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

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.