The Playwright
by Daren White and Eddie Campbell
160 pages Hardcover landscape format, £9.99 from Knockabout – BUY HERE
The Playwright is the yellow-est thing in town and a glorious looking thing on the inside too. Campbell (Alec: The Years Have Pants) says “[It’s] the most colourful, sexiest thing likely to ever come from my hand. And if that sentence sounds like one of the Playwright’s own double entendres, so let it remain.”
It’s a comedy about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man written by fellow British ex-pat Daren White who is no stranger to a Campbellian collaboration (see weird Elseworlds book Batman: The Order of Beasts). The character first appeared in White’s own anthology series DeeVee, in a two or three pager black and white story. The new book is fully painted in the brightest of bright colours which somehow makes the Marks-&-Spencers-underpants-Englishness of it all the more funny. The whole thing is so cringeingly English it could only have been deliberate and “aimed to exaggerate the stuffy, self conscious embarrassment that underpins a certain type of Englishman,” says White.
Comicbook Resources have an interview with the both of ‘em and a preview of the first chapter. Campbell was putting up bits and pieces as he worked on his now somewhat defunct blog; they’re still there if you know where to look. As books go I’ve seen bigger: This is an object of joy and misery you can fit in the palm of your hand. Highly recommended. And rude.
