Month: February 2023

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Form and Content, Again

For the longest time, I was saddened that the mammoth Alec: The Years Have Pants omnibus didn’t include Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of The Artist in addition to all of his other autobiographical work; it’s not as if the book — which runs over 600 pages as-is — is too short without it, or that it wasn’t included out of a fit of pique that I disagreed with; I just felt as if there was a hole in the book left by it’s absence, even if there were complicated publishing deal reasons for it. (Short version: Campbell didn’t own it outright, as it was still under his First Second deal at the time The Years Have Pants was released.)

After having just finished an accidental re-read of Campbell’s autobio work, including The Fate of The Artist, though, I now feel that it’s a good thing it’s not in there. I don’t say that because I’ve changed my mind and now dislike the book; if anything, my empathy and understanding of what Campbell’s doing with his later period autobiographical material has only increased as I’ve gotten older and built a family unit around myself. Instead, I’m glad it’s not in there because The Fate of The Artist isn’t really an Alec strip in any appreciable form.

Even though Campbell dropped his pseudonym of Alec McGarry midway through the earlier After The Snooter, there’s a visual and textual language to the Alec stories that is all their own: they’re drawn in black and white, with a purposefully scratchy, unfinished line, and in a nine panel grid, with a wry, yet kind, omniscient narrator who is clearly Campbell, but sometimes pretending not to be, telling the story in captions that hover outside and above the images. As much as there’s a “feel” to the Alec work, there’s a look to it, as well.

The Fate of The Artist has none of that, by design; it’s a more removed investigation into Campbell’s life at the time and his obsessions and his relationships that is intended to be more clinical and removed, though no less wry — this is Campbell after all — and, importantly, it’s not necessarily a comic, per se. It switches between prose and comics, and fumetti, and fake-found-material, and more. It is, in the truest sense, a graphic novel… yet, at the same time, it’s very much separate from what Campbell did with the Alec material even if the subject matter is shared between them.

Re-reading all of this now, I realize that I failed to see the importance of the differing approaches and formats earlier, or credit the differing intents between projects. I was blinded by the completist impulse of, “but it’s by the same guy and about the same thing!” as opposed to, you know, actually paying attention to what was on the page in front of me. Alec: The Years Have Pants is, in fact, the complete Alec cycle, just as was intended, and remains as perfect a collection of comics as can be imagined. The Fate of The Artist is something else, and a wonderful something else, entirely.

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Cogno, Redux

Not unrelated to the recent thoughts I’ve had about art school friends and the work we were all producing back then, I’ve been toying with the idea of finally unpacking — literally — the scraps of work I produced during those ancient, halcyon days and putting it some of it up here.

I mean, I’ve been toying with it in a more relaxed, laid back manner for years at this point — I might even have teased doing it once or twice, for that matter — but there’s always been the problem of, to be blunt, my laziness when it comes to actually unpacking the various boxes it still exists in (well, what little of it still exists) and then scanning it all in or photographing it, or whatever would be necessary to making it all happen. It always sounds like a good idea in theory, and then the practical elements come in to spoil the party.

Yet, here I am again, thinking that this might be the year and this might be the time. I blame a couple of influences in this regard: re-reading Eddie Campbell’s Alec: How to Be an Artist, which excels in making self-mythologizing appealing — not to mention, attempting to create a quasi-accurate accounting for your own past in the process — but also re-reading an issue of Kevin Huizenga’s Or Else in which ended the series by advertising a number of future issues that would never happen.

That last one made me imagine writing new installments of the work I wrote and drew for the university newspaper when I was a student, as if I’d continued to do it across the past 27 years or however long it’s actually been since I stopped. (I didn’t want to do it for the final year of my undergraduate program, so… since mid-1996, I guess…?) But in order to do that, I feel like I’d have to share some of the original pieces, so…?

Again, maybe this won’t happen, yet again. Maybe I’ll search all of this stuff out, take a look and then feel so embarrassed it stays locked in my budget version of the Disney Vault. Or, just maybe… maybe this is the year to put all that back out into the world after all. We’ll see.

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One Man’s Treasure, And Other Stories

One of the things about re-buying things I owned years ago is the realization that so many of them have become genuinely expensive, rare, and treasured items in the intervening decades. Across the past few months, there have been times when I’ve gotten the idea to try and track down one particular weird thing — an issue of a comic series, say, or one specific edition of one specific book — only to find it online and think to myself, sure, I want to have it again, but there’s no way I’m going to spend that much money on that piece of pop culture trash.

It’s the flip side of whatever nostalgia wave I’m surfing, I guess; the slow acceptance that these various totems that I’ve been collecting for God knows what reason (besides, I mean, just wanting to re-read or re-hear certain things; that’s certainly part of it, if far from all of it) have value to other people as well, and seemingly more value than I’m willing to agree to. I made the reference to how much a Green Lantern comic cost the other day, but it wasn’t really a joke as much as my sincere befuddlement at the idea that people are apparently paying that much money for that particular comic.

In many cases, these are things I intentionally or unintentionally devalued in the past; I think of my teenage bedroom, a mess of comics and books and cassettes and CDs on the floor, me treating none of it with the reverence of today’s collectors. Of course, at that time it wasn’t decades old, and still easily available; I was disposable trash culture. That might be the reason for my current confusion: this stuff remains disposable trash culture for me still, purely because I lived through it. I was there, man, or whatever.

It’s 2023; it’s, what, 33 years since They Might Be Giants released Flood…? If you go back 33 years from that, you hit 1957. Imagine how arcane, how prehistoric that era felt to you back in the day. Imagine being upset that people were selling 1957’s pop culture for collector prices.

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At Sea

I’ve started waking up close to 6am every day — just before, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so — with a dull sense of consciousness nagging at me, preventing me from falling back asleep. There’s no other way to describe it; it’s a different flavor of waking up than mid-night awakening, when it’s easy to slip back under the metaphorical blanket of sleep without a care even after getting up to piss or whatever. At 6 or thereabouts, something in the back of my head whispers, you don’t really want to sleep again. I know you think you do, but I know better and you, my friend, are wrong.

And so, I lie there as the rest of my mind washes up on shore, systems slowly booting up for the rest of the day. I’d like to say that I’m being thoughtful and mindful during this entire time, but that’s not really the case; usually, my conscious mind is in a daze, still, stuttering and fluttering around trying to get started while I look out the window at the marvelous, terrifying silhouette of the overgrown tree directly outside against whatever kind of sky is happening that particular morning. I’m not thinking thinking, not yet; that happens later.

As all of this happens (slowly, it feeds like, although my perspective might be off in that regard), the rest of my body starts to check in: my belly, my bladder, my shoulders, the whole aching, aging shebang. I can tell how hard I slept from whether or not my ear hurts from pushing my head into the pillow all night when I was out, or if I was twisted around to the point where my back hurts. As I’m lying there, wondering what makes this my silent wake up call time each day, my body chimes in as if to say, hey, sleep wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be either.

Sometimes, I stop to think about how easily I used to wake up, how instantaneously it appeared to happen. Othertimes, I marvel at the fact that we make it through the process every single day.

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Wherever I Lay My Phone

With Chloe having been traveling so often recently, I’ve taken to carrying my phone around with me in case she sends a message. It’s been a singularly strange experience for me, in part because the strangeness for me is something that’s so absolutely, resolutely normal for everyone else.

I don’t, usually, keep my phone with me. It’s not a habit I’ve had for some years now — going back at least a decade, if not more. The idea of carrying my phone around isn’t something that occurs to me without having a reason to do so: that I’m waiting for a message or a call, or that I’m listening to music (for years, my phone was basically a device for listening to music that could also do other things if it really had to, I guess far more than it was, you know, a an object to use to communicate with others), or that, I don’t know: I want to take photos of something for some particular reason. It’s not been something I’ve just had with me at all times; why would I want something like that?

So: the very act of carrying my phone around has in itself been unusual, and something that I’m very aware of, when it’s happening. I can feel its weight when it’s in my pocket; I can feel the impulse to just pick it out and start playing with it, killing time on it by scrolling through screens or asking it random questions, or something, anything, because it’s there and I feel like it has to be there for a purpose or else, what’s the point?

(I spend all day looking at the internet, asking random questions; one of the reasons I don’t carry my phone around with me otherwise is to exist away from the internet.)

The curious thing — as welcome as it is — is that it doesn’t feel any more natural, any less alien, to be carrying around my phone when it happens, not even after so many opportunities in the past few months. I feel as if something should be normalizing about it, but that’s not the case. Maybe I’m simply phonephobic in some way, destined to not want to have it around all the time. Maybe I’m just not a phone guy.

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Only A Fool Would Take The Chance To Stay The Same

I was thinking the other day about the fact that so many of the people I went to art school with 25 years ago are still producing work that is, if not the same as, then at least on a par with, what they were doing in their final degree show. I see friends post their work on social media and I recognize everything about it — not in a bad way, per se, but it’s very much of what they were doing way back when.

At first, when thinking about this, I had a moment of… jealousy, perhaps? A sense of, “Oh, they found their voice early on, and that’s never been true for me.” I think back to the work I was doing in art school, and all I can really remember is how derivative so much of it was; I can think of the bits I was lifting from Dave McKean, the bits I was lifting from Kent Williams, the bits I was lifting from whoever. (Really, I was pulling left, right, and center from the various comics I was reading at the time; I was shameless, but because my teachers weren’t familiar with the source material, they never called me on it, as much as they should have.)

I was swiping so much because I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted to say; I think that’s why I felt this feeling of envy when looking at friends’ work decades later and seeing the through line from then till now. I have this moment of, I wish I’d had that certainty of who I was way back when, as if that would have changed everything for me in some cosmic, inexplicable manner.

Of course, as I said, that was my reaction when all of this first occurred to me, and I thought to myself, oh, I should write about this on the site. Then, today, I opened up this window and thought about it again, only to switch my opinions on it almost entirely. Imagine not really finding a new aesthetic, a new thing in all that time? I might not have known who I was when I was 23, but that’s probably been all for the good in the years since; if I had, would I have ended up where I am, with the career and friends and relationship I have?

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Don’t Bore Us, Get To The

I tweeted a variation on this the other week, but I’ve become increasingly depressed about the lack of comic outlets outside of comics these days.

The thought initially occurred while reading Alec: How to Be an Artist, which makes a point of showing how important a weekly strip in the music papers was to Eddie Campbell and his peers when trying to get started as creators in the UK in the 1980s. The same thing was true of Campbell’s collaborator-to-be, Alan Moore; without his strip in Sounds, the world would likely have never gotten his work in Warrior, which arguably led to everything he did in his career from the mid 1980s forwards.

Unless I’m entirely misremembering, Rian Hughes had a short stint in one of the music papers in the ’80s, too. Certainly, Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy had a weekly strip in a newspaper, as did the Pleece brothers (Warren and Gary, for those who remember the latter). The mere mention of comics in newspapers conjures up thoughts of Will Eisner and The Spirit, 80-odd years ago now when it started, another touchstone in my personal history of comics.

What all of these comics and creators had/have in common is that their work didn’t just reflect or try to fit into an existing idea of success, but instead strove to be both original and, perhaps even more importantly, entertaining to an audience outside of the mainstream. More than any pre-determined notion of craft or formal, practical skills in terms of writing or illustration, I feel that working on a regular basis outside of the comics industry creates an awareness of, and hunger for, what a broad audience is looking for outside of the Direct Market standard, or whatever it being promoted by bookstore buyers that particular season.

It exposed creators to a mass media audience, and asked them to make something that anyone would find enjoyable. In a way, it made comics — the medium, not the business — into pop, which is arguably something that more creators in today’s industry should go through. If only.

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Everything We Know And Less

For better or worse — spoilers, it’s worse — I’m still thinking of Infinity Pool days after seeing it. It’s not necessarily a movie that I was looking forward to, per se; I’m unfamiliar with Brandon Cronenberg’s work to date, but my quasi-crush on Mia Goth after the double-header of X and Pearl last year had me curious, and the trailer had enough in it that I was more than ready to head to the theater when it arrived, especially as it also meant a chance for a date with Chloe, who was far more into Cronenberg, Goth, and the trailer, as well as the movie itself.

Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be… hollow might be the best way to describe it. So many of the ingredients are there — it looks good, and the sound mixing and design and music are shockingly good, carrying multiple scenes all by themselves — but there’s nothing new or interesting being said by the movie, despite a palpable smugness to the contrary. It’s the cinematic equivalent to talking to someone so convinced not only if their moral superiority, but also that their intellectual superiority, even as they’re making the most boring and meaningless statements possible.

For example: did you know that rich people are monsters that dehumanize others? Did you know that, when people go on vacation, they do things that they never would in their everyday lives? Did you, though? There’s a science fiction gimmick at the heart of Infinity Pool that unlocks the potential for existential dread, but it’s only ever clumsily used, and never explored, as if the mere hint is somehow enough in and of itself; it’s not, and the lack of that exploration feels like a signifier of the movie’s disinterest in anything other than itself.

It’s not even that I disliked the movie; there’s not enough there even for that. Instead, I just… was disappointed by it, and saddened that, given the potential for anything that lived up to its own self-belief in its transgressive qualities, my main takeaway from the whole thing was my unhappiness at Mia Goth’s real accent finally being on display.