Contemporary Authors

• XTC69 - 2018 Koyama Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists - 2016 Koyama Press, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

• Jessica Campbell Home Page - https://www.jessicacampbell.biz/curriculum-vitae/

  Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist based in Chicago
  EDUCATION

  2014 MFA, Painting and Drawing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL
  2011 BFA with distinction, Painting and Drawing, Concordia University, Montreal QC

  SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS

  2019 Field Projects, New York NY
  2018 Chicago Works, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL
  2018 Western Exhibitions, Chicago IL
  2016 Bria, Sub-Mission, Chicago IL
  2015 That’s What She Said (w/ Etta Sandry), Roots & Culture, Chicago IL
  2012/13 Learning to Live with Your Aloneness Laroche/Joncas, Montreal QC
  2011 Making Room (w/ Rachel Shaw), 427, Belgo Building, Montreal QC
  2010 Art Anarcholympics (w/ Bridget Moser), Red Bird (Nuit Blanche), Montreal QC
  2009 You Don’t Have to Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here, Gallery X, Montreal QC
  2009 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, (w/ Bridget Moser), Art Pop, Montreal QC
  2008 Pictionary (w/ Darcy Cooke), VAV Gallery, Concordia, Montreal QC
  2008 Colour Coded, the FiftyFifty Arts Collective, Victoria BC

  GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES

  2018 Chicago Area Cartoonists and Comics, Kishwaukee College Art Gallery, Malta IL
  2017 Outside Jokes (curated by Jesse Malmed), DEMO Project, Springfield IL
  2017 Variety Hours—t/here and the/n (performance), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL
  2017 Eyes, Nose, Lips, Etc. Etc. (curated by Ryan Travis Christian), Left Field, San Luis Obispo CA
  2017 Zone of Totality, Fernwey Gallery, Chicago IL
  2017 A New Look, Monique Meloche, Chicago IL
  2017 Three One-on-Ones (curated by Magalie Guérin), Cleve Carney Gallery, Glen Ellyn IL
  2017 The Sensual World (curated by Patrick Allaby), Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, Sackville NB
  2016 The Month Show with Jesse Malmed, PRINTtEXT, Indianapolis IN
  2015 Exposition 10ième Anniversaire, Laroche/Joncas, Montreal QC
  2015 The Dominion of Chuckles, Sharky’s Place, Chicago IL
  2015 Male Nudes, The Honey Hole, Chicago IL
  2015 Talents’ Archive, Onassis Cultural Center, Athens Greece
  2014 Embodiment, The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, University of Chicago, Chicago IL
  2014 DIY:XX, Ralph Arnold Gallery, Loyola University, Chicago IL
  2014 Thesis, Woman Made, Chicago IL
  2014 Brain Frame 19, Thalia Hall, Chicago IL
  2014 Lumpen Comics Exhibition, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago IL
  2014 SAIC MFA Thesis Exhibition, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago IL
  2014 Salonathon (performance), Beauty Bar, Chicago IL
  2014 Brain Frame 16 (performance), Constellation, Chicago IL
  2014 Boulevard Dreamers (performance), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL
  2013 Global Positioning Systems (Green Acres), Art Expo (curator Amanda Ross-Ho), Chicago IL
  2013 Poetry Slam, Rhombus Space, Brooklyn NY
  2013 Vitrious Humor (collaborative mural with Chicago comics collective Trubble Club), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL
  2011 Combine, FoFA Gallery, Montreal QC
  2011 stART, Gallery Studio 21, Halifax NS
  2011 Mental, Galerie Onze, Cegep Vieux Montreal, Montreal QC
  2011 We’ve Been Here Before, Studio 303, Montreal QC
  2009 Art Pop Fundraiser, Push Gallery, Montreal QC
  2009 Fresh Paint, New Construction, Art Mûr, Montreal QC
  2009 Demon Night, Lab Synthese, Montreal QC
  2009 Orange Table, Galerie Onze, Cegep Vieux Montreal, Montreal QC
  2009 Surface Tension, Les Territoires Gallery, Montreal QC
  2009 The Beginning/The End, Les Territoires Gallery, Montreal QC

  BOOKS

  XTC69, Koyama Press, Toronto ON, Spring 2018
  Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists, Koyama Press, Toronto ON, Fall 2016

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  “The Sensual World," exhibition catalogue, Sackville NB, April 2017
  “Gunt” Joketown Crier, Montreal, QC, April 2017
  "Debt Settling Lifestyle,” The Nib, November 2016
  “Wage Labourer,” Joketown Crier, Montreal, QC, November 2016
  Life’s Too Short, Trubble Club, Chicago IL June 2015
  Bodblestein, Trubble Club, Chicago IL June 2014
  “Mile End,” Lumpen Comics Issue, Chicago IL June 2014
  “Raven 72D,” The Editorial Poetry Insert, Montreal QC (upcoming)
  “Kenny Rogers: Tomb of the Unknown Love, pt 3” the Tardy Eagle, Boston, MA May 2014
  Girls on Pot (offset print), Oily Comics, Hancock, MA April 2014
  “Kenny Rogers: Tomb of the Unknown Love, pt 2” the Tardy Eagle, Boston, MA January 2014
  “Kenny Rogers: Tomb of the Unknown Love, pt 1” the Tardy Eagle, Boston, MA December 2013
  Rave #1, Oily Comics, Hancock, MA 2013 (upcoming)
  Mrs Connie Dutton, Oily Comics, Hancock, MA June 2013
  The Public Life of Bees, Oily Comics, Hancock, MA February 2013
  “I, Child Weirdo,” The Editorial, August 2012
  My Sincerest Apologies, Oily Comics, Hancock, MA June 2012
  “Foreword,” COMBINE 2010 catalogue, FoFA Gallery, Montreal December 2010

  PRESS

  Sutton, Benjamin. “The Most Important Question About Modern Art’s Great Men: Hot or Not?” Hyperallergic, November 3, 2016
  Cardoza, Kerry. “Making Art from Loss,“ NewCity, October 12, 2016
  Dluzen, Robin. “Editorial: Recommendations,” Visual Art Source, October 10 2016
  Clough, Rob. “Koyama: Jessica Campbell,“ High-Low, September 27, 2016
  Spurgeon, Tom. “Sunday Interview,” the Comics Reporter, September 2016
  Rogers, Sean. ”Review: New comics from Jessica Campbell, Tom Gauld and Riad Sattouf.“ the Globe and Mail, September 16, 2016
  Sava, Oliver. ”This Hot Or Not preview judges renowned male artists on their looks.“ the AV Club, September 7, 2016
  Sierzputowski, Kate. ”Jessica Campbell’s Drawn-Out Humor,“ INSIDE / WITHIN, July 2015
  Toale, Erin. “Breakout Artists 2015: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers.“ NewCity, April 30, 2015
  Kuntz, Jac. “Not Just a Pretty Cover.” Fnewsmagazine, March 2, 2015
  Morris, Matt. “Kavi Gupta Opens Art Bookstore in West Loop.“ NewCity, September 12, 2014
  Froh, Kelly. “Six Great Small Press Titles You Should Seek Out.” Bitch Media, November 5th, 2013
  Seven, John. “Book Review: Mind MGMT by Matt Kindt & The Public Life of Bees by Jessica Campbell,” the North Adams Transcript, May 29, 2013
  Spurgeon, Tom. “Sunday Interview,” the Comics Reporter, July 2012
  Ugolini, Rebecca. “Come together right now,” the Concordian, November 22, 2011
  Pohl, John. “Jean Paul Lemieux’s northern views are an easy sell,” the Gazette, November 19, 2011
  Chan, Crystal. “Warped Interiors,” the Montreal Mirror, November 17, 2011
  Crummey, Rachel. “Making Room With Jessica Campbell and Rachel Shaw,” Primed, November 16, 2011. Web. November 16, 2011
  Gay, Sofia. “Public Places For Private Spaces,” the Concordian, November 15, 2011
  Barnard, Elissa. “Studio 21 Exhibits Art From Students Across Canada,” the Chronicle Herald, April 1, 2011
  “Nuit Blanche: Best Bets for Montreal’s All-Night Art Party,” CanadianArt.com, February 2, 2010
  Fadden, Robin. “Dream Big,” The Hour, October 1, 2009
  Eisen, Jaime and Natalie Gitt. “Appetite For Destruction,” The Link,September 29, 2009
  Avrashi, Adam. “Piñata Playhouse,” The Concordian, September 29, 2009
  Dewolfe, Stacey. “Autumn Harvest,” Montreal Mirror, September 10, 2009
  Lortie, Marie-Claude. “La bonne affaire de la semaine” La Presse (blog),August 5, 2009
  Boulianne, Mario. “De Gatineau à Québec en 24 heures.” Le Droit, July 27, 2009
  Dewolfe, Stacey. “All Killer, No Filler.” Montreal Mirror, July 23, 2009
  Mavrikakis, Nicolas. “Peinture fraîche et nouvelle construction: Artistes de demain?” Voir, July 12, 2009
  Fadden, Robin. “Hitlist.” The Hour, July 9, 2009
  “Accolades,” Concordia Journal, June 4, 2009
  Dewolfe, Stacey. “Heated Spaces.” Montreal Mirror, June 4, 2009
  Delgado, Jérôme. “Montréal - Vieilles photos et peinture fraîche s’affichent sur murs et sur rues.” Le Devoir, May 9, 2009

  GRANTS, AWARDS, AND RESIDENCIES

  2018 Ox Bow School of Art Faculty Residency
  2017 Doug Wright Spotlight Award Nominee
  2014 Edward L. Ryerson MFA Fellowship, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
  2013 Ox Bow School of Art Residency with Merit Scholarship
  2012 Vermont Studio Center Residency with Artist Grant
  2010 Art Dealers Association of Canada Art Foundation Scholarship
  2009-10 BC Arts Council Visual Art Senior Award Scholarship
  2009 Stanley Mills Prize
  2008–09 BC Arts Council Visual Art Senior Award Scholarship

• Comics Reporter - http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_sunday_interview_jessica_campbell1/

  QUOTED: "Many years ago I read Paul Auster's City of Glass and his use of his own name in the book was fascinating and really stuck with me. So I guess in using my name in this book, or in my previous performances, I was kind of thinking of the character as sharing my name and characteristics but not being me, necessarily."
  "it's completely true that a huge bulk of the artists in the museum are men, and white men, and straight men, but no docent would say, "OK, the significant thing about this room is that these paintings were all made by white european dudes." However, while race, gender, class, appearance are clearly not irrelevant to who ends up in the museum, we generally discuss the work as though it's distinct from that. Unless the work is made by someone poor, queer, female, black, asian, etc, then all of a sudden biography is super-important."

  September 18, 2016
  I thought Jessica Campbell was very funny before I knew she did comics. Once I read the comics, though, I was done. I really like the sense of humor on display, made even better as she's refined how to use herself as a comedic stand in. I spoke to Campbell in 2012 when she left Drawn & Quarterly to attend school in America. She's since been all the way through grad school and been married, which I guess means she's stuck here for good.

  Campbell's latest book Hot Or Not: 20th Century Male Artists is a stand-alone about judging the hotness of artists and comparing it to some element of their work or creative reputation. I like its send-up of museum culture and the general dumbing down of cultural interaction. I'm also grateful to learn who was hot and who was not. I hope that we continue to get work from Campbell however she choose to provide it. -- Tom Spurgeon

  ****

  imageTOM SPURGEON: I always like talking to people about comics they've done that are funny, because now we can ruin it. Can you talk a little bit about what and who you think is funny, first in comics and then more broadly?

  JESSICA CAMPBELL: Lisa Hanawalt7, Gina Wynbrandt, Jillian Tamaki, Amy Lockhart, Tom Gauld, Joan Cornella... There are so many extremely funny cartoonists. My day job is in the fine art world and humour there feels a lot rarer. I think this is partly due to Western comics' origin in newspapers, the funnies, and also to the fact that there is a kind of liberty in being viewed as a low art form. The alleviation of the pressure to make "serious art" allows cartoonists to have a sense of humour about themselves, the world... Perhaps this is just due to cartoonists' unhealthy self image.

  Outside of comics, an example of something that I find really funny is this: there is a "corgi meet up" group in Chicago on facebook, and they keep trying to organize a corgi meet-up at one of the dog beaches in the city. All of the events have disclaimers on them like "this is only open to corgi owners and please do not click 'attending' unless you actually plan on coming" but then the word will get out and like 12,000 people will click "attending." So the whole group devolves in to this frantic discussion about how the beach can't actually accommodate 12,000 people and did we, the "attendees" even know that there is a kennel cough pandemic right now?? [Spurgeon laughs] And then it inevitably gets cancelled. I love the whole thing: the idea of corgis "meeting up," the unheeded disclaimers, the frantic misguided use of social media, and the final realization that the corgi owners can't have "nice things" because we -- non corgi owning social media users -- keep ruining their digital event.

  SPURGEON: How much of the performance that you've done would be recognizable to those who seen both in your comics? Is there a difference between the two forms that you like the most, something about comics that works for you in a way performance might not?

  CAMPBELL: Most of my performance work is intertwined with comics. I'll have a slideshow of drawn images and will narrate them. I did a piece a few years ago where I narrated a police report in the future that itemized all of the things in a derelict apartment owned by someone named "Jessica Campbell." I like performance art because of its ephemerality, that you have to be present in a space to really experience it and then it's over. However, that can also be frustrating. For instance, I now have a few performances that I've done and I'd love to make something more concrete/longevous out of them but am uncertain of how to do that since they were really designed to only function in a time-based way.

  There's so much that I love about comics, but firstly, it's amazing to be able to create a physical object that exists in multiple so that everyone can own/experience it equally, as opposed to performance that exists only for a specific, short time period or painting/drawing/fine art in which there is a singular object that has to be seen in person.

  SPURGEON: How have you adjusted to being a name-company comics alum? That wasn't an easy transition for me. How hard was it to try to shift your identity away from D+Q and was there a moment you became comfortable kind of seeing that as a complete chapter?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, it's weird! While I was at D+Q, I wanted to make comics but was surrounded by the work of many of the (in my opinion) greatest living cartoonists, so I was too intimidated. Working there had become so much of my identity -- for instance, my family still sends me links every time a D+Q cartoonist is interviewed on the CBC or something -- so leaving was something I had mixed emotions about. However, my goal was and is always to be a full time artist, so stepping away was the right decision, though I miss all of my old coworkers on basically a daily basis.

  Grad school and moving to Chicago was a pretty huge break in my life, and a clear demarcation of D+Q/post D+Q. Around the time that I left, however, I was super fortunate to have been asked by Chuck Forsman to contribute to Oily Comics, and I made a few of those, which allowed me to get my feet wet with making comics. The other people who have been helpful in re-imaging myself as just an artist and not a worker in comics are Frank Santoro, who let me post work on Comics Workbook; Trubble Club, the collective I'm a part of here; and, of course, Annie Koyama, who is publishing my book and who, before that, was very encouraging.

  SPURGEON: How do you look at that period in your life now? Do you have perspective on it? How different are you yourself for this succession of major life changes since 2012?

  CAMPBELL: 2016 has been the best and worst year of my life. A number of friends died in the past year, there has been some family illness and we had to put down our beloved dog, Tanuki. At the same time, I started teaching at DePaul and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I got married, I recently opened an exhibition at the Sub-Mission in Chicago and now my book is coming out. Life's a g-d rollercoaster.

  Other than that, my life since 2012 has changed in other ways. I think that going to grad school made my work a lot better. I don't exactly know how to explain it, but I'm able to think in a way that I couldn't before, like the world has opened up more. Also, Canadian friends tell me that I'm getting an American accent, though I don't think I am.

  SPURGEON: There's a definite art-school feel to this one, including our narrator, Docent Jessica Campbell. I know that heading back to school can be terrifying; was it good for you? Did any of that experience make it into here beyond it being roughly in the same neighborhood? Is this a take on art and artists that you used to riff on at school, for instance?

  CAMPBELL: Well, I wasn't out of school for that long between my BFA and MFA since I took forever to finish my undergraduate degree (first I flunked out of community college and then went to school part time while I worked at D+Q). I had just turned 26 when I finished undergrad and I was 27 when I started grad school, which I thought was young, perhaps partly due to my living in Canada where school is a lot cheaper and most of the grad students I knew were at least that old. However, when I got to school, many of my compatriots had just come straight out of undergrad so I felt kind of old? The weirdest part was feeling like I had been an adult with a studio and a day job then all of a sudden I was having critiques where people where like "Why are you talking about humour? You're not funny. You don't know what you're doing." My pride was definitely bruised a lot in the first year of grad school.

  One of the things that I took note of in school in the US was this emphasis on the American Abstract Expressionists. Like, there is this whole other history of Abstract Expressionism in Quebec that actually started in the early 1940s, earlier than the American movement that was more post WWII. However, in the schools here, even though it's kind of common knowledge that there was collusion between the US government and art writers like Clement Greenberg to falsely promote Ab Ex as a native American art form, distinct from other cultures, it was still kind of the standard against which everything else was gauged.

  Anyway, the idea for the book really came from two experiences. The first was that, when Cy Twombly died, I was still working at D+Q and Lynda Barry sent me an email that just said (facetiously) "Cy Twombly when he was my boyfriend" and included a picture of a handsome young Twombly. The second was that my former coworker in Chicago, a painter named Katherine Harvath, and I would gchat at work and at some point started asking each other to guess if certain male painters were hot and then would find images to prove/disprove each other's theory. There's a really nice nude pic of Frank Stella with one of his paintings that sort of kicked the whole thing off.

  imageSPURGEON: Chicago has a great reputation as an arts town and as a comics town? Which one does it deserve less and why? If the gotcha formulation of that is as annoying to you as it looks to me, can you talk about making art in Chicago, making comics with what looks like a growing scene? Is it like JC Menu suggested, a cartoonist on every corner?

  CAMPBELL: [laughs] Yeah, cartoonists are stationed around the city on each block, greeting tourists and attempting to promote comics. Hm, this is a tough question!!! I guess one indicator might be that I know a lot more fine artists who leave Chicago for LA or New York than cartoonists. Perhaps this is because comics are more mobile than art is. Like, if you're a painter, your goal is probably to exhibit your work somehow. In order to get opportunities to exhibit your work, you will probably need studio visits, which means, most likely, being in a city where there are galleries or institutions that can come to your studio. While there are a few phenomenal museums in Chicago, and a healthy number of galleries, your chances of getting a gallery exhibition are probably higher in New York or Los Angeles where there are just more places to show. However, Chicago's cheaper than other big cities so it's more feasible to work part-time or to have a studio here.

  Cartoonists, however, can kind of live wherever. Aaron (Renier, to whom I am married) and I talk about this a lot, like, where do we want to be? And basically it comes down to somewhere that is affordable and where there are other cartoonists to hang out with. If we ever leave Chicago, it'll likely be because I need to be able to get in to the forest or to the ocean before I go insane.

  SPURGEON: This might fold back into my questions about the performance stuff you've done, but I really like the way the Jessica character has developed. She has a real presence on the page she didn't. Was it hard for you to find a way to depict yourself, to facilitate your humor? Was there any difficult in developing how you were going to draw and so on?

  CAMPBELL: Many years ago I read Paul Auster's City of Glass and his use of his own name in the book was fascinating and really stuck with me. So I guess in using my name in this book, or in my previous performances, I was kind of thinking of the character as sharing my name and characteristics but not being me, necessarily.

  SPURGEON: Comedy can be about feel and it can also be about precision. How much attention do you pay to the mechanics of what appears on the page? Do you work through the timing of things, how many words you use, and so on? Were there any difficulties with that here?

  CAMPBELL: Oh, I write and re-write the same sentence over and over again until it feels "right" to me. I think my dedication to writing, to rewriting the same thing until it sounds as funny as possible is why stand-up comedy is really challenging and my accidental dabblings in improv were complete nightmare. (One time a friend and I went for a drink in Chicago and it turned out the bar was an improv bar and, as the only "audience" members, we got dragged onstage so that it was just us and the improv-ers, performing a scene, for no one.)

  The difficulties are really now, when I read the book and realize that I could have phrased things differently. Also, I couldn't decide whether calling Gauguin a "child fucker" was going too far so I cut it. But that's what he straight-up was, so maybe I should have left it in. I don't know.

  SPURGEON: To broaden that question, tell me a little bit about how you work. Like how did this go from idea to the choices you made to unpack that idea in a certain way. Why make the choice with the full pages, and the introductory narrative?

  CAMPBELL: Originally, I just had the full pages and was going to release this as a mini. Then I sent the files to Annie, and she pointed out, rightly, that it felt too abrupt and wanted to expand it. So I added a bunch of new pages and the intro/post script, as a way of easing the abruptness. Adding the introductory narrative was a way for me to create a context for the meat of the jokes, like, we're going through the museum, that's the connection between all these artists; they're all next to each other on the wall.

  imageSPURGEON: Where the hell did that great bit of business where you say the answer and then call on someone in the audience to say yes? I don't know that I've seen that before, and that strikes me as really straight-forward and funny.

  CAMPBELL: Going to school at the Art Institute, and teaching there now, I have spent/spend a lot of time in the museum, so I see tour groups going through, and watch the docents. I also will bring my own classes there, and there's this performative element to teaching where I'm like "OK! Who can tell me what they think is significant about this Daumier drawing?" or whatever, so having myself, the character, do that was intuitive.

  The difference between this and actually giving tours or teaching is what I'm saying and how the audience is reacting. For instance, it's completely true that a huge bulk of the artists in the museum are men, and white men, and straight men, but no docent would say, "OK, the significant thing about this room is that these paintings were all made by white european dudes." However, while race, gender, class, appearance are clearly not irrelevant to who ends up in the museum, we generally discuss the work as though it's distinct from that. Unless the work is made by someone poor, queer, female, black, asian, etc, then all of a sudden biography is super-important.

  SPURGEON: What do you have the most trouble with as a cartoonist just getting work down on the page?

  CAMPBELL: Crippling self doubt and anxiety? Depression? Day jobs? Netflix? In the past month, I got married and finished/installed an exhibition, so I haven't made comics, but am going to get back in the saddle this week, I swear. Ugh, this question is stressing me out!

  SPURGEON: Sorry! So which artist was the toughest call? Did you flip flop on any of them? Who was the biggest slam dunk?

  CAMPBELL: There is one artist in the book who I deemed I could not determine the hotness of. I mean, the great thing about this book is that it's completely up to my subjective taste, so it generally was fairly easy to just make a decision.

  The book was previewed on the Onion AV Club the other day, and one of the comments was just like "Let me explain to you why Mondrian wasn't hot." and then this person listed a bunch of reasons? Which was amazing. [Spurgeon laughs] I am praying that all of the criticism I get is exactly like that. "This book gets one star because obviously Sol LeWitt was really handsome and I'm offended that you said otherwise." If I can drag literary criticism down to my debased level, I will die happy.

  SPURGEON: Please, please, please tell me you're doing with this comics artists next. Or sometime in the future. I don't even care if you end up doing it or not, just tell me you are.

  CAMPBELL: I'm working on an autobiography that's just a definitive ranking of all male cartoonists' looks that Koyama can publish 100 years after I'm dead. The book is 1400 pages long.

  *****

  Hot Or Not: 20th Century Male Artists, Jessica Campbell, Koyama Press, softcover, 64 pages, 9781927668337, September 2016, $10.

QUOTED: "This oddball escapade delights from opening salvo to closing quip."

XTC69
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
XTC69

Jessica Campbell. Koyama, $12 trade paper

(120p) ISBN 978-1-927668-57-3

By the creator of Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists, this sarcastic sci-fi send-up opens as Commander Jessica Campbell and her all-woman team of space explorers land on Earth, left vacant after a long-ago apocalypse, to locate "males for our own planet to breed with." They find a cryonic chamber and free ... another Jessica Campbell, a chipmunching slacker from the 21st century who can't tell them anything about her planet's understanding of quantum physics but can expound at length on the Harry Potter series. Together they set back off into space in search of men, but are none too pleased with what they discover. Campbell's simple, thickly inked black-and-white artwork, complete with details like a cutaway diagram of the spaceship, gives her graphic novel the feel of a children's book. But the content, with its cast of radical female separatists exploring planets and fighting space bros, is closer to the material found in feminist underground comics of the 1960s. Despite the nudge-nudge title and suggestively-shaped spaceships, there isn't much raunch; the subversion is found in cheerful machismo-bashing and the book's refusal to take itself seriously. This oddball escapade delights from opening salvo to closing quip. (May)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"XTC69." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 63. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099981/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ae53439. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099981

• High-low
  http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com/2018/05/koyama-press-jessica-campbells-xtc69.html
  Word count: 959

  QUOTED: "What Campbell has achieved in this book is a delightful balance of satire, absurdity and sharply-observed witticisms. That she achieved this with a plot that makes far more sense than most science fiction stories was just icing on the cake."

  THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2018
  Koyama Press: Jessica Campbell's XTC69
  In Jessica Campbell's first book, Hot or Not?, she took on sexism and the male gaze in the art world by judging artists by their looks and overall sex appeal. It was a blunt-force object of satire, taking its premise to its limits and beyond by actually making the satire funny and a willingness to stay in character the entire time. Her new book, XTC69, is a brutal take-down of the kind of science fiction novel that's sexist to the point of misogyny. The way she drew the cover (a woman in another woman's arms, a crew member fighting a zombie, a spaceship whooshing by) was meant to evoke those sort of books from the 1960s and 1970s. Robert Heinlein in particular is a target, both his simpler books like S Is For Space and his more "mature" work like Stranger In A Strange Land.

  Those books tend to be power fantasies, with the handsome, brave space captain as a stand-in for the author, who inevitably has sex with whatever female character or characters whom might be introduced. Campbell does that one better: the protagonist of the story is Captain Jessica Campbell from another planet, and the female love interest also turns out to be Jessica Campbell, frozen in a cryo-chamber on earth for seven hundred years. Captain Campbell and her crew are looking for mates to help repopulate their all-female planet. Despite all the silliness in the book, Campbell plays fair and has her trio of alien women act very seriously, and the slow reveal of the plot also reflects a carefully assembled bit of scaffolding that surrounds the commentary.

  After they take earth Jessica (whom they dub JC2, since the name "Jessica Campbell" was a title won through bloody combat on her planet) with them on their search, they find the last planet that can save them: Mxpx. Along the way, Campbell subtly sets up romance between the book's Jessicas, with a detour into a gag where the captain asks JC2 about the Hadron Collider and quantum physics (getting no results) and then asks about "Harry Potter, Boy Lizard", setting up a twelve hour lecture from JC2. That's a bit of silliness, along with the food available to eat and the aliens' preferred cuisine, "glug glug", which turns out to be pizza. When they find their destination, Campbell goes back to the blunt-force object approach, as the main continent on the planet of only men is shaped like a giant penis and there is some kind of football-like object at its north pole.

  When after a period of trial and error that resembled an all-male version of the film Idiocracy, they meet President Chad, who helpfully tells the reader that women long ago abandoned the planet, "because those ingrate bitches wouldn't give us nice guys a chance." They get ordered around a bit, and JC2 gets bombarded with questions like "Why aren't females funny?", "Could you smile? You have resting bitch face" and simply "Blowjob?" The commander is so enraged that she orders the planet to be destroyed, seemingly dooming her planet until a deux ex machina of sorts pops up, albeit one that's totally consistent with the plot and its clues. The two Jessicas kiss in triumph at the very end, in the way the hero usually gets the girl but all the mushy stuff is left for the very end.

  Perhaps the funniest part of the book came on the acknowledgements page, where she did a strip where someone asked her if the book was "misogynist against men" (in itself a hilarious turn of phrase). Campbell replied that "A man read it and said it was fine" and that "...some of my best friends are men." That was a rhetorical extra point after the touchdown that was the rest of the book, crushing the kind of arguments men have used for justifying sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. in their own work. Campbell's critique is pointed, even as she dresses it up with gags and sci-fi tropes. For example, she makes a sharp rebuke of transphobia when she has Captain Campbell relate that on her planet, people chose their genders based on their own personal revolution, and to force someone to be a man (because of course everyone would want to lean toward being a woman), to go against their own construction of gender, would be an act of cruelty.

  Visually, Campbell keeps her pages simple, with a 2 x 3 grid and a thick, expressive line. Her self-caricature (in her trademark striped shirt and bushy hair) is one of my favorite in comics. Her character design is distinctive, with the page full of asshole guys questioning her containing hilarious and various "bro" types. Campbell's comedic timing is sharp, as she uses panel beats to heighten the awkwardness of a situation, like when Jessica first appears out of the cryogenic tube. The book is also breezily paced despite the occasional info-dump, especially such instances were usually incorporated with some bit of silliness. What Campbell has achieved in this book is a delightful balance of satire, absurdity and sharply-observed witticisms. That she achieved this with a plot that makes far more sense than most science fiction stories was just icing on the cake (or if you prefer, more cheese on the glug glug).
  POSTED BY ROB CLOUGH AT 3:00 AM
  LABELS: ANNIE KOYAMA, JESSICA CAMPBELL

• Ryan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse
  https://fourcolorapocalypse.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/what-the-world-needs-now-is-jessica-campbells-xtc69/
  Word count: 901

  What The World Needs Now Is Jessica Campbell’s “XTC69”
  ON MAY 19, 2018 BY RYAN C. (TRASHFILMGURU)

  By now you’re well-familiar (or should be) with the laundry-list of societal problems that have “trickled down” into all forms of media, including comics, and also know that right near the top of said list is misogyny, which many of us fooled ourselves into thinking was on the way out — that is, until the biggest misogynist imaginable was elected president, and the once-appropriately-marginalized “alt right” and “edgelord” internet subcultures, both rife with unreconstructed sexism of the most sickening sort, seized on the opportunity of Donald Trump’s political ascendance to become more loud, brash, boorish, and obnoxious than ever. Their bullshit is just plain unavoidable now, and as “gamergate” and “comicsgate” have proven, no corner of the “information” superhighway is safe from misogyny’s malign influence. We’re literally saturated in a toxic stew of aggressive male chauvinism that churns and boils 24/7.

  Cartoonist Jessica Campbell, thankfully, isn’t taking it laying down. Her previous book, Hot Or Not?, turned the whole premise of the “male gaze” on its ear with by means of sharply-delivered absurdist satire , and in her just-released Koyama Press graphic novel, XTC69, she one-ups herself by taking aim at misogyny in a very specific literary sub-genre, namely pulp sci-fi (with the work of Robert Heninlein coming in for an extra dose of richly-deserved skewering), and deconstructing it with what can only be called a sense of sheer, unadulterated joy.

  Campbell is a bona fide expert at tackling serious subject matter without taking herself too seriously along the way, and for proof of this look no further than the fact that she makes herself the center of her own story on two different fronts, to wit : in the future, a trio of adventurous, rough-and-tumble female astronauts, led by a captain named Jessica Campbell, arrive on a barren Earth, ostensibly seeking mates in order to repopulate their all-female planet, but find only — Jessica Campbell (who they come to label “JC2,” for obvious reasons), as in, the “real” Jessica Campbell, who’s been cryogenically frozen for the last 700 years and barely has time to take in the fact that she’s the last survivor of her world before deciding, what the hell, she might as well tag along with these other ladies and see if she can find a new place to call home.

  Standardized six-panel grids are Campbell’s preferred page layout, and her thick, fluid linework is especially effective at driving home the less-than-subtle OTT absurdity of the situations she places her characters — and herselves — into : on the all-male planet of Mxpx, for example, the continent the “dudebro” assholes live on is literally shaped like a penis, and these guys, led by “President Chad,” sound more or less exactly like the “men’s rights” dipshits you find all over social media these days, literally informing our protagonists that women abandoned their planet because “those ingrate bitches wouldn’t give us nice guys a chance,” before requesting that they smile more or, in one instance, even just coming right up to one of them and asking “blowjob?” Jordan Peterson, these are your offspring, and it doesn’t take too long for “JC1” to do the entirely reasonable thing under the circumstances and order Mxpx to be destroyed.

  Wait, though, doesn’t that consign the all-female planet to certain doom? Well — no, but I’m not gonna give away how that fate is avoided because you really should read the book. And besides, all this is almost second-fiddle to the real action in the story, which involves a budding romance between, you guessed it, both Jessica Campbells. Does that get interesting? You bet it does! And it goes no small distance toward ultimately setting up the book’s redemptive final act.

  What really impresses, though, is how swiftly and thoroughly Campbell manages to obliterate every bogus “argument” used to advance not just misogyny, but patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, and even racism over the course of her narrative, and how she does it all with — dare I say it — a smile. It’s a knowing smile, an informed smile, a wry smile, but a smile nevertheless : her enemies are paper tigers clinging to outmoded systems of “thought” and she’s already got them beat — and furthermore, she knows it.

  Now, all you nervous fellas out there, just in case you were wondering whether or not this book “goes too far,” fear not : Campbell employs the classic “logic” of straight white cis male privilege against itself and informs us that “a man read it and said it was fine” and that, hey, “some of (her) best friends are men.” A “comicsgate” numbskull like Richard C. Meyer or Ethan Van Sciver couldn’t have put it better himself, and it just goes to show that there’s no slack in Campbell’s act when even her frigging acknowledgements page is this spot-on.

  By the time you reach it, though, you’ve come to expect no less. XTC69 is a work that oozes entirely-earned confidence by a cartoonist firing on all cylinders. Jessica Campbell takes us to the farthest reaches of space and time, sure, but her book is as “here and now” — and, consequently, as essential — as it gets.

• Comics Alliance
  http://comicsalliance.com/jessica-campbells-hot-or-not-review/
  Word count: 740

  QUOTED: "Hot Or Not is a delightful, funny, and smart as heck book."

  JESSICA CAMPBELL CASTS A FEMALE GAZE ON THE ART WORLD IN ‘HOT OR NOT?’ [LOVE & SEX WEEK]
  EMMA LAWSONFebruary 15, 2017
  Jessica Campbell
  SHARE ON TWITTER
  SHARE ON FACEBOOK

  Jessica Campbell’s Hot Or Not: 20th Century Male Artists has a very simple premise: which 20th century artists were bangable? And based on an artist’s work, can we tell if they were hot or not?
  Published by Koyama Press in fall 2016, Hot Or Not is a short but searing work of satire skewering the male-dominated world of art, and society’s desire to pass judgement on people based on their attractiveness --- which is of course subjective, as is art itself.

  Campbell inserts herself into the comic, just as many artists put themselves in their work. She takes the position of a docent at a museum, walking through the halls and sharing with the patrons which artists were hot, and which were not. She makes a point on the first page of telling the museum patrons (and the reader) that she has an MFA. Expertise and authority matter in the art world, don’t you know.

  Jessica Campbell / Koyama Press

  Campbell groups the artists by type of art --- geometric abstraction, feelings, erotic freaks --- as well as including a section on Canadian artists. That section might be a bit more impenetrable to non-Canadian audiences, but consider it your Introduction to Canadian Art class.

  Campbell reproduces a black and white illustration of one work by each artist, along with some commentary, so you get some context even if you’re unfamiliar with the artist or their work. She then illustrates a portrait of the artist themselves, along with a judgement: hot, or not? You have to actually flip the page to get to the punchline, which makes it that much more powerful a joke. It’s not a complicated premise, but that’s what makes it work so well. It’s also a short book, only covering 19 artists in total, so the joke doesn’t get old.

  Jessica Campbell / Koyama Press

  There’s snark and spite, both about the artists and their work. On Sol Lewitt, a minimalist conceptual artist known for his wall drawings and open modular sculptures, she writes, “Dude’s gotta be a nottie. He seems like a wearer of monocles and ascots who’d scoff at anyone who didn’t appreciate squares with enough gravitas.” And the verdict? “NOT. Did you know that in order to get a temporary, minimum wage job scribbling on the wall per Lewitt’s instructions you need an 80K USD master’s degree?” Dang, girl.

  Let’s be real, though. Most “important” artists from the 20th century were male. Many focused on the female form, painting nude after nude, and even abusing their models --- like Picasso, who decided that Françoise Gilot, the mother of two of his children and a model for many of his works, looked better with a beauty mark, so he created one by burning her with a cigarette. If the art world thinks that this kind of context doesn’t matter, or that women don’t matter except when subject to the male gaze, then why not turn that objectifying gaze back on the men? Why not reduce them to just “HOT” or “NOT”?

  Portrait of Lawren Harris by Jessica Campbell / Koyama Press

  Hotness is subjective. What we find attractive, while guided by our culture for sure, ultimately varies from person to person. Maybe my type is “snobby Super Mario,” Campbell’s description of Barnett Newman (a nottie, in her opinion). By juxtaposing Hotness with examples from the 20th century artistic canon, and then tearing many of those works down, Campbell questions the very notion of the canon itself. Maybe it would have looked different if it hadn’t been men, often white, cisgender, heterosexual men, who decided what was good?
  Hot Or Not is a delightful, funny, and smart as heck book. Plus, it has scratch-off thongs and shorts on the men gracing the cover, posing seductively like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon with six-packs.
  Don’t worry --- just scratch those off and you’ll get plenty of hot, full-frontal action.

• AV Club
  https://news.avclub.com/this-hot-or-not-preview-judges-renowned-male-artists-on-1798251512
  Word count: 307

  QUOTED: "a hilarious, slyly subversive exploration of subjectivity."

  This Hot Or Not preview judges renowned male artists on their looks

  Oliver Sava
  9/07/16 10:30amFiled to: BOOKS
  57
  Save

  (Image: Koyama Press)
  The 20th century brought about huge shifts in the world of fine art, thanks to the technological and cultural changes over those 100 years, but Jessica Campbell isn’t interested in evaluating the merits of the actual artwork in her new graphic novel Hot Or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists. The majority of the major artists during this time are men, and Campbell subjects those men to the objectification women have had to deal with for pretty much all of history by judging them on their physical appearances rather than the quality of their creations. The result is a hilarious, slyly subversive exploration of subjectivity, and the criticisms ultimately reveal more about the critic than they do the artists.

  This preview of Hot Or Not spotlights some of the figures in the Geometric Abstraction section of the book, and the nonrepresentational nature of the art makes the assessments of the artists especially far-fetched and very funny. The works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Barnett Newman reveal nothing about what they actually look like, but that doesn’t stop Campbell from making assumptions anyway, most of which are disproven by the actual images of the artists. While the format may seem simple, it allows Campbell to control the comic timing exceptionally well, with each “Hot Or Not” reveal occurring after the page turn to accentuate the punch lines. Readers can revel in Campbell’s sense of humor when Hot Or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists hits stands later this month, complete with a cover featuring scratch-off underwear because Campbell can’t wait to get her audience laughing.

• Comics Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-jessica-campbell-is-so-judgmental/
  Word count: 657

  Review: Jessica Campbell is so judgmental
  11/15/2016 3:00 PM BY JOHN SEVEN

  Share this:
  100Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)100Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  campbellhot

  I’ve been a big fan of Jessica Campbell’s work since I read her Oily Comics debut My Sincerest Apologies, and what her output lacks in girth it more than makes up for in originality. I don’t think there’s anyone else in comics quite like her, more often than not attuned to offering humor collections with her riffing off a topic than anything necessarily resembling traditional comics, though she does do those as well. Hot Or Not from Koyama Press is the ultimate culmination of her schtick, which frames the illustrated humor section of the book — the main point of the book — between two paneled comics segments of Campbell conducting a tour of an art museum.

  As the tour takes over from the action, it becomes a rapid-fire monologue on page by Campbell, riffing through various artists, some important, some obscure, some just Canadian, and reframing their work in context of their sex appeal. Campbell reduces it to a formula that gets funnier with the repetition — she reproduces famous artwork in her own crude style and gets laughs from that, uses the artwork to decipher whether the artist is hot, and then offers her drawn portrait of the artist with some sort of ridiculing pronouncement of the hotness or the notness that the artist might exude, thus megating the artist’s work, as well as his whole person, based on his appearance. Good art, bad art, it all gets measured against the physical attractiveness.

  This might be one of the best ways to learn about art I’ve encountered, since what Campbell is doing in her analysis is turning the tables on a parade of self-involved misogynists who routinely treat women the same. Okay, I admit, I’m vastly generalizing with that, but if the Warhol drawing of a shoe fits … you get the idea. I’m just getting into the spirit of one of my favorite traits about Campbell, or at least her work — the assured fierceness.

  A few weeks ago, I reviewed Joann Sfar’s Pascin, and I’m struck by how Campbell’s book is the antidote to that. I liked it well enough, but I liked it despite Pascin, who comes off as yet another wounded, intense male who acts out over-dramatically about how hard it is to live life, and uses women mainly as a vehicles to try to soothe his own pain. This is typical of the type of artist who becomes celebrated, and coming at it from the point of view of Campbell’s book, I echo that it is a tiresome obsession we men have, portraying our unlikable, whiny art heroes, trying to justify their nasty and often pathetic behavior and general attitude toward women as acceptable because of the great creative achievements they gave to the world at great sacrifice of their souls, hurting so deeply in order to plunge into the depths of the truth and regurgitate it onto a canvas and only understand thanks to them.

  Campbell is having none of that bullshit and I’m completely with her on this.

  John Seven
  Journalist and children’s book writer living in North Adams, Massachusetts. Author of ‘A Rule Is To Break: A Child’s Guide To Anarchy,’ ‘Happy Punks 1-2-3,’ ‘Frankie Liked To Sing,’ and others. My latest children’s books are ‘Gorilla Gardener: How To Help Nature Take Over The World’ and ‘We Say NO: A Child’s Guide To Resistance.’

• Comics Journal
  http://www.tcj.com/reviews/xtc69/
  Word count: 800

  QUOTED: "For anyone unaware of the sheer reactionary venality of a vocal contingent of the comics world, check this out for a jolting wake-up call. Campbell proves once again that comedy and satire are powerful tools in an artist's arsenal in the battle against entrenched oppression. XTC69 is thoroughly delightful and sneakily powerful."

  XTC69
  Jessica Campbell
  Koyama Press
  $12, 120 pages
  BUY IT NOW

  REVIEWED BY ROBERT KIRBY MAY 22, 2018
  Chicago-based artist Jessica Campbell's first effort with Koyama Press, Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists was a wonderfully funny, pointed satire in which the author presented herself as a museum docent, assessing not the artistic merit of celebrated male artists such as Gustav Klimt, Henry Moore, and Mark Rothko, but their sexual attractiveness, i.e., their "boneability." It was wicked fun, and Campbell never let the politics of her role-reversal override the silly humor of it all, proving herself a humorist to be reckoned with.

  With her followup, XTC69, Campbell explores the same satirical territory, holding a mirror up to male chauvinism and misogyny and reflecting it back with merciless aim, this time through a science fiction parody seemingly inspired by the 1967 drive-in trash classic Mars Needs Women, in which a group of male Martians visit Earth to find female mates with whom to repopulate their planet. Campbell quickly establishes her everything's-opposite scenario, making her aliens a trio of females from the planet L8DZ N123 (read that carefully—get it?) roaming the galaxies in their titular ship in search of males. The L8DZ are led by Commander Jessica Campbell and the planet they have landed on is Earth—only it is 700 years in the future and no humans remain… except for one young woman also named (gasp!) Jessica Campbell.

  It turns out that the earthling Jessica Campbell was cryogenically frozen right before the world ended, with a bag of ketchup chips firmly in hand. She quickly revives, immediately goes back to eating her chips, and informs her rescuers of the circumstances of her long sleep. To avoid confusion, Commander Campbell decides to call Jessica "JC2." (A nonplussed JC2's response to Commander Campbell: "Ok… You do you.") The L8DZ decide to take this earthling away with them as "The archivist for this… Earth."

  Soon, the crew and JC2 make a forced landing on the planet MXPX, which is populated entirely by men. Unfortunately, the MXPXers, headed by the fratboy-like "President Chad," are all complete sexist dolts. When the L8DZ first meet the men, they are gathering for a big festival they call "The Great Cupcake Bake Off and Murder Show." They ask the women inane questions like: "Uh, could you smile?" "Why aren't females funny?" and simply, "Blowjob?" The L8DZ and JC2 understandably take umbrage at the nerve of these idiots and the battle of the sexes is on. The story continues with some fun twists that you won't see coming.

  Campbell makes funny plays on standard slang (Commander Jessica Campbell admonishes her charge: "Leigh! Grow some tits already!"), and peppers the narrative with silly visuals, such as the landscapes of the women's home planet unmistakably resembling the top and bottom of a bikini, while the largest continent of the men's planet is clearly shaped like a phallus. There is millennial-style humor, including a great riff on Harry Potter, demonstrating that Harry Potter devotees are among the most dedicated (and longwinded) fans in the Nerdiverse. A brief scene where Commander Campbell shows JC2 around the XTC69 spaceship also scores.

  Commander Campbell also makes a pointed, no-kidding-around remark against gender binaries:

  Campbell limns her story with the thick-brushed, faux naïve look of Hot or Not. At a mere 64 pages, Hot or Not was over before I really wanted it to be, but with XTC69 she has twice the pages to tell her story, and paces it with an assured hand. She branches out with more ambitious layouts, including some imaginative use of landscapes. Her high-contrast black and white visuals at times remind me of Jennifer Camper's work (echoing both Camper's thumb-to-nose satire of the patriarchy and her deliciously female-centric sensibility). Campbell's wry sense of humor and her crack comic timing are in evidence throughout. The pulpy cover art is particularly fabulous.

  In a brief coda, the "real" Campbell is asked if she worries that the comic is “misogynist against men.” For anyone unaware of the sheer reactionary venality of a vocal contingent of the comics world, check this out for a jolting wake-up call. Campbell proves once again that comedy and satire are powerful tools in an artist's arsenal in the battle against entrenched oppression. XTC69 is thoroughly delightful and sneakily powerful.

• Comics Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-jessica-campbell-conquers-the-universe/
  Word count: 682

  Review: Jessica Campbell conquers the universe
  05/01/2018 5:00 PM BY JOHN SEVEN

  Share this:
  70Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)70Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

  Jessica Campbell has gotten plenty of attention with her sharp cartoons examining the art world through the lens of gender politics. Her attitude, part take-no-prisoners and part don’t-mind-me-self-deprecation makes for some singular, honest, and hilarious examinations of not just the historical male domination of art, but the double standards that became the roadblocks for women artists.

  In XTC69, Campbell continues her gender examinations but takes it to the world of science fiction, a genre that routinely embraces extremes in its depictions of societies and personal attitudes — see any dystopian fiction in the last 15 years — to create some form of fable offering well-meaning lessons in living together. Think of any episode of Star Trek and the function of each planet it visits as the setting of a cautionary tale.

  Campbell starts that conceit off with a visit to Earth, where humanoid alien space explorer of the future Jessica Campbell discovers the fictional avatar of our Jessica Campbell, who has survived a worldwide disaster and the end of the human race for hundreds of years. This Earthly Campbell is sweet, dopey, and, as she realizes her fate, touchingly human.

  It turns out that the crew of XTC69 is seeking out men to mate with, after an unnamed circumstance on their planet that lead to the disappearance of all men. Our Jessica Campbell, now known as JC2, accompanies the crew on their search to find the answer to their biological dilemma.

  The reason for the lack of men is eventually revealed, and it’s a telling moment of Campbell’s multi-faceted humor about gender. Without giving anything away, the explanation is a cautionary tale within a cautionary tale, where acceptance and understanding pave the way for extinction, but this planet of women would rather go to impossible galactic extremes to save themselves than hurt anyone’s feelings.

  When the crew lands on an all-male planet, the self-destructive empathy of the woman’s planet is matched by an out-of-control, hostile, self-assured misogynistic attack culture that is as timely and right on as it is funny. It’s sure to offend some sensitive males and I should point out that not all men … nah, never mind.

  For the crew, Campbell applies stereotypical attributes, which means that there is much traditional male posturing and quipping going on — a gender flip, in its simplest terms. This is taken to its logical extreme by the end of the book when the crew encounters the perfect solution to their problem in the cliched form of a couple of naked aliens from another planet — no spoilers here, but consider the 1962 film Invasion of the Star Creatures after you finish the book.

  Gender role juggling for humor is entirely the point here, but Campbell doesn’t take it just one way, and in the end, she demonstrates that men and women may have a lot more common ground than is acknowledged. Not that her presentation of misogyny is wrong — in fact, it’s chillingly prescient — but somewhere in the extremes, Campbell fashions a middle ground where all solutions as currently acted out present their own set of problems. And she makes you laugh pretty hard even as she casts a critical net over everybody, including you.

  John Seven
  Journalist and children’s book writer living in North Adams, Massachusetts. Author of ‘A Rule Is To Break: A Child’s Guide To Anarchy,’ ‘Happy Punks 1-2-3,’ ‘Frankie Liked To Sing,’ and others. My latest children’s books are ‘Gorilla Gardener: How To Help Nature Take Over The World’ and ‘We Say NO: A Child’s Guide To Resistance.’

• Women Write about Comics
  https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2018/05/jessica-campbells-xtc69-gives-the-middle-finger-to-misogyny-and-transphobia/
  Word count: 807

  QUOTED: "From the gorgeous pulpy cover to its sick burns on the cruelty of human society, XTC69 is pure delight all the way through. We all need a break from the current onslaught of awful, and Campbell has given us one full of hope that, someday, all our world’s horrors will be a distant memory."

  Jessica Campbell’s XTC69 gives the Middle Finger to Misogyny and Transphobia
  In Indie & Small Press, ReviewsMay 16, 2018Alenka Figa0 comments
  Jessica Campbell’s XTC69 gives the Middle Finger to Misogyny and Transphobia
  XTC69
  Jessica campbell
  Koyama Press
  May 2018

  XTC69 cover via Koyama Press
  Sometimes, when I feel buried under a flood of stress both in my personal life and from the general state of the world, I want to consume media that just makes me feel joy. I need to smile and laugh, to step out from under the weight of anxiety, frustration, anger or fear, and read something that I know was written with my happiness in mind. Jessica Campbell’s XTC69 does just that; it makes sick burns on the messed up state of the world while asking you to experience joy.
  The opening to the story is quite simple: a rocket ship lands on Earth. Three women exit, seeking human life. They find an empty landscape and, just as they are about to give up, discover a stasis chamber containing a single human: Jessica Campbell, a woman who loves ketchup chips. Jessica can’t help the alien women solve their planet’s population problems. All she can do is follow them and see if, along the way, she can find her place in the universe.
  The first hint that this comic is delightfully self-indulgent arrives when Human Jessica steps out of the stasis chamber and learns that the aliens’ captain is also a woman named Jessica Campbell. Moments further along the line reaffirm that feeling of indulgence; the aliens reveal that they consider Betty Crocker’s cookbook to be a comprehensive tome of human foods, and in a glorious piece of dialog, Jessica Campbell asks Jessica Campbell a question her species longs to answer: “Who is Harry Potter, boy Lizard?”
  L8DZN1T3 image via Koyama Press
  I like to think that Campbell began writing this comic for her own enjoyment but quickly realized that others would delight in the way she uses the distance of sci-fi to critique human society. Her aliens come from a planet that, over time, has evolved to only have women. Their species has both cloning capabilities and the ability to evolve their spirits and bodies to match their gender. Eventually the entire species realized women were just better, and men ceased to exist. When Human Jessica asks why some don’t evolve purposefully as men to solve their current population problem, Alien Jessica snaps at her, abhorring the cruelty of forcing sex markers on people who don’t identify with those markers. It’s a quick moment, but also a sick burn against the cruelty of our society that is very satisfying to read. XTC69 is full of these satisfying burns.
  While mostly focused on biting commentary and indulgent plot, XTC69 also contains some moments of sharp realness that contrast its usual tone. In an early scene, Human Jessica can’t climb up a cliff face and has to piggyback ride on Alien Jessica’s back. Human Jessica’s skirt rides up revealing her underwear, and when they get to the top she clumsily readjusts it. These details are small, but they’re unsexy and real. Jessica is already emotionally vulnerable from learning her entire world is essentially gone, and then has to face her physical vulnerability. Campbell’s character designs are simple and lack the familiar level of detail used to exploit women’s bodies; despite the thick line work and cartoony style, the women in the comic are awkwardly real. In a comic full of commentary on misogyny, it’s small details like this through which Campbell shows how easy it is to draw outside of the male gaze.
  Underwear scene via Koyama Press
  From the gorgeous pulpy cover to its sick burns on the cruelty of human society, XTC69 is pure delight all the way through. We all need a break from the current onslaught of awful, and Campbell has given us one full of hope that, someday, all our world’s horrors will be a distant memory. I’ll go farther than just recommending this book – I recommend that you read it while in a bubble bath, with a cup of tea, curled up next to a cat, or paired with whatever relaxing activity (that allows you to multitask and read) is your jam. You deserve the break.

• Daily Grindhouse
  http://dailygrindhouse.com/thewire/grindhouse-comics-column-xtc69-jessica-campbell/
  Word count: 944

  QUOTED: "XTC69 is a work that oozes entirely-earned confidence by a cartoonist firing on all cylinders. Jessica Campbell takes us to the farthest reaches of space and time, sure, but her book is as 'here and now'—and, consequently, as essential—as it gets."

  May 30, 2018 Columns, Comics, Featured Tagged Columns, Comic Books, Comics, Jessica Campbell, Koyama Press Comments 0

  By now you’re well-familiar (or should be) with the laundry-list of societal problems that have “trickled down” into all forms of media, including comics, and also know that right near the top of said list is misogyny, which many of us fooled ourselves into thinking was on the way out — that is, until the biggest misogynist imaginable was elected president, and the once-appropriately-marginalized “alt right” and “edgelord” internet subcultures, both rife with unreconstructed sexism of the most sickening sort, seized on the opportunity of Donald Trump’s political ascendance to become more loud, brash, boorish, and obnoxious than ever. Their bullshit is just plain unavoidable now, and as “GamerGate” and “ComicsGate” have proven, no corner of the “information” superhighway is safe from misogyny’s malign influence. We’re literally saturated in a toxic stew of aggressive male chauvinism that churns and boils 24/7.

  Cartoonist Jessica Campbell, thankfully, isn’t taking it laying down. Her previous book, Hot Or Not?, turned the whole premise of the “male gaze” on its ear with by means of sharply-delivered absurdist satire, and in her just-released Koyama Press graphic novel, XTC69, she one-ups herself by taking aim at misogyny in a very specific literary sub-genre, namely pulp sci-fi (with the work of Robert Heninlein coming in for an extra dose of richly-deserved skewering), and deconstructing it with what can only be called a sense of sheer, unadulterated joy.

  Campbell is a bona fide expert at tackling serious subject matter without taking herself too seriously along the way, and for proof of this look no further than the fact that she makes herself the center of her own story on two different fronts, to wit: in the future, a trio of adventurous, rough-and-tumble female astronauts, led by a captain named Jessica Campbell, arrive on a barren Earth, ostensibly seeking mates in order to repopulate their all-female planet, but find only — Jessica Campbell (who they come to label “JC2,” for obvious reasons), as in, the “real” Jessica Campbell, who’s been cryogenically frozen for the last 700 years and barely has time to take in the fact that she’s the last survivor of her world before deciding, what the hell, she might as well tag along with these other ladies and see if she can find a new place to call home.

  Standardized six-panel grids are Campbell’s preferred page layout, and her thick, fluid linework is especially effective at driving home the less-than-subtle OTT absurdity of the situations she places her characters — and herselves — into: on the all-male planet of Mxpx, for example, the continent the “dudebro” assholes live on is literally shaped like a penis, and these guys, led by “President Chad,” sound more or less exactly like the “men’s rights” dipshits you find all over social media these days, literally informing our protagonists that women abandoned their planet because “those ingrate bitches wouldn’t give us nice guys a chance,” before requesting that they smile more or, in one instance, even just coming right up to one of them and asking “blowjob?” Jordan Peterson, these are your offspring, and it doesn’t take too long for “JC1” to do the entirely reasonable thing under the circumstances and order Mxpx to be destroyed.

  Wait, though, doesn’t that consign the all-female planet to certain doom? Well — no, but I’m not gonna give away how that fate is avoided because you really should read the book. And besides, all this is almost second-fiddle to the real action in the story, which involves a budding romance between, you guessed it, both Jessica Campbells. Does that get interesting? You bet it does! And it goes no small distance toward ultimately setting up the book’s redemptive final act.

  What really impresses, though, is how swiftly and thoroughly Campbell manages to obliterate every bogus “argument” used to advance not just misogyny, but patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, and even racism over the course of her narrative, and how she does it all with – dare I say it – a smile. It’s a knowing smile, an informed smile, a wry smile, but a smile nevertheless: her enemies are paper tigers clinging to outmoded systems of “thought” and she’s already got them beat — and furthermore, she knows it.

  Now, all you nervous fellas out there, just in case you were wondering whether or not this book “goes too far,” fear not: Campbell employs the classic “logic” of straight white cis male privilege against itself and informs us that “a man read it and said it was fine” and that, hey, “some of (her) best friends are men.” A “comicsgate” numbskull like Richard C. Meyer or Ethan Van Sciver couldn’t have put it better himself, and it just goes to show that there’s no slack in Campbell’s act when even her frigging acknowledgements page is this spot-on.

  By the time you reach it, though, you’ve come to expect no less. XTC69 is a work that oozes entirely-earned confidence by a cartoonist firing on all cylinders. Jessica Campbell takes us to the farthest reaches of space and time, sure, but her book is as “here and now” — and, consequently, as essential — as it gets.