When you're keeping a monthly comic book on schedule, there really
isn't an opportunity to "redo" pages. On the other hand, if you have
serious doubts, there is a window of opportunity to change your mind.
Sometimes the window was a little wider than it was at other times:
You remember the rejected page from the beginning of MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS that I gave up on because it lacked Scale? Well, before I decided that Scale was the problem, I thought maybe it was a lack of Gravitas, so I wrote this honking great block of text giving a peak into the mind of Cirin as she's purging the Papal Library.
That was when I realized that you can't START an 1100 page graphic novel with a giant block of text. Comic fans HATE text.
Now, I'm not so sure. CEREBUS fans already had the experience of JAKA'S STORY and if it's just ONE block of text in the early going, it might have been acceptable. You know? As long as the REST of issue 151 is a fattening sugar-rich comics dessert, maybe you can get them to eat a bowl of vegetables first.
Hope you can read the text because I'm NOT retyping it.
4 comments:
So...are these "False Starts" going to be included in the Cerebus Archive packages?
Just wondering.
I would love to know just how many of these false start pages exist. And what total adds to the 6,000 + how many ever pages there were over 20 per issue for the first several issues. Add in all the essays and 280 some issues with Aardvark Comment and I would say Dave was responsible for dam near 10,000 pages of Cerebus.
Plus, 300 covers.
The "FALSE STARTS" booster set for the Cerebus Archives!
Good Idea Matt!
I'm glad "Mothers and Daughters" started the way it did - the visual of Cirin chucking all those books away says what this text is saying - with less detail, I suppose, but with more storytelling impact.
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