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

By Eddie Campbell
Top Shelf Productions, $35.00, 640 pages

Eddie Campbell is probably best known for his work with Alan Moore on From Hell, the comic about Jack the Ripper, eventually turned into the movie of the same name staring Johnny Depp. While Campbell has done a number of other books, either as illustrator or as full creator (Bacchus), one project that he has maintained for more than three decades is his semi-autobiographical stories of Alec MacGarry, Eddie’s alter-ego. Originally distributed like mini-comics (photocopied and hand sold), different parts of the story have been collected by various publishers over the following years. This massive collection (640 pages) has almost every Alec story previously published (except The Fate of the Artist still in print at First Second), and a new 35-page story that provided the title to the collection. Even as an alter-ego, Alec is an engaging character, and Campbell’s insight into personal interaction keep even the most innocuous interplays into a realistic exchanges most anyone could relate to. Being that the project has been done over years in small pieces, you can also see the development of Campbell’s art as he experiments with new styles rejecting what doesn’t work and keeping what does. You can also see the growth and changes of Alec/Eddie as the years go by and he changes from a pub crawling youngster to a wine drinking parent, trying to potty-train his child. Guest appearances from Dave Sim (Cerberus) and Alan Moore (Watchman, Swamp Thing) and other comic luminaries provide a behind the scenes look at some of Campbell’s professional life.

Even as autobiographical comics have been popular for the last couple of decades, no one has really ever produced something of this magnitude yet. Alec “The Years Have Pants” is a lifelong labor of love, and it shows, not only in the magnitude of the volume, but in the persistence of production and the honesty of the stories.