The Soundtrack to Cerebus (Restoration)

Mara Sedlins:

This week we’re excited to be wrapping up restoration work on the C & S I Trauma pages. I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to spend the time necessary to bring these pages as close as possible to the original intention. It’s very satisfying to look back at a page after spending hours absorbed in its details, toggle the visibility of my “adjustments” layer(s), and watch the time-damaged image heal itself and come into focus.

Not to say that the absorbed-in-details work isn’t sometimes tedious. For these time-intensive pages in particular, the thing that’s saved my sanity (I think!) is listening to an almost-constant stream of music while working. There’s evidence that listening to music while doing the kinds of immersive, repetitive tasks involved in restoration work actually improves productivity too, by improving your mood and facilitating a state of “relaxed focus.”

The choice of music is crucial, though. Some types of music that work better for these purposes than others - like, Motörhead wouldn’t be ideal. The best music to work to should be ambient, mellow, without too many highs or lows in the sound, repetitive, familiar, and obviously something that you like. Lyrics can be distracting, although this isn’t as important for non-verbal tasks. The presence of music has been such an integral part of my work experience that I’ve come to think of my choice of what to listen to as almost part of the restoration process, to think of myself as a curator of Mara-optimizing sounds.

I wonder how common it is to listen to music while creating comics? What did Dave and Gerhard listen to while working on Cerebus? Or are there songs that aficionados of the series associate with particular issues, that you were listening to while you read?

I didn’t see the article I linked to above until just now, so I’ve been making my choices through trial and error, mostly just listening to stuff I like and then changing it if it gets too distracting. Putting the same album on repeat works really well. If the music’s too slow, though, it’s easy to get bogged down in details that won’t show up on the page - so as we approach our target deadline for finishing cleanup, I’ve been opting for music with a faster beat.

The reason I’m writing about this now is that last week I noticed a particularly beautiful confluence of music choice with the page I was working on. Since I was looking for faster music, a friend introduced me to footwork - specifically, this album. The music (and art) that I like best is emotionally complex, and these songs definitely meet that requirement. They’re fast and energetic, rhythmically fascinating, while having a depth and melodic flow that create a state of intense focus without being intrusive.

I listened to that EP over and over while working on Issue 75, page 20 (phonebook page 492), a Trauma One page with shrunk tone in every panel. It was only as I finished cleaning the last panel that I zoomed out and took in what was being depicted, the sampled and deconstructed lyrics still running through my head:

"I’m rollin’ down a lonely highway
Asking god to please forgive me
I’m rollin’ down a lonely highway
She’ll come back and she’ll forgive me"

(And, inexplicably: “We got tamales”)

(The last track on the EP, “Broken Heart” runs in obvious parallel too.)

This page, in isolation, may be my favorite yet. In focusing on the restoration work I’ve been enjoying my imaginations about the plot nearly as much as reading the book itself (if you’re interested in my half-made-up plot summary of Church & State I, see the response to Reginald’s comment on my last blog post).

Thinking about sample-based music more broadly, I realized that there are not only emotional and thematic parallels between what I’ve been listening to and the work I’m restoring, but structural and creative parallels as well. One of the principal features of Cerebus (from what I’ve read) is the way Dave creatively parodied ("sampled"?) characters from literature, history, and other comics. By situating these references within a new context, he created a work that became more than the sum of its parts, just as sampling in music - or, in visual art, collage - recycles existing elements to create something new and valuable in its own right (despite legal controversies over copyright infringement). Much of the artwork in Cerebus could literally be considered mixed-media collage as well, if you consider the combination of line drawing with cut-out pieces of tone and xeroxes.

To me, one of the appeals of collage-based work is that the creation process appears transparent to the casual observer. You can see what the thing is made out of and imaging putting it together yourself. You can see the "mistakes," the edges of things. This is especially true looking at the original art pages for Cerebus, even being a step removed working with black and white scans. In the restoration and printing processes, this textural quality gets smoothed and refined. After all, the intended final product was always a two-dimensional black and white image. The edges of the tone are supposed to disappear into the surrounding black ink. The blue pencil lines were never meant to be visible.

One of the ongoing decisions we have to make in restoring the work is how much process ends up being visible. Ultimately, what adds to a viewer’s experience of the page, and what distracts? In any case, it’s been a privilege to work with these unrefined, imperfect, process-transparent, and now time-distorted pages. I’m sure this in large part explains the pleasure of owning original art in the first place, too.