Books
www.list.co.uk/books Hitlist THE BEST BOOKS, COMICS & EVENTS*
‘THERE’S WISDOM IN HAVING BOTH THE PAST AND THE FUTURE IN YOUR HEAD’
✽✽ Nick Cave The Death of Bunny Munro is only Cave’s second novel. Presumably the band, the film scores and the film scripts all got in the way a little bit of him getting round to another one until now. Here, he reads from it anyway. Borders Books, Glasgow, Tue 29 Sep. ✽✽ Glasgow Poetry Week A convergence of events that keenly illustrate the live (and for that matter lively) nature of contemporary performance poetry in the city with everything from DiScOmBoBuLaTe’s axis of comedy and poetry to start ups like the brand new Poetry at the Ivory at the Art School. Various venues, Glasgow, Fri 2–Fri 9 Oct. ✽✽ Sister Split Forward thinking female-facing arts festival Ladyfest shows it has many strings to its bow with this celebrated feminist lit event, a showcase of American female writers led by Michelle Tea. The Big Red Door, Edinburgh, Fri 25 Sep. ✽✽ By Leaves We Live This all-day event in the capital is a welcoming melting pot of talks, events, stalls and a chance to share any poetry passions. Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh, Sat 26 Sep. ✽✽ Wigton Book Festival Christopher Brookmyre, Sue Lawrence and Nick Nairn are among the deft mix of local heroes and international stars that bring their literary magic to Scotland’s national book town. See caption, page 34. Various venues, Wigtown, Fri 25 Sep–Sun 4 Oct. ✽✽ Lorrie Moore Moore’s first book in almost a decade is an intense, densely woven tale that allows right into the very fabric of her characters. See review, page 33. (Faber). ✽✽ Eddie Campbell See preview, left. (Top Shelf Publications).
Smart Alec
Miles Fielder talks to comics artist and writer Eddie Campbell about his latest work, a semi-autobiographical opus filtered through an outlandish but real lens
G lasgow-born, Brisbane-based Eddie Campbell is best known for illustrating From Hell, his and writer Alan Moore’s exhaustive graphic novel investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s the Oz-based ex-pat’s autobiographical comics, however, that have secured the 54-year-old a place in his chosen field’s hall of fame. Campbell’s new book Alec: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Sized Omnibus) collects, as the subtitle suggests, his lifetime’s work, 30 years of comics plus previously unpublished material and a brand new story in a mammoth 640- page coffee table tome. Riddled with absurdist humour and metafictional tricks, these astute autobiographical musings broke new ground in a medium now filled with confessional comics. Of the book, Neil Gaiman says, ‘Alec is the best comic about art and wine and mid-life crisis and family and friends and love there is.’ Moore says simply, ‘Alec is magic.’
‘I wanted to do comics about real life,’ Campbell says, ‘and the autobiographical idea came later. I love the cartoons from the early years of the last century, like Gasoline Alley. They used the rich humour of day-to-day life, married couples, kids. There seemed to be nothing real enough in comics in the 70s. I wanted to do something ordinary, but at the same time wonderful. At first, I didn’t know to what degree it would be about me and to what degree it would wander off into fiction. Eventually, the work became my companion, as over the years I recorded what I saw.’ The eight comics collected in the book present a version of Campbell’s life as filtered through his alter
32 THE LIST 24 Sep–8 Oct 2009
ego Alec MacGarry. Some of the stories are outlandish fantasies (imagining the patronising doctor at a clap clinic self-asphyxiating with a giant condom, for one example), but they’re all grounded in real life. Reading the stories altogether, what’s striking is how homogenous his life’s work is.
‘When you work on a painting you don’t work on the top left-hand corner and paint down to the bottom right,’ Campbell says. ‘Painters paint the whole thing at the same time. This book was done that way. I was moving backwards and forwards in time assembling the various stories. It’s not linear, as a diary would be. It’s much more cunningly constructed . . . it’s very useful being able to go back to an earlier stage in your life and remind yourself of the problems you were having then that you overcame, just as you’ll overcome the ones you’re having now. There’s wisdom in having the past and the future in your head all at the same time.’ Campbell’s been busy with other publishing projects, most recently his adaptation of an unpublished screenplay, The Black Diamond Detective Agency, his portrait of circus life, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, and the forthcoming anthology of his saga about the Greek god of wine and revelry, Bacchus. Meanwhile, Alec remains an ongoing project. ‘I’ve got another book starting to cook in the mind,’ Campbell says. ‘I think there’s plenty more material to come.’
Alec: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Sized Omnibus) is out Oct, published by Top Shelf Productions.