Creativity Quote by Eddie Campbell

“Writer driven” lands like praise until Campbell swivels it into a punchline: the editorial note isn’t about clarity, rhythm, or character. It’s about word count. The anecdote makes Karen Berger - legendary for shepherding DC’s Vertigo line - sound less like a muse and more like a foreman on an assembly line where the raw material is text. “There weren’t enough words in it” is funny because it’s absurdly literal, the kind of note that treats language as ballast. “Put some more in” is the closer: blunt, managerial, and deliberately anti-romantic about craft.

Campbell’s subtext is a long-running tension in comics: the medium sells itself as a marriage of image and text, but its prestige economy often tilts toward writing. “Writer driven” can mean sophistication, literary ambition, and adult sensibility - exactly the Vertigo brand. Campbell, an artist who’s spent a career proving how much storytelling can happen in the line itself, is quietly calling out the insecurity inside that ambition. If you need more words just to feel “serious,” you’re mistaking density for depth.

Context matters: Berger’s era helped legitimize comics for bookstore culture, awards culture, “comics as literature” culture. That shift elevated writers as auteur figures and sometimes treated artists as illustrators of a script, not co-authors of meaning. Campbell’s joke isn’t anti-writing; it’s pro-comics, defending the idea that silence, pacing, and visual intelligence are not empty space.