Aardvark News Round-Up #3

Cerebus Guide To Self-Publishing

The recent release of the digital download version of the long out-of-print Guide To Self-Publishing drew a guarded response from Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter who noted:

My hunch without re-reading is that this may serve better as a historical document than a how-to and as a world of insight into the unique publishing achievement that was the 300-issue Cerebus best of all. 

Other opinions strongly disagreed and argued that it is still a highly relevant resource, most notably by Stephen Holland at the Page 45 store in Nottingham, UK. In a review of the first edition back in 1997, Stephen said, "Without a doubt I would not want to enter this industry as a creator without having read this first, regardless of whether I intended to self-publish or sell my creativity to/through other publishers...".  A recent tweet confirmed that his opinion still stood:

Comicbook artists, writers but also retailers, I stand by my quote: I would honestly read this CEREBUS guide now: http://t.co/orlEWhsd9k

— Page 45 (@PageFortyFive) May 18, 2015

Why not risk $9 and decide for yourself?


Gerhard At Motor City Con

Gerz Blog this week posted a wall of photos from Gerhard's guest appearance at last weekend's Motor City Con. Here's just a couple of great Cerebus illustrations swiped from that post:

Charles Burns At The Believer

The McSweeney's Store is now offering a giant poster of 130 portraits drawn by Charles 'Black Hole' Burns for the cover of The Believer magazine. Sadly, that poster doesn't include the Cerebus illustration the magazine ran back in 2005, but it's all the excuse I need to run that picture again. As Dave Sim said at the time: "Wow. A Charles Burns Cerebus. Hitler or Rembrandt: once a fanboy always a fanboy." A gallery of Charles Burns' portraits can still be seen online at the Adam Baumgold Gallery.

The Avant Garde List

Penguin Graphic Classic Covers

Cover art by Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Seth & Charles Burns

(See all the Penguin comic covers at Paul Buckley Design)

DAVE SIM:
(from 'Mind Games Of The Avant Garde' in Following Cerebus #8, May 2006)

...when [Chester Brown] and I were en route to The Beguiling after having had lunch with Rob Walton and James Turner, we were discussing a recent plum assignment that Chet had landed with Penguin Books: doing a comic-strip / cartoon illustration cover for a literary classic -- in his case D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. I had asked -- more than a little disingenuously -- who else had been asked to do one of those covers? "Let me see," he said, "Art Spiegelman did one, Dan Clowes, Charles Burns, Seth, Chris Ware..."

"The usual suspects," I said.

Chet smiled and allowed -- I suspect more than a little disingenuously -- that it did seem to be the same group of cartoonists that kept turning up in these high-prestige real-world environments. Indulging in a little good-natured teasing from the sidelines, I asked, What had happened to the Brothers Hernandez? How did they get dropped from The List? Chet didn't know. Hard to tell if he was being serious or answering in the same facetious manner -- as is always the case until one of us cracks up. They hadn't been in that special issue of McSweeny's had they? Mmm. Chet was pretty sure they had been. As I say, good-natured teasing. Of course then we got to the Beguiling and Chet pulled out a copy of McSweeny's, and there they were: Jaime and Gilbert. Okay, I thought, time for some more good-natured teasing. What about Adrian Tomine? Why wasn't he on The List? Adrian -- or Mr Tomine if he prefers -- was on my mind because I had just picked up the latest issue of Optic Nerve.

"Oh, Adrian is definitely on The List," said Chet.

Yeah? How so? I asked -- preparing to be needlessly quarrelsome -- which is always a big part of discussions when I visit Chet: whether the subject is comic books, Scripture, prostitution, or gloves vs. mittens.

"Adrian passed on doing Lady Chatterley's Lover -- that's why it was offered to me."

I cracked up. Okay, Chet won that round hands down.

...what bothers me about The List is the sense of More Validity Than Thou that seems to accompany membership on it for several of its members. It seems to me that the latest round got launched with the New York Times Magazine - can you cite the date? - cover that you had done and the picture of you with Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Seth, Dan Clowes and... am I missing anyone?... and the accompanying article last summer. Nice Big Feathers in everyone's cap all the way around, to be sure, for whatever actual value the "real world" coverage has. But I really thought we had all gotten past that back in the 1980s when the Major Piece on Frank Miller in Rolling Stone really didn't do anything much for Frank that Frank... and DC... hadn't done for himself and when Alan Moore became Top of the Pops pop culture phenom in England that left him, at the end of the day, you know, Alan Moore. Not that there's anything wrong with that stature. I should be so lucky...

New York Times Magazine (July 2004)
Clockwise from Top Left: Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco

'Not Funnies' by Charles McGrath

Charles Burns: Cover Portraits For The Believer 2003-2013

Cerebus illustration by Charles Burns
Published in The Believer #27 (September 2005)

ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY:

Adam Baumgold Gallery presents an exhibition of portraits by Charles Burns that were published on the cover of The Believer magazine between 2003 and 2013. Using ink on paper in a strict 6 by 6 inch format, Burns creates endless variations of texture, lighting, and composition. His stark, black line offers a distinctive take on the tradition of portrait drawing. Over 300 drawings of artists, writers, musicians, animals, comic characters, and historical figures will be included.

DAVE SIM: 
(from Following Cerebus #7, February 2006)

"Wow. A Charles Burns Cerebus." Hitler or Rembrandt: once a fanboy always a fanboy. 

Charles Burns Portraits (clockwise from top-left):

Dan Clowes, Joe Sacco, Alan Moore, Phoebe Gloeckner, Scott McCloud, Gary Panter

The Charles Burns: Cover Portraits For The Believer 2003-2013 exhibition is being held at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York City between 30 May to 26 July 2013. 

The Believer: A 'Cerebus' Review

The Believer #27, cover detail (September 2005)
Art by Charles Burns

DOUGLAS WOLK:
(from The Believer #27, September 2005)

...It is an absolute masterpiece - one of the most ambitious and fully realised narratives of the past century. And its flaws are plentiful, wide, and maddening, and penetrate straight to its core...

...Which brings us back to the aesthetics vs. politics problem. It's comforting to see first rate art that's compatible with one's own political views; but to see first-rate art that's violently opposed to one's own political views is necessary. If your sympathies are even vaguely secular or liberal - if, that is, you're reading the Believer, whose title Sim would probably find bitterly amusing - then the second half of Cerebus is an attack on you. It demands a response in the reader's mind, and if you can see past "what a total dick," you're likely to come out of it with your own thoughts about gender, power, and the nature of creation (with both a large and small C) clarified.

Any one can come up with a grand twenty-seven-year plan for a mammoth work of art, but Sim, along with very few others in human history, actually went through with it. He made the commitment to his story and spent more than a quarter of a century grinding away at it, and he finished it, exactly when he said he would. A serious, ambitious, completed large-scale work, no matter how deeply flawed it is, beats a perfectly envisioned but unrealised project every time. At the very least, Cerebus is worth reading for the same reason a grand, half-ruined cathedral of a religion not your own is worth spending time in: it's a cathedral. Take what you can from it.

Douglas Wolk is an author and critic, and his book Reading Comics won an Eisner Award and Harvey Award in 2008.