This is somehow like, year three of us meeting up around San Diego [Comic Con] time to talk. It’s becoming tradition at this point.

Right. I saved up all of my blathering for SDCC [laughs]. You always find you’ve said something interesting when it wasn’t being recorded. It’s just how it always happens. I’m going to try and avoid repeating myself. Eventually you find yourself saying all the same things and telling all the same stories. I remember the great songwriter Sammy Cahn came to England to publicize his autobiography and he kept using the same jokes at every single show, not realizing just how small Great Britain is! All the people who had watched the one show watched all of the others. [laughs] But he did — he had the same jokes. He said “I’m often asked: what comes first, the words or the music?” And the answer is “It always always starts with a phone call.”

[laughs] That’s actually pretty good.

Yes, and he did this joke on everything that he was on; the radio, the television, and everything else.

Since we’re on the subject of good comedy, I’m digging the very Billy Connelly vibe you’ve got going with the hair. I was concerned at first that when we met in the lobby I wouldn’t be able to find you easily but let me tell you —

[laughs] Yeah, I kept the lockdown look. There’s a piece in The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell where it says “You can’t go back to a haircut” as something of a political statement. I mean you can’t just go back to the world as if it’s the normal world. It’s not possible. I mean, democracy is on the verge of collapse. You can’t just get a haircut after that.

[laughs] Fair point. And yeah, let’s dig into the book a bit. You’re here at the show promoting The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell—

It’s The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell — that’s the official full title!

Really squeezing as much in there as you can.

And at the bottom it says “A new pandemic graphic novel by Eddie Campbell!”

If nothing else you’ve got a hell of a branding ability.

[laughs] It’s true, my name is on the cover three times. I usually have a hard time selling my titles, but this one was accepted right away, as was the idea of doing the book as a double, flip-over book with Second Death on one side and Fate of the Artist on the other. That was Audrey’s idea actually. 

Oh it was? Well it was a good one. You get something new and also something to bring the audiences back to your older work as well.

Her subject is book arts which is its own complex genre of art. She’s only really a novelist by accident. She had this story and said “Oh I suppose I’ll make a novel”. And then she made another one. And now she’s got a third novel that she’s been working on for almost ten years. It’s a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s finished, of course — it’s been finished some years ago but publishers keep mucking about wanting rearrangements with it. Editors, amiright?

Hey hey now.

You’ve edited before?

Not books, in any official capacity. But editing [The Gutter Review] sure can be something. Feels like you’re definitely no one’s friend sometimes. Or God forbid you end up editing one of your friends.

Then you’re definitely no one’s friend!

[Laughs]

Yes, it’s a tricky thing isn’t it? I usually end up running into the most trouble with book covers and editing those.

Really? Why?

Well, like, the new From Hell that has the ladies walking on the front of it? I had such trouble getting that through. They wanted Jack the Ripper and knives and that sort of thing. But I thought it was nice to just have the women walking in the gas light.

Which is really effective for its own reasons.

I know! I felt it was time to put the women on the cover because — well there’s this musical or perhaps an opera in England called The Women of Whitechapel and there’s been a move to recognize the victims [of Jack the Ripper] instead of glorifying the villain all the time. So I wanted to put the ladies on the cover. But oh the trouble I had. In the Italian edition — or maybe the Spanish edition — they said “We don’t want to use this cover; this kind of cover won’t work very well here”. So I said “Well that’s fine because my editor says it doesn’t work anywhere else either.” [laughs]

[Laughs] A global problem, these women.

Yes, women in coats in the semi-dark.

Scandalous!

Yes, it’s a surprisingly dark cover for a book that’s re-released in color. And people keep coming to me to say that they preferred it in black and white…which is not the thing to say to the person who spent two years coloring the whole thing again [laughs]

[[[We pause for a moment to get some water, lamenting the fact that so often at conventions there’s rarely time to eat or drink when you’re there to work.]]]

I actually made it a habit of, in the mornings, just having a massive breakfast in the hotel lobby and going the rest of the day without eating until dinner after the show had closed. I’d just work the table all day and til exhaustion…but they don’t really do that anymore. IDW doesn’t even sell books. They just have signings.

Yeah I noticed that a lot this year. There’s quite a few publishers who have had their own booth for signings and for the talent…but then there’s maybe a separate booth for actual sales and things.

Marvel and DC brought books then? Top Shelf didn’t.

Yeah, neither did Rebellion.

Funny. I see the publishers like Simon and Schuster and Random House and Abrams and McMillan — they still pull out all the stops with their books.

Some of the smaller —  well “smaller” — comics publishers still do as well. First Second and Last Gasp and Fantagraphics have fucking fantastic setups this year.

The way Fantagraphics has their set up is how we used to do things with Top Shelf. It would just be four of us running the table. But yeah, something has changed this year. It’s always changing.

Do you still enjoy doing conventions? Is it still something that does it for you? Is it still fun — or I mean, was it ever fun?

[laughs] This one’s hard work! But I enjoyed doing CAKE [Chicago Alternative Comics Expo] in Chicago just a month or so ago. That was lovely.

I’ve heard it’s a fabulous show.

Oh you’d love it. The thing about CAKE is that it’s a bit of a carnival of gender [laughs] and because it’s not been able to happen for almost four years it’s jumped from one set of gender peculiarities to a whole new set. Those four years made a difference and it really is a friendly, wonderful carnival of costume and oddities. I like to do SPX as well. But San Diego has become very…corporate, maybe? Perhaps corporate is the word I’m trying to find. I don’t so much mind the Hollywood part of it but there’s a corporate aspect of it that has really expanded to consume everything. I still love to see cosplay here because it’s always great. It’s funny though because everybody is somebody, you know? I went for a quiet drink at a bar and the waiter elbows me and point and says  “Tom Petty”. And then a moment later The Dude from The Big Lebowski walks in. San Diego becomes a strange fictional wonderland where you accidentally bump into Chewbacca in a lift. 

Con brain kind of takes over when people reach these sorts of places, I think. I wear a lot of black clothes and these Docs [Martens] and all my jewelry basically every day, and the last convention I went to I got to the show and someone said they liked my Death cosplay from Sandman.

[Laughs] Fantastic. Reality does get pretty skewed at these things. It’s hard for it not to, considering.

Let’s get back to your book though —  and I suppose this question kind of rides the line between professional and personal, but with some of your other auto-bio and semi-auto-bio works like Fate of the Artist there’s so many stories with your ex wife. Reading The Second Fake Death, you just seem…happier. Like there’s these little vignettes of you and Audrey where you’re ripping the absolute piss out of each other but it feels loving; much less tumultuous.

It’s just life, isn’t it? Life has changed. I was talking to someone the other day about something like this and I honestly didn’t realize — frankly that’s probably why my wife left me. I think she was tired of living in a comic strip madhouse. I realize now that it’s probably all my fault. The new book, in a way, is like a big apology. [laughs] Like a big “I’m sorry” about being such an asshole. And of course at the end I humiliate myself — Campbell meets his final humiliation before meeting the Grim Reaper! [laughs]

Literally caught with your trousers down for nearly the entire book.

[laughs] Yes. It’s my apology to the world for being Eddie Campbell. I’m so sorry, world. What I’ve made you go through you poor things.

Reading the book — it really is just happier! You’re happier. It’s the funniest thing, I picked it up from the bookstore and read through it immediately and came away going “…well shit, is Eddie Campbell finally content?”[laughs]

Not intentionally! But you know, sometimes I look through some of my older books, or like The Lovely Horrible Stuff or Cul-de-Sac, which I did for a Humanoids anthology, and I think “This is monstrous! Is that really who I was? Who I used to be?”

That’s a pretty intense way of describing it! Monstrous? What’s monstrous to you about it?

The acceptance of— well…hm…I guess the anger. There’s an anger there almost all of the time. Usually it’s an anger about money. Looking back now, now that I’m out of that, I managed to — for two decades — I managed to bring up a family as the breadwinner, somehow. We were never delinquent. Everything came out right and everyone came up right. There was never any embarrassment about the car being repossessed. The bills were paid on time. And I think…why was I so angry all the time? Everything was pretty good. Everything came out alright in the end. I don’t know why I was so angry. I would have been a much happier individual if I had just taken a second to notice that everything was working out. Or as my wife had said — “I don’t know why you worry about this stuff all the time! It always comes right in the end!”

Well that’s a bit of hindsight that we all could stand to remember sometimes, isn’t it? Why wait for the other shoe to drop when you can continue to worry about the countless other shoes that could drop at any moment! Damn shoes.

[laughs] Right, exactly. And I tell you —  a guy said to my sister once “I don’t know why you’re cleaning the house all the time! It’s never dirty!” So it’s a bit like that, too. But who knows! Maybe being angry was what was getting things done all the time. And even then it wasn’t so much angry as it was distracted. I seem to have gone through life distracted. People often try to tell me things and then I realize that I should be paying attention because it’s probably something important. ‘Cause it’s always a monologue happening in my head and because I haven’t had a day job since 1986, my entire world is cultivating the nonsense in my head.

What a life!

But that means I don’t have to pay attention to anything. I go through life without ever really needing to engage further — do you know what I mean?

Sure, I get what you’re saying. It’s all very insular when you look at things like that.

I guess it’s kind of selfish. Because I don’t pay attention it usually means like Audrey has to pay attention. [laughs] Sometimes it’s thing like having a tradesman around the house and he’ll trying to explain something about the plumbing or electricity and he’s looking at me… and the whole time I’m trying to subtly direct his gaze towards Audrey because she’s just so much more skilled when it comes to the practical stuff. Along with being a literary genius she just gets the practical stuff; even little things like what cleaner to use or not use on a particular kind of stone floor because it’ll seep into it. She knows the right thing for every job and understands thing.

I remember when I arrived at Audrey’s house I had brought a stereo to play my old records and some guy was going around that afternoon for some reason or another and I couldn’t figure out how to hook the stereo up so I said “We’ll just wait for him to get here and he’ll know how to hook it all up” and Audrey just looked at me and said ‘Why wait? What’s wrong with me?” [laughs] Cause stereos at that point they had all the bajillion wires

Totally. It was all tubes and wires and frustration. 

I felt like such an idiot. I felt like such a louse.

Well what’s funny to me is that you say you spend a majority of your time not paying attention, but so much of what is lovely about your work is your attention to the details in the mundanity and in the world around you. Is that just a different part of your brain? Is it a romanticized version?

Yes? There is that, I think. Someone the other day commented on the fact that From Hell is still very much a horror story but that it takes place in a happy world. I thought that was odd. I was trying to be dark and forbidding and miserable but it didn’t come out that way. When they do From Hell in the movies it’s all costume drama sort of thing. All of the women are wearing feather boas and the makeup is kind of overdone. I was determined to make it look like you’d gone out in the street — and remember, I had started this back in 1989 so the world looked completely different. The only time I was ever approached by a prostitute in London, I didn’t even know she was a prostitute.

She probably just looked like a woman. It’s almost like prostitutes are just ordinary women. [laughs]

Right! She was just some woman. And I only knew because she said something like “Are you looking for a companion?” Or something like that. But I thought that I’d draw the women in From Hell that same way because there’s just such a tendency for people to write and depict any woman at that time who walked alone at night or was interested in sex in any way as a generalized version of “prostitute/whore”.

Or showing a bit of ankle. Time to call the church.

Yes! Going out without a male chaperone was quite the offense and was liable to get someone labeled as “the wrong sort”. So when you read the statistics on the bajillion prostitutes in the East End of London, you’ve got to think that that would include a lot of people that today we wouldn’t consider prostitutes whatsoever. So I was trying to draw it like that. Anyone who has sex in that book doesn’t look like they’re trying to sell sex. For instance, ordinary women couldn’t afford makeup; you’re not going to spend your money on makeup when you can spend it on gin.

We should move back to that mentality.

[laughs] Well I thought it was important to draw them having thought just that. I drew them doing what they could with what they had. They do the best they can without. That’s kind of the line I was thinking about; just making things as ordinary and everyday as possible. I think actresses and high class ladies of the evening might wear makeup, but it was a rarity for a woman who otherwise didn’t have a ha’penny to her name. They might borrow each others’ if one of them got a hold of a single tube of lipstick or something of that sort — but otherwise it was making do. That’s the way I was figuring it out at the time. And from what I read, most of them wore second hand men’s coats! In the movies they wear bright green and bright reds —

Yeah, somehow that era is always shown as the downtrodden women of the night as being able to afford shockingly well-boned corsets and colorful underpants.

Yes! But I spent a lot of time reading the description of the clothes that these women would wear, and many of them were wearing used men’s overcoats and men’s work boots. They wore what they could get ahold of because that was the reality of living in the time and doing the job that they did.

So, in your opinion, why do you think more authors don’t research and include those details more when it comes to historical pieces? It’s not like it’s a rare piece of history — there’s plenty of places to do the research and read up on these sorts of things. It feels unique that you took the time to be that detailed and respectful to the story.

At the same time I really don’t want it to seem like I’ve spent the time on the details, if that makes sense.

Oh sure. You don’t want to overdo it.

There’s never any sense of “ohh look at how a gas lamp works”. There’s no mechanism behind it. It’s all just sketched in, really.

In giving those details, is that how you also have to curate how you create tension in a book like From Hell? Because in writing alone, the book is incredibly tense and brutal…but there’s a certain respect and level of detail that surely must go in to making sure that tension and brutality comes across on the page visually as well.

Hm … .yes. You see, I never carry a sketchbook with me. I’m always just sort of sketching in my head. I’m sketching you right now as we’re talking! I mentally memorize details and where things go with wherever I am and whomever I’m with. Not the mechanical details, mind you — I’m useless at that. But when it comes to figures…that’s different. I can draw realistic figures from my memory. Poses and how people stand and where their center of gravity is when they move and things like that. I’m always — at any minute of the day — just looking around at things and picking them apart and mulling them over. I stare a lot — I get into trouble for it. My first wife would always elbow me in the ribs and tell me that I was staring and that I needed to stop. Sometimes — most of the time — I’m staring at something and thinking about something entirely different. Maybe I should just start staring at the ground.

You can work on your chastised child look by staring at your feet.

[laughs] “Eddie! Hands out your pockets! Stop chewing gum! Stand up straight!”

I do the same thing, to be fair. I stare off into the distance all the time and think about things that happened or that I saw weeks prior. Or think about things in front of me and turn what’s going on around in my head until — and sometimes well after — it’s not even happening anymore. I have people who will ask me what I’m thinking about because I’m just staring into the middle distance and sometimes the answer is “Dude, so much.”

We should be allowed to stare! I think there’s a line in The Women’s Room by Marlyn French where someone says to the protagonist “A penny for your thoughts” and the character thinks to herself “Not even my thoughts are my own!” [laughs]

It really does feel like that. But anyway — we should probably get back to your book, Eddie. 

Ah, yes, true, we should. Well in a way it’s kind of a sequel because I’ve indulged myself a lot. Something that I loved doing with Fate of the Artist was recreating old newspaper-style strips. They don’t look like any actual strips but like the form of a Sunday page. You know, nine panels with punchlines or whatnot. But I did things like Honeybee and Angry Cook — and do you know that everyone loved “Angry Cook”? And that was just me observing my daughter! They’re not even witty or clever! I was just observing something she had said! For some reason that’s everyone’s favorite.

Because they’re fuckin’ hilarious! Probably has a lot to do with the fact that you did approach it so unintentionally.

There was no cleverness! It was just there to fill the space. Because I’d created the idea of doing a daily comic strip, the one that’s supposed to be in there is Honeybee, but in order to make it look like a page of comics, I had to create some other ones like “Angry Cook” and “Theatricals” and so on.

What is it about old newspaper strips — or I guess newspaper cartoons in general — that are such a draw for you? It’s something you include pretty regularly in a lot of your work. And especially, of course, in things like The Goat Getters.

Well I love the history of comics and the history of cartoons. I dislike the whole business about comics being called “sequential art”. To me, even things like cosplay is part of comics. It’s like…people are acting these stories out in the street and people have taken it into the real space — they’re moving around it, and they’re posing and moving in the way we see as drawings

That’s true! Even the photos that get taken are people getting as close to the character poses as possible.

Yes! And to me, that’s part of comics. This pure idea of comics as a pure art bothers me. I don’t like it, but I do believe it has history. I don’t even think comics are the most interesting kind of cartoon. I think of comics as a genre of cartooning, and there’s political cartooning and sports cartoons like in The Goat Getters. And one of the lovely things about sports cartoons is that it established its own form. And this is around the whole Yellow Press thing — it established its own vital form in which the athlete is drawn, realistically, either in a portrait or a full figure in action doing what his thing is. But it’s a bit of a roundabout because there’s all of these facetious scribbles in which he’s made fun of, so he’s both honored and ridiculed at the same time in the same picture space. And I thought, well, where else does that happen? Because in comics, we decide on the style. And it’s a funny comic. It’s in a funny style. If it is a horror comic, it’s in horror style. Etcetera.

And in a way, I’ve carried that over into The Fate of the Artist and the The Second Fake Death where the same characters are rendered in different parts of the book. In both, in fact — but particularly in the new one — there’s a kind of photorealism in main stream of the text. But then I’ve got these Sunday page things titled, “Life’s Too Complicated”, which are humorous style. They’re drawn as funny and all in the same continuity, the same sort of narrative. I think I would’ve loved to have been a Sunday page or daily strip cartoonist — but that doesn’t work anymore. Most of them are kind of daft stupid, but one or two good ones, two good.

There’s a couple that are still running that are pretty solid. What was it — Beetle Bailey only ended a couple of years ago, and that stayed solidly funny up until the end. And you get people like “Zippy the Pinhead”’s Bill Griffith still making some fun stuff. 

True, yes, there are a few. 

I’m actually really surprised because earlier on in your career, newspaper strips were still pretty relatively popular. How come you didn’t break in at that point?

Well I was in Britain, remember.

Ah, yeah, that’s true I suppose. That makes a difference. 

Yeah. There isn’t the same market there. And so you end up going into the thing where the doors doors half open. You know what I mean? “Can I get my foot in there?” You go through whatever door you can get your foot in. And so I ended up doing comic books, which is not because I didn’t read comics at the time — I don’t even really read comic books now. They don’t really interest me. I do think the evolution of the graphic novel does create a new kind of comic, which is, in theory, totally separate from comic books, except for being in the same umbrella of a comic book world.

A friend of mine went to a small comic show in London, and he was surprised to find that most of the artists behind the tables are well-educated, middle, middle-class women drawing comics that are “aesthetically pleasing, if minimal” —  these exact words. And I thought, there’s a whole new, well new in the last 20 years, 20, 25 years of, there’s a whole new idiom of comics that I think is great. There’s a readership out there who recognizes it and instinctively knows that it’s separate from what goes on at places like San Diego Comic Con. This is a whole other thing. It’s all comics, but they’re separate idioms within the field of comics.

Well, and then you’ve also got things like web comics too, that are just busting out a whole new and different kind of monster.

Another idiom!

Yeah. I mean, there’s so many different opportunities and ways for people to make things now. So it’s hard to classify anything at this point. It all just falls under the one umbrella.

And we no longer have to justify it. Everybody generally understands that comics are for everyone.

Part of that too has become this new thing  — and much to a lot of people chagrin —  in there being more comic book movies. I mean, being a nerd’s cool now. It’s hip to call yourself a nerd and wear comic book t-shirts and talk about your favorite comic characters. It’s great but it’s a concept that’s still wild as fuck to me because I got bullied so hard for liking comics when I was a teenager!

I know! All the movies are comic book movies now.

It’s just wild. But it’s so funny to see comics not being this weird, shameful thing anymore. But what’s funny is if you say, “I’m really into old cartooning”, or “I’m into these indie small press comics from the 1980s” or whatever, you’ll still get something of a side-eye from people. And it’s like…but there’s no difference. It’s all a different version of the same thing, it’s just not the thing that’s been made the loudest. I’m not fussed about it but it’s funny to see it evolve.

And as we were saying a minute ago, one of my biggest interests is how all these things came about tracing them all back. You meet so many people doing comics now who don’t have any sense of the depth or history. For so many people comics in any greater respect only existed over the past handful of decades. It’s a foreign concept that comics have essentially always exists.. Maybe I’m just being upset because. — hey, they dunno who I am. Like, C’mon. I’m Eddie Campbell [laughs]

[laughs] Well, speaking of people not knowing some of the earlier works of Eddie Campbell:  you started doing Gag! again with Glen Daikin and Phil Elliot!

Oh yes! We’ve gone back to where we began. We’re doing this print on demand. This print on demand, I was trying to get them to print a couple of hundred. I thought what’s… But they were taking so long, I realized I should’ve given them a small number. It’s actually better to ask for a small number, because when you ask for a big number they keep putting it to the back, put it to the back of their to-do list.  It’s the first one from 1984 actually. The first time I ever get paid for doing a comic. Up to then I just learned photocopied things. And now I was getting paid for collaborating with Phil Elliot…but we got paid to turn this thing in every week. We got to cut our teeth on something we enjoyed.

Yeah. There’s a number of artist friends that I have that have been like, “I keep wanting to do something, but I go to a publisher and I pitch them this idea and they go, yeah, we’ll turn it into a graphic novel. It’s going to be 250 pages and you have to have it done in three months.

I know. It’s grim, isn’t it?

Just seems like there’s no time given for people to cut their teeth anymore.

And when I was doing bits and pieces circa 1990, I was working for eight different publishers all at the same time. I mean, people have said that to me. They could have followed back, all come out in one place, but they could never figure out where it was going to come out next.

I suppose you already kind of addressed this, but how are you liking doing the print on demand thing?

Well, I wanted to try that out. I had no idea how this works. Asking said 200 copies. I’m thinking, how low can I go? But to them, that was a big job. So they kept putting it to the back of the pile and [Chicago Alternative Comics Expo] was coming. I realized that if I turned it into a small job, I might get it in time. So I said change that to 50 copies, and I got it right the day before the fifth. Just amazing. Right before the convention. And I thought, “Fantastic. It looks like a professional print job.”…and I got that done for 10 bucks and can sell it for 20. It’s like it’s buying my own books from the publisher! Obviously I can’t sell ’em to a distributor — the pie is not big enough to cut — but for something to take to conventions, it’s a great little idea.

I wonder why more creators don’t go the print on demand route. It seems like it’s probably much more cost effective for conventions, like you said.

When we started doing it originally, back in the day, we were young punks at the time, but he paper was just horrible. It was like we were doing our own little flighty defensible things. They wanted it to be horrible. And they’re like, alright. By the end of it, I was even upsetting my collaborator. It was so horrible.

There seems to be the recurring thing then, between Gag! and The Second Fake Death of you revisiting earlier version of yourself. It’s like a little Time Machine, but new and updated.

Right, yes. I’ve ended up back there and it kind of feels like it’s come full circle. Yes. I think I’ve reached a place where I can see everything in perspective; I can see what led to what. You’ll love the new issue. I realize that readers might not know what we’re talking about though so —Gag! was a comic. It was our first foray into American style comics and it was a monthly style of American comic. There were only seven issues, but we’re not just reprinting that —  we’re doing a selection of our funny comics from me, Phil Elliot and Glen Daikin —  the three amigos. We did everything together for a year or two then back in the eighties. I think young artists are drawn together into little clubs and gain strength from fellowship.

There’s something to be said for the camaraderie of “we’re all mates and we’re all poor, but at least we can sit in a room and draw together.

And you get the local style’s happening from that, too. The particular mix of these talents, all influence each other and create a little movement — a mini movement where you’re all drawing from each other and yeah, it’s great to see.

So if this is you kind of revisiting some of those works in different ways — and kind of displaying them in a more contemporary way — are we going to see you revisiting more of the broad Alec material?

I don’t think you can go back on things like Alec really. I think it’s interesting to bring them out and show them to people, but to actually go back there and create new stuff in that, I dunno. I think you’ve always — you’ve got to be in the moment. To some extent. I’m working on another autobiographical book. It’s more linear than the current one and it’s about how I met Audrey.

Oh! Oh that’s lovely. I’ll look forward to that very much.

It begins with me living in a dead end road in Australia, because my wife has stormed off. She stormed justifiably, I should add. She never did anything quietly. She didn’t just slip out the back door. No, she left in a fiery fury. I didn’t realize that we had a fiery relationship until someone mentioned it the other day.

Well in revisiting the book before talking to you again, I was always kind of amused and horrified at the abuse that’s present in a lot of those stories.

Oh gosh, yes. In The Fate of the Artist. Anne hits me in the head with a tumbler and my head’s cracked open. She had to take me to the hospital to drive me to the hospital to get stitches in my head. And I thought this was a funny incident, but people have looked at me in horror when reading about it or when I tell the story.

That’s the thing though! It’s funny! You make it something funny. And honestly I think it’s great that you can look back on it and have a laugh.

I was laughing at the time! I was saying to her, “I’m glad you’ve finally spoken out!” She bottled things up. “If you let things out more, they wouldn’t come out explosively.”

It just came at the expense of your head. [laughs]

Lord, the things that I’ve made humor of. What was I thinking? The world is changed now where we take a dim view of certain things.

How to be an Artist sort of romanticizes all of this, right, where it’s like, “Yes it’s hard sometimes now but fate would protect us.

It is full of a kind of highfalutin baloney where I’m on one knee, pledging my allegiance to the God of fate.

I love How To Be An Artist. It is such a great history, but also an autobiography at the same time.

Yeah, somebody said to Glenn, he says, “This is true? Does this really work? Does this work for Eddie?” And Glenn said, “Yeah, but you’ve got to remember Eddie worked very hard.”

Yeah, well that’s it. You did a lot of work. If you look back at… You say you’ve been rereading your own work, think of everything you did in a 10 year stretch.

I know. When people ask me how to get into comics, I always say, “To get anywhere, you’ve got to be mad enough to think you were already in it long before you’re technically in it. You have to create the work.” In the early zine days, in my head, I’d sent them to the publisher and there’d be a check in the mail.

That check just took 10 years to come.

The check probably took 10 years to come. But you have to actually believe this, and not be deterred when somebody tries to explain to you that, “Wait a minute, that isn’t reality.” But yeah, everything I’ve ever done has made a buck or two at some point. And most of it, I didn’t make… Most of that early stuff I did for myself or an imaginary publisher under the bed. But yes, you’ve got to stay angry. You’ve got to actually believe you’re already published. Otherwise, it’s hopelessly disappointing. You’ve got to walk around believing that you are already the thing that you want to be in the future. “People should be looking up to me!” and that sort of mentality. In a way, you need to be that arrogant, I think, to succeed in it. And nowadays I see people who can’t afford to finish the first volume of their work.

Well this is all something I’m curious about personally. I’ve got The Gutter Review, who this interview is for, obviously, and we’re a nonprofit that works only off of donations. And I’ve got people left, right, and center saying how much they love the work and charming and smart and how unique it is and what-have-you. But the hard part is realizing that  those nice words don’t actually amount to the money I need to pay people — including myself — for the immense effort it takes to be charming and smart and unique. And I keep thinking — do I just keep going in the hopes that one day it’ll happen? Will those kind words turn into monetary success for myself and the writers I love to employ?

Be angry about it until it happens. You must be mad enough to believe the checks in the mail. You have the believe that ten years from now that check will arrive at your doorstep.

I guess I’ll stay angry. [laughs]

Good. It was my plan on the way up and it’s still my plan as the decline down into obscurity and senility. It got me a new book out on the shelves again. [laughs] I recommend it.