FIGURE HAS JUST ENTERED THE STREET AND IS AND IS COMING LIESURELY DOWN IT TOWARDS US. ALTHOUGH WE ARE TOO FAR AWAY TO MAKE HIM OUT AS MORE THAN A DARK SHAPE HERE, THE MAN IS IN FACT CHARLES A. CROSS, A CARMAN EMPLOYED BY PICKFORD AND CO. THE TIME IS NOW 3.45.AM. ON THE MORNING OF THE THIRTY-FIRST OF AUGUST. RELIABLE HISTORY STARTS HERE.
No dialogue.

PANEL 3
SAME SHOT, ONLY NOW CROSS HAS WALKED CLOSER TOWARDS THE FOREGROUND AND HAS DRAWN LEVEL WITH THE BODY. HE STOPS AND LOOKS DOWN AT THE DEAD WOMAN DOUBTFULLY. IT IS TOO DARK TO SEE THAT HER THROAT HAS BEEN CUT, OR THAT THERE ARE TERRIBLE WOUNDS IN HER BELLY.
No dialogue

PANEL 4
SAME SHOT. HERE, ANOTHER DARK FIGURE HAS ENTERED BUCK’S ROW FROM THE TOP ENTRANCE, THERE IN THE BACKGROUND. CROSS, IN THE FOREGROUND, LOOKS ROUND AND NOTICES THIS NEWCOMER AS HE STANDS THERE NEAR THE BODY. RAISING HIS HAND HE CALLS OUT TO THE MAN AS HE ENTERS THE STREET. THE NEW MAN UPON THE SCENE IS ROBERT PAUL, ANOTHER CARMAN, POSSIBLY EMPLOYED BY THE SAME COMPANY. CROSS CALLS OUT TO HIM, EAGER TO ENLIST A SECOND OPINION CONCERNING THE INERT WOMAN LYING AT HIS FEET.
CROSS: OY!
CROSS: OY THERE!

PANEL 5
SAME SHOT. PAUL HAS APPROACHED A LITTLE CLOSER TO US. BUT HE STILL HANGS BACK WARILY, UNCERTAIN AS TO WHETHER CROSS MEANS TO HARM HIM. CROSS HOLDS OUT ONE PALM TO CALM THE OTHER MAN AND INDICATES THE MOTIONLESS WOMAN LYING AT HIS FEET, WHO DOES NOT MOVE THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE EXCHANGE.
PAUL: Wha… what are you after?
CROSS: Oh, I’m not about to ‘urt yer.
CROSS: Come an’ look ‘ere. There’s a woman. She might be drunk, but…

PANEL 6
NOW BOTH MEN ARE KNEELING BY THE BODY. CROSS, KNEELING NEAR THE TOP HALF, IS HOLDING UP ONE OF POLLY’S LIMP, DEAD HANDS. PAUL, LOWER DOWN IS SMOOTHING DOWN POLLY’S LIFTED SKIRTS FOR THE SAKE OF DECORUM. HIS OTHER HAND HE PLACES BENEATH POLLY’S BREAST. THE SCENE IS VERY DARK. THERE IS ALMOST NO LIGHT AT ALL.
CROSS: “Er ‘and’s cold. Why, I believe she’s dead…
PAUL: NO… ‘er face was warm.
PAUL: I think she’s breathin’, but it’s very little if she is. Let’s sit ‘er up…

PANEL 7
SAME SHOT. BOTH MEN HAVE RISEN TO THEIR FEET ONCE MORE AND ARE ABOUT TO DEPART OFF THE RIGHT HAND SIDE OF THE PANEL. CROSS WAVES ONE HAND DISMISSIVELY TO INDICATE THAT HE WANTS NO MORE TO DO WITH THE WOMAN, WHETHER SHE BE DRUNK OR DEAD. HE LOOKS DOWN AT THE BODY WITH DISGUST. PAUL, ON THE OTHER HAND, INDICATES SOME POINT OFF PANEL DOWN THE ROAD WHERE HE HOPES THEY WILL FIND A POLICEMAN. HE LOOKS TOWARDS CROSS FOR APPROVAL. AT THEIR FEET, POLLY LIES MOTIONLESS, COOLING SLOWLY IN THE NIGHT AIR.
CROSS: I’m not goin’ to touch ‘er. Anyway, I’m late enough for work already…
PAUL: Aa. I am too. We’ll try and find a copper down the road, shall we?

The Villains in my Home Town- part 12.

L eader of a paedophile ring. Committed indecent acts against twelve boys, the youngest only ten years old. "He was so brazen that one of his associates brought boys to meet him during visting hours while he was serving previous time for child molestation."


Pleaded guilty. Seventeen years.


*******
big piece in the Sunday NY Times on Nick Bertozzi's The Salon.
When Picasso Went Down to Georgia May 6.
"THE birth of Cubism may not seem like standard fodder for a graphic novel. But the painting breakthrough is at the heart of “The Salon,” by Nick Bertozzi, which quickly moves from art history to murder mystery with the help of a magical blue absinthe. Along for the ride are early-20th-century Modernist heavies like Braque, Picasso and Satie. And just as those artists provoked controversy in their day, the graphic novel has led to a skirmish about its depiction of nudity."
(Tom Spurgeon linked to this first, but if I'd been paying more attention to my own NY Times download I'd have noticed it before then)
*******

hayley campbell (who lost her capitals in sympathy with archy the cockroach, you may recall), used the word 'smirting' and when I demanded to know whereof she spoke she linked me to this:
Smoking ban lights up love life Sarah Hughes Sunday October 30, 2005
"Welcome to the practice of smirting (smoking and flirting), a craze which has swept Ireland since the introduction of the pub and restaurant smoking ban in January 2004. As it took hold, enterprising pubs and bars introduced outside areas for smokers to gather and with them came a more relaxed attitude to meeting people. Now, instead of spending time in crowded bars, people find themselves striking up conversations over a quick fag.
This increase in social smoking is one of the more worrying aspects of smirting. Anti-smoking campaigners believed that the ban would improve health and stop people smoking. But many young Dubliners admit that they have increased their consumption of cigarettes because of the social benefits.
'Definitely,' says Conlon. 'I'm not much of a smoker - I used to hate it when you'd sit around in a pub and it was smoky and you'd come home at night with your clothes stinking. Now you just pop out for a quick cigarette, meet some quality people and have a laugh.
'I met my last girlfriend in a cafe on Dawson Street. I had been talking to her briefly, then went out for a smoke. When I came back, she says to me: "Do you smoke ... coming out for one?" We went out for two months.' "

The Villains in my Home Town part 11.

(continuing the round up of my courtroom sketches from ten years back)

This was a 28 year old guy who abducted a 14 year old boy and took him across state lines. He got two years which was the maximum, and the real story seemed to be about the difference in maximum sentences among states and the exact meaning of 'abduction of a child'. This was an early outing, my third. The full figure was small on screen and quite out of focus here. Since all these images are lifted from horizontal video tape frames, the full figures are all thus, though in this instance, the camera panned from the hands up to the face and if I'd thought about in advance I could have shown that in three or four descending panels. But it's sunday. Who would see? Who would applaud? Who would care? "Make room for me, Vinnie!"






*******

Readers of my Fate of The The Artist will remember the lines I quoted from O. Henry:
"God help me! Next my fangs were buried deep in the fugitive sayings of my little children. I found a ready sale for this kind of humor..."
Relevant to that is this piece in the Guardian of May 5
They write you up, your mum and dad.
"Lucy Etherington looked on aghast as her teenage tantrums were played out in a primetime sitcom..."
Second Thoughts was a British comedy television programme running from 1991 to 1994 and Etheringtons' mother was the writer.
"And as for my parents and what they did to us? Well, I've got kids - I understand how hard it is to be a working mother, and how when you write, real life is sometimes too much of a gift. All life is potential copy, almost irresistibly so. And there is no richer source of inspiration than your own family."
(link via Ben Smith in comments yesterday)