A while back Dave Sim gave his okay for different translations of CEREBUS, starting with the HIGH SOCIETY phonebook. Recently we’ve seen the Spanish and French translations, and soon we will be seeing the Italian translation. Black Velvet Editrice is doing the Italian version of High Society, which will be a hardcover with a dust jacket and a retail price of 30 Euro.

I was contacted by someone at Black Velvet Editrice for a high resolution recent picture of Dave for usage on the dust jacket. I pointed them towards my flickr page and said pick which one you’d like to use and I’ll send you the hi-res copy of it. This is the one which was selected:

This one was taken in Halifax, NS during the Last Signing events. Dave is sketching a MoonRoach for Bill, the CBC radio interviewer, and this picture was taken just after the interview. The person from Black Velvet Editrice sent me this picture of the dust jacket (and when the time was right, said I could post it here for all to see):

You can see the picture I took in the upper left hand corner (you can see a larger version at the flickr site, just click on the picture). For the usage of my picture I’ll get a credit and a comp copy of the book itself. wOOt! I look forward to seeing the book and comparing the lettering of all four editions – as I don’t speak / read any language other then English, the translations themselves are lost on me. But I can look at how close to the original they retained Dave’s unique lettering style.

Here at the Black Velvet Editrice site, they have this artwork, the inside cover artwork and a preview of the first 17 pages.

So at The Last Signing last month Dave Sim had brought several pages of original art from his comicbook glamourpuss. One of the people helping out CerebusTV, Robin, of the blog Images Degrading Forever, had donated the artwork which Sim had given to him for his help on CerebusTV. Dave brought the artwork with him and put it up for silent auction with proceeds going to the Nova Scotia Foodbank:

Some of the art wasn’t on auction, but was on display as it will be put on eBay in November by CerebusTV.  The top left piece in the picture above is the one I put a bid on. The piece is of Linda Evangelista and was used on page one of issue 12 of glamourpuss:

The next night at the glamourpuss event the silent auction was continuing, and I saw I had been outbid. So I put another bid on it. And guess who won the piece (for $225)? Yuppers, me. Cal from Strange Adventures sent the piece to me and I just had time to pick it up at the post office this morning. Amazing to see Sim’s line work up close, beautiful stuff.  So thanks both to Dave and Cal, but also a huge hat tip to Robin for donating his “earnings” from CerebusTV to charity auction.

So there was an auction recently for some Friends of Cerebus items from the early 1980s. One of the items was a FoC membership card that I had not seen before. Well, I kind had, but not really. The card looked the same as the other 198_ cards used in 1981 and 1982, but it was green. A friend out bid me on it and won the auction. When he got the package, he sent me one of the green cards.  Here it is beside the other 198_ cards:

You can also see that the green card is a bit different in shape: shorter and sharp 90° corners instead of the round corners. The paper also feels different. The white and yellow cards are a heaver cardstock and the green card feels like was made out of construction paper. +Nate+ theorized that it was a mock up for the other cards, and I’d have to agree with him.

Well, last week I mean. This week was work, work and a bit more work.

Last week was releasing Cerebus the Newsletter #18:

The fifth newsletter from the current incarnation of The Friends of Cerebus.

And it was also road trip to Halifax, NS for Dave Sim’s The Last Signing. I’m writing an article about the trip for issue #19 of Cerebus the Newsletter.  Good times. Yes, good times.