Bacchus (character)

Bacchus a.k.a. Deadface is a comics character created by Eddie Campbell and based upon the Roman god of wine and revelry, known to the Greeks as Dionysus. In this incarnation, Bacchus is one of the few Greek gods who have survived to the present day, and is now an elderly barfly wandering the world telling stories about "the old days."

In his introduction to one of the Bacchus collections, writer Neil Gaiman explains that the series "mixes air hijacks and ancient gods, gangland drama and legends, police procedural and mythic fantasy, swimming pool cleaners and the classics. It shouldn’t work, of course, and it works like a charm."

Publication history

Bacchus first appeared as a character in Deadface (March 1987), a Harrier Comics title which lasted eight issues. In issue #5 Campbell spun the character out of that book and into his own comic, the eponymous Bacchus, a book that lasted two issues, focusing the Deadface comic on Joe Theseus, an updated version of Theseus. When Harrier Comics ceased publication, Campbell managed to sell stories containing the character to numerous publishers; the American publisher Dark Horse, where the character appeared in their anthology title Dark Horse Presents, and who also collected the Deadface comics in the Deadface: Immortality Isn't Forever collection published November 1990; and two British publishers, Trident Comics, where the stories appeared in their black-and-white anthology, Trident, and Atomeka, appearing in A1, another black-and-white anthology.

Dark Horse then collected these short stories and serialized them in comic book form as the three-issue mini-series Deadface: Doing the Islands with Bacchus (1991), as well as serializing the adventures of another character from the mythos, The Eyeball Kid (grandson of Argus "all eyes"), in the Dark Horse anthology Cheval Noir, which was later extended and repackaged as a three-issue mini-series, The Eyeball Kid in 1992.

After these collections and repackaging, Dark Horse commissioned the new storyline, Deadface: Earth, Water, Air, & Fire, a four-issue mini-series published in 1992. Following this in May 1993 came 1,001 Nights of Bacchus, a single-issue comic book compilation of various other previously uncollected storylines which Campbell had placed with various publishers but which he had also created within a unified framing sequence.

The next storylines related to the Bacchus mythos were again serialized, this time in Dark Horse Presents as Hermes vs the Eyeball Kid (1993-1994) and The Picture of Doreen Grey (1995), the former also collected as a three-issue mini-series in 1994-1995.