Eddie Campbell and Daren White introduce us to the Playwright, a man who might seem somewhat embittered by life but is actually surprisingly open to it. Meet this conundrum in their compelling and wonderful new book, and read here about what this fictional man meant to the two creators behind him.

 
 
 
Given the kind of person the playwright is…do you like him? Do you relate to him?
Eddie: I think of him as so real that it’s a bit like asking me if I like Daren. So I would have to say that I do like him a lot. Whether I relate to him is another matter.
 
Daren: I think he’s a sympathetic character, but if you got talking to him at a party you probably wouldn’t stay with him all night. While his personality is grounded in reality, it’s very much exaggerated for comedic effect. He’s not based upon an actual person.
 
The Playwright—both the story and the man—are very funny and it’s humorous to see inside this one man’s various quirks and personality traits. But as the story progresses, he becomes so much more. The true beauty of the story, for me, was that before you can actually make up your mind about whether or not you like him, you’ve completely bonded to him. Was it similar while you were writing and drawing this project?
 
Eddie: One of the things about the fact that the book was drawn over such a long time, 10 years, is that every time I came back to it, I’d have to spend time trying to recall what the character was supposed to look like, and the sense of his physical presence. So I’m just amazed that he succeeds in being the same character all the way through. He was this haunting little quiet figure in our lives for so long. In a way, I feel guilty that we always laughed at him.
 
Daren: My initial idea for him was for a short story which mostly became the first chapter in the finished book. I suppose he did grow on me, because it quickly became obvious that he deserved a bigger story. It also meant that it had to be more than a just series of oddball observations played for laughs. There had to be an underlying story. Knowing how things would unfold then made it easier to ramp up the cringe factor at the start. The fact that readers seem to like him, despite his weird, judgmental personality, is very rewarding for me as an author.
 
In some ways, did you feel you’re letting female readers in on some of the most twisted and devious aspects of the male brain?
Eddie: You mean Daren’s? I’m just the illustrator. But kidding aside, the women in my house were always quick to read the latest episode of the Playwright as each was completed. Oh, how they laughed at all of us males.
 
Daren: I think we’re probably just confirming what the women always suspected. I should point out that it is a work of fiction. I had a reader recently enquire as to whether I’d had a strange upbringing.
 
You’ve created a story without dialogue, but the truth is that we feel an intimate connection to the protagonist and witness his personal growth over the arc of the story. Was it a challenge to make that possible without the use of any dialogue or even thoughts?
Eddie: It’s actually the most efficient way of doing things. The reason that From Hell is so long is that Alan eschewed the use of captions, meaning that the pictures had to do a great deal more work and thus there had to be more pictures. Sticking with captions in this case has tended to trap the reader inside the playwright’s claustrophobic mind, because really we could have done it in the first person. There is little that is not seen through the Playwright’s eyes. The nurse’s story is one of the exceptions there, though it is shown really as he pictures it. It’s all from his point of view.
 
Daren: I think the honesty of his personal thoughts and feelings tends to make the reader take him serious. The challenge was to keep him sympathetic. I did spend a lot of time revising the pacing so that things that are moving the plot forward almost seem to happen retrospectively. We learn about his past, and why he is who he is, but the information almost drips out rather than flow. Almost everything is included for a specific reason, however, it might not become apparent why they are relevant until the end. Hopefully.
 
The artwork is impressive and beautiful. Eddie, what can you tell us about how you achieved the look you wanted in this book? How did you choose the particular color palette and the style of the layout?
Eddie: Thanks, John. I had actually intended to evolve from the painted colour of Black Diamond and Leotard into a more computer-coloured style, but when I sat down to tackle it I found I wasn’t yet proficient enough. So I watercoloured the whole job. But then I felt it needed to be much more vivid, so I put it in Photoshop and cranked up the colour levels. While I was doing that, I also solved all the problems that were holding me back before. I started dropping in scanned coloured wallpaper in the house interiors, and things like that, and developed a freewheeling way of using the computer to colour images. In the next book I’m working on I’ve taken the process several steps further. I’ve worked out a way of doing it that retains the looseness of hand colouring, and I’m having a great time with it.
 
How did you two work together on conceptualizing and executing the artwork?
Daren: A few of the early chapters appeared in my anthology title, DeeVee, in black and white and a portrait format. When we planned the collection we felt that the content needed to look different from a regular comic book and arrived at the landscape format closer to a newspaper strip. Eddie suggested repainting, and finishing, the book with water color. Not requiring any extra work from me, I magnanimously agreed. When you look at some of the beautiful skin tones there’s an opulence about it that made the decision to color it absolutely correct. And let’s be fair, there’s a fair amount of skin in the book. Eddie also used a number of digital effects to enhance the brightness in certain scenes and create the magnification and fine details on the repeated panels. He created a new way of using repetition that quickly became part of the storytelling process. He really took the book to a new level, visually.
 
Eddie, you released Alec: The Years Have Pants very recently. Were you working on that collection and The Playwright at the same time?
Eddie: Sure, I’m always working on numerous things simultaneously. It’s the only way to survive in this business.
 
How long did you two spend working together on The Playwright? How did the project come about from start to finish?
Daren: The first few pages were written almost ten years ago, and so it seemed like an absolute age until the final book appeared. I used to joke to Eddie that if we didn’t finish the story soon the Playwright would die on us. The problem was that he was never a priority, which is a shame because he’s a favorite of mine. We kept adding chapters until Eddie had a window in his schedule and finished off the remainder of the book last year. Looking over the book as a whole I think we managed to keep him consistent throughout.
 
Now that you’re done writing and drawing him, do you find yourself missing the playwright?
Eddie: Not in the least. He’s not half as interesting after the way things worked out.
 
Daren: He definitely reached his conclusion at the end of the book. I’ve nothing more to say beyond that point. I sometime make an observation which would be a perfect Playwright moment, but it would really just be more of the same.
 
What’s next up for both of you?
Eddie: This weekend I’m off to the Sydney Opera House where I’m collaborating on a live event with Neil Gaiman. And next week I will get back to working on my new book about money, titled The Lovely Horrible Stuff.
 
Daren: I have a short story in the upcoming EEEK! collection from Asylum Press. I’m also working on a coming of age story that spans decades and the globe and is narrated by a sentient tea pot. Plus, I’m waiting to catch Eddie at a weak moment and get him to illustrate our Johnny Calendar and His Date with Destiny short. We meet up the pub on a weekly basis to discuss ideas and really need to create another story to justify ourselves to the wives.