Saturday 22 December 2012

Gerhard's Photos: The 'Flight' Flight

GERHARD:
Jeff Tundis had posted a bunch of my old photos on his Art of Gerhard website quite a while ago. I've just started going through my old photos again and here are a few that aren't on his website. 

March 1993: We needed to sign 5,000 copies of the Flight trade paperback and decided that it would easier to for us to go to Preney Print in Windsor than for the mountain of books to come to us. So we chartered a plane. This definitely tops out our "rock star" days of limos, fancy hotel rooms and bar tabs as long as our arm. We had reasoned that for us, at that point, time was more important than money and the less time we spent on the road, the more we spent at the drawing board. I got to sit up in the cockpit with our pilot (who let me fly for a bit) while Dave crashed out in the back.

We had decided not to try to autograph 5,000 printed and bound books. They would be just that much more difficult to maneuver. So we signed the first untrimmed and unbound group of pages (oddly enough know as a "signature"). As you can see, signing over five thousand signatures is no laughing matter.

Here we are with our stack of 5,110 signed signatures ready to be bound. We had signed extras in case there were problems in the binding and shipping process. Which there always are.

Dave had finished signing first and was talking with Kim Preney about where to go for dinner. Kim said he would go call a cab and as I was scrawling my last few "Gerhard"s, I saw myself write "CABhard" instead.

Gerhard provided background art to Dave Sim's cast of Cerebus characters between issue #65 (August 1984) and #300 (March 2004) - contributing to over 4,700 pages of comic art, as well as numerous Cerebus covers and illustrations. Keep up to date on all of Gerhard's current projects at his blog and website, including details of his new book, The Wish.

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