Roland Bunn
Unless you're familiar with a publication called Beem, it's unlikely you've been exposed to Eddie Campbell's earlier strip work. Very different from his later autobiographical tales, both in terms of subject matter and artistic style and also penned under the pseudonym Roland Bunn.
Sir Edmun was a down-to earth and counter-trend Arthurian strip/character (best coat-of-arms ever) that one episode of eventually found an outlet for in Rob Sharp's Dark Star Heroes, issue 1. Early 1984, something like a decade after it had been drawn. DSH was itself one of the magazines that found its origins in the early-eighties joint project of Ed Hillyer and Rob Sharp: GEN. Ed's GEN street-level art concept found a curious pairing with Rob's science fiction orientated Anti-Matter stable of fully-imagined, but rarely realised comic strips and collaborative projects. Intending for a coherent series of fanzines and stripzines at regular intervals, timing and costs and the realities of working across long-distances meant that the ideas often outstripped the actual appearances of the products, and when they did appear they were often in very different forms, under very different names. Rob's fecund conceptualising had the imprint changing from publication to publication. And stories jumping from one point in their own history to another seemingly at random. Along the way this circumstantial inconsistency and Ed's life caused him to part company from the overall vision, leaving Rob with a lot of contacts, prospective submissions and double that in loose-ends.
As time went by Ed himself discovered the joy-of-pseudonym's from his long-term friend and collaborator Eddie Campbell, and reinvented himself more than once under the noses of those who'd only previously known him via GEN.
As confusing and all-shook-up as the post-GEN/A-M output was - and that's saying something considering how crazily produced the publications during the actual period of collaboration were - Dark Star Heroes: One was an absolute gem. Surprisingly together for the Anti-Matter imprint and blessed with two very different Eddie Campbell strips from entirely different periods, both equally far away from his Alec and Ace Rock'n'Roll Club.








