Thursday 10 October 2019

Steve Peters Week II: Comic Jam with Dave Sim

MARGARET LISS:
A few years ago I scanned all of Dave Sim's notebooks. He had filled 36 notebooks during the years he created the monthly Cerebus series, covering issues #20 to 300, plus the other side items -- like the Epic stories, posters and prints, convention speeches etc. A total of 3,281 notebook pages detailing his creative process. I never really got the time to study the notebooks when I had them. Just did a quick look, scanned them in and sent them back to Dave as soon as possible. So this regular column is a chance for me to look through those scans and highlight some of the more interesting pages.

No notebook stuff this week for this week is Steve Peters' Week!

Friend to the Blog Steve Peters is running a new KickStarter to fund his latest project: Parallel Comicverses #1, which has a new story in it, WRITTEN BY DAVE SIM! And to celebrate, A Moment of Cerebus is doing STEVE PETERS WEEK II!

In last week's column I showed you some Cerebus cover recreations that Steve Peters did using his characters I thought were pretty spot on. This week I thought I'd show you the original art I got from him way many moons ago. It is a jam piece between Steve and Dave Sim that Steve used in his Origin of Sparky comic.

According to Steve on the jam: "The Dave Sim jam was done by mail over a 2-year period between 2004 and 2006. Dave tells me that it was the first thing he began drawing after completing his epic comic, Cerebus!"

Neither signed the piece (insert sad face, guess it means I'll need to track them both down again at a comic con to have them sign it) so guess what is Dave's bit and what is Steve's bit. To me, I can pick out a Steve Peters' character pretty easily. . .but Dave is known to be a master at mimicking someone else's style.

And all these pictures can be clicked on to get a larger version so you can zoom on it.

Like this hand, that looks like a hand drawn by Steve Peters. The woman also reminds me of his style:



As you can see, that section has some thinner paper that covers the artwork - I'm guessing to protect it in  transit. Perhaps Steve did the pencils and mailed it to Dave for the inks? There is also thinner comic art board used and a thicker comic art board used. Though the thicker comic art board isn't Bainbridge, so I'm guessing both types originated with Steve.

The K with the eyes makes me think that is Dave, as it reminds me of the bits from Minds and Guys:


The section below? I'm thinking the face on the planet is Steve, perhaps the Sparky, the rest of it? I'm not too sure:



And this next section? I'm not sure who did what. What I do know, is it reminds me a lot of the scene of Cerebus going up up up in Women to reach the Eighth sphere where he talks to Po.


And yes, if you haven't gotten yourself a copy of The Origin of Sparky, you can get one as the 'Cerebus Package" reward for Steve's current kickstarter.

3 comments:

Jeff said...

Okay. You said guess, so here are my best guesses (and thanks for letting me play, Matt):

Image 4: Left side Sim, right side Peters.

Image 3: Left side Sim, right side Peters.

Image 2: Left side, Sparky by Sim, the rest by Peters; Right side, multi-eyed creatures by Sim, the rest by Peters.

Image 1: All by Peters, except maybe the lips and the watches.

Please mail my Anti-Prize via the USPS.

Anonymous said...

Okay, comments here are fun.

Comments here are usually high-altitude comments. Fair enough.

Lately, some interesting, but disturbing things.

Including mine? I dunno.


Steve Peters said...

Margaret, I'm surprised you weren't aware of the pedigree of these drawings---I thought I'd mentioned it at the time. There IS some discussion about it in Dave's letters to me in Collected Letters 2004.

Dave and I took turns doing entire tiers. He preferred the heavier boards, so those are his---the lighter bristol paper ones are mine. That said, he left a lot of the inking to me.

So the one with the lady angel is all me aping Dave's pointillist style. I can see that I was aping his lettering as well.

For the 'K' tier, I asked Dave to include the demonic beasties as seen in Rick's Story. He did all the pointillism on the angel except maybe the wing. I inked all the beasties myself (Dave replied, "Hey! Only I'M supposed to be able to ink those beasties like that!"

The tier with the Earth and Moon---all me. They, along with the angel with the sword, are references to a comic I was working on at the time with Comicverse co-creator Bianca Alu-Marr that never saw the light of day. I may yet make an appearance in The Comicverse someday, God willing.

The tier with the two Sparkys was Dave's. I'm pretty sure I inked the entire thing on that one.