Other, better foods
I think I learned that Groucho Marx’s eyebrows and moustache were painted on from the “issue zero” special of Dave Sim’s Cerebus. I write this apropos of nothing. Dave Sim seems to have a lot of problems. But I went to see a talk with Gerhard, who drew the intricate backgrounds for Cerebus, and it was fascinating. He would do exploded views and even build macquettes of the buildings in the comics. He would do exploded views to show the location of furniture, and other ones simply to show where the shadows fell. When Cerebus finished, he chose not to draw for a decade or more. In the Q&A portion of the talk, I asked him what he did during this time. His answer was so vague that I left the talk very ill at ease indeed.
I really, really admire that level of dedication to the craft. There’s the tour de force that makes people gasp in admiration and bring it up years later… and then there are the huge efforts and subtle touches that readers might never be aware of at any conscious level, but that convince some part of them that the world they’ve entered is utterly real.
Whereas I usually stop at “People can guess that’s a horse, right? OK, good enough.”
I usually stop at “No one’s going to want to see this. Even I can’t tell what it is. I just won’t show anyone.”
Horses are cursed. They’re worse than bicycles. I have never managed to render one that didn’t look like a deformed dog.
Generally laying the drawing out quickly helps so you can CONCENTRATE on the legs, those weird legs, and then work your way up to the pointy ears.
By the time I get to the ears, my ability to translate from reality to drawing is exhausted enough that I usually go for “Bassett hound”.
Turin??? So Paolo is one of the many unfortunates who had to go to study in the incredibly ugly Palazzo Nuovo and then recover by watching the extraordinary nightlife that was in Murazzi at the end of the 90s. I like him!
I would think that poor Gerhard, having to work alongside Sim day after day after day after day probably had a serious need to take ten years off to return to the real world. He clearly made enough to retire on & good for him because it’s clear he not only worked his butt off art-wise, he probably had to listen to endless homophobic, misogynist & quasi-religious dogma while doing so. I don’t know if I could’ve endured all of that for art OR lifetime security. He must be a Zen Master.
I understand that by the end of the project they were barely speaking to each other.
I admit I had to Google “Eccles Cakes”, and now I kind of want one.
I was also not familiar with them. What’s interesting is that they are currant pies, but are called cakes. They do look tasty.
It’s good that you learned about them. It’s important to keep up with currant events.
I’m curious about these particular Eccles cakes. Traditionally, they would be round, and I wonder if these were peculiar to a region or shop or moment in time, or if round cakes just look like blobs when drawn in two dimensions.
They were always square cut slabs as sold to me
The ones in the bakers when I was a kid were flat and round and they had Banburys which were similar but had little ears. Not seen any for years round here : (
Here in the North East of England the square cut slab of currants between two layers of pastry is called sly cake. Eccles cakes are only really reliably found in the M&S food hall.
Of course, poor Jack can’t tell Paolo, “Oh, and the Fascists will be back in power in 25 years.”
“You’re going to want to forget what ‘bunga bunga’ means as early as possible.”
Paolo gives off a bit of an Umberto Eco (RIP) vibe.
There was a lot to like early on in Cerebus (High Society and Jaka’s Story in particular), but, IMO, his relationship turning sour probably drew the misogynist to the front. I only read the last half (and ESPECIALLY the interminable trip back to Cerebus’ childhood home) just to finish what I’d started, as I was collecting every issue of the comic at the time.
Well done at getting through it. I gave up somewhere around Guys.
I believe I gave up somewhere in the middle of Reads. I wish I had stopped with the “Lord Julius, Elrod and Cerebus stuck in a closet for a whole issue (It’ll write itself!)” issue.
I tend to do that. I’m currently slogging through Gunnerkrigg Court despite the fact that Tom’s having Annie give her father a pass on abandoning her caused one of my favorite webcomics to go off the rails. I’m still reading to see how it all comes out, but the damned story keeps flying off the rails.
Don’t know if you researched it, but you pretty much nailed the career path of every Turin philosophy student with Paolo.
Even the Eccles cake?
Especially the Eccles cake
You mean every philsophy student anywhere.
It’s good that Paolo can say Ciao without sounding pretentious. Also I like the wire springs coming out of his head, like little ideas, philosophical ideas. ping, ping ping.
When he leaves he says “Ciao goodbye”
Gerhard’s backgrounds were the main reason that I saw Cerebus through to its conclusion. That, and the hope of a rare flash of pre-Reads brilliance from Sim.
Everyone has a different jumping-off point for Cerebus. I made it through the second telephone book of Church and State. Just.
What Jack doesn’t realise is that Paolo is a fellow time traveller, who disappeared from a stage in Montreaux in 1971, only to reappear with a flash that set the casino on fire, an incident recorded by Deep Purple in their song Smoke on the Water.
Pretending to be an italian philosophy student allowed Frank Zappa to explain away his natural weirdness in his brief foray into the future.
John Waters’ mustache is painted on too!
I haven’t thought of Dave Sim in quite a while.I read every page of Cerebus. In addition to the slapstick and adventure story, there were several episodes of breathtaking emotional intensity, presented with a power and realism as effective as any in literature. Not to mention brilliant biographical pieces on Wilde, Hemingway, and and Fitzgerald. Not bad for what started out as an amateurish Conan parody. I read a fair amount of his post Cerebus writing, and in many ways, his heartbreaking descent into madness was a fate worse than death, That said, I would recommend Cerebus to anyone.When Gerhard began to contribute. every page became a work of art, and the scope of this work is literally indescribable.
Hard to argue with this. There was a lot to learn from Dave Sim before he veered right off the tracks – about DIY publishing as much as anything else. As you may recall, I’ve never really progressed past Conan parody.
But your backgrounds! Gerhard could never achieve the level of background detail you have crammed into those last two panels
I put him to shame!!!!
It’s easy to gloss over, given what he turned into, but Sim was way out front on intellectual property and creators’ rights.
Dave Sim is a lesson to us all. However, he shared the profits with Ger.
I had a complete set of Cerebus – right back to #1. I threw the lot in the bin when I finished reading the last issue – I had held on in case somehow Sim could turn it around at the last moment. The whole project turned into a complete waste of time when Dave when off the rails the second time. He should have stopped at issue #200 like he originally planned and had a masterpiece as a legacy. Thinking about Cerebus makes me sick/angry/sad now so I try not to do it.
I still have a few of the phone books from the glory days of the comic, and while I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, I haven’t cracked them open in a long, long time, either.
I supported Cerebus from issue #1 all the way to #300. I bought the first two issues in person at the late great Bud Plant comix store in San Francisco and subscribed through various online stores during the early days of internet catalogs. Cerebus was often thought provoking and Dave Sim was a MAJOR promoter and supporter of independent comix. That’s why I supported him as a matter of principle even though I recognized he dived off the deep end of Cloud Cuckoo Land after issue 250.
Thanks for making me remember Cerebus. That series was one of my monthly reading highlights for many years. Dave expressed the thoughts of the far right for years before the extreme right wing became an acceptable (by some) part of popular culture. Dave was very antifeminist and antigay, yet he tried to provide storylines from the female and gay viewpoints. At the time, I thought his female point of view storyline “Jaka’s Story” and his gay point of view “Melmouth” were truly poignant. If you haven’t read them, this is a brief discussion https://medium.com/@john.roberson/i-didnt-write-that-jaka-s-story-what-it-was-in-1988-and-what-cerebus-used-to-mean-c68e7f07ca81 DEEP stuff in the 1990’s!!!
I feel that anyone who can present the opposing view to their own without making it into a parody can not really be called “Far-” anything. I see Dave as a tragic, conflicted figure in many ways.
Paolo é male notizie. But then, for Jack, right now, so is everything: downstream of the fact that “right now” cannot be defined.
“Computers are the future” shouldn’t be hard for Jack to acknowledge, should it? I was told that in the ’60s. and it was said before then.
If I understand the rules jack’s operating under correctly, and I probably don’t, someone from his current time period (late ’90s) would have to tell him that computers were the future as an absolute statement (not turned into a question by the addition of that “no?” at the end) for him to be able to acknowledged the truth of it in any way. Even then, the fact that he knows it as a fact, not simply as a belief, in a way impossible for people of that period, would probably keep him from being able to state it with certainty.
My interpretation was that Jack has simply (understandably) become extremely skittish about saying anything related to the future, even when it’s probably fine. I’m not convinced the Black Goo would actually have cared if he had said “yes” in this case.
I would expect him to use savvier circumlocutions like “That’s what they say” in response to statements like that one
As someone who doesn’t really know anything about Cerebus but the fact that it’s what’s coined the term “Cerebus syndrome”, the comment section is particularly fascinating today.