Cerebus #114 (September 1988)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
CEREBUS ARCHIVE NUMBER 5:
A portfolio of 10 Signed & Numbered Prints from "Jaka's Story"
Raising Funds For The Restoration & Preservation Of The World's Longest Graphic Novel
(from an interview, June 2008)
Rose and I had taken a trip up to Bruce Mines, which is up north of
Lake Huron here in Ontario and I took a photo into the woods shooting
into the light with all the trees back there or all the leaves backlit
and all the trunks of the trees in silhouette basically -- and that's sort
of what I used as the basis for the wooded part.
4 comments:
My first issue of Cerebus. My favorite Cerebus cover. Can't wait to see these prints first hand.
As Margaret can tell you, it's also the quality of the trees in the Kitchener park where "Magic" used to be -- between Mill Street and Highland Streets, almost at Mill Street. I did send Gerhard over there to see the playground and the environment when I started writing the story. I don't remember if "Magic" was still there when he went over.
Brielle, who lived next door to the Off-White House (for as long as we were there) with her mother, Trudy (who still lives there) -- "the girl next door" -- definitely looks Jaka-like. She just had her first baby three weeks ago with husband Tom (Congratulations!)
She was skipping rope (age 9?) one day when I was leaving the house and asked, "What -- EXACTLY -- is it that you DO?" (We basically ignored the neighbours at the time, like a lot of people). I assume her curiosity was piqued by the number of times Ger and I were picked up by limousines back in the day.
I said, "I draw a comic book."
She thought this over. "Oh." and then asked "Which ONE?"
And I said, "It's called CEREBUS."
And she said (rather gleefully I thought) "I NEVER HEARD of it."
I said, "Well, it's a good thing some people have or I'd be out of a job". And then became self-conscious that I was talking to this nine-year-old girl with her mother nowhere around and said "Bye bye".
She and Tom live on Mill Street a few blocks down from the park.
One of the greatest draws of Cerebus during these years were the stunning covers.
Absolutely nothing like them anywhere on the shelves of the LCS.
And given Dave's ... revelations during that Lola / Jaka origin video I guess Brielle is lucky she wasn't 19 at the time with Dave asking her upstairs to look at his etchings...
How formative our formative years really are!
Steve
Well, Brielle WAS 19 and living next door. I remember Chris Verhoeven and I standing at the door talking about a cover separation this time when she walked by and he went full-on Jackie Gleason: hummina-hummina-hummina-hummina. She was -- and IS -- a stunner.
But, once a thing is seen, it can't be UNseen: NEVER cross your own timeline. I'm older than her mother. You just don't DO that.
Even "back in the day", I would very, very, very rarely get involved with anyone here in town. Just too complicated and too messy too quickly.
She and Tom went to Fan Expo in Toronto a year ago (two years ago?) as Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze the same week that the guy in California who used to send me old beat-up comic books sent me an old beat-up copy of the second appearance of Poison Ivy in BATMAN (which I had gotten as one of my subscription copies when I was 10). So I had to leave it in her mailbox along with that part of the letter where I was reminiscing about it.
It was a very funny letter, I thought. What I "made of" Poison Ivy as a ten-year-old boy. Judge for yourself when we get to COLLECTED LETTERS 2014/2015!
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