Episode 615 – Eddie Campbell

Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 615:
Eddie Campbell

“Cartoonists spend most of their life sitting at a table; we don’t get out very much. But that’s the very thing that distinguishes Kate Carew from all the others.”

Cartoonist & historian Eddie Campbell returns to the show with his fantastic new book, KATE CAREW: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Underground), which explores turn-of-the-(20th)-century artist, cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, interviewer & journalist Kate Carew. We get into how Eddie discovered Kate’s work while researching The Goat-Getters, how Kate wound up interviewing the likes of Mark Twain, Picasso, the Wright Brothers, and other celebs (& non-celebs) of her time, how her self-caricatures serve as a sorta graphic autobiography (and precursor to the whole world of graphic memoir storytelling), her support of women’s suffrage, and how I accidentally semi-sorta inspired Eddie to make this book. We also talk about how Kate’s story evades sentimentality, how Eddie & Audrey Niffenegger formed the Digital Art Burglars firm, what he’s learned from exploring the early history of American cartooning, why his next book is about the Midwest school of cartooning, how he wound up writing the comics histories he wanted to read, and why he had to pull a page from this book due to a complaint from the printer. Plus we discuss his new graphic novel about how he met Audrey, how his comic strip of the Pajama Girl, a murder victim in Sydney, led to him working with Alan Moore on From Hell, his life-lessons about making every pitch & taking every job that was offered, and why Kate Carew was such an enormous outlier in the world of cartooning. Give it a listen! And go read KATE CAREW: America’s First Great Woman Cartoonist!

(And listen to our 2018, 2020, and 2023 conversations!)

“I never manage to finish a book; there’s always an ideal version where I’ve managed to fix all the mistakes.”

APPLE PLAYER TK

“I always wanted to write comics history, but with thoroughness, not as an academic book, but like a detective investigation, and entertaining.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Eddie Campbell has been making a living from comics since the 1980s. He is best known as the artist of From Hell (with Alan Moore), and made a splash with Bacchus, whose monthly comic ran for 60 issues. His semi-autobiographical concoctions however form his favorite strain of his own work. The former material was gathered in Alec: The Years Have Pants, all except the full color book The Fate of the Artist and his all-new book, The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell. In 2018, he published The Goat Getters: Jack Johnson, the Fight of the Century, and How a Bunch of Raucous Cartoonists Reinvented Comics.

Follow Eddie on Bluesky, and listen to our 2018, 2020, and 2023 conversations.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Eddie by someone else. It’s on my instagram.