Lost at Sea

Atypically cheerful panels from Pictures for Sad Children“Every man driven by a fixed idea is insane.”—Joseph Conrad, NostromoJohn Campbell used to draw pictures for sad children, a surreal webcomic featuring sparse locales, stick-figures, silence, existential dread, and, true to its title, plenty of sadness. Despite its often dark subject matter, pfsc maintained a playful tone that brought some measure of joy or levity to the lives of characters who embraced the absurd and arbitrary nature of human life.I started reading Campbell’s work in 2004 or 2005, on Livejournal, which was then home to a burgeoning comics community full of many names webcomics fans might recognize today: Kate Beaton, KC Green, Meredith Gran, Ryan North, Lucy Knisely, and Anthony Clark were all active members, and many more I could name off the top of my head. Livejournal is long since dead, at least for English speakers, and most of the community has migrated to Tumblr. This includes Campbell.But once Livejournal was a vibrant and teeming space. In the parlance of the website, which is really little more than a kind of RSS-aggregator, the people you chose to read were your “friends,” and weirdly, that might have actually meant something. From my vantage, over time it seemed like the major players in the community had become “friends,” coming closer and closer into an ever-tightening orbit, despite the thousands of miles their words and pictures initially had to travel. If Campbell wasn’t in the centre of this group he was definitely close, a kind of auteur praised by more accomplished artists for the simplicity of his lines and the strength of his writing, appreciated equally by hardcore webcomics fans and those who were largely uninitiated. But that was a long time ago.

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The reason I said Campbell “used” to draw pictures for sad children is that he has deleted all instances of the comic off the internet. There are no longer comics on his Tumblr and there’s no longer a corresponding website. Pfsc has gone totally dark: it is tempting to believe that the only remaining traces of its existence are the physical and digital copies that are currently in the hands of his fans, or in what remains searchable in Google Images. How it got this way speaks to the power of money and expectation to warp reality and aggravate mental illness.In May 2012 Campbell raised just over $51,000 on Kickstarter, funds he would use to publish his second book. Those books were produced, but according to Campbell’s reckoning, only about 75% were ever mailed out to backers. On February 27 of this year he released a rambling 4,500-word manifesto that explained the reasons he would not be mailing any more books and the reasons he was dropping out of webcomics. These reasons include his disgust with the realities of capitalism and production, running out of money, and depression (perhaps owing to issues with his sexuality that are never fully explained).Some of Campbell’s concerns about the monetary system are definitely legitimate, others less so, but all have a note of falseness to them owing to the fact that he is making his complaints after taking and spending other people’s money. In a kind of performance art work, he included a video of 127 pfsc books being burnt in a huge bonfire, each supposedly representing a query about an unmailed reward. He explained that he would continue burning books for every message and email he receives about those books, and, true to his word, he has already released another bonfire video on his Tumblr.Campbell’s complaints about the market all seem to some extent rooted in his desire for community: specifically, he desires a community that recognizes the contributions of all, even those who don’t want to make contributions, as equal. He says that money is arbitrary, a “bad joke.” He thinks that people with more money should be able to see this joke more clearly than people with less money, and is disappointed that people with more money care about their money as much as, or more than, people with less money. He explains that there is no “good” or “bad” and that all people, regardless of their position in society or how hard they work, have an equal right to the necessities of life. There is obviously some truth to this, although it doesn’t quite work as an excuse.Campbell cites Herman Melville’s, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (which he claims to have read dozens of times in high school) as a major influence, and links to an essay which uses “Bartleby” to elucidate a theory of “chronopolitics” and “liberation through laziness.” But Campbell’s Kickstarter manifesto is saying more than “I would prefer not to,” and his statement of negation extends much further than himself. His rebellion is prescriptive. Instead of “I would prefer not to,” he is saying, “No one should.”According to images posted on Kickstarter, Campbell has only $750 dollars remaining in his sole bank account. He has decided to stop paying rent, and to live for as long as he possibly can on that money. In his own words, he is conducting a kind of economic experiment. Campbell wants to live in a world where nothing is expected of him, where his basic needs are met, and where he is allowed to persist in a “neutral” way. I would argue that is stagnation and death, not living.Campbell’s negation is more public than it needs to be because he needs the help of other people to meet his goals. But he is also apparently ignoring all of his friends’ frantic offers to help. This is a huge warning sign. Legitimate social or political complaint is often written off as psychological disorder, so I will tread carefully here (Campbell himself makes this point, in a hopefully non-portentious essay on self-immolation). But in the fall of 2011, due to a lack of funds, Campbell went off his anti-depressant medication for the first time. Presumably, he is not on it now.It is difficult to buy the idea that Campbell burned his books as a form of political protest. What seems closer to the truth is that he is making an attempt to release himself from a heavy psychological burden (and one that he could only have otherwise gotten rid of by begging for money to pay the required postage for the books). By his own admission, Campbell does not present a coherent and consistent argument. Mostly, he is flailing, and his methods of coping are at best dishonest, at worst fraudulent and illegal. Neither do they seem likely to work. What Campbell seems to want most of all is to retreat into himself, to cut himself off from society, from everything—perhaps to better prepare himself for a coming cataclysmic break.

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Money doesn’t always lead to success. In Season 2 of the hit HBO comedy Girls, Hannah has received, in the form of an ebook contract, the break in her writing career she’s long been waiting for. Her only problem is that she doesn’t have a book for her publisher, who wants a final draft in a month. The anxiety this causes reignites her dormant OCD, one of the consequences of which is that Hannah begins gradually retreating from her friends. When her friend Marni enters her apartment with little warning, Hannah hides underneath her bed. “Are you okay?” calls Marni, ostensibly to no one. “I haven’t heard from you in days.” When Marni walks into Hannah’s room, she finds Hannah’s laptop still open and glowing, its blue-tinged screen conveying the desperation and absurdity of Hannah’s refusal to engage.When Hannah can’t deliver the promised ebook, her publisher threatens to sue, and Hannah gets even worse. The expectations unhinge her, in much the same way that exposure to a horde of silver contaminates two of the protagonists in Joseph Conrad’s epic Nostromo, a novel that challenges European colonialism in South America. The silver has been secreted from a nearby mine following a coup, in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the revolutionists. By a twist of fate, the silver is supposed lost, but the mine and the nearby town of Sulaco are saved anyway.Martin Decoud, temporarily abandoned on a deserted island with the silver, quickly loses all sense of connection to the outside world, not daring even to believe in the existence of his beloved fiancé. Driven mad by the isolation, he takes four ingots from the horde, throws them in his pockets, rows out into the bay, shoots himself, and drops into the water. The silver, in cutting Decoud off from society, has made life worth nothing. When Nostromo returns to the island and discovers what has happened, he realizes that he has become the treasure’s sole possessor. Nostromo, previously a man of character, is gradually hobbled by the secret that he keeps. Finally he, too, is destroyed: shot in the dark by his closest friend, who mistakes him for another man.Silver brings wealth and prosperity to Sulaco and the surrounding province, wealth and status to the Goulds who own the mine. While it is this wealth which allows the province to save itself from the revolutionaries, the wealth is also what attracts the attention of the revolutionaries; because of its remoteness, Sulaco passed through previous revolutions largely unmolested. In addition, the wealth causes dissent and unrest in Sulaco’s meeting houses long after the mine is saved.While essential to the survival of Sulaco, the silver is inherently antisocial. Money, the point is, distorts. Money destroys. Money tears people apart and sets them at each other’s throats. In this sense, Campbell is not wrong. Charles Gould, the proprietor of the mine, arrives in Sulaco as an idealistic entrepreneur, and turns the silver concession into a thriving and humane power in the province. It is his idealism which first charms his future wife, Emma Gould. But by the end of the novel the mine is no longer an unambiguous force for good. Charles Gould is its taciturn, disconnected master, retreating from Emma and all else, beholden only to the mine and his belief in its power.

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In his Kickstarter rant, Campbell mentions that his mother didn’t seem to fully understand or want to think about the value of money when he was growing up, and that this led to tension when his mother racked up huge credit card bills sometime after the family had finally climbed out of debt. Campbell cites his mother uncritically, as a reason for his own ambivalent relationship to money.In this light, it almost seems tragic that Campbell’s Kickstarter campaign was so successful. Instead of working to produce a product that would satisfy his backers and allow him to come ahead financially, Campbell spent so much money on the production of the book that those at the upper tiers were subsidizing the costs for the larger group that purchased at the base level. Obviously this wasn’t tenable: Campbell was forced to ask his backers for money, via selling original art, to cover some of the costs of shipping, and it still wasn’t enough.Even the best intentioned and best managed Kickstarter campaigns sometimes fall through. The platform, as my youngest brother is fond of saying, is not Amazon. In retrospect, Campbell’s campaign seems perfectly designed to fail: there are much better bets than a depressed cartoonist with money issues, working alone on a project that is roughly six times the size he originally conceived (he initially asked for only $8,000). But even if his Kickstarter failed, Campbell need not fail himself.

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What did Marni find when she read the words on the screen of Hannah’s laptop? “A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance…” Even as Hannah is consumed by her illness, she still maintains faith in the power of friendship. Money might separate us from the ones we love, but that need not be the end of the story. When Campbell says that everyone should receive money regardless of their economic production, he is making a political point, but it seems to me that he is also asking to be cared for, even if he is also making this difficult for friends and family. He can’t produce art, and yet he wants to live. In this context, his protest seems much more desperate and important.As Gary Tyrell at the webcomic blog Fleen points out, there are other people throwing books to the flames in that first bonfire video, and they share some responsibility should anything happen to Campbell. It is one thing to feel overwhelmed by pressure and experience a mental breakdown, and it is quite another to enable that behaviour, or even to ignore it. But Campbell has other friends, and they are worried about him. I hope, for his sake, that he finds them.