Finally
get all 128 pages of The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard wrapped up and off to be scanned well before the Sept 1st deadline. The day starts with buckets of rain and continues with them, and with our state still in a drought panic too. Everybody weeps into their breakfast cereal because they don't know what to do and then orders a taxi. Normally I'd cycle there and carry the art in a big back-pack, but that's too risky with watercolours in this weather. So I wait two and a half hours for the one I called at 7.30 a.m., having risen early and showered and shaved with the nervous energy of one who does not normally have to leave the house in the morning. Around ten I wonder if it's safe to nip into the bathroom for two minutes. Sure enough, while I'm wiping my bum I hear the hooting of the horn and run down the front stairs in disarray, doing up my trousers and tucking in my undershirt, past Monty who is leaping up and down trying to get a look at the driver.
Here's a glimpse of the work while it was in progress:

covers- DHP no. 94

A Dark Horse Presents cover from the period when they dispensed with the sidebar (starting #91) and the covers were open and spacious, well except I've crowded in a bunch of skulls where the sidebar used to be. The signature is dated the month after the ones I showed yesterday. The cover goes with the first part of a serial of six ten-page chapters that ran monthly in DHP, Feb-July 1995, immediately following the miniseries I showed yesterday (Dec-Feb) and overlapping the The Bacchus color special (Apr) and launch of my own imprint (May). My entry into self publishing, or Campbell's world takeover as it was referred to around our house, was nothing if not impeccably planned. Hellblazer was in there too, Jan-Apr, and volumes seven and eight of From Hell in Nov and April. There were a couple of other things too, so that roughly speaking we had three outings per month over a seven month period, from four different publishers. It's no wonder I thought I needed help. Nevertheless, the main figures on this one look like my own pencilling and inking. I must have run out of patience and asked Pete Mullins to finish off the skull headed villains. I could never take that kind of thing seriously, even if this outing was more mock than heroic, though always played straight-faced.
I'd forgotten there was a pencil rough for this one until yesterday. There must have been a colour guide too, though I can find no record of it, as the Eyeball Kid is wearing the hat worn by my son age 2, and they wouldn't have otherwise known it was supposed to be white.
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hayley campbell linked me to CBS News: Dangerous Bomb Deactivated.
As for Londoners, the chances of something like this sending London into a panic are about zero. In 2005, Slate's David Plotz happened to be in London on 7/7 and noted, within a couple of hours of the attacks, "When I walked by the Queen's Larder Pub, not half a mile from the Tavistock Square wreckage, at 11 a.m., a half-dozen men were sitting together at a sidewalk table, hoisting their morning pints of ale. Civilization must go on, after all."
Hearty bunch, those Brits.

covers- BACCHUS no.1

A lways on the lookout for stuff to show here, I noticed some interesting oddities in my master-file of Bacchus copies when I was looking in there recently. These include unused art, variations and interesting solutions to technical problems that you may find either educational or too Campbellian to be of any use to anybody anywhere. I'm just going to show a handful of the more interesting ones.
My first issue was fairly straightforward. The finished line art is dated Sept 1994 and the painting Nov. 1994 even though it wasn't to be released until May 1995. I would never again be this far ahead of the game in all my years of self-publishing. I even had time to make a concept sketch in pencil, and furthermore, to file a photocopy of it. The ink version appeared in black and white ads wherever needed. I had to look hard to remember who did what on it. I think Pete Mullins must have pencilled the girl and then I inked the whole thing. Pete then painted in acrylics over a photocopy of the line art made on the sturdiest paper or card that the copy machine could handle. Pete paints great hair. The third image is the colour xerox from my file, and these never looked 100% accurate; the flesh tones look too red, but on the other hand I remember being a little disappointed with the yellow on the finished print. The printed versions always looked dirty compared to the xeroxes and I came to expect that and make allowances. There's a warmer tone about the printed version which is perhaps a mix of aging paper and the different photographic process. Furthermore, the printer, Preney in Canada, lately defunct, had a rather annoying tendency to make things blacker than they needed to be, which means in painted work even the yellows will have an unwelcome amount of grey content. We were well underway before I got around to speaking to them about it. This was my first experience in buying printing and I didn't know much about the process. If things looked murky, I was inclined to think of it as an inevitability rather than something within my control. But after dealing with comic book publishers for some time Preney were in the habit of cranking up the output on the black inkjets. This is fine with black line art, but for painting it's all wrong. Also at this time, I had no idea how to put a logo on a cover other than by gluing it onto line art, which you can't do with colour. I simply left enough space for it, and asked Preney to put it on there in red with a black drop-shadow, in the same place as we put it in the completed black line ad. Thus the logos on my first five issues were pretty much left to chance.

Mr Black, Mr White, encore!

H ere's another stage-by -stage image. In 2001 Beaux Arts magazine in Paris wanted a drawing of Alan Moore in the same way the Face in London wanted one of Johnny Depp, that is, in the 'From Hell style'. I used a photo of him I'd taken the previous year, from the 1999 session of Stanley Black meets Norman White,



during which Mr White was innately incapable of holding a grim face for two pictures in a row.




A clipped version of the photo went go to the Onion for their interview with Alan, the ink drawing went to Beaux Arts



and I saved a scan of the pencil stage to show in Bacchus #59.



Nothing ever went to waste at Eddie Campbell Comics.

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Chris Wisnia cracks me up.

Did you ever see this spoof of From Hell by Chris Reilly?

"There oughta be a law!""There already is, m'lud."

T his post relates to both the courtroom sketching I've been showing over the past ten days and my post of feb 25 about why on a comic book page the lettering should be done first. There are five stages in this sequence. I can't recall now why I would have gone to the trouble of making copies as I was going along. There must have been a presentation at the college coming up, but I don't rememeber ever using these for such a purpose. Stage one is the lettering, with just enough of a sketch to get the composition clear in my head. Click on each for a legible view.



There's a stage missing, as I have relettered the page to get a better descending rhythm to the balloons, and also altered the angle of approach slightly to make a deeper pictorial space (though you probably can't tell that from the scribble above). This was to be the first page of the final volume of Bacchus, so I was prepared to spend more time than normal to make sure it worked well. The main figures also look like they've been placed by me. I'm still happy with the composition here. Pete Mullins has gone in over my rough, added all the foreground figures and thoroughly worked out the perspective.



Next, I've pencilled and inked Bacchus and the other principal figures. There was to be a standing figure in the far corner, but I've decided to eliminate him.



Pete inked everything else



Then the page went to Anne for cleaning up, which in my studio was usually a lot of work and included such things as whiting the point on the balloon outline where the tail joins it. Since the balloons were drawn first it was usually wise to leave the tails until we knew exactly where the figure was going to be. You can follow that process above.



This appeared in Bacchus #16, which was (without checking) august 1996, before I got into the court sketching work. Perhaps Pete was already doing it and I thought it a good idea to take advantage of his experience. That would have been the reason I gave him so much to do on this page.

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p.s. at the time of posting this, Blogger is having problems with pictures. I see that my photo in the sidebar has disappeared for instance, and the system won't let me upload any new pics. This one is already in the can and the pictures are working at my end. Any problems let me know. This will be a pretty pointless sort of post if the images have all gone AWOL.