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With The Complete Alec’s pub date approaching rapidly, we’re getting more and more Eddie Campbell , including an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid at The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log:
I was reading the autobiographical novels of Henry Miller, but now I can’t recall whether I was reading them because I wanted to go that route or whether they inspired it. Essentially I liked the idea of finding things to write and draw in the life I saw around me rather than just filling out the readymade narrative templates of thriller and fantasy and soap opera. There’s new stuff everywhere if you take the trouble to look for it. I do know that I didn’t see Spiegelman’s or Pekar’s work ‘til 1982.
Meanwhile, over on his blog, Campbell digresses about many essential things, such as the history of copying in art:

A note to any of those younger readers still hanging about after the pictures finished. We’re not looking at cases of artists ‘ripping off’ another artist. there was a time, long ago, before you were born, when if you wanted a copy of something, you couldn’t just scan it. Pictures in books were printed from engraved woodblocks, which would wear out after much use. Thus fifty years later, if a reprint of the book was required, it would be necessary to hire another artist to hand-copy the whole job. And each successive artist copying the same images would be likely to add his own touches. He may also not have had access to the earliest version and have worked from an intermediary copy. It was akin to a shakespearean play, which would have to be restaged and performed anew for each generation.