Campbell Unearths a Black Diamond, Part 1

by Wil Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2007

The surest way for a framed man to prove he's innocent? Join up with the very group that's tracking him down. At least that's what John Hardin figures, the protagonist of Eddie Campbell's new graphic novel, The Black Diamond Detective Agency.

Out now from First Second Books, the story takes place in 1899 as a train bombing leads the titular detective agency after Hardin, with the Secret Service and a sinister conspiracy waiting in the wings. The project started out as a screenplay, and on the road to the silver screen the film’s producer, Bill Horberg, approached First Second about bringing the story to life as a graphic novel first.

Enter Campbell, the artist of From Hell and creator of such graphic novels as Bacchus, the Alec series and The Fate of the Artist. The always fascinating Campbell talks about transferring a property like Black Diamond to the illustrated page, the realities of the emerging work model for creating graphic novels, and much more.

PW Comics Week: How did you go about tackling this project?

Eddie Campbell: I just started in with paint and made it up as I went along based on the script, and it came out exactly the number of pages, 140 pages or whatever it is. Somehow I've acquired an instinct for that over the years. So I just started painting it from page one and hoped it would all work out.

PWCW: Really? You didn't write your own script beforehand?

EC: No, no, no, I just adjusted the main one as I went along. The biggest thing with doing a 140-page book is that every time you go out of the house with nobody in it and 100 pages of painted artwork [sitting there], a terrible panic comes over you. Wherever you are, you're out shopping, you just imagine the place being burgled and all those pages going. We never suffered from this when we did the monthly periodical. The worst you could ever lose was 30 pages at a time. So after being afraid to go out of the house for more than a year, you end up a bit rattled.

It's kind of interesting that the so-called "graphic novel" has got to this stage now where we can do a book all in one go and not have to serialize it.

PWCW: Do you miss that, serializing the work?

EC: I think this is why I've taken up <a href = "http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/">the blog</a> in the meantime. The blog gives me daily contact with the world, a bit like the old letters pages in the monthly mag, except that it's every day. So you lose one thing and something else takes its place, something else quite different.

PWCW: Do you like this model better? Or it is it not really an "either-or"?

EC: I do, actually. I think with this model it's more regarded as an authorial work rather than a product. The old comic book tended to be—no matter who was working on it—regarded as a product. For instance, I've just been invited to a couple of writers' festivals, which is unusual, quite a change from comic conventions. You're invited as another author, you're being introduced to other authors, you're being introduced to the mayor of the town—I don't know, it's all quite different.

PWCW: And you think it's because now you're viewed as a graphic novelist rather than just a comics creator?

EC: Yes, yes, there's definitely a—I don't like the words "graphic novel." I always spell it with inverted commas around it, so when you transcribe this, put inverted commas around it. The inverted commas isn't just a longer comic book, I've always argued this, it's quite a different thing altogether in many ways. One of the things is the respect of the authorial voice; it's regarded as a statement from an author rather than some kind of improvised graphic madness between two or three parties. I quite like that. The old model has its attractions too, but I quite like the new one.

PWCW: Do you know the intentions behind the filmmakers wanting to do this as a graphic novel?

EC: No. My first thought was that the movie people, Bill Horberg, the film's producer, had read somewhere that the "graphic novel" is the thing of the moment, "Why don't we get this out as a graphic novel?" I thought it might have been a cynical manipulation. "This is an original screenplay, we can have a book out there first. I hear 'graphic novels' are big, why don't we get someone to make it as a 'graphic novel'?" I was quite pleased to find that Bill was actually enthusiastic about the form. In fact, while I was working on the book, he sent me an old 1950s Western comic book called Black Diamond Western. He found one on eBay and sent me a copy of it. I think Dick Ayers drew it. So I think he enjoys that whole kind of thing. He's a good guy. I like Bill.

PWCW: One thing that I enjoyed about the book was that the information comes at you so quickly, I didn't really have time to process it, I just wanted to finish reading the story, and afterwards I went back to read it again because I wanted to sort it all out—was that kind of intentional or am I just slow?

EC: You can do things with a book, with a detective mystery, that you can't really do in a movie. In a movie you can't turn back the pages to work out a problem or a conundrum. With a book you can stop it, you can sit back for a minute, you can work something out. It engages you, it challenges the mind. I'm a big fan of the great writers of detective fiction like Raymond Chandler. Reading Chandler, it's always a challenge to actually follow what the hell is going on. But at the same time, the fact that he's always one step ahead of your cognitive understanding of the events, gives kind of a captivating rush to it, because you know you're being outwitted. That's part of the fun of it, the writer is outwitting you, and you're struggling and striving to keep up with him. There's a challenge going on all the time—"See if you can follow this one!" I do like that version of the classic detective novel, as opposed to the English style, the Agatha Christie thing, which is much more sedate. It's like a parlor game where all the evidence is given to you a spoonful at a time, and everything is explained to you as you go along. I much prefer the hard-boiled American style where it's helter-skelter and you just have to hang on tight to keep up with it.

[Continued in part II]