Tuesday 8 July 2014

Cerebus Restoration Bulletin #2 -- Two Days Remain

SEAN MICHAEL ROBINSON:

Greetings everyone,

With two days remaining, we're powering through, despite some pretty heavy computer-related setbacks. Mara is setting up our template on a borrowed laptop while I'm blasting through the remaining pages, doing my best with the time remaining.

In the meanwhile, with the discussion of Dave's "cartoony" style versus his more recent strides towards realism, I thought I'd share one of the biggest shockers for me through this process so far. Here's a panel from the VERY beginning -- issue one, page two of Cerebus. For me, this goes a long way to showing that aesthetic judgments are complex and many-faceted, and it's easy to pass judgment on an image without understanding how the mechanics of the reproduction, or even things like the cleanliness of panel borders, are affecting your view of the image as a whole.

This panel has everything I love about early  Dave's artwork -- exuberant acting, atmosphere, strong design, and, muscular and inventive inking. It's a shame it's been reproduced so poorly in the past.

Will do my best to rectify that.



6 comments:

Margaret said...

whoa. Seriously. WOW. Amazing work Sean and Dr Mara! If this is an indication of what the reprinting is going to look like, it looks like I'll be re-reading Cerebus. Again.

Sean R said...

Thanks Margaret!

The first five issue will have the most dramatic improvements, for various reasons, but we'll only be prepping the first issue for this printing. Assuming the fundraising goes well, we'll work on the other ones as well.

So, the later early issues will be much more subtle of a difference, tho, printing out comparisons today as we work, there are still significant improvements even in issues 14-15! (The latest ones we're working on currently.)

Unknown said...

That is pretty impressive. Cerebus jumps off the page. Nice job guys !

Dave Kopperman said...

Holy shit, that's looking good.

Anonymous said...

Looks great.

- Reginald P.

Lee Thacker said...

That is one heck of a difference in quality! Keep up the great work - very impressive stuff!