An Interview with Eddie Campbell

This interview was conducted on 23rd April at the Supanova Pop Culture Convention in Brisbane.

As we’re trying to find some place to sit and conduct the interview Eddie Campbell laments about the current state of comic book conventions,
“You’re not into all this manga and anime rubbish are you?”
The way he asks the question gives me the distinct impression that my answer could determine the outcome of the interview before it even begins.
“Some of the more mature stuff, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, but not this Yu-Gi-Oh bullshit that’s been big for the last few years,” I say, and he seems content.
What follows is an interview with one of the industry’s true gentlemen; he’s intelligent, friendly and good-humoured.
In typically-Wastrel style, the Dictaphone refused to cooperate, so bear in mind that any inconsistencies are completely the fault of the note-taker, and not the well-spoken interviewee.

An Interview with Eddie Campbell

WM: We’ve read some rumours about your “retirement”, is this mere exaggeration and what, if anything, do these rumours have to do with the closure of Eddie Campbell Comics?

EC: Retirement? No, no, no. Everything since the closing of Eddie Campbell Comics has just been sideways motion, not retirement. I was missing too many steps as a self-publisher. I ended up being owed US$50,000 by an American distributor; a publisher who’s more on the ball would’ve seen that coming. So, I withdrew from the publishing industry game. I suppose I was also experiencing something of a mental meltdown. After the From Hell movie I found that people I used to go to high school with were finding my website. I had to kill the web page, well, I didn’t really kill it, I just sort of didn’t pay the ISP. It was a shame because it really was beautifully designed by Chris Breach.

WM: You can still actually access the site through archives.

EC: Really?

(Quasi-tech ‘net talk where WM vaguely explains how one would access web archives)

EC: I actually really enjoyed the ‘Thought for the Day’ which I managed to do twice a month or so. A lot of people would also send in daft questions and the Letters section of the mag had a very jocular feel. We even used to make up some letters just for a laugh. I enjoyed doing the website, writing the essays and all of that, but you look back and say: ‘How did I have time to do all that?’ I wasted years of my life working in factories or offices where everything is cyclical. I used to work in a factory for five years cutting sheetmetal, where every day, everything was the same. Creating something original is the real reward one finds in this pursuit. We should be formulating a society where work, leisure and reward are not separate things. We should attempt to create a life for ourselves where the work itself is the reward.

WM: I’ve read a quote to the effect that you don’t have time to be ‘creative’…is this something to do with a philosophy about the relative merits of Artisans V. Artists?

EC: Heh, everything I draw is a job; I’m working at a job, getting a job done. I look at some young guys sketchbooks and am amazed to see them drawing in their spare time. . I just never have any spare time. Now as for this business of art and artisans, I think we wrongly separate these things in this modern day. Art’s everywhere. It’s in the way we represent ourselves in our clothes and buildings and furniture, and art is all wound up in this, not separate from it. The idea of gallery art is obsolete. What the ‘art world’ tells us is art is a hoax to perpetuate this business which they have to keep feeding.

WM: The Birth Caul saw your style evolve into something very different from your previous work, you used a lot of mixed media, a lot of collage…has this continued to be a trend in your work of late?

EC: Yeh, that was certainly an evolutionary step for me, getting away from pen and ink. I did a forty eight page Batman book, but that too was an interesting step because it was my first chance to do a book in full painted colour. It’s got these English, upper crust gentlemen who have secret meetings where they dress in animal costumes and call each other Mr Horse and Mr Frog as though they were characters from The Wind in the Willows. I would never have done the grotesque, brutish version Batman that’s around today, God I hate that. And I have enough of a standing in the industry that they let me do it the way I saw fit. I’ve just finished painting an autobiographical book which is what I would like to be remembered for: The Fate of the Artist.

WM: ‘The Last Word in Postmodernism’?

EC: (Laughs) Yes, ‘The Last Word in Postmodernism’. It’s an autobiography in which the author does not ever appear; where I’m required to show my face my part is played by an actor. As the story evolves the actor develops his own personality, though to an extent he is still me. He fights with my wife and she hits him on the head with a tumbler at the dinner table, just like she did to me, and then she has to take him down to the hospital, just like she did with me.

A theme I’m kind of working on in the book is that artists all end up miserable, it’s hard to find one whose life ended happily. This is the beginning of the book:

One day the artist wakes with the disquieting feeling that it’s all gone wrong. The man in the street supposes the problem to be something called ‘writer’s block.’ But what in fact has happened is that the artist has come to find that he despises his art, his self, and his readers. It is difficult to obtain sympathy for this condition.

That’s my opening gambit, we’ll see if it pays off.
I’m writing it for a new line of Graphic Novels called The First Second. The first second, not the first minute. Anyway, I feel this is a good move, because I feel I need to move out of this comic book environment that’s currently being choked by manga and anime; I need to go somewhere else.

WM: What kind of space do you envision your work comfortably occupying?
I remember reading of an odd experience you had with seeing From Hell in a catalogue…

EC: Yes, Nestled in between The Natural Guide to Better Breast Feeding and The Dog Owners Manual. That was in the Random House catalogue.

WM: Something about comics gaining a true acceptance… (Can’t quite remember how I worded it, drunk…)?

EC: I don’t know, we’ve wrestled this one for a while now, since Spieglemen and Maus. And um, we get taken seriously for about five minutes and we’re forgotten again.

WM: Every year I swear I see an article in a newspaper that says ‘Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.’

EC: They’ve been saying it for twenty years. They’ll use the examples of Will Eisner inventing the graphic novel, right down to the Sin City movie, or whatever is the latest thing at the time. I don’t know how we can change that.
In the new book I’m trying to experiment with a variety of typographical techniques… These Graphic Novels, big thick things like From Hell, they look like it’s going to be a long haul to read it all… I want to try setting things out so that it leads the readers eye; so that he’s read half of it before he even realises it’s a graphic novel.
The subtitle to Fate of the Artist is; ‘A novel with typographical anomalies.’

But having settled this book – selling this book – to First Second, I’m doing another book for them, adapting a screenplay for Bill Horberg, who was the producer on The Talented Mr Ripley and Sliding Doors, amongst other things that everyone has heard of. It’s an original screenplay with no book preceding it, so I guess they’re going to fabricate one. The book will be written and drawn by Eddie Campbell, adapted from a screenplay by C. Gaby Mitchell.
I did the first page, but then I tore it up. I’ve done it a couple of times but I’m still not completely… I’d still rather be doing this than a superhero book. It’s another period thing, set in the 1890s, so I can use a lot of so I’m back in my From Hell references territory. It’s full painted colour, another step forward for me; this is why I have to get the first page just right and make it visually memorable.

WM: Can you tell us the story of what happened with Australian Customs and From Hell?

EC: Uh – right, the book was banned in 2002, I think, before the movie… The book was banned because one of the original parts, the chapter of Marie Kelley getting cut up, was banned, and because it had the same name it shared the same fate. I argued that the complete book put that chapter in a different context, so it should be alright, but it was impossible to get an answer out of anyone. Different offices would pass responsibility to other offices; customs would say the ruling was up to the OFLC –Office of Film and Literature Classification – but the OFLC would say that they just give advice, and it was up to Customs how they wanted to use that advice. It just went back and forth like that with no one willing to claim responsibility for the decision.

WM: Classic bureaucracy.

EC: Very bureaucratic …but I was able to find a loophole eventually. Resubmitting the big book wasn’t fair, but that’s what I had to do. They said it was contaminating Australian culture, but then I told them that it was actually published in Brisbane, and that it had won a number of awards in different countries, Paris, London, etc...
“That may be alright in those places, but this is Australia,” was their response, the inference being that the moral fibre is stronger in Australia than the wishy-washy ethics of Italy, Spain, Britain, France. The OFLC got the book on Tuesday and then returned it on Friday saying it was alright. It’s a committee of twelve, and how many of them do you actually think would have read the whole book in that amount of time? I’d guess less than one.
So, if there’s any one thing to learn from all this, it’s: don’t be afraid of Australian censorship; it’s wishy-washy at best, and easily confused.

WM: In closing: Any favourite ways of wasting time?

EC: (Long Pause) My favourite ways of wasting time? Ummm, it’s kind of odd, because wasting time is such a non-activity, so it’s difficult to do it with originality. As soon as you do that it’s not really wasting time anymore. Apart from the obvious – pairing the socks, folding the sheets – I may do my GST this week to avoid doing the first page of my new book, again. There’s a quote I love, it’s from, I think, Keats:
“Sad is he, full of care, who has no time to stand and stare.”