Don’t worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can’t help doing. If you write enough, or draw enough, you’ll have a style, whether you want it or not.

Don’t worry about whether you’re “commercial.” Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

As a corollary to that, let me say something else.

In this strange, small market we’re in, no one knows anything. All bets are off. The kind of comics which were surefire commercial certainties five years ago are as likely to tank as they are to succeed, while the kind of oddball cult comics which, five years ago, would never have registered on anyone’s radar are now solid commercial successes, or as solid as anything is these strange days.

If you believe in it, do it. If there’s a comic or a project you’ve always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you’ll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.

8. And last of all, know when to leave the stage.

I thank you.

This speech was given in April 1997 at ProCon, a comics professionals convention, in Oakland, California.

“But What Has That to Do with Bacchus?” Eddie Campbell and Deadface

I want to talk about Eddie Campbell.

Our word tragedy comes from the Greek tragos-oide: “the song of the goat.” Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

A man called Thespis is credited as being “the Father of Tragedy.” He was an itinerant player, who traveled from Greek town to Greek town, in a cart, about 535 BC. The cart was both a form of transportation and a stage, and in each town he would recite his poetry, and his actors—a novelty in themselves—their faces “daubed with the lees of wine” (the earliest stage makeup), would entertain the crowd.

As the story goes, until then all songs and performances had been about Bacchus, the god of wine. Thespis first tried to experiment by sticking into the songs little recitations he had written about Bacchus—a remarkable innovation which the people bore nobly, up to a point. Then he decided to experiment further, and began to speak and recite about other things.

This failed miserably.

“What has that to do with Bacchus?” they would ask him, and chastened, he would return to the subject of the god of the vine.

As far as they were concerned, real songs, and poems and stories, were about Bacchus.

They would have liked Deadface too.

So who was Bacchus?

Like most gods, he accumulated to himself a number of names—amongst them, Dionysus (“the God from Nyssa”), Bimater (“twice mothered”), Omadios (“Eater of Raw Flesh”), Bromios (“the noisy”), Bacchus (“the Rowdy”), and of course Enorches, “the betesticled.”

He was the son of Zeus and Semele, god of wine and drama, who taught mankind how to cultivate the earth, the use of the vine, the collecting of honey. The fir, the fig, the ivy and the vine were sacred to him, as were all goats (whether they could sing or not). He was the most beautiful of all gods (despite often being represented as having horns), and many of the stories of his life and miracles have remarkable parallels to those of both Jesus Christ (whose biographers may have pinched them) and Osiris (from whose legends they were probably nicked in the first place).