I've pulled out a favourite Bacchus cover from 1995 for the front of volume 2 of the new Bacchus collection. Back in 1995 the only record I was keeping of artwork was large size colour laser prints. These are not good enough for re-use of the art on a front cover at the original size, and I regretted not being able to use this old favourite on the Italian editions. Then I found a black and white full size (A3) photocopy and had the idea of recolouring that. Pete Mullins had coloured the original, so the new version has some variations. I also thought it was neat the way Edizioni BD reframed it in a more assymetrical arrangement and have repeated that for the new one.

A Big Spread-1

I'm scanning and preparing Bacchus for its big printing coming up soon. This spread was tricky. It's four pages that all connect up to show a huge absurd brawl in a pub. In the original comic it was printed on two spreads, and will be probably be in the same configuration this time around. You can click on it and blow it up to the width of your screen. Bigger than that if you like..


The original is in two large pieces 22x17 inches and I drew it with Pete Mullins away back in April 1996. A four-page spread is something I always wanted to do at least once in my life after Jim Steranko, a childhood hero of mine, did it back in April 1968.


I got the Steranko scan from Bully's blog. You'll need to go there for the enlargeable version.

another episode of "It's funny how things turn out."

I've been scanning all the Bacchus artwork recently for the big collection in 2010 and particularly enjoyed revisiting the second volume, The Gods of Business (drawn 1987-88). The art on this one was by Ed Hillyer over my roughs, with the lettering and balloons placed by me in ink. They were alternately as rough as the one on the left (with Ed's finished version on the right):


And as vague as the one on the left (again with Ed's on the right):


(For a handy introduction to Bacchus, Rob Vollmar Posted his excellent Comics Journal Article in two parts (A, B) on his blog last year)

Ed Hillyer was the first small press guy after Paul Gravett, the Man at the Crossroads, to pop up in front of me when I started casting my eye around for fellow travelers in 1981. In typical Campbellian fashion, I think I began by biting his head off over some imagined slight. He had been introduced to my work by Paul at the office of Psst magazine, where Paul was working in a sub-editorial capacity, and where I had deposited some samples. The manager there had taken offense at some implied sexism in one of these samples. It sounds daft now, especially given some of the ugly crap the magazine went on to publish, which nobody remembers anyway, but women were trigger-happy about taking offense back then. Anyway, I didn't know about this until Ed jocularly referred to it in his letter, unwittingly getting me started. Writing letters was another thing we did back then.

Ed had an idea about being a small press publishing impresario and he put out a few ambitious anthology things before disappearing off to college and tending to his own talents instead of that of others, which I had encouraged him to do from day one. When Ed came out of college in 1986 he duly started putting out his own mini-comics and I quickly nabbed him to help me out with Bacchus, because I was the one now consumed with megalomaniacal ambitions. What I mean is that I was trying produce more comic books per month than I could actually write and draw myself and was looking to hire machines to do half the work for me (well, I thought of it more along the lines of putting a band together). Ed never liked filling this particular role as the thing he enjoyed most was, and is, page-design. I asked him to do all the art himself on the later volume 4, but I think he still felt constipated by the kind of stories I was telling. He wanted something more kinetic. He was one of the first guys to get into Manga way back in the day. Recently he applied his accumulated expertise to a book on the subject:


It has just come to my attention that Ed is now the author of a NOVEL. Actually I knew about this a long time back, (ten years?) when he directed me in obtaining xeroxes of an obscure 19th century manuscript in the National library of Australia. I just never thought the finished book would ever come to be. It will be titled The Clay Dreaming

Set during the first Australian cricket tour of England in 1868, this magnificent début novel explores an extraordinary friendship between King Cole, one of the Aboriginal players, and Sarah Larkin, a bookish spinster living in London.

And it will be published in April 2010 by Myriad Editions of Brighton, UK:

We're involved in the challenging but thoroughly enjoyable process of editing The Clay Dreaming. This is a hugely ambitious novel set around the time of the Australian Aboriginal cricket team's historical visit to London 1868. It explores an extraordinary friendship between one of the cricketers and a bookish young English woman and their mission to uncover the mysteries of his ancestry. Different story lines, original documentation and various texts within texts mean that Vicky Blunden, Myriad's fiction editor, and the author Ed Hillyer have a hard task to cut down the manuscript from over 1,000 pages to a more manageable 700 or so.

While looking for an online photo of Ed I found this great one by Andy Konky Kru on his own site, and I hope he'll forgive me for borrowing it. This is Ed (left) with Paul Gravett. I always felt Paul had disappeared into the woodwork when he was managing the Cartoon Art Trust 1992-2001, I mean it's a job worth doing but in the sense of 'oh well, somebody's got to do it.' It's been good to see a string of big books come out under his authorship and editorship over the last four or five years.


The photo is from a set taken at 'The UK Web and Mini Comix Thing' 2006, which looks like a very good annual event. Perusing Andy's great photos taken there I found myself transported back to 1981 when we started the whole xeroxed minicomics thing, Paul, Ed, myself, Phil Elliott and the rest.

Still, you'd think by now we'd all have proper jobs in real estate or banking. It's funny how things turn out.

goat's crowning as king of Ireland in doubt

DUBLIN (Reuters) – The annual crowning of a goat as king of Ireland at one of the country's oldest fairs is in doubt after organizers said the heir to the throne may be stopped from traveling to the festival.
Traditionally a male goat is caught in the mountains of Kerry in southern Ireland and paraded through the town of Killorglin where he reigns for the three days of Puck Fair, a centuries-old festival of drinking, music and dancing.
Locals may have to desperately trek the nearby hills after this year's chosen animal from the Northern Ireland town of Ballycastle could only get a four-day license for the trip south of the border.

(Goat from a panel in Bacchus)

i've been thinking of another Hallowe'en, nineteen years ago. I had been working on getting Dark Horse interested in collecting the Bacchus issues previously published by the now defunct Harrier comics. While we were talking it over they invited me to do a short Bacchus story for Dark Horse Presents, which appeared in issue #32 August 1989. I somewhat insecurely reckoned that to get them to take a second story I'd have to give an added incentive. I was due to be staying a few days with Steve Bissette in Vermont (his second issue of Taboo containing the prologue and first chapter of From Hell had been delayed due to the printer backing away from it fearfully (Bissette interview here tells the story)). So I proposed we work on a story together. My idea was to boil down Robert Burns' great narrative poem Tam o'Shanter to a manageable length and simply illustrate it as a Bacchus story. A poem is less linear than prose, so this gave us plenty of room to improvise. Here's the witch with the short skirt, who looks like Steve's work (the other witches are more obviously his of course)

I cast my old pal Mike Docherty as the titular character, and Steve cast Alan Moore as one of the numerous demons with which he populated the pages.


"I need not mention the universally known fact, that no diabolical power can pursue you beyond the middle of a running stream."


Five years later I was working with Dave Sim in a similar situation. This time I picked an old time song, 'The Face on the Barroom Floor' as our subject, and turned up with it all lettered on five art boards, awaiting our improvisations. Dave modelled the sentimental wailing artist on our dear pal Steve Bissette. I don't think Steve has ever commented on this. (I expect he'll be long in a minute.)

for the final volume of the Italian run of Bacchus I felt that the cover I used on my own edition lacked presence. We looked for a variant among the assorted covers that I used on my monthly comic book and thought this one from issue #36 might do the job. However, at that time, ten years ago, I wasn't keeping a good digital archive, and I'm missing a reusable file for it. So I took the photocpoy of the version of the image that was used for soliciting the issue in the distributors' catalogues and painted over it.




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The best thing I saw at San Diego ths year was Dean Mullaney's advance copy of his huge book on Noel Sickles.
Lief Peng takes a look at it this week here and gives us more info on the great American illustrator here and I'm off to see if I can get a copy on Amazon.

at last I have a copy of the latest volume of the Italian edtion of my Bacchus, the seventh, being King Bacchus, and it looks very pleasing. I like the way they've placed the image in the space. The picture is one we drew for Bacchus #8 way back in late 1995, though I had to colour it afresh for this outing. Pete Mullins coloured it the first time around. He also drew approximately half of it. The book came out earlier in the year, so if you're in Italy you may have already seen it.
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in other news, the New York CBLDF event is now cemented. See link from sidebar.

the stygian leech

He just turned up on Youtube.
Here's a screengrab for a teaser:


He told his story in the second volume of Bacchus:

"If I could talk," he said, "my story would probably go something like this...," and we proceed to imagine that he is telling us how he found his way out of the river Styx attached to the leg of an oarsman...


In short measure, he turns up in the restaurant that has been commandeered by the evil Telchines for the purpose of ambushing the Eyeball kid.


Here is Chryson disguised as a waiter, about to perform the wicked deed:


Success! They have leeched the power of the thunderbolt from the Eyeball Kid, who had previously nicked it from Zeus the king of the Gods.


Except that the Leech having it doesn't mean they have it themselves, and the Leech being a leech is never going to do anything with it, just wait around for the next bit of leeching that comes his way.


I'm sure I figured my way out of this impasse in a future volume, but right now I can't recall the details. It was twenty years ago and the only version to hand is the Italian translation, and I can't understand a word of it.
(finished art by Ed Hillyer)

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While looking for jpeg of the old Harrier issue at left, in which the Leech got cover space, I also came across Bill Cucinotta's site. I had completely forgotten 'twas he who redesigned the logo when I went with Dark Horse.

Bacc in the day.

T he new volume of Bacchus is out in Italy. That's number 6. See the covers of the other five here. This one is the equivalent of my vol. 7 (labelled 7/8), containing Hermes versus the Eyeball Kid, my big tribute to the old comic book 'slug fest' in which two big figures duke it out and destroy half the city in the process. Back in the day we used to think that was the height of jollity. There is also The Picture of Doreen Grey, my story about face transplants, accomplished through the auspices of The Body Corporation. Remember we used to think plastic surgery was invented so that Humphrey Bogart could avoid discovery in Dark Passage, instead of for something useful like reducing the disfiguring appearance of 'port wine' birthmarks. My story preceded the one in which Travolta and Cage swap faces. I distrust any story which ends with everything getting put back the way it was. There is a fundamental lie in that which i will not allow. I couldn't let the subject go without also mocking that other great cliche in which the hero and villain swap bodies, courtesy of the Soul Agency.
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Speaking of Bacchus, my pal Diana Schutz, who edited my books at Dark Horse, sends me the link to this theatre review of The Rockae in which The Bacchae of Euripides is turned into a rock opera. I wonder if the author read my version, in which the young Bacchus, upon arriving in an old town to visit his mother's grave, is treated like they treated Rambo and ordered to shuffle along by the local bigwig. Naturally he incites all the dames of the burg to tear the stuffed shirt to pieces and play catch with his head. Oops, no that was Euripides' version.
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wee hayley campbell links me to the Millais exhibition, "the first major solo survey of his art since the Royal Academy retrospective of 1967, and the first exhibition since 1898 that examines the entirety of his career."
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Alan Moore: the wonderful wizard of... Northampton - Telegraph, UK-7 Oct.
Alan Moore, the undisputed, eccentric king of comic-book writing, made it acceptable for literary-minded adults to enjoy books about superheroes. Will his new book do the same for erotica? Susanna Clarke, the novelist and long-time Moore devotee, speaks to him about sex, magic, and why he prefers his home town to Hollywood
There's no doubt that Lost Girls is stimulating and erotic and that Gebbie's art matches the sensuality of the material, but it feels as if Moore the writer is firing on fewer than usual cylinders – which may say something about pornography's limitations as a literary form. The shape of a pornographic narrative is easily guessable in advance; the climax of the story must be, well, a climax. The early 'vegetable-sex issue' of Swamp Thing and a later issue of Promethea, which explored 'magic-sex' ('Sex, Stars and Serpents'), though considerably less explicit, pack more of an emotional punch, simply because the reader is invested in the characters and has an emotional context to fit the sex into. When the Swamp Thing and his lover pull away from each other they have been changed by the encounter. One of the assumptions of the fantasy world that pornography inhabits is that sex should be consequence-free. Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.
Moore on 'GRAPHIC NOVELS' 'That pompous phrase was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.'
Link via wee hayley campbell, who is still missing the shift key, and who liked this bit:
susanna clarke interviewed alan moore. 'why was the first chapter of your book (voice of the fire) unreadable/written in a made up language?'
alan: 'to keep out the scum.'
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LA Times on Gilbert Hernandez- October 7.
novelist Junot Diaz: "In a real world, not the screwed-up world we have now, he would be considered one of the greatest American storytellers."
(link via Tom Spurgeon.)
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Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family- 8 oct. NY TImes.
Apparently Schultz was a cranky bastard. He woke up every morning full of gloom and dread. Wha?? But he was a cartoonist and an artist. It canna be so! Tell me it 's not true!!!
“I think Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick the football: “Happiness is not funny.”
For the world to maintain its equilibrium It is neccessary for the world's conveyers of information to tell us that the bloke who had pots of money could not possibly have been as moderately happy as the rest of us who have but wee piddling amounts. 'His wealth did not make him happy' is one of our essential myths, which is not to say that it is or isn't true, but that we are obliged to believe it religiously.

brisk report anthologies

Some evil bastard just sent this link. (no , in fact I see the page has now been removed. no, it's back.):
A graphic novel is a capture of comic book, usually with a lengthy and hardheaded of buildings storyline like to those of novels, and often expected at mature audiences. The idiom also encompasses comic brisk report anthologies, and in some luggage mechanism collections of beforehand in print comic-book series.
There's yer thought for the day, Dirk Deppey.

F rom 2000, sketch for Bacchus T-shirt I drew for Grafitti designs, with finished image. I always liked this sketch and sent it along as an illustration with just about every interview I did since then, but nobody ever used it. looks like it's drawn with a broad point calligraphy pen, plus my favourite flexible nib, finished with liquid paper dashed on in a painterly manner (i used to dilute it with the thinners till it was very fluid).


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Tha always perceptive Colman G. in comments the other day was talking about the late Guy Davenport and sent me to the Wikipedia entry for the writer, from where I cut and paste this:
He was rare among American artists in that he was not obsessed with his own image in the world. He could therefore live in perfect privacy in a rotting Kentucky town. Davenport bought Oscar Mayer bologna, fried it, and ate it with Campbell's soup. He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005.

covers-Bacchus no. 53

Solicitation drawing and finished painted cover. June 2000: This was the year before the movie came out.

Breakfast news.

F rom the files. I used to design my own wine label every Christmas. I'd buy a case of unlabelled wine, or 'cleanskins', and glue my own label onto each bottle. This particular year's booty was a red obviously. Under our auspices it became 'Blood of Bacchus'. I'm sure it went down well. I can't remember what year it was, what region it came from, or what grape went into the making of it. Nobody presented me with tasting notes. No anecdotes, no problems, no phone calls, no rescue missions, no involvement of the constabulary, no nothing.
Why can't it always be like that ?

(unlike the next story)
Lee Paul C. in comments yesterday linked to: Drunk horsejacker leaves two injured-By Ben Parsons
A drunk woman caused chaos when she hijacked a horse-drawn wedding carriage and ran down a one-legged man on a mobility scooter. The shire horses were standing outside a pub when the woman and her daughter clambered aboard and whipped them into bolting. They knocked a disabled man off his scooter and ran over one of the horses' owners as the animals headed off down the road.
I must be getting old, as I'm just thinking about all the needless damage.

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Noticed by our pal Chris Breach: The indefatigable Everett True is blogging at the Village Voice and is lamenting the passing of PUNK PLANET magazine:
I appreciated the fact it didn't slip into ready cynicism (people confuse criticism with cynicism too often) and its questioning heart, its thirst for knowledge, the way columnists such as Jessica Hopper would write, unencumbered by the desire to impress. I liked the fact it gave over whole issues to the print media, visual artists. It mattered to me: it was an ideal to aspire to. And now it’s gone after 80 issues and 13 years
They've illustrated the piece with my Nick Cave cover for #57.
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The traffic at Johnny C's blog goes off the graph when he shows all the pictures from this old article:
In 1947 Life Magazine asked some famous comic strip artists to to draw their famous characters while wearing a blindfold.
"Artist Graff even managed to get necktie dots on coat lapel and cigaret in left ear."
(link via Hemlockman)
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Police seize magic trick from preacher.-Jul 10.-KAMPALA (Reuters)
The Electric Touch device is usually sold in magic shops alongside card tricks, magic coins and disappearing balls.
"People could be duped to think it is a miracle," the New Vision quoted Civil Aviation Authority security chief Herman Owomugisha as saying.
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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.