Thus concludes the Brisbane Writers Festival. An odd thing happened yesterday. I got a call from festival publicity who connected me to a journalist writing for the Australian who wanted to talk to me. I'm already on my way out of the house to my evening session at the Powerhouse, with the plan to take on board a couple of 'looseners' with my pal White, chairman for the session, on the way. Anyway, she arranges to come round for a quick interview. A cameraman arrives first, catching me unawares; he's taken fifty pictures by the time the journalist arrives and settles down with her notepad. I suddenly recall where I've seen her name in the last week: Rosemary Sorensen, arts writer for the Australian, wrote a negative review of Nicki Greenberg's Great Gatsby just a few days ago, ending it on a very peculiar note, 'Shaun Tan says... (quoting his praising blurb)... but then he would, wouldn't he.' Shaun told me yesterday that he would have considered it fair play if she reviewed his own book and criticised some structural aspect of it, but to snidely dismiss his personal taste in a review of another person's book was unseemly (I can't recall Shaun's actual words). She arrived with the definite idea that the 'graphic novel' is preposterous pretense at literary seriousness and was putting me on the spot to prove otherwise. I put up a vigorous and intelligent defence. I shall let you know if it makes print. Meanwhile, a quick tally shows that I have now promoted the cause in eleven separate public 'events,' and managed to mention my own books too whenever I saw the chance, since I posted the Melbourne Age article here three weeks ago. Can you imagine how many 'looseners' that entails?
(ps. The tv spot may turn up on ABC Sunday Arts later today, I guess.*)
pps. And a big round of appreciation to the lovely Cori Stewart, who fought to get the 'graphic novel' into the Brisbane show this year, and who organised all the events while sweetly putting up with my curmudgeonly rants. Bless you.
*Nicki thinks it's next week. (Not showing on this week's menu")

The panels last night went very well. It was great just having a public conversation with Bryan Talbot for an hour. If you want a hint of what that might be like you should check out his new book, The Naked Artist, certainly relevant to the title and theme of my blog. It is a compendium of the anecdotes that comic book artists tell each other, gathered from hither and yon during Bryan's multifarious travels around the globe. I personally have had a drink or two with Bryan on at least three continents and we have dined together with the wives of our bosoms. One of my own yarns even pops up in here, the one about my meeting with the great Hugo Pratt, which I was telling as a bar anecdote long before I put it into my own book How to be an Artist. Some of the stories have been so exaggerated through retelling as to be near mythical. Others are quite charming such as the one where where innocent passerby Harvey Kurtzman is dragged into a swimming pool at the El Cortez hotel in 1977 by Linda Gebbie and two other female cartoonsists. A fanboy hears the splash and looks over his balcony. "Hey! It's Harvey Kurtzman! he's in the pool with three chicks! And they've all got their clothes on!" Harvey was mortified.
Bryan's book is in prose with a dozen large illustrations by my old pal Hunt Emerson

The 'graphic novelists' at the writers festival launch party. Nobody here knows who we are. And I'm standing talking to young Leigh Rigozzi, planning our assault upon the literary world. A pretty young lady arrives, walks across the room through the throng straight to Leigh and asks if he would sign her autograph book. "How come Leigh is recognised when he's only been in town a few hours, while I who have been here twenty years am invisivble?" I ask, rudely self-important. And the pretty young lady says "I'm the one who picked him up from the airport."
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update: Guy Delisle can't make it alas. More room for Campbell's head, as one of my pals said.

'looseners'

The plan: I'm going to head out of here at four, meet the Festival coordinator and put her mind at rest that I know what I'm doing in regard to these various panels, in spite of my 'insane rant' of a couple of weeks back. I will deftly demonstrate my command of the subject at hand, my familiarity with the work of the various guests and show that I am certainly the man to be trusted with the task. Then my pal White will turn up and we'll have a couple of 'afternoon looseners' and some eats before proceding to the festival's opening party. Eating out with White is always fraught with difficulty, or at least the 'afternoon looseners' part of it. I was sure I had told the anecdote on my blog, but can't find it, about how he got us all arrested one night. Present were Mick Evans and, this is the tricky part, wee Cal, aged then about nine. Chalky's argument was over the wrong sauce that had been served on his gourmet hamburger. He demanded that the chef come out and discuss the matter. The chef refused to come out. White refused to pay. He instructed the waitress to tell the chef that we would set up office in the coffee house across the road until the chef came down from his perch. Half an hour later the constabulary came and removed us from the coffee house. The belligerent one was prepared to get locked up over the difference between 'cordon bleu' and 'blue cheese'. We were stuck for a couple of hours at Police H.Q. and once we had paid the bill and were out I made the wee one swear to secrecy, otherwise his dear mother might not let him go anywhere with us again. But then I went and told the yarn at a dinner party a few weeks later, and as I looked around the table at the guffawing faces, my eye fell at last upon that of the wife of my bosom, transfixing me with the glare of Medusa.

*********
Sleepwalker orders a curry
"Next morning I had garlic breath and thought it odd. Then I went through my pockets and found some change and the bill. I was stunned. I would never have known had I not found the bill. I just hope I left a tip.
(via anonymous commenter yesterday)

Nicki Greenberg saw me off from Melbourne yesterday, and I arrive back in Brisbane to find that she's here too. Waddayaknow! this is from the Brisbane Courier Mail, tuesday. It's a tabloid sized paper, so this spread is the equivalent of an old broadside page, with colours and a photo, and not a single ad.


********
I heard this story on the taxi radio yesterday; it's online in a number of places. Study pits liberal brains against conservative brains. It interested me on account of all the stupid arguments I get into in spite of all I do to avoid them, about the naming of things (the 'graphic novel' etc.) I can't find a version that uses the quote exactly as I heard it, to the effect that conservatives demand rigid structures while "A higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity is typical of people who are liberal. That’s not a surprise. It does, however, suggest there may be a hereditary and neurological basis..."

Since I've now got to give a talk on the subject...

Overcome by remorse after my insane rant the other day, I thought it would be more civilized to write a polite explanation to my host at the Brisbane Writers Festival, who I suppose cannot otherwise complain about all the publicity I'm giving it here. Thus I've cut and pasted, from a longer email, the explainy bit, which may interest those of my readers who are not yet sick to their stomachs with the whole disquisition. (If you make the effort, I promise a good punchline, and if you're new here, hey kids, you can cut and paste this into your homework and call it your own. If you steal my explanation rather than somebody else's i won't need to browbeat you later.)

Firstly, the works of Tezuka are great works indeed, no slight intended there. But the issue at hand is one of eras rather than achievements or intentions. It's like when my grandmother used to refer to all pop music as 'jazz,' bless her.

In its most ideal conception, the 'graphic novel' idea originates in the early '70s. It tends to reject the superheroic characters of the comic books, and instead hearkens back for its inspiration to the characters of an earlier period, of the first twenty or thirty years of the century. It begins when various publishers started to collect in handsome hardcover editions those old comic strips, lying forgotten except by the antiquarians of popular culture (e.g. the huge and gorgeous Nostalgia Press collected Little Nemo from 1970), and critical writers started appearing to discuss them in the terms of serious art and literary criticism. The trend caught the fancy of a generation of enthusiasts who had been taking the monthly comic books very seriously through the sixties, when it became not uncommon to find college students reading the things (well, supposedly). It was a simple step from there to the conception that, since wit, truth and charming artistry could be found in the best of the old things (in the poetic improvisations of Herriman's Krazy Kat for instance), that it would be possible to conceive new and ambitious works using the simple formal elements of the daily comic strip, that the great novel of our times could be composed just using these. Note that the concept of the graphic novel, and the name too, existed before any examples. The theory preceded the fact, in other words. Spiegelman's winning of the Pulitzer was the event which confirmed once and for all the concrete validity of the abstract theory.
(It is argued, with justification, that this is not entirely true, and that the quest to match the abstract to concrete has turned up many examples from the history of illustrated books, such as the woodcut novels of the 1930s. For historical clarity it's best to classify these as 'antecedents' of the 'graphic novel')

However, in its more corrupted version, among people who are so wrapped up in the comic book thing that they can't really recognise a fine idea from a second rate one (and I'm not saying there are no good ideas in comicbooks, but talking about a general perception among their readers and producers), the only difference they can see is one of format, thus to them 'graphic novel' is just a highflown name for the old news-stand thing presented in a bound format. I think this is the version that will win out in the end because in our modern world, the greatest power of all is the steamrolling power of stupidity (and as you've observed, it is the source of my accumulated disillusionment). There is an exreme version of this mindset that cannot even grasp the concept of formats, and to them there isn't even that distinction, it's just a synonym for comicbooks.

Anyway, it has been my hope that a literary festival might be receptive to the subtleties of the idea in its finer conception, and I press ahead intent that I may yet win the day. The works of my fellow guest, Guy Delisle, would be a very good example of what I mean. They deliver information and observation to the modern reader in a way that satisfies the most rigorous standards of art/writing/journalism.

But wait! There is yet another voice of disagreement. This is the crowd that have mostly come in late and are trying to impose a logic where they don't see it growing of its own nature. Thus they look at something like Delisle's book and say 'You called this a 'novel' but it is hardly that. Let's call it a 'graphic memoir' since that would be more logical.' These are the annoying people who arrive late at a bibulous soiree and start putting the furniture back in order while you're still sitting in it.
*************

Entirely relevant to the above, that cheeky Nicki Greenberg has put me in her comic Smackdown!! Campbell vs Greenberg Title Fight

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not related at all, a quote:
"There is a point at which the sane man believes a doctrine and says 'yes'- beyond which he disbelieves it and says 'no'. That is why the mentally sane have such an uncomfortable time in a world compose largely of doctrinal lunatics."
Leonard Woolf, quoted in Victoria Glendinning's biography.

I'm such a fool.

If you read my beef a couple of days back about the Article on Douglas Wolk's book ("Did Ingmar Bergman have to justify Star Wars every time he sat down for an interview?"), and picked up Tom Spurgeon's commentary on it, (not to mention those of Ben Schwartz, and James Vance) you will respond to the following with an accumulation of unkind mirth or of righteous dismay. This is not a qualitative beef. Bergman is great, Star Wars is fun. Neither needs to know about or explain the other. My beef: everywhere I go, why must I always have to represent the whole customary f*****g stereotype of comic books? It is tied to my ankles like clattering tin cans.

I thought that by appearing at a couple of 'writers' festivals' I would have a chance to establish my name as an author with his own world view and humorous thoughts about life. Yesterday on me blog i was so happy, if a little intimidated, to think about my appearance next week in Melbourne in the company of a couple of significant literary figures. Look, I'm not asking much. I don't mind if I come off as a literary jester, for that really is the role of the cartoonist-author (my real fear is that i'll come off as a fuckwit). BUT, today I see the program for the 'graphic novel' part of the Brisbane Writers Festival (12-16 sept), and Astro Boy is all over it... ?

A large number of questions are automatically asked:
If Campbell is to be a fuckwit, can't he be left to do it on his own account? Is Astro Boy connected to the concept of 'graphic novel'? With Eddie Campbell on hand to answer questions, how was such a mistake made? Is the author of that character going to be present? Will there be any authors from Japan? How about authors from other nations who are working in the 'manga' idiom? Surely it's not meant to stand in for the whole medium (whatever that medium might be)? Does it in any way relate to the festival's guests: Campbell? Talbot? Greenberg? Delisle? Tan? Rigozzi? White? And anyway, even if we can't all agree that it is not relevant why is the figure of Astro boy so clumsily traced from here?????

Where have I gone wrong? Sure, I looked away for a minute while my attention was diverted by wrapping up my new book, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, but where have I seriously misjudged the situation? I had a meeting and several phone conversations and explained the whole thing. A certain disgruntlement on my part has been interpreted, I think, as a dislike of the idea of the 'graphic novel,' (really a feeling that the term is useless, and the real irony in all of this is that I don't use the term any more , except when quoting another, which is why I always spell it with the quote marks) which they have taken to mean a dislike of 'comics,' because all the terms seem to mean the same thing, and since they have determined to spotlight the medium (loosely therefore understood as all of 'comics' I suppose), it is necessary to humorously disregard my 'literary pose' of being disgruntled, because that is the sort of affectation that authors like to sport.

"Eddie, Sorry 'the graphic novel' as a whole program is not quite to your taste/opinion." (from an email yesterday. Note that the quote marks were remembered.) Having early in the process sought the opinion of a supposed expert, it is now politely dismissed. Hey, I've got nothing against Star Wars OR Astro Boy. I like them all. Early in the planning they were talking about getting some DC and Marvel people in. I said (phone converation, no record of it), fine, but just call it 'comic books' and lose that pretentious 'graphic novel' tag.

Returning to the 'beef', a chap at Newsarama takes me to task for being critical of Wolk's book without having read it. When I said the book is doing 'more damage than good', I didn't need to go further than the title: Reading Comics; How graphic novels work and what they mean. Analyse it. 'Comics'= 'graphic novel', 'graphic novel'='comics', names for the same thing. Wolk is telling the world that they are one and the same. When Eisner first used the term he used it because he wanted it to mean something other than, or at least more than, comic book (as did the person before him who coined the term). I don't want to get into a semantic argument. If that original intention is now lost, I accept it. I believe Eisner felt that it was lost too. In his last years he was pleased to get his line of books out of the comic book market and into the hands of a mainstream book publisher (Norton). Anyway, that's why I don't use either of these terms any more (I'm going with the old fashioned 'strip cartoon' from here on, or at least till that gets screwed (just noticed I put it in quote marks too... wonder if I should leave them?) and note that I have no objection to 'comic book', which I see as a genre of popular fiction). From Hell is a 600 page strip cartoon.) And as for Douglas, he is an agreeable guy who is probably perplexed to learn that his enthusiastic celebration of his innocent pleasures could possibly be an obstacle to my megalomaniacal world conquest.

Now, lest you think this is all a bit abstract and not worth getting my nickers in a twist over (and as a professional humorist I must admit this is the sublime comedy of it all) I am the guy they have got in to stand up at the front and explain what a 'graphic novel' is, despite having promised myself I would never let it happen again.

From the online promtion:
CYA Later Alligator: The inaugural "CYA later, Alligator" Children's and Young Adult (CYA) Writers and Illustrators Conference will be held in Brisbane on 16 September 2006 in partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival. This conference is aimed at new and established writers and illustrators of children's and young adult literature. Seminars and master classes will be conducted by well known Australian and International authors and illustrators.

From an email:
As discussed you are appearing at the CYA Later, Alligator Conference, on 15th September 2007, at the QUT Creative Industries Precinct in Kelvin Grove at 2.50 to 3.30.
Your topic is: The Graphic Novel Manifesto

(You may or may not recall that Campbell's so-called 'manifesto' was written as a jest, but has become his most reproduced work ever on the internet, even available on Wikipedia and long removed from its original context, and now comes home to haunt him. It was originally written in response to the mass of confusing information that the 'comics community' gives out. Wolk's title is the most recent example of same.) (there's a link in the sidebar if you're new around here)

wait a minute, it's the phone...

(it's my pal White..)
"hey Eddie, have you seen the program for the festival?"

sigh

"hey, nothing changes. it's 1984 all over again...FLASH!
Flash - Ah - Saviour of the universe
Flash - Ah - He'll save ev'ry one of us"
...ha! remember that radio show you were on...

yeh, fuck off.

"Flash - Ah - King of the impossible
He's for ev'ry one of us
Stand for ev'ry one of us
He'll save with a mighty hand
Ev'ry man ev'ry woman ev'ry child
Dispatch War Rocket Ajax to bring back his body"

yeh, Daren, sob... thanks for roning.

AAAAGGGGGGGODAMMMFUCKINSHITTINFUCKINFFFUUCCKFUCKFUCKK!!!!!!

Appearances. Keeping up with them.

In my last post I introduced my part in the program of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Now here's the Brisbane program. They're shining a spotlight on the 'graphic novel' and are flying in Brian Talbot from England, Guy Delisle from Canada, Sean Tan from Perth and Nikki Greenberg from Melbourne. I will have already crossed paths with these last two in Melbourne. There's also Leigh Rigozzi, I think from Sydney, who is the only one I haven't met before. My pal Daren White, well known in this parish, also plays a role, chairing one of the panels. I have a feeling there may be a fourth appearance which I haven't listed here, which is part of the separate schools program. More on that when I figure it out. (update: if you read this earlier, I made a mistake in that second session, now fixed. I'm with Brian Talbot first, then I'm chairing a session with Greenberg, Delisle and Rigozzi. Third session has the biggest line-up.)

BRISBANE WRITERS FESTIVAL
The official site

Thursday, 13 September 2007, 8:15 PM - 9:15 PM
EDDIE CAMPBELL IN CONVERSATION WITH BRYAN TALBOT
Visy Theatre - Brisbane Powerhouse. Of Graphic Novel Fame
Eddie Campbell in conversation with Bryan Talbot. Brisbane’s award-winning graphic novelists Campbell and Talbot discuss their work as it relates to the larger history of illustrated literature.
Bookings essential. Tickets $12/$10 at PowerTix.War:

Thursday, 13 September 2007, 9:30 PM - 10:30 PM
AS IT HAPPENS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN GRAPHIC NOVELS
Visy Theatre - Brisbane Powerhouse
Join Nicki Greenberg, Guy Delisle and Leigh Rigozzi, three of the sharpest self-styled graphic novelists, to discuss how they use their everyday lives to produce acclaimed graphic novels. Chair: Eddie Campbell.
Bookings essential. Tickets $12/$10 at PowerTix.

Friday, 14 September 2007, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
DOES THE LITERATURE OF OUR TIMES HAVE PICTURES?
Visy Theatre - Brisbane Powerhouse
Eddie Campbell, Guy Delisle, Bryan Talbot and Shaun Tan.
Hear four of the world’s most renowned graphic novelists talk about the rise and rise of the medium and the ideas and issues that propel their work. Chair: Daren White
Bookings essential. Tickets $12/$10 at PowerTix.