It’s a big read from one of the comic industry’s long-time veteran artists. Dark Horse presents Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography, by Dave Gibbons.
Dave Gibbons, of course, needs no introduction, but suffice it to say that in addition to being the co-creator of Watchmen with Alan Moore, he has met and worked with a huge assortment of British, American, and Canadian comic creators over the span of at least 40 years.
Autobiographies tend to be memoirs that describe a person’s life, and typically follow the chronology of that person. So, “I was born at an early age” type of thing. Confabulation takes another tack: it is a memoir, fully packed and loaded with drawings, scans of original artwork, and photos, but organized alphabetically. In other words, it runs from “Aliens” to “Zarga-Man of Mystery”, hip-hopping from anecdote to artwork to anecdote.
Confabulation (“…fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories…”) is an apt name for this 320-page book.
Gibbons (With Tim Pilcher editing, and Rose Weitz assistant editing) places us in the neighbourhood pub, the after-hours drunken parties, the convention aftermath, with a beer in one hand and a tequila in the other. It’s a rousing rendition of funny, inspiring, and informative experiences, shuffled up like cards and dealt with a sure hand.
The best part of the deal for me is that by reading through the collective events in alphabetical order, we can piece together the length and breadth of Gibbons’s fascination and love of comics and drawing, through his early beginnings in the ‘cut and paste lettering by hand’ days through to his multimedia work. He has worked his way up from the ground, as they say, and his exhaustive Timeline of Published Work runs for seventeen pages!
It’s well illustrated, ambitiously planned and verbosely written: Gibbons has a large vocabulary and a rather formal way of speech, but all the credit goes to him for shining a light on the names, places, heroes, and villains in his illustrious comic career.
Dark Horse, Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography, $49.99 for 320 pages HC.
Newsdesk