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Monday, May 01, 2006
The Fate of the Artist
Ha, you all thought you were rid of me for good, didn't you? Sorry to spoil the fun, I'm still here. I can only tell you that when you're in the middle of very boring real world matters fun things like blogging about funnybooks get pretty low on the priority list. That sort of ties into the book reivewed below. The good news is I'm finishing up my junior year of college, moving into a new place, am continuing writing for places that actually pay me and sometimes live, laugh and love in the City by the Bay. But you know I can't go too long without running my mouth off about comics here. Why not start with a book felt almost impossible to review?
In his Comics Journal interview Chris Ware noted how stunned and grateful he was that Gary Panter would tell him that Ware’s generation of cartoonists have set the bar for older generations. One older cartoonist who seems to be picking up some tips from Ware in particular is Eddie Campbell. Fate of the Artist reads a bit like Acme Novelty Library with Campbell changing media throughout the book but processing the same ideas.
Campbell starts the book missing, with a detective on the lookout for him. We learn from interviews with the Campbell clan what Campbell’s life was like. A lot is revealed early on during a fumetti featuring the lovely Hayley Campbell explaining her take on her father. The picture (or rather pictures) of Campbell is that of a household Hamlet. He is full of thoughts about art, humor and life and yet seems to have trouble with proper human interaction. The Honeybee strip is a parody of the many “dumb husband/snarky wife” strips there have been in comics’ history except in this context it seems like serious stuff placed next to Campbell’s real life. Or maybe it makes Campbell’s real life seem much more comedic.
The book’s format is Campbell’s scatterbrain put on paper. No one strip is used for too long and even the parody strips are only two panels long (until Honeybee gets a full page in the Sunday edition of whatever paper it would appear in). Even the straight autobiography becomes more complex as we find there are really actors playing the roles of the Campbells. We use to have Alec to stand in for Campbell, now he it is struggling actor Richard Siegrist. As Campbell’s own recent Comics Journal interview shows, Campbell likes to define and examine what is and isn’t a comic or graphic novel. Anyone else who likes to play along will have a field day here. It’s that love for comics that gives all of Campbell’s experimentation a very real emotional element. It’s through this work, the work that seems to distract his mind from the pragmatic parts of life, which he can communicate his problems with the rest of the world with and the problems he deals with the ones he is closest to. Even with Campbell’s body missing throughout the book his mentality rules it. From the stories in here Campbell seemed to be in danger of just being a brain on legs, so either the body or soul had to go. We find out which won that match in the end.
The story ends with a remix of an O. Henry story about a humorist with Eddie Campbell acting as the protagonist, a newspaper humorist. Our hero finds that when art becomes one’s life both seem to suffer. Dedicating one’s life to the abstract cuts oneself from the rest of the world. The humorist is only content when he gets a job at the laugh-a-minute field of funeral services and uses his humor as a tool for greater business. It’s a cynical idea of what the fate of an artist is and one I suspect Campbell doesn’t fully believe in (he hasn’t given up cartooning and is doing another book for First Second). This fate of the artist seen here still holds a lot of truth to it.
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