Page 45 Review by Stephen
"Loneliness, he remembered reading, is not so much a longing for company as a longing for kind."
The first slices of Eddie's life we're privy to in the ALEC OMNIBUS or separately here find young Alec MacGarry (as Eddie calls himself) round Southend, cutting sheet-metal for a living where he meets forklift driver and instant drinking buddy Danny Grey. There's a mutual appreciation rather than resentment or suspicion right from the word go: in modern parlance they buzzed off each other, and you can't say fairer for a friendship than that. Alec is a thinker, but then so is Danny Grey - it's just that one's more premeditated about it than the other. Early on Alec goes so far as to bring conversation pieces to the table, and at one point an actual list. His self-confidence ebbs and flows; sometimes he's fluent and full of ideas, but liable to freeze on a date:
"I just don't feel at home in the world. I envy the ease with which other people make use of the amenities, by which I mean... everything from... sex to playing a jukebox."
Danny by contrast is a man of the world. A man of action. A man with a van. He takes it upon himself to drive forgetful old ladies home from hospital, and offers Alec a lift with him on deliveries to Glasgow. He's the sort of mate you know will always have your back, so the first half of the years revolving round the King Canute pub and therefore Danny Grey himself paints not a false idyll, but a friendship free from outside forces. However, as the cast slowly grows the stories stretch farther - right to the other side of The Channel. Two mates can easily agree on what to do when, and how you're going to get there. But when it's a mass outing it can be a mess organising it, and the frictions here serve as but a foretaste. Couples break up, offence is taken, and arguments that flare up in seconds can then last for pages. It's as if the friendships crumble under the weight of their numbers, their history and their complicated pairings. The pride and the egos too. For Alec, his obsession with girlfriend Penny Moore makes him question his own self-image, then there's the small matter of a morbid preoccupation with teeth that I can entirely relate to. For Danny, well, there are clues early on involving a supermarket raid. In the end tempers fray to a point of no return, and whether or not Danny had in fact been harbouring resentment from day one, it's a painfully violent episode marking the end of an era.
What's striking is that even on the earliest pages here (written and drawn in the 1980s) not only is Campbell a masterful portrait artist both visually and verbally, and not only are his own foibles so thoroughly familiar, but his sense of priorities is too: "The finest thing in this life is just to be with your friends". If his ability to perceive and distil is impressive, more so is his talent for verbalising those thoughts that float too fleetingly within the rest of us, and record them for our empathy and amusement. In fact, Campbell's predilection for self-deprecation ensures that we never feel preached to by a superior know-it-all, more entertained by a bemused witness using his superior powers of observation, rumination and timing. He's a very funny bloke.
Lets lift our glasses to the early years then: the weekly routine, the weekend celebrations; the fights down the pub, the booze in the barn; girls that come, girls that go and the countless pints and bar games! And waking up with a bleary head, kissing the carpet of The King Canute pub and eyeing the evidence suspiciously:
"Is this a bottle in front o' me or a frontal lobotomy?"
Yes it is.
