Cerebus Volume One--that COVER!

Sean Michael Robinson:

Talk about iconic images.

The Cerebus Volume One cover certainly qualifies. I'd imagine for a significant chunk of readers it's their first interaction with the series, their first exposure to the material at all. And it's interesting too, in the way it serves to both contextualize and, well, distract from the interiors of the first volume of the series.

Although Dave had been discussing the Cerebus the Barbarian book in the back of the monthly book for several months, we don't get a peek at the cover (and release date!) until well after High Society was released into the world. The first look at the cover comes in an ad in the back of issue #97 (April 1987 listed publication date). It's not the finished image, though, just a thumbnail sketch from Dave in technical pen and (or marker? hard to tell from the reproduction). Here it is, along with the Church & State I thumbnail also included—

It's interesting to see that the composition is already there. The bay, the arc of land behind him creating a strong contrast with the sky and an interesting negative shape for the middle ground. The foreground stones and tree and the strongly indicated lighting. It's a great image even small, and it certainly captures something (or points to a hidden aspect of) the early book. Namely, this figure both simultaneously funny and menacing, in this case, glowering out at the viewer, fully-armed. It's reminiscent of the early segment of issue 5, where a sleeping Cerebus is awakened by the Pigts.

This is heightened in the finished image by the one thing missing here—the fire, still-smoking.

Four issues later, in the back of Issue #101 (August 1987), we get our first look at a Gerhard version of the image.

At first I thought this was a Gerhard sketch worked up over a photocopy of the Sim drawing of the figure, but after inverting it and placing it over the finished image, I think it's most likely a photocopy reduction of the finished image, either with all of the detail blown out, or of the image in process, after it's received all of the blacks but prior to the finished hatching. Either seems likely.

Here's the image inverted.

And then, a month later, the finished image finally appears in the rear of the book, in issue 102 (September 1987)— "The Sudden Return of the Melodramatic Narrator."

This is significant for a few reasons. Those of you who have read my Reads essay already might remember that this issue has narrative significance that, as far as I know, hasn't really been touched on anywhere else, and provides a bridging link between the early issues, Church & State, and Mothers & Daughters. 

It also happens to have this image, which is strikingly similar to the back-cover portion of the Cerebus Volume One cover.

Which brings us to the actual cover.

For the fully-restored Cerebus Volume One, Dave and Sandeep removed the original artwork from storage, de-framed it, and scanned it on the Epson 10000XL in overlapping sessions. I then stitched these scans together using Photoshop's fantastic "Photo Merge" tool, checked to confirm that the work was solid, and flattened to the final image. 

There was a shocking amount of detail there that's never seen print before.

I'd always wondered about the right edge of the cover, the whiting out effect that occurs as the image moves towards the bleed edge. I'd always assumed, I suppose, that it was an intentional effect, some kind of atmosphere blowing over the water, a mild fog or something like that. Seems now that it was overexposure while shooting the artwork. 

Here's the right edge of the image, scanned from by eighth printing of Cerebus Volume One, and then the same section from the original artwork.

The same is true for the entire image, many of the fine line details burned off in photography, with the strong blacks left to carry the image.

So how would this happen?

I've mentioned before that during several periods of the book, it would routine for the camera operators to play with the exposure of the images in an attempt to anticipate gain on-press. This was done by the Fairway Press camera ops, and the Preney camera operators. Sometimes this was done with masks, masking off certain areas with smaller tone and exposing those longer or shorter than other segments of the page to lighten certain areas, mostly areas using tone with fine LPI (the first few issues of Church + State I use this, with only the Cerebus figures with fine LPI masked off). Other times this was done universally, across the page, which oftentimes had the effect of blowing out detail and fine-lines (the three "Jaka returns!" issues of C + S I are fine examples of this). 

That seems to be what happened here. An overzealous camera operator saw the Cerebus dot tone and, anticipating gain, overexposed the entire image and blew out the detail. And away it remained, until now.

You can see that the nomally 30 percent Cerebus dot tone has been overexposed to a 15 percent (or so) tone.

Next week— some balance! I present some excerpts from a printing textbook from the 1970s to give you an idea of what a difficult job it was to be a camera operator. It's, uh, more exciting than it sounds from my synopsis :)

(Bonus! A related excerpt from the current draft of Cerebus Volume One essay:

my

Printing highly detailed line art from negatives shot on a stat camera is a complicated process that took a century to refine, and camera operators were skilled technicians. That kind of expertise is rare in an era where everyone has a scanner on their desk. Which is to say, if we’re at a high water mark for the quality of printing in the world, you would  never know it from looking at the average quality line art reproduction in books being produced today.