Eddie Campbell swaps River City for Windy City

He spent three decades as a Brisbane resident, but renowned comic artist Eddie Campbell now calls Chicago home.

Eddie Campbell has been drawn from the River City to the Windy City.

WHERE Eddie Campbell’s heart goes, so does he.

“My first wife was a Queensland lady,” the Scottish comic artist says.

“We met and married in London and then one day she wanted to go home, as Queensland ladies tend to want to do when it turns cold.”

Thus began a 30-year residency in Brisbane, raising a family, until his marriage ended a few years ago.

He then maintained a long-distance relationship with second-wife-to-be Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, before finally making the move to her hometown of Chicago.

“I had an old labrador dog named Monty, and I was hanging on there living in Windsor to see him through his last couple of years,” Campbell says.

As a household name in the comics world, Campbell obviously never found living in Brisbane career-limiting – “Maybe I could have been emperor of the world after all? I’ll never know” – but it did mean a lot of coming and going. And it was through this travel that his fondest memories of the city were formed.

Eddie Campbell now calls Chicago home.

Campbell is now illustrating the Master Edition of his acclaimed From Hell with Alan Moore.

“The best feeling I ever got in Brisbane was the feeling you get after arriving at the airport,” he says.

“It doesn’t come until the taxi turns the corner at the Toombul shopping centre on to Sandgate Rd. Only then do you get that warm relieved feeling of being home as you start to pass wooden houses with palm trees out front, and whatever the humidity was at when you came out the automatic doors, now it's the quality of that warm bath you're going to sink into in no time at all.”

He struggles to think of a complaint about the city, but when he does it’s a common one.

“Trying to get something to eat and drink in town at eleven o’clock in the evening,” he says.

“At that time in Madrid all the grannies are coming out of their houses to meet up for tapas and a glass of tinto.”

As for his new hometown: “Well it’s bloody cold, let me say. You don't hear the accents of any Queensland ladies around here.

“It wouldn't have been my first choice for a place to live. I had my eye on Malaga in Spain.”

Campbell and Niffenegger released a book, Bizarre Romance, earlier this year.

“It does reflect our courtship in that we put it together over the few years since we met, but the 13 stories are all weird and fantastical little things,” he says.

“So I illustrated these short stories of hers and turned half of them into fully fledged graphic narratives.”

One of Campbell’s last Brisbane-inspired pieces

Campbell has also just released the first of 10 volumes of the “Master Edition” of From Hell, his most famous work done with comics legend Alan Moore, about Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders.

“The thing about From Hell is that it’s set in Victorian London and I drew it in its entirety, 580 pages over a period of 10 years, while living in steamy Brisbane,” Campbell says.

“I was only back in London for a year and a bit before I emigrated a second time. So now it will be entirely reworked in colours while I'm living in Chicago.

“I'm steering true to the original intent, but there's a chapter in which for some forgotten reason the heads are too small, another in which the arms are too long. The reason for that one is that I had a concept of Victorian fashion in which I placed the pockets too low on the coats and I had to make the arms come down to meet them.”

Campbell says he never paid much attention to politics up to now, but the age of Trump-alism has changed all that.

“Now I wake up in the middle of the night and think what the hell has he been and gone and done this time?” he says.

“The nerves are frazzled worrying for the equilibrium of planet Earth.”

From Hell: Master Edition #1 (of 10) (Top Shelf Productions)