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.
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
Warning: Spoilers Throughout
The latest comic by Eddie Campbell is conventional in a number of ways peculiar to the form. It is a collaboration with a writer, in this instance Daren White, the editor of the Australian anthology DeeVee. Also familiar is the presentation which is not dissimilar to what you might find in a newspaper strip collection with the panels laid out in single file across a squat rectangular book. The pages only lack the closing punchlines once deemed so necessary to such endeavors, but these occur frequently enough so as to negate any perceived differences; the temporary conclusions and logical ellipses between the pages being the very stuff of modernity (see Campbell’s remarks on the rearrangement of the strip from 9 panels per page to its current format in the interviews below).