Eddie Campbell

Most of you will know Eddie Campbell, if you know him at all, from his work with Alan Moore on From Hell, Moore’s magnus opus on Jack the Ripper and the birth of the 20th century, amongst other things. What you may not be awareof is that Campbell has had a much longer career than that and is not just an artist, but a talented writer in his own right.

His best know solo work is probably Bacchus, a long running series starring the Greek god of alcohol and his adventures in the twentieth century. The centuries have not been kind to Bacchus and he’s now little more than a wino, though a wino who looks uncannily like Corto Maltese. The drawing is semi-realistic, more in the style of Milton Caniff or Hugo Pratt, though with periods of Kirbyesque excess. The stories are somewhat meandering, with interchanging episodes of high voltage action and more quiet, slice of life drama. Various other surviving Greek gods show up from time to time as well. The early stories are somewhat on the rough side still, but get much better over time. The best Bacchus book you can get is probably King Bacchus, with Bacchus is king of the Castle and Frog pub, which has seceded from the United Kingdom and declared its independence. The followup volumes are also quite good. But really, no Bacchus book is a bad buy, even the early, rougher volumes are worth getting.

Next to Bacchus, there’s Alec, which is basically a slightly fictionalised autobiography. Campbell has been doing these stories for years and unlike many cartoonists he’s actually had an interesting life. Born in Scotland, quite bright, worked for years in various blue collar jobs, started cartooning, lots of drunk adventures (notice a theme), got married, moved to Australia, got kids, settled down. Alec is the longest running series Campbell has been doing, having done Alec stories since he started drawing comics. What’s impressive about them is that, again unlike other cartoonists, he knows when to move the focus from his own life to that of the people around him, without coming across as a voyeur. Much of it feels like the sort of stories you’d tell your mates in the pub, only much better.

Campbell’s artwork is excellent, at its best in black and white I find. As said he is very much in the style of Hugo Pratt or Milton Caniff, though immediately recognisable as his own. He has an eye for small details and knows when to put in details and when to leave them out. The small samples here really do not do his work justice; the best way to sample his work is to get one of his books and
just start reading. Any good comic book store or library should have at least some.

Now to do a Mike Sterling and do a half post of linky goodness:

The art of reviewing

No matter how crap I find my reviews the next day, I can’t help but think that at least I’m still doing reviews, rather than ill-disguised hitpieces. The English socalled quality newspapers especially have a nasty habit of abusing their bookreviews; here are two from the supposedly liberal Observer that annoyed me today

The first comes via commenter Dearkitty and is an Observer review of Richard Ingrams’ The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. What annoyed me especially here was the opening paragraph:

If William Cobbett hadn’t existed, few people today would feel the need to invent him. Best known for Rural Rides, his socio-lyrical tour of England in the 1820s, Cobbett’s early life is a chaos of politics, tangled up in the kind of issues which are world-shattering to those who live through them but forgotten in a generation.

I can’t stand the jocular matey tone in which Cobbett is dismissed here. It also shows an uncanny lack of history to dismiss the cause of parliamentary reform and extended voting rights for the common man as “the kind of issues” that are “forgotten in a generation”. The rest of the review is almost as awful, written to template: “catchy” opening, some discussion of the subject of the book done with not too much accuracy, with less than half the review actually talking about the book itself and never actually coming out in judgement of it.

The other review is more vile and more dangerous, a hatchet job on Noam Chomsky, which “Lenin” neatly dissected.
Here it is the last two paragraphs that got on my tits:

But what I find most noxious about Chomsky’s argument is his desire to create a moral – or rather immoral – equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: ‘Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others – have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.’

Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world’s greatest – if flawed and selfish – democracy going to the polls.

There are several things to object to here: the deliberate and stupid misreading of Chomsky’s argument in the worst possible light, the histrionic fashion in which he accuses Chomsky of hypocrisie –“is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky” — “Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?” — “Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?” and finally, the great slobbering sucking up of those last two sentences. It fair turns the stomach.

It turns the stomach even more so, because it is the Blair defence. Everytime Blair has been confronted by angry members of the public and is held accountable for his actions towards Iraq, he comes out with the same old line, that you are allowed to your opinion because you are living in a country, in which you have the right to criticise your government (nervous hand gesutre, sweaty forehead) and should the people of Iraq not have that right?

Not that anyone is ever convinced by this pap, but it is a nice way to claim the moral high ground and any misdeeds are swept under the carpet – never mind Iraq is in a perpeptual civil war and embassy employees cannot reveal who they work for without being killed, at least the Iraqies are free now. In the same way, as long as Chomsky is not dragged from his office and burned in front of M.I.T., clearly his criticisms of the United States are without ground. Because this great United States is still a democracy and that excuses any and all misdeeds, which will anyway surely be resolved by the voters in the next elections.

Rural Rides


William Cobbett – 542 pages – published in 1830

Cover of Rural Rides

If you’ve read any of China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels, like Perdido Street Station, you’ve got some idea of what pre Parliament reform England was like in the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth century. It may have had a parliament and some semblance of a constition, but it was far from a democracy and it ruthlessly repressed any political movement that attempted to change things. Despite this repression there was a long and diverse tradition of reform and in the early nineteenth century there were few more impressive figures within the radical reform movement than William Cobbett.

Cobbett started his professional life by taking the stagecoach to London on a whim, spending several months as a clerk before becoming a soldier. In the army he got disgusted with the endemic corruption, brought charges against his officers and had to flee to France just as the revolution there broke out. He then spent time in the United States, until bankruptcy forced him back to England. At this point he was pretty much still a monarchist Tory in his political outlook, but this slowly changed towards Radical, especially after his conviction for treasonous libel after he protested the flogging of local militiamen by Hanovarian mercenaries.

In 1802 Cobbet founded his own newspaper, the Political Register, which ran until his death in 1835. During this entire time it was one of the most well known and consistent Radical publications, with a popularity unmatched by any other. In it, Cobbett agitated for Parliamentary reform and an end to the rotten boroughs and corruption, against the tax eaters, the clergy with their tithes and in favour of the honest working folk of England getting a decent living for their labours.

His politics in short were a mixture of genuine radicalism coupled with a nostalgia for a bygone England, where there were masters and labourers, but both with rights and duties towards one another. His ideal was an England of smallholders, small independent craftsmen and masters, each trading with another directly, without interference by capitalist middlemen. His sympathies lay mostly with rural England, rather than the cities.

Rural Rides is the logical outgrowth of Cobbett’s politics and sentiments, an attempt to discover the real state of the English countryside. Originally published in the Register, it covers a period of four years, from 1822 until 1826. Its strength, the reason why it is still in print is that it is not just a political examination, but a portrait of a countryside now long gone, still partway in its transformation from the medieval to the modern.

Cobett has a real love for this landscape, and a real hatred for the pressures that are transforming it or have transformed it. Furthermore this love is coupled with an admiration for the people who inhabit it. Time after time in his descriptions the condition of the people in a given town or county is as much a reason as its natural beauty for Cobbett to praise it.

You can therefore not read Rural Rides properly if you discount its politics, decouple it from its context. Cobbett was a partisan observer at a time of deep political turmoil, with the forces of capitalism –the owners of great estates, the new factory masters, the free trade ideologues– were mounting their assaults on the ancient priviledges and rights of the English country people, when people like Cobbett were not only defending these ancients rights but were attempting to extend them. There’s a deep anger in Rural Rides, an anger at the changes happening in England, a very personal anger.

His egotism is delightful, because there is no affection in it. He does not talk about himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject and he himself is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration from a squamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well“. It is this personal feeling that keeps Rural Rides in print, because his anger, his despair and his joy are still palpatable more then 170 years after first publication

Also published at my booklog.

Football and the English socialist

It’s an even year, so as always the English socialist is put in an awkward position: who to support for the Worldcup? Supporting England is out of the question, because, as Snowball puts it:

As if the corporate takeover isn’t bad enough (many firms have produced ‘I love England’ badges for their employees), then the political consequences don’t bear worth thinking about. All of the main three capitalist political parties are doubtless gearing up already to associate themselves with supporting England – and it is likely that Blair will try to use a good Cup run and the associating ‘feel good factor’ to hang onto power – though one suspects the hapless croquet playing fuckwit Prescott will not be used in too many New Labour photoshoots playing football.

This sort of feeling is quite widespread amongst English socialists, but I’ve never seen its like in other countries. Certainly Dutch socialists are content enough to support the Dutch team, rather than coming up with convoluted reasons to not support it. That is not to say the Engerland-haters don’t have a point: the Worldcup is commercialised, politicised and will be used by quite disgusting people to bask in its reflected glory. But I still think you’re making a category error if you take your disgust about
the circus surrounding the cup as a reason to not support England. Your support of Trinibad and Tobago instead of Engerland will not stop the abuse, only boycotting the Worldcup might do it.

Even worse is being anti-England out of a misplaced sense of anti-imperialism: Blair’s policies will not change because the SWP does not support England! It just seems like yet another form of identify politics, a way to show how socialist you are without, you know, doing anything about it. As the Dead Kennedys said quite a while back “Play ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz On your five grand stereo / Braggin that you know how the niggers feel cold And the slums got so much soul“.