Bits and Pieces

MARGARET LISS:

Contributor to A Moment of Cerebus with a weekly column on Thursdays that give us a look at Dave Sim's Cerebus notebooks. Since Matt is gone this week, I wanted to do something a bit different for Tuesday. If you've got complaints, wait for him to get back as I don't get paid enough to handle them.

So. . .the Boss Man is away possibly trying to get his elves to make presents faster as Christmas approaches or perhaps Boss Man knows something about how 2020 is going to end so he went to his bunker. Whichever it is, he left the rest of us in charge of the contents. Bwahahahahaha. The power went to straight to my head. Time to pull out the stuff that Matt would probably let me post, but you know, he only gives me Thursday. 

First up, Cerebus the Newsletter. If you haven’t heard about it, go read up on it here and even AMoC got in on it with some of my articles from it. While I do have copies of issues #14 through 21 in print – though you couldn’t tell that from the Friends of Cerebus website. If you want to purchase copies at $2 each plus shipping, just email me – the original 13 issues went out a print a long time ago, so I can't help you with hard copies of those. Occasionally I get requests to reprint them, but who has the time? So instead, here is Cerebus the Newsletter #1 in PDF. Enjoy!

Next, how about some tracing paper preliminaries? Many of Dave’s tracing papers are just black pencil, I’ve only see a few blue pencil ones. He must’ve made the switch at some point to skipping the blue pencil and going straight to the black pencil. This one is on tracing paper that is 14” x 11” and is the cover for Cerebus #97:

Tracing paper prelim for  Cerebus #97 cover

The next piece of tracing paper is 19” x 24”, but I was only able to get a picture of the part of it with the drawing on it:

If you're curious, the yard stick is from my Great-Great-Grandfather's ice scream store

The piece was part of the opening to the Cerebus Art site that is now defunct (unfortunately) that if I remember correctly, Dave sold some of his art at. The opening was an animated opening, which I cannot find in my archives nor is the internet helping out. I did find part of the color art for it on Brian Coppola’s art gallery, labeled Cerebus: Cinematic A (drawing).

And finally, how about the color separations for the cover to Cerebus #59. When I got them, someone had taped them to paper on both the left and top side. The registration of the four layers as to be so good that I cannot tell by eye alone if they are misregistered or not. I’ve since removed the top tape, so they can be flipped like a book. On top is black, then cyan, yellow, and magenta. 

Yes, make with the clicky to make it bigger

To get them to show up, I had to put a piece of white paper behind them. I tried different color papers behind the yellow, but white seemed to work the best. And sorry you can see me taking the picture in them, I didn't bother hooking up the scanner for them. So here is another picture of them together:

I don't know if Dave has the rest of the color separations for the covers - I hope so! - but at least one was saved from the garbage bin.