See the entry for page 19 for the beginning of the story.
The original:
Dave's take in the re-creation:
Fortunately on page 20 which I’ve started on, it looks like all I’ll have to fix is Cerebus impaling himself with the croquet mallet in panel 2.
Thanks again for the commissions. I’m attaching a strip that I did for
Siu Ta, Canadian actress and wife of long-time reader John Tran all of it done
from photographs for her website. I was wondering if you were interested in
doing something like this for your website: a comic strip featuring you. You
supply the photographs and the dialogue and I supply the strip, which is exactly
computer monitor-sized.Had the opposite reaction to page 20 than I had to page
19. I was already thinking this early that the Elf was just an illusion fabricated
halfway between Cerebus and the real Regency Elf which meant she was something
of a ventriloquist’s puppet. What’s interesting is that here she
just keeps asking Cerebus “And then what?” (I made it a little
more playful sounding in the recreation – like a two-year old who enjoys
tormenting adults with questions that become progressively more difficult to
answer ad consequently keeps repeating the question in a louder and more gleeful
way) so, essentially, this is a dominant and suppressed part of Cerebus that
has never actually asked himself, as a barbarian, “Well, okay, so we
loot a lot of money – then what? What do we exactly want to buy?” And
in a real sense all people in that situation want to buy the same thing:
a quiet Elf; that is they want to buy the suppression of an inner voice that
says materialism is a dead end.
Of course I had to change the last panel where he says “Shut up and play.” This
was a swipe of Shirley MacLaine’s last line in The Apartment which I
believe was “Shut up and deal.” Again, my enthusiasm for a good
line overcomes my narrative sense. The Elf had just taken her shot and I had
used two panels to show her take it. When it’s your shot, you don’t
say “Shut up and play.” I could fall back on “Cerebus was
confused by the questioning and forgot whose shot it was,” but he had
just said “Your shot,” a couple of panels previous to this. The
player who says “your shot” is usually the one keeping track of
the game for the less focused opponent. “Shut up and play” also
violated the later plot point of “Don’t get mad at an elf.” If
you’re that wary of it, you wouldn’t say “shut up” even
in a light-hearted way. She’s a female and females are notoriously literal-minded. “Shut
up” is “shut up” and “shut up” is “being
mean to me.” He would need to be evasive instead of direct.