Saturday, 17 January 2015

Weekly Update #66: Supplemental

Steve Harold meets Dave Sim
The Off-White House, January 2015
DAVE SIM:
(via John Funk via Dropbox, 15 January 2015)
Former Diamond/Chicago Warehouse guy and co-organizer (with another former Diamond Warehouse guy, Tim Gagne) of the I.C.E. Spirits show in Chicago, Steve Harold, was invited to the Off-White House for a quick "between prayer times" visit -- starting with this "photo-op" in the Rectangle Office - -January 6th when he found out he was going to be in Toronto on business. (That's Tim's Grinch-y Christmas card -- which arrived with a single panel of original art from Stan Drake's THE HEART OF JULIET JONES "Pop" and Eve Jones with the street number for "234 Hemlock Rd." clearly visible in the background -- as a surprise Christmas gift!

I asked Steve if he had any advice as a former Diamond employee and long-time reader/viewer of A MOMENT OF CEREBUS. His immediate suggestion was that I sign the front of the CEREBUS ARCHIVE FOLIOS being solicited as "unsigned" through Diamond. Too late for NUMBER ONE but I will definitely be doing that on NUMBER TWO. Thanks for the suggestion, Steve! Please think kind thoughts of Steve when you see my autograph on the front of CEREBUS ARCHIVE NUMBER TWO in your local store -- and watch for his "CEREBUS IN MY LIFE" contribution here on A Moment of Cerebus... whenever he gets around to it. My suggestion to him was to see if he could put together the first "CEREBUS IN MY CITY" segment with all of the Chicago folks who have always been a big part of CEREBUS' success.

(Click image to enlarge)


Another Christmas gift -- and more Stan Drake original artwork! This from a syndicated cartoonist (King Features) who I'm not going to identify since I'm not sure he wants to be "exposed" publicly. It would have been published on January 31, 1978.

Weird metaphysics: that would have been Norman Mailer's 55th birthday and I had just been musing -- the day before it came in -- that Zack Kitchen-of-the-perpetual-Christmas-card-from-Jeff-Seiler -- had been born right around my 55th birthday in 2011, not knowing that Mike had, at that point, posted the video of Zack playing the Christmas card even as I was musing. Even weirder, that same day's mail brought two articles on Norman Mailer sent by Robert R. of Van Nuys, CA. Even weirder, the syndicated cartoonist is from Minneapolis where Jeff Seiler lives.

The piece is important to me, personally, because -- calculating from Stan Drake's six-week lead time on JULIET JONES, he would have drawn this strip on or about the day that CEREBUS No.1 came back from the printer!

I just noticed when I put the strip in to be scanned that Stan Drake must have had trouble with Eve's left eye in the middle panel because he's pencilled it on the other side of the strip (and either inked it directly on his lightbox or traced the reverse image in pencil).

Anyway, many thanks, Mr. Anonymous!


1 comment:

Jeff Seiler said...

That's me, all right: Weird Metaphysics.

And, yeah, I noticed right that her face in the middle panel is just kinda wonky. Looks like she's drunk. Drake was trying to draw her looking downward at the girl, but didn't quite pull it off.