The Fate of the Artist ~ written and illustrated by Eddie Campbell. First Second Books, 2006. Trade paperback, 96 pages, color. This is a brand new copy but it has a remainder mark on the top page edge.

In this pseudo-autobiography, the subject of the memoir has vanished without a trace. Through six separate threads, each one typographically and stylistically distinct, a private investigator tries to discover the artists' fate through false trails, family and daily life reenactments, and even an imaginary Sunday comic strip. As the narrative threads intersect and collide in surprising ways, the reader is carried along on a fantastic journey through the life of the artist.

Campbell, best known for his work on From Hell and his autobiographical Alec comics, has come up with a marvelous sui generis oddity: a meta-memoir about his own disappearance that's a kind of intently controlled nervous breakdown on paper. It's a nonlinear, mixed-media collage of a book—there are typeset prose passages, painted comics about his family, old-fashioned newspaper strips, photos with typeset word balloons, a child's crayon scrawl representing God and, near the end, an illustrated adaptation of O. Henry's story "The Confessions of a Humorist," which concerns how habitually turning life into art can make life unbearable. Campbell's always been interested in the curious nooks of history, and there's a running thread about artistic also-rans like Johann Schobert and the Greek sculptor Phidias; there's also an ongoing gag about Campbell replacing himself with an imaginary actor named Richard Siegrist. The tone is whimsical and playful, but there's a deep despair beneath it—about drinking, burnout and what happens to an artist "when his imaginary friends [stop] calling"—that overwhelms and takes the place of the plot. What pulls the whole thing together is Campbell's stunningly protean visual technique: fierce blotches of watercolor, scraggly pen-and-ink work and whiplash stylistic shifts from impressionistic caricatures to exquisitely rendered painterly miniatures.

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: First Second (May 2, 2006)
• ISBN: 1596431334
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.3 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• List Price: $17.95