HARDtalk: The Virtual Tour #18

Were you ever surprised by an unexpected background drawn by Gerhard that wasn't what you intended or envisioned when you drew the characters?

Yes and always pleasantly... verging on gobsmacked astonishment. It actually got to the point very early that I would just say, "This is where the characters are" and leave it at that.  Whatever he was going to come up with was going to be a lot more accomplished than anything I could even picture in my mind's eye.  It's only as I've had to work with very precise vanishing points on THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND -- photorealism is a, technically, very unforgiving style -- that I've realized how much more of a help I would have been to him if I had started with a horizon line and vanishing point every time out. See, I say that and right away I'm thinking it might not be true.  As soon as you put a specific horizon line and vanishing point in, you've really limited his options.  When it's just the characters, he's able to rotate everything mentally as needed -- moving things up and down and his ability to do that, which has always been phenomenal, might have been limited by my intruding upon it.  Sometimes even hindsight isn't 20-20.  He usually did WAY more than was required, but then we both have that problem -- or "problem" if you're the one getting a piece of work done by one of us.  Once you get working on something, you come up with a really good visual idea that's going to take more time.  But it's such a good an idea that you have trouble letting go of it, so you just decide, "Oh, what the heck..." and watch another big chunk of your life get devoured.

I saw his "World Without Cerebus" commission for Brian of the pub he started with on "His First Fifth". Another syndrome we both experience:  I know HOW to do this now, so it's like an opportunity to fix something from your youth.  But, again, it eats your life.

Okay, We're now headed back to MILLAR WORLD for a question from Todd Gross as I forgot his follow-up question the other day:

Did you ever have your own 'Margaret Mitchell Mystique' experience as you were producing glamourpuss?

...and then here comes Eddie Khanna again at CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE where Eddie posted this one:

As a bit of a connection between High Society and glamourpuss, I note that in the campaign issue of High Society, Cerebus #40, which had a publication date of July 1982, a carriage carrying the cast breaks down off the side of a road as they travel to the fictional ‘Grace District.’ A few months later after the issue came out, Princess Grace Kelly (who’s connections to the death of Alex Raymond have been discussed in glamourpuss) died when her car went off the side of a cliff in September 1982. It seems that you may have been prescient here, and I’m wondering if you recall:

1) if you choose the name for Grace District from Grace Kelly in any way (bit of a long shot I suppose);

2) any reactions you may have had when she died a few months later after the above sequence was published?

Hit the links to MILLAR WORLD and CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE for the answers to those questions - and I'll be back tomorrow for more of your HARDtalk questions.

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