Dave Sim talks drawing, Spawn #10, and his wrist

Hi, Everybody!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Spawn #10 Exclusive Halloween Cover:

Not finalized, or colored yet...

Ya want one?

Me too.

Get it here. (If I timed it right, it's available RIGHT NOW!)

OR, if you're not afraid of a little controversy, you can get the UN-"Censored-For-Grandma" variant of the variant here. (Ditto on my timing. But you get an extra two minutes to buy this one.)

As Dave sez:

MOST! CONTROVERSIAL! BACK! COVER! EVER! reads the front cover banner on the AARDVARK-VANAHEIM SPAWN 10 HALLOWEEN EDITION. Are you easily offended? Then DON'T buy this one. $75 Canadian (roughly $58 US) with postage included SIGNED BY DAVE SIM. Want to know what the controversy is? The only way to find out is to buy one*. Available only for 24 hours between 12:01 OCT 31 and 12:01 NOV 1 at cerebusdownloads.com. Just hit the HALLOWEEN EDITION $75 CDN button. "I will never be able to afford an original Ghastly Graham Ingels HAUNT OF FEAR cover, so this is the next best thing -- draw my own while I'm still (sort of) able," says CEREBUS creator Dave Sim. This is ONLY being announced here on A MOMENT OF CEREBUS so it might well be the RAREST CEREBUS COMIC BOOK ever. MACHINE NUMBERED OUT OF HOWEVER MANY COPIES ARE SOLD IN THE 24 HOURS (plus #1, 2 and 3 for THE CEREBUS ARCHIVE).

NOTE - Please don't show the HALLOWEEN EDITION back cover on AMOC. You can show the GRANDMA EDITION back cover.   

*I know, but that's because I'm an "inside people"...

And now, Dave Sim:

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Dave Sim:

[From October 19th -Matt]

[Now, Dave kinda slags the Sketchbook covers here, and I would like everybody to look at the following and tell me if you don't think it's worth it . -Matt]

Dave Sim (again):

For however long I was unable to draw -- two years? Three years? -- I was surprised to find myself looking mostly at the COMIC EYE EC homage cover I did for Blind Bat Press in Hamilton, thinking, "I should have done more EC stuff when I was still able." I imagine Bernie Wrightson thought the same thing. The problem is always that EC isn't actually popular enough to do EC-style stuff and make money. So, when Dagon told me he wanted a HALLOWEEN SPAWN 10 cover, I decided I better do my best Ghastly Graham Ingels cover while I still can. I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep the original art and have the wraparound cover framed in the Rectangle Office, finally replacing the Robert Bateman print which was one of those "90s" things. You can't even give Bateman prints away these days. I'm also going to take my time with it so -- although the HALLOWEEN COVER will be sold for 24 hours on October 31st, I have no idea when it will actually be done. It's very possibly my last chance at an Ingels/Wrightson piece so I'm not going to rush it.

Here's the cover roughly pasted up from enlarged photocopies that have been partly inked to show where the solid blacks are going to go.

[All these are click for more detail -Matt]

In order to spare "wear and tear" on the wrist, instead of tracing the image in pencil on tracing paper, flopping it and then retracing it -- the best method -- I, instead, divided the image into squares with blue pencil and then cut away one square at a time, penciling and inking each square one at a time, fitted into the appropriate space

I made an exception for the mouth since I wanted to do really accurate-looking Graham Ingels/Bernie Wrightson saliva which required doing the teeth and the tongue and the shape of the mouth 100% accurate and as a series of single lines so the saliva could be drawn relative to the non-saliva features.

The word balloons are a combination of Japanese brush pen for the solid blacks and then some Hunt 102 enhancement. All done at shoulder height in order to keep the wrist fully extended and all of the drawing done with the tips of my index and middle fingers under the magnifier lamp. It's a really awkward way to work but it extends the period of time I can draw before the pain and stiffness in the wrist can't be ignored any more.

This is what the lettering looks like in close-up which is roughly what I'm seeing in the magnifier lamp. Because I can only see a limited amount of the cover while I'm drawing, there's no way of knowing what the overall look is or to adjust what I'm doing to improve the overall look. Just "fly blind" and hope that there are enough successful parts to minimize the flaws in the unsuccessful parts

This is what "drawing" look like these days (apart from the remote control in the left hand taking the picture). My pneumatic drawing chair dropped to its lowest height (approximately 14" off of the ground), the part of the cover I'm "drawing" pushed up as high on the drawing board as I can get it so the forearm and wrist are as fully extended as I can get them, peering up through the magnifier lamp -- whose brand new circular bulb just burned out when I tried to turn it back on so I could see where I was going -- these pictures being taken between 3 and 4:30 am so I have them when Rolly comes in. It's been that kind of a year.)

Dave Sim (again, again.):
Okay, this is what I got done on Friday the 23rd. First of all, the heavy black brush stroke overtop of Batvark's snout. The face is going to be under-lit so I wanted the brush stroke to go to grey at the bottom which raised the problem of "How do I do that?" I decided on dry brush which came out good, but then posed the question of "Where that continues at the bottom side of the snout, do I want to go with 'dry-ER' brush? Or pen lines?" Couldn't make up my mind…

[ever since I decided to keep this one, the decision-making has been brutal -- I'm going to be looking at this every time I'm on the phone. I only have a landline and it's only in the Rectangle Office. I don't want to spend the rest of my life going "that part on the underside of the snout I really should have... (whatever I decided NOT to do)"].

So I did the contour brush strokes with the Japanese brush pen since I knew I wanted those. That was brutal because it was waist-height and all-wrist cornering curves -- you can see the jitter in it. So, I decided @#$% it...

I'm going to ink the mouth waist-height without the magnifier lamp (waiting for a ring-light replacement). I got most of the mouth done before that became untenable, wrist-wise. And then went, "Okay I'll do the horn on the helmet and the shadow from the under-lighting, completely 'dead-hand' " and suddenly it didn't look like Graham Ingels, it looked like Jack Kamen. So it was time to stop. DEAD.

Nothing against Jack Kamen.

On the contrary. One of the most amazing EC stories about an EC artist for me was the decision to get Jack Kamen to draw the comics adaptation of the Stephen King EC-homage movie, CREEPSHOW. I don't own the adaptation, but I still remember how amazing the cover was. JACK KAMEN DID THIS? Applause applause applause. Wow! How OLD must he be now (I remember thinking in the 1970s)? Probably younger than I am now. Did he do any of the interiors? Mm. No. That would have been good. Get Wrightson to do most of it (Wrightson did all of it) but get Jack Kamen to do this AMAZING STYLE he's suddenly capable of on one of the stories. Just like an EC horror comic, different stories drawn by different guys.

It was years later that I found out that Kamen had agreed to draw the book, had done the cover and then everything went south. Whoever was supposed to coordinate the comics adaptation didn't and by the time they did contact Kamen, it was crunch time and he knew there was no way he could get even a fraction of it done in time. So, that was when they went to Wrightson. Last minute. "Can you draw" -- whatever it was -- "a hundred pages of EC comics overnight?" It's all in a Wrightson interview somewhere. It would never have worked. By the time there's an actual finished script and movie stills, the movie is maybe a month or two away from the release date which is carved in stone. Wrightson did an amazing job with an impossible deadline. But, when I picture -- as I do often -- what CREEPSHOW would have looked like if the length of time needed to do the book had been factored in. Which Stephen King had the clout to make happen. And Wrightson was very emphatic that he had no complaints. He made more money from CREEPSHOW than he probably made from all of his other published work combined because it was STEPHEN KING'S CREEPSHOW.

To drop a name, the one time I had dinner at Peter Straub's place in New York (Peter was a CEREBUS fan) -- pretty much paid for by his collaborations with Stephen King -- he had a couple of CREEPSHOW originals in the downstairs bathroom that Stephen King had given him. They were really nice. But they were in the downstairs bathroom. Which spoke volumes about the pecking order.

I'm always grinding my molars over that whenever I'm doing an EC homage. Which is why I'll never let it be rushed or dicked around with. And I know from long experience that if I accidentally "swerve" towards another artist, that's where I'm going to end up unless I actively saturate myself in who I want it to look like. So beaucoup de Ingels, beaucoup de Wrightson over the next couple of days.

I'm hoping that keeping this really over-elaborate diary will help sales. We'll see.

Dave Sim (once more, WITH FEELING!):
29 October 20

Hi Matt!

0730 at the coffee shop after a few hours sleep. My right forearm is swollen, which evidently answers the question "What happens when I put in a full day at the drawing board, drawing mostly at shoulder height?" Wrist is also sore for reasons I'll explain in a moment. The unsolvable problem being: how do you show people what they're buying with the NEW 24-Hour Comic (apologies to Scott McCloud) and only two days to go until the on-sale date? Answer: You have to draw most of it and leave all the micromanaging for later (when, hopefully, the swelling in your forearm has gone down and your wrist isn't throbbing any more).

Studying Graham Ingels work turned out to be a good idea. I started going through my HERITAGE AUCTIONS catalogues looking for Ingels pieces. Found the "Ventriloquist's Dummy" splash page, then a HAUNT OF FEAR cover. Then THE HAUNT OF FEAR cover -- No.25 (1954) -- and the search was over. Auctioned August 2, 2013 [see attached] it had all the textures I was looking for. The big surprise was that it was almost all brush with some pen. 

Bad news for the wrist...

(there's no such thing as non-wrist Series 7 Winsor Newton brush inking and it can't really be done at shoulder height because brush inking is done by sight. That deserves a little explanation: because the fibres on the brush are so flexible, you only know where they're touching by the line they produce. You extrapolate where they are by what you're seeing. But you need to see them right in front of you to see them properly and that's not a shoulder-height thing. Pen, on the other hand is by touch. You physically feel where the pen is touching the paper and can adjust accordingly. I used to be able to. Now it's mostly shoulder-height, magnification-lamp guesswork. )

…but good news for my Ingels homage.

I minimized the amount of brush inking by "picking my spots" and making liberal use of Alex Raymond's brush sharpening (see SDOAR VOLUME ONE) trick but it was still a good couple of hours of waist-height, all-wrist inking. I just kept telling myself that this would be "it" for the new SPAWN 10 art.  
  

After that is the on-going assessment of KICKSTARTER's role in Aardvark-Vanaheim's future. The CEREBUS #1 KS took five months for fulfillment and A-V took in $12.5K of the $52K that came in, compared with (to cite two examples) the CAN8 KS which brought in $16K out of which A-V got roughly $8K (and right away) and the YOU DON'T KNOW JACK KS which brought in $21K out of which A-V will be getting roughly $2K. 

The perennial business owner's question: Now that I know THAT what do I know?

Still have high hopes for the SPAWN 10 KS, which is why I've been pushing the boundaries of what the right wrist is capable of from the moment Dagon told me that Todd's assistant had e-mailed him the SPAWN 10 digital files. If anything is going to Work (as opposed to work or "work") SPAWN 10 will be it. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 8 is either a close or distant second, potentially, so I'm getting psyched for doing multiple covers while also getting ready to take a hard pass if partnership Kickstarters -- and Big Revenue Kickstarters -- prove not to have the necessary economies of scale. That is, if I turn out to have just gone in a giant circle, back to the CEREBUS ARCHIVE Portfolios (No.9 has been done for the better part of a year) where I started from. Do them more efficiently and more quickly and you'll make as much money as you will from a partnership "bells and whistles" KS that brings in three to four times as much revenue. 

We shall see. EVENTUALLY. 

Okay, that was an hour and a half of left-handed typing. Hope TMI is good luck for SPAWN 10 THE HALLOWEEN EDITION! 

Thanks for you help, Matt. Talk with you, God willing, Thursday. 

Dave 

PS: In case you might be around and available tomorrow, I might keep up the SPAWN 10 HALLOWEEN TMI "CHATTER" by fax since my e-mailing capability ends when Rolly goes home this afternoon. He's out back at Camp David scanning The Monster right now.

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No, no, thank YOU Dave, as always.

There you go people, TMI/TL:DR on the Spawn #10 LIMITED EXCLUSIVE Halloween Cover.

Next Time: Oliver and everybody's tweets about this...