Marty Feldman

Cerebus #218 (May 1997)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

JAMES A OWEN:
(from Cerebus Yahoo! Group, 20 August 2005)

'Marty' was pretty much a straight pull from my Marty Feldman-based character Martin Humble in STARCHILD. I created him in #3, and featured him regularly in more than a dozen issues (and did an 'origin' story in STARCHILD: CROSSROADS #3).

Dave was about to start pulling other self-publisher characters and likenesses into GUYS, and showed me the first pages where he - ahem - misappropriated Martin for CEREBUS #201 at the Spirits stop in Phoenix.

Later, he morphed the straightforward 'Martin Humble' into more of his "Marty' - although by the time he was doing that, the action had switched to the Starchild Tavern (even using my logo as the sign on one of the CEREBUS covers) so he was still riffing me, or riffing on me, or something like that.

At first I was flattered; then annoyed; then chagrined. I mentioned it to Neil Gaiman, who said he only got annoyed when Dave did Swoon because Dave did 'Neil' so well, and I should consider the company I was in (Neil, Frank Miller, etc...). And he was right. Dave had my patterns down cold, and in several cases, could do my own character better than I did.

Had nothing at all to do with the short Canadian guy named Serbius in STARCHILD.

Writer/artist James A. Owen self-published his Starchild comics in the 1990s. More recently James is the author of the MythWorld novels and runs Coppervale International, an art and design studio that also published International Studio and Argosy magazines.

Marty Feldman (1934-1982) was an English comedy writer, comedian and actor, who starred in several British television comedy series, including At Last The 1948 Show and Marty, and the film Young Frankenstein.