The Fate of the Artist

In Eddie Campbell's latest graphic novel, the author will conduct an investigation into his own sudden disappearance.

In wildly comical reenactments of incidents from his curious life, his part will be played by an actor. With audacious literary sleight of hand, he will put words into the mouths of those who knew him. Clues will be sought in artistic blow-outs from the history of all the arts. And all the major players, even down to Monty the dog, will get their own daily strip and Sunday page in yellowed newspaper sections from an imaginary long ago.

In this creative mining of the rich resources of the comic strip language Campbell will give us a complex meditation on the lonely demands of art amid the realities of everyday life.

"Campbell, best known for his work on From Hell and his autobiographical Alec comics, has come up with a marvelous sui generis oddity: a meta-memoir about his own disappearance that's a kind of intently controlled nervous breakdown on paper. It's a nonlinear, mixed-media collage of a book — there are typeset prose passages, painted comics about his family, old-fashioned newspaper strips, photos with typeset word balloons, a child's crayon scrawl representing God and, near the end, an illustrated adaptation of O. Henry's story 'The Confessions of a Humorist,' which concerns how habitually turning life into art can make life unbearable. Campbell's always been interested in the curious nooks of history, and there's a running thread about artistic also-rans like Johann Schobert and the Greek sculptor Phidias; there's also an ongoing gag about Campbell replacing himself with an imaginary actor named Richard Siegrist. The tone is whimsical and playful, but there's a deep despair beneath it — about drinking, burnout and what happens to an artist 'when his imaginary friends [stop] calling' — that overwhelms and takes the place of the plot. What pulls the whole thing together is Campbell's stunningly protean visual technique: fierce blotches of watercolor, scraggly pen-and-ink work and whiplash stylistic shifts from impressionistic caricatures to exquisitely rendered painterly miniatures." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Campbell's latest report from the art front continues to demonstrate his mastery of the comics medium." Booklist

"[T]he variety of styles and media employed by Campbell adds up to a dazzling, albeit ambiguously artful experience." Miami Herald

"Graphically the book embraces ink, paint, and photographs, sometimes all on the same page. Weaving through all of these elements is a warm and well-grounded sense of humanity." VOYA

In this pseudo-autobiography, the subject of the memoir has vanished without a trace. Through six separate threads, each one typographically and stylistically distinct, a private investigator tries to discover the artists' fate through false trails, family and daily life reenactments, and even an imaginary Sunday comic strip. As the narrative threads intersect and collide in surprising ways, the reader is carried along on a fantastic journey through the life of the artist.

A master comics artist, here Eddie Campbell offers a complex, caustic, and surprising meditation on balancing the lonely life of the artist with the demands of everyday life.

In wildly comical reenactments of incidents from his curious life,

Eddie Campbell is the acclaimed artist behind From Hell, for which he won the Ignatz award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and the Eisner award for Best Graphic Album. In 2001, From Hell was made into a major motion picture starring Johnny Depp. Campbell is also the creator of the series Bacchus and Alec: The King Canute Crowd.