Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

There’s a working cartoonist’s weariness tucked into this: the sense that creative “progress” is only obvious after the fact, like panel borders you don’t see until the ink dries. Eddie Campbell, an artist who’s spent decades balancing craft, commerce, and the long grind of making books, is zeroing in on a brutal asymmetry of artistic life: certainty arrives late. You feel “on the right track” only once you’ve already paid for the ticket.

The quote leans on Dave Sim as a kind of cautionary talisman. Sim’s career embodies the high-wire act of self-belief in comics: the lone-maker model, the obsessive longform project, the stubborn conviction that your private vision can become public fact. Campbell borrows Sim’s phrasing not to canonize it but to expose its trap. If the only confirmation comes at the finish line, then the middle is governed by faith, ego, or delusion - often indistinguishable while you’re inside it.

That’s the conundrum: “believe” isn’t framed as inspirational advice, but as a necessary coping mechanism. Campbell’s last line, “It’s not easy,” is doing more than understatement. It’s a small refusal of the motivational-poster version of creativity. The subtext is studio realism: deadlines don’t wait for clarity; confidence doesn’t correlate neatly with quality; and the artist’s job is to keep walking even when the map is drawn in disappearing ink.