Happy Longboxing Day!

Hi, Everybody!

It's Longboxing Day! (The day AFTER Free Comic Book Day, where you file away your FCBD goodies in your longboxes.)

So what'd ya get?

That's great, here's what I got:

Conan! Rob De La Torre's art looks like John Buscema. Like, a lot.

Dog Man! I live with a 7 year old. So I got this for her.

Turtles! Half is the 80s cartoon, and the other half is the 2010s cartoon. And then there was this ad which made me giggle like a schoolgirl:

Note, it DOESN'T include Turtles #8. (But IF you got a copy of the remastered Turtles 8, AND this you'd have an empty wallet...)

Frazettaverse! Basically, what if you took a bunch of Frazetta's iconic posters/covers, and made a comic universe out of it.

One of the Marvel books! Look, they were out of the Archie Horror book and the Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. book. My options were limited...

The Umbrella Academy! Well, the first one of these ended up being worth money...

But that's not all, I also hit the $1 boxes (The whole store was 25% off, so they were 75 cent books...)

"Okay, the Cerebus issue makes sense, but what's with the weird indy book Matt?"

I'm glad you asked Imaginary AMOC Reader who lives in my head rent free.

Para Troop #0 is a comic no self respecting Cerebus in Hell? Fan can be without.

"Okay...that's a minority, but WHY?"

Look at the credits page:

Yup.

Damnit Birdsong hisself.

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Speaking of people who work(ed) with Dave, Gerhard will be in The Lakes International Comic Art Festival 2023 in September, if you see him, tell him "Matt says, 'hi.'!

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The Last Day Remarqued Editions at CerebusDownload.com.

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Heritage has the page from Minds where Cerebus asks what the hell the things around his neck are. And other neat stuff.

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CEREBUS IN HELL?:

New one!

CIH PRESENTS WAR IN HELL? & CIH PRESENTS WAR IN HELL? Signed

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Hey Matt!

Could you add a link to SDOAR 2023 GFM at the bottom of your posts on AMOC?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/sdoar-2023

Thanks!

Jen

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Oliver's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".

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The AMOC TeePublic Shoppe

Up to 35% off site-wide:  

May 10-14 & 25-29

Tell your fans! Remind them that everything will be up to 35% off 

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Next Time: Monday!

William Tucci's Shi

William Tucci's Shi
by Dave Sim
from Shi: Senryaku (Crusade Comics, 1995)

Click image to enlarge

Shi: Senryaku (Crusade Comics, 1995)

Cover art by Frank Frazetta

The Distance Between 'Semi-Professional' & 'Professional' Cartoonist

Left: Conan Berserker (1968) by Frank Frazetta

Right: Cerebus Berserker (1978) by Dave Sim

(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from the notes to Cerebus Archive Number One, May 2014)

[Cerebus Berserker] is the earliest piece of published CEREBUS artwork in the Cerebus Archive, measuring 11.5 x 17.5 inches. The idea had been to have a third item to sell on our convention table in Toronto along with copies of CEREBUS No. 1 and 2 -- the image is such an iconic one, that I thought it would attract attention in that way.

It's a good example of having an exaggerated idea of your own commercial viability and your ability, as an artist, to attract attention to your work.

It was certainly exceptional -- at the time and since -- to get two issues of CEREBUS out two months apart -- an actual bi-monthly schedule -- but not nearly as noteworthy as I thought it would be seen at the time. Anything that wasn't DC and Marvel -- particularly at a late 1970s comic convention -- was a fanzine until proven otherwise. A fanzine on a bi-monthly schedule was still just a fanzine...

...It's characteristic of the semi-professional cartoonist. You know that you draw better than 99% of the human population and you know that you can produce relatively complicated pieces in relatively short periods of time compared to the "man in the street". But the distance between that status and being a professional -- and then aspiring to be a professional in the top ranks of your profession (which is what Barry Windsor-Smith was and I wasn't) is the shoals upon which most cartooning ships founder.

Basic amateur errors: like the pen lines which cross the design midway down the right hand border. The fact that the shadow patterns along the parallel lines don't fall consistently in the same direction. "I need to get this done." conflicting with the need to do it properly. "The more haste the less speed."

It was a great IDEA for a poster. But to be commercially viable, I had needed to take a LOT more time in execution, and didn't.

I don't even own any copies of the poster itself, but the colour was a real nightmare, as well. I tried to guess what colour combinations were needed, doing cyan, yellow and magenta overlays on acetate with mechanical tone, trying to imitate Frazetta's earth tones and, instead it came out pretty much as it was: a pastiche of light blue, largely because I wanted Cerebus to be the only toned part of the black plate and there's no way to fake Frazetta earth tones without using shades of grey WITH the cyan, magenta and yellow.

The answer would have been to create the necessary shades of grey with pen lines -- lots of cross-hatching and stippling with a Hunt 102. But I wanted to translate Frazetta's oil paint effects into Barry Windsor-Smith pen lines, the kind BWS used on his Gorblimy Press prints which DIDN'T include cross-hatching. Another amateur mistake: if you close off solutions to your rendering and printing problems on the basis of what you want the finished piece to look like and ignore what your own solutions are going to result in, you're going to end up with a very amateurish finished product.

I signed and numbered 500 of them.

I don't think we sold one, either at the convention or when it appeared on the back cover of CEREBUS No. 3 and 4. They just sat in a pile over the course of the first few years of Aardvark-Vanaheim, getting dog-eared, dusty and torn wherever they had been thrown and finally we just threw them all out. I willing to bet that Harry Kremer (1946-2002) at Now And Then Books bought way too many of them -- and that they probably suffered the same fate in the Now And Then Books basement.

I wish I had at least saved three of them for the Cerebus Archive.

Remembering Frank Frazetta

Varkzetta Sketches (2010)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(promoting the Cerebus TV special on Frank Frazetta, June 2010)

There's never been before and never will be again a Frank Frazetta in the world of comics. If Michaelangelo had been fired by Al Capp, as Frank was, there might have been thought balloons on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel! ...All of us in "The Comic Book Nation" owe so much to Frank's genius...

Commission: Bonfire Of The Super-Heroes
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:

(discussing the commission Bonfire Of The Super-Heroes at Cerebus Art)

Intended to be the centrepiece of a triptych, this is Bonfire Of The Super-Heroes. The specific request was for Cerebus a la Frank Frazetta's Conan The Destroyer cover art, only in this case with Jaka holding onto one leg and Red Sophia holding onto the other. This is a good example of getting your money's worth. Once I had the Cerebus, Jaka and Red Sophia figures done, that left the question of what the pile of dead adversaries was going to be and I tried just roughing in a few corpses (it's a pretty vague aspect of Frazetta's original painting. There's an arm sticking up and a rib cage, but that's about it). Ger and I did one of these commissions years ago, that consisted of Cerebus standing atop a pile of dead Smurfs so, really hating to repeat myself… that was when I got the idea of doing Marvel and DC characters. A natural gag. Of course, if that had been part of the request, I would have said we needed to get more money for it, but since it was my idea, Patron A is basically getting a bunch of extra characters for free. It's not a guarantee that that's going to happen but I'd have to say that it happens a lot more often than it doesn't.