LWIA 4.3: Eddie Campbell (Patreon)

Two sections to go on Act I, which looks like it'll come in at a basically reasonable 8-9k. I'll probably start in on the reading for Act II soon, since that has a shockingly large amount of quite hard material.

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In one sense Moore’s high level map proved accurate: the comic was finished largely as he initially imagined it. But Moore would soon find himself blindsided by the sheer depth of what he found once he began exploring these ideas in more detail. As with Big Numbers, this would quickly lead to From Hell becoming an overwhelming project. But whereas on Big Numbers the bulk of this burden fell on the artist, Bill Sienkiewicz, who burnt out on the project three issues in, dooming it, on From Hell, the burden would largely fall on Moore himself, who would have his entire world upended by the project. Thankfully on From Hell he had the most sturdy rock of a collaborator imaginable in the form of Eddie Campbell.

Campbell was one of the more unusual figures in the British comics scene, in that his career emerged entirely from self-published work, beginning  in 1975 with a comic called, depending on what interview he describes it in, either Beem! A Comic Book for the End of the World or The Tale of Beem Gotelump, which Campbell printed five hundred copies of and sold a whopping forty, stashing the remaining four hundred and sixty in his parents’ loft. (In 2006, he recounted that “every time I go gome, I go up there and grab a handful. There’s probably still a hundred up there.”) After a several year break “where I reassessed what I was doing with my art” he tried again, this time getting involved in the growing British small press scene, of which he would later note that “By ‘small press’ I mean really small. If you have a ‘distributor’ you’re no longer small press—I mean selling from a wooden table at a market, taking them round backstreet bookshops in a suitcase, sending them out by mail entirely to fellow enthusiasts.” 

The centerpiece of this scene was Paul Gravett, who would sell work from Campbell and other photocopier publishers from his Fast Fiction stall at the Westminster Comics Mart, and would later found Escape Publishing, who would put out the first collections of Campbell’s work in 1984. These were the earliest compilations of what came to be known as Campbell’s Alec series—a run of autobiographical comics featuring Campbell’s self-insert character Alec McGarry in short, generally elliptical stories in the same broad vein as Harvey Pekar, often including his friend Danny Grey, who famously never forgave himself for leaving Alec McGarry asleep at the turnpike (as the opening panels of the collected Alec memorably have it). 

Unlike many of the other creators on the Fast Fiction table, most of whom eventually made the jump to 2000 AD or something in the course of establishing their careers, Campbell remained almost singularly focused on these autobiographical comics.  Even after moving to Australia with in 1986 and, by necessity, becoming “immersed 100% in the very situation I had hoped to avoid, which is that every single thing I do now appears in the direct sales comics shop market,” he remained associated entirely with publishers like Escape and Harrier Comics that emerged from the small press scene and generally went out of business within a couple of years. It was not until 1987 that he commenced on Bacchus, his impish spin on the American superhero story, and even that took a strangely low key, domestic perspective on its subject.

Campbell explains this focus by noting that he’s “not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It’s exciting, unbelievably exciting. I was on my bike the other day and I overshot my turn-off and I found myself away down by the river and there were these trees growing out of the river. It was so crazy and beautiful I couldn’t believe it.” This, perhaps unexpectedly, was much of why he was chosen for From Hell—because he would, as Steve Bissette put it, “not be seduced by the violence inherent in the tale.” Campbell was not a completely left field choice—he’d contributed a four page true crime tale called “The Pyjama Girl” to the first issue of Taboo, and more to the point had been known to Alan Moore for virtually his entire career—back in 1983, when Campbell was just getting started, Moore proclaimed him “one of the most interesting talents, amateur or professional, working in comics at the moment” in one of his fanzine reviews back in The Daredevils, and they struck up a friendship not long after when Moore tried to set Campbell up to succeed him as the cartoonist for Sounds; Campbell lost the gig to Bryan Talbot, but would get it a few years later. (Campbell recounts their first meeting, which saw Danny Grey driving him to Northampton, giving Moore an interior monologue upon meeting Grey, “Just for an instant I have the sense of panel borders looming ont he periphery of my vision, framing me, the lorry, the handshake, the Sainsbury’s carrier bag in my other hand, the infants school over the road…”)

As previously observed, there is an impishly counterinuitive streak in putting Campbell on From Hell, especially when paired with Bill Sienkiewicz on Big Numbers. Campbell’s proficiency at and fascination with depicting the mundane and everyday would have been a natural fit for Big Numbers, and indeed he pitched Moore on drawing it after it collapsed for good. Sienkiewicz, on the other hand, was a born horror artist, seemingly perfectly suited to drawing Jack the Ripper. The decision to effectively switch their books was a clever one that enlivened both projects tremendously. But it also effectively doomed Big Numbers while ensuring From Hell would be the one that succeeded. Indeed, Campbell commented on this before Big Numbers had even collapsed, noting that it was “a mystery to me how they can’t get the books out more than once a year. I think the trouble with Mad Love is that Alan adopted the conventional big-business comics methods of the writer-artist team when he should have just set up his own shop and masterminded the thing under his own eyes. Then if the artist was too slow, fire the artist and get another one. That’s what I would do. Indeed, when I work with other people now, that’s what I do do. You can’t go into this with airy-fairy notions of the idealism of Artistic Brotherhood and then except some Flash Dan on the other side of the world to deliver the goods when Dan is also being wooed by Marvel and all the other corporate biggies.” Ultimately From Hell was just as turbulent as Big Numbers, and Campbell would soon come to intimately understand the annual release schedule, but for all the chaos he at no point did he waver under the pressure, pulling the book kicking and screaming over the finishing line, and even going so far as to set up his own Eddie Campbell Comics imprint to get a collected edition of it out in 1999.