Eddie Campbell

The original inspiration is derived from Jules Léotard, who was the original man on the flying trapeze. He’s one of the earliest circus celebrities. He had a Victorian music hall song written about him, “Look at the man on the flying trapeze. He flies through the air…

He’s the inspiration for the book and he dies on page four.

120 pages. The rest of the book is someone attempting to imitate him.

No, it’s a complete fantasy.

I just got to the point on page 80 where all my characters get on the Titanic.

[laughs] And I’ve got 40 pages to go. I’m very excited about it. It moves very quickly. I cover 60 years of world history at a rapid clip. I don’t know if I’m going too fast. I may have to go back and fill in some detail [laughs].

Yeah, Black Diamond Detective Agency belongs to producer Bill Horberg and he found agent Judy Hansen, who works with Denis Kitchen, and she found a publisher. Bill’s latest project is a movie that just came out here called Copying Beethoven starring Ed Harris. Since Black Diamond is an original screenplay, the idea was to create a book that would come out before the movie. Judy Hansen has sold a lot of graphic novels from the big publishers. She sold Crumb’s book Genesis to Norton and I think she sold Kings in Disguise to Norton as well. So she took the property to First Second just when First Second was starting up. First Second saw me as the right person for the job because it’s later than the Wild West, but it’s not yet the Gangster era of the 20’s and Prohibition. It’s caught somewhere between a western and a gangster story. It’s a crime/mystery set in 1899 on the cusp of the modern world. The modern world that rides the railway stations and then it blows up and everything goes wrong. That’s my interpretation of the script. I was looking for some small, little hook by which I could turn it into something I could be interested in doing. Not just for the sake of plastering my own personality all over it, but if I was going to spend a year drawing a graphic novel based on this; I had to find something that would appeal to my concept of reality. One of the running things in it, that I don’t think they even realized, is that there seemed to be a theme that right there on the eve of the modern world, everything was breaking or exploding or going wrong. The first scene of the movie script has a train arriving at the station and exploding in this horrendous conflagration. The story is the unraveling of the mystery as to why this happened.

I think that’s the idea. But I was so eager to get my other book done, The Fate of the Artist, that I talked them into doing that first. I think they phoned me up to get me to draw this detective thing. They casually asked me what I was up to and I quickly sold them on The Fate of the Artist so they had to finish that before I could start The Black Diamond Agency.

Essentially it’s a genre thriller/adventure. Where genre fiction is concerned, I’ve always leaned much more toward detective and mystery rather than science fiction or fantasy. Usually comic aficionados are fantasy buffs or science fiction enthusiasts but that’s never been the case with me. I’ve always leaned more towards detective fiction like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane and so on all the way up to [James Bond creator] Ian Fleming. I’ve read all the James Bond books; I love them even though I thought they got too whacky towards the end. I can’t watch the movies. They are too far removed from what Fleming was talking about. Although I was impressed with the new one [Casino Royale] because it got back to basics. They really turned it into a hard-hitting, physical thriller again without all the gadgetry.

You must see it. It’s great stuff. That’s based on the very first Bond book that was written in 1954 and I was surprised at how closely they followed it and still kept it modern. If you read it now, it reads as very old-fashioned. So I was really surprised that they could keep that same story and still bring it up to date, which in a roundabout way brings us back to what I was trying to do with Black Diamond. My challenge was trying to make this story, set in 1899, relevant to here and now.

I went in presuming that since it was a screenplay, it would be like the From Hell screenplay. The first From Hell screenplay I saw was so different from the finished movie.

1994 was the first time I read a screenplay based on it. Given that we were only halfway through the book at that point, that tells you how much it was based on what we were doing. But later on, it went through several rewrites. I presumed that Black Diamond was going to be rewritten and whatever I do would just be one of the rewrites. Nobody could possibly take offense if I changed several things in it. So there were a few things to mend, but they were practical things. The big gun battle at the Chicago rail station right in the middle of this thing was supposed to be the old LaSalle Street Station but it was set before they built the new LaSalle Street Station in 1903. I looked around and thought, “Let’s shift this around to Chicago’s old Grand Central Station,” because it was a much more interesting visual possibility. So I changed things like that to make it more visually exciting.

I had already gone through all of this with From Hell. Alan Moore had a coach going across a bridge that hadn’t been built yet. It was being built at the time but it wasn’t open yet, so I had to change it to another bridge. I was used to dealing with things like that, not necessarily to make it more sensational but to work out a more workable, logistical solution. I had done all this research so now I know more about Chicago than anybody who lives there. I had these great photos of Chicago’s Grand Central Station, which I think was closed down in the 1970’s. From these great photos, I started to imagine this great gun battle because only the Untouchables movie that Brian De Palma directed used Chicago’s Union Station to shoot that. From all the old photos, it took me ages to figure out that was Union Station. I’ve been in Chicago but never long enough to figure out these things. I found this German website that had this great scale model of the Grand Central in Chicago and I thought, “I can set it in here.” So I had to reroute things just to suit my own interests in making things work in a more exciting, big urban chase way. But there were other things too. A lot of times with the movie script the characters are not fully worked out because once you hire the actors, the actors bring a lot of that with them. I was reading this script thinking, “These characters are kind of dull on the page.” I had to keep reminding myself, “Wait a minute. I’ll create a character, then cast the actor in that part.” That’s totally different than if you’re working with a script by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. The characters are the first thing they’ve worked out and they’ve worked it out thoroughly.

When I think over all the comic book things I’ve done, if you’re drawing Steve Rogers [secret identity of Captain America] or Will Eisner’s The Spirit or something, it’s fully worked out. In an original movie script, the characters are blank templates so that if they get Brad Pitt, it will be a certain type of character and if they get George Clooney, it will be a different character. I thought, “I can give them something that completely changes a character.” That gave me the liberty to play around with the characters and make them up to some extent. So a lot of what the characters do is my input. I ended up writing a lot of stuff that fit in without changing the shape of the story.

I did. Without changing the shape, I thought “We’ve got to up the ante here. There seems to be a lot of people getting killed for small potatoes, just for stealing money. Let’s make this a lot bigger plot. I’ve got to put this on a under a more sinister, international conspiracy label.” Readers want something that’s a bit more dangerous, that’s going to give them shudders. I tried to create something that would send a reverberating shudder, right up to the present moment. So we’ll see how that goes down. It does make things a bit more complicated. But then again, when you’re reading a book, you want more complexity. When you’re reading a book, you just flip back a couple of pages but when you’re sitting in the cinema, you can’t flip back to check what happened ten minutes ago so I think a book can sustain much more complexity than a movie can. When you read Raymond Chandler, you think, “What the fuck is going on here? I’m lost. I’m going to have to go back and reread this.” So you never knew what was going on. But at the same time there was an exhilaration about trying to keep up with it. When you’re in the middle of a really challenging book, you get this exhilaration from being continually outwitted by what you are reading and you’ve got to keep changing sides. I thought this character was on this side, now he’s on that side. Everything’s changing all the time.

I would like to think that the autobiographical stuff will be remembered. But in order to make a living, I’ve got to alternate that with the stuff of the more genre nature. My last book was The Fate of the Artist, before that was Batman: The Order of Beasts, which was another detective thriller. I’ve got to alternate to survive.

Yeah. I think that last book The Fate of the Artist is the best book I ever did.

I’d like to think that some of the things that I’ve introduced to them would be considered for the final cut. I think a lot of it may be good in the book, but whether it would work in a movie, I don’t know. As you know, I have experience with the From Hell, which was so complicated that they had to throw most of it out for the movie. To do it properly, they probably needed a 12-part miniseries or something. I think making a movie is more like creating a pictorial extravaganza that is closer to PT Barnum than anything literary.

It wouldn’t be a movie without blowing something up.

Yeah, I think I’ve gotten past all that now. I’ve become a much more mellow person. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting old or something. One Saturday night, I was already in my dressing gown, ready to go to bed at like half-past nine. My 16-year-old daughter was heading out with a box of booze under her arm and my wife made me confiscate it. I quite righteously did it, but I had to think to myself, “How did it come to this? Eddie Campbell in his bathrobe at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, on his way to bed, confiscating somebody else’s booze? What’s going on in the world? What happened?” But I think it’s just getting old.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck