Alec by Eddie Campbell (No. 51)

Alec (1981-2010)

by Eddie Campbell

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Eddie Campbell started his curious autobiographical stories about Alec McGarry in 1981 and they continue to the present. He may have been the first cartoonist to illustrate the slacker lifestyle - Alec is an over-educated character working in a dead-end job and spending all his time drinking in pubs. But don't hold that against Campbell. These are great stories, majestic documents of small events. Campbell's unlabored approach to storytelling draws you in. Even when he writes about misery and despair, as in Graffiti Kitchen, there is always a deceptively diary-like feel to the work.

I say deceptive, because the stories have a structure. They exist in service to their characters - Alec, Danny Grey, Penny, Jane, Georgette etc - and these characters are given flesh the same way an oil painter uses glazes. Each new appearance or vignette adds a little more detail to the character until finally a full-fledged personality - complex and irreducible - emerges. The stories, such as they are, are almost invisible in this process. They inevitably describe the arc of a relationship - the rise and fall of Alec's friendships and love affairs with Danny, Penny, Jane and Georgette. But the means of describing these cycles is so discursive that one might not even see the big picture at first.

Campbell's drawing likewise seems exceedingly casual. The early Alec stories have zip-a-tone, so at least the reader knows Campbell went over them twice. But there is probably no artist who has ever used zip-a-tone in such an impressionistic way as Campbell. In Graffiti Kitchen he drops the zip and the work becomes pure handwriting. Each panel reads as if it were dashed off on a notepad as the events described were unfolding. The drawing has an expressive urgency (even though the story has a typically stately pace) that perfectly matches the heightened emotions depicted.

Alec continues to pop up - in the lighthearted Dance of Lifey Death and most recently in a story being serialised in Dee Dee. This is strong work, and will no doubt comfortably sit with the brilliant work Campbell has done before.

REVIEW BY ALAN MOORE:
I like Eddie's stuff because it's Masculist fiction and it demonstrates that you don't have to be published by Virago books in order to have any heart, understanding or human sensitivity. Men feel things too. It just takes them longer. I like it because it doesn't confuse being realistic with being depressing and because it is written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum. I like it because it fills me in on what would have happened to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady if they'd traded in the Lincoln for a Ford Transit and moved to Southend-On-Sea. On The Pier as opposed to On The Road.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:
Do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that Alec is probably the best book-length comic about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?

READ THIS BOOK:

The collected Alec stories were finally published in one big book in 2010 by Top Shelf Publishing and available from a quality comic shop near you!

FURTHER READING:

Official Site: Eddie Campbell Dammit!

Interview: The Comics Journal #273 (January 2006)
Interview: The Comics Journal #145 (October 1991)