covers: Bacchus #54

While rummaging through my files I came across a lost Previews cover sketch (only a photocopy I add, anticipating a request to own it). I wasn't always particular about filing these. They were sketches made to be printed along with the solicitation in the distributors catalogues two months before the book was due to come out, and the solicitation and drawing would have to be done another month in advance of that, making it three months in advance altogether (or four?... it's been a while). At the beginning, when we (Campbell Industries) had ten distributors we'd photocopy a dozen of these and hand-color with felt-tips or coloured pencils the ones that were to be sent to colour catalogues. If there was a colour version of the one below i can't recall it. When we started we usually had a black ink version of the cover that would be used, but after a while we were always rushing and making do and I'd have to just guess what the cover was going to be about. On this one I had a good idea of where I was headed but it it still had to be worked out. It's one of those occasions when the sketch had its own particular quality that wasn't repeated in the finished work or anywhere else. (Bacchus #54, August 2000).

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.

covers-Comics Journal 273

The idea was my pal White's. We argued about the way I'd worded the opening phrase, and I fixed it before Fantagrothics sent it off to the printer.
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WALLACE AND GROMIT are to star in a new short TV film - the first since their Oscar-winning show A Close Shave over a decade ago.
Nick added: "It's nice to be out of that feature film pressure now. I don't feel like I'm making a film for a kid in some suburb of America - and being told they're not going to understand a joke or a northern saying. I'm making this for myself again and the people who love Wallace and Gromit."

covers-Bacchus no. 53

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

covers- DHP no. 98

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

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

covers- DHP no. 94

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

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

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


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


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


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

covers- BATMAN: The Order of Beasts.

I gave up the self-publishing at the beginning of 2003 and spent the following year painting a 48 page Batman book. The cover was the last part to be done. I made a couple of sketches. My editor said no to the first (2), probably because the arrangement of characters in the foreground gave away too much about where the plot was headed. The picture on the right (3) is a scan of the finished cover without the logo (1). Daren White co-wrote and Mick Evans did all the production work including the lettering using a font designed by Woodrow Phoenix (Mick also came up with the title; he's always good at that sort of thing). I was pleased with the way it worked out and with the fact that we packaged the whole book ourselves leaving space for DC to add a logo and drop in the indicia and credits. I'm still not sure howcome they allowed me to do all of this. I'd never even done a whole issue of anything for DC before, never mind a 'prestige format' book with a shiny card cover.

Here's the story behind it, since I have gotten into the swing of laying out the business complexities over the last few posts, though that wasn't my original intention when I thought of showing some old cover sketches beside their related finished versions. I was already working on this when I drew a line under Eddie Campbell Comics at the beginning of 2003. It started with either my short Batman piece in Bizarro that Hunt Emerson illustrated, or my interview in Egomania #1 with old time Batman ghost artist Lew Sayre Schwartz (who has remained a very dear friend over the last five years), or perhaps both. I had let the world know that I was something of an enthusiast for the old Batman stories, particularly late '40s early '50s (Schwartz, Sprang etc. -Here's an article I wrote on the subject way back in 2001. I just reread it and I still like it.) I was invited to pitch a script idea for a proposed Batman to be drawn by Tony Millionaire. I wasn't interested in that and I don't know if it ever came about with another writer, but when I mentioned the whole thing to my pal White, he said he had been sitting on his own Batman idea for some time, and how dare I turn down the gig without asking him first. I mixed this up with half an idea of my own and pitched it to Joey Cavalieri at DC. Somehow we got in.

Then I made things complicated. I said that nothing would make me happier than to draw this myself. They said they didn't allow a situation where a creator would both write and draw the same book unless he was 'incorporated'. I mentioned this to Whitey, whom you may remember is a chartered accountant, so that's exactly his field. He said, "It's not as complicated as you think. A company's just a box of documents you can keep under your bed." And it doesn't cost too much either, well compared to the amounts I've been bandying about here of late. Now, companies are usually named and indexed by having two unassociated words hinged together (well, this is the campbellian explanation), so he finds a combination that he figures will embarrass me, runs the checks to confirm it's not already in use, and next thing you know I'm director of a company named 'Antelope Pineapple Pty. Ltd', just so I can get to draw Batman.

Then I asked if I could paint it too. For a week it looked like this wasn't going to fly until I explained that all I meant by that was that they take the amounts they were going to parcel out to penciller, inker and colorist and give them all to me instead.

Somehow or other I got what i wanted and It all worked out well. That was my first full colour book, and I've been working in colour on all my books since then. It was the beginning of a new phase in my career, leaving the self publishing one far behind. However, that damn Antelope Pineapple Pty. Ltd lately became a millstone around my neck. I have a hard enough time remembering one set of tax dates and duties without being legally obliged to remember another and different lot. More than once I have been fined for missing a superannuation deadline or some other important pecuniary obligation. I decided to get rid of the thing.

So three months ago I went to see my regular accountant, and it cost me more to get out than it did to get in, what with things being in a muddle. But while on the way I passed a tea room and I pulled over on my bike. I was reminded of my Bruce Wayne having a cup of English tea at the beginning of The Order of Beasts. Outside they had a blackboard with an interesting quote chalked on it. which has stuck in my noodle: "Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing" (by someone named Michael Lapoce). Anyway, the previous tax year had been bad for me, what with From Hell being out of print all that year, but me still paying large in taxes, and I got a huge rebate of $15,000 bucks. My accountant's young assistant accountant was handling it all for me. In a moment of bravado I told him why I had the damn company in the first place, and how it got its daft name, and Whitey's assistance in the matter, all just so I could draw a Batman comic book, and I think he thought it was very cool and interesting.

And as we were finalising the paperwork I said, "Now do I have to hand over that box of papers from under my bed?"
He looked at me for a minute as though to probe my noodle and find out if I was joking.
And then he said, "uh, no, you can keep that."

covers- BACCHUS no.32

T here are a couple more anecdotal cover things in the can, but I'm skimming the surface here today, so this is a lightweight post. The solicitation image was a hastily coloured job, but when I saw it in print i liked the accidental effect of mixed colour at top right, like those occasional chord changes in music that make you tingle, and tried not quite successfully to duplicate it by colouring another xerox of the same sketch (not having kept the first one.) For the design I was thinking of the Punch covers in the late 1970s when they would have a big one-line coloured cartoon on the front, with the caption typeset under it. Not sure whose idea it was to do the logo like Superman's. The way the story goes, they try to intervene on Superguy's drinking problem...
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two from hayley campbell!
Great piece at the Onion:
James Gandolfini Shot By Closure-Seeking Fan- June 25
NEW YORK—Actor James Gandolfini, best known for his portrayal of mob kingpin Tony Soprano on the hit HBO show The Sopranos, was shot to death Tuesday in a Greenwich Village restaurant by a fan unable to accept the open-ended conclusion of the series finale that aired earlier this month.
According to police reports, 28-year-old marketing research assistant Louis Bowen walked into the small Italian restaurant Occhiuto's at approximately 7:40 p.m. and...

Woody Allen quote:
Woody Allen to Direct Opera- June 24
“I have no idea what I am doing,” the famously humble director said. “But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.”
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looking at Stuart immonen's life drawing outings over the last couple of weeks reminds me how one always meant to keep that up but forgot.
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In other news: Gag writers wanted!
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Patrick Knight, 39, has been soliciting jokes on the Internet and plans to tell one of them before receiving a lethal injection, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said on Monday.
"Everybody who is there takes it very seriously and will not be participating in the joke," she said. "So knock-knock jokes are out."

Kids' stuff.

C omic books in their first great flourishing were a genre of popular fiction in which characters were illustrated wearing gaudy clothes, aimed at a class of people "not given leave to dress themselves. No doubt about it; they were kids' stuff." (last bit's from Chabon's Kavalier and Klay... apologies if I've misremembered it). In their current great flourishing we need scholars to explain them, even though they have not changed much.
Salon.com presents an excerpt from Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. to be published by Da Capo Press on July 2, 2007.
Comics fans, grow up!-June 23.
"With the rise of the graphic novel, comics have hit the big time. It's time for fans to quit whining and celebrate their favorite art... "
Where is he headed? An 'art' has 'fans'? (I'd like to buy an art please, said Dr Zoidberg when he came into some money).

"The blessing and curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as "comics culture." The core audience of comics is really into them: we know that Wednesdays are the day when new issues appear in the stores, we populate endless Web sites and message boards..."
Looks like it will be a thorough history of the comic book genre, which does have 'fans', and I'm writhing in embarrassment at the thought that somebody might think i'm one of them.

"Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship..."
'Secret embattled fellowship' expresses it better than my 'loose-knit society of fellow travellers' of june 9. Wolk's phrase, with its hint of more desperation, would have suited my enquiry better, and supported my conception of it as a 'genre allegiance', a modern mindset that we recognize but would need a psychiatrist or sociologist to explain to us. Commentary on the genre has taken a sad turn of late. Paul Gravett's books have been giving me the same disquiteing feeling. In fact, hasn't wee Paul already covered all this, him and everybody else who has made a semantic mud puddle and then cheerfully stepped in it (like my commenter (hi, Steve) of June 15 who wound up arguing about the definition of the word 'definition' and who will probably be back for another serve at the end of this):
"But the "novel" part of "graphic novel" blots out the idea of short fiction and nonfiction -- it's odd to call, say, books of reportage in cartoon form by Joe Sacco ..."Graphic narrative" sounds like a euphemism twice removed from its source, and still has the unfortunate resonance of "graphic" with the way it tends to be paired with "sexuality" or "violence." And "sequential art" sounds utterly arid."

I've always thought that to describe comicbook culture beginning with its 'fan' roots would be the honest thing to do, as opposed to the other approach, in which aspects of ancient art (eg. the Bayeux tapestry) are cunningly and dishonestly 'colonized'. However I would have drawn the line at offering it to the world at large for fear of looking foolish, and not only because of our tedious arguing about the naming of things. The triumph of this geeky subculture in the big world can only presage the downfall of good taste. Oh, what am I blathering about; that got fucked a long time ago.
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If you're still with me, here's another cover:
My best ever party trick was making issue 50 coincide with the new millenium; I gave Mick Evans the painted figure and the little sketch and he made a lovely design of it even though he still argues to this day that the millenium wasn't until the following year. Here's my four pager about millenium night, from After the Snooter
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in other news: (the catholic boy in me couldn't less this one go by)
The Vatican issued a document listing its rules of the road, including one warning against using cars "as a means for outshining other people and arousing a feeling of envy."
"Unless having fun has become a sin, I don't believe it (to be wrong)," Amedeo Felisa told Reuters this week at an event celebrating Ferrari's 60th anniversary in its hometown southeast of Milan.

covers- EGOMANIA no.1

T he first drawing (1) is Picasso's well known portrait of Igor Stravinski. I was trying to evoke thoughts of that in my pencil drawing (2) for the cover of the first issue of Egomania. I made several different versions of it, tracing on a light box (ok, a window) over and over. The three above are all different drawings. Mick Evans worked out the design (3) for the solicitation. By the time of the finished version he was wearying of me redoing things over and over and he stuck the logo over my face in an act of flagrant effrontery (4). I liked the joke, a self-effacing egomania so to speak, and said let's keep that.

Egomania ran for two issues, July and December 2002, and was the last thing from Eddie Campbell Comics, publisher. I figured if I dropped Bacchus and started a new mag that was forty eight pages of all new material, not a single hint or whisper of reprint, and all mine too, including articles and interviews with other people, then I'd be starting afresh with a decent level of orders. But alas the orders came in as though it were just the next issue of Bacchus. The only logical conclusion was that I had worn out my welcome. Maybe it was too esoteric. It was designed to be an actual magazine, with well thought out typesetting and design, and my new comic strip work in it was all in gray half tones (the unfinished History of Humour). In fact there was so much 'design' that I think Mick Evans may have made more out of the project than I did.

The publishing model I had picked up from Dave Sim served me well for a few years, but the situation had changed radically since '95. There were eight or nine distributors then and now there was one. I was placing a lot of hope on the bookstore side of things as an altenative route, but that is fraught with difficulty. Top Shelf had been making inroads there for a few years and it was working well for us when suddenly our bookstore distributor, LPC, went out of business owing us around eighty thousand bucks, 50 of which was my business, mostly for the very successful From Hell. Indeed From Hell had been so good for me that I was able to roll with the punch. But I was getting tired of dealing with all this bankruptcy going on around me. A couple of years later it would be Preney, our printer through all this self-publishing, that would go kablooie (owing twenty thousand bucks), but by that time I had handed From Hell over to Top Shelf. The book shown above was the last thing I had printed there. Once again it was a murky thing. I had put up with all that when it was just 'comic books', but now that I was trying to do an art magazine, I needed better. I tried the second issue with Quebecor with more success. That was a much cleaner and crisper looking mag, but by now I wanted to go to sleep somewhere, or at least just draw pictures, and not have to worry about the calamitous business side of things (note that between yesterday's post and this one I've described four separate bankruptcies). More on that next time.

covers- BACCHUS no.46

I 'm not sure this solicitation image was for the Aug 1999 issue #46 of Bacchus, but since it doesn't relate compositionally to any other printed cover, it hardly matters. I can't deny that I spent as little time on it as I would on a con sketch. And the finished cover recycles a painting I made eight years earlier to go with my first Comics Journal interview. It looked much better in that original setting as the printing on Bacchus was sill making everything look murky. But I was always fond of that painting (i still like the texture of the bread) and between that and the piddling amount I made from it on its first outing, I didn't feel I was gypping anyone. This followed, as I said yesterday, a run of five issues where I didn't paint new covers but just coloured a panel from inside the book. They didn't look too bad and it sure saved time. When I posted yesterday's cover I started trying to recall why my mind wasn't entirely on the job at hand during these months. One reason is that I was spending most of my time at the drawing board on my 48 page illustration of Alan Moore's Birth Caul, which I published in June '99 very successfully with a print run of 18,000. But over and above that there was the problem that everything seemed to be falling apart around me and I was fearing for my future. The Direct Sales market was one thing. In my head I felt I was just merrily running the 'monthly' Bacchus book into the ground and at a future point not yet decided it would come to a finish. This didn't appear to be negotiable; sales dipped one or a couple hundered units on each issue and nothing could alter that. Anne went back to working as a legal secretary around this time, and what had been a busy studio operation was now just me on my own, hooking up with Mick Evans regularly to take care the design of the books. In fact, Mick also had six story pages in this issue, and White and Slattery ('Mr Duds' occasionally in this blog's comments box and more recently a bank manager, to the astonishment of all who know him) contributed a four-pager (in fact there were twenty pages of new art altogether, for anyone who thinks there was too much reprinting going on).

I'd been making a good living from comics since 1989, for ten years at this point, but things were getting tight. Everybody else I was working with was operating in the same market. Capital City, the second of the two big distributors, now went bust owing me ten thousand bucks. Kitchen Sink Press, who had rather strangely made an exclusive liaison with Capital, was caught in the middle of the release of the second Crow movie with all their merchandise tied up in Capital's closed down warehouse. They went bust too owing me and Alan over fifteen thousand bucks for From Hell royalties and that second Spirit story I produced in-house at Campbell industries (I paid everybody else involved at the time we made it, so to this day I'm still out of pocket on that one). The only thing I had that wasn't tied to the comic books distribution system was the upcoming From Hell movie; we'd been paid large for that in '98. But then, to top everything off, we lost the rights to From Hell to the conglomerate holding Kitchen Sink's assets. I was faced with a movie now officially going into production and no book coming out. I had to go through a few months of legal aggression to turn that around. By the time the above issue came out, my planet was back in its orbit. There's an ad on the back of it promising From Hell by November 1999, with the oil painting of the black hat, purple grapes and bloodied handkerchief. So at least the back cover was new.

And that's what went through my noodle when I looked at that cover after all this time, with wee Eddie Campbell drowning in a glass of wine in the foreground.

covers- BACCHUS no.40

C ampbell is all over the place today, so I'll just show this cover for no other reason than that the solicitation version (1) was quite diffrent form the finished print (2). The series was in a second phase in which I was cutting corners more drastically than before. The orders followed a straight downward slope right from the first issue, and nothing I did was able to divert it from that course. We started at 8,500 and ended and 1800. Thus I was able to plan ahead to the extent of saying 'by the time we reach a level of 3,500 somewhere between issues 30 and 33, certain cuts will need to be made. One of those was that Pete Mullins wasn't working with me on a weekly basis; the Bacchus story was wrapped up except for a few shorts to fill out volume six , The 1,001 Nights of Bacchus; From Hell was wrapped up; and I was concentrating on my autobiographical work, and also travelling a great deal. For the five issues following this one I didn't even draw new covers. I coloured a panel from inside and put that on the front. Interestingly, this made no difference to the sales curve either though I'm sure those who love me felt their patience being tried. And there was another much more serious problem screwing with my brain. More on that next time.
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If you need absolutely need to hear more Campbellian jabberings today, You'll find me interviewed in print by Colleen Mondor.

And in sound at Inkstuds. My goodness, it's an hour and a half! And they've framed me with Charlie Parker's Bird of Paradise and Beirut. How sweet.

covers- BACCHUS no.20

A nother cover from our run of good ones around 1997, this one being for Bacchus # 20, Dec 1996. I was tickled by the situation with the tobacco industry, being legally obliged to spend one third of its product surface and advertising space telling people not to buy the product recommended in the other two thirds, and the way the industry gamely presses on under those and other constrictions. For a moment I thought we were MAD magazine, with Bacchus standing in for Alfred E. Newman. For the first sketch I stretched out an actual cigarette packet and glued a drawing of Bacchus plus a logo onto it. I always used to put a thick line around the sketch with a caligraphy marker when I used it as the solicitation image (1), to make it stand out in the crowded Diamond catalogue. For the finished cover I was thinking of the typographical arrangement of the slick magazine ads for cigarettes. I gave it to Pete Mullins to turn into a painting (2) and Mick Evans did the finished cover design (3), taking a notion to dull the image and put it slightly out of focus for an effect of queasiness. The cover was odd enough to stand out quite nicely on the shelf.
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Our regular commenter Ben Smith noticed this because they used the photo of the gigantic condoms again, last linked to here when it tickled wee hayley campbell: India rattled by vibrating condom -By Jyotsna Singh -BBC News, Delhi-20 June
A vibrating condom has sparked a fierce debate in India, over whether it is a sex toy - which are banned - or a means of birth control. Hindu hardliners have held protests asking the government to ban its sale, though most people on the streets of the state refused to be drawn on the matter.
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meanwhile the lass herself is off to see Grinderman. Honeybee, we'll have to make do with youtube.
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covers- BACCHUS no.22

This has the same cover date, Feb '97, as the neat DeeVee cover by Pete Mullins I showed on Saturday. It was a year of good covers. It's one of those where I honestly can no longer tell who did what on it. I even think I see both Pete's and my own hand in the colouring. There is a slight change in the judge's facial expression, becoming a little more malevolent, between (1) and (2). I remmeber selling the original to a lady lawyer who was tickled by it and wanted to hang it in her private office. One thing I do recall is that I knew Pete was driving by the courthouse and asked him to do a quick reference sketch of the statue of Lady Justice in the fourcourt from his parked car. I subsequently received the following by fax, and like all faxes received from the inestimable Mr Mullins, I made a xerox for long term filing. He would usually find a humorous way of including himself.
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The music of science
Horace Dorlan by Andrzej Klimowski is a weird, witty and oddly humane graphic novel- reviewed by Michael Moorcock-Guardian-Saturday June 16,
(link thanks to regular commenter Ben Smith)

covers- BACCHUS no.25/27

After that gorgeous cover Pete Mullins made for DeeVee #1 of feb '97 (see yesterday's post) I commissioned one for Bacchus in the same manner. So he put together the image of the Anchovy, a character in the storyline being reprinted in the second half of the book, in his own studio, and brought it in and it appeared on my #27 August 1997 issue. This was one of only two or three occasions when a Bacchus cover was coloured on the computer. That approach would never have been cost or time effective in the Campbellian set-up. It was much more expedient to just get out the markers and paints and work over a good quality xerox of the image. Pete could always get a good crisp result that way as in the cover of Bacchus #25 of May '97, the gathering of the Elvises, which is also all his work. In pulling out pictures to scan here I was again struck by how clean and bright the pre-press proofs in my files are (used here for both of the above) compared to the printed results.

p.s. Some time later we put together a whole 8-page Spirit story for Eisner and Kitchen Sink Press that we coloured in-house on computer. It had its own technical problems. I'll talk about that some other time.
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hayley campbell sends this link: Doherty, the scruffy urchin with the million pound record contract and supermodel girlfriend, will join drinking pal Shane Macgowan and Meltdown festival curator Jarvis Cocker to pay tribute to classic Disney songs as part of the South Bank's annual music jamboree. Nick Cave, Baaba Maal, Ralph Steadman and Bryan Ferry will also perform. The event is June 17. you may have missed it already.
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In other news:
China censors "Pirates" for "vilifying Chinese"

covers: DeeVee #1,2

D ee Vee was published by a trio consisting of Mick Evans, a freelance graphic designer who was already doing the necessary on Bacchus (the ad for the first DeeVee is on the back of Bacchus #21), Daren White, a chartered accountant who moonlights as a comic book writer and Minty Moore, who was working as a comicbook store clerk back then, all of whom have popped up on this blog from time to time. They launched in Feb 1997 and managed to get Pete Mullins to make a gorgeous knockout cover for their first issue. I attempted to keep up my end on the second issue, but I'm wilting in the shade. The series was an anthology that ran for fourteen issues, with one special during that time titled Life is Cheap by Moore and Single. The Book appeared quarterly and even bi-monthly for the duration of six issues. I drew a serial that appeared in all those issues and was later collected as Alec: How to Be an Artist, considered by some to be my best book. What it really needed, we can see with the advantage of hindsight, is for the character on that cover to have appeared in an eight page story every issue, and to always look as good as she does on there. I think the guys managed to get Pete to illustrate a couple of one-pagers along those lines, but more might have made the enterprise a more resounding success. But who can say? Everything in the business was following the trajectory of Newton's apple in those days. The thing I most like about 'those days' is the complicated ways we got things done. One thing was that I was doing my stuff for DeeVee in exchange for design work and story ideas, but once over a few beers Whitey got onto explaining to me the myriad equations and deals and exchanges by which money hardly ever changed hands but everybody involved felt they came out even, and furthermore, in all those fourteen issues, thanks to Whitey's acuity in such matters, Deevee never lost a cent.
Another thing I enjoyed about that period is that there was a sense of a lively scene here in Brisbane Australia. Pete Mullins had a full colour page in a national magazine, which he must have found time to draw in between all this other stuff. DeeVee were using my mail box at the suburban Paddington Post Office, but just a couple of boxes to the right of mine there was the one rented by the Platinum Grit folks, Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy. PG was a popular indie comic book here but not known much outside of Australia.
"Platinum Grit began as a self-published printed comic from back in 1994 and was released up to issue 10 in 1998." It's still around nowadays, but in an online* capacity. You can read a whole episode at the site. It has a great quality of Australia about it, in its sense of character and space.
Update: They show it online then collect it in print, a publishing model that is becoming more prevalent of late. Corrected by Drjon. thanks.
After the DeeVee series ended they put out three special editions. Tom Spurgeon has just reviewed one of those.
Finally, a new issue is at the printer! I've drawn thirteen pages in it and I wrote about it on April 16.

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."