Our Eddie: The King Canute Crowd

by Eddie Campbell. Eddie Campbell Comics, 2000. $14.50.

I'm not trying to make ordinary life interesting: it is interesting. It's unbelievably exciting.

-- Eddie Campbell, The Comics Journal #145

Welcome to the second installment of our series on Eddie Campbell's Alec MacGarry/autobiographical graphic novels. (Our first episode, mostly a dialogue on Campbell's collaborations with Alan Moore, is here.) Today our subject is Alec: the King Canute Crowd.

The stories in Canute originally appeared between 1981 and 1987 in various venues, including Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury's British alt-comix magazine Escape and Campbell's own self-published Flick zine. A couple of witty panels in Graffiti Kitchen (1993) clarify why Campbell and a friend chose the name Flick for their self-pub:

Since the 1980s, the Canute material has been reprinted in a book called The Complete Alec (Acme/Eclipse, 1990), and resurfaced as a series of backup tales in Campbell's Bacchus comic. In this review, however, I assume that the definitive edition is the most recent: Alec: the King Canute Crowd, published by Eddie Campbell Comics in 2000. I should note here, for those unfamiliar with the Alec stories, that they're autobiographical in all but proper names. In his preface to the 2000 Canute, Campbell wishes that he could "get rid of all that 'Alec' and 'Danny' stuff" and just go for straight memoir, but he'd rather not spend the rest of his life "fixing the old when so much of the new remains to be done." He's also said elsewhere, and only half-jokingly, that he's waiting for the statute of limitations to run out on the events he chronicles before he gives out real names and places.

What are these stories about? In many lives, there's a gray area, a liminal zone temporarily outside the influence of proper society, when you've outgrown childhood but aren't quite ready for the responsibilities of being an adult. I remember this period in my own life, the intoxicating flood of freedom and hormones I felt when I graduated from a strict, all-boys Catholic high school and enrolled in a comparatively bohemian public university. I remember passing out and sleeping overnight in my car outside the Continental, a scummy punk bar in downtown Buffalo, after dancing so hard that I thought my head would blow off. I remember falling hopelessly in love with Nancy (not her real name), who was with me when I saw The 400 Blows the first time and whose father spoke Gaelic as musical (and, to me, as unintelligible) as a passage from Finnegans Wake. I've never tried to write a memoir (or a MacGarryesque "fictionalization," or a song) about those days, though, because I don’t have the objectivity or intelligence necessary to represent them truthfully. In 2006, I saw Nancy for the first time in over 15 years, and I couldn't speak: all I could do is stare at her for a half-hour. The nostalgia I felt was powerful enough to freeze the words in my throat.

But not Eddie. Eddie's able to speak about those days of being wild like a poet.

There's plenty of literature about adolescent rebellion--do they still make high school kids read The Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace?--but it seems to me that the art dries up once the rebel disconnects from repressive structures like boarding schools and dysfunctional families. Once the rebel achieves a degree of freedom, his or her goal becomes existential and contemplative ("How will I live my life?") and questions like these don't lend themselves as easily to dramatic treatment as, say, conflicts between a priggish schoolmaster and a smartass student. There are authors, though, who make "How will I live my life?" a major theme of their work: Joyce explores how difficult it is to fly above the nets of "language, nationality, religion," for instance, and Kerouac's Dean Moriarty exemplifies the dangers inherent in the quest for freedom. (Warren Ellis has a sharp commentary on some of the connections between On the Road and Canute.)

Meanwhile, sexual and ideological libertines like Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller argue that our libidinal energies are too furious to be tamed by any attempts (ideological or self-driven) to regulate our lives. At one point, Campbell quotes a diary entry from Nin that serves well as a one-line summing-up of Canute--"Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled elsewhere"--but Miller seems to me the major influence on Campbell.  One of my favorite single drawings by Campbell, one that renders with witty accuracy the nature of the give-and-take of the Alan Moore-Campbell collaboration, reveals Eddie's regard for the author of Tropic of Cancer and Sexus:

Alan's the metafictional world-builder, and Eddie's the celebratory sensualist, the artist who sees the essence of humanity not in bonds of sympathy, but in a Milleresque web of cum. Here’s the first six panels of Canute's book three, "Doggie in the Window" (click the thumbnail for a legible view):

Two panels later, Alec writes "It’s all sex," and Canute chronicles his attempt to live a life devoted to drinking and fucking your way through your early 20s, to staying out late in pubs with both your literal and figurative "mates" and waking up in unfamiliar beds. In true Dean Moriarty/Sal Paradise fashion, Alec apprentices himself to Danny Grey, a slightly older and considerably rowdier sensualist given to byzantine love affairs, brawling, swinging from telephone poles, and canceling wedding plans at the last minute. Canute begins with Alec and Danny meeting at work, and ends with a fight between them that permanently disables their intimate bond. (In After the Snooter [2004], Eddie/Alec visits Danny for the first time in several years, and seeing them as settled, middle-aged men gave me the same low-key melancholy vibe as Michael Apted’s Up films, or the way I felt when I saw Nancy as a middle-aged woman.) But while they're pals, Danny and Alec go on a tear, dragging us along with them through the four "books" (sections, really) that comprise Canute.

This is not to say, however, that their adventures add up to nothing more than a graphic novel equivalent of Superbad. Campbell is careful to simultaneously celebrate the sensualist life and point out its limitations and dangers. Consciously or unconsciously, Alec (and Eddie) embrace the quintessential Freudian dialectic of eros and thanatos; even while driven by thoughts of sex, Alec obsesses about his own mortality, and one metaphor for his (and everyone’s) eventual death is dental health. At the end of a story in Canute's second book, Alec prepares to go to a birthday party for his friend Penny Moore, half-deciding to "make a play" for Penny there, but Danny arrives and tells Alec that Penny’s been in a car accident and "lost a couple of teeth." Alec reacts by shuddering in horror, and Campbell reveals, later in book two, that the loss of teeth is Alec's (and, presumably, Eddie's) "particular anxiety":

This dental anxiety blossoms in book four, in a six-panel short-short story that Campbell disingenuously claims has no connection to anything else in Canute (click that thumbnail!):

Alec races from party to party, rationalizing his waster lifestyle with bohemian philosophies about webs of semen, but his teeth are still wearing down, and the skull beneath the skin reminds him that his good times (and all lifetimes) are finite. In Graffiti Kitchen, the first Alec comic novella Campbell draws after Canute, teeth symbolize not only mortality but also Alec's inability to transcend his own desires and feel empathy for the people in his life. After falling into a strange, somewhat unrequited love affair with a girl named Georgette, Alec fucks Jane, Georgette's mother. (The Flick example at the top of the post is the first time Alec and Jane sleep together.) Alec's reasons for this are complicated--he's genuinely attracted to Jane, but it also seems a vindictive fuck, done to anger Georgette--and on a date soon after said fuck Alec and Jane "discuss over a beer what it would be like to suddenly find yourself stuck with someone else's body." The answer:

Predictably, this whole web of semen ends poorly. Alec never gets comfortable with Jane’s back teeth; he never tries to understand the situation from Jane's point of view, and she becomes a pawn in his love-hate relationship with Georgette.

In Canute, Campbell implies that Alec's constant motion--his running away from the Grim Reaper, and away from faithful relationships with the women around him--threaten to make him immature and shallow. The first time Alec and Danny go out drinking, for example, Alec carries notes with him, quotes from famous thinkers and artists to help him "over the uncomfortable pauses," and he adds little of his own experience and ideas to the exchange. And when he does chime in with his own ideas, we almost wish he'd be quiet. One scene begins with Alec visiting his parents and getting into an argument about abortion. When Alec refuses to take a stand on the issue, his mother berates him thusly:

"How can you have no opinion at all about something this serious? You can’t have half an abortion…you have to be on one side or the other—you can’t go through life with your eyes closed!"

Personally, I understand why Alec dodges this discussion. The abortion topic inflames passions so much that communication between different viewpoints isn't possible anymore. But Alec's mom is onto something with her "eyes closed" comment; immediately following the abortion discussion, Alec is in a pub, spouting platitudes like "Life is just passing time till the train comes in." A caption identifies this line as a sample of Alec's "effete philosophies," and a bar chum responds to the line by saying, "As a philosopher, you’re humorous." At this first stage of his bildungsroman, Eddie is willing to show his cartoon self being an asshole, a windbag blowing effete philosophies. We still listen, reassured by the fact that Canute is such a terrific read: we realize that down the road Alec the wishy-washy waster figures out How to Be an Artist.

Criticisms of Alec mount as the book lopes to its conclusion. Alec has "increasingly regular flare-ups" with Penny Moore, one that culminates with Alec putting her in a headlock and forcing her to the ground. (This is disturbing, like the black eye Joe Matt gives to Trish in Peepshow.) During the same overnight drinking trip, Danny sleepwalks, inadvertently pisses in Penny's purse, and wakes up to Alec's mocking laughter (click):

Everything's a big joke to Alec: abortion, friendship, love. The King Canute Crowd disbands after this dust-up, and Alec knows that "the adventures are over. It is time to return to the humdrum familiar behaviour of real life." But Campbell the Artist knows better. In Canute, Campbell chronicles a remarkable period in his life--a mad, rowdy, heartbreaking would-be lark--and discovers an unexpected lesson in the process: the rhythms of everyday life are, in fact, thrilling and exciting if you're able to go beyond empty platitudes and "effete philosophies" and show life with honesty and artistry. Campbell's devotion to the genre of memoir, his dedication to the representation of life as lived, defines the rest of his exemplary career.

Maybe I'll buy an extra copy of Canute and send it to Nancy.

Campbell's blog, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, is here.

Comments

[Nate A.]

Great reading… this is one of my favorite books by Campbell and it seems to me you capture its concerns quite well. I would like to add something about the art, specifically the way Campbell uses light to almost painterly effect despite the work being in black and white. For example, he captures beautifully the difference between the dark we encounter when we leave the house at night (punctuated as it is by streetlamps and the artificial light from windows) and the darkness of a room with its drapes pulled shut in the morning. I often thumb through the book for the art alone.

[CharlesWHatfield]

Craig, great post, and thanks for taking a solo today.

I love the way this post speaks to your own experiences while casting light on Campbell's work. Sure, all criticism is implicitly autobiographical, but this post really benefits from making the implicit explicit! Besides, it's nice to know something more about your dissolute youth. :)

Regarding the treatment of "adolescent rebellion" in literature, of course it's not confined to the usual suspects in the Young Adult genre. The "adolescent idea," as Patricia Meyer Spacks puts it, is a guiding idea in everything from Fielding's TOM JONES to Goethe's WERTHER to Joyce's PORTRAIT. Spacks' book, THE ADOLESCENT IDEA: MYTHS OF YOUTH AND THE ADULT IMAGINATION (1981), is revealing and useful on this subject, the more so because it does not confine its attention to Young Adult literature so labeled. It's a study of how adolescence has been variously depicted in literature, with particular emphasis on the novel from the 18th century forward. Spacks argues that depictions of adolescence often reveal more about the needs of the adults who are doing the depicting (which is a central point in my Literature for Adolescents course).

Regarding resemblances between Miller and Campbell, or Kerouac and Campbell, I dunno. I appreciate Eddie's lightness of touch and ironic self-awareness, which I think set him apart. As an aside, I've never cared for Kerouac, whose narrowness of outlook bugs me (perhaps I didn't read him at a properly susceptible age?). Eddie's work feels different to me. It seems to me that Eddie takes a distinctly unRomantic view of the libertine goings-on in CANUTE, and I appreciate that. Perhaps it's the fact that the COMIC is never far from Eddie's comics; his comic sense suffuses everything, even the grimmest, most troubling episodes, with a grace and air of civility.

BTW, Warren Ellis has good words to say about Campbell, but I'd say he doesn't understand some of the other autobio work that he disses in passing. He's using the usual cheap shots against the genre. As if Chet Brown's work in this vein could be reduced to "beating off." Bah. (This is a pet peeve of mine.)

Nate, I like your comment about the painterly qualities of Campbell's art. Eddie addresses this in a series of blog posts (from last September) regarding his use of zipatone:

http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/search/label/zipatones

Campbell does wonderful, gestural things with zipatone, ignoring the way the technique is usually trapped within solid contours and instead letting it spill all over the place. It sprays, it clumps, it scatters in shards all over; it's a beautiful mess. Check out, for instance, the tones in Craig's "Doggie in the Window" example: I love that panel in which Alec is shown drowning. Or dig the way tone patterns are used to define Penny's shape, in Craig's last example.

On his blog, Eddie talks about wanting to define forms in a painterly way (to avoid the deadness of straightforward line drawing), and, Nate, you've nailed that. I like your remark about distinguishing between different kinds of darkness. I agree: the art alone (sorely underrated) is a pleasure to the thinking eye.

Craig, I hope to follow you in high style with ALEC: HOW TO BE AN ARTIST!

[Nate A.]

Campbell also talks about his preoccupation with shades of light and dark in his most recent Comics Journal Interview, and my observations owe much to his open discussion of his process. I'll be interested to see how you folks handle his transition into color and fumetti for "Fate."