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Cerebus vs Michael Zulli's Sweeney Todd

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Cerebus / Sweeny Todd (unfinished, 1991)
Art by Dave Sim, Gerhard & Michael Zulli
(from Cerebus #154, January 1992)
Sweeney Todd remains an unfinished and unpublished story written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli for Stephen R. Bissette's publication Taboo. Work on Sweeney Todd was stopped when the anthology itself was discontinued.

Weekly Update #19: 'Cerebus'&'High Society' Reprinting

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Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':
Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...
Cerebus Vol 1 & Cerebus Vol 2: High Society
Cover art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
DAVE SIM:
Checking in.

Working on page 22, the last page of THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND No.4.  Still have to do the Notes section in the back, production notes for Chris Ryall and colouring notes for Jay Fotos.  But...very close.  Which brings up a key point -- I started the issue December 14 and I'm close to finishing it February 21.  Which would lead your average person to say, "Okay, so it takes you two months to do an issue." Well, no.  Even if I was done today it would be two months and one week.  "Well, whatever." Well, no NOT whatever :).  Over 18 issues, if I say I'm going to get them done in two months and it takes two months and a week, that adds FOUR MONTHS to the length of time it takes to do them.  If that isn't factored in, the result would likely be 16 issues coming out on a monthly schedule and -- just as you were waiting for the Big Payoff -- suddenly you'd have to wait FOUR MONTHS for No.17.

Just sayin'.

This -- the Weekly Updates -- I think, is proving to be a successful experiment in Complete Transparency in running a business. Since I'm not a Computer Person or an Internet Person, I'm always thinking "What genuine use could you have for the Internet?"

It seems to me this is it, potentially.  Everyone gets to read my "mail" before I do, so we all know what it is that I'm talking about when I come in to the coffee shop to weigh in.

Big plus (to me):  genuinely interested readers and fans know exactly what's going on so anytime anyone wants to disparage Dave Sim as "crazy" and "evil" and wonder aloud what I'm doing right now, they can tell them. "Just go to A MOMENT OF CEREBUS and read the Weekly Updates. That will tell you all you want to know." 

I think George and Sean are making REAL progress in their discussions. Too technical for me in its particulars, but where it does intersect with my own areas of expertise:

1)  I'm very aware of the differences between, say, IDW's Artists Editions and 100% accurate reproduction of the INTENT of the artwork.  i.e. Wally Wood didn't intend for you to see where he pasted up a correction or whited out and patch of brush work. Scott Dunbier makes interesting choices some places, opting to "go dark" a lot of times to pick up more of the paste-up/white out Reality of the original artwork.

Sandeep, by contrast, definitely did the bitmap conversion on glamourpuss.

My personal preference is for the latter.

[and for glossy paper -- I think the best reproduction so far -- apart from glamourpuss :) -- is the Barry Windsor-Smith RED NAILS book which is on glossy paper. IDW prefers trying to match to the texture of the paper to the Strathmore art paper most guys used. But, that's apples and oranges to me. Guys didn't draw on glossy paper because it wouldn't take pencil very well, erase well, or hold up to man-handling. If the pencils just magically appeared on the page and could be inked without any further erasing, slick paper would be more precise. They were using fibrous art paper because it worked with pencil AND eraser AND ink and (often) tone. I did a revised Inside Front Cover for #3 on Strathmore paper and pasted it up on my usual 172 Illustration Board.  I think I know why those guys liked the 3-ply Strathmore with kid finish so much :)]

This will be an interesting situation when each issue of THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND is (God willing) finally published as a black-and-white version and a colour version.  My inclination would be to do the glamourpuss bitmap conversion method and cover up white-outs and paste-ups and things in the black-and-white version.  But I'm doing it through IDW -- which has definitely showed a preference for the paste-up/white out Reality method.  It should be something that Ted Adams, Chris Ryall and Scott Dunbier are happy with and fits in with their way of viewing comic art. It's THEIR money that's making it possible.

There are many things that George has picked up in his restorations (MANY things) --

[as an example, a trail of smoke from a candle being lit in #7 -- it was done in white paint and the white paint wasn't thick enough to make a definite trail. I never really got the hang of how to mix white paint so it was thick enough to be picked up by the camera but not so thick that you have to roll in between your fingers and stick it down by hand (just kidding).]

-- that I don't know if they would survive the conversion to bitmap.  That's where I can't adjudicate the discussion.  I would definitely opt for losing the pencil lines where they are being picked up where that doesn't compromise any linework that has been missing to now.  I agree with Sean, it takes the reader out of the story -- particularly the guidelines for the lettering -- and the CEREBUS trades are, first and foremost, "popular editions". They're meant to be read. And where you err, you have to err on the side of "literary/visual" anywhere where you would be interfering with the READING experience. As long as you don't lose tiny lines that the "visual/literary" reader is entitled to. ALL THE WAY into the page and balancing between those two things -- I'd tend to leave it up to the guy doing the heavy lifting.

Photocopied panels, I'm in complete agreement. Kim Preney finally had to explain to me that photocopies only LOOK accurate and clean. They're actually formed by the toner powder adhering magnetically to the charged area. So the "thin line" is actually closer to a pattern formed by iron filings on a piece of paper over a magnet. When you shoot that with a camera, you're going to be shooting that "flare" of iron filings that aren't readily visible... and get a fuzzy image. Where that happens -- like Weisshaupt taking a drink early in CHURCH & STATE -- I'd suggest scanning the first panel which is the original and then matching the placement where the photocopies are)

Way, way, way off in the future -- if anyone is still interested in CEREBUS -- someone is going to face the choice of scanning Gerhard's original artwork for the bags of gold backgrounds (which are still in The Cerebus Archive) in CHURCH & STATE and digitally substitute them for the bags of gold photocopies on the original artwork, matching area to area.

How DEDICATED are you to restoration of INTENT?  I sure wouldn't want to do it.

Watery ink, I'm still dealing with on a daily basis. I'm doing the thinnest lines I've ever done on the STRANGE DEATH pages and there does come a point where -- through evaporation -- the pen nib just won't do fine enough lines because the ink is too thick. This is particularly true when the pen nib is brand new (my solution to not being able to Master the Gillott 290 pen nib -- a brand new Hunt 102 is the same fineness of line but it requires changing nibs VERY frequently) and I'm trying to copy, say, Ray Burns lettering on a RIP KIRBY panel that is maybe 1/20th the size that HE lettered it at. So, I dilute the ink -- actually using distilled water which keeps mineral impurities out of the mix -- but then have to wonder:  is IDW going to be able to pick this up? First of all on the black and white and second of all on the colour version? Which is a persuasive argument for their Reality Original method. You'll pick up a light brown letter that's supposed to be black that you're apt to lose when you're making everything Either Black or White.

Following on from the "heavy lifting" on CEREBUS restoration: Possible solution:  George provides Sean with his finished digital files and Sean goes through them looking for instances where reproduction choices are, in his view, interfering with the reading experience.  Then, the discussion could move over here with Sean saying:  "Okay, here's what can be done.  If I adjust the reproduction to lose the pencil lines on this page, THESE lines are going to fade.  THIS is the tipping point.  Here's "-1""-2""0""+1""+2".  What say you, CEREBUS fans?"

Or CEREBUS fan -- since there will probably only be one person still reading at that point. :)

But, that to me would be the hidden benefit to running a Completely Transparent Business:  the person who has the level of interest to stick with the discussion right to the end, IT GETS TO BE THEIR CALL!  COOLNESS!

I'm sort of kidding I sort of think.

Travis P.:  Thanks for your comments.  I don't want to make too much of a point of it, but I infer that anyone who hasn't signed the "I Don't Believe Dave Sim Is a Misogynist" petition thinks I'm a misogynist and -- to me, compelled inference --  doesn't want the immaculate purity of their Feminist reality trodden upon by me. Particularly including requests for things like assistance, advice or comped books. It's all guesswork which is why I asked Margaret to start the petition. When Rob Walton signed and Chester Brown didn't, at that point I knew that there was NO WAY I could ever guess who thought I was a misogynist and who didn't.  Same reason I wouldn't contact Colleen Doran or Eddie Campbell.  You don't want to make a mistake in those cases. Or, I don't, anyway.

Speaking of which, the Petition has 20 EXTRA NAMES since, like two weeks ago.  WHAAAAT??!!

The best jump we ever had in the last  six years was when Oliver's significant other Carma Chan decided she was, single-handedly, going to get the 2,000 signatures. Which I knew she wouldn't. But I think she got something like 12 in the space of a month or so. Which was INCREDIBLE!

Not sure what's going on.

Okay, still waiting for a response from Lebonfon both here -- Monsieur Auberge pere ou fils (turns out that the General Manager is the son of the President: very reassuring that Lebonfon is a family operation: so it's not as if internal communication is going to be a problem) or Patrick or Josee -- and also a quote as to what they are going to charge to do a test signature of George and Sean's (at the moment theoretical) final fixes.

They're probably just mulling over what George and Sean are talking about.

Also looking forward to seeing THE YEARS HAVE PANTS and the first two volumes of the A DISTANT SOIL restorations when Eddie Khanna sends them to me.

See you all next week!


Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

Alan Moore: A Biographic

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Extract From The Revised & Update 16-Page Biographic
"Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman"
(Free download, only from the Sequential iPad/iPhone App

GARY SPENCER MILLIDGE:
(from the introduction to the Alan Moore Biographic, revised 2013 Sequential Edition)
Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman was originally created in 2003 for a tribute book compiled to celebrate Alan Moore's first fifty years on the planet, which I published and edited in conjunction with the Italian publisher Black Velvet... I thought that the book needed an overarching introductory sequence of some kind. And rather than just a mere text biography that would provide some context for the rest of the book, I decided to map out the essential events in the life of Alan Moore in a comic format, using images from his own comics to illustrate his journey, literally and metaphorically. Like the book itself, the 'biographic' grew from four pages to eight, and finally to twelve. Alan Moore: Portrait Of An Extraordinary Gentleman was a great success, selling out of two substantial printings in super-quick time and raising over $36,000 for its chosen causes.

Skip forward to 2010 when I was invited by Tim Pilcher, a commissioning editor at Sussex-based publisher Ilex Press, to write a lavish 'visual biography about Alan Moore. Believing  that I had already done much of the groundwork necessary some years earlier, I foolishly agreed. That book became the Harvey Award-nominated Alan Moore: Storyteller. Upon completion of the new book, it was suggested that perhaps my original strip Alan Moore: An Extraordinary Gentleman could be included, reproduced in colour for the first time in English, as a bonus supplement to the UK edition.

However, after a short review of the material and armed with a vast quantity of new and accurate knowledge culled from nine months of intense research, study and investigation, I realised the full extent of the errors, falsehoods and unsubstantiated information that it contained. So the decision was made not to proceed with the idea, and the strip has continued to remain in limbo until now...

Gary Spencer Millidge is a graphic designer, illustrator and writer. He is best known for his self-published Strangehaven comic book series, and his books Alan Moore: Storyteller and Comic Book Design.

Petunia Con 1984 Print

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Petunia Con 1984 Print
Art by Dave Sim
(Click image to enlare)

Star Trek (TOS)

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Star Trek (2012)
Art by Dave Sim
CHRIS RYALL (IDW EDITOR-IN-CHIEF):
(via Twitter, 19 February 2014)
It's not for any particular issue right now, just a great piece of Sim art.

DAVE SIM:
(from A Moment Of Cerebus, 24 February 2013)
...Chris had asked me to do a generic-variant cover and had sent images from the recent movie. And I ended up just doing Shatner and Nimoy, which he bought for another book but explained that they have the licence for the recent movies so I need to do those characters... 

The Doctor Who Cast Read Sim!

Dave 'n' Ger's Credo

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Cerebus #1 Page 1
Art by Dave Sim
Originally published December 1977; Redrawn 2010
(Click Image To Enlarge)
DAVE SIM:
(from Aardvark Comment in Cerebus #166, January 1993)
After you have finished an issue of a comic book, you could do a better job if you redrew it starting at page one because of what you learned while doing it. Theoretically you could redraw the same comic book for ten years and end up with a perfect comic book but you're not going to earn a living that way.

Every creator does work that he isn't happy with. You can't be at your peak 365 days a year. Ger's and my credo is that if you didn't like the page you just did you try harder on the next one. First you get good, then you get fast, then you get good and fast. Burnout, I think is a myth. You go through dry-spells. You work hard, you are disciplined and ultimately you should be able to produce at a high enough efficiency on a day-in day-out basis (drawing quality, composition, execution and finish) so that when the quality slips (as it is going to, people being human and all) it is still at a high enough percentage of your peak efficiency that it  doesn't obviously and self-evidently, stink on ice.

Pulling Back The Curtain

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Cerebus #200 (November 1995)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
CRAIG MILLER:
(from Following Cerebus #12, August 2011)
...one of the key turning points in the Cerebus storyline was where Dave shows himself drawing the Cerebus comic. He pulls back the curtain -- I think it's in Minds -- he pulls back the curtain, and you see Dave drawing the comic you're now reading. John and I talked about this for hours, beyond whatever we ended up writing. That's a key narrative shift which neither of us was really happy with...

...This is an overused term, but it's a very postmodern thing to do. You're being reminded that you're reading a comic book, and part of the fun of getting lost in fiction, is that just for a while you can become lost in that fiction. You don't have Tolkien coming in saying, "By the way, this is just a story about hobbits and orcs." You get lost in that world. And that had happened in the first hundred, hundred-fifty issues of Cerebus, whatever, and Dave reminds you that you're sitting there reading a comic book and he's drawn it for you, and it's like "I know that, but I don't want to be reminded of it when I'm reading the story." And once that shift happened, all of the real-world stuff from Dave was necessarily a part of the comic because he brought it in, and while on an intellectual level I understand what he was doing, and on an intellectual level it was completely brilliant, on a fun, fiction reading level, I'm going, "Oh man, did you really have to do that?"...

...And then there's the whole section of the story in which Cerebus is talking to Dave. Okay, it's an analogy: Cerebus has a creator, Dave has a creator. I could see it on an intellectual level; I just didn't enjoy it. I don't like it when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby popped up in Fantastic Four comics, or Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were in Spider-Man. It was a silly kind of thing there. But I still thought, "You people can't resist putting yourselves into the stories!"

Weekly Update #20: A Solution For Diamond?

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Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':
Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...
Glamourpuss #14 (July 2010)
Art by Dave Sim
DAVE SIM:
Okay, it looks as if George and Sean have their work cut out for them.  Still no word from Lebonfon on  a) the price for a single signature and  b) what they can do to keep me and Diamond from having to pay 95% of the cost of getting the printing to look like the proofs.

Thanks to Barry D. again. Patreon.com is definitely the kind of thing that I'm looking for since it took me two and a half months to do STRANGE DEATH No.4 and that issue had a good ten pages from glamourpuss that I only had to add comic panels and transition backgrounds to.  No.5 is going to have to be all new so that should tell me how fast or slow I actually am.

Let me try and give you a bit more of an overview of where everything stands now, thanks to a phone message from Brendan (no last name). He wanted to know where everything stands on:

THE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING
That was an example of a book that everyone told me was a sure seller because copies of the original were going for $50 on eBay and it turned out not to be the case (a sure seller I mean).  Sold a few hundred copies and then zip. I think that's the category that I'm in: stores have limited display space so they special order anything that isn't CEREBUS or HIGH SOCIETY.  That requires Large Printing Bills for books that then trickle out over the course of years.  I really should have stuck with my original plan: telling people that the GSP was designed to help young cartoonists, not as a cash cow, so if they can find the text online, download the text.  No problem by me.

THE IDW CEREBUS COVERS BOOKS
The COVERS books are under Special Projects at IDW which is Scott Dunbier's beat.  That covers a lot of territory, primarily (I'm guessing) the Artists Editions which are one of those "success attracts success" deals.  The more of them come out, the more Prime Comic Art becomes available and then Scott has to prioritize.  I'm not egomaniac enough to think the CEREBUS COVERS are going to be very high up on the immediate list even two years ago when we agreed to do them, let alone now.  They've also reprinted the Walt Simonson THOR edition which means there's a new category:  perpetual sellers.  Again, I don't think CEREBUS COVERS are on that list.  If you can sell another batch of Simonson THORs just by relisting them, you really need to do that.  Also, I think Scott is determined to get ALL the covers and that's one of those things that only patience is going to lead to.  And -- from MY standpoint -- and for all I know from IDW's standpoint -- I'm better off working on THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND which is already going to take years to do.  Three or four years to produce a year and a half's worth of monthly comic books. Stopping STRANGE DEATH to write commentaries on 300 covers -- how much time is that going to add to the wait time?  Rhetorical question.  None of us knows.

CEREBUS ARCHIVE COLLECTION
Well, that's one of those: is this another GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING where people SAY it will sell and it DOES sell but not in sufficient numbers to make it worthwhile?  The other problem is that it pretty much...you know...drops off a cliff. Here's my history as a freelancer leading up to the creation of Cerebus.  Almost got to the creation of Cerebus. All I'm going to hear is "Are you ever going to finish CEREBUS ARCHIVE?" Well, probably not.  I'm glad I got as far as I did but even as a print-on-demand title it sold really badly.  There just isn't a large enough audience interested in How CEREBUS Came To Be.  For my own purposes, I think it helped in an area I was concerned about: putting my version of the history on record.  For people concerned about that.  To the best of my recollection, this is how it happened, these are the important elements and how they interacted. There are a number of different versions out there, obviously. Steve Peters suggested putting the issues up on KA-BLAM, the "other" print-on-demand outfit. It sounds good, but almost ALL of these things are in the "if you can just wave a magic wand and it happens", well, fine, but even the simplest thing takes time. I'd be more inclined to look into Barry's suggestion of Patreon because it's a "bottom line" thing. Here: you've got patrons who have committed for $80 a month. That's $80 you can bank on.

GLAMOURPUSS COLLECTION
Same as the above but with the added problem of getting it confused with THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND before STRANGE DEATH even comes out.  "Oh, yeah. I bought that collection. I thought it was supposed to be a comic book.  What a drag".  The story is ALWAYS going to garbled. ALWAYS.  That having been said, when Lebonfon decided that would no longer store books for publishers, I had to figure out what to do with 6,000 copies of glamourpuss (and NO No.5's. D'OH!!).  What I decided to do was to have them shipped to Waterloo and then sign them all so IDW could use them to promote THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND.  They're all signed and they're sitting there while I look into packaging them here in town.  Which isn't working, I've come to the conclusion in the last few days.  So, soon the whole skid full of books is off to IDW to be... packaged... in some way. THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND: ORIGINS or something like that.  But that's not a top priority right now with me just having finished issue No.4. That's something -- HOW to package them and HOW best to use them to promote THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND maybe a year or six months before No.1 ships -- we will be brainstorming about when I have, like issue 11 or 12 (God willing) done, two years from now?  Three years from now?

THE CEREBUS MISCELLANY BOOK
Same deal as above.  You're talking about a five-figure amount to print it.  You're talking about how do I compensate the people I did jam stories with? Or do I? My view is that they can reprint their own work if they want, but Creator's Rights is usually interpreted as:  cut me a cheque if you use my work.  With JUDENHASS and THE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING it was a one-time sale.  If someone wants to offer to pay me back for the five-figure printing bill if it turns out to only sell once, but, hey the world doesn't work that way. "Gee, Dave, I thought the CEREBUS MISCELLANY BOOK was a guaranteed goldmine.  Oh, well." I can't really afford even any potential "Oh, well's" at this point, I'm afraid.

Frankly, my biggest concern right now is the amount of money Diamond has tied up in CEREBUS inventory that isn't moving because the whole process of getting CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY back into print has dragged on for two years with no end NECESSARILY in sight.  I mean, how long is it going to take for George and Sean to have a finished signature or finished book between them? As long as it takes to do it properly.  Then we still have to work out how Imprimerie Lebonfon fits into this.  Are they going to insist on an additional 50% on the printing bill?  What happens if we look at the printed signature and don't like it?

With that in mind, I've floated a trial balloon with Diamond: suggesting that if we get to the finished signature stage and we don't like the quality that Diamond consider doing a run of CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY through Gemstone Publishing, Steve Geppi's publishing arm that does mostly the OVERSTREET PRICE GUIDE.  Basically, doing a version of CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY that they can live with that matches the trade paperbacks as they are now.  A one-time deal -- the Gemstone versions -- just to get copies of the books back in circulation while we keep negotiating with Imprimerie Lebonfon through 2014, 2015, 2016, however long it takes.

I'm not prioritizing the suggestion. I just made it to my Diamond rep instead of to his boss... or his boss's boss.  It takes weeks for any suggestion to make its way to the person it needs to get to in an operation the size of Diamond.  But, I have to look at "Do I see this logjam coming to an end in the foreseeable future?" Well, I'm trying to stay optimistic but I thought this would all be worked out before Bill Schanes retired as Diamond's VP of Purchasing -- and that was last April.

It's really none of my business as to how "antsy" Diamond might be getting about this.  That's an internal Diamond question.  But I see it as my job to offer a potential shortcut later this year if we get to later this year and nothing is happening.  Diamond can compensate me whatever they want for the Gemstone editions of CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY.  The idea isn't to line my own pockets, the idea is to treat Diamond as the major stakeholder they are.

Matt Demory, my Diamond rep said his Aardvark-Vanaheim file is... bulging.  I have no doubt. All of my faxes and proof copies on CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY are stacked in the corner of the office and the stack is a good foot and a half high.

I wish there was an easy way out of this and, as always, anyone who sees anything I don't see or has a sudden VISION or an answer in a dream  :)  Please, post it here.

Okay, see you all next Friday.


Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

Bill Sienkiewicz's Moon Roach

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Convention Sketch
By Bill Sienkiewicz& Dave Sim
FPI BLOG:
(from The Art Of Bill Sienkiewicz, 2 November 2013)
...Sienkiewicz began his pro career at Marvel, his style on Moon Knight very quickly shifting from something very influenced by Neal Adams to something far more expressive, and it's this extreme expression most people will think of when you mention Sienkiewicz's name. From here it was on to various projects; Marvel Comics'New Mutants, DC Comics'The Shadow, and on to various other publishers. Famously he produced the first couple of issues of Alan Moore's lost epic Big Numbers, before leaving the project. Sienkiewicz's work is still as visually interesting as it’s always been, mot recently seen in the pages of Brian Michael Bendis'Daredevil: End Of Days….

(Image via Brian Coppola. Thanks!)

Spicy Space Stories

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Strange Attractors vs Cerebus
Art by Michael Cohen
DAVE SIM:
(from the introduction to Strange Attractors Vol 1: Chaos Jitterbug, Retrografix, 1996) 

"What is it about Strange Attractors anyway and why can't I put it down on paper?" 

...I'm really at a loss. When I think back to the first time that I read Strange Attractors my response (to the first issue) was uniformly positive, viscerally positive (if you will). The problem with attempting to analyse the reason for that positive reaction is that many of the initial questions remain. Let's take Sophie as an example. Is she a cliche character, a cardboard cutout? Possibly. Her gestures, her overall look and her dialogue are not very far removed from those of the female characters in "romance comics" from the forties, fifties and sixties. Is this intentional? Evidently, since the question is raised in the first place. She's a librarian, a curator, an archetype... or a stereotype. Archetype or stereotype - which is it? Well, I'm not sure. And not only am I not sure, but I'm not sure WHY I'm not sure. Let's even make the arbitrary distinction between an archetype and a stereotype; let's say (for the sake of argument) that the first is a foundation, a short-hand, a launch pad, a jumping off point. The second is a short-hand form, an icon and that's all that it is. Now if you'll grant me my own arbitrary distinction -- feel free to substitute nouns that you think are better suited if that helps -- it's pretty clear to me that Sophie is an archetype. There is more to the character than there is to any of the interchangeable heroines of the "romance comics". But what? Here's where the analysis gets very tricky. Is there anything that Sophie does or says, any variation in the way she is portrayed in Michael's pictures and Mark's words that would indicate larger doings than you would find in stereotypical "romance comics"?

Uhh.

The answer is yes and no. The overall impression, the overall sense of the book is that there are larger doings afoot. Sophie is a person and a person that I like a great deal, I likes her by about page 3 and I haven't stopped liking her since. I couldn't say that -- it would be ridiculous -- about any of the heroines of "romance comics" like Patsy & Hedy. Sophie is a likable person, it's just that there's no evidence as to why she's a likable person.

Opening an issue of Strange Attractors and starting to read it is comparable to walking into an environment that creates in us a pleasurable sensation at all levels. Your grandparent's house. Where you are sitting right now, you can't even picture the smell of that house, but the moment you walk in all of your senses, all of your perceptions and awarenesses seem to relax into the sheer comfortableness of it all.

Well, that's as close as I can get to it.

Sophie creates a level of perception -- as does the Strange Attractors comic itself -- that cannot be explained by analysing her component parts. Now, this would be no mean accomplishment in itself. But as you get past the first three or four pages, Michael and Mark do it again and again and again. Spicy Space Stories, Pirate Peg, Nurse Nebula. These are names that, alone, would create a sense of "camp", of stereotype, spoof, patronising parody. Nothing about them suggests otherwise as they are encountered each in turn and yet that perception of them is momentary, quickly replaced by an unquestioning acceptance, appreciation and, well, comfortableness. Spicy Space Stories. Sorry, I just wanted to type that again. Spicy Space Stories.

Heck, I give up.

Spicy Space Stories.

Nurse Nebula. Nurse... Nebula.

Dave Sim, Kitchener, Ontario
April Pirate Peg 9, 1996

In 1993 Michael Cohen and Mark Sherman began self-publishing Strange Attractors, which ran for seventeen issues during the 1990s. You can read Strange Attractors for free online at Web Comics Nation.

Cerebus Publishing Timeline #1-100

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Cerebus Publishing Timeline: #1-100
Report all errors/omissions in the 'Comments'. Thanks! 

(Idea stolen from CBG #1267, February 1998. Thanks to Michael Cohen!)

Cerebus Publishing Timeline #101-200

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Cerebus Publishing Timeline: #101-200
Report all errors/omissions in the 'Comments'. Thanks!

(Idea stolen from CBG #1267, February 1998. Thanks to Michael Cohen!)

Cerebus Publishing Timeline #201-300

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Cerebus Publishing Timeline: #201-300
Report all errors/omissions in the 'Comments'. Thanks!  

(Idea stolen from CBG #1267, February 1998. Thanks to Michael Cohen!)

Ditko Package #3

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The Ditko Package #3
by Joe Gill & Steve Ditko
(Published by Robin Snyder & Steve Ditko, 1999)

DAVE SIM:
(from The Blog & Mail, 2 March 2007)
Ditko Package 3 clocks in at 160 pages and reprints 20 different short stories from the old Charlton Horror line, most of the stories written by Joe Gill. I think it's worth quoting his and Steve Ditko's reciprocal introductions to the book (even though, not having asked permission to do so, I know is WRONG and I expect a visit from Mr. A in my dreams tonight):
I'm delighted to introduce a collection of Steve Ditko's wonderful stories. While Steve's art is always up to the Ditko standard of excellence, my scripts are not prize-winning material.

Steve and I and all the other great guys at Charlton during the years of glory (?), worked for extremely low rates. A few of us accommodated ourselves by working fast in order to make as much moolah as possible. This accounts for my enormous volume of pages. When I worked for other NY publishers I was paid much more; Steve, too, worked for more generous publishers.

But Steve's work was the same, no matter for whom he worked or how much he was paid. Steve denied he was driven to always do his best. He swore he was only in it for the money. I told him if he had no market, no pen or pencil or paper, he'd be creating masterpieces in bare dirt. I never knew my friend to deliberately do less than his best in order to grind out pages.

Many of us worked as fast as we could move. There was little criticism and that suited us just fine. Steve moved at his own pace, doing his brilliant best, and he made my work shine.

Steve's got a quiet sense of humor and he's more well-mannered than I but we got along very well and imbibed a few martinis together from time to time. After a day in `the shoe factory' we explored the delights of night life in Derby, CT.

Steve was always the best and he stayed that way come Hell of high water. I have fond memories of those Charlton years and now you will, too.
It's very true. One of the things Joe Gill doesn't mention is how atrocious the Charlton printing was. Anyone who goes back to those distant times knows what I'm talking about. If you bought your Marvel and DC comics and picked up a couple of Charlton's, back in the 60s and 70s there was no question that the printing standards dropped off precipitously. Which is very funny since, as Neal Adams pointed out, Marvel and DC were basically printing their books on toilet paper and had no production standards whatsoever. Still, their comic books looked like world class magazine slicks when placed alongside Charlton's books. And yet, flipping through this volume, you see absolutely no sign of Steve Ditko letting that affect his work even though he obviously knew what it was going to print like. That's an amazing level of integrity to exhibit over the course of 160 pages. None of it looks "hacked out".

And then it's Steve Ditko's turn to introduce Joe Gill:
Joe Gill is one comic book story/script writer who understands a comic panel. Most other writers believe a single panel is a long, continuing strip of a movie film containing numerous, changing, point-of-view frames.

I read the screenplay of Gorgo. From the first reading to this day, I marvel at how well Joe adapted the character to comic books. I didn't read the Konga screenplay but that comic script was a treat.

As for Captain Atom, Charlton (like many companies) gave up too soon on the new feature.

Joe may have been partly responsible for my long stay at Charlton. (Actually Charlton left us and the comic field.) I know Joe's scripts made my stay and the work enjoyable and worthwhile. Our efforts are worth saving and still enjoyable in reviewing with a long list of favourites.

The comic book story/script writer? It doesn't matter who follows the first. That first choice is Joe Gill.
Speaking from the experience of having broken into the comic-book field on the short horror story end of things, I'd have to say that Joe Gill is a little hard on himself. These eight-pagers are not the easiest things in the world to write basically because it's so hard to hide the twist ending when you have so few pages to work with. The veteran horror reader is finely attuned to any plot development or line of dialogue that just reeks of twist ending and if they've guessed what your twist ending is before they get there then you've basically failed as a horror writer. I must have several dozen plots for short horror stories in the Cerebus Archive that I submitted to Skywald and Warren, all of them rejected. I sold two: Cry Of The White Wolf to Skywald and Shadow Of The Axe to Warren. Some of the stories are pretty lame, but then the batting average in the Warren magazines wasn't anywhere close to 1.000, either. As I say, these things are tough to write and very easy to pick apart. One of the Gill stories is credited to Jack Daniels and another to Johnny Walker. They're still readable and, as Ditko says, he knows exactly how much you can get into one panel and how you move the reader through the story and exactly the right pace for an eight-pager so it doesn't feel rushed or padded.

Gene Day and I submitted a story to Charlton back in 1974, maybe '75, The Gravedigger's Banquet which I pencilled and wrote and Gene inked. You know, the most basic advice for the freelancer is to learn about the publications you're submitting to. "Gravedigger's" had been intended for some other venue and I basically just redrew it incorporating Baron Weirwulf, one of the Charlton horror hosts at the top of the first page. Never actually read a Charlton horror comic. Reading these, I noticed that they incorporated the horror hosts into the stories. They play bit roles and comment on the action as its unfolding. Which is actually pretty clever and sets Charlton apart from all the other horror titles with narrators that only appear in the first and last panel. I might have had a better shot at selling a story if I had known that. Stupid, arrogant, know-it-all eighteen-year-old.

Anyway, I was sorry when I came to the end of this volume. It's a steal at $13 US. 


Shadow Of The Axe!

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'Shadow Of The Axe!' from Creepy #79 (Warren, May 1976)
Story by Dave Sim, Art by Russ Heath
6-Pages of Original Art Sold for US$2,500 in October 2002
HERITAGE AUCTIONS:
The successor to the legendary EC Comics of the 1950s, Warren's fright mags Creepy and Eerie were successful in signing some of comics' most legendary creators to fill their pages with tension and terror. One of the finest stories to grace the pages of a Warren publication (and, in many people's minds, the most memorable), was the story offered here by the great Russ Heath. Atmospheric and moody, every panel is a masterpiece of horror. Rendered in subtle wash-tones, each page measures approximately 11.5" x 17.5", with an image area of approximately 10" x 15", and is in excellent condition, with little to no white-out. Held privately since its publication, this art may never be offered again for public sale.

Shadow Of The Axe! is included in the Dark Horse reprint series Creepy Vol 17.

Weekly Update #21: Eddie Campbell's Comics Remastered

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Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':
Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...
DAVE SIM:
Thanks to Barry Deutsch for the suggestion and to Tim, our gracious host, for implementation it is now possible to pledge monthly amounts to "Dave Sim" at Patreon.com. Every little bit helps, so thanks in advance to everyone who chooses to participate. Working 12 hours a day six days a week, you are at least guaranteed that the money will not be going on riotous living!

I've been reminded of the Dave Sim Societal Pariah Lunch that took place in Toronto with all of the contributors to LOW SOCIETY who had signed the petition -- me and Rob Walton and Sean Menard and Devon Wong (Rina Rozas couldn't make it because of illness). Devon was very interesting on the subject of vinyl records. He's taken to sitting his friends down, putting a vinyl record on his turntable, putting the needle on the record, putting ACTUAL HEADPHONES on them -- NOT ear buds -- and saying "HERE. LISTEN to this." And they're perfectly astonished at the amazing sound quality. Which is the reverse of what we all went through back in the 80's when everyone was buying their first CDs and going gaga over the UNBELIEVABLE SOUND QUALITY. The only vocal dissenter I remember back then was Bob Dylan. He thought digital sound was awful and preferred analogue.

At the same time, Paul McCartney and George Martin spent untold hours remastering all of The Beatles songs digitally. Presumably, thinking that what they were doing was making the songs better. I'm moved to wonder how many artists on the spectrum between Dylan and McCartney/Martin agreed with Dylan but didn't say anything because CDs were such a goldmine.  No more "singles" -- you want the "single" you have to buy the whole "album". You had to re-purchase all of your favourite artists entire catalogue at the cost of roughly three vinyl records per CD.

I don't have a dog in that fight. Music is music to me. Moon June spoon. Tinkle tinkle plink. But, obviously for the HUGE number of people for whom music is the closest thing they have in their lives to a religion, you're not likely to have a calm discussion. Segue into:
Alec: The Years Have Pants (Top Shelf, 2009)
by Eddie Campbell

Thanks for Eddie Khanna for the copy of Eddie Campbell's THE YEARS HAVE PANTS -- he even sprang for the hardcover! What a guy! --  I was interested to see it because I had earlier printings to compare it to, in particular THE COMPLETE ALEC (the joint Acme/Eclipse reprinting of the material from 1990).

It's a valuable thing to look at because of artistic choices that Eddie was making at a particular time with the Alec material.  He used a lot of tone, and very fine tone and a number of different shades of tone that verged over into the "extremely dicey area" when it comes to darkness and density.  Ger and I would only occasionally use anything above a 40% tone but Eddie did use what appears to be 50% if not higher and a very fine screen.  LT25?  LT26?  Then he also used tone scraps for special effects (when you cut the tone you ended up with little odd-sized bits on near-empty sheets), often layering them:  sticking them on top of each other.

So looking through THE YEARS HAVE PANTS, I can see a lot of the decision-making that has gone on with restoration.  Did Eddie do it himself?  I seem to remember reading or hearing something saying that he did.  It's a LOT of work if he did.  Or a LOT of work for someone else if he didn't.
Page 118, The Complete Alec (1990)
Most of it is either neutral or an improvement.  If you've got a copy, comparing page 120 of TYHP and page 118 of TCA, in panel 1, the tone looks more 10% now than 20%.  Which makes the gaseous stream part of the illustration (cut into and whited out on the tone) less visible, but drops the tone back and brings the ink lines forward.  So, it's a trade-off:  which is the more important information? How accurate is it?  Well, inaccurate compared to the 1990 TCA but possible more accurate depending on what's on the original artwork: 10% tone or 20% tone?  Or, more accurate, because Eddie looked at it and said "I think it'll work better as a 10% than a 20%" and changed it digitally. Those are three different "answers", though.

Staying with the same page, in panel 2, Eddie has added a TINY little scrap of tone to the crease between Danny's cheek and his mouth.  In the 1990 version this has definitely caused a moire but in TYHP the moire is gone.  Which I can't believe is an accident, but would rather be a case of taking advantage of the computer ability to cut out that tone and replace it with a tiny equivalent fulfilling Eddie's original intention:  he wanted a sharp tiny little darker shadow in that spot.  But he didn't want a strobe on it.  So he took the strobe out.

In panel 3 on that page, there is a LOT more definition in the tone on Danny's sleeve, which is a very dark tone but not as fine as some Eddie was using.  So I'd call that an improvement.  You can see the demarcation between the tone and the artwork much, much more clearly and the tone itself is clearer.

Panel 4 is another instance of 10% or 20%?  10% in the TYHP edition and 20% back in 1990.

Panel 6 -- and there's a bunch of them in TYHP -- definitely qualifies as "most improved".  It's a very dark tone over the drawing and in the 1990 version a lot of the drawing detail has disappeared as a result.  It's also noticeable in the 1990 version that Eddie "patched" a small strip of tone over the bulldog.  This happened a lot in toning. The carrier film was so thin that it was easy to have it tear -- particularly when you were peeling up the excess -- and we ALL have those occasions when we just stick the torn piece back where it belongs even though it doesn't align perfectly with the tiny dots around it.  In the 1990 version, this "patch" went almost completely black so it looks as if the bulldog has a stick balanced on his head.  That's all cleaned up in TYHP.

(which suggests that there's a lunatic extreme possible here:  anywhere that tone is being restored and there's an obvious "patch" where that happened, you should be able to just clone the surrounding tone and fill in the area in question. But a lot of times that's going to require the artist doing it himself or herself because they're the ones who know the difference between an accidental tear-and-patch and an artistic choice. In my case, it's not going to happen because I'm not a computer technician.  Maybe in the long-term, depending on what I choose to do with keeping the material in print, I could flag it for someone else. But doing that with thousands of pages is a debilitating prospect.) As someone noted, GOING HOME is THE tone-heavy Cerebus book but I can't picture it as a good use of Gerhard's current illustration time/life to go through all of the pages and restoring/asserting his original intention(s) on each page. His original intention being to get the page done and get the hell out of the studio as close to 5 pm as possible   :)

Eddie also whited out something overtop of the dog's owner's head and that tended to cause tonal problems:  whiteout doesn't add a LOT of "height" off the page but definitely enough to show up under really fine tone.  There's also a certain amount of discolouration that results with tone on top of white-out.  But that was also fixed in panel 6.
Page 104, The Complete Alec (1990)
I'm not sure what was done with page 104 (TCA) page 107 (TYHP) the last panel where Alec is asleep.  It seems to have been digitally manipulated to eliminate the moires of the overlapping scraps but it's almost become it's own special effect as a result of everything being carefully cut out and reassembled...and intentionally lightened?...perhaps to emphasize the "falling asleep" quality?

Page 103, The Complete Alec (1990)
Same with the "funny notion..." panel of Alec "drowning" on page 103 (TCA) page 106 (TYHP).

Page 80, The Complete Alec (1990)
One of my favourite Eddie Campbell panels is the "Penny age 17 who Alec sees as Athena".  There are two small tone scraps on the figure that were moired in the 1990 version and are still moired.  So, was that an artistic choice?  Presumably.  I can't say that it diminished my appreciation -- after all, it was on there when it became one of my favourite panels. 

Page 31, The Complete Alec (1990)
There are also artistic changes that have been made like the sky over Charles De Gaulle airport on page 31 (TCA) page 37 (TYHP).  It APPEARS on the "original" that there's an accidental tear in the tone over the tail section of the jet that -- to my eyes -- was a happy accident.  I like the effect, like metal glinting.  But it's been replaced by cloud effects over the whole area.  I don't revisit my work but that's a personal choice.

Long-winded way of saying, I would guess that -- had Paul McCartney and George Martin sat down and played the remastered White Album for Bob Dylan and explained everything they had improved on it, I doubt he would have been convinced.  But, then he didn't work on the White Album originally, so it really doesn't matter what he would have thought of it.  As someone who has no interest in the medium in question, I'd still, I think, find such a discussion interesting.  But more from the standpoint of "this computer business has brought us all to a funny turn and I don't think we're going to have any hard answers anytime soon."

Dave Fisher has stuff stored out back of the house, including a lot of photographic development equipment which he doesn't know whether to keep or throw out.  With Kodak out of the photographic paper business, there's no such thing as cheap photographic paper, a mainstay of traditional photography.  He'd prefer to develop his own pictures but in the Digital Age, that's just another casualty.  Can a "boutique industry" spring up around photographic paper making it possible again?  Yeah, probably.  Where is the Kodak paper formula among the crushed-beyond-recognition-shards-and-fragments left by the Digital Deathstar?  Can photographers get it and make paper for themselves?  Or will they just  get blown to shards and fragments themselves by whatever is left of the legal Kodak?

I'm on the inside front cover of THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND #5 with page one composed and ready to be drawn.

Weirdly, there were about 20 new names, as I said, on the petition right after I posted my comments on the Alan Moore business.  Boom.  That dropped off to nothing.  Which, I have to say, is pretty amazing in that Digital Deathstar "Feel Our Power" sense.  I mean, 20 names is completely unheard of in a two week period.  20 names is a three month to six month period.  And then, as if everyone was collectively Smacked Upside They Digital Heads.  Zip.  Not a single name in the last three weeks.  In fact it even dropped from 533 names to 532. Damian Lloyd's comment about my "ridiculous Comic Art Metaphysics theories" made me go, "Ohhhhhh, right.  I forget how capable they are of doing that stuff.  Crazy Dave Sim." I was NOT crazy for about three days and then the Collective Darth Vader reasserted control.

No problem.  It would probably be more helpful if you could, you know, refute the Fifteen Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast but, you know?  In your...collective...situation I'd probably do the same thing.  "Crazy Dave Sim" being much easier than "Here's why these things aren't impossible and are really the Only Sensible Way to run a society." 

Another $100 donated at cerebusdownloads.com in the last couple of weeks, so thanks to everyone for pitching in on that.

See you next Friday.

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond' 
by making a monthly donation at Patreon or a one-off Paypal donation.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

Gone Fishing!

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Cerebus #211 (October 1996)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
AMOC is taking short break.
Normal service will be resumed on Sunday 16 March. See you then!

Mid-Week Update #21(b): Lebonfon Responds!

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Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':
Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read  on...





Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond' 
by making a monthly donation at Patreon or a one-off Paypal donation.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

Strange Death Of Alex Raymond - Update

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Find out IDW CEO Ted Adams' answer to that question exclusively over at Dave Sim's Patreon page!

There are now two exclusive updates posted there:

These updates are for Patrons only. You can donate as little as $1 per month to gain access.

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond' 
by making a monthly donation at Patreon or a one-off Paypal donation.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.
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