In one of his holiday interviews Tom Spurgeon talks to Eddie Campbell:
SPURGEON: I’m always fascinated in how you approach your different projects visually, Eddie. Monsieur Leotard is very complex that way: there’s a grid on some pages, but the margins are frequently filled, and there are sometimes up to four competing visual throughlines on a single page. What interested you about all of the marginalia and shifts in storytelling strategies on this project? Are you cognizant of these choices going in, or do they just grow organically out of doing the work?
CAMPBELL: There was a chapter in my History of Humour in my defunct Egomania magazine (a selection from this will be in the Alec Omnibus by the way) in which I examined the old marginalia in gothic illuminated manuscripts and talked about the late Michael Camille’s theories about them. I came away with the idea that there are potent regions on “the page,” that things tend to happen in specific quadrants of it. Camille’s main idea, with regard to the old fourteenth century psalters and bibles was that God lived at the center and evil and folly was pushed to the outer edges, which is why the modern browser may be astonished to see obscenities in holy books. The page is symbolic of the universe, with everything in its place. It struck me that a page in our own time is lacking in any kind of magic or meaning as a thing in itself. So for a couple of years there I was on the lookout for a project where I could put some of my thoughts into play. Leotard came up in my discussions with my co-author Dan Best (we’ve done two or three other things together) and I saw that book as the one. So right from the start it has a big generous margin in which a life outside of the physical everyday one is taking place. Characters have a life-after-death there. The authors can turn up there, as well as the more prosaic kind of footnotes that normally appear in such an environment. Once I got going it became deliciously complicated.
Monsieur Leotard is one of the books from his year that I must reread before I speak about it, but the marginalia issue interests me as I wrote a bit about this way back in April of 2007 in my ComixTalk column (which by the way, this is a good time to note that the October 2008 column was the last one).