Dave Sim's blogandmail #80 (November 30th, 2006)

Thursday November 30 -

Hey! Speaking of don't you LOVE TwoMorrows publishing—I got to Al Nickerson's letter of October 29 where he mentions that he's writing an article for Back Issue magazine about the early issues of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and wondered if he could interview me about Turtles #8. So, his phone number is right there. It's 9:30 on a Friday night and where is an enterprising young comic-book inker going to be at 9:30 on a Friday night? You guessed it. Right next to the phone. "Hi, Al. Do you want to do the interview right now?" "Have you got the questions?" "Yeah, I've got them right here." "Okay [BEEP!] I'm recording." You can see how much or how little he uses of it in March of 2007 or so ("Those guys work pretty far ahead"). Got off the phone and went, "Hang on. Back Issue. That's TwoMorrows Publishing as well, isn't it?" And went and checked and sure enough.

TwoMorrows Publishing. Everyone LOVES them and they're taking over the world.

Al also sent a very long letter that Steve Bissette posted to the Creators' Bill of Rights discussion group. I'll admit that I probably had very little idea of what I was talking about…and what I was mostly talking about was how "Those a—holes in Vermont" (in Jim Valentino's immortal phrase which is far more affectionate on my part than I think it was on Jim's part when he delivered it back in the 1963 dust-up time period) looked to me from hundreds of miles away than how they actually were.

I was struck this time by Steve's reminder that his divorce lawyer had told him not to do anything but work-made-for-hire until his divorce settlement was finalized. I don't know if that was, indirectly, the straw that broke the camel's back but it certainly seems like a skuzzy—though financially sensible—thing to tell an artist to do. If he had told me that part before, it hadn't registered. Obviously I think that we would live in a much better society if creative freedom wasn't specifically targeted by family law in that way…and I can understand that Steve's priorities were different from my own.

This is really all I'm going to say on the subject: two things 1) I hope Steve does Tyrant again someday 2) Danny and Maia are great kids.

Oliver Simonsen, the 3D Animated Cerebus film guy, sent a nice letter October 17:

Hi Dave,

I think I speak for all of us when I say we are really excited to be working on such an amazing character: We are all honoured and grateful and hope to make this a truly amazing 3D cartoon. We've gotten some really useful feedback from the fans [he means you guys and Margaret] and we are really glad they are on board so far. Jeff seems like a great guy, and his support means the world to us. We are looking forward to seeing the website he's building for us, and his voice is made for voice-overs which will only elevate our cartoon.

There isn't a whole lot to report—like being a writer and/or illustrator it takes a lot of patience.


Oliver

Thanks, Oliver. I'm glad that we could reach an understanding which means that there will be a degree of quality control without my having to be involved with it until the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down. It's very possible we're making history here and that wouldn't have happened without your vision and determination. Your 13-year-old son has every right to be 100% proud of his old man and I'm sure that will always be the case.

Tomorrow: wrapping up the mail


___________________________________________________

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 appears on Eddie Campbell's blog!

Thursday, 30 November 2006

[...]

About ten years back I invented a fake cartoonist named Bunny Wilson as a wheeze for something to put on the back of my Bacchus#3. Over the next few years Bunny kept popping up and plays a key role in King Bacchus. Every time I showed an example of his work I got mr j to 'ghost' it. I calculated that mr j's style would be unknown to my readers since his appearances have been confined in the US so far to caricatures in wrestling magazines. The most impressive stroke was this fake cover on the back of Bacchus #58 , of a character invented by j for this purpose:
The only known published photo of mr j occurs in another hoax: the Eddie Campbell All-stars soccer team, a photo of which is on the back cover of Bacchus #14 and the inside back of After the Snooter.

(You may have read the first part of this in my Comics journal interview) My pal, and occasional collaborator, Daren White was an accountant at Coca Cola and played in their soccer eleven at that time. One weekend when it was his turn to wash the team jerseys we rounded up eleven guys for a hoax photo, which I then cut and pasted against another photo, of the crowd at Wembley. White had already washed the shirts and now had to wash them a second time. When Sim caricatured me in a sequence in his Guys, he has me wearing the soccer gear for some reason known only to himself (I only ever had it on for half an hour).



At the same time I was drawing him in Bacchus (riffing on Sim's use of the 'injury to eye motif' in his own Cerebus.)



Around this time I wrote to the Cerebus letters page under the name of Bunny Wilson saying something like "If you lot stopped pulling each others plonkers you'd sell a lot more comic books," but Sim never printed it.

- Eddie Campbell

Dave Sim's blogandmail #79 (November 29th, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

Wednesday November 29 -

I think I'm starting to understand how to do this. When the mail piles up too high, I just go through and do this quick little responses until it's back down to zero and in doing so, I've filled up another weeks worth or so of Blog & Mail. I'm a slow learner, folks, but once I get the idea of something I latch onto it like a bulldog!

Mel Smith writes back in September (I told you I was falling behind on my mail) enthusing about just about everything having to do with me, which is very nice and a balm for my ego. He's still fighting to get the Bob Burden/Rick Geary Gumby comic book back to a bi-monthly schedule and said he will send me photo reference for Gumby creator Art Clokey so I can do a Siu Ta style strip about him (I will never give up my dreams of photorealism comics!). If you're a retailer, please keep supporting Mel's Gumby if you can. It's a great kids' book/all ages book.

D.B. Little and I had a little dust-up awhile ago and I've got this here short letter from him. Hello, D.B. Hope all is well.

Stephan Lapin sent me a script and character designs for a one-page jam that we're going to be working on when I can get around to it (I knew the script had to be around here somewheres and hyar it is).

Greg Vondruska of Tampa, Florida sends along a copy of his Summer Goes Slowly dedicated "For Dave! A huge inspiration and a great cartoonist, writer, blogger, visionary! All my best, Greg Vondruska." It boggles my mind how many wannabe Pariahs there are out there. Even one seems unlikely to me. Anyway, the half-sized booklet was published with the support of the Arts Council of Hillsborough County and the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners. If you want to check out some of his work (for FREE!) you can do so at www.gregvondruska.com and www.penandbrush.net or you can write to him directly at greg@penandbrush.net. Tell him Dave sent you.

James Turner brightened my day by writing and telling me that Slave Labor won't need the introduction to the first volume of Rex Libris until MARCH! MARCH! Can you imagine? Hey, Vado—don't you know that everything in the comic-book field needs to be done next week at the latest? Anyway, James also sent me another complete set of Rex Libris (all of my copies are in the hard copy correspondence file boxes along with James' letters) so I'm looking forward to it. Is it just me or does B. Barry Horst, the fictional publisher of Rex Libris look like Larry King? See if you can scare up a copy of Rex Libris at your local comic-book store and see if you don't agree. The conversations between Rex and Barry about how to increase sales on the book are some of my favourite parts of the book.

And the offer of another introduction came in by fax November 8. George Khoury is doing a book for TwoMorrows (hey, is there anyone who doesn't absolutely LOVE TwoMorrows publishing? I mean BESIDES the moping Fantagraphics types?) on the first fifteen years of Image Comics (he'll be interviewing and profiling six of the seven original partners but evidently Rob Liefeld has declined to participate which is really unfortunate and I hope he'll reconsider). Considering that the whole Image experiment took place on a plateau several quantum levels above my Pariah Cave, I'm very flattered and accepted right away. 500 to 1,000 words. As readers of the Blog & Mail know, I can barely tell you what I had for breakfast in 500 to 1,000 words but I'll see what I can do. They're even going to pay me. Can you believe that? Paying the Pariah King of Comics for an introduction! Don't you just absolutely LOVE TwoMorrows publishing?

TwoMorrow: Morrow Mail!

___________________________________________________

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 #78 (November 28th, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

Tuesday November 28 -

Another letter from Scott Berwanger that got lost for a spell and I apologize for that. You might remember that he had ditched the idea of trying to do a gallery exhibit of his paintings and his mammoth Anubis graphic novel at the same time. Now he's rethought it again and is guessing that if he alternates one episode of Anubis and one painting, the one will make a nice break from the other. I can see that. He might be kidding himself or he might be right. That's the real nutcracker of trying to be a successful graphic novelist (successful in the sense of getting your graphic novel done and getting good at doing it): you're really the only person in a position to make the call about yourself and your work. Civilians are just going to treat you as a moody Artiste and your peers are too busy either figuring themselves out or lying to themselves (or both) to worry about how you're doing with yourself.

Letter from Margaret Liss (hey, anyone out there ever heard of www.cerebusfangirl.com? She does an amazing job, our Margaret does).

First off — I can't believe the scanning is complete for the notebooks. Secondly, I can't believe the amount of work ahead of me. Well, us I should say, as I've got a couple of volunteers off the Yahoo!Group, Steve B and Jay (all the way from Switzerland) are helping with "cleaning up" the images. As much as I want to dive into scanning the actual Archive itself, I think it would be prudent to at least get a head start, if not complete, the notebook portion of the archiving first before starting the rest of the Archive. So I'll let you know how the progress of the notebook portion goes, and when the time is ready, I'll ask for the rest—if that works for you.

It does indeed. She's also a little worried about any time constraint on the donation of the Cerebus Archive but needn't be. I've just signed my Last Will and Testament and it specifies that the Archiving process continues with or without me, with Sandeep keeping the Off-White House open and the Archive proper heading down to Margaret in Massachusetts and back up here a hundred or so documents at a time until everything has been scanned. The specified institution is the University of Waterloo at the moment, but that could get changed to NYU if I have to raise some money in a hurry at some point (Canadian universities only offer government approved tax credits authorized by the National Archives—no cash—and, not being a socialist I'm not likely to be offered more than nickels and dimes at least until the vast Ottawa bureaucracy finally gives up on Marxism: most unlikely) and I'm sure that Mike Kelly, the proprietor of the Fales Collection at NYU will be more than amenable to working around Margaret and her team's schedule. The first priority is to get everything scanned and made available as commercial DVD packages as well as an Institutional Use package. Only when all of the raw materials have been scanned will the material actually change hands from Aardvark-Vanaheim to the designated institution.

She also notifies me that Daniel, Daniel Parker, King of the Wild Frontier is back involved with the on-going plans for the Online Digital Archive (hi to Dan and his lovely wife Linda, Linda Parker, Queen of the Wild Frontier) by upgrading it to a DSPACE database form. As with everything else Daniel, Daniel Parker, King of the Wild Frontier has to say about computer systems, I'll take his word for it. He's always looking for the widest form of accessibility and the form least likely to get compromised by corporate proprietary interests or other trump cards. If Daniel, Daniel Parker, King of the Wild Frontier says that DSPACE is the way to go, then, by gum, DSPACE is the way to go.

One of the great things about Margaret is that she is so compulsive about Cerebus that she's always checking references to the book on the Internet. She turned up one at http://community.livejournal.com/scansdaily/2466540.html that has the entirety of issue 51 scanned in along with a somewhat patronizing appreciation along the lines of "I don't know where Dave Sim went wrong and ruined his book, but here's one from back when the book was GOOD".

"The `livejournal' that it was posted on is called `Scans Daily,'" Margaret continues, "Which posts large quantities of comics scans. I don't know how they get away with it, but they do." She offers me the choice of reporting them for copyright infringement or linking it to www.cerebusart.com and www.followingcerebus.com. Tentatively, I'm going to say yes to the link and no to the report of copyright infringement. This came up because I had wondered aloud if it made sense to post the first 50 pages of each of the trade paperbacks with a link to the www.followingcerebus.com ordering page. I haven't come to any hard and fast conclusions, yet, to say the least. The last couple of days I've been thinking that what is really needed is to post the Diamond order codes for the trades here at the old Blog & Mail homestead along with the Comic Shop Locator number. That way anyone interested in ordering the books can first try calling their local shop and—if they don't have that specific trade, the caller would have the Star System order code to give the retailer. If the retailer isn't interested in ordering them a copy, then at that point, I think I'm on solid ground steering them to www.followingcerebus.com . I may end up being the last guy on the planet whose primary loyalty is to brick and mortar stores but I think that's The Right Thing To Do since we wouldn't be where we are today without the brick and mortar stores.

She makes a few observations about Oliver's 3D Cerebus Film-in-progress which really amounts to "wait and see" (really the only thing for you Yahoos to be doing at least until there's enough there to start rendering some final verdicts)

Moving right along, Jeff Seiler e-mailed Gerhard that Dave Hutzley of Dave's Comics & Collectibles—which was the Detroit store on the '92 Tour (Hi, Dave!)—and who has been in business for 30 years has closed up his Ann Arbor and Royal Oak stores and moved to Hillsdale, Michigan, home of Hillsdale College and Imprimis magazine which I've plugged before (and which Jeff signed me up for) but will plug again—e-mail imprimis@hillsdale.edu for a free subscription—where he has opened Vintage Advantage located at 42 Union Street. He's quoted in the Hillsdale Collegian as saying he "prefers the small town venue". Folks, you couldn't get Dave Hutzley out of the comic book racket with a crowbar!

Next: more mail

___________________________________________________

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 #77 (November 27th, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

Monday November 27 -

Okay, here I go again making a Blog & Mail just of the things that I got in the mail and haven't answered. Conrad P. Felber sent in a Reuters news clipping from the Toronto Star for October 14 "Superheroes of God" written by Jason Szep about a nice young Muslim fellow whose Kuwait based company is planning to publish a comic book called The 99 which will consist of Muslim super-heroes based on the 99 attributes of God ("This Ramadan The World Has New Heroes") and is also "rolling out" classic U.S. comic books like The Hulk, Spider-man and Archie in the Arabic language.

This one was bizarre, given that depictions of anything divine are prohibited in Islam. No word on any fatwas against him yet. It's worth remembering that Muslim countries like Kuwait do tend to have a more Western spin to them, ideologically speaking. It would be interesting if super-heroes became either a buffer or a lubricant in the Clash of Civilizations. Thanks Conrad…

Tim Corrigan, a totally legendary name in the small press field got the third SPACE Lifetime Achievement Award this year (Ger and I got ours two years ago when Cerebus came to an end) and last year Matt "Cynicalman" Feazell got it. Always looking for somewhere else to do my "photorealism thang" I did a drawing of Matt that Ger scanned in and did a colour version of (the Comics Journal was nice enough to print a photo of us presenting the two versions to Matt in their Newswatch section), so this year we intended to do the same thing for Tim but Bob Corby was only able to find one really terrible photo of Tim on the Internet from 1975 or something. So instead, Ger snapped a photo of him when he came over to say hello and I did the drawing from that after we got home…and I just got in a VERY nice thank you letter from him, typed on an electric typewriter. What a day-brightener—someone who actually makes Dave Sim look modern by comparison. Tim writes:


Dear Dave;


I just wanted to thank you for the extraordinary gift you recently sent me. I was absolutely stunned when I opened the package! Clearly a lot of thought and work went into that piece and I am genuinely moved you would take the time to produce this fine piece of work for me. It is one of my proudest possessions and I shall have it framed.

Sorry I didn't respond sooner. It's a hectic time of year for me. All the sign customers who procrastinated all summer decided they wanted their signs in September, and I painted my fingers off the whole month. It happens every year that way.

I'm always amazed to find that the ol' SMALL PRESS COMICS EXPLOSION magazine was such a pivotal point for someone. For me, the pivotal point came some years earlier. I was 14 when I stumbled across a copy of All in Color For a Dime by Don Thompson. That was the book that galvanized my belief that comics were a direction worth following. So my magazine was where others needed it to be because Don's book was exactly where I needed it to be. Isn't it remarkable and a little magical the way life unfolds and how we brush each other's lives.

So, thank you very much, Dave. You're a huge talent and a heck of a nice guy. I'll always treasure your gift.

See you at SPACE next Spring.


Sincerely,


Tim Corrigan


Say, this is probably a good spot to mention that


The Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo

SPACE

WILL BE HELD APRIL 21 & 22 2007

At the ALADDIN SHRINE COMPLEX IN

(it's worth going just to SEE the Aladdin Shrine Complex)

COLUMBUS, OHIO

OVER 150 EXHIBITORS, UNDER THREE OF WHOM ARE NAMED DAVE SIM & TIM CORRIGAN

Reserve your table now at www.backporchcomics.com

tell Bob & Kathy & Megan that Dave Sim sent you

(I get a substantial kick-back when you do)


Quite a coincidence that I heard from Tim when I did, because I just saw George (Big George) Stasinos out in Salt Lake City and he mentioned how influential and helpful Tim's Small Press Comics Explosion was when he was starting out. I actually came in before Tim, since I remember Don & Maggie Thompson's mimeo zine (find a very, very old person to explain to you what "mimeo" was, young'uns), Newfangles having the same impact on me some time before All in Color for a Dime came out. Don & Maggie were like completely mystical beings because they knew what was going to be happening in comics, sometimes months ahead of time (I still remember the only "Extra" they put out when Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC). I felt as if I was cracking open the secrets of the universe whenever the new issue came in. Don and Maggie KNEW! Don & Maggie would TELL ME what was going to happen long before it did happen and then (GASP) it would actually happen just the way they said it would. Coincidentally, my personal phone directory is sitting here open with Don & Maggie's phone number from the mid-1980s. I was pretty impressed with myself, let me tell you. A mere fifteen years after I had been just another Newfangles subscriber, here I had Don & Maggie's home phone number.

Tim also sent along the PREMIERE ISSUE of Tim Corrigan's Comics and Stories featuring Tim's legendary Mighty Guy character. It's a nifty little 11-page one shot he'll let you have for a sawbuck. As Allen Freeman (Fan-atic Press) wrote about him in the 2006 SPACE program booklet in a Believe It or Not parody: "Tim Corrigan of Houghton, NY was the publisher of Small Press Comics Explosion the first nationally distributed mag about small press comics. He created the ne'er-do-well hero Mighty Guy whose adventures he claims are `The Funniest Comics Known to Man!' He's drawn comics for 50 years and hasn't seen one dime of profit." Probably because he still publishes comics he sells for a buck. Or LESS. And what's even more amazing is that it's turned into a family operation. Last year Tim held down table #108 and his sons Matt Corrigan (South Star) and Nate Corrigan (Gumshoe Comics) split table #109 and between the three of them they had a whole raft of comics for sale. The family that publishes together…uhhh….the family that zines together…uhhh…I've been working on that gag since SPACE 2004 when I first saw the Corrigan & Sons set-up and I still haven't got one. Help me out, someone. The family that staples together….uhhh….

Anyway, you can write to all three of them at POB 25, Houghton, NY, 14744 and send them money if you want a bunch of good funnybooks. However much you send them, they'll make it worth your while. Or maybe you'd like a hand-painted sign. Tim does those too—for a living.

More on SPACE as we get closer to April 21 and 22 (that is, if I'm still doing this by then).

Tomorrow: More catching up on the mail

___________________________________________________

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 #76 (November 26th, 2006)

Scripture at the Registry Theatre



Continues in January, 2007

At the Registry Theatre, corner of Frederick (122 Frederick) and Weber in downtown Kitchener

Joshua 1-24 (January 7, 2007)

Judges 1-21 (January 21, 2007)

First Samuel 1-25 (January 28, 2007)



All 1 pm start times Admission Free

all donations to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region

gratefully accepted



Continuing with some of my favourite passages from The Torah, over the next few weeks, I'm going to be serializing Balaam's parables from The Fourth Book of Moshe chapters 23 and 24:

And God met Balaam, and he said vnto him, I haue prepared seuen altars, and I have offered vpon altar a bullocke and a ramme. And the YHWH put a word in Balaam's mouth, and said, Returne vnto Balak, & thus shalt thou speake. And he returned vnto him, and loe, he stood by his burnt sacrifice, hee, and all the Princes of Moab. And he tooke vp his parable, and said, Balak the King of Moab hath brought mee from Aram, out of the mountaines of the East, Come, curse me Iacob, and come, defie Israel.



How shall I curse, God hath not cursed? or how shall I defie, the YHWH hath not defied? For from the top of the rockes I see him, and from the hilles I behold him: loe the people shall dwell alone, and shall not bee reckoned among the nations. Who can count the dust of Iacob, and the number of the fourth part of Israel? Let my soule die the death of the righteous and let my last end be like his.



And Balak saide vnto Balaam, What hast thou done vnto me? I tooke thee to curse mine enemies, and behold, thou hast blessed them altogether.



And he answered, and said, Must I not take heede to speake that which the YHWH hath put in my mouth?

2-DVD Sets of me reading The Pentateuch

The 50 chapters of The First Book of Moshe (aka Genesis)

The 40 chapters of The Second Book of Moshe (aka Exodus)

The 27 chapters of The Third Book of Moshe (aka Leviticus)

The 36 chapters of The Fourth Book of Moshe (aka Numbers)

The 40 chapters of the Fifth Book of Moshe (aka Deuteronomy)

Are available from Trevor Grace at

tgrace2001@sympatico.ca



All profits from sales are donated to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region

Thank you for supporting the poor of Waterloo Region

___________________________________________________

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 #75 (November 25th, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

Saturday November 25 -

I finished my review of The Ditko Package and, vaguely dissatisfied, I finally broke down and called directory assistance in Washington State to see if they had a number for Robin Snyder. It's one of those things that I tend to be ambivalent about in the comic-book field particularly when you're looking at a book that's from seven years back. What are the odds that all the playing pieces are still on the same chessboard and in the same configuration? From my experience, not very good. I'm one of the few people I know where I can say that I'm still in the same geographic location I was sixteen years ago, with a phone number that predates that by probably another seven years. And, no, they didn't have a phone number for Robin Snyder on Yew St. Rd. but they did have a number for a Robin Snyder on Canterbury. Now we are into serious ambivalence. What are the odds that it's the same Robin Snyder? So I phoned and asked "Is this Robin Snyder?" "Yes it is." "The Robin Snyder that works with Steve Ditko?" and sure enough it was. My first question was out of my mouth before I could even assess whether I wanted to ask it.

"How's Steve Ditko doing?"

Robin laughed heartily and said, "He's doing GREAT!" with just that level of emphasis which was more than reassuring: communicating the sense that there are probably people in the world where it would make sense to ask about the state of their health and overall being but Steve Ditko definitely isn't one of them.

Robin didn't have much time to talk—he and his wife were getting ready for a trip to another part of the state to "visit the kids"—but I did manage to get some basic information about how RSComics is doing and where he is in his collaboration with Steve Ditko. They've done a total of FIVE Ditko Packages (the one I have is the first) and besides that they've done roughly THIRTEEN other projects in the last seven or eight years. They did have a website at one time, but Robin closed that down and now they do strictly mail order. He said probably their best selling title is the smaller 32-page Ditko Package. I asked him if he had a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to buy everything they have and he guessed somewhere around $110 US. I asked if he sold to comic-book stores and he said they did on occasion but they don't offer stores a huge discount—he said the highest they go is maybe 15 or 20%—so that tends to limit their orders from comic-book stores (which usually need at least 40 to 50% off). He laughed again and said that it's more common for a huge Ditko fan to run across one of their books somewhere and get in touch and then order, you know, EVERYTHING. Which is why the $110 ballpark figure wasn't a real challenge for him.

It's an interesting field where someone who is that much of a comic-book household name (and apart from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby I don't think there's a name in that category in the comic-book field) can still be happily producing his own work on a regular basis and just selling it direct (or, at least, relatively direct) to his legion of fans without Diamond and without the comic-book stores. Not with any animosity, just that this way of doing things suits his purposes and so he's happy to just keeping hoeing his row in his own way on his own terms.

The Static volume which came out in 1989 is on its second printing, as is The Mocker.

After I hung up, I thought, You know? Wouldn't it be nice if just once we could have one of those great comic-book outpourings of affection BEFORE one of these legends kicks the bucket or we find out he's in hospital barely clinging to life? Wouldn't it be nice if everyone for whom Steve Ditko means the world (in many cases that isn't hyperbole if you've ever met a Ditko fan—this is a guy who had his own Ditkomania fanzine devoted to him back in the 1980s, long before the Jack Kirby Collector came out) could write to him—while he's still doing GREAT—in care of Robin Snyder and tell him so? And (not to be totally pushy) maybe send along a few bucks for Ditko's latest project (whatever that might be?). I mean, if you don't think it's a good idea, don't feel obligated. But if the idea just really bangs your gong, sit down right now and send a nice letter and a few bucks to

Steve Ditko c/o Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Ln. #81, Bellingham, WA, 98225-1186 or at least send him an e-mail at RSComics@aol.com.

[parenthetically, it's the 25th of the month and that means that it's time to remind all of you that no one has yet asked Jackie Etrada or Heidi Macdonald why they chose, along with the other five board members of the Friends of Lulu to reject my suggestion of a petition signed by female comics professionals opposing censorship and in support of the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund back in 1996 OR when I raised the subject again on September 25 and October 25…thus affirming my contention that feminists get a free ride in our society for the intellectual dishonesty. See you on Christmas for my next reminder!]

___________________________________________________

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 #74 (November 24th, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

The book—we're discussing Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package if you're tuning in late—is a mixed bag but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. It's very hard—and always has been—very hard to see what it is that Steve Ditko sees or what it is, specifically, that he's trying to communicate and I suspect that that's because so much of his work centers on (or appears to center on) the profound level of self-deception which most people perpetrate against themselves, the intrinsic level of dishonesty and the consequences of that. And that's a difficult vein to mine—as I can attest—because there is a nearly automatic hall of mirrors quality that kicks in for the reader. "He's talking about me" and an immediate consequence of withdrawal and resentment. "I'm not really like that and even if I am like that what business is it of his and who is he to pass judgement on me" etc. etc. Woody Allen experienced the same thing with Stardust Memories. The closer you get to absolute accuracy the more offensive the vast majority of people are going to find what you are saying. He attempts to stay within the confines of genre most of the time in what appears to be an attempt to retain the comic-book genre fan. The super-hero or science fiction elements are the bait and Ditko's perceptions are the hook. The more obscure the metaphors, as on "Faces" or "The Animal" or "Starters" or "Starter and Finisher" or "Lift My Veil" or "Shocker" the further he gets away from something that can be appreciated in a strictly comic-fan populist sense and the more he begins to resemble Kafka in combining otherworldliness with an archetypal template open to wide interpretation: "I can see that Ditko sees the subject of this story as archetypal, but what is the archetype exactly?" And, of course, the less sharply clarified the archetype, the more accurate it is and the more sharply clarified, the less accurate it is—Orwell's Animal Farm wouldn't be the classic of its type that it has come to be if the metaphors were more sharply clarified into specific communist analogues or specific fascistic analogues, as an example. But the borderlands shift uneasily around all suppositions when you move beyond the universally acclaimed work like Animal Farm or Kafka's The Trial and into the area of their less universally acclaimed works. There it becomes permissible to ask: is this actually a less sharply clarified archetype or just a badly-done story? And there everything circles back to the fact that everyone is aware of the high level of integrity—in every sense of the term—that Orwell and Kafka…and, yes, Ditko…brings to his work.

There is no such thing as a throwaway story. If Steve Ditko sat down and wrote and drew it, it is because he had something he specifically wanted to say. Even his choice of words and phrasing is obviously laboured over in order to get as close as he can to what it is that he is trying to communicate. And then there's a story like "The Blinder" which is one of the best stories in the volume visually, in my opinion, and the best at making use of the costumed protagonist archetype. Except in this case, the costumed protagonist is actually a criminal who is undone by…well, you'd really have to read it for yourself. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story? I've re-read it twice just trying to get a handle on it. The otherworldliness—both in layouts and designs—that he brought to the table with Dr. Strange has crept into his dialogue and his narration. In several places he has contracted the iconic comic-book curseword (!@#%!) into a single icon (#). Can you do that? He just did.

There are two entries from Ditko's "Avenging World" canon which point up the difference with the rest of this collection in that the title page is composed of the classic Mr. A dichotomies and intermediary dichotomies which (we all assume, perhaps wrongly) reflect Ditko's own beliefs. Most of the pieces here are far less direct than that, far more narratives which illustrate the consequences of choice rather than the choices themselves. "If…Then" is particularly good in this regard, combining a texture/contour means of inking that I've never seen Ditko do before with a narrative that intrudes upon the otherworldly but only at the story's climax and with a mystical narrator cut from the classic Mr. A/The Question cloth. Steve Ditko, irrefutably, is a very literate man and yet his phrasing in places is awkward to the point of incomprehensibility. "The `No!' Because one didn't want to know!" is the concluding line of dialogue in "If…Then". It is as if the story itself has come from another world and couldn't wait until "End" to get back there. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story?

"The Void vs. Burner" is the best in terms of conventional expectations, having a sort of combined Spider-man and Doctor Strange flavour to it and was the story that made me want to devote a couple of days of the Blog & Mail to this remarkable artist/writer, particularly with my agreement to do Sean M.'s Dr. Strangeroach commission. This is the sort of pure Ditko narrative that makes me want to participate IN Ditko, even as I realized that that's an inherently false ambition when you are talking about someone who is scrupulously fully integrated in and within himself and his self-chosen context. What would Ditko even think of the idea of a "jam"? Presumably it would be just another false trail of the many that he's had to avoid, another means of the outside world attempting to lead him astray. And even if he could be persuaded what could I do? No one else can do Ditko layouts quite the way Ditko does them; no one draws people the way Ditko draws them; no one inks the way Ditko inks. All a collaborator can do is obscure what is there and there are few things that could be considered more inimical to what Steve Ditko represents in our field than to do anything to obscure his pure expression.


___________________________________________________

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 #73 (November 23rd, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

The book—we're discussing Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package if you're tuning in late—is a mixed bag but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. It's very hard—and always has been—very hard to see what it is that Steve Ditko sees or what it is, specifically, that he's trying to communicate and I suspect that that's because so much of his work centers on (or appears to center on) the profound level of self-deception which most people perpetrate against themselves, the intrinsic level of dishonesty and the consequences of that. And that's a difficult vein to mine—as I can attest—because there is a nearly automatic hall of mirrors quality that kicks in for the reader. "He's talking about me" and an immediate consequence of withdrawal and resentment. "I'm not really like that and even if I am like that what business is it of his and who is he to pass judgement on me" etc. etc. Woody Allen experienced the same thing with Stardust Memories. The closer you get to absolute accuracy the more offensive the vast majority of people are going to find what you are saying. He attempts to stay within the confines of genre most of the time in what appears to be an attempt to retain the comic-book genre fan. The super-hero or science fiction elements are the bait and Ditko's perceptions are the hook. The more obscure the metaphors, as on "Faces" or "The Animal" or "Starters" or "Starter and Finisher" or "Lift My Veil" or "Shocker" the further he gets away from something that can be appreciated in a strictly comic-fan populist sense and the more he begins to resemble Kafka in combining otherworldliness with an archetypal template open to wide interpretation: "I can see that Ditko sees the subject of this story as archetypal, but what is the archetype exactly?" And, of course, the less sharply clarified the archetype, the more accurate it is and the more sharply clarified, the less accurate it is—Orwell's Animal Farm wouldn't be the classic of its type that it has come to be if the metaphors were more sharply clarified into specific communist analogues or specific fascistic analogues, as an example. But the borderlands shift uneasily around all suppositions when you move beyond the universally acclaimed work like Animal Farm or Kafka's The Trial and into the area of their less universally acclaimed works. There it becomes permissible to ask: is this actually a less sharply clarified archetype or just a badly-done story? And there everything circles back to the fact that everyone is aware of the high level of integrity—in every sense of the term—that Orwell and Kafka…and, yes, Ditko…brings to his work.

There is no such thing as a throwaway story. If Steve Ditko sat down and wrote and drew it, it is because he had something he specifically wanted to say. Even his choice of words and phrasing is obviously laboured over in order to get as close as he can to what it is that he is trying to communicate. And then there's a story like "The Blinder" which is one of the best stories in the volume visually, in my opinion, and the best at making use of the costumed protagonist archetype. Except in this case, the costumed protagonist is actually a criminal who is undone by…well, you'd really have to read it for yourself. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story? I've re-read it twice just trying to get a handle on it. The otherworldliness—both in layouts and designs—that he brought to the table with Dr. Strange has crept into his dialogue and his narration. In several places he has contracted the iconic comic-book curseword (!@#%!) into a single icon (#). Can you do that? He just did.

There are two entries from Ditko's "Avenging World" canon which point up the difference with the rest of this collection in that the title page is composed of the classic Mr. A dichotomies and intermediary dichotomies which (we all assume, perhaps wrongly) reflect Ditko's own beliefs. Most of the pieces here are far less direct than that, far more narratives which illustrate the consequences of choice rather than the choices themselves. "If…Then" is particularly good in this regard, combining a texture/contour means of inking that I've never seen Ditko do before with a narrative that intrudes upon the otherworldly but only at the story's climax and with a mystical narrator cut from the classic Mr. A/The Question cloth. Steve Ditko, irrefutably, is a very literate man and yet his phrasing in places is awkward to the point of incomprehensibility. "The `No!' Because one didn't want to know!" is the concluding line of dialogue in "If…Then". It is as if the story itself has come from another world and couldn't wait until "End" to get back there. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story?

"The Void vs. Burner" is the best in terms of conventional expectations, having a sort of combined Spider-man and Doctor Strange flavour to it and was the story that made me want to devote a couple of days of the Blog & Mail to this remarkable artist/writer, particularly with my agreement to do Sean M.'s Dr. Strangeroach commission. This is the sort of pure Ditko narrative that makes me want to participate IN Ditko, even as I realized that that's an inherently false ambition when you are talking about someone who is scrupulously fully integrated in and within himself and his self-chosen context. What would Ditko even think of the idea of a "jam"? Presumably it would be just another false trail of the many that he's had to avoid, another means of the outside world attempting to lead him astray. And even if he could be persuaded what could I do? No one else can do Ditko layouts quite the way Ditko does them; no one draws people the way Ditko draws them; no one inks the way Ditko inks. All a collaborator can do is obscure what is there and there are few things that could be considered more inimical to what Steve Ditko represents in our field than to do anything to obscure his pure expression.

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!



VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434





A review of Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package. I have to admit that I completely bypassed this one when it came out and I doubt I ever would have picked it up if Sandeep Atwal hadn't brought it over. Best known for his work on Spider-man (the first 38 issues) and Dr. Strange, I first knew his work at DC on The Creeper and The Hawk & Dove both of which I bought off the newsstand back in the late 1960s (Hawk & Dove are probably overdue for a revival since the US victory and/or defeat—depending on your perspective—in Iraq). His Moral Absolutist themed work, Mr. A and The Question tended to leave me cold because of my liberalism back in the day when I was a liberal. Beautifully drawn but just too severe in (repeatedly) hitting that shrill high note of Moral Absolutism. I really think a definitive Mr.A volume is called for at some point but I have no idea what Mr. Ditko would think of the idea. I hope he's in good health and I hope he still has strong connections with Robin Snyder (who published this book) and others who either share his philosophy or whom he trusts with his legacy and that there exists filing cabinets or at least A filing cabinet with correspondence and notes on his various creations and so on. And, of course, I sincerely hope that he isn't a Franz Kafka type who wants everything destroyed when he dies or that Robin Snyder (or whoever would be charged with the task) would just ignore the instruction if that was the case, as Kafka's executor did.



Mr. Ditko and I tend to get lumped together in The Comics Journal's context and we were the first two candidates to be subjected to their murderous roundtable (the multiplicity of reviewers allowing for a dramatically magnified version of the standard Comics Journal ratio of nine parts literary homicide to one part grudging admiration—Alan Moore just went through it with Lost Girls) but, personally, I've always felt more a kinship in the sense of "to thine own self be true". There are any number of roads that Steve Ditko might have taken from the decision to quit Spider-man just as it was going through its first wave of near-phenomenon stature. You can fault his decisions if you want (and many do—they want their Ditko Spider-man) but the fact that he ended up doing what he thought was right—both on the printed page and in his personal life—and suffered the career and income consequences of that—in my eyes marks him out for Greatness. Between the time he left Spider-man and when he (finally!) got the big payday with the release of the first Spider-man film you would be hard-pressed to see any point where he compromised with his personal sense of right and wrong. It would be nice if that on-going process could be documented someday. He's also one of comic books' greatest mystery men (Ghastly Graham Ingels was a distant second). The extent of that mystery can be conveyed by the fact that it wouldn't surprise me if he possesses every scrap of paper related to his career back to the 1940s and it wouldn't surprise me if he regularly purges his own past and has one neat folder that contains only twelve sheets of paper that have survived those purges. Obviously in either case, whatever he has on hand would be of profound interest, particularly to comic-book fans of the Baby Boom generation who were weaned on Marvel Comics. I just loaned Sandeep Ken Viola's Masters of Comic Book Art videotape which both Mr. Ditko and I are on



Sandeep: He's actually got him on tape?!



Me: Just the audio, he wouldn't allow Ken to film him.



There's a good example. Who else would draw that distinction between audio and visual recording? As I recall it took a lot of negotiating. Ken had known Mr. Ditko for years and was one of the (handful? dozens? Hundreds?) who regularly visited (visits?) him or attempted (attempts?) to visit him. That he would even allow Ken to record his voice was a signal honour for those of us familiar with the Ditko Legend. There was trust there, at least of a kind. Did that trust survive the recording or survive Mr. Ditko's first viewing of Ken's film? All interesting questions, circling warily around the central mystery of Steve Ditko.



There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY'S

BLOG &….MAAAAILLL

___________________________________________________

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 #72 (November 22nd, 2006)

Yes…yes…that's it! Don't be shy. Staroo

isn't going to hurt you…cough cough

Staroo just wants to tell you his

cough cough secret


So I went downstairs to the Off-White House Library and started looking for this English book on comics that James "Baby" Bruno—who used to be part of the drinking buddy circle I hung out with which included Joe Boo, James' sister Beth, John Brent, Warren and a few others—bought me back in the 1990's for Christmas because it had Cerebus in it. He was just so totally flipped out that he had been in a real bookstore and had seen this book on comics and had thought, "I wonder if Cerebus is in there?" and when it was he just had to buy it for me. Anyway, it had a bunch of great reproductions in it…

…Suddenly flashed on my Silver Age book, which is a new fave since a lot of the stuff is shot from the original artwork in that Chip Kidd method where you colour scan it so you get all of the blue pencil and white-outs and stuff. Nope. Only one Doctor Strange page and it isn't one of the better ones.

…then checked my two Overstreet Price Guides but that isn't going to work, Ditko never did very much of the otherworldly stuff on the cover. Yeah, here's the book I was looking for, Comics an Illustrated History. Nope, only one Strange Tales cover, 107, which everyone uses because it's the Human Torch versus the Sub-mariner.

Good thing I'm going to see John next week. He'll probably have all the original issues in duplicate, the Essentials volume and the Marvel Masterworks volumes.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. As I told Sean on the phone, I never know what's going to make me go GONG. The last time it happened was at the last Torontocon when a guy asked if I would draw Cerebus with the original Batgirl. Not the original original Batgirl back, like, in the Shelly Moldoff era, but the Batman-TV show era Batgirl, the Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson Batgirl. Boy did I ever want to draw her. But, as I told Sean, if someone just asks me, "What do you want to draw?" none of that comes to mind. So, he just got lucky the way the Batgirl guy did.

Because I've been so impressed with what Jeff's done with that animation effect on the cerebusart.com website, I figure what I'll do is start sketching Dr. Strangeroach upstairs here next to the photocopier on a tracing paper pad and just photocopy every step of the process. If I rough it in and decide to change the arm, I'll photocopy it before I change the arm. And when I've got ten or twenty photocopies done, I'll send them to Jeff and he can scan them in. That way even if I'm jumping around on a dozen different things (which is happening a lot lately) there will at least be a Dr. Strangeroach in progress that Sean and all the Yahoos can be looking at. Depending on how it goes, I'll just make that my new way of doing the commissions or I'll never do it again or I might go a little easier on the number of photocopies. We'll see.

It was kind of "luck of the draw" for Sean. I got that GONG when I read the print-out of his e-mail that Ger brought in and then, maybe a week later, Sandeep dropped by with Steve Ditko's 160-Page Package from 1999 where I was looking at it and aching to do my own version of something Ditko-esque.

Tomorrow: My favourites from Ditko's 160-Page Package which I hope is still available from Robin Snyder at 2284 Yew St. Rd. #B6, Bellingham, WA, 98226-8899 (e-mail RSComics@aol.com)


There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY'S

Blog &…MAAAAILLLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #71 (November 21st, 2006)

All right. You win. Come back closer

where you can hear Staroo and Staroo will tell

you his …cough…cough… secret


Elaborating a bit on the extent to which I'm falling seriously behind on my mail, I think one of the things I'm most uncomfortable about this experiment is that I have gone over to the "dark side" in the sense that I tend to answer things here and never stop to consider if the people I'm talking to even read the Blog & Mail or know that it exists. My time is so taken up with getting this done every week and with remarking on the fact that it does seem to be boosting sales (the first time an order from Diamond has come in for Collected Letters 2004 since the initial sale of 1,000 copies, then 100 reorders and then another 100 when we relisted it—this time, 113 and only two months after I plugged it for a whole week? Is that how this works? We actually sell what I'm selling but it has to hatch out two months later?) that I never really stop to consider the more direct issues of communication. This became especially clear when Claude Flowers sent me the final manuscript/galleys for Collected Letters 2 which I've been reading and correcting for about two hours before bed every night. Because I'm responding to an individual's letter there, my response is tailored to the individual, a little rancour where it's called for, a leaven of humour, all of it provoked by what I've just read in the letter they wrote to me. The Blog & Mail is an entirely different process having more to do with broadcasting. I have no idea who I am talking to or how interested they are (common sense would dictate that there is no specific reader. Some people are fascinated by some things and bored or repelled by others. Doesn't matter what I write about or how I phrase it the reaction is going to be across the whole spectrum). In fact, the main reason that I tried doing this is that I figured it wouldn't work so it would be just one more thing on the list of things that haven't worked but sounded like they might. The appearance at the Salt Lake City Book Festival was a good example. The Number One Library in America (and it is gorgeous), a prestigious book festival, one of the best comic stores in the country, right there at the library with one of the most aggressive retailers on the planet, a fair amount of media coverage. It's worth a try—I've never had that combination of elements all in place. But, it really didn't work. It was still just the usual handful of people—all of them interesting and I'm always appreciative that I can spend that much time with each one—but still just a handful of people. As I've gotten fond of saying, a Cerebus signing usually has about a half dozen people—two of whom drove for at least nine hours to get there. Weighing even the limited expense of getting back and forth to the airport (which is really all we had to invest besides books and time) and the four days or so that it took out of the schedule, there were any number of more lucrative things I could have been doing, starting with commissioned drawings which we're starting to get inquiries about. And that's really what it comes down to. I'd rather be writing and drawing my own stuff first of all and drawing commissioned pieces that interest me if there is just no way to actually promote the trade paperbacks which seems to be the case. This works better. The Blog & Mail, I mean. But I really have no idea what to do, because I thought it wasn't going to work. In fact when I was talking to Claude on the phone (that's another weird thing—after two years of avoiding the phone like the plague, I've started using it a lot more when it's someone like Claude Flowers that I'm working with on something—bye-bye 2204-05 paper trail to keep people from reinventing Dave Sim to suit their own agendas) I just sort of blurted out, "How do you think I'm doing?" With the Blog & Mail. Which was a silly question. Claude is a huge fan. And, of course, then he turned around and asked all the Yahoos. Do you read it? What do you think? Which, already, it isn't going to tell you anything because you can pretty much predict the half dozen people who will respond publicly on the Newsgroup which leaves up in the air the question, Who are the people who compelled Diamond to order 113 copies of Collected Letters? What do they think? And you're never going to get an answer to that question because of the structure. Who's reading this? No idea. Why are they reading this? No idea. How often are they reading this? No idea. Is this working? Yes, really well. That's the bottom line. I don't really believe in surveys because they always tilt towards the answer that they're looking for. Any survey I take, I just have to look at the responses and none of them are going to match my own. That last one was Chester Brown with a survey that asked "Are You a Libertarian". Most of my answers to his questions were "That depends." But, of course, surveys don't have "That depends" as a category. Just "yes" or "no". No big surprise that when forced to respond "yes" or "no" I turned out to be a Raving Libertarian. So, at least in my case the pretence that a survey can help show What Our Customers Want or What The Voting Public is Interested In or What Is Your Political Affiliation is inherently false. And I've begun to suspect that might have the direct implication that the people I'm reaching with the Blog & Mail, people who, more than 50% of the time 19 times out of 20 are in the same category: "Other" or "within the bounds of statistical uncertainty".

So, I'm starting to get some ideas of different things that I want to try.

I finally got a chance to check out Jeff's revamping of the www.cerebusart.com website and was so enthusiastic about the animation thing he has happening there that I dug through to find the Cerebus Radio Show animation tracing paper and just sent it to him. This is made for this. That's an instant response thing. No point in taking a survey to find out if people want to see that. I want to see that, so it's a done deal. That having used up the sum total of Aardvark Vanaheim's animation inventory, I started thinking what else I could do. That was when Ger brought in Sean M's commission request for a Doctor Strangeroach, a la Steve Ditko. I told Ger to give him the number here and I'd talk to him about it which I did just a little while ago. He's one of those really good art collectors who likes to give artists a lot of latitude. Major Steve Ditko fan so I wanted to know what his level of compulsion was. I don't remember a lot about Dr. Strange, but I did remember that they changed his costume pretty quickly after he first appeared in Strange Tales #110. It was sort of a subdued blue number to begin with. Sean mentioned that the amulet used to look different, that it actually had something sculpted on it, a figure or something. I had definitely forgotten that part and wished I had some reference to check (yes, I know, if I was hooked up to the Internet I could just Google it and there it would be). He told me about another artist who's working on a commission for him where it's going to have all these giant disembodied floating eyes with devouring maws. Because we're talking about Steve Ditko, I instantly get a definite mental image. Sean said that he had mentioned it to his wife (who shares his love of comics, lucky guy) and she said, "How could an eye have a devouring maw?" I think you have to have grown up with Steve Ditko for that to be second nature. So, all right, now I'm getting the range and this was what I was interested in—Steve Ditko's way with drawing otherworldly dimensions. Nobody else even comes close. And he's going to give me the latitude to do whatever I want in that way, so specific preference for the earliest Doctor Strange over the later Doctor Strange.

Tomorrow: More On the Evolving Dr. Strangeroach
___________________________________________________

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 #70 (November 20th, 2006)

You think you've won? You haven't won! Staroo

will just yell for shorter periods of time until his

throat…cough…cough…feels better.

Staroo! Feel the…cough…cough


Finally got the "Reply to Roberta Gregory" three-pager is DONE just after my afternoon prayer on Wednesday the 8th and then I couldn't stop sitting there and looking at it, which was the case with the T. Casey Brennan story I drew for the ACTOR benefit book (which, not to sound uncharitable, but I still haven't even seen yet—if the guy who spear-headed the project is reading this and knows where to get me three copies for the Archive it would be much appreciated. I would have called ACTOR head honcho Jim McLauchlin but as I recall he wasn't hands-on with this one). Back in the days of doing Cerebus on a monthly schedule, I'd have spells of that—staying up late and going in and sitting and staring at the pages but most of the time it was just a mad scramble to get the pages done. Ger would bring in the last batch of pages, we'd have five minutes to appreciate them and then it was time for him to pull them down and take them upstairs to be photocopied (in case the FedEx box ever got lost on the way to Preney—which, mercifully, it never did even on 274 tries) and then FedExed. But now? WOW! THREE WHOLE PAGES! I FEEL LIKE SUPERMAN!

So then it was time for studio clean-up and to put together the pile of mail on which I am falling further and further behind (my best current thinking is to get Blog & Mail postcards printed up so I can notify people when I'm going to mention their letter or if I'm going to mention their letter). So, in an attempt to prioritize:

Here's what happens when you take a chance on trying to be funny. Back on October 11 I offered a couple of returned Cerebus Fan Club packages to the person ordering the most trade paperbacks in the month of October and printed the names of the intended recipients—Tim Maroney and Tom Vogel—because it would be funnier that way. Even as I was doing it, I thought, You know? This could really blow up in my face and in this case it did. I received the following letter dated October 12:

Dear Dave,


I hope this letter finds you well. We've met, though it was a great long time ago—at least once in Chapel Hill, NC, at the Heroes Aren't Hard to Find store (I'm the one staring stupidly at the camera in the photos in the back of…was it issue 68?), and once at the Heroes Con, at which you treated me to dinner at a local steakhouse along with Scott Hampton and some other people I wish I remembered more clearly.


Two different people e-mailed me today to ask if I knew anything about "Tim Maroney" of Chapel Hill. I do; he's my late brother.


Tim lived in Chapel Hill until 1983—I can't remember if he lived on Hillsborough Street or Bolinwood Drive after coming back to Chapel Hill from Greensboro. He moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie-Mellon; then he headed west and bounced around the Bay area working for Apple, Adobe and probably some companies that don't start with A and end with E and have three letters in the middle, but they're not as memorable. I've included one of his cards from Apple.


He died suddenly in 2003, victim of an undiagnosed genetic disorder which led to a blood clot which led to a pulmonary embolism which led to oxygen not getting to his head or much of anywhere else.


So, it's unlikely that he's going to return to civilization any time soon, but we can hope. If you care to, you can check out his writings at .


While waiting for his return, I would be happy to take guardianship of his bounced fan club materials; I will put them next to Tim's stuffed Cerebus and my Diamondback deck in my study.


I can't say that I know Tom Vogel; I hope he's doing well.


Yours,


Kevin J. Maroney

Anyway, sincere apologies to Kevin Maroney for my inadvertent blunder. I called and got his phone number of Yonkers, NY and left a message saying that if he'll send me a photo of Tim, I'll be glad to do him a drawing of his late brother to put with the stuffed Cerebus and the Diamondback deck. Haven't heard back from him, but I will be sending out the fan club package in the mail this week. Again, sincere apologies.


___________________________________________________

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 #69 (November 19th, 2006)

Since I'll be (God willing) reading this today at 1 pm at the Registry Theatre, I thought I'd just run it in its entirety: one of my favourite parts of the Torah, The Fifth Book of Moshe, chapter 33 which recalls Jacob's instruction to his sons at the conclusion of The First Book of Moshe:



And this the blessing wherewith Moshe, the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death. And he said, The YHWH came from Sinai, and rose vp from Seir vnto them, hee shined foorth from mount Paran, and hee came with ten thousands of Saints: from his Right hand a fire of law for them. Yea hee loued the people; all his Saints in thy hand: and they sate downe at thy feete; euery one shall receiue of thy wordes. Moshe commaunded vs a Law, euen the inheritance of the Congregation of Iacob. And hee was King in Iesurun, when the heads of the people, the Tribes of Israel were gathered together.

Let Reuben liue, and not die, and let his men be few.



And this of Iudah: and he said, Heare, YHWH, the voice of Iudah, and bring him vnto his people: let his hands bee sufficient for him, and bee thou an helpe to him from his enemies.



And of Leui hee said, Thy Thummim and thy Vrim with thy holy one, whom thou diddest prooue at Massah, & whom thou didst striue at the waters of Meribah; Who said vnto his father & to his mother, I haue not seene him, neither did hee acknowledge his brethren; nor knew his owne children: for they have obserued thy word, and kept thy Couenant. They shal teach Iacob thy iudgments, and Israel thy Lawe: they shall put incense at thy nose and whole burnt sacrifice upon thine Altar. Blesse, YHWH, his substance, and accept the worke of his handes, smite thorow the loines of them that rise against him, and of them that hate him, that they rise not againe.



Of Beniamin he said, The beloued of the YHWH shall dwell in safetie by him, shall couer him all the day long, and he shall dwell betweene his shoulders.



And of Ioseph he said, Bless of the YHWH be his land, for the precious things of heauen, for the dew, and for the deep that coucheth beneath; and for the precious fruits by the sunne, and for the precious things thrust forth by the Moones, and for the chiefe things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of the lasting hils, and for the precious things of the earth, and fulnesse thereof, and for the good will of him that dwelt in the bush: let come vpon the head of Ioseph, and vpon the top of the head of him separated from his brethren. His glory the firstling of his bullocke, & his hornes the hornes of Vnicornes: with them he shall push the people together, to the ends of the earth: and they the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they the thousands of Manasseh.



And of Zebulun he said, Reioyce, Zebulun, in thy going out; and Issachar, in thy tents.

They shall call the people vnto the mountaine, there they shall offer sacrifices of righteousnesse: for they shall sucke of the abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand.



And of Gad he said, Blessed he that enlargeth Gad: he dwelleth as a lyon, and teareth the arme with the crowne of the head. And he prouided the first part for himselfe, because there, a portion of the lawgiuer was he sieled, and hee came the heads of the people, he executed the iustice of the YHWH, and his iudgments with Israel.



And of Dan he said, Dan a Lyons whelpe: hee shall leape from Bashan.



And of Naphtali he said, O Naphtali, satisfied with fauour, and full with the blessing of the YHWH: possesse thou the West and the South.



And of Asher hee said, Let Asher be blessed with children, Let him be acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oile. Thy shooes shall bee yron and brasse, and as thy dayes, so thy strength.



There is none like vnto the God of Iesurun, rideth vpon the heauen in thy helpe, and in his excellencie on the skie. The eternal God, refuge, and vnderneath are the euerlasting armes: and he shall thrust out the enemie from before thee, and shall say, Destroy.



Israel then shall dwell in safetie alone: the fountaine of Iacob vpon a land of corne and wine, also his heavens shall drop down deaw.



Happy thou, O Israel: Who is like vnto thee, O people! Saved by the YHWH, the shield of thy helpe, and who is the sword of thine excellencie: and thine enemies shal be found liars vnto thee, and thou shalt tread vpon their high places.

The Balance of the Winter Program of

Scripture at the Registry Theatre

Is

Joshua 1-24 (January 7, 2007)

Judges 1-21 (January 21, 2007)

First Samuel 1-25 (January 28, 2007)

All 1 pm Start Times



___________________________________________________

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 #68 (November 18th, 2006)

STAROO IS GETTING HOARSE FROM HAVING TO

YELL LOUD ENOUGH FOR YOU TO HEAR HIM, BUT STAROO WILL

NOT BE DISCOURAGED BY A MERE MORTAL! STAROO WILL SHOUT

THE FACT OF HIS MYSTERY FROM THE VERY ROOFTOPS

TIL ALL MUST TREMBLE BEFORE THE…cough

Cough…uhlgg…Staroo feels as if he ruptured a

blood vessel in his throat or something


Concluding my review of Create Your Own Graphic Novel, I think the average retailer would have to get a copy and read it and try to figure out if this is just something they want to sell a few copies of and forget about or if this is an actual Graphic Novels for Teens/Graphic Novels for Dummies that they can use as the thin end of their wedge of public outreach. Although I think Scott McCloud and Will Eisner say a lot more in their books that actually apply to the nature of the medium, I think a persuasive argument could be made that they are still, for the most part, preaching to the converted and that we as a creative community and (particularly) as a retail community might still be looking for the entry-level Holy Grail book for the Total Civilian. There may even be two books required: Teens and Dummies and Create Your Own Graphic Novel might one of them, both of them or neither of them.

[Just to head anyone off at the pass, I can't picture ever doing an Understanding Comics or a Comics and Sequential Art or a Create Your Own Graphic Novel book of my own. I consider those to be just Too Large As Subjects to tackle definitively but I certainly think all three are potentially very helpful to what we are all, presumably, trying to do here. The closest I came was The Guide to Self-Publishing which I will be theoretically revising and republishing somewhere up ahead and that I only tackled because in the course of 1992/93 with the US Tour I had been asked the same questions enough times that I had a clear idea of how to compose a primer that would take care of most of the immediate self-publishing entry-level questions. How I wrote and drew comics myself is, to me, Too Large A Subject for a book. Usually all I can picture is looking at someone else's comic book and critiquing it on the basis of my own creator prejudices and hopefully giving them a different perspective or a helping hand. Sometimes the lettering is the biggest problem, sometimes it's the inking, sometimes it's the layout, so if I can just do some suggestions on tracing paper, sometimes I can help and sometimes I can't. Sometimes the honest answer is: stop looking at my stuff and start looking at Chester Gould or someone who's more stylized. Sometimes they just have to go through a few years of wrong turns before they get there.]

Anyway, I do think Create Your Own Graphic Novel is worth checking out, again, particularly for retailers (www.ilex-press.com) and possibly for XTreme Cerebus Completists (yes, I'm looking at you, Margaret and Jeff) since it does include 6 reproductions from Cerebus. I think retailers have to look at it and decide if this reflects their own viewpoints to a sufficient degree that it can serve as an introductory volume for the comic medium in their own context, their store where they labour on a day-in day-out basis to establish what comic books and graphic novels are and what they can be. "This will help you, as a new customer, to start seeing the way we see". Of course that might just be my own prejudice in favour of brick and mortar over Internet consumption.

[And I also have to say that I don't think any Holy Grail publication is ever going to take the place of hand-selling on the part of retailers, managers and store employees. And hand-selling at every level. I had occasion to be at Night Flight's Library store around noon on the Saturday of my recent visit and the store was empty except for me and Mike Justice—a comic-store employee name if ever there was one—and a single customer who didn't seem much interested in buying anything and didn't have much knowledge of comics in general but was engaging Mike in conversation. My visual sense being engaged by scanning the racks for anything of interest—I ended up buying American Splendor #2 and three random issues of Big George since Big George himself had come to our signing the day before and we had had a nice chat. He's produced twenty issues in twenty years, Big George has—my ears were able to stay occupied listening to Mr. Justice's patient and prolonged explication of comic books as a reading experience versus comic books as collectibles or investments (which the potential customer kept belabouring in one sense of another). Unfailingly polite—always watching for some on-ramp clue of a book or comic he could direct the fellow to—this I think is the engine that drives the comic-book economy. If there was an unlimited supply of Mike Justice's out there, Night Flight might be a national chain of comic stores, but there aren't which is why staffing is always going to be a key irreplaceable element. The sales resistance to comic books is profound on a percentage basis. If you have a store with an interchangeable high school kid slouched at the counter listening to his iPod, I think you have a store in danger of a swift demise. Mike Justice is the exact opposite of that kid.]

At 15 quid plus mailing it's going to be a high ticket item for a store that doesn't look at things the way Mike Chinn does and would likely result in the average store owner spending the next three years having to explain who Luther Arkwright is and why they don't carry him. For me, seeing Bryan Talbot's work on that seminal graphic novel again was worth the price of admission (in my case, authorizing them to use Cerebus in the book) and was definitely one of the gold stars in Ilex's notebook by my reckoning. Luther Arkwright will never be forgotten in Merry Olde England, I don't think. Bryan made a place for him and then persevered with blood, sweat and tears to bring it in for a landing and even in a book dominated by computers and in tiny flawed reproductions, those fine pen lines and meticulously spotted blacks which were so many years ahead of what most others were doing in comics at the time have more than stood the test of ensuing decades. Sometimes that's really all you need to get a favourable opinion out of me: playing up somebody who should never be forgotten and Bryan Talbot and his Luther Arkwright are both in that category.

Oddly enough, just as I finished writing that part, I turned over an old chequebook and there was Bryan Talbot's phone number. I must call and find out if he's still living in his remarkable Talbot Castle.


There's More For YOU

In TODAY's

Blog & … MAAAAAILLL

___________________________________________________

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.