A Gerhard Background

Cerebus #206 (May 1996)
Art by Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #184, 1996)
It's another thing on the palette. I get to throw a Gerhard background in here. If I'm trying to get across, as I'm doing here, working on #206, a change of seasons. It's now Fall. Well, you can start the issue off with "It's now Fall." Or you have a bunch of ducks fly off the pond, heading south for winter, lots of leaves flying, very bare trees, very stark sort of sky, continuing across a two-page spread with the shadows going across the building... that's great. Once I've got that thinking done, how I want this to come across, or what I want these pages to say with the background, then I can just hand it to Gerhard. And then he creates from the sense that the pages have creates for him. He sits down and analyses. We don't discuss them very much. He just takes... tomorrow he's coming in and doing pages two and three of #205, and he'll just put them on the drawing board and stare at them for like half an hour, until he sees what it is that he wants to put in there. He can read the page, all the letterings there, he can see the characters, he's got his own repertoire, his own palette...