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.
***********
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."
************
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.

The Sopraners

The night before.

hayley campbell: hope your sopranos party went well. tell me anything about the episode before i've waved the flag and i'll put my foot in your ass. i'm heading over to JP's place after work where we're going to watch sopranos, cry a bit, then hang ourselves because there's nothing left to live for. it's our sopranos suicide party. he's got a tv so we're watching it there rather than my place (where we'd have to sellotape our heads together to get the right angle on my mac screen) which means that there's no oven. ah well. jam and toast fer tea probably. i suggested we whack someone on the way home too, for authenticity's sake…

(s-p-o-i-l-e-r ---w-a-r-n-i-n-g)

The morning papers:

The Morning After: Did Tony Soprano whack Game 2 of the NBA Finals?-Cleveland Plain Dealer.

So this is how it ends: with a big, raised middle finger aimed straight at the TV audience," -Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times.

Fade to Black Has 'Sopranos' Fans Seeing Red-Washington Post.
A bunch, who were way mad at the way Chase had messed with them in the finale, started messing with his Wikipedia entry. Finally, the brain trust at Wikipedia locked the page from further "editing" until June 18, citing "vandalism."

hayley campbell: the scene went like this: it stops abruptly at the end at a point of high tension. the screen goes black. i say 'oh fuck your hard-drive just shat itself at THAT POINT!' and JP leaps off the sofa and starts hitting the thing, near tears. it's black for about 7 seconds and then the credits roll. 'no. no i don't believe it. not a word of it. i downloaded two in case one was fucked. let's check.' so we run to his computer and play the last scene. that's it, that's what happens. 'DAVID CHASE CAN EAT MY BALLS!' shouts campbell. i'm furious, called Chase all the the rude words i know, JP said he was off to hang himself. but then if they'd gone out with a bloodbath i would have hated them for the cliche.
jp's not in today. i sent him a text saying 'i can't believe you hanged yourself - it's only a bloody tv show!' turns out he's actually ill and has been scooted off to hospital. see? the manipulative aspects of the sopranos can bloody well DO YOU IN!
I bet you like the last episode. i bet someone a tea you'd like the last episode.

Eddie Campbell: I larfed. I wished I could end so well

hayley campbell: good. i'm owed a tea then. What did the mammy think of it?

Eddie Campbell: Well, it finished ten minutes ago and the mammy is still in front of the tv blue screen hoping something else will come up.
To put it musically: It modulated back into the tonic, gathered to a climax and then the cadence was witheld. But in strict musical terms that's just a formality. returning to the tonic key supplies the resolution.
p.s. not sure you read me right earlier. You said “thought i was going to die! and I said “maybe you did-- did the soundtrack suddenly stop?

hayley campbell: you're making a funny, aren't you. chris ware has broken my eyes and david chase took care of my mind. the theory that the soundtrack suddenly stopping was Tony getting whacked.

Eddie Campbell: i was asking if YOUR soundtrack suddenly stopped, which would be an indication that you had died, rather than the malfunctioning of your breathing, the ceasing of your heart or any other of the traditional indicators, including falling over with your head under the wheel of a car...

hayley campbell: haha. leapt off my chair when his head went splat. got wine on my jeans.

Eddie Campbell: well, we're all off to bed I think... the mammy is still waiting for that bit that comes after the credits, even though we pulled out the plug an hour ago. nitey nite, honeybee.

hayley campbell: night night par, i loves ya. X

Eddie Campbell: nitey nite, Phil Leotartdi; nitey nite, Silvio Dante; Christopher Moltesante; Bobby Baccala; nitey nite, Sopraners.

may you all Rest In Pizzas.

This is your Life.

H ayley Campbell is twenty-one today.
Having an autobiographical cartoonist for one's pa may not turn out to be a good thing in the long run, so here we go with the customary embarrassing stuff, starting with her potty training, as depicted in little italy (birthday or no, I've still got to push these books.)


"They spent the night in a crockery jar
and each of them thought
'How wise we are'..."

Her fascination with the the things that live under rocks started early.

Speaking of beasties, she was the first to see the Snooter flying in. (Tell them it had a long curly proboscis. They never believed me.)


Studying languages:

Visiting Hollywood:

These were the angry years:


But it all turned out as well as could be expected. This is the latest photo of the lass, in Paris this year, as provided by Nathalie, regular visitor to this blog. (Hope you don't mind me using it here... thanks in advance).



panel 1 from Doggie in the Window (1986) collected The King canute Crowd, 2 and 3 from Little Italy (drawn 1987, collected 1991), 4 and 5 from The Dance of Lifey Death (1993)... these last two books are now in Three Piece Suit, 6-9 are in After the Snooter ( drawn 1995-2002) and 10 is 'Angry Cook' from The Fate of the Artist (2006). Fate is from First Second. Top Shelf has that and all the others. The line of verse is from my rendition the Jumblies by Edward Lear.

Hayley Campbell speaks good F**&@% English... and writes it bloody well too.

I've been thinking about cusswords following this furore;
Westchester HS girls to serve suspension for 'Vagina' reading Newsday.com, March 7."CROSS RIVER, N.Y. -- Since its Off-Broadway opening in 1996, "The Vagina Monologues" has moved beyond theaters to colleges and high schools. But if performances in educational settings are not uncommon, they still occasionally provoke controversy. In the latest debate over the well-known feminist play, three 16-year-old public high school students were to serve suspensions Wednesday for disobeying officials by saying the word "vagina" during a reading from the script."

The lasses got to front up on the telly while the people in authority worked off their embarrassment. March 10 Lower Hudson Journal news: "District officials and concerned parents have spent the week defending themselves against claims of censorship as news spread across the globe..."

Wait a mo... 'vagina' is a cussword?

Upon starting this blog I made a rule that my English would be of the politest standard as I feared that in the wake of The Fate of the Artist there would be many who would think me rather a rather foul mouthed individual. When I offered the book to First Second Books a couple of years ago, editor Mark Siegel loved it but was concerned about all the cusswords and suggested we might supplant them with asterisks and the like. I understood that the publisher was aiming a great deal of its output at 'younger readers,' but since a lot of the text was actually 'about' the cusswords I argued that it was difficult to take them out without rendering the thing meaningless. And besides, in my experience that's the way the young readers talk.


Since Hayley Campbell moved to London, we have the evidence to prove it. At the big legal office where works the wife of my bosom, the emails have not been getting through. Well, they've been getting through but in a much edited form. It's true. In this day and age, our mail is being censored. Here is a sample email from Hayley Campbell to her beloved Mammy.

Now, you can see that what has happened is that the whole message has been seized and edited by the electronic guardian known as the 'MailMarshall'. The recipient receives the edited version, but instead of the bad words being removed , the recipient just receives the bad words. Only. As evidence that the mail was not good for you we have retained it, but here are the bits that were not good for you. Here's another example.

For the past six months wee Hayley Campbell has been communicating with her dear Mammy entirely in cusswords. We believe she's doing well in her flat in London. Very fuckin well.
******

This is for Stephen Frug.
Here's a single panel comic of a man raising his hat. The most comic part of it is that his head is still stuck in the hat.

(apologies to McCloud, who drew the panel©... and I confess I was chucking stones there, but Stephen's "Best Of the Blogosphere' series of posts is something I found useful when I was forming a picture in my head of what a blog can amount to. It gave me the certainty that it is something worth investing time in. Thanks. And on the off-chance you'll stop fretting about comics and write some more good'uns I'm putting you in my sidebar.)

And speaking of blogging, did you catch this last month in New York mag (via Michael Evans): Say Everything
" As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited."

labels

I did some house cleaning and filing in the middle of the night on account of I got up to relieve a cramp in my foot and all the jumping up and down thoroughly woke me up. So should you wish to do some backtracking and find out, say, where the hell 'thanks for roning' comes from, here at Campbell blogspot we now have LABELS, including but not limited to these:

Otherwise

My pal White sent in this gag which I illustrated this afternoon. (original not available.)



It's in the same series as this from The Fate of the Artist



...which originated as a running joke between me and Hayley Campbell during a trip to Melbourne in 2004 for a convention called Continuum. There are some pictures of me doing a talk there, and here's a photo of my fellow artist, Shaun Tan, wearing Cthulhu on his head at a Continuum. It must be an initiation thing at this kind of event.

'Otherwise' is trying to be one of those one-panel gag comics that used to be popular, in which the punchline is a catch phrase or 'motto' and is the same each day. The humour comes from the sheer accumulation of variations. Noted examples from cartoon history include 'They'll do it every time' and 'Things you see when you're out without a gun.'

While I was getting the 'otherwise' logo out of the file, I came across this, by my pal Patrick Alexander, which is also a variation on a theme from Fate, the Angry Cook!



Patrick does a great little strip titled Raymondo Person. Well worth checking out.

(edited 4.04 pm for clarity, adding a couple of links, and ...spelling.)

Hold that Thought balloon!

My pal Evans just sent me this link from the Australian: "Myth, legend and the academic discipline of history all serve the same end, to enrich our understanding of ourselves, argues Alex Miller."
This fits with my earlier statement (dec. 6) that I'm interested in the blurry areas between things. In this case, between fiction and non-fiction (history, reportage, biography). "Each generation rewrites history for itself and, in doing so, refutes the truth of much of the history written by its parents' generation." The next part strikes me as extraordinary: "...a retired German historian who is driven to write a factual story not as history but as fiction. He does this to preserve the story against the revisions of future generations." Think about that one. He dressed the facts as fiction for their own protection
* * * *
My pal mr j, last seen here on (dec. 4) sent me his latest cartoon, this one in response to the Hayley Campbell horrors I've been showing. click to enlarge

Speaking of which,
The Ripper Files, Part 5: this is the last of those I scanned while I had the 'Files' out. The second one is a guest spot by me. I never dreamed the wee lass, then aged 7, would adopt Morticia Addams as her fashion mentor.
* * * *
Make sure you've read the comments for yesterday's post as the subject of my piece, John Coulthart himself, threw in a couple of paragraphs of pure information.
* * * *
Andrew J. Bonia, who contributed that great little Simpsons piece here a couple of days back, which involved tinkering with a speech balloon, writes about the elimination of thought balloons from the conventional comic book style and their replacement with turgid running voice-overs. The 'thought' bubble (or balloon) is one of the few inventions truly indigenous to the twentieth century comic strip and it would be sad to reject it in order to make comics more like movies (see comments on this theme under 'Things' two days back), or because it is somehow pictorially unseemly for a tough heroic figure to have fluffy clouds around his head. When you tell an anecdote orally it's commonplace to say 'I thought' and 'she thought' etc., and perfectly logical to codify that on paper in a thought bubble. And if it makes your character less heroic, try taking the pole out of his ass. Always works for me.
Here is a History of speech balloons since the dawn of time. But observe Thierry Smolderen's admonishment in Comic Art #8 in his very excellent and lavishly illustrated essay, Of labels, Loops and Bubbles, that the exact function of these comparable devices needs to be interpreted in entirely different ways for different historical periods.
waitaminute. the phone.
Anne? yeah, what... yes of course they know I meant take the pole out my character's and not actually my own. yeah, sure... very funny... yeh...anyway, remember to pick up the cat food... and thanks for roning.

Things.

Big Thanks to Marcus Gipps for sending me the three little books by Barnaby Richards, whose work I mentioned here on Dec 6th, but only from second hand knowledge since I hadn’t actually handled one of his books at that date. The books are small, about the length and width of the palm of my hand (A6). Their titles are: 20 Enchanting Things, 20 Scary Things, and 20 Artistic Things. These are lovely little objects that take me back to the mini-comics of the early ‘80s. The essential aesthetic of mini-comics is the simplest possible expression of an idea. Here’s the cover (pleasingly matt) and a page from 20 Artistic things. I like the muse idly admiring herself. These are all marvellous little books in the same style, with a series of witty observations around a theme. There’s no address on them except an email: barnabyrichards@hotmail.com

They connect with a query in comments from Andrew on 14 dec.
“I just picked up Fate of the Artist and it provoked a debate: Are comics necessarily narrative? Something you mentioned about single panel comics still being comics brought this off.”
I would no longer wish to argue about what is and isn’t comics. That would be futile, but I have noticed a growing conservatism in that department over the years. The process has been reductive rather than expansive. In the ealy ‘80s, in the heyday of Raw, we would have been too busy enjoying it all to split hairs over, say, what medium Richards was working in when he made the little books above. The business about ‘who is to be allowed in’ probably starts with McCloud’s Understanding Comics. McCloud was the minicomics king and his every little booklet was as pleasingly odd as the those mentioned above ('Some words Albert Likes" was a favourite of mine). He was also the great inventor, with Five Card Nancy etc. But 'twas he, or so I'll pretend for the purpose of this rant, who invented the idea that it is worthwhile to argue about whether a thing is or isn't a comic. He excluded single panel comics and then fought for the inclusion of digital comics.
Personally I have never equated comics wholly and exclusively with sequential art, but it has become a foundation stone in what is turning out to be an 'academy' of the comics world. Thus you find The National Association of Comics Art Educators: ”Comics, An emerging medium: Sequential art is pictorial storytelling. Its most widely recognized form is comics…” If you listen you can hear an intimidating edifice of rules and terminological complexity being built.
The point of my Dec 6th essay was to say: I like the way ‘graphic novel’ is regarded as just another illustrated book (in the two situations examined), not an autonomous art-form, inviting us to take a mental sidestep around all the obfuscation that is swiftly becoming the order of the day (is The Complete Peanuts: study guide likely to render that strip, the simplest and most perfect of all strips, more lucid?). And I thought, what if I avoid using, as I did in my discussion of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, the official terminology of the comic-book academy, such as ‘panel’, when the much more commonplace and easily understandable ‘picture’ is more readily to hand (and never mind ‘closure’ or ‘aspect to aspect transition’). Just to be stubborn.

I'm sure somebody somewhere is already misinterpreting the above as an anti-intellectual rant, and ending with this ain't gonna persuade them otherwise (It's also from Andrew. he's been a busy bee tonight):

That's Moore and Campbell in the Simpsons comic book (slightly doctored, with a new word balloon). See yesterday's post, and go check out the tree-house of horrors if you haven't read their lampoon of From Hell.
* * * *
The Ripper Files, Part 4
(By hayley campbell, age 7, 1993, see previous posts for background)

"Tumbling into Madame Tussaud's."

I don't want to become a self-appointed commentator on all matters concerning the word 'ripper'. I once declined a television magazine-type program when they wanted me to comment on-screen about Patricia Cornwell's nutty theory about the Ripper, DNA and Walter Sickert. (though I'm sure we'll have something to say about it when we do the Dance of the Gull Catchers, part2). But I do find myself curious about the phenomenon of commentators and explainers who all come out of the woodwork on cue, 'ripperologists' if you like. Thus I found myself drawn to this interesting snapshot of the current flurry of ripperology in England in a commentary column in The Guardian: "...this country has a surprisingly large number of shadowy individuals whose profession is described in a variety of ways, from the colloquial "real-life Cracker", to the flexible "reader in personality", more formal "criminal psychologist" and catch-all "profiler" or "leading criminologist". Between lurid criminal events, little may be heard from these individuals, as they ply their trade in obscure corners of the semi-academic world. Indeed, in the absence of eye-catching crimes, some of these experts on the deviant mind may struggle to survive, diversifying into comments on football and celebrity, stress and compulsive shopping. In recent days, however, many of these men have been restored to prominence and prosperity by the murders in Suffolk..."
and: "Meanwhile, the British media tumbled, en masse, into Madame Tussauds. The killer was, naturally, a "Ripper". Forget the details: centuries-old, penny-dreadful tradition holds that this is what serial prostitute-killers are called."
* * * *

This next item went the rounds just before I started this blog.

The news was that Alan Moore had been written into an episode of The Simpsons. "'Husbands and Knives' is an upcoming episode of that will air during in 2007, as part of the show's 18th season." That link will give you a short summary of the episode. "The sub-plot of this episode sees a new, 'cool' comic book store open in Springfield, which competes with Comic Book Guy's store, The Android's Dungeon. Alan Moore will guest star." A blogger responded to the original posting of the news by pointing out that Moore had already appeared in the Simpsons, albeit in the Bongo comic book version. This is from Gary Spencer Millidge's From Hell and Back or: The Truer Story of Jack the Ripper, which was in Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror #9, from 2003, and which was subsequently collected in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror: Hoodoo Voodoo Brouhaha. Whaddayaknow! Campbell's there too. I liked the way Millidge used hand lettering (when i saw it in the 2003 appearance), which made his story stand out among all those others with the godawful computer fonts.
* * * *

The Ripper Files. part 3
(by Hayley Campbell, age 7, 1993)
this is one of my favourites. Count the toes.

The Ripper Files. part 2

I probably picked the wrong time to be talking 'Ripper ' here with another fucking lunatic on the loose. I used to think Alan was making too much of the recurrence of names and odd details in the Whitecahpel Murder cases, but here it is all over, with a Police Superintendent Gull, and one of the victims named Nicholls.
* * * *
You should read yesterday’s part 1 before this. And while you’re looking for something to read, make sure you have a copy of The Fate of the Artist.
* * * *
The Ripper File: this 'book' consists of 35 A4 size loose pages (regular typing paper to you Americans) on which wee Hayley Campbell, age 7, catalogued, with one or two digressions along the road, all the ways of dying. I’ve dated the work from one of the pages which imitates the cover of the Kitchen Sink Press edition of From Hell volume #5 (dated 1993), in which Hayley , in a very rudimentary drawing that is not one of those I wish to present here shows us: “Rotton Kidney on a Hang Kachef.”
In her final edit and arrangement of the work, that appears as page 1. It is rapidly followed by “Witches cooking babies”, “Being Shot”, “Being buried Alive”, “Being bitten on the neck by a vampire,” “Being hit by Lightening,” and “Being left hanging up for the birds to eat.” And an early sign of genius, this one:

You can see how it has gone completely beyond the parameters of From Hell, and who could have put these notions in her little wee head is anybody’s guess. This morning she told me that this one came from the movie Gorillas in the Mist, which she was probably encouraged to watch on account of it being a nature film:

It is certainly one of the best pages in the series, for the clarity of its design, and the vibrancy of its execution, though the next one would be my choice for the best selection:

And finally for today, at the end of the book I submitted for inclusion a little sketch by myself, which has been given the red pen editorial touch by ms Campbell.

We will append some more pages from this precious artefact to future posts.

The Ripper Files. part 1.

And it's not about what you think it's going to be about. If Hayley Campbell should ever end up going bad, god forbid, then the revelations I am about to lay before you may come to be entered as exhibit A at the trial. But what was I to do? In my defence I urge you to consider (your honour), that I was a 'house-husband' at home with a wee'un, and just given my big break, the task of illustrating the heinous doings of Jack the Ripper. Should I have closed myself away in a private part of our very small apartment, leaving the child to fend for herself in the daily round?
(that first panel is from Dance of the Gull-Catchers.),

The child had shown her talents quite early. During a visit from my old friend Daniel Grey esq. the child sought to emulate the attractive illustrations upon his arms, by copying in blue inks upon her own arms the hearts and roses, the proclamations of love and other mementoes. The wife, on returning from her day of drudgery and finding the two men full of alcoholic beverages, charged the errant husband with having drawn upon the child for his own misguided amusement. "I don't like you drawing on Hayley while I'm at work!" were the specifics of her accusation. And I narrate this epidsode in order to show the level of ability in the child's work, that it should have passed so easily for that of the father.
It was away back in 1989 that I drew this next picture of wee Hayley Campbell and me. When she was about four she had her own drawing table, an upended cardboard box, set up next to mine. And now that I look at the first panel again I notice my phone is sitting on a cardboard box too; for a wardrobe we used the big box the fridge came in, with a length of curtain-rod shoved through holes cut near the upper edges. The table probably came from Anne's brother. That second panel appeared in the last page Of The Dead Muse, which is long out of print. Not wanting the thought to be lost to posterity (the words spoken in the cartoon remain the subject's signing-off phrase before retiring to bed every night; indeed she tells me that she used it in London recently, resulting in the immediate bafflement of those present), I drew it again in After the Snooter in 2002. The composition is much better this time. Perhaps all those years of intense drawing yielded some improvements in my ability, though I'm more inclined to think that I had lost my way during the period of 'The Dead Mouse", as Hayley Campbell tended to call it, (that book took the form of an anthology in which I narrated my own story and at the same time introduced the work of other artists whose paths crossed mine, so it would be somewhat difficult to ever revive it outside of my own pages for their interest as odd and disconnected pieces of Campbelliana.)
Now, readers of yesterday's post will remember that I was rummaging in the attic, which is where I once more became acquainted with the documents wich have come to be known as 'the Ripper Files'. The pages of this artefact were drawn by the aforesaid Hayley Campbell shortly after her seventh birthday, which date has been deduced from external evidence, the excuse for their fashioning being the a gift set of colour markers. I will call a recess until tomorrow, at which time any of the ladies and gentlemen present who have no stomach for viewing a catalogue of all the possible ways of dying, seen from the point of view of a seven year old, will be permitted to absent themselves.
* * *
To anyone who bagged a sketch from previous posts; I've mailed everything out, hopefully in time for Christmas. And none of the sketches in this post are up for grabs as they're all part of archived art pages.
* * *
Just in. The December issue of the online magazine Dystopia has five pages on From Hell and ripperology, with a couple of my old color covers for those who may not have seen them before.

Me, jabbering.

I've just noticed that the second part of the interview I did for the Australian Sci-fi radio show, Faster Than Light has been online for a whole week. My Fate of the Artist is discussed, with particular attention to Hayley Campbell's exclamation, "I've had enough a this family Christmas koombayah bullshit!!", which I think interviewer Grant Stone has made his personal catchphrase.The first part is accessible from the same page, if you missed it. That's November 20 and 27. it amounts to thirty one minutes total. I don't think anything was cut. Even when i stop and fart about while a truck goes past, it's all left in. it's like you're visiting my house. But when I listen to myself jabbering I always focus on the spot where I've missed an obvious punchline. After talking about 'Angry Cook', I say something to the effect of, but then we leave home and look back on it and regret all the time we spent being angry... and we start to see our parents as real people... what should come next is: "after a period of empathy, next thing we realize: we've become our parents."
That's all, folks. Half an hour of me, jabbering, is enough Eddie Campbell for one day.

Pass the baton, dear.

Mark Siegel at First Second is the first to link to Sunday's NY Times article by David Hadju, reviewing the Ivan Brunetti edited Graphic Fiction. Hadju wants to boost comics to some level of cultural import. So far so good. That's all very routine to our way of thinking.
But I'm much more interested in this aspect of the situation. Hadju quotes Time book critic Lev Grossman's article of July 10, 'Who's the voice of this generation?." Grossman describes a century of literary baton-passing (as this theory of artistic historiography has been described elsewhere), from Fitzgerald to Hemingway to Salinger to Kerouac to Heller to Vonnegut to McInerney to Ellis, but laments that the baton seems to have got dropped and lost around sixteen years ago. Hadju says he's looking for it in the wrong place. But this model of artistic development, this passing of some kind of legacy, is regarded with suspicion in our postmodern environment, and for that matter I think the notion of looking for it in any one place is also to be seriously questioned.
The interest for me lies in certain similarities to an article by Barry Gewen in the NY Times of dec 11 2005: The State of Art, in which he examines six books of Art criticism which all appear to have arrived at the conclusion that art is in a serious crisis: "One critic stands at the center of this "worldwide crisis." Clement Greenberg sensed there was an anything-goes problem long before it had reached the stage of decapitated chickens..."
What I love about it all is the spectacle of intelligent critics in a state of terminal bewilderment. Somebody has palmed the baton! It makes me Laff.
* * *
Andrew wrote in yesterday's comments: "One set of panels I would love you to post? I read somewhere once that there was a page in the script of From Hell which had Gull and Netley driving over London Bridge, which hadn't been built at the time, so you sketched the page anyway essentially with Gull stopping mid-sentence to scream as his carriage hurtled into the Thames. I think I read that somewhere. Does that exist?"
That would have been Tower Bridge. It was built in late Victorian times, but styled to chime with the medieval architecture of the Tower of London itself. Thus many sightseers don't realise it is in fact just over one century old. But of course they didn't have the means to make a big mechanical rising bridge like that away back in the middle ages, so obviously it must be relatively recent. What happened: I didn't draw the script as written but sent Gull down to the next bridge and just stretched the dialogue over more panels than Alan intended. In the meantime I scribbled a gag on a photocopy of a 19th century photo of the bridge under construction and sent it to Alan, so I no longer have it. However, for an article in the final issue of Bacchus (#60) I made a new version of the same thing, more or less identical. I no longer have that either, but here it is scanned from the article: (click to enlarge) I haven't looked at the big bulging box of photo reference for From Hell in a long time, but I'm sure there are many more treasures contained therein, including Alan standing in front of some of the London monuments for which he sent pictures. If enough people ask I could go root around in there and see what I find. Would make interesting posting on slow news days.
* * *
mr j thinks I made him look 'obsessive compulsive' (yesterday's comments) so I'll remind you that he's also brilliant. Here's a recent strip.(click to enlarge) Readers of Angry Cook in The Fate of the Artist are anticipating the possiblity that one day Hayley Campbell may notice that the other great beauties of history inspired poetry, while she has tended to inspire comic strips.

HA! just in my inbox:
Dave Gibbons has left a new comment on your post Old block off the chip: "Met Hayley in the pub on Saturday. Much was spoken of. Forgot to mention the dishwashing rota, though..."

Old block off the chip

Hayley Campbell started a blog before I did. You may remember her from such books as The Fate of the Artist and After the Snooter. As you can see, she's in London. Her house sharing pal took her on a search for a croton to decorate the place. Never having encountered one before, Hayley says it might be one of those creatures that comes round while you're out and tries on your underpants.

If you see her, tell her that her turns in the dishwashing rota back here are piling up at an alarming rate.