Dave Sim's blogandmail #110 (December 30th, 2006)

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Mike Lovins of Midvale Utah writes


Good to see you last week in Salt Lake, we all enjoyed your presentation and all the work that went into it. I'm the one who gave you copies of Brent Anderson's work and some reading materials. I've been reading through The Last Day since then and am impressed with the innovative sequential narrative that you worked out. Your lettering still remains unique in the age of digital lettering and still gets nominated a lot as well.


You mentioned Will Eisner in the preface. It should interest you to know tons of his original art was exhibited here last year and was a privilege to behold. I had the opportunity to interview him a few years back when Pro Con was going on. There were only two other people in the room, so I pretty much asked him whatever I wanted. One of the things he said was that he was savvy enough in business to get the deal he wanted (remember his graphic novel, The Dreamer?) and that cartoonists, generally, were taken advantage of because they were ignorant of it. I neglected to leave my contact information. Feel free to respond when you're inclined.


I enjoyed talking about spiritual things and regardless of any divergent views will find common agreement in how it has changed our lives. Take care.


Thanks, I enjoyed it, too. Some people took it personally when I indicated that the only time I'm really fully awake at a signing is when discussing God and scripture and related matters, suggesting that I was as much as telling my long-time atheistic readers to f—k off in saying so. Well, I don't think so. I've always tried to be honest with the Cerebus readership and it wouldn't be honest for me to be implying or leading people to draw the inference that I consider Cerebus as important as God or scripture even though it probably be a far more lucrative position to take. I'd rather take a major financial hit being honest than get rich by lying.


And I always try to remind myself that Will Eisner had a lot of ups and downs along the way as someone who was always on the outside of the comic-book industry per se even in the last decade of his life when he was seen pretty much indisputably as a Living Legend. The Pro Con example is a good one. For my readers who aren't aware of it, Pro Con used to be put on in association with Wondercon, the idea being that professionals would come in a couple of days ahead of time and basically do panels and presentations for other professionals (Dick Giordano did a faultless presentation on comic-book inking the year I was there, 1993 that was recorded but I don't think it's ever been transcribed or circulated). As Mike says, Will went to one to do a presentation and only two people showed up to hear what he had to say. That had to hurt, whatever the explanation you want to attach to it.


The Third Person:

Stalking the Large Narrative


Pat Harrigan has been working on a (thesis? Essay?) called The Third Person which basically addresses from an academic standpoint the creation of large narratives. At least I think that's what it was about or maybe that was just my section. Anyway, I answered a bunch of questions off the top of my head and gradually he's been piecing my answers together into essay form and has sent a rough draft with boldface interjected questions where he wanted some more elaboration. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone—helping Pat and his co-essayist Noah with their essay and filling up a Blog and Mail instalment at the same time.


What are some of the closest analogous works to Cerebus?


That would really depend on the individual viewer/reader. My own opinion is that Lynne Johnston's For Better or Worse is probably the closest analogue because it's also done in comics form and it's also a rare instance where comics characters actually age and change. A lot of people will tend to roll their eyes at that because For Better or Worse is not seen as a particularly sophisticated (as opposed to populist) strip and certainly if you were to try and read the entire history of the strip it would far more resemble a soap opera than it would a novel, but in terms of large narratives it is a very large narrative and it does strive for realism and the sense of being a document of actual lives, as opposed to the latest try at breathing life into an old trademark.


How does a long work like, say, Lone Wolf and Cub compare?


I've never read Lone Wolf and Cub, although I've tried to. There I think you get into the problem of defining "long". I wasn't only doing a lot of pages in Cerebus, I was also trying to determine what level of literary density was needed in order to do the equivalent of a novel in comics format. The conclusion that I came to was that the relationship was about a 1:10 ratio. You have to do ten comic book pages on average in order to equal the level of information that can be imparted in a single page of good text. But part of that ratio, for me, included the long blocks of text in Jaka's Story, the text pieces in Reads and so on, counterbalancing the reasonably long stretches of wordless comic page narrative and with the average reading time of, say, ten to fifteen seconds on an average page with six panels on it and maybe eight to ten word balloons and captions. Manga has a very different literary density from that, from what I understand and from what I've seen. The idea is that you're supposed to read manga very, very quickly and that the experience should be halfway between reading a book and watching a movie. Flip Flip Flip Flip. If that's the basis of the medium you're working in, then I think the ratio goes up exponentially. You would have to do as many as 50 pages of manga-style narrative in order to equal what a page of text communicates. I'm not going to make any friends in the manga community or the graphic novel community with my opinions, but those are the opinions I hold.


Do you think this holds true for all graphic novels? Or are there alternate modes of attempting it? Does a page of Cerebus have the same informational quotient of, say, a page of Watchmen?


I would think so, although that would probably vary from one Cerebus book to another. Watchmen is pretty much a "base nine"—nine panels to the page—and most of those panels had at least one word balloon in them. Most of Cerebus was "base six"—six panels to the page and an average of one to two word balloons per panel: so the reading time would be comparable. When I went lower than "base six", I'd compensate with more word balloons to offset the fewer number of panels. I'd have longer stretches of "off the map" variations because the canvas was 6,000 pages as opposed to Watchmen's 400 or so pages.


What about 100 Bullets or on the other side of things, more decompressed forms of graphic storytelling like some manga, or something like Planetary? Again, I'm not so much interested in discussing the relative merits of various works as I am in making sure I'm clear about how your ratio operates in other contexts.


It really comes down to reading time. If you take any graphic novel and flip through it you'll get a pretty good idea of the literary density of it just by doing so. What's the average number of panels per page, how many pages are there, how many word balloons are there, how many captions and how many words are there in the average balloon and the average caption? A Contract with God is "base two". The average page has two panels on it and the average caption or word balloon maybe a dozen to two dozen words. I can read A Contract with God in its entirety in about twenty to thirty minutes. And I do, very often. There are few better ways in the graphic novel field to spend twenty to thirty minutes than in reading A Contract with God from cover to cover. I can't read From Hell in twenty to thirty minutes. I would only pick it up to enjoy a favourite sequence or if I was prepared to spend time with it over a period of several days. The "base" figures that I use aren't a ranking according to quality but a ranking according to structure, like "time" in music. This piece is 4:4 time. This comic book is "base two" this other comic book is—David Lapham's Stray Bullets is the best example—"base eight". Chris Ware goes all the way off the map up to "base thirty-two" or "base sixty-four" depending on how drastically he chooses to subdivide his pages.


I tended to think of it as "value for the money". When I started mapping the story in longer arcs so that a whole issue might end up having 20 very light pages in terms of literary density just because of what was required at that point in the 500-page graphic novel I was creating, I expanded the letters pages to bring the "total package" literary density up higher.


Is there a difference between a 20-page magazine article (the analogy you use here) and a 20-page short story (the analogy you use earlier)? A magazine article is primarily informational but a short story, at least a good one, has an aesthetic objective that goes beyond simply conveying information.


It depends on the magazine article and depends on the short story. There are good magazine articles and good short stories that you can sort of tell have been pumped full of air in order to hit a higher word count. In both cases—as with a good graphic novel—what I want is for it to impart something to me. "Here's a new way of looking at things and here's my best attempt at distilling it for maximum impact." Some people just have one good idea and try to fluff that up into a novella or a novel when it would've made a better short story. Set it up, impart your one good idea and have done with it. Really good authors usually have a lot to say either in an article or a short story and know how to connect a series of good, original ideas into a narrative form that becomes larger than the sum of its parts. Anything that makes me think I consider to be an accomplished piece of writing.


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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 #109 (December 29th, 2006)

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Larry Hart just got his first taste of "future vision," getting a print-out of the December 16 Blog & Mail in the first week of December. Now he's about to get a second taste as I answer his answer dated December 6 on December 13 for the December 29 Blog & Mail. Larry writes:


Remember, I sent you the Brin article the day before the election. I also feel like laying off of politics for a while. So does Brin, for that matter.


Well, forgive me for saying this, Larry, but that's just plain silly. I'm laying off politics because my team lost. Your team won. Your team has control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, NOW is when you have to show everyone that you aren't just whiners and complainers, that you actually have workable ideas that will allow you to retain legislative control and take back the White House in 2008. All that it requires is a Democrat consensus and non-stop hard work for two years and you can show George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney how a REAL political party functions. Unless, as I say, you're actually just whiners and complainers.


As to Stacey [the babe he drew as part of his contribution to Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2: he had sent me a photocopy of an early pencil drawing]—no she is not my wife. She's a girl I knew from my neighbourhood in the mid-1970s when we were 15 to 17 years old. In a nutshell, she's the one who got away big-time. I know she moved to New York City some time after high school, and that's pretty much all I know about her now. The gag of using her in the CRIC #2 story is that I've mentioned many times on the Yahoo! List that my idea of heaven would be an endless loop repeat of the year 1977, both for the time spent lusting over Stacey and for the fact that that was the summer of the original Star Wars. I've mentioned the poor girl by name so often that I thought it would be a cute in-joke for the other Yahoos to use her as a character in my own version of the afterlife.


Now I know you think I'm Missing The Point ethically, but I don't want you to think I've concluded that an endless loop repeat of the year 1977 would really be heaven. What I hope to get to in the story is the question of whether such an afterlife would be more like heaven or like hell. And why? And I'm not finished fleshing all that out yet.


On a related subject, I seriously thought you'd get a kick out of this one. I spent last Friday digging out from a 14-inch snowfall, which is not an unusual amount of snow to have on the ground in Chicago, but is unusual to get all at once, especially so early in the season. It did occur to me that both January 1977 and December 1977 were very, cold snowy months where I lived. After years of talking on the Cerebus list about wanting to relive 1977, God (apparently) said "You want 1977? Here's 14 inches of it!" Even I see the humor value in the situation.


Well, whether you're Missing The Point, we'll all have to wait and see when we read the story, Lar…and we'll all have to make our minds up individually. Personally, I'm really looking forward to it and I have to say as well that I can't get over the fact that you would actually see God as possibly having taken an active role in making use of your sentimental attachment to 1977 to send you a message. Even if you just thought of it in a humorous way, hey, at least you thought of it.

I'm impressed.

Jeff Seiler called a little while ago/some weeks back (depending on how you look at it) and I told him that I would be glad to draw a cover for issue two if I can get good photo reference for one of the scenes in one of the stories. I don't know if you have period pictures of you and Stacey (or how Jeff is going to decide which story gets the cover slot) but it's maybe something you can start thinking about. Billy Beach sent me his finished story for Cerebus Readers in Crisis which I'll be getting to when I hit that strata in my pile of mail here.


* * * * * *


Got a Christmas card from Chet who, coincidentally decided to update Steve Ditko's Mr. A strip "It's Either Good or Evil" "starring Santa Claus in multiple roles!" So this is the card that I sent back to him. After I got it done, I thought it might make a good Christmas card for myself to send to people who sent me Christmas cards this year (I am a complete Christmas card reactionary that way—and, yes, the offer has expired), so I spent part of today (December 13) pencilling it. If I actually end up doing it, I'll get Jeff to post one here so you can have a look. If not, this one will remain the one-of-a-kind only-owned-by-Chester-Brown original.







* * * * * * *


Every once in a while, I still get a request for one of the autographed Sandman parody issues of Cerebus, the latest one from Isaac, a cadet at the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT who writes that he and his dad are both big fans of the book. We're up over 1900 responses at this point, but I'm afraid that I lost the exact count some time ago.


* * * * * *


Tommie Kelly from Co. Louth in Ireland writes


The whole point of this letter is to say that you have inspired me to finally get my finger out and do my comic. So here it is, #1 of The End. I hope you like it, if u have time drop me a line and let me know what you think. My email is included at the bottom, but last I heard you don't use the web.


Hopefully, next year I'll finish my collection of Cerebus. I only have 27 issues left to get out of the 300. Man, do I miss the little gray guy!


Thanks for the comic, Tommie: I've definitely seen worse. Come to think of it, I've definitely DONE worse. I'd have to say the strongest elements you have going for you are composition and design and knowing how to incorporate drawings and computer coloring. I'd have to say the area where you're falling down is in actual execution of the drawings, anatomy and so on. It's always hard to tell if someone has the ability to actually make a go of it, especially early on. I mean, I showed pages to Mike Kaluta back in 1973 that showed roughly this amount of ability and he said, "You're on the right track, keep going." Now, I would assume that he said the same thing over the years to any number of guys who either didn't keep going or who did keep going but didn't get any better or who didn't get good enough or fast enough or both to actually do it for a living. I'm sure he also said it to any number of guys who, if Mike was a betting man, he would not have staked very much money on their actually making a go of it and I'm pretty sure that I was in that category. It was really just too early and there was too much that I needed to fix for him to say much more. The fact that you're posting new episodes of The End every second Monday—particularly if you can stick to that schedule or improve on it—is a good vital sign. Anything that forces you to be productive is going to lead to improvement and anything that leads to improvement is going to give you a shot at the Big Leagues. Interested Cerebus readers can check out Tommie's work at www.tommiekelly.com .


I'd also like to give a tip of the hat to www.ka-blam.com who have an ad for their print on demand service on the back cover The End (I assume they were the ones who printed Tommie's book for him—they did a very nice job). They do standard-sized comics, perfect bound trade paperbacks, manga sized digests, ashcans, you name it. 20% off on your first order, no minimum on their print runs, no setup fees. I hate to sound like Cranky Old Grampa, but if I could have found a deal like that back in the early seventies? By gum. Anyway. You can check out some of the books they've printed at www.indyplanet.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 #108 (December 28th, 2006)

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Those of you hoping to tune in and find a new commissioned piece underway are, unfortunately, forgetting how Luddite Time Travel works. Even though tonight is Industry Night at the Victory Café in Toronto and I'm down there having lunch with Chet at Peter Pan and then heading over to the Beguiling and then for the first hour or two of the festivities, through the miracle of Luddite Time Travel it is actually a little over two weeks before that, December 13, as I am typing this and—having had nearly six days of uninterrupted work on my secret project, I am now getting both sufficiently Lead-Time Paranoid and Unanswered Mail Guilty to try and push my way to the end of 2K6 (how was your year? That's nice.). So: to the Mound o'Mail:



Nice to hear from long-time Cerebus subscriber Ed Komara, librarian at the Crane Music Library at the State University of New York in Potsdam NY: among other things he writes (offering encouragement: which is nice I need all the encouragement I can get):



I have noticed that few (if any) "commentators" and fans of Cerebus write about or even discuss the last one hundred issues—actually the last 150 issues, to be honest. I find this to be an interesting parallel to studies on American blues. It seems everyone wants to write on the pre-World War II Mississippi era, on the postwar era in Chicago through 1970. But there seems to be comparatively little on blues during the last 35 years, when blues merged with soul music. That current Southern US black audiences call what they hear "blues" seems to have no effect on changing some influential writers' minds. So there is still meagre commentary on contemporary blues. And there may well continue to be meagre explication and commentary on the second half of Cerebus, compared to the large amount for the first half. But the second half deserves more.



I appreciate the compliment. I think that might be attributable to word of mouth which, in an almost completely left-leaning, atheistic environment like the comic-book field, is going to severely limit the "spread" of the last half of Cerebus. The people who have read it aren't going to talk about it (because they didn't like it) and, consequently, the people who would be interested aren't going to hear about it. And of course those who would be most interested in Latter Days and The Last Day (that is, the religious) are going to be put off by the content of the first half of the book which is tailored to the sensibilities of left-leaning atheists. Just to get all the way through the Cerebus storyline requires a level of open-mindedness that is pretty well non-existent in our world. As does the Blog and Mail with its Sunday Editions devoted to things scriptural. Certainly in the short term—the next thirty to fifty years—it looks to me as if Cerebus is a closed system with only minor "leakage" from its present habitat as a major disappointment and failure in comic-book frames of reference (with the "early funnier ones" all that recommends it within those restrictive confines) with the potential for actually "hatching out" to an interested audience being a long term—hundred to two hundred years—proposition. I'm kind of philosophical about it since I suspect that that was the way that God planned it to happen when He created me, so I write as much explication as I can with the long-term audience in mind knowing that that communication is entirely one-sided: basically "reading into the record". Looking on the bright side, the Baby Boom and post-Baby Boom generations have always prided themselves on being able to Face the Face (apologies to Pete Townsend) whatever the Face might be and Cerebus will go down in the official record as something that they just couldn't. Face, that is—which I consider to be no small credential. As I said to someone a while ago, it's a strange conundrum in that there is no greater credential to Baby Boomers in considering an individual in an entertainment field than for that individual to still be considered an outlaw at the age of fifty—which I definitely am considered to be. So much of an outlaw that I've become the Pariah King of Comics. It'll be interesting to see how it all hatches out in the long term (even though I won't actually see it in the long term, myself): if the 90% of the comic book field who want Cerebus destroyed by ignoring it to death can accomplish that or if the 10% who think Cerebus should be preserved will ultimately prevail (85-15? 80-20? 70-30? You pick).



Regarding the Scripture readings. I think it is a marvellous endeavour—after all, they were meant to be read aloud, even read aloud one book at a time, at the time of their compositions. Out of curiosity I bought the DVDs of the Genesis readings from tgrace through Ebay. It was during the chapter on Sodom and Gomorrah that I thought, "Hey, that Sim is on to something here," and I reached for my King James Bible. I thought the Joseph chapters were well done as a sustained Told narrative. I like to think I can attend a reading sometime. Meanwhile, I read on your blogspot that DVDs of the rest of the Torah are now available, so I think I will order those. I wonder how you read all those laws in Numbers and Leviticus.



With great difficulty. It's very difficult to maintain even the façade of intellectual interest when what you're reading is that seemingly redundant and, often, seemingly nonsensical. That was the reason that I didn't even dream about reading scripture aloud publicly until I had a lot of experience doing it privately and I was sure that I could give "full value" even to those parts that I don't understand and to those parts that would, on the surface of them, seem tailor-made to put a saint to sleep. Scripture is scripture and is deserving of the most reverential reading you're capable of bringing to the table. Even the atheists (who, I suspect, make up the vast majority of the dozen or so people who have come for the readings) are struck by the fact that it is a very engaging narrative and that three hours goes by very, very quickly. That was, really, my core point. Even the most boring parts of the Bible aren't actually boring. Preaching of any kind tends to be boring and reading the Bible without inflection—or reading scripture that has been leached of its poetry and "dumbed down" into monosyllables and "See Spot Run" sentences—can make it seem boring but it's actually very compelling material. My assumption is that the soul responds to scripture because it understands what's being said and why and the more scripture the soul hears, the more it responds and that this has a positive spin-off effect on the conscious mind which has no idea or a very limited idea of what its listening to. I think scripture is "soul nutrition" so it's kind of humorous to me to picture the way it is usually dished out in churches—parsimoniously—and then picked apart word by word and letter by letter. All of these souls gathered for the purpose of being fed and there's the big "feed bag" right there, the Bible, just chock a block full of soul nutrition and—here's the little lump that you get this week. Now, let me tell you about my fishing trip on my latest retreat and how I think it tells us all something valuable about generosity.



So far we've been able to keep going. Unfortunately the Registry Theatre has become very popular and can no longer cut me a "half price" deal on the rental nor guarantee me more than one or two Sundays over February, March and April. So, the next stop is the Starlight Lounge, 47 King North in Waterloo, thanks to Bernard's generous offer to let us use it. Maybe we'll see you there, someday, Ed.



I'm trying not to push my atheistic readership too hard, so my answer to Ed's question about Paul's epistles will be in the Sunday Edition this week, God willing.



There's MORE for you…

In Today's Blog and…

MAAAAIIIILLL!


___________________________________________________

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 #107 (December 27th, 2006)

TOMORROW! FIRST LOOK AT THE

NEW CEREBUS COMMISSIONED PIECE

ALONG WITH MUCH MORE BLAH BLAH BLAH

ABOUT IT!



The Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City continues with the second Mormon Devotional someone handed me on the trip. Oh, right—you knew there was a reason you weren't going to read the Blog and Mail today.



Anyway, the second one was called "The Probationary Test of Mortality" by the Elder Bruce R. McConkie (January 10, 1982) and I find the same problem with what I see as borderline and "over the line" blasphemy:



Our revelations say that when that situation exists where the speaker speaks by the power of the Spirit, and the hearers hear by the same power, perfect worship results.



But isn't it reasonable to suggest that what is perceived to be a situation where the speaker appears to be speaking by the power of the Spirit—but isn't—and the hearers hold a consensus view that the speaker is speaking by the power of the Spirit—but that consensus view is mistaken—doesn't that qualify as a "blind leading the blind" scenario? Especially given that there is no objective test of when the Spirit is present and when everyone present is just selling themselves individually and collectively a bill of goods?



There's a lot of interesting theorizing in the text that dovetails with my own best thinking on the subject of the nature of reality—that we were all "with God" at some point in the primordial past and whatever happened led to us being "without God": my own view is that this was the Big Bang. It goes that far back. But it's my own view, my own gut reaction to the subtext of scripture. I wouldn't pretend to describe it as "a true gospel verity" as Bruce R. McConkie does at one point in his text. Unless you're a prophet, I don't think you have any business using terms like "a true gospel verity" about what you've chosen to believe. It's the thing I find the most troubling about religious people in general. To me, unless you can start a sentence about God or about your faith or your beliefs with "I may be completely wrong, but…" then I think in a real sense you are behaving and speaking in a blasphemous fashion, you are pretending that you have knowledge that you don't have and that means that you are pretending to be an equal footing with God. I just don't buy the idea that a congregation full of people fervently praying for you to be attuned to the Holy Ghost is going to make you any more attuned to the Holy Ghost than anyone else. It very well might (I may be completely wrong, but…) but it's just not in the same category as, say, short wave radio reception. "Elder McConkie's coming in clear as a bell tonight—last week he was a little `static-y'." You can certainly say "I'm picking up Elder McConkie clear as a bell tonight: my gut instinct tells me that the Holy Ghost and Elder McConkie are just peas in a pod tonight". But if the guy sitting next to you thinks that Elder McConkie is just chewing the scenery as usual I don't think there's any definitive test that's going to tell you which perception is the more accurate. I read the Devotional and it seemed like a standard issue tent-revival speaker and crowd group psych. There were a couple of paragraphs where I pricked up my ears and thought, that's interesting, I wish he had described his impressions of that more elaborately. But I don't have the sense that God was suddenly speaking through him or that if I responded to that part then I have to seriously re-examine myself to see where I went so severely off the beaten path that the rest of it just seems like self-important gibberish. It either resonates with me or it doesn't. And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have been better served reading actual scripture for the hour or so that it has taken me to read and then re-read these Devotionals.



But, I do appreciate the individuals who gave them to me. Thanks, guys!



And rounding out the show with three complete amateurs (let me rephrase that) and rounding out the show with three aspiring cartoonists who gave me their comics at one point or another during the Salt Lake City trip, there's



#1 – JJ Cano with Utah Languish #11:



1994: Jim Weaver has been moved, with his family, to Utah where he will complete his high school education. He isn't happy about that, and is not looking forward to making new friendships. Despite that, however, he is befriended by the enigmatic Madeline (Maddy) Farmer, a survivor of a suicide attempt, who he ends up spending inordinate amounts of time with sluffing, going to lunch off-campus, among other places…



It's continued. Now I'll probably never find out what happened between Maddy and Leo and whether or not she and Jim stay "just friends". www.thx3811.1@...



#2 – Jeff Chapman's Very, Very, Very Scary Comics #6. This guy has a really pretty cartoon style which is well suited to this shaggy dog tale that he wraps up in a block of text on the last page. Oh, well. He had me up until that point and it didn't cost me anything so "Two enthusiastic thumbs up!" Dave Sim. jeff.chapman@...



#3 – Mike Lindsay's 24-Hour Comic (18 pages). I forget why I called Mimi on 24-Hour Comic Day, but I asked her who had the most pages done and it turned out to be Mike (who was on page 6 at that point) so I asked to speak to him and—what do you know?—I ended up being part of his 24-Hour comic. He also offered to make a computer program featuring my lettering style: I still have to get around to sending him a couple of alphabets for my standard lettering and for my modified Abe Kanegson (Will's old Spirit letterer) display lettering. I wonder if Starkings' Comic craft would be interested? I mean, theoretically I'm supposed to be a good letterer, right? Post-issue 186 according to the comic book field, lettering was the only thing I was good at. So wouldn't it make sense that there was a computer font available of Dave Sim's lettering style? No, I didn't think so either. That would diminish the intent behind the comic-book field considering me a great letterer which was to indicate that I was no good at anything else. You can't turn a politically-correct insult into a revenue source, I don't think. But major thanks to Mike for putting together an EC lettering font (SPA FON!) for me. If I ever get around to doing my EC parody story I've had in mind for a while, well, it'll be right there waiting for me thanks to Mike! And I might send him my alphabets anyway. Who knows? I might need the Dave Sim lettering style for something someday! Right now I'd rather use Joe Kubert's font.

Okay, and that's a wrap on the mail for this week. See you tomorrow or in three weeks as the case may be. Theoretically, I've just started my next commission today after three weeks of intense work on my secret project (and, God willing, my commentaries on Mark).



THERE'S MORE

BLAH BLAH BLAH

IN TODAY'S…

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___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #106 (December 26th, 2006) (Double Sized!)

WHAT IS…OH, SORRY I FORGOT MOST OF YOU ARE

ARE HUNG OVER TODAY:

WHAT IS THE NEXT CEREBUS COMMISSIONED PIECE?

TUNE IN THURSDAY TO FIND OUT!

HAPPY BOXING DAY!



Now seriously into the final stretch of wrapping up my narrative on the Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City and its contents:



Here's the part where Matt Dow turns up, not once but twice. He was shopping in a book store someplace and found in a remainder bin (for three bucks each) three copies of Future Day, the Flying Buttress Publishing collection of Gene Day's short science fiction stories which was published in 1979, including four stories I lettered for Gene: "Gifts of Silver Splendor" "Gauntlet" "Paper Dragon" "War Game"—all of them circa 1977 when Gene had the Star Wars Jones really bad. I was an idiosyncratic letterer even back then (make that, "especially back then"), taking what I had learned from studying Bill Payne's lettering and stylizing it a fair bit most especially by really angling my italic letters so that you could probably call it Italic Sprawl. Gene gave me a lot of latitude (he couldn't letter worth a darn himself and he knew I was cheap, reliable and fast—and he really liked me lettering: I have to remind myself all the time that Gene was the only unquestioningly loyal supporter/peer/patron I ever had) so I started really pushing the boundaries to the extent that the lettering was calling attention to itself. That was no problem with publications like Gasm who were really just interested in filling pages with Star Wars knock-offs but it finally caught up with me with Mike Friedrich who deemed it sub-professional quality and got Tom Orzechowski to letter Gene from then on in all his Star*Reach appearances. Very funny flipping through a book with work from almost thirty years ago and looking at Gene staring back at me from the back cover and it's almost real to me. I'm looking closely at the bookshelf behind him. It isn't the First Avenue house, I don't think although it could be the upstairs studio where I drew most of the first issue of Cerebus, the two of us sitting back-to-back, sick as dogs with the flu but still drawing away, filling this big garbage bin with the (as I recall) toilet paper and paper towels we were using to blow our noses—Kleenex was too expensive for the amount of paper we were going through. Gene was working on "Days of Future Past". I still remember that splash page of the T-Rex. But I'm not there, I'm in Night Flight Comics in the Cottonwood Mall in Salt Lake City Utah, October, 2006. And Matt Dow is sort of looking for some kind of reaction and he's not really getting one (I don't think) so I just start talking about the stories. Gene developed this quirky Star Warsian approach to the space ships, basically laying in regular thickness pen lines in perspective and then laying in fake machinery detailing into the spaces between the pen lines with a fine-point rapidograph. It didn't really work—it more "worked" since it meant that he had figured out a way to get a pseudo-Star Wars look to his spacecraft which was no small arrow to have in your quiver back in the late 70s. People forget what a revelation those George Lucas humongous space barges were. The Alien franchise was pretty much built around taking the concept and grunging the ships up even further. We all got the Ralph McQuarrie book the Christmas of 1977 and tried to figure out how to do cheap comic book knock-offs of his designs. Some of us decided to stick with drawing cartoon aardvarks as our "bread and butter" but then some of us are just, you know, weird.



Anyway, Matt was nice enough to give me my pick of which of the three copies I wanted so I picked the one with the cleanest picture on the back. Someday I'm going to get Sherwood to do a good enlargement of it and then do a photorealism shot of Gene Day. That should be fun.







And then Matt also gave me a copy of Dear Wisconsin… …Love, Vietnam which is a collection of letters home from Vietnam from his aunt (I think it was his aunt), Bridget Gregory when she was serving aboard the hospital ship USS Sanctuary AH-17 as an American Red Cross worker off the coast of Vietnam 1968-69, edited by his grandmother (remember? Topsy? The one with the school bus full of eleven kids travelling from Wisonsin to California and back again?). Looking forward to reading this.



This being Salt Lake City, I was also given a couple of Devotionals from the Salt Lake City Institute of Religion at the University of Utah which I was looking forward to reading. The first one was "I Now Call the Attention of This Congregation" a sermon delivered on 7 April 1844 on the subject of the dead.



I want your prayers, faith, the inspiration of Almighty God, and the gift of the Holy Ghost that I may set forth things that are true and that can easily be comprehended and which shall carry the testimony to your hearts.



I don't know if this is the general model of Mormon teaching, but I would be suspicious of it since it has the appearance of a short circuit, to me. Anytime someone says they want the inspiration of Almighty God and the gift of the Holy Ghost in a tone that suggests they seem to EXPECT that God and the Holy Ghost are going to treat it as a direct order I think you end up with a leap of faith that, personally, I find unsustainable. Mixing in the prayers of your listeners make them a party to that and can go a long way towards leading into blasphemous areas. When the narrator starts talking about "I calculate to edify you with the simple truths of heaven" that seems to me to be over the line into blasphemy. "What I hope are the simple truths of heaven" or "what it seems to me to be the simple truths of heaven" which is a giant step back from the brink of blasphemy are still over the edge for me. Even Muhammad was most emphatic in relaying the Koran to say, "I don't tell you that I know the things unseen" and he was a prophet. I think all a human being can legitimately say is: "Here are my choices and opinions—maybe they'll be of some use to you, as well". That seems to me to be staying in safe areas. It's not as if I'm picking something out that's exceptional, I'm afraid. I almost gave myself eyebrow spasms at various points. Here's a couple of jaw-dropping sentences in a row:



There are but very few beings in the world who understand rightly the character of God. If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend their own character.



How can you say things like that with a straight face without adding "in my opinion" or "it seems to me"? First of all, whoever you are, you don't know and can never know more than a handful of "beings in the world" so how can you say definitively whether or not they "understand rightly the character of God"? You're making yourself into a judge of people that you've met and their innermost awarenesses and stating definitively that you know whether or not those innermost awarenesses are accurate or inaccurate. Excuse me, but that's, at the very least, extremely presumptuous. The speaker retreats intermittently: "If I should be the man so fortunate [italics mine] as to comprehend God and explain to your hearts what kind of a being God is, so that the Spirit seals it, then let every man and woman henceforth put his [sic] hand on his mouth, sit in silence, and never say anything or lift his voice against the servants of God again." Well, that doesn't really follow sequentially. You'd have to be explaining it to their hearts, because their heads are going to recognize the complete disconnect with logic. What the speaker is essentially saying is "If I know the unknowable…" Well, I think it's pretty self-evident that you can't know the unknowable otherwise it wouldn't be, you know, unknowable.



I am going to inquire after God because I want you to know God and to be familiar with Him. If I can get you to know Him, I can bring you to Him. And if so, all persecution against me will cease. This will let you know that I am His servant, for I speak as one having authority and not as a scribe.



Well, that last bit is a direct paraphrase of a Scriptural reference to the Synoptic Jesus so if the speaker is a Christian and believes that the Synoptic Jesus is interchangeable with God—which is pretty much the stock-in-trade of universal Christianity—then that's self-evidently a blasphemous statement. This is the sort of stuff that boggles my mind. "If I can get you to know Him." That presupposes that YOU know Him and that in itself is blasphemous as far as I'm concerned. The best that any man can say, as far as I can see, is "here's how I BELIEVE that I experience God, here's the way I THINK He acts in my life." I mean, what are you going to do on Judgement Day in front of God when you tell Him about something He told you to do or something you know He instructed you about and He says, "No, I didn't." What? Are you going to argue with Him? Are you going to tell an omniscient being where He participated in your life and where He didn't? And then the speaker makes these occasional leaps into the absolutely infernal in my opinion:



I am going to tell you the designs of God for the human race, the relation the human family sustains with God, and why He interferes with the affairs of men. First, God Himself who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a Man like unto one of yourselves—that is the great secret!...



…Here then is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God. You have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods in order to save yourselves and be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done—by going from a small capacity to a great capacity, from a small degree to another, from grace to grace, until the resurrection of the dead from exaltation to exaltation—till you are able to sit in everlasting burnings and everlasting power and glory as those who have gone before, sit enthroned.



It ends in mid-sentence shortly after that (and, no offence intended, not a minute too soon for my comfort level when it comes to blasphemy).

Next: Secular Break on the Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City



THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S

BLOG AND MAAAILLL!



Tuesday December 26 – Continuing our coverage of the Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City…



[Sorry, one more interruption: I want to wrap up the package of two Fan Club Newsletters that Elizabeth L. of Western Springs Illinois won by ordering the most number of sequential trade paperbacks and the largest number of trade paperbacks in October—basically a complete set—"Here it is, Elizabeth, and thanks for your order!" It was pretty early on in the Blog and Mail's history so I'm sure she had no idea she was even in contention and this is a good way of letting her know without having to actually write a letter]



Tucked inside The Best of Big George was Lucas Ackley's business card. Lucas Ackley, Graphic Designer. Lucas is one of the world-class "behind the counter people" at Night Flight (I already told you about Mike Justice). So if you need some graphic design work done, you can contact him at pickpocketproductions@.... On the back of the card there's a quote from Albert Einstein: "Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value," which I would certainly consider words to live by even though my value—or "value"—is popularly in dispute right now.



I also got my two copies of Archie #570 which features "Archie in the City Library", the issue's lead-off five-pager, as the Riverdale Gang goes to the City Library in Salt Lake City and, among other things, meets Night Flight's Mimi Cruz…



[Alan Carroll, Mimi's husband and co-owner of the store, couldn't wait to show me the, um, really deep sun tan that Mimi has in the book. See, Mimi comes from a Mexican background and I guess Barry Grossman, the colorist, when they told him about her ethnicity decided, "Okay, Mexican: Brown #8A." (or whatever it was). This led me to suggest that the way to international understanding might lie in comic book stores since store owners see the sun so seldom, if we all in the Family of Man and Family of Woman choose to become comic-book store owners, we'll all eventually become the same pale washed out shade of white that all comic-book store owners eventually become. One World, One Off-White Colour and Kumbaya, y'all!]



The story is kind of strange. I mean the idea behind it is interesting—comics and libraries and a comic book store all pulling together to promote literacy—the same thing that attracted me to the Salt Lake City Book Festival when Mimi pitched me on the idea. As Chuck the Black Archie Character puts it "Yes! This library is supportive of anything that promotes reading!" But I have to take issue with some of the choices: like the piped in music.



Betty: "Music seems to be almost everywhere!"

Mimi: "The Director feels [italics mine] the Library is not just about books, but all the arts! …She says the goal should be to also stimulate the mind, eyes and ears!"



I can go along with the mind and the eyes…but ears? In a library? It's probably just an oppressively patriarchal misapprehension on my part (I mean, when it comes right down to it here in the twenty-first century what isn't, eh?) but I've always laboured under the impression that libraries should also be about study (actually that they should be primarily about study but I know when its time to switch terminology: usually about the time that I'm being elbowed out of the way as I am here) and that study is best conducted in absolute silence. I don't mean study in degraded politically correct terms—point a kid towards the book he's looking for and have him copy it out three paragraphs from it while listening to Def Iguana on his iPod and call that scholarship—but of reading a hard text and really attempting to discern and, if necessary, dissect the inner meaning of what the author is attempting to communicate. Back when the earth was still cooling, I used to study at the library but now that libraries (and not just here in the People's Republic of Kitchener, evidently) have been turned into substitute daycare centres where infants are encouraged to fully express themselves spontaneously, at the top of their lungs and without oppressively patriarchal suppression of their personal expression such as I advocate, if I need to study a book, I take it out and bring it back here to the office where I can actually digest it without some ear-splitting interruption. Just so: Mimi goes on to say "And notice the `No Shh!' button on Julie Bartel and Matt McLain, two of our key librarians!...It's a far cry from when the librarians would shush their patrons!" It is, indeed, a far cry. Fortunately everyone is now encouraged to bridge that formerly insurmountable distance with Good Human Interaction Conducted at Roadhouse Decibel Levels now that all of us oppressively patriarchal suppressionist spoilsports have been driven back to our domiciles where we clearly belong since we lack the Appropriate People Skills to Fully Engage With Today's Modern Library on Its Own Swinging Hip-Hopping Terms.



Mimi's "I'd like you to meet Alan Carroll, our store's owner" line is more than a little bizarre for those of us in the know. Um, and what else, Mimi? Alan is…Alan is…it's a word that starts with "h"…Alan is…your…your…it starts with "h", Mimi. C'mon Mimi, apply yourself, you'll think of it.



[I should probably mention that I kid Mimi shamelessly about her marriage since she has confessed to being a terrible wife. It was her and Alan's anniversary the week before I came down there and she forgot it again. So, of course when I was doing the public radio interview that day I made a point of wishing Alan and Mimi a happy anniversary which provoked the interviewer (as I hoped it would) to say, "Did you know she FORGOT it?" I laughed uproariously and said, "I know!" I kid her about it because Alan is completely cool with her being a terrible wife and that's the only one it should really matter to, right?]



Is it just my oppressively patriarchial suppressionist side that finds it odd that Mimi makes no reference to being married to Alan and that Mimi is featured in (let me count them here) fifteen panels and Alan is in one panel? I mean, if that's what it is—that I'm just a narrow-minded oppressively patriarchal suppressionist tyrant who doesn't know when to shut up and that I'm missing the intrinsic fairness in having one co-owner of a store in fifteen panels (who happens to be a female from an "ethnic" background) and one co-owner of a store in one panel (who happens to be an old white guy)(not that there's anything wrong with that, Alan) then please, don't be shy. Give it to me straight. I'm just a redneck KKK bigot, right? I just don't understand that 15-1 is the only fair ratio when you're dealing with an ethnic woman and an old white guy. And this is my Michael Richards "n-word" moment. If I'd just learn to leave this stuff alone I might be welcomed back into the Right Thinking Comic-Book Field, but no. I just have to keep shooting myself in the foot.



The Pariah King of Comics (surveying his blown-to-s—t foot as the smoke and smell of cordite dissipates): Well, MY work is done here!



Not quite. "Politically incorrect miles to go before I sleep and politically incorrect miles to go before I sleep." I got the staff at Night Flight to autograph one of my copies of Archie #570 which is, evidently, available at www.archiecomics.com or you could write to Mimi and Alan: they have boxes full of them. Alan autographed his panel "Muchas gracias! Alan Carroll" which still makes me laugh every time I read it. Alan and I crack each other up on a regular basis. Mike Justice and Josh signed the staff panel. Mimi signed one of her panels that happened to be on that same page (she had three others to pick from!). Incorrigible (I don't think I've ever capitalized the adjective before and I doubt I will again) Erin signed the staff panel "To Dave: These boobs are for you!" Theresa signed the staff panel "To Dave: These boobs would be for you, but I don't know where they have gone." That requires a little explanation: See, Theresa has HUGE breasts which have inexplicably been rendered in Archie Comics size in the comic. Evidently they started sprouting when she was in grade three and they haven't really stopped or slowed down. She's very good-spirited about it in the Dolly Parton way that some women can be, so even though you all hate my guts for mentioning it, I'm pretty sure Theresa won't mind. But, it's an interesting point. I mean, Mimi also has huge breasts now that I come to think of it (and I don't think she'll mind my mentioning it, since the way she initially persuaded me to do a signing at Night Flight was with an overhead shot of her cleavage along with the cleavage of two of her girlfriends and a note "six good reasons to do a signing at Night Flight Comics). Is it just my narrow-minded oppressively patriarchal suppressionist nature that finds it odd that large breasts—even on women who actually have large breasts—is considered inappropriate when it comes to their pictorial representation in an all-ages comic book? No, don't tell me. Let me guess. Another Michael Richards "n-word" moment, right? Cutting my own throat on the Internet. And I don't know a soul who can get me on Letterman and Larry King Live to tell my side of it and plead for forgiveness.



Ah, well. Once the Pariah King of Comics, always the Pariah King of Comics.



At least I'll always have Erin and Theresa's boobs (or what's left of them) in the Cerebus Archive now that I've committed career suicide. Yes, "AGAIN": thank you for reminding me.



Tomorrow: A different form of career suicide as I tackle the second Mormon Devotional I was given



THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S

BLOG &….MAAAILLL!



___________________________________________________

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 #105 (December 25th, 2006)

The Gospel According to John

Chapter 4, verses 1-32

King James Version, 1611



When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized moe disciples then Iohn,

(Though Iesus himselfe baptized not, but his disciples:)

He left Iudea, and departed againe into Galile.

And hee must needs goe thorow Samaria.

Then commeth he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, neere to the parcell of ground that Iacob gaue to his sonne Ioseph.

Now Iacobs Well was there. Iesus therefore being wearied with his iourney, sate thus on the Well: and it was about the sixth houre.

There commeth a woman of Samaria to draw water: Iesus sayth vnto her, Giue me to drinke.

For his disciples were gone away vnto the city to buy meate.

Then saith the woman of Samaria vnto him, How is it that thou, being a Iewe, askest drinke of me, which am a woman of Samaria? For the Iewes haue no dealings with the Samaritanes.

Iesus answered, and said vnto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that sayth to thee, Giue me to drinke; thou wouldest haue asked of him, and hee would haue giuen thee liuing water.

The woman saith vnto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to drawe with, and the Well is deepe: from whence then hast thou that liuing water?

Art thou greater then our father Iacob, which gaue vs the Well, and dranke thereof himselfe, and his children, and his cattell?

Iesus answered, and said vnto her, Whosoeuer drinketh of this water, shall thirst againe:

But whosoeuer drinketh of the water that I shal giue him, shall neuer thirst: but the water that I shall giue him, shalbe in him a well of water springing vp into euerlasting life.

The woman saith vnto him, Sir, giue me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.

Iesus saith vnto her, Goe, call thy husband, and come hither.

The woman answered, and said, I haue no husband. Iesus said vnto her, Thou hast well said, I haue no husband:

For thou hast had fiue husbands, and he whom thou now hast, is not thy husband: In that saidest thou truely.

The woman saith vnto him, Sir, I perceiue that thou art a Prophet.

Our fathers worshipped in this mountaine, and ye say, that in Hierusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

Iesus saith vnto her, Woman, beleeue me, the houre commeth when ye shall neither in this mountaine, nor yet at Hierusalem, worship the Father.

Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for saluation is of the Iewes.

But the houre commeth, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit, and in trueth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

God is a Spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in trueth.

The woman saith vnto him, I know that Messias commeth, which is called Christ: when he is come, hee will tell vs all things.

Iesus sayth vnto her, I that speake vnto thee, am hee.

And vpon this came his disciples and marueiled that he talked with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest thou? Or, Why talkest thou with her?

The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and sayth to the men,

Come, see a man, which tolde me all things that euer I did: Is not this the Christ?

Then they went out of the citie, and came vnto him.

In the meane while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eate.

But hee said vnto them, I haue meate to eate that ye know not of.



[Just a reminder—September 25, October 25, November 25 and now December 25 that Sgt. Claude Flowers hasn't gotten an answer from the Friends of Lulu and no one has yet asked Jackie Estrada or Heidi Macdonald why they rejected my idea of an all-female comics professional petition against censorship to assist the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund back in 1996, thus proving that feminists get a free ride in our society because they never have to explain or justify their choices. See you January 25th for the next reminder!]

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #104 (December 24th, 2006)

Sunday December 24 - Dave Sim's Two-Sunday Christmas. I've chosen to treat Christmas as basically just another Sunday ever since I started celebrating it alone after becoming estranged from my family back in 2003. Well, just another Sunday in the sense that I fast and read Scripture and sleep a lot. And, of course, the scripture in this case is John's Gospel which I read in its entirety. That maybe requires a little explanation. It's just a theory, but since the Synoptic Jesus, from what I understand, couldn't have been born on December 25 (shepherds aren't watching their flocks out in the fields at the Winter Solstice in the Middle East) and given that December 25 has gotten locked in globally to the extent that it has, my theory is that December 25 is the birthdate of the Johannine Jesus, thus, I read John's Gospel on December 25.



I realize that it was also an observed date for Saturnalia in the Roman Empire but if I'm not mistaken that was the Winter Solstice specifically which usually occurs a few days before Christmas—certainly never on the 25th. I tend to think that it was a nice gesture on the part of God that He would allow His Redeemer to be linked to a pagan festival and it's just another example of pagan mean-spiritedness that they draw the opposite inference: that Christianity appropriated the pagan festival for its own purposes. All depends on how you look at it but if you're a pagan you might want to consider the extent to which you're bristling right now at my suggestion and wonder "Hey, where is THIS coming from?"



Or not.



Anyway, I figured I would run the Kingdom Interlinear version of John Chapter Four 1-32 (a favourite of mine) here on Christmas Eve Day and then run the King James Version from 1611 on Christmas Day. I've decided that that's the way I'll be dealing with the Gospels in my scripture readings (God willing I get that far): reading the Kingdom Interlinear version in the first half and the King James version in the second half of the reading.



Coincidentally, I'm writing this on the opening night of Christkindl here in Kitchener, the traditional German market festival recreation they hold at City Hall every year and which is a big part of my own "with folks" Christmas celebrations as opposed to my "without folks" observances of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so this feels very Christmassy indeed!



A very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all readers of the Blog and Mail!





The Gospel According to John

Chapter Four verses 1 to 32

A word-for-word translation from the original Greek

[italicized "you" signifies the singular, no italics means it's a plural "you"]



As therefore knew the Lord that heard the Pharisees that Jesus more disciples is making and is baptizing than John,

Although indeed Jesus he not was baptizing but the disciples of him,

He let go off the Judea and he went away again into the Galilee

It was necessary however him to be traversing through the Samaria.

He is coming therefore into city of the Samaria being said Sychar near the piece of ground which gave Jacob to Joseph to the son of him;

Was however there fountain of the Jacob. The therefore Jesus having laboured out of the journey was sitting thus upon the fountain; hour was as sixth.

Is coming woman out of the Samaria to draw water. Is saying to her the Jesus, Give to me to drink;

The for disciples of him had gone off into the city, in order that foodstuffs they might buy.

Is saying therefore to him the woman the Samaritan, How you Jew being beside of me to drink you are asking of woman Samaritan being? Not for are using together Jews to Samaritans.

Answered Jesus and said to her, If you had known the free gift of the God and who is the saying to you Give to me to drink, you likely asked him and he gave likely to you water living.

She is saying to him, Lord, not and means of drawing you are having and the well is deep; wherefrom therefore you are having the water the living?

Not you greater are of the father of us, Jacob, who gave to us the well and he out of it drank also the sons of him and the nourished ones of him?

Answered Jesus and said to her Everyone the drinking out of the water this will get thirsty again;

Who however likely should drink out of the water of which I shall give to him, not not will get thirsty into the age, but the water which I shall give to him will become in him fountain of water bubbling up into life everlasting.

Is saying toward him the woman, Lord, give to me this the water, in order that not I may get thirsty not-but I may come through here to be drawing.

He is saying to her, Be going under, sound to of you the male person and come here.

Answered the woman and said to him, Not I am having male person. Is saying to her the Jesus, Finely you said that Male person not I am having; five for male persons you had, and now whom you are having not is of you male person; this true you have said.

Is saying to him the woman, Lord, I am beholding that prophet are you.

The fathers of us in the mountain this worshiped; and YOU are saying that in Jerusalem is the place where to be worshiping it is necessary.

Is saying to her the Jesus, Be believing to me, woman, that is coming hour when neither in the mountain this nor in Jerusalem YOU will worship to the Father. YOU are worshipping which not YOU have known we are worshiping which we have known, because the salvation out of the Jews is;

But is coming hour and now is, when the true worshipers will worship to the Father in spirit and to truth, and for the Father such is seeking the worshiping him;

Spirit the God and the worshiping him in spirit and to truth it is necessary to be worshiping.

Is saying to him the woman I have known that Messiah is coming, the being said Christ; whenever should come that, he will announce up to us all.

Is saying to her the Jesus I am, the speaking to you.

And upon this came the disciples of him and they were wondering because with woman he was speaking; no one of course said What are you seeking? Or Why are you speaking with her?

Let go off therefore the water jar of her the woman and went away into the city and is saying to the men

Hither see YOU man who said to me all which I did; not what this is the Christ?

They came forth out of the city and they were coming toward him.

In the between were requesting him the disciples saying Rabbi, eat.

The however said to them, I food am having to eat which YOU not have known.



Tune in tomorrow for the King James Version from 1611 and see if you consider it an accurate translation of the above.

___________________________________________________

Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd on eBay

___________________________________________________

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 #103 (December 23rd, 2006)

THIS IS IT! THE FINAL DAY FOR THE FINAL OFFER

ON THE NEXT COMMISSIONED CEREBUS PIECE

SO IF YOU SLEPT IN AND IT'S AFTER 11 AM

WHEN YOU'RE READING THIS…

…YOU MISSED IT, BUBBAH!

AND EVEN IF YOU GOT UP BRIGHT AND EARLY

AND YOU'RE NOT HUNG OVER AND YOU ATE A HEALTH AND NUTRITIOUS BREAKFAST, THANKS TO THE MIRACLE OF DAVE SIM'S PATENTED

LUDDITE-O TIME-DELAY POSTING™

YOU'RE STILL NOT GOING TO FIND OUT WHAT THE NEXT COMMISSIONED PIECE IS UNTIL THURSDAY!


The Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City arrived at Canada Post on Pandora Street on December 4, having been mailed by Mimi November 17. I think Canada Customs held onto it because the 12 South Park VHS videotapes Mimi and Alan sent Gerhard made for some great lunchtime viewing. They knew already that they weren't going to let us off the hook with the "No Commercial Value" designation—Mimi's "for review" designation suited most of the stuff I was getting, but South Park videotapes? Nah, not a chance. And then there were the two sets of Ye Bookes of Cerebus bookends—one of them still with the "$36.99" price tag on it. Mimi? You have a long way to go to qualify as a criminal mastermind, I'm afraid.

Anyway, a quick rundown of my own loot from the Salt Lake City trip:

Big George Comics #17 – published by George Stasinos, 846 East Uintah Avenue, Tooele, Utah, 84074. I already told you about Big George—one of the guys who Tim Corrigan corrupted into a life in comics through Small Press Comics Explosion. Well, this is his special 20th anniversary issue with the Best of Big George Comics. They really are funny, mostly because they're drawn in a classic underground style but Big George is so unfailingly cheerful and optimistic that you start laughing just because it's so weird to be reading an unfailingly cheerful and optimistic underground comic. If you buy only one Big George comic in your entire life, this should be the one, I think. $2.50

In Utah this week magazine. It's actually just called IN magazine, I think. Kim Burgess, the writer, showed up with copies at the party at the Cottonwood Mall store so this was the first chance that I had had to read her article which was (oddly enough) in the "Living in Utah" section (which I suppose I was for a period of days, anyway…and which I hope to be again for a week or two this summer). A good reconstructed interview (I could hear her typing at the other end of the phone line) with the occasional odd "where did THAT come from?" glitch. i.e. "…he was a high school dropout pouring over Superman and the Hulk at Ottawa's first comic book store." OTTAWA? Other peculiarities include "…making it the longest-running English language comic book by the same creative team, according to Wikipedia." Oho. I guess in an alternative paper you can actually cite Wikipedia as a source. I wonder if that "washes" these days? Oh, Wikipedia. Then it MUST be true! Anyway, nice to have one more article to add to the Cerebus Archive's "Publications/Tabloid" pile which doesn't get many additions these days.

[I have to interrupt myself to say that there's been an even more recent addition—the December 2006-January 2007 issue of Exclaim!. Jason Schneider is an entertainment writer at The Record whom I heard about from my financial advisor at CIBC, Jeff Shalk because Jason is a Cerebus reader (and we all know how astonishing that is to non-Cerebus readers here in Kitchener!), so I gave Jeff an autograph and a head sketch to give him. So, this guy turns up with Sandeep at the Scripture reading a couple of weeks back and tells me he works at The Record. "Oh, you must be the guy I gave Jeff the head-sketch for." And, sure enough, it was. Anyway, he asked if he could do an interview with me about the Scripture readings so we set something up. It's Kitchener, so whatever it is it's going to be a paragraph long and probably spell my name wrong, but what the heck, eh? So we did the interview and he said he was going to show it to The Record which is in the "snowball's chance in hell" category, but then he also mentioned that he had a contact at the Toronto Star (snowball ditto: the People's Republic of Toronto? Yeah, right) and as well was going to do a mention in Exclaim! I've seen Exclaim here and there and just figured it was another Echo—the local weekly paper of record— knock-off. Does anyone actually read these things? So, I'm at the bus station waiting to go down to Toronto for the Ragmop launch and there's this big pile of Exclaim!'s on top of one of the garbage bins. So I look at the cover. Yep, the year-end issue. That's the one he said it would be in. And I just ignore it, because it's going to be bad news, right? It's Kitchener. I'll probably count myself lucky if ALL they do is spell my name wrong. And finally I decide, okay, I'll page through it and see if I can find it. It a) won't be in there b) will be in there but it will be so small I'll never find it c) will be in there but it will be intentionally insulting. And then I change my mind again. I'm going to Toronto. I'm going to see Chet and Rob and Peter Pan and the Beguiling. WHY am I going to let Kitchener even try to ruin my day? All right, I finally decide I'll page through the top copy and if I don't spot the item or if the bus comes first I'll just forget the whole thing. And then there it is: A HUGE photo of me reading Scripture. That's right. Dave Fisher had been taking pictures the same day that Jason was there. And then the little article under it—"Voice of Sim". That wasn't snarky or mean-spirited that I could see. "Voice of Sim". So then I read the little article and there didn't seem to be anything snarky or mean-spirited in it. I grabbed a copy to show Trevor since he's been taping all the readings ("Hey, Trevor! We made the papers!") and figured he'd never see a copy in Toronto. It wasn't until I was reading it on the bus that I realized that it was a national publication, not a Kitchener publication…which explained the lack of snarkiness and mean-spiritedness. In a way, I mean. But in another way, it was also only the third mention in a Canadian publication of Cerebus coming to an end and the first mention since 2004. And it was the first one that wasn't unfavourable or mean-spirited or denigrating. I know because I kept skimming the article looking for those things which had been right there in Saturday Night and Eye magazine. Yep, there's "unfavourable" part, there's the "mean-spirited" part, there's the "denigrating" part. Chet picked up a copy at Peter Pan of his very own. And there it was at Latierri and the bookstore Chet and I went to. Completely bizarre. Dave Sim in the Canadian media. And even more bizarre, it's a magazine almost completely devoted to punk, hip-hop, and bands with names like Fuck You (literally) and pages and pages of concert reviews. I've been trying to figure out what God was up to with this (if anything): Bernard has offered me his nightclub, the Starlight Lounge in Waterloo for free for my scripture readings so I don't know if God was just showing me the juxtaposition to help me make up my mind: "Here, Dave, does this look infected to you?" In a way, but at the same time there's nothing wrong that I can see in taking the fight to the enemy in his own backyard—as long as no one is serving alcohol during the reading, let's say. Anyway, three years after finishing the book it sure was an on-going surprise!]

Tomorrow: Dave Sim's Two Sunday Christmas


THERE'S MORE FOR YOU!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU!

IN TODAY'S

IN TODAY'S

BLOG &

BLOG &

…MAAILL!

…MAAILL!


___________________________________________________

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 #102 (December 22nd, 2006)

OKAY. FINAL OFFER ON THE

NEXT COMMISSIONED PIECE IS

TOMORROW!

CUT-OFF TIME IS 11 AM EDST

(SEE, I HAVE TO GO AND GET GROCERIES TOMORROW)

519.576.0610

watch for the next

DIARY OF A COMMISSIONED PIECE

WITH TIME LAPSE IN PROGRESS WALL-TO-WALL

STATION-TO-STATION PENCIL-TO-PENCIL INK-TO-INK COLOUR-TO-COLOUR GAVEL-TO-GAVEL ASHES-TO-ASHES

DUST-TO-DUST COVERAGE STARTING DECEMBER 28!

KEEP IT TURNED ON TO

YOUR EXCLUSIVE

CEREBUS COMMISSIONED PIECE

HEADQUARTERS

"YOU CAN'T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF OF IT…

AND YOU CAN ONLY SEE IT HERE!"



uber Yahoo Matt Dow of Two Rivers Wisconsin's legendary Mouse Skull Entertainment (well, I've heard of it, anyway) makes two surprise appearances in the mail this week.



Dear Dave,



You mentioned in your Blog and Mail that you're doing the Dr. Strangeroach piece. And in my role of "go-and-get-whatever-he-wants-as-long-as-it-ain't-loaded" Wise Fellow, here's a reprint of the first three or four Ditko Dr. Strange stories. Just on the off chance you haven't found any reprints yet (Doubtful, but Stranger things have happened).



Too late for reference but not too late to enter my personal collection so much obliged. I was going to feel very Dr. Strange Challenged having given back Essentials to Sandeep and soon having to give back Masterworks to John. My very own first four Dr. Stranges from November 2004 in a "Not for Resale" edition. What is the story behind THAT, I wonder. Same month that Darrell and I last discussed photorealism versus cartooniness. Just a coincidence I'm sure.



Oh, and if you're still thinking about coming down to my dear old Aunt Susie's post Christmas party (sometime in January, I think the second weekend) let me know and I'll see if I can get some of the out of town aunts and uncles to come back then.



Matt (and his lovely wife Paula, hi Paula) drove from Wisconsin to Salt Lake City for Ye Bookes of Cerebus. He brought with him a full page reproduction from a Wisconsin daily newspaper from 1956 of the trip his grandparents and aunts and uncles made in a converted school bus (eleven kids!). Having read the book I was transfixed by the article and got Matt to identify all of the kids for me. So, then he tells me about this big shindig they have every year, post-Christmas and asks me if I want to come out for it. That would be just too weird. Mind you I'm tempted—imagine re-reading the book on the plane and then meeting everyone!—but that would be just too weird. Maybe it would be less weird next year. I somehow doubt it, but it definitely needs a lot of work to get down from the too weird heights I see it as being on right now. It's a long way from "just weird enough" but I surely do appreciate the offer.



AND NOW FOR THE OBLIGATORY CEREBUS QUESTION:



Aaagh! And ALL IN CAPITALS! Sneak up on a guy why don't you?



A new guy joined the Yahoo group and asked what happened to various secondary characters. And I answered as best I could, but he asked whatever happened to Jaka. And my answer was:



Dead by #300. Everybody was dead by #300 if you think about it (Except Cirin and Cerebus). Do you mean where'd she go after Form & Void? My GUESS is she went to Mealc and became the patroness. If she had any political capital left that is. If, because she lied about the guns, she lost as political capital, then (assuming that "Jaka, Princess of Palnu" still had name value) she might have become a tool of the Cirinist State. Going from community center to community center. Making speeches and placating the Cirinist masses. Her existence would be a series of hotels and maybe different men (the Cirinists hoping the whole time that she'd settle down and get married. Leading to a Princess Diana-esque affair). Much like Cerebus and his Five Bar Gate career.



So Dave, how about it? Any thoughts on what happened to Jaka post-Form & Void? Or did she walk into the carriage and out of the series, and that's all you wrote?



Feel free to just "Blog and Mail" any answers. I'm a reader. And you can use my name there. I'm not ashamed.



"There's MORE FOR ME In TODAY'S BLOG &….MAAAILLL (Well, not today's. Maybe in a week or two. But soon, REAL SOON!!!!"



Hey, wow! Remember the Blog & Mail theme song that used to close out every edition? That was, like, a zillion years ago in Internet terms. Have to remember to include it when I start running "Best of the Blog and Mail" next week (joke: little joke. just relax).



Jaka post-Form & Void? That would be a tough call and not one that I've given any amount of thought to. I would say that given that these things tend to occur in a symmetrical way, yes, I would imagine that whatever her life ended up being like it would probably have resembled Cerebus's traumatic beginning to Latter Days spinning out in a comparable "can't win for losing" way. Probably not quite AS traumatic because I would assume that she had closed off most of herself in the aftermath of the end of her marriage. The ending to the marriage was too traumatic, too brutal and with no room to manufacture an alternative happy reality in her own mind that would fit the known facts but allow her to escape the tragedy personally. No, the Cirinists do their work too well for that. The core question would be "How much in love with Cerebus was she?" which is another way of asking "How much had she closed herself off at that point?" And that I would no more attempt to answer than I would attempt to answer for which (if any!) of my own girlfriends or my wife I was their greatest and most significant relationship and for which of them I was just one of the guys they acted out their "strong, independent woman" role against—going through the motions for the sake of having a boyfriend or husband—before moving on to their next "strong, independent woman" drama with their new Best Supporting Actor. They were upset for a period of time, but then the next guy came along and it's "happily ever after" "I've never felt this way before" time again. Certainly in the case of Jaka, she wasn't wife and mother material so I think I'm safe in saying that although she thought of herself as monogamous and bonding for life, she was actually just doing the "I've never felt this way before" "Oh no its coming to an end" "Boohoohoo" "NEXT!" trip. Very possibly she just saw Cerebus as the safe option because he was always in love with her every time she saw him. There was never the remotest danger that she had lost him even when he was married to Red Sophia or when she was married to Rick. Women tend to find that incredibly boring but after a series of traumatic dramas where they win more than lose a lot of them will opt for the safe option at least for a period of time either to rebuild their egos or just to have a nice rest.



In the long term? Jackie Onassis used to say that it's nice to have a son so that when you're old you might have someone to take you to the opera once in a while. It was her way of acknowledging, I think, that—for her personality type—once the youth and the looks go there's not a whole lot left besides those sorts of small faded but real pleasures. And I think it was her way of acknowledging the crucial role of Being a Mother (as opposed to being a mother, a distinction now completely and, perhaps, irretrievably lost to us as a civilization) so that you will have just such a small faded pleasure when you were old: some small vestige of love that isn't an enactment, a euphemism for rutting, nor feigned nor wholly faded and, finally, her own. Someone who actually cared even though she was wrinkled up and aged. It's the reason, I think, that Princess Diana, at the legal dissolution of her marriage to Prince Charles sat in the driver's seat of her car and, reportedly, wept piteously. Although she had two sons I think she, at least in a vestigial way, knew the difference between Being a Mother (in the Jackie Kennedy-Onassis sense) and being a mother—arguably she was presiding over the demise of the former by choosing to be the latter—and knew that she was in the latter category. At that point all you can do is bang as many Egyptian playboys as you can squeeze into your datebook as the clock ticks down to your "best before" date because there isn't much on the horizon after that and what's there isn't pretty. I think she got involved in the landmine cause because she misconstrued the sense in which she had personally stepped on a landmine…



[I suspect that Princess Diana was one of those who hear voices from deep within the earth—guess wHWH?—and that voice cautioned her sibyl-like to "beware the landmine" as she seriously contemplated divorcing the heir to the throne and she took it literally instead of metaphorically: always a danger with voices from deep within the earth from what I can see]



…by seeing herself as more important than the Crown which sense of inflated self-importance is a landmine to which all "strong, independent" women are going to be susceptible in my view: by their own successive "strong, independent" choices they blind themselves to the fact that there are, indeed, larger and more important things in the world than their perceived need for immediate "strong, independent" self-gratification in all particulars (seeing one's own maudlin self-pity as more important than God's anointed sovereign over the English-speaking peoples being a prime example) which means that their lives become filled with metaphorical Larger Spiritual Interest landmines that they can step on at any second. And, as we are seeing, often do.



It seems to me that Jackie Kennedy was far more aware in her heart (where women traditionally go to find their Larger Spiritual Interests) than Princess or Lady Diana ever was of the Larger Spiritual Interests at stake in her life, coming as she did from a time period and a Catholic tradition where duty was not a term that could only be viewed ironically and so delayed her self-gratification choices until both John and Bobby Kennedy were dead (which was still rather short-sighted—John and Bobby Kennedy were not personifications of the United States of America, true, but to a wide swath of the Democratic Party they certainly were at the time that Jackie was choosing to chuck it all in with the net effect that the sanctity of their memories was critically important to the Democratic Party they had both devoted their lives to and that sanctity was certainly bruised irreparably by Jackie choosing to become the trophy wife of a Greek shipping tycoon—but her choices were, at least, less short sighted than Princess Diana's would prove to be)



Jaka gradually merged with my evolving perceptions of Lady Diana and Princess Diana and so became a kind fictional missing link in the long slow erosion of womanhood which began, for Christendom, with Mary the mother of Jesus, leading down, down in our present age down to Jackie Bouvier, down from there to Jackie Kennedy, down from there to Jackie Onassis, down from there to Lady Diana, down from there to Princess Diana and, ultimately—failing the sincere repentance which I see nowhere in evidence in our society—all the way down to the base depths of the Whore of Babylon and the cup of her fornications of John's Apocalypse.



That's the best I can come up with, Matt, old buddy. Hope I haven't scared the new arrival away with my Large Scale Speculations.



Tomorrow: The Honking Great Box from Salt Lake City Doth Arrive



THERE'S MORE FOR MATT DOW…

IN TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAIIILLL!


___________________________________________________

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 #101 (December 21st, 2006)

TWO DAYS TO GO.

519.576.0610


Darrell and I have also been having an on-going debate about realistic art versus non-realistic art (i.e. Rembrandt versus Picasso, as an example) and then we got into "cartooniness versus non-cartooniness" which is the same discussion I keep having in one form or another with Chet centering on the same subject: content (a discussion dropped in November of 2004 and just revived by Darrell this week—yes, I think that might look more than a little insane to some folks). "Your championing of photo realism in comics leaves me cold, however. I like the way your art looks, but whenever anybody else does photo realism in comics, the figures usually look unconvincing, stiff, phoney, the facial expressions unnatural…" Well, granted, but that just means that they aren't doing it right. I maintain that isn't a problem with Al Williamson or Neal Adams or Stan Drake which is why those are the guys whose work I aspire to. It's a lofty plateau to strive for in my view. "Also, when I see someone who put so much effort into making his drawing of the guy look just like a photograph, I end up wondering why he just didn't take a photograph then and save himself the trouble." I'm not a photorealism Absolutist. I'm not a fan of paintings that are so tight that you can't tell from a distance if it's a painting or a photograph. That's not what I see in Williamson or Neal Adams or Stan Drake. It's obviously a drawing but it is very realistic i.e. if the girl's right eye was drawn 1/32nd of an inch lower it would look grotesque. It has to be right where it is and it has to be rendered in such a way as to look life-like, not sitting there dead on the page. That's the challenge and that's what interests me in, say, the Siu Ta strips. To be successful it has to be a good likeness and a good drawing and a good comic strip. It's almost impossible to get all three of those to work. Some of the shots of Siu are good drawings but not good likenesses. Some of them are good likenesses but they're not good drawings. I'll flatter myself that all three are pretty good comic strips—something that would catch your eye if they were on a newspaper page as an ad, as an example. It's like the difference between being able to do a handstand and being able to do a handstand on a teeterboard balanced on top of a rubber ball on top of a highwire thirty feet off the ground. Most cartooning is just doing a handstand. For those of us where doing a handstand is no big trick, we just keep adding more layers of difficulty to it. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate a good idiosyncratic handstand that doesn't pose the same level of difficulty. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life just doing Roach pictures in a cartoon style that comes very easily to me and getting well compensated for it. I could probably invent a Jules Feiffer style for myself that I could do in my sleep. I wouldn't rule out either of those, but I know where the top of the mountain is and the top of the mountain is primo Al Williamson, Neal Adams and Stan Drake. I have to try climbing it and having tried to climb it in various forms, I can say that it's ridiculous to try to make a basic handstand the same as doing a handstand on top of a teeterboard balanced on a ball balanced on a highwire thirty feet off the ground. If you can do it: if you can do a drop-dead gorgeous Stan Drake style Sunday page in a few hours working from photographs and show it to me so that it takes my breath away and THEN you want to say, "But I think this is the REAL art" and then do something in broad brush cartoony style, well, all right then we might have a discussion. But if you CAN'T do it—and all of the guys I know who pooh-pooh Stan Drake and Neal Adams and Al Williamson CAN'T do it—then I think it's just sour grapes.

I agree that the content isn't there. For reasons unknown to me—but which probably has a lot to do with a mass market family audience—none of those guys has ever done a comic-book story or graphic novel that actually had anything important to say (but I think that's true of Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley, too). I would not measure Ben Casey against Maus or Secret Agent Corrigan against Louis Riel, but I find that an unpersuasive argument against photorealism in comics. "Gee, Dave, obviously no one has done photorealism with content so you should probably be teaching yourself to draw like Seth." That just doesn't follow logically to me. The significance to me is the challenge to get a life-like drawing, a good likeness and a good drawing. That IS content if you measure things on a "degree of difficulty" scale as I do. Yeah, there's a lot of photorealism stuff out there that is flat and lifeless. But that just means they only had the chops to get halfway up the mountain. They knew how to trace a photograph and they have their own inking style, but they don't have the chops to get a good likeness or a life-like drawing. "…can you see situation where there are skilled guys who go to different ends of the spectrum to achieve different ends, or does craft, and keeping it close the photorealistic side of things supersede all, for you?" No—there are lots of good things being done from super-cartoony to super-realistic but, to me, it's a matter of reality vs. unreality. If it is more difficult to balance on a teeterboard balanced on a ball balanced on a highwire thirty feet off the ground than it is to do a basic handstand on the sidewalk outside your home then I think for the sake of maintaining a firm grip on reality, that needs to be acknowledged. A handstand is difficult. The other kind is BEYOND DIFFICULT AND VERGES ON THE IMPOSSIBLE. And consequently needs to be acknowledged as being a higher level of achievement. Even as I'm fully aware that it not only won't be acknowledged as a higher level of achievement in the sort of world that we live in—it will be degraded, deprecated, mocked at and dismissed. I just don't think there's any legitimacy in that dismissal and, personally, I would rather achieve at the highest level I'm capable of, fall short and know that I will be degraded, deprecated, mocked and dismissed largely because I aimed so high than to settle for doing something that I can do effortlessly and which is infinitely more popular and lucrative. Why? Beats hell out of me, but it seems to come from the same place as my unwillingness to kowtow to feminism.

Reality versus unreality. I'd rather live in the gutter embracing reality than live like a king embracing unreality. Or Truth and illusion if you prefer.

You have a good day, too, Darrell. Oh, and your postscript ("actually this whole letter's a bit much. I can't believe you made it to the end")…no, you always write an interesting letter even though there's very little that we agree on. And it gave me an excuse to get up on my photorealism hobby horse again.

And here's a new poem by Darrell:


Victoria Day

rahim rants about the computer-

chip-implant-conspiracy, slices

a falafel, gives me half. i wonder

where dorothee is, try to ignore

the television. the television's

louder than hell

(i've always imagined heaven

to be very quiet, like it was

populated solely by librarians).

i wonder where dorothee is.

stupid as pavlov's goat i get

up to check the mail (maybe

she felt the urge to write a

letter for the first time in her

life) but immediately sit back

down, there's no point, there's

no mail delivery today.

today's a holiday.

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU…

IN TODAY'S

BLOG &…MAAAILLL!



___________________________________________________

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.