Monday 1 September 2014

Cerebus False Starts: Bear

DAVE SIM:
When you're keeping a monthly comic book on schedule, there really isn't an opportunity to "redo" pages. On the other hand, if you have serious doubts, there is a window of opportunity to change your mind. Sometimes the window was a little wider than it was at other times:

FORM & VOID page 397. This was a good example of a literal visualization of a scene just not working. The idea is that Bear and Cerebus are sitting across a campfire from each other and Bear is reverently uttering his "uber fanboy" line about Grizzly Beer, that it started being called "Griz" because Ham Ernestway called in that in one of his short stories.

It's really nothing to get reverent about (and I see a lot of that in the Hemingway cult: the Running of The Bulls at Pamplona is nothing to get reverent about -- it's really a pretty stupid thing for anyone to do, but it has this reverence attached to it since DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON: that was the satirical point I was trying to make).

This is what it would have looked like, Bear's features burned out to white and viewed from Cerebus' lower angle. And then I thought, "Well the heat from the fire would cause wave distortion in Bear's features or in part of his features" and thought -- I really don't have that many lines to work with in the first place without having to white some of them out and then "wave" line some of them back in. So that was when I went with the angle I did in the story, viewed from Bear's left and slightly elevated. It wasn't accurate, but it conveyed the idea visually a lot better.

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