i was in town today to visit the dentist, due to the mishap mentioned here on Saturday. I popped into Folio Books, where my pal mr j works. he showed me all sorts of wonderful things. I bought a book which I'll write about later, but right now I'll give a quick mention to the one I didn't buy as it is a recent release and relevant to yesterday's celebration of James Kochalka. James is one of the fifty "artists, illustrators, designers," featured in


An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers (Paperback) There are six pages devoted to Kochalka's sketchbook diaries, including some close up photos of the objects, which invite us to see them in quite a different way from his online digitally-colored scans.

It was released in December 2008 and Amazon included it in their best books of that month.

And since I haven't mentioned my pal mr j here in quite some time, you can see what he's been up to on his blog, ON THE MAT, which is all about his wrestling cartoons, of which this is a sample:



Meanwhile, there is abeautiful big white whale that we love to watch for along our coast here.

Migaloo, a 14-meter, 35-ton pure white humpback whale, has been spotted off the New South Wales mid-north coast and could soon be in Queensland waters, where hefty new fines apply to anyone who gets too close.
"Migaloo has been declared a special-interest whale, granting him more space to swim up the Queensland coast," Ms Jones said.
The first reported sighting of Migaloo was in 1991 off Byron Bay, when he was three to five years old.
His unusual colouring makes him easy to track.
In winter humpbacks migrate north to warm tropical waters, where females give birth. 2005 PHOTO AT THE LINK

!!!!!!!!!!Normal service will be resumed when you all stop sending me gecko stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It just happens to be his birthday on the day I get an emailed cartoon from my pal mister j. (click to enlarge.) Happy birtheday to ya. J is appearing all over the place of late. Here's one from Hayley Campbell's blog in full colour!. And here's a bunch of them at Pro Wrestling Daily. You may remember me saying that this is what his 'Hayley Campbell Funnies', seen numerous times on this blog and accessible by clicking j's name above, evolved into. There will be a good selection of HC Funnies in the next Deevee, which I mentioned here yesterday, and which you will recall is a comic mag produced by messrs. White, Evans and Best. Which reminds me I've still got one last page to finish for that.
hold on a minute, there's the phone.
"Wha? King Features? You're kidding. Cambo? No, that's just a one-off by my pal mister j.
A series? Don't be daft. His phone number ... yes I'll get it for you... look while you're here, I have this other... wha, you've seen it already?
sigh, okay.
thanks for roning."

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The comic book database is a useful resource. Last time I used it was when I was doing the interview with Lew Sayer Schwartz for my Egomania magazine. I've just discovered (via my pal Spurge) that they've got all the Bacchus covers catalogued, with enlarged view too!!. (Well, almost all. I guess the print numbers on the last five issues were so small that they can't find copies). That'll save me some scanning; next time I need one I'll pinch it from there.
I've added this link and some others onto the 'gallery' at the foot of the sidebar. There are a lot of unpublished sketches and stuff in there, for when you're stuck indoors with a case of the flu. I discovered I could make a virtual gallery by linking to my own and other people's uploads. Well, they're all my own pictures, so why not?

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John Coulthart is looking at the German magazine Simplicissimus and telling you where you can download the whole lot of it.

Artist Mark Badger left a comment under Sunday feb 25th's post in reponse to regular commenter Hemlockman. I'm sure you'd miss these things if I wasn't directing the traffic. We need one of those butler guys to announce famous people when they walk into the ballroom.

Here, there and everywhere.

First review of The Black Diamond Detective Agency appears in Kirkus Reviews this week, 15 jan. You can read the first sentence then you need an account. I'm sure my publisher will have it up in a few days.

While you're looking for it over there at First Second, Part two of the interview I did with Lat is promised to be up today. I have a few of Lat's books, but my pal mr j made up the deficit by lending me the rest so that I could do the email chat with the great cartoonist from Malaysia.

You will remember mr j from his previous appearances on this blog, here, here, here and here. Here's one you haven't seen before, just to remind you whom we're talking about.



Well, Hayley Campbell Funnies has lately evolved into a different strip titled On the Mat, which is about wrestling and the daft characters you find there. he's done loads of them already and they're starting to surface here and there. j warns these links may not be very permanent, but they're working as of this minute.

The same Hayley Campbell sat my old pal Ed Hillyer down in front of her laptop so I could talk to him via skype this morning ( I always hear of these things two weeks before Google buys them up for 19 fersquillion dollars). Ed drew two of the Bacchus volumes (2 and 4), which are both out of print at the moment. Forgot to ask him whether he knows he gave that lady two left feet in the image I reproduced here yesterday (in the floatation thingy, click to enlarge). Happens to all of us, my old friend (but not me this time, which is why I'm laughing my head off). Needed Hayley Campbell to point it out though.

Next panel's from my favourite scene in Bacchus: the Gods of Business. Ed drew the finished art over my roughs, an arrangement he was never happy about (my goodness, this would have been 18 years ago, even before From Hell). Ed's style is more frenetic than mine, so he felt quite cramped. This is from the Italian edition which came out three or four years back, but I can't find a date on it.



Following is the cover of same. This was one of my favourites (issue #5) from the Bacchus comic book series. Looks like all mine except for the painted colour which Pete Mullins took care of beautifully. On the Eyeball Kid's coat I made him use those colouring markers the kids play with, where when you use the white one over the others it changes all the colours where it touches them. Actually, it looks like my own hand in that part; in retrospect I wish I'd left it all to Pete to do it his own way. It's probably not very permanent and whoever bought the original will have noticed it change over the years no doubt (I'm sure I would have warned them about it at the time). We used the markers more successfuly on the following issue's cover (the background 'noise') and then lost interest in them and gave them back to whichever kid we pinched them from in the first place. I kept good photos for the purpose of using the images again, as in this Italian edition. A crucial part of the composition however, was the word balloon. The guy holding the gun is saying "YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT!". For some reason the Italian publisher, Alta Fedelta, has removed that. Maybe it's only funny in English. Perhaps in Italy the Polizia don't say a great deal as they bundle you into the wagon. Perhaps my regular correspondent, Nathalie, can tell me. Anyway, as you can see, there was a lot of police-procedural malarkey in this story.



Ed edited a big book of Manga for the English speaking market recently, and there's a good interview with him at the Forbidden Planet blog.

My editor mark Siegel once had a suspicion that I was acquiring a habit of quoting from Beatles songs, which the title of today's post will not dispel. And tomorrow's post will be my fiftieth consecutive day of blogging !! However, since I am now off to my pal Slattery's (mr Duds for anybody who has been studiously following the comments sections... he wrote and drew a classic one-off comic titled Everybody Loves the Lizardman) stag afternoon (they start early here in Australia*, but I hope to effect an exit well before my bedtime), do not expect it to make a lot of sense. (like this last sentence...but that's me off out the door. too late)

(*The time of day here does not correspond to the time on my blog as I have set it to USA east coast time.)

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
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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..."

Look at all the lovely people

Can this handsome man with his beautiful lady wife in front of Times Square possibly be a 'graphic novelist'? Gene and Teresa Yang after the National Book Awards. Gene had the honor of being nominated for his American Born Chinese, in the young readers category. I'd be a runner up in anything if I could be either of the people in that photo (by Mark Siegel, with more of them at First Second Books)
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For all those whose appetite has been whetted by my words and links re. mr j, I give you his latest. Out of context of the series as a whole, it may not be clear that the titular Hayley Campbell doesn't appear in this example. On seeing it she said; "How come the Mammy gets a nose and I don't?" (click for larger)Well, you see, that's one of our tricks of the trade, those subtle techniques we cartoonists use to differentiate characters.

A whole bunch of these strips can be found in the upcoming DeeVee.

The colourful cover above came about when my pal White (who is by day a chartered accountant, you will remember me saying yesterday) said to my pal Evans, the designer, "We're forking out for full color on the cover, so I don't want any of your minimalistic crap." The issue will also contain the next chapter of The Playwright by White and me. We've managed to get out one of these per annum for the last four or five annums. At this rate, by the time we gather it into a book White will be retired and living off his perfectly planned superannuation.
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Here's an odd item. 'Una curiosidad sobre el From Hell.' On Little Nemo's Kat, a Spanish blog; the writer reports on the finding of an annotated copy of From Hell in his local public library. By annotated I mean thoroughly glossed in blue ballpoint pen in the margins, with cross refs to the notes at the back. He has scanned and reproduced a couple of pages. If anyone can ventilate the Spanish better than Google, send me an update and I'll report further (unless it turns out to be dumb of course). (since I jotted this draft I see the writer has responded to the note I left on his blog, in the comments section of my From Hell post.)
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Still on From Hell, Mark Clapham commented...
"Gull Catchers part two? Very tempting. I'm probably not alone in thinking its one of my favourite parts of the book.
The most startling Ripper revelation in recent years was on a recent documentary on the UK's Channel Five, in which a contemporary criminal psychologist was asked to look at the evidence. Her conclusion was that a man who butchered his fellow human beings in such a way probably 'lacked empathy'. "
Revelatory indeed. thank god we have experts. I haven't seen the show but i did read about it. Like Alan said, we've got enough for another 24 pages of hilarious ripperology. It was the favourite part of the book for me and my pal Mullins, where we were permitted to unleash our madcap antics that had been kept very much under wraps till then.

eddie campbell's pal, mr j

At Journalista yesterday Dirk showed a four panel caricature of me by my pal mr j, which he lifted from Hayley Campbell's blog, where you will find other examples of his brilliance. And if you scroll down to her oct 30 post you'll see a cut-and-paste of page 45's (the best comic shop in England) review of mr j's 40 page minicomic Hayley Campbell Funnies.
About ten years back I invented a fake cartoonist named Bunny Wilson as a wheeze for something to put on the back of my Bacchus#3. Over the next few years Bunny kept popping up and plays a key role in King Bacchus. Every time I showed an example of his work I got mr j to 'ghost' it. I calculated that mr j's style would be unknown to my readers since his appearances have been confined in the US so far to caricatures in wrestling magazines. The most impressive stroke was this fake cover on the back of Bacchus #58 , of a character invented by j for this purpose:
The only known published photo of mr j occurs in another hoax: the Eddie Campbell All-stars soccer team, a photo of which is on the back cover of Bacchus #14 and the inside back of After the Snooter.
(You may have read the first part of this in my Comics journal interview) My pal, and occasional collaborator, Daren White was an accountant at Coca Cola and played in their soccer eleven at that time. One weekend when it was his turn to wash the team jerseys we rounded up eleven guys for a hoax photo, which I then cut and pasted against another photo, of the crowd at Wembley. White had already washed the shirts and now had to wash them a second time. When Sim caricatured me in a sequence in his Guys, he has me wearing the soccer gear for some reason known only to himself (I only ever had it on for half an hour). At the same time I was drawing him in Bacchus (riffing on Sim's use of the 'injury to eye motif' in his own Cerebus.) Around this time I wrote to the Cerebus letters page under the name of Bunny Wilson saying something like "If you lot stopped pulling each others plonkers you'd sell a lot more comic books," but Sim never printed it.
However, as to mr j, you won't learn a whole lot about him from the soccer photo as he is the player wearing a wrestling mask at far right.
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To Gabriel Villa and Hemlockman: your interest in a complete Bacchus is noted. meanwhile here is something you may not have seen before. I'd forgotten about this until I pulled out the box of old Bacchus to scan a couple of things shown above . It's a cover I made specially for the Spanish edition of Bacchus vol 2: the Gods Of Business
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The covers on these rereleases of the works of Will Eisner look very tasty, but a new didactic work on 'expressive anatomy' causes me to grimace. The histrionics of his figure drawing always made him appear old fashioned. Will a new generation be picking up the habits?
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Hi to Matt, Nathalie, Ryan, Tim , Bissette!!, and other commenters. And to David Cake, Lucy and anyone else who noted technical difficulties, my pal Breach has been tinkering around fixing things. So hopefully it'll be smooth running until the next time. What would Eddie Campbell do without his pals, I asks ya.