In sync with our Years Have Pants roundtable, Isaac Cates looks at page rhythms in Daren White and Eddie Campbell’s The Playwright.
Scroll down for some comments there by Mr. White and Mr. Campbell themselves!
As you may have noticed, our roundtable paused today — but we should pick up tomorrow and go through Saturday, with hopefully another bit next week.
We got a couple of really thoughtful comments on the Years Have Pants roundtable, so I thought I’d highlight them.
Greetings, Hooded Utilitarians. My name is Casey Rae-Hunter, and I’m a so-and-so who lives in Washington, DC. Both personally and professionally, my karma sees to it that I wrangle with issues at the intersection of creativity, policy and technology. I also wear pants, which have been known to have years, and vice versa.
It is my sincere hope that my twaddle in no way corrupts my fellow roundtablers’ insights and illuminations. And if it does, I can only offer a heartfelt GAROOGA!
I’d hoped to put this post later in the week and run more positive assessments first. But bumps occurred, and here we are. For Campbell fans, I’d urge you to read Suat’s preamble for a more loving assessment, or check out Robert Stanley Martin or Charles Hatfield for discussions of the Playwright. And of course the roundtable here runs all week.
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Eddie Campbell’s “How To Be An Artist” ends with Campbell writing an angry letter to the Comics Journal excoriating them for mistaking a Bill Sienkiewicz drawing for a Stan Drake drawing in the latter’s obituary.
At The Panelists, Charles Hatfield discusses the Playwright. Here’s an excerpt:
Billed as a comedy about “the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man,” The Playwright is an austere book about an austere life: a life lived at a remove, so to speak, one of productive loneliness, sexlessness, distance, and disconnection. As if to match, the book is narrated in a kind of arid, emotionless third person, and the main characters lack names. There are no balloons, only boxed captions. You can feel the chill.
Go read it! We’ll have more Campbellania here later today….
In sync with our Years Have Pants roundtable, Robert Stanley Martin has published a review of Daren White and Eddie Campbell’s The Playwright
Part of the Eddie Campbell-The Years Have Pants Roundtable
This one’s too big to really get a good grasp of. It’s a wizened but lively old cat at 600 pages and 30 years long. You can hold it up by the scruff of its neck with the strength of one hand, but not for any reasonable duration.
Then again, you don’t really need to. There’s a summary provided by the author himself (and who else better to do it) — a pilgrimage to Hugo Pratt’s breakfast table during a comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland. The words are Pratt’s but they weren’t spoken to Campbell during that meeting. Instead, depending on your faith in the narrator, they were taken from an “older interview” with him where he recounts a kind of third person autobiography, which in turn describes everything that we have read up to that point.
