Eddie Campbell

I came across this on the 'net, a convention sketch I drew for somebody somewhere. These things are hit or miss, though naturally I try to have a basically acceptable image I can do in my sleep and that won't embarrass me if I chance upon it later. Every now and then my unconscious butts in and I accidentally do something that surprises me, like this one. I always use a ball point, on the principal that the ink comes out of it no slower or faster than the rate as my artistic brain works. Also, I have acquired a facility with it so that you can see some variety and spontaneity in the line.
(click to enlarge)

Labels: sketches

monty the dog, of 'Monty and me'. Picture of him losing his winter coat.


Every night, in his hungry impatience, he leaves his drinking water with a fragment of dog biscuit floating in it. The wife of my bosom, who has been watching far too much Gordon Ramsay, fondly refers to it as his 'signature dish.'

The first to claim the sketch in comments can have him signed and sent to them in the mail.

meanwhile
This blog was launched two years ago today here!

Labels: sketches

i've gone and let them talk me into getting foxtel. oh well. I caught the end of an episode of The Tudors from last year. I see this production is not afraid to embrace the bogus. Wolsey supposedly committing suicide is problematic but outside of my little floor tile of expertise. But this sex scene is a worry:
Actress Natalie Dormer, 24, played Anne Boleyn in the recent BBC bodice-ripping drama, The Tudors, where she faced several sex scenes with co-star Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Were the sex scenes embarrassing for you?
Taking your clothes off in front of a film crew, even on a closed set, is completely harrowing. Anyone can sympathise with that situation. You find the motivation for it in your head. With Henry and Anne, you’re talking about an intense love affair. In my experience, intense love affairs result in taking your clothes off. It’s about justifying it through characterisation.

Hell, it embarrassed ME. I found it very cringeworthy. Pornographic even. Not because sex is pornographic but because that position they adopted (out in the English woods for heavens sake) with her astride, arching back over him reclining, only exists on account of pornography's camera. The position allowing one's lover a view is quite different from that which allows the screen viewer ocular access. Still, I can't imagine it would be bad for her career. They do the same shit in ALL the movies.
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The part of me that enjoys mocking other people's innocent pleasures finds this hilarious:

"For your satisfaction, we assure that the CDs offered on this site are Genuine Mantovani And His Orchestra recordings before listing them here. Please see the report on the Bogus Mantovani CDs being offered around the world. For the most part they are absolutely awful in quality, sound nothing like Mantovani, and Mantovani Fans will recognize this within a few bars of the first track. I believe this is just as serious and fraudulent as selling bogus Rolex watches."

For the immortally young among you, they're talking about what used to be called 'elevator music'. There's a note at that link about a latter day reversal of the principal, first tried at the central railway station in Amsterdam, where they play loud classical music to chase away the drug pushers.
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Now here's something we haven't done in a while. This is just a little sketch on typing paper. I'll sign it and send it to the first who claims it in comments.

Labels: screen2, sketches

just going out to the photocopier, thirty years ago. (sketches for part of a cover idea... they weren't intended to look like a sequence)



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blogger Alicia Carrier finds wee faces in the broccoli (photos)

Labels: sketches

clearing up my shelves I came across this sketch I made on a beach a couple of years ago, of a girl who was standing on a rock at the water's edge. Ballpoint is my sketching tool of choice. The ink runs out at approximately the same speed as my eye uploads, and you can go light tentatively and then darker decisively. After the first sketch I realised the subject should have been the way the intense sunlight was falling vertically on the figure and quickly did a second one.


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At Electronista ('gadgets for geeks'): Latest Blu-ray copy protection cracked

The latest effort at blocking unofficial copying of Blu-ray movies has been undone, the developers of a cracking utility claim. Any DVD 6.4.0.0 adds the ability to bypass BD+ encoding, used on a number of discs to prevent either direct copying, or ripping to a hard drive. This change is said to particularly affect releases from 20th Century Fox, who have led the adoption of BD+, while other companies continue with variants of AACS... etc etc bla bla bla

The author of the above has chosen the From Hell DVD to illustrate his article. (link thanks to my pal Chalky White)

Labels: sketches

This was the original cover design for Egomania #2. I ditched this when Jose Villarrubia let me use his great photo of Alan in its place.



There's a lovely picture by Jose at the Digital Medusa site.


There's one by me there also:


go for a browse, see these full size and lots of other unexpected images.

Labels: Egomania, sketches

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Vitamin E gives you LUNG CANCER!!! - BBC- 28 feb 2008-

Taking high doses of vitamin E supplements can increase the risk of lung cancer, research suggests. The researchers followed people aged between 50 and 76 for four years and looked at their average daily use of vitamin C and folic acid, and vitamin E supplements. Over the course of the study, 521 people developed lung cancer. Smoking, family history and age all had unsurprisingly strong links to cancer risk. And while neither vitamin C or folic acid use had any effect on lung cancer risk, vitamin E use did.

The position on these things changes so rapidly that in the sidebar we can still see the previous one: 2 sept 2006-Low vitamin E linked to asthma

Expectant mums should ensure they get enough vitamin E as low levels during pregnancy increase the risk of asthma in the unborn child, UK experts say. Children of mothers who had the lowest intake were over five times more likely to have asthma than peers whose mothers had the highest vitamin E intakes. Vitamin E has a beneficial effect on the developing lung, the University of Aberdeen researchers believe.

(observed by Hayley campbell)
This expert says: Beware the Snooter, grim omen of doom.
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The Watchmen script: ""I actually read the script before reading the comic book and I thought it was awesome... Then I read the comic book and it’s great. The little bits that have been added define it so much more." (via Heidi)
You have been warned.

Labels: sketches

Two more of the small pictures I made for use as decorations in the second issue of Egomania and which have only ben printed in black and white:

Labels: sketches

Two more pictures from the batch I mentioned a few days back:

Labels: sketches

In 2002 I made a set of small colour pictures to sell and also used them in black and white to decorate the Alan Moore interview in Egomania #2 (reprinted in A Disease of Language). I just discovered that I kept colour scans of some of them. Here's a thinker:


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Restaurant sorry over F word bill A restaurant owner has apologised after diners had their very own F word experience - without Gordon Ramsay.
Ten friends found the abusive and sexually-explicit message on their bill at Joe Delucci's Italian restaurant in Bird Street, Lichfield, Staffordshire. Diner Clare Watkin said she thought it was written after they complained about poor service.


(link thanks to wee hayley campbell, our bad language correspondent))

Labels: alan moore, sketches

A nd that bloody publisher of mine is giving away a full color 32 page excerpt from The Black Diamond Detective Agency!
Douglas Wolk explains Free Comic Book day here: "Five years ago, the weekend that the first Spider-Man movie came out, the American comics industry launched an experiment: Free Comic Book Day, in which thousands of comic book specialty stores around the country gave away comics to readers young and old. It worked out well enough that it's become an annual tradition, and this Saturday, May 5, is the sixth Free Comic Book Day. Almost every major comics publisher in the country has at least one free title this year, as well as plenty of smaller publishers; the mainstream and indie presses don't always see eye-to-eye, but they've all found that giving away samples is good for business."

In fact this tradition was introduced around the time I stopped publishing my own books, and it added to my number of reasons for doing so. I was reminded of another reason why I stopped being a self-publisher when Eroom Nala commented on my post of march 1st.
"Typical we're supposed to have everything published in NSW at my library but we've only got Bacchus volumes #1-6 and 9."
As comics started to become more involved in selling to the book market (rather than just the comics 'direct market') this brought with it other administrational complificutions. For instance, the ISBN numbers by which proper books are identified all over the world. Campbell decided he was not going to line up and be given a number by the civil servants of the publishing world. Then I found that amazon.com wouldn't take the books without an ISBN number. Okay, so how do we get them? Well you need to write off to the...bla bla bla and purchase a whole batch of them which you assign to your books as you go along. You register each title with the official governing body, then you need to send a copy of every publication thus registered to the national library. "What, gie away the books fur free?" (don't know why it didn't occur to me to treat it as a sale and bill'em for it). Anne used to handle all that stuff and I'd be throwing a spanner in the works saying, "ah let'em send in a postal order like everybody else!"
Anyway, more often than not I never remembered to do it, or didn't bother, and they were always phoning me to find out why there was a number in the system and no corresponding book on the shelves. Then you need to actually print the number on the books and while you're doing that you might as well put a barcode on there too, so you have to go and find somebody who knows how to make goddamn barcodes, and you're starting to feel like your in the supermarket business instead of the Art game. Now in order to get Amazon.com to take volume 4 I'm going to have to retroactively assign numbers to vols 1-3 (since I'd been a pain in the ass about this for three whole volumes) I suppose I could put the numbers on the book on a sticker. Of course when the time came I thought, what if I don't put the number on it, save the cost of a sticker, and just say that I've put it on.
Then I started losing sleep at night thinking somebody was going to catch me cheating. This was all getting me too far from the simple reasons why I wanted to draw my work and get it out there.

Between all that and Staros giving away free copies to reviewers, I decided I'd had enough of this bullshit. So I gave up publishing my own books.

First person to put their hand up in comments can have the little sketch shown above in the mail. For free.
"So help ma boab. Noo their givin' away ma originals fur nothin. Fuk this."
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ad break!
I've had a tornado of traffic over the last 24 hours thanks to Dan Shahin linking to my piece on Vinnie Colletta of two days back on the boingboing site where some clot described Vinnie's work in disparaging terms. So with a view to fostering a Vinnie Colletta appreciation society, let me return the favour by drawing your attention to Dan's online graphic novel store at www.comicbookshelf.com. If you need a copy of one of my books or anybody else's, you can have a look there.
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Anyway, I went along to Free Comic Book Day at the major store in our town here, as we have ours earlier than everybody else, except the New Zealanders, with a view to chewing the fat with local comics readers about my new book, only to find that the store had not heard of the Black Diamond freebie and didn't order any in. Once again the world of comics has reduced me to a disappointed and despondent state. I want to propose a new catch phrase, as I am sure you are aware of our liking for catch phrases here at campbell blogspot, and will recall such gems as "It's not a graphic novel. Percy," among many others.
When the world of comics has disappointed you, and you just don't care any more and can't be bothered to make the effort, you must say: "Make room for me, Vinnie!"
And speaking of catch-phrases, I gotta laff! While I was checking my statcounter I noticed somebody arrived at this blog with the following Google searchwords:
Frank Miller Roning.

whoever you are, "thanks for roning."

Labels: 'thanks for roning'(1), "Make room for me vinnie", sketches

I did some house cleaning and filing in the middle of the night on account of I got up to relieve a cramp in my foot and all the jumping up and down thoroughly woke me up. So should you wish to do some backtracking and find out, say, where the hell 'thanks for roning' comes from, here at Campbell blogspot we now have LABELS, including but not limited to these:

Labels: 'thanks for roning'(1), black diamond, hayley campbell 1, hogarth, my pals, neil, old books(1), plagiarism, sketches, the wife

Here’s another from the Campbell sketch portfolio. Wee Eddie Campbell growing up on Straight Street, hoping one day to make his way in the world as an artist, as seen in After the Snooter.

First to claim it in comments can have the original in the mail.

I was reluctant to show it here as I have lately worried that Straight Street is not where I thought it was. It may have found itself in a different borough after one of those reshuffling of the boundaries that happen just before an election. What made me think this is that I noticed the street sign graphic in the opening titles of a daytime rerun of the tv show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. So Obviously I wouldn’t want to be alluding to it if it has acquired a sexual connotation. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But you know what I mean; a writer wants to express his thoughts very precisely. You do know what I mean, don't you... it's not like I'm fretting about what you're thinking of my sexual orientation. You know that, don't you?

However, my fear has been allayed by George Martin, famous record producer, featured last week in the Weekend Australian (not online), ruminating about the sixties again:
"Young people had the space, the time , and the income to indulge themselves in the endless experiment of self. If you couldn’t make it in straight street (and who wanted to?), you could make it in counterculture."

Uh, hold on... the phone. It’s my pal Best.
"What’s up?"
"Al Columbia ... (whom you may remember from such books as How to Be an Artist... and if I one day find myself waking up in Hell, it will be because of the wickedness I perpetrated in that one book. I know Steve Bissette was deeply hurt for one. I'm waiting for the rest of them to find out.)

(these excerpts are not consecutive)

(I drew Al as a smiley face because I've never met him and don't know what he looks like)


"He's on the Comics Journal forum?"
"He said what?"
"Eddie Campbell’s a fuckin’ homo."
"gasp!"
"It's near the bottom of the page? Hold on, let me find it..."
"Oh dear... but when the dust settles, I’m sure we’ll find out that he meant it in good fun."
"In the meantime, don’t let the wife hear about it. Okay?"
"Yup"
"And... thanks for roning."

Labels: 'thanks for roning'(1), alec1, sketches

Sketch of the Snooter, whom you may remember from such books as After the Snooter, doing what he does best. Being an annoying bastard.



This is just pulled from my sketch folio.The Snooter's hand appearing to extend Campbell's nose is entirely accidental and means nothing. I think. First to ask for it in comments can have the drawing in the mail.
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Excellent gallery of the works of William Hogarth



I was talking about William Hogarth the other day and it carried over into the comments to the extent that I felt I owed a few more words on the subject. I was critical of the notion that "Hogarth’s sequential narratives... consolidated the graphic experiments of earlier prints and established a complex language of graphic devices that artists have borrowed from ever since". This has become accepted as fact among too many comics scholars.

My argument essentially is that it can't be so as I have never met a comics person who would know how to read Hogarth properly (myself included) let alone be influenced by his work. In support of my statement I quote this article by Martin Heusser reviewing
Reading Iconotexts:From Swift to the French Revolution. Peter Wagner. London: Reaktion Books, 1995.
"Reading Iconotexts is a study of 18th-century prints and their inscriptions, which Wagner prefers to call iconotexts in order to emphasize the high degree of mutual interdependence and interpenetration between word and image which they exhibit. In fact, Wagner claims that they form a specific genre, because in them, neither text nor image is free from the other."
"Reading Hogarth "right" is difficult for two reasons, one intrinsic and one extrinsic. On the one hand, these illustrations are in and of themselves heterogeneous; they represent both a critique and an enactment of 18th-century commercialization of culture and taste. On the other, modern interpretation suffers from a severely distorted view, because, over the generations, the immensely broad range of 18th-century cultural phenomena has been pared down to a very narrow body of samples.
Taking Hogarth's well-known first plate of A Harlot's Progress as an example (shown above), Wagner convincingly shows what he means. To "understand" this picture - that is, to get the maximum information out of it and to grasp it - we have to be capable of decoding a wealth of sign systems running criss-cross through its visual appearance. On a pictorial level, we find both the re-enactment and the subversion of traditional subjects as diverse as the Penitent Harlot, the Choice of Hercules and the Visitation. Similarly complex but more difficult to trace and recognize are those references to what must have been first-rate contemporary tabloid material offered by the three central human figures: the rapist Colonel Charteris, the notorious prostitute Kate Hackabout, or the debauched Mother Needham. Then, there are the numerous emblems and puns present in the guise of seemingly accidental elements such as the dead goose and the bell, which may both well refer to the fate of the silly goose who may soon be a dead belle. By the same token, the horse whose excessive appetite causes it to knock over a pile of utensils demonstrates ad oculos how the consequences of gluttony affect the careless without delay.
The quasi infinite number of allusions generated by the quite finite space of Hogarth's engraving proves Kristeva's point that references do indeed evoke a "universe" of significances... "

Here's an extended argument over the details of the same image by two experts: READING HOGARTH By Ronald Paulson, Reply by Richard Dorment. They're making as much progress as you and I.

Labels: 18th century, hogarth, sketches

Thanks for being too polite to mention it. Whoever puts their hand up first in the comments can have the above cartoon in the mail.

Labels: sketches

I got a response to my Dec 6 post that began "we don't need any more names for the same thing." My opening paragraph was intended to inform that I have no interest whatsoever in arguing about what the medium is called and what's allowed in it. You keep the old thing and you call it what you like. I'm not in the business of naming. Here we are all about UN-naming. I'm not interested in comics as they are defined and I'm not interested in the graphic novel as it is defined (at least four different ways). Just for the record, I'm not interested in 'defined.' I'm interested in the movement of ideas and aesthetic impulses from here to there, and from there to somewhere else. I'm interested in making Life better. I'm interested in the Book and what the Book is in the process of becoming, which is to say, a book of a different stripe, and I'm interested in the ways it will find to tell the stories that need and/or ought to be told in order to make Life Better and us wiser.
That above was the slogan on a t-shirt I bought and used to wear at conventions till I accepted that Chris Staros didn't like it, though to be fair, it was proably the obnoxious cartoon cat speaking the words on the original that offended Top Shelf's sensibilities. I gave it to wee Callum Campbell, who wears it out skateboarding. He's not in the shit business either. First to ask for it in 'comments' can have it in the mail (the sketch, not the t-shirt.)
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On the same theme, I left that post of Dec 6 with a confession that I was unfamiliar with the writings that Steve Braund of Falmouth U. credited with positing the idea that an 'authorial' presence may elevate the profession of illustration out of the crisis it has found itself in over the last twenty years. Illustration is a field that provides a service, fulfills a brief, satisfies a client, so that in a way the notion of an illustrator speaking in his own voice could be seen as coming from outside of the process. But If we stop to think about it we are remiinded of many great illustrators of the past who certainly spoke with their own voice, though it in turn may have spoken for entire generations; the work of Norman Rockwell for instance (and others mentioned below).
Steve has responded by supplying me with some references:
"Susan Aldworth interviews Robert Mason from Artists & Illustrators magazine in the UK from 1999, entitled.. 'Is Illustration Dead?' Here's a quote from it with comments set against the UK recession of the early nineties..
'Mason's research also showed that while there is currently less work in areas of illustration like book jackets and editorial, there is a reemergence of authorial work and a renewed interest in handmade illustration. Authorial work is a term being used to describe long-term projects like children's books, graphic novels or picture essays, illustration which demands more from the illustrator than a clever one-off image. In the States, Mason explains, some important magazines like... Esquire are commissioning illustrators to go to events from serious news stories to fashion shows, to draw what they see. He goes on to mention Posy Simmonds as part of this authorial movement ('Gemma Bovery' in the UK's The Guardian.')
Rob wrote a book in 2000 surveying illustration in the UK through the 90's called 'A Digital Dolly' (after 'Dolly' the first cloned sheep). Publr: Norwich School of Art & Design. Isbn. 1 872482 39 2. It offers a really clear reflection on illustration through that period with a real sense of the importance of encouraging a return to the 'authorial' integrity of many illustrators of the past.. Lear, Heath-Robinson, Peake, Gorey (one of my personal heroes). I think that's the point about the term 'authorial illustration'.. Illustration has always produced truly unique and personal 'authorial' talent.. Those witth a strong personal voice. So the term 'authorial illustration' was first used by somebody, 'one of us', who wanted to point back down the road at that tradition. I remember having a converstion with Robert Mason in a pub in South Kensington around 2000 where we looked at each other and simultaneously uttered the same words.. 'I'm thinking of writing an MA in authorial illustration!' It turned out we were further on with our course plans, so Rob was kind of happy to let us proceed. But it was
very much his influence on my ideas, along with Vienne and others, that led me to want to do that in the first place.
These might be useful:
'Pictures & Words. New Comic Art and Narrative Illustration by Roanne Bell and Mark Sinclair. Publr: Laurence King, London.
Ric Poynor - 'Illustration's last stand' (Graphis No.321 May/June 1999)
Ric Poynor - (Eye No.22 1996) 'The client says he wants it in green.'
Veronique Vienne - (Graphis No.316 July/Aug 1998) - 'Illustration and the Politics of Polite Outrage'
She says.. 'To reclaim their rights, illustrators would do well to shed their artiste persona and reposition themselves as authors - as equal partners in the storytelling process. There are some hopeful signs - the increasing popularity of animation, the growth of children's literature - indications that some illustrators are no longer willing to simply embellish the page. They've realised that asserting their authorship is the only way to transcend the conundrum of ownership.' "

"On March 16th next year we are putting on a one-day Forum here at Falmouth on the theme of Publishers talking about publishing graphic literature. We are putting together (a real mixture) the following speakers: Yvan Alagbe from French publisher Fremok (www.fremok.org (Atlanic Press has just helped them publish the original drawings and text of 'Alice Underground' with a French translation); Gita Wolf from Tara Books in Chennai, India, Chris Oliveros from Drawn & Quarterly and The UK's Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape/Random.The day will be chaired by Paul Gravett 'Comica' etc."

Thanks for filling in these details for me, Steve. More power to you! And whaddayouknow? there's my old pal Paul Gravett, 'the man at the crossroads', right in the middle of it.

Labels: new books (1), sketches

Tita asked:
"I have the three Alec series from TopShelf and am still wondering if they publish them in different sizes on purpose."
I don’t know what I’m going to do with those boys.
Actually, I have to confess it’s all my fault. I think I had some idea about a 'book' comic being such a different model from the old style floppy comic-book that I should go to lengths to undermine the idea of it being a series. That is, no volume numbers (I’d already done that with the Bacchus books) because with volume numbers you can’t get a customer to take the third one if he doesn’t have the first two, and stuff like that. So I went to lengths to make sure the message got across, by making each one a slightly different size, and gave each one a different price, completely ignoring the convention of ‘price points’. I carefully calculated each according to page count, which tended to vary. What I never considered was all the time that would be wasted having to check the goddamn prices all the time, and then packing them in boxes, all the repacking and stuffing that would be needed to make sure the corners of those sticking out wouldn’t get ‘dinged’ (that may be a top shelf word, we don’t know it around these parts).
Ah, the practicalities of publishing. My pal Staros always says he can explain the Bacchus backstory in five minutes but it takes him half an hour to explain why Campbell published volume 9 in between volumes 3 and 4, and why although there are ten in the series there are only nine books because Campbell collapsed volumes 7 and 8 into one book

Same drill as before. The small original above: first to put their hand up in the comments can have it in the mail. Give me an email contact so I can get your address.

Mikel Midnight wrote:
" One strip I've been waiting for years to see? The final 'Ace Rock & Roll Club' which was apparently done in watercolours. I keep hoping for a Campbell color special which might squeeze that in."
I pulled it out and had a look. It’s the story I redid into black and white and it was included in the 1993 Fantagraphics collection in that form. It was of course drawn some 27 years ago in 1979 and the the color work leaves much to be desired, alas. There are maybe a handful of panels I’m not unimpressed with. Here are a couple.

I find these days that virtually all of my work is in painted color. There was this year’s Fate of the Artist, and there will be next year’s Black Diamond Detective Agency (more on that very soon as I hope to have a copy in my hand by end december though it won't be officially released till next june) and a new one that I am 30 pages into and have not mentioned once in public until now. There was also Batman: The Order of Beasts, a 48 page special in 2004. My pal Evans suggested the witty title. Then the 13 page Escapist story of 2005, A Fair to remember, a play on an old movie title , suggested by my co-writer on that, my pal Best. It’s a good job I’m surrounded by geniuses, as I’m really dumb myself. With all this stuff I have to steal, my nom de plume should be Alexander Dumbass. Actually, I just pinched that one from Stephen Fry. It’s a good job nobody is fussed about plagiarism in these modern ti-
Wait a minute, the phone
"uh...what?... they are? Since when?... shit no.
okay, thanks for roning."

Labels: 'thanks for roning'(1), ace, sketches

Another reason I wanted to start a blog is that I've noticed i often tend to be misrepresented around the Internet, and If I put my actual words here then people can just link instead of trying to paraphrase. For instance, there's a guy here saying : "William Hogarth...early work that bears similarities of form, although Eddie Campbell has argued that these may be more a collection of cartoons rather than actual comics. " No, what I said is : ARGUING ABOUT LABELS IS A PAIN IN THE ARSE. (and anyway, both comics and cartoons are anachronistic terms in relation to the satirical prints of William Hogarth). There's a review of my Fate of the Artist by a fellow with impeccable taste (he likes PG Wodehouse) which begins "Not a graphic novel per se...". (Actually, I don't mind this because it fits with an idea I want to get around to in a few days. Tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow.) But it's remarkable that there is somebody who knows what a graphic novel is. I just wrote a sidebar for an article in World Literature Today explaining that the term is used in four mutually exclusive ways. So anybody who knows for a fact what it is... is doing better than me. back
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First person to ask for it in the comments can have that little Campbell drawing signed (I've only just noticed it's unsigned but I'm not rescanning it) and sent to them. If you don't want to leave a street address, give some way of opening email contact. When "It's not a graphic novel, Percy" becomes the catchphrase on everybody's lips and t-shirts over the next few months you can say you have the little sketch that started it all.
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When I give a reason above for blogging, I naturally understand that there are much bigger forces at work that subject little folk such as me to 'the nihilist impulse'. Breach has just drawn my attention to Geert Lovink's interpretation of the blogosphere: "Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message. That’s the nihilist moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before." I can go for this. I've always believed in a kind of nihilism as a postive thing, the throwing away of the crutches, of naive credulity.
nothing works.
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In last night's comments Lucy tells us we can still find most of the old Eddie Campbell Comics webpages at the Wayback Machine. Thanks for the help. I printed them out from the start, which is not much use to anybody else, and I'm not sure this goes all the way back to the beginning. It definitely doesn't go further than April 11 2003. After that, somebody else nabbed it. Happy rummaging

Labels: 'thanks for roning'(1), "it's not a graphic novel percy", sketches