My old pal Phil Elliott decided to post in his blog after not touching it for over a year. What makes people do that?

A big Spread-3

S till on the subject of that big spread, here's a photo of Pete Mullins beside the original art, taken in 1996.


Next door to that in my files I have this better photo of Pete posing as Luke Skywalker for a Dark Horse Star Wars cover from around the same time. That was for our brother of the brush and fellow Brisbane artist, Hugh Fleming. The pictures were in an interview with Hugh in a Star Wars magazine. The Pete image was very small and I've enlarged it and put it side by side with the painted figure.


I have no idea what Hugh's doing these days. Maybe he's still as busy as we all appear to have been back then
Pete's always busy doing design work for tv.

this piece in The Onion made me larf



Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum

"West's previous failed proposals include requiring the high school band to perform the tuneless flute songs of the blind idiot god Azathoth and offering art students instruction in the carving of morbid and obscene fetishes from otherworldly media.
Several parents attending the meeting were not impressed by West's outburst.
"Last month, he wanted us to change the high school's motto from 'Many Kinds of Excellence' to 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,'" PTA member Cathy Perry said.
"We already changed the name of the school from Abraham Lincoln High to Nyalrothotep Academy," Perry added. "What more does he want?"

(link via wee hayley campbell)
It's always good fun to put Lovecraft into a regular social setting. Reminded me of this piece Mick Evans and I composed for the inside back cover of Bacchus #58:


"We'd all been looking forward to the Earth being thrown into the howling void, said Michael Evans, public relations officer and Magister of the Dark Grail... Eddie Campbell felt particularly embarrassed that Yog-Sothoth, The Eater of Souls, had not put in an appearance."
That's the wife of my bosom behind the comatose Don Juan at bottom right.

1 9 8 6

Richard Bruton has posted a piece about London Underground Comics. "It's the brainchild of Oli Smith, and is really the rebranding of the Camden Comics Stall." Richard compares it to the old Fast Fiction stall of the early eighties and shows a photo, see left, of me and Ed Pinsent and Peter Stanbury at the (FF) stall. Internal evidence suggests that the location is UKCAC (United Kingdom Comic Art Convention) in 1986, shortly after the last day in which I held down a regular nine-to-five. I don't remember that particular pic, but the style was immediately familiar to me, making it one of Phil Elliott's. He always had a roll of black and white in his camera. Here's another from perhaps April/May that year, judging from the internal evidence of wee hayley campbell's skinny legs. That's Phil and Fiona Elliott on a visit with us in Brighton and the wife of my bosom would be the one on this side of the camera.


Phil and I used to work together a lot back then, though we'd just lost our regular gig in the weekly Sounds. He drew us into his comic strips more than once, such as this little record of our visit with them in Kent.


Funny to think that back then we had no money but we don't seem to be half as concerned about the subject as we are now. Even Anne thought it was hilarious:



Phil has a great website. Go and have a look.

Old photos

I came across this old photo the other day. It's of me and Pete Mullins and was taken by Randy Stradley at a Sydney convention fourteen years ago in 1993, around the the time Pete started working with me regularly.


Pete had been picking up a few art jobs around the place including drawing a few books for Revolutionary comics such as this one:


The Revolutionary story is more interesting than any of their actual books, and you can find the short version here and here. Even shorter, Publisher Todd Loren put out unofficial biographies of famous individuals and rock bands and got sued every which way by the likes of Bon Jovi and Motley Crue.
I remember quite well the day Pete came round and said he thought he was going to have trouble getting paid for a certain job, perhaps the one above. And I said, give me the details and we'll see what we can do, as I liked to pass myself off as somebody who knew a thing or two. He said 'my publisher just got murdered.'
I had no answer.
Even the FBI had no answers: In June 1992, at the age of 32, Loren was found stabbed to death in his San Diego condo. The case remains unsolved, although some people suspect spree killer Andrew Cunanan. The FBI later investigated and ruled out Cunanan's involvement.
Here's another cover by Pete. This one is dated Sept 1993.


Lots more by me and Pete under the label Bacchus.

bit parts

Spot Campbell's pals. This isn't something I go looking for, but at the same time I enjoy it when it comes up. I'm talking about the odd occasion when I draw a few pages in a superhero comic-book published by Marvel or DC. Just counting off the top of my noodle, I think I've appeared in maybe thirteen individual books from the 'big two', including a complete art and writing job, a 2-issue art job and a 4-issue writing job, and assorted guest spots of three, five and eight pages. Here are a couple of panels that have similarities in that the two writers each kindly allowed me a crowded bar scene and I took the liberty of putting all my pals in it. First one is page 1, panel from an Orion five page back-up scripted by Walt Simonson. Far left, that's White doing the goggles effect when he plays 'dambusters', a game in which you hum the theme tune of the old Dambusters war movie and then pretend you're the bomber flying in low to cripple the Mohne dam in May 1943. The dam is a beer jug on the floor and the bomb is a 50 cent coin clenched between the buttocks. If you can't picture it, ask hayley campbell; I have heard that she brought the house down recently in London with a demonstration during a dinner party attended by several comedy writers (email her for bookings).


Left to right you can also see Staros, Minty Moore, Evans tipping the dancer, and me and Mullins. Pete Mullins chipped in on this job for me. The two dancing girls were drawn by him. This was in 2001. In the same year I drew an 8-page guest spot in X-men #400. Joe Casey successfully wrote me into the special issue in such a way that I didn't have to draw a superhero, if you don't count Wolverine with his shirt off. In the villain's history in flashback there's an old-time scene in the bar of a gentlemen's club. I'm on the left, White's behind the bar. Mullins is wearing a bow-tie and Evans is just arriving.


When you have to draw a bunch of people in a crowd scene it's useful to use people you know just to get a sense of assorted personalities in order to avoid falling back on stock types. Otherwise, it's self indulgence and this is a blog.

'looseners'

The plan: I'm going to head out of here at four, meet the Festival coordinator and put her mind at rest that I know what I'm doing in regard to these various panels, in spite of my 'insane rant' of a couple of weeks back. I will deftly demonstrate my command of the subject at hand, my familiarity with the work of the various guests and show that I am certainly the man to be trusted with the task. Then my pal White will turn up and we'll have a couple of 'afternoon looseners' and some eats before proceding to the festival's opening party. Eating out with White is always fraught with difficulty, or at least the 'afternoon looseners' part of it. I was sure I had told the anecdote on my blog, but can't find it, about how he got us all arrested one night. Present were Mick Evans and, this is the tricky part, wee Cal, aged then about nine. Chalky's argument was over the wrong sauce that had been served on his gourmet hamburger. He demanded that the chef come out and discuss the matter. The chef refused to come out. White refused to pay. He instructed the waitress to tell the chef that we would set up office in the coffee house across the road until the chef came down from his perch. Half an hour later the constabulary came and removed us from the coffee house. The belligerent one was prepared to get locked up over the difference between 'cordon bleu' and 'blue cheese'. We were stuck for a couple of hours at Police H.Q. and once we had paid the bill and were out I made the wee one swear to secrecy, otherwise his dear mother might not let him go anywhere with us again. But then I went and told the yarn at a dinner party a few weeks later, and as I looked around the table at the guffawing faces, my eye fell at last upon that of the wife of my bosom, transfixing me with the glare of Medusa.

*********
Sleepwalker orders a curry
"Next morning I had garlic breath and thought it odd. Then I went through my pockets and found some change and the bill. I was stunned. I would never have known had I not found the bill. I just hope I left a tip.
(via anonymous commenter yesterday)

my best pal.

Photo of him taken yesterday by hayley campbell.


You may remember him from such books as After the Snooter in which this scene occurred:

It slithered out of my pal Best's other shoe!

A subject that occasionally comes up here is the sweet and lovely wildlife of Australia, this country in which I got stuck twenty years ago and have not managed to get out. Here's somebody else who got stuck. These photies are being passed along by my pal Best, who has only recently recovered from the necrotic flesh malady caused by a spider setting up house in his Florsheims:


Waitaminnit, that's him on the phone!
"Eddie, did you get the photos? Some tourists on holidays came across the snake caught in an electric fence at a cattle station near Nyngan, being continually shocked, and getting very angry! The group wondering what to do, decide to divert the current, cut the wire AND let the snake go! (As you should do)."
wha? how they-



"When the property owner found out he went ballistic, besides being upset about his fence, the snake had been eating lambs in the area, and he'd been trying to track it for ages. He did not appreciate the help!"
I hope that's not anybody we know inside it.
"Speaking of which, are you coming in for lunch?"
No, I think that'll be me off back to Scotland.
But thanks for roning.

*******
Another thought on yesterday's RULE #5.
When I was sketching the criminal trials for the tv news, there were a couple of times they weren't allowed to show the face of the accused, because he was underage or whatever. So they pixilated the face in the sketch, which at the time seemed daft to me, to pay somebody to go and get a likeness of the guy on trial when they knew in advance they'd have to hide the work. Later it occurred to me that all the tv news wants is pictorial evidence that a trial took place, and also that they had a person covering it. Similarly, on another occasion I saw them throw a story out because they had nothing visual to support it.

"Dying is pointless." (and Rule #5)

My pal Michael Evans emailed me in disgust a few days ago to say he tripped over this nonsense about the death of Captain America in the Guardian of all places, while looking for the obituary for the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It was only a couple of days later I realised how clever that was.
Obituary . Jean Baudrillard. Wednesday March 7, 2007 Guardian Unlimited
"Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place. 'Dying is pointless,' he once wrote. 'You have to know how to disappear.' The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: 'What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?' Baudrillard replied: 'What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.'
Baudrillard, whose simulacrum departed at the age of 77..."

March 12, 2007 02:19 PM Guardian blog. Why Captain America had to die
"The superhero's demise is being analysed in the blogosphere as a damning indictment of George Bush's America.
You've probably heard by now, Captain America - the comic-book superhero - is dead. Certainly if you live in the United States, it's a story that's been hard to miss."
Here stands the noble chap while he was still a picture of health:


That's from one of the two issues I drew in 2004. I thought it would be a good move for the overall benefit of my career to do a short stretch of that kind of work as I had once been in danger of getting a reputation for not being a team player. That happened way back in '93 when I was writing a thing for Dark Horse's ambitious superhero universe, and got to sit in on the script committee for a session. I figured the experience might make for some useful observation. Now those guys are good at their jobs and long may they thrive, but there was one odd issue that came up during the long conference. Having created the superhero team at the centre of this 'universe', they put one member in there who died at the end of the first story. This is standard practice. I call it the Eden effect. These characters lived in a state of grace, and then one died. Mortality has now 'been seen' (remember that phrase) to exist in this 'universe' (Junior Juniper RIP, Thunderbird RIP... I'm embarrassed to admit I know all this crap). The character that had to be offed also happened to have the power to restore mortally wounded people to life by the laying on of hands. No more immortality. Symbolically it all fit exactly so. But one of the notions that got kicked around briefly was of bringing this character back from the dead, except that her powers would now be in reverse and anybody she touched would be turned into a zombie. I exerted all my energy to shoot that one down since it threw the whole universe out of whack, as horror stories operate on reverse principles and you can't play it both ways simultaneously (matter/anti-matter). Or you could, and it would be shit, and besides I'd be the muggins who was going to have to write this particular series. And what would I know, the kids would perhaps have thought it was a 'cool' idea. I lasted five issues before I got the boot.
(The ideal zombie story needs to take place in a separate world because it will be an atheistic apocalypse. It must annihilate without hope. The scene going on behind the end credits in the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead is what a good zombie movie is all about. I threw that in just in case you think I'm being snobby.)

Death in comic books is just this kind of clay pigeon kind of death, a video game where everything is back in place the next time you plug it in. And I'm not the bloke that should be writing it. In my own books, every character I ever offed I can explain exactly why it was done. No gratuitous death in my 'universe'. The only vid game I ever had any time for is the original version of Mario Kart. In fact, I'd play it right now if wee Cal was home from school.
When wee cal was actually 'wee' instead of six foot two, he said a thing which had an effect on my thinking. This was way back in August 1997, when he was five and the news was coming through about the tragedy of Lady Diana Spencer. The lad was getting pissed off because he wanted to watch his superhero animations, and the adults had taken over the television, and eventually he complained loudly and said what was on his mind. "I don't think she's really dead anyway, because you didn't see the car hit the wall".
This would become one of Eddie Campbell's RULES*.
RULE #5: In a visual medium, an event has not occurred unless it can be seen to have occurred. Thus, you can't refer back to something that only happened in a word balloon. Technically it didn't happen at all. (Well, of course you can do it, but you must recognise that your reader will probably be doubting your veracity. You may wish to use that to your advantage, but now we're getting complicated.)

Without wishing to get into arguments about Baudrillard, as I am not equipped to do so, this line, taken from a review of his writings, strikes a note relevant to the current blather, and allows me to exit without leaving you with the bad taste of comic books on your palate: "(essay by Baudrillard...) proposes the familiar notion that we are imprisoned in a world of media simulations, video phantasms, and that we cannot come to know the real not because we are ignorant but because we are overinformed: 'we will never in the future be able to separate reality from its statistical, simulative projection in the media.' This isn’t an uncertainty we’ve experienced in the past, but a brand new kind of uncertainty brought about by an excess of information."

postscript. My pal Evans is the fellow who killed me inThe Fate of The Artist. He would perhaps be fair in claiming as justification the fact that I had killed him in three other books. One day, when I think my publisher is not looking, I will tell you the whole sorry story, and how he got his ultimate revenge, apart from killing me I mean, because as I have been at pains to demonstrate, in comic books Death is pretty bogus.

(':'*\_e t' s * '. h A v E '* a *' p @ R t y *! :']

In comments yesterday, my pal Liz (we'll phone!), (married to my old pal Pete Mullins), singer, news cameraperson, and all round sweetie, as well as the model for the singing lady in Batman: The Order of Beasts (left), although I'm sure she didn't realize that at the time I was snapping the photos, but didn't mind it as she got to hang out with Bruce Wayne in print, brought back to mind an old recording act I had forgotten completely: The Nutty Squirrels! They did fairly modern jazz numbers in the the 'chipmunks' style, with the speeded up voices, but got some top jazz guys to play, such as Cannonball Adderley for a track on the second album, already famous for his part in Miles Davis' immortal Kind Of Blue album. All daft novelty stuff of course, but good for the wee'uns.

(album covers, 1959, 1961... 'when I was in knee pants,' as the old song says)
It has furthermore reminded me of one of my favorite jazz albums in my collection, and I guess not too far from the novelty end of the spectrum itself, but on the 'trad' side of the tracks, Let's crash a party by The Firehouse Five, (plus two) 1960. The band was led by Ward Kimball and everybody in it was an artist at Disney studios, playing in their spare time. They got all their wives and pals in to make party noises in between the tracks, calling requests to the band and shouting for cocktails and stuff like that, and 'somebody turn that record over!' at the end of side one, and at the end of two the police arrive and they all head off to a party at somebody else's house. A wave of ineffable joy always comes over me as the first track starts up.

(Over there in London, that wee'un Hayley Campbell will be saying 'aw, that's it, i'm on the next plane home.')
'The band recorded at least thirteen LP albums (I'm quoting the wikipedia entry), starting in 1955. The last album, "Live at Earthquake McGoon's" was recorded in 1970 in San Francisco.' How can ya not love 'em?

But before I go, I'm quoting Kimball's contribution to the sleeve notes: "Party people we all are. Parties put people here. Beats, bankers and figs dig parties. FH5+2 blows about 104 parties per annum: Public parties, private parties, Elks' parties, firemen's parties, country club parties, strip parties, booze parties. Going-in parties and coming-out parties. When we blow we see: Drunks, squares, math teachers, matrons, motorcyclists, morons, Miltowns, bartenders and hypes. About 11 pm shoes and coats come off and we see them grab our afterbeat like it was their mother. We sweat and they sweat. Everybody sweats. Everybody yells, everybody screams, and then they want the "Saints." We kindly comply and when they're on the ropes we slip 'em "Old Tige" (Tiger Rag) and everybody dies. We put the tambourines and hats away and go home and our shirts smell like burned veal cutlets."

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:

The stupidity tax.

Thought for the day:"First, we'll kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, Pt.2)-Shakespeare. Quoted by Christopher Lydon on Open Source radio program (see further down).

I was cycling to town today, as is my wont a couple of times every week, to have lunch with my pals Best and White, and realized, when it was too late to turn back , that I'd forgotten the key to my bike's lock and chain. So I stopped en route and bought a cheap lock and chain for fourteen bucks, just a lightweight one to get me by for one day. There are two ways of looking at this. First, you can say that you paid fourteen bucks just to park a push-bike for two and a half hours (we take our time over lunch), or you can take a more stoical account of the situation and say the fourteen bucks was the quarterly 'stupidity tax.'
At least once every three months the world demands that you will spend money on some thing that you neither want nor need, and it could have been avoided if you were paying attention. Just accept it, hey?
* * * *
On the bright side, at least my pal White was pleased to see a couple of stories he wrote for me that have been translated into Italian. The latest volume of Bacchus has just arrived from Black Velvet in Italy. This is number 5. They collapsed 4 and 5 into one, and I collapsed 7 and 8 into one, so the Italian edition will cram the 10 stories into 8 books. Anyway, this one, The 1,001 Nights of Bacchus (its English title), contains 13 short stories, each done in a completely different style. I tried to cover as many different traditional types of story as I could think of. So there is, for examlple, a beast fable about a little mouse trying to cross a busy highway, a story told entirely in mime, or silent pictures, with Laurel and Hardy playing the parts of the leading characters. It's a good fun book. I was interested to see what my Italian editors would do with the Gilgamesh story, which is the mythical epic of Gilgamesh told in terms of Scottish soccer hooligans. In style it looks like a cubist ransom note, with every letter of text cut from a magazine and glued on individually. Here are a couple of panels from the Italian edition. They did quite well in the circumstances. (click for a slight enlargement)
That collage cover has served me well. In its original form it appeared on the Dark Horse edition (a much smaller, 48 page version) way back in '93. Their legal dept. had apoplexy when I sent the cover in, with all those trade marks flung across it, but Mike Richardson overrode their decision. When I used it in 2000(?) Mick Evans gave it some digital distortion to increase the effect. So I guess this is its third outing. Always good to see an old pal again.

* * * *

Back on the subject of PLAGIARISM, Jonathan Lethem’s essay, which I linked to yesterday, has become a cause celebre and he’s talking on the Open Source radio show along with other interesting folk. Podcast now downladable. (Thanks to drjon and Dirk at Journalista)
Obviously he's not urging us all to go out and steal the next guy's work. His proposal is that by 'dissolving the prohibition', and the terror of plagiarism that we can reopen the dialogue in art, as opposed to a situation where every artist beilieves he must find his own craggy outcrop and sit upon it in isolated uniqueness.
It fits with my concept of what art is and does: Art writes the dialogue that a society has with itself, with its gods and with posterity.

50

I managed to extricate myself from the boozy proceedings at a reasonable hour last night and so I was not there to see the young future husband lying in the gutter with his whole life before him and, in closer proximity, his dinner.

And since I wrote that before I got there, it may well have ended differently.

FIFTY! My fiftieth day of continuous posting. I am reminded of another boozy night, my fiftieth birthday bash, which took place about eighteen months ago. The photos were coming out looking all wrong, all cold and harsh, until I turned off the flash. With the longer shutter speed everything's looking a bit out of focus now, which is kind of the way I remember it anyway, and the colours are all rich and fruity, except I don't recall my pal Mullins having a purple head on the night.



For anybody interested in the characters in my personal sitcom here at Campbell-blogspot, that's mr j and Hayley Campbell at extreme right, Chalky White in the red shirt and I'm at the back acting like I just scored a goal by getting to the night's end without anybody falling out. I can't see my pal Best in among this colourful flurry. Perhaps he succeeded in 'extricating himself from the boozy proceedings at a reasonable hour', but a memorable moment in the evening was the halting of all eating and drinking so that we could listen to his singing of Meet me in the Alley MacGarry, complete with new verses written by him specially for the occasion, with me leading the chorus. This, you probably forget, was the song that the three tenors were supposed to be singing in our photo hoax in Bacchus #20, which is to be rendered as an 1890s type of waltz. Minty Moore and White, who wrote it (and were the other two tenors in this ridiculous display), had a different conception of the 3/4 time, so when I sing it (as I still do occasionally in the shower) I have to omit and add syllables here and there.


(click to enlarge if you want to read it. If you want to sing it, I'm afraid you'll have to improvise)

If you're new here and don't know who Alec Macgarry is, look here, where a wonderful fellow named Guido Weisshahn has catalogued all my books and the chapters in them, showing where everything has ever appeared. I have never thanked him enough, perhaps from a fear that acknowledging having looked at his impeccably detailed pages might in itself be an act of egotism. If I ever make it to Dresden I will Take Guido and his family out for a slap-up dinner.

And you can buy here, at Top Shelf where the Alec books are still in print.

And finally, a picture of me and the wife of my bosom from the same night. I seem to have lost my glasses, which I daresay is why everything was out of focus.

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.)

Indulge yourself today!

Bacchus wishes you a day of exhuberant self indulgence, and to kick it off in the right spirit, this is about me indulging myself. The above photo comes from one of our outings to the annual black tie ball at the Irish club. My pal White's a member and he used to book us a big round table every year (between '96 and 2001) until it all went pear-shaped. They had a regular do and a masked one. We'd alternate. The main thing was that we always used the event to come up with some photographic nonsense to run on the back of Bacchus or Deevee. For instance this is me, Minty Moore and White pretending to be 'the three tenors'.


And a year later we picked a picture out of the session from which this came to pass off as the monthly editorial meeting of Eddie Campbell Comics inc. That's Mullins, Me, Kirsten and Minty (who was contributing quite a few storylines to Bacchus back then).


Anyway, in 2000 we did the masked ball and I went as Bacchus. I used a papier mache mask that Hayley Campbell had made at school using a plastic template as the base. The other kids made clown and pussy cat faces while my daughter fashioned the dark goat-god Pan, with his horns and all. In urgent need of a mask and not having a clue how to start from scratch I acquired permission to turn Pan into Bacchus by sawing off the goat-beard and then using acrylic paints with that thickening gel, laying it on with a big impasto, moved the mouth downwards and introduced all the other distinctive facial characteristics. (There are some out there thinking that destroying my daughter's work in the process was a heinous crime against ART. I'm sorry, Kelly... I don't know what to say... the gods will punish me one day... i just hope it ain't Pan.) This is Mullins at the same event, as Dr. Zaius. Wait, it was White who arrived as Dr. Zaius, but now Mullins is wearing it home?.


A similar case of confusion happened the following year when an attractive lady mistook me for Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of my pals overheard this and, what with me being a long skinny geezer and the other guy being Mr. 'pumping iron', not to mention me lingering a little too long at the site of this implausible compliment, suddenly our table was beside itself with uncontrollable mirth. The wife thought the joke was on her, instead of me, and took umbrage.
And that was the end of our annual black tie ball.
Nice mask though?

A merry Christmas to yez. An a happy new yair.

Let me Outta here!

These guys fell off the shelf while I was looking for something else and reminded me that Christmas is less than a week away. The fashioning of these little chaps owes something to the same impulse that guided Michelangelo. It is said that when he carved the Dying Slaves for the tomb of Julius II it was 'a process of highy symbolic direct carving which consists in freeing from the dead stone, the raw inert material, the beauty it imprisons'. As the great artist himself said in a sonnet "The marble not yet carved can hold the form/ Of every thought the greatest artist has..." Well, it was exactly like that when, at the end of one of our Christmas parties here at Castle Campbell, I was gazing at the champagne cork after the delicious liquids had all been consumed, and I was certain I saw my pal Evans in there, asking to be let out. "let me outta here!" I heard him yell. So I immediately took to the cork with my acrylics and my scalpel and in short order there was Evans on the table. Well, a miniature version of him I mean. And then this became a tradition here at our house. Neil Gaiman recently said that you can make anything into a tradition. Just do it and name it a tradition, but make sure you remember to do it again next year. And remember we did. Every year at the end of our Christmas bash, and after other mid-year parties, the cork would be retrieved from the floor and one of those present, or even not present but dear to our funny bone, would request to be let out of it. There were a dozen of them at one stage. I know this because our lad Callum used to get them off the shelf and put them in a 12-size egg carton, standing room only, and, pretending it was a bus, drive them all over the floor of the house. He even took them to school for show-and-tell once, introducing them as 'the cork people'. Looking at them now, the sheen has gone off them and their paint is chipped, and only four of them remain. It should also be mentioned that they once had necks, but champagne corks find their way back to a cylindrical shape if you don't tie string around them. In the foreground above is my pal Mullins, my right hand nib thorugh From Hell and Bacchus, and on the left my father himself, giving me a stern look. I don't think he knows about this tradition.

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.