Saturday, September 30, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #19 (September 30th, 2006)




All this week the Blog & Mail

Is brought to you by individual

Cerebus Trade Paperbacks

Including this copy of

Going Home

Sitting right here.

It's not just the elaborate homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his writings that you, yourself, can get at your local comic-book store or online at

www.followingcerebus.com

it's the only one available that has the words

"As seen on the Blog & Mail"

hand-lettered on the title page

and autographed by Dave Sim & Gerhard

The First Money Order or Certified Cheque for

$50 to reach Box 1674 takes it!


In the event of a tie—since Gerhard only picks up the mail once a week—all cheques and money orders for $50 will be honoured with an autographed copy marked "as seen on the Blog & Mail"

So Ger looks at my cover idea and the title card and he listens to my idea of Cerebus breaking through like Porky Pig and he is getting less and less impressed by the moment. Then he says, "It's not going to show up very well in the solicitation". Which is true. The covers in Diamond Previews are about the size of a large postage stamp and the more complicated and detailed a cover you have, the less people are going to be able to see it. Whatever "brand" value there is in using Elrod is going to be lost because a) he's going to be too small to see b) his dialogue is going to be too small to read and c) he's going to be dressed in a giant rooster costume. I was already thinking about re-doing the Looney Tunes style lettering in some way to diminish the fact that there really are too many letters in the words "Following Cerebus" to do a visual analogue. And I had started wondering about having the logo rise up in the successive film frames and wondering if the Looney Tunes logo actually did that or if I was misremembering it and realizing that I had hours of paste-up to do to try and get it done in rough form and Ger would have more hours on the computer trying to get it to work (if I thought he was laughing through his nostrils now…). And he said, "So there would be the regular Following Cerebus logo in addition to the film strip?" and no, that wasn't actually what I was picturing but I can see what he's saying. "What's this going to look like in the solicitation stage?" And the answer isn't very good no matter what I try reconfiguring the cover mentally.

Meanwhile, Ger has mentioned that he's pencilled another wraparound-cover-sized drawing from a photograph he found interesting and I'm starting to think that I really can't save this potential animation cover, so maybe we should just go with a nice unrelated wraparound cover. This has been an on-going question: does the cover have to apply to the contents or can it just be a nice picture? Knowing my crabby, hair-splitting, literal-minded audience (and I love each and every one of you dearly as I would my own flesh-and-blood and you know that MWAH!) I've tended to think it has to apply in some way (even going so far as to coerce Craig into writing an analysis of "The Night Before" to tie in to the cover to #10 which Ger has done pretty much on his own except for getting me to actually pencil and ink Jaka and Cerebus) as often as possible, but I'm starting to wonder if I'm fighting uphill for no good reason. From Ger's standpoint even if we go with the straight "Eye Candy" cover that's unrelated, we want to avoid Cerebus looking like a "stuck on" afterthought and he really can't picture where Cerebus would go on the picture he has tight pencilled on tracing paper. Ger promises to bring in the tracing paper drawing the following Tuesday so I can take a look at it and see what we can do about turning it into a cover. I don't see the same problem he does, but then I'm not the one who is going to be filling up a good 9/10s of the finished cover with my work, so how he sees it has to be taken into account (nor, presumably, does he want a significant 1/10th of the visual point of his cover obliterated by an aardvark if he can help it).

The following Tuesday is here and in and around unloading 6,000 plus pages of Cerebus negatives all taped onto 8-pages-per flats and an eight-foot fire retardent cabinet big enough to hold them Ger informs me that he forgot to bring the drawing in because he forgot to write it down. As he is fond of saying these days, "Post-it notes ARE my brain cells".

Well, around this time, Craig has finally gotten all of the Neal Adams material off of his desk and he's had a closer look at the Dream Issue and it's starting to seem to him that there might be more there than one issue's worth so he's suggested that we make issue 11 part 2 of the Dream Issue[s] and he does a quick description of an Odd Transformations cover and I'm just about to fax him back saying that Ger's already halfway through a cover and we're just going to have to live with whatever it is. So that's when I suggest to Ger that whatever the drawing is that he's done, I could just do a drawing of Cerebus asleep on a pillow with his blanket fluttering over him and that would serve to make the background a dream, whatever it is.

Continued on Monday.


You're not REALLY going to fall for that, are you?

Sending a cheque or money order for $50 just to get an autographed $30 book that says "as seen on the Blog & Mail"?

It'll only encourage us, you know!


___________________________________________________

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.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #18 (September 29th, 2006)



All this week the Blog & Mail is brought to you by

Individual Cerebus Trade Paperbacks

You don't have to buy them all, they're even really good

One at a time.

Today's Trade Paperback: Flight

Surreal! Mind-Bending! Blood Soaked!

Winner of the Eisner Award for Best Reprint Volume

1994

Then issue 186 came out and that was the end of that!

Available at better comic book stores or at

www.followingcerebus.com


Anatomy of a Following Cerebus cover

A Week-Long Except for Wednesday, Sunday and Tuesday Blog & Mail Essay


Figuring out what an issue of Following Cerebus is going to be about is really one of the toughest things about my and Craig's jobs right now. Just about the time we're getting our publisher's copy of Diamond Previews with the solicitation for an issue of Following Cerebus, it's time to start working on the next cover. So, about a week ago, the Previews issue came in with the solicitation for issue 10 which means we now have three weeks to get a cover done, scanned, the logo and type put on and a description of it sent to Diamond. Of course, right now Craig is just cleaning up the debris from the Neal Adams issue—sending me back my Adams reference material and getting his own files back in order—and starting to write some of the text and come up with the interview questions for issue 10's "The Night Before and Dreams" issue. The last thing he wants me to ask is: "What's the one after that going to be about?" But that's what's right in the middle of my plate if I'm going to get my part done and Ger's going to get his part done and each of us is going to have enough time to do our part properly. If I'm doing the cover solo (a la the cover to issues 5 or 7) that isn't as much of a problem, but obviously if you have the King of the Pen and Ink and Watercolour Eye Candy standing by, you want to make maximum use of him (a la the covers of issues 2, 8, 10) and that means giving him as much time as possible.

So, a while back I had faxed Craig the suggestion that we do an Animation Issue. I had just had brunch at the Walper Terrace Restaurant with Rob Walton who had come up for a visit and I had recorded our conversation, got the waitress to take photos, etc. Apart from Ragmop [again, highest possible recommendation on this 400-page graphic novel—get your orders into Diamond before the book actually ships if you're a retailer and let your local store know you want one if you're a comics reader] Rob's primarily made his living from animation, working for various companies but primarily Toronto's Nelvana Studio over the years, doing storyboards and all other aspects of the animation business and he knows them inside and out. As far as I know, apart from the guys who have drawn the Hanna-Barbera characters over the years for their various comic-book incarnations, Rob is the only one to use that cartooning style extensively in his own comic-book work. So it seemed like a fruitful idea to discuss what both of us have taken from the animation field in our own work, where comic books and animation are similar, etc. And, what the heck. I'm the point man. No one else is thinking of issue 11 at this point, so let's just say it's the Animation Issue. I suggested to Craig that I could do an Elrod/Foghorn Leghorn homage, with Elrod wearing a Foghorn Leghorn costume and Foghorn wearing a Lord Silverspoon tunic and wig. He thought it was a great idea. So, that was what I decided to do when it came time (which, as it turns out, was last week).

So, I got my part done and the gag hinged on knowing what "Space Jam" was—Foghorn basically fools Elrod into switching places. Foghorn will get all of Elrod's High Society royalties and Elrod gets to go to Hollywood and star in the big "Space Jam" sequel. I showed Ger the pencilled cover idea and he laughed a little bit through his nostrils which meant that he didn't like it, but I soldiered on anyway. The following week when he came in, I had my part pencilled and inked and lettered and finally he asked in an exasperated voice, "What IS `Space Jam'?"

Uhhh. So, I explained that "Space Jam" had been this huge animation fiasco that only Time-Warner could put together that came out five years ago which involved the Warner Brothers cartoon characters teaming up with Michael Jordan, of the NBA's Chicago Bulls to save the universe in a big basketball game. Does this sound familiar to anyone? One of the problems with a two-man operation is that there's no way of telling who is crazy and who isn't. I figured pretty much everyone would remember "Space Jam" because it had been so bad—that really irritating Roger Rabbit crap that they do these days where every frame of every scene looks as if it had been drawn by Tex Avery on amphetamines—LOTS of amphetamines. And, um, it tanked really, really badly. I tried watching it on Pay TV back when I had a TV and I think I lasted about eight minutes. So, I'm explaining this to Gerhard and he has his "REAL people won't know anything about that" look on his face. So, I'm the crazy one. And I'm not so much agreeing with him (does ANYONE out there remember "Space Jam"?) as I'm thinking, the target outreach audience for this issue (if there is one) is animation people and maybe trying to get a laugh out of "Space Jam" is not a particularly cagey move given that the movie virtually single-handedly sunk traditional animation which is what most of the potential new audience would have been employed in. See, they didn't do the movie in-house but farmed out most of it to animation studios all over North America and then stitched it together at the end. I heard that Jeff Smith's old studio Character Builders did some of it and I know Nelvana did some.

Meanwhile, I've gotten a book out of the library on the Classic Warner cartoons which has a great Robert McKimson model sheet of Foghorn Leghorn from 1953 (there are approximately three or four really good Foghorn Leghorn cartoons—the first one won an Oscar—and then a bunch of so-so and lousy ones) as well as the Looney Tunes title card. I figure I'll do an animation strip of the title card, lettering "Following Cerebus" in the "Looney Tunes" style and in the final frame Cerebus is bursting through the title card a la Porky Pig only Cerebus says, "Nay. Nay. Cerebus is NOT going to say it." (`Th-th-th-That's All Folks", right?)

Tomorrow: I know Gerhard's out there I can hear him breathing


___________________________________________________

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.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #17 (September 28th, 2006)



Today's edition of the Blog & Mail is brought to you by

High Society (Volume 2 in the series)

When 16 Volumes Seems Like Committing to a Marriage

Remember, several of the books can stand alone

High Society (Volume 2 in the series)

The Walking Barbarian Id encounters Civilization For the First Time

You'll Laaauuugh! OY!


Anatomy of a Following Cerebus Cover

An Almost Week-Long except for Wednesday and Sunday and Tuesday Blog & Mail Essay



Well, no sooner do I tell you guys that I'm going to do a colour cartoon for the cover of Collected Letters Volume 2 than I change my mind. I dug out a list of letter recipients that I could do caricatures of on the cover and then realized that virtually no one knows what any of them look like! "Boy, doesn't that just look like Kitchener Mayor, Carl Zehr?"

[His Worship got a big laugh at the General Meeting and Dinner of the Kitchener Downtown Business Association when, after a monumental build-up introduction by the KDBA Director, he stepped to the podium. Thanking the director for his lavish praise he then said that while the praise was much appreciated, there's always something that will bring you back down to earth. Two of the women who were sitting at his table had just asked him, "So where do you work downtown?"]

So that was when I got in the new paperback edition of The Little Man, Chet's short story collection which has just come out from Drawn and Quarterly (www.drawnandquarterly.com Highly Recommended) where Chet did a comic strip on the cover (having gotten the idea from the series of Penguin Classics that he did one of the covers for, Lady Chatterly's Lover). He had been pushing Rob Walton to do one on the cover of Ragmop [the great 1990's self-published title which is now a 400-plus page graphic novel available from Diamond Comics Distributors. Highly recommended even though you couldn't get much further away from my end of the political spectrum. That's right: Ragmop is squarely in Yahoo Territory! And has a pretty good track record for making me laugh out loud at its ultra-liberal caricatures of my side of the fence] while I had been pushing Rob to revive his original issue one cover which had been modeled on the It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World movie poster design. The book ships later in the year—Rob's driving the artwork up to Quebecor even as you read this—it was listed one or two Diamond Previews back so your local store should be able to get you a copy if you say something now!]

It is an interesting idea, I decided. The concept is, obviously, that people feel compelled to read comic strips so putting one on the cover of your book is going to make use of that compulsion. I'm not sure that it actually works, but I bypassed that thought with another thought: what kind of a strip would I do? And the obvious answer (all you Yahoos are going to get sick of hearing this, I think) was a photo-realism strip, along the lines of Stan Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones and Leonard Starr's Mary Perkins On Stage [I can't believe how many plugs/digressions this one little item is necessitating. I just got in volume one of Classic Comics Press reprinting of Mary Perkins On Stage's first year February 1957 to January 1958. Volume two is scheduled for release in November. I bought the premium package including a print signed and numbered by Leonard Starr himself! The books are $19.95 each plus $3.95 for shipping and handling www.classiccomicspress.com. It's a surprisingly good read in addition to the gorgeous art.] So I put something together last week making use of the "Siu Ta (so far)" method: photocopying photographs, cropping them to panel size and dropping computer font lettering in the right space. Margaret "Maggs" Liss wrote me that there has been some dispute on the Internet about whether I was hand-lettering the strips or using a computer font and Jeet Heer brought up the same subject at the Doug Wright Awards. Yes, it's true. It's a computer font from Richard Starkings' Comiccraft called "Joe Kubert". Basically I wanted something that was as close to the ultra-clean Ben Oda style as possible which I frankly don't have the "chops" for (Oda lettered virtually all of the narrative comic strips of the 1950s and 60s. I've even heard the story that he had the keys to a lot of cartoonists' studios so he could just let himself in in the middle of the night, letter the strips and then let himself back out again. Which would make a really good photorealism strip in and of itself!). It's also a lot easier to do caption and balloon corrections. You just retype the material, re-space it and away you go. The final reason is that in the aftermath of issue 186 the predominantly liberal comic-book field went from treating me as a first-rank penciller, inker, writer, writer-artist, cartoonist and letterer (nominations for Eisners and Harveys) to relegating me to nominations in the Best Letterer category only (where I finally won a Harvey in 2005). It didn't bother me since it was so obvious that that was what they were doing: if you're not a feminist you can't be any good at anything but minor technical achievements. But, as I told Margaret and Jeet, I figured if I used a computer font that they wouldn't be able to do that anymore and, sure enough, everyone has been favourably mentioning my artwork on "Siu Ta (so far)" the first time my artwork has been mentioned favourably by anyone since 1994. I did want to emphasize that I gravitated directly to the Joe Kubert font, so Mr. Kubert can take a very deep bow that his lettering is what Dave Sim Superstar Letterer picked over any other for his photorealism work. It's a damned fine font and worth every penny of the $75 or so that it cost. Joe Kubert's lettering font! Accept no substitutes!

Anyway, I've got the logo lettered and a cover inset image of two of three teenaged girls pencilled and inked so hopefully I'll have the finished cover ready to go to Diamond for solicitation in October sometime. Ger's also working up his part of another wraparound cover for Following Cerebus 11 this week. Craig and I are betting that the Dream Analysis issue 10 is going to "burst all bounds" and have to be split up over two issues. More on this tomorrow but at least I GOT to the Following Cerebus cover before the end of episode 1, eh?

___________________________________________________

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.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #16 (September 27th, 2006)



Last week's Blog & Mail was brought to you by

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

"You can't buy a better corrective for the Dave Sim-challenged and those with Dave Sim issues in your life. Compassionate, caring, loving, a devoted family man. Dave Sim is none of these things. It's all just ideas and hair-splitting arguments and sophistry and even when he talks about Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce Knowles he doesn't get into what they would be like in the sack or tell you where you can find a website with the best shots of their boobs hanging out of their dresses. Frankly, I don't get the point at all."

Albert Einstein,[I absolutely swear: at a séance I was at the other night. He looked just like his photos, too. I absolutely swear to you.]

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

Available at better comic book stores somewhere in the Tri-state area but don't ask me which ones because I think the idea that the book is available in any comic-book store probably qualifies as a serious delusion on my part that I'm just not in the right space to deal with that fact at this point in my life, you know?

Or order on-line at

www.followingcerebus.com


Last week's Blog & Mail (and this spill-over addition) was dedicated with the greatest respect and admiration to Chris Woerner, serving with US Forces in Baghdad even as you read this, stationed in one of Saddam's old palaces. Talk about a room with a view. God willing he comes back to us safe and sound and we'll be seeing him at one or another of the Yahoo get-togethers—maybe SPACE in April of '07? Say, if anybody has an idea of what we can do with the trade paperbacks before we send them over to make them less inclined to turn into trade paperback stew (glue bindings on books melt in the Iraqi heat, I've been told) please feel free to post your favourite recipe here ("Then take a small spatula and carefully extracting the remaining glue residue…").


Okay, I'm going to have to be a little careful here because today's entry deals with Alex Robinson and he sure didn't have any idea that I was going to be doing this Blog when he wrote to me on 6 September or that I intended to use excerpts from people's letters without permission. [I also apologize for getting these columns out of order—I kept juggling them, trying to minimize the "emotional trauma" they were apt wreak in feminist circles—and ending up promising that this column would appear last Sunday in doing so. Last week I did two Tuesday columns by accident. Jeff Tundis suggested that I type the days of the week in a single column at the beginning of my work on a week's worth of Blog & Mails and I took his excellent suggestion this week, so everything should be straightened out from now on].

He writes, "It was also good to see you at SPACE, though I wish we could've spoken some more in a less noisy setting. It was also strange because at one point I noticed that a few people had gathered around us and were just listening to us converse, without actually participating. I'm sure you're used to it by this time, being the former godfather of self-publishing and all, but it was a very disconcerting experience to me, almost like being on stage."

Well, truer words were never spoken (and the subtext makes me even more hesitant about quoting Alex here) but I think it's just a difference in perspective. I'm so used to it by now, I didn't even notice our "audience" per se. I started off doing fanzines, Alex started off doing mini-comics and here we were in an environment where we were THE Dave Sim and THE Alex Robinson and in that context—a night-before party at a small-press convention—I just think it polite to let people listen in who are, in their turn, starting off. It gives them a sense of connection (however valid or invalid that sense might actually be) which I think is a major part of small press events.

Of course the subject also touches on issues of privacy that I've had to give up since publicly stating that I'm not a feminist and that I advocate non-feminist political choices. Feminists never attack ideas they always attack you personally which leaves you with two choices: let them tear you to pieces in absentia with rumour and innuendo or adopt the view that everything about your life is public and an open book, there's no such thing as a private correspondence or a private conversation because anything you do privately is going to get "spun" by the feminists into some form of foundation for further character assassination.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Alex and I have a long history that goes back to him sending me copies of Box Office Poison in the original digest comic format I mentioned above and I was always pulling for him to make it and always gratified when another issue arrived with the familiar return address. Needless to say, having watched his painstaking and hard-fought for progress, I'm a HUGE fan of his latest graphic novel, Tricked, and made a point to write him a long letter about it after buying it and devouring in one afternoon shortly after it came out (he sent me a copy sometime between my buying it and writing to him). Years ago, on those occasions when we were both set up at the same small press or mainstream con, I'd wander by his table and say, "Wow. THE Alex Robinson." It's a good example of a joke that later comes true and threatens to devour you. Alex freely confesses to have lifted a few of my storytelling tricks (far more obvious in Box Office Poison than it was in Tricked—he's definitely become his own man) and might even have been charged with being a Dave Sim clone at one point. But, in the future? It would be no great surprise to hear: "Ah, Alex Robinson. Yes, brilliant graphic novelist. Have you ever heard of Dave Sim? No? No, most people haven't. He did this largely forgotten work called Cerebus. See if you can dig up some of the issues from the mid-1980s and you'll see a lot of where Alex Robinson came from." There's no point in trying to argue with it. If it happens it happens. I got a letter a while ago from someone who had just discovered Barry Windsor-Smith's work and was amazed to see just how profoundly he had influenced my own work how much of his Gorblimey Press stuff and his later Conan material I lifted practically intact. Several people have told me that they had no idea that Lord Julius was based on someone until they ran across the Marx Brothers by accident!

The ultimate verdict of art history is always out of our hands.

Anyway, I'm friendly enough with Alex and have enough history with him (which is a little different than the situation with Batton Lash—I inadvertently influenced Batton through my Pro Con speech to write Archie vs. Punisher and use the proceeds as seed money to start Exhibit A Press and that's really where the professional connection begins and ends) that I just flat-out asked him in my last letter if his crazed misogynistic character Steve in Tricked was based on me.

"I was surprised that you would think that the character Steve was you. If that was really what I thought of you, why would I send you the book? I know your stock has fallen a bit in this stupid industry, but I didn't think you got many people insulting you directly to your face."

I didn't think that was the type of person that you are but there are very few people who have genuinely and sincerely been charged with misogyny in our industry (or in society in general for that matter) and none where no voice has been raised in his defence—I'm the only one I can think of aside from, perhaps, Robert Crumb and he's pretty much "vouched for" by being married to Aline Kominsky whereas as far as I know I'm under universal female indictment for having broken the hearts of D.L., D.S. and S. A. (discretion really is the better part of chivalry) in the ranks of my industry "conquests" (they broke their own hearts, in my view, all I did was refuse to capitulate to their feminist politics—a subject for another time). And Steve in Tricked was definitely a truly misogynistic character which is also virtually unique in the field (as well as in society in general) so based on my alleged misogyny (which, in my view, is really just opposition to what I see as feminist excesses) if that had been your intention—to document comics' only universally agreed-upon misogynist with a genuinely misogynistic character—I thought it would at least make for a fruitful and open discussion if you thought, as an example, that I was in some way slighting your better half (as seemed to be the case with Batton Lash—at least from his better half's point of view) on the only occasion that Kristen and I chatted at SPACE (2003, I believe).

The most recent person to violate the Dave Sim radio silence dictated by the comic-book feminists was Dirk Deppey in his Comics Journal interview with Terry Moore who, apropos nothing, suddenly launched into


About a year and a half ago, we did a critics' roundtable on Dave Sim, and I'm sure you're aware of his, what's the euphemism, "controversial" views on men versus women. I have to say that the official Comics Journal line was best described the first time around they did this, which basically, had an artist's rendering of Sim as the commandant at a concentration camp for women. I have a difficult time working up that level of antagonism towards Sim's views, not because I agree with them, but because most men and women I know really do view the opposite sex as the opposite species on one level or another. The whole men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus thing is fairly ingrained not just in our culture, but virtually all cultures. Sim just went a little overboard in trying to turn it into an all-encompassing, goofy-ass theory, in my opinion.


Again, there is no effort to address my ideas, they are just declared "goofy ass" and that's expected to be the end of it. Again, I find that intellectually dishonest. Lawrence Summers—before feminists hounded him from his office as Harvard president—addressed a core biological reality that women are incapable of competing in the advanced maths and sciences even though thanks to the excesses of affirmative action they outnumber men by a wide margin at the start of the academic "race". In both instances we were labelled as misogynists even though we were just making an observation based on empirical evidence. With all deference to Mr. Deppey—who is, I grant you, an improvement over his predecessors at the Journal in this area—the intellectual dishonesty in continually evading what Lawrence Summers and I and people like us are saying by suggesting we have "goofy ass" theories and that we should content ourselves with being dismissed out of hand in that way goes well beyond the feel-good parameters of "men are from Mars women are from Venus". If you want to be intellectually dishonest on the subject of feminism, that is your fundamental right but I would appreciate it if people would stop deprecating me and Lawrence Summers and others like us just because we base our views on empirical evidence. Either refute our views with contrary empirical evidence or, you know, stop referring to them as "goofy ass" as if you have already refuted them.


Anyway, on to happier subjects:

Thanks very much, indeed, for sending along Husky, the two-headed digest with the first chapter of your 2 Cool 2 B 4gotten and Tony Consiglio's Titanius. An actual brand new Alex Robinson digest comic. Just like old times. Is it just me or this a kind of mano a mano "who's actually going to finish their story first?" kind of gig? Anyway, splendid shot by Kristen of you two boys in tuxedos and sporting a couple of spiffy cheroots really badly reproduced. Is that a vest Consiglio is wearing or have the shingles come back so bad that they're now actually growing out through his shirt? Scandal-mongering bloggers and the comic-reading public have a right to know. Maybe Alex has the original photo posted at http://members.aol.com/ComicBookAlex or can put it up there sometime soon for verification by any of the Yahoos specializing in skin ailments (yep. Looks like shingles all right. Right through his dress shirt. Yeccch.)

Tony and Alex have been hanging out together since their days at SVA in one of Will Eisner's classes where they were (how can I put this?) deemed to be somewhat-less-than-exemplary students in the deportment department. Tony tells one of my favourite stories about Will coming over to his and Alex's table at a comic-book convention (San Diego?) and has really gotten tired of me dragging him across the room at SPACE to tell yet another complete stranger (the last one was Jason Trimmer as I recall). Tony is easily one of the funniest guys in comics (not quite Evan Dorkin level but definitely up there) and I always look forward to new work by him. If we can get a hundred or so people to check out his website at http://members.aol.com/DoubleTony we might even be able to persuade him to post the Eisner story. Also recommended is his latest book from Top Shelf, 110 Per[cents sign. Why doesn't my keyboard have a "cents sign"? I never noticed that before. Somehow I just know this is all Tony's doing! Curse you, Tony Consiglio!]

Alex's contribution gets off to a running start. There's a quality to writing a serialized graphic novel that's quite different from just writing a comic book and, I suspect, different from writing a non-serialized graphic novel and Alex, it seems to me, has that nebulous quality pretty much nailed. Tricked was non-serialized and Box Office Poison was serialized. I've only done "serialized" (so far). How quickly do you have to get into the story and how much information do you have to impart in how short a time seems to me the core of the aptitude. Here Alex gets a lot of the information across in the form of a patient's questionnaire at a holistic medicine center and an interior monologue that is one large block of text in the iconic shape of the narrator's face, both really good ways of accomplishing the necessary task that don't impede the narrative flow or call unnecessary attention to themselves. The result is that you get (by my estimation) roughly 22 pages of narrative in 16 pages. That's a very good proportion to hit in a medium where so much of the narrative challenge is how you condense information without appearing to do so, so that you can let conversations between characters take a more natural-sounding (to the reader's inner narrative ear which he or she isn't usually aware of unless he or she happens to also be a cartoonist) course.


Today's edition of The Blog & Mail has been brought to you by

Page 139 of Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

(one page? Only one stinking page for Eisner-Award winning Alex Robinson and nothing for Tony Consiglio? Sad but true. Nowadays I just clip out all of the appearances of Alex and Tony from the comics press and glue them into big scrapbooks. I don't know what that's all about. I'll decide to go and pick up groceries and two hours later I'll "come to" with a bowl of soggy cereal I haven't touched in front of me and just, you know thumbing aimlessly through scrapbook after scrapbook with the big colour photos of Alex and Tony from WizardWorld and San Diego Comic-con. Frankly, I'm getting a little worried about myself)

Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

Available at better comic book stores, gathering dust and stuffed in behind big piles of Alex Robinson and Tony Consiglio "new hot releases"

Or order online at

www.followingcerebus.com




___________________________________________________

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 #15 (September 26th, 2006)



All this week the Blog & Mail is brought to you by Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

Buy a copy and ignore it. That'll show me.

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

We're not above using transparent reverse psychology a five-year-old could see through to move some of these books.

Available at better comic book stores briefly in the Fall of 2005 and now for all intents and purposes vanished without a trace.

Or order online at www.followingcerebus.com


Okay, this is the end of week two and it seems pretty clear that the choice is between actually answering my mail or continuing with the Blog & Mail. Just out of curiosity, I asked Chester and John and Siu and Han what length of time they would pick if they started a pool to decide how long I would keep this up. Balancing how much of my life it was already taking up against the fact that I did a monthly comic book for 26 years the lowest guess was two weeks and the highest guess was three weeks.

At that point—after briefly considering starting a pool then and there, making it to four weeks, packing it in and taking their money—I thought: the key thing will be to not set a precedent that you get 3,000 to 5,000 words every day. As soon as I can I have to do a real short one so they know that some days that's just going to happen. They're Big Yahoos (for the most part). They can take it.


Today's Blog & Mail has been brought to you by Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

587 pages of All Dave All the Time.

Unlike the Blog & Mail, if you buy a copy of Collected Letters it will be 587 pages long when you buy it and when you wake up tomorrow it will still be 587 pages long! A specious argument, to be sure, but it means I get to go to bed now!

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

Available at better comic book stores everywhere

Or order it online at

www.followingcerebus.com


___________________________________________________

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.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #14 (September 25th, 2006)



All this week the Blog & Mail is brought to you by Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

Available at better comic book stores everywhere or order online at www.FollowingCerebus.com


This week's Blog & Mail is respectfully and with great admiration dedicated to Chris Woerner, long-time Yahoo in good standing serving with US Forces in Baghdad. And, with a couple of days left in the week, I'd like to expand that dedication to include all of the military forces which are serving in the War on Terror, in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of NATO and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom (and, for obvious reasons, a special hello to Operation Foundation, Canada's representative group at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida). The free world is forever in your debt and your contributions to the advancement of freedom and democracy will never be forgotten.


Lou Copeland forwarded a draft petition from Joe Kubert which had appeared on Tom Spurgeon's website on the refusal of the Polish government to return Dina Babbitt's art which had been acquired and was being displayed by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. The cover letter in part read:


Deported to Auschwitz as a teenager, Mrs. Babbitt's life was spared by the infamous war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, after he saw a mural of Snow White that she had painted on the wall of the children's barracks to soothe the children in their final hours. He then compelled her to paint portraits of gypsies upon whom he was performing his barbaric "experiments".


After the war, Mrs. Babbitt relocated to California, where she worked as an animator for Warner Brothers and Jay Ward Productions. Among other things she illustrated such characters as Wile. E. Coyote, Speedy Gonzalez, Capn Crunch, Daffy Duck and Tweety Bird for many years…


...Four years ago, when I wrote the book Yossel, about a teenage cartoonist whose life was spared by the Nazis because they were amused by his drawings, I did not know that there had been a real-life case that bore similarities to my book. I was stunned to learn of Mrs. Babbitt and even more stunned by the Polish government's position.


The petition is "intended to be signed specifically by cartoonists, animators, and comic book artists and creators". I left a phone message with Tom Spurgeon last week asking to have my name included. I encourage all other interested cartoonists, animators, and comic book creators to send an e-mail to the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Dr. Rafael Medoff, at rafaelmedoff@aol.com.


Issue 43 of Batton Lash's Supernatural Law came in and is Batton's usual great work, ably assisted by Trevor Neilson and Melissa Uran. When Terry Moore packs it in on Strangers in Paradise sometime in the next year, that will make Batton's book the longest-lasting self-published title (as in: most number of issues). "A Vampire in Hollywood" touches a lot of satiric bases (which is a lot of the fun of Batton's work as you successively go along with the transition of his themes)—O.J. Simpson, Gay Rights, "Outing", the predatory press, all get little nose-tweaks and whoopee cushions in a story that is ostensibly just about a vampire selling the rights to his life story to the movies. Highly recommended as always. Check out Batton's all new stories online in full colour every Monday and Thursday at www.supernaturallaw.com and if you still haven't got the Supernatural Law parody of Cerebus (the cover of which Ger and I helped ink) go to www.exhibitapress.com where they have them available.


I really didn't want to get into this, but Mimi Cruz, a long-time friend both of Batton and his wife Jackie Estrada told me that Jackie had told her that she and Batton WANT to come to the "Ye Bookes of Cerebus" event at the Salt Lake City library but she (Jackie) is afraid that I won't talk to her. As I pointed out to Mimi, back in 1996, in Cerebus 203, with the Planet Comics retailers in Oklahoma City facing a combined prison term of eighty years for selling comic books deemed to be obscene, I had written an open letter to the Friends of Lulu when Jackie was the president of that organization saying that I thought it might be a good idea if the Friends of Lulu (composed in part of female cartoonists and writers and other creators) could get together a petition that they were opposed to censorship of any kind in the comic-book field. I proposed that if the whole organization didn't want to participate, maybe some female cartoonists would want to participate and was it possible for the organization to facilitate that? What I got back was basically an evasion from Jackie and Batton's fax machine dated January 23, 1996 over the seven names of the Board of Directors (Anina Bennett, Jackie Estrada, Deni Loubert, Cheryl Harris, Heidi MacDonald, Liz Schiller and Martha Thomases) enunciating at length the Friends of Lulu mission statement and concluding with a single paragraph saying that they didn't see what I was suggesting as part of their mandate and that the CBLDF and the Friends of Lulu were separate but complementary organizations. I gave another try at a response dated 24 January (printed in issue 206) trying to find some compromise which would allow the possibility of such a petition to take shape and to be used by the CBLDF as part of any mainstream media/public relations exercise in any jurisdiction where there had been an obscenity bust. I thought in 1996—and I think now—that a roster of female names (especially if they had drawn or written Wonder Woman or other iconic characters) would carry a lot of weight in the mainstream media particularly if some higher profile members were willing to do anti-censorship media interviews in those jurisdictions.


My last-ditch attempt involved offering them four pages in the back of Cerebus for a membership drive (basically, I'll help you with something I'm not interested in if you'll help me with something you're not interested in) if they would put a mention in their newsletter asking if anyone was willing to sign such a petition and offered to continue to debate the issue in Cerebus with them until some sort of compromise was reached. I finally got a reply nearly two months later:


Dear Dave: Thanks for your offer of four pages. We are grateful, but we would prefer not to accept. We will not be continuing this correspondence. Sincerely, Friends of Lulu Board of Directors.


Through the course of the discussion I heard from exactly ONE female comics reader who expressed her support for the First Amendment as taking precedence over her personal likes and dislikes, so—something I'm not terribly proud of, to say the least—I gave in instead of pursuing the matter. The feminists won again.


It was a year later that I saw Batton and Jackie at Will Eisner's surprise 80th birthday party in Florida. I don't think I was discourteous to Jackie, but I certainly didn't have much of anything to say to her. I found her and her Board of Directors' response to me and my suggestion to be intellectually dishonest and I, quite frankly, don't have much to say to people who I find to be intellectually dishonest. If they had a good reason not to put my suggestion to their membership, they should have explained it. If they didn't have a good reason not to put my suggestion to their membership, then I think they should have put my suggestion to their membership. I was willing to leave it at that and had done so for ten years. But, in my view, Jackie has again crossed the line of intellectual dishonesty by attempting to make it sound as if she was—and is—the victim of my shunning her, when it was she and her then Board of Directors who shunned my suggestion and discontinued communication with no good reason for doing so except, I assume, because of two possibilities: 1) personal animosity toward me in the wake of Cerebus 186 or 2) feminists support censorship of anything they disapprove of but don't want to be seen as doing so.


Mimi asked if I could phone and tell Jackie that I don't hate her and that I would talk to her if she came to the Ye Bookes of Cerebus exhibit and my answer (as much as I like to accommodate Mimi wherever I can because I have always found her to be intellectually honest) is no. I don't think you should reward intellectual dishonesty and "victim posturing". I capitulated in allowing the feminist then-Board of Directors of the Friends of Lulu to close a discussion without a valid rational reason. In my view, our society is in the mess it's in because that has become the societal norm: allowing feminists to close off and evade discussions without valid rational reasons so I see myself as having made an enormous concession in doing that and in not raising a big stink about it until I got a rational answer. But, that's as far as I'm going. To ask me to further mollify Jackie Estrada because her feelings are wounded is to descend into the inner circles of feminist lunatic hell, in my view.


I'd be delighted if she and Batton came to the gig in Salt Lake City but mostly because I think she is using her false portrayal of victim-hood to make it impossible for Batton to come. And I find that profoundly intellectually dishonest—the urge to try to cling to victim status even when you are victimizing someone else.


Let me put it another way: back when 186 came out, Sook-Yin Lee (Chester's then girlfriend) declared Cerebus to be the "Mein Kampf of Comics". I just met her for the first time at the Doug Wright Awards. We exchanged pleasantries and I congratulated her on all the publicity she's getting on Shortbus at the Toronto Film Festival this year. Does that mean I think she was right to call Cerebus the "Mein Kampf of Comics"? No. Does that mean we're going to become close personal friends? No. Does that mean that she now thinks Cerebus is a great work of art and she'll be recommending it to all of her friends? No. But it does mean that we're grown-ups and that it is very grown-up thing to do to treat someone in a civil manner in any social context.


The only people I have no dealings with, personally, are my ex-wife and ex-girlfriends because I think doing so is a bad idea. If my ex-wife or any of my ex-girlfriends are interested in coming to Salt Lake City, they are certainly more than welcome. It's a free country. If they want to come by and politely say "hello" and I'll say "hello" back politely and to make a little amiable chit-chat, I'm certainly more than willing to do that. As long as they don't push it and try to become one of my best friends or in some other way insinuate themselves back into my life. Yes, this is all terribly personal and inappropriate but so is the on-going use of victim posturing to maintain the high ground against Dave Sim's anti-feminist views terribly personal and inappropriate. As I say, I left the whole thing where it was sitting for ten years. If Jackie had left it alone, I would have left it alone.


Given the propensity of liberals to revise history this is not unexpected. If I don't say anything to remind people what the actual historical record shows (the Cerebus Archive nears completion) they will soon be treating my decade of ostracism and vilification as just another example of crazy Dave Sim's delusions. "Oh, we always LOVED Dave, he just overreacted". I'm willing to be accommodating up to a point. I'm willing to be polite up to a point. I'm willing to be gracious about my ten years in the wilderness up to a point. What I'm not willing to do is to accept a revised version of history where my dissenting views on feminism were accommodated, because that strikes right to the core reality of who and what feminists are as opposed to how feminists like to view themselves. If they're willing to make use of intellectual discussion rather than character assassination to support their own views and refute the views of others, I think that's great and I support it 100%. If they want to sweep me up into the falsehood that they were always that way when I'm living proof that they have never been that way, then that's something else again.


Batton, Jackie? Hope to see you both in Salt Lake City.


Today's Blog & Mail has been brought to you by Dave Sim's Collected Letters 2004 pages 30-31, 306 and 330

The Batton Lash pages.

Batton Lash. Is Here to Save Comics or Destroy Them? Or Just to do Lots of Really, Really Good Ones?

Dave Sim's Collected Letters 2004

Available in this and many other realities.

Or order online at www.FollowingCerebus.com

___________________________________________________

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.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #13 (September 24th, 2006)



NEXT READING IN THE "SCRIPTURE AT THE REGISTRY THEATRE" PROGRAM (FORMERLY "NO PREACHING") IS NOVEMBER 12, 2006

DEUTERONOMY 1-17




"Remember thy seruants, Abraham, Isaac, and Iacob, looke not vnto the stubburnnesse of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sinne: Lest the land whence thou broughtest vs out, say, Because the YHWH was not able to bring them into the land which hee promised them, and because hee hated them, hee hath brought them out, to slay them in the wildernesse."

Deuteronomy 9:27-28



With the "Scripture at the Registry Theatre" readings on their Ramadan hiatus through to November 12, I thought this might be a good time to print an excerpt from a letter I wrote to David Birdsong about a month ago when he sent me a form letter that had been circulating on the Internet that asked "Can a Good Muslim be a Good American?" which, purportedly, had been written by an American who had spent a number of years living in Saudi Arabia. David had been appalled by it. I certainly disagreed with most of it, but I did think it raised some interesting points that were worth, in most cases, refuting and in other cases addressing in greater depth. The original points are in italic.


Theologically – no because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon god of Arabia

That's a bit of a stretch. If the God of the Koran is the God of the Torah and the God of the Gospels (which I assume He is) and He is called Allah in Arabic (as He is called Dieu in French) then that puts him on a much loftier plateau than a "moon god". To even refer to Allah as a "moon god" would be to violate a central tenet of Islam: you must not join gods to God. "Moon god" smacks of animism which is just another form of idolatry and strictly forbidden in Islam. Actually "In God We Trust" is very Islamic and Koranic in tone and certainly calls the Koran to mind more than it does the Torah or Gospels and there's no better instance of America at her best than "In God We Trust".



Religiously – no. Because no other religion is accepted by his Allah except Islam (Quran 2:256)


It depends on how you interpret the term Islam which literally means submission to the will of God (a Muslim is "one who submits"). The Koran certainly deplores most Christians and most Jews of Muhammad's time and locale (the Arab Peninsula) but I think it's a stretch to suggest that that means only Islam is accepted by God (I don't believe the name Allah should be used unless you are writing in Arabic). On the contrary in many places the Koran explicitly states that there are good Christians and good Jews and says that it is an unforgivable crime to kill a believer. "You to your religion and me to mine". It also tells us that all the disputes between monotheists will be explained by God on Judgement Day. I think it would be a stretch to infer that all the resolutions will favour Islam. There are definitely Muslims who believe that. It seems to be endemic to monotheistic religions in their adolescence and seems particularly virulent in Muslim ranks, I suspect, because theirs is the most recent revelation. It's hard not to infer from that "disregard all previous memos" as it is hard for Jews not to believe that they have the "true gen" because the Torah was the first and that Christianity and Islam are just weird offshoot cults that can't even get basic quotes from the Torah correct. Myself, I infer that if God says that the disputes won't be settled until Judgement Day then it's kind of pointless to waste time disputing. Do what you think is best, I'll do what I think is best and we'll see who "wins" when we get there.



Geographically – no. Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.



His allegiance isn't to Mecca. To declare allegiance to a city would be another form of idolatry. The direction you face when you pray is called a "kebla". The point of bowing in the direction of Mecca is submission to God's will who instructed that believers should do so. The point isn't Mecca or allegiance to a city.



Geographically there IS a dichotomy in that Orthodox Muslims believe that anyone who doesn't live in a Muslim country under Shariah Law is an infidel. Until a few hundred years ago it was unheard of for a Muslim to do so. This is the more salient recurrent point: what do extreme Orthodox Muslims believe and what are they willing to commit murder over? And the answer in both cases is: quite a bit.



Socially – no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.



Actually the Sura in question forbids being friends with infidels and idolators and suggests that most Christians and Jews are either one or both. Again, I think this had more to do with the Christians and Jews that Muhammad encountered in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century who were mostly of a very corrupt aspect and a long way from home (in more ways than one).



Politically – no. Because he must submit to the mullah (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and Destruction of America, the great Satan.



No, he must submit to the will of God as a Muslim. If as a Muslim he believes that that entails submitting to the teachings and directions of mullahs who counsel the destruction of believers (taking it as a given that there are believers in Israel and America which I think any thinking Muslim has to do), well, he is obligated to do so. I find it inadvisable as I would find it inadvisable to ask a priest or a minister or a rabbi what I should or shouldn't believe and how I should or shouldn't conduct my religious observance. If following their instructions let me off the hook in some way when it came to either reward or punishment in the next world, then fine, I would just pick someone arbitrarily, do what he told me and then use the Nuremburg defence: "I was just following orders". But I sincerely believe that will no more "wash" on Judgement Day than it did at Nuremburg. Most folks choose to follow a religious authority and ignore all others without ever looking at their own specific beliefs and how they might be at variance with that authority. It's a choice, a choice I personally choose not to make and I will derive the benefit or suffer the consequences. "You to your religion and me to mine." This is the crux of the debate: whether God desires submission to His will by any and all means possible (like the kidnapped Fox News reporter and cameraman who were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint) or if He is only interested in submission to His will as a free choice. I think the Great Democracies favour the latter view (as do I) and Muslim extremists favour the former view. Which is the reason that much of the Arab world was (and is) in favour of or coming to be in favour of the disarming and (if necessary) the eradication of Hezbollah. It seems to me a large step in the right direction.



Domestically – no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34)



He is allowed to marry up to four women if he can provide for them and treat them equally. Which even Muhammad proved incapable of doing. It is universally agreed in Islam that Aisha was his favourite wife and that directly contradicts the spirit of the law (although Muhammad was also given special dispensation to have as many wives as he cared to have). A Muslim is instructed by the Koran to take physical action against a wife only if she is demonstrably guilty of harlotry. Scourging so far as I know is limited to whores and whoremongers. There are a wide variety of interpretations of what constitutes a harlot and what constitutes a whore and what constitutes a good wife and that is a core element of the debate between the West and Islam. The vast majority of girls and women in North America would certainly qualify as harlots and whores in Muslim frames of reference. One of the reasons that Muslim girls and women choose to wear the hijab or other form of cover is to sharply draw that distinction: to consciously choose to be a good wife instead of a harlot or a whore. They are not flaunting their beauty, their hair or their flesh. They are modest and believe modesty in attitude, attire and conduct is an attribute of a believing woman. Anything that deviates from that leads to harlotry and whoredom which is defiance of God or fitnah or haram or various other negative states of being. But a key element is choice, again. Choosing to dress modestly is different from being forced to dress modestly. The Koran also tells us "good women for good men, bad women for bad men". If you want to be a harlot or a whore or marry a harlot or a whore that should be your business and no one else's, as far as I can see. You're only harming yourself in doing so. Madonna spends every night of her current tour pretending to be nailed to a cross with a crown of thorns. I wouldn't pay to see it and I sure wouldn't want to try explaining it to God on Judgement Day, but, "You to your religion and me to mine."



Intellectually – no Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.



Again, this is an issue between extremist and non-extremist Muslims. Most extremist Muslims would believe that no law has validity unless it is Shariah Law and is based on one of the handful of approved schools of Islamic Law which are founded in the Koran. It's the reason that Saddam Hussein refuses to countenance the court that's trying him because he sees it as being based on American or International Law and not on Shariah Law. The American constitution isn't based on Biblical Principles that I'm aware of. It's a document which protects choice, person and property. If you are a Muslim and believe that those protections are divinely inspired (as I do) then you can certainly be a good Muslim and a Good American. You make your choices based on what you believe and let others make their choices based on what they believe. "You to your religion and me to mine." The vast majority of Muslims would believe that I'm damned to eternal hellfire for my beliefs and my advocacy. I really couldn't care less what the vast majority of Muslims believe about my beliefs. The only opinion I care about is God's and I'll find that out on Judgement Day and live with whatever it ends up being.



Philosophically – no. Because Islam, Muhammad and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and expression. Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist.



So far as I read in the Koran, it does allow for freedom of religion and expression. It counsels moderation, as do the Torah and the Gospels. It specifically prohibits, as an example, targeting churches and monasteries in wartime. It has very little patience with shoddy religion and I think much of North American Christianity and Judaism would have to be described as shoddy religion insofar as the momentum is in the direction of allowing everything and judging nothing unfavourably. I don't believe in judging others, but I do believe in judging myself and quite harshly, too. I think that's the only way you can improve. I got rid of all my electronic media, CD player, tape player, television, etc. That's harsh self-judgement on a Taliban-style level for a Westerner. "Dave you don't need this crap and you're getting rid of it. No ifs ands or buts." But I have no interest in banning electronic media in general or advocating that. I do advocate that individuals choose to throw away their electronic media. "You to your religion and me to mine." I'm perfectly aware that 99% of North Americans worship pop music to an extent that overwhelms any sense of God that they might have. That's their problem. I co-exist with that universal viewpoint and am untroubled by it. As long as you don't pass a law that I have to listen to pop music in my own home or I have to have a television, I'm perfectly amenable to being bombarded by the stuff when I go into any public place.



Muhammad certainly expresses a number of opinions in the Hadith, the sayings of the prophet that aren't found in the Koran. I don't read the Hadith because I don't think it's divinely-inspired. It's just the opinions of the human being who was God's conduit for the imparting of the Koran to mankind. He may very well have been opposed to freedom of religion and freedom of expression. The Koran interests me greatly so Muhammad as God's last messenger interests me greatly. Muhammad the man doesn't at all.



Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic.



Usually both, but founded in Sharia Law and in the handful of Islamic Law Schools based on the Koran. If you're saying that a good Muslim living in a Muslim country can't be a good American, I disagree. It would be profoundly difficult because you would have to stick to your guns that freedom of choice supersedes the imposition of faith which runs contrary to virtually all Muslim governments. But that just means that a good Muslim would have to be both a good American and an extremely brave American in a Muslim country—willing to courageously face imprisonment, torture and execution for the sake of his beliefs as an American. But, then, that's why America is called the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.



Spiritually – no Because when we declare [ourselves to be] "one nation under God," the Christian's God is loving and kind, while Allah is never referred to as heavenly father, nor is he ever called Love in the [Quran's] 99 excellent names.



Wow, that's quite a dog's breakfast of observations. Since the full declaration of the Pledge of Allegiance is "One nation under God with liberty and justice for all" I think that returns to my previous assertions that the debate is largely between freedom of choice (liberty and justice) and the imposition of faith. "Allah" is never referred to as heavenly father but then I tend to the view that the procreative function is a terrible thing to accuse God of. We are God's creations, not his offspring. But I also accept that people can in good conscience hold what I consider to be a blasphemous view. Whether God had a son or not or whether that son was the Synoptic or Johannine Jesus, God will let us know on Judgement Day. I can't picture any way for it to be settled before then. And the original concept of Christian Love as encompassed in the Greek term agape is far more on an intellectual plateau—profound respect and acknowledgement of stature—than it is about smarmy sentimentalism, in my view. [18 September update - coincidentally enough, last night I was reading Sura 19- "Mary" where verse 96—after discounting that God has a son—asserts "But love will the God of Mercy vouchsafe to those who believe and do the things that be right." So love is not an unknown commodity in God's dealings with his Muslim followers.] In all but one of the Suras of the Koran God is addressed as The Most Gracious, the Most Merciful and Muslims believe that no enterprise great or small should be embarked upon without that pre-eminent acknowledgement "In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful". I don't think, as a result, Muslims are lacking in proper reverence for God. How many Christians or Jews pray five times a day?



Therefore after much study and deliberation…perhaps we should be very suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both "good" Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you will it's still the truth.



I quite agree. I think until Muslims begin more universally to deplore extremist Islam and to denounce the excesses of extremist Islam and join the West en masse in the war on Terror and the eradication of those who advocate and practice the intentional eradication of civilians and functioning democracies that all Muslims and those with Muslim loyalties (like myself) should be viewed with suspicion. I think there are good signs that things are changing—the fact that much of the Arab world now supports the eradication of Hezbollah I would consider to be a good vital sign, the fact that much of the Arab world still thinks the "Palestinians" should get the West Bank seems to me a bad vital sign—but it's five years after 9/11 and those positive signs are still anecdotal and few and far between. As Ronald Reagan said, quoting a Russian proverb to Gorbachev, "Trust, but verify."



If you find yourself intellectually in agreement with the above statements, perhaps you will share this with your friends. The more who understand this, the better it will be for our country and our future. Pass it on, Fellow Americans. The religious war is bigger than we know or understand.



Again, I quite agree. I think it will take a while to sink in, but I think ultimately it will sink in that the war is between those who believe people have the right to choose their own behaviour and those who don't believe people have the right to choose their own behaviour. As an example, I don't think Iran can be reasoned with any more than Iraq could be reasoned with. I think Iran needs to be invaded and occupied until freedom of choice prevails over imposition of faith. I think as with Iraq that will probably take decades and thousands if not tens of thousands of lives but I think there could be no more worthwhile investment of resources and lives on the part of the Western Democracies if we are going to build a better future for the world.





Scripture at the Registry Theatre

122 Frederick Street in Kitchener

November 12, November 19, January 7, January 21,

January 28 All 1 pm start times

___________________________________________________

___________________________________________________

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:

http://spectrummagazines.bizland.com/cerebusgn.chtml

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

http://www.marsimport.com/display_series.php?ID=142

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


_____________________________________________
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.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #12 (September 23rd, 2006)



All this week the Blog & Mail is brought to you by Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

Strong, independent professional woman seated at desk in beautifully decorated corner office:

"I'd heard a lot about Dave Sim over the years and I finally decided to see for myself if he was the malicious demented evil misogynist everyone paints him as being, so I decided to find a copy of Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004 at a comic-book store—as soon as I could find one that was better lit than the alleyway behind my apartment. But, then, when I saw what they were charging for the book and realized that for that amount of money I could buy a really nice cream-coloured top for 70% off at the end-of-season sale at Banana Republic that would go with my suits for the office and also serve as a good casual-dressy outfit for upscale social occasions I thought, f—k that and bought the top "

Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

Because even terminal fashion victims need to be SOMEONE's target audience

At variously-lit comic book stores everywhere or order online at

www.FollowingCerebus.com


This week's Blog & Mail is dedicated with the greatest respect and admiration to long-time Cerebus fan and uber-Yahoo, Chris Woerner, who has recently begun his service with US Forces in Iraq in one of Saddam's old palaces. I'm tempted to ask questions about solid gold toilet seats but if the information isn't classified, it probably should be. Devoted readers of the Internet know him better as ChrisW ("I think ChrisW is the funniest man in entertainment still alive" Tom Spurgeon). Formerly of Lincoln, Nebraska, I've still got in the drawer next to my drawing board the 36-page printout of his "Metaphys-X" essay from March of 2004. An amazing piece of work. Thanks, as always, Chris for doing the heavy lifting on behalf of the rest of us and extend best Yahoo wishes from our group to the guys in your unit.


Next up in the mail was my contributor's copies of Steve Peters' The Origin of Sparky through his Awakening Comics imprint. He states in his cover letter, "I'm still too close to the comic to know if the thematic link gives the whole some cohesiveness, or if it just comes across as a disjointed, jumbled mess." As one of the contributors with pencils and writing (as well as pencils and inks on some infernal beasties a la the back cover of Guys as per Steve's request—a motif which he then mirrored in a way that was downright eerie in its accuracy. Hey, Steve, only I'm supposed to be able to do those beasties like that) on the "Musical Origin of Sparky" four-pager, I'm probably in the same boat. This was my first stab at a creative work after finishing Cerebus so I'll always remember it for that and evidently Steve has turned it into an actual song that you can hear at his website for free through the rest of 2006 (Awakening Comics) or buy it on his new 5-song Origin of Sparky CD (at Cafe Press). The pure, solo Steve Peters material in the book (roughly six pages) is the best, in my opinion—and that includes our jam—but it's probably a safe bet that he ironically doubled his sales over his previous offering, Chemistry, with the efforts of some of his "name" contributors—the Diamond Previews listing included Bob Burdon (sic) and Shannon, Wheeler (sic) and he also has panels by James Kochalka, Donna Barr, Roberta Gregory, Alex Robinson (tomorrow's Blog & Mail subject), Sean Bieri, Matt Feazell, Carla Speed McNeil and other alternative press luminaries. The fact that the Origin of his winged, white-gloved, haloed, angel-winged and pointy-tailed iconic cartoon mascot is given twenty different treatments, most of them free-form jams with other cartoonists (including Steve's year 2000 Cartooning Class—Dany, Luke, Curt, Dan C., Ashley and Grant—sponsored by the Northern Pennsylvania Arts Alliance) is going to rub a lot of comic-shop fur the wrong way but is in itself pretty witty. Why take twenty-five years to thoroughly muddy the waters as Marvel has done with Wolverine (as an example)—why not just do twenty different origins right off the top? The appreciation of wit in comic-book stores in my experience doesn't really skew in such directions. You can laugh yourself right into a case of career suicide that way.

One of Steve's great innovations—having resolved to do a panel a day—is that his solo work always includes a two- to four-digit notation to indicate when the panel was done (i.e. "1-22"). Some days he gets a bunch of panels done and some days he doesn't get any done but the historical record is always laid bare both to himself and his readers. There was a long lapse between pages 2 and 3 of "The Musical Origin of Sparky" when I didn't hear from him, but I was always pretty sure I would hear from him again.

He also sent me an issue of Punch (No. 2968, Volume CXIV, May 28, 1898) as a belated 50th birthday gift which is very much appreciated and which I'm looking forward to reading (I've never actually seen an issue of Punch, let alone owned one). The gift is quite witty as well. The issue was published 58 years before I was born so roughly the same length of time back-dated from my birth-year as I've been alive takes you back to the late Victorian era. Certainly raises a rueful grin from me.


In his P.S. he adds: "Recently saw a short clip of Norman Mailer & Gore Vidal having it out on the Dick Cavett Show circa 1970. Mailer was asking for an apology, and Vidal said he was sorry if he hurt Mailer's feelings. Mailer said his feelings weren't hurt, he wanted an apology for his intelligence being insulted. Made me wish I could see the entire conversation (It was on an `I Love the 70s' clip show)."

I've never seen the Dick Cavett episode in question but I've certainly studied the exchange at great depth (and repeatedly) in Mailer's essay "Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots" since acquiring it in a collection of essays of his called Pieces (ISBN 0-316-54420-5) at a used book store in Northampton, Massachusetts in the late summer of 1997. The essay is broken up into twelve Channels instead of Chapters and constitutes one of the best examinations of the television medium I've ever read. The entire blow-by-blow dissolution of the Mailer-Vidal "neutrality pact" ("Still Mailer knew his own career had become too popular for the pact to continue. Sometime after Armies of the Night had won a couple of prizes, Vidal began to sour in public.") takes up most of Channels 9 through 11.

The grievous offence to which you refer was contained in a review by Vidal of a book by Eva Figes in The New York Review of Books where Vidal had written, "There has been from [Henry] Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression. The Miller-Mailer-Manson man, or M3 for short, has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed…". It's a perfect example of hysterical feminist hyperbole—anyone who isn't feminine is blatantly homicidal—in that first feminist summer. Imagine being a writer finally attaining to Mailer's hard-won stature in 1970 and then being compared to Charles Manson less than a year after the Sharon Tate murders and being expected to just take it. And THEN to be invited by Dick Cavett to share a stage with Vidal in the immediate aftermath.

Look up the essay if you get a chance and if you're at all interested. It's a real barn burner and was the foremost educational text for me in "what to do and what not to do when the hysterical feminists come to get you." Mailer made many mistakes in his dealings with them, in my view, running their gauntlet unaided (as all of us who choose to run their gauntlet end up having to do) but I can say without contradiction that I couldn't have survived the feminists' characteristic malice and fury if I hadn't seen someone else survive them first.


Today's instalment of the Blog & Mail has been brought to you by pages 42, 60, 104, 223, 229, 254, 266, 392 and 418 of Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

Steve Peters. Fellow Professional, Former Mystic, Devoted Deist, Accomplished Musician, initiator of our "Spirituality vs. God" dialogue, Really Tall Person and he'll bag your groceries faster than anyone else in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania

Order your copy of Collected Letters 2004 in comic-book stores or at

www.FollowingCerebus.com

_____________________________________________
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.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #11 (September 22nd, 2006)



All this week The Blog & Mail is brought to you by:

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

Nearly 600 pages of minority-of-one opinions, arguments and societal model/constructs elaborated at excruciating length and investigated to hair-splitting sophistic depths. Gags and buffoonery. Enticing allusions that will leave you begging for further elaboration and which might permanently alter the way you look at life itself.

"Oh, come on. I wrote the damn things and even I don't think they're as interesting as all that." Dave Sim

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

THIS is what CAN happen when ONE MAN DARES to become his own OVER THE TOP CYBERNETIC PUBLICIST and DOESN'T GET OUT MUCH!

At better comic book shops everywhere or order online at www.FollowingCerebus.com


Congratulations are in order for long-time Yahoo and "Ye Bookes of Cerebus" curator Jason Trimmer on his new appointment at the Allen Memorial Art Museum bringing him back from upstate New York to his native Ohio (within TV reception range of the Cincinnati Reds as he put it). He sends along an interesting package this time out, including print-outs of the CBC Radio Archives online material supporting an April 9, 1983 interview of which I have absolutely no memory which was conducted by Arn Saba (as part of his Canadian cartooning series on CBC Radio—like everyone else in this country it really aggravated him to have to address Dave Sim or Cerebus even though I had been publishing his work for a year or so at that point but I think I was the only person left that he hadn't interviewed at that point) and which featured Deni and legendary Canadian retailer (for whom the Shuster Best Retailer Award is named) Harry Kremer. Running time 16 minutes and 42 seconds (it says here).


The 2006 historical context text is very amusing. CBC Radio, forced to address the idea of the Pariah King of Comics is clinging tight to the Official Canadian Version of Dave Sim (pioneered by Saturday Night magazine and parroted by Eye magazine—two years later on, still the only Canadian media to acknowledge that Cerebus came to an end): young interesting guy, MARRIED (always a big plus in this country) to his strong, independent publisher/wife, dropped acid, fried his brain irreparably, got divorced, started writing vicious attacks against feminism (note the interconnectedness of those last three items), lost most of his readers and will never be heard from again. There are some new wrinkles this time out.


"In December 1996, Sim underwent a religious conversion from atheist to a non-mainstream version of the Abrahamic religions." Only someone at the CBC could write a sentence like that with a straight face. "Underwent". Most of the time when you write that someone "underwent" something it's, you know, something like cancer surgery or a triple bypass. To Marxist Toronto it's the same thing. Whatever it is that you would change you from a decent clear-thinking atheist into a follower of a "non-mainstream version of the Abrahmic religions" they couldn't imagine anything more grisly or abhorrent. So, whatever it was, I "underwent" it.


[supplement in the aftermath of the Doug Wright Awards: Mark Askwith asked if I had ever met Stuart Mclean who is very well known in this country for his Vinyl Café show on CBC-Radio. I knew the name because Seth has done a number of drawings to illustrate his work in recent years, so I got introduced to Stuart Mclean. Or, as it turned out, "introduced" to Stuart Maclean. "Oh, yes," he said. "I interviewed you once back when Cerebus was just starting." I don't think that's true (as far as I know I was interviewed a couple of times on the CBC in 1983 when we had a full-time publicist attached to the Canadian Tour and as far as I know that's the only way to get on the CBC is through a press release/publicist route unless you've made the headlines through tragedy or homicide or something else). Anyway, you couldn't find a nicer person in the world than Stuart Mclean. He literally exudes niceness in person. He was so sincerely and so earnestly trying to remember when he had interviewed me, I asked him if I could take a picture of him doing so. And he said, Sure! Which was very nice of him. So that photo is part of my coverage of the Doug Wright Awards.


It reminds me of the time that I was using the bathroom in Chet's condo and there was a small sign on the wall facing the toilet that read "They MEAN well." So when I came out, I had to ask him. "What's up with the sign?" It turned out that he reads the newspaper sitting on the throne and he would get so irritated with the latest manifestation of Liberal idiocy that he decided to put the sign up for a while to keep his blood pressure down. So, I try to bear that in mind these days as well and it particularly comes home when you meet someone like Stuart McLean who is so much a part of the CBC culture but is obviously so gosh-darned nice it just radiates from him. "They MEAN well."]


Jason also sent along some print-outs from the Comic Book Resources website ("Original `Cerebus' Art on Display in Salt Lake City August 21st – October 30th") where they seem to have printed Mimi's press release just about verbatim (thanks, folks! Much appreciated!) and The Comics Reporter ("Go, Visit: Cerebus in Salt Lake City") which was kind of funny. Even though the exhibit is listed as "The Comic Art of Dave Sim AND Gerhard" it mentions "The artist will discuss his work during an extended appearance October 27th". Looking on the bright side it almost seems to suggest that instead of succumbing to personality dissociation I've managed instead to merge both Ger and myself into one fully integrated psychological being! What a psychiatric over-achiever I've become since those bad old days when I fried my brain irreparably after being on CBC-Radio with my strong, independent wife! This was followed by "I believe this is the same exhibit that would up at St. Bonaventure, and that student is listed as this show's curator." Student? Jeez, Jason hasn't been a student for so long he's almost old enough to be flattered at being confused with one. And what does "would up at" mean? Is it a typo for "wound up at"? As if "Ye Bookes of Cerebus" boarded the wrong bus in Syracuse and instead of hitting the Big Apple "wound up at" St. Bonaventure? The posting's only a paragraph long, for crying out loud. Who ARE these people? I thought, flipping back to the cover page.


"From the People Who Bring You Comic-Con International".


I laughed. Oh, well. That explains that.


And then Jason also included the coverage from the CBLDF's website where, again, they seem to have run the press release just about verbatim. Thanks, Charles, very much appreciated again. Hope the Saturday night fundraiser is a good one for you and the Fund.


Today's instalment of the Blog & Mail has been brought to you by pages 43, 59, 218, 343 and 506

of Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

You asked for more Dave Sim letters addressed to

Jason Trimmer, Former Student

And you got them…in spades!


At your local comic store or order from www.FollowingCerebus.com

_____________________________________________
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.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Dave Sim's blogandmail #10 (September 21st, 2006)



All this week the Blog & Mail is brought to you by

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

The only book ever published in the history of the human race that has literally oodles* and boodles** of comic book fans listed in the index!

* **(see cit.: World Trade Organization numerical statistics constituting internationally agreed upon definitions of both n. pl. oodles and n. pl. boodles under Davros Protocols of 2002. see also dissenting views from Non-aligned Nations and NGOs at www.marxistpartypoop.com).

Dave Sim Collected Letters 2004

"Indexing the otherwise nondescript with an eye towards an uncertain future posterity because we're, you know, into that kind of s—t"

At your local comic-book shop or order from www.followingcerebus.com

This week's Blog & Mail is dedicated with the greatest respect and admiration to Chris Woerner who is serving with US Forces in Baghdad. He called me the night he got his "marching orders" and we had a very nice chat with the excited babble of innumerable others preparing to serve "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" (and the larger interests of freedom and democracy) and saying their own "fare thee well's" providing an exhilarating auditory backdrop.

He wanted to know what a set of the trades would cost him and I said, "For you? A hundred bucks. You're putting your life on the line and they're just trade paperbacks." I did warn him that one of my other US Forces correspondents told me that glue binding on books melts in the Iraqi heat. So—given that they're likely to turn into a 16-volume glue and newsprint trade paperback stew—Ger and I have since reconsidered and decided to make them a comp. Let us know what your APO address is and we'll get them out to you, Chris! And keep `em flying, soldier! We're with you all the way!

With Gerhard having been gone for a week and there was a more-than-usually-large stack of mail to go through last week—which fell into a distinct thematic pattern, oddly enough, as you'll see as the week goes by—including four, count `em four letters from long-time correspondent Scott Berwanger who readers of Collected Letters 2004 (ISBN 0-919359-23-x) will recall is the creator of Anubis, a mammoth graphic novel that he has been working on since the mid-90s and of which only the first few instalments were ever published. I ran a Plugola ad for them on the back of Cerebus 233 and, yes, that address is still valid. He tried it as a full-sized comic book, then he tried it as a digest format and just wasn't able to get enough orders to sustain publication so, ultimately, he just decided to forge ahead and produce the entire work and worry about the publication end of things when he was done.

I can't count the number of wannabe self-publishers that I've cited Scott's approach to. When he gets Anubis done (and I do think it's a matter of "when" not "if") in another ten or fifteen years, I think his letters in the Cerebus Archive are going to be of interest to a lot of guys who are going to have to take his approach into account as one of a number of options (including self-publishing, working for a publisher, web comics, etc.) and will be interested to see what he had to say about the experiment while it was still in progress. I mentioned this in a letter to Scott a while back and I think it's made him a little self-conscious now (hence the four letters in one week, clarifying his clarifications). That's good, though. He's a trailblazer so the more reports he can send back from his forward position the better for those who are going to follow in his footsteps.

Scott's also a part-time painter and he got offered exhibit space at a gallery called 49 West for an exhibition of a series of paintings based on his Anubis work and he's been going back and forth on whether or not to go for it (by letter number four he seemed to have decided not to). It's always interesting to see a problem that I never faced during the 26 years of the Cerebus experiment. What if a gallery owner had come to me at some point and said, "You remember Roy Lichtenstein? We were wondering if you'd be interested in doing Pop Art enlargements of some of your panels on canvas and exhibiting them at our gallery?" I mean even a small exhibit is going to eat up a large amount of time relative to the time the average graphic novelist has to spare from his graphic novel. Scott's proposed exhibit was twelve canvases which he figured he could produce over the course of a year or so while still producing Anubis the graphic novel. He even tried to back out at one point when there was a fixed deadline and they just eliminated the deadline and left it open-ended. I think I would have been getting migraines by that point trying to decide what my best course of action would be.

The appeal of a gallery show is unmistakeable: it's the Real Art world and that was—and is—a big plus with the Ye Bookes of Cerebus exhibit. I don't think either Ger or I thought that it was ever going to dramatically boost sales on the trade paperbacks or allow us to Conquer the World Of Real Art. But, there is a definite gratification to the Real World environment and to have people treating your work seriously.

Tomorrow's correspondent is the man responsible for making it all happen.

Today's instalment of The Blog & Mail was brought to you by pages 92, 139, 143, 154, 165, 170, 183, 213, 215, 359, 420, 459, 479 and 548 of Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004. More pages featuring Scott Berwanger and Anubis than any other publication since the dawn of time! And remember!

Collected Letters makes an ideal Bar Mitzvah Gift.

"Today I am a Cerebus Reader!"

Dave Sim: Collected Letters 2004

At your local comic store or order from www.FollowingCerebus.com

_____________________________________________
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.