Commission A

"Bonfire of the Super-Heroes"

Intended to be the centrepiece of a triptych, this is "Bonfire of the Super-Heroes". The specific request was for Cerebus a la Frank Frazetta's Conan the Destroyer cover art, only in this case with Jaka holding onto one leg and Red Sophia holding onto the other. This is a good example of getting your money's worth. Once I had the Cerebus, Jaka and Red Sophia figures done, that left the question of what the pile of dead adversaries was going to be and I tried just roughing in a few corpses (it's a pretty vague aspect of Frazetta's original painting. There's an arm sticking up and a rib cage, but that's about it). Ger and I did one of these commissions years ago, that consisted of Cerebus standing atop a pile of dead Smurfs so, really hating to repeat myself…that was when I got the idea of doing Marvel and DC characters. A natural gag. Of course, if that had been part of the request, I would said we needed to get more money for it, but since it was my idea, Patron A is basically getting a bunch of extra characters for free. It's not a guarantee that that's going to happen but I'd have to say that it happens a lot more often than it doesn't.

As an example, last month we did a commissioned piece of Cerebus being "roasted" by the other Cerebus characters. I ended up adding a lot of dialogue because I thought the patron was getting a raw deal in that he was only getting half a character-that is each character was visible from the waist down of the six characters he chose (ballpark figure of $500 per character)-only I had forgotten how time-consuming writing and lettering is so I ended up putting in twice as much time as I had intended to. And then Gerhard got it and decided to put the background from Da Vinci's The Last Supper in behind. He would've charged a lot of money for that but, again, it was his idea so the patron gets a much better picture than he actually paid for.

The three primary figures on this one are pretty much finished and ready to be transferred to the board. The super-heroes are a little small, relatively speaking so I'm going to need to enlarge them before they're ready to be incorporated into the picture. So far, there are two full figure Jaka tracing paper drawings, Cerebus preliminary sketch on water colour paper, and ultimately two super-hero master drawings. I did a very quick Barry Windsor-Smith style Gaelic border that Gerhard will be doing on the finished piece since most of this one is just figures with little or no background.