Aardvark News Round-Up #2

Gerhard's The Walking Dead

Over at Gerz Blog this week, Gerhard posted the above stunning variant cover for The Walking Dead:

"I was asked to do the exclusive variant cover for the Wizard World St. Louis edition of The Walking Dead... (any Cerebus fans recognize the sunset?)... and there will be a black & white variant edition as well... These will be available at the Wizard World St. Louis show, also coming up soon."

Gerhard's limited edition cover will only be available to attendees at the Wizard World St. Louis con to be held on 22-24 May. VIP attendees also receive an additional black & white sketch version of the comic.

Neil Gaiman: Thinking Of Metal Bikinis

Game developer Larin Studios took some flack this week for their game Divinity: Original Sin. News site Games Skinny reported that: "...gamers were less than pleased about the advertising art for one of the characters: Scarlett. Scarlett had been decked out in the RPG worlds favorite piece of female armor: the metal bikini. And possibly no pants or underwear. From the image, I'm not actually sure where her underwear would go." The back-lash forced Larin Studios to redesign her costume, and prompted a tweet from Neil Gaiman invoking Red Sophia in Cerebus #10:

http://t.co/qD5smOniPf is still all I can ever think of when it comes to metal bikinis, alas.

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) May 12, 2015

Bill Sienkiewicz: Ask Me Anything

While promoting his latest project H8 Society with an AMA session over at Reddit this week, Bill (Elektra Assassin, Moon Knight) Sienkiewicz was asked for his thoughts on Cerebus:

"Dave's an old friend. I think Cerebus is one of the greatest accomplishments in comics, not only as a work of art, but as a commitment to a vision."

Jeff Seiler: Dave & Me

Jeff Seiler has been busy tweeting exerpts from letters he has received from Dave Sim over the years. Here are a few examples to whet your appetite from letters Dave wrote back in 2004:

"If it wasn't for missing prayer times, I seriously considered getting a job after I was done Cerebus. No usable job skills, no recommendations from previous employers and I'm just this side of 50 years old. So, I figure washing floors or dishes would probably be about it and it would probably take me 5 tries to get in on the ground floor there."

"That's what I always think about when Gerhard says that he doesn't know why anyone would be interested in the piles of crap I'm carefully sorting through." [This was a reference to Dave and Ger organizing the Archive, back in '04.]

"As you'll find in The Last Day annotations, I was less concerned with who was or wasn't in the light than in the larger point that virtually everyone Cerebus knew was there, emphasizing the 2:98 neutrino ratio from [issues] 289/290. Yes, I did decide to leave Bran Mak Mufin out because of his suicide (and left Ham in because it was murder, in my You never hear about suicides who are rescued from the brink of death having the same near-death experience with the light and all that."

"Well, yes, the tunnel of demon heads and skulls from the end of 'Church & State' could be seen as a kind of "anti-light" tunnel. There are a lot of physical metaphors for the same things throughout the story. I knew that was where I was headed for."

1970's Cerebus Stuffed Toy

I don't normally feature eBay auctions on AMOC but the current auction for the little fella above took me aback. The current bids are already over $500. Yikes! Is that some kind of record? If you can't live without your very own Cerebus, you'd better hurry. That auction ends today.

Update from Margaret Liss:
It isn't a bid that is over $500, it is the 'buy it now'  feature that is at $519.99. There is no way that will sell at that price. While the dolls are rare, it isn't nearly worth that much. This is the 16" version, which is the 2nd version of the dolls,  and is more common from what I've seen. The smaller, 12" version with longer snout, is more valuable. However, I would say neither is worth $519.99.