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Back when people actually cared about what happened in Cerebus The Aardvark, just before Dave Sim nuked most of his audience from orbit with a view of life and the universe that was breathtakingly sexist and offensive, Sim offered comic creators a tiny platform in the back of his comics, giving artists exposure to an audience eager for new alternative comics.
This would evolve into multi-pages previews of comics from other self-publishers, but at one point he offered up a single page, with no rules about what could go on that page. Anything goes.
And for a while, the Single Pages were some of the best value comics available, with one page offering up a wide variety of styles and techniques from some established pros like Evan Dorkin and eddie Campbell, and lots of enthusiastic amateurs who nobody ever heard of again.
There were a few dozen of these Single Pages, and instead of providing some actual goddamn content, I'm going to share some of them over the next few days. (There would be more, but I recently traded up up bunch of Cerebus bi-weekly comics, which had the addition, for the earlier original copies, which didn't, and oh fuck I'm boring myself to death...)
They vary greatly in actual quality, but this Jim Henson tribute from Jim Aubry, published in Cerebus #162, is always my favourite, and the saddest bloody single page story I've ever seen. That look on Ernie's face as he fades away...
My own Single Page appeared in Cerebus #146, oddly enough. Dave Sim said he was booked solid for the bi-weekly series, but since my page had Cerebus in it, he asked me if he could run it in Cerebus. Who was I to say no? There was alos a Richard Corben preview in that issue. My first published page, sandwiched between Sim/Gerhard and Richard Corben art! Not bad. Wish my own art had been better!
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