Eddie Campbell

Eddie Campbell (born 10 August 1955) is a Scottish comics artist and cartoonist who now lives in Australia. Probably best known as the illustrator and publisher of From Hell (written by Alan Moore), Campbell is also the creator of the semi-autobiographical Alec stories collected in Alec: The Years Have Pants, and Bacchus (aka Deadface), a wry adventure series about the few Greek gods who have survived to the present day. His graphic novel The Lovely Horrible Stuff, which playfully investigates our relationship with money, was published in July 2012 by Top Shelf Productions.

His scratchy pen-and-ink style is influenced by the impressionists, illustrators of the age of "liberated penmanship" such as Phil May, Charles Dana Gibson, John Leech and George du Maurier, and cartoonists Milton Caniff and Frank Frazetta (particularly his Johnny Comet strip). His writing has been compared to that of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller.

Biography

Alec and other autobiographical work

Campbell made his earliest attempts at autobiographical comics in the late 1970s with In the Days of the Ace Rock and Roll Club. This evolved into Alec, with the character of Alec MacGarry standing in for the author. Campbell self-published these early comics in the amateur press association BAPA and then as short-run photocopied pamphlets in London in the early 1980s, selling them at conventions and comic marts and via Paul Gravett's "Fast Fiction" market stall. When Gravett founded Escape Magazine, Campbell was one of the artists featured.