Weekly Update #24: Ultimate Cerebus!

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...

Ultimate Cerebus (2010)
Art by Dave Sim
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:

1. IMPRIMERIE LEBONFON:

Still waiting on a price quote from Imprimerie Lebonfon for a single signature and what the minimum number of copies they would need to print would be.

2. GEORGE & SEAN:

Had a phone message from George Gatsis that he WILL be forwarding raw digital files and his finished files to Sean but that it will take about a week to get them all assembled. MANY thanks to George -- and Sean -- for taking time out of their very busy schedules to help out on this.

3. HERITAGE AUCTIONS:

The 4 "BBC CENSORS DAVE SIM" DOCTOR WHO PRISONERS OF TIME original covers (#8, 9, 10 and 11) (well, they didn't really CENSOR me, it was work- made-for-hire, but it seems like a catchy way to headline an original art auction) have been sent to Heritage Auctions along with the "non-censored" #12 cover with all 11 DOCTORS WHO on it and the Wally Wood tribute THUNDER AGENTS #2 cover.

Watch the weekly Heritage Auctions if you're interested in getting one. I haven't done a variant cover for IDW since last April and it looks doubtful I'll be doing any more before THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND is done, so these six covers are your last chance for a 21st century Dave Sim cover until at least 2017.

4. ULTIMATE CEREBUS:

I asked Ted Adams during our phone chat a couple of weeks back if IDW would be interested in publishing ULTIMATE CEREBUS: basically the "re-telling" of the first 25 issues by other writers and artists and he was VERY enthusiastic.

My thinking is basically that the CEREBUS volume is a tough "sell" for a lot of people since I was, at best, semi-professional at the time but that there's enough Warner Brothers-style funny and well-designed (though not IMHO well-drawn) raw material there to produce 25 comic books and a trade paperback if enough top-quality writers and artists want to have a go at them.

Let me emphasize "TOP quality" writers and artists -- amazing veterans or undiscovered geniuses, I'm not fussy :) -- there's not much point in replacing my semi-pro comics with someone else's semi-pro comics -- writers and artists who are able to meet a deadline obviously preferred.

This could, potentially, become a "feed-in" volume to the self-published Aardvark-Vanaheim trades starting with HIGH SOCIETY (and a Plan B if it takes much longer to get the CEREBUS trade back in print -- basically skipping printing the CEREBUS trade and going right to printing the HIGH SOCIETY trade).

You may have noticed that anything having to do with Dave Sim and CEREBUS tends to go "lariv" on-line (that is, the opposite of viral), so I think I'm safe in saying that if any TOP quality artists and writers have a favourite among the first 25 issues (and ONLY the first 25 issues) and are interested in trying out it might be worth doing a few sample pages and sending scans or photocopies of them to Ted Adams, ULTIMATE CEREBUS, 5080 Santa Fe Street, San Diego, CA, 92109. You'll be one of the few, practically guaranteed. And if you have the "chops" a regular paying gig for the next couple of years. Not without pressure attached. I imagine long-time CEREBUS fans will be very critical.

Note that IDW doesn't accept ANY unsolicited manuscripts or submissions, but I think an exception can be made in this case because I'm the rights holder and all you would be doing is a variation of what I already did. And you'd have to get a green light from Ted before he would send something to me. If you don't hear from Ted, that would tell you, pretty much, whether you were considered a TOP quality writer and/or artist. i.e. NOT! :)

And if this goes "lariv" no harm, no foul, eh?

5. PATREON.COM:

Thanks to everyone who has been pledging monthly amounts at Patreon.com "for dave sim". We were pushing up towards $300 a month the last time I checked (last Friday). I'll be commenting there this weekend on Ted Adams' interview from a couple of weeks ago, particularly as regards his interest in getting a national PR firm to promote THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND -- with an eye to getting SDOAR onto the New York Times bestseller list where IDW's PARKER and LOCK & KEY collections have gone before and releasing the material as a series of trade paperbacks instead of as monthly comic books.

See you next week!

Dave

UPDATE:
Reaction to the ULTIMATE CEREBUS proposal:
 -  Bleeding Cool
 -  Cerebus Facebook Group
 -  Bill Sienkiewicz
 -  Roger Langridge
 -  Simon Fraser

 

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond' 
by making a monthly donation at Patreon or a one-off Paypal donation.

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.