Dave Sim's blogandmail #19 (September 30th, 2006)

All this week the Blog & Mail

Is brought to you by individual

Cerebus Trade Paperbacks

Including this copy of

Going Home

Sitting right here.

It's not just the elaborate homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his writings that you, yourself, can get at your local comic-book store or online at

www.followingcerebus.com

it's the only one available that has the words

"As seen on the Blog & Mail"

hand-lettered on the title page

and autographed by Dave Sim & Gerhard

The First Money Order or Certified Cheque for

$50 to reach Box 1674 takes it!

In the event of a tie—since Gerhard only picks up the mail once a week—all cheques and money orders for $50 will be honoured with an autographed copy marked "as seen on the Blog & Mail"

So Ger looks at my cover idea and the title card and he listens to my idea of Cerebus breaking through like Porky Pig and he is getting less and less impressed by the moment. Then he says, "It's not going to show up very well in the solicitation". Which is true. The covers in Diamond Previews are about the size of a large postage stamp and the more complicated and detailed a cover you have, the less people are going to be able to see it. Whatever "brand" value there is in using Elrod is going to be lost because a) he's going to be too small to see b) his dialogue is going to be too small to read and c) he's going to be dressed in a giant rooster costume. I was already thinking about re-doing the Looney Tunes style lettering in some way to diminish the fact that there really are too many letters in the words "Following Cerebus" to do a visual analogue. And I had started wondering about having the logo rise up in the successive film frames and wondering if the Looney Tunes logo actually did that or if I was misremembering it and realizing that I had hours of paste-up to do to try and get it done in rough form and Ger would have more hours on the computer trying to get it to work (if I thought he was laughing through his nostrils now…). And he said, "So there would be the regular Following Cerebus logo in addition to the film strip?" and no, that wasn't actually what I was picturing but I can see what he's saying. "What's this going to look like in the solicitation stage?" And the answer isn't very good no matter what I try reconfiguring the cover mentally.

Meanwhile, Ger has mentioned that he's pencilled another wraparound-cover-sized drawing from a photograph he found interesting and I'm starting to think that I really can't save this potential animation cover, so maybe we should just go with a nice unrelated wraparound cover. This has been an on-going question: does the cover have to apply to the contents or can it just be a nice picture? Knowing my crabby, hair-splitting, literal-minded audience (and I love each and every one of you dearly as I would my own flesh-and-blood and you know that MWAH!) I've tended to think it has to apply in some way (even going so far as to coerce Craig into writing an analysis of "The Night Before" to tie in to the cover to #10 which Ger has done pretty much on his own except for getting me to actually pencil and ink Jaka and Cerebus) as often as possible, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm fighting uphill for no good reason. From Ger's standpoint even if we go with the straight "Eye Candy" cover that's unrelated, we want to avoid Cerebus looking like a "stuck on" afterthought and he really can't picture where Cerebus would go on the picture he has tight pencilled on tracing paper. Ger promises to bring in the tracing paper drawing the following Tuesday so I can take a look at it and see what we can do about turning it into a cover. I don't see the same problem he does, but then I'm not the one who is going to be filling up a good 9/10s of the finished cover with my work, so how he sees it has to be taken into account (nor, presumably, does he want a significant 1/10th of the visual point of his cover obliterated by an aardvark if he can help it).

The following Tuesday is here and in and around unloading 6,000 plus pages of Cerebus negatives all taped onto 8-pages-per flats and an eight-foot fire retardent cabinet big enough to hold them Ger informs me that he forgot to bring the drawing in because he forgot to write it down. As he is fond of saying these days, "Post-it notes ARE my brain cells".

Well, around this time, Craig has finally gotten all of the Neal Adams material off of his desk and he's had a closer look at the Dream Issue and it's starting to seem to him that there might be more there than one issue's worth so he's suggested that we make issue 11 part 2 of the Dream Issue[s] and he does a quick description of an Odd Transformations cover and I'm just about to fax him back saying that Ger's already halfway through a cover and we're just going to have to live with whatever it is. So that's when I suggest to Ger that whatever the drawing is that he's done, I could just do a drawing of Cerebus asleep on a pillow with his blanket fluttering over him and that would serve to make the background a dream, whatever it is.

Continued on Monday.


You're not REALLY going to fall for that, are you?

Sending a cheque or money order for $50 just to get an autographed $30 book that says "as seen on the Blog & Mail"?

It'll only encourage us, you know!

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.