Weekly Update #18: 'Cerebus' & 'High Society' Reprinting

Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':

Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...

Cerebus Vol 1 & Cerebus Vol 2: High Society
Cover art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
Hello everyone.  Okay, easy to answer the latest posts:

Barry Deutsch:  Thanks! I will do a screen capture of the info and give you a call. I really don't have time to do glamourpuss as a web comic. It's interesting watching myself because I don't know how slow I'm going to be on a given page until I'm working on it but I'm very aware that my theory on glamourpuss -- tracing Raymond, Drake, Williamson et al and then inking them and then doing my own fashion stuff and "merging" the two into a distinct photorealism style:  doesn't work. They are apples and oranges.  So all I did was to "just get good at apples" and it's time to do oranges for a month.  I'm definitely learning how to do THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND now. But it's definitely 12 hours a day 6 days a week which leaves no time for anything else except this once every two weeks "Everything Else" 20-hour marathon. There are Very Good Signs. I'm working through the foot square tub of research materials and it's a lot more organized than I thought it was. I'm not doing the initial cull, I'm doing the final cull. While I'm having dinner and flossing my teeth (TMI! YES!)

Sean, George and Lebonfon:  I know doing it this way is irritating and everyone is getting short-tempered. Unfortunately I can't just forge ahead and authorize tens of thousands of dollars in printing so everyone's blood pressure drops by a few points. George says "Been There, Done That" and Sean says, "No you haven't". It's important for me that people -- particularly Diamond, the stores and the customers -- know that this is the Current Situation. If anyone has a suggestion as to HOW I would arbitrate between George and Lebonfon and Sean and George, I'm wide open for suggestions. Failing that, all I can do is just keep saying, week after week, Well, here we are again.

Sean, the questions I wanted to ask you are:
1)  Well, first, thanks for any help you're willing to give. George is quite adamant on "Been There. Done That. Period."  You're saying that that's not true. Obviously I can't arbitrate that.  I mean, I can, but that involves flipping a coin which is not how I want to move forward after this many months.

2) Do you have original CEREBUS or HIGH SOCIETY issues and can you do your own scans from them?  I mean, there's a certain squeamishness that can be there: "I don't want to tell Dave that I don't want to bend the cover back on my #22". No need to be squeamish. If you can give me a mailing address I can send you Preney printed pages of some form that you can (ahem WILL) bend, fold, spindle and mutilate as necessary. We don't really need an actual signature, just 32 pages that are from the storylines being printed. How much of a problem is this for you? As you can see, everything around here is "When you can manage it" because anything else would be churlish on my part.

3) The "Manga Something" process you mentioned that you said Colleen is using. How does it do what it does? My concern is always the parts of the screen that have penwork under them -- the flare lines on either side of Cerebus' eyes, the texture lines showing the brow, the forelock. How do you replace that tone and still get the line detail? I also went to the Aria Press site but I'm not good with finding information on websites but my impression was that the A DISTANT SOIL volume(s?) haven't been printed yet.  She was definitely fundraising for the printing but that might be Volume 2 or Volume 3 or whatever she's up to. I was thinking if I could see her restored material, I have pretty much all the A DISTANT SOIL individual issues, so it would be easy to compare. I'm thinking the same with Eddie Campbell's PANTS book. I have all of the material from back in the pre-computer age for comparison. Eddie Khanna is always ordering me something from Amazon for THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND and I'm sure he'd be glad to add them in if they're out there and available.

4) And, yes, I think we definitely want examples published here so Diamond, the stores and the fans can see what's going on. But we will have to go the same route as George did. You e-mail digital files to Lebonfon for Sean's Signature, Lebonfon runs them out at 600 dpi and sends them to me as proofs and I look at them and say, (as Gerhard used to say, quoting Opus: "RUN THAT BABY!"  :)  Then I look at George's Signature and Sean's Signature and see what -- if any -- difference there is.

Okay. Now for George (nice stuff from the movie by the way). NO chance of my coming to Toronto. I owed Vince at Metropolis Comics in NYC a favour -- for supplying us with scans for original artwork -- and he asked me to sign about a hundred books that Pete Dixon at Paradise Comics would witness as "Signature Series". Ordinarily it would be a good excuse to go to TO and one of two stores in North America who have signed the petition. No can do, so Peter ended up having to drive all the way up here. I definitely want Vince at Metropolis to be thinking good thoughts about Dave Sim. Turned out that one of the #1's he wanted signed was a) a counterfeit and b) cost him a lot of money. So much for good thoughts about Dave Sim.

George, when you have time, I think the next step for you is identifying WHICH signature you want Lebonfon to rerun. It might be a toss-up or it could be that there's a specific 32-page stretch in one book or the other. It seems to me that "The Night Before" chapter was the biggest pain but that might be because it was right at the end there OR because there's so much white space anything "off" with the tone really shows up. Do you have a gut instinct on which it would be? Or, as soon as I say "pick one" do you get an automatic pick in your head?

To Lebonfon:  If you could mail me a work order for a 32-page signature is it possible to just identify it as that?  i.e. send it as soon as possible. AND how few copies can you print of that signature and still have enough to say, yes, this is how the press run is going to go? Do you have to run 3,000 and risk having George say "No, not good enough" or can you run 1,000 (and still have George say, "No, not good enough") and maybe save Aardvark-Vanaheim a few dollars. Obviously we're all hoping that this signature will be fine and that will make it more possible to just go ahead, tell Sean "Thanks but everything seems to be okay" and then just get the books done.

I definitely think the next step is George's Signature, whichever one that turns out to be. George can just let you know directly.

Just to complicate things, while I thought I had a virtually "mail-free" mail answering day, Thursday THUD 131 pages of screen captures arrived from Rob Imes -- the Alan Moore is a Misogynist AND a Racist saga up to the end of last week. Tim had already sent me a link. And I went "I'm not going anywhere near this". And had my sense of God tingling. "Uh, actually you are." "No, I'm not. Uh. Uh. No way." As I say THUD. It's very nice of God, I always think, to never say "I told you so." I think I made the right choice because even when I went to pick up the mail in Waterloo there was virtually nothing there. "Uh. Actually you are."

So that's what I've been doing since about 1 am until I came in here to do this Update.

I've learned a lesson from Alan (sadly from him having to go through it) -- a lot of the comments Rob sent me were "Alan should have had someone vet this." I infer: someone who knows how things sound on the Internet. Which non-Internet users like Alan and me just don't know anything about. It's a pretty fine-tuned thing for people who LIVE on here. So when I have it done, I'm going to fax it to Tim (if his is one of the fax numbers that I can get OUT to right now) and get him to e-mail it to Rob and I've told them explicitly in the cover letter; take ANYTHING OUT that needs to come out. Just write [CRINGEWORTHY TWO PAGES DELETED] or [CRINGEWORTHY FIVE LINES DELETED]. I have too much respect for Rob to just "round file" the whole mass which he suggested as a possibility or to just cherry pick what I talk about.

So I have to get back to that now.

Sincere apologies to everyone. Again, I am wide open for suggestions but right now all I'm getting is varying degrees of "Tell everyone else to eff themselves and do what I want you to do. Today." :)

No can do. Hope the next step in Sean's Signature and George's Signature constitutes sufficient movement on my part because that's all I can legitimately see myself doing right now.

See you next Friday.

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Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.