Egomania is the reincarnation of Eddie Campbell's series Bacchus, presumably to reflect the fact that it had drifted so far from the original premise that it had become a totally different series.

Strictly speaking, this isn't a comic. It's a magazine with a comic in it, and as the title suggests, the whole package is only really unified by the fact that Eddie Campbell felt like writing about it. As anyone who's seen him at conventions can confirm, you can pretty much stick Campbell on a stage for an hour and let him ramble about whatever comes into his head, and it'll be highly entertaining.

The comics content (fifteen pages) is the first two parts of Campbell's "History of Humour". The market for non-fiction comics has never exactly been strong unless your name happens to be Scott McCloud, but Campbell writes entertainingly on the subject. It's not a humour strip in its own right, and it doesn't really develop a strong central thesis so much as jump from point to point. But the points are interesting ones, and it's worth your time in reading.

Of course, you're hardly going to spend five dollars to read a fifteen page comic. The issue also contains a fifteen page interview with 1950s Batman artist Lew Schwartz talking about his career; another nine pages about the history of a painting in Campbell's dining room; and four pages by Campbell's daughter about the From Hell premiere. They're all well written pieces, but plainly the scattershot approach to subject matter means that the natural audience is going to be people who are interested in seeing Campbell chat in a "Sunday morning, Radio 4" kind of way about whatever comes into his mind this month.

That requires a certain leap of faith if you're not familiar with Campbell - or at least interested in the theory of humour, Silver Age comics, and the art of Jules Lefebvre. But if the package sounds vaguely promising to you, it's worth picking it up.

Rating: A-

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