Flowers in a Foreground – Eddie Campbell, Frank Miller and the art of everyday life

I’m revisiting some of my earlier writing on Eddie Campbell’s work in preparation for a short post on his latest book.

This piece was originally written in September 2007 for a site that no longer exists. I later re-tooled for an early LGH comic I’m now actively embarrassed by – the two text pieces were good, but the attempts to pastiche Campbell and Miller were mere juvenalia.

If you’re interested in the topic of appreciating what’s in front of your face, we need to talk about Eddie Campbell. I’ve previously argued that Campbell is the premier artistic talent in comics, and while I’ve heard strong arguments for other candidates in the field as a whole (Alan Moore is a popular counter choice, as are Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez; Dave Sim’s admirers are remarkably dogged despite the number of qualifiers they need to throw into the mix) I’ve yet to be convinced that he has any hassle from his fellow autobiographical cartoonists. 

Campbell takes care to stay interested in the world outside of his own head, to the extent that he even wrote himself out of his most solipsistic work, 2006’s The Fate of the Artist.  It’s hard to imagine many of Campbell’s peers even attempting such a gloriously cheeky conceit, let alone making it work.

This sense of endless investment in the world manifests itself most obviously in Campbell’s choice of subject matter (the adventures of his friends, family members and fellow artists), which in turn demand the impressionistic richness of his art style. Like most great author-cartoonists, Campbell has had to create his own personal vocabulary of the comic book page, one equally suited to exploring the finer points of double dates gone wrong and musing on the philosophy of art. 

At first, I took in Campbell’s artistic grammar on a page-by-page basis.  His autobiographical works have the timing of a good newspaper comic, so I would often find myself too caught up in the procession of pratfalls, punch lines and moments of everyday glory to fully appreciate the content of his individual panels. There were exceptions of course – there’s a one-page drawing of a dreary street in Alec: How to be an Artist that catches my breath every time, but that image has a narrative context that necessitates this effect, so my broader point stands.

This was changed by a series of posts on Campbell’s weblog in which the artist discussed his use of zipatone and tipex to achieve what he calls a ‘painterly’ effect. These posts make for great reading, all the more so because Campbell provides plenty of images to back up his musings.  The picture I used at the start of his article is a great example — looking at this single panel up close, I couldn’t help but think of the differences between the way Campbell depicts the elements and the way Frank Miller does the same.  This Sin City excerpt is case in point:

This panel shares a sense of centralised composition with Campbell’s – in both images the human subjects are located in the middle of the frame, assaulted on all sides by a storm of pure white blotches. Beyond this similarity, however, the content of the images is as different as Miller’s subject matter is to Campbell’s.  In contrast to the inky, melodramatic blackness that defines Miller’s Sin City work, Campbell’s panel contains a glorious abundance of different objects and textures – bins, buses, buildings and bits of stray signage are all present, depicted in a series of overlapping tones where Miller would show only darkness. 

Which is to say: where weather conditions obliterate detail in Miller’s work, they inflect it in Campbell’s.

This isn’t an attack on Miller’s art, by the way.  Whatever I think of Sin City, or of the man’s post-9/11 descent into right wing racist crankery, I’d be hard pushed to argue that Miller’s brutish cartooning and stark colour choices lack pulp vitality.  Derision of Miller’s hyperbolic language can be bought cheap, but it can’t quite disguise my envy of his raw artistic firepower. Anyway, the point of my comparison is that the same mundane clutter that has no function in Miller’s stories is central to Campbell’s, and that Campbell’s work succeeds partly because he’s so good at suggesting the nuances of a ‘simple’, drama-free street scene. Or as Campbell put it on his blog:

‘Normal comicbook drawing has always looked dead on the page to my eyes. I needed a style that could suggest light and air.’

Looking at another blown up image from Alex: The King Canute Crowd (below), I’m amazed at the way that Campbell makes this stylisation look so effortless:

From this perspective the mix of ink, tipex and zipatone has an abstract beauty that nevertheless meshes into a larger, more recognisable picture. And isn’t that what Campbell’s work is all about, in part at least?  Life is full of detail that is every bit as arresting as the strangest flights of the imagination; the fact that Campbell’s subtle eye and stealthy hand can conspire to create such artful naturalism is a useful reminder to look around more closely, to be less bound to your well-worn fictions.