Alec: The Years Have Pants

 

Alec: The Years Have Pants - A Life-Sized Omnibus by Eddie Campbell (2009 Top Shelf Productions, Kindle 641pp)

 

Sometime around the turn of the century I got hold of a bulky collected edition of Alan Moore’s magnum opus “From Hell”. Ostensibly about Jack the Ripper but actually about so much more, that book was illustrated by Eddie Campbell, an artist whose work was new to me. His scratchy, sketched-in-ink, gloomy art initially repelled me but eventually grew on me and by the end of the volume I thought nobody else could have done the story justice.

“Alec” collects nearly all of his autobiographical strips from the early 1980s to around 2008. Initially he uses an alter-ego, ‘Alec McGarry’ to tell the stories of his friends, family and dead-end job in the UK of the 1980s. The early work mainly involves the patrons of a bar named the King Canute and all his misadventures involving them. The artwork and story-telling style alters from time to time, sometimes becoming more surreal then switching right back to ultra-realistic. As the years go on, he drops the Alec identity and things become more of a straight chronicle of his life as he struggles to find his way as an artist. He marries, moves to Australia and sets up his own publishing company. Issues with money and travel become a major theme.

There’s a lot of material crammed into this book, he includes pages of abandoned projects and just about everything including the kitchen sink. It took me a couple of months reading this on and off to get through it all. Its probably not something you should try to read all the way through in one go. As it consists of many one-page strips, its easier to dip in and out reading a few of those at a time.

Maybe one for fans of the artist or anyone into unusual biographies, it’s probably a bit of an acquired taste.