Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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COMICS & BOOKS

17.9.05 Collections Hard and Soft

A few recent Smoke reviews I missed:

Wil Moss, in the Nashville City Paper: "It's refreshing to hear from new voices in comics, especially when they sound as professional and talented as that of Alex de Campi, who really knocks one out of the park with Smoke." Wil's column is really one of the best and most comprehensive columns on comics in America. I'd love to see it fixed up with an RSS feed or echoed onto Livejournal.

Rob Nott, in Comics International: "Alex de Campi has created something really quite unique within the pages of Smoke. Her multi-faceted story straddles several genres with its satirical thriller set in a dissolute Britain of 2012. In many ways it reminds me of quality BBC dramas like Dead Head and Edge of Darkness. A fresh and exciting voice in contemporary comics."

The Smoke paperback collection and a limited-edition hardback will hit stores in November. The hardback is signed by both myself and Igor, and features a fairly substantial amount of extra material by me outlining some history of the world in which the story is set.

The individual issues of Smoke sold out at many comic shops the day they arrived, and the anecdotal evidence I've had from many readers of having to go to three or four shops to find the issues suggests that it might be worth pre-ordering the collected editions to avoid frustration. Diamond order codes are at top right. If you're not a comic-shop-going type, I'll be putting up a link to the book on Amazon a bit closer to the date.

There will also be German (Egmont) and Spanish editions of Smoke coming out next year.

Minicomics guru Shawn Hoke recently reviewed my mate Rob Croonenborgh's I Love Short Shorts collection, which contains a story I wrote called "Six Characters": "It's no secret that I would rather read a story where someone functions as a cartoonist (both art and writing) rather than read something by a creative team. It's a preference I have. It doesn't mean that I'll ignore or dismiss something by a creative team; it just means I have a preference. De Campi's tale is an atmospheric meditation on the creative process and Croonenborghs' moody art suits it perfectly. Here the black pages and borders are a natural fit as a writer seems to be haunted by a book that she hasn't written yet. She's obsessed with it regardless of how much time she's spent putting pen to paper. This is a great short story and it's the first thing I've read from de Campi."

"Six Characters" is also collected in my own Defective Comics anthology, which can be ordered by going here and scrolling down. There are only about 20 copies of Defective left, and when it's gone, it's gone forever.

There is also a recent interview with me in the Millarworld webmagazine. Warning: they've been a bit cackhanded with closing the href tags, so vast swathes of the text is bile-green.

In a few weeks' time (once I have image-editing software again) I'll be announcing my sequential projects coming out in 2006. There are at least four creator-owned series, with one or two more possibly being finalised by year end. No Image work, no Marvel or DC. Not that I have anything against them; they're fine companies... I just haven't needed them.

( 11:33 AM )

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