Bonjour to you too!

Tsecond volume of Alec in French, Graffiti Kitchen, is just out this week. Hopefully anybody likely to take offence can't read French. You can see it at left alongside the first volume. Ça et La have changed the cover since we last looked at it here. I expect they don't really want to hear who prefers the first one at this juncture, so keep it to yourself. The edition translates my Three piece Suit and it prints it very nicely. I'm working towards having all four of my autobiographical blathers in digital form. I've just sent the third, How to Be an Artist, now offically out of print in English, off to France on disc, so that's three down and one to go. When all four are done I'll be looking at putting it out a big omnibus in English through Top Shelf.
Seeing wee hayley campbell speaking French long before she knew how to:
... reminds that me she was in that lovely country around the time of my birthday and sent me a bottle of 1995 Coteaux du Layon Chaume, a grand vin d'Anjou, (11 years old? 12? living down here so long i've forgotten when we count from in the northern hemisphere), deliciously sweet. Didn't we bring that kid up right!! She included a cartoon of herself, 'french variant edition campbell with comedy beret':

review
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Nicki Greenberg puts on a slide show at Avid Reader while in town on other business- finds herself a victim of the sort of mishap that happens to me regularly.
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Actress (I know we say 'actor' these days for the ladies but...) Deborah Kerr died this week, age i think 86. The bloke on breakfast tv reminded me of one of the great lines of all time:

"When you speak of this, and you will, please be kind."

Spoken by Deboorah Kerr in the movie version of Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. (1956)
Controversial play about the difficult coming-of-age of a boy who is scorned by his peers for being "unmasculine," and the efforts of a sympathetic older woman to help him overcome his self-loathing. The movie version dilutes the effect, despite some excellent performances.

the SnOOTeR---part 2

This is the one we've gone with.



More on this at a later date

the SnOOTeR

I had to come up with some new drawings of The Snooter (see After the Snooter, Top Shelf.) last week for a speculative project I can't say anything about as yet. You will remember that it was a big insect, an oversized moth probably, that flew in our kitchen window way back in 1994. Later in the story an unnamed character that happens to look exactly like Bob Kane's Bruce Wayne is sitting staring purposefully into the dark night, contemplating "The annoying complacency of people. I need a symbolic form by which to strike fear into their hearts," when it fluttered in his window too. "That's it! I shall become a hideous insect of the sleepless humid night. I shall remind them of their childhood terrors, of snakes under the bed and beast droolings in the dark that make you afraid to put your bare foot on the floor."
And thus he stitched a costume together and became The Snooter! Everybody said the pink rubber kitchen gloves were the piece de resistance.
I found that my concept of the character had drifted considerably since I last drew him, and It took several attempts at it before I arrived at something presentable.

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My pal Mia Wolff, painter and veteran of the flying trapeze, has started a blog.

And everyone said 'how tall they've grown!'

A fter showing the photo of not-so-wee Cal yesterday I remembered that i had meant to compare it to these images from my 1993 story in The Dance of Lifey Death, which was my adaptation of The Jumblies by Edward Lear. I pictured my children as the jumblies , going to sea in a sieve, and then coming back twenty years later. hayley campbell is none too impressed with my clairvoyance, but Cal turned out just about right.


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MELBOURNE WRITERS FESTIVAL

The program is now up and I think you need to sort out tickets for these things. If you're going to be in town that week, go to the site and see what's doing.

Eddie Campbell & Nicki Greenberg
Date: 29 August 2007 Time: 12:45 - 1:30 Venue: Beckett Theatre Session for middle school, lower and upper secondary students: Grades 7 - 11 ---THINK VISUALLY. Eddie Campbell is the acclaimed artist behind From Hell, which was made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp. Comic artist Nicki Greenberg has turned The Great Gatsby into a graphic novel.

GET THE PICTURE?
Date: 30 August 2007 Time: 11:45am – 12:45pm Venue: Merlyn Theatre: Words and images work well together, but never completely without tension. Manipulators of word and image, picture book writer Shaun Tan, scriptwriter Keith Thompson and graphic novelist Eddie Campbell, discuss what can be said and what can only be shown.

SCHOOLS OF PAINTING
Date: 31 August 2007 Time: 1:30pm - 2:30pm Venue: Merlyn Theatre: A close likeness, of course, is what you’re looking for. But just as portraits can be impressionistic, expressionist or caricature, biographies can be executed in many ways while still being clearly of the subject. Victoria Glendinning, Brenda Niall and Eddie Campbell talk about elements of style in their art.
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update: Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan, mentioned above, is interviewed in The Australian today:
THERE is something disconcertingly familiar about Shaun Tan's calm, open face as he looks up to greet the next autograph hunter in a queue snaking out the bookshop's door and around the corner. It's a mixed crowd here at a writers festival in homage to a book without words. Tan smiles and opens the book handed to him, stamps and signs it twice, and looks up again. Finally it dawns that, of course, it's Tan's face that appears on the protagonist of his graphic novel The Arrival. There it is in frame after frame of the more than 800 images in this sumptuous 120-page story tracing the journey of migration in a fantastic world.
(link thanks to Mick Evans)
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Steve Martin interviews Roz Chast, video (link via Journalista)

About drawing paper. (part 7- final)

A note about the translucent ivory board I mentioned before. Looking in my archive I see that I started using it almost eactly at the time I found myself without a day job. I recall the old chap in the art shop having a word with us (Dave Harood and me) and suggesting that this other card might suit our purposes just as well as the expensive bristol board we were buying. It suited me fine. In contrast to the bristol it's whiter, almost blue white, and I've photographed two for comparison above, being pages from Alec: The King Canute Crowd, from 1981 and 1986. I adjusted the image in curves for the purpose of showing up the contrast. Later when I lived in Brisbane and found a supply of it, I used to order it in big slabs and have it delivered onto my verandah by the manufacturer, and I say this in case I gave the impression that I just steal whatever the kids bring home from school for their projects. I started a fad of sorts and Evans and Mullins used to come around for armfuls of the stuff at intervals. Having an ultra smooth finish it was right for all the penwork I was doing during this period, so long as I didn't gouge, so that From Hell and After the Snooter and all of Bacchus were drawn on it. Either the translucent smooth or on special occasions the textured as illustrated earlier. On the other hand, it's not suited to conventional comic book brush inking with 'feathering', having no tooth or grip, though Pete could ususally pull it off well enough if we needed that kind of effect. I started buying directly from the manufacturer after there was a dip in quality in the stuff I was buying at the art store, with ink lines tending to bleed slightly, and I fretted for weeks over the problem. In fact, I seem to recall it was Mick Evans who found the solution of buying direct for me. Paper quality is not a matter to be taken lightly. I'd get four A3s out of each big sheet. It was one of Anne's jobs to cut it and rule it up to order using the different templates I had cut for each job type, i.e. 9-panel grid, or 'comic book' format or special other (which is why it was no good to me to have stuff printed with blue-lines, though in retrospect, From Hell went on long enough that it might have been a good idea for that template at least.)

Another thing about these old pages, and these are the original and only, is that I once read that I had redrawn almost 60% of the art. There are some touches of white on the page on the left, mostly some fine tuning of jaw and hair lines, but none at all on the page on the right, which is more typical of the whole book. The correction white always showed up bluish on the bristol and yellowish on the ivory.

p.s. Shawn in comments for july 6 queried my view on preservation. I'm certainly not cavalier about the issue, and you can see that the pages above are looking healthy after 25 years. Curiously though, there is a problem with the more expensive card, the bristol, because one of my publishers used a gum to put backing sheets on all the pages (many have abandoned attempts on them which may have confused the printer) which has reacted chemically with the card causing the beginnings of brown stains which caused slight problems when Preney photographed the pages in 2000. The cheaper paper, oddly, was not affected at all. On the page on the left above you can just about see the brown coming through from the back at the outer corners of the inked area. If your work is in any way successful so many people are going handle it over time and You have to allow that you can't control everything. I once got a cover original back that had been accidentally torn in half. The publisher was most apologetic and made good, which i thought was grand as they gave me more than I would have charged for the same original in good condition.
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Just received one of those circulating emails, The Kid from Eromanga. This was so well constructed (and very funny) I immediately thought to myself, what's the origin of it? Eric Shackle has already tracked its lineage, but I note this was a couple of years back. I may be the last person in the world to read it. Its variations as it travelled and its origin in Hillbilly Zeb from Texas are intriguing.
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Well, I have now got to the end of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (I think I'll go with the French form). There are a couple of pages spare so I've gone back and inserted some new business between pages ten and eleven. I now have a month to get through it page by page and fix all kinds of problems, including continuity, logic, feeling lazy some days, etc.

Go out and get your bawbaw.

Happy Seventeenth Birthday to Erin Campbell!
you may remember her from such comicals as "This is your lunch'
(enlarge each tier separately)
(From The Dance of Lifey death in Three Piece Suit.)
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Meanwhile, "It's a pain in the gary," said the other one, wee hayley campbell (who took the photograph above), at the beginning of a conversation that had me phoning our local chirpy cockney, mr White, and ended with me finding the cover of this week's London Time Out magazine. Soon as I set me minces on this I said, 'very From 'ell, dontcher fink?'
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In other news:
Drunk takes a free bike ride on car roof-
Jul 3, "The driver and his wife, when stopped by the police, said they heard a noise while waiting at a traffic light, but did not realize they were taking on an extra passenger."

covers- BACCHUS #57/59

T wo covers from near the end of the six year run. I was trying for an icky insecty feeling on these Snooter covers. The first is finished in pastels on grey paper, the only time I ever employed that medium in a published work. It's not intentional, but the effect reminds me of old 1950s paperback covers. The second looks like I painted over a photocopy of the same drawing. I finally let Mick Evans throw out my old logo and design a new one for the last four issues. I was turning the book into more of a 'magazine', introducing typeset articles instead of comic book stories. I figured it was less time consuming to write than draw, given that I was doing a lot of travelling at this time (connected to the release of the From Hell movie). This would lead to the two issues of my actual magazine, Egomania. Mick was also contributing his own running series, and Bacchus #57 had the best page he ever drew. His character has just got a negative result on his HIV test:

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This piece from the New york Sun has got stuck in my head, being a review of Austin Grossman's "Soon I Will Be Invincible" (Pantheon)
Cannabalizing the Comic Book (sic) By BENJAMIN LYTAL- June 13,
Mr. Grossman clearly belongs to a new generation. His novel almost takes superhero comics at face value. Good opposes evil: On both sides, cybernetics, genetics and offworld intervention have variously combined to produce individuals with bulletproof skin and retractable rocket launchers. At first, Mr. Grossman seems to have caught a sincere tone of glory. Precisely 1,686 superpowered persons inhabit the earth:
"Of these, one hundred and twenty six are civilians leading normal lives. Thirty-eight are kept in research facilities funded by the Department of Defense, or foreign equivalents[. . . .] Twenty-nine are strictly localized—powerful trees and genii loci, the Great Sphinx and the Pyramid of Giza. Twentyfive are microscopic (including the Infinitesimal Seven)."
(link via Tom Spurgeon)
The following is related to my post of last saturday
Something has slipped into place in my noodle. I find myself more and more at odds with the common conception of the word 'comics'. For instance, the tenet that 'comics' and sequential art are interchangeable terms is of no use to me. The idea that all comics are the same medium I also exclude from my list of useful ideas. I have come to feel that comic books (which is a medium of American origin, and is quite different from similar popular media elsewhere e.g. France (Bande dessinee), Japan (manga), Britain (the comic paper), where the term 'comic book' is not traditionally used) are in fact a genre of popular ficton. If you click on 'genre fiction' in my sidebar you'll see that's where I've filed it, and if you check the Wikipedia entry on genre fiction, you'll find it's included there too. I'm sure that would be how Mr Grossman above was thinking when he wrote his book, and comic books can be translated into other media such as prose and film while still remaining essentially comic books. The comic strips in the newspapers are a type of cartoon native to their environment and have no relation whatsoever to comic books as they now exist. In fact, many newspaper comics are not 'sequential art'. Sequential art can be said to be one characteristic of the different species of 'comics', just as it is a characteristic that you will find in many other types of art and design. The McCloudian conception of 'comics' should also be filed under fiction, though it is not yet embraced by a genre. None of this should be misconstrued as a 'definition', though I have no doubt that within 24 hours it will be inserted into my wikipedia page as my 'defintion of comics' to replace whatever my previous 'definition' was even though I have said repeatedly I loathe definitions. By all means refer to it as my DESCRIPTION. It will change as the objects described change. This is my current map of the word 'comics' and I find it useful. If you don't like it, make your own.
And when you draw your own map, you may make some things closer neighbours than I have, but to your dismay you'll find that your map will not help you get there any quicker.
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in other news: (actually two months old)
Mystery cat takes regular bus to the shops

covers-Alec

S ometimes you have to kick a cover idea around for weeks before it settles into place:

Other times it's all there from the first sketch:

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Journey's Steve Perry held back permission to use "Don't Stop Believin' until Chase told him how the story would end. People mag has the best version.

McSweeney's can use a few orders following their distrubutor's bankruptcy. I'm starting with this one: The Riddle of the Traveling Skull by Harry Stephen Keeler: In dozens of dumbfounding novels, Harry Stephen Keeler ecstatically catapulted the mystery genre into an absurdity that has yet to be equaled. Now, the Collins Library is proud to usher his best-loved work back into print. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull begins with a cutting-edge handbag and grows to engulf a villainous Bible-spouter, experimental brain surgery, Legga the Human Spider, and the unlikely asylum state of San Do Mar.

London's flashing judge: The Daily Mail's coverage includes a courtroom sketch of him holding up the underpants.

A different judge in Washington "pressed a $54 million lawsuit against a dry cleaning shop which he said violated consumer-protection laws when it lost his pants.
The lawyer for the Korean immigrants who run the dry cleaner said Pearson was looking for a way to resolve his financial difficulties after a divorce."

covers- THREE PIECE SUIT

I went about this one in an unusual way. I pecilled a few little groups of figures (1-sample):Alec and the figures of Life and Death from The Dance of Lifey Death (being one of the three books in the collection). On the original cover for Dark Horse Alec was caught up in their mad terpsichorean cavorting; in this version he becomes their fiddler. The initial sketches were loose and then began to get tighter, but curiously smaller and smaller until I was looking at a couple of options each of which was about one-inch square. Out of these tiny groups of figures I enlarged the two that looked most promising. I inked these two and tidied them up before we scanned greyscale at several hundred percent. Then we converted to bitmap. Mick Evans, who was doing all the design work on my books at this time, treated one of these in a cubist manner (2), colourng it in photoshop with flat sharp edged colours and we used that for the solicitation image. When it came to making final decisions I went with the other enlarged drawing (3) and tried a different approach altogether. I modelled it fully and carefully with coloured pencils on an overlay (4). Then we dropped the black line drawing over it (5) for the finished cover, the point being the contrast of different scales, but I'm not sure that works as the drawing tends to hide its tiny origin. If I ever reuse this design, I shall not put the black line on top, but simply pencil some details of face and hands onto the colour layer, which I like for its clean simplicity, and print from that.
Top Shelf have it.
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Joe McCulloch reviews The Black Diamond Detective Agency
*****
First second reveals its catalogue for fall 2007
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Naked `Tony Blair' at Art Exhibition. Washington Post (Via AP) June 6,
"This is a biblical allegory _ Adam and Eve expelled from paradise _ and this is Blair's legacy," Sandle said, calling the Iraq war "disgraceful."
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Looted Art Found in Nazi Dealer's Safe Businessweek.com- Jun 6
A number of masterpieces believed to have been looted by the Nazis have been found in a Swiss bank safe, the Zurich prosecutor's office said Tuesday, confirming earlier reports in the German media. The paintings include works by Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, reported the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. The safe was rented by Bruno Lohse, an art historian and dealer commissioned by the Nazis to assess works of art looted from Jewish people in territories occupied by the Nazis, especially France, the report said. Lohse died in March aged 95.
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Warner offers free music over the internet - London Times- June 7
Lala.com, which received $14 million (£7 million) in funding from Bain Capital and Ignition Partners, the venture capital firms, will pay Warner a royalty each time that a user listens to a track. The streaming service will, in effect, be a loss-leader. Lala.com aims to make money by selling downloads, but has suggested that it could lose as much as $40 million in the next two years. It added that it is in talks with other labels to launch similar tie-ups.
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in other news:
CHILDREN"S BOOZE!: AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Just add water! Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.

How to Beat an Artist, and a fan too.

The above appears at Amazon.com.. How to BEAT an Artist. Presumably when you 'search inside' you'll see one getting walloped:

That's a scene from The Fate of the Artist- see sidebar.
(Amazon tip via Ben Smith and Marcus Gipps in comments here a couple of days back)
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Speaking of artists being mistreated, Heidi MacDonald alerts us to Stan Sakai being ripped off by a bastard selling his free sketch on EBAy
It reminds me of my con-sketch anecdote. A guy asks for a sketch and I say 'Only if you're buying a book.' he says, 'Okay, what's the cheapest book you have?'.
"I'm selling the Bacchus Color Special at cover price, three bucks." 'Will you draw a sketch if I buy one of those?"
"yes." I sigh.
So he pulls out his pad. As I'm starting in, "Can you make it a drawing of me?"
So now he's making things difficult and I'm beginning to feel restless. But I start sketching the generality of his physiognomy. He butts in again: "Can you make it of me, but have me being stabbed to death by a London prostitute?"
Now I have to angle the thing so that he's falling over.
"And make the prostitute Marie Kelly."
I'm starting to feel pissed off now. I finish the job as quickly as I can.
At the last moment a thought occurs to me. I execute it.
As Marie Kelly murderously brings down that blade and the blood spurts, I give her a word balloon. In it she is saying: "Take that, you cheap bastard!" and I make sure it has the guy's name on it.
He seems pleased and thanks me.
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And so to sweeter things:
Craig Yoe's contest: AMERICA’S TOP TOON-A-MILF!--Monday, May 21.
And the Winner is: Morticia Addams!!!
And that’s whom I’d have picked:

(reused from my dec. 18 post. Its origin is explained there.)
On the same subject: Gomez, 'Tish Addams Broadway-bound--NEW YORK, May 21 (UPI)
The creepy, kooky Addams family is heading to New York's Broadway for the 2009-10 season.
The grand-scale musical, based on the cartoons of Charles Addams, will be capitalized for more than $10 million by producer Elephant Eye Theatrical in Chicago, Variety reported Monday.
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Craig Thompson’s notebooks. Look at ‘em and weep. Like I just did.
How did he find the time? Still, now that he's blogging, that will be an end to that.
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our pal hemlockman photographs a shark! But he says those sorts don't eat you. Send them all over here to Australia. Still, rather him than me.
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and in other news:
Man busted while drunk driving in wheelchair --Tue May 22.
"It's not like we can impound his wheelchair," the spokesman said. "But he is facing some sort of punishment."
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Reviews of the Black Diamond Detective Agency, due out middle of next week I believe:
Newsarama
Edmonton's Vueweekly.

I just found my soulmate (don't tell the wife).

T o the right is the probable cover for the second volume of the French Alec. It's Three Piece Suit in my own edition, but I've been told that won't fly in France. From Ca et La hopefully in September.
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There was an interview /article on Lionel Shriver, the author of We need to talk about Kevin in the most recent Weekend Australian magazine, which is online but you have to pay.
"Her novel about a campus killer was rejected by 30 publishers before finally getting into print...".
From Amazon .com, the Publishers Weekly review: "A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far."
This passage from the Australian shows the habits of her daily life to be remarkably not unlike my own, and I was once called Frugal MacDougall in the middle of an argument about them: "Surprisingly, her life has changed little since she won the prestigious Orange Prize, awarded to female fiction authors." (the prize is thirty thousand quid... it would keep you nicely for a year) "But the real value is the hugely enhanced book sales- 600,000 in Britain alone. Yet she still lives in the same rented flat in inner-city Southwark- shouldn't she be buying somewhere? "No, I'm too much of a coward! Large amounts of money scare the hell out of me. And the thought of going around looking at property is odious, your life passes before your eyes and you feel a bit like dying." She still cycles everywhere, still buys her clothes in charity shops, still refuses to have a mobile phone. It's so bad that I have virtually no tax deductions because I don't spend any money. I don't keep the heat on during the day, even in winter (which explains why she suffers from Reynaud's disease- poor circulation- and has to wear gloves all the time.) Other people seem to regard these little habits as peculiar. But I suppose I am bloody minded about cycling everwhere. I bicycled to those (book) parties last night. I wore these clothes. I'm also very frugal about laundry because I don't like to do it, so I wear the same clothes all week."

"That sounds just like you!" said the wife of my bosom as she handed me the article to read. That's her sleeping soundly in the above picture while I contemplate the fickleness of biscuits.

However I'm reminded of the episode of Sienfeld, in which Jerry finds a girl exactly like himself in every possible way, and he falls in love. By the end of the episode he can't stand her any more and arrives at the logical conclusion that he doesn't like himself.

(update: Roly in comments indicates the Shriver piece syndicated from the UK Observer) (should have thought of that)

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Google in Klingon, says hayley campbell.

Home again home again

I'm busily scanning the pages from my book Three Piece Suit for its French edition. I just came across an odd one which demands to be seen at least once in colour. In those days I would occasionally paste collage onto the page as part of the finished artwork. I didn't bother about whether it was in black and white or colour, as it would be photographed for black only and the colours would disappear. However, my printer, Preney of Canada, didn't know what was going on the first time they saw me do this. "Do you want us to print these colours like this?" and I'd say, " Good lord no, just photograph it like all the other pages and I'll accept it however it comes out." But once or twice I noticed they excerpted and screened some of my details for halftone and then positioned them back in place on the page.
There was another time, the Gilgamesh story in the 1001 Nights of Bacchus, where there is so much collage going on I was able to run the whole five pages as a colour story on the back covers of five issues of Bacchus. Dave Mckean was in a similar circumstance with Violent Cases, where the first edition was in black and white but later ones were all shot for colour.

(click image for closer view)

Wee Cal

I t's the lad's 15th birthday and as of today he is officially taller than I am at 6 ft 2 ins. This will come as a shock to those of you who still picture him as the wee nyaff in After the Snooter (above).

The ID card at left is newly minted. He was telling me at dinner last night that the five guys in front of him all borrowed the new kid's Harry Potter glasses and greased their hair back for their photos until the photographer twigged to what was going on and started doing his pieces. He grabbed the last one still wearing the borrowed specs, marched him to the class teacher and asked her if he was legit. The teacher, half paying attention said she didn't recognize him so he must be the new kid.
Oh to be fifteen again.

Well, rather you than me.

(ps slipping into anecdotal mode I found myself using the phrase 'doing his pieces' above, which is not a wee Cal phrase, in fact I was astonished to find that nobody else in the house knows it, and I had to rummage to find an online definition for those of you who will be confused. But it is a phrase i think worth preserving so i stuck with it. 'Nyaff' you can take or leave. See links )

and if you don't have After the Snooter, here's how the story finished:

A Litter of links.

I have to clean the bathroom this morning and go out to dinner this evening and finish a page in between, so just a bunch of links and stuff today.

Ian Richardson dies. He played Sir Charles Warren In the movie of From Hell, but his finest moment would have to be the role of British politician Francis Urquhart (F.U.) in BBC's House of Cards trilogy.
* * * *
The PLAGIARISM thing won't go away. Dean Simakis has drawn my attention to this, from Slate Magazine (Feb 7): Can Photographers Be Plagiarists? . By David Segal. A gallery of photographs that have caused controversy, and lawsuits or out-of-court settlements due to resembling somebody else's photos

Blogger Douglas Tonks caught the new York Times review of Posner's The Little Book of Plagiarism, which passed unobserved a month ago. It's written by Charles McGrath, who wrote the big extravaganza on the graphic novel for the Sunday NY Times for July 11 2004, which was much discussed in funnybook circles at the time and the cause of me writing the 'graphic novelist's manifesto'. He seems to be making this one up as he goes along, and gets to the end probably dismayed that he hasn't managed to come up with a point.
* * * *
My pal Bob Morales got a laugh out of this Battle of the Bands at YOUTUBE, and so did I.
* * * *
Oh, lovely words. A review of Fate of the Artist in case you're still dithering about buying it. The object in the picture, that Monument to Chaos, or brick, still exists. Hayley Campbell found it kicking around under the house among its brother bricks. She brought it in, cleaned it up and put it on top of the bookshelf, where it now resides in the more illustrious company of china ornaments. Now that's art!

Oh Bloody blatherin' poo!

I'm taking it easy today after two days of monster posting. This would have to be my favourite cover from the 60-issue run of the old Bacchus comic book. It represents the exact moment when you remember what you said/did last night, and I thought it would make a jolly thing to greet you with on this monday morning as you get back into the weekly grind. It is exactly how I imagine my pal *****'s wife (*for I am nothing if not a gentleman) felt on Saturday morning after her, uh... monologue, at the restaurant on friday night. Of course it must be said that her husband too is no stranger to the ill-considered tirade. What larks.
That cover in turn reminds me of the days when I used to imagine myself to be a publisher. For those who haven't read After the Snooter, the five page piece titled "Running a publishing house out of the front room' is still readable online at my old defunct website thanks to the Internet archive Wayback machine. I've put a permanent link in the sidebar if you want to go rummaging in the old site. I've put a lot of other links in there too. When you reach that moment of utter despair this morning when you realise somebody forgot to replace the tea and coffee supplies, check out the gallery of amusements at the foot, or you can amuse yourselves by thinking of me painting on my sunny veranda with my iced fruit juice on the side. I'd rather you thought of me that way than as the nitwit in the picture.

I've been outed!

Here’s another from the Campbell sketch portfolio. Wee Eddie Campbell growing up on Straight Street, hoping one day to make his way in the world as an artist, as seen in After the Snooter.

First to claim it in comments can have the original in the mail.

I was reluctant to show it here as I have lately worried that Straight Street is not where I thought it was. It may have found itself in a different borough after one of those reshuffling of the boundaries that happen just before an election. What made me think this is that I noticed the street sign graphic in the opening titles of a daytime rerun of the tv show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. So Obviously I wouldn’t want to be alluding to it if it has acquired a sexual connotation. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But you know what I mean; a writer wants to express his thoughts very precisely. You do know what I mean, don't you... it's not like I'm fretting about what you're thinking of my sexual orientation. You know that, don't you?

However, my fear has been allayed by George Martin, famous record producer, featured last week in the Weekend Australian (not online), ruminating about the sixties again:
“Young people had the space, the time , and the income to indulge themselves in the endless experiment of self. If you couldn’t make it in straight street (and who wanted to?), you could make it in counterculture."

Uh, hold on… the phone. It’s my pal Best.
"What’s up?"
"Al Columbia … (whom you may remember from such books as How to Be an Artist… and if I one day find myself waking up in Hell, it will be because of the wickedness I perpetrated in that one book. I know Steve Bissette was deeply hurt for one. I'm waiting for the rest of them to find out.)

(these excerpts are not consecutive)

(I drew Al as a smiley face because I've never met him and don't know what he looks like)


"He's on the Comics Journal forum?"
"He said what?"
“Eddie Campbell’s a fuckin’ homo."
"gasp!"
"It's near the bottom of the page? Hold on, let me find it..."
"Oh dear... but when the dust settles, I’m sure we’ll find out that he meant it in good fun."
"In the meantime, don’t let the wife hear about it. Okay?"
"Yup"
"And... thanks for roning."

What the first version of Alec looked like.

It looked just like that. I thought it was lost forever. Then Hayley Campbell called to say she was rummaging around in my parents loft up in the north of England and she'd found this object (among many other wondrous objects) which she described to me. A Daily Mirror racing diary from 1979, with so many loose pages and napkins and beermats and tickets for this and that all inscribed with tiny narratives and stapled into it until the thing had taken on an almost cylindrical shape. It could onty be one thing. Thus it was that it arrived in the package from Hayley Campbell previously mentioned on this blog on jan 11.



I had carried it around in my coat pocket at first until I realised it wasn't going to be big enough to record the epic I wanted to put in it. So I'd write on whatever paper was to hand and then staple it in when I got home, sometimes three or four sheets of typing paper inscribed on two sides in tiny lettering. All of it recording everything I'd seen and heard and done that I thought was worth recording. I haven't read any of the contents yet, for fear I won't like myself when I was twenty three, or worse , that I'll find I've lost it all in the interim.



This object, containing my daily ramblings and observations through '79 and the beginning of '80 was the source of my first actual book, Alec:The King Canute Crowd, which was published in three parts in '84, '85, '86, and then collected with an unpublished fourth part in a big book from Acme/Eclipse in 1990. I put out a new edition on my own imprint in 2000, which is still available from Top Shelf. Today however, is a day for celebration as I have just recieved a handful of copies of the first French edition, from Ca et La. This is the first time the art has been reproduced digitally, believe it or not, and that involved quite a bit of hard graft to get it all to work, what with all those dot patterns. Here is the very first version side by side with the very latest.



While I was talking to Hayley Campbell I said, "And while you're up in the attic, if, among the wondrous objects, you find my painting of Anne in the nude, can you secure it in some way so that nobody else finds it. Okay, Hales, I'll talk to you again soon, and thanks for roning."

Two hats

I won't show the panels to which this anecdote refers. I'll let you take your copy of the book off the shelf and pretend that you've just discovered the mistake for yourself.
Today I got an email from Serge Ewenczyk of Ca et la, He tells me they've noticed a mistake in book 2 page 42 panel 2 of Alec: The King Canute Crowd. Danny Grey gives his hat to Louise, who puts it on in the next panel, except in the next panel they're both wearing it.
two hats.
It was published like this in 1985, 1990, 1997 and 2000. and Serge is the first person to mention it. These guys have been paying a lot of attention to the details, which is a good sign. but then so have I. A font has been specially made from samples I hand lettered. I have scanned all of the pages from the original art and I had to consult more than one expert before I worked out a dependable system. The big serious problem with it is how to get all those zip-tones to reproduce via the digital process without introducing moire patterns in the greys (look at the awful repro in my two pages in the recent Smithsonian book of comics for a bad example). I mean, over and above the ones that were intentional, put there for deliberate pattern effects in clothing materials for instance. I recently heard that Serge and his team went to some trouble to try to fix those too but gave it up as hopeless.
LOL, as you young 'uns would type.

* * *
oh bloody hell, this post was up and now it's down again. there's a voice mail from my pal, mr j: "It's there, and then its gone again...of course, in the meantime i've gone and checked the page in question in my copy of the king canute crowd... think the page numbers were different in the old books ( which were closer to hand, so i couldn't find it... )... in fact, i have now...and in alec... love and beer glasses, danny grey isn't wearing the hat in the 2nd panel... is this some sort of a conspiracy...

and another voicemail, again from mr j: "ok... alec-love and beer glasses pg 28 ( this is the escape edition we're talking about )... no hat...so at what point exactly was it drawn back in??? and by whom??? is this like a comic book x-file??

what's this? another message from my pal mr j: "seriously, do i get a no-prize for this?"

Damn. if i had anotther post for tonight i'd scrap the whole thing, but we just had drinks with my pal Huge Andrew. Okay, consider the no prize yours, mr j.

and thanks for roning.

another call from mr j.... "you've spelt another with two t's."

ladies and gentlemen, this is live blogging.