Following the resounding success last August, the Graphic festival is on at the Sydney Opera house again this year. I wasn't blogging during that period, so here's a reminder of that marvelous event:


Neil Gaiman read his story Truth is a cave in the black Mountain with an accompaniment of music specially composed by string quartet Fourplay as well as a projection of my painted illustrations on a huge screen behind him. The above photo shows the scale of the thing, and was taken at the same-day rehearsal, if I recall correctly, by Peter Hollo of Fourplay. The show was performed again in Tasmania in January 2011 at the Mona Foma festival, and there is talk of taking it on the road. More news as it develops.

Meanwhile, I'm appearing at Graphic again this year, performing an entertainment in one of the studios. This is a FREE event, so everybody in the neighbourhood, or in town for Graphic, is expected to be there.



EDDIE CAMPBELL ON THE LOVELY HORRIBLE STUFF

It possible to make money out of comics?

The subject is money. As explained with no authority whatsoever by a man who draws pictures for a living. Featuring unpublished illustrations, histrionics, humorous asides and totally useless information, including how Campbell became incorporated just so he could write and draw Batman, and what went wrong with that; how his accountant goes to work in a sarong and bare feet because he fancies himself as an artist. As well as his weeklong visit to the mysterious tropical island of Yap, to get the inside story of the ancient stone money for his next book.
Venue: Studio
Dates: Sun 21 Aug
Time: 12pm
Register Now!


Other guests include the immortal Robert Crumb

Now it’s time for Australia to meet the man behind the myth in his first Australian appearance when he discusses his life and work with co-founder of Fantagraphics Books, Gary Groth.
Crumb is one of the most celebrated comic book artists in the world and has been hailed as a genius and a revolutionary. Though he never studied art nor had any formal teaching, he began drawing at an early age and became the founder of the Underground Comix movement and is now a highly collectable artist.


and also Jim Woodring, Peter Kuper and Scott McCloud.

this has all the earmarks of a publicity stunt, but here we go anyway:
130,000 inflatable boobs missing at sea

MORE than 130,000 pairs of plastic inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.
Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.
The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.
A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

(link thanks to Michael Evans)
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Callum was looking at the Italian edition of King Bacchus, wherein you will recall that I illustrated a legendary meeting between Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore (one of many of course), and he has drawn my attention to the fact that they have translated 'Neil scary-trousers Gaiman' as "Neil pantaloni orridi Gaiman." I call upon my Italian correspondent, Nathalie, to opine whether this is a good translation or otherwise (or otherwise we shall all start using it).
Neil explains the origin of the nickname:


(ps the book was King Bacchus , but it is out of print, in English at least.)
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THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY May Yet Unfold In Live Action!

Two years ago, it appeared that Stephen Daldry was locked in to direct the long-awaited adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY. His stars: Tobey Maguire as Sam Clay, Jamie Bell as Josef Kavalier and Natalie Portman as Rosa Saks.
Well, that didn't happen. In an April 2007 interview with DETAILS, Chabon, who also wrote the screenplay, lamented that "...it just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I’m not privy to." Bummer.
But no project is ever completely dead in Hollywood...

since it's Neil Gaiman week here at campbell.blogspot, and we showed a glimpse of the unpublished Callum's Alan Moore anecdote a month ago, here is his Callum's Neil Gaiman anecdote, from After the Snooter.

at last a photo of Gaiman and Campbell. It's out of focus, but the other one Anne took made me look like the grim reaper.


I arrived at the Children's Book Council of Australia's Annual Conference just as several people on a panel were explaining what a graphic novel is (Graphically Speaking: the challenge of 'reading' graphic novels.) I wanted to give it a miss, for as any one who has followed this blog from its early days knows, I have exhausted my tolerance for that subject. But then Anne noticed that we seemed to know almost everybody on it (the blogs of Neil, Nicki Greenberg and Zoe Sadokierski are all linkable from my sidebar.) Neil was up, emphasizing that 'The Important thing about comics is that it's a medium and not a genre.' He explained the same thing earlier in the profile interview in Junior Bookseller and Publisher May 2008, and I'm sure all the four hundred trade people at the show, the librarians and bookstore managers, all knew what he meant. The problem is that the hundred thousand or so who read about him in the Melbourne Age the same day got the garbled version:


"Neil Gaiman is relieved the comic book genre now has wide acceptance, writes Frances Atkinson".
And further down it says: "He agrees that the line between comics and graphic novels has blurred over the past two decades..." the journalist, on her own authority, giving us to believe 'comics' and 'graphic novels' at some time in the past were distinct entities (or genres if you prefer to continue with the befuddlement.) If one is invited to go somewhere and explain what a graphic novel is, then it would sure seem like a good idea, on behalf of the creative community and for the benefit of readers everywhere, to perform the offices to the best of one's ability, but since my debacle with the Sunday Arts tv program last year, for which they shot forty minutes of me explaining it and then decided it didn't fit with what they already understood and threw the whole lot out, I avoid the situation.
It was a treat to see me old pal again and to experience the marvellous hospitality of Peter Nicholls and Clare Coney (see Neil's own post from yesterday)

(If you've arrived here from Neil's link, click the Neil label below for update)

as there was quite bit of interest in Wednesday's post about the the Spirit story that Neil Gaiman and I wrote and drew (respectively) way back in '97, I've fetched out the three original art pages that are still in my possession. As is to be expected, the ones that show the Spirit himself have all gone. But these give us the best showing of the villainess, Mink Stole. Once the story starts rushing along you don't really get to see anything as clearly as you do here in the exposition. I'm tryingto recall who was the model for the femme fatale. probably Ann Sheridan when she looked like the photo at left. She was in the Cagney film, Angels with Dirty Faces, way back in '38 and had a long career in the movies. Here is a sequence made up of the protagonist ruminating in front of his laptop on the balcony of a California hotel. The mysterious woman appears on the next balcony and he can't get any sleep that night. Walking on the beach he finds himself in the middle of somebody else's story. I'm leaving out a complicated third story, which is the one happening in type on his laptop, the Tarantino spoof that Neil mentioned (see comments wednesday), not to mention a possible fourth which is the romantic liaison he imagines himself having with the lady on the balcony (beginning with the mental image ninth below). The good thing about Neil's script (alas the words can't be seen below; see yesterday's link for a rough idea of the story) is that everything was so clearly set out that you can read what is happening below without the need for the words. This left the writer free to play out a separate, ironic argument in the captions.
Another thing to notice is that I knew Will Eisner was going to be scrutinizing these pages and I wanted it to look like something that could be taking place in his established graphic universe. I worked very hard to make things precise, much more than I usually would. In places this has resulted in drawings looking overworked. Look how all my erasing has left the paper looking smudgy and smeared. But by the time the protagonist rubs his weary eyes below I was starting to loosen up. The action got underway and it included a seaplane taking off with the Spirit clinging to the mooring rope. You can see them coming out of the sea in Wednesday's final page scan.














(you can tell that the above happens in two different scenes as the protagonist has changed his Hawaiian shirt. he wore three different ones in the course of the story.)

since I'm meeting up with Neil Gaiman in Melbourne this week, here's a glimpse of the Spirit story we put together ten years ago. Someone has posted six and a half of the ten pages online. Steve Oliff did a sweet job on the colours.



Next, the above page as it looked when I'd done my part. Since I normally start with the lettering, working this way just felt all wrong to me, and to this day when I look at the printed version all I can think about is that the lettering (can't recall the name of the letterer) was put on after the art (although on page 1 you can see that I was planning it very carefully).


The story had a swarthy thug named Squith because Neil wanted to name one of the characters after Mark Asquith for some reason.

The 'New Adventures of the Spirit' set of stories (including three interrelated by Moore-Gibbons) remains out of print in spite of at least two different publishers intending to do it over the years. I did a second story in the last of the eight issues, by which time I had a better handle on the look of the thing except it was our first attempt at computer colouring in-house here at Campbell Industries and The Spirit camme out looking more like the Green Hornet.

i'm making arrangements to meet up with Neil Gaiman when he's in Australia next month. It occurred to me that in the twenty years I've known Neil, the only time I can recall us being in a photo together is this one, and I'm only in it by accident because I'm asleep in the background. It was July 2005 and Neil arrived the day I'd just got back from San Diego.


that's wee hayley campbell at the front.
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Termites feast on trader's money- BBC- 7 april

A trader in the Indian state of Bihar has lost his life savings after termites infesting his bank's safe deposit boxes ate them up. Dwarika Prasad had deposited currency notes and investment papers worth hundreds of thousands of rupees in a bank safe in the state capital Patna. The bank says it put up a notice warning customers of the termites.

(link thanks to abovementioned wee hayley)
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our pal drjon interviews Shaun Tan for the new Comic Journal You can read part of it here.

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:

Ordinary decent crims.

Damn, I nearly forgot to cover this in my new blog. I just remembered it because I was phoning them to get my art back. This was a job I drew in the middle of 2005. I spoke a little about it in my Comics Journal interview a year ago. It was for an exhibition described as follows:
City of shadows: inner city crime & mayhem 1912-1948 - Sydney at the Justice & Police Museum. (great old building, shown left)
"The extensive collection of police forensic negatives casts a fascinating light on the shadowy underworld of Sydney between the wars. In the mugshots we encounter people of that world - thieves, breakers, receivers, 'magsmen', 'spielers', 'urgers', 'gingerers', false pretenders, 'hotel barbers', shoplifters, dope users, prostitutes, makers of false oaths - and the occasional murderer."

Crime writer Peter Doyle is the curator of the exhibition, and also put together the marvellous book that goes with it.
My pal at Top Shelf, Brett Warnock came across it over Christmas and wrote on his blog: "In Sydney i revisited a gorgeous bookstore called Ariel... They had a copy of Lost Girls under glass, retailing for $175 Aussie!! I picked up a stunning book called City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912 - 1948. My god some of these people looked rough & tumble." (I don't think he knows there's an exhibition and I'm connected with it).
Anyone with an interest in film noir would love this book. And it's all real, from police files of the period. Some of it is pretty ugly and horrible, bodies dragged out of the river, or found shot up in their living rooms. Characters on every page, and old cars too.

"Another room is devoted to the notorious Ernst Hofmann murder of 1942, which triggered one of the most comprehensive investigations ever conducted by Sydney police. Presented as a black-and-white comic strip by artist Eddie Campbell, it’s a compelling and salacious tale of prostitution, murder, false identities and very nasty crims."
Peter had the idea of bringing one of the documented cases to life by making it into an illustrated narrative running all around the walls of one of the small rooms of the museum, and contacted me to provide the drawings. I was in the middle of Fate of the Artist at the time, which I put aside for three weeks, as I recall. He used a line from the recorded dialogue as the title of the piece, "The fat shiela hit me!" (for my foreign readers, a 'sheila' is common Australian slang for a woman, or it used to be, in less pc times). It amused me when the statement that came with my cheque had the job itemised with that title, on the official headed notepaper of the Historic Houses Trust, maintainers and preservers of the museum, as well as publisher of the book. I filed it as one of the humorosities of the year. That's the illustrious Mr Doyle standing in front of my title panel.

Reproductions of relevant evidence, photos, fingerprints, handwritten police notes etc., were attached to the wall in appropriately relevant positions, footnotes as it were, to make for quite a complex read. These photos are from the launch night, taken by my pal Breach, who went along as my representative as I couldn't fly down there at the time.
The exhibition was supposed to run till last october, but has been so popular that it has been extended to 11 feb, which is next week. If you don't get to see my part of it on the wall, before it goes, all is not lost. It will be appearing in Deevee 2007 (cover shown) and will occupy perhaps 14 pages. We still have to figure out how to break it down into page portions, since it was designed to run a round a room.

The style of the piece changes according to who is giving their version of the story. Thus the detective's voice is represented by a style that looks like a movie detective story, like Gangbusters say, and another voice is given a more stressed artistic treatment, as you can glimpse here.
The job was quite a different experience for me, and Peter Doyle was a great guy to work with.



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Update 5.33 am Eastern standard (9 in the evening here). Hayley Campbell has a couple of better photos of the show. They also happen to have Neil Gaiman in them, from when he was over here for a convention last summer.

Old Books, and rare.

When we did well with the release of the complete From Hell a few years ago, I indulged myself by purchasing a couple of very expensive books, including a very lovely copy of Apperley's LIfe of Mytton of 1837 with numerous aquatints by Henry Alken, a book I had dearly wanted to possess for many years.
"The nineteenth century equivalent of a boy racer, John Mytton's life has been described as simply "a series of suicide attempts", such was the reckless disregard he displayed for his own life and well being. Although it is worth remembering that since 'Mad Jack' was in the habit of drinking eight bottles of port a day, he was most likely in a permanent state of intoxication, which may well have had a bearing on his behaviour."
As a result, illustrious rare book dealers still send me their annual catalogues. This purple arsed baboon, by Charles Catton, is the earliest use of aquatint in a book of natural history (1788). You can have it, and the book it comes in, for 8,000 quid, apparently.



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After mentioning William Gaunt's 1942 book The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy yesterday (which is kicking around here in a 1965 edition), I recalled that it was dramatized as a BBC 6-parter in 1975 with a very young Ben Kingsley (or King Bensley as he is called in our house) playing Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was distributed variously as The Love School, The Brotherhood and Beata Beatrix
"The Love School (is an) examination of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, wherein Kingsley starred as a wild and wilder-haired Dante Gabriel Rossetti (yes, he did once have hair) with Peter Egan, once a fellow minor back in The Cherry Orchard at Chichester, as Millais."
I remember also an excellent portrayal of Jane Morris by Kika Markham. This chap would like to see it released in some viewable form almost as much as I would.
If you see it out there and don't tell me, I'll be very cross.

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A touch of bathos for my tailpiece.
Before I started this blog, Hayley Campbell emailed me this photo taken in a big London bookstore, I think Foyle's. That's my Fate of the Artist and other 'graphic novels' filed as 'Low-brow Art'.



Hayley says my pal Gaiman took the photie... "while giggling uncontrollably."