As I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, I have a long and abiding love of the autobiographical work of Mr. Eddie Campbell– a man perhaps forever followed by “the artist best known, along with writer Alan Moore, for creating From Hell.” I’ve nothing but admiration for From Hell, but by virtue of its subject and co-creator, the murder book inevitably overshadows Campbell’s achievements with his autobiographical works, which are massive.
Of the four so-called Alec books, my dead on favorite is How To Be An Artist. It’s not simply my favorite work by Campbell, but my favorite work in comics, period. As this is a wildly idiosyncratic choice in many ways symbolic of the Ideal, I decided that it was time to once more crack the old bastard open.
Told across 14 chapters, How To Be An Artist is expansive and messy– in its 128 pages, it’s partly a history of Campbell-as-Alec’s life and early professional career, partly an examination of Art with the capital A, partly an exploration of what it means to be an artist, and partly a history of comics in the 80s and the Rise and Fall of the First Wave of the Graphic Novel. Every page bursts with ideas, visual and verbal.
I chose this page because it demonstrates several of Campbell’s techniques. Most apparent is the 9-panel grid giving the illusion of Sequential Narrative. Certainly, Artist has sequential moments, but it’s better understood as a series of one-off panels on an overarching theme. Occasionally, as in the first tier, these panels will be narratively interrelated, but often as not they’ll be meditations on a central idea occupying either the book, the chapter, or perhaps just the page.
Tying the panels together is the hand-lettered narrative. Several things here are remarkable. It’s in the second person, which is difficult enough, but it’s also present tense. This device is one of the hardest things for a writer in any field, let alone on pages dominated by drawings. Campbell never loses the surety of his voice.
Interestingly, there are some pages where Campbell drifts near a Stan Lee level of word count per page, but because there’s no attempt to have a cohesion amongst the individual drawings, a really wordy chunk can be put with something that’s almost a sketch. The key is flexibility, where the final impact is a balance measured against itself and its page. We also see several examples of Campbell’s sampling & collage. Being a history of comics and art, Campbell gleefully throws in work from his various friends and forbearers. Again, what impresses is the flexibility of his page and the ability of the so-called medium of comics to incorporate anything.
For the record, this is the only time in the history of comics that an artist living in Thatcher’s Britain is happy. Just saying.
Fuck, this page is awesome. Beginning with a pleasant enough drawing of the Artist intoxicated on the apparent success of the ’80s graphic novel boom, Campbell quickly moves to the bastard sons of achievement: gossip and jealousy. In this case, the rumor is that beardo Alan Moore has bought his mother a house with his big 1980s American dollars– Campbell then establishes that, in truth, Moore bought his mother a greenhouse. For her plants. The greenhouse is then employed as a literary and visual metaphor for a very universal condition of envying another person’s success.
Tier three is where the whole thing becomes a masterpiece. The previous set of ideas are enough for another person’s entire book, but Campbell then gets all Socratic and riffs in the final three panels on an idea that’s not only funny, but also deadly true. I distinctly remember reading this page in 2003 and feeling like I was encounter a glimpse of a great insight: other people’s successes have nothing to do with your own, nor your failures.
So much of our culture, especially amongst folks inclined towards the arts, involves hating other people for their success. But, really, why? What’s the point? This isn’t to say that one can’t call The Dark Knight Returns a shit book, or that one shouldn’t wonder if Frank Miller is not one of our leading intellectual lights, but there’s a huge difference between disliking an artist, or an artist’s work, and resenting them for their success.
Now, with all that Ayn Randian blather out and done, draw your attention back to that third tier: it’s nothing but a bunch of very loose sketches, almost stick figures, beneath about 100 words. Dudes like Joe Quesada will go on and on about how comics can do things that no other form can– like show a jackass in tights lifting a car while eating prunes– and that I won’t deny, but these three panels demonstrate exactly what separates comics from every other form of expression.
Basically, you can’t do that anywhere but here.
