Cerebus: In My Life - Richard Starkings

Richard Starkings is the creator/writer of Elephantmen published by Image Comics. Richard was an early pioneer of comic-book lettering with computer fonts and his company Comicraft has been an industry leader in that field since 1992. Dave Sim's recent Elephantmen short stories will be collected in Elephantmen Vol 6: Earthly Desires to be published in July 2013.

A Moment Of Cerebus:
How did you discover Cerebus?

Richard Starkings:
I remember seeing CEREBUS #1 at one of the Comic Marts Gez Kelly used to host in Leeds at a hotel near the railway station -- shame on me for not buying one there and then, although it might have been one of the pirate copies that circulated a couple of years later. I have to believe that I started to read good things about it in Martin Lock's BEM fanzine. I started buying it when I lived in Manchester near a store called ODYSSEY 7. Alan Moore was writing SWAMP THING with Steve Bissette, Howard Chaykin was putting out AMERICAN FLAGG and there was an air of independent spirit even if it wasn't necessarily independence in fact. Was LOVE AND ROCKETS on the stand at this point? If it wasn't, it was close. SWORDS OF CEREBUS sat on the shelves there for a while before I saw the Barry Smith cover on volume 5 and decided to pick up the lot. The concept of catching up on a series by reading trades was in its absolute infancy back in the 80's, but once I'd read SWORDS I immediately picked up the last few issues of HIGH SOCIETY from the rack, and I remember tracking down back issues stretching back to 25, 26 through a mail order comics supplier called CONQUISTADOR.

Do you have a favourite scene/sequence from Cerebus?

The issue that sealed the deal for me was CEREBUS #36 "The Night Before." Even if you read that issue not having read the previous 35, you can figure out what's going on between Cerebus and Jaka. It's a beautifully observed character piece with seemingly effortless dialogue and it's set in ONE room with just two people. The background -- a sea of window panels -- ebbs and flows with the mood between the two and the last page is a sword through the heart. Years later that last page bubbled up from my subconscious and informed the first issue of ELEPHANTMEN, which also ends with a gift and a teardrop.

Cerebus #36 (March 1982)
Art by Dave Sim

How has your own creativity/comics been influenced by Cerebus?

It seems very obvious to me now that ELEPHANTMEN is my creative response to books like CEREBUS, LOVE AND ROCKETS and 2000AD -- my favourite comics in the 80's. CEREBUS spawned and inspired dozens of creators to create their own characters and self publish. It seems obvious now, but back in the 70's the industry was dominated by the Big Two, and self publishing seemed to be exclusive to Underground Comics and creators like Robert Crumb. CEREBUS offered a continuous narrative with a cast of entertaining characters and a stable creative team -- something Jack Kirby's run on THE FANTASTIC FOUR had convinced comic readers was possible before Marvel and DC's approach to creative teams became more like a game of musical chairs.

Dave's bold determination to produce 300 issues of CEREBUS allowed other creators not only to conceive and create comics that they owned, but also allowed them to consider that commitment and longevity was just as important as ownership. Readers get that. We understand that we're following the gestation and evolution of writers' and artists' ideas and we're disappointed when we realize we've been sold a shallow imitation or a fill-in issue that jars with the overall tone of the creators' original intent.

The fact that Dave turned down offers from Marvel and DC to buy CEREBUS or publish colour editions of CEREBUS, or to work on Marvel and DC properties is also worthy of note. Dave didn't spend time helping to develop company owned characters to help jumpstart sales of CEREBUS -- his creator owned work can't be judged alongside a run on BATMAN or DAREDEVIL, it stands on its own merits.

Has Cerebus influenced your approach to working in the comics industry?

I've said before that Dave's Notes from the President that ran on the inside front cover of CEREBUS were invaluable sources of information for anyone interested in self-publishing. Dave's openness about being a publisher as well as the creator was extremely useful in the pre-internet age. Conventions and comic book gatherings were not as organized or as accessible as they are today and creators working for the Big Two didn't have the same kind of information to share that Dave shared in his editorials... I'd even suggest that many mainstream comic creators today have better deals than they'd have been asked to sign thirty years ago because of the free exchange of ideas and ideals creators like Dave Sim, Scott McCloud, Steve Bissette, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird shared in the Bill of Creator's Rights. I used to distribute copies of the interview regarding Creator's rights that was published in THE COMICS JOURNAL in the mid 80's to everyone in my department at Marvel UK.

Would you recommend others read Cerebus, and if so, why?

CEREBUS should be essential reading for anyone interested in the art and form of comics and comic book storytelling. HIGH SOCIETY and CHURCH AND STATE are high watermarks in the field, and even though later volumes are more challenging reads, Dave's constantly shifting -- yet paradoxically consistent -- approach to storytelling is a marvel to behold.

Elephantmen: Ebony Dreams (2012)
Art by Dave Sim

NIP'ORR

NIP'ORR (2007)
Art by Dave Sim

THE DOUG WRIGHT AWARDS 2007:

The organizers of The Doug Wright Awards, Canada's premier comics and graphic novels awards, are happy to announce that three of the country's best-known cartoonists, Chester Brown, Seth and Dave Sim, have created one-of-a-kind original artwork to be auctioned off during their 2007 fundraising drive. Each an internationally respected cartoonist, Chester Brown (Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, Ed The Happy Clown), Seth (Clyde Fans, Wimbledon Green) and Dave Sim (Cerebus), have agreed to provide The Wrights with their interpretation on a unique theme: the monster comics of Jack "King" Kirby.

The revered artist behind such superhero comics as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Silver Surfer and the X-Men, Kirby had an illustrious career that stretches back to the early days of comics. Long before he came up with his popular superhero creations, he was honing his skills on Marvel's "monster comics" of the 1950s and early 1960s -- many of which have earned a cult status among cartoonists and comic fans. These pre-superhero Kirby comics featured such unforgettable characters as Fin Fang Foom, Groot!, Goom, Gagoom (Son of Goom), and Korilla, among many others. As an homage to this era, each cartoonist has taken their pen to paper and given us a unique take on a Kirby Monster. Each one-of-a-kind artwork will go up for auction on eBay beginning Monday October 8th 2007, with all of the proceeds going towards the non-profit Wright Awards. Dave Sim (Kitchener, Ontario) offers up "Nip'por" --his humourous interpretation of the work of both Kirby and Canadian cartoonist Doug Wright (who created the popular weekly strip Nipper.)

Nip'orr by Dave Sim:

This highly-detailed and masterfully executed scene imagines Nipper, the child hero of Doug Wright's comic strip, as a rampaging monster in the Kirby vein. Nipper's dad, a stand-in for Wright, looks on in parental bemusement. Ink and paint/wash on art board. The art is on board measuring 11" x 17". The art is titled "NIP'ORR" across the top and is signed "DOUG WRIGHT AWARDS 2007" in the bottom right corner, in a pastiche of Doug Wright's signature. Sim's actual signature -- "Dave Sim 2007" -- is hidden along the middle left edge of the art.

Todd McFarlane: Spawn at #250

Cerebus #276 (March 2002)
Art by Dave Sim

TODD McFARLANE:
(from Comic Book Resources, 7 June 2013)

...We're heading toward issue #250. I'll be writing #234 this week, and we've got the artwork done for up to for #241, so we're way ahead of schedule! The artist [Szymon Kudranski] and myself have been doing this book since issue #201 and he's given me forty-one issues of artwork. We'll have at least forty-one consecutive issues with the same art team. I've got to at least get to #301 so I can break Dave Sim's independent record! He's got the record for the longest running independent comic book with Cerebus the Aardvark. I've gotta beat him by at least one. It's just a little competition amongst fellow Canadians...

Debbie Harry

The Elf As Debbie Harry (2010)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from The Beguiling, 2004)

...The look of the Regency Elf was my shameless peroxide tribute to Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry whom I adored at the time with a passion that surpasseth human understanding. A condition dramatically worsened by the acquiring of our first VCR (Beta, which I was assured was the format of the future) and a commercial tape which collected all the videos from the Eat To The Beat album (at a time when commercial videotapes retailed for around $90 each). "Dreaming" "Eat to the Beat" "In the Flesh". I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

A few years later, when Richard and Wendy were negotiating with Toronto’s Nelvana Productions to do the Elfquest animated film, Nelvana was in the middle of producing their big debut full-length animated film, Rock and Rule -- which would prove to be as lousy as its title and take them out of the full-length animated film game permanently. Anyway, lo and behold, one of the characters in Rock and Rule was voiced by Debbie Harry, who just happened to be at Nelvana on a day when Wendy was there and they met. And sometime later, Wendy is dropping this casually into the conversation over the phone.

My mouth went dry and my heart started pounding. "You met Debbie Harry?"

"Oh, yes," she snorted. "What an awful woman. She is completely anti-art."

I just let it go and we moved on to other subjects. And I always wondered what she meant by that: "anti-art".

But what a weird footnote to the creation of the Regency Elf.

Cerebus Style Sheet

Cerebus Style Sheet
Art by Dave Sim (1977)
(Click image to enlarge)

BRIAN COPPOLA: 
(from My Comic Art Museum)

How cool is this? This is the third piece of Cerebus artwork ever created. According to Dave, the first was the little logo that appears on the cover of Issue #1; the second was a sample comic page; the third was this style sheet; and the fourth was page 1 of issue 1.

Post-Agrarian Matriarchal Society

Cerebus #194 (May 1995)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview with Charles Brownstein, Feature #4, 1997)

The structure of Estarcion didn't so much collapse as mutate. I mean, I was really stretching a point and you have to bear that in mind. It was taking a series of hypotheticals with definitive answers and pretending the answers weren't definitive. How could you have a post-agrarian matriarchal society? Actually, it started with a feminist society - women on top. The tripartite "she dresses better than me and she's prettier than me so she thinks she's better than me," "She's not as nicely dressed as I am and she's not as pretty as I am so she's jealous of me," and "How you are dressed and how you look are not important" are simply unresolvable and the first two will always overwhelm the third. Which is why I had Cirin make shapeless ugly dresses with hoods a core element of her revolution. In real life, she'd only be able to get a small percentage of women to go along with it. Even if she could it would still bog down over whose eyes were prettier, a nicer shape, a better colour.

The Single Man

Cerebus: The Women
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview with Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Journal, 1996)

...I noticed in my life, going through the various romantic permutation - in a relationship, and then out of a relationship - that there were two different ways of thinking for me. I would think one way on my own, and I would think another way in a relationship. The conventional thinking about that, and the thing that really stuck in a lot of people's craws when it came to [Cerebus issue] 186 was, "Well, yeah, of course you think that way when you're alone because you're not supposed to be alone, you just haven't found the right person. As soon as you find the right person, then you become the right you." And the single you is just this victim of past experiences, a person carrying along resentments - the whole victim infection that makes up society at this point. "If you're not like us, the only reason you're not like us is this horrible thing that happened to you when you were growing up. We just have to go back and find out what this horrible thing was, pat you on the back and say, 'It's okay, the bogeyman's gone,' and you'll become like us." Because that's viewed as a universal truth - that a single man is half a couple, a couple with a person missing - it seemed worthwhile to show the view from the other side of the fence. The merged male being devoured psychically by his mate and to do it in such a way that it had the same patronising, pitying, wiser-than-thou quality that a single man gets from the "Don't you worry - someday you'll find the right person and you'll be able to be good and happy like we are." No one likes to be patronised or pitied or talked-down-to. So, as a single, unencumbered, undevoured male, I decided turnabout was fair play - husband as pitiable victim rather than single man as pitiable inadequacy.

To me, there is worth - as a distanced observer, as an uninvolved spectator - in commenting on something which a husband or boyfriend is not at liberty to comment on and is probably unable to perceive anyway: what merged permanence is like. To say that wives devour husbands is no greater an exaggeration than to say that husbands suppress their wives. In each case, I would say, the participants are the last ones to recognise the reality of the observation. The man just examining from a distant perspective, I have no vested interest. I don't have to worry about, "Oh, what's the wife going to think about when she reads this?" So it struck me as a good counter balance point. There's so much on that side, we should have a little weight to it over on this side...

It's A Man's World

Hate #21 (Fantagraphics Books, December 1995)
Art by Peter Bagge

DAVE SIM:
(from an interview with Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Journal #184, February 1996)

...Diana Schutz faxed me the cover of Hate that [Peter] Bagge did. You know, "It's a Man's World" and Buddy Bradley as a dog. Why is it when Dave does this he's a Nazi and when Peter does it he's a scathing critic of the social milieu? Why is Robert Crumb immune from criticism? Ask Gary [Groth]. "Crumb is the subject of a successful docmentary. Crumb lives in France. Crumb gets written up in literary journals I read." [Cerebus] number 186 was singled out because it provoked a profound reaction of emotional hurt in emotional people...

Indy Magazine: A Cerebus Retrospective

INDY MAGAZINE:
(from a Cerebus: A Retrospective by Adam White, Indy Magazine, 2004)

It works. It actually works. Cerebus is a single sustained comics narrative about the life and times of a single character, following him through his youth right up to the very end of his days. Some parts work much, much better than others and, in general, the later stuff is rather better than the earlier, but it really does work. Cerebus is six thousand pages of comics telling a single story that miraculously all comes together clearly in the end to make a single point about the nature of power, gender, and spirit. Whether that point is worth making is somewhat less clear. It is a book born of the brilliance, arrogance, prescience, skill, recklessness, self-indulgence, strong opinions, misogyny (and, yes, it is misogyny), of its creator: David Sim. It is also a book that would have failed without the stabilizing influence of the photo-realistic backgrounds created by Sim's long time partner, Gerhard. Together, these two men, the heart and the head of Cerebus, were able to create the emotional and physical reality of a world that seems, at times, more real than our own. However much its creators, particularly Mr. Sim, might protest,  Cerebus is, by its very nature, a profoundly emotional book, a work of the heart, summing up the strife of the spirit as it is glorified and terrified by the divine. In time, Cerebus will be recognized as one of the grandest achievements of comics: a unity of form and void, motion and emotion, depicting the galaxy of ways in which the human race can make itself unhappy. It is a deeply pessimistic work, though it sings its pain gracefully. It seems to look upon the universe as a colossal blunder, all the while depicting it with beauty. Certainly, the book is most successful when it is depicting that terrible beauty and depicting only; when it attempts to spell things out for us, the comic grows terribly tedious. From its early and somewhat incompetent beginnings to the masterful way with which it ends, the book holds itself together, as a wounded man might clutch his sides, pressing in his guts, in a desperate attempt to go on, even though it knows it will only die alone, unmourned, and unloved... [Read the full review here.]

Using Computer Fonts

Glamourpuss #1 (April 2008)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from the 100 Hours Tour: TCJ, 30 Januray 2008)

On the subject of the lettering on glamourpuss, I think the Joe Kubert font is better suited to the Raymond School work that I'm doing on glamourpuss. I got nominated for awards for lettering...and was fortunate enough to win a Harvey... but it sure wasn't for the straight narrative lettering. My lettering is idiosyncratic but Joe's is a pretty close match to Ben Oda who lettered most of the newspaper strips. Not Raymond's though. If I was at home I could refer to my copy of Tom Roberts' ALEX RAYMOND book I picked up today at Carry On in Waterloo and tell you the name of his two letterers... But, the biggest reason for using a computer font is that I'm able to edit the text right up to the last minute. Hand lettering you have a tendency to just "let it go" because there's no easy way white out whole passages and re-letter over the white out. I can understand you not being thrilled at it, but it's really a "writer over letterer" debate. I'm judge, jury and executioner, unfortunately.

Who Owns Miracleman?

Cerebus #274 (January 2002)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

PADRAIG O MEALOID:
(from Poisoned Chalice Part 13 at The Beat, 12 May 2013)

...Considering that Todd McFarlane was claiming that he owned Miracleman free and clear, he seemed to have been very shy of actually just going ahead and publishing a comic with a clearly identified Miracleman character in it. In fact, he seemed to be acting in exactly the opposite manner to how you’d expect someone who was sure they owned something would: If he really owned Miracleman, as he continually claimed, surely he would have met Gaiman's legal challenge to his publishing Hellspawn #13 - which was to feature the return of Miracleman - head on, instead of giving in to it. He was, after all, no stranger to the inside of a courtroom at this stage. And he would have started calling the unnamed character he used in the Image 10th Anniversary Book Miracleman, if he owned the rights to the character, instead of having to evolve a completely different name and origin for it after being warned away by Gaiman. As to why McFarlane kept pursuing a course that was pretty obviously colossally stupid, who knows? Perhaps he thought that, in the same way that Dez Skinn had said he wished to do when he first published Marvelman in Warrior in 1982, he could establish rights in the character by the act of publishing it. Or perhaps he was hoping to provoke Gaiman into taking a case against him directly about the ownership of the character...

Cerebus #274 (January 2002)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

Pádraig Ó Méalóid explores the convoluted history of Marvelman/Miracleman's ownership in an ongoing series of 'Poisoned Chalice' posts at The Beat.

The Cartoon Mascot Logo That Started It All!

Cerebus Archive #16 (October 2011)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:
(from 'Birth Of The Icon', Cerebus Archive #16, October 2011)

Well down on my personal emphasis list, below freelance paying work, was any kind of non-paying fanzine work -- which brings, finally, to the cover for Deni's Cerebus The Fanzine and the cartoon mascot. It looms large in retrospect (particularly in a publication called Cerebus Archive) and the sentimentally-inclined will find  it charming that I was doing for my new girlfriend, but at the time it was just another example of what I wanted to avoid doing. The more free work I did (or work that I - this sounds very bad, but I'm afraid it's accurate - traded for having a girlfriend) the sooner my bank account would empty and the sooner I would be facing having to get a real job - not just working a few days a week in a comic-book store for wages that paid only half my rent... It just wasn't "front of mind" stuff for me -- as breathlessly awaiting Bearvers-mania sweeping the country had been. If you ask "what was on your mind when you created Cerebus?" That would be the answer: The Beavers...

...The magic moment of Cerebus' creation really came about when I was finished with my paying work for the day (or mailing out promotional fliers advertising my writing, drawing and lettering services). The [cover] illustration came first. It was pretty basic -- "how fast can I do this and still have it a plausible cover?" A girl in a flowing robe, looking mysterious and a devil or a troll or something. It was a graphic, hopefully eye-catching. But it was definitely the first thing that went down on the art board. I wasn't going to redo any part of it. Just make it as good as I could in an hour or so...

...That was when it got interesting. I called Deni (I think she was at her parents') and said "You need a company name. I'm doing the cover." And she said, "Cerebus." "No," I said, "That's the name of the magazine, like Dark Shadow Fantasy, but Dark Shadow is published by Shadow Press." "Just a minute," she said, "I'll ask Michael and Karen." She wasn't gone long and came back and said "Michael says 'Vanaheim Press'" - Vanaheim was a geographic place name in Robert E. Howard's Conan -- "And Karen says 'Aardvark Press'."

Had I been more of a graphic designer by nature or had I been seized by inspiration, Cerebus might likewise have never been created... abandoning all hope of a graphic, [I] realised that the only sensible direction was a wholesale retreat to a full-blown cartoon mascot.

Sensible because I knew how to do cartoons -- as with the cover illustration and the logo -- how to do them quickly. Quickly enough that I took time when I was done to add a 30% LT 17 dot tone (which I had on hand mostly for doing red's sweaters in The Beavers) and even took the time to cut white highlights into the medallions after cutting out the eyes (this would prove to be a significant decision if you calculate the sheer number of man hours I -- and later, both Ger and myself -- would devote to putting tone on literally thousands upon thousands of Cerebus images over the course of the next quarter century-plus). Not quickly enough that I bothered fixing it when I changed my mind about retaining the 30% tone on the sword -- so it remained part-toned and part not-toned in all subsequent appearances: the only one of which that would end up being published would be on the back cover of Cerebus No. 1.

Cerebus #1 (December 1977)
Art by Dave Sim 
(Click image to enlarge)

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. 

Gerhard's Cerebus Prints

GERHARD:
(from Gerz Blog, 25 May 2013)

I had these prints done on really nice, 140 lbs, acid free, watercolour paper. I'm going to colour them and see how they turn out. I'll post the results here... Once I have worked out all of the details of pricing and shipping I will be offering these prints for sale. Stay tuned.

IDW's 'Cerebus: The Covers' Update

Preliminary designs for 'Cerebus: The Covers'
Edited by Scott Dunbier

DAVE SIM:
(from Kickstarter Update #160, 30 May 2013)

People have been asking about THE CEREBUS COVERS books from IDW. Right now there's nothing to report. I suspect Scott Dunbier, thorough fellow he is, is trying to track down ALL the original covers. At some point both Gerhard and I are committed to writing text about the covers and neither of us have heard anything yet. Scott also still has some scanning to do of the later material and should be up sometime this summer. But, bear in mind, even when the books are done, there's a five-month lag time for the Diamond solicitation so the books definitely won't be out before the end of 2013 and probably not until well into 2014.

A Metaphysical History Of Comics Photorealism

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond'.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

DAVE SIM:
(from Kickstarter Update #160, 30 May 2013)
...On THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND, I'm still working on the first issue. You'll remember last time I was at page 10-11 and that they were new pages. My plan (ten days ago) was to splice in comics pages and smooth out the narrative. Which worked fine up until pages 10-11, but when I looked at the subsequent pages, it just wasn't working.  You can't turn what is, in effect, an illustrated essay into a comic book story by splicing in comics pages. So, essentially, I stopped work on the first issue to rewrite the whole thing as a comic-book story. Which required some major, major cuts to the text.  Basically "What am I trying to say here and how would you say it in comic-book pacing word balloons and captions?" So I've got all of the new word balloons and captions pasted up in rough form (for some reason, my MacBook won't "hold" boldface Joe Kubert lettering -- as soon as I shut it down, it defaults to either regular or italic -- so there's no point in putting the boldface text in until I'm at the finishing stage). I then went back to doing the first issue and -- with the now "comic-book-ized" intermediary pages in place -- I'm (I THINK) on page 21 of 22.  I have to read it all the way through when I'm done in its new "comic-book pacing" incarnation. The plus is that, at the time, I had just been spouting everything that I had been thinking about comics photorealism for years with no real intention of doing a traditional narrative. More just getting it off my chest and having fun doing photorealism pictures and tracing RIP KIRBY panels. Now, I not only know where I was actually going but I know where the emphasis is. So, it's going to be an interesting process of seeing what makes the cut in the new "comic-book-ized" narrative.

In terms of the schedule, yes, it's not too bad. But it's really ALL that I've been doing in the month of May (besides Kickstarter stuff and answering the mail) and that isn't possible on an on-going basis.  I HAVE to do OTHER things just to keep everything from collapsing.

So, thanks to all of you who have been donating $1, $5 or $10 at cerebusdownloads.com At least for the foreseeable future this IS viable with your help...

Glamourpuss #2 (July 2008)
Art by Dave Sim (after Alex Raymond)

But, as I say, in terms of schedule, that's not too bad.  I had told [IDW publisher] Ted [Adams] and [IDW Editor-In-Chief] Chris [Ryall] that I'd be posting what I had done in May on the 27th. But now, it's the first issue of a comic book, so it has what I hope is a first-issue ending on it that people will like and bring them back for a second issue, so there's really no point in showing it to IDW until I have the ending done (pages 21-22) because it's, um, DIFFERENT. And I wouldn't want to just spring DIFFERENT on them as an afterthought. Oh, BTW, here's my 90-degree angle I didn't tell you about.  It might be TOO different, which is one of the things I'll be asked Ted and Chris about.  If it's TOO different, I can make it more comic-book normal. I actually like that that I have two completely (I assume) shell-shocked veterans of 21st century comics publishing to give me an honest reaction. They'll just be reading it like comic fans reading the first issue of a comic book. Is it okay? Does it work?

...Of course, when I was "comic-book-izing" all of the pages, I originally thought I would just rewrite them and mock them up from the scans and get IDW to merge the two based on my mock-ups.  And then, I thought, well, that's really just asking for trouble and causing a lot of work for someone besides me on my book. Why not do it on the original artwork? Which I was a little hesitant about because it was, say, page 8 of glamourpuss #1 or whatever.  But for the sake of clarity and ease it seemed like the way to go.  So, to do that I had to go retrieve all of the glamourpuss artwork and then sit and literally do a glamourpuss-ectomy on it. Glamourpuss pages here, STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND pages there.  So, starting with #2, I can literally just line up all of the pages next in the narrative and write comic book pages around them and on them. The book is subtitled A METAPHYSICAL HISTORY OF COMICS PHOTOREALISM which could end up being the world's biggest understatement. And I figured, Well, if they really want to read the original glamourpuss issues, they can get them from ComiXpress. And right after I thought that, ComiXpress went out of business. So I might have to find another POD place. It would make an interesting essay question: compare and contrast the original illustrated thesis HISTORY OF PHOTOREALISM with the comic-book-ized STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND. Some day. If I get there. God willing.

Art Auction: The Colonized #1

The Colonized #1 (IDW, April 2012)
Art by Dave Sim
Sold: $450 (+19.5% BP)

DAVE SIM:

Chris [Ryall, IDW Editor-In-Chief] said that he was doing a creator-owned 4-issue mini-series called THE COLONIZED and was I interested in doing the covers? He described Drew Moss' designs as "a kind of '50s Wally Wood sci-fi aesthetic... in brief, aliens and zombies and militia men... I always like something that can be a good representation of the series, since the image often has to function as both an ad for the series and also the eventual trade paperback design... I envision a big, bold 1950s blocky "IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE!" sort of treatment that clues people in to the tone of this (it's largely played straight, not for laughs). And he offered me 50% of my cover rate if I would draw the logo. Read the full article here...

The Albatross

Cerebus #45 (January 1983)
Art by Dave Sim 
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebuswiki)

[The Albatross] is the most formidable power object in the known universe: a wildly improbable plot device. Like The Maltese Falcon only more politically formidable. In a Real World context, I called my notebooks my Albatrosses because I was as saddled with them much like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. So I was declaring in a way -- by making the albatross statue that significant in High Society -- that I was ambitious enough to want to do something of remarkable significance with all the half-witted notions and half-baked philosophies I was sketching out and jotting down in my own "albatrosses". "Invoke often", is the first rule of the sort of mysticism that one finds in used paperbacks in 5 for a dollar bins. Unless one is in a New Age bookstore, in which case one can pay 50 dollars to be told the same thing between hemp-derived hard covers.

Cerebus #90 (September 1986)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

What If Gerhard Had Worked On Cerebus From The Beginning?

Following Cerebus #4 (May 2005)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from Following Cerebus #4, May 2005)

This issue's illustration is the first in a series of 'Wouldn't It Have Been Great If Gerhard Had Worked On Cerebus From The Beginning?' covers. This one is based on panel one of page 234 of the Cerebus volume (or page 6 of issue 11, if you prefer). My attempt at the time to convey the rooftops of Paris at the time of the Revolution ended up looking -- with the balcony running the width of the second building and the dormer windows occupying most of the face of the same building -- like an upscale subdivision of Swiss ski chalets. Gerhard smooshed the buildings together, shortened the elevation of the roofs, lowered the perspective to establish the density of the streetscape, and made all the windows appropriate sizes. Since all I had to do was to draw Cerebus and the Roach, I decided to solve one of the other problems from the original picture -- the impression that the buildings were set on a wide boulevard -- by drawing my own foreground building. The delineation of the bricks, the cartoon birds huddled in their nest, the "negative space" compositional use of snow, the books visible on the shelf through the window, the battered drainpipe: each element was consciously or unconsciously influenced by the Will Eisner studio look of the late 1940s. That seemed to me sufficient reason to retain the picture when this, unexpectedly and sadly, became the Will Eisner Tribute Issue.

Cerebus #11 (August 1979)
Art by Dave Sim

IDW Covers: DR Who - Prisoners Of Time #8

Doctor Who: Prisoners Of Time #8 (IDW, August 2013)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:

This was in the "happy accident" category. The DR. WHO covers are done from official BBC publicity stills they've supplied to IDW. Basically what I would do is just click on each one for that issue's Doctor and then drag an image that showed potential onto my desktop. Usually: does this look like an Al Williamson drawing? In the case of Doctor #8, who has more of a Gothic look about him, I thought I'd look for a good Bernie Wrightson shot. It wasn't much of a contest. I liked this one. But I hadn't noticed it was a horizontal, rather than vertical photo (the vertical ones tended to fit perfectly in the available illustration space beneath the logo). So I tried to enlarge the print-out to 11x17 on the office photocopier but the photocopier was having a bad day. It's over 20 years old so it has more bad days than good days. Anyway, the printed image was too dark to see anything. But I was really stuck on this particular photo. So I decided to see, okay, how much space DOES it take up? And it took up a fair amount of space with all the excess space at the bottom once I had the Tardis "peaking" at the top of the cover. And that was when I got the idea of doing multiple images -- basically doing a relatively finished tight pencil on the primary image and then enlarging that 120% or so and tracing THAT off and then enlarging that 120% or so and tucking that in at the bottom. Which gave it a really good illustrative "Prisoner Of Time" look, I thought. Then it was really a matter of careful inking to make sure that I didn't lose the illustrative quality. This one's tied with THE COLONIZED #2 cover for my favourite IDW cover I've done so far so you might NOT see this one auctioned.