I’m most dissatisfied with my review of Eddie Campbell’s The Black Diamond Detective Agency. Somehow I came off 1000% more negative than I had intended and not enthusiastic enough about the book’s many virtues. I’ve noticed that this negativity is a reoccurring trend whenever I mention comics.
But I have profoundly idiosyncratic taste & am not in any way a typical comics reader. I’m not even a typical atypical comics reader. My brain processes comics as a primarily literary form, rather than a visual one. This goes back to the earliest days– I’ve memories of being 8 years old in the mid-80s, in a cottage in Hampton Beach, NH, and reading Peter David’s Ace stories in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man annuals. I couldn’t tell you anything about the artwork, but I remember some of the dialogue.
So for this entry, I’d like to be unremittingly positive, and in that spirit, I direct your attention to this post by the aforementioned Mr. Campbell, celebrating his daughter’s 17th and also reproducing a page from one of the Alec books.
The Alec books are always mentioned in the same breath as early 80s comics– generally this chatter is about the pages that ended up finally collected as The King Canute Crowd, a hugely influential romantic autobiography about being a drunken Scots youth (Glasgow’ll set about ye). But Campbell continued on with the Alec books, and the narrative followed his path from dissolute lad to actual & true comics artist to reasonably-happy domestic in Australia, and I think it’s with that last lot that Campbell achieved something wonderful.
My favorite of the Alec books is How To Be An Artist, but that’s the preference of a person throwing away his life and needing encouragement– in an argument on the bizarro world where I got into arguments with people about Eddie Campbell, I’d claim After the Snooter as the greater achievement. The titular Snooter, if I remember it right, is a sort of bug-headed avatar of Campbell’s anxieties and concerns about aging and hitting middle age. By chronicling the minute particles of his domesticity, Campbell ended up with something even more significant than his initial goal. For he gives us a picture of married life and parenthood being, you know, basically happy and genuinely so.
This is an image rarely encountered in any media. If one thinks of the (now-dead? I haven’t watched tv in years) Family Sitcom, long the last outpost of marriage, the couples are never, ever happy. If they were, where should the jokes come from?
But especially not in comics. We need not go into the depths of superhero marriages, but so much of what used to be called independent comics (what’s it called once you’ve got major publishing outfits behind the stuff?) is crap relationships and bad parenting. What other creators have really gone out of their way to document the day-to-day and show the rest of us it how it can be done? How many people have taken such an incredible delight in their families? (Or had families willing to put up with it?) It’s a sad state of affairs when it’s almost revolutionary to show people being happy.
There’s something subtle and wonderful about the book, and I do think it’s one of the great achievements in comics, because Campbell, as ever, is a master of the written word and the visual form. My basic rule of thumb about what makes a Good Comic Great is: could this easily translate into another medium, or is it so ineluctably of the pen and paper that it’s only conceivable as it is?
Need I even answer my own rhetorical question?
All of the Alec books are still available from Top Shelf. As they were issued under Campbell’s now defunct self-publishing imprint, I assume there will be a time when they will go out of print. So buy them now.
P.S. I pledge not to mention Eddie Campbell again at least until August.
