Being A Perfectionist

Cerebus #147 (June 1991)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

DAVE SIM:
(from Comics Interview #107, 1992)

We try to do the best we can and our theory is if you're not happy with it you've always got another page tomorrow that you can do better on. That's about the extent of our reasoning on the influence of each other's work.

There does come a time when you've got to tell the other guy, "Don't worry about it. You don't like it? Fine There's always going to be stuff that you are not going to like. Try harder on the next one." The Melmoth cover that has Oscar sitting out front of the cafe and it's sort of light pinks and light mauves and whatnot and the shadow of the birds going up the wall - I didn't like my part of that when I had it done, [Gerhard] didn't like hie part of it when he had it done and then he coloured it and he didn't like that. Then the separations came in and that was even worse, and then the printed copy came in and that was even worse. But then Michael Zulli called a month, a month and a half ago, and he said be sure to tell Ger that he really liked that cover. So, what are you going to do? The one cover that Michael singles out to say, "That was just amazing" was, as far as we were concerned, something that just didn't pull together.

Sometimes it's got nothing to do with the cover, really. It's just whatever's going on in our lives at the time, but we don't know that because we are both going through whatever's going on at the time. A particularly lousy issue of the Comics Buyers Guide is enough to throw me off for the rest of the day. You know what I'm saying. Not that there's anything wrong with the Buyer's Guide, but a particularly bad mix of letters or news headlines, "The Industry Triumphant", "This Week's New Improved Robin", "Hologram Covers - the Wave of the Future". It can make you feel physically ill.