Cerebus in Hell Contest--the Handbook of Hell?

Sean Michael Robinson:

Greetings!

After a long Friday and Monday morning doing prepress for the first issue of You Don't Know Jack! (details coming next week...), I spent the first chunk of my Tuesday morning work time putting together a road map and monthly schedule for the next issues of Cerebus In Hell?

As I've mentioned before, although the online strip ended its run at the end of March, Dave never stopped producing strips, and that constant production of between seven and ten strips a week has meant that we continue to gain lead time for the series. In fact, there's currently material enough to project out as far as May of 2019. That's right, that sequence of "Cerebus Woman" you got a peek at on Friday will be published nineteen months from now, and not a day sooner.

That being said, the need for new material continues, and we continue to look for different books, and even different formats, to try on for size.

Which brings us to the current contest—

The Handbook of Hell?

The much-loved and equally maligned Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe was first published in 1983. The massive undertaking was initiated by Jim Shooter, who claimed baseball card stats as his inspiration—but I think a more obvious inspiration would be the current exploding popularity of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and other table-top role-playing and adventure games. Stats were everywhere.

And inside OFOTMU, it's definitely the minutiae that dominate.

The majority of the writing was done by the incredibly disciplined and long-suffering Mark Gruenwald, who managed to make semi-coherent narratives out of several decades of scattershot monthly storytelling.

Entries fall into a few broad categories.

Take it away, Wikipedia--

The OHOTMU detailed the more significant characters, items and locations in the Marvel Universe, itemizing them into individual entries. Individual entries usually consisted of:

• A frontal full-body view of the character.

• Prose text describing the character's origin, powers, and other abilities and unique traits, as well as "statistics" such as place of birth, former aliases, height, weight, hair and eye color and so forth. The original edition opted only to describe the "origins" of characters (how they acquired their powers), instead focusing heavily on detailed explanations for how those powers functioned. In the Book of the Dead supplement, however, the handbook provided entire "histories" for the deceased characters, a trend which was then adopted for the main body of the Deluxe Edition, allowing the entire life and career of the characters to be covered. Major important pieces of equipment were also given technical illustrations with breakdowns of their functions and features.

• Example images of the character in action, taken directly from the comics themselves.

And in a move that must have delighted me as a prepubescent but I now find mostly hilarious, individual entries are also reserved for, ahem, important weapons, locations, vehicles, pretty much anything that can be viewed in a neato exploded view with lots of tech speak jutting out from it.

So, yes, the plan is to write a Handbook of Hell? , twenty (or so!) entries about assorted random characters/background characters/locations/objects/groups of people/etc. These will be primarily funny, NOT really long recitations of their lives as depicted in Cerebus in Hell? unless you're a comic genius who can make such a thing funny. Deviating from the normal course of things, in addition to the normal Dore Inferno illustrations, we'll also (most likely) be illustrating the technical objects with original drawings by myself or Benjamin (or, hey, stolen from somewhere and doctored up a bit). Just to give you an idea of where we are on this, the currently-written "object" entries include "The Whore of Babylon's Waffle Maker", lovingly labeled with the least technical language ever committed to paper. 

Want to participate? Write your entry and email it to cerebusarthunt at gmail dot com. Make me laugh (yes, this is Dave's criteria for acceptance--that it makes me laugh...) and we'll slot it into the issue! You'll receive a by-line in the issue and a cool $25.00 for your trouble.

For instance—see a random background Inferno figure who clearly has a story to tell? Give 'em an entry!

Like, say... that guy!

No, no, THAT guy!

I hope that some of the regular AMOC readers who also happen to be very fine writers will take a crack at putting together a few entries. This could end up being the strangest issue of the book yet, and let me tell you, as one of the three people who's read every single strip, that's saying a lot.

Any questions about the contest? Hit me up in the comments! And good luck!

Special thanks to Cerebus fan David Branning for the copious OHOTMU scans! It's much appreciated!

Edit:

For entries about individual characters or organizations, i.e. the really text-dense ones, I'd recommend a length of somewhere between 900 and no more than 1,200 words. For the other types of entries, take a look at the samples above for some idea of what we're looking for!

Edit Number Dos:

Can anyone name the (pretty significant) tie that OHOTMU has to Cerebus? Hint--the answer is on the credits page above!