Really, introductions are a bit of a wasteland, aren't they?
I'm sitting here at the top of a fresh sheet of Croxley Script and all of the clever and incisive Clive James stuff that I wanted to say about Eddie and his work has been chewed over for so long, that it's lost all its spearmint and I wish I'd gobbed it into the waste paper basket half an hour ago. I'm surrounded by abandoned first drafts torn out of the typewriter two lines into the first paragraph and strangled at birth. There's one that starts off by talking about pacing, graphic storytelling and the parameters of visual continuity in a very deep and level masculine voice. There's another one that affects a kooky, zany approach, and a third in which I spell Eddie's name with a "y" halfway through and then abandon the whole thing in a sudden fit of depression. Life is useless and there is no God.
The thing is that I really want to explain how brilliantly the artefact at hand shines with the light of truth and beauty, but I'm painfully aware that all you have to do is turn over the page and start reading 'Danny Grey Never Forgave Himself...' to render by best efforts redundant, obsolete and sickly. Also, when you're fully immersed in something as powerful as 'Mammoth In Ice', the last thing you are short of is a weedy intellectual voice telling you to watch out for all those clever panel progressions. It'd be like watching the shower scene from 'Psycho' while the jackanapes in the row behind is saying, "...and do you know, it's amazing, but you don't actually see the knife go into her, well, it's all in the editing..." in a load voice to his girlfriend. Alec is magic, and even if I knew how it was all done I'd be doing you a disservice if I pointed out the wires and mirrors.
So what am I doing here? I suppose the only thing that makes even a moiety of sense is for me to tell you why I like Eddie's stuff, rather than why you ought to like it.
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 its 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 Cassidy 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'.
I like it because I like Eddie, I like his accent, I like the shade of blue Magic Marker that he uses to hand-colour the covers of his hand-published collections and I adore the fact that he's never going to be commercial enough to start crowding me on my own turf.
Oh, and one other thing... Eddie came up to visit earlier the year, bumming a lift with a lorry driver of his acquaintance. I was out when they arrived and returned to find the lorry parked street-centre and Eddie quizzing neighbours as to the whereabouts of my domicile. Announcing my arrival I was introduced to Eddie's chum behind the wheel of the truck. It was Danny Grey. We shook hands awkwardly through the wound-down window and just for an instant I had a sense of panel borders looming on the periphery of my vision, framing the lorry, the handshake, the Sainbury's career bag in my hand and the infants school over the road.
Eddie Campbell thinks he can see across the world and hear babies sleeping, and I think he can too.
Eddie Campbell is best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on the epic graphic novel From Hell, but as writer/artist he created the irreverent and wine-soaked series Bacchus, which revives the Greek gods in a sprawling, unpredictable, and enormously entertaining thousand-page epic; and the award-winning autobiographical series Alec. These works are all available from Top Shelf Publishing.
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