Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

Numbers do the talking here, and they talk like a punchline with bruises underneath. Eddie Campbell’s slide from seven thousand to twelve hundred isn’t just an anecdote about a bad year; it’s a compressed tragedy of creative economies, delivered in the dry, shrugging cadence artists often use when the real story is too exhausting to dramatize. “The whole bottom just fell out of the market” has the bluntness of a post-mortem: no villain, no rescue plan, just gravity doing what gravity does.

The twist - “It was bad for me because I was in Australia at the time” - is where Campbell’s intent sharpens. He undercuts the macro-collapse with a petty, human inconvenience, a line that reads like gallows humor and self-protection at once. The subtext is clear: when you’re a working artist, catastrophe is rarely cinematic. It’s logistical. It’s being on the wrong continent when your already-fragile livelihood evaporates. The joke isn’t that it was “bad”; the joke is that this is the kind of “bad” you’re allowed to admit without sounding melodramatic.

Context matters: late-80s comics and illustration markets were volatile, with booms, speculator churn, and sudden contractions that punished freelancers first and hardest. Campbell frames market collapse as weather, not policy, which is its own critique: artists are expected to absorb systemic shocks privately, then narrate them as personal misfortune. The line lands because it refuses both panic and romance - a hard-eyed reminder that “the market” is often just another name for who gets to keep making work.