It's not a graphic novel, Percy.

Another reason I wanted to start a blog is that I've noticed i often tend to be misrepresented around the Internet, and If I put my actual words here then people can just link instead of trying to paraphrase. For instance, there's a guy here saying : "William Hogarth...early work that bears similarities of form, although Eddie Campbell has argued that these may be more a collection of cartoons rather than actual comics. " No, what I said is : ARGUING ABOUT LABELS IS A PAIN IN THE ARSE. (and anyway, both comics and cartoons are anachronistic terms in relation to the satirical prints of William Hogarth). There's a review of my Fate of the Artist by a fellow with impeccable taste (he likes PG Wodehouse) which begins "Not a graphic novel per se...". (Actually, I don't mind this because it fits with an idea I want to get around to in a few days. Tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow.) But it's remarkable that there is somebody who knows what a graphic novel is. I just wrote a sidebar for an article in World Literature Today explaining that the term is used in four mutually exclusive ways. So anybody who knows for a fact what it is... is doing better than me.back
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First person to ask for it in the comments can have that little Campbell drawing signed (I've only just noticed it's unsigned but I'm not rescanning it) and sent to them. If you don't want to leave a street address, give some way of opening email contact. When "It's not a graphic novel, Percy" becomes the catchphrase on everybody's lips and t-shirts over the next few months you can say you have the little sketch that started it all.
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When I give a reason above for blogging, I naturally understand that there are much bigger forces at work that subject little folk such as me to 'the nihilist impulse'. Breach has just drawn my attention to Geert Lovink's interpretation of the blogosphere: "Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. That’s the nihilist moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before." I can go for this. I've always believed in a kind of nihilism as a postive thing, the throwing away of the crutches, of naive credulity.
nothing works.
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In last night's comments Lucy tells us we can still find most of the old Eddie Campbell Comics webpages at the Wayback Machine. Thanks for the help. I printed them out from the start, which is not much use to anybody else, and I'm not sure this goes all the way back to the beginning. It definitely doesn't go further than April 11 2003. After that, somebody else nabbed it. Happy rummaging