The Fate of the Artist

I’ve long felt musicians should never write songs about writing songs, directors shouldn’t make movies about making movies and authors shouldn’t write books about writing books, well, because history has shown - the results have always almost ended up shit. This is especially true in comics. There have been so many bad comics written about writing comics! For me, it’s a clear warning sign that the artist has gotten so wrapped up in their own artistic struggles that it has become all they can see anymore, and that perhaps they have nothing left to say... But they need to keep talking. “All I have left to say is that I have nothing left to say,” and that shit is generally the most boring thing you could possible spend your time reading. In The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell comes frightfully close to plopping into the middle of this dangerous territory. However, I’m definitely willing to give him a little slack, considering his huge, sprawling body of work - much of which is quite excellent, especially his first decade plus of autobiographical type stuff. The difference with that earlier work, and one thing that makes it much better than your average autobiographical comics, is that he had a tendency to be looking out at the world, instead of in at himself - the other people in the stories were more important (and more interesting), than Eddie/Alec. Over the years, those other characters drifted out of the stories though, and his autobiographical work, somewhat to its detriment, has seemed to become much more just his own navel gazing musings on his own frantic life and interests, and much less interested in the outside world. His other characters have become mostly his close family members and he seems to be more interested in how they relate to him, seeing them in relation to himself, than as their own individual selves - which could make for more interesting, involving reading. In The Fate of the Artist, I believe he takes this to a new extreme, by have large sections of the story told in the voice of his daughter, talking about his “disappearance,” his interests and his life - she only comments on herself in relation to him - which is frankly, a bit creepy.

So, The Fate of the Artist isn’t exactly autobiography as we’ve come to think about it, and it’s also not a graphic novel as we’ve come to think about it. In a way, it seems like the book is at war with itself and its form. Instead of telling its tale in a straight narrative line, the book is broken up into many different short fragments and uses many different approaches, while dancing around a certain feeling - of writer’s block and maybe domestic problems… The constant arguments between Campbell and his wife seem meant to be humorous, but it’s definitely a dark humor (for instance he has to get stitches at the hospital after she clowns him over the head with a glass - funny?). I do like the book best when it’s being drawn in his more traditional loose, small paneled style - most of which is in color, which looks especially nice. His drawing has always been surprisingly expressive, minimal, original and well, charming - without going for the easy cuteness many others want to express themselves with (you can’t make a cute pink t-shirt out of an Eddie Campbell drawing).Unfortunately maybe only one-fourth of the book’s 96 pages are drawn in that great style. Actually the funnier pages in the book, do tend to be the one-off stuff, drawn to look a little bit like an old newspaper strip from the 1920s - although occasionally the jokes in those tend to be so inside, I couldn’t make heads or tales of what he’s going on about. Less interesting is the quarter of the book told in straight, typeset text (traditional novel-ish), usually written in his daughter’s voice, mystery novel style about his own disappearance. Least successful of all is the rather long section written as an interview with his daughter (for The Comics Journal?) about some of his quirks and delusions - that’s all made up of photographs of (presumably) his Joy Division t-shirt clad daughter drinking a beer at an outdoor cafe, with computer printed out text pasted above her head and circled in thin pen, traditional comic book style.

All these approaches don’t quite seem to add up, but we’re left with some kind of weird, disjointed meditation, on, I guess, Campbell’s struggle with creating comics, and being a kind of obsessive weird, uh, cartoonist not sure he wants to be a cartoonist, but who is nonetheless drawing a comic this instant (that we’re reading), who can’t quite pay the bills, but obviously needs to pay the bills. Uh - it’s just a book about a confused middle aged guy - a book maybe also meant to confuse the reader a bit too? While it has its good moments… Eddie Campbell can still write a funny line, can still be charming, and is still obviously one of the smartest persons to have ever written a comic - this one just feels like it went a little too far over the edge into self-involvement and confusion to be a satisfying read for most anybody but Campbell’s most intimate associates. It’s too disjointed, too much of a mess, and too unfocused to leave this reader with any other feeling but a confused shrug of the shoulders.