...but for me and thee.

Final on the Black Diamond Detective Agency for a while, but we will be back. In case the facetiousness here at campbell-blogspot should give a false impression of levity in the overall tone of the book, here is a page with a glimpse of the tragic. It's also the first appearance of a Black Diamond Detective. And I'm rather pleased with my colour scheme, if I may say so.


(click for larger)

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Joining in the spirit of proposed spousal address here at campbell-blogspot, Brad Weber sent me an email beginning 'The wife took me to the art institute in Chicago..." and apropos of my 'cork people', he attached a photo of some little figures made by Lyonel Feininger which are on display at the museum, of which this is an enlarged detail.



Feininger was one of the great early comic strip makers, and later a noted painter in the cubist manner.

For a look at his comic strip work, Andy at Bugpowder is a good place to start. Here's a reduced detail from one of the pleasing full-scale pages on show there, including some examples I'm unfamiliar with, presumably work published in Germany rather than the two famous series he made for the Chicago Tribune. The little figures above look like the Kinder Kids from that paper, which is where the panel below comes from.



My old publisher, Kitchen Sink put out a full collection of the pages back in 1994, but you ain't getting my copy.

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My pal White, chartered accountant with a legal firm, as you may or may not recall, sends the following:
"The defence lawyer of a Wisconsin man charged with having sex with a dead deer is claiming he's innocent of any wrongdoing - because a "crimes against sexual morality" statute prohibits sex with animals, but fails to mention carcasses, The Duluth News Tribune reports..."

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How to hide a comic book.
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“When I was a kid, if a guy got killed in a western movie I always wondered who got his horse.”

The Black Diamond Detective Agency (that's my next book, see previous two posts.) It's 144 pages , in full painted colour, which I wrapped up in july '06, to be released June '07. That's a whole year of waiting. The year I spent drawing it I was also waiting for my Fate of the Artist to come out. There was a comfort in knowing that if Fate was too pretentious and complicated for everybody, I had this more straightforward action-adventure waiting in the wings to redeem my reputation.



It's based on an original movie script by Charles Gaby Mitchell, who has a co-writer credit, I see, on the new movie, Blood Diamond. Everything he touches turns to diamonds.

Film Producer Bill Horberg has been working the BLACK Diamond property for some time. I'm presuming it was his idea to get a 'graphic novel' published, based on the script and preceding the possibility of a film. It appeared to be understood from our earliest discussions that a 'graphic novel' was necessarily a completely different thing from a movie, and that not everything that works in one can be expected to work in the other. So I was able to approach the work quite at liberty to imagine it as an Eddie Campbell book. The first thing I liked about the script was that it was about the arrival of the twentieth century, of the optimistic and shiny modern world. Except that it arrives with a huge bang,



and in the ensuing confusion everything is out of whack.

Nothing works.

The opening line of my Fate of the Artist is : "One day the artist wakes up with the disquieting feeling that it has all gone wrong." Black Diamond is an action adventure, but at the same time I've been able to carry my own theme over into it. In fact my version begins:
"The day it all went wrong
started out fine..."



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The quotation at the top of today's post is from George Carlin. I found it while looking for something else. It reminded me of a bit of business in Black Diamond. In the movie script he cuts his hoss loose before jumping a train for the city, which might be interpreted as a big symbolic gesture, but later when he's grubbing about in Chicago I was trying to figure out the finer points of where he could get some ready cash, to buy meals and stuff and the obvious occurred to me. He should have traded in the hoofs. Now, I don't know what the animal would have been worth back then, with there being so many of them around, but I figured you could live on the proceeds for a couple of weeks or more, so I went back and inserted a scene where he sells it.
I don't know from horses. they're so long ago.
Well, I don't know from cars either, and they're only last week . First car I ever bought was for 35 quid, which is a bout 60 bucks, a piddling amount in '80 as now. We poured two pints of water into the tank and watched it all come out of the exhaust pipe.

Ah! Nothing works.

"Oh, they're tough, mighty tough, in the west"

I used to read westerns, well maybe for a year or so I read 'em, and in the Campbellian way, read every possible author on the market and analyzed the history of the whole thing. But I got the impression I was supposed to be reading science fiction. The whole 'comics fandom' thing was understood by everybody in it to be a sub category of sci-fi. Then in the seventies it became fantasy. I remember one fanzine defining its content as 'all the stuff we're interested in', and I thought: how would you know what I'm interested in? There was a sense of one thing connecting inevitably to another. I never got that. In fact, I've never got the idea of 'genre fiction' either. I mean, as a thing to which you pledge some kind of allegiance. Anyway, for a year, Westerns were for me. I spent an hour this morning trying to google up the cover of a book I owned way back when I was fifteen.



It wasn't easy because I couldn't even remember the author's name. All I could recall is that it was painted by Gino d'Achille. It was in '69, a few years before he came to the attention of American collectors with his painted covers for the Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Looking at those now, I care for none of them. But I did find my cover in the end and I still love it as much as when I once owned that little paperback written by Matt Chisholm. A British writer of westerns (real name peter Christopher Watts), with a painted cover by an Italian; indeed, isn't that cover just saturated with the stylings of the spaghetti western.

The Comic book was my customary means of expression, so I took Chisholm's Apache rogue, Gato, and drew a couple of 13 page stories around him, in full colour. This was in 1971. Don't expect more than juvenlia here, and by the end of the second story it's starting to look too much like Buscema's Conan (perhaps I had shifted my genre-allegiance by then.) Also, and alas, I had a habit then of drawing the action scenes as though I was taking part in them. It was many years before I'd learn to take pains over all aspects of the work. Still, one or two pages show a little promise.



I only located the links for Chisholm (whose name I had forgotten) due to the fact that I named one of the characters in this story after him.

The Black Diamond Detective Agency (my upcoming book from First Second Books- see yesterday's post) is not really a western, but it starts quite westerly, in Missouri in 1899, and then shifts to Chicago and becomes a gangster story (if you need to understand fiction in these terms). It's really more about the arrival of the train than the fate of the horse, but I find it interesting that I seem to have subconsciously remembered that horse from the cover above when i drew this silent sequence in Diamond. If I'd been more conscious of it, I'd have made more of the horse no doubt, perhaps going so far as to swipe that perfectly observed leg in the air in the d'Achille painting. But then I'd have been too ashamed to show the original here.



The title of this post comes from a 1937 hit sung by British jazzman Nat Gonella
"Oh, they're tough, mighty tough, in the west,
and their beards are thicker than an eagle's nest.
Their dentists have bad manners
and they pull out teeth with spanners..."

I have for a long time been of the opinion that this song was the inspiration for the British comic strip character Desperate Dan, which started in december of the same year.

" 'Ja think I'm a cowboy?"

The time has come to reveal the cover of my new book, due on sale in June 2007, or five months from now, from First Second Books in New York. Design work is by Charlie Orr , who also did the designs on my Fate of the Artist. Charlie's idea of a theatrical, or showground, facade on the front/back of that cover has been called, by at least one reviewer, the funniest gag in the whole book.


(click to enlarge)

On the back cover I am pretending to be the protagonist of the book, in a photo taken under our house by wee Callum under my direction:



It's the first time I have been photgraphed as a cowboy since, well since this one I suppose:



The title of today's post is of course the very first line uttered by Popeye, on Jan 17 1929. Castor Oyl is walking along the harbour trying to buy a boat to get to Dice Island. He says to Ham Gravy, "You'll find the scum of the earth right here in this port. So we've got to be careful in picking our crew". In panel 2 he calls to someone off-panel, "Hey there, are you a sailor?" and then in panel 3 we see him, the character who will become one of the greatest ever: Popeye.
"''ja think I'm a cowboy?"
"O.K. You're hired."