Sometimes comic book creators spend so much time on personal works and superhero comics that you forget how good they are at a rousing genre tale. Eddie Campbell has mastered nearly every genre within the comic book medium and just released The Black Diamond Detective Agency. That book takes him back to stories of murder and conspiracy, which was the focus of his now classic co-creation From Hell. The Black Diamond Detective Agency is based on a screenplay by C. Gaby Mitchell. It is set in turn of the century America where John Hardin is the sole suspect in a series of train bombings and is being investigated by the renowned Black Diamond Detective Agency.
Check out the website for The Black Diamond Detective Agency
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read youre working on a new book already.
Eddie Campbell: Yeah, I am getting very little done on it today, but Im working on a new book called The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard.
DRE: Is it a fantasy?
EC: The original inspiration is derived from Jules Lotard, who was the original man on the flying trapeze. Hes 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
DRE: with the greatest of ease. Sure.
EC: Hes the inspiration for the book and he dies on page four.
DRE: How long is the book?
EC: 120 pages. The rest of the book is someone attempting to imitate him.
DRE: Is it based on something true?
EC: No, its a complete fantasy.
DRE: [laughs] It sounds great.
EC: I just got to the point on page 80 where all my characters get on the Titanic.
DRE: That doesnt bode well.
EC: [laughs] And Ive got 40 pages to go. Im very excited about it. It moves very quickly. I cover 60 years of world history at a rapid clip. I dont know if Im going too fast. I may have to go back and fill in some detail [laughs].
DRE: I read that the First Second publisher brought you the screenplay for The Black Diamond Detective Agency.
EC: 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. Bills 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 Crumbs 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 its later than the Wild West, but its not yet the Gangster era of the 20s and Prohibition. Its caught somewhere between a western and a gangster story. Its 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. Thats 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 dont 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.
DRE: Obviously at this point, you are First Seconds most well-known creator and when someone brings something like this to them they are going to first offer it to you.
EC: I think thats 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.
DRE: Besides what you mentioned, how else did you connect with Black Diamond?
EC: Essentially its a genre thriller/adventure. Where genre fiction is concerned, Ive 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 thats never been the case with me. Ive 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. Ive read all the James Bond books; I love them even though I thought they got too whacky towards the end. I cant 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.
DRE: I havent seen it yet, but Ive heard its very good.
EC: You must see it. Its great stuff. Thats 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.
DRE: Is the book much different than the screenplay?
EC: 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.
DRE: Wasnt From Hell optioned something like ten years before the movie was done?
EC: 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, Lets shift this around to Chicagos 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.
DRE: Its funny that you changed things for practical purposes. When youre doing a comic book you can draw anything you want. When you change something in a movie for practical reasons, its because you couldnt afford the location or they couldnt get it.
EC: I had already gone through all of this with From Hell. Alan Moore had a coach going across a bridge that hadnt been built yet. It was being built at the time but it wasnt 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 Chicagos Grand Central Station, which I think was closed down in the 1970s. From these great photos, I started to imagine this great gun battle because only the Untouchables movie that Brian De Palma directed used Chicagos Union Station to shoot that. From all the old photos, it took me ages to figure out that was Union Station. Ive 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. Ill create a character, then cast the actor in that part. Thats totally different than if youre working with a script by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. The characters are the first thing theyve worked out and theyve worked it out thoroughly.
When I think over all the comic book things Ive done, if youre drawing Steve Rogers [secret identity of Captain America] or Will Eisners The Spirit or something, its 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.
DRE: Did you change anything major?
EC: I did. Without changing the shape, I thought Weve got to up the ante here. There seems to be a lot of people getting killed for small potatoes, just for stealing money. Lets make this a lot bigger plot. Ive got to put this on a under a more sinister, international conspiracy label. Readers want something thats a bit more dangerous, thats going to give them shudders. I tried to create something that would send a reverberating shudder, right up to the present moment. So well see how that goes down. It does make things a bit more complicated. But then again, when youre reading a book, you want more complexity. When youre reading a book, you just flip back a couple of pages but when youre sitting in the cinema, you cant 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? Im lost. Im 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 youre in the middle of a really challenging book, you get this exhilaration from being continually outwitted by what you are reading and youve got to keep changing sides. I thought this character was on this side, now hes on that side. Everythings changing all the time.
DRE: We did an interview about four or five years ago where you said that the autobiographical books are the ones that you want to be remembered for because they are your favorite books to do.
EC: I would like to think that the autobiographical stuff will be remembered. But in order to make a living, Ive 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. Ive got to alternate to survive.
DRE: Are you still most fond of the autobiographical stuff?
EC: Yeah. I think that last book The Fate of the Artist is the best book I ever did.
DRE: When or if Black Diamond gets turned into a movie, do you want to be involved?
EC: Id like to think that some of the things that Ive 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 dont 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.
DRE: Black Diamond certainly might cost a bit with all those explosions.
EC: It wouldnt be a movie without blowing something up.
DRE: [laughs] I remember you created the Snooter because you were becoming a hypochondriac. But youve done more Snooter books since then. Do you feel like youre less of a hypochondriac as a result?
EC: Yeah, I think Ive gotten past all that now. Ive become a much more mellow person. Maybe its 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 oclock on a Saturday night, on his way to bed, confiscating somebody elses booze? Whats going on in the world? What happened? But I think its just getting old.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the website for The Black Diamond Detective Agency
Daniel Robert Epstein: I read youre working on a new book already.
Eddie Campbell: Yeah, I am getting very little done on it today, but Im working on a new book called The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard.
DRE: Is it a fantasy?
EC: The original inspiration is derived from Jules Lotard, who was the original man on the flying trapeze. Hes 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
DRE: with the greatest of ease. Sure.
EC: Hes the inspiration for the book and he dies on page four.
DRE: How long is the book?
EC: 120 pages. The rest of the book is someone attempting to imitate him.
DRE: Is it based on something true?
EC: No, its a complete fantasy.
DRE: [laughs] It sounds great.
EC: I just got to the point on page 80 where all my characters get on the Titanic.
DRE: That doesnt bode well.
EC: [laughs] And Ive got 40 pages to go. Im very excited about it. It moves very quickly. I cover 60 years of world history at a rapid clip. I dont know if Im going too fast. I may have to go back and fill in some detail [laughs].
DRE: I read that the First Second publisher brought you the screenplay for The Black Diamond Detective Agency.
EC: 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. Bills 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 Crumbs 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 its later than the Wild West, but its not yet the Gangster era of the 20s and Prohibition. Its caught somewhere between a western and a gangster story. Its 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. Thats 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 dont 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.
DRE: Obviously at this point, you are First Seconds most well-known creator and when someone brings something like this to them they are going to first offer it to you.
EC: I think thats 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.
DRE: Besides what you mentioned, how else did you connect with Black Diamond?
EC: Essentially its a genre thriller/adventure. Where genre fiction is concerned, Ive 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 thats never been the case with me. Ive 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. Ive read all the James Bond books; I love them even though I thought they got too whacky towards the end. I cant 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.
DRE: I havent seen it yet, but Ive heard its very good.
EC: You must see it. Its great stuff. Thats 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.
DRE: Is the book much different than the screenplay?
EC: 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.
DRE: Wasnt From Hell optioned something like ten years before the movie was done?
EC: 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, Lets shift this around to Chicagos 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.
DRE: Its funny that you changed things for practical purposes. When youre doing a comic book you can draw anything you want. When you change something in a movie for practical reasons, its because you couldnt afford the location or they couldnt get it.
EC: I had already gone through all of this with From Hell. Alan Moore had a coach going across a bridge that hadnt been built yet. It was being built at the time but it wasnt 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 Chicagos Grand Central Station, which I think was closed down in the 1970s. From these great photos, I started to imagine this great gun battle because only the Untouchables movie that Brian De Palma directed used Chicagos Union Station to shoot that. From all the old photos, it took me ages to figure out that was Union Station. Ive 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. Ill create a character, then cast the actor in that part. Thats totally different than if youre working with a script by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. The characters are the first thing theyve worked out and theyve worked it out thoroughly.
When I think over all the comic book things Ive done, if youre drawing Steve Rogers [secret identity of Captain America] or Will Eisners The Spirit or something, its 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.
DRE: Did you change anything major?
EC: I did. Without changing the shape, I thought Weve got to up the ante here. There seems to be a lot of people getting killed for small potatoes, just for stealing money. Lets make this a lot bigger plot. Ive got to put this on a under a more sinister, international conspiracy label. Readers want something thats a bit more dangerous, thats going to give them shudders. I tried to create something that would send a reverberating shudder, right up to the present moment. So well see how that goes down. It does make things a bit more complicated. But then again, when youre reading a book, you want more complexity. When youre reading a book, you just flip back a couple of pages but when youre sitting in the cinema, you cant 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? Im lost. Im 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 youre in the middle of a really challenging book, you get this exhilaration from being continually outwitted by what you are reading and youve got to keep changing sides. I thought this character was on this side, now hes on that side. Everythings changing all the time.
DRE: We did an interview about four or five years ago where you said that the autobiographical books are the ones that you want to be remembered for because they are your favorite books to do.
EC: I would like to think that the autobiographical stuff will be remembered. But in order to make a living, Ive 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. Ive got to alternate to survive.
DRE: Are you still most fond of the autobiographical stuff?
EC: Yeah. I think that last book The Fate of the Artist is the best book I ever did.
DRE: When or if Black Diamond gets turned into a movie, do you want to be involved?
EC: Id like to think that some of the things that Ive 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 dont 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.
DRE: Black Diamond certainly might cost a bit with all those explosions.
EC: It wouldnt be a movie without blowing something up.
DRE: [laughs] I remember you created the Snooter because you were becoming a hypochondriac. But youve done more Snooter books since then. Do you feel like youre less of a hypochondriac as a result?
EC: Yeah, I think Ive gotten past all that now. Ive become a much more mellow person. Maybe its 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 oclock on a Saturday night, on his way to bed, confiscating somebody elses booze? Whats going on in the world? What happened? But I think its just getting old.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
Sometimes comic book creators spend so much time on personal works and superhero comics that you forget how good they are at a rousing genre tale. Eddie Campbell has mastered nearly every genre within the comic book medium and just released The Black Diamond...