Eye of the Majestic Creature

Famously, Eddie Campbell preferred the bits in Spider-Man where Mary-Jane and Peter hung out at the Coffee Bean with their pals. So he mined time spent weekending with Southend teds and gave us In the Days of the Ace Rock and Roll Club, featuring a thinly disguised version of himself in stories that could, but may or may not, have happened.

Later another Campbell alter ego emerged, Alec MacGarry, chronicler of, amongst other things, the ‘King Canute Crowd’, and again a very thinly disguised version of Eddie Campbell himself. Or so you’d think, except, unless you happen to be a friend of Eddie’s, you’re never going to know how much of Alec MacGarry is actually Campbell and how much is a fiction. Or whether Campbell is actually like McGarry at all.

How much authenticity and authorial transparency matters in the autobiographical school of comics is up for grabs, but comics can cast confusing reflections about this hall of mirrors not least because, in comics, autobio, as opposed to autobiography, suggests a very particular genre – introspective, punky, probably self-published, probably from Berkeley, New York or Portland.*

There have been times recently when I’ve been reading stuff that overtly states that it is fiction – Joe Coleman’s Midlife, Patrick McEown’s Hairshirt – and nevertheless have mentally classified it as indie autobio purely because all the tropes are there: bars, bands, romance (thwarted or otherwise), marginal jobs, drugs, friends and families. And because of having read so many (apparently) true autobio comics I found it pretty hard to remember that what I was reading was fiction.

I found myself doing the same thing when I was reading Eye of the Majestic Creature, Leslie Stein’s first collection of stories from issues 1-4 of her pamphlet series of the same name. It feels, generically, autobio. It’s all there, the bars, the bands, the shitty jobs and thrift-store living.

Stein’s alter-ego, Larry, lives somewhere out in the boondocks. She’s left the urban grind behind her and has retired to a small town idyll with her friend and companion Marshmallow. They wonder about living where they are, they bicker, drink wine, watch sunrises, take visitors, make art.

Larry’s interaction with Marshmallow is intimate and is the focus of a fair portion of the comic, and it’s also typical of the ambiguities of the rest of the comic too. The relationship they share, though you’re not ever quite sure of its exact parameters, is a very nice portrait of two long-term muckers, rubbing along, grudgingly dependant on each other despite their sometimes polar differences, united by time, habit and circumstance. Weird thing is is that Marshmallow is a guitar, a guitar with legs and arms and little cute cowboy boots, and most curious of all is this wanton anthropomorphism doesn’t grate. It seems like life, or Leslie Stein’s life at least.

But if it is life there’s also animated objects all around the place.  It’s a bit like an early Betty Boop feature – the sort with singing teacups and friendly little birds causing trouble – but rather than ending up cutesy it feels kind of mystical: around the mundane details of Larry’s life, the visits to the big city, working as a mobile phone decorator, seeing her mom, there’s another world, of animals and trees and things that have a life of their own, which they pursue mostly off stage, but that we catch occasionally from the corner of our eyes.

If you like this kind of thing, that is the autobio kind of thing, then Eye of the Majestic Creature will surely be to your tastes. It’s drawn in a naive clean-line style, quite flat with very little shading which gives it a lightness and feeling of empty space that perfectly match its curious mix of the real and the imagined.

*Other centres of bohemianism are available.