Campbell's Sticky Tape Soup

Eddie Campbell with God: "I knew it! All of existence is held together with paper clips and sticky tape."


While waiting in the dentist's office last weekend, I realized I didn't bring any books with me. I snuck into the Powerbooks branch downstairs and went through their sale pile. And there, waiting for me was a copy of Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist (New York: First Second Books, 2006). At 85% off and Php119--and a first edition at that--it's a steal and very much worth it. Managed to finish it over two dental visits.

The book's title page declares that this is "an autobiographical novel (1) , with typographical anomalies (2), in which the author does not appear as himself (3)."

What this means:

(1) The author has suffered a kind of "domestic apocalypse." He has disappeared, and what's left on the floor of his storage space was this scrawled picture of god as a smiley. We hear about Campbell's various neuroses through vignettes told by his daughter Halley, old Honeybee comic strips which portray the travails of a married couple from the last century, and other passages which portray the author as a hypochondriac, depressive, obssessive artist. But then again, which artist is not like that?

(2) The book is a collage of sorts. You have the aforementioned Honeybee strips, the interviews with Halley, the brief prose passages which are bookended with found objects, and sections which look into the tradition of comedy, humor and obscure artists, and even a comics dramatization of O. Henry's "Confessions of a Humorist" featuring Eddie Campbell who is not exactly played by Eddie Campbell.

(3) It's not Eddie Campbell because there's a guy named Richard Seigrist who appears as Eddie Campbell.

It's a very playful book. At 96 pages, it's a short one, but manages to give us a sustained meditation on "the lonely demands of art amid the realities of everyday life."

You can read an excerpt here.

Whose Memory Is It Anyway?

Karl Taro Greenfeld has a problem: "Had some of my earliest memories actually been implanted by reading my father's book about our family as a very young child?"

In writing his memoir about growing up with an autistic brother, Greenfeld kept comparing his own memory with that of the already published version--his father's books. He says: "Many of us have recollections that turn out to have been created or nurtured by family photos we have seen or stories we have been told. But most of us aren't writers setting down a life's story. One could argue that the more fortunate memoirist is the one who doesn't have another writer also weighing in on his childhood, who doesn't measure his own memories against those of some external, recorded source."

In a way, Greenfeld is writing his memoir with the conscious effort of not merely echoing the story that has already been told. Later on, he realizes that memory is a tricky thing: there's same game of catch and yet his father's account was similar and in other ways different. Then incident about a graduate student who spanked the very young Greenfeld when he threw a tantrum over dinner. This he remembers with clarity, but his parents cannot recall it ever happening. In the end, he resolves that "The memoirist's ultimate responsibility is to himself, his own version of his life, his truth and reality. If he does not stay faithful to that story, then why is he bothering to write it at all?"

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

I found my copy of The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam in Powerbooks Midtown. I wandered over to the nonfiction section and was looking for Persepolis (which like Maus is frequently shelved with the other "biographies") when I found something bright bluish green. I looked at the cover and was fascinated by the little drawing:



It was drawn by Ben Gibson and the inside pages suggest that it be shelved under the categories of "Magicians-China-biography-comic books, strips, etc." and also "Long Tack Sam-Comic books, strips, etc."

So is it a book about magicians from China, or a biography of a magician from China, or a comic book, period? It is all three, but the weird shelving contributes to the confusion. If I'm into comic books, I'd look at the comics shelf, or if I'm into biography, I'll head into the nonfiction section, where I'll find this between the biographies of Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Meanwhile, the review from Entertainment Weekly recommends this for fans of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Wtf? But anyway, who reads EW for the book reviews, right? Also, the American Library Association lists it as part of their Top 10 Comic Books for Teens. So what is this book really?

But anyway, I liked the cover and when I looked inside the book, there was this rather crude drawing of a girl telling me that her life was all about messing with the proper borders. Ann Marie Fleming was born in Japan, but couldn't get a birth certificate because her parents were not Japanese. Her mother is from HongKong, but they couldn't go there and so it happened that her birth certificate was issued by Korea. All her life, this is what would happen.

Then she discovers that she has a great-grandfather who was a magician with a touring company at the height of Vaudeville. But she knows almost nothing about this man because her grandmother wouldn't say anything. So she travels around the world trying to find out who Long Tack Sam is.

She pieces together old photographs, playbills, posters, and drawings of herself as "Stickgirl" interviewing various people who had known or had known about Long Tack Sam. There are pages drawn in the style of the Golden Age of comics which detail the origins of Long Tack Sam. There are many versions, but the gist is always this: that Long Tack Sam was from a poor village, and he was training to be an acrobat, or had a mean older brother so he ran away and went hungry but saw this young boy/old magician and became his apprentice and that's how he came into the magic trade.

From there he goes around the world, marries an Austrian girl in 1908, has two little girls who later join his act, and when the moving pictures came, refused to join the circuit because the movies put Asians in a bad light. After two world wars and a bad wound, he got gangrene in his leg and died. And now, nobody knows who he is until his great granddaughter stumbled upon an old costume, playbill or photograph. And I didn't know this book existed if I hadn't wandered over to the nonfiction section in a big chain bookstore.

What makes this book interesting is the mixing of different styles to tell the story of the girl looking at her family history. It's a collage of photos, posters, playbills, drawings, etc. On some pages, there's a sidebar detailing the things happening around the world on a certain year: the news headlines, historical events, popular movie or song, etc. It's an attempt to contextualize the world beyond Long Tack Sam's traveling act. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes I just wish the author could blend it with the narrative.

It's also interesting that it was first a documentary before it was a comic book/graphic memoir/whatever it wants to be. There's a note from the author saying that at first she didn't know how to tell the story on the page after doing it on video. I haven't seen the docu, but I have a feeling that it pretty much retains the humor and the collage of different elements and fusing them together into a coherent narrative. And that for me, is ultimately what it should be: a well-told story. And in that aspect, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam succeeds as a good read.

EDIT: Caleb Mozzocco of Every Day is Like Wednesday has a good review of the book. He shows page scans (which I can't do as I have no scanner and zero scanning abilities) detailing the different styles employed by Fleming in the book. Here is a sample from the Golden Age of Comics section: