Alec: The Years Have Pants

AUTHOR: Campbell, Eddie

ARTIST: Eddie Campbell

PUBLISHER: Top Shelf Productions

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1981-

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009

Publication History

Emerging from the British small-press comics scene of the early 1980’s, Eddie Campbell has documented the adventures of his fictional alter ego, Alec MacGarry, for more than three decades and with multiple publishers. Inspired by the autobiographically based fiction of writers Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, Campbell has tried to create a similar literature in a different medium. Like autobiographical comics writer Harvey Pekar, whose work Campbell soon discovered after creating his first Alec comics, Campbell has demonstrated that everyday life can make for extraordinary art. Unlike Pekar, however, Campbell both writes and draws his comics, making the Alec series the singular vision of an artist.

Campbell’s first work was self-published. Hailing from Scotland, Campbell was living in England when he first turned to his own experiences for source material in the late 1970’s with the In the Days of the Ace Rock’n’Roll Club stories, centered on a group of rockabilly music fans. With Alec, his work turned even more personal, and he used pseudonyms for the characters’ names (a device dropped later in favor of real names) as he began publishing the stories in the minicomic Flick. When Campbell began meeting fellow cartoonists who also took advantage of the accessibility and affordability of the photocopier to disseminate their comics in small booklets, his Alec stories soon became a staple of the Fast Fiction anthology. After publishing in numerous fanzines and minicomics of the small-press scene, Campbell began moving into more commercial publishing ventures. Publishing wherever he could get paid for his work, in such anthologies as Fox Comics and Taboo, Campbell disseminated Alec stories as widely as he could. The stories were collected occasionally in such volumes as The Complete Alec (1990) and Little Italy (1991).

Still having trouble making a living and isolated from the British comics scene by his move to his wife’s native Australia in the 1980’s, Campbell returned to self-publishing in the 1990’s with his Bacchus comic book. By forming Eddie Campbell Comics, Campbell was able to collect and present his work in a series of trade paperbacks such as After the Snooter (2002). After releasing his most successful work, From Hell (1989-1996), a long collaboration with Alan Moore about Jack the Ripper, Campbell tired of publishing and closed down his company in the early 2000’s.

Since then, his work has been made available through other publishers. His body of autobiographically based work was collected in 2009 by Top Shelf Comics in a large single volume entitled Alec: The Years Have Pants—A Life-Sized Omnibus.Though this collection does not include The Fate of the Artist (2006) and stories such as “The History of Humour” have been condensed from their serial publication, it does include unpublished and rare work. Campbell named the volume The Years Have Pants after a line in a poem by William Ernest Moenkhaus, a friend of songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Campbell viewed the line as an apt understanding of how time eventually carries everything into oblivion, while his own work provides some glimpses of the life along the way that might otherwise be overlooked.

Plot

Traditionally appealing to readers looking for down-to-earth comics, Alec can be read as a long picaresque novel depicting the everyday life of cartoonist Alec MacGarry (a stand-in for Campbell); however, The Years Have Pants can also be read as a collection of short stories. Some of the chapters in the omnibus, which is arranged chronologically according to the lives of the characters, have been regarded as graphic novels on their own in previous publication. As of 2011, however, only The Fate of the Artist stood as a separate volume.

“The King Canute Crowd” details the drunken escapades of a twenty-something Alec and his compatriots, who gather at a country pub called the King Canute in late 1970’s England. The artistically inclined Alec works at a sheet-metal factory and strikes up a friendship with forklift driver Danny Grey, who serves as a role model of masculinity for Alec as they both endure romantic troubles, workingman blues, and the occasional pub punch-up. The fun ends when the characters mature and drift away from one another.

“Graffiti Kitchen” picks up the story of Alec in 1981, as his relationship with a girlfriend, Penny Moore, is falling apart. He falls into the social circle of Jane and Georgette Maison, a mother and daughter, and he has sexual relations with both, causing metaphorical friction between the generations and literal friction between the sexes. Grey, now married, reappears, and the story turns slightly metafictional as he reads the first Alec story.

“Shorts” collects two stories related to Alec, though Alec only appears in one of them.

In “How to Be an Artist,” Alec attempts to make a living from cartooning after his factory job has ended. He has just started self-publishing his autobiographical comics and meets a number of fellow cartoonists. As a result, the story also serves as a history of the British small-press comics scene of the early 1980’s, complete with sampled art from other cartoonists and a treatise on the history of the “graphic novel” (a term about which Campbell has reservations).

The story also introduces the second most important character of the Alec stories, Annie, Campbell’s future wife, as well as other significant characters such as Alan Moore. Alec starts getting published by others but not paid, so he has to move in with his parents again. Eventually, he marries Annie, and they have their first child; the new family moves to Australia in 1986. The chapter concludes with a meditation on Moore’s disastrous experience in self-publishing after the success of Watchmen (1986-1987) and the beginning of Campbell’s collaboration with him on From Hell.

“Little Italy” details Alec’s move to Australia, as he explores local history, family life, and nature. “The Dead Muse” includes the portions of an anthology of fellow comics artists compiled by Campbell. In the stories, he attempts to make a living in his adopted country and has little luck doing so.

“The Dance of Lifey Death” begins with Alec traveling around the world to attend comics conventions. He details his obsession with wine, his growing family, the collection of his friend Doc Nodule, a visit from fellow artist Glenn Dakin, and various other anecdotes.

“After the Snooter” shows Campbell in midlife, reflecting on the past and dreading slightly the inevitability of aging and death. He starts his own publishing company and visits his parents and Moore in the United Kingdom, while fellow comics professionals Dave Sim and Neil Gaiman visit him independently in Australia. Later, he starts court sketching on the side, and he and his family buy a house with the money he receives from the film adaptation of From Hell (2001). Then he embarks on “The Millennium World Tour of Eddie Campbell,” as he attends comics conventions in Maryland and Spain and visits Bob (“Danny Grey”), his parents, Moore, and Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros. His family, friends, and pets in Australia are the focus of many of the stories in the chapter, and it concludes with a trip to Hollywood for the From Hell movie premiere.

“Fragments” includes Campbell’s aborted work “The History of Humour” and a couple of shorter stories.

“The Fate of the Artist,” the only major story not included in The Years Have Pants,is a mystery about the alleged disappearance of Campbell after he has closed down his publishing company. This colorful, postmodern storytelling experiment can be read as a stand-alone graphic novel but also fits comfortably into the later Alec stories, especially if one regards it as the artistic representation of a midlife crisis.

“The Years Have Pants” makes its debut in the collection of the same name and is filled with recollections of the past, including a series of stories centered around “Obscure Objects,” such as the Lempi International Award that Campbell received for From Hell at a Finnish comics convention. Many of the stories were initially composed as blog posts, so some feature Campbell on the computer, providing a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man, as life goes on.

Characters

•Alec MacGarry, a.k.a. Eddie Campbell, the protagonist, is usually presented as a bespectacled, dark-haired, mature Caucasian man, though, depending on the story, he is depicted at various ages, from childhood to old age. He is typically amused by the events surrounding him and prone to thoughtful digressions on the nature of art and the meaning of life. The story shows how he grows from his early twenties to his early fifties, with flashbacks showing his childhood and adolescence and occasional imagined visions of his later years.

•Danny Grey, a.k.a. Bob, is a dark-haired, tattooed, muscular Caucasian man who is intelligent and sociable. He works as a forklift driver in the same factory as Alec, and they start to drink together, leading to numerous drunken escapades and a lifelong friendship. Later in life, he becomes a veterinarian’s assistant and continues to be a hero to Campbell.

•Penny Moore is a pretty, blond-haired Caucasian woman who is charming and flirtatious. She is separated from her husband and has a child. She owns a horse and is missing two teeth from an automobile accident. Alec meets her through Grey and becomes romantically involved with her for two tumultuous years.

•Georgette Maison is a young Caucasian woman with long, dark hair. She is artistic and precocious. She lives with her mother, Jane, and the two of them become involved in a love triangle with Alec, for whom Georgette serves as a muse. The relationships end when the Maisons move away.

•Annie Campbell is a dark-haired, Caucasian woman from Australia. She frequently becomes exasperated with Campbell but loves him nevertheless. She meets him in London, marries him, and serves as a comic foil for him throughout the stories, often in conjunction with their three children: Hayley, Erin, and Callum. Because of her homesickness, she moves to Australia, taking Campbell with her.

•Alan Moore is a long-haired, bearded, and dour-looking large Caucasian man, known for his genius, wit, and magical propensity to help Campbell at key moments. He is usually pictured as smoking a cigarette. In addition to trying to find work for Campbell, he becomes a creative partner with him, and they collaborate on several comics.

Artistic Style

The Years Have Pants starts with an illustration of a boy sketching at a bus stop, an apt symbol of the artistic journey on which both artist and reader embark in the book and in the series in general. Campbell’s art constantly changes: It includes lush colors, Zip-A-Tone, children’s drawings, and photographs as he experiments, but underneath it all remains a core sketchiness that is always idiosyncratically recognizable and charmingly personal. Despite the surface casualness, Campbell is a meticulous craftsperson, and the reader can see his illustration deepen and develop throughout the Alec stories, from the kitchen-sink realism of “King Canute” to the more expressionistic work of “The Years Have Pants.” From the beginning, though, Campbell favors nine-panel grids for his page layouts, and in the single-page stories, he typically and masterfully delivers a punch line on the last panel.

Most of his work is in black and white, but The Fate of the Artist is in color and is experimental in other ways, with its faux-vintage comic strips, play with typography, and extensive use of photographs. Campbell often likes to reference the work of other artists by sampling it for demonstrative purposes, such as in “How to Be an Artist,” in which he provides a miniature history of the comics industry in the 1980’s. His panels are often arranged with the narration on top and the illustration on the bottom, and he prefers to have Alec appear in the panels, rather than have the story be told from his point of view visually.

Themes

The major theme of Alec is the wonder of life, particularly the small moments that would otherwise go undocumented. Campbell’s tone remains whimsical and ironic throughout the series. Campbell laughs along, as he observes how human beings occupy themselves with alcohol, art, death, love, sex, and, most of all, one another. The importance of social bonds seems paramount in the stories, as Alec leaves his parents to form a new family with Annie and their children. In the interim years, his friends, such as Grey, form a surrogate family. Despite the frustrations that come from close interactions with others, Campbell finds such interactions of fundamental importance. Indeed, his art seems to ask the reader to pay attention to her or his own life in a manner similar to how Campbell examines his own.

History emerges as a theme, particularly the history of comics and graphic novels. Strangely enough, humanity’s collective history is not much of a concern for Campbell. For example, a reader would hardly know the Cold War ended during the time period documented, though social transformations such as the emergence of women in the workplace and the increasing role of computer technology are reflected in Alec. Everything in the book is viewed through the prism of private life, which is precisely the point of the work. While professional historians cover the rise and fall of nations and other major events, Campbell chronicles his personal history and provides a refreshing, individually scaled take on the passage of the decades.

Impact

Like the work of Pekar, Campbell’s Alec pushed the boundaries of comics further, making everyday life a subject every bit as important as the genre material that typically appeared in comics beforehand. As such, Campbell can be seen as a forerunner of the following generation of independent cartoonists and graphic novelists, particularly those of an autobiographical bent. As a form of comparison, when Campbell’s comrade Moore was writing Watchmen and bringing new levels of realism to the superhero genre, Campbell had already dispensed with the superhero fantasy and was just focusing on realism. As a result, many comics professionals such as Warren Ellis have cited Campbell as an influence.

Though the Alec stories often appeared in serialized form over the years and can be enjoyed individually, with The Years Have Pants, many readers are likely to view the Alec oeuvre as a whole. Perhaps no one other than Pekar has documented her or his own life in comics for as long a time as Campbell has. For both Campbell and his doppelgänger Alec MacGarry, life and art go on. Though Campbell has always had a love/hate relationship with the term “graphic novel,” he likely will be long identified as one of the masters of the form.

Further Reading

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home (2006).

Brown, Chester. I Never Liked You (1994).

Campbell, Eddie, et al. Eddie Campbell’sBacchus (1995).

Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. From Hell (1989-1996).

Pekar, Harvey, et al. American Splendor (1976-1991).

Bibliography

Campbell, Eddie. “What Is a Graphic Novel?” World Literature Today 81, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 13.

Coale, Mark. Breaking the Panels: Over Seventy-Five Short Interviews from Around the Comics Industry. Colora, Md.: O-Goshi Studios, 1998.

Fischer, Craig, and Charles Hatfield. “Teeth, Sticks, and Bricks: Calligraphy, Graphic Focalization, and Narrative Braiding in Eddie Campbell’s Alec.” SubStance 40, no. 1 (2011): 70-93.

Wiater, Stanley, and Stephen Bissette. Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1993.