Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

A line like this lives in the deliciously awkward space between critique and confession: the speaker wants to register a real response, but can only manage the vaguest possible language. Eddie Campbell, a comics artist who’s spent a career making the case that low culture is where the serious work often hides, leans into that vagueness as a kind of tell. “Something there” is both an endorsement and an evasion. It implies depth while refusing to pin down what, exactly, deserves credit - the mark of someone wary of overclaiming, or someone aware that the object in question (a “Turtle’s movie,” likely a pulp-y, kid-facing franchise) isn’t supposed to bear critical weight.

The repetition - “something there, definitely something there” - is the engine. It mimics the way people talk when they’re trying to persuade themselves as much as their listener: an almost embarrassed insistence that their interest isn’t frivolous, that their attention has landed on a genuine signal amid noise. Campbell’s intent feels less like formal evaluation than a nudge toward rereading: look again, don’t dismiss it too quickly.

Subtextually, it’s also a quiet jab at criticism itself. We’re trained to produce clean takes and neat meanings; Campbell stages the opposite, the honest moment before interpretation hardens. Context matters: coming from an artist associated with self-reflexive, literary comics, the line reads as a defense of finding craft, anxiety, or cultural truth inside commercial spectacle - even if all you can initially name is “something.”