Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks: Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization, and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell's Alec

In this era of the graphic novel, we are used to seeing comic books—that is, comic magazines—migrate to the bookshelf in the form of bound collections. Yet do these collections cohere as books? Do they exhibit the cohesiveness, the formal and thematic unity that we have come to expect of, say, the novel or the memoir, a unity that the tag "graphic novel" seems to promise? How may a serial comic in collected form become more than a mere artifact of its serialization? How may it achieve book-ness? Given the dominance of serial publication in comics, addressing such questions is crucial to theorizing graphic narrative.

Artist Eddie Campbell's most imposing artifact, and arguably his most aesthetically accomplished work to date, is Alec: "The Years Have Pants" (2009), a 640-page omnibus that brings together in a single book most of the autobiographical stories written and drawn by Campbell over a span of thirty years. The Years Have Pants represents a remarkable achievement for many reasons, and in this essay we will discuss one of these reasons in particular: how the omnibus stands as a unified and complex whole—a "tight weave," as Campbell characterizes his aesthetic (Deppey 68)—despite three decades of on-and-off production and the project's roots in fragmentary serial publication.

We begin with a short chronicle of Campbell's life and an overview of Alec. We then use three concepts—the calligraphic line, graphic focalization, and narrative braiding—to reveal how The Years Have Pants achieves narrative coherence. By calligraphy we mean the spontaneous quality of Campbell's line; by graphic focalization, we mean Campbell's tendency to draw in a style flexible enough to encompass both sketchy impressionism and detailed realism, and how this flexibility allows Campbell to present simultaneously both the events of his past and subjective ideas and opinions about those events. In our discussion of narrative braiding, we adopt the theories of comics scholar Thierry Groensteen to highlight some of the themes and motifs that unite the Alec stories into an artistic whole. Campbell uses these devices—sudden shifts in visual style and intricate networks of connection among panels and pages—to create a graphic memoir with the scope and complexity of a great literary novel.

"Ouch!": Campbell's Career and Comic Book Serialization

Eddie Campbell was born in Glasgow in 1955, and became interested in comic books in his early teens. One of his stories, titled "Ouch!", describes how that interest arose. It begins with Campbell being hit by a car and whisked off to hospital, where he is kept for a few days under observation (probably for concussion symptoms, since his head is wrapped in a large bandage). At one point, a nurse passes out some comics to Eddie and his hospital suitemate. Eddie gets an issue of the Beano (a long-lived British humor weekly) while the other boy is given a copy of Strange Tales #141 (February 1966), a bravura example of Marvel Comics' mid-sixties resuscitation of the American superhero comic book. Eddie burns with curiosity—he's not seen a Marvel comic before—and when the other boy takes a nap, Eddie reads his Strange Tales and is immediately transfixed. The second page of "Ouch!" ends with a close-up of Eddie, bandage around his head, raptly staring at the comic, while a caption written by his wiser, older self poetically describes the Nick Fury story as having "a magic, otherworldly quality, but with all the cheeribliness of this one, also the tragicness, transposed whole to the other" (469).¹ This is the epiphany that changes him into a comics fan and future professional, though the moment is wittily undercut by the notion that Campbell's blossoming love of the medium might be due to brain damage.

Fig 1.

Eddie Campbell, "Ouch!" After the Snooter. From Alec: The Years Have Pants, page 470.

© Eddie Campbell. Used by permission of the artist.

Eddie then leaves the hospital and visits various...