Q&A: Alec Comicker Eddie Campbell

Eddie Campbell on Alec: "The Years Have Pants"

By Martha Cornog -- Library Journal, 11/05/2009

Award-winning comics artist Eddie Campbell is probably best known for his work on Alan Moore's From Hell. Readers would do well to check out his recently published Alec: "The Years Have Pants," the superb omnibus edition of his autobiographical series (see my complete review in the Nov. 15, 2009, Graphic Novels column).

Campbell, who lives in a suburb of Queensland, Australia, kindly took the time to answer my questions about his beer- and wine-drinking alter ego, as well as blogging and his "Snooter."

MC: I bet a lot of readers of Alec will wish they could fly to Australia and have a beer with you. What’s your favorite brew in the United States?

EC: If they came all the way over here, I’m sure they’d be disappointed as I’m becoming more and more of a curmudgeon as I get older. It takes something like a San Diego Yellowtail Pale Ale to soften me up. Maybe two.

MC: Many of us can empathize with Alec’s beer-soaked younger years, and naming his pet tavern the King Canute was a creative touch. Do people know about this Viking king who is said to have rebuked his flattering courtiers by showing them he had no power over the waves? Or do they ask who King Canute was?

EC: I think I do give readers all they need to know about the historical king as I go along, by which I mean that it doesn’t hamper the reading if they don’t know. But nowadays a colossal amount of obscure information is but a wiki away.

I like a book that sends me looking for stuff, as Michael Chabon recently did with a very casual reference to "Wakefield." Within minutes, I found it was a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I read the whole thing online. It’s about a man who takes a notion to leave his wife without telling her. He lives in a nearby street for ten years, after which he suddenly returns and resumes marital relations. And nothing is explained.

It’s a wonderfully curious little story, and it surprised me because I felt that I had tried to write something similar in "The Fate of the Artist," an autobiographical story in which the author is absent, and his family are interviewed about his disappearance. As for the King Canute [the setting for the first major story in Alec: The Years Have Pants], the real pub it was based on had a very prosaic name shared by many pubs. I felt that mine should be mythologized in some way, like everything else in the book. I like to promote the idea that life is full of wonder, that there is an interesting story in everything we see, and always more to find out.

MC: You’ve taken to blogging up a storm. Do you find it’s a useful break from drawing, or can it pull you away from your inks and paper?

EC: I have come to believe that blogging, for better or worse, is the literature of our times. Actually, that was yesterday. Twittering is the literature of today. God help us. I’m really not sure where it’s all going to end up. I’m not sure how we’re going to "monetize," to use another word of our times, twittering.

MC: Have you ever thought about doing a webcomic?

EC: That seems too artificial to me, like trying to carry a print-appropriate form over into an electronic medium. Blogging seems to me the more spontaneous and natural option, a form truly appropriate to the Internet. It’s less formal, so that you’re not held to a word count or space limitation. For all that I’ve blogged, and all the pictures I’ve included, I’ve used only 21 percent of my fee-space allocation. In print you’re always in a panic about filling space, or having to cut stuff because you’ve overfilled, and if you add pages then you’re adding weight, which demands new freight calculations.

The electronic medium demands new procedures altogether. And twittering definitely expresses the gestalt of our times. We have a 140-character attention span. Looking at my blogging stats yesterday, I was struck by how many visitors couldn’t have stayed long enough to get to the end of my newest post.

MC: Do you take photos for reference for your drawings? Use existing photos? Or sketch from life? Or do you work mostly from memory?

EC: In my autobiographical work, I very rarely use photos, as my subjects are all close to hand in the flesh. Using photos can sap the life out of a drawing. I only use photos when I’m called upon to draw a time and place far away from here and now, as in The Black Diamond Detective Agency, which is set in Chicago in 1899. As with the Victorian London of From Hell, I found that visiting modern Chicago was no help whatsoever for re-creating how it looked more than 100 years ago.

Some books demand more of a scientific investigation to get the details right, and even after all the work, when the book’s published the first thing I’ll notice is some glaring anachronism. It’s like I drew it in invisible ink, and only the printing process can make it perceptible to the naked eye.

MC: The episode on page 481, where Alec and Annie switch clothes, absolutely tickles as well as moves me. It strikes me as a vignette that really captures their marriage. How does your family react to your interpretations of them in the Alec stories?

EC: That’s one of my favorite pages in the book. The idea is a great expression of intimacy, I think, so that even though the characters are shouting at each other, the pictures are telling us a different story. That, of course, is one of the tricks of comics. But it’s the kid dressed as Batman that makes it. By the last panel, nobody is dressed as themselves.

As to how my family reacts, it’s all taken with an air of amusement at the time but later, when they realize how many people are reading this stuff, there are sometimes expressions of horror. They learn to live with it. It’s not like it’s on show in the local news agency, though once one of my wife’s friends found one of my books in the local library. Suddenly, my wife had to deal with the possibility that I might be the well-known author I’ve always been claiming to be. There’s nothing like marriage for keeping one’s feet planted on the ground. But surely she must have wondered where my money was coming from?

MC: Do any of your children draw comics?

EC: No, not yet, but my 17-year-old son, previously the kid in the Batman suit, makes some very funny short movies. I’m hoping he’ll take that further. I’ve just been instructed that I have to buy him an expensive camera.

MC: Your Snooter (one’s inner killjoy) has made its way into my vocabulary, since of course I’ve got one, too—although I never had a name for it before. Do other people tell you about theirs?

EC: No, but I was confident that we all have one. I think psychologists a long time ago identified it as the parental side of our psyche, always trying to keep the child in check. I have given it a face. And it has a long curly proboscis. For getting into stuff, finding out what we’ve been doing that we shouldn’t ought’a been doing.

MC: Alec seems to have a rather pessimistic ending—as if the Snooter had taken him over at last. But there is a bottle of wine in the bag you’re carrying in the photo at the end. Are you going to do more Alec comics?

EC: Yes, a bottle of wine and a celery. When they were doing the photo shoot (for use in originally pitching a TV version of the Snooter that has now been in development for quite some time), they had brought in an assortment of stuff. There was a bunch of flowers, which we tried on the version of the photo you see on the cover flap, and some of the goodies were for the catering table.

But I saw the celery and insisted it had to be in Campbell’s bag with the bottle of wine. It’s over a year later, and I still haven’t worked out what the symbolism of the celery is, but my instincts about these things are usually good, and I am confident that it will occur to me one of these days. Hopefully before I start my next Alec book, which I think is going to be about money. When you’re young, you’re always just trying to have enough to do the things you need to do, but I think I have enough of an overview of life and the world to make some big statements about the awful horrid stuff. In fact, in my notes that’s the working title of the book: Alec: The Awful Horrid Stuff.

MC: Your use of color in The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard is delightful. Do you have other color work planned?

EC: Thank you for saying that. I’ve had a nice little run of full-color painted books between 2004 and 2008 that I’m very pleased with (starting with Batman: The Order of Beasts, and the others that I’ve mentioned above). There’s another in the can, the title of which is The Playwright. This will be out from Top Shelf in 2010. It’s about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man. Actually, he’s not so much celibate as English.

I’ve tried to give each of these books its own palette of colors. The Playwright is very bright and vivid, like the character’s imagination, which is where the sex part happens, though he’s such a neurotic that even there it never quite comes off properly.