From printing strips in a Southend bedsit to working for Marvel and DC, comic artist Eddie Campbell has drawn everything in between, all the while remaining in the shadows of stardom Eddie Campbell is a genius. But don’t take my word for it, take Alan Moore’s. “Eddie’s is a genuine one-off talent, utterly idiosyncratic and personal,” he says. Or perhaps Neil Gaiman’s: “The man’s a genius, there’s an end to it.” If you don’t know Campbell by name, you’ll know his comics: most famously, he was Moore’s artistic collaborator on the tour-de-force From Hell, eventually adapted into a film starring Johnny Depp. But the Glaswegian artist produced a wealth of work both before and after From Hell. The Glaswegian artist’s oeuvre ranges from the ultimate punk-DIY – photocopying and distributing his autobiographical In the Days of the Ace Rock’n’Roll Club strips from a Southend bedsit in the 1970s – to drawing the likes of Captain America and Batman. But while his Marvel and DC work is proof that Campbell can do pretty much anything, it’s in the more experimental, creatively free projects that he seems to shine, no doubt informed by the punk rock publishing ethos of his early days: Bacchus, a series that plonks ancient Greek gods into the modern age, or The Lovely Horrible Stuff, a treatise on our relationship with money. Continue reading...