CEREBUS IN HELL? #0 ships 28th September 2016
(Diamond Order Code: JUL161105)
(Diamond Order Code: JUL161105)
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CEREBUS IN HELL? strip #9 -
One of us pointed out to the other that it was much funnier if the two-dimensional cardboard cut-out of Cerebus was suspended upside down rather than right-side up. Which turned out to be true.
Comedy may not be rocket science but it's still pretty mysterious and exacting.
8 comments:
It was interesting proofreading Jeff's proofreading of READS at the same time we were prepping CEREBUS IN HELL? with Victor Reid's bugaboo about illustrators never getting the details right on the stories they're illustrating.
Dore's plates are amazing but are, most of the time, only distantly related to Dante's poem.
Which is another kind of hell: Dante's epic poem trapped inside Dore's largely unrelated pictures.
What were that famous stage actor's last words? "Dying is easy; comedy is hard."
Actually, having witnessed first-hand John Totleben fully illustrating (for Harry A. Chesler, back in the 1970s) THE RUBIYAT not once, but twice, I sympathize completely with Doré's plight in illustrating many of the books he took on. The quantity of artwork is staggering; the prose, not always so inviting for such a volume of illustrations. Doré's THE RAVEN makes more of a man, a chair, a room, phantasms, and a bloody black bird than ANY artist should ever have to even contemplate toying with.
That's part of the contention between writer and illustrator. The artist sees it as having to make something visually interesting out of something that isn't visually interesting. And the writer sees it as "Why can't he just draw what I actually wrote?"
I have my own rules as an illustrator (and I've illustrated a LOT of books, both novels and short story collections (and even a bit of non-fiction) by authors like Nancy Collins, Joe Lansdale, Joseph A. Citro, Rick Hautala, Douglas Winter, Neil Gaiman, etc.
(1) NEVER reveal a key plot or story point with an illustration.
I, for one, hate every edition of MOBY DICK that features the great white whale smashing into the Pequod on the cover.
(2) All illustrations should have impact AS illustrations, but bear up to scrutiny in the full context of the book or story being illustrated.
(3) All illustration should reflect the actual reading of the work being illustrated; thus, I always read and reread the text before diving into my roughs, and usually again before the final art completion.
You'd be amazed (or not) how many books, pulps, short stories have been "illustrated" (and above all had cover art created) under vague directions of an editor or art director.
Now, there's a circle of Hell or two I could propose!
I see those poets are causing problems for Cerebus again! :)
Back in my illustration days, I took great pride in that: doing a picture that was exactly as the writer described it. And, as you say, that requires close reading of the text and close reading of the text requires multiple readings.
It is definitely a weird and exacting process. I'm doing a funny short story as a giveaway for a big publisher. They wouldn't allow me to use the word "idiot" so I had to substitute "doofus." The whole thing just falls flat that way, but there ya go. And why it falls flat, I don't even really know. It just does.
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