The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist

by Eddie Campbell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603095242
Publisher:	IDW Publishing
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	427,136
Product dimensions:	6.94(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Eddie Campbell has been making a living from comics since the 1980s. He is best known as the artist of From Hell (with Alan Moore), and made a splash with Bacchus, whose monthly comic ran for 60 issues. His semi-autobiographical concoctions however form his favorite strain of his own work. The former material was gathered in Alec: The Years Have Pants, all except the full color book The Fate of the Artist and the all-new The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/17/2023

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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

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.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Campbell merges memoir and hardboiled mystery to create a fascinating and revealing portrait of how world events impact an individual’s sense of self and creative drive." — Library Journal

From the Publisher

05/19/2023

Acclaimed cartoonist Campbell (From Hell) returns with a playfully metatextual memoir of life in lockdown at the height of the COVID pandemic. Too much time cooped up indoors has Campbell in a creative rut, endlessly tinkering with works of political satire that don't have much to say about anything at all. Worse, his relationship with his wife, Audrey, has strained to the point where she wonders if he's been replaced by an imposter. Inspired by this question, Campbell begins a new work in which a stylish detective, Royal Boomer, is hired to investigate whether Campbell is actually who he claims to be. The line between fiction and reality blurs as Boomer's quest for the truth leads him to enter the "real" world, where interrogating a collection of Campbell's friends and acquaintances reveals a surprising connection to plot elements from Campbell's previous metatextual memoir, the classic The Fate of the Artist (the full text of which is collected as a B-side to this new story). VERDICT Campbell merges memoir and hardboiled mystery to create a fascinating and revealing portrait of how world events impact an individual's sense of self and creative drive.

Library Journal