New Gerhard art: The Murder Ballet.
April 16, 2016 7:54 AM   Subscribe

New Gerhard art: The Murder Ballet.
PlanetSlade is (somewhat belatedly) celebrating its 5th birthday with a big new piece off artwork from Cerebus's Gerhard. The piece - which I commissioned a couple of months ago - builds references to 33 PlanetSlade essays into a single giant composition, and also sneaks in a "Where's Wally" style appearance for Cerebus himself. There's a roaming zoom function to let you scrutinise the art close-up, an enlargeable scan of it in its pencils stage and Gerhard's own animated GIF showing the inking process stage-by-stage. I've added a short essay explaining the genesis of the project and letting people follow it through from conception to finished art.

Gerhard's key idea in developing the commission sprang from PlanetSlade's murder ballads essays. "One of the things I came up with early on was to have the murder ballad sung/played by a musician, and the scene acted out by the characters in a dance pose ... sort of a Murder Ballet," he told me. In every case, he's included just enough detail to ensure each dancing couple can be clearly identified, with Zantzinger's cane marking out Hattie Carroll, for example, and The Kingston Trio's presence flagging up Tom Dooley.
Role: Instigator
posted by Paul Slade (1 comment total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

This is amazing!
posted by Theta States at 10:26 AM on April 18, 2016


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