Dave Sim's blogandmail #48 (October 29th, 2006)

And he who believed said, "O my people! Follow me: into the right way will I guide you.

O my people! This present life is only a passing joy, but the life to come is the mansion that abideth.

Whoso shall have wrought evil shall not be recompensed but with its like; but whoso shall have done the things that are right, whether male or female, and is a believer—these shall enter Paradise: good things unreckoned shall they enjoy therein.

And, O my people! How is it that I bid you to salvation, but that you bid me to the Fire?

Ye invite me to deny God, and to join with Him gods of whom I know nothing; but I invite you to the Mighty, the Forgiving.

No doubt is there that they to whom ye invite me are not to be invoked either in this world or in the world to come: and that unto God is our return, and that the transgressors shall be the inmates of the Fire.

Then shall ye remember what I am saying unto you: and to God commit I my case: Verily, God beholdeth his servants."

Sura "The Believer" 40:41-47

I've highlighted the line that struck me so forcibly my last time—my second of three times— through the Koran, reading it aloud, this Ramadan which was as far as I had gotten with this Sunday entry (although I typed a couple of paragraphs of blather that went nowhere and then stopped when I realized that was what it was). I wasn't sure if I should highlight the line like that, but that was the vivid mental image that I had to accompany the larger mental image: of the day when the dead will be awakened to life and the sort of mental evasions and false memories and "strategic deletions" of what we did and didn't do in our time on earth will vanish away like smoke leaving only who and what we actually were (and, as a result, are). Submission to the will of God, in my experience, opens up the aftermath of this life as well as life itself into a fully integrated whole so that both become vividly real. I'm fully aware of having been an infant, simultaneously aware of having been an adolescent, a teen-ager, a young man, a middle-aged man, a man on the cusp of old age, being an old man, being a man on his deathbed being a man who sleeps awhile and then suddenly being awake—all of us being, finally, irretrievably awake—on Judgement Day. All of those states of existence are the same to me now, all of them are as real as my sitting here and typing this at 4:25 am on October 26.

If thou couldst see when they shall be set over the Fire, and shall say, "Oh! Would we might be sent back! We would not treat the signs of our Lord as lies! We would be of the believers."



Aye! That hath become clear to them which they before concealed; but though they should return, they would surely go back to that which was forbidden them; for they are surely liars!



And they say, "There is no other than our life in this world, neither shall we be raised again."



But if thou couldst see when they shall be set before their Lord! He shall say to them, "Is not this it in truth?" They shall say, "Yea, by our Lord!" "Taste then," saith He, "the torment, for that ye believed not!"



Lost are they who deny the meeting with God until "the Hour" cometh suddenly upon them! Then will they say, "Oh, our sighs for past negligence of this!" and they shall bear their burdens on their back! Will not that be evil with which they shall be burdened?



The life in this world is but a play and pastime; and better surely for men of godly fear will be the future mansion! Will ye not then comprehend?



Now know We that what they speak vexeth thee: but it is not merely thee whom they charge with falsehood, but the ungodly gainsay the signs of God.



"The `master of dreams' commeth unto me by night."

About an hour ago, in fact. I'm sitting in a living room on the floor between couch and coffee table and I have a hand-written list that I'm reading aloud of metaphors contained in a story I've just read in manuscript form. The metaphors function at just about every imaginable level. It's a new story and an old story, the story I've been telling and living and having thrust upon me since 1994 as well as, as I said, a story I've just read. It's both and I understand that. There are people in the living room listening but I'm not aware of anyone specifically or how many people there are or why they're there. I'm checking off, basically (with a sense that bears a resemblance to adding up the same column of figures I have added up a dozen times previously and which always produces the same result) what has happened, what is happening and what continues to happen after the fashion of the Blog & Mail entry earlier this week where I revisit the Friends of Lulu rejection of my suggestion of an anti-censorship petition to be signed by feminist cartoonists and the free ride that feminists get in our society. The one is a metaphor for the other. They're two sides of the same coin. The rejection of my suggestion and the free ride that feminists get in our society—their complete license to be completely and totally intellectually dishonest and never have to explain why or why not—and I'm going down this list and reading them out loud and suddenly Neil Gaiman comes swooping in and lands on the couch behind me.

"I've called The Globe & Mail…" he begins—citing the name of Canada's other national newspaper (the "loony leftist" one) of whose name the Blog & Mail is a parody—and I realize that what he is talking about is some kind of reparation. He's going to use his celebrity cachet to…to what? Explain to The Globe & Mail the importance of Cerebus and of me, I guess. Explain to them why they should have covered issue 300 coming out two years ago. He's still talking and I'm vaguely aware of that fact but what I'm thinking is "No, no, no, Neil,"—not angry or anything but as if I'm patiently lecturing a recalcitrant schoolboy for the umpty-umpth time, "You don't get it." I look down at the list in my hand which is composed of these two-sided metaphors which has nothing to do with anything that calling The Globe & Mail is going to apply to or help. "The rejection of my suggestion and the free ride feminists get in our society" is one of them. There's no one at The Globe & Mail who would have a frame of reference for that. There are about ten of these double-sided metaphors, in ascending order of importance and significance with the highlighted line above being a rough approximation of the most important one, that the issues under discussion—feminism, I would guess, being foremost among them (witness the Whore of Babylon of John's Apocalypse)—do have an end point on Judgement Day. You can evade discussing it as much as you want but there does come an end-point, a terminus to all evasion. There is no "moving on" from Judgement Day. "Then shall ye remember what I am saying unto you." "No, Neil, what you're talking about only goes up so high" is what I'm thinking as Neil is talking. And I look down at the list of metaphors and the damage to my professional reputation, my undisputed status as the Pariah King of Comics and that's like #3 or #4. If that. If that. And Neil's still talking and I'm just sitting there wondering if there's some way—something I could say or do—to get his thinking up at least another level. And then I'm thinking, "For crying out loud, he's supposed to be the `master of dreams'. I shouldn't have to instruct him on these simple basics." And I wake up and it's 3:15. So I get up and do the preamble to my prayer which is my SOP. If God wakes you up, get out of bed, get down on your knees and pray. If prayer does the trick—and I usually know if it does or doesn't—go back to sleep. If it doesn't do the trick—as in this case it didn't—get up, turn on the light and read aloud from the Koran. As it turns out Sura 6 "Cattle" which I then proceeded to read in its entirety. Definitely very large resonance with the dream, with the higher metaphors standing out in sharp relief. As it will be said to the newly awakened dead on "the day witnessed":



"Now are you come back to us, alone, as We created you at first, and ye leave behind the good things which we had given you…"

Things like professional reputation or fame or public acclaim—the stuff that, so far as I can see, only goes up as high as #3 and #4 on the list of metaphors (if that, if that). It's not about that: that all gets left behind. It's about reality and Truth and the fact that feminism has little or nothing to do with either of them. What value would there be in pulling strings to get me a nice write-up in the Globe & Mail salvaging what's left of my now non-existent reputation or celebrating the end of the Cerebus two years—soon to be three years—after the fact? "Now are you come back to us ALONE". We reawaken as the solitary individual souls we have always been and will always be. Professional reputation and public acclaim are the dissipating smoke no sooner seen than gone. "But – I had such a nice write-up in the Globe & Mail" just isn't going to cut it on Judgement Day.

Verily God causeth the grain and the date stone to put forth: He bringeth forth the living from the dead, and the dead from the living! This is God! Why, then are ye turned aside from Him? He causeth the dawn to appear, and hath ordained the night for rest, and the sun and the moon for computing time! The ordinance of the Mighty, the Wise! And it is He who hath ordained the stars for you that ye may be guided thereby in the darknesses of the land and of the sea! Clear have we made Our signs to men of knowledge. And it is He who hath produced you from one man, and hath an abode and resting place! Clear have we made Our signs for men of insight.

As the dream receded—like my "Meet You at the St. James" movie dream last week—it left in its wake the residue of what had been expressed to me through it, whether in a spiritual collectivist sense or in the sense of my unconscious mind telling me what's going on. So, let's "cut to the chase": I will revisit the subject of feminism in this space from time to time—I consider the headline "Daily hectoring from the Pariah King of Comics" to be a generalized fair warning—but in such a way to try to establish overview: that, to put it bluntly, the problem with feminism isn't my problem, it's your problem. Bringing up my petition to the Friends of Lulu from 1996 that had been rejected outright over the seven signatures of its president and board members and further debate closed off I revisited the subject September 25, then leave it sit for a month and then point out that nothing had been said about it since. The feminists' free ride in our society. QED. I'll tell you right now that I'll bring it up again the third week in November and I can guarantee you that nothing will have been said about it by then either. The core point (and as gently as I can put it) is: " no offence, but you folks haven't changed a bit in ten years" as a means of hopefully bringing some new level of self-awareness to those of you who like to believe that "moving on" is always the best answer, is always the high road. "Moving on" most often is just shameful evasiveness, intellectually dishonest, wishful thinking that if you ignore a problem it will go away. It's more accurate to say that if, as an example, you ignore the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s, it will lead directly to 9/11. QED. It's another two-sided metaphor. At least that's the grown-up way of looking at things as far as I can see.



When Cerebus came to an end, had there been an accommodation or an attempt at an accommodation or an attempt at inclusiveness: some people are feminists and some people aren't feminists and Dave happens not to be—had, as an example, Neil Gaiman said in 2004 when everyone was asking him to comment on Cerebus coming to an end, "Whether you agree with Dave Sim or disagree with Dave Sim, clearly what he has accomplished is not only worthy of respect but of celebration. Grudging admiration muttered behind his back and coupled with tolerance of the assassination of his character and the unrelenting and libellous insistence that he is clinically insane in that context is no different from outright ostracism and is intellectually dishonest and shameful." But, alas, that's "of the moment" and the moment, alas, was 2004. I initiated the "Lithograph No.1: Neil Gaiman" benefit piece at least partly to give Neil an excuse to say something along those lines as 2004 was coming to an end. We all face these trials and I don't mean to single Neil out except in the sense that he was THE individual who could have most decisively shifted the terms of the debate over Dave Sim because of his lofty pre-eminence in the comic-book field (and this was obviously the reason that people kept asking him about the book coming to an end)—I invoke Neal Adams' moral-centered question posed at the end of my article on him in the latest Following Cerebus: "Is this what we do in comics?" Yes. Inescapably in 2004 this is what the comic-book field chose to do from Neil Gaiman on down. "Let's ignore it and maybe it will just go away." The perversion of the multi-levelled metaphor scraped near-infernal lows. As Christopher Shulgan wrote in the November, 2003 smear piece in Saturday Night magazine—still the only media acknowledgement of Cerebus coming to an end in this country—quoting my ex-girlfriend and former executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund:

Others worry that Sim, without the grounding demands of Cerebus, will lose all touch with reality. Says Alston, "One of my greatest fears is that when Cerebus ends, Dave will take his own life…"



Finally as Sim sits before his drawing board and works on one of the last issues of Cerebus, I ask him about Alston's suicide fear.



Continuing to draw, Sim says, "they're hoping that I will [commit suicide], because for them that will invalidate what I'm saying. That the way Dave Sim lives is not the way to live. That's not the case. I have never been further from suicide than I've been since reading the Bible and the Qur'an." He rotates his gaze from his drawing board to look right at me. "I think it's wishful thinking," he says. Then he turns and continues working on Cerebus, as he has most days since 1977, and as he will continue to do for only a few days more.

It was a tough call as to whether I was more amused or disgusted by the transparent attempt at all levels of thinly-veiled metaphorical reality—Shulgan, Alston, the editors of Saturday Night—to solve the "Dave problem" by earnestly suggesting in a thinly-veiled metaphorical fashion that it might be better for all concerned if he would just "do the right thing" and snuff himself. "We're already universally ignoring you and we are now preparing to universally ignore Cerebus coming to an end. PLEASE take the hint." I could understand the motivation. Dave Sim dead means that the free ride for feminism never having to defend itself intellectually could continue unabated and without opposition or an insistence upon an intellectual accounting that men are (justifiably) forced to make of their views. In fact Dave Sim killing himself would strengthen the case. "See what happens to you when you `lose all touch with reality' (i.e. when you choose not to be a feminist)? You become distraught and then you kill yourself." Nice try, I thought, nice try but too clever by a secular-humanist half. You're missing the point, I thought. I'm not the one who is delusional here. You are. The only real sharp pain of anguish was seeing, suddenly, with crystal clarity that this was what the environment I had been a part of all of my life, the comic-book field, had reduced itself to: it would rather try to force me to kill myself than face the intellectual emptiness of feminism.

"Is this what we do in comics?"

Again, all I can say is: this is what comics chose to do in 2004. That can't be changed. My reaction to being left completely alone—far from being suicidal—was a sense of profound pity for everyone who had chosen that course of action, "isolate him and hope he kills himself," and who would (most of them) persist in it right up to the present day and presumably (no evidence to the contrary) for years to come. I can't imagine what it would be like to carry that burden of being just that small-minded and mean-spirited. Not just individually but collectively when the history of the comic book medium is written in years to come and as successive generations enter the field and the people of my generation in their sixties, seventies and eighties will be asked (not directly: that would be needlessly cruel—but to be asked metaphorically by the unrelenting gaze of idealistic youth which is always the core of the comic book field): WHAT did YOU do in March, 2004? And WHY did you choose to do that? Or to NOT do that?

"Is this what we do in comics?"

As I say, we all face these trials.



I faced (I'll flatter myself here) an even more difficult one when I came to the stunning realization that the Bible was the Truth that I had been looking for when I first read it in 1996. The same rule of intellectual honesty holds true. Had I publicly stated "Yeah, I read the Bible and there seems to be a little more there than I thought, originally. Overall it was not a bad book." And then blithely carried on with my happy secular-humanist existence, the same indictment would have held true. "Grudging admiration in that context is no different from outright ostracism and is intellectually dishonest and shameful." There was only one chance to "get it right" and that was in 1996 when the realization came to me. The right decision in 1996 would have been a downright shameful "so what kept you?" decision had I vacillated and rationalized and evaded for another year or two or three or five.



See you nice folks on Judgement Day. "Then shall ye remember what I am saying to you." Oh, and Good Luck to everyone on "that day that will turn children grey-headed". No offence, but I think you're going to need it.

The Scripture at the Registry Theatre

Readings continue November 12 and 19

122 Frederick St. in Kitchener

with the Fifth Book of Moshe

[also called Deuteronomy]

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail - "Live" from Salt Lake City #3 (10/28/06)

Thank You, Past Dave. It's now Saturday Morning 8:53 am here it's time for the third and probably final installment of


THE BLOG & MAIL LIVE

FROM SALT LAKE CITY



Here we are in the next day after the LAST DAY READING. You know, I don't think until I walked into the auditorium that I actually thought anyone would show up for it: and there they were: a handful of people. I mean, the auditorium wasn't remotely full, but as compared with the only thing I had to compare it to: the turnout for the Scripture Readings at the Registry -- which is really just me, Sandeep, Trevor, Chris from the Food Bank and either one other person or two other people (the purpose is really just Trevor's recordings at this point and whatever he can sell them for on eBay to donate to the Food Bank) – it was an actual audience. It was going to be very long, I knew that already, but that was directly analogous to the Scripture Readings as well. Three hours of Scripture is a lot of Scripture. The difference that I had overlooked was that this was a Book Festival where Ger and I were just the second cartoonists to be invited (Batton and Jackie had been the first last year) so, finally, at 6:30 after I had been reading for two and a half hours Mimi slipped me a note "Dave – It's 6:26". Now when someone slips you a note like that it means it's time to get off the stage but I'm also in the middle of reading and trying to pay attention to that. Mentally calculating, okay they have someone else coming in at seven (actually eight). I can just keep reading and live with the consequences of whatever happens. The problem with that was that there were no consequences for me. If I didn't get invited back it would just be one more place on a very long list that I would never get invited back to. But for Alan and Mimi and Night Flight it could be a disastrous setback in their effort to make a place for comics at this Book Festival. So, there I was reading and trying to figure out how much trouble we were all in and I decided, okay, I have to just skip ahead and try to read as much of it as I can. Tried that and thought, "Can't do that. It's Power Point – now Mimi is wondering where I am and what I'm reading doesn't match the images on the screen". So I just stopped and said, I'm afraid we've gone overtime and we'll have to stop here, if anyone's interested I'll finish the reading at the signing table. And then Mimi directed everyone to the exits and I went to the signing table and, of course, only eight or so of the people were still there. I mean, that was one of the things that I was aware of. As I was reading, over the course of the two and a half hours, the entire thing was punctuated with the sound of people leaving. The two heavy fire doors at the top of the auditorium opening and closing -- sometimes noisily sometimes not so noisily. People coming in as well – late arrivals, I guessed, but basically just a steady exodus. I assumed that of the twenty or so people who were there gradually they would all leave and when I came to the end it would just be me and Mimi on the stage. Maybe two other people politely applauding and (the unmistakable core reality) wondering if they can now get a head sketch in their copy of High Society. Made the mistake of waiting too long for Mimi to get her laptop set up so that people could still see the slides. By that time we were really down to maybe five or six people. What I SHOULD have done, in retrospect was to just give everyone a copy of THE LAST DAY (we had overstocked Night Flight for the event) to follow along in. Anyway, three-and-a-half hours later I staggered to the end and Mimi and a couple of people applauded. And then it was time to sign some nice young fellow's copy of Spawn 10 and the First Comics volume 3 of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then the usual collection of trade paperbacks, sketches in sketch books. Another couple of hours. Once everyone was sure that I wasn't reading anymore they started trickling back in.



I've developed a thick layer of insulation between myself and the world of which I hadn't been previously aware. Came home very forcefully there on the stage, as it had the night before when I kept reading as Ger and Alan arrived at the house and the sound of conversation was deafening. I do what I have to do and close everything else off. I'm aware of it, but it's "outside the insulation", it was particularly pronounced after the Ramadan fast where all is scripture and self-deprivation. On stage, I was neatly divided within myself, part of me just reading the first 40 pages of THE LAST DAY, critiquing it and wondering at it simultaneously ("That could have been phrased better: oh, hey, THAT part was good where did I come up with that?") and part of me wondering also at this new element, an audience. Touched really. Like all those people who would sit politely at George Harrison's concerts aching for the Ravi Shankar part to be over with but out of respect and affection for Harrison, bearing up under it. Matt and Paula -- 25 hours on the road from Wisconsin -- running on one two-hour nap sometime in the last full calendar day and now subjected to two and a half hours of dense biblical prose and interminable scientific footnotes. There really should be a whole new section of the UN Human Rights Code or the Geneva Convention that would prohibit people from being subjected to that. But there they were right up to the point where I pulled the plug and, mercifully, Matt was able to drive Paula back to the hotel where she could finally get some sleep. But mostly I was wondering at this thick layer of spiritual tissue between the two. The part of me assessing my own work and attempting to critique it and seeing nuances of what I was driving at – Biblical references I wanted to check again and sit and mull over – it's protected from the world (I assume by prayer and fasting and isolation) and keeps the demarcations between Real and Unreal sharply maintained. Ultimately, the audience was unreal and, ultimately, I never lost sight of that even as I was appreciative of what they were going through, speculating on what motivated them to get up and leave after an hour and a half instead of an hour. Two hours instead of an hour and a half.



And it progressed from there when I was reading at the table. Bystanders wandering past on the way to the washroom, some teenagers talking noisily, probably wondering who this crazy man reading this crazy stuff was all about. But it would have been a passing thought, a momentary state of existence no sooner there on their radar screen than it was gone. Mere minutes from the end, the final three hours plus and a fire door slammed shut BANG very close by so that I saw Mimi jump. It's just another personal challenge one among many on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. God's adversary trying to throw me off. No go. Except for the premature pulling of the plug. Win or loss on my part? I finished the reading but I didn't finish it on the stage. Had I stepped down from my post, a position God expected me to hold? Was it a critical core moment that meant I had thrown away the last five years worth of effort that had been building toward it? Had I been bluffed by the note into overvaluing the negative impact on Night Flight, letting that take the place of my duty to God? Arguably, arguably. But what I was reading only contained bits of scripture – primarily it was just my very human commentaries. Staying on the stage I could arguably have been overvaluing that, giving in to base vanity and raising myself up above my place. A slight buzzing sensation in my head that persisted after I was done reading and somewhere remote from there Cerebus creator Dave Sim was on auto-pilot. Shaking hands, smiling, making small talk, answering questions, getting his copy of Archie #570 autographed by all of the Night Flight staffers who were still around and who had appeared there. Unreal. Unreal in the sense that the person had – and has – very little to do with who I am, now. So there's a weird oscillation that takes place over and across the insulation. Who I am goes to sleep and who I was "struts and frets his hour upon the stage". And then suddenly someone asks me a question about the Bible or the Koran or fasting and I'm instantly awake. Then someone hands me a copy of Cerebus No.7 or 12 or 18 to sign and I go back to sleep as the actor dredges something up from the time period, some trace memory of the Dave Sim who was in answer to a question I've been asked dozens or hundreds of times before. "Best Wishes to Andy at The City Library '06 Dave Sim and" over to Ger "Best Wishes Steve & Amy Salt Lake City 27 October 06 Dave Sim and" over to Ger.



And then out for dinner. And there it's all portrayal and insulation. The Real Me absolutely appalled. Do people talk about nothing else but sex and bodily functions and blaspheme against God and scripture? Well, obviously they do. But coming off of the Ramadan fast it's really like going to eat somewhere and everyone just sits there and throws mud and feces at you. And we all laugh and laugh.



And that's when I realize that the layer of insulating material absolutely surrounds me. Nothing sticks. Back to the hotel, ritual ablutions, change of clothes, down on my knees and back to my relationship with God. Up at dawn, ritual ablutions, change of clothes, down on my knees, back to my relationship with God. I wonder how many of us there are, really. How many people are in their fully insulated escape pods.



And the whole thing resonates, as did the collapsed end of the reading last night with the ending on the Prologue to the LAST DAY. Two in every hundred. I channel surf the television in my hotel room. Sex, sex, materialism, rape, threatened rape,sex, blasphemy, infidelity, violence, homicide, harlotry, sex, sex, paganism, sex, adultery, insurrection, torture, gruesome violence, mutilation, sex, sex, paganism, homicide, drugs, drunkenness, materialism.



I really hope it's just the contrast with my newly ended Ramadan fast. I really hope it hasn't gotten that much worse since the last time I channel-surfed in another hotel room back in April or May – only six months ago. But the hope is insulated from all that by a thick, thick, THICK wall of celibacy, continence, prayer, fasting and Scripture, almsgiving, acknowledgement of God's sovereignty. It does seem very clear that if things aren't necessarily getting as profoundly worse as they seem to be, they show no signs of getting better.



Two in every hundred here in the on-going bonfire of the vanities.



Talk to you all later when I'm back in Kitchener.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #47 (October 28th, 2006)

A CERTAIN TRADE PAPERBACK WHICH SHALL BE NAMELESS WOULD LIKE TO ONCE AGAIN APOLOGIZE…ABJECTLY, ABSOLUTELY AND CATEGORICALLY…FOR ITS UNCONSCIONABLE, INSENSITIVE, UNCARING AND DEPLORABLE ACTIONS AND SPITEFUL, VICIOUS, VENAL, HURTFUL AND UNFORGIVEABLE WORDS OF EARLIER THIS WEEK. THAT SAME TRADE PAPERBACK WOULD LIKE TO FURTHER APOLOGIZE FOR THE COMPLETELY EVASIVE INADEQUACY AND TRANSPARENT INSINCERITY OF THAT TRADE PAPERBACK'S EARLIER APOLOGY WHICH ONLY DRAMATICALLY MAGNIFIED THE EARLIER INFRACTION AND THEREBY MALICIOUSLY AND CRUELLY REOPENED THE FESTERING RUNNING PUSTULES OF VIRTUALLY HOLOCAUST-SCALE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL SADISM WHICH THAT TRADE PAPERBACK PERPETRATED WILFULLY, KNOWINGLY AND WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT AND WITHOUT ANY PROVOCATION OR JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER UPON THOSE WONDERFUL, KIND, GENEROUS, FLAWLESS AND NOBLE DIFFERENTLY- NATURED SEXUALLY SELF-IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE, AFTER ALL (AND THAT TRADE PAPERBACK NOW REALIZES THIS) THAT TRADE PAPERBACK'S "BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND NONE-OF-THE-ABOVES" UNDER THE SKIN.

Hopefully, I will have had some time in Salt Lake City to post live stuff here as well as these "last week's potatoes" entries but just to be on the safe side, here's some more blather:

The Blog & Mail actually seems to be working out. I wasn't going to take a hard look at the numbers until I had done this a while, but I have to say that revenues are up—I won't say substantially, but noticeably—from about Week Three onward. Couldn't be more surprised. My plan had been to do this for a while to reassure myself that, like everything else, it wouldn't work and then move on to something else.

PARIAH KING OF COMICS: Well, MY work is done here! Now to head somewhere ELSE where I can be forcefully ignored! Pariah! AWAY!

[actually we have a promotion program that has been in the works for about a year but it has been log-jammed for the last while. Everything was supposed to be straightened out by September 1 and then nothing happened so, really, the Blog & Mail was more of a "Waiting for Godot" substitute. "I don't think this will actually work, but it's the only other thing I can think of while we're waiting, so why don't I do this so we can check it off as a non-starter?"]

It was a shock when Gerhard came in and said we had actually gotten ten or twelve orders from one of the mock ads [Whaat?! You've got to be kidding me!]. And there I was pulling trade paperbacks in the office and wrapping the packages and mulling it over. That created a bit of a problem. The success could just be a "success"—one of those temporary flukes that you can waste a lot of time over not realizing that it was just that, a fluke. On the other hand it could be a minor success that could be made into a…less minor success! ("Small Increments Are Us" PARIAH KING OF COMICS GUIDEBOOK). So, now I've had to drag Ger into it: getting him to actually monitor sales on the books at the Diamond Star System website after I plug one of them and see if there's a "cause and effect" (which is why we started including the Star System order codes last week: who knows? there might very well be as many as…2 to 3 retailers out there lurking in Yahoo Land. They might even be ordering books and, you know, paying actual money for them. If so, hey thanks) (Dave waves his arm around in the dark seeing if it hits anything) (whoever you are).

Anyway, where was I? Oh, I got some photos in from John and Siu that Siu took at the baseball game (did I mention that the Jays won? I did? Oh, well: I just thought I'd mention it again: the Jays won) and the Toronto International Film Festival and the Mr. Meaty set, so I'm going to see about getting Ger to scan some of them and include them here. Thanks John and Siu! (Thursday night update: a fax just came in from Siu telling me that she landed the part of Boston University student "Cynthia" a recurring role on a show called The Best Years that starts filming tomorrow. That was one of two parts for which I did line readings with her on my last visit to help her rehearse for the audition. Congratulations, Siu! She didn't mention if they wanted me to play Betty or whatever her name was even though I really thought I, you know, nailed the emotional core of the character. Oh, well. Their loss.) I've also got John's Ben Casey strips back from Craig Miller so John's complete set of photocopied strips will now be complete again.

Speaking of Neal Adams, he was very pleased with the way issue 9 of Following Cerebus came out and said that folks were still talking about it and thumbing through it up at Continuity. I've heard from a few people that the issue sold out faster than usual and Dave Kostis at Now & Then said no one was blinking at the $8.95 cover price. Craig's still got about a 100 copies, I think. He's trying to cut the print runs a little closer to the bone now that it looks as if he's going to be doing a trade paperback via print-on-demand of the first five…six?...seven? issues? Still some bugs to iron out. We both thought it was pretty unlikely that you could even do a trade paperback of a magazine but that's what the stores have been asking for and retailers know this business a lot better than we do when it comes to demand (Dave waves his arm around in the dark to see if it hits anything)…so…uh…it seems to make sense to do things their way.


So, okay, short entry this time out…here's hoping this is followed by a Live Report from Salt Lake City. Over to you, Future Dave.

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU IN TODAY'S BLOG & MAIL.

ONE TIN SOLDIER RIDES AWAY.


written Wednesday morning October 18

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail - "Live" from Salt Lake City #2 (10/27/06)

The BLOG & MAIL IS LIVE AND ON THE AIR FROM SALT LAKE CITY

STARTING AT 7:47 AM LOCAL TIME

HERE IN THE TASTEFULLY APPOINTED BUSINESS CENTRE OF THE TASTEFULLY APPOINTED

LITTLE AMERICA HOTEL

500 SOUTH MAIN STREET IN BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN SALT LAKE CITY

"THERE'S NO PLACE ELSE IN AMERICA I WANT TO BE THE NEXT THREE NIGHTS THAN THE LITTLE AMERICA HOTEL…MAINLY BECAUSE ALL MY STUFF IS IN MY ROOM"

Dave Sim author of SUCKING UP FOR POSSIBLE

UPSCALE COMPS YOU'RE NOT NEARLY FAMOUS ENOUGH TO GET


LITTLE AMERICA HOTELS

"Our Chain Is So Small and So Tastefully Appointed We Look Like `Just Folks' Next to the Hiltons and the Marriotts"

Well, the best laid plans of mice and men as the saying goes. My intention was to be doing these regular updates of what's going on here but yesterday pretty much just disappeared. After I got Mimi to e-mail the last LIVE POSTING in early afternoon yesterday (having started the posting in mid-morning – a rough idea of how flawed the concept of LIVE is – more a case of WRITING MY LIFE ON COMPUTER IS DEVOURING MY LIFE IN HUGE BITES: but then I do it all for you and you know that, all you beautiful, beautiful people out there in Yahoo Land) I went back upstairs to the living room and took up a place on the love seat where I could watch her cutting and pasting the now last-minute remodeling of the LAST DAY Power Point presentation and offer suggestions if needed (and only where needed – it seems a computer age courtesy that if someone's life is being devoured by a computer as Mimi's obviously was, they get to decide how it's going to be devoured) or answer questions where and when she had any. The Devouring is no small point. By my reckoning she had been at it for several hours the night before and in the morning and she was barely halfway through. The target was to be done before Alan came back to the house and we went out to get Ger at the airport (arriving 24 hours after me – in the interests of Aardvark-Vanaheim having a fighting chance of survival, come what may, the new company policy is that we never travel on the same plane). I still had hopes of getting together with Craig Holyoke and Jason and Matt and Paula (who were obviously going to be turning up sometime) and the unnamed guy from L.A. who had come to see the exhibit and was somewhere around the Library store a half hour away from the house. About mid-afternoon Mimi was seriously wondering if she was on the right track and wondered if I could do a read-through. Sure, no problem. So I went and got my spiral bound script which Ger had put together, alternating the text and the footnotes and had Kinko's assemble and off I went in my best sometimes Orson Welles sometimes Richard Burton (when I really want to chew the scenery) voice (which evidently comes out sounding like Donald Sutherland according to Mimi) and by the time I had caught up to where Mimi was it was more late afternoon than mid-afternoon and I had to take her word for it that it was working. You can't read and check the Power Point. So, by that point, I gave up trying to supervise and found a collection of writings by P. J. O'Rourke (which included a parody of Truman Capote called "The Rent Est Due" from the 1970s that was devastatingly funny and which I tried not to laugh too loudly at as the computer devoured Mimi's life) (good case in point: it's now 8:10 am). Then Robin and Trevor arrived. Both of them former Night Flight employees. Trevor (Neil? Neill? O'Neill? My journalistic precision is suffering a time-lagged, sleep-deprived computer devoured massive relapse) is Batton Lash's assistant on Supernatural Law and was the guy who coordinated and got a good price on the framing of the exhibit and was bringing back all of the pages that hadn't been included but many of which would be posted on easels later on today. Anyway, he has four issues penciled and inked of his own comic book, a treatment of Joan of Arc. He passed all of my "basic means requirements" of having a pretty clear idea of where he was going with it and knowing pretty much what he was in for. Took him two years to go from a standing start to four finished issues in between assisting Batton AND holding down a full-time job at this framing outfit to pay his California-sized rent. How many issues is going to be, roughly. "About twenty-six," he says without missing a beat, "I've got most of it mapped out". Good vital sign that, especially the "not missing a beat" part. I suggested that he get Chet's Louis Riel and study it because as far as I could see he was facing the same basic problem. A historical piece about someone who saw visions/heard voices. It's a balancing act because you have to make it work for someone who thinks your central subject/character is crazy and for someone else who thinks your subject/character is at the high end of a virtually singular human state of existence. He said in The Town That Joseph Smith built as he prepared to read commentaries on Genesis 1 and John 1 that runs about three hours. Metaphors within metaphors within metaphors.

Anyway, by that time Robin was on her way to the grocery store to pick up fixings for her signature dish/home-cooked dinner. Laugh of the day:

ROBIN: Do the oven and the stove elements still work?

MIMI: I don't know. I think the last time they were used was the last time you were here.

By that time it was getting to be six o'clock and Alan was home to change and go to the Library to pick up Craig Holyoke and go out to the airport to get Ger and Mimi was just about ready for me to read through the next part, so I had to pass on going out. As I say, the day was just devoured. Mimi was working on page 32 of the 40 pages and we could see light at the end of the tunnel. By the time Ger and Alan arrived at the house, the place was filled with the smell of chicken pesto a-borning, the antics of Mimi's two Pekinese Queequeg (sp?) and Taz (for Tasmanian Devil, aptly named), the babble of conversation and me trying to get through to the end of Chapter Six. Which I did just as dinner was being served. I apologize for knowing very little about Robin besides that she makes a mean chicken pesto and she has a copy of Seduction of the Innocent that she gets cartoonists to autograph and do little sketches in. Anyway, blah blah blah, hahhaha eat eat eat, blah blah blah hahaha, eat eat eat and the next thing you know it was 11 pm. And Alan (to my great relief) produces my hotel key. I'm already checked in. That counts for a lot when you've been up and at it for thirteen hours two time zones away from home.

Up this morning at 6:30 for my pre-dawn prayer…

[had to phone the desk to ask which direction my room faced: it's something I still haven't gotten used to when checking in. "There's something I'm supposed to ask about. What is it that I'm supposed to ask about? The mini-bar key. No, I don't drink. I must be hallucinating. And as soon as I get in my room and a prayer time comes around, I go – Home Simpson-like "Oh. Yeah." At that point I'm always tempted to phone the desk and put on a thick Pakistani accent and ask "Be excusing me please. Which direction would be the Holy Mosque of the City of Mecca from my room?" But, there's funny and then there's only ostensibly funny, you know? Let's not go begging for trouble]

Read three Suras aloud and thought I'd have a nice leisurely bath (oh my aching "half bath" muscles of home) since I wasn't due for anything until meeting Ger in the Lobby at 9:30 for a 10 am interview at the local NPR station. So I'm lying in the bath and basically feeling bad about Jason and Matt and Paula and the guy from L.A. (evidently now on his way back to L.A. having seen the exhibit) and Craig Holyoke and not being able to do the LIVE TRANSMISSIONS I had promised and I thought: THEY'LL HAVE A BUSINESS CENTRE IN THE HOTEL! Quick out of the tub, dried off, dressed and out into the waning moments of pre-dawn in search of the lobby (having been dropped to the building my room was in I have no idea where the lobby is and it takes me a good fifteen minutes to find it). And here I am.

8:49 am. Time to save this to a disk, get something to eat in the lobby coffee area which I can smell from here and then it's off to NPR, lighting discussions with Aleko, our lighting and sound guy, apologies to Jason and Matt and Paula and Craig Holyoke and letting the afternoon evaporate until IT'S SHOWTIME, FOLKS!

The sun's been up for an hour and I already feel like I'm running behind.

This LIVE EDITION of the BLOG & MAIL

Has been brought to you by

ALL SIXTEEN CEREBUS TRADE PAPERBACKS

DON'T YOU THINK YOU OWE IT TO DAVE TO BUY ANOTHER SET OR TWO FOR EVERYONE ON YOUR CHRISTMAS LIST SINCE HE GOT OUT OF HIS NICE HOT, RELAXING BATH TO TYPE ALL THIS JUST FOR ALL YOU BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE OUT IN YAHOO LAND?

NO, DAVE DIDN'T FIGURE THAT YOU DID, BUT DAVE FIGURED IT WAS WORTH A SHOT

CEREBUS TRADE PAPERBACKS

FEEL THE OBLIGATION

PLEASE PROOF-READ IT YOURSELF. I NEED A MUFFIN AND A COFFEE.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #46 (October 27th, 2006) (Double Size Issue!!)

ALL THIS WEEK THE BLOG & MAIL

IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY

UM…GUYS. THE TRADE PAPERBACK.

THE GUYS TRADE PAPERBACK IS VERY, VERY SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY'S SUPPOSED "FUNNY LEAD IN" AND THE GUYS TRADE PAPERBACK NOW REALIZES THAT THERE IS NOTHING FUNNY….ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FUNNY…ABOUT THE SUGGESTION OF A "HETERO PRIDE DAY" IN COMIC BOOK STORES. THE GUYS TRADE PAPERBACK (SNIFF) JUST MADE THE WHOLE THING UP (SNIFF SNUFFLE SOB) BECAUSE THE GUYS TRADE PAPERBACK IS IN…IN…

INSENSITIVE! AND…(SNIFFF) UNCARING!

THE GUYS TRADE PAPERBACK IS VERY, VERY, VERY SORRY AND ENCOURAGES EVERYONE TO NEVER BUY A COPY OF GUYS AGAIN EVER. JUST MELMOTH…JUST…SNIFF…MELMOTH.

BOOHOOHOOHOOO..BOOOOOOOHOOHOOHOOHOO BOOOOOOOH HOOHOOHOOOHOOO

Besides being the author of the graphic novel Road to Perdition and besides being the co-creator of Ms. Tree—a title that Deni and I published back when the earth was still cooling—Max Allan Collins really got his start in the comics field writing the Dick Tracy comic strip from 1977 to 1993 as Chester Gould's heir apparent. It's his participation in the reprinting of the complete Dick Tracy that really makes this a very, very promising comics project since he knew Chester Gould from 1973 on. As he relates in his introduction to volume one "Dick Tracy Begins":

In recent years I haven't been associated with Dick Tracy and haven't said much about the strip, or frankly even thought much about it…Now enough time has passed that I can look at Tracy with the old warmth and appreciate it both on its own terms as one of the truly great comic strips and as the first major "break" of my storytelling career…I will gradually tell the story of my friendship with Chester Gould and my own years on Dick Tracy over the course of future introductions…

"Storytelling career" is right. Check the pointed use of the term "gradually" here. If the comics field can just get its act together in time, we're not only going to have the complete Dick Tracy in all it's 50-year careening narrative glory (be still my beating heart), but Max Allan Collins, a world-class storyteller of our time and one of a handful of a) Dick Tracy experts and b) one of a handful of Dick Tracy insiders (he was one of Chester Gould's pallbearers) is going to get all of his ducks in a row and tell us exactly how the whole thing happened right from the beginning with his own voluminous wealth of information. Like any good storyteller, he jumps ahead of his narrative at several junctures offering a foretaste of what's in store, including one of several luncheons with Chester Gould and "the foremost Dick Tracy fan/collector of them all" Matt Masterson (with whom he interviews Gould in a piece reprinted from NEMO:The Classic Comics Library #17):

Oddly enough, Chet had nothing to with my getting the Tracy scripting job. In fact Matt and I had lunched with Chet in July, 1977, at the Tavern Club in Chicago, one of several luncheons. Chet insisted that he would keep doing Dick Tracy forever. When I went back to the comics convention at the Congress Hotel (where Chet had just made his one and only comic-con appearance), Murray Bishoff, then a columnist for The Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom, cornered me to ask if Gould had revealed whom his successor would be. Rumour was, Bishoff said, that Gould would be retiring soon.

I laughed that off, told Bishoff that anyone who told him Gould was retiring was a fool or a liar. A month later, I was signed on as the writer of the strip, with Fletcher as artist.

Well! Stay tuned for volume twenty, I guess, to see that little anecdote fleshed out.

I really can't recommend this series highly enough. Just the idea that all of those classic strips from the 1940s featuring The Brow and Mumbles and Flattop are set to be reprinted between hard covers and on heavyweight glossy paper stock…Quoth the Fanboy: "Wow!"

The more I look through this first volume, the more I see. Where did Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson come from—that sincerely odd bachelor-and-his-ward combo that strikes such a weird note even seventy years later? Check out the daily strips for October 14 and October 21 1932 and the Sunday page for October 23—where the police detective brings a nine-year-old boy along to break-and-enter criminal premises!—and see if the early appearances of Junior Tracy don't strike as resonant a note with you as I suspect they did with an adolescent Bob Kane…Tess Trueheart, turning her back on Tracy ("But, Tess—Don't you love me—don't you believe in me—don't you have enough faith in me to give me a chance to clear myself? Hello—hello—hm. She hung up.") after falling for a frame-up that has the fabled detective cast as a counterfeiter and thrown off the force and then falling for the criminal who has framed him (What!?) a criminal named "Stooge" Viller (WHAT?!):

Tess: M-mmm? "Stooge"! An awfully funny name—but—very, very fascinating!

Hmm promptly at eight—the Ritz Club—music gaiety—and a new thrill—!

(WHAAAT?!!)

Tess: But you know, there's something mysterious about you—this name "Stooge"—

that—that isn't your real name is it?

Stooge: Could I lie to anyone I'm as crazy about as I am about you? Besides—tell

me this—what's wrong with a little mystery?

Tess: I-LOVE-IT!

Stooge: Listen honey—when I go back east, how would you like to go along with me

as Mrs. "Stooge" Viller? We'd make a team that would wow `em—honest!

You see, now that I've known you for about an hour I feel I can propose.

Tess: Why, I would think of answering that question till I'd known you for at least an

hour and a half

(WHAAATTT??!!)


Seriously, if you have $29.99 US to throw around on a big fat glossy hardcover, do yourself a favour and pick up The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume One (October 1931 to May 1933) at your local comic store this week. Or, if they don't plan to carry it, order a copy from www.idwpublishing.com. And find out what state-of-the-art careening narrative is all about!

IN LIGHT OF YESTERDAY'S INSENSITIVE AND DEPLORABLE LEAD-IN, THE BLOG & MAIL JINGLE WILL BE TYPESET IN A COMPLETELY DISPASSIONATE TONE FOR THE REST OF THIS WEEK, WITHOUT ELLIPSIS OR BOLDFACE OR ITALIC ENHANCEMENTS AND ALL BLOG & MAIL READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO READ IT MENTALLY AND NOT SING IT MENTALLY AS A GESTURE OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE DIFFERENTLY SEXUALLY SELF-IDENTIFIED WHO WERE SO GRIEVOUSLY AND INEXCUSABLY INSULTED YESTERDAY.


THERE'S MORE FOR YOU IN TODAY'S BLOG & MAIL.


Written Wednesday morning October 18

(part 2)

ALL THIS WEEK THE BLOG & MAIL IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY

MELMOTH THE TRADE PAPERBACK.

THIS WAS ALWAYS OUR INTENTION FOR THIS WEEK'S BLOG & MAIL AND THE BLOG & MAIL SINCERELY REGRETS EVEN MENTIONING ANOTHER TRADE PAPERBACK IN THIS SPACE EARLIER IN THE WEEK. MISTAKES WERE MADE AND THE BLOG & MAIL NOW FEELS THAT IT IS TIME TO BIND UP THE COMIC-BOOK NATION'S WOUNDS AND MOVE FORWARD.

MELMOTH. AT YOUR LOCAL COMIC BOOK STORE

IN THIS TIME OF HEALING.

I guess God must've wanted a big push on the Dick Tracy book since I came up very light in the mail department this week. As I'm writing this Wednesday morning, I'm in a bit of a rush since I still want to finish up my three-page "Reply to Roberta Gregory" strip for Following Cerebus 10 which is being worked on in pieces. Ger took page one to Sherwood to get scanned so that he can do any necessary touch-up (since I've patterned it on Mort Drucker's Hollywood parodies in Mad, this is my first time working with washes in a good thirty years) and scan in the typesetting (yes, square word balloons with Franklin Gothic Demi-Condensed type—it's not an exact match to Mad magazine but it's pretty close) before he leaves for Salt Lake City where we both are right now (God willing) as you read this through the Miracle That Is Cybernetic Time Travel.

[What's the strip about? Sigh. Oh, you know. The usual stuff. Mostly it's just an excuse to draw a lot of pretty Queen Street West girls in a more understated version of Drucker's style: there are, I have found, only so many ways to address totalitarian feminism in our society. How many different ways can you say, "Oh, come ON, people. Open your EYES!"]

NOTE TO FEMINISTS: TO AVOID BEING OFFENDED BY THE ACTUAL PRACTICE OF FREE SPEECH IN OUR SOCIETY PLEASE SKIP THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH

[Did you just make a face there? Yes, you did. I saw you. You made a face and rolled your eyes. So, very quickly because I know you are all shutting down like the computer HAL in 2001 because the subject of feminism has come up let me reinforce the point that totalitarian feminism gets a free ride in our society. Way back on September 25—a billion years ago in Internet terms—I brought up the fact that I had asked the Friends of Lulu back in 1996 to solicit their membership to find out if any of their members were willing to sign a petition, as female comics professionals, deploring censorship. Basically, they said no and said they didn't want to discuss it further. One viewpoint over seven signatures. As I said a month ago, it was a good idea in 1996 and it's a good idea today. In the ensuing four weeks, has anyone asked Jackie Estrada or Heidi McDonald—both very, very high profile members of comic-book society—to explain WHY they didn't think it was a good idea? Has anyone asked the Friends of Lulu if they're willing to solicit their membership now—and "if not, why not?" No. Why? Because totalitarian feminism gets a free ride in our society. It never has to explain itself, it just starts with the assumption that if you're a feminist whatever the subject is, you're right and to ask any questions of a feminist if you're not a feminist means you're a misogynist. Ergo, totalitarian feminism gets a further free ride even as it is getting a free ride because anyone who doesn't kowtow to it gets crushed beneath its wheels, just as you are all now thinking that it's no wonder I'm the Pariah King of Comics and that I only have myself to blame for disagreeing with totalitarian feminism. I reiterate: "Oh, come ON, people. Open your EYES!" even as I know that I'm, once again, wasting my breath)

I also have to get a column done for Sandeep Atwal's new Versus magazine the first issue of which has just come out which includes Part One of my series "How to Fight City Hall" which is really intended to try and generate more civic participation here in town (I'm not sure what Sandeep's doing as far as out-of-town ordering goes, but he has all of his contact info right at the top of the masthead, so presumably he's cool with everyone bugging him about it: 39 King St. North, Suite 1, Waterloo, Ontario, N2J 2W9 OR sandeep.s.atwal@gmail OR find out if his new phone is working: 519.500.9977).

Mayor Zehr always gets a good laugh when he's finished presenting citizenship awards or design awards before a City Council meeting when he says to the recipients "You know, you're welcome to stay…" I mean, invariably he gets a good laugh, as if nothing could be more ridiculous than someone staying at a City Council meeting unless they're paid to be there. He was over talking to one of the city staffers just before a Committee meeting a couple of weeks back and caught sight of me and he said, "So, I didn't see your name on the final list of candidates." [Municipal and Regional elections are coming up in November] I smiled and said, "No, you didn't." And then he said, "Of course, I know you said that you weren't running…" and then trailed off and I knew exactly what he was thinking: the only reason people come around Council Chambers this regularly is to get a feel for the place so they can run for office. Quite apart from the fact that I don't have five minutes to rub together these days, I think it's important to have SOME representation of the citizenry in the audience. As a provincial politician lamented recently contemplating the slow pace of provincial and federal legislation, "It was different at the municipal level…there we just had to decide what we wanted to do and then we voted and went ahead and did it." Personally, I find that terrifying when what is at stake is tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money (or in the case of EDIF, $110 million—see my letter to Mayor Zehr in Collected Letters volume one].

"You know, you're welcome to stay…"

Hahahah. That's a good one, Your Worship.

And in this corner, representing the interests of the citizens of Kitchener who are all home watching television: Citizen Dave!

Anyway, I've got my subject: DTS (Development & Technical Services) Report No. 06-138 with the catchy title: Zone Change Application ZC06/10/K/JB scrawled with my notes from the September 18 meeting. I just have to find enough hours between now and next Tuesday night (October 24) to distill it all down to 2 or 3 thousand words.

I also have to write descriptions of all the material we're sending to Craig for Following Cerebus 10, dig out my original letter to Roberta Gregory and hopefully get a start on the Young Cerebus commission Uber-Yahoo Brian Coppola has requested. I also have to go out to Wilf's office and sign my years-in-the-making Last Will & Testament and go to an open house at The Working Centre and St. John's Kitchen in downtown Kitchener. Aardvark-Vanaheim alternates its charitable giving between the Food Bank and the Working Centre/St. John's Kitchen (5% of our monthly revenue) which qualifies us as a "special donor" so we're being invited to take a look at the remarkable (I mean, REMARKABLE) job that Joe Mancini has been doing single-handedly downtown in redoing this big warehouse at 97 Victoria St. North to combine St. John's Kitchen (a food kitchen for the poor), a medical clinic, public washrooms, showers, laundry and Worth a Second Look Furniture & Housewares almost all of it done with volunteer labour and materials. Joe knows how to take every penny we donate and make each one scream. If I really just have too much work, I'm going to miss it [and that turns out to be the case, I'm doing my final proofreading at 7:15 pm Thursday night for this week's Blog & Mails] but I do hope to make it over there. I finally got to meet Joe briefly at last Monday's City Council meeting where he had come out to put in his bid for some more grant money. I couldn't stick around because I had a prayer time to get home for, but the way his eyes lit up when I introduced myself was very gratifying indeed and I'd like to see his operation close-up. Coincidentally the building used to house Dumont Press Grafix, a communist printing collective that used to shoot all the negatives for Comic Art News & Reviews and the first few issues of Cerebus.

You know, this really is a cushy job where you can get a whole day's Blog & Mail just out of "things to do."

Onward to Friday.

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU IN TODAY'S BLOG & MAIL.

LEST WE FORGET.


written Wednesday morning October 18

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail - "Live" from Salt Lake City #1 (10/26/06)

12:45 pm LOCAL TIME THE BLOG & MAIL LIVE

(LIVE being a relative term and largely dependant on Jeff Tundis not
having gotten himself arrested at the Frank Zappa's Son's
concert last night) BROUGHT TO YOU BY ARCHIE COMICS #570 WITH SPECIAL
GUEST APPEARANCES BY THE CITY LIBRARY IN SALT LAKE CITY AND NIGHT FLIGHT
COMICS, MIMI CRUZ AND NF STAFFERS MIKE, JOSH,
LUCAS, ERIN AND THERESA. NIGHT FLIGHT COMICS THE ONLY PLACE ON EARTH
THAT
COULD PUT ARCHIE COMICS IN A BLOG & MAIL HEADLINE!

Sorry, Mr. And Mrs. Yahoo and all our ships at sea about being delayed
by roughly 24 hours in my LIVE reporting from the Pioneer State – if
this was a television network I'd have been fired by now -- but we
pretty much hit the ground running right from the airport. LET'S GO
TO PRESS! As I had suspected, no one came out to the airport in either
Toronto or Salt Lake (nice to have some ammunition to use against those
folks who keep insisting that I'm famous) except Mimi who told me
that Craig Holyoke (who interviewed me for the same newspaper, the
Deseret News back in 1994) had finally gotten the OK from his editors to
do a feature piece on me and was waiting at the City Library to do the
first of several interviews over the course of the next couple of days.
Craig's a great guy and it was nice to get caught up with him.


He's hoping to come out to the rehearsal for The Last Day reading
that starts at 4 pm tomorrow. I'm staying at Alan and Mimi's
palatial digs in the hills above Salt Lake City and typing this
downstairs in Alan's office which is right next door to the Bill
Willingham Suite where I stayed last night. The motif is early Sandman
with Night Flight posters from early Gaiman/Dringenberg signings, framed
original artwork (two page spread from Sandman # 4, Sandman #3, amazing
page from the legendary issue 8, print of the Endless with silver and
gold ink enhancements by Dringenberg. I had forgotten how intimidatingly
good Mike's work was and the original art only makes that more
apparent) colour piece by Jill Thompson, Rick Veitch double page splash
from Swamp Thing's Alan Moore scripted "My Blue Heaven"
including layout and colour guide (and a signed Rare Bit promo poster
from APE `95 – HEY! I was at that one TOO!). Mimi is upstairs
working on the Power Point presentation. But let me interrupt myself
here with a story I did want to get to as soon as possible:

Dave Kostis at Now & Then Books phoned and left a message with Gerhard
at the office on Tuesday while I was running around getting as many
last-minute things done as possible before the trip that Now & Then
Books is closing its doors. I wasn't able to get him on the phone
that evening, there was just the store's answering machine so I hope
it isn't true but I have an awful feeling that this really might be
it. He along with a lot of downtown Kitchener merchants have been
struggling in recent years and this summer was particularly bad.
It's particularly sad because this month marks the thirty-fifth
anniversary of the store's opening in 1971. So far as we know, the
longest run of any comic book store (pre-dating the Direct Market itself
by several years) still in continuous operation. Ger and I had given
Dave several loans to help float the store over the last couple of years
and I know John Balge with whom I worked on Comic Art News & Reviews
kicked in as well. There's not much I can do from two time zones
away (which is why I had been really hoping someone might have come out
to Pearson Airport with a laptop so that I could have at least started
circulating the word yesterday). At this point all I can do is encourage
anyone who thinks they can help in whatever way – either by
donations or buying some store stock or maybe offering to buy a part
ownership or full ownership or even just phoning to offer some words of
encouragement and to let Dave know that his prodigious efforts to keep
Harry Kremer's legacy alive for these last four and a half years are
not unappreciated – to give a call and leave a message at
519-744-5571. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had asked Dave's
permission to use his office to be interviewed by Matthew Ingram of
Cameron Heights
Collegiate for their high school newspaper and it was very gratifying to
sit for the first time in Harry's old command central chair
surrounded by all of the store's photographic and illustration
memories including the framed full front page of the entertainment
section of the K-W Record of Harry and then-partner Bill Johnson back in
1971. If worst comes to worst we'll certainly be working closely
with Dave to preserve as much of the material as he thinks appropriate
as part of the Cerebus Archive. There are a lot of folks out there with
memories of the store that go way back, so please get in touch with Dave
if you've got a spare minute or two over the next couple of days.
Thanks.

Anyway, back here in Salt Lake City, as I say, we hit the ground
running. Mimi dropped me off at the Library Square store -- which is
amazing – and I did my sunset prayer a little late in the back room
and then went over to the coffee shop in the Library proper (which is
AMAZING and has just been declared America's Number One Library:
Congratulations, City Library!) where Craig and Mimi were waiting.


Craig really threw me for a loop when he dove right in on the Dave Sim
the Evil Misogynist thing. He had been up until 3:30 am that morning
once he had the go-ahead for the article reading everything he could
find on the Internet about me. "People talk about you on the
Internet the way they talk about axe murderers." He threw me for a
loop because this is very much the "elephant in the room" when
it comes the news reporters. I had done a one-hour phone interview with
a very nice young lady for In magazine who hadn't mentioned it. I
mean, I find it weird. If you Google Dave Sim, so far as I know, the
first thing that comes up is Misogynist and yet no one even mentions it.
Of course I remembered Craig as a real no-
nonsense cut-to-the-chase news guy from my last visit but this is really
the first time that any journalist has even mentioned it. Usually if
they mention it at all it comes very late in the proceedings where
they're obviously already stopped taking notes. So I actually got to
explain the difference between misogyny and being opposed to feminism,
how wrong and completely undemocratic I think the UN program to set
aside legislature seats for women is as is happening in Iraq and
Afghanistan. "I have no problem with any woman running for any
office as long as she's competing in a democratic fashion. We'd
be about twenty years
behind where we are as a society if Margaret Thatcher hadn't run for
office and won. But subverting democracy just to get more women elected
is as wrong as lowering standards for firemen, police offers and the
military just to get more fire-persons and police persons and army
persons." And Craig's writing all of this down on the over-sized
file cards he still uses this many years later on. Over the course of an
interview – we adjourned to the still excellent Market Street Grill
(my post-Ramadan stomach is the size of a grapefruit but the two
appetizers were excellent) – he's shuffling his cards like a
poker hand, filling the blanks and asking follow-ups. By the time we
were done and got back here to the house it was after 11 pm and we just
got started on doing a final once-over on the Power Point presentation
which we ultimately decided to overhaul completely and the rehearsal is
mere hours away.

Went upstairs to ask Mimi the name of the restaurant and she called
downtown to Alan who is busy devouring the chocolate donuts that Lucas
had bought for me. Someone's just been in the store who had come all
the way from L.A. to see the exhibit but won't be able to stay until
tomorrow for the reading so Alan wondered if I would be able to see him
before he has to head back. Hell, yes. At least until we actually get
famous, we might as well invite everyone along for the ride who's
interested. Ger and I already left word with Matt and Paula and Jason
that they're welcome to hang out with us when they get here and I
said the same thing about our newly arrived friend from L.A. Ger's
flight gets in about sunset so we're all going to head out to the
airport and hopefully get some of our promised and delayed LIVE coverage
happening here.

Keep It Turned on to THE BLOG & MAIL LIVE!

The Only Internet Broadcast that Gives a S–t that Dave Sim is in
Salt Lake City
all Yahoos & Lurkers welcome to drop by The City Library Auditorium to
meet Dave and the Exhibit Area to meet Gerhard in Salt Lake City
starting at Noon tomorrow Friday 27 October. The READING (God willing)
starts at 4 pm.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #45 (October 26th, 2006)

ALL THIS WEEK THE BLOG & MAIL IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY
GUYS THE TRADE PAPERBACK
Why is that? BECAUSE DIAMOND HASN’T ORDERED A SINGLE COPY SINCE MARCH! WHICH MEANS THE STORES HAVEN’T ORDERED ANY SINCE MARCH! WHICH MEANS CUSTOMERS HAVEN’T BOUGHT ONE SINCE MARCH
So?
“So”?
Yeah. SO?

So that means that the GUYS trade paperback with the funniest line-up of GUYS including Prince Mick, Prince Keef, Marty, Boobah, Alec McQuarrie, Squinteye and all the rest IS GETTING ITS ASS KICKED THIS YEAR BY MELMOTH!
ALMOST THREE TO ONE!
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
$%&#ing MELMOTH? The &%$#ing
trade paperback about the $%#ing...

NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT!
HANH? Are you &%$ing kidding me? Are you... Oh..oh right. Not that there’s
Anything &%$ing wrong with that. EXCUSE ME…I gotta go buy me a
&%$ing copy of GUYS. Right NOW!

GUYS! TODAY IS “HETERO PRIDE DAY”AT YOUR LOCAL COMIC BOOK STORE. GO IN AND PICK UP A COPY OF GUYS OR CLICK ON
www.followingcerebus.com

From what I understand, the bane of most syndicated cartoonists’ lives was the Sunday page because of all the problems attached. The fact that not all subscribing newspapers carried both the daily and the Sunday was a big one right there. Imagine trying to tell a story in five strips and then continuing the story through the Sunday page and then having to recap everything that had happened in the Sunday strip the following Monday and sometimes Tuesday for those devoted readers who never got to read the Sunday strip. It sounds funny even just to describe it—and it is one of the reasons that I describe Cerebus as the longest sustained narrative in human history. Not only do the characters actually age but there isn’t this fitful three steps forward two steps back structure to have to work around. Reading a collection of newspaper strips you just get adjusted to it mentally. I used to joke to Chester when he was pushing Little Orphan Annie that all of the characters must have had Alzheimer’s because they kept telling each other the same things over and over again day after day. Of course that was just to make the strips accessible to a casual readership, getting folks to read just one strip could be enough to turn them into constant readers so that was a big part of the creative challenge: to create individual strips that would attract the eye and excite curiosity. What happens next?

And, boy oh boy, was Chester Gould ever good at it. Let me give you a rough idea: I had finally gotten around to making a start on William F. Buckley’s The Right Word, a collection of essays, letters and various writings on correct usage in the English language which had been a 50th birthday gift from Uber Uber Yahoo Jeff Seiler (hey, Jeff! And thank you again) who had gone to a great amount of trouble to get it autographed to me by Mr. Buckley personally (and whose secretary had sent along a translation of what the dedication says since Mr. Buckley’s handwriting is atrocious: seriously I would have to go and look up the letter from the secretary in the Archive because I was trying to read it again the other night and couldn’t make head nor tail of it). Now, just to give you the full contrast, Chester Gould repeatedly in this volume spells kidnapped as “kidnaped”. At least a dozen times in one story. He often forgets even basic punctuation. His captions and his dialogue are…well, let’s just say “unique”. Here’s an example from 13 July 1932:

Pat Patton: Look! That door’s giving in we’d better throw the door open and use our pistols on them or we’re goners.

Dick Tracy: PAT! DON’T DO IT! It would require a perfect aim to stop one of those lions—and even if we succeeded in sending bullets into their brains, we should be in danger of being clawed to death before the beasts gave in.

It isn’t just that it should be “before the beasts died”, the peculiar use of the formal “should”—it’s the discordant juxtaposition of the door “giving in” and the beasts “gave in”. Neither usage is correct. The door should be “caving in” and the beasts “died” to keep it conversational. And this was just a strip that the page happened to be open to when I started this part. You don’t have to read more than two of them before you find just such a misuse and/or mutilation of English prose.

But the larger point is that as soon as I had this book in my mitts, Mr. Buckley was, alas, so much eloquent and euphonious lexicographical toast. Sure, I could just read a dozen pages of Dick Tracy for laughs and then cleanse my palette with William F. Buckley’s perhaps endogenous, frequently incondite and difficult to decoct bloviations. Not a chance. I read through all 600 daily and Sunday strips as fast as I could. Not even Ramadan was going to stop me. See, I had owned a copy of Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy so I already knew the effect—the flawless effect—that Chester Gould has on readers like myself. I have to find out what happens next. Dick Tracy doesn’t flow, it careens. Literally. This was a chance to see where and when Gould started that, where he developed that aptitude for the careening narrative and the answer is: almost immediately.

(Here I owe a great debt of thanks to IDW for my comp copy. This is one of those books I would have picked up several times at the Beguiling and thought, “Nah, I bet he didn’t really develop the technique until the late 30’s—I’ll wait until volume three or four”)

It’s complete and total “Perils of Pauline” melodrama. It would not have been out of place to see Tess Trueheart (I mean, the name alone) tied to some railway tracks and the runaway train bearing down on her. But once you get caught up in it—once Mr. Gould has you bagged but good—you start careen reading if you aren’t careful: you become SO eager to find out what happens next that you start skipping strips to find out. In the careening narrative the answer is seldom more than a strip or two ahead of where you are and still the impulse is to GET THESE DARNED CAPTIONS FILLED WITH EXCLAMATION MARKED SENTENCES OUT OF THE WAY!!! I WANT THE ANSWER!!! NOT TOMORROW!!! NOW!!!

Anyway, this becomes particularly funny at the point in the strip where the Sunday pages joined the daily strip narrative (29 May 1932—JFK’s fifteenth birthday). Up to that point the Sunday pages had stood alone as twelve-panel anecdotes (the book reprints all of these stand-alone strips from half page tear sheets in colour in the back—it’s a very complete package). But it appears that Chester Gould was working pretty close to deadline on both the dailies and the Sundays because the blending is a little fitful at first. Pretty clearly he was having to write and draw the Sundays well ahead of time to leave the Syndicate time to have them coloured and engraved and was hooking them up with the continuity in the dailies on the fly as those were completed. In the 10 July 1932 Sunday strip, Tracy informs Pat “You see, the night I hid out here and watched this place, I saw that fellow Bellas enter the cave in this manner—that’s how I knew about it”. In the 6 and 7 July daily strips, he and Pat both hide out and witness the sliding cage trick. The same thing happens with the end of the sequence where the week-long raid of the gangster’s hideout comes to an abrupt four-panel conclusion (made necessary by the Sunday page’s lead caption “After a terrific gun battle” looming):

Dick Tracy: Take these two guys, Milligan. WHY PAT what’s the matter?

Pat Patton: That guy that rolled down the stairs—socked me on the head and beat it.

Dick Tracy: [suddenly outside, firing a machine gun at a concrete lion] I’ll show you where that bozo is!

Pat Patton: Gee whiz, he was hid in that concrete lion!

Dick Tracy: The lion has a hinged top! I saw him get into it when I glanced out of the upstairs window a minute ago. Fellows, meet Mr. Alec Penn, alias B. Bellas—our counterfeiter friend and owner of this zoo! — and the man with the phoney mustache!

Even the Master of the Careening Narrative, Chester Gould must have gotten whiplash on that one!

TOMORROW: How our old pal, Max Allan Collins, finds himself mixed up in this

There’s MORE FOR YOU
IN TODAY’S
BLOG & MAAAAAILLL!

Written Tuesday evening October 17

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #44 (October 25th, 2006)

ALL THIS WEEK! THE BLOG & MAIL IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY

"GUYS"

(YEAH WE KNOW. DAVE AND GER, RIGHT?)

NO NO NO—THE TRADE PAPERBACK!

(DAVE AND GER ARE A TRADE PAPERBACK? SINCE WHEN?)

THE CIRINISTS ARE FIGHTING BACK THE ONLY WAY THEY KNOW HOW: TURNING MASCULINITY AGAINST ITSELF

HOW DO THEY DO THAT, YOU QUERY? WITH BOOZE OF COURSE!

"GUYS" THE TRADE PAPERBACK

(I THOUGHT YOU SAID DAVE AND GER WERE THE TRADE PAPERBACK)

ALCOHOL IS FREE AND THERE'S NO LAST CALL!

AT YOUR LOCAL COMIC-BOOK STORE OR CLICK ON

www.followingcerebus.com

(free alcohol? At MY comic-book store? No way. Believe me, I've asked plenty of times)

Very strange. The day that *********'s letter was being posted (Monday, as it turns out) I had cause to be pawing through the Archive in search of the tracing paper drawings I had done of a short animation of Cerebus talking on the radio for the abortive Radio Show album that never got done way back in the 1980s. Having seen what a great job Jeff Tundis did on www.cerebusart.com I figured there couldn't be a better use for them than to have him scan them in and then I figured the least I could do for all of his hard work was to give him the tracing paper drawings to keep. So, anyway this entailed having to dig way, way back into the oversized pages and photocopies and way, way, way at the back what do you suppose I found? "Panties in the Garden of the Moth," the strip that ********* had sent me—his only copy of it—in his past life as M.B. of Brooklyn, NY. It even had my cover letter to him attached, just the way I remembered it. As I said: very strange.

So, did I actually think anyone was going to come out to Pearson Airport to get stuff autographed and take digital pictures and bring their laptop with them? Nah. Can you imagine if, say, Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller posted their departure time and flight and invited people to come out to the airport? See, that's what makes Dave Sim The Pariah King of Comics and why I say that I don't have fans, I have readers. I think it's worth keeping these things in perspective. Of course, someone might come out to the airport, but I doubt it SO severely that we're just going to pick right up on my review of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy (in stores in the next week or so).

I still can't get over the crispness of the line on that first strip, the bold outline and the George McManus brand of composition. Kahles' Hairbreadth Harry as well, whom Gould credits as an inspiration. Throughout the fall of 1931 and into the beginning of 1932 he's really all over the map, trying for an illustrative look and realizing that he just doesn't have the talent to put things down on the page the way he pictures them in his head. He's trying too hard and then, suddenly, he'll do an absolutely beautifully composed and executed strip very much outside of his abilities like the strip for 6 November 31, where Tess Trueheart is being coerced into driving a getaway car for Big Boy and three hoodlums warn her "Don't fergit yer instructions" along the way. The car is shot from four different angles and each one works really, really well. The next day everything flattens out again and it's definitely back to being a cartoon strip. It would take most of the first two years for Gould to recognize that he "drew flat" and to stop fighting it although he clearly aches to be Alex Raymond. Oddly enough his women are more realistic than his men. Tess Trueheart is a cutie (and a flapper) right from the git-go. Even when he strays from the John Held Jr. template, he's still able to draw women who differ from each other, who actually look as if they're wearing their clothes (the men's clothes look like cardboard cut-outs hung around their necks). By February of 1932, the three-dimensional panel is the exception rather than the rule: flat panels where everything is staged on the same plane, two faces in profile facing each other. Even when he attempts foreground and mid-ground figures, the foreground figure is in profile and the mid-ground figure facing directly towards the reader. It's the idiosyncratic look that Gould will come to be known for and it's interesting watching him fighting a destiny to which he will ultimately surrender. But not without a fight. It might just be, but I would swear that in the sequence starting 27 February 1933 and running through to the end of April, he's doing Harold Gray! It might just be because so much of it takes place in the countryside but the staging and composition is very much along the lines of Harold Gray to me. It takes Gould until well into May before he manages to get all of the compositions nicely flattened out again.

What's even stranger was the shift in the look of the strip through the spring of 1932. I'm always half reading and half analyzing a comic strip when I'm looking at it. "I know this look," I was thinking to myself, "Whose look is this?" And then it hit me. Joe Shuster's Superman. Not just Joe Shuster's Superman (you can see where he got the slicked back hair and the single thin lip, oddly discontinuous, two short horizontal lines on either side of the nose) but his early Superman and pre-Superman lettering style as well from the 1937 to 1939 period when he was drawing pretty much every page. He must've seen a kindred spirit in Chester Gould. "I don't draw very well, and this fellow doesn't either but he seems to get by okay with what he's got." Tracy's sidekick, Pat Patton, is the archetypal Joe Shuster everyman. Round face, dots for eyes, flattened oval mouth.

Yes, I'm pretty sure that Joe Shuster was looking at a lot of Dick Tracy strips as he was figuring out how he was going to draw his comics as soon as he got the chance. He would've been the right age in 1932 for slavishly copying someone else's work as a learning experience.

TOMORROW: Oh, that annoying Sunday page problem!


THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S

BLOG &….MAAAILL

Written Tuesday evening October 17

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #43 (October 24th, 2006)

All this week, the BLOG & MAIL has been brought to you by

The

LAST SEVENTEEN

signed and numbered

JAKA'S STORY

First Printings

Did YOU managed to get one of them? Don't miss out on the next BLOG & MAIL special…put

www.followingcerebus.com

on YOUR speed-dial (or your speed-mouse or spE-mail or whatever you call it) RIGHT NOW!

(regular edition always available; Diamond item # STAR00359)

Max Collins: Well, when did you sleep?

Chester Gould: I didn't sleep. The Lord gave me one hell of a good body, let me tell you. I'd be sitting there when the Art Department was going home at the American, and the Art Department was right in the editorial room, what they called the newsroom. There were four fellows, and their day was over when the last edition of the American was out. It was an afternoon paper, and that last edition came out just about the time when the commuters were going home, so they would get this hot off the press, and after that the boys got up and put on their coats, folded their Americans under their arms and said "Goodnight." I'd say "Goodnight". And they'd come down the next morning, and most of the time I'd be sitting there just finishing up something. And one would say "Hey, guys come here. He's still here." And the other'd say, "He's nuts! What do you do? When do you sleep?" And I'd just keep on working. And they got my goat there once or twice, but then I laughed it off and said, "They have to go home and do things, but I don't". I had no family, no one I was responsible to. No reason to be home at 5 o'clock. I can just sit here and work, and I said, I'll do the work of two men, and I will get to my goal in half the time that these monkeys will even if they work hard. In other words, I'm on a fast train, doing two lifetimes while they flounder through one.

Collins: The theory being that if you do away with sleep you pick up an extra day's work.

Gould: An extra life, year. I would work right through the night at least two nights a week.

I'm pretty jazzed about this. Ger had to take "Mound o'Mail" (the Christmas offer trades) to the post office so he checked the box while he was there and there was a package for me. So, just when I thought I had gone through all of the mail…it turned out to be a box from IDW publishing with a cover letter from Ted Adams, the IDW president announcing the publication of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 1. All the daily strips from 1931 to 1933, including the complete Plainclothes Tracy strips that Gould had used to sell the strip to the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Release date of November 1, 2006. Could I mention it on my Blog? I don't know which I was more dumbfounded by: the fact that the collection existed, that I was holding it in my hand, that I had gotten it for free (THANK YOU!!) or that someone actually thought that the Pariah King of Comics was anyone you wanted to have flogging your book for you.

Well, you came to the right place, Mr. Adams.

I haven't bought The Complete Peanuts which this package has been modeled on pretty closely (to the extent that Designers Ashley Wood and Robbie Robbins probably owe Seth a royalty cheque!). I've looked at it every time a new volume comes out and I'm just not that interested. When they get to the point where they're reprinting the strips that I collected—and I was a fanatical Peanuts collector in 1969-1970—I think I'll be really interested in that book. I remember discussing my Peanuts heresy with Chester and Seth and Joe (who are all still fanatical Peanuts fans). I think the strip hit an amazing peak from about 1961 to 1971 and, around the time that Woodstock showed up, I thought it just got lost in the woods and never found its way back out. The absolute peak to me was the scene in the A Charlie Brown Christmas animated special where Linus (voiced by Christopher Shea) comes out on stage and lisps the words to Luke chapter 2 verses 8-14

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night/ And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid/And the Angel said unto them, "Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people./ For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord./ And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger./ And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,/ "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to all men.

And then Linus walks offstage and says, "And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown." And dear little Christopher Shea gets a hitch in his little lisping voice.

See? You're tearing up. That's why it was brilliant. Even in the worst depths of my years as an atheist, I would tear up watching that scene. I did as a nine-year-old when it first aired in 1965 and I did every year after that. The network didn't want it in there and fought tooth and nail to take it out. Schulz and the animation studio wanted it in and fought tooth and nail to keep it in. And they were right. And they won. Can you imagine anyone even in our forty-years-more-degraded secular age saying to a network exec: "Yeah, we'll rerun it, but this year, take the Jesus part out of it so we don't offend any non-Christian viewers"? Wouldn't happen. Couldn't happen.

Unfortunately for the legacy of the comic strip, I measure everything against that and what I come up with is 1961 to 1971. And I don't share Seth's view that Peanuts is a "profound" strip. Honest difference of opinion.

Drawn & Quarterly is reprinting the complete Gasoline Alley and many is the time that Chester has looked at me in unblinking disbelief at the Beguiling. "You HAVEN'T got the Gasoline Alley book and you're NOT going to buy it?" I finally had to admit that Now & Then Books have a used copy at a substantial discount and I hadn't bought it, either. I'm not sure why. Chet was right about Little Orphan Annie all those years, but Gasoline Alley, from what I've read of it, strikes me as Little Orphan Annie Lite.

So, there's a long preamble that I've felt a little left out of the Complete newspaper strip sweepstakes that are starting to heat up. I got in on the reprinting of "On Stage" as I told you, but nothing in the coffee-table hardcover line of things.

Until now.

The first test is the reproduction. Yeah, they're all in here but if they were shot from second generation photocopies or worse, I'll pass (still hadn't sunk in that I had gotten this for free: that I didn't have to make a buy/not buy decision). I flipped to the first page of the strip's debut (which I had had years ago in the Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy hardcover they published back in the 70s—I don't think they printed much of the first story, as I recall and what they did reprint looked like it was shot from second-generation photocopies) and my eyes bugged out. Holy smoke! These were either shot from the originals or from syndicate proofs or something within shouting distance of them. I couldn't stop looking at that first strip. "He's doing George McManus," I thought. A really bold hard-edged line, geometric precision on the meticulous backgrounds. "He's also doing John Held, Jr. Tess Trueheart looks like a John Held, Jr. flapper inked by George McManus. This is amazing." If you'd have told me when I opened the book that I would be studying the art on that first strip, based on my mental image remembrance of it, I would've told you you were loco. And the more I studied it, the more I saw. Jeez, he looks like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not the later Dick Tracy, of course—the famous profile hinges on that square beak, squinty gaze and cowcatcher chin.

As art spiegelman says in his back cover quote


What great cartooning! Gould understood better than anyone that comic-strip drawing isn't really drawing at all, but rather a kind of diagramming. The stunningly composed panels, which progressed more and more toward abstraction over the years, are a kind of Blueprint Expressionism with art that obeys no natural laws except the laws that govern dynamic story-telling.


But here in these very earliest strips, I swear Tracy looks like F. Scott Fitzgerald (if you have to draw someone that many times as I did in Going Home you get very familiar with his features).

Was this Ramadan reading material? was my next question.

That was an interesting one. Not really. The strip is pretty salacious both for its time and even now and one of its hallmarks is graphic (albeit mostly suggested) sadism. Pretty early on the crooks have kidnapped Tracy and tied him up and force him to write a ransom note by taking a blowtorch to his feet. The sadism became more overt later on and was spaced out widely enough (usually one or two "over-the-top" grisly endings or torture sessions per sequence) that it would get past newspaper editors. And, of course, the fact that it was a cop enduring this and meting it out in the name of "To Serve and Protect" made a great camouflage. But, was it camouflage? I suspected that was my old leftist self patronizingly sneering at the sensibility. No, it was arguably a celebration of the uncommon bravery of policemen and detectives in the face of merciless opposition and certainly informed by what Chester Gould was seeing on a day-to-day basis in Capone-era Chicago where it usually seemed the gangsters had control of the cops and not the other way around. You'd have to be so far off on the squishy left as to have lost your spine completely if you were to read Dick Tracy wondering at what unhappy upbringing had led the Brow or Mumbles or Flattop to their inevitable social choices. "Look, fellas," Gould was saying, "There are irredeemable bad guys, literal mad dogs that society needs to either lock up or extinguish. Here, I'll show you some of them."

But, at the same time, it is sadism. "How could you make up this stuff for a living," I thought, as I hit the mid-point of the book around August of 1932.

Even as another part of brain queried, "I thought you decided this wasn't Ramadan reading material."

Ah, shut yer yap.

The Hollywood gangster lingo—used interchangeably by the crooks and the cops—starts creeping into your own thought processes the more of Dick Tracy you read in one sitting.

(You're avoiding the Ramadan question.)

(I said put a lid on it, see? Stop cracking wise or I'll give y'a knuckle sandwich to chew on.)


– Okay, I really wanted to do seven full-sized entries this week but I really got thrown off (more than was necessary) by Ger coming in on Wednesday and Thursday instead of Tuesday and I have no idea how much time I've put in, but now it's Friday around 4 pm and I have a phone interview to do with In Magazine in Salt Lake City which means I'm not going to be getting much more done besides this entry today…

And Following Cerebus 10 sort of snuck up on both Ger and me—I came upstairs yesterday and he's got this giant image of Jaka's face up on the computer screen from the cover and is doing touch-up on it…it had just sunk in for him that Craig was going to be calling for the finished cover pretty soon and all he had was the solicitation cover. Well, I had just had he same epiphany the day before: I'm supposed to have a three-page "Reply to Roberta Gregory" strip (answering her strip in issue 8) done for the same issue and all I have is a mock-up of it. And I'm thinking of doing, of course, photorealism, but then I think, "It takes me a good three or four days to do a page in that style" so that's it for photorealism (as I'm writing this there's only seven working days left until I leave for Salt Lake City). So that was when I thought—hey, what about my Mort Drucker style? That's reasonably fast. And when I thought that, I thought "Why not make it look like his movie parodies in Mad with the typeset captions?" So I converted all the dialogue I had done from the Joe Kubert hand-lettering font to Franklin Gothic Demi Condensed and it looked pretty darned close, so, what the heck let's go for it. And it actually went pretty fast. I got the first panel pencilled and inked in about a day, but that was two days ago now.

Now it's three days ago and I still have to walk up to Central Fresh Market

Central Fresh Market

"in beautiful but prematurely frigid downtown Kitchener"

Your Ramadan Fast home-away-from-home

Frosted Mini-Wheats! Crusty rolls! Lettuce! Cucumber! Croutons! Ranch Dressing! V-8 Vegetable Juice! And Canned Pineapple

Over and over and over and over again…

Central Fresh Market

"Let us put the `fast' in YOUR Ramadan Fast!"

So, just like Chester Gould, I'll leave you with a cliffhanger on my THE COMPLETE CHESTER GOULD'S DICK TRACY VOL.1 review and pick it up after I get back from Salt Lake City so I can get back to work on my "Reply to Roberta Gregory" strip. I'll leave it up to you if it was worth it when you see the strip in Following Cerebus 10 sometime in late November or early December. Or, if I've already convinced you, click on www.idwpublishing.com and order your copy today.


"A complete reprinting of all five decades of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy is a project as mad and quirky as the strip itself…it's time to build new bookshelves to welcome one of America's singular artistic achievements."

art spiegelman

watch tomorrow for the

(God willing)

first ever LIVE BLOG & MAIL

either from Pearson Airport in Toronto

or the Airport in Salt Lake City

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.