At best, the last few years have seen us all forcibly put into a place of uncertain discomfort.
The pandemic had us locked away in our own homes, bubbled up with a select group of loved ones, wearing masks while grocery shopping, frantically working our jobs at dining room tables right next to our kids attending school on a laptop and trying to figure out how to navigate extended family obligations.
Oh, there was more insanity, for sure. Much more. The pandemic changed all of us. Hopefully you traversed that change as well as you possibly could.
In pop culture, the last year in particular has seen a number of written columns, music albums, books and comic books where the subject of living through the pandemic has taken front and center. Today’s release of writer and illustrator Eddie Campbell’s The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate Of The Artist covers that ground – and so much more.
You would likely best know Campbell’s more famously illustrated work From Hell, the Alan Moore deep-dive tale about Jack The Ripper. The award-winning tale was originally serialized and published in multiple installments from 1989-1998 and then collected as a whole in 1999. But Campbell is also known as the writer/artist on Bacchus, and Alec: The Years Have Pants, among others. He’s also written comics for mainstream comic book publishers: Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics and DC Comics, including well-regarded issues of John Constantine: Hellblazer.
Published by Top Shelf Productions, in The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate Of The Artist, Campbell returns to, and continues with, his more fictionalized autobiographical studies, compiling two stories into one book, inspired by the mid-twentieth century’s Ace Doubles flip-book publications. This artistic collection has a Side A and a Side B. The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell is a brand-new work that continues from The Fate of the Artist, which is a deluxe reissue, itself a continuation of the story and work begun in Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.
In The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell, the artist has gone missing from his own autobiography. It’s only the advent of the pandemic lock down that makes his wife believe, amongst the face masks and visage-changing long hair, that her husband has been replaced by an imposter. She hires a private investigator to solve the real Campbell’s disappearance, setting the stage for anecdotes, wry and witty observations on people and life, a car chase and a violent ending. It is the sequel to The Fate of The Artist.
Meanwhile, in The Fate of the Artist, both the subject and the author have gone missing. It’s a story that illuminates the person that Campbell is through various visual and prose styles including inventive detective fiction and interviews with other living people, including the writer/artist’s own daughter.
The 192-page hardcover compilation that is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate Of The Artist is a wonderful meta-autobiographic treatise on both the creator and his life. It’s an entertaining story that we can enjoy as a casual reader or as a more involved participant that sees and understands their own life experiences through the eyes of the missing and/or fake dead protagonist.
Make the run to your local bookstore or better comic book shop and pick up the illuminating The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate Of The Artist today.
