Eddie Campbell Signing at Gosh! Comics - Saturday 7th November

These days Eddie Campbell successfully avoids the grim greyness of London despite having been stuck drawing the bloody place for ten long years (see the burglar-stunning brick that is From Hell). Instead he can be found in his sunny house in Australia with a cat asleep on each foot, spouting opinions on the internet and most recently finishing off the behemoth that is Alec: The Years Have Pants - A Life-Sized Omnibus. He told CbR all about it last week.

Campbell’s a well known Scottish raconteur whose work has been likened to Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. He’s probably best known for his Eisner-award winning collaboration with Big Hairy Alan Moore on the enormous From Hell I mentioned above, and also his own wine-drenched Bacchus. Pants collects his groundbreaking autobiographical work (a list of all the books included can be found on the Top Shelf website) plus a whole new book: thirty-five pages you haven’t seen before (check his blog for teaser panels). Moore turns up in it, as does Neil Gaiman and various other comics folk so it’s probably just as well they like it:

"Alec is magic, and even if I knew how all of it was done I'd be doing you a disservice if I pointed out the wires and mirrors. ... It is written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum."
– Alan Moore

"Do you need me to tell you how good Eddie Campbell is? Or that Alec is probably the best book-length comic about art and wine and midlife crises and families and friends and wine and love and art and saying goodbye and terror there is?"
– Neil Gaiman

Campbell will be in the Gosh! basement signing and sketching from 2pm to 4pm on November the 7th. Printing delays have meant that his new Pants aren’t going to be out in time – but fear not, we’re having them shipped in especially for the event. Weighing in at a whopping 640 pages at least one thing can be said about it: it’s big and it’s thick.