A Night with Eddie Campbell at McNally Robinson

by Edward Carey

June 30, 2008

Eddie Campbell (“From Hell,” “Bacchus”) captivated an audience at McNally

Robinson with a presentation tied to the release of his new book, “The Amazing
Remarkable Monsieur Leotard” from First Second Books. He regaled them with
anecdotes about his new book, a Batman book he once did, his opinion on Scott
McCloud’s theories and a hint at what’s to come.

He began by talking about the impetus behind “The

Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard,” which he
attributed to a quote by either Will Eisner or Michael
Chabon about superheroes having their prototype in
the old circus. After putting it to the test, he realized it
was true.

“The Fantastic Four consists of the Indian rubber

man, the firebreather, the strong man and the girl that
disappears inside the magician’s cabinet,” said
Campbell.

The main character in his book, Leotard, has a midget

clown that follows him around, tying it to the
tradition of comical sidekicks which appeared in
superhero comics during the forties.

“I think this was after the war; it became popular for every superhero to have a midget
clown as the comic relief. For instance, the Spirit had Ebony White, Plastic Man had
Woozy Winks, but my favorite was Green Lantern’s, [who] had Doiby Dickles. I think he
drove a cab. All these characters were the comic relief, like the midget clown in the old
circus. All the mutants, they’re the sideshow freaks. Any comic book character you
mention, you can find their prototype in the old circus,” said Campbell.

Leotard was influenced by an actual trapeze artist, which Campbell called “the original
flying man,” who inspired a popular 19th century song, “The Daring Young Man on the
Flying Trapeze.” Campbell quoted the highly recognizable refrain: “He’d fly through the
air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on the flying trapeze.”

“That song was inspired by Jules Leotard, who was an actual trapeze artist. He was the
Elvis of his time, he was famous. He was the first man to wear a tight costume in his
stage act. The circus was basically a stage act at that time; nobody had thought of putting
it in a tent and driving it around the country. There were jugglers and street performers.
The finest circus performers did it as a stage act. There’s a famous painting of Leotard
performing at the London Alhambra Theatre, which I actually adapted, hand-copied into
the book. He was actually flying out over the audience, though he was only about 15 or
20 feet up, not that high up,” said Campbell.

“Leotard was the first guy to wear a skin-tight costume; again with the superhero thing.
Dan [Best (co-writer)] and I had this idea . . . we wanted to Forrest Gump our way
through history in the 19th century. We wanted our character to turn up for all the
important events . . . the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888, the Siege of Paris in 1870, the
sinking of the Titanic in 1912 . . . but if we were going to be true to Leotard, we were
going to have a problem, because he died in 1868 at the tender age of 28. He was actually
more like the James Dean of his era, than Elvis, because he died at a ridiculous young
age, although he did write an autobiography before he went. We tried to track it down,
here in NY to an antiquarian bookshop, but it was going to cost us $20,000, so we
decided just to make it up and wing it. We thought we’d play it straight, so we said, if he
died in 1868 how were we going to put him in the book . . . so, he dies on page 12, and
the rest of the book is about his much less interesting young nephew, who wears a false
mustache and pretends to be Leotard. Another aspect of the superhero, the secret identity.
He inherits from his uncle a blank book and a false mustache, with the fond wish ‘may
nothing occur,’ which is an Irish thing I came across. It probably started as, ‘may nothing
occur tomorrow, your prosperity,’ but in Irish usage it became ‘may nothing occur.’ It’s
similar to the Chinese proverb, ‘may you be doomed to live in interesting times.’ So, the
characters use this in the book. One of them says, ‘may nothing occur in the next
episode,’ then in the next episode, they’re all boarding the Titanic,” said Campbell.

After relishing the cover design of the book, produced by First Second, he discussed his
own problems with cover design and typesetting when he began to self-publish his own
books back in 1995 with the first volume of the Bacchus series. Up till then, he’d just
done the artwork and sent it in to the publisher. A graphic designer wrote to him after the
first couple of books came out and told him, “I’ve followed your work for years, I love
your new comic, but you’re typesetting is s#!t. If you want it done properly, phone me.”
So, he put this man, Mick Evans, to work on designing the books and they developed a
friendship.

“Suddenly, we were sophisticated. I loved this guy so much that I put him in the comic,
so I designed this character to look like him and I made him the acolyte of Bacchus. He
was only known as the Acolyte . . . I love him dearly, but I don’t think he liked being
depicted as anybody’s acolyte. I started to notice funny things on the covers, because he
was doing all the cover designs for me. He’d trim the cover in such a way that my
signature would be trimmed off. I didn’t say anything. After the second time, I thought
this can’t be a coincidence. Is he undermining my authority and my confidence by
removing the signature? There were two things I could do about it. I could ignore it, or I
could bring it out into the open and talk about it with him. I chose a third option. I
decided to kill him. The character, that is, the acolyte. So, I had Bacchus order him to be
taken out and fed to the pigs. I think there was something worse done to him beforehand.
We never actually see him fed to the pigs, but we never see him again,” said Campbell.
Campbell also related problems with the cover design on “From Hell,” a huge 640-page
tome of a graphic novel.

“We could put the front cover on straight and let it

wrap around [because it was black], and there was a
photo on the back that was no longer essential. The
printer came up with the idea, because it was black
(the front cover was basically black and the back
cover was all black) we could just get away with
fudging it and pushing it to the corner. The problem
was that the publisher’s imprint, Eddie Campbell
Comics, was in one line along the bottom. We lost
the first two letters and the last letter, so instead of
‘Eddie Campbell Comics,’ it read ‘Die Campbell
Comic.’ Did Mick do this on purpose? I don’t know.
I could have asked him or I could forget it, but I
decided to kill him again,” said Campbell.

So, he based another character’s likeness on Evans,

this time in a Batman comic he did, “The Order of Beasts.” Before describing Evans’
death, he digresses into a scene involving a Gordon’s gin bottle.

“You’re not allowed to put real people in a Batman comic. DC Comics happens in a
universe that’s separate from ours. For instance, there’s a scene in “The Order of Beasts”
where I have two characters . . . There were these guys who wore animal masks. One was
Mr. Horse. Mr. Weasel. The villain was Mr. Wolf, but he gets killed by page 12. I like to
surprise the reader early. Mr. Wolf was a Nazi . . . the Nazis in 1939 had this idea of
influencing the intelligentsia and aristocracy of England and other countries and
persuading them over to the Nazi plan. Mr. Wolf is a Nazi and he’s talking to Mr. Horse
(but they don’t have their masks on, they’re just two guys in a sitting room) and they’re
having gin and tonics on the side (there was a Gordon’s gin bottle, but it was recognized
and I had to change it; they said, we don’t have Gordon’s gin in the DC universe) . . . As
you know, when you have gin and tonic, you have a slice of lemon. So, on the side table,
he’s got a cutting board with a couple of lemons and one is chopped into slices. And
there’s a knife, you know, a fruit knife. This bloke is getting antsy, and he knows
something is wrong, so he’s gonna go and tell everybody, and of course he has to die.
Everybody dies in this thing. This was just a funny incident. They both lunge for the
knife . . . One of ‘em gets the knife, the other one gets the lemon, and the guy with the
lemon wins. He rams it into the mouth of the other guy and chokes him on the lemon.
The guys goons come and drag him off the carpet and take him away and they dump his
body somewhere. Batman catches them in the act; one runs away, and one takes a
cyanide capsule, so he unwraps the carpet, finds the dead body and immediately smells
lemons. You see him go ‘sniff sniff’ and there’s a thought balloon with a perfectly drawn
lemon, like the ones on the slot machines in Vegas,” said Campbell.
“Anyway, Evans is the judge in this story, he’s Mr. Eagle, the Beak. The old Beak is the
London sign for judge. There were lots of important people wearing these animal masks,
going out at night and indulging this society. . an English social club. I don’t know the
things people do to be in a club. It’s the point where he’s being killed, and it happens in a
perfectly innocent English sitting room, the guy’s wife is lying dead and her pink knitting
has been left on the sofa. And it’s kind of a surreal image, because behind the sofa is a
guy with a huge horse’s head and he’s galloping across the sitting room, and the other
guy’s going, ‘No Hathaway, you can’t be serious.’ That was him . . . Evans. And so Evans
was dead again. I did kill him again later, but there wasn’t any reason, I just got into the
habit.”

Evans reappears in “The Fate of the Artist” as a little-

known composer whose sonatas were adapted by
Mozart and who died eating poison mushrooms.

“He found these mushrooms on his way home, and he

tried to get a restaurateur to cook them for him, but
the guy refused and said they looked unhealthy. So, he
brought them home and had his own cook prepare
them and managed to take out himself, his family, the
cook, and a kitchen maid who ate the leftovers. So, I
thought, he’s got to be Evans,” said Campbell.

“The Fate of the Artist” was his first book published

by First Second in 2006, the premise based loosely on
the real-life disappearance of Eddie Campbell. First
Second also published “The Black Diamond
Detective Agency,” which debuted last year.

“His disappearance is being investigated by a detective. It’s based on a real event. I

actually left home one day and wasn’t going to come back. My wife wasn’t home and the
kids were at school, and I thought, ‘I can’t do it anymore, I’m leaving home.’ So, I
packed a lunch, and got my bike and took off. But, I made the mistake of stopping in a
library and read a book and then forgot why it was I was supposed to be leaving home.
And I was actually back home by 4:00 in time to walk the dog. As my daughter said at
the time, ‘most people leave home longer than that five days a week.’ My editor, Mark
Siegel, said you’ve started a detective story, there’s got to be a resolution, it’s a who-dun-
it. I came up with a solution which I thought was quite brilliant. Evans gets his revenge
and he kills me. I actually die in my own book. [At this point, Campbell reads a piece of
prose from “Artist”] I didn’t kill him anymore after that,” said Campbell.

Campbell fielded questions from the audience, the first of which mentioned Scott
McCloud’s theory of comics as a form and asked Campbell to expound his theory of
comics as more of a tradition.
“I think any theory on comics is a limiting thing. I think Scott McCloud’s theory is
limiting. I’ve heard people find it a liberating thing, but I find it the opposite. I’ve read
several reviews of [‘Fate of the Artist’], which say it’s an autobiographical graphic novel.
If it’s not that, it’s something else. We have this obsession with taxonomies, and
pedigrees, and deciding with what a thing is. We’re terrified if we don’t know what
something is. If we can name it and possess it, it’s no longer frightening. I prefer to leave
things vague. I don’t think comics and sequential art are equivalent things. There are one-
panel comics in the newspaper. Scott McCloud expounds a theory that excludes the
things he doesn’t like. What’s that all about? A lot of times, these things have very good
motives, like the Academy in 18th century art. The Academy and fine art later became this
conscriptive thing, with set rules, and the Academy in France or England always
organized the exhibitions. The Royal Academicians decided who would be in it and who
would not be in it. The formation of the Academies had a good motive originally; it
became this power thing, this control thing. The original motive was to raise the arts
above what it was considered . . . artists were considered artisans, because they worked
with their hands, they wore paint, they got dirty. An artist was never on the same level as
a poet, or a composer. In the 19th century, composers started to become venerated, and the
great authors (Scott, Byron, etc.) were considered great men, but artists were in danger of
being considered artisans. The Academy was formed to address that, and to raise the
whole thing to a gentlemanly level. The problem being, it became a set of rules and
obligations, and you had to pay your dues to the right people to get into the exhibitions.
So, it was around the time of the Impressionists that the idea came about of holding
alternative or anti-exhibitions . . . I’m just very suspicious of where those things lead. It’s
a laying down of rules. Who’s Scott McCloud to be making the rules? For instance, he
said the “The Family Circus” is not a comic. Who’s he to say that it’s not? What the hell
else could it be? It’s not a poem, it’s not literature,” said Campbell.

Another questioner asked him to elaborate on other correlations between superheroes and
the old circus, particularly the characters in his book, like the Tattooed woman.

“The tattooed woman? I don’t think she does, but

now that you mention her. . . Since we’ve been
wooing the book market, I’ve noticed that the book
publishers, as opposed to the comic book publishers,
they’ve ceased upon the idea of the graphic novel
enthusiastically, but my worry is that they think of it
as a young reader’s genre. I’m seeing this more and
more. For instance, I’ve got a book that’s virtually
finished and the way we’re pitching it is that it’s
about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man. I
can’t get anyone to publish it. I’ve offered it to two
different publishers who have come back to me and
said, we’d love to work with you Eddie and we’d like
you to illustrate this, and it turns out to be a script by
a young reader’s author who wants to get into graphic
novels. That’s happened to me twice. I think this will
do well across the board, because it could be mistaken for a children’s book. And by the
time they get to the sex scene with the tattooed lady, it will be too late. But, it’s all done
very tastefully,” said Campbell.

“Do you have anymore Alec or Bacchus books coming out?” was another question.

“Next year, we have the big ‘Alec’ omnibus coming out and it’s gonna be 640 pages and
I’m very excited about that because it gathers up all of the books except for [Fate of the
Artist]. I’ve drawn a new 55 page book to add in at the end, which will bring the story up
to date. It’s really rich and full of variety, and it’s the best work I’ve done in a long time,”
said Campbell.

He was approached by a production company in Australia that wanted to adapt “The Fate
of the Artist” into a TV show. The show is currently in development.

“It’ll be live-action with some animation, a bit like the “American Splendor” movie.
Also, I think they see me as the Australian Larry David, a cranky old curmudgeon who
keeps embarrassing himself,” said Campbell.

The first script is complete and the casting is done. The only hurdle, he said, is to raise
financing to go into production.

“I’m not much of an actor, but I will be in it. We’ve done some screen tests, you know,
with me playing myself to help with the pitches, and they were surprised that I could play
myself so well. When they put a camera on you, a different person comes out, your alter
ego. ‘Cause I’m actually a shy person. I just sit at home and fret all the time. I wake up in
the middle of the night and fret over all the stupid things I said that day and wonder if I
should commit suicide or go back to sleep,” said Campbell.

Campbell ended the night by signing copies of “The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur
Leotard” for all those who attended.