Eddie Campbell’s long out of print DAPPER JOHN has been released as an iPad app, he writes:
In the Days of the Ace Rock’n’Roll Club was a book, or an ongoing series of 7-page stories which I drew between March 1978 and March 1979. The stories interlocked in various ways, with characters from one piece showing up in another. The ‘arc’, as we say nowadays, came to a logical conclusion after the eighth story, by which time Dapper John had emerged as the main character. A proto-Alec MacGarry appears as the second key character. It was in these pages that I started to get the idea of using autobiography as a starting point for a big serious book.
The “app,” as Campbell refers to it with a touch of humour, is published by iEnglish, a Hong Kong-based producer of various ebooks. At a price of $9.99, this would seem to be a logical step in digitization of unavailable comics material.
Campbell notes that he now owns an iPad — when he can get it away from his daughter. We eagerly await the 19-part, 70,000 word Campbellian analysis of how comics are read on the gadget, which will surely be the last word on the subject.
I still have all of my original copies of these, which took me ages to find. They’re great.
There’s a huge amount of extra and previously unseen material in the app — well worth a look, even if I say so myself!