On Sept 7 I said the New Adventures of the Spirit was out that week. Very previous of me.


However, I just received a copy in the mail, so it does actually exist. Watch for it this week or next. Image above from a panel drawn by Ed Hillyer in Volume 1 of Bacchus, which I am currently compiling. I'll let you know when that one's not coming out too.
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The Louvre has "permitted McDonald's to open an outlet practically in the museum":

The Giaconda's legendary watery half-smile will, if popular passion is believed, wince under the pervasive odour of Le Big Mac and associated McDonaldry as they float up through IM Pei's pyramid and make their insidious way through the palatial salons, up the grand staircase, under the armpits of the Winged Victory at Samothrace, left down the corridor and right up the Mona Lisa's left nostril. A stale kipper set before the Queen could not be a worse breach of protocol.

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Having a google alert that tells me every time my name is mentioned on the internet, I find myself taking a sympathetic interest in the calamities that befall my namesakes: Man left homeless after Monday afternoon crash

FORT WALTON BEACH — After climbing out of his wrecked Chevy S-10 in the intersection of First Street and Perry Avenue, Eddie Campbell pulled out his broom and began sweeping up what was left of his life.
Campbell was heading east on First Street when the truck was hit by a Nissan Altima heading south on Perry Ave. Campbell said the other driver, who asked not to be identified, ran the red light. The Altima driver places said the same of Campbell.
The wreck left both drivers stranded.
Until Campbell’s Monday afternoon wreck, the East River Smokehouse Barbecue employee was living in his blue Chevy truck.
“I’ve been sleeping in my truck because I ain’t been able to get a house because it costs so much,” Campbell said...

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"In a way, the story of Betty and Veronica is a demented combination of Ground Hog Day and the Myth of Sisyphus."

i have just finished working my way through all five seasons of the utterly marvellous Boston Legal, and something has now gone out of my life because there will never be a new episode to sit down to in the evening. I think it may very well be my favourite tv show of all time. My Talisker that Hayley Campbell sent has also run out coincidentally at the same time. I have nothing to say here today.

Let me just clear out my drafts folder:

Brock Clarke on MURIEL SPARK AND THE CASE FOR RUTHLESS AUTHORIAL MANIPULATION

For another, it teaches us that, in writing such a self-conscious book, one must constantly make sure that the novel is leading us toward something beyond its own artifice.

In other news:

LONDON (Reuters) – Visitors to London always have to be on the look out for pickpockets, but now there's another, more positive phenomenon on the loose -- putpockets.
Aware that people are suffering in the economic crisis, 20 former pickpockets have turned over a new leaf and are now trawling London's tourist sites slipping money back into unsuspecting pockets.
Anything from 5 pounds to 20 pound notes is being surreptitiously deposited in unguarded pockets or open handbags in Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and other busy spots.

There's even a little picture in this here drafts folder. I can no longer remember what i intended to do with it or even whether I've already posted it.


Which reminds me, I noticed recently there's now a band named The Eyeball Kid. I bet mine goes back before any of them were born.

Eyeball Kid is a powerhouse teen band that just won the 14th annual WBCN-Berklee College of Music Battle of the High School Bands competition, beating 100 others for the prize.(24 April 2008)

i don't know why I haven't come across this before, as it's been up a few years to judge from the fact that it links to my old defunct website. It's at tomwaitslibrary.com, a whole page listing all his lyrics, comments and other people's observations on his 'Eyeball Kid' character that pops up in a couple of different songs, and specifically the ways in which it relates to Eddie Campbell's Eyeball Kid (with half a dozen colour cover illustrations, some of which you may not have seen before.

Tom Waits: "The Eyeball Kid is a comic-book character. Actually, it was Nic Cage that reintroduced me to comic books. I hadn't thought about comic books since I was a little kid, but he seemed to carry that mythology with him. It was inspiring to see him keep alive some of those principles that we associate with childhood, to the point where he named himself after Cage, the comic-book hero."
And in 1999 some people talked to Waits for a while after his New York shows: "Alex asked Tom if there was a relation between the Eyeball Kid of the song and the character in the comic book Bacchus by Eddie Campbell (which I've been told - if I remember correctly - is based on Greek mythology). Tom told Alex that yes, when he saw that he became fascinated by the idea of a character with no body and was inspired to do his own version, very different but that's where he said it came from!"

(hayley campbell found it)
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Amy Winehouse At Cambridge- June 1, - John Lundberg

No, she wasn't actually staggering around the hallowed halls. But a Cambridge English professor caused quite a stir last week when a question on his final exam asked students to compare the poetry of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) to song lyrics by Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday and, you guessed it, Amy Winehouse.
The British press is still buzzing about it, with critics accusing the school of dumbing down its exams and focusing particularly on Winehouse--one of their favorite targets. What was the drug-addled starlet's work, they asked, doing in a Cambridge English class?

(thanks to Bob Morales)

covers- DHP no. 98

Sometimes the black and white drawing looks like it didn't involve very much work, but once it's been colored you couldn't add or subtract a line without ruining it. This is another where the colorist completely understood the desired effect, and I don't know who did it (When I visited Dark Horse in '93 they had a colouring department with three or four people working industriously at their monitors) and I don't think we sent a colour guide as I would have made Joe's hair white instead of blond. The drawing illustrates the part of the story where Joe Theseus meets God, and God turns out to look exactly like a child's crayon drawing. Pete and I both tried to draw God in a child's style but it just wasn't working. It was coming out too cute, too knowing. Another thing about a child drawing a comic strip is that the character would never look the same twice. You would never even get the same proportions reccurring. Thus for authenticity I got wee hayley campbell to draw God. She'd have been eight at the time the story was drawn and just a couple of months older at the time of this cover, dated 28/10/94. I honestly didn't think I'd get away with having her draw the 'hand of God' in the foreground of the actual cover, but I decided to brazen it out. Nobody said anything to the contrary and it remains a favourite of mine. Pete had more of a sense of big heroic figures, so he worked over and inked Joe Theseus, but the Eyeball Kid looks like mine. And the girl at the back is Pete's.
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hayley campbell, no longer eight, reviews Beirut's London gig at audioscribbler.
She has also been looking up Grose's 1811 dictionary of the Vulgar tongue. This is probably what Neil Gaiman was looking up when Alan Moore wrote (in the appendix for From hell Chapter 3 page 3):
"The expression , in this instance, was passed on to me by Mr Neil Gaiman, who has a dirty mouth in at least seven centuries."
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Find out the rating of your blog (thanks to John C.)

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
hell (19x) death (5x) crap (2x) shit (1x)
It's that hayley campbell's fault.

covers- DHP no. 94

A Dark Horse Presents cover from the period when they dispensed with the sidebar (starting #91) and the covers were open and spacious, well except I've crowded in a bunch of skulls where the sidebar used to be. The signature is dated the month after the ones I showed yesterday. The cover goes with the first part of a serial of six ten-page chapters that ran monthly in DHP, Feb-July 1995, immediately following the miniseries I showed yesterday (Dec-Feb) and overlapping the The Bacchus color special (Apr) and launch of my own imprint (May). My entry into self publishing, or Campbell's world takeover as it was referred to around our house, was nothing if not impeccably planned. Hellblazer was in there too, Jan-Apr, and volumes seven and eight of From Hell in Nov and April. There were a couple of other things too, so that roughly speaking we had three outings per month over a seven month period, from four different publishers. It's no wonder I thought I needed help. Nevertheless, the main figures on this one look like my own pencilling and inking. I must have run out of patience and asked Pete Mullins to finish off the skull headed villains. I could never take that kind of thing seriously, even if this outing was more mock than heroic, though always played straight-faced.
I'd forgotten there was a pencil rough for this one until yesterday. There must have been a colour guide too, though I can find no record of it, as the Eyeball Kid is wearing the hat worn by my son age 2, and they wouldn't have otherwise known it was supposed to be white.
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hayley campbell linked me to CBS News: Dangerous Bomb Deactivated.
As for Londoners, the chances of something like this sending London into a panic are about zero. In 2005, Slate's David Plotz happened to be in London on 7/7 and noted, within a couple of hours of the attacks, "When I walked by the Queen's Larder Pub, not half a mile from the Tavistock Square wreckage, at 11 a.m., a half-dozen men were sitting together at a sidewalk table, hoisting their morning pints of ale. Civilization must go on, after all."
Hearty bunch, those Brits.

covers- HERMES Vs. THE EYEBALL K!D (3-part miniseries)

L ooking at these two covers (inked 1,2) (colour roughs 3,4) I noticed they both have the same date, 13 July 1994, and I recalled the industrious enthusiasm with which I and Pete would throw ourselves into the thing away back when I started 'Campbell Industries' (as Pete called it) in 1994. Whoever did the computer colouring at Dark Horse (April Johnson, who is listed as designer?) did a very nice job of interpreting our intentions (5,6), I like the way a potential tonal muddle has been avoided in the lower left corner of the second cover, enabling the foreshortening to thrust forward. Also, there is a sensible scaling up and redrawing of the logo from the small one Pete designed for the chapter box headings.


It's tricky now to say who did what on these, but relevant to recent debates around this blog, I decided to try for some Colletta lines on that first one, though they look like Pete's execution, on the Hermes at least. That's his more fluid line all over the second cover
Not only did we do the two covers in one day, but for the third I included in the package this cover I drew for Dark Horse Presents when the serial originally appeared there but which had not been used at the time.


I sent some extra spirograph patterns which I'd blown up from that product's demonstration booklet when I found that making them by hand was turning out to be much too difficult (another of wee hayley campbell's toys commandeered for professional usage), and invited the colorist to have fun.


All in a day's work.
Here's a recent review of the first issue.
And if this has made you curious about the story, It's all collected in here.

covers-Eyeball kid: One man Show

When I made the simple black line drawing above (1) I wouldn't have intended to use it for the finished cover. It looks like the sort of character-sketch that artists do at conventions. But the reason I know it wasn't intended for the finished cover is that it's drawn 'same size'. I would always (at least up till this time) draw finished art at 'A3' size, which is the biggest size that will fit in regular photocopiers, and more importantly, in a regular Fedex box. Go bigger than that and you're making problems for yourself. Reduction from there to comic book size is about 63%. I recall my fellow cartoonist Glenn Dakin once explaining for the young 'uns on a letters page the arithmetical formulas for scaling artwork up and down, at the end of which he wrote "Or you can just be like us; get a comicbook and draw round it." So, never mind your specially blue-line printed art boards, for the solicitation and preview art I would always just grab the nearest comic book, usually last month's issue of Bacchus, and draw round it with a pencil. I coloured it with pantone markers, and then to fix some misjudgement I introduced gouache on top of that.
MIck Evans ran with that and made up a rudimentary cover that we used for promotion, but it wasn't quite coming together (2), with too much of a candy box look about it. At this stage I probably thought I was still going to have to get my head down and do a painting, as I'd done on the previous volumes. However Mick took it away and injected the kind of energy it needed (3).
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linkety split:
I'm interviewed at Wizard. It's a phone chat where the interviewer, Kiel Phegley must have had his work cut out compiling my jostling monologues into regular sentences. At the end of it I reveal some new info about The Amazing Remarkable Mr Leotard.
Brian Talbot's Alice In Sunderland reviewed in the Guardian (link via ben Smith)
Allan Holtz shows two more 1906 Herriman political cartoons from the LA Examiner. he is doing us a great service here. I hope you appreciate it.

Canadian Prime Minister doesn't want to meet Bono.
HEILIGENDAMM, Germany (Reuters) "I've got to say that meeting celebrities isn't kind of my shtick, that was the shtick of the previous guy," said Harper in a dig at his Liberal predecessor Paul Martin, who met Bono regularly."

covers- THE EYEBALL KID no.1

Above are two versions of the cover of the first issue of the Dark Horse mini-series from 1992. The first is the color xerox from my files. This is another cover that gave my editor Diana Schutz a hard time. There's no way this will reproduce, she said. Just photograph it and see how it comes out, I insisted. The problem was all this collage I'd stuck on the surface. As I said a few days ago, I was on a collage kick for a couple of years back then. The Kid's suit was made of a shiny material which looks purple on the original and in my copy, but which photographed green, and I thought that was really cool. The rest of the picture is made up of cut out stuff; the eyes are actual photograph-eyes from magazines, except the one which is an apple. There are little diagrams of jockey shirt colors from the racing section of the daily paper. And finally there are all those color stickers from the stamp books of the Billings method of birth control*, which the wife of my bosom was giving a trial back then. Whether the multitude of our progeny is due to some failing in the system or because I and hayley campbell used the calendar-mapping color stickers to make collages, is a question I will leave to my biographer.

* I see that John Billings himself died last month, aged 89. (sciencedaily.com)
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I'm proud to say I was involved with this project as a thesis advisor for one of the students, a young lady named Elizabeth Chasalow, of whom we will be hearing great things in the future:
Center for Cartoon Studies graduates 18--Times-Argus--May 20, 2007
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION – In early 2005, James Sturm looked out the window of his studio in downtown White River Junction and saw opportunity where others saw an ancient, vacant department store.
Two years later, Sturm is graduating a class of 18 from that storefront, which has been since renovated into the Center for Cartoon Studies, a two-year college dedicated to the art of cartooning and graphic novels.
Sturm, the cartoonist behind the graphic novel, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," about a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s, was looking for teaching opportunities, but instead decided to embark on his dream to found a comics college.
Tom Spurgeon shows us the certificate of Completion (soon hopefully to be called a 'diploma'), designed by Ivan Brunetti.
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More about the garbage bags, for those who have been following this important story:
Trial would have upset Ben Wicks -Toronto Star- May 18,
Fight over abandoned drawings takes toll on Wicks' family but, on a lighter note, gives glimpse into life of a sketch artist
Rarely, if ever, has a civil case dwelled so much on the legal ramifications of "garbage" or green garbage bags, the method by which Wicks stored many of his works.
In a more interesting sense, however, the trial revealed stunning insights into the work of a sketch artist, who was incredibly disorganized for all his genius and was even worse at financial management.
Wha? who'd'a thought..?
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Camera phone photography emerges as art--Orange County Register--Monday, May 21,
"When people see my images, they don't believe that I took them with a cell phone," she said. "The depth and clarity of the images are so phenomenal."
The quality was good enough to persuade John Matkowsky, owner of Drkrm, a small gallery showing Elmi's work through May 26, to break from his norm of featuring only traditional silver prints to do his first-ever show of digital prints.
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And in other news:
Woman still likes gorilla
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A 57-year-old Dutch woman who was attacked by a gorilla at a Rotterdam zoo said the ape was still her favorite even though she felt she was going to die when he bit her.