At The Club One Afternoon

At The Club One Afternoon (Cerebus #59, February 1984)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview in Following Cerebus #6, November 2005)

...it's an implied element of Cerebus' nature that different people see him in different ways and that no one sees him as he actually appears in the book. One of the story points that I never got to was to have an artist attempt to render a portrait of him, to show the dozens and dozens of failed attempts all of which would have elements of Cerebus to them but which would never quite add up to a likeness. The human part of the artist would be trying to render Cerebus in the likeness of a human - rendering the eyes separately, putting the ears in the right spot and making them the right size, shrinking the nose and putting the mouth under it - and consequently driving himself to drink. If you look specifically at the ears, you see normal ears but when you stand back and look at the overall effect, it looks nothing like him. At The Club One Afternoon is the closet that I got to depicting how people react to Cerebus' appearance: that he's shorter than he initially appears to be and that he's somewhat deformed. It can probably be attributed to the "magnifier" quality that he has. His perception of himself dominates any individual in his immediate environment, certainly anyone within visual range of him.