The Fate of the Artist #[nn]

Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist arrives from First Second in 2006 as a genuinely distinctive work, its cover immediately signaling the inventive mixed-media approach within — a painted face split and layered with newspaper text, comic strip panels, and photographic fragments, as if identity itself is being collaged together and pulled apart. The haunting central image, half watercolor portrait and half assembled ephemera, speaks to Campbell's role here as writer, artist, inker, colorist, and letterer all at once, with photography contributed by Hayley Campbell. It's a richly self-aware package that promises something far outside the ordinary comics experience.