Neil Gaiman and David Mack Collaborate On Dude’s Tattoo To Benefit The CBLDF

Paul Pope is providing (yet another) variant cover for Before Watchmen  and donating it to the HERO Initiative. Here’s a way cooler way to benefit a comic book-related foundation.

Robot 6:

Writer Neil Gaiman and artist David Mack have teamed up to create a new piece of art that features a poem written by Gaiman. The CBLDF are selling a print of it to raise funds for their cause, limited to 90 copies, but the rarest version is on the back of Burton Olivier

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“He’s the person who wrote to me and asked if I’d write a comic for his back … and I said yes, if it could also do some good for the CBLDF,” Gaiman said on his Tumblr. “And then I asked who he’d want to draw it, and he said, David Mack. So I asked David, who also said yes.”

The CBLDF is selling the “variant blue test run” versions of the print, which were created in very limited quantities prior to the standard edition grey run. Check out the print, which is on a French paper called Madero Beach rather than, um, human flesh, after the jump.

The poem:

I will write in words of fire. I will write them on your skin. I will write about desire. Write beginnings, write of sin. You’re the book I love the best, your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends. -Neil Gaiman