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-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- 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
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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.

"I now need to decide what to do with my life"covers-BACCHUS no. 56

Tpair of images above will be familiar to anyone who followed the old Eddiecampbellcomics.com site. It was close to the end of the run and I was habitually showing the preview version of the covers beside the finished print. The latter is in watercolour with a smear of white pastel on the mirror. It's a fairly accurate depiction of me, age 15, from memory.

I recalled this image of my younger self last night after my pal White, who you will remember is a chartered accountant and co-wrote a couple of Batman books with me, directed me to a Millarworld forum where I was supposed to find something, but I forget what it was, and instead found a young guy who is leaving college and is wondering how his life is going to work out. It's that time of year.
"Here's a crazy situation...I'm due to graduate at the end of this year from a Biological Sciences degree and I'm now faced with the scary prospect of entering the real world. The problem is that I now need to decide what to do with my life. One parent thinks I should go into postgraduate work and the other says I should get a science based job. I've got all these options being thrown at me - research work, scientific surveys abroad, the forestry commision (what the heck?), a Phd, a masters - and yet nothing involved my dream to write comics. My Dad even said to my face the other day that "you can't stay at home your entire life and write comics".
Writing is my life. There's nothing else I want to do."

A discussion ensues, and somebody else chirps in with some solid advice:
“There's a chance that none of us will 'make it' and be rich and famous (hell Eddie Campbell, an Aussie writer an artist who worked on batman still earns his daily wage as an accountant), but if we lead rich lives (and are disciplined about our writing) we will both increase our chances of succeeding and not live a half life if we don't succeed.”
I have decided to introduce a new catch phrase here at campbell blogspot. Whenever somebody steps up to offer a word of inspiring and reassuring truth, but then cocks it up, you must say: "Truth is strangler than fiction." (sic) And you can quote me on that.

After many years of hard slog and inspiration, when it all works out for you, you will have a great big studio like these folk photographed by Greg Preston in The Artist Within: Portraits of cartoonists, comic book artists, animators and others. Each one is depicted in his personal working space, and a few examples from the book are shown at the link.
"how do these cartoonists afford such ENORMOUS EXPENSIVE ROOMS?" commented hayley campbell when she sent the link. As it happens, I think this is the book for which my pubisher Chris Staros was trying to get the author to include me in his photographic collection, but my personal working space was much too far away.
hayley campbell envisions his arrival at castle campbell:
you (campbell) would have sat at the end of the table and he would have looked
around corners expectantly.
'so, ah, mr campbell... where exactly is your room?'
'room?'
'er.'
'i work here. and occasionally a few inches over there... depending on
whether it's dinnertime or not.'
'right right.'
'...'
'um, mr campbell, do you know any amateurs in brisbane with big flashy studios?'
'why many! there's wayne, he's got a good'un, and there's always---'
'good good. do you know if they're in? we won't need the room for long..'
'hurrumph.'

Remember: Truth is strangler than fiction.

Speaking of wee Campbell, she has just described an early screening of the Gaiman movie Stradust.
And here is a review of the Black Diamond Detective Agency at Stagenoise
The two parties quoted above obviously need to read my How to be an Artist while anyone interested in more about 'wee Eddie' will find it in After the Snooter

covers- FOX COMICS no.22

When you start out, you fashion little photocopied books in black and white. Maybe you hand colour the covers to make the whole enterprise look a bit more like 'proper' comic magazines (like I did for three or four years in the early eighties.) Somewhere along the line you dare to reach higher, and a bigger print run makes offset litho printing a viable option. Then you try adding one colour to the cover. It probably doesn't work that way now. Computers have altered the equation. It's probably like getting your photos developed in black and white; you need to go somewhere special to do it. But back in the old days, photographically separated colour was beyond dreams to a small potatoes guy like me, and adding the cost of a single printed colour to the cover was a big decision. When I put out the original three Alec books with Escape in '84, '85, and '86, we added an extra colour on the cover of each, but instead of the process primaries, magenta, cyan and yellow, we used one of the secondary colours on each to avoid an obvious cheap look. Thus we used green, orange and purple on the Alec books. It worked; at first sight a secondary colour is read as a mix of two primaries, so it's not obvious there's only one ink (two counting the black of course). I can still look at them now without getting that thought of obvious cheapness. Each has a black and white image set against a flat colour field. A couple of years later I got a chance to do a wraparound cover for Fox comics. They had gone the conventional route of adding a colour, and then two colours, with a complement of
the full four arriving I think in the issue after mine. The one before mine was, if memory serves, by Dylan Horrocks, with three colours, black, yellow and magenta. With three colour printing, the mind's eye immediately realises that something is missing even if it takes a minute or two to work it out, but of course Dylan's design was big and bold enough to make a feature of the limitation. With my outing, I suggested they inquire as to what options we had with regard to colour selection, and I composed a picture in Black, green and brown, the colours of trees, for a bar with the rainforest beginning immediately outside (and I've been in a few like that). Somebody at Fox hand-made the two overlays, and they're all in half-tone too, just to make it trickier, but since my design called for a mad sloppiness, there was no problem about lining things up with an excess of accuracy. I still like my drawing on this, and I usually use it as an endpaper whenever I bring Little Italy out for a new printing ('92 fantagraphics, 2001 my own imprint)

footnote . I reccollect a British comic in the sixties that attempted, in only one issue as far as I know, to save the expense of a fourth colour on the cover (insides were always black only in those days) by cutting out the black. That is, it ventured to put the cover image across with just magenta, cyan and yellow and achieve darkness in places by overlaying all three together, with the logo in red and a headine in blue or purple. Even as an eight year old I knew something extremely unusual was happening and pored over that thing for hours.
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ya gotta larf:
I'm up to the page in The Amazing Remarkable Mr Leotard where the Titanic goes down, and I googled for picture reference 'Titanic Sinks'. the first thing up is the brand name of a manufacturer: 'Titanic sinks, taps, appliances and showers'.

covers- DOING THE ISLANDS WITH BACCHUS

D oing the Islands with Bacchus - Like the 'Immortality' cover I showed on may 21, this is another that I lived with through several variations over a ten year period. In the top two I was stuck at two extremes; one puts the protagonist so far back among the beach girls that we hardly notice him, while the second brings him so far forward that the girls could be in another picture. The lower composition tries to resolve the problem by having a large girl in the foreground and the small group further off , but not too far. I like that I kept the rough painted edge in that second one in my xerox copy. You never see that again after the picture is printed as a cover. I remember visiting Matt Wagner in Portland Oregon around the time I painted the second picture and we discussed the aesthetic of painting up to a straight edge by using masking tape. Collectors apparently like to have a clean edge. Damn them I say; let's see all the workings. The foreground girl in the lower pair is based on a figure from a ladies' underwear catalogue; I was very taken with the arrangement of a strong reflective light thrown up from the hot sand
(1) is an ink drawing intended for the cover of a third issue of the Harrier Bacchus in 1988 if the series hadn't been discontinued (#2 saw Bacchus arrive among the Greek islands to begin his adventures there). I saw a chance to successfully submit it to the Amazing Heroes annual swimsuit special (Fantagraphics) 1991-(third girl back looks out of proportion, and the band of distant figures was added to fill the space that would originally have been taken up by a logo)
(2) Doing the Islands with Bacchus, Dark Horse mini-series 1991, 1 of 3- a xerox of my cover in oils, untrimmed, without logo and title type.
(3) coloured ink drawing, solicitation image for my own 176 page collected Doing the isands With Bacchus 1997, all the girls in this one, (colouring too), by Pete Mullins from photo refs.
(4) chemical proof of my finished cover in oils, 1997, without logo and title type. Note the seated girl in the middle-distance, from a photo, who appears in all three of the colour versions and may even still be sun-baking in my cumbersome file of old reference cuttings, third drawer down in the old metal cabinet..

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coincidentally from comments:
"This next story caught my eye after re-reading 'Doing the Islands with Bacchus' the other night."-Ben Smith
An 89-year-old (british) woman took a £2,000 taxi trip to Greece - because she can't stand waiting in airports.-BBC NEWS-30 May
Taxi driver Mr Delefortrie said: "I like driving and it seemed a good idea. The drive through Austria was spectacular.
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John Coulthart alerts me to a new exhibition opening June 1:
DALí & FILM - A GROUNDBREAKING SHOW AT TATE MODERN. This is from the 24 Hour Museum site:
The dream recounted by Gregory Peck for analysis by Ingrid Bergman (in the Hitchcock movie Spellbound, the dream sequence of which was designed by Dali)– with its distorted perceptions, eerie landscapes and faceless tormentor – remains one of the most powerful depictions of the subconscious ever seen in the medium of film. The image of the eye returns here, again being slashed by a man with a pair of scissors; other disembodied eyes watch the chaotic action from their position on top of plant stalks.
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in other news:
Man falls off balcony in spitting contest

covers- BACCHUS no.17

T he Yellow Bustard. I was going to inscribe that on the cover of this sly dig at Sin City, but I thought, oh everybody will get it. I suppose they did, but nobody ever said anything. Picture on left from Frank Miller's The Yellow Bastard, picture on right by me except for the rubber chicken, which Pete Mullins contributed and logo and color were added by Mick Evans at the design stage. We had conquered that problem some time before, as explained in an earlier post. Apart from my suspicion that everybody missed the joke, we had no problems whatsoever with this one, and the solicitation image was the same drawing as the finished cover. Why can't life always be like that?
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After enjoying the Beirut video the other day I’ve been doing some digging. Hayley Campbell sends me this Guardian article from November 24 last, the day before I started blogging, in which Zach Condon and Eugene Hutz are cussing at each other. Ah, not since the heady days when trad and modern jazz locked horns have such passions been raised.
'There is no such thing as Gypsy music'
From Basement Jaxx to Beirut to Gogol Bordello, bands are looking to the Balkans for inspiration. But, asks Dorian Lynskey, is this a genuine new musical hybrid or just cultural tourism?
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I've been enjoying Leif Peng's look, over the last couple of weeks, at the work of great American illustrator Al Parker
There are yards of beautiful pictures.
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wha? there have been 50,000 views of this pilot of the Furry Freak Brothers movie and I've only just heard about it? Gilbert never mentioned the possiblity of a movie when we had dinner with him, Hunt Emerson and the Knockabout crowd in Angouleme in France two years ago.
(via mr j, drjon and just about everybody else who heard about it before me)
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I'm interviewed at Suicide Girls. These long distance telephone conversations are always tricky, but I don't seem to have embarrassed myself too much here.
There's another interview at Comic Book resources. This was by email, so there was less chance of me making an ass of myself, but you be the judge.
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Website of writer Miranda July is the most original and funny thing I've seen online in a long time. (link via Neil Gaiman's blog)

covers- BACCHUS no.30

With this one at least I had a confident idea from the start. Collage waving 'Yoo-hoo' at the reader. She hadn't been on a cover for quite a while. In fact she hadn't been in the storyline either since Bacchus was locked up in jail. The problems started when I painted it in gouache. Well, actually if I'd just stuck with the gouache we might have been okay, but I coloured her coat with a fluorescent orange pantone marker. I'm sure Evans would have called me an idiot, and remembering how well that Eyeball Kid cover came out, I'd have just said 'photograph it and see what happens', in my naivete not realizing that whenever these mad ideas worked out well it was because some poor muggins, unbeknownst to me, had put a lot of thought and effort into how it might be reproduced. So Mick grumbled, had a few beers with me, grumbled less, took it away to where he was working the nightshift in a design studio, and dropped the negs in at my place the following morning on his way home (he described our working method in brief a few days ago in comments). We'd usually be pressing ahead with the days rigors when he arrived. I had two drawing tables in the front room for me and Pete, as well as big desk with the typewriter on it, which was Anne's station. In fact, it wasn't really a 'front room', more the passage between the veranda and the living room. The front door remained open all day, letting in the subtropical sunshine and occasional bodies trying to sell me a story idea.
The problem this time was that the orange insisted on reproducing as a bright yellow as evidenced by the chemical proof Mick was showing to me. I can't recall whether we had another attempt to photograph it, but my solution to the problem in the end was to retouch the chemical proof and use that as the actual cover art. The retouching involved quite a bit of additional colour on the face. The surface of this was tacky, and we may have kicked it around before I decided it was to be the precious finished surface. There's a little speck of dirt stuck to the character's nose, and when I tried to remove it I just made it worse.
The true solution never occurred to me at the time. I had successfully made xeroxes of the painting at full and half size, which is why I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't reproduce for the process camera. There would be times like that I dearly wished I had been accepted for the graphic design diploma course way back in '74 (to this day I can't figure out why I couldn't get in there... must have been my arrogance or something) since I've spent so many days wrestling with technical problems associated with printing. Anyway, the local university paper made a special issue devoted to comics and Minty Moore became a key guy in rounding up material for them. I gave them the large size xerox of this cover as a stand alone piece of art (there's a great deal going on in the graffiti behind the figure), and it printed perfectly, at a nice big tabloid size too. In other words the xerox process converts everything in the art to the same material, photopcopy toner, so that all the elements react in the same way under the process camera. It's when you mix media on the same surface that you run into problems. Lesson learned.
(1) is the solicitation image as it appeared in the Previews catalogue, (2) is my half-size xerox and is colour-true (There may be a moire pattern caused by the scanning for showing it here.) (3) is the print job.
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I awoke today to find that I have that new Blogger feature I’ve been hearing about, the one that deletes your post while you’re working on it, and it doesn’t matter that you saved it earlier. It’s gone, pal. Thus the following has been done more than once, so let’s just hope it makes sense.
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Women in Art a short video. This is very lovely. Thanks for the link to my fellow artist, Christopher Moonlight. Christopher also says he just picked up The Black Diamond Detective Agency at Barnes and Noble, so it is in the shops now..
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Belgians do what PM can't: banish Tintin -The Australian-Sally Jackson- May 31
Bill Leak, The Australian's artist and daily editorial cartoonist, has been threatened with legal action unless he stops depicting federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd as Tintin…
This follows the news that three Tintin movies are in the pipeline, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson confirming they would direct two of them. Leak said he had been drawing Rudd as Tintin at least since December. Tintin's dog, Snowy, also features in the cartoons, although not his best friend, the hard-drinking Captain Haddock. "Sadly, Julia Gillard doesn't have a great big black beard," Leak said yesterday.
(link thanks to Michael Evans)
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Nobel laureate's next project will marry words and pictures.- May 30-Guardian
The Nobel laureate, whose previous acclaimed works include My Name is Red and Snow, had wanted to become a painter before he began writing novels... As part of the early groundwork for the book, he is preparing to teach a course at Columbia University in New York this autumn which has the working title of "pictures and texts".
"It's sort of a random survey of the relationship between pictures and texts," he explained, "from Plato's cave to Heidegger's Van Gogh shoes." The course will examine pictures as illustrations of texts and texts as descriptions of pictures, and explore the intermingling of picture and text in human thought...

Followers of this blog will recall that I have a special interest in the evolving concept of the novel in our times.
(link thanks to Ben Smith)
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German mistakes subway for underground car park
May 30, -BERLIN (Reuters) –
her vehicle got stuck on the stairs, police said on Wednesday.

covers- BACCHUS no.29

T his issue had the story that was bumped along from #28, whose cover I showed yesterday. I must have realized it was getting too difficult to predict where I'd be when the time came three months later to draw the promised story, for I've drawn a standard sort of pin-up cover in the solicitation image (1), showing a grouping of the characters as they were appearing in the supporting (reprint) story. The coloring on the printed solicitation (2) looks like Pete's work. Very nice too. I can imagine I bought the catalogue just to cut that out for my files. The printed size of these could vary; this one is two and a half inches high, yesterday's was two inches. With the finished painting (3), which Pete has painted so thoroughly I can't recall how much I was involved, a boot is tromping on the flag of civilisation. In retrospect, the idea is too complicated since it's not an object that anybody could possibly recognize. What I really wanted to do was have Bacchus wiping his bottom with it (4), as he does in the story, and was promised in the solicitation for the previous issue, and I've mocked up here just for a laugh, but I didn't think the distributors and the shops would stand for it.
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Book without words wins literary prize The Australian, may 29.
The graphic novel, The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, won the Community Relations Commission (CRC) Literary Award for 2007.
The $15,000 award was one of 11 announced tonight at the annual New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards dinner in Sydney. (thanks to Michael Evans)
I wrote about the book on dec 11
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Alan & Mel's Wedding Reception Flickr set. (thanks, drjon)
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Marjane Satrapi shares the Jury Prize at Cannes. I missed this profile in the Herald Tribune from last week.-may 22
Marjane Satrapi at Cannes: An Iranian graphic novelist's coming of age
(via First Second blog)
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here's another great sound. French band Dionysos, and my First Second stablemate Johan Sfar appears to have designed the cartoon video. (link via mr j.)
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If you liked that Nick Cave cover I drew for Punk Planet, David Carroll has posted a big full size version. My monitor is showing a lot of yellow on the face that shouldn't be there, it should be a flat flesh tone all over, but there's some nervous pencil detail that's picked up nicely. Mick Evans cobbled all my bits and pieces together in photoshop for this job by the way. the main portrait sketch is on a piece of tracing paper (used to trace the best parts of an earlier sketch) which when last seen hayley campbell was using as a bookmark in her copy of From Hell. In an artist's house, such things are taken for granted.

update: she says "'it's no there noo, it's shifted.' Now it's a bookmark in How to Beat an Artist."
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in other news:
Man wrestles leopard in his bedroom--Tue May 29,
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli man wrestled a leopard to the ground after it entered his bedroom in a desert college and tried to make a meal of his pet cat.
"He jumped on the leopard and pinned him to the floor, then his wife called us so we could take it away," Amram Zabari, a local park ranger who rushed to the scene, said on Tuesday.

covers- BACCHUS no.28

I headed into my third year of Bacchus, without having missed a month, although in the third and fourth years the schedule would slip down to ten issues per year and then eight in the fifth and sixth. That's sixty altogether in six years. For most of that time, If I missed a month of Bacchus, there would be something else to take its place, either a big collection or a 48 page special such as the Birth Caul. In this third year I found quite a few of the cover predictions were hopelessly off course by the time we came to draw the issue. With this one I thought we'd be up to the collapse of social order and the advent of Bacchanalian chaos, but a couple of short chapters were inserted to delay that, such as the one titled 'the murder Ballad'. If I remember correctly, Nick Cave had just recorded his duet with Kylie Minogue, which had her playing the dead girl floating in the pond. With Minty Moore we came up with the idea of the blues singer narrating a murder ballad in rhyme and I pulled out the oil paints once more, unused since the Bacchus color Special cover. The printing on this cover was the single most heartbreaking dissapointment in my whole publishing career. So, (1) is the black and white small scale cover solicitation image. (2) is how it looked in the Diamond catalogue. Pete Mullins inked and colored it I think. Interestingly, the story described here would be in the following issue (see next post) but this cover idea was kicked out a second time and thus never used. (3) is my prepress color-correct proof of the painting, which has never been seen anywhere before. Click for an enlargement. Seeing it as it was meant to appear, for the first time in ten years (I sold the original quickly) I felt quite moved, recalling all the tragic feelings I tried to put into it. (4) is the dismal end result of the print job. For a couple of hours I felt like giving up.

In fact, what impresses me more than seeing the actual colours after all these years, is the fact that I was able to put it out of my head and get on with the next issue and the one after that. And the covers of those issues would create their own particular problems. Actually, no, what terrifies me the most is that this was all ten years ago.

covers- BACCHUS no.18/19

Y esterday I was writing about those little advance cover images that I'd send for the previews catalogues. Once I acknowledged the unlikelihood of the first idea being the one that would make the eventual finished cover, it seemed inexpedient to go to the trouble of drawing it up in a 'finished' way. Also, since my covers were more often than not painted, an inked line version was surplus to requirements. Thus I decided to cut a corner. Instead of drawing a full size cover at this stage, I'd make a very small drawing that would look good at the repro size of two or three inches high. In other words, since the distributors were agreeably showing a picture in their jam packed catalogues, I'd make the most dynamic use of the available space by composing to best suit the scale, and think of my picture as a 'placeholder' for a better one that would come along later. There was a lady at one of the distributors who phoned to point out that I had delivered a cover different from the one advertised in the catalogue, which was against the rules. I responded by pointing out that the rule was a sound one designed to stop publishers from offering , say a brilliant cover by Dave Stevens and then delivering a dumb one by Eddie Campbell, thus causing discontent with the readers who would naturally feel gypped. Since I had promised a cover by Campbell, and then delivered a more detailed cover by Campbell, I wasn't playing against the purpose of the the rule. I presume the matter was referred to somebody who knew who Eddie Campbell was, and no more was heard about it at this end for the rest of my duration as a publisher.
Anyway, after that first year of self publishing, most of those solicitation images were quite different from the covers as later published. Above are a couple of good examples. You can see how in the small versions the bold and simple black and white miniatures command their space more authoritatively, while if you click through to the bigger version, the colour image comes into its own. The Issue #18 (oct. '96) preview has a profile of Bacchus that is almost bigfoot cartooning. I tend to prefer it to the finished picture. The Subject of #19 (nov.'96) was so suited to Pete Mullins' skills that I handed it over to him and kept out of the way, so that one's 100% Mullins. The small girl's head sufficed until I or Anne found a photo ref for the finished image. With that issue Mick Evans finally got to redesign the logo after complaining about it for a year. 'Colo' was of course our version of the popular British mint, 'polo'. The story in this episode was one that Marcus Moore wrote for me, about the invention of a mint for inserting in your posterior, or the 'arse-mint.' Forever after, in the pages of Bacchus, Marcus was referred to as 'Minty Moore'.

(That's after 'Dinty' Moore, who was the chef in the great Bringing Up Father daily comic strip. There's a great site devoted to it, courtesy of Mark J. Holloway, including Dinty Moore way down the page.)
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Short Is Good: The concise joys of condensed books -- and the virtues of brevity
Wall Street Journal-May 12-By TERRY TEACHOUT
NEW YORK -- "Orion Books, one of England's top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as "Anna Karenina," "Moby-Dick" and "Vanity Fair." The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as "Compact Editions."
Of course great art deserves to be experienced on its own uncompromising terms, flaws and all. But the older I get, the more I appreciate those artists who say what they have to say, then shut up. Is there a more powerfully moving novel than F. Scott Fitzgerald's 56,000-word "The Great Gatsby"? Or a funnier film than Buster Keaton's 44-minute "Sherlock Jr."? Or a more profound meditation on the brevity of human life than "Anakreons Grab," Hugo Wolf's setting of Goethe's 12-line poem about the grave of an ancient Greek poet? "The happy poet rejoiced/In spring, summer and fall/Now at last this mound of earth/Protects him from winter." I'd trade any number of operas for that exquisitely wrought three-minute song."

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European men are flocking to Bulgaria to buy 'breast-boosting beer' after EU accession led to customs duties on the drink being abolished
Constantin Barbu crossed the Danube from Romania to buy Boza in the Bulgarian border town of Ruse.He said: "I've bought a case for my wife to try out. I really hope I see an improvement."

covers- BACCHUS no.10

W hen I assembled each of my first few issues of the sixty-issue run of Bacchus, I was at least five months ahead of release date. By the end of the first year it had slipped back to two months. But the cover still had to be submitted five months ahead, and for that I would have to guess three months in advance what the story was going to be about. Issue #10 is the first one where there is a disparity between my original thought and the finished one.
When we started we were supplying nine different distributors. We'd send each of them a solicitation text, a description of the story, accompanied by a small cover reproduction. It was two inches wide. I suppose they'd just glue it onto their layout for photographing. For the bigger distributors we could send colour, so we'd make those slightly larger and just colour by hand; we were past the stage where we were advanced enough to have a fully worked out painting that early in the process. We didn't even have enough time usually to keep a copy of the colour versions, so they now only exist in copies of Diamond's Previews catalogue, or Capital's catalogue (I can't even remember what it was called now). Since we had to photocopy a bunch at a time, I usually filed a black and white if there were any left over after the day's operation. I'd give a handwritten text and a bunch of repros to Anne and she'd sort it all out, always two weeks ahead of the submission deadline to allow for mailing time since we were working so far from the market.
With Bacchus #10 I had envisioned the character of Mr Dry, my take on the old Prohibition cartoon 'wowser' (as they call the type in Australia: 'one whose overdeveloped sense of morality drives them to deprive others of their pleasures.") playing a healthy game of picnic softball against Bacchus as pugilist. By the time I got to the story I had cast him as a character more likely to wag his finger at any kind of sporting activity. This in fact was the issue in which Bacchus, in a surreal diversion from the main story, finds Mr Dry washing his socks in the gene pool. The black and white version at (1) was the original solicitation image. (2) is my xerox of the original after I coloured it. If you enlarge it you'll notice that I've given Mr Dry a more receding chin since the first version, probably in a vain attempt to save this version before acceding to the need for a new figure. (3) is the new version of the antagonist. I gave all the parts, including a boldly sketched piece of watercolour for backdrop, to Mick Evans, who digitally assembled the finished cover (4). Then I gave them all away as gifts, Christmas 1995.
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in other news:
Congressman chases down pick-pocket-WASHINGTON (Reuters) -May 25.
Asked about the incident, a police spokesman confirmed that "something like that occurred tonight in Georgetown."
"I can't identify the surviving victim of any crime," he said. "But, I understand the victim has been calling the news media and telling them his story."

covers- THE STAROS REPORT 1996

Continuing the general thread of a story through these covers, I wrote on may 17 and 19 that I launched into self publishing in 1995 figuring I'd solve all the problems as I went along, there being far too many of them to think about all at once. One was: how do you put the logo on a color cover (I remember Jeff Smith saying when he started Bone he didn't know how to do that either). The solution to this one arrived when Mick Evans turned up and told me my design was crap. I had plenty of good looking covers and typeset pages when I was with other publishers, but now that I was soloing, perhaps I figured everybody would be happy to accept a hand-made look. From Bacchus no. 7 on, all my books would be properly designed by Mick Evans, with text pages nicely typeset, and from then on we sent our own negatives for the covers instead of just asking the printer to put the logo in approximately the right place in one of the four colours. I was even able to have photos on the backs of the trade paperbacks and some computer trickery now and then.
The other big problem was what to do about storing extra copies Stateside for reorder activity. Chris Staros in Georgia had made enquiries about helping me out, obviously wondering how I was dealing with that. At the beginning there was a fellow in Brooklyn who was keeping boxes under his bed for me and sending out subscription copies, but after an issue per month for six months, with a couple hundred overprint on each, it was getting too complicated. Staros had a bigger plan to become a publisher, and handling my stock was his second step in that direction (Top Shelf Productions being the final destination, though not envisioned clearly at the time). He had been putting out a little annual book for a couple of years, The Staros Report, which contained a directory of addresses and numbers for publishers and agents and character listings of Love and Rockets other such useful info. Now he wanted to turn it into a proper magazine with a glossy cover, and interviews and articles. So we packaged the cover for the first of those. I did the art with the help of Pete Mullins and handed the rest of the job to Mick Evans. The result shows the big difference between what I was doing before and a new set of possiblities. Evans heads a design studio in Brisbane these days.

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HEY!! Today marks six months of daily blogging here at campbell.blogspot. I gave up my day job and took on this assignment on November 25 and haven't missed a day.
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hayley campbell says "here's a newish band wot I'm liking at the moment. beirut.
the fabulist:"I wish life were like this video, elephant noses, gorgeous people, and all."
A ukelele and a trumpet!
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In other news.
Ohio executes man. Takes so long, he's allowed a toilet break.--Friday, May 25,
(My 'other news' is usually humorous)

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.

covers- IMMORTALITY ISN'T FOREVER

E volution of a portrait. That first image from 1989 has never been printed anywhere. It was my first attempt at a cover when I took the original 192 page big Bacchus story to Dark Horse. I seem to be under the influence of my old buddy Bissette there, perhaps because he had just started publishing From Hell in his Taboo, a fondly remembered anthology that was also the birthplace of the Moore-Gebbie Lost Girls. I rejected that and made another painting in 1990, the second image above. There's still a feeling of it being a horror story, which Bacchus was never meant to be, but I was prepared to give that impression if it helped attract readers. The third picture was for an issue of Dark Horse Presents in 1991, which explains its vertical format. They used to run a strip down the left hand side of the covers, with medallions showing the characters appearing in the issue. I used a closer view of that picture when I published 'Immortality' myself in 1996, this time in a 96 page version, cutting the original book into two parts. It was my first attempt at painting in oils for publication This is the set of paints I mentioned in my earlier post on the Bacchus Color Special, though I used the medium for a long time in my teens after getting a set for Christmas. (My ambition was to be Claude Monet; not just a follower, but actually the man himself.) There's some collage on there too: the grapes, and a configuration of markings from a photo of a marble slab which I pasted under the eyes and around the nose and mouth. I was getting closer to what Bacchus ought to look like. When I sold the original of #3 I had another potential buyer who was upset at missing out, so I agreed to paint a new version as a commission. This new painting, from 1998 I think, is also in oils and on a larger scale than the others. I kept a photographic transparency and used it when the time came to print a new edition of Immortality Isn't Forever (that title sounds too much like a Bond movie) in 2002. However, I painted a better ear in #3; I guess it's one of those things you realise you've been thinking about for far too long, and anyway, the best comic strip characters tend to have a physiognomy that defies photographic rationalisation. The more real he looks, the less like (Eddie Campbell's) Bacchus.
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John Coulthart draws our attention to the exhibition of fakes and forgeries at the Bruce Museum in Conneticut, May 19
The NY Sun had a good long article on it on may 10.
"In 2000, Sotheby's and Christie's were embarrassed to learn they each held the one and only "Vase de Fleurs" by Gauguin. And consider those legions of small, unsigned works still beckoning scholars whose enthusiasm outweighs their discernment. The sheer scale of falsity prompted Newsweek's celebrated quip that of the 2,500 paintings Corot made in his lifetime, 7,800 were in America..."
while your at John's blog, check his showing of his own pastiches on May 21.
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covers- BACCHUS no.6

Colour covers always filled me with a spirit of gleeful liberation. This one features Bacchus with Collage, who had been introduced in the previous issue. She was intended to be ‘The spirit of an instantaneous, chance-embracing new age.’ (I lifted that phrase from somewhere, but Googling it doesn’t give a result.) And whether that job description was different enough from the Eyeball Kid’s, as queried by one critic, I am not sure. The image is based on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, although that is probably not obvious in the finished version. Collage is cast as the old man’s daughter (Wood meant her to be a daughter, but posterity has mistaken her for the man’s wife.) I drew the black and white and Pete Mullins coloured. In the background I asked him to use those markers where when you use the white one last it changes the colours of all the others where it touches. Red changes to yellow, green to red, each one not what the eye expects from a knowledge of mixing pigments. I wanted to confuse anyone who was accustomed to ‘reading’ colour mixes. Then for good measure I stuck a fish on the top.
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I’m hoping the above looks right as Blogger is playing silly buggers again.
Blogger Status Update
Some Safari and Opera users are experiencing difficulties saving or previewing posts and uploading images. We are aware of this problem and currently working on a fix.
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Those damn garbage bags in the Wicks case continue to be a subject of fascination here at Campbell.blogspot:
Judgment reserved in Wicks cartoon case --May 17,
"The final submissions were presented today in the lawsuit by Ben Wicks' family to reclaim a vast collection of cartoons left behind in a move 15 years ago. The Wicks family is seeking the return of more than 2,400 original sketches dating back to the 1960s.
They were left behind by movers in 1992. The cartoons were found in three green garbage bags, some of which were mixed in with kitchen waste. In court today, the defendant's lawyer, Charles Campbell told the judge, "If it was packed like garbage, looked like garbage and smelled like garbage, then it was garbage."
I can easily envision a scenario in which, with me deceased and not there to oversee things, the garbage bag containing my most prized possessions is left by an unthinking clod of a removals man next to the garbage bag containing… well, garbage… perhaps even a dead rat our cat brought in. And then perhaps the discovery of a note to not throw out any garbage bags, that all said garbage bags might then be put aside together in the garage. Maybe even some extra garbage gets tossed in the one containing the prized possessions. Yes, I can see that. It’s in my nighmares every night. Right after the scene where I’m back at school with 36 years of uncompleted assignments.
They should have asked for my affidavit

covers- The BACCHUS COLOR SPECIAL

T he color special was Teddy Kristiansen's idea. It probably started as one of those things you say at conventions; "hey, let's work together sometime!." He proposed it to Dark Horse, it was accepted, so I wrote a script and he painted the whole book. I had never done a whole comic book in color before, only covers, and more often than not I'd make a disaster out of those, but I said I'd do the cover for this one. Since this was going to be a big showpiece, the cover had to something special, so I pulled out the oil paints. This was a little box of cheap Chinese colors I bought back in '91 to do the three covers for 'Doing the Islands with Bacchus'. I had no problems with those, perhaps because they were done on paper, but with this new one I decided it should be done on a grand scale, large and on canvas board. I posed myself and the wife of my bosom by the natural light of a window and took a bunch of photos. I laid down the paint in undercoats and lauyers in the very old traditional manner of oil painting technique. It really is the medium for building up that integration of flesh tints. Now, the only problem was that i couldn't get the damn thing to dry. I even had it hanging out of the oven. Months were trundling by and still it was wet to the touch. It was a good thing Teddy was dragging his heels with the interior art. With regard to that, I had been paid on delivery for the script, so from Teddy's point of view, it wouldn't have looked like he was causing me difficulties, except that from my point of view it was totally necessary to my master plan that the color special come out before I launched my self published series (see yesterday's post).
Teddy was nearly done and things were coming to a close, so I decided to stick a big piece of that clear sticky backed plastic over the whole job (I usually did this with black line art whenever I used smeary pastels, and it always worked there... eg. From Hell chapter 2). Of course that was a stupid thing to do, the last resort of a desperate loony. My editor Diana Schutz received this monster in the mail and phoned.
"We can't photograph this. The light will bounce all over the place. it will be a mess."
"Okay." I replied. "This is what to do. Put it on the floor, put one end under your toes. Get Bob Schreck or somebody to pull the plastic sheet off in one firm tug."
"Are you nuts? I can't do that to your painting!"
"hmm.. let's try it this way then. you send it back here and Ill do it."
In a few days the painting was back with me by fedex. I laid it on the floor and asked the wife of my bosom to put her toes on one end while I firmly dragged the plastic sheet off. 70% of the painting was still on the board and the othr 30% was on the plastic.
In defeat I put the thing in the garden shed and painted another picture, this time in quick drying acrylics. That's the second one you see above. But this was now Dec 1994. The self publishing operation was advancing at full steam. I was probably working on the second issue by then, and My enthusiasm for the color special cover-image had waned. There was only one thing for it. I pulled the defeated picture out of the shed and finished it carefully with the quick drying acrylics. The damage was mostly to the dark areas,so i didn't have to mess around with that figure too much. I sent it in and it was photographed. I included the second picture in the package and that was used on the back cover. The book came out in April 1995, one month before my own launch. I think we got orders for 12,000, which nobody considered very good in those days, except me. For my own launch I got 8,500, which is what I usually got for a no.1 in a black and white mini-series when I was with Dark Horse, and that was great since now all the takings went to campbell Industries, and the US-Australian dollar exchange was all in my favour.
All's well that ends. (as Walt Kelly used to say).


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Wicks trial bogs down-May 17,-Toronto Star
Man must show that cartoonist's family meant to abandon cache of his drawings
"Ben Wicks, who had moved to a condo late in his life, had stored many boxes of cartoons at his children's homes, either in cartons or loosely in green garbage bags.
As I said to Tom Spurgeon by email the other day, we need to be cautious about the word 'garbage bag' in this story. It's only comic book collectors who store art in acid free binders and boxes. We artists keep all or stuff in those black or green bags designed for tossing out the garbage. The dark opacity keeps out first all the light and secondly all the beasties and humidity. I keep all my archives thus, and as you can see from the things I show here, I keep them very well. I also said to Tom that I immediately asked my father-in-law about this story and he said it sounds like 'theft by finding'. Still, the case rages back and forth.
more here
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At Forbidden Planet International my old pal Rian Hughes reminisces about the old days . Most interesting part is a scan of an invoice to Escape magazine for twelve quid. Well, there’s also cool art and a rather interesting photo, but you know me.
FPI : The new comic magazines really seemed aimed at the same audience that might buy music papers like NME or style mags like ‘The Face’ or ‘ID’. Was that the intention? It certainly all got a bit ‘rock and roll’ around then. I remember signings by yourself and Brendan in Dublin and Jaime Hewlitt and Alan Bond in Cardiff that felt a little like rock stars signing in terms of the adulation. Did you feel any of that ‘vibe’ or were you just thinking it looks like there will be a great new comics scene for us all to work in?)
RH : We were young, some of us younger, and so new to all this we simply thought it was just how it was supposed to be. I wasn’t sure what the “old” comic scene had been like, and so had no comparison. As to rock and roll… ask Grant to tell you the story of the chap who prostrated himself and kissed my shoes on stage at the ICA. Looking down, all I could see was his hairy arse poking out the top of his jeans.
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Lionsgate Acquires Film Adaptation Of Graphic Novel "The Spirit"- May 17, 2007
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hayley campbell is tickled by the cunning manipulation of perspective in this photie.

covers- BACCHUS no.1

A lways on the lookout for stuff to show here, I noticed some interesting oddities in my master-file of Bacchus copies when I was looking in there recently. These include unused art, variations and interesting solutions to technical problems that you may find either educational or too Campbellian to be of any use to anybody anywhere. I'm just going to show a handful of the more interesting ones.
My first issue was fairly straightforward. The finished line art is dated Sept 1994 and the painting Nov. 1994 even though it wasn't to be released until May 1995. I would never again be this far ahead of the game in all my years of self-publishing. I even had time to make a concept sketch in pencil, and furthermore, to file a photocopy of it. The ink version appeared in black and white ads wherever needed. I had to look hard to remember who did what on it. I think Pete Mullins must have pencilled the girl and then I inked the whole thing. Pete then painted in acrylics over a photocopy of the line art made on the sturdiest paper or card that the copy machine could handle. Pete paints great hair. The third image is the colour xerox from my file, and these never looked 100% accurate; the flesh tones look too red, but on the other hand I remember being a little disappointed with the yellow on the finished print. The printed versions always looked dirty compared to the xeroxes and I came to expect that and make allowances. There's a warmer tone about the printed version which is perhaps a mix of aging paper and the different photographic process. Furthermore, the printer, Preney in Canada, lately defunct, had a rather annoying tendency to make things blacker than they needed to be, which means in painted work even the yellows will have an unwelcome amount of grey content. We were well underway before I got around to speaking to them about it. This was my first experience in buying printing and I didn't know much about the process. If things looked murky, I was inclined to think of it as an inevitability rather than something within my control. But after dealing with comic book publishers for some time Preney were in the habit of cranking up the output on the black inkjets. This is fine with black line art, but for painting it's all wrong. Also at this time, I had no idea how to put a logo on a cover other than by gluing it onto line art, which you can't do with colour. I simply left enough space for it, and asked Preney to put it on there in red with a black drop-shadow, in the same place as we put it in the completed black line ad. Thus the logos on my first five issues were pretty much left to chance.