Just Swoon

Cerebus #164, Page 10
Original art by Dave Sim & Gerhard (November 1992); Recreated art by Dave Sim (2008)
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(via ComicArtFans, 2008)

I was interested in "having a go" at the [Bernie] Wrightson-by-way-of-Kelly-Jones look now that I have had more experience with brush inking... I also wanted to try doing Wrightson-style clouds with the Gillott 290 (now that I know what that can do).

Wickets Revisited (Again!)

Cerebus #29, Page 20
Original art by Dave Sim (1981); Recreated art by Dave Sim & Gerhard (2006)
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus The Artvark, 2006)

Had the opposite reaction to page 20 than I had to page 19. I was already thinking this early that the Elf was just an illusion fabricated halfway between Cerebus and the real Regency Elf which meant she was something of a ventriloquist’s puppet. What’s interesting is that here she just keeps asking Cerebus "And then what?" (I made it a little more playful sounding in the recreation – like a two-year old who enjoys tormenting adults with questions that become progressively more difficult to answer ad consequently keeps repeating the question in a louder and more gleeful way) so, essentially, this is a dominant and suppressed part of Cerebus that has never actually asked himself, as a barbarian, "Well, okay, so we loot a lot of money – then what? What do we exactly want to buy?" And in a real sense all people in that situation want to buy the same thing: a quiet Elf; that is they want to buy the suppression of an inner voice that says materialism is a dead end.

Of course I had to change the last panel where he says "Shut up and play." This was a swipe of Shirley MacLaine's last line in The Apartment which I believe was "Shut up and deal." Again, my enthusiasm for a good line overcomes my narrative sense. The Elf had just taken her shot and I had used two panels to show her take it. When it's your shot, you don’t say "Shut up and play." I could fall back on "Cerebus was confused by the questioning and forgot whose shot it was," but he had just said "Your shot," a couple of panels previous to this. The player who says "your shot" is usually the one keeping track of the game for the less focused opponent. "Shut up and play" also violated the later plot point of "Don't get mad at an elf." If you’re that wary of it, you wouldn't say "shut up" even in a light-hearted way. She's a female and females are notoriously literal-minded. "Shut up" is "shut up" and "shut up" is "being mean to me." He would need to be evasive instead of direct.

Wickets Revisited

Cerebus #29, Page 19
Original art by Dave Sim (1981); Recreated art by Dave Sim & Gerhard (2006)
(Click image to enlarge)

DAVE SIM:
(from Cerebus The Artvark, 2006)

Frankly, I'm more than a little embarrassed by the early material (which I try not to let on about since it is our bread and butter). I know what the stuff looked and read like in my mind's eye and ear at the time and the contrast between the mental image and the actual results on paper are sincerely mortifying. "Insanity is the last line of defense for the master bureaucrat" is an interesting observation, but it’s hardly a Lord Julius line, so I tried to fix it so it read like something Groucho Marx would say. The salesman line was indelicate relative to the personality of the Elf. You just wouldn’t say to the Elf (or ro a female of any kind) "sniffing your crotch" since they don’t hear it in the abstract the way men do. If you say "sniffing your crotch" what they is is that someone wants to sniff their crotch. I switched genders, elevated the action anatomically and "cuted" it up with the "mooing" which would pass muster with a female. "Impregnable" is not a word that Cerebus would use. As with the Lord Julius line, this is Dave Sim conveying his best current thinking on an abstract subject and completely losing his characters’ voices and personalities in the process. As I say, it's really cringe-inducing, particularly since it is exponentially more popular than anything else I did. Other things like Cerebus walking towards the reader with his tail about to hit the wickets. If you had a tail you would know to get it out of the way, I think. Trying to figure out how the robe is sitting on his body by the white stripes in the middle panel and finally giving up and drawing it properly. Likewise with him holding the croquet mallet in the second panel. It looks to me was if I got the figure done, realized I hadn't put the mallet in so I just drew it vaguely intersecting the right hand which is resting on his knee (and then had it disappear behind the outer instead of the inner panel frame as a way of showing how clever I was an hoping that would distract from the fact that there is no rational way he would be holding the mallet at that angle even if he was holding his hand at waist level, the mallet would either be horizontal or tipping the other way.

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