CARSON GRUBAUGH:
Cerebus original-art super-collector, and saintly patron of all kinds of great Gerhard work, including the
World Without Cerebus series, Brian Coppola, reached out to me recently to commission a very interesting piece.
Brian's initial idea was:
"What I am thinking is a meta-perspective. It seems from what
I can see that there is a lot of activity around a comics
shop venue in which SDOAR figures as a comic book; one of
my favorite set of pages in the entire Cerebus story is
just at the end of Minds, issue 200, where Dave and Ger
are drawing at their boards, and that really truly
incredible sense of the story progressing in one
dimension and being captured by the artists.
It's really the most damned clever thing I think I have
ever seen depicted.
Think about 2 pp where these pages are being drawn and
the decision to not end Cerebus with #200, and some
connection to the sale/storage of the comic in a shop,
and/or the creation or imagining of SDOAR... I'm pretty
keen on seeing your interpretation of the Cerebus character,
and Dave, and Ger, even if in passing."
"Okay, have Jack reading those two pages and uhh, we will see...," was about all I knew I was going to do prior to cutting and pasting the images together in Photoshop for a mock-up. The way the overarching themes from all three projects fell into a seamless narrative with all kinds of symbolic resonances was wild. It all suggested itself as I went. The" CARunch" lining up right over the only place I could put the SDOAR logo literally sent a chill down my spine.
22" x 17" ink on Bristol board over blue-line print.
The real technical killer was recreating the look of the Letratone dot-pattern on Cerebus and the splatter effect on the cover by hand. Yowza!
