eddie campbell's 'the fate of the artist': yay? nay?

hardcover's legitimate Vic.

ANYWAY, how about that Fate Of The Artist eh?

is there another eddie campbell thread or is this it, like?

The Fate Of The Artist is interesting in this regard, because it pushes both of the aforementioned strengths to new limits, leaving out any sort of immediately flowing continuity in the process. I mean, both the Alec books and After the Snooter have this very personal “having a story told to you by an entertaining mate” quality that is all but absent from his latest work, and that’s important here… Campbell’s both developing his existing storytelling techniques and also trying out a few new things (more on this later).

The individual components of The Fate Of The Artist are so disparate that it does feel quite slight and tongue in cheek at first. But then you realise that all of the clashes and connections between the various forms and levels of reality convey this very strong sense of disassociation and worthlessness. That’s what constitutes the Eddie Campbell shaped hole at the heart of the book. Taken in this light, I think the form of the comic is actually quite brilliant: it perfectly depicts this mindset while also playfully mocking it, making the work richer and more nuanced in the process. Or at least, that’s how it feels to me.

A few more thoughts:

--The Fate Of The Artist is almost a negative image of the Pottersville section in It’s A Wonderful Life. In Capra’s movie, we see the world without George, and it’s hellish (okay—the “She’s a librarian? NOOO!” stuff comes off a bit silly, but whatever). Campbell, on the other hand, writes himself out of the picture, and everyone’s taking the piss out of him and commenting on how much of an arse he was. Like I said before, I think this is a tonal device intended to make sure that the whininess of Campbell’s mental state doesn’t annoy us too much, but it probably makes the book even bleaker in the end.

--That Capra comparison doesn’t match up 100% because Campbell doesn’t imagine what it would’ve been like if his life never was, but I think that’s an key part of what’s going on here. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey sees life without him in it and thus realises his importance to the fictional world he inhabits. This is every bit as egomaniacal as the picture we get in The Fate Of The Artist, where the denizens of Campbell’s fictional universe (as well as the comic strips that exist in it) directly or indirectly, mock, undercut and complain about him in his absence. His worthlessness is proportional to George Bailey’s worth in their respective stories.

--When I talked about how Campbell was playing with storytelling tricks old and new, I was thinking about the influence of Ice Haven, In The Shadow Of No Towers and various bits and bobs by Chris Ware on The Fate Of The Artist. These comics all use old-fashioned comics strips and other visual distinctions for different purposes, but they do very much “use” them, if you know what I mean. In the hands of Clowes, Ware and Speigleman, different styles are adopted and combined to create very distinct emotional and artistic effects; something that Campbell is definitely trying to do in his new book, with its cheeky detective story, typographical intrusions, artistic histories, comic strip depictions of marital dysfunction, etc.

--At the same time, you can trace a lot of the different elements at work in The Fate Of The Artist to Campbell’s previous work. The smoother toning of the artwork relates to both his aborted History of Humour and to the collaborations with Alan Moore collected in A Disease Of Language; the use of “actors” in some of the comic strips can be seen as an extension of the Alec pseudonym/persona; the artistic histories that pepper The Fate Of The Artist are prefigured in the subject matter of both the History of Humour and How To Be An Artist; the use of disparate visual elements to convey something about a theme/life can be traced back once more to his comic strips derived from Alan Moore’s spoken word performances, and so on.

--It’s also worth noting that Campbell still works the interplay between words and pictures like no one else. There are lots of very visual moments in The Fate Of the Artist (see the bit where the artist gets washed up on shore—wowza!), but when Campbell wants to he can make the prose narrative drive a page, with the visuals bouncing off of it, commenting on it and illuminating it as it goes on. He’s almost the anti Harvey Pekar in this regard: lots of American Splendor stories seem really static to me, with huge screeds of Pekar’s text covering up some very uninvolved visuals. Partly because Pekar’s a writer rather than a cartoonist, and partly because Campbell’s just a really fucking good cartoonist, the difference in the way these two autobiographical cartoonists integrate text into their stories seems really, really huge!

--The key scene in After The Snooter, for me, was the one with the young Eddie Campbell piecing together the adventures of various Marvel characters in a disordered, issue-by-by issue fashion. That whole book felt like the older Eddie Campbell’s attempt to do so with his whole life. He was arranging the various episodes, dropping the Alec persona, wrestling with mid life problems, etc, and it made for good, full-bodied reading. The Fate Of The Artist stands as a fine contrast top this—Campbell disembodies himself in it, and it’s both way sillier and quite a bit darker for it.

--And yeah, Campbell’s funny, in an very wry and silly way. The yuks in his books are surprisingly old-fashioned, and its true that his comics make you chuckle inwardly more than laugh out loud, but I love ‘em all the same!

Yeesh, somebody shut me up already! Take the microphone away before I return to ramble again!

the football bit in after the snooter is the key one for me, tho i don't like football: the sudden cut from how these things matter as a child to the very different way they matter as a plausible adult ... good call on the relation of his structures to the notion of trying to track down the marvel comics, tho.

more to say once i reread it, maybe. i don't think it's really 'dark', at least not once the third possible ending is in place. i guess the other two are kind of dark; also i didn't realise 'evans' was in after the snooter, too, i.e. someone we'd seen before: which makes that potential ending make a lot more sense.

That "confessions a humorist" story though--it's optimistic and very cheery, but there's still a slight downer to it. It does, after all, suggest that in order to get past his problems Campbell would have to give up art, or at least autobiography, which is... an odd but maybe fitting ending for a book by someone who has so thoroughly fictionalised their life.

There's a bit in How To Be An Artist where some boring guy asks Campbell what he'll do when his art catches up with his life--is this book Campbell's attempt to deal with the literal fulfilment of this idea?

It took me a while to realise that we'd seen Evans before too, by the way, and you're right--this realisation does give that element of the book a bit more shape.

campbell's old-fashioned sense of humour is kind of appealing, tho i didn't actually find anything in the first part of "the history of humour" funny (never managed to find #2 of egomania.) i wonder if i) he'll ever get back to that and ii) whether that'll be before i enter post-grad ed., bcz i plan to do a dissertation on that topic.. i can't tell whether the old cartoons are meant to be funny, or actually quite scary stuff forced into strip-cartoon joke form, or a mix of the two.

hadn't noticed how many parallels the two parts had on the first reading - karl schutz's engraving and tad dorgan's cartoon - 'the screamer' showing up in 'honeybee' - the murder scene replayed in honeybee, also - the first half's alluding to the "eddie campbell sticking out of god's ear" scene... its very dense for something that might or might not be slight. i dunno, i guess that accusation really only applies to the bits about "the fate of the artist" in the other sense, rather than the detective-mystery sense. which are fascinating when stuff i don't know about (ike and mike, greek sculpture) and rather less so when stuff i already know (leni riefenstahl.)

Does this follow on from the "confessions" story, or is it working on a separate level?

Before the story starts there's a picture of an artist (I don't have my copy to hand and have had a few too many drinks tonight to say exactly who) lying down, having killed himself and torn up copies of his works. This image is mirrored by the picture of Campbell (or maybe his stand in) lying in bed at the start of the narrative. My questions is, do these bookend images work as benchmarks for the progression of the work from point A to point B, or are they there as just more ironic window dressing? If the former is the case, then it does make the work a bit cheerier on the whole, and if not, well, that doesn’t really make it much bleaker than I already thought it was.

The Honeybee strips constantly straddle the dark/silly divide. In fact, they’re probably the best example of what I find the tone of the work to be. Tom’s right to be confused as to what they’re supposed to do (if it is in fact them he’s referring to in his post, I think. To me, they come across as creaky, amusing and slightly deranged all at once.

Tom’s also got me wanting to re-read After The Snooter again, for the football stuff. I remember liking that section (I like the whole damned book, really), but it’s a bit fuzzy in my head so I’m gonna look over it and see how it strikes me now.

I was interested to see where Campbell was going with his History Of Humour, but neither of the serialised parts quite clicked with me. They were odd and periodically compelling, but I wasn't really sure what the overall point of the exercise was going to be, beyond the literal level.

Campbell's since said that the History Of Humour was eventually going to cover some of the same ground that The Fate Of The Artist covers, so I think he’s considering it a dead end right now, though I’m not 100% on this.

At the moment I’m thinking that The Fate Of the Artist’s weirdly interconnected mix of silly bits and bobs probably is probably more effective as a depiction of a muddled mindset than the History of Humour would’ve been. Even the less exciting bits of Fate do more for me than the anything in the first few chapters of the History, but who knows how that one would’ve worked out in the long run.

Evans is also the aesthete cellmate that gets raped and slaughtered in Banged Up, and one of the club members in Order Of The Beasts* (Mr White from the repertory company also appears as the Constantine in the latter). He spat the dummy and refused to be killed again on the second Comics Journal cover, which is why he's lurking at the bar and Campbell's the corpse.


*this is probably mentioned in Fate, I can't remember

Because I'm thick, like.

One difference between this approach in the two books, though, is that he's a lot more comfortable, by Snooter, with the world in his head being what he's largely interested in. The young man of Canute is somewhat awed by the social facility of the slightly older group he's observing, and deliberately sets out to romanticise them in his writing because of this. The middle-aged father of Snooter has been out of the factory for almost twenty years, and has been making actual money for making up stuff or thinking about himself for about a decade - but he's also just grown into himself and come to amiable terms with his own self-fascination. The observed world in Canute is something he sort of admires and wants to be part of but is a bit afraid of, but the observed world in Snooter is either just what happens around him, or what he's specifically created.

The piece about needing a new "gang" is explicit about this - "what do I like? Me, and comics - I'll make friends with all the people who write to my comic!", as is the set-up of "Running A Publishing House Out Of The Front Room" - but apart from those people all becoming the cast of characters for many of the strips [though many of them had also played roles in Bacchus over the previous few years], it's also implicit in so much of the book being about the joy he takes in his family. Here is the house my work got me. Here is my wife whom I adore. Here are the kids wot I made. Aren't they great? So I don't see him even looking at Australian culture so much (what even is there in Snooter? the Arthur Stace precis? mmaybe, that's on a similar level to the Italy and Lifey anecdotes but what else? here I am at the pub, here I am buying a car...I'll have to flip through tonight) as looking at his culture that he's built around him.

(Though if you're only talking about shearers drinking beer "if one do me no harm" and actresses bathing in champagne, not Snooter at all, fair enough!)

Thesis writers of the future may want to see if they feel like drawing correlations between the tantrumic withdrawal of "I Have Lost My Sense Of Humour" that sets up the opening of Fate Of The Artist, and said culture dissolving from its own component motivations (people having kids and settling into domesticity, people moving to Tasmania, the Campbell kids growing out of the on-paper roles he'd created for them...).

(from 'how to be an artist'!)

Being thoroughly infatuated with the autobio work, I'm inclined to ask:

THE BACCHUS STUFF ANY GOOD (INCLUDING HIS WORKS IN A SIMILAR MODE)?

I'm gonna give 'em a read anyway (natch!) but it's worth pondering, cuz no one really gives them a mention.

YES! THEY ARE TERRIF!

OKEY DOKEY, SEZ I.

I like the Bacchus/Eyeball Kid stuff better than his autobio stuff.

Probably worth waiting for the Compleat Bacchus in 2010ish at this point. Either that or grab Doing The Islands, if you can find it - that's a good transition from the autobio material.