Dave Sim's blogandmail #21 (October 2nd, 2006)

Just checking how many people are actually reading this in Real Time we are hereby offering our

24-Hour Christmas Special

That’s right! For the next 24 hours Ger and I will be singing Christmas Carols on your ipod no matter what you do to try and stop it!

No that's not it. What's the…Oh, right:

Anyone ordering ANY Cerebus trade paperback from the Following Cerebus website (www.followingcerebus.com) before the October 3 Blog & Mail is posted will get those trade paperback[s] autographed by Dave Sim & Gerhard and personalized to themselves or the person[s] of their choice and a copy of the 2004 colour Aardvark Vanaheim Christmas Card also autographed by Dave Sim & Gerhard and with the year 2004 rather sloppily changed to 2006 for each trade paperback ordered.

You are on your Word of Yahoo Honour not to e-mail anyone about this offer or you'll COMPLETELY SPOIL the whole MARKET RESEARCH PURPOSE behind THIS OFFER!
This being the Internet you know what that means:
F—K MARKET RESEARCH!
E-MAIL EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO MIGHT BE EVEN REMOTELY INTERESTED!
YAH! ANARCHY RULES!
AN-AR-CHY! AN-AR-CHY! AN-AR-CHY!

Anatomy of a Following Cerebus Cover

A Nearly Week-Long Except for Wednesday and Sunday and Tuesday Blog & Mail Essay

Those of you with long memories who are also gluttons for Blog & Mail punishment will remember that we were just getting towards a conclusion on the Following Cerebus cover which is due for solicitation in about three weeks (two weeks when you're reading this). Basically if it's a big wraparound Gerhard cover it comes down to Ger's allocation of time. All I have to do is put a plausible Cerebus on there somewhere which, if you're going to advertise for someone to draw Cerebus, I have a pretty impressive c.v. at this point. I don't even have to colour him. We experimented on the cover to issue 8 with my doing the colour on Cerebus and Ger doing the rest of the colour, but that tended to lock him into specific colour choices, tones, lighting, etc. and to keep him from pulling his hair out I had to tell him to re-colour what I had done to match his own colours. If he's going to re-colour it anyway, there's not much point in my colouring it in the first place. It's far easier to DO colour than to FIX colour.

Anyway, when he heard that it was going to be the Part 2 Dream Cover then he wanted to start over from the very beginning anyway—looking for a background that was suited to a dream subject or a number of backgrounds that would make a dream collage. I'm inclined to say, You already have half a cover done if we just put a sleeping Cerebus on it, but that doesn't really apply if Ger's mind is made up and Ger's mind appears to be made up. He'll come up with something on his own. First he wants to finish inking a background on a big Cerebus sketch that I did back in 1983 at a convention in Houston which Brian Coppola (Hi, Brian!), having bought the sketch on eBay recently, commissioned him to do because, again, Ger's just that way (and Brian, too, for that matter). He wants to get something done before he starts something else. So, basically in the space of 48 hours I have gone from "Hurry Up Offence Get My Part of the Cover Done to Issue 11 Hup Hup Hup So Ger Has Enough Time to Do His Part" to "Forget About the Cover to Issue 11 Since I Won't Be Doing My Part for At Least Another Week". So, that's why I'm working on the cover to Collected Letters 2. I have a tendency to snap awake suddenly, going "I'M SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING ON THE FOLLOWING CEREBUS COVER!!" But, then, I mentally go through this week's entire documented sequence of events until I remember: "Oh, right. Not until Ger has got it pencilled."

That's pretty much what life is like around here.

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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.