Probably the best and strangest of Euripides’s plays is The Bacchae, the story of Bacchus’s revenge on Pentheus, king of Thebes, who refused to acknowledge the divinity of this new god. Pentheus gets—literally—torn to pieces by his mother, and his two aunts.

Really shitty things happen to people who piss off Bacchus. It’s a tragedy, really.

But what has that to do with Eddie Campbell?

I don’t suppose anyone much (except maybe me, and I’m weird about that stuff), cares that mythologically speaking (and any other way of speaking lacks something important) Deadface is correct and on the money in every detail, but it is anyway. It’s joyful and funny and magical and wise.

It is also a tragedy—quite literally. (I was kidding about the goats singing. Actually the singer of the best tragic song got a goat as a prize. I think.) Tragedy tells us of the hero with one tragic flaw, of hubris (something between pride and arrogance) being clobbered by Nemesis. For Joe Theseus it’s a tragedy. For Bacchus, of course, it’s a comedy.

Most things go back to Bacchus.

Within these pages you’ll find the old mythology and new. The Eyeball Kid and the Stygian Leech rub shoulders with older gods and heroes. Deadface mixes air hijacks and ancient gods, gangland drama and legends, police procedural and mythic fantasy, swimming pool cleaners and the classics. It shouldn’t work, of course, and it works like a charm.

But what has that to do with Eddie Campbell?

Well, Eddie Campbell is the unsung king of comic books. While the rest of us toil away on what we imagine, certainly mistakenly, to be Olympus, Eddie is traveling from island to island, thyrsus in one hand, scritchy pen and Letratone in the other, surrounded by short men with hairy ears and women who suckle panthers and eat human flesh, and all of them are drinking far too much wine and having much too much fun. (The Silenus for this tale is Ed Hillyer, who wanders in, in the second half of the book, and inks over Eddie’s pencils.)

I hope that this book, along with Eclipse’s collection of Eddie’s Alec stories (which don’t have all the fun killing and flying and running about that this one has, but are, in my opinion, probably about as good as comics ever get) and From Hell (in Spiderbaby Grafix’s Taboo, which Eddie’s drawing. It’s being written by a talented Englishman called Alan Moore—definitely someone to watch if you ask me), will raise his reputation to the heights where it ought to be. The man’s a genius, and that’s an end to it.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who read this series when it first came out, you’ll need no further recommendation or praise from me: you know how good it is. If you’re discovering Deadface for the first time, I envy you: you have a treat in store.

But what has this to do with Bacchus? Or Eddie? Or the Eyeball Kid?