This interview originally appeared on TCJ.com in February 2011 in a slightly different format. Several images have been added throughout the interview. A follow-up post with further analysis and thoughts can be found here. Gerhard has recently launched a website as well.

Gerhard at his drawing board, the same one he’s been using for 30 years.

He’s soft spoken, self-effacing. Thoughtful. He worked on almost 5,000 pages over 20 years, but in the past seven years has struggled to draw at all. His former partner is one of the most well-documented figures working in comics, and yet he himself has given only a handful of interviews.

For 20 years, Canadian artist Gerhard worked as a background artist and environmental designer on Cerebus, one of the most sprawling pieces of visual fiction ever created. His designs and meticulously crafted drawings served to ground even the most fantastic of events, or drastic of stylistic shifts. Sim and Gerhard worked in a way that to many may seem unimaginable — Sim penciling and inking his characters in vast fields of white, and handing them off to his collaborator sometimes with the barest of instructions. A pencil line for a table, a hastily written note reading “door.” And yet the resulting work almost always seem unified, of a piece. It’s a remarkable tribute to Gerhard that no matter what was happening in the foreground of the books, the characters always seemed grounded in a reality, capable of exploring and interacting with their richly textured world.

Gerhard and I spoke to each other over the course of a few hours on Boxing Day, December 26^th, 2010. On each end of our respective phone lines we both had an intimidating stack of books — the almost five thousand pages that Sim and Gerhard created together over the course of those 20 years. We flipped through the books chronologically, with the idea of discussing the evolution of Gerhard’s process and techniques, focusing on his development as an artist and a craftsman. I find that when cartoonists get together to talk, they almost inevitably end up circling around issues of craft, grilling each other on the “how to” and the “what for.” I consider Gerhard a master draftsman, and one of the greatest pen and ink renderers of the last 50 years, and so I thought that such a conversation with him would be compelling for pen and ink enthusiasts, for Cerebus admirers, or for or those curious about a job whose quality depends on its invisibility. He did not disappoint.

For those of you who are hoping for a juicy expose on Gerhard and Sim’s working relationship, or the dissolution of their partnership, I’m afraid you might be disappointed. I hope you stick around anyway, though, and enjoy — there’s a lot to take in.

— Sean Michael Robinson

 

Robinson: Do you remember much about your formative art experiences? Were they in a classroom, with your parents, or …?

Gerhard: My mother’s told me I was the easiest kid to keep occupied. If she was busy with housework, all she had to do was give me a piece of paper and a pencil or some crayons and I was quiet for hours. Drawing is just something that I’ve always liked to do. In school I would doodle more often than I would take notes.

In high school, I had three notebooks. One was for math and science, and one was for English and geography and those were empty and pristine. And the third notebook was just jam-packed with blank paper, and I would just doodle in it constantly. And when I filled up that notebook I would take all the pages out and usually just throw them away and fill it up again with blank paper, and off I’d go.

I remember one particular time in math class the teacher had given us these assignments to work on. He wasn’t teaching — everyone was working quietly on the math problem or whatever it was — and of course I’m sitting there lost in my own little world doodling stuff. And unnoticed by me, he was walking up and down the aisle seeing how everyone was doing. And he came up behind me and sort of reached over my shoulder and picked up this notebook with all my doodles in it. And I thought, “I’m screwed. I’m totally screwed.” This wasn’t intended for anyone but me, so there was anything and everything in there. So I thought, “This is it. I’m going down to the office. I’m dead, I’m dead.” And he closed the book, started at the beginning, and he flipped through it until he got to the page I was doodling on. Then he put it back down on my desk and continued walking up the aisle helping people with their math problems, and I thought, “Whew.” Because he could have really hung me up to dry.

I’ve been thinking about this — I thought you might ask me about my early influences. And I would love to quote all these great names, Bernie Wrightson and other brilliant artists. But I realized that one of my biggest early influences was my babysitter. I was maybe in grade three. And she was probably just late teens, just a girl, I have no idea what her name was. I had a paint-by-numbers coloring book, a Stingray coloring book, the TV show with the marionettes and the  submarine. But I only had the book — I didn’t have the paints, the colors. So she was trying to get me to sit down and draw. And I said, “I can’t because I don’t have the paints to put the colors in.”

She said, “OK, why don’t you try this?” She pointed out that the number one on the page was yellow, the lightest color. So she said “leave that one blank.” For the number two, the next darkest color, orange or whatever, she said, “Put in just one set of lines. [Laughing.] And then for three, the next darkest color, put in two sets of lines. And for the four, put in three sets of lines.” She basically taught me right then and there how to think in a greyscale. [Laughter.] Once I started doing that, I realized it actually worked and I was amazed. I remembered that just recently.”Oh my God, that’s really where I first learned to crosshatch and think in a greyscale!”

As far as any other art training goes, I never took any sort of extra classes or anything like that. Actually I was not a good student in high school. I majored in drugs, mostly.

Robinson: Which drugs in particular?

Gerhard: Oh, marijuana mostly. I actually had to take grade 10 art three times before I passed it.

Robinson:Oh my God.

high school doodles, 1975 or 1976

 

Gerhard: Mostly because the curriculum was divided — the first half of the year was drawing and painting, which I was fine with, and the second half of the year was ceramics and sculpture, which I didn’t care for at all. My one pottery thing that I built blew up in the kiln and wrecked everybody else’s stuff that was in there. I guess you could say I’m self-taught. For the longest time I had a lot of trouble talking about this kind of stuff. You know, influences and technique — because basically I was learning on the job. And I was embarrassed to look at the early stuff. As I’m sure Dave is to look at a Cerebus #1. He probably cringes every time. [Laughter.]

Robinson: When you say early stuff, which particular period are you referring to? How long would you consider that journeyman stage?

Gerhard: I don’t think there was ever one particular turning point. It was a very gradually evolving thing — I just slowly got better. Thank God. [Laughter.]

 

Strangely, Gerhard and a friend used this aardvark (adapted from the anteater in the BC comics) as a logo for years, well before they’d ever heard of Dave Sim or Cerebus.

Robinson: In the first 300 pages you worked on in Church and State, it’s amazing the amount of techniques you’re adding through that time — and subtracting too.

Gerhard: Right, yeah. Get rid of what doesn’t work, keep what does work, and you slowly build up a bag of tricks. Like when something worked, you kept that. “OK, remember how you did that.” And when something didn’t work, it was like “Don’t do that again.”

Robinson: It’s interesting to me to look at the very first issue. You seemed to avoid contour lines a lot for the backgrounds and more focused on the value relationships, but you almost immediately ditched that.

Gerhard: That’s the problem with learning on the job — all these thousands of people get to see all of your mistakes. And luckily I managed to muddle through that. It was a learning process for both Dave and I. He has this incredible ability to mimic almost any drawing style. And when he got stuck, when he had a page where he’s thinking “How should this look? How should I present this? What is the effect I want here?” — all he had to do was to pull out a Bernie Wrightson book or Jeff Jones or whoever, and he could emulate that. He tried to get me to do the same sort of thing. And I would look at those references, but ultimately it would always work out best if I just drew the way that I drew. Not trying to fight it. I would try to make it look a little more like that, but I would still have to do it the way I do it. That was just the way it worked best. And it usually involved a whole lot of little lines. [Laughing.]

Robinson: Well, you certainly modified your inking style at times. Not to jump too far ahead, Going Home is very pattern focused, and Form and Void has the stark contrast.

Gerhard: And that was actually really difficult for me, because I really do think in a greyscale, in those tonal values. I realized at some point that it sort of defines the differences in the personalities of Dave and I: He’s very much a black-and-white kind of guy, even in his thinking, and I am more shades of gray. He was a master at spotting blacks. In High Society, before I started on the book, there was a lot of black. He was concentrating on the writing and the characters and there’d be a whole lot of black on the page, which was basically why he asked me to come on board and flesh out the world that Cerebus lives in.

Robinson: To take that up, how much back-reading of Cerebus did you do before you actually worked on the Epic stories, or the series? Did you actually sit down and read all of the issues?

Gerhard: At the time before I started on Cerebus, I was working at the local art supply store, which was appropriately named The Art Store. And I was doing some commercial jobs on the side, trying to make some money and trying to build up a portfolio of published, or at least printed, work. So a lot of it was commercial work. I would have to draw snow tires and meat pies. One assignment was to draw a frozen beef pie using pointillism and “make it look delicious.” [Laughter.]

 

Above: Two examples of Gerhard’s commercial work ca. 1982 or 1983

 

Robinson: Is that possible?

Gerhard: Well, I gave it my best shot. But this was the sort of thing that I was doing at the time. I was also working at the art supply store and doing the deliveries. And Dave was on my route. I would drop off the Letratone that made Cerebus gray. And that’s how I met Dave. Also Deni, his wife at the time, is a sister of a friend of mine. So we met at parties and stuff too. At the time I had done a whole bunch of pen-and-ink pieces and colored them with watercolor wash on top of the pen and ink, and framed all of those up to try to do a show, and that met with, let’s call it limited success? Because it takes a long time to put all those pieces together, costs a lot of money to frame them up and takes a long time to sell them and get your money back. So I had a whole bunch of unsold pieces hanging up in the apartment. I had a party and Dave and Deni came. I was aware he was doing a comic at the time, but I wasn’t into comics at all. I had seen an issue here or there, and thought, “That’s pretty cool,” but I hadn’t got into the story or anything. And then when Dave saw these colored pieces that I had done, he mentioned that Archie Goodwin at Epic had approached him about doing some color pieces, and Dave was never big into doing color. And so he asked if he laid out the pages and inked the characters and the word balloons, would I be able to do backgrounds like this behind it? So I said, “Let’s give it a shot.”  And that’s how the Epic pieces came about. Then when he asked me if I wanted to do the backgrounds on the monthly book, I sat down with issue 1 and read all the way up to the current one, and sort of dove in from there. I read the whole thing pretty much in one sitting.

Robinson: What was your impression at the time?

Gerhard: I remember going into the studio the next day after reading them and I just started gushing. Just “I love this part, I love that part, this is great, that’s great, when he does this, when he does that …” and Dave’s just sort of rolling his eyes like “Oh, God, he’s turned into a fawning fan.” What he wanted was a collaborator. “No, no, it’s OK. I’m just saying, I’m really blown away, I’m really excited about working on this stuff.”

And he was like, “Well, let’s get to work.” [Laughter.] And of course the first few pages were just brutal. Here I am — I figure basically all I’m doing is ruining Dave’s pages. [Laughter.]

Robinson: Did that feeling last a long time?

Gerhard: Let’s see here. We’re in Church and State 1. Here we go. Looking back on this stuff is just …

Robinson: I’m sorry to do this to you.

Gerhard: Well, I knew it was going to happen. [Laughter.] No, especially the first few issues …. the thing too is Dave was using a crow-quill pen [Long sigh.] I’d been using mostly technical pens. So not only was I trying to learn technique and whatnot, I was using a completely new medium… oh, God, I can’t look at this, that’s just awful. [Much laughter.]

Robinson: What page?

Gerhard: Church and State page 282. Booba’s at the desk writing and there’s all these horrible bricks in the background. [Laughter.] But again, I was learning on the job. I remember saying to Dave at this point, “I’m drawing individual bricks. What I have to draw is a wall.” Learn how to draw a wall instead of a bunch of bricks.

Robinson: That’s a great way to say that. I was noticing on … 233 was the first monthly page you were on, right?

Gerhard: Let’s see … [hums] Yes.

Robinson: There’s some techniques in those first few pages that you don’t really come back to. Is that stippling on 275?

Gerhard: What happened there was I inked it as a contour and though it was too distracting, too stark, so what I ended up doing was putting a sheet of white Letratone on that breaks up the black line. The other stuff on the page is a sheet of stipple Letratone. I wanted a gray value in there, but I didn’t have the confidence, especially with a new pen, to do it with crosshatching, so I did it with the stipple tone instead.

Robinson: Had you used much of that before?

Gerhard: Not to that extent. I was familiar with it. Now that I’m flipping through the pages, I see that I abandoned it pretty quickly. It’s not like I used it on very many pages directly after that.

Robinson: And when you did bring it back it was on top of some of your crosshatching.

Gerhard: That’s the thing. Sometimes I would put all the layers of crosshatching down and decide there wasn’t enough contrast, so, rather than trying to add another layer of crosshatching, I would just put the stipple tone on top.

Robinson: 277 is one of those pages I was noticing trouble with the line weight. Making the chair appear like it was really attached to her hand or not.

Gerhard: Oh yeah. That’s actually a very good point. OK, we’re very early on here. We’re — What? — four or five pages into this. In the Epic stories, all the background stuff was very much in the background, and, other than the bottle he was drinking from, there wasn’t anything that the characters were directly interacting with. So when she picks up that chair all the sudden it still looks like it’s too much of a background chair, it’s not enough of a foreground chair. So I did my best at the time. But even looking at it then I’m going,“That’s not right. I have to do it differently than that. Not sure how yet, but differently.” So there was a distinction. A few pages later on Cerebus is in the courtyard playing cards, and the chair he’s sitting on there looks more like a foreground chair, not a background chair.

So I had to learn that distinction. The stuff that the characters are directly interacting with needs to be more cartoony, more contour line, and as things go further in the background, I could break up the contour line, use more value, or whatever.

Robinson: When you came back to those locations, sometimes a couple of hundred pages later, did you feel kind of stuck with the design that you had instigated?

Gerhard: In a lot of ways, yeah. That was one thing that I was probably overly concerned with, was trying to keep things looking consistent. At the same time I didn’t want to go back and make this thing exactly the same as before. I knew this was all one big long continuing story, and I knew it was going to be looked at in that way, especially when it would be reprinted in the phone books. I didn’t want any jarring stylistic change from one issue to the next, one page to the next. It was a bit of a struggle to not repeat the same mistakes I made before. It was a balancing act — make it look like it did before, but better.

Robinson: When we hit 305, is this some type of splatter on top of a Letratone?

Gerhard: Nope, again it’s the stipple tone. I would use two layers of it. The lighter gray is one layer, and I would put another layer of the stipple tone on top of it. If you look at the original pages it looks really good. If you look at this page reduced and printed on newsprint, it’s like “Ugh, that looks muddy. Don’t do that again!” That was the other thing learning to draw for reproduction. Most of the stuff I had done up till then was for framing, not reduced and reproduced. I would do the pages and I wouldn’t actually see how it turned out until the printed book came in. And I would look at it and go “Oh, that didn’t work; that did. Do that again; don’t do that again!” These issues were pretty much done without the knowledge of what it was going to look like in the final book.

Robinson: One small thing. On 328, there’s a crowd scene.

Gerhard: Hold on, let me find it. I think I know which one you’re talking about- it’s going to make me cringe again. [Pause.] oh yeah. We did a lot of stuff with photocopying. I would draw it on a separate piece of paper and photocopy it, and paste it on the page.  This was a long time ago. I think I drew a small section of the crowd, just the faces as ovals, because I didn’t want them all to look the same. So I had a little segment of faces and then photocopied them and pasted them up, and then just went in and put in different hair and stuff, tried to make each one a little different.

Robinson: How much adjustment do you think Dave was doing at this point knowing what you were going to be coming up with?

Gerhard: Well, when he was working, he was starting on a blank piece of paper. I think initially anyway his drawing style didn’t change too much. Did you notice on 331 the top right panel there’s no turn on Cerebus’ arm? [Laughter.] That was my job too — I took over the toning responsibilities, and I just completely forgot to tone his arm on that one. Anyway, this was sort of our philosophy too.  No matter how good the original art looks, whatever it looks like printed is the important thing, because that’s what everybody’s going to see. Not the original art. So if it worked on the original art and it didn’t work in print, then I had to change that. It was a learning curve for the both of us as we got the printed book back. We both sort of adjusted our styles and techniques down until we sort of met in the middle and finally gelled and it looked like one cohesive … I wonder when that started happening.

Robinson: In my estimation, around 466, 500, somewhere around there, it really starts to gel.

Gerhard: Even this one, 444, where Cerebus goes down in the basement and he gets the case of whisky. I like that. That bottom panel. That’s very reminiscent of the Epic stories too. Yeah, more like that.

Robinson: There’s a kind of coordination that seems to be at work there.

Gerhard: Yeah. 449’s not too bad.

Lost it for a little bit there. And then … Oh yeah, the room with Jaka. I think that’s when it really started. I was still doing too much grain on the door — that’s too much. The stipple stuff worked out well. And I started putting down the stipple and then having just a little bit of crosshatching in the corner to give it some weight. That would come back from the printer and I would go, “Ohh, OK, that works. That’s one.”

Robinson: It’s an unusual combination. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before: stipple tone on top of crosshatching.

Gerhard: In some cases I would do it the other way around — I would put the stipple tone down, say, “That’s too flat,” then I would crosshatch on top of the tone. On the job training. And one of Dave’s philosophies, which I really credit him for, was to do stuff just because it occurred to you. I remember where the little farmer guy comes in and there’s one panel where he’s looking out the window — there it is — 573 — and as I was penciling it I said to Dave, “Oh shit. All of a sudden it occurs to me that I want to do the reflection of the sun coming up in the window.”

And he said, “How are you going to do that?”

I said, “I dunno.”

He said, “Do you think you’re gonna be able to pull it off?”

And I said, “I dunno.” [Laughing.]

 

Robinson: From then on it seems like the experiments are constructive and expanding the boundaries. More than just confidence, it seems like you have some mastery over your skills.

Gerhard: Wow, mastery already, huh? That’s very generous of you. Well, we’re that many issues into it, and it does like a lot better already. So, I guess, thankfully, I’m a fairly quick learner. [Laughter.] I wouldn’t quite call it mastery.

Robinson: Well, of the things that are in the repertoire.

Gerhard: Yes, slowly building up the bag of tricks. Get rid of the stuff that doesn’t work, refine the stuff that does. But you know, it’s funny. Just because of the sheer size of this story and the sheer number of pages involved, after a while your bag of tricks slowly fills up and you can refine them. I would look at the page, and I would see what needed to be done in my estimation, and I would decide which technique, which little trick from my toolbox I was going to use in any given situation. And as the years go by that starts to feel like hackwork. I’m just doing the same stuff over and over again. And it’s like, I would almost become hesitant to try new techniques, because it was a monthly book. We had to average a page and a half a day to get this thing out every month. I guess every once in a while if the situation was right and I was feeling confident I would try something else, but otherwise it was stick with what works. Day in, day out, month after month, year after year. It just started to feel like hack work, almost.

Robinson: It must have been tempting to get more conservative in a certain way.

Gerhard: Yeah. But it was also just developing a style; you have to stay with a style. Also, because I stayed fairly consistent, it gave Dave the freedom to change up styles, a different feel for a different character, and as long as the backgrounds stayed the same it wasn’t a jarring change in the overall look of the book. I guess my point was that after so long the bag of tricks gets full and it seems like I’m doing the same thing over and over again.

Robinson: On 416, there’s a couple of visual devices that you inherited from issues that you didn’t work on.

Gerhard: Are you talking about the streams of light?

Robinson: Yeah. What was your reaction to those things that you were called upon to replicate?

Gerhard: Not happy. Not happy, no. It was difficult to try to emulate some of the things that Dave had done. I would have much rather he had done those streams of light, because I think he was better at it.

Robinson: So 513 is the “Odd Transformations” story. And it seems like the first time that what’s happening in the foreground is completely dependent on what’s happening on the background.

Gerhard: I loved all the dream sequences. I loved doing that stuff.

Robinson: So how did you guys coordinate those types of things? [Long pause.] Or did you coordinate? [Laughter.]

Gerhard: Well, this is probably the reason I loved doing them so much. Because it was a dream sequence, I guess I didn’t feel that I was constricted as much. It could look different and it didn’t matter. Because it was a dream somehow that liberated me from feeling like I had to stay just in the background. You know, page 512 I always liked, the panel on the bottom.

Robinson: That’s another one where the lighting is so dramatic that it’s hard for me to imagine how you guys could coordinate that without doing some type of joint planning.

Gerhard: From the shadows on the character I could tell which way the light was coming from. So I knew where I would have to put the table lamp. Then it was just a matter of designing the room around him and getting the perspective right, and then putting the shadows where they would fall if there was a light sitting on the table. And then bingo bango, there you are.

Robinson: How did you develop your pre-visualization? I would imagine it wasn’t always that keen. When you’re looking at a page like that, what process is going on as far as being able to visualize the elements you need on the page?

Gerhard: With this one, there’s two elements I’m considering first. The first one is where’s the light source, and the second one is finding the horizon line. For this, he’s on the floor and we’re looking straight down like we’re a fly on the ceiling, so I knew right away that this one would be one point perspective. And again, determining the light source from the shadows on the character. After I’ve determined those things it’s just a matter of building the room.

Robinson: Of construction.

Gerhard: Yeah, constructing a room and then going back to the light source and figuring out where the shadows would be. So getting back to the dream — when the characters interacted with the background, Dave would usually just draw with a pencil line — indicating, say, the edge of a table. Sometimes if it would be important to the story he would draw a rectangle or whatever with the word window in it — or he would just very quickly sketch a window in.

On page 516 where the nurse character is in the partial sphere there, and she’s getting enveloped in the water, I remember that was me — I’m not exactly sure what Dave had intended there — he gave me no real indication. And again, because it was a dream issue, and because of Dave’s philosophy of doing something just because it occurs to you, well, that’s what I did. And then at the bottom left, where Cerebus breaks through the panel borders, and you can see all the reflections in the water, that was me too. There was no indication from Dave that that was supposed to happen. The dream issues were always a little liberating for me because all bets were off. On 521 where the one tree snakes from one panel to the other, that was my decision. Dave really gave me free rein on the backgrounds.

For the longest time Dave would work only a page or two ahead of me, and I was on a need-to-know basis. I still enjoyed reading the book one page at a time. So if there was something really important to the story that needed to be on the page, he would either quickly rough it in, or write window or whatever.

Robinson: So if you wouldn’t mind moving to Church and State 2… In a certain way I have less to ask you about as your skills …

Gerhard: As it became more obvious what I was trying to do? [Laughter.]

Robinson: You added so much in the first 600, 700 pages, there’s just an incredible amount of forward progress. And your technique becomes more invisible.

Gerhard: That was another thing that I was always trying to do, not to make what I was doing too obvious. All the early stuff just looks too obvious.

 

Robinson: The first section in Church and State 2, you guys introduced the fingerprints.

Gerhard: That was Dave’s thing too, something he had done in an earlier issue, and again somehow I thought he managed to do better than I did. His always seemed more spontaneous, grainier and messier, and mine seemed too finicky.

Robinson: The overall value got a little bit darker too.

Gerhard: I was getting more confident in putting in solid blacks. Part of the thing was, because all I was doing was the background, my Judeo-Christian work ethic compelled me to put in as many lines as possible. I figured that just doing Dave’s trick of using an entirely black background was cheating. I would see it in his work and think, “That’s brilliant,” but if I did it in my work I would think I was somehow slacking off. [Laughter.]

Robinson: I’m looking at these early scenes now. How much of this wood was drawn in reverse, in white on black?

Gerhard: None. That’s all black.

Robinson: None? That seems so impractical. [Laughter.]

Gerhard: Tell me about it. [Laughter.] But it was almost fun.

Robinson: So you got a kind of hypnotic effect.

Gerhard: Yeah, I’d get this kind of zen-like effect.

Robinson: I find that inking in general can be like that.

Gerhard: Well, for me laying out the page and penciling and working out the perspective and lighting and all that is mentally engaging. It takes a lot of concentration and focus and thinking to do it right, especially in the penciling stage. There were a few times when I would have trouble inking a page, and I would think, “Why am I having so much trouble with this?” And then I would realize “I’m not done penciling.” So I would put the inking stuff down and tighten up the pencils more. When the pencils are tight enough, when I ink I can just put my mind in neutral and away I go. All I have to do is turn what I see in pencil into ink

Robinson: It has a kind of performance aspect to it, where you might rehearse for a hundred hours on a set of songs before you play them.

Gerhard: Yep, there’s definitely an element to that. That’s very good. But inking for me was always nerve-wracking in some ways too. Because that’s the final version. If I screw up on the inking, I’ve screwed everything up.

Robinson: I wanted to ask you about the snow …

Gerhard: Oh, the snowstorm! [Chuckles.] Yes.

Robinson: So were you using a toothbrush for the splatter?

Gerhard: Yep. It always made a huge mess, but it was fun to do.

Robinson: Well, it looks great. It gives a kind of randomness to the pages that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

Gerhard: On the 708-709 spread look at the cityscape at the top of the page there. All those little lines and all that crosshatching and stuff and then I just cover it all with splatter. [Laughing.]

Robinson: Where did you pick up that particular technique from?

Gerhard: Oh, Dave had used it in previous issues. He showed me how he had done it, and I thought, “Well, that’s just the coolest thing. I’m going to do that.” It’s the same technique I used for the moon as well. After I was done splattering on my cityscape, I would go in and ink out any blobs that were too big, if any of them individually drew my attention. You know, I tried an airbrush once and that didn’t go too well, so I went back to the toothbrush. I guess I’m more of a toothbrush kind of guy. [Laughing.]

Robinson: Let’s skip way ahead here. These are beautiful pages here by the way. So in this next dream sequence [897] there are a few pages of full-bleed. You guys used actual full-bleed so infrequently. Was that a function of the printer, pricing or an aesthetic decision?

Gerhard: I remember our printer, Kim Preney, saying something at some point about full-bleed being a pain because it made a big mess of the press, but those were done as full-bleed. Notice they don’t actually bleed off the side of the page in the phone book, but they did in the monthly book. The reprints are a slightly different aspect. That’s why you have the rough, unfinished edges on the left and right, although it bleeds off the top and the bottom. Anyway, Dave wanted the full bleed for the dream quality. I remember Dave did a solid black full bleed in one of the earlier Mind Games issues, and someone wrote to him and said they didn’t like it because their fingers would get dirty when they were turning the pages. [Laughs.]

Sean Michael Robinson: What was it like having a fresh starting place for the first time with Jaka’s Story?

Preliminary drawings — Jaka’s apartment floor plan and kitchen design.

Gerhard: Well I completely designed the environment — the interior of Jaka’s apartment, the interior of Pud’s store and tavern — before we started doing any actual pages.  I gave Dave all those items. There were floor plans, there were 3-D views. I designed all that stuff because we wanted a real sense of place. The Church and State story arc was done and this was the first book we were starting on together. So I created those environments and Dave stuck to them as well as he could. I think I spent a month on the designs. This is where we started getting behind the monthly schedule. We were also falling behind at the end of Church and State because we were doing a lot of promotional stuff, traveling, signings and conventions.

Robinson: Well, you guys did that double issue in attempt to catch up …

Gerhard: Yeah, we did a lot of things later in an attempt to catch up. But at the beginning of Jaka’s Story we decided to take the time at the expense of the monthly schedule. Especially since Dave let me know we would be in this location for a while. I really did want to establish right off the bat where we were and what it was going to look like. Because up until this point the only recurring location was the hotel that Cerebus was in, but it was done on the fly. If I drew a room once I would have to refer back to it — try to figure out what it might look like from another angle. And I wanted to have all that established ahead of time so that when it came time to actually do the pages, all I’d have to do was look at the characters Dave had drawn, where they were supposed to be standing, and then from my floor plan I could extrapolate what you should be seeing behind them.

More preliminary drawings —  Oscar’s living room.

More preliminary drawings —Jaka’s living room.

It was almost like transcribing. My first considerations would be light source and horizon line. And a lot of the stuff was done pretty close to Cerebus’ eye level. And it was just a matter of looking at the floor plan and establishing the view.

Robinson: There’s some more extreme lighting, for instance, shadows from the windows on top of the characters while they’re sleeping. Are there any instances where you’d go back in and put lighting on top of the characters?

 

Gerhard: Very rarely. With the shadows from the cross-pieces of the window, sure. But very rarely would I put a crosshatched shadow across a character — more often than not I’d just move the shadow.

Robinson: Did you have any physical models at this point?

Gerhard: For Jaka’s Story? I don’t think so. It was all pretty much floor plans and elevations. I didn’t actually make a physical model until Melmoth.

Robinson: And that was primarily because of the canted streets?

Gerhard: Yes [Laughter.] That made my head hurt. “I’m not doing this any more. I’m building a model.”

Robinson: The only major ink technique you seem to have added was using that fine dot tone for clouds.

Gerhard: Yeah. I tried cutting out the clouds but it would just have too hard of an edge.  I tried using white paint on top of the tone but wasn’t happy with that. I found that if I pressed hard enough I could erase the dots on the tone to just soften that edge.

Robinson: I was wondering because it’s pretty common in manga, but I hadn’t seen it in North American comics before. But I didn’t think you had any direct exposure to manga.

Gerhard: Nope. It was just something I made up.

Robinson:Moving on to Melmoth … I was interested to see that you had a lot more overt atmospheric effects, in terms of weather reflecting characters’ emotional states. Obviously it’s thematically related, but was that directly from Dave or were you just responding to the morbid nature of the material itself?

 

Gerhard: By this point, we had an unspoken understanding. I don’t think there was a whole lot of discussion. He really left the backgrounds up to me. Like the scene where they’re walking up the street and the characters are all in silhouette, it’s obvious that it’s night and it’s very dark. My challenge is: How do I make it dark and make it so you still see silhouettes?

Robinson: I suppose if you handed him back a page and it’s completely black that might not be …

Gerhard: That might not go over so well. [Laughter.]

Robinson: The other thing I noticed in this particular one is having selected portions of the page whited out reflecting Cerebus’ emotional state — 121.

Gerhard: Yeah, having the background collapse in on him. That was Dave’s suggestion. On page 122, for example, where he’s in the kitchen, the background’s all foggy around him, but when the other character comes in, there’s a full background.

Robinson: Was Dino’s Cafe modeled on any particular building?

Gerhard: The cafe itself? No. But Dino is.

Robinson: Yeah, I recognized him. [Laughter.] What was your architecture background then?

Gerhard: I took drafting in high school, but that was about it.

Robinson: On 130, we get a pretty good view of the exterior.
Gerhard: Melmoth was another one where I basically designed the street before we got too far in the story. When it came time to design the buildings, I’d go to the library and take out a bunch of books and just take any architectural features that I found interesting and use those. Photo books from Europe.

Robinson: In the doctor’s office, and Oscar’s final resting place, were any of those researched details?

Gerhard: I couldn’t find anything specific. All I knew was that the wallpaper had to be really ugly. [Laughter.] Because of Oscar’s famous last line.

Robinson: Mission accomplished. [Laughter.] That’s a beautiful rendering of the ugly wallpaper. Although I think you’d be hard-pressed to find attractive wallpaper.

Gerhard: That’s true. Although I had a lot of fun with the covers from Reads, with the wallpaper motif. Those were all based on Barry Windsor Smith’s stuff.

Robinson: I was wondering how many classic ink illustrators you’d looked at. Did you ever see the Arthur Guptill book Rendering in Pen and Ink?

Gerhard: Geez, I’ve got a book named that. I wonder if that’s the same one.

Robinson: It’s the one written in the ’30s and reprinted sporadically since then.

Gerhard: Here it is! Arthur Guptill.

I would refer back to it. Not that I would want to emulate anything in particular, because, again, I was just better off drawing the way I draw, but I would look through that and think, “Wow, that’s the stuff.”  Well, here we go, I just flipped it open and I obviously used some of that in Church and State, in the room that Jaka was in. Page 211. And here on 212 was the basis for one of the Epic illustrations. Not the color stories, but one of the individual illustrations we did and I colored up. That was definitely a reference for one of them.

So, yeah, this book was something I would refer to often. But not too often, because sometimes I would just get out-and-out intimidated, as in “I can’t do that.” Another one was Winsor McCay, Daydreams and Nightmares, and towards the end of the doing Cerebus I found Franklin Booth’s Painter with a Pen. It’s phenomenal.

Robinson: Booth was incredible. He’s got a bunch of work in the Guptill book too.

Gerhard: Obviously, he would have to be in there. When I first started on Cerebus, I was over-rendering, using way too many lines. I tried to be more economical as I went along. But there was definitely a big learning curve for me.

Robinson: The reason I brought up that book is that you’re the only comic artist I can think of working in black and white that actually gave a full range of value, like the classic pen-and-ink illustrators would. Although there are some exceptions, in the American idiom of working in black and white, people are reaching for that Milton Caniff-like using contour as a container for color that never appears.

Gerhard: I know what you mean. That goes back to the grayscale that is in my head that was ingrained by my babysitter.

Robinson: That’s a crazy story. I really love that.

Gerhard: It’s amazing where influences come from. I remember I was doing an interview a long time ago with someone who said they really admired my use of light and shadow, and it suddenly dawned on me that that’s what it’s all about. Without light and without shadow you wouldn’t see much of anything.

Robinson: I know you’ve expressed frustration with the pen-and-ink medium in the past. I was wondering if you’d considered the idea that pen-and-ink is in a way a more permanent medium than any other visual artistic medium in the sense that I can take a cheap, printed-on-newsprint copy of a drawing you worked on and make a million copies of it and it’ll have some fidelity to the original in a way that no other medium can.

Gerhard: That’s true to an extent, but you know, it’s amazing to see the difference between the printed book and the original artwork. If you ever see a copy of the Winsor McCay book, look at the difference between the illustration on the cover, which is a giant multi-layered, multi-winged multi-engined airship, and then it’s reproduced much smaller on the title page, and all that delicate line work is filled in to solid black. And that’s sometimes the difference between the original art and the printed version. I look at that and I think, “I’m not going to do all that crosshatching when it’s just going to fill in to solid black anyway.”

Robinson: So you think that’s largely an illusion, because the reader hasn’t seen the original.

Gerhard: In some cases. As the book went along I tried to draw for how it was going to reproduce rather than how it was going to look on the original art. For me the cover of this Winsor McCay book, with all the crosshatching and the gray values that are on the cover, I’m sure this is how Winsor McCay intended it. There’s almost no solid black on here. That’s more towards my way of thinking. And in the smaller reproduction on the title page, that would be more Dave’s interpretation of things. The small one works too. It just doesn’t look like a Winsor McCay drawing.

Robinson: So, moving on to Flight. On page 24 is the Red Marches, which we’ve heard about for a long time, but every exterior up till this point has been in 22-year-old Dave style. What’s on your checklist of things to accomplish?

 

Gerhard: Well, I tried to refer back to whatever Dave might have done, but in this case there really wasn’t much to refer to. So it was pretty much left up to me. And what I was going for was a big wide-open nothing. At one point, Dave told me that when he’s drawing the characters standing around an empty page of solid white that he’s got an idea of what it will look like when I’m done. Sometimes it would be pretty close to what he was thinking, and sometimes it would be completely different from what he was thinking. [Chuckles.]

Robinson: On 94, there’s a beautiful image that would make my head hurt — of the foundry. What type of research was involved in this?

Gerhard: Dave and I made it up.

Robinson: Really.

Gerhard: Yeah. I thought, “How the heck would you pour a sphere of gold?” That was another thing that Dave said early on that stuck with me. He said you can do research and you can find out how it was done, but he preferred to just make it up. That this is how it’s done in Cerebus’ world. This is an instance where I took that and did that myself. What would a mold look like for a giant sphere of gold? So I just started thinking about it and did a bunch of little sketches and this seems at least somewhat feasible [laughing] and then it was just a matter of drawing it. Now that I think of it, though, I seen to recall that Dave might have made a very rough indication of how this was done. But most of the particulars were left up to me. This is the blast furnace up here, and it would pour out of this spout into the big ladle thing that would be kept warm; this is like a warming pad that would keep the gold warm until they could hoist the ladle up to the chute that would pour it into the spherical mold.

Robinson: That’s the perfect illustration of what I was hinting at before. Whatever else is happening in the story, you’re providing a grounding for those things.

Gerhard: Well, my job was just the backgrounds, so I gave the backgrounds a lot of thought. When it was just close-ups of the characters and a lot of dialogue then I would try to focus more on the design aspect, try to keep it simple. That’s when I started using more solid blacks and whatnot. But when it came to panels like this I would give it considerable thought toward trying to make Cerebus’ world a little more real.

Robinson: A texture to it. So I was wondering if you ever had trouble working out perspective with the figures as they were given to you.

Gerhard: Oh, absolutely. If I actually went through some of these pages, I know there’s many instances where Cerebus is interacting with other characters, where if Cerebus is only three feet tall, he would be hovering a foot above the floor. So there are all sorts of instances where I would have to put a step or a platform for one or the other characters to stand on so they wouldn’t be hovering above the floor. Sometimes I just could not find a horizon line. There would be some conflicts where some of Dave’s characters would not fit into the perspective. I would take the perspective from the largest character, or the majority of the characters, and work from there, and anyone that didn’t fit into that perspective, that’s just the way it is.

Robinson: Moving to Reads, other than making up some time, was it a relief to work on some individual illustrations?

Gerhard: Yeah. I liked doing that, getting a more illustrational quality.

Robinson: Of course, in opposition to that you have the tremendous amount of time spent in the throne room.

Gerhard: Yeah. If I had that to do over again, I would not do it the same way, that’s for sure.

Robinson: Which aspect?

Gerhard: The reflection. [Knowing laughter.] I wouldn’t make the floor quite so shiny. [Laughter.] Maybe a big area rug in the middle.

Robinson: Did you know going in that you were gonna have a slow-motion fight that was going to last 80 pages?

Gerhard: Had I known that was coming up, no. No way. I definitely would have done the floor differently. It still comes back to haunt me. Dave and I did a commission for a fella, he wanted a scene from the throne room, and Dave drew it from a high perspective, looking down. So 75 percent of it was the floor. Before I did this commission, I had done the cover for the Following Cerebus “Dreams” issue, the Escher thing, where you can see both down and up. And I used the same sort of perspective trick on this thing. Now that I’m looking at it I’m not a hundred percent sure that it works, but I did the best job I could.

Cerebus commission, 2008 or 2009

Robinson: The scenes in the throne room in Reads are really beautiful. I noticed you seemed to use ruled lines for the first time.

Gerhard: Some of the lines were just too long. I developed this technique where I would pivot on my elbow holding the pen lightly, but, because of that, the longer the lines get, the more they would arc, and the harder it was to keep the lines a consistent distance from each other. And some mornings I was just too shaky for that.  I don’t like doing the crosshatching with a ruler, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable.

Robinson: It works for me because the surfaces are just a little colder, and so the lack of texture of the line adds to that.

Gerhard: I guess that’s why I figured I could get away with that there.

Robinson: When I was looking back through these books I was surprised at how stylistically consistent the Mothers and Daughters books are for the most part. They’re all pretty close to Church and State 2, whereas Jaka’s Story and Melmoth seem of a piece to me. I suppose that’s pretty natural, since they take place in pretty similar environments. So anyway, if you wouldn’t mind skipping ahead to Guys …

Gerhard: The one thing with this book is the lack of a panel outline. That actually proved to be quite challenging sometimes. If I didn’t have something in the corner defining the panel, then I needed to have something in the corner in the next panel. I’m glad we tried it, but I’m glad we stopped. We used white Letratape for the nice, sharp edges.

Robinson: Where did the jagged Letratape come from?

Gerhard: Dave just started using that. He liked the hand-drawn quality to it. It became an iconic thing. I liked it because I could crosshatch on top of it and not have to stop the pen lines right at the panel border. For longer crosshatched lines, it was useful for me to have a large area of solid black for me to dump the line into so I didn’t have to stop. With the tape on the borders, whether it was the jagged stuff on the clear carrier or the white, I could just ink right on to the tape and I didn’t have to stop the line. And when I was done I would just take my knife and scrape the ink off, leaving a nice, crisp straight edge.

Robinson: That active edge is the curse of the crosshatcher.

Gerhard: Definitely.

Robinson: On 114, there’s that great seasonal change.

Gerhard: Oh yeah. That kind of worked, didn’t it?

Robinson: It’s a lot better than a caption box that says “later …”

Gerhard: And I liked those pages. Working on the other pages was great, but working behind something Dave already inked there was always this fear in the back of my mind about ruining one of Dave’s pages. Plus, like you said, the curse of the crosshatcher, I couldn’t just dump the line into the character; I would have to stop the line right on the edge of the character or the word balloons — I was always working behind something else. So a page like this that was completely blank when I started — those were pretty rare.

Robinson: I’d imagine it was a relief too to not be drawing the inside of the damned bar.

Gerhard: Yeah, any chance to get out of the bar.

Robinson: I’m curious what it’s like to do that kind of passive drawing. Passive in the sense that you’re working from a template that you’ve already planned out, and just mapping it to something that’s not under your control whatsoever.

Gerhard: Well, it goes back to what I was saying earlier. I’ve already worked out what’s in the bar, and what you would see from that angle. It’s a very formulaic thing. But one of the other things to consider is that I can’t have grey behind Cerebus — if I had grey tone or crosshatching he would just disappear. Nothing works better behind Cerebus than solid white or solid black. So that was always a consideration too.

Robinson: Nice work with the bar chairs, then. [Laughter.]

Gerhard: Yeah, bar chairs, shadows, windows. Throw something in behind the stupid little grey thing. Otherwise you can’t see him. And it really is his book, so you should be able to see him. In a lot of ways it was also a time saver, because I did know I could use a lot of solid black, and it’s just chairs and the bar and a few bottles or whatever, and it left me more time to do the pages where we were outside the bar — either playing Five Bar Gate, the geese or whatever. The interior ones were “Boom, boom, boom, move on.” The whole thing with the bar, too, the intention of it thematically is that this is where guys go to drink themselves to death. So it couldn’t be cheery — it had to be stark. It doesn’t have any decoration. It’s just like a jail cell.

Robinson: Is there a point where working on Cerebus became a job? Maybe that’s a naive question — maybe it was always a job for you …

Gerhard in the studio: notice the row of pages on the wall to the right

 

Gerhard: It was always treated like a job. In a lot of respects Dave treated it that way too. Although Dave lived and breathed this book — he was always writing and he was always thinking about it. But for me I would go in every day and it was a 9-to-5 thing. I would try to get so much done before lunch, and try to get my page and a half done by 5-6 o’clock, pack up and go home. So in a lot of respects it was a job from day one. But — especially early on — it was a learning thing and very exciting and challenging in that way. But by the time we were at Guys, at least for me, the important thing was to get the pages done by the end of the day. At the same time I had to be happy with or at least accepting of how the pages turned out. And some of the days were better than others. One of the nice things was we always had twenty nails in the wall with clips on them and when the pages were done they would go up on the wall, and you could stand back and look at what you had done that day or that week or that month. The depressing part was taking them all down and having a wall to fill up again. [Laughing.]

Robinson: There’s not an awful lot of jobs where you have a physical product like that that you can point to.

Gerhard: Yeah. But like I said, some days are better than others. That early stuff. But you have to consider the time constraints. I look back on it now and look at the stack of artwork that we’ve got, you know, it’s 6,000 pages. Who in the hell does 6,000 pages? Who were those guys? How did we ever manage to do that?

Robinson: Flipping through now, are you really having a lot of those cringe moments?

Gerhard: Not that we’re in the later stuff, no. But Church and State was brutal. Even with the later stuff, some pages work better than others. When we first flipped to the pages with the geese, I was like “Hey! That’s not so bad.” That was the funny thing, too. We would get the original art done, and that gets sent off to the printer, and the monthly book would come back in, and at first we were concerned with the print quality. “OK, that filled in, that was too light.” But we’re always making adjustments a month behind. And I was always striving to do better, never really satisfied with the results at the time. But when the reprint book would come in, enough time had passed. We’d sit down and look through it, just to make sure that the pages were all in the right order and that sort of thing. But inevitably we’re flipping through going, “Geez, that’s pretty good. That’s not so bad — what the hell was I complaining about? Geez, lighten up!” Or even worse, “That worked really well. Why can’t I draw like that now?”

Sean Michael Robinson: Moving on to Rick’s Story, there are some interesting things happening here, some new tricks. I really like the faux stained glass on 130. This has got to be what your coloring book looked like when you and your babysitter were done with it.

Gerhard: Right.

Robinson: So on these where the figures are really integrated into the panel, how many of these were worked out by Dave?

Gerhard: You know, in this particular example, I believe Dave probably did most of this. I probably just did the decorative strips on the side.

Robinson: How about, say, 128.

Gerhard: Right. Dave did the foreground figures and I did the rest of it.

Robinson: I like the combination of the optical and the medieval perspective.

Gerhard: I spent so much time and thought trying to get the perspective right on the backgrounds, and I was now trying to do this and have to figure out “How did they do it wrong?” We had some reference books on medieval stained glass and I’d see that they would flatten the perspective.  They would see the top of the bar stool as round instead of an ellipse from there. I had to unlearn everything that I was trying to get right.

Robinson: I really like how when you guys have the figures that hearken back to classical sculpture, you both drop the contour line. That’s really nice.

Gerhard: Yeah.

Robinson: I suppose I should put some of these in the form of a question, huh? [Laughter.] So on 143 there’s this mind-boggling portrayal of a cracked fresco in ink …

 

Gerhard: That’s all Dave.

Robinson: Really.

Gerhard: I may be just flattering myself, but I think he was trying to emulate me there.

Robinson: So that was a surprise when it came to you?

Gerhard: Yeah. Every once in a while he would just decide to do something. You know, we had this kind of unspoken competition, where I would look at something like that and go “Shit! If he’s gonna pull this out of his ass I’d better straighten up and fly right.” And over the next couple of pages my line work would get even more tight and meticulous, and then he would see that and his line would get more tight and meticulous. We were trying to out-meticulous each other. [Laughter.]

Robinson: Towards the end of the book, on 196, we’ve finally almost left the bar, and you get your big stepping-out moment.

Dave’s dialogue — “You might be surprised at who you’re driving crazy- staying in one place this long, I mean.”

 

Gerhard: After I finished that page, I was wondering if people would get it. That’s a photocopy of the Staedler pencil and my ruler and my floor plan. Those are all the issue numbers that we’ve been in the bar. And the bottom left panel is a reference to way back when, when Dave said that if I wanted to, I could draw the interior of a submarine behind the characters, the backgrounds were up to me. Well, I finally got to draw my interior of a submarine. I wonder how many people actually got that, or were they thinking, “What the hell is going on here?”

Robinson: In Going Home, it seems to me like there’s a pretty significant stylistic shift at the beginning of the book. There seems to be a shift toward more pattern, especially in the exterior scenes. I was just curious about the design-y-ness of some of the pages.

Gerhard: It has a lot to do with there being no outline to the panel border again. It made the design aspect more important. The only thing that defines the top of the panel on page 57 is the line of the clouds and the corn and the fence going through.

I need something here to show where the edge of the panel is. As far as the corn went, I would draw the contour of the front row of corn, and then it was a matter of putting little indications of corn behind the front row. It was quick and efficient and looked good, so into the bag of tricks it goes, and then belabor it to death.

Robinson: On 76, there’s that great quilt. Did those designs come from anywhere in particular?

 

Gerhard: Dave had some books around the studio on medieval times and that kind of stuff. Those designs were in that book, I’m sure.

Robinson: I didn’t want to ascribe too much intentionality to the stylistic shift …

Gerhard: It’s all intentional when it comes to Dave.

Robinson: When we get to “Fall and the River,” the screen tone technique is interesting.

Gerhard: At the beginning of a new story arc it was a chance for me to stylistically change what I was doing, so I wasn’t stuck doing the same thing again. Looking back on it now it doesn’t look too bad, but I think I got better at it as I went along.

It was a change for me, because before if I was going to use tone on the background, I would use that stipple tone stuff, because it had a non-mechanical, organic feel to it — as if it could have been hand-drawn as opposed to using a dot tone, because again I can’t use a dot tone behind Cerebus. But especially on the boat itself I didn’t want to have a lot of crosshatching, but I still wanted to define shadows. So I selected a very fine tone, with a much finer dot per inch, that was much lighter than Cerebus. I didn’t want that Church and State, rough hewn look. This was another case where I actually built another model — I had a physical model of the barge.

Robinson: I didn’t know if you had gotten to the computer era yet.

Gerhard: I used a little of both. I had a computer model of the staterooms, and a physical model of the whole thing. It was a pretty crude computer program by today’s standards, but it did what I needed it to do. This is where we started putting the panel borders back in, so I didn’t have to worry about defining every edge.

Robinson: There’s a really interesting panel on 265.

The perspective is so flat, I don’t know why, but when I did it, I thought, “That’s what I want.” The moiré pattern happens because you put one dot screen on top of another. And I thought “I like that too.”

Robinson: You managed to get the sun glinting off the water from the moiré pattern. It’s interesting, in Japan, the comics industry is huge — there are a ton of books on really specific techniques you can use with screen tone, that kind of thing. But I guess intelligent people using the same tools will sometimes come up with really similar solutions.

Gerhard: I discovered the moiré effect quite early on working with tone. It’s hard not to — all you have to do is accidentally put two pieces of tone on top of each other and you go “Isn’t that cool?” Of course it’s also distracting — more often than not it’s something you’re trying to avoid. But when you can use it as an effect …. like Dave said: “If it occurs to you…”

Robinson: So where did the photo covers come from?

Gerhard: Vacation pictures, mostly. Some of them are from across the street or the backyard, but a lot of them are photos from travel. Dave decided that we would do photo covers; one reason was then we wouldn’t have to draw them. I used to take slide photos all the time, so I sat down with all my slides and my projector. We’re talking thousands of slides. So over the course of one or two nights I literally saw my life flash before my eyes one slide at a time. And I just pulled out hundreds, all that I thought might be appropriate, that didn’t have any anachronisms, any that might make a nice cover or could be used thematically for the book. So I gave all those to Dave, and he picked out the ones he wanted to use for the covers.

Robinson:It’s inspiring to see the stylistic shift you pulled off in this book.

 Gerhard:They do stand apart from each other. 292’s interesting — dense. Where it’s supposed to be foggy, there’s gray on everything.

Robinson: Did you draw in reverse on the back of the page for the tone that didn’t have any contour?

Gerhard: No, I just cut out a strip of tone and stuck it on there. Man, I went through a lot of Letratone on this one.

Robinson: It’s not cheap.

Gerhard: No.

Robinson: But at least they were still making it.

Gerhard: Yeah, that became a problem before we finished the book. We were having a tough time finding the Cerebus tone. Letraset stopped importing Letratone to Canada.  It’s not like we could suddenly change  the gray on the main character. It was always the same numbers too, depending on how big the Cerebus was on the page. LT 10,LT 17, LT 30 or whatever.