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Bacchus Omnibus - FINALLY HERE!!!!!!!!

Started by Colin YNWA, 18 March, 2015, 09:50:13 PM

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Colin YNWA

Know anyone who doesn't think this deserves its own thread when there are perfectly adequate threads around this parts to host this info... well ... you clearly haven't been following my posts around here with enough passion and verve to remember that I've been hackering after this for almost as long as I've been posting here. I can't remember when Top Shelf first listed this BUT finally today while casually looking through IDW's June Solicitations

QuoteBacchus: Omnibus Edition, Vol. 1—CERTIFIED COOL
Eddie Campbell (w & a & c)
Eddie Campbell's BACCHUS is a true epic, spanning a decade of work, over a thousand pages, and several millennia of alcohol consumption. In BACCHUS, the visionary behind FROM HELL (with Alan Moore) and ALEC: THE YEARS HAVE PANTS presents his version of "an American-style comic book," filtered through his own brilliant, whimsical, and wide-ranging sensibility. With a fine blend of action, comedy, suspense, and an ear for a great story, BACCHUS brings the gods and myths of ancient Greece to modern life, as if they had never left. Nearly 600 pages, this deluxe volume collects the first half of the BACCHUS saga (including Immortality Isn't Forever, The Gods of Business, Doing the Islands with Bacchus, The Eyeball Kid: One Man Show, and Earth, Water, Air & Fire) with new notes and commentary by the author.
TPB • B&W • $39.99 • 576 pages • 7.5" x 10" • ISBN: 978-1-60309-026-1
•"Bacchus mixes air hijacks and ancient gods, gangland drama and legends, police procedural and mythic fantasy, swimming pool cleaners and classics. It shouldn't work, of course, and it works like a charm...Eddie Campbell is the unsung King of comic books. ... The man's a genius, and that's an end to it."–Neil Gaiman
•"A story of surprising richness and gravity... Bacchus stands as one of Eddie Campbell's crowning achievements as writer, artist, and executive creator."—The Comics Journal
•" Campbell is one of the premier cartoonists of his generation."—Publishers Weekly

I am so gibberingly excited!

Hawkmumbler

Up on Amazon already. A title i've been meaning to read since I read the scanlations of his Cerebus team up months back. At £30 a pop I will need to mull it over, but deffinelty a title i'm intruiged by.

TordelBack

#2
This quite literally made me dance around the room with pure unbridled joy. I seem to have been waiting for this ever since Banged Up finished in 2001 (?).  That's a long time, even at my age.  I have the whole of Bacchus in a bizarre hodgepodge of formats from a crazy number of publishers (all except The Face in the Bar Room Floor anyway), from Harrier, A1 and Trident floppies and semi-floppies to DHP to reprints in the back of Eddie's self-published line to several of the eventual TPBs, for many years constituting a quest in the comic shops of whatever city I happened to be in.  But a proper, comprehensive, luxury treatment: oh yes indeedy.

Bacchus may be wildly uneven (it is), but for me it is one of the greatest comics projects of all time, the comic I wish more than any other that I myself had written (if not drawn).  I've vanished down more rabbit holes chasing ideas and throwaway details from Bacchus than anything else I've ever read; I've been inspired to follow Bacchus around the islands of Greece on four wonderful occasions (including a holiday that changed my life completely) and hiked up and down innumerable hills to drink wine in his honour at temples and shrines in Greece and Italy; I've read and re-read everyone from Graves to Pharand on the myths that Campbell so effortlessly revitalises in the most deliciously convincing fashion, flagrantly revisionist and yet compellingly genuine; I've read Robbie Burns for the first time; I've taken up making my own wine; I've pondered and re-pondered the classical thesis that shapes the whole magnificent mess: everything starts out grand but turns to crap in the end, and there's never, ever, enough time. But it isn't that simple, is it?  After all, what about the noble rot?

And naturally I've brushed my teeth with a dry Riesling (but just the once).

If you haven't read this, you must.  And if you have read it, you should do so again.  Either way, buy it, and support one of the greatest comics creators of all. 

As good as comics get, and one of those things that could only ever be achieved in this medium.



Judge Nutmeg

i have a few of the trade paperbacks, definately an underrated character

Hawkmumbler

Quote from: Hawkmonger on 18 March, 2015, 10:31:30 PM
Up on Amazon already. A title i've been meaning to read since I read the scanlations of his Cerebus team up months back. At £30 a pop I will need to mull it over, but deffinelty a title i'm intruiged by.
Ah feck it a pre-order can't hurt my wallet in the mean time! I (read as 'my wallet') bloody hate, hate you all!

Colin YNWA

Well Tordelback puts my apparent enthusiasm for Bacchus into perspective. I've waited and waited for these simply as I don't have them.

Back in the proverbial day I had all the stuff I could get hold of. I was always very jealous of my friend who had 'Immortality isn't Forever' which I borrowed frequently in the hope that one day he'd forget and it would become mine. Put I got everything else I could get my grubby mitts on. It was just about the only comic that came close to my affection for Cerebus. Just brilliant stuff.

Them my wilderness years struck.

When I got back into comics Bacchus was one of the first things I tried to track down but could never get my hands on everything, so held off. When I heard of the coming out I decided to let go all the odds and sods I'd accumulated including the 3/4s of the ongoing all my originals etc etc.

and I waited

and I waited

and I talked to the folk from Top Shelf who left me worried that it would ever happen.

and I waited

etc etc

You can't believe how excited I am to read this again AND all the stuff I never got.

Link Prime

I've never read a single page of Bacchus in my life.
Your collective un-curbed enthusiasm is bookmarked.

I, Cosh

We never really die.

Dunk!

I remember Bacchus in the late 80's 90's but never got into it.

Will pick this up under your recommendation to rectify this, in a "suck it and see" way.

Dunk!
"Trust we"

Colin YNWA


TordelBack

#10
Here, does anyone know if the painted stuff in the second volume will be in colour? 

Yes, obviously I've oversold it to the point where it can't help but be disappointing, but it was a very important book to me in the mid-late 90s, when Cerebus, Rare Bit Fiends, From Hell and Bacchus were pretty much the only comics I read.  Before Tharg got his claws back into me in '99 at least. I've always enjoyed teasing out the real-world aspects of wild fiction, and visiting such locations as there are (see also Star Wars, Slaine, Ghostbusters...), and Bacchus was just perfect for that - Campbell wears his knowledge lightly, but it is vast, and almost every page of Bacchus has something that can be followed to source.

Colin YNWA

Quote from: Tordelback on 20 March, 2015, 11:01:03 AM

Yes, obviously I've oversold it to the point where it can't help but be disappointing...

I dunno, I tend to agree (could you guess) that this is an important, significant work (and bloody good too) and one that even if it gets 'over-hyped' if that leads people too it then cool. They will almost certainly enjoy it. Well assuming they read a little about what it is and it sounds to their taste.

It's this (and a few others) that when people say ... certain writers... are the greatest thing that's ever happened to comics make me pause and think...

"Well they are indeed bloody good, but did they do something like ...insert those select few titles..."

and I wish deeply the outside world (outside our nerdsphere) would do the same and gave equal credit to the other quite brilliant works that were being done at and around the time of... well certain deified works (can you deify a comic? Well since when did I worry about the specifics and detail of language huh!?!). Fandom doesn't help itself by not being exposed to, or not really pushing the exposure to really significant works like this and so we go around in the same bubble thinking... a certain writer... is the only true great thing that happened to comics and people look in and see us saying that and don't bother to look any further.

Its a really short sighted view and really to the detriment of the medium as a whole.

So I say lets go ahead and hype this to death - hence I started a separate thread, as I've done with other works - cos I think some stuff we should bloody well be shouting about from the roof tops. Cos if we don't, you can sure as hell know no one else will and that's leaves everyone's view of comics all the poorer.

(well why I insisted on trying to avoid conflict by being vague when it was bloody obvious I mean the brilliant, if slightly too revered writer Alan Moore. That was just damned cowardly. Still covered it here and no one will get this far down!)

TordelBack

Hey, at least there's precedent for deifying Bacchus...

Spikes

Got a few bits of Bacchus from the old Dark Horse Presents, etc. Pretty good, if I recall.

Must dig these out for a re-read.

sheridan

Quote from: Tordelback on 18 March, 2015, 10:40:32 PM
Bacchus may be wildly uneven (it is), but for me it is one of the greatest comics projects of all time, the comic I wish more than any other that I myself had written (if not drawn).  I've vanished down more rabbit holes chasing ideas and throwaway details from Bacchus than anything else I've ever read; I've been inspired to follow Bacchus around the islands of Greece on four wonderful occasions (including a holiday that changed my life completely)

My guess is that you met your future spouse  :)