It's certainly interesting doing these commissioned pieces. I mean, on
the one hand it makes me feel like a much older artist than the fifty
year-old that I am. Commissions are sort of an Legendary Veteran kind of
thing, but then being the Pariah King of Comics puts you in various
contexts that you might otherwise not be in. Producer of Commissioned
Work being one of them (although I've yet to tie it in with my
discussions with Chester about prostitution). The interesting part is
that I end up drawing things that I would never in a million years
choose to draw on my own. It's no big secret that I am definitely not in
the Star Wars fan category. I had gone to see the first film when it
came out and loved it (more vicariously through Gene Day who L*O*V*E*D
IT) and then went to see the second film when it came out and, well,
that was it for me. I went to see the last instalment when that came out
a couple of summers ago, part of me wondering, "How did I get so easily
put off by these things? Wasn't there enough Gene Day Juice in the
first one to keep me coming out to see every one of the films the day it
was released?" The answer came at some point in that final instalment
when Yoda showed up on the screen. Oh, right. Fozzy Bear. Frank Oz doing
his Fozzy Bear voice with that strange syntax. That was what had done
it all right. My willing suspension of disbelief went from willing to
unwilling the moment I was being asked to accept a Muppet with Fozzy
Bear's voice as a Jedi Master. Mm. Sorry. No can do.
No offence to all the Star Wars fans who are legion in the ranks of the Cerebus Yahoos, but that was it.
So
it was interesting going to get reference at the library for the piece.
There was a picture book that was just tailor-made for my purposes,
Star Wars The Visual Dictionary (D.K. Publishing Inc.). Big display
publicity shot of Harrison Ford from the first movie looking as if
George Lucas is somewhere off-camera explaining to him exactly how to
pose as Flash Gordon as drawn by Al Williamson. This was one of those
"luck of the draw" things for John H. that he was asking for a Star Wars
commission and that Al Williamson had drawn the original Star Wars
newspaper strip. I would get a chance to do my best Al Williamson
impression on the page and John was pretty much guaranteed to get a much
nicer drawing as a result as I tried to impress my inner Al Williamson.
I
had already warned John over the phone that Cerebus as Han Solo was
going to pose some difficulties since Han Solo is a distinctly vertical
figure. The more vertical a character is, visually, the more difficult
it is to compress him to Cerebus size. The leg holster was a good
example. It was either going to be too large if I drew the blaster
accurately, taking up most if not all of Cerebus' leg, or it would look
like a toy if I drew it to Cerebus scale. The Flash Gordon jackboots are
a big part of the look and there was no way to do them on the shape of
Cerebus' leg. The best I could manage was shiny leggings. John expressed
confidence in whatever solutions I came up with. "At least he has the
same vest," he said hopefully. Han Solo had a Cerebus vest? Sure enough
when I got the book out -- cut differently but definitely a black vest.
Anyway,
this serendipitous publicity shot of Harrison Ford looking exactly like
an Al Williamson Flash Gordon pushed me in an entirely different
direction. I just HAD to use the whole thing and traced it off in short
order manufacturing my rationalization as I went. What if Cerebus is
using the legs as stilts? That way I could draw the legs and boots as
much like Al Williamson as I wanted and it would look kind of funny to
have Cerebus' own legs bulging up Harrison Ford's svelte waistline. I
even decided to include Harrison Ford's hair as if someone had taken
extraordinary pains to make this aardvark character look as much like
the actor as possible. I tightened up the figure in pencil on tracing
paper and got out a sheet of 11 x 17 S-172 artboard to figure out how
much space he was going to take up.
That was when I noticed
that the book had a nice Star Wars logo in gold against a white
backdrop, which meant that I could trace it off without even shooting a
photocopy. It only took a few minutes to change Star Wars to Vark Wars.
Then it was time for Jaka as Princess Leia. I tried the traditional
all-white robe and the hairstyle that looked like two cheese Danish
stuck on either side of her head from the first movie. It just didn't
work for me somehow. It was hard to tell why. The basic answer is that
the outfit is pretty much featureless—a nun's habit is more
distinctive!—and it was pretty much tailored to Carrie Fisher's body
type which is very different from Jaka's body type. I could trace off
the publicity photo in the book, but pretty much everything would have
to be redrawn anyway including the posture of the figure. What a strange
outfit. Did they cast Carrie Fisher before they designed the costume?
These are the sorts of questions you find yourself asking yourself when
you're hip-deep in a strange commission and mentally analyzing the
physical components. Under what other circumstances would Dave Sim find
himself asking himself if Carrie Fisher or her costume came first in the
first Star Wars movie?
On the facing page was a smaller
shot of Carrie Fisher dressed as Jabba the Hutt's slave girl. It
certainly seemed more suited to Jaka with her dancer costumes (and I
suspect if your average Star Wars fan was to choose a favourite Princess
Leia outfit the slave girl outfit would be the one) (I wonder how many
slave girl publicity stills Carrie Fisher sells versus the other
publicity stills at show signings these days?). This raised even more
layers of speculation that I had no idea I had inside of me. How did
George Lucas talk Carrie Fisher into the slave girl thing? I mean, that
was pretty far along in the series and presumably Carrie Fisher was
still thinking and hoping that this Star Wars gig might be a stepping
stone to other roles in "major motion pictures". "Barely there" costumes
are not exactly something with which actresses with hard-won screen
cred are known to willingly associate. Did he just blindside her with
the script? Throw it onto her front steps in the middle of the night?
PRINCESS LEIA DRESSED AS SLAVE GIRL ENTERS FROM RIGHT OF SCENE. When did
she first get a good look at the costume? Did she call George Lucas up
screaming? Can you even do that to George Lucas or did everyone have a
"Whatever George wants George gets" clause in their contract? That might
explain my favourite Harrison Ford quote where he said that George
Lucas should be tied to a chair and forced to read his own dialogue out
loud.
Where was I dredging all this stuff up from?
Were
there negotiations about how much skin would be showing? Or was the
outfit just presented as a fait accompli? I mean, it's a very good
costume, based solidly in the Alex Raymond/Dale Arden mode (I assume it
was one of the things on George Lucas' mental checklist) but with all of
the high-end Hollywood costume artistry brought to bear. "Here's Alex
Raymond/Dale Arden and here's Carrie Fisher's body type. Now, how do we
do work them both in?" Pretty flawlessly, I would say. In the publicity
shot she certainly doesn't look very happy (which I suppose could be
just "in character" for a slave girl). Looks like she had to work out
pretty hard to get that toned. How old was she at that time? Early
thirties? No love handles, no pot belly. She did a great job.
As
I say, it's bizarre what goes through your mind when you actually work
on something like this. In the same vein, it was an unexpectedly happy
nostalgia jolt to have John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack running
through my head for days on end. Took me right back to 1978-79 when that
was what you listened to most mornings at Gene Day's studio in
Gananoque. "What'll it be? John Williams' Star Wars soundtrack or John
Williams' Superman soundtrack?" It certainly made writing and drawing
comic books seem incredibly heroic at the time.
I really
have to give George Lucas credit as a thorough-going storyteller,
assuming that all of the detailed information included in this book came
from him personally. I mean, I'm probably just outside the loop, but I
had no idea that that broken red racing stripe on the side of Han Solo's
pants is a "Corellian blood stripe" or that his belt is equipped with a
Droid caller and blaster power cell. Or that the blaster consists of a
scope, enhanced blast delivery circuits, power pack release lever, low
power pulse warning, power pack, cooling unit, final stage collimator
(with "puree" setting?) and flash suppressor. Or that it's officially a
DL-44 pistol. I think I managed to get them all on there, although I'll
frankly admit that the proportions are probably off by quite a bit.
Anyway,
I did a quick Jaka as Jabba the Hutt slave girl drawing on tracing
paper and then reduced it a bit on the photocopier so she didn't look
TOO much larger than Han Solo (although I did want her to look
larger—this is, after all, Cerebus and Jaka), turned over the photocopy
on the light table to trace off onto another piece of tracing paper…
…and the next day promptly fell ill for nearly a month.
Shall a bore you with my illness? Not the Full Horror Story. I'm saving
that one. But just the sheer surprise that I had never been through
anything like this before. All of my recent experience of the last
twenty years or so has been that when you feel sick the best thing to do
is to just go straight to bed for twenty-four hours. My experience has
been that if you catch it early in the gestation, you sleep and let your
body—by itself—get rid of the virus or whatever it is. Usually involves
staying as warm as possible in bed and letting that body warmth crest
until the fever breaks (that is, you wake up bathed in sweat from head
to foot, towel off, change night clothes and go back to sleep for
another six to eight hours). Worked like a charm for years. The
difference this time was that I went to bed but I didn't sleep. I didn't
really even notice that I didn't sleep (which was very weird in
itself). I also couldn't get my body temperature to go up no matter how
many night clothes I put on (up to and including my winter coat). So I
just had this feverish weight on my brain that made even basic thought
processes really difficult and then virtually impossible but which just
stayed up there on my scalp and refused to come down into the rest of my
body. Since I run on my thought processes this posed no small problem.
The biggest concern, as always, was my prayer times and for a couple of
days I struggled out of bed and attempted the ritual ablutions and
changing into my prayer clothes and kneeling down until that just became
impossible and I would, instead, just lie in bed with my hands crossed
over my chest and recite my prayer. With my impossibly slowed-down
thought processes it took me about a week to realize exactly how strange
this ailment was. It did finally dawn on me that this was something
that I had speculated about. What happens when you get too old and you
can no longer kneel down to pray? My assumption was that you just lie in
bed and pray that way (but how interesting to be that close to The End:
"I'll never actually kneel down to pray again"). So, the strange
ailment suddenly became a dress rehearsal for my own Last Days. And then
I started wondering—with my incredibly slowed down thought processes (a
stroke? A brain tumour?) if it was a dress rehearsal or if this was the
real thing. I found that either way I was fine with it. Obviously
swimming upstream every day of your life as the Pariah King of Comics
can get to be a drag and the idea that I might just be headed down the
exit ramp was fine by me. "If I keep going downhill like this, I could
actually be Out of Here by the end of January."
Cool beans!
There
really wasn't much that I could do, so I'd recite my prayer and when I
was done, I'd recite it again. I'd drift off for strange brief periods
like ten minutes or twelve minutes and then snap wide awake. It was only
two weeks in where I had actually managed one morning to sleep for a
two-hour stretch—what a sense of accomplishment!—that it sunk in exactly
how strange this ailment was. "I've basically been wide awake for two
weeks." My mind and brain were really, really slow but at that point I
started wondering (really, really slowly) about sleep deprivation. I
mean it isn't natural to not sleep for two weeks but it's even more
unnatural to not really feel any ill effects from it. No delusions, no
hallucinations, no light-strobing in the corner of your eyes, no
paranoia. Just really, really slow thought processes. I never doubted my
faith in God or came anywhere close to recrimination against God ("God,
after all my faith and prayers how can you DO this to me?"). It seems
to me one of those things about faith in God that the more you have the
more you pretty much anticipate that life is going to be something of an
ordeal when the time comes for that. The Job Rule seems to me to always
be in effect. The more you have absolute faith in God, the more you
become a potential contending ground against God's adversary. "Sure he's
got faith in You now, but take away his ability to think, take away his
health, his mobility and see how much faith he has then." Well, quite
simply it didn't work. "Unto death" was my simple response. If that's
what this was: I was dying of a stroke or a brain tumour then that's
what it was. It would be hard not to see it as a failing grade on my
report card being that abrupt: I had guessed wrong too many times, had
written way too many controversial Blog & Mails in way too short a
space of time and now I was being taken out of the game because I was
over-throwing all my pitches. Trying too hard and missing. Well, so be
it. I had no cause for complaint. Especially in the last ten years of my
life, I had made each of my own calls every step along the way. People
had tried to get in the way and tried to coerce me into different paths
but I couldn't say with a straight face that any of them had had any
success. No, all of my decisions were my decisions. "Dave Sim Fails at
Fifty." Well, okay, Dave Sim fails at fifty.
What was interesting was that this was also my first month running
Aardvark-Vanaheim completely on my own with Ger's decision to leave the
company at the end of 2006. I suspect that might have been part of God's
point: even with my diminished capacity where I had to plan one or two
half hour stints per day a day ahead of time just getting the basics
done -- bills still had to get paid, invoices had to be sent out, the mail
still needed to be picked up -- I was able to run Aardvark-Vanaheim even
though I was flat on my back for the better part of a month. I
shepherded the first printing of a Cerebus trade paperback anywhere
outside of Preney Print & Litho. A FedEx package came in containing
three copies of the fourth printing of
Form & Void from Lebonfon in
Montreal -- and they did an excellent job! The mail piled up. I'd take a
cab to the post office and back once a week (I'm putting on my coat and
the scarf Linda Parker knitted me. I'm standing in the doorway waiting
for the cab. I WILL remain vertical and I WILL walk out to the cab and
get in when it gets here) and just pull out the cheques and the bills
that needed to be dealt with. Mid-month was about the worst: it actually
took me the better part of an hour to write four cheques, put them in
envelopes and put postage on them. Mid-month I'd get the newspaper in
the morning and force myself to read the headlines on the front page
until I understood what they said. Then I'd flip through the front
section in about ten seconds and go back to bed where I would lie awake
repeating my prayer over and over and having these weird eight to ten
minute naps every two hours or so.
Finally, whatever the
mystery ailment was was... well, not gone, but no longer had a stranglehold
on me... and about two o'clock one morning in the third week, I went
upstairs and started tracing the Jaka figure for the commissioned piece.
What an adventure that turned out to be. I had to do everything at
least eight times before it was even remotely close to what I intended.
"It's a picture of Jaka, Dave. You can draw Jaka in your sleep." Maybe
so, but this morning? Not so much.
It was interesting
because by that point I had such a clear mental image of what the piece
was supposed to look like that it became hard to tell if I was doing
everything eight times because I was still sick and incompetent or if I
was doing everything eight times because I wasn't going to rest until
this picture looked exactly the way it did in my mind's eye. I had done
the "Vark Wars" lettering in a double outline, as an example, and
intended to colour between the two lines. As I looked at it, though, I
could see that the space for the outline was off about a sixteenth of an
inch. It needed to be a little bit wider. Not too wide. I didn't want
the lettering to be the first thing you saw. I wanted the first
impression to be of a nice Al Williamson splash panel. Only once that
had registered did I want the viewer to see the "Vark Wars" lettering. I
don't know how long it actually took me to expand that outline by a
sixteenth of an inch, but it definitely took a while. Then I filled in
all of the areas where the space backdrop would show through with
brushed in solid black—as close to the pencil lines as I could get -- and
then filled in the remaining spaces with a Hunt 102 instead of a
rapidograph. Using a Hunt 102 to fill in solid blacks. Only a very sick
and/or very obsessive person could come up with something like that and
stick with it, but I wanted every straight edge as straight as an arrow.
My inner Al Williamson was watching closely. I wanted every corner as
sharp as I could get it, coming to a precise point with no extraneous
line intruding or extending beyond where it was supposed to be. I was
also determined not to have to white anything out. I was aiming for an
Al Williamson level of accuracy and precision and I can't think of a
higher level of accuracy and precision than that. I forget how long that
took. I also made the choice to not outline the Vark Wars lettering in
black which added a whole other level of precision to the inking stage. I
forget how long that took. I remember it took the better part of a day
to colour Jaka's fleshtones, adding layer upon layer of light orange,
pink, pink and yellow blended, building it up and building it up.
Bright! Brighter! Brightest! Al Williamson Bright! After a month you
forget how good it feels to be actually drawing and to have the picture
coming out right how it would colour your entire day so you didn't even
think about strokes and brain tumours. I'd just sit and look at it while
I was getting my shoes on (which meant I had plenty of time: putting on
my shoes took a while) or waiting for a cab or getting ready to
actually walk downtown on one of my "half-hour of health" sojourns.
Looking at all the sharp lines, looking at that bright colour of Jaka's
fleshtone and the pretty close match on the slave girl skirt colour.
"Don't screw it up, now" I'd think, looking at everything else that needed to be done.
John
had asked when I wanted to get paid and I told him to send a cheque.
The cheque came in Monday and at that point there was a sense of
obligation. Nothing worse than getting paid for a piece and to have it
sitting there three quarters done. What if I have a relapse? So I spent
most of Monday working on it. I mean, literally most of Monday. I woke
up almost exactly at midnight with the Sabbath over and I went out and
sat down and worked on it, inch by painstaking inch from midnight to
roughly three-thirty when the newspaper arrived which I was finally able
to read from front to back while resting in bed. Apart from picking up
the mail, I had nothing planned for my "half hours of health" on Monday,
so I alternated resting in bed (and actually sleeping for a change!)
with each inch by painstaking inch of the picture. And then,
unbelievably, twenty-two hours later it was done. And apart from a few
minor glitches, it was about as precise and accurate a piece of work as
I've ever done.
In fact, I'm so pleased with it, that I
decided to make it this year's Thanks for Showing Up Print at SPACE in
Columbus, Ohio (i.e. it will only be available at the show). I'm getting
50 high quality cardstock colour photocopies done of it and I'm going
to sign and number them and sell them exclusively at SPACE for $20 each.
Except the #1 out of 50 which I'm going to auction on eBay. If I have
any of them left over, I'll sell the remainder at Torontocon.
Just
called and told John Higashi that his commission is done and chatted
with him a bit about his art collection. Has he gotten a lot of these
Star Wars commissions done? Turns out he's been collecting them since
2000 and at this point he has (get this) SIX HUNDRED individual Star
Wars pieces that he's commissioned. You think I'm kidding? Click on
ComicArtFans... and he tells me that you can see just about all of them. Since
I know most of the Cerebus Yahoos are raving Star Wars fans as well, I
figured I better mention it.
It's
a funny thing about drawing. It exists in a world all its own. Out of
the six thousand pages of Cerebus, I can tell you what was happening in
my life on the day I drew the page with maybe a half dozen of them. If
that.
I wonder if that will be true of the Sickbed Star Wars
Commission? Probably not, now that I've told the whole story here. But
I've forgotten other pages that I thought I would always associate with
specific events.
And, at one point in the depths of my
feverishness I thought, "Lord Julius as a WOOKIE!" Now I'm never going
to my final rest in peace until I get THAT one out of my system.
