Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2023 November 10 • Friday

Another comics event: a new Eddie Campbell, The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell or The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell or The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell as Presented by Eddie Campbell.

Flip it over and you get a new edition of a previous book, The Fate of the Artist, to which Second Fake Death is sort of a sequel.

In the first book Eddie Campbell is missing, presumed dead, and a meta-fictional investigation takes place among Campbell's traipsing through different material and presentations, using photographs and creating pastiches of old newspaper comic strips.

The second book is similar, combining Campbell's familiar nine-panel pages with art done on computers and offering readers a view into what his life in Chicago was like during Covid lockdown.

It's a stimulating balance between elements of comics' history and future.

It's very unusual and certainly different from anything else I see being done in comics these days. Campbell is not only an expert scholar on where comics have been, he's also one of the creators leading the medium to its next exressions.