ALEC: The Years Have Pants (A Life-Size Omnibus) - Hardcover Edition - Hardcover

Campbell, Eddie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1603090479 ISBN 13: 9781603090476

Publisher: Top Shelf Productions, 2010

Synopsis

• For the first time ever, the pioneering autobiographical comics of master cartoonist Eddie Campbell (From Hell) are collected in a single volume!
• Brilliantly observed and profoundly expressed, the ALEC stories present a version of Campbell's own life, filtered through the alter ego of "Alec MacGarry." Over many years, we witness Alec's (and Eddie's) progression "from beer to wine" - wild nights at the pub, existential despair, the hunt for love, the quest for art, becoming a "responsible breadwinner," feeling lost at his own movie premiere, and much more! Eddie's outlandish fantasies and metafictional tricks convert life into art, while staying fully grounded in his own absurdity.
• This Life-Size Omnibus edition of ALEC includes all the stories from The King Canute Crowd, Three-Piece Suit, How to be an Artist, and After the Snooter, as well as the very early, out-of-print ALEC stories and a staggering amount of bonus material.

About this title

About the Author

Publishers Weekly calls Eddie Campbell "one of the premier cartoonists of his generation." Campbell has been writing and drawing comics since 1974, and is best known for his collaborations with Alan Moore (From Hell, A Disease of Language) and Neil Gaiman (The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains), as well as for Alec, his tour-de-force autobiographical series that Booklist called "a high-water mark in the graphic novel's short history," and the 1200-page epic Bacchus. Forthcoming is Bizarre Romance (in collaboration with Audrey Niffenegger).

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Just about the last thing that the comics world needs (apart from more action/horror mashups) is another dry and inspiration-free autobiography—thankfully, Alec shows with thrilling certitude that quotidian observations make just as great comic art as the most action-packed fiction. This monster of a book (billed as the definitive edition) contains a life's worth of Campbell's previously published Alec MacGarry stories. Running from 1981 to the present, these witty and thoughtful pieces (etched with the prolific Campbell's typically scratchy impatience) show Campbell's alter ego progressing from irresponsible Scottish pub crawler to striving graphic novelist to responsible and reasonably successful Aussie father. Along the way we can trace Campbell's rise from penny-pinching obscurity to relative fame, sketching an engaging portrait of the comics community. Though best known for his Alan Moore collaboration From Hell, Campbell shows in his MacGarry stories a breezy comic touch that can still flirt with darker topics of artistic responsibility and mortality without weighing down the narrative. The book can drag in its earlier, more minutely observed pages, but taken as a whole, delivers a life-size work, a great and epic comic documentary novel like no other. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1603090479
• ISBN 13: 9781603090476
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640