Yesterday's televisual event went as well as can be expected (as Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit would say). However, when you're trying to make the case for there being no reason why the significant stories of our times cannot be told using the simple elements of the strip cartoon, citing as examples a memoir of being a child during the Islamic revolution, and a personal account of  9-11 and its aftermath, and then the superheroes are entered into evidence, at that point you're going to have to plead guilty.

It happened while my mind had momentarily wandered. The same thing happened last week while we were negotiating the travel agency fiasco with a person in a position to effect a solution. A detail in the awful narrative gave me a story insight. I suddenly realized that I had dropped out for a few seconds and the wife of my bosom was now doing the negotiating. I brought it up later and she said, 'oh, everybody knows when you've left the building."

The show is The First Tuesday Book Club which airs the first Tuesday of every month on ABC tv here in Australia. They shot fifty minutes and have to cut it down to thirty. My fellow panelists were  Nicki Greenberg, Bruce Mutard and Sophie Cunningham, editor of Meanjin Quarterly. It should air in a few months, and there may be a longer version online

Nicki had her wee baby girl with her. here is Campbell easing the little one off into noddyland. You will find him surprisingly good at this sort of thing.


*************

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

(link thanks to Bob Morales)

Comics Scholarship—Mississippi Style

If the last century saw the state of Mississippi as the cradle of the blues, this century may see the region’s University Press of Mississippi set the course for modern comics scholarship. Although there is a lot of academic and critical interest from journals such as Comic Art, The Comics Journal and comics-centered blogs, the concept of comics scholarship is still frequently seen as an oxymoron.

this beastie is the Snooter, as seen on the first page of my 2002 book, After the Snooter.


Someone in comments recently drew my attention to a 'snouter' that existed long before mine, and I apologise that i can't find the comment at present. I must say I had never seen or heard of this peculiar creature before and I like to think that its resemblance to my own is one of those wonderful coincidences that happen from time to time in the creative business. It's perhaps fortunate that the real point of my story was the human version in the suit, which comes about after the insect flies in the window of the famous wealthy playboy, Bruce Wa*ne (this story was full of dodgy coincidences). I said 'existed' above, but in fact this earlier 'snouter' was a fake:

The Rhinogradentia (also called snouters, Rhinogrades, or Nasobames) are a fictitious mammal order documented by the equally fictitious German naturalist Harald Stümpke. The order's most remarkable characteristic was the Nasorium, an organ derived from the ancestral species' nose, which had variously evolved to fulfill every conceivable function.
The snouters were discovered on the main island of Hiddudify in 1941 by the Swedish explorer Einar Pettersson-Skämtkvist. Unfortunately, as a consequence of atomic bomb testing, the islands sank suddenly into the ocean in the late 1950s. Thus perished all traces of the snouters, their unique ecosystem, and all the world's specialists on that intriguing subject — who happened to be holding their congress there at the time.

You can find online pictures of these little chaps, such as stevelewalready's Flickr set, sourced from Stümpke's book, from which this comes:


I think the following photo was taken in the Folklore Section of the Haus der Natur in Salzburg, Austria, by 'curious expeditions' who have a whole Fickr set of such taxidermied curiosities.


My own Snooter recently contrived to appear on film, as hinted at in my previous post on this subject. Following are a couple of stills from it, which will have to keep us for the time being. Campbell has just been woken up in the middle of the night by an odd buzzing sound...



After the Snooter will of course be contained in Alec: "The Years Have Pants," where it will have two pages that weren't included in the original printing. One of these, titled Bastards Under the sea has never been in print before. It was half-finished at the time of going to press in 2002 and I've finished it for this edition. That'll be coming in September and is in Diamond's ordering catalogue right now. And you can click the 'alec2' label below for more excerpts and previews, and when you get to the end of that selection, look for the 'alec1' label.

Our TV adventure, so far- part 7

i've been quiet on this subject for a month as I'm almost up to date on developments. It was about two months ago that we shot a two and a half minute demonstration film based on the Snooter story. You will recall that the beastie flew in our window one humid night.


It bit me and caused me some medical grief and I decided to have a midlife crisis. Later it flew in Bruce W@yne's window...


...and he decided to become a hideous creature of the night, a big insectoid nag with Snooter attributes including the long curly proboscis.



The setting was Campbell's supposed bedroom in a house rented for the day, and Campbell played himself. Mrs Campbell played herself too, though all she had to do was pretend to be asleep all day Saturday. Apparently she actually dozed off for a while, as somebody told her something and she afterwards had no recollection of it. Being a novice in this situation, it was weird being in bed with seven or eight other people in the room, the director, photographer, sound guy and all the rest, with blacked out windows in daytime ('I guess a shag's out of the question,' said the wife of my bosom, quoting somebody, probably Austin Powers). The beastie was added in later using computer animation. The guys did a beautiful job of getting it just right, with its little dangly insect legs. On the next day, Sunday, we shot some stuff in the studio against the green screen. Here's a still I took. What you can just about see is the guy in the Snooter costume with the pink dishwashing gloves and all (There are better photos but the producers are keeping them under wraps). Christiaan, the young actor wearing it, is about six foot eight. It was specially made by Adam Head and it's a really strange feeling after all these years to see something like this actually physically put together. One of the producers meanwhile is keeping it in his wardrobe at home. If there are any midnight Snooter sightings, let me know and I'll give him a serious talking to.

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 6

more about the photo-shoot that produced the image I showed in part 4. The original plan was to photograph Campbell walking the dog in a variation of the photo that appears at the end of Fate of the Artist except that they are being harassed by the Snooter. To this end I drew three different versions of the Snooter, which I showed here exactly a year ago (1, 2) ( The project has indeed been going on that long!). After a couple dozen shots we decided that Monty wasn't controllable and we would be wasting a lot of time. Here's a photo of Monty taking directions:


So we switched to the new idea of Campbell with his bags of groceries (linked above). After making the composite image I was sitting waiting for the producer to come and pick up the disc. I sifted through the out-takes. One hundred and fifty photos had been taken but I wondered if we had ditched the Monty version too early. So I started to compose a second image using one of the other Snooter drawings and photos of Campbell and Monty. I think it's still too complicated for our purpose and include it here as an interesting but rejected alternate take. It also has another one of those ridiculous comic book faces you won't be seeing again any time soon.


After raising the development funding we went into an endless series of brainstorming sessions to figure out the plots and details of all the episodes, plus the ages of the characters since the source material covers a decade, with everything being constantly rejected and restarted. The wife of my bosom, who has developed a healthily skeptical attitude to Campbellian schemes over many years, made a quotable comment. I'm not sure whether it was born of sarcasm or if she just wasn't completely paying attention, but it nevertheless demands to be dressed up as a Honeybee cartoon:

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 5

what is the most important and undervalued skill a strip-cartoonist can have? Is it the facility to neatly ink brush lines with a steady hand? Is it a keen grasp of the complexities of perspective? Is it the ability to negotiate a bigger page rate? Nay! I say resoundingly. It is the art of pulling faces in the mirror. And Every comic book artist worth his salt who is reading this is grinning and nodding his head.
Of course you won't find many who will admit to it and you would have to be very stealthy to catch one of us in the act. But there you have it. It's the truth. You just read it on the internet. Artists need to be constantly reminding themselves of the muscle and bone structure of the face, and looking for the expression best suited to the situation at hand. And since we are working on a very small scale, these expressions need to be grand physiognomical exaggerations in order to communicate clearly with the minimum of means.
When Pete Mullins worked with me, he always had a full size mirror next to his drawing table, and if it wasn't there waiting for him, he would draw attention to our oversight. And every time my eye roved around the room in contemplation and alighted upon his lively countenance in the act of such a performance, he would have me doubled up with cackling mirth. And how else would he have achieved such an array of interesting cartoon faces?


To relate this to the matter at hand, and for those who wondered about the face I was pulling in yesterday's post, it could have been much more outlandish than it ended up. I'm not saying this is the same thing as acting, but for the purpose of the one-sheet still-photo promo I showed here, I figured the thing to do was to arrive at the studio with a portfolio of sample muggings. Thus I caught a few facial distortions on the digital camera, looks that would express the proposed set-up of me being harassed by the Snooter, printed them out on typing paper and when I arrived I presented them as a swatch. Below is an edited version. When the producers saw it I'm sure they thought that I thought we were doing silent movies in the style of Lon Chaney. In modern film, where the image is going to be enlarged big and precisely focused on a screen, and the soundtrack is conveying a share of the meaning, everything needs to be understated. I'm learning this as I go along. The facial expression for contemplation is the same as the one for constipation, and that would never do in a comic book. My fellow artists, you may file these away for the next time you need reference for a sequence of a man being pursued by running zombies.




(drawings above: top is mine from the 1001 nights of Bacchus, lower set is a montage of faces by Pete Mullins, from assorted Bacchus books)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 4

the original plan that was put to me was for the production of six five minute short films. However, after initial tentative approaches to a network the producers were encouraged to think on a much bigger scale. Now we were talking about eight half hour episodes, which would involve coming up with a lot of extra material as there are no obvious half hour tv stories in After the Snooter or Fate of the Artist. The possibility of me playing myself was kicked around when it was five minute shows we were talking about, but now it was starting to look complicated.
For the time being at least it would have to be me in the photo-shoot that was organized for the purpose of making a promotional image to front the proposal. We had a brainstorming session to come up with a working title. For a while it was Eddie Campbell's Domestic Apocalypse, which is one of the assorted subtitles of Fate ("EDDIE CAMPBELL, his Domestic Apocalypse: The Fate of the Artist: An Autobiographical novel, with typographical anomalies, in which the author does not appear, as himself") but that was soon deemed too complicated. But for the time being, the image had to reflect the 'domestic' angle as well as being a combination of cartoon and photographed figure. This was the result (click on it for larger):


The proposal was successful and raised the capital necessary to take us into 'development,' which if it goes on too long gets to be referred to as 'development hell', but at the very least, for somebody accustomed to print-time, is a long sojourn in purgatory.
(more later)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part ##

i thought this, Eddie Campbell's 'reading' in Chicago, would probably be edited into a more compact shape for posting online, but at the same time I wondered how it could be done and am pleased to see it presented whole, even though I may have left myself hanging out to dry a couple of times. It begins with four minutes of me boosting Leotard, which you've probably heard before, in both its outline and detail, if you've been coming around here over the last couple of months. A promotional operation very swiftly condenses to a few soundbites that have been proven effective. But bear up as from then on it's a half-hour shaggy dog story, a single anecdote with a loony assortment of tangential diversions leading up to an actual four minute reading, in a single piece of unedited videotape. The film was shot by Brown Finch Films, Laura, Michelle and Stacey, "a filmmaking collaborative based in Chicago, IL; producing transformative documentary films that inspire, evoke, and enliven. The cinema is both an art and a history, and as filmmakers, we respect our calling to make films that are both artistic and insightful." They have made a documentary titled Proceed and Be Bold about Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a printing press artist internationally known for his controversial posters and book art. (trailer)

The venue is upstairs at The Hopleaf, a great pub with choice beers, one of which you see me sampling, and there were maybe thirty in attendance. Jessa Crispin of Bookslut is the host. That's her sitting at the front in the black dress. I only learned on the actual day of the event, when I got a chance to check my emails, of the intention to film my 'reading'. The wife of my bosom had given Jessa the thumbs up several days earlier. It's probably a good idea I didn't know as I might have ruined it by trying to plan it better. However, I have noticed one or two places where I missed installing some important narrative info. But that's always going to happen I guess when you risk letting a bit of improvisation into it. If you think I'm in a muddle here then you should have seen the bigger one I made in my best man anecdote at Mick Evans' wedding, which was all about him, the best dressed man of 1998, splitting his trousers up the back at the San Diego Comic Con. Mick Evans is both my dear friend and the graphic designer on all the books I self-published. I'd like to apologize for all the crap I've thrown at him over the years. He takes his revenge in the final line of my anecdote.

two other things:
A) I forgot to mention, in case you ask an obvious question during my blather about printing From Hell, that time was crucial (original proposed date of the movie release etc. and other issues) and we needed to avoid having to redo the negatives that we had supplied, which would have added a week to the production time given I'm in Australia and the printer was in Canada. The problem could have been solved quicker today, nine years later. Even by me.

B) Before I went on, David Schwartz had read from his novel Superheroes, which is why I'm referring to the subject at the start. Geoff Goodwin interviewed him here for the Bookslut site. Otherwise you know I don't have any truck with superheroes, and that can't really be me pretending to be Batman in the video.


Eddie Campbell Reading - July 2008 from Jessa Crispin on Vimeo.

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 3

in June 2007 two tv producers phoned me out of the blue to talk about adapting my Fate of the Artist to the small screen and I found myself having a series of daytime sessions at assorted pubs as we got to know each others’ ideas about what such an adaptation might look like. They were pleasantly surprised to find that Fate was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and it was suggested that the Snooter in fact showed greater dramatic/comedic potential. One thing we particularly agreed on was that there was scope for a combination of live action and some kind of animation and we talked about the ways this had been done previously. I mean specifically in relation to the cartoonist and his work, the artist seeing his drawings come to life. You have to start with the first, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo of 1911: "The Famous cartoonist of the NY Herald and his moving comics. The first artist to attempt drawing pictures that will move." Even at nearly a hundred years on McCay still charms. And the magic is still persuasive too! I was happily watching for a couple of minutes before it occurred to me that you can't draw with a dip pen on an upright surface.



Then there is the the old 1970 tv show My World and Welcome to it, based on the stories and drawings of James Thurber, with William Windom playing cartoonist John Monroe, which I told the guys about. We went to some trouble to get hold of a copy of the whole series and I wrote about it here. I found the following on Youtube, which I think is the intro to the first half hour show:



It was American Splendor that got the producers thinking about our proposed show in the first place. This image of Pekar walking through a simple drawing of a street (composited for the DVD ?), is among the most expressive things under the ironic 'American Splendor' banner. Pekar's slouch is in perfect harmony with his backdrop


And the movie’s opening credit sequence, borrows the multiple levels of synchronous action possible on a comic book page.


Pekar is played by Actor Paul Giamatti and also by animated drawings, but over and above that Pekar also appears as himself.
In one incident Giamatti as Pekar goes to see a stage play based on Pekar’s comic books, so that the actor playing Pekar on film is watching Pekar played by another actor on stage.

The artist and the artist's drawings-come-to-life. The idea has a long and worthy history. Does Campbell have anything to add to it? I find myself excited by the challenge.
(more to come)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 2

up to the moment I was having a beer with the two tv producers, and leaving out random video taped interviews, and a couple of short super-8s I made when I was a kid, I had never been practically involved in any film project. Except for once when I found myself in front of a camera in September 2006, for a shoestring budget movie and I don't know if it ever was, or ever will be, completed. It was for a fellow who likes my books and thought it would be a hoot if I took a walk-on cameo part in his movie. So I was a wealthy art buyer scrutinizing some antique paintings in an actual gallery which was closed for refurbishing but to which they had acquired access for a day. I was unnamed but when the young lady, playing the manager of the gallery, comes in and addresses me, I suggested that I ought to be named. What name? How about 'Mr Campbell' I offered, and so it was. I wasn't required to speak, just look contemplative, walk the length of the gallery, then answer my mobile phone before leaving in a hurry. Never having owned one, I kept squidging that part of the performance. If nothing else, I've got a still of me imagining I'm in some old film noir classic.


(more next time)

OUR TV ADVENTURE, so far-part 1

there's a conceit in The Fate of the Artist, and I choose the word deliberately, in which I posit that a film crew is in my house shooting for a proposed arty documentary which revolves around Campbell. We will have observed this activity a couple of times before wee Hayley Campbell explains it (in words put into her mouth by me, for the sake of fiction):


This particular thread runs up and down all the levels and modes of the story, with what is seen in one part explained later in another where we don't expect it. The principal player in this drama is the actor Richard Siegrist, who plays Campbell. In this pretend newspaper daily strip cartoon we see him in front of the camera:


We can presume it's a 'green screen' setup because we see the same shot later in the full colour painted mode with the rest of the picture supposedly added at the editing stage:


Of all the mischief in the book, I was inclined to feel that this notion was a little dishonest, because I really couldn't picture a situation in which anyone would be filming my real-life stories. (Let's leave the From Hell movie aside, which is a different beast altogether and I really wasn't physically involved with that). But within a few months of the release of Fate I found myself having a beer with a couple of television producers.
(More next time)

a whole bunch of Campbelliana seems to have appeared overnight. The lovely Jessa Crispin is interviewing me at Bookslut. This took place on 29th July in Chicago. Brown Finch Films ( Check their excellent site), who shot the interview, also captured my 35 minute comedy routine. It's supposed to be a 'reading', but how do you read a comic book out loud? At one point I was galloping around pretending to be a horse. I'll let you know when they post some of it. Meanwhile, in the interview I mention our tv show which is in development. I'm almost ready to start telling you all about that here, and God knows how I've managed to keep it to myself for over a year. Things take forever in teleworld.


Two days after the above was shot, Chris Mautner interviewed me by phone in my New York hotel room and that's just gone up too. There are a couple of words that came out oddly due to my accent (Just been fixed), but what the hey. In these interviews I do tend to roll out a standard spiel, so if you've read one you may not want to read them all, but I do mention the tv show again here if you're fishing in that pond.
Otherwise should read Joe McCulloch's very poetic review of leotard.
My six page Constantine, from script by Pete Milligan is wrapped up and off to New York
And now I'm tired of reading about myself, so I think I'll see if my pal Dazzlin' White is available for lunch...