The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Eddie Campbell is not himself. But these days, who is? It’s meta-fictional mystery and mischief as the award-winning artist of From Hell sets out to find his own imposter. Plus, on the flipside: a deluxe new presentation of The Fate of the Artist, Eddie Campbell’s classic work of graphic meta-memoir! SIDE A: The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell, by Eddie Campbell, is a spiritual sequel to his acclaimed graphic novel The Fate of the Artist, in which the author was missing from his own autobiography. Many years later, during an endless Covid lockdown in which everybody wears a mask and needs a haircut, Eddie’s wife is certain that he has been supplanted by an imposter. She hires a detective, the square-jawed Royler Boom, to solve the mystery. What follows — interspersed with Campbell’s trademark wry anecdotes, dreams, parodic pastiches, and pandemic peccadilloes — is a thrilling investigation that builds to a car chase and a violent conclusion. The author cunningly passes this off as another piece of autobiography. SIDE B: The Fate of the Artist: In an autobiography, the author and the subject are the same person… but now they’ve both gone missing. The Fate of the Artist is a complex weaving of different strains of invention including a mock prose detective story, an imaginary Sunday comic strip, a mock fumetti-style interview with the author's daughter, intertwined with Campbell's beloved brand of autobiographical comic storytelling. In this deluxe reissue of a groundbreaking book, the award-winning cartoonist of From Hell and Alec presents a complex, caustic, and fiendishly clever meditation on the lonely life of the artist and the busy life that swirls around him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eisner winner Campbell (From Hell) pairs a meditative graphic novella on authenticity with a reissue of his metafictional memoir, The Fate of the Artist, in this quixotic double feature. In the original The Fate of the Artist, the artist has disappeared, leaving his friends and family to piece together his fate through six interconnected story fragments. In the sequel, his protagonist navigates the strange new world of the Covid-19 pandemic. "Eddie Campbell, are you home?" asks Campbell's wife, novelist Audrey Niffenegger, as they stroll down the sidewalk in their snow-covered Chicago neighborhood early during Covid. Her seemingly innocuous question has no easy answer. This Eddie, who's wearing a face mask, seems to Niffenegger to be an imposter, a suspicion she reveals to a hard-boiled detective named Royler Boom, who agrees to take the case. "The virus, you see, introduced a culture of masks and social distancing that brought its own brand of skullduggery," suggests Campbell in his foreword. Is this merely a figurative identity crisis, or is Eddie literally someone else? The artist wrestles with his place in the world, and even his very sense of self, as forced isolation leads the introspective cartoonist into an experimental phase. Through a collage of early 1900s–style illustrations, blunt political cartoons, subtle slice-of-life moments, gallows humor, and a surreal crime story, Campbell wrestles with his own existential crisis as he attempts to uncover the truth behind his apparent doppelgänger. It's an indelible pseudo-autobiography from a true master of comics storytelling.
