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

The Blog & Mail

Bookmark it today…Remember!

The Blog & Mail is the only place

On the Entire Internet

that truly LOVES and RESPECTS

And UNDERSTANDS you, 24/7!


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.


There's MORE for YOU

In TODAY'S BLOG AND…

Comic store subliminal advertising

Cerebus Tpb Diamond Order Code

STAROO70E Order Lots…

MAAAIILLL


___________________________________________________

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)

PLEASE

BOOKMARK

THE BLOG & MAIL

ON YOUR COMPUTER

EVEN THOUGH IT ISN'T A BOOK

AND THERE IS NO PHYSICAL MARK

I'VE ALREADY ASKED YOU ONCE, NICELY, AND IF

YOU WON'T COOPERATE YOU'LL LEAVE ME NO RECOURSE

BUT TO ASK YOU, NICELY, AGAIN


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 Slavitt, 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)

Bookmark the Blog and Mail!

Remember! Unlike many of your so-called friends and relatives

We're here for you EVERY Day!



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…

BLOG &…MAAILLL!


___________________________________________________

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 #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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #100 (December 20th, 2006)

THREE DAYS TO GO BEFORE THE

OWNER OF THE

NEXT COMMISSIONED PIECE IS DECIDED

519.576.0610



A very nice letter from Kevin J. Maroney (brother of the late Tim Maroney—remember, I was giving away his returned Fan Club newsletter from the 1980s in an early edition of the Blog & Mail?) dated 26 November:



I hope this letter also finds you well.



Your phone call came at the very start of a lengthy vacation, and then I was swept up in work in its wake, so this long weekend for our Thanksgiving is the first chance I've had to respond.



First, thank you so much for calling. The package containing Tim's newsletter and the Christmas card arrived last week and are now up by the stuffed Cerebus.



Second, in absolutely no way should you feel that this has "blown up in your face" (as you put it on Blog and Mail). I thought that your prize offer was funny, and, knowing Tim he would have, too. (One of our oldest friends said that "You know, I can kind of see Tim in the Andes. He'd have been the one charming a condor down from the sky and roasting it on a spit while the other were having Filet of Human Butt and toothpaste for dessert.") I've spent much time in the last three years dealing with ghosts from Tim's life, and these days they're welcome reminders of his embeddedness in the world.



Third your offer to draw a portrait of Tim was so unexpected that I still have trouble believing it—not in the sense that I think you're having me on or any such, but simply in that it's such an astonishingly generous and apt offer. There's a photo I'd very much like to use as the basis of such a portrait, but unfortunately I only have it in a (quite tiny) electronic thumbnail. I am soliciting my sister and my sister-in-law (Tim's widow) for their recommendations for pictures and should have something for you in a few more days.



Thank you for everything.



Oh, well. Thank YOU. Considering how many people have "jumped ship" over the last number of years, the fact that someone would actually want a relative who had "passed on" to be remembered in any kind of context that included Cerebus or Dave Sim is pretty darned rare. A black and white photo would be best—failing that, something with a lot of contrast between light and dark areas. I'll try and make it a good likeness of the photograph but I'm afraid that's all I can do, not having any mental image of Tim from "way back when." And you're welcome.



Another letter from Scott Berwanger. I'm going to not even mention the rough outline of the contents of this one since I only recently wrote and told him that I've been mentioning the subjects of his letters and quoting from them over the last while. I figure I should probably wait and see if the Pariah King of Comics has now been banished from Scott Berwangerland on a permanent basis or if he's going to be okay with me sharing dispatches from the Anubis Graphic Novel frontlines. In this day and age it could go either way.



And a relatively long letter (probably the result of my whining that I don't get long letters from him anymore) from Darrell Epp, our Resident Poet which I will condense as follows: he sent a full-page strip that he did with David Collier—"Egg Buns"—which I'm not going to run here because it's really too good. Also he sent the original art (I don't know what he was thinking). For all I know my readership consists of you Yahoos and two winos in Oxnard which is not exactly a demographic that you want to use up a rare collaboration on. The offer still stands from Darrell to send you twenty bucks worth of poems if you send him twenty bucks. I repeat, I really like his poems. Darrell Epp, 4-526 King St. East, Hamilton, Ontario, L8N 1E2. His website is www.twohandedman.com. David Collier's works of comix journalism are collected in many fine books like Hamilton Sketchbook and Just the Facts and can be ordered from www.drawnandquarterly.com. E-mail him at collier@hwcn.org. I think what I might do is hang onto the strip and if David gets a new book out that he wants to publicize, I'll run it there, offering him the same deal as Darrell—fill up one day's worth of Blog and Mail and see if you can drum up some business for yourself.



Darrell works at Dofasco in Hamilton, a non-union shop and sends along a funny union story. A guy was caught stealing from the Sobey's warehouse in Milton. Sobey's fired him. He filed a wrongful dismissal grievance that went to arbitration. The union lawyer asked if management had specifically TOLD the guy that stealing the company property was prohibited. Long story short, the company lost, the guy got his job back and the company had to post a sign saying stealing is wrong and will be punished. "True story. Twenty bucks of my paycheque was going to finance shenanigans like that, so I split, and Dofasco is a REALLY pleasant place to work, a well-run company."



He goes on: "Not sure, I might have mentioned this already, but awhile back I got an email from John Totelben, whose work I greatly admire, and he said he was recuperating from having surgery on both eyes…AGAIN! So, if scalpels haven't sliced open your eyeballs lately, you have something else to be thankful for (I think I'm writing this sentence on US Thanksgiving)." Yes, he had mentioned it and I had forgotten to say something last time out. Get well soon, John! I admire the work and I admire the guy. Who can forget what a bolt from the blue the inking on the Moore/Bissette/Totelben was? Like steel engravings. He always gave 110%.



Darrell sends along another Caravaggio (a colour photocopy, that is, Dofasco doesn't pay him that well), this time his David and Goliath which is a corker all right. Evidently David is the young Caravaggio and Goliath the old Caravaggio. "He (Caravaggio) was always drunk, fighting, vandalizing, he once killed a man because the guy had beaten him in a game of tennis and he died at age 37 from injuries sustained in yet another bar-room brawl." [See, that sounds like demonic possession to me: psychiatry just doesn't cover it]



"Do you miss Rumsfeld yet? I sure do." Well, yes, sure. But that's the problem when the American people expect absolute peace as the immediate result of ultimate warfare. Iran and Iraq used to regularly lose tens of thousands of combatants in a single day when they were at war with each other. What's going on Iraq is a tea party compared to that. I still think "stay the course" was the answer and is the answer. Iraq is like a bucking bronco and as long as Uncle Sam can stay in the saddle my money is on Iraq getting broken, not Uncle Sam getting thrown. But, that's what makes a democracy a democracy: not enough voting Americans agree with us so it's now the other team's turn: it's up to the Democrats now. They control both the House and the Senate so it's up to them to come up with a foolproof plan for Iraq that will win the approval of the American people and make it impossible for George W. Bush to veto it (just as they made it impossible for him to hang onto Donald Rumsfeld). The last thing they need is me or anyone else harping at them while they come up with their foolproof plan. Donald Rumsfeld was given a lot of room to manoeuvre from 9/11 to 2006 so it's only right to give the Democrats a lot of room to manoeuvre from 2006 to January, 2009 (and from January, 2009 to January 2013 if they can find a presidential candidate with that foolproof plan). But one way or the other, the only responsibility I see the Republicans having for the next two years is keeping an open mind and accepting that the Democrats may very well come up with a foolproof plan and an ideal candidate for president to implement it. That's what makes a democracy a democracy. Bill Clinton persuaded a BUNCH of Republicans to vote for him. Twice. George W. Bush persuaded a BUNCH of Democrats to vote for him. Twice. A solid plan crosses all party boundaries. Okay, that's all I'm saying. If another Republican gets elected in 2008 I'll start offering my opinions on American politics publicly again. But, for now, it's the other team's turn.



Tomorrow: More Fun with Darrell Epp & Friends



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 #99 (December 19th, 2006)

Only Four Days Left

Until the Final Offer for the next

Commissioned piece is accepted

519.576.0610



Is there any better news than finding out that there are no Committee Agendas waiting for you on the counter at City Hall because there are no Committee meetings until next week? None that I can think of. So I'm putting pedal to the metal to get a bunch more of these done now that I've picked up the mail for the week of December 4. I actually put in three full days on my secret project last week, so Lead Time is King around here right now. Let's see if I can get completely caught up on the mail before lights out.



Before I do that I should mention that I got a phone call from Greg Theakston of Pure Imagination—which has published at least three collections of Steve Ditko's work that I'm aware of—in response to my lead-off piece on Steve Ditko and the possible/possibly- not existence of black magic. Greg told me that the Blog & Mail got linked to a Ditko discussion group and that he was interested to read what I had to say. He also said that I seemed to know what I was talking about when it comes to black magic which isn't really true as far as I can see. My own view is that you can't know about black magic without participating in black magic so I've always avoided anything that could be described as research because, to me, research is participation. I was of the same mind when I was an atheist, oddly enough. I reckoned I had enough tar babies in my life without going looking for any more (particularly on a larger scale). I spoke warily with Greg on the subject, not having any idea if he was way over in Alan Moore territory and was fishing to find out if I was, too.



He then suggested that black magic is very real as far as he's concerned and he cited an example: a woman who had had a very bad day at work and had a splitting headache and went home and her daughter was singing and the woman said to her daughter, Cut out that singing, and the daughter did and never sang another note for thirty-five years. He suggested that examples like that (except for the thirty-five years part) are ubiquitous in our society. Well, I could see what he was saying (power of suggestion and all—and it doesn't take a psychic to pick up on the fact that much if not most communication in our society is from the black/negative end of the spectrum) but I wasn't sure how deeply into his parable I was intended to go. Usually I tackle these things literally, so thirty-five years takes us back to 1971 or roughly the time period of Mr. A (give or take a year). The daughter could be Steve Ditko and his response to the comic-book field's (the mother's?) response to Mr. A. It isn't exactly true that he hasn't sung in thirty-five years—he's been very productive in the last ten for an "indy" creator—but it is true that we haven't seen a whole lot of Mr. A in that time. If that was the point of Greg Theakston's parable, I can't say that that moves it outside of my own construct. If off-putting negative verbalization is a species of black magic or (another possibility) the essence of black magic, then by virtue of working on Doctor Strange Master of Black Magic Steve Ditko might have sown the seeds of Mr. A's own destruction, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind—however inadvertently and I assume it was completely inadvertent—of what had been implanted (at least partly) by him in the mass mind of the then largely adolescent Comic Book Nation, triggering a kind of psychic or spiritual recoil effect by attempting to countermand the power of suggestion implied within and by "Dr. Strange, Master of Black Magic"—black magic can be used for good purposes if you are one of its two or three greatest practitioners—through the countervailing thematic psychic or spiritual currents implied within and by Mr. A—good is good and evil is evil and you can't make use of something which is evil for a good purpose. The maturing adolescent minds, arguably, were appalled to cross the latter track while continuing to pursue the former one and at some deep level recognized that the latter track posed a threat to the former track (which is thematically resonant with what troubled the mass comic-book mind about Mr. A in the first place: you have to choose—Dr. Strange or Mr. A). It's a kind of precursor analogue to Who Watches the Watchmen?: i.e. Who Punishes the Punishers? If you reach the core of a mass mind the answer you are apt to get at all levels from the fictional to the spiritual is a vehement We Do! Followed by an act of spiritual or moral violence which is arguably what happened to Steve Ditko's Mr. A. He was expelled from comic books for not being discreet about what all the costumed heroes were already doing: beating crap out of the bad guys on their own extra-legal initiative. Dr. Strange, on the other hand, has been perennially welcomed home by the mass comic-book mind (for? even though? while?) continuing to advance the view that black magic can be used for good purposes. I'm not sure if the "singing daughter" parable Greg Theakston has presented is intended to be Steve Ditko or Mr. A (or both, at different levels) but I would argue that the answer is to keep singing if there's some larger purpose afoot in your doing so than mere entertainment. Obviously if someone has a splitting headache and you're singing just for the sake of singing then you should probably stop at least for the duration of the headache. If, on the other hand, your singing is in service to what you see as a larger purpose and you suspect that the headache is potentially just a deus ex machina which is intended to keep you from benefiting whatever you see your singing as being in benefit of (and assuming as I always do that Steve Ditko wouldn't do anything creatively unless he thought it was benefit of some Larger Good, however mistaken he might prove to be), then I think you might have to take the hard option and keep singing.



After "literally" I usually go for "extrapolation" and calculate backwards by a comparable time period and see what that does: 1971 minus 35 years or 1936. So, roughly contemporaneous with the dawn of the comic-book field itself, certainly the cusp of the innovation of material being produced exclusively for comic books as distinguished from the reprinting of comic strips. It's an interesting idea if you consider it in its larger sense. What has dominated comic books for their entire seventy-year history? Good guys beating crap out of bad guys (March is the seventieth anniversary of the debut of Siegel and Shuster's "Slam Bradley" in the first issue of Detective Comics). What did everyone get bent out of shape about halfway between then and now? Steve Ditko doing a strip about a good guy beating crap out of bad guys. I mean, it's interesting in the sense that all Steve Ditko really did with Mr. A was to make what was the overriding motif of super-hero comics—vigilantism—into a moral and political theme and to call attention to it as a philosophy. I'm not sure that The Batman's governing philosophy wouldn't be altogether different from that of Mr. A if you could ever get it down on paper. The only difference was that we never got to (or get to) see the public reaction that would result if a Batman scripter cared to examine the subject. Last night Batman put three guys in hospital. Okay, let's bring in the doctor and get him to make the call. Was excessive force used? I would maintain that it depends on how much of a liberal you are. The three guys were pulling a heist at a diamond merchant's. In today's politically correct climate, the fact that the crooks felt compelled to steal diamonds would just be seen as an example of how society had let them down so that they had been reduced to that. The real enemy would be the guy who, by trafficking in diamonds, was supporting the worst aspects of African slave labour and that he deserved to be ripped off in turn. Batman would just be seen as a thug oppressing the downtrodden for his own paternalistic ego gratification. The guys pulling the heist didn't need the crap beaten out of them, they needed to be given a group hug and some social assistance and understanding. I think Steve Ditko was just a little (okay, a lot) ahead of the learning curve in showing what rampant liberalism and a politically-correct media adds up to: Alice in Wonderland Society. I think it's arguable that whatever Batman's interior narration of his life is or was (in a fictional character sense) it couldn't be that far from Mr. A or he wouldn't be doing the things that he's doing: basically combining detective, judge, jury and "punisher" into one extra-legal lifestyle.



Of course thirty-five years also takes us back to the dawn of feminism and in that case you could make me the "daughter" singing about what feminism actually is (as I perceive it) and feminists in general as the mother (telling me to knock it off). Of course if they think they're going to keep me from singing for thirty-five years just by telling me to knock it off, dey don't know me vewwy weww, do dey?



I do think that seeing verbalized negativity as the sum total of black magic is probably something that would leave you vulnerable in too many ways to actual black magic—that is, those who genuinely traffic in and who are genuinely consumed with large scale malignancy and (to me, a key point) those who are unaware that they are possessed by malign spirits because, not having prayer or any kind of connection to God, they are just "easy pickings" for the demonic natures floating around (as far as I can see) pretty much everywhere. In my own case, I have never met a person who I was pretty sure was demonically possessed who had the least awareness that that might be the case. To them, they just suddenly got severely honked off about something and just, you know, let fly. Although I will occasionally experience someone where I would catch a momentary glimmer of self-awareness in their eyes ("What am I getting so freaking angry about?") it would usually be gone in the same instant I could see it—and needless to say, suggesting that the root cause is demonic possession is usually a non-starter with such individuals. Mr. Theakston's view was that you defeat black magic by just not allowing it access, by adhering to reality and recognizing when someone is trying to manipulate you to his or her own advantage (the working definition of black magic) with verbalized negativity, to sow doubt within you or to make you feel bad or worthless or (most especially) to provoke you into a display of anger—and then (and I found this innovative) calling them on it: i.e. "You're a terrible (witch/warlock/magician/sorceress)! You're attempting to make my life bad by saying bad things to me or about me but you're doing it in such a transparent and ineffective way that you're just making yourself ridiculous." I certainly endorse that programmatically (it's definitely the approach I've taken with feminism over the last twelve years or so) as far as it goes but, personally, I sure wouldn't want to venture very far out in the world without praying five times a day, observing a Sabbath, acknowledging God's sovereignty, reading Scripture aloud and so on now that I've seen all that there is out there (up close and sulphurous, as it were). I asked him if he wouldn't mind posting his theory to the Yahoo newsgroup and he told me the reason he was phoning to tell it to me was to save himself having to type it. I quite understood. He's obviously on the cutting edge of advanced awareness of the extent to which computers are devouring people's lives by turning them into compulsive typists. As someone who ONLY types the Blog & Mail (i.e. not having bottomless e-mails to deal with on a daily basis) I'm happy to take "one for the team" here. If I paraphrased him badly or misunderstood him completely, I'm sure he'll let me know.

Anyway, I have to say that I was VERY flattered to get a call from THE Greg Theakston who has been a devoted citizen of the Comic Book Nation for as long as I can remember. In fact (I'll date myself here) he even pioneered a process called Theakstonizing which involved leaching the colour out of printed comic book pages in order to make possible the reprinting of comic-book stories—for which no printing plates or stats or film still existed—back in those pre-photoshop days which certainly led those legions of Golden Age devotees like myself to sing his praises morn and night when Theakstonizing was the only way we were going to get to see early Simon and Kirby, as an example.



Not to mention giving me a painless way to fill up this December 19 posting.



Tomorrow: Actually answering the mail, I promise.



There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY'S

BLOG &…MAAAAILLL!


___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #98 (December 18th, 2006)

It's TRUE! Anyone making the best offer on

The Next Commissioned Piece

Is free to steal someone else's idea—just not an

Actual commission

i.e. if you want your own Dr. Strangeroach you got it

but it will be completely different from Sean's

Dr. Strangeroach

The next commission (God willing) will be started December 27. I'll be accepting offers up until Saturday of this week

If you want to make an offer call

519.576.0610


– Well, this is going to be old news by now, but I was at the Victory Café on Markham Street in Toronto November 30 for Rob Walton's launch of Canada's newest graphic novel, Ragmop. Old people like Rob and me undoubtedly remember when Rob was self-publishing Ragmop through Planet Lucy Press around the time of the Spirits of Independence Tour. Anyway, I persuaded Trevor Grace to come out and do some videotaping (he is now the official Blog & Mail Live cameraman of record), starting at Peter Pan in Toronto where Rob and I did some slapstick (which Chester vehemently declined to participate in) and talked a bit about the book. Then Chet and I left Rob and Trevor to their own devices which involved picking up Rob's daughter Grace (one of the characters in Ragmop) and taking her to get her hair done. Chet and I did the Beguiling thing and then went browsing at a local bookstore for a couple of hours before heading over to the Vic where we helped Rob unload cartons of books from his car and I did a short interview with Grace (and again some slapstick as can be seen in the preview photos) as we waited for the show to begin. Chet and Trevor and I had a good chance to talk to Rob's brother Brad (who did the Adam Smith strips as a back-up in Ragmop and which are reprinted in the new graphic novel) shared church-going experiences—undoubtedly a first at the Victory Café!

Rob's a big believer in conspiracy theories and I'm not so we always reach an impasse in our discussions of most of the subjects that he covers, tongue-in-cheek, in Ragmop. Chet tried to force the issue at lunch by asking why the book isn't annotated, page-by-page, so we could get some definitive answers to what Rob believes and what Rob doesn't believe and what sort of documentary evidence he has to support those beliefs. Rob pointed out that the book has an extensive bibliography, but that seemed kind of evasive to Chet—obviously we aren't going to read dozens of conspiracy theory books to try and figure out which theories Rob subscribes to and which he doesn't. But there was no way that Rob was going to get pinned down any further than that: apart from holding out the possibility of another book.

Anyway, the book—our profound political differences to one side—is a real old-fashioned comedic romp: from the cover modeled on Jack Davis' legendary It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World movie poster from 1963 to the 1960s Marvel-style pin-up pages and all points left and right. Highly recommended at the cover price of $29.99 US (the Beguiling has it at $35.00 Canadian). Rob's Diamond rep told him the book is already on the Star System so interested retailers should be able to track down a copy or many copies over there.

And with any luck at all, the footage we shot will be available for viewing on YouTube as soon as Trevor can get a disk to Jeff Tundis which should have been sometime last week from where you are or next week from where I am (December 4).

It was a double launch night including Jim Zubkavich's The Makeshift Miracle with a Power Point review of some preliminary sketches and some finished pages (he wasn't enough of a ham to act any of it out). The back cover copy reads


How many times have you wished for a different life? [um—never, actually]


How many moments have you let pass you by? [um—none that I can think of. See what I mean about me being outside of any demographic group?]


A young boy named Colby Reynolds searches for meaning in the world around him and discovers a place where dreams can come true, if he's willing to pay the price. Along the way he'll see sights he's never fathomed and encounter hidden truths about himself he'll wish he never knew.


I had already bought Ragmop for $35 when Chris Butcher (through whose courtesy/technological expertise you get all of Chester's photos posted to the Blog & Mail) announced that you could get both books for $40 as a Launch Party Bonus Value… fortunately Amy remembered selling me the Ragmop (as she later remembered where I left my umbrella!) so, hey, for 5 bucks I'm definitely there. I was first in line to get my copy autographed, taking advantage of that shambling Toronto moment when everyone is still unsure if it's okay to get something signed even though the creator is just sitting there with pen in hand waiting. And Jim Zubkavich had actually heard of me and said that he was the one who should be asking for an autograph which was nice of him to say. Of course given that the Beguiling is your Fantagraphics/Drawn & Quarterly headquarters in the GTA I'm usually just flattered if no one spits on me (and, so far, no one has—still, I always check to make sure the little Cerebus head is on the sandwich board advertisement out front of Honest Ed's).

Scott McCloud was a big supporter of Jim's early on and provides the headline cover quote "A melancholy, enchantingly drawn meditation on imagination and yearning." Jim gets his pages done (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) in and around his full-time job and his readers cut him virtually no slack so he was able to finish "Makeshift Miracle" pretty much on schedule. Check it out at www.makeshiftmiracle.com. And apologies to Jim for not getting Chet to take a photo of us.

I'm going to try and make it a habit to go to the first hour or so of Industry Night at the Vic, the last Thursday of every month. Things get started around 7 pm and if I leave around 8:30 I can make it to the bus terminal in time for the 9:30 bus.

The Industry Night web presence is www.industrynight.blogspot.com or you can e-mail them at industry_night@yahoo.ca. Their motto? "Maintaining the spirit of the convention after party year-round." See you there, God willing, December 28.

Next: Mail's in. Thank you, Thing.


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 #97 (December 17th, 2006)

UPCOMING SCRIPTURE READINGS

AT

THE REGISTRY THEATRE

CORNER OF WEBER AND FREDERICK ST.

IN DOWNTOWN KITCHENER

January 7 – The Complete JOSHUA

January 21 – The Complete JUDGES

January 28 – The Complete FIRST SAMUEL

February 4 – The Complete SECOND SAMUEL

All 1 pm start times!


Dear Mr. Sim,


When I recently purchased a copy of the mini-comic Cerebus Readers in Crisis, Jeff Seiler accidentally send me a signed and numbered copy instead of a plain ol' regular copy. In the interest of karmic balance, I offered to send him the difference in cost or send you a check for the food bank. He left it up to me, so enclosed please find a donation for the food bank you support, as mentioned in the Blog and Mail (the check's in US dollars; if converting to Canadian is a hardship, please destroy the check and let me know and I'll figure out a way to get Canadian funds to you, though when I was last in Niagara Falls they didn't care if I spent American money, so hopefully it's the same where you are).


Anyway, I'm a fan of your work since around 1979, and bought Cerebus for a few years, but then college came around and I quit reading comics for many years, becoming instead enamoured with that other form of escapism known as alcohol (I've since gotten over that particular crutch). I always thought I'd read Cerebus in full someday, and only recently undertook reading the whole series from start to finish. I just finished Church & State. I understand I have interesting reading ahead.


A few incidents in the last few years have brought me, hopefully, closer to God, and I spend a good deal of time these days thinking about my faith. It's interesting that I decided to return to reading Cerebus at this point in my life, and following your spiritual journey at the same time I'm making mine (well, I guess our whole lives are a spiritual journey in some sense). I'm a Christian and trying to determine the proper path God wants me to take (raised a Polish-Catholic but recently became a Lutheran). I'm reading and trying to learn; it's a very difficult journey at times, especially during these times when everyone seems to be moving away from the church. My wife left her previous husband because he became a Jehovah's Witness, so it's difficult to broach the subject of faith with her, as she still habors resentments. I wanted to let you know that I appreciate you sharing your struggles in the Blog and Mail. It helps me at times with mine.


Anyway, best of luck with your future endeavours. Please keep creating; it keeps you sane.


Actually, I'm hoping to get to an uninterrupted stretch of creativity pretty much as soon as I wrap up the last couple of letters I have to answer here in the Sunday Edition. With any luck at all, pretty close to three weeks. I quite agree with you that sharing the nature of our own struggles can help others with their own—and particularly letting someone know when they've helped you in some way as you did here (and as I now attempt to return the favour). Obviously I have doubts about the religious content of the Sunday Edition and what it might be doing to my career, so it's gratifying to hear from people like yourself (and Steve Peters who called the other day) that this is helpful in some way. And thanks for the financial contribution. Since we're still only getting five or six people out for the Scripture at the Registry readings, the Cerebus readers who are buying the DVDs from Trevor and the occasional cheque like yours are making all the difference—and there's absolutely no problem with US cheques. I just write on the back "For Deposit Only The Food Bank of Waterloo Region" and that's that!


Obviously I can't be of very much help to you with your marriage. From the time that I started praying and fasting and reading scripture (and sleeping—the "day of rest" part I think should be taken literally) all day on Sunday and downscaled my life to one bed, one chair, one bowl, one plate, etc. I pretty much knew that that was it as far as marriage and me were concerned. I think if you have committed to marriage then you need to perform a definite balancing act between your faith and your wife. If God leads you in a different direction, God leads you in a different direction but if your gut instinct tells you your marriage is a core element of His Plan for you, then I think you have to put in the work that that's going to require and, above all, be open with your wife in discussing how the two of you are going to make it work. She has to understand that God comes first but you also have to be open to making sure that she isn't made to feel like a sloppy afterthought in your own life together. One of the big problems you're going to face is finding anyone to talk to about this if your wife isn't a Lutheran, herself. If she is a Lutheran, it will probably be a lot easier. As Christians the important thing is keeping God and Jesus as pre-eminent entities in your life, so she'll be facing the same problem you are.


Good luck and thanks for writing. And thanks again for the donation to the Food Bank of Waterloo Region.

And speaking of Jeff Seiler:


Dear Dave,


Not wanting to inundate you with letters, I'll try to keep this one short(er). I would have waited until you replied to my previous letter that you excerpted in the blogandmail on Sunday last, but I'm a) not sure you'll respond to it beyond the blogandmail excerpts and 2) wanting to get this latest anecdote out while it's still fresh to mind.


I went to church on Sunday. Yeah, the synchronicity of that just hit me. But it was just coincidental. Like you, I'm not much of a churchgoer. First of all, I prefer the one-on-one communion with God over the group religious experience—there's way too much "pray for this, pray for that, pray for the missionaries in Turkey, pray for brother Jim's gout", etc. going on for my tastes. Secondly, like Groucho, "I would never join a club that would have me as a member."


But, I decide to check this church out because, 1) I find myself with the somewhat pressing need to be a regular, for a while at least, because the one college that is willing to accept me for certification training as a full-time teacher is a Christian school and requires church membership or a good recommendation from a church acquaintance as a part of the application process, and b) I have gotten to know several of the guys at the private school affiliated with that particular church through my frequent coverage of their school's football team as part of my work for The Dallas Morning News over the last four years. Since I got to know these very nice guys, I thought I should check out their church, as it is within a short walking distance from my new residence.


So, I went to church. As has been my experience (I really try to think of it as a sort of extended coincidence) the first time I tried a new church, this one, the pastor used his entire sermon to talk about giving. He broadened his purview a bit more than some have, to include generosity (as in the Christian characteristic of a spirit of generosity), but he made a point of mentioning that it takes over a million dollars a month to run the church and its entire ministry (it's one of those mega churches that are so ubiquitous in Texas—everything's bigger in Texas). Later, he pointed out that during the weekend of the Men's Retreat in east Texas that the church paid for, giving to the church went down by 20% and then reminded us that it takes over a million dollars a month to run the church and its ministry—"so you can do the math", he actually said.


I did the math. That means that, out of the 350 men that he said went to the retreat, they alone account regularly for some $200,000 in weekly tithes to the church. That's roughly $600 a week per person/family.


Wow. I felt guilty for not throwing in a fiver, and the guy next to me jokingly rebuked me during the sermon for passing the bucket to him empty (he repeated the pastor's joke, "you can't hitch a U-Haul to your hearse" by saying to me, "that's not your car I saw that U-Haul hitched to out in the parking lot, is it?"---yeah, I was tempted to tell him I didn't drive a car to church, but I let it go).


Now, as you probably know, Christians are exhorted (repeatedly) to give "the first dime of every dollar", not the 2.5% that Muslims are expected to give to the zakat, so that $600 a wekk was just mind-boggling to someone like me who will probably have a gross income of around [amounts deleted] on the books for 2006.


So that was one jarring aspect of Sunday's going-to-church event. The other thing was the sheer mass of humanity (I would estimate about 2500 people for one of three Sunday services). I do get the whole communing-with-others-in-the-presence-of-God and "wherever two or more are gathered, there am I" and the benefits that a church can offer to its members when they are in need. But I just lean to the small church experience, if at all.


And then Sunday's experience included the state-of-the-art digital in-house camera work, including remote controlled crane cameras and what looked to be at least high definition if not plasma televisions for the closed-circuit or same-time-live broadcast of the sermon. There must have been a dozen television monitors sprinkled throughout the church, including the one on which they showed the taped message from the senior pastor and his wife to the first-time guests in the guest room that I was invited to after the service. They did give me a free Bible, though, so that was nice. But (small quibble) it was the New Living Version, a revision of The Living Bible that came out in the 70s that put the Bible in everyday current language, while what I was looking for was the New King James (from which they quoted on the television broadcast), so that I could at least try to follow along when I come up there for a Scripture reading.


Oh, and the icing on the cake was the announcement (several times) that the church choir was featured on a local television news program last Wednesday and that the station is holding a vote for the several choirs they will feature weekly to see, via Internet voting, which choir is the best in the metroplex. That one stirred the bile a little bit. I mean, if your choir is designed for the purpose of uplifting God and augmenting the worship of God, then exhorting your parishioners to vote early and often (my words, not theirs) for your choir as being better than all the rest that are featured on the television news segment seems to be serving man a whole lot more than it is serving God. That's my opinion, anyway, for what it's worth.


Everyone was very polite and nice, though. Overall, it was a pleasant enough experience, but still quite jarring.


I'm afraid it is going to be an uphill battle to meet that application criterion (the potential hypocrisy of my going to church just to meet it notwithstanding). I wonder whether they would accept a nice recommendation from a (somewhat) reclusive Canadian Muslim.


Oh, well, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.


Hoping that your readings of the 12th and of the 19th

went well, I remain


Yours beyond 300,


Jeff Seiler

Hey, Jeff! Thanks for helping me fill up the Sunday Edition once again. I'm certainly standing by in the event that you want someone to vouch for the fact that you are one of a small handful of believers of God in the context of the discussion group and that you stood your ground against universal opposition in defending the validity of my belief in demonic possession as a genuine present-day threat (which I suspect you don't share) and that you would not give in against pretty relentless pressure to denounce me, with your psychology background, as clinically insane. Personally, I find that a more impressive demonstration of faith in God than regular church attendance. If you need me to put that more coherently in a letter, I'll do my level best.


I used to actively denounce Large Scale Organized Religion (regularly late-night viewing of the PTL Club with Jim and Tammy Faye was a major impetus behind Church & State) but at this point I have to confess that I don't know what to think. Personally, I believe there are a lot better used for a million dollars a month for faith-based purposes, but I also have no idea what's at stake or where we are in God's Plan. It's very possible that the Texas mega-churches are the last and best hope of Fundamentalist Christianity in the war against Terrorist Islam—a matter of Go Large or Go Home?—and that all of the Internet voting, plasma TV stuff is a slightly unsavoury but essential component of making sure there is still a Large Christian Standard around which to rally. As opposed to, say, the Anglican Church which seems to be determined to wish itself into non-existence through the active embracing of ethical relativism and feminist-based social engineering. A lot depends on how much of their livelihood that $600 a week constitutes, I think. For some of those guys it might be half their paycheque and for others just the skimmings from the petty cash box. The Synoptic Jesus praised the widow who contributed a single mite because it was all her substance rather than the Ostentatious Big Spenders in the Temple. I don't think that rule has been made null and void in the interim.

Same thing with the Christian college telling you that they want regular church attendance or someone to vouch for you. You can call that "compulsion in religion"—which is theoretically something we're fighting Terrorist Islam over—but it can also be a necessary rear-guard action against rampant secular humanism and corruption. Unless we, as God-fearing men, start linking ourselves up and getting some semblance of standards back onto the table, we're not far from turning society into the gray interchangeable mass that none of us wants it to be. And with THAT territory, I think, comes the acceptance that different people are going to perceive of different ways to avoid the fate we seem to be on a collision course with. For me, it's scripture and feeding the poor, no church. But I certainly can't fault the reasoning of anyone who sees the situation differently.


Particularly if they can raise a million dollars a month doing it.


___________________________________________________

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 #96 (December 16th, 2006)

One of the current contenders for

The Next Commissioned Piece, John G, is interested in

Cerebus as Han Solo and Jaka as Princess Leia.

That led to an interesting question: can someone else steal his

Idea and offer more for it?

The Answer on Monday in the Blog & Mail.

The Final Offer for The Next Commissioned Piece

will be accepted one week from today!

519.576.0610



Five letters this month, reading into the Cerebus Archive record, from Adventure Comics' Scott Berwanger re: his magnum opus Anubis which he intends to complete before even considering publication. He's still sticking with his plan to alternate doing full-sized black and white paintings of enlarged panels and alternating them with the production of the graphic novel itself in digest instalment form. He got a very good reaction at SPX this year and is obviously psyched to keep forging ahead. He has two 40-page episodes left to complete and then he promises to send me a two-volumed boxed set of the full completed first third of the story (also known as Book I).

The more I think of it, the more I think that it's an interesting approach to take—to promote your magnum opus by exhibiting paintings adapted from it in a gallery setting. I still think Anubis will do well in comic-book stores when it's done, but I can certainly understand Scott's wariness about the environment given that he was one of the mid-90s casualties of the mini-boom and bust.

You can write an offer him encouragement and/or money at Adventure Comics, 1100 Belle Vista Ct. Severna Park, MD, 21146.


* * * * *

A small mystery solved! Long-time correspondent and fellow Creators' Bill of Rights Dialogue participant, Robert Rowe of Reseda CA, was the mysterious Californian who showed up at the exhibit at the Salt Lake City Library and Night Flight store the day before the appearance! He sent along a photo of Barry Windsor Smith and Roy Thomas from a convention in the early 1970s that he found at http://members.tripod.com/mluebker/73_NYC.html. Looks like it's from the time period of Barry's guitar solo on-stage at Carnegie Hall (see, I'm old enough to remember that Barry once did a guitar solo on-stage at Carnegie Hall).


* * * * *


Larry Hart, uber Yahoo: Long time no hear from! He sends along an article by David Brin "An Issue to Help Conservatives to Do the Right Thing"—that is, to vote Democrat in the recent congressional elections. Much obliged, Larry, but personally I'm going to enjoy a time out from politics for the next two years now that the Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, having written pretty much non-stop on Where I Think We Are and What I Think We Should Do since 9/11 (starting with "Islam, My Islam" and "Why Canada Slept"). It's now up to the Democrats to decide what to do about Iraq specifically and Extremist Islam in general with an eye toward persuading the rest of their country and the rest of the world to follow their lead in November 2008. Good luck!

Those of you who enjoyed Cerebus Readers in Crisis #1 which debuted at SPACE last year (and which is still available from Jeff Seiler at 2400 Queens Court, Carrollton, TX, 75006 or you can get his e-mail address pretty regularly either here or at groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus depending on where you're reading this) will be glad to know that there's a second issue in the works and Larry's hard at work on his story called "Following Larry" which begins with his death and "explores some of the choices I had made and continue to make afterwards". Evidently it involves a total babe named Stacey (which I hope, for his sake, is his wife's name) of whom Larry sent a photocopy of an early sketch. Hubba hubba.

Having missed the debut of the first issue you don't want to miss Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2, do you? No you certainly don't, so this is another good spot to plug the 2007 edition of SPACE taking place at the Aladdin Shriner Complex in Columbus Ohio in April. Details at www.backporchcomics.com. Tell Bob, Kathy and Megan Corby Dave Sim sent you over there.


* * * * * *


Claude (Just Call Me Sarge) Flowers, uber uber Yahoo, having gotten tired of waiting for a response from me on the excerpts he's pulled out from Collected Letters 2—which are a good selection and a definite "go"—and which will be running in this space in the not-too-distant future…

[the problem is that I don't know how distant in the future: I've had to reassess whether we're doing the book Print on Demand or doing it through whomever turns out to be the new Aardvark-Vanaheim "printer of record"—narrowing the list of candidates has been a full-time job the last couple of weeks. Until I know that, I don't want to solicit for the book and until I know when I'm going to solicit the book I can't say when would be a good time to run the excerpts here. In the Army that's called SNAFU]

…decided to take the cow by the horns and send an e-mail to the Friends of Lulu quoting from my "Why not a feminist petition against censorship?" every-25th-of-the-month stance here at the Blog and Mail and asking what their official position is.

Which might account for the snow currently blanketing British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. He sent the e-mail on the 25th of November, I'm writing this on the 28th of November and then faxing it to him. Who knows what might be going on when this appears nine days before my next mention of the "free ride" feminists get in our society?


Alex Banchitta writes:


I'm currently taking a portfolio class with Phil Jimenez and it seems like no matter what I do everyone improves drastically faster than me. In all honesty, I'm not working excessively hard in this class but most likely as hard or even harder than the other students, but I guess just due to lack of natural talent I can't compete with these kids. Is this something I should worry about? Is it better to just lock myself away and draw all day or should I really study art more and try a different approach to working? I'm sorry if these questions aren't worded well, I just feel like in general that I'm not drawing faster and I'm not improving at the rate everyone else seems to be. Should I just start drawing a page a day and wait till I get to page one thousand for the good ones? Or is there something else I should consider doing?


Well, Alex, looking at your samples it seems unlikely that you're going to turn into a world class illustrator, but at the same time guys who have started out with less of a grasp of what "finish" and "polish" are than you do have gone on to have successful careers in the comic-book field (me for one). The fact that you admit that you aren't working "excessively hard" and measuring your efforts against the efforts of others I would suggest is a bad sign. As with everything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Gene Day and I were rated very low on the Southern Ontario totem pole of wannabe cartoonists in 1973-74, but by 1979 we were the only ones still working in comic books on a full-time basis and making a living at it. Gene Day had a phenomenal work ethic and I learned that from him. I also remember Howard Chaykin telling me how badly he wanted Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser when DC got the license to do it. It was between him and Alan Lee Weiss. Weiss did a couple of display pieces over the weekend and Howard pulled a couple of all-nighters to produce a (relatively) huge amount of material which was less accomplished than Weiss' but which gave the editor a clearer idea of what he was going to do with the material. Chaykin got the gig.

The early bird catches the worm, all that stuff. It's as true today as it was in our grandfathers' time.

Alex mentions hearing my interview at www.indyspinnerrack.com. It was a lot of fun to do and I hope to be back on the show in the future. John Tran played me the "Dave Sim You're My Hero" song that one of the hosts came up with and that ran at the end (?) of that episode (?) and I was laughing until tears were coming out of my eyes. Very, very funny stuff. Now I have to write the definitive "Indy Spinner Rack" tribute song and perform it—hopefully on their second anniversary show next September.


* * * * *


Okay, coming to the end of the mail for the week of November 27.

Just heard from John Frizelle (aka Romero Burruel). I wonder if he ever saw the letter I wrote him in Collected Letters 2004 (page 81) that got returned as having an insufficient address. I not only recognized his work when it came in, I recognized his bathroom from his earlier autobiographical work! Oh, hey, this is the guy from Philly that I talked to on the phone that time (it was a rare instance where I had come to the end of answering my mail and his phone number was on his letter that had come in with samples of his work so I just up and called him, on a Saturday night I think it was). That's a pretty good testimony to his work, I think.


Anyway, he writes:


Ah, Hey there, Dave!

Just starting the big 26-year project here. Not sure if this issue fits in or not, hence the #0. But…I can't think of anything cooler to do than put out a self-published issue of empty as often as I can until I've got something.

I've read & re-read & digested your Guide to Self-Publishing so many times, I believe I've gained a fair amount of practicality.

I'll print enough to keep a few on the shelves of my local comic shops & try to spread a few around when the opportunity arises but…well…I work a full-time job and have accepted the fact that I may well be working for my own satisfaction only for the next ten years.

OK. Take care!


John


What's kind of ironic is that empty #0 is concerned with John losing his full-time job as a cook and making all these resolutions to use the money he's saved up to buy himself the time to really bear down on his comics work and his song-writing. Reading between the lines it sounds as if he ended up doing the same thing we all end up doing—resolving to work and then ending up doing just about anything except working (like me doing the Blog & Mail and now, right now, here I am with the Blog & Mail written up to December 17 and it's November 28 so hopefully I will be working on my secret project and my commentaries on Mark for the better part of the next seventeen days) (oh, except I'm going to Toronto on Thursday to try a Blog & Mail Live centred on the release party for Rob Walton's Ragmop trade paperback at the Victory Café) (oh, and I still have to send the number of skids worth of books we have at Recker to the two candidates for our new printer) (oh and Christkindl is on at City Hall December 6 to the 10th) (oh, and I'll have to write another article for Versus #4 when #3 comes in) (oh, and…) (well…you get the idea).

This is a very solid outing for John, though. He's working in a photorealism style that's probably closest to Michael Zulli's point of view and style. He needs to go a little heavier on the lettering (some of it is breaking up in the reproduction). But, as I say, the last time I saw his work was two years ago and I knew whose work I was looking at the moment it came in and that's really the best criteria that I have for recommending someone. "Here, this guy's work stuck with me enough that I know that that's his live-in Asian girlfriend in the one panel, even though he makes no reference to her as such."

Empty #0 is published by Midnight Lamp Escape Plan, 4404 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA, 19104 and sells for $4.00. I definitely recommend it for guys wanting to psych themselves up for the big creative push. This is Romero Burruel at his most psyched.


There's MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S

Blog &….MAAAAILLLL!



___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #95 (December 15th, 2006)

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far to

The Next Commissioned Piece

Which I'll be starting December 27

As of December 7 the highest offer so far is $850

I'll be accepting offers until December 23

Your Direct Line Commission Phone Number is

519.576.0610

Our operators are standing by


Answering the mail at the speed of light so I can get back to some uninterrupted work on my secret project: A form letter from Charles Brownstein at the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund dated October 23 with an update on the Georgia vs. Gordon Lee case:


The charges Lee faces arise from accidentally distributing Alternative Comics #2, a Free Comic Book Day anthology including an excerpt from Nick Bertozzi's "The Salon" depicting the first meeting between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. On three pages of the eight-page section, Picasso is depicted in the nude, a factually accurate detail for the period during which the story is set. There is no sexual content in the story. The comic was inadvertently distributed to a minor during a 3-hour Halloween promotion where 2,200 comics were given away. Lee offered an apology, but it was refused and within days he was arrested and fighting for his survival.


Your support helped the Fund knock out both felony counts of "Dissemination of Unsolicited Nudity/Sexual Conduct" and three of the five misdemeanour "Harmful to Minors" counts. Lee still faces two remaining misdemeanour charges of "Distribution of Harmful-to-Minors Materials," each of which carries penalties of up to 12 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. To date we've spent over $60,000 defending Mr. Lee. We anticipate spending more if the case goes to trial, where our odds of prevailing will be strong. It's a battle we will continue to fight, but we can't do that without your support.


I haven't renewed my membership yet, but I certainly intend to and I encourage everyone who is a comic-book fan to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. You can find out how to help at info@cbldf.org or http://www.cbldf.org. Also, they should have something up there now—or soon—about auctioning or raffling the #3/50 Lithograph No.1: Neil Gaiman. Basically, I did a Lithograph of Neil back in 2004 and now, every year, he and I sign and number one of them and he adds his own artistic enhancements to the three images of his face.

* * * * * * *


The return address was from "Crumb Clone" in Michigan so that pretty much narrowed it down to Nate Neal, of Hoax (along with Karl Kressbach and Lydia Gregg) fame. Uh-oh. I had been pretty blunt in correspondence with Karl about the fact that I found Nate's work to be too heavily influenced by Crumb, so I might be about to get an epistolary earful. Nope, no letter, just a new comic book, which is entitled Picture of a Bison. Actually it isn't called that, it just has a cave-style picture of a bison overtop of an image of a caveman drawing on a cave wall. The inside front cover has the picture of the bison looking the other way and the title The Sanctuary 1, so I'm going to throw caution to the winds and say that The Sanctuary isn't just the name of this instalment, it's the name of the series.

It's definitely not Crumb Clone material. Instead it's a genuine and pretty imaginative attempt to explain where, how and why those ancient cave paintings of animals (and the outlines of human hands) co-exist. Nate has invented his own primitive language ("Fft! Ka nu kas!") and tells the story of a small tribe of cave-dwellers without English translations, so he's set a pretty daunting task for himself and possibly for the reader. The last person to attempt an extended narrative in a fictitious language was Chester Brown with Underwater but that was another set of problems, I suspect. It's a pretty generous helping that he offers for $3.95 US (40 pages in black and white), so turning this into the success it could be is probably a matter of getting it out on a regular schedule and keeping all of the instalments in print.

You can order a copy or copies from OM Comics, 55 Ionia NW Ave Apt. 315, Grand Rapids, MI 49503 or e-mail him at natoonea@hotmail.com.


* * * * * *


Bob Corby sent along a Day Prize nominee comic book that slipped through the cracks…

(Aardvark-Vanaheim awards a $500 cash prize and a plaque to the winner selected from the previous year's exhibited comic books at SPACE Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo—for details on next year's SPACE which is being held at the Aladdin Shrine Complex in Columbus Ohio or to sign up as one of the 150 exhibitors, go to www.backporchcomics.com)

…Love in a Time of Super-Villains (with cover cleverly adapted from a 1970s era DC romance comic) answers the question that I'm sure we've all asked ourselves from time to time: what would happen if Wonder Woman got roaring, amnesiac level drunk and ended up marrying Superman in Las Vegas? They aren't called Wonder Woman and Superman, but you'll get the idea (wink wink). Very funny material from Michael Wood of Space Monkey Comics, 4 Alpen Strasse, Latrobe, PA, 15203. Contact him at HATEMAIL@SPACEMONKEYONLINE.COM . 24 pages for $2.50 (it says on the cover).


* * * * *


James Turner sends along issue 6 of Rex Libris. Lots of inside thinking on where he's going with the next few issues, so I don't want to run that part of his letter (I'm trying to give myself amnesia so I won't remember them myself!). He does say that he's wanted to introduce book reviews to the back of each issue but hasn't had the time to do it yet.


I just read Christopher Hitchens Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man which is either a short book or a long essay. Still quite interesting. A moderate who got caught between the crown and the revolutionaries in France and never failed to argue for reason, responsibility and democracy. Before that I read Jared Diamond's Collapse, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. I loved his earlier book, Guns, Germs and Steel. But writing reviews of these texts would take a bigger time and attention investment than I really feel I can afford. I'm already behind on the current issue, and haven't gotten it plotted completely (even in the vague way I plot before starting on the pages). No doubt I'm over-thinking it, but I feel obliged to give their books a worthy review, and I'm not sure I can pull that off without seriously impinging on illustration and comic content time. Perhaps when I get ahead of schedule, or become faster at turning out issues (the style change has resulted in Rex sucking up more time) I'll give it a whirl.


He's added greyscales to the pages which definitely gives the book a different look (and certainly appear time-consuming). My own view is that the fun of Rex Libris is the riff on 1960s Marvel super-hero comics, using an intergalactic librarian as the title character with all the grandiose "When Titans Clash" style dialogue which James is so great at. I'd probably still buy the book if he just ran it with thumbnail sketches. But, maybe that's just me. As far as I'm concerned, the "Barry's Brain" note from fictitious publisher B. Barry Horst is worth the price of admission, as is the side feature "How to Read Advanced Visicomboics" ("The Innovation of the Millenium!"). Besides, Dan Vado's kids probably need new shoes or something. Call 1-800-8668929 for a free Slave Labor catalogue or click on www.slavelabor.com

I'll be back to talk to you some more about Rex Libris when I've finished my introduction for the trade paperback shipping in March.

Tomorrow: Much More Mail!


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 #94 (December 14th, 2006)

The Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81

Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186



Thursday December 14 -

It was interesting to me, in the sense of "downright peculiar" that the Marvel Masterworks Dr. Strange volume ends with issue 141. There are only 35 Steve Ditko-illustrated Dr. Strange stories: Strange Tales #110, 111, 114 to 146. If you reprint those 35 stories, you have the complete Steve Ditko Dr. Strange. So why omit five of them? Conversely, why reprint up to issue 168 in the Essential volume? Am I just paranoid, or do I smell Marvel Legal Department here? Are these two sides of the same coin, both meant to diminish the importance of Steve Ditko to Dr. Strange if there's a movie in the works? No way to say for certain. But it is unfortunate since those last five issues really get better and better in terms of Steve Ditko's drawing abilities. 141 looks as if it was shot from really bad stats, but 142 has a crystal-sharp clarity that left me more than a little agog at the confidence of his brush work coupled with his pen work. I go back and forth between thinking he does some of it with pen and thinking he does all of it with brush, alternating thin lines and thick lines. In black and white, it's pretty apparent —in a way that it isn't in colour—that he's only working with two or three densities of line and he knows exactly how to integrate them and to spot his blacks on the run (between Spider-man and Dr. Strange he must have been producing upwards of thirty fully inked pages in a given month). It really jumped out at me because I had somehow convinced myself that he had been dogging it a bit as he came to the end of his collaboration with Stan Lee but I think now that was probably sour grapes on my part. When I knew there was to be no more Ditko after Spider-man 38 and Strange Tales 146, I had half-convinced myself it was all for the best since he wasn't at the top of his game. No, he was very much at the top of his game—and still climbing. The backgrounds were getting more detailed, instead of less detailed, the compositions were getting more fully integrated with the rest of the page. "Andy Yanchus could had a field day with these," I remember thinking.

The other thing I noticed about the last year's worth of strips was the evolving credits. Whereas previously the script was credited to Stan Lee and the illustrations to Steve Ditko, issue 135 debuted a new approach: "written and edited by Stan Lee, plotted and illustrated by Steve Ditko". Clearly someone had had a chat with someone else about what they, respectively, were doing here. This credit form continued through issue 138. Issues 139 and 140 suddenly switched back to "Script by Stan Lee, Art by Steve Ditko." Issue 141 (the last one reprinted in the Masterworks volume) features the credit "Dialogue and captions: Stan Lee, Plot and Artwork: Steve Ditko". No mention of editing. The more noticeable difference occurs in the lead-off caption for "Those Who Would Destroy Me" (a significant title in itself?) in issue 142 where the "edited and written" and "plotted and drawn" credits have been restored:


For the benefit of those who came in late: Dr. Strange (the good guy) has just defeated Dormammu (the bad guy) in combat! But before he can return home, three more baddies hide a bomb in Doc's Greenwich Village pad! Cleverly they make it a plain everyday tick-tock bomb, with nothing mystical about it, so Doc's magic powers don't react to it! And now, you know as much as we do! (which isn't hard!)


It's only reading the stories right through in succession that causes the text to stand out by contrast. It's Stan Lee's high ironic, quasi-hipster prose which he used in addressing the reader directly (baddies, Doc, tick-tock bomb) and which he used in all of the Marvel super-hero titles except (why had I never noticed this before?) Dr. Strange! This is the first time that he isn't playing it straight. Are the two facts related in some way? It seems to me that something was up, because this is the last issue for the pure Lee/Ditko collaboration. The following issue, 144, "With None Beside Me!" (another significant title?) is credited as "edited and rehashed by Stan Lee, written and rewritten by Roy Thomas, Plotted and drawn by Steve Ditko" then 145 is "edited by Stan Lee, scripted by Dennis O'Neil, drawn by Steve Ditko" and the final issue, 146 ("The End—At Last!") is edited by Stan Lee, penciled and inked by Steve Ditko and scripted by Dennis O'Neil.

Ditko knew he was leaving. He does his level best in the final instalment to wrap everything up with a climactic battle between Dormammu and Eternity where Dormammu is destroyed (it was a nice try, anyway: death was no more permanent in Marvel Comics in the mid 1960s than it is today) and Clea—who is finally identified by name—gets released from her other-dimensional prison. Cataclysm was the order of the day.

With Stan Lee's notoriously porous memory and Steve Ditko's reluctance to revisit the sequence of events that led to his departure from Marvel, we'll probably never know the story behind those evolving credit lines. For all I know it had more to do with Stan Lee withdrawing from universal Marvel scripter duties (was Dr. Strange the first feature that he withdrew from?) as the Marvel Universe continued to mushroom in scope and population. On the other hand, that might be the answer to why the Masterworks volume only reprints through issue 141. Maybe that was Stan Lee's call and, remembering the dispute over credits determined that the small ending on 141 was the place where Lee/Ditko actually came to an end in his mind. "Let's leave the Roy Thomas and Denny O'Neil stuff out of it". Maybe Denny O'Neil has something to contribute to the discussion since he was obviously there when it was taking place. Did Stan Lee give him any special instructions about collaborating with Ditko or indicate in any way what had been going on in their nearly three-year long collaboration? Did Ditko communicate anything, or just send in his pages? And did "scripted" mean that the Marvel Method had been abandoned. Had Ditko been demoted from "plotted and drawn" to "pencilled and inked"—presented with a Roy Thomas script or Denny O'Neil script and told to stick to it?

I guess we'll never know.

Sure was fun revisiting the question, anyway.



Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

Click image below for larger version:

___________________________________________________

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 #93 (December 13th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81

Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186

Wednesday December 13 -

Since this is Steve Ditko we're talking about—Mr. Either/Or—I don't want to be accused of being either evasive or indifferent so let me say that I do believe in the American constitutional right to bear arms, largely because of statistics which have come to light in the U.K. and Australia since they banned civilian ownership of handguns, statistics which show that their handgun crime rate is climbing alarmingly since they did so. A weapon is a weapon and if you make a weapon illegal, essentially what you are doing is telling any criminal with a handgun in his pocket that in any situation where he is in a crowd and he doesn't see a policeman or a soldier, he can take it as a given that he holds the trump card: by virtue of his criminality he can assert his control over any situation just by pulling his gun out and using it. It's taking the exceptional nature of criminality and empowering it by reverse inference. If you feel aggrieved, powerless and impotent, just become a criminal and buy an illegal handgun and you will automatically outrank everyone except the police and soldiers when it comes to power and potency. Not the best message in the world to convey to the aggrieved, powerless and impotent.

In the United States, particularly in a large metropolitan area, the criminal has no such guarantee. In any crowd anyone could be carrying a handgun and it could be of a larger calibre than his own and the guy carrying it could be more proficient in its use than the criminal is. This definitely, to me, constitutes a demonstrable level of deference resulting from having the right to own and carry a handgun as a basic human right.

Even though I wouldn't carry one myself.

See, to me, one of the key elements is proficiency and another is predisposition. In order to validate carrying a handgun, you have to have confidence that if a situation comes up where you need to use it, you will use it and that you will use it effectively. That requires not only training with the thing long hours until you are as comfortable with it as I am with this computer keyboard but having the confidence that if you're in a variety store and a guy comes in and holds up the cashier that you will pull your own gun out, tell him to drop his own and make it stick. If he turns around and sees me staring at him with my finger rock-steady on the trigger, the barrel pointed unwaveringly between his eyes and my eye staring unflinchingly into his own, then the odds are I will become a citizen hero. If, however, he turns around and sees my gun vibrating and me behind it, wide-eyed and twitchy because this is worlds away from firing at human outlines in a shooting range, then all I've really done is bought myself a mess of trouble. What you are doing as a gun owner who carries his weapon with him is deciding ahead of time that you are willing to match your nerve against that of a criminal in a situation where you will probably have less than two seconds to decide what you're going to do and then to do it. If he's more comfortable and proficient with his gun than you are with yours and/or if he is in the "mad dog" category (as soon as he locks eyes with you he is going to know that he is top dog because there is virtually nothing in him that resembles a human being, he is virtually 100% attack dog) he's going to shoot you dead while you're still assessing his state of mind and your own—and then he will probably shoot the store owner or cashier as well in the heat of the animalistic moment so instead of making the situation better, you would have made it worse. And what's the point of that?

To me, that's the real-world debate about gun ownership and the use of firearms. In the context of the Mr. A story, however, everything is just too far outside the realm of the actual to be dealt with sensibly. If I lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant instead of Kitchener and I heard about a kidnapping and I somehow found out where the kidnappers and the child were and I owned a handgun, would I go over there and break in and start shooting them? No. However much training I have with my firearm and however much confidence I have in my nerve and matching it against the nerve of a known criminal a big part of a civilized society is understanding what is the job of the police and what is the job of the citizen. If I know where they are, I phone the police and tell them and leave it up to them to deal with it, even if I think the kidnappers deserve to die and I know that the Canadian justice system is probably going to let them off with a slap on the wrist.

The fact that Canadian police officers live with this reality on a day-to-day basis—it might surprise my American readers to know that we're still debating whether or not to issue sidearms to our border guards in this country (seriously!)—indicates to me that people are basically good. If anyone is justified in going outside the law it's those with daily experience with the "mad dogs" and "bad seeds" which exist (Mr. A's secret identity is Rex Graine, crusading journalist). And yet they don't. There is a genuine and deep-rooted awareness that the only hope is to play by the rules even though, as I've said elsewhere, if you gave any police chief in any jurisdiction five "freebies"—five bad guys they could just wish out of existence or blow away with their service revolvers—they would know which five to pick and the elimination of those individuals would improve the quality of life in any given community exponentially.

Anyway, one of the kidnappers bashes the other over the head with a club and attempts to flee with the ransom money. The other kidnapper, his head bathed in blood shoots the fleeing kidnapper in the back, all under the watchful gaze of the white silhouette of Mr. A who then blithely steps into the scene and retrieves the bag of ransom money, while ignoring the mortally wounded kidnappers ("I can't see…ooohh…h…help" "Sob…please Mr. A have…sob…mercy…I'm in pain…sob…help me…I don't want to suffer…die…sob…please!"). Mr. A tenderly unties Lilly and carries her away with the bag of ransom money across his metaphorical calling card out of the black square and into the white square as the kidnappers, clinging to the edge of the black square, plead for help.


Lilly: They're calling! Will you help them?

Mr. A: No.

Lilly: Why won't you?

Mr. A: I won't help anyone who believes he has a right to hurt you!

Lilly: Don't you care what happens to bad people?

Mr. A: No! I only care what happens to the innocent and the good people!

Lilly: I was afraid of them. But I'm not afraid of you! …You're not mean!

Mr.A: I treat people the way they act toward human life! I grant them what their actions deserve, have earned! I don't reward the bad or cheat the good!


There's a certain dishonesty to this exchange, I think, centering on the fact that I see liberalism as originating in the feminizing of society. From an early age, girls are aware of being in a situation of intrinsic vulnerability and, as a result, tend always to identify with the vulnerable even when common sense would indicate that it's misguided to do so. Since females are emotion-based, common sense seldom has much to do with their actions and reactions. The fact that the kidnappers are mortally wounded and pleading for help would strike a resonant female chord and, once Lilly was safe herself, I think her identification would shift to the kidnappers and the alleviation of their suffering. It's a core flaw of Mr. A, to me, that Ditko overlooks that—although mercy for mad dogs might be (and I think he and I would agree, actually is) misguided—this view is not shared by our liberal society and most particularly not by the female members of it. What I think Ditko was documenting and what has become even more pronounced in our feminized society is the extent to which justice suffers when compassion is given disproportionate weight in deciding the severity of imposed consequences for wrong-doing. All prison sentences in Canada are routinely cut in half from the sentences that are mandated by statute. I think this is directly attributable to the disproportionate influx of women into the criminal justice environs that has resulted from feminism. Protected as they tend to be from societal realities women tend not to believe that there is such a thing as a human mad dog and consequently tend to consider all criminals as just needing the right level of TLC and social engineering to become upstanding citizens. And, of course, they believe that there is never any reason to commit an act of violence.

Whatever you might personally think of their views (and I think very little of their views), there are unavoidable unhappy consequences of viewing the world the way they do. I'm thinking of Marc Lepine, the gunman who took a classroom hostage in Montreal, ordered all of the male students out of the room and then shot the fourteen female students to death. Well, that to me is a mad dog and a good example of what happens when you so feminize a society that when a gunman shows up and orders all the male students (I hesitate to call them men) out of the room, they just dutifully go and leave the female students to their fate. In what I would consider a good society, the men would have found that an unacceptable choice (Either-Or) in the same way that the men on Flight 93 found it unacceptable to just acquiesce on September 11 and would have realized the only right thing to do was to attack. Marc Lepine could have shot one of them or two of them or maybe three of them but a classroom of men would have overwhelmed him whatever the casualty figure and instead of fourteen dead women you would have had two or three dead men…and one dead or at least severely injured mad dog. In the same way that you elevate the stature and implicit advantage of the gun-toting criminal by outlawing guns, by indoctrinating boys from an early age that violence is always wrong in all circumstances, you also give the mad dog a disproportionate advantage in any circumstance where he crops up. Years later, I read a newspaper story that one of the males who dutifully exited the classroom killed himself the following summer. I can certainly understand him doing that but I think society would have been better served if it had trained him, instead, to kill a mad dog like Marc Lepine and to prepare himself for that situation when it arose.

At the conclusion of the story, the black square quickly begins to shred ("How can you be so cruel to the needs of the suffering human life…sob") as Mr. A concludes his soliloquy ("We must not give up hope…must believe the irrational, injustice and suffering are the abnormal in life…that reason, happiness are the normal and justice will triumph!"). In the penultimate panel, Lilly rushes into the loving arms of her parents across the white square which is surrounded by the words Reason, Honesty, Logic, Truth, Good, Rights, Rationality, Mutual Consent, Retaliatory Force, Principles as the black square falls completely to pieces and the kidnappers, in the final panel, plunge downward into Irrationality, Corruption, Injustice, Deceit, Lies, Crime, Force, Compromise, Dishonesty ("Have mercy…we didn't mean any harm…we're not bad…it's not our fault…sob…we couldn't help it…sob.." "…Forgive us…give us another chance…we're sorry…forget what we did…save us!...sob").

Thirty-three years later, turning the page to find a two-page The Monster Times Super-Duper Back Issue Department! at with cover reproductions and descriptions of the first 23 issues plus order blank, I experienced the same sense of temporary relief from Steve Ditko's Absolutist Onslaught.

It's a short respite. The next page begins with Mr. A's narration: "No man can have it both ways! When a man refuses to uphold the truth, he betrays the good! But he will not get away with it! He will constantly be on the scales fearfully waiting for what he dreads most—the verdict of justice!" and the reader is up to his eyeballs in a Mr. A six-pager from 1972, a two-page centrefold from 1972 ("A is A. A thing is what it is. No man can have it both ways. Only through black and white principles can man distinguish between good and evil. The principles guide man's basic choice of actions. Men can attempt to choose contradictions, grey principles, like men can choose to be dishonest, corrupt. But that choice only leads to evil—to self-destruction!"), an 8-pager from 1969 ("Those who attempt to create a fake world by evading the truth only succeed in making themselves a slave to an unreal world and a fake in the real world!" The switch to the plural "themselves" is inopportune, but it is, I think, a very valid indictment of liberal excesses). And then there are eight single pages, each making up a chapter in the concluding story.

Like I say, I think this stuff really should be reprinted, hopefully with commentaries by Ditko himself.

Tomorrow: Meanwhile, back at Dr. Strange.



Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

___________________________________________________

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 #92 (December 12th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham

Washington 98225-1186



Tuesday December 12 -

It's not as if Mr. A as a work isn't thematically consistent. You can disagree with the sentiment that as soon as you have terrorized another individual or threatened them with harm or committed violence against their human rights, you have effectively negated your own rights to life and security. Virtually all liberals and a great number of conservatives are going to disagree with your assessment in the context of a presenting the question as an intellectual exercise which is all that a comic-book story can be. That's one of the problems Ditko faced and faces in advancing his own perspective in the comics form. These events didn't take place, these characters aren't real and so it becomes difficult to relate to them in any sense of their representing or portraying the objective reality and the consequences of ill-advised ethical decision-making that Ditko appears to demand of the reader (and which are either unique to Steve Ditko or, at least, exceptional within the context of the comic-book field). Particularly in 1973 there was no widely-perceived context for a comic book being anything other than an innocuous entertainment—leaving aside the sex and drugs of the undergrounds—so the extreme goings-on in these Mr. A stories just strike the reader as even more-than-usually "over-the-top melodrama" in a field largely based on that very thing. The evolution of the comic-book field can be chronicled as to how high the bar is set to qualify as "over the top". Lilly's pathetic interior monologue and her mother's hysterical breakdown seem to caricature the tropes of the super-hero genre and to both make use of and needlessly escalate the voyeuristic nature of the True Crime Drama genre which Ditko is both critiquing and making use of (always a precarious balancing act). A malicious young woman threatening to slit the throat of a young girl and subsequently getting shot in the head—this was over the edge into virgin territory for costumed heroes at the time and is even today, to a degree (although thanks to Frank Miller and Alan Moore those boundaries are now being pushed in a way that makes Ditko look both prescient and, by comparison, relatively innocuous).

So, having said all that, is it possible to make sense of and to justify what Ditko is advocating? I might be the first person in the history of the field to actually be willing to do so, which is kind of an implicit message about the overwhelming majority of the comic book field being die-hard liberals. But taking Ditko at face value, let's try to answer a basic question: was it right for Mr. A to shoot the female kidnapper in the head? Without any sense of irony, I can say that it might have been better to shoot her in the leg or the arm if the idea was to get her to drop the knife and so eliminate the threat to Lilly. If the idea was suffering—she has made Lilly and her mother suffer, so now she needs to be made to suffer—you could even shoot her in the knee. It would certainly make for a lifelong reminder. But I think Ditko's point is that the elimination of a person who would do the sorts of things the female kidnapper had done and was threatening to do is an inherently good thing. I can't say that I completely or even partly disagree, but Thou Shalt Not Kill is still one of the Ten Commandments and endorsing exceptions to that is a perilous business. To me, supporting the US's pre-emptive strike into Iraq and the ancillary deaths of the Iraqi civilians that resulted as a way of the United States indicating to Muslim terrorists that another 9/11 is a really, really bad idea—as I do—is one thing: balancing the safety and security of one civilian population against another is an unfortunate implication of the necessities of realpolitik. There the question is one of scale: thousands must die in one geographic location to keep the potential of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands dying in another geographic location from becoming a reality. At one time the casualty lists in Darfur could have been kept to a few hundred if the democratic nations had intervened militarily in a potent enough way to eliminate the worst of the aggressors and to impose order. Not doing so resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands which have now become a hundred thousand or more. As Romeo Dallaire has described it, Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion: it's the same problem with the same implicit solution—massive military intervention in order to prevent wholesale slaughter from becoming the societal norm (see also Bosnia and Sarajevo in the late 90s)—and it just isn't being seriously addressed so it's getting progressively worse and the death toll is rising exponentially. At some point you have to decide that a hundred thousand dead is enough and it's time to take action before it becomes a half million or a million dead. Or maybe you don't. So far that seems to be everyone's answer: "Let's do absolutely nothing about Darfur". I don't think it's a good idea, but I know when I'm seriously outvoted.

But, this isn't what Ditko is talking about here, specifically. What he is talking about—or what he appears to be talking about—is individual wrong-doing and what we should all agree should be the sensible consequences of such individual wrong-doing. Again, your average liberal is going to see the fictional scenario played out and want to second-guess all the decisions involved in order to maintain the largely delusional basis of liberal thinking on crime, which usually entails avoiding any examination of the specifics of wrong-doing itself and what needs to be done about it and, instead, going all the way back to the female kidnapper's childhood and finding a way to validate her as a person and to make her feel loved so she wouldn't one day become a female kidnapper threatening to cut a child's throat. Or to find a universal way to treat young girls so that there is no chance of any one of them ever becoming a female kidnapper. In the real world, this liberal tendency towards delusional idealism tends to play out a little differently. A year of two ago in the People's Republic of Toronto an ex-boyfriend shot and then pistol-whipped his ex-wife in a busy downtown shopping arcade, fled the scene, was cornered by police in front of Union Station where he promptly took a fifteen-year-old girl hostage and held the gun to her head. One of the officers told his superiors by walkie-talkie that he had a clear shot at the guy, he got the go ahead and shot him in the head, fatally. Not a word in the aftermath from the myriad bleeding hearts who constitute the body politic of the PRT which surprised me to a degree but didn't surprise me the more I thought about it. I thought they would at least make a point that the gun had jammed and the police knew that, so the hostage was at least potentially not in danger. But the thing about liberals is that they usually just shut down in these contexts and agree that it's better to "move on" than to examine what actually happened in any depth (i.e. if a gun has jammed previously, do you take the chance that it has jammed permanently and base of your actions on the supposition that what you are facing is a disabled weapon?).

To take it to an absolutely personalized level—which I suspect is Steve Ditko's primary intention: to get the individual reader to ask him or her self hard questions—I would never own a gun because of the context in which I live. Owning a gun in Kitchener strikes me as being about as sensible as wearing nothing but flame retardant clothing given that people have—on occasion and inexplicably—spontaneously combusted. There is crime in Kitchener and there is no question that at any time I could find myself in a situation where it would be very nice to have a registered firearm in my pocket. The odds of that happening in Kitchener, however, are about the same as my winning the lottery three weeks in a row. Also, in Canada, you can't just carry a handgun because you feel inclined to. I'd be breaking the law even if the gun was registered because I didn't have it under lock and key in my home or at a licensed shooting range. From what I understand the penalties are pretty severe if you're caught just walking around with a registered weapon in your coat pocket. So that gets into issues of civil disobedience and a willingness to go to jail over the principle of my right to carry a handgun.

Tomorrow: More on Me and Mr. A


___________________________________________________

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 #91 (December 11th, 2006)

The Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81,

Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186

Monday, December 11 -


Okay, I'm going to be jumping back and forth a bit here because I suddenly find myself with a number of balls in the air: Mr. A, Dr. Strange (I finished reading the complete Steve Ditko Dr. Strange last night) and my Dr. Strangeroach commissioned drawing, which I finally decided to go full speed ahead on yesterday, having realized that doing a commissioned piece and writing about a commissioned piece at the same time was getting really, really time-consuming. The only thing slower than pencilling, inking and colouring a drawing turns out to be pencilling, inking and colouring a drawing and then describing pencilling, inking and colouring a drawing. Not to mention trucking down to Sherwood to get colour photocopy reductions done every step of the way. Five of them the day before yesterday and three of them yesterday. The process went faster as the areas to get filled in got smaller. It's Ditko-influenced, but I don't think anyone would ever mistake it for Ditko. Sherwood's closed on Saturday, so I'm going to leave it as is and hopefully finish it on Monday (or Tuesday or Wednesday) and send all the photocopies to Jeff to post here.



Anyway, I skipped over the Mr. A cover which was probably a bad idea since it was the first thing we all saw back in 1973 when the comic started circulating in the handful of comic book stores then in existence. "Your only choice…either Good or Evil" Then there's an enlarged question mark with the words "When is a man to be judged evil?" overlapping a figure in a classic Marvel posture of profound apprehension (legs and fingers widely splayed, mouth and eyes agape. There's an illustration of a set of scales with a little blob of red in one pan and a big blob of red and hatched mass weighing down the other pan which is casting a shadow on a repeated image of the same figure. Dominating the cover is a .45 automatic, discharging a huge bullet which appears to be knocking the figure backwards, the trajectory of the bullet and the bullet lettered "…Right to Kill!" And in the bottom right a panel of the dressed-completely-in-white Mr. A holding the smoking gun. Subtle it wasn't. It cut to a core element of the comic-book field that heroes don't use guns and they don't shoot people, they capture them and bring them to justice (it is still an enduring titillation in the comic-book field that Batman used a mounted machine gun to kill a monster in the first issue of his eponymous comic book).



To oversimplify the point being made, Ditko was probably the only person in the comic book field who thought that the justice system should take a more hardline view of misbehaviour—which, if you think about it, was no great leap of faith in an environment where super-powered figures function wholly if not exclusively outside the law. What is the difference between a vigilante and a public-spirited citizen? In the context of the comic-book field, there really wasn't any difference. If you had particular super-heroic abilities and you wore a leotard or a body-stocking it was just assumed that you were doing good, basically stopping comparably powered evil-doers who were too much for the police or conventional forms of law enforcement to deal with. So, it was interesting to see Ditko essentially take the comic-book field's primary thematic supposition and basically extend it into lethal directions. As the splash page suggests "Who dares to claim he is above the collective good, public truth, right of society, the law, and can rationally justify his…" (the cover image of the .45 discharging its bullet overlapping the scales—one pan holding the word "life"—and overlapping a man's divided face half normal and half skull) "…Right to Kill!" But, here we already have a good example of the perplexity that Steve Ditko would always engender in his readership. I mean, shouldn't that be a question mark on the end there? Because it's an exclamation mark it definitely moves the political debate involved a giant step away and puts the syntax of the initial assertion in the same category as The Shadow's "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" but even more in the sense of a definitive statement. The second panel depicts Mr. A shooting a perpetrator in the face. Is the reference to Mr. A or to the perpetrator who has been judged to be evil? The terminology causes further problems. What is the "collective good" if it isn't freedom from the threat of vigilantism? What is "public truth" but the right to a fair trial? What is the "Right of Society" period?

"Right of Society"?

If we thought that turning the page was going to help clarify things, we were sadly mistaken. What follows is an eight-page Mr. A story which centers on the kidnapping of a little girl named Lilly. It's very direct. Lilly gets kidnapped in the second panel, that's how direct it is. Lilly has a lot of thought balloons in the story while she's tied up blindfolded and gagged ("Don't they care how much they hurt me?...sob…not right.") mostly, it would seem, to reiterate Ditko's point that there is genuine suffering on the part of victims of crimes. To be fair, he was pretty much a pioneer in this: the comic-book field has never been real big on documenting the victims of crimes, nor has any other entertainment form which uses crime as a springboard. Victims were bit parts in comic books, not headliners: the headliners were the super-heroes and their colourful adversaries, the victims of the crimes were just the plot device that set thing in motion. Arguably this overlooking of genuine victimhood is a valid point both in the comic-book field and in our society and I think Steve Ditko is to be commended for calling attention to that fact. The celebration of true crime fiction and the mythologizing of criminals signify, implicitly, that we're going the wrong way as a society. The problem Steve Ditko faced is that this is a conservative viewpoint and the comic-book field is a liberal environment. The liberal response to any fictional portrayal of the "criminal element" (as they used to be called and which has, as a term, fallen into disfavour in a liberal society) is to become interested in the criminal and to take it as a given that the kidnapping of Lilly (in this case) was as the result of society having somehow let down her kidnappers so that they felt compelled to take such an extreme action. Interestingly, this then just reinforces what it was that Ditko was saying and reinforces the fact that as society becomes more interested in celebrating true crime fiction and mythologizing criminals, the victims and morality in general get lost in the shuffle. To a degree Ditko participates in the sociological two-step, himself, in an attempt to create an awareness in the reader both of what he understands to be society's overall perception of the realities that apply and of his own perceptions of what he sees as the real issues that are at stake. When the ransom money is paid, one of the kidnappers is delegated with the task of killing Lilly with a knife. In a flashback, we learn that he is typically the good boy gone bad, seduced into the evil undertaking by the promise of easy money ("One bad thing then for the rest of my life…I can…I will be good…I swear to God…just let me…this one time…get away with evil.") with this being illustrated by a sequence where he passes over from Mr. A's iconic white square to his iconic black square. But the most significant part of the story is Lilly's suffering and the suffering of her mother who endures a calamitous nervous collapse in the course of the kidnapping unfolding. This presumably is Ditko's core point. Lilly and her mother are made to suffer and are innocent victims of the kidnappers' individual and collective choices of evil instead of good that therefore renders the kidnappers fully culpable for the consequences of their own actions at the hands of Mr. A. A struggle ensues and the female kidnapper (Ditko was way ahead of the Claremont curve on the "is there any reason this character can't be a woman?" question and, in my view, too far ahead: I don't think there is any great historical trend of women as merciless, violent kidnappers that justifies the choice to make one of them a woman) tells Mr. A, "throw the gun over here or…I'll kill the kid…" "I'll slit her throat," she says, holding Lilly's head back by means of a claw-like grip on the child's face and brandishing the knife. Whereupon Mr. A snatches up his gun and shoots the kidnapper in the head, informing her as he does so: "And I'd be surrendering both of our lives…if anyone's going to die…it is not going to be the innocent!" In the next panel, with the mortally wounded kidnapper sprawled on the ground, eyes agape and staring, Mr. A further informs her, "Success or survival at another's expense is not a price anyone can impose on others without also having to face it…and pay!"

Tomorrow: More fun and games with Mr. A

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610


___________________________________________________

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 #90 (December 10th, 2006)

And when Balaam sawe that it pleased the YHWH to blesse Israel, hee went not, as at other times to the meeting of inchantments, but hee set his face toward the wildernesse. And Balaam lift vp his eyes, and he saw Israel abiding in his tents, according to their Tribes: and the Spirit of God came vpon him.

And he tooke vp his parable, and said, Balaam the sonne of Beor hath said and the man who had his eyes shut hath said:

Hee hath said, heard the words of God, which saw the vision of the Almightie, falling, but hauing his eyes open:

How goodly are thy tents, O Iacob, thy Tabernacles, O Israel!

As the valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by the riuer side, as the trees of Lign-Aloes which the YHWH hath planted, as Cedar trees beside the waters.

He shall powre the water out of his buckets, and his seed in many waters, and his King shall be higher then Agag, and his Kingdome shall be exalted.

God brought him forth out of Egypt, he hath as it were the strength of an Vnicorne: he shall eate vp the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce thorow with his arrows.

Hee couched, he lay down as a Lyon, and as a great Lyon: who shal stirre him vp? Blessed hee that blesseth thee and cursed hee that curseth thee.

And Balaks anger was kindled against Balaam, and he smote his hands together: and Balak said vnto Balaam, I called thee to curse mine enemies, and behold, thou hast altogether blessed these three times.

Therefore now, flee thou to thy place: I thought to promote thee vnto great honour, but loe, the YHWH hath kept thee backe from honour.

And Balaam said vnto Balak, Spake I not also to thy messengers which thou sentest vnto me, saying,

If Balak would giue mee his house full of silver and gold, I cannot goe beyond the commandement of the YHWH, to doe either good or bad of mine owne mind? What the YHWH saith, that will I speake.



Hey, kids! Here's a first! Dave Sim talking about comic books on the Sabbath! From Steve Ditko's introductory text to Mr. A (1973)



So, by his actions, a man has the power to be a protector, to be indifferent, or to be a destroyer of life—of others' and his own.



I found this interesting. In terms of morality, Ditko often developed theories with a hard and soft option and something in between the two. One of the reasons that he rubs liberal fur the wrong way so badly is that the middle course is seldom defined as being admirable or framed in flattering terminology. The average liberal who sees him or herself as neither a protector nor a destroyer is not apt to see viewing themselves as "indifferent" to be a viable option. They prefer neutral terminology like "moderate" and if you frame your argument in unflattering terms, they're apt to just kill the messenger and have done with it. Personally, I think the distinction between any given man as being either a protector or a destroyer raises an interesting point in that you can't protect everyone in the world in need of protection even if you were inclined to. I can "adopt" a child in the Third World through World Vision or a similar agency and provide for them to one degree or another, thus "protecting" them from starvation or similar deprivations which might otherwise "destroy" them, but I can't "adopt" all of the children in the Third World. However, I could sit down and calculate the costs of my basic necessities, subtract that from my income and savings and then divide the resultant amount into World Vision sized monthly amounts and find out that I'm capable of protecting, say, 400 children in the Third World for a five-year period if I subscribed to Steve Ditko's inclination towards Absolutist ethical positions where you are either a "protector" or a "destroyer" (which I tend to, I think, more than most). In those frames of reference, a persuasive argument could be made that anything that I do which falls short of protecting those 400 children amounts to destroying the children that I'm not protecting and would classify me as "indifferent". Maybe "less indifferent" than you because I have adopted A child through World Vision, but in Absolutist Terms that would still leave me 399 children short of being able to definitively classify myself as a protector.



This also intrudes upon questions of the degree of my faith in God. If I cash in all of my savings and income and give it to World Vision, why would I not have absolute faith that God would provide for me? It is certainly one of the core attributes of a secular society that it is naturally assumed that everyone is "graded against the curve" when it comes to ethics and morality. Most of the statistics I've seen about charitable giving in Canada indicate that the average person gives maybe a hundred or two hundred dollars to charity in a given year. If our own choices are measured against the average, then all I would have to do is cut back my donations to $300 a year or so and forget about it. Personally, I can't do that so, in effect, what I am doing is betting that Right Behaviour is defined by giving something less than everything I own to the poor and something more than what the average person gives. The only thing I am certain of is that everyone can choose to be more generous when it comes to charity no matter who they are. And I think creative works like Mr. A when viewed properly can force us to really examine those sorts of issues which are all too easily overlooked or swept away. Even if you're not an Absolutist, measuring yourself regularly against Absolutist yardsticks is, I think, a useful enterprise and a valuable habit to adopt.



"Protector", "Destroyer" or "Indifferent".



Choose.



It seems to me well worth examining.



Life is man's most valuable possession! It is the unique phenomenon that gives man an existence and his existence a meaning. Every man is aware that his life cannot be lived by or through another person—that his life, his existence is individually his own. Life is the property of the possessor, and it is the owner's responsibility to act to protect, sustain and to fulfill its potential with actions devoid of fraud and force. If a man cannot claim ownership of his life and mastery over his choices and actions, WHO CAN? AND BY WHAT RIGHT? If a man's life and actions are not his responsibility, WHOSE ARE THEY?



Well, here is where Steve Ditko and I part company. Since life as constituted—physical incarnation on planet earth—is, to me, completely illusory, I think life is man's least valuable possession. His most valuable possession is his soul, in my view. As the Synoptic Jesus put it, "What shall it profit a man to gain the world and lose his own soul? And what would a man give in exchange for his soul?"



While reading Dr. Strange these last few nights, I got into the habit of reading aloud from the Koran afterward just as a way of confirming which team I'm on and one night I didn't. I had what I assume was meant to be a horrible dream where I was both in the gas chamber of a prison and in the electric chair and I was about to be executed (presumably for not being a feminist). Oh, I thought, well, this will be it, I guess. And I started reciting my prayer. There was a guard there who dropped the cyanide capsule into the sulphuric acid (or whatever combination it is) and made a face about the smell. I had a momentary doubt when I remembered reading that you're supposed to inhale deeply in the gas chamber, the more poison you take in, the quicker your demise. Hang on, I thought. Doesn't that constitute suicide of a kind? That is, shouldn't I just breathe normally in order to make sure that I'm being killed and that I'm not killing myself? Another guard indicated that the electric chair was malfunctioning and at least half the time the prisoner's chest virtually explodes into flame because of the flaw in the wiring in the backrest. I mulled that over and thought, Oh, well, one way or the other it will all be over in half an hour or so. Then I noticed one of the guards looking at me in a concerned way and I just sort of smiled and gave him the "thumbs up" with my shackled right hand and went back to praying. Then I woke up.



I think it would be nice if "every man is aware that his life cannot be lived by or through another person—that his life, his existence, is individually his own," but I don't think the evidence supports that contention. In fact, I would say that it's far more common for men to live for and through their wives, for and through their children, for and through their pets or whatever else they choose to live for and through. As the Koran says, "Your wealth and your children are only a temptation" (and even adds wives in a particular passage) and I think most men succumb to that temptation repeatedly or in perpetuity. "Life is the property of the possessor and it is the owner's responsibility to act to protect, sustain and to fulfill its potential with actions devoid of fraud and force." We converge a bit here. This reads like a pretty fair description of personal jihad, the action that one takes in response to a visceral understanding of what one is required to do in order to fulfill one's responsibilities. I see it as the urge Godward, the impulse of my soul towards what I deem to be good actions and away from bad actions in order to find favour in the sight of God. I would assume that Steve Ditko sees it as a comparable visceral impulse but without the "God-centred vector". The only way I can see fulfilling my potential is by finding favour in the sight of God. That's the only real potential that I can conceive of, whereas I suspect that Steve Ditko's view of his own potential would include a lot of earthly things that I would largely see as illusory. I didn't freak out in the electric chair because what I was about to lose wasn't anything that I deemed to be important. On the contrary, I was on the cusp of passing from an illusory to a real (or perhaps just less illusory) state of existence. Either one constituted good news for me.



"If a man cannot claim ownership of his life and mastery over his choices and actions WHO CAN? AND BY WHAT RIGHT?" Here the chasm widens again. I could maybe be persuaded that a man has a custodial role to play in his own life, but taking care of the Empire State Building is very different from owning the Empire State Building. I think the proper owner of each man's life is God since it is God who gives a man life but I think that's the core of the decision that faces each man. God gives you life and the only sensible thing is to choose to devote that life—or the vast majority of it—to God. Sensible in a self-preservationist sense. If you devote your life to God, you won't get into anything that could be described accurately as serious trouble whereas if you devote your life to anything else, all you're ultimately going to find is various kinds of serious trouble. That's been my experience, anyway. But I think the key point is that even though God has the greatest claim to ownership of a man's life, He only claims ownership of the lives of those who have chosen Him. I have never had any sense of coercion on the part of God whatsoever. God is someone you can choose to be with or someone you can choose to be without and, as far as I can see, He leaves the choice entirely up to the individual man. There are certainly a lot of priests and imams and rabbis who tend not to look at it that way, but as far as I can see, that's the way God looks at it.



"By what right?" would God claim ownership of a man's life? By virtue of being man's Creator. But, as I say, I don't think God looks at it that way. It's your life to do with as you please with all of the rewards and punishments that entails.



"If a man's life and actions are not his responsibility, WHOSE ARE THEY?" Back to complete and total agreement. Each man is responsible and culpable for his own life and actions.

ALL LIFE is conditional! Survival is not automatically guaranteed to any living entity. For a form of life to survive, it must fulfill the needs required by its specific nature. For man, it is his nature as a rational animal.



Since rationality is a potential and not an automatically guaranteed actuality, man must choose to live as a man—RATIONALLY! The choice is also not automatic, but one that must be continually made and sustained.



Life is given, survival is not! The desire to live as a man demands a conscious choice, a conscious effort, effective knowledge and proper action with no guarantee of success.



A man has a right to denounce his life—to do with it as he wants. But no man, or no group of men, can claim the "right" to ownership, use and disposal of another's life without the other person's UNCOERCED CONSENT!



"ALL LIFE is conditional! Survival is not automatically guaranteed to any living entity. For a form of life to survive it must fulfill the needs required by its specific nature. For man, it is his nature as a rational animal." Here we part ways again. Man is man and animals are animals. There's no such thing as a rational animal. Only man is capable of reason and I think reason is part of man's specific nature which is in the nature of a "need required". Men need reason the way all living things need air and water. Reason, to me, is the urge of the soul Godward. We are separated from God but through reason we can urge ourselves away from the illusions of physical incarnation and towards Him and into alignment with the nature of His Reality.



"Since rationality is a potential and not an automatically guaranteed actuality, man must choose to live as a man—RATIONALLY! The choice is also not automatic, but one that must be continually made and sustained. Life is given. Survival is not! The desire to live as a man demands a conscious choice, a conscious effort, effective knowledge and proper action with no guarantee of success." This, of course, mirrors my own thinking if the rational choice is God (which in Ditko's case I suspect it isn't), the conscious and rational choice to act upon visceral awareness of God, to do what's right and avoid what's wrong and to realize that the odds are that you're going to be very far from being 100% right 100% of the time and that all you can do is work to improve yourself and hope for the best on Judgement Day.



"A man has a right to denounce his life—to do with it as he wants. But no man, or no group of men, can claim the `right' to ownership, use and disposal of another's life without the other person's UNCOERCED CONSENT."



You might be able to mount an argument that there exists any number of forms of coercion that might compel a man to consent—in a forensic sense—to allowing his life to be owned, used or disposed of. A lot of husbands end up doing things they don't want to do because they have to feed their families but you'd have to go a long way to find anyone (besides me) who tends to see families as a form of coercion for that reason. If you marry and procreate in good faith and then find that your responsibilities compel you to make decisions and take actions that you personally deem unethical and immoral or if you allow your love for your mother, let's say, to compel you to do things you don't think are right (or, more to the point, Right), a consequence issuing from the choice to do wrong is still a consequence of your own decision-making in one sense while it can also leave you "trapped (in a conscious sense) in a world you never made". Forewarned is forearmed and if you're looking for someone to denounce the idea of educating young men as to the extent to which relationships can lead to very bad decision-making and unethical and immoral choices in the long term, I'm afraid you're going to have to look elsewhere.



There was an article in the National Post this morning that points in the same direction. A man with two small daughters and a wife is awakened by a sound downstairs. He goes down to see what it is and finds an inebriated sixteen-year-old has entered his house and he proceeds to beat crap out of the kid. Now, Canada being Canada, people are calling for him to be prosecuted for assault. Question: would the guy have whaled on the kid that badly if he didn't have two infant daughters and a wife to be concerned about? If it was just him living in the house, what are the odds that he would have just kicked the kids ass out and told him if he saw him around there again, he's beat the living crap out of him? Question: Does the more violent response constitute a form of coercion implicit in marriage and fatherhood?



Okay, that brings us to the end of Steve Ditko's introductory text piece to Mr. A. Tune in tomorrow when I take a look at the Mr. A strips themselves.



2-DVD recordings of "Scripture at the Registry Theatre"

are available from Trevor Grace at

tgrace2001@sympatico.ca

Currently available are The Five Books of Moshe

(also known as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy)


___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #89 (December 9th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186

Saturday December 9 –

Continuing my analysis of Steve Ditko's introductory text piece to the 1973 first issue of the Mr. A comic book:


Some men respect life—theirs and others. Some men abuse life—theirs and others. Most men do both in degrees.


The troubling thing about this, to me, is the flat and vague declaration. It's certainly arresting. I think it took me a good hour to get through the block of text the first time because I kept doubling back to a) make sure that I had actually read what I thought I had just read and b) that I understood what it was that it was saying and c) attempt to determine where and why I either agreed or parted ranks with the sentiment expressed. Definitive Vagueness became a recurrent problem. These three short sentences need to be applied to a specific instance in order to achieve any real level of communication. If what he is saying is that Steve Ditko respects life, his own and others and Stan Lee abuses life, his own and others and that both do both to degrees, it's still too Definitively Vague to tell us anything. How did Steve Ditko respect life and how did Stan Lee abuse life?


The respecters of life seek to fulfill its potential. The abusers of life seek to manipulate, hinder, corrupt, coerce and destroy life. Most men do both!

The means of the respecter is through reason. The end is a life proper for a man—of holding valid values and pursuing productive goals. The means of the abuser is through irrationality. The end is misery and destruction of others and of self. For most, the means is a combination of both and the end is an unsatisfied, empty betrayed life.


It depends on how you look at it (which is the problem which I had with Chester Brown's "Are You A Libertarian?" survey). I'm sure that Stan Lee never saw himself as manipulating, hindering, corrupting, coercing or destroying either life or Steve Ditko or Steve Ditko's career or their collaboration. Stan Lee was the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and he did what he thought was in the best interests of the company. It was his call to make. Are those "valid" values and "productive" goals? Depends on how you look at it. Nothing succeeds like success. Stan Lee invented the Marvel Method and the more he made use of it and refined it the better the books sold. In the space of a few years, Timely went from a hole-in-the-wall company on the ropes to overtaking Comic Books' Only Superpower, DC. Arguably the method Stan Lee pioneered was more organically in tune with what the comic-book medium was all about—exciting, fast- paced sequential pictures with lots of dramatic narration and dialogue added in afterwards. The cart was finally behind the horse (artists driving the narrative) after two decades of trying to use the horse to push the cart (page by page and panel by panel scripting). What was at issue was really the next step in the debate. Because the Marvel Method was that successful did that mean that the artists should be compensated and credited more extensively? Depends on how you look at it. Presumably a lot of the problem entered in when Stan Lee the editor made a decision in favour of Stan Lee the writer over Steve Ditko the artist (and, again, this seemed to be something that rubbed Jack Kirby's fur the wrong way). They were driving the narrative, sending in their pencilled pages with marginal notes explaining what was going on and with rough dialogue. As a writer, Stan Lee would make the choice to change something. Ditko or Kirby wanted this to be the point of the two pages in the middle and Stan Lee the writer would change it into something else entirely and Stan Lee the editor would back him up on it. I suspect it was more disorienting for Ditko than for Kirby because he was getting the lettered pages (lettered by the great Artie Simek, by the way) back to be inked. Kirby might not find out how his story had changed until he saw it in print because someone else would ink it. Ditko had to sit there and read a different story than the one he had "written". I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the reason Stan Lee chose to assign George Bell to ink Ditko after a while. It probably was intended to cut down—and likely just postponed—the "what the hell did you do here?" phone calls and was subsequently abandoned both for that reason and because Ditko was just not interested in being inked by someone else.

But, I would doubt that Stan Lee would see himself and the "end" of his choices as an "unsatisfied, empty betrayed life." It depends on what you're looking for from life. Stan Lee seems like a pretty satisfied and happy guy. Which I'm sure was only salt in the wound for Steve Ditko as the two of them proceeded on their collision course.


How a man will live—if he deserves to live—follows from how he uses his faculty of survival: REASON! From the quality of a man's thinking, his actions follow with the inevitable good or bad consequences. Diseased means cannot bring about healthy ends. They must contaminate and poison success, thus making real achievement and worthwhile success impossible.


Again, it depends on how you look at it. If material success is what makes you happy then Stan Lee's was a "real achievement" and a "worthwhile success"—both from his perspective and from the perspective of the vast majority of the members of the society in which he functioned and functions. Most people would see Steve Ditko as a failure because his own post-Marvel work is only available from a one-man publishing operation by mail order and would see Stan Lee as a success because he has a million-dollar a year PR contract from Marvel and has his name on all of their comic books. Since my own situation is a lot more comparable to that of Steve Ditko than that of Stan Lee, I try to hold a balanced perspective on it. I consider myself a success because of my own priorities—ethical integrity and creative and business autonomy—but I'm also aware that I would almost universally be considered (and AM considered) a failure by most conventional measures of success. It depends on how you look at it.

Okay, violating virtually every rule of water-colouring where you're supposed to build from the lightest shades to the darkest, I decided to slap on the solid red. This is one of the reasons that I will never be a great water-colourist: I just don't obey the rules even though I know that they're there for a reason. The part of me that understands that really wants to stick to the rules but there's another part of me that says I'll be able to make better colour choices as soon as I have the huge area of yellow and the huge area of red filled up. Then I just have to figure out what "goes" with them. But colour is really not my thing. To give you an idea of the extent to which that's true, I only own black jeans and black socks so that whatever shirt or sweater I wear is guaranteed to "go" with my pants and socks. I'd probably just own black t-shirts and black sweaters but everyone would just think I was "doing" Neil Gaiman.

Speaking of whom, I got a PERSONAL call from His Neilship's personal assistant, the Fabulous Lorraine yesterday (November 22) telling me that His Neilship has completed his modifications to the #3/50 Lithograph No.1 to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund. She wanted to send it to me, but I told her to send it straight to your friend and mine (unless you're the Friends of Lulu) Charles Brownstein. If I got my hands on it, I'd probably just accidentally put it with my five artist's proof copies signed by Neil and myself and accidentally forget to tell anyone Neil finished it. Check out the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund's website for late-breaking developments as to whether they're going to auction it or raffle it or what. Unless Charles accidentally puts it somewhere and accidentally forgets to tell people it came in.

Anyway, I'm experiencing another unique adjustment to my ordinary routine of producing artwork just because I'm getting these colour photocopies done. Ordinarily I would lay in the flat colour, blanche visibly and then use every trick in the book to cover up the fact that I don't know what I'm doing. But I decided it would look more peculiar if the drippy bridge suddenly appeared fully rendered when all you've gotten up `til now is flat red and flat yellow. So here's a close look at just how incompetent I am when it comes to a flat "muddy brown/tan" colour. I'm already throwing my little Jack Davis colour blobs on there to cover up the fact that I can never figure out how to get a layer of flat colour completely flat (actually, that's not true. All you have to do is to wet the entire area and then brush the colour on smoothly—but I'm always convinced that I can manage it without wetting the area first even though I know that I never have and never will: like I say colour just isn't my thing, even though I eventually have fun doing it when I get to the Jack Davis blobs of colour stage).



Okay, I've actually hit a part in my Mr. A review that will be appropriate for the Sunday Blog & Mail so everyone who never reads the Sunday Blog & Mail now have a choice to make: read it and have to think about morals or not read it and miss a part of the Mr. A review.

Hey, we're talking Steve DITKO here, Bubba.

Either! Or!

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

___________________________________________________

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 #88 (December 8th, 2006)

Friday December 8 –



Getting a very early 6 am start today so—since Sherwood doesn't open til around 9 am—it looks as if we're actually going to start with Mr. A, today, instead of trying to work him in around the periphery of the Dr. Strangeroach commissioned piece. I never actually bought Mr. A when it came out but this first issue was definitely the first conscious awareness I had of the character even though I had already been going through my initial indoctrination into the whole underground comics phenomenon (which was actually about to collapse rapidly in 1973 when this collected Mr. A was published because of that year's US Supreme Court decision on pornography and the wide-ranging crackdown on head shops) and was a fanzine veteran of at least three years' standing. So it took me by surprise to read in Joe Brancatelli's editorial that


Mr. A's appearance here is not his first. He has been a huge part of the comic fandom underground for many years. He's appeared in many amateur comic art magazines, those lucid journals of opinion published covertly by comic fans. Among others, Mr. A has appeared in Witzend, The Comic Crusader, The Collector, Guts and Graphic Illusions.


If I saw him in any of those—and Wally Wood's Witzend is the only one I can visualize mentally although I knew about Martin Greim's Comic Crusader—I blanked out the memory at some point. The splash page definitely drops us into the deep end of the Steve Ditko swimming pool right off the top with a large block of typewritten text.


Any man who claims the right to another's efforts or life automatically renounces the concept of rights, and their protection of his right to his own legitimate efforts and life.

A claim to a contradiction—or wanting it both ways at the same time—is a wish for the irrational to come true, the impossible to become possible. It is a confession of a wish to live in a fake, unreal world, and it can only be attempted by holding and acting on an ANTI-LIFE PREMISE!


Was I alone in thinking that Ditko was here discussing his relationship with the comic-book field in general and Marvel Comics and Stan Lee in particular? That was certainly how I read it at the time and I'm not sure that it isn't too far wrong—that Steve Ditko was attempting to address the nascent issues of creator's rights in light of his own experiences collaborating with Stan Lee who had the full weight of editorial fiat on his side of the equation. Put another way, it was the experience of Howard Roarke the architect in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (or Atlas Shrugged—I apologize that I always confuse the two) acted out in the somewhat narrower confines of the comic-book field which would have suggested the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot relative to the Ayn Randian archetype of the Exceptional Individual Versus Unenlightened Capitalism. In 1964-65 when the whole Lee/Ditko collaboration was unravelling it would have been ludicrous to suggest that a comic-book illustrator would have a valid analogous claim to that of Roarke. Architecture was up there on the Big Board whereas drawing comic books was, well, just drawing comic books. Had you suggested to Ayn Rand that there was a validity to the analogue, I suspect she would have dismissed it out of hand. A comic-book artist in her frames of reference would have been seen as having as much application to The Grand Scheme of Things as, say, a janitor. And yet, in Big Board terms you can't get much bigger in the twenty-first century than a film franchise that grosses a billion dollars (as the Spider-man franchise allegedly has) and which, consequently, in the fullness of time reverses the roles. An architect being small potatoes when compared to the number one movie franchise in today's frames of reference.

The problem with so much of what Ditko is trying to say or appears to be trying to say with Mr. A is that it isn't lucid in any conventional literary sense, which in many ways just makes it all the more compelling. How does an artist successfully plead his case against a writer? You can certainly sense the outrage implicit in what Ditko is saying, sense the injustice which has been perpetrated against him but—as with the case of Gene Day—the company is always going to be in the right because that's the way the game is constructed: Stan Lee was Mr. Inside, the publisher's nephew, Steve Ditko was Mr. Outside, the freelancer. We have no way of knowing if Stan Lee made any efforts to accommodate Ditko but we are certainly aware that there was a germination taking place which suggested that the Marvel Style of comic-book creation was making use of the artists as the primary storytellers and that Stan Lee's job was just to write appropriate word balloons and captions after the story had already been told. Jack Kirby essentially had the same beef when it came to acknowledgement and compensation. The problem was further compounded in the fact that Stan Lee's eloquence tended to abandon him completely when it came to the real world. He obviously heard the criticisms but never had much to say about them either publicly or (so far as we know) privately. Presumably his salary was going up as the senior company man below the executive level. In the 1960s there weren't a lot of precedents for such largesse to spread downward through the chain of command to the hoi polloi and you couldn't get more hoi polloi in the context of the time than a freelance artist.

But there is definitely an over-the-top Ayn Rand quality to suggesting that anyone possessing those idiosyncratic traits exhibited by Stan Lee as company man, as Mr. Inside, meant that he "automatically renounces the concept of rights and their protection of his right to his own legitimate efforts and life" and it's hard imagine, as an example, any court of law sharing that view even in our own degraded age of Advanced Victimology as Lifestyle.

How about that? A whole day's instalment of the Blog & Mail and I'm not even halfway through the introductory text piece to the 1973 Mr. A comic—and Sherwood won't be open for another HOUR yet!

Tomorrow: More Mr.A!

___________________________________________________

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 #87 (December 7th, 2006)

Thursday December 7 -

There's also the problem coming up, as soon as I transfer the background to the Dr. Strangeroach piece onto the artboard as to how I'm going to chart the progress from that point when I start colouring it. I don't have a colour photocopier here and Ger is on vacation with his digital camera. So I think what I'm going to do is to walk down to Sherwood and get colour photocopies done as I progress on it. Looking on the bright side it will force me to slow down and let each layer of colour dry before applying the next one and give me time to mentally assess what I'm doing on the way there and back. Looking on the not-so-bright side what I'm really doing is just avoiding buying my own digital camera which is going to be an invaluable part of doing the Blog & Mail at some point but which is also going to be a literal albatross around my neck that has remained largely albatross free for lo, these many years.

All right, time to transfer the background.

Background transferred and tightened up in pencil and I've also done the initial colour which is a sort of golden yellow background colour. So, while that's drying…



It's interesting that the colour on the Marvel Masterworks book by Andy Yanchus is actually pretty good. Flat colour—that air-brushy quality that computer colorists tend to overuse that makes everyone and everything look like the back end of a Buick has been kept to a minimum—and as far as I can remember is reasonably faithful to the original colour sense of the early sixties Marvel Comics in general and Dr. Strange in particular. Very bright colours for the most part. Comparing the colour volume to the Essentials volume is an education in just what a challenge Ditko's art was when it came to colour. You have to think about what it is that he's driving at because he has a very idiosyncratic sense of lighting and composition that issues from his largely brush inking (there's some speedball pen nib work on there as well but I'm pretty sure that most of it is brush). You have to follow his compositional decisions and sort of mentally "hook up" the established areas with flat outlines from panel to panel. Not too slavishly or the whole thing would flatten out but at the same time with a consistency that makes the great compositions jump out at you. I suspect that the advantage for a colorist on one of these Masterworks volumes is that you do so many pages of a defined, singular viewpoint (and Steve Ditko pretty much defines "singular viewpoint" in the comic-book field) that you can lock into the artist's way of seeing and learn to work to his strengths. The problem I always have with doing colour is that it opens up so many possibilities that there's no right way to do it. I'm sitting here looking at my initial layer of yellow and mentally colouring everything else every shade in the rainbow. I have a lot of trouble visualizing colour. The ectoplasmic figure is going to be black and white and the corporeal figure's cape is going to be comic-book crimson and bright yellow. White, yellow, crimson and bright yellow. So what "goes" with that? In any conventional environment vis-à-vis colour schemes it would be either an eyebrow harshly arched in disapproval or spontaneous projectile vomiting. In the comic-book field it's considered a serious question. Pale green, navy blue or brownish red. Having very little to no experience with it, my choice is to colour everything (like the cape) the colour it has to be and see what "comic-booky" colour seems called for. Bet I guess wrong.



The other question as I'm sitting here looking at it is the inking. And I still haven't made up my mind on that one. I've pencilled it like a Dave Sim parody piece which means it needs to be inked sort of half-Mort Drucker and half-Will Eisner Tudor City studio. On the other hand, because I'm "doing" Ditko it calls for brush inking—BOLD brush inking—which I'm loathe to do because I'm not very good at it and eager to do because I never get to ink that way and I've been studying it for about a week now. There you get into the question of what Sean M. is paying for and that would be pushing the boundaries of creative freedom even though he has given me carte blanche. I can do this in a way that I'm familiar with and have it come out looking as if its worth more than what you paid for it or I can do it in a way where I haven't really got a clue what I'm doing and have it come out looking as if it's worth about half what you paid for it. Nice married guy with a comic-book-tolerant wife it is certainly tempting but we're talking an amount that would pay for part of a freezer or a nicer coffee table or some lawn furniture. One doesn't muck about in those situations.

I think I'll go for a total Steve Ditko-brush-like quality on the folds on the cape, the radiation lines around the amulet's eye, the foreground cage and the drippy curved path (I'm looking at the one in the Essentials reprint of Strange Tales 127 in the panels featuring the battle between The Mindless Ones—and, no, they aren't feminists: this was 1964! Good guess, though!—and it's absolutely astonishing what Ditko was able to do with what appears to be a brush he hadn't cleaned in a few weeks and maybe—MAYBE!—two or three thin lines defining the fingers on one of the characters. Completely astonishing in the way that Joe Kubert's brush inking is completely astonishing) and hope that those elements dominate the finished image to the extent that any comic-book ocular brain is going to register it as "DIT! KO!" without having to look any more closely. And when that ocular brain does look more closely (hereby resolved) it will see all the little Mort Drucker and Will Eisner pen lines "PEN! LINES!" it has every right to expect from a Dave Sim commissioned piece.

While studying Ditko's approach to the ectoplasmic figures (how in the heck do you do the eyebrows and mustache if you aren't using solid black anywhere? Several different ways, evidently: outline, thin line hatching to establish definition or just "the hell with it" and make `em black) altered the line-weight on the ectoplasmic figures on a regular basis using either a thin brush line or a thick or thin pen line. The question he seemed to be asking himself was "Do I really need to alter the density of the line that much if the printed image is going to be in black and white?" You can see this quandry more clearly in the Essentials volume than in the Masterworks volume because the former is in black and white as the original art had been. Where he has rendered the ectoplasmic Strange in a thin brush line roughly the same density as the corporeal Strange it definitely looks…uh…strange: like a double image instead of a ghost image emerging from the corporeal form. Conversely in Masterworks there is a tendency for the figure to look "under-drawn" and too insubstantial once the colour has been added, which raises the question: if he's that insubstantial and ghost-like, why can't you see things through him? At least part of the answer there is "Because it's a pain in the butt to draw things visible through a ghost image where you are trafficking in a minimalist brush approach to inking." The thinnest line—and my own Ditko ectoplasmic rendering of choice—is in "Witchcraft in the Wax Museum" from Strange Tales #121 where the line-work is so thin that it's definitely breaking up in places, particularly on the last page (even with the restoration work that was done). I don't know if Ditko sensed that he was going way too fine for 1960s-era colour comics production values or if he got a phone call from Stan Lee or the production department when they had the stats shot for the colorist, but he goes to the other extreme in the next two issues and inks the ectoplasmic Strange in the same density as the corporeal Strange. Which, to me, is a shame. The slight loss of density and the breaking up of some of his linework in 121 was more than offset by the gracefulness of the look that he achieved there. So that's the story I'll be looking at for my own ectoplasmic Dr. Strangeroach.

Okay, it's 9:15 pm on Day Three of BIOGRAPHY OF A COMMISSION and I'm going to pack it in and read some more Dr. Strange. I'm up to issue 130's "The Defeat of Dr. Strange" which I can't wait to read. I mean, if Dr. Strange gets defeated in issue 130, what happens in the next eleven issues? If it wasn't for the fact that it says right on the splash page "BEGINNING NOW!! The Start of the Greatest Black Magic Spectacular Ever Presented!" I'd almost suspect that Dr. Strange doesn't get defeated (I mean, AT ALL!) in this one.

But I HAVE to find out.

Tomorrow, we'll see if I can colour the piece, describe my progress on it, take it back and forth to Sherwood to get colour copies made AND talk about Mr. A at some point.

Can it be…?

"The Defeat of Dave Sim"?


___________________________________________________

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 #86 (December 6th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186

Wednesday December 6 -

Mission accomplished. As soon as I got the two tracing paper figures juxtaposed, what the ectoplasmic self was staring at became a no-brainer: the "all seeing eye" coming out of Dr. Strange's amulet. Another level to the gay-looking/ballet humour in that it looks like an erect uncircumcised penis. Unless Sean M. doesn't want that on his wall (and who could blame him or his wife if they didn't?) in which case that wasn't my intention AT ALL. It's just the "all-seeing eye" coming out of Dr. Strange's amulet with the distinctively wavy, thick-line Steve Ditko motif.





The background I roughed in quickly and then positioned on the drawing.



It's a big part of the fun of this piece so I want to put some time in on it but, as is always the case with commissioned pieces, I have one eye on the clock. I've already been working on this for part of three days and it's still in the pencil stage. Let me put it this way: let's say that you make $100 a day at your job. Now let's say that instead of getting that $100 a day you get $100 to do a given set of tasks. If you can do all those tasks in one day, you're still making $100 a day. If it takes you two days, you're making $50 a day. If it takes you three days, you're making $33.33 a day. If it takes you four days, you're making $25 a day. By about day five, I figure you would be starting to think about what part of the tasks you can jettison rather than trying to figure out how to make it more complicated. This is the core problem with commissioned pieces and in fact with all creativity: where am I putting the time in? And how much time am I putting in? As it is, I'm not even charging for reading the Complete Steve Ditko Doctor Strange and I'm not charging for writing a diary of all of my decision-making. And yet I'm still expected to make what is roughly half of what I was doing commissions for a few months ago.

This gets into interesting areas. I was talking to Phil Irish who is the Kitchener Artist-in-Residence this year (drop by and say "hi"—he's just across from where you pay your public utility bills at City Hall) a while back about the series of paintings he's working on whose subjects are people's favourite places in the world which he gets them to draw a map to and then he goes there and makes sketches and then comes home and does a finished painting of the place and hollows out a space in the painting where he puts the map that the person gave him. Anyway, we were talking about the favourite parts of our work and discovered that we had in common that the parts we actually LIKE doing take up very little of our working time. Most of the time we are doing preparatory work that we're less interested in so that we can get to the part that we're more interested in. And that suddenly struck me as decidedly screwy. If art requires being a sincere personal expression to be considered art, then presumably it also requires that the vast majority of what goes into its production is supposed to be pleasurable. And yet most of it isn't. The subject came up again last week when I had lunch with Chester at Peter Pan and he mentioned that he had done a commissioned work that paid well (but, again, not as well as it would have it if would have taken one day instead of the four days that it took) and had recently been asked to design a package for The Complete Little Orphan Annie. As he said, they interested him but not in the way that working on his new graphic novel interested him. Likewise with his recent Western Canada tour. It was interesting and probably useful but not as interesting or useful as working on his new graphic novel. So, there it was again. I'm more interested in working on my secret project and my commentaries on Mark than I am on the things I am working on and yet these are the things that I'm working on.

Part of it, I think, is plain Judeo-Christian work ethic which has as one of its key—although seldom discussed—components that you are supposed to do unsatisfying things first before you can do satisfying things: for the same reason that you eat dessert last and dinner first. You always save the most pleasurable for last. The problem with that theory in this workaholic age is that you can very easily get yourself into a situation where by virtue of the sheer volume of work that we're all required to do, you NEVER actually get to what it is that you WANT to do and you are ALWAYS doing things that are less interesting to you because you're labouring under the delusion that at some point there will come an end to the things you don't want to do when the evidence is very much to the contrary.

My problem is that it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. I think myself obligated to do things like the Blog & Mail because it seems to be making a difference in sales and obviously I'm interested in generating more sales. If it isn't generating more sales (and I talked about this with Chet as well) and it just so happens that we were due for a little sales spurt that has now come and gone then there are any number of other ways that I'd rather be spending my time—like doing another Siu Ta: So Far strip or commentaries on Mark or my secret project. And that's where this links up to this commissioned piece that I'm working on (and discussing as I'm working on it). By waiting for something that banged a gong with me—a Ditko-influenced piece—I'm not sure if I'm not just refining my own level of self-distraction. I mean I really would rather be doing those other things but by incorporating the Blog & Mail and sticking to a theme that interests me at the upper end of my disinterest I would have to say that arguably I have possibly become the serpent in my own garden, tempting myself away from what it is that I want to do.

There's also the interesting question of whether I'm doing myself any good here talking about Steve Ditko and Dr. Strange and Mr. A. All of those are considered to be in the mainstream culture of comic books, genre fiction, etc. which is supposedly the death knell for anything that has any larger ambitions. I THINK I had larger ambitions with Cerebus but I don't know if I'm driving people away by talking about mainstream stuff or casting a wider net. Again, it's the difference between answering the mail and getting a letter from a Steve Ditko fan who wants to know what I think of Mr. A and just using the fact that Mr. A dropped into my lap as I was working on a Ditko-influenced commission as an excuse to talk about Mr. A.

I mean, I'm definitely looking forward to talking about Mr. A…

…but I'd still rather be doing my commentaries on Mark.

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

___________________________________________________

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 #85 (December 5th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186


Tuesday December 5 -



The nice thing about doing a really lousy tracing paper drawing as the last thing on a given day is that you know whatever you're going to do the next day is going to be an improvement. I'm convinced that a part of you works on it unconsciously in the interim and that would seem to have been the case here. I basically reversed the process I had used for the ectoplasmic ballet dancer and moved the head up. Whenever his ectoplasmic self left his body, Dr. Strange would look even more wooden than usual, so I thought I would emphasize that with Berni Wrightson-style deep sculpted shadows on his eyes and under his nose. I also decided to use the later cape that Ditko came up with at the end of Strange Tales #127. Ditko had obviously had a lot of trouble with the part of the cape that stuck up in behind the head (what do you call that, by the way?). Sometimes it was flat and sometimes it was curved, sometimes it barely came up to ear level and sometimes it loomed over his head. For an issue or two he put little blobs of ink on it as trim and then just as quickly eliminated them.



[It's always interesting to get little insights when you actually have to study something for drawing reference. In this case a) the Dr. Strange cape is where the Spawn cape originally came from and b) I learned how to do those little ornate squiggles on Cerebus' papal scarf and his Cerebus the candidate vest from what Ditko had come up with for the trim on Dr. Strange's cape]

I don't know if Stan Lee finally told him to make up his mind what the cape looked like (it's just the sort of thing you would get letters about) but, evidently, Ditko finally sat down and designed the whatever-it's-called to be distinctively Steve Ditko in nature with a plausible but largely contrary scalloped front view and side view with inlaid swirls and then also designed a definitive circular amulet. And then Stan Lee wrote them both into the story ("From this moment forth, you shall have a new cape and a more wondrous amulet!").

This was one of the reasons that I was glad that Sean M. wasn't stuck on any particular Dr. Strange, because it allowed me to mix and match various elements. The eyebrows and mustache and oriental look (and there's no doubt in my mind that at least in his first two or three appearances, Dr. Strange was oriental) I took from the earliest incarnation of the character. As I did with those little round black dots on the back of his gloves (which is one of those things that you're only going to do for a little while when you realize exactly how time-consuming and largely unnoticeable they are). The winged creature (or whatever that is on his chest) I just sort of modified to suit the drawing—Ditko has a number of different looks for it. I also stuck with the old square amulet with the round centre.

I had brought my ruler upstairs to be able to do a quick assessment of whether I would need to reduce the two images. So far, so good. They were taking up a little less than the 17 inches I had to work with and made an interesting tall and thin central composition. I had to get the ectoplasmic figure up high enough to see his ballet feet. I also realized that I needed to have him yelling "By The Lightness of Nuryev's Loafers!" or something similar. His mouth wasn't open wide enough. So I think I'm going to go and fix that right now.

I also enlarged the right eye (these directions are all reversed, of course, when I transfer the image to the illustration board). I have no idea what he's going to be staring at, but that brings me to the other good reason to do this commission: Steve Ditko's otherworldly backgrounds. And here I have my work cut out for me. At John's place I immediately started flipping through the Marvel Masterworks volume, looking for the most distinctive Steve Ditko otherworldly backgrounds. It is usually the case that you will find that an artist repeats himself within specific set parameters when it comes to alien environments. Steve Ditko? Not so much. Just about every page had a distinctive approach to an alien environment (Nightmare's realm, the Purple Dimension, The Other Side of Nowhere, the Eternity Dimension) and what was more, each of those distinctive approaches could be identified as specific to Steve Ditko from a mile away. That's no small point in a field where 99% of the battle is imagination, being able to visualize something that you've never actually seen and commit it to paper in a way that makes it plausible.

This plausibility—the fact that Steve Ditko's renderings of the realm of nightmares are so distinctive and yet so various—also intrudes upon my earlier allusion to the fact of what was (possibly) actually being done and which centers on the standard question addressed to artists and writers: Where do you get your ideas from? The honest answer is "I don't know." There is certainly something to Steve Ditko's backgrounds that provokes just such a question most especially from his peers and successors: how do you come up with this stuff? How do you make The Most Otherworldly backgrounds in a field that specializes in the otherworldly? And, I would assume, the honest answer is "I don't know." And that brings us (if we allow ourselves, which most of you won't) in the direction of invocation. If you are doing a comic-book story about black magic and drawing things whose origins you have no idea about or if you're doing a comic-book story and writing things whose origins you have no idea about and you continually reiterate, as Stan Lee does, "the Dread Dormammu…the all-seeing eye of Agamotto (again, a blasphemous assertion since only God is All-Seeing)…the Hosts of Hoggoth…the Vishanti, The Crimson Circle of Cyttorak, also called the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak, the Vapors of Valtorr, the Seven Rings of Raggador" (if you're just making it up then why stick with the same names over and over? And why actually come up with a Dormammu character later in the day?) then how do you know for fact that you aren't, indeed, invoking something you would never in a million years invoke if you had a conscious awareness of what you were doing? It's an interesting mix: these distinctive Steve Ditko backgrounds, visual motifs and visual tropes coupled with Stan Lee's words, written motifs and written tropes. "May the hosts of the Vishanti smile upon you—may the mighty Dormammu be your slave," concludes one of the stories. We've already seen that Stan Lee was narrating on at least two different levels—there was the story itself and then there was the sales pitch addressed directly to the reader—and that this was pretty unique in the annals of comicdom. The only precedent being the three EC horror hosts of the previous decade who addressed the reader directly, as Stan Lee does here, at the beginning and end of each story. What is the net effect of unconscious and careless invocation? I think the implicit answer is that—if there is a net effect, and I assume there is—it is both unknown and unknowable.

Anyway, there's a lot here to pick from in the way of backgrounds, so many different variations that they would be impossible to even bookmark and then subject to a process of elimination. All I can do is flip through the book and then dive in on tracing paper. One recurring motif is the dripping pathway and then the reiterated doorway cut directly into the page and also the cage which is usually composed of energy or something similar and which is disintegrating on one side. I think the first thing is to get the figures…

Hang on, I just ran across a great shot of the "all-seeing eye" coming out of Dr. Strange's amulet. I've got to put that into his corporeal figure before I forget. Okay. There. I'm back.

Okay, I think that's as far as I can go just sitting here next to the photocopier with my tracing paper pad. Time to transfer the two figures and see what they look like.

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

___________________________________________________

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 #84 (December 4th, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186

Monday December 4 -

So, finally, November 20 I ended up having two hours to myself before the Community Services committee meeting started at City Hall and I figured I would start on the commissioned piece, photocopying it in progress. What a pain in the you-know-what that turned out to be. How much should I pencil before I photocopy it? I also ended up using an HB pencil instead of the 3H I would ordinarily use just to make sure that it showed up better on the photocopies without having to juice up the darkness setting too far. So, already there is a certain corruption setting in there—making decisions on the basis of how the "in progress" material is going to look at www.cerebusart.com instead of on the basis of what is going to help me draw a better picture. Anyway, I started with basic Roach proportions which I never get right at the outset.



As exaggerated as I try and make his physique, I always spend the first while telling myself "Bigger, BIGGER, BIGGER" but this is the first time that you get to see it in photocopy form.



A lot of times, just the outline of the Roach with the costume details fitting proportionately onto it is enough to establish the humour (to which I owe a debt to Wally Wood and his "Superduperman" parody in Kurtzman's Mad). In this case, not so much. The big billowing sleeves detract from the comedic effect of the oversized shoulders and biceps. It doesn't matter how big you make the shoulders, the billowing sleeves are just going to make him look ordinarily super-heroic.

So, then I had to go to plan B—what else have I got here in Dr. Strange's costume that I can use to enhance the comedy? One good trick is to lower the head into the torso so that the shoulders are up around his ears. Which worked pretty well in this case.



That's pretty much the same face I drew originally, but just setting it lower on the torso made it look funnier. I tried putting the Roach antennae on the chest emblem and tucking the amulet in tight under his chin but that didn't really add anything (so, as you can see, I gave up before I had even completed drawing that part).



Maybe a skinny waistline. Yeah, that worked pretty well, too, with the oversized belted sash, hiking the belted sash up to mid-abdomen and making it form-fitting. It makes the over-sized billowing sleeves look funny by contrast. Why? I have no idea. I just traced the left sleeve from the previous drawing and then thought I'd try something else with the right sleeve—a ballooning quality, cinched tight around the elbow and top of the gloves and flaring dramatically up to the shoulder in a single exaggerated curve.



Then I decided to make the tail of the tunic proportionately shorter, barely extending down to his groin to emphasize how hiked up to the midriff it is. And that was when I first thought, "Oh, a ballet dancer." Dr. Strange as a ballet dancer—now that's funny—so I drew this enormous muscular leg and the foot en pointe and the other foot in one of those really gay-looking poses.


Let me just interject in that relentless grinding day-to-day reality of Our Humourless Feminist Society Retrospect the next day that, yes, I do consider male ballet dancers inherently humorous. I can certainly understand that Relentlessly Humourless Feminists will disagree and in their own Relentlessly Humourless Fashion they will point out the years of training and top-notch physical condition that male ballet dancers are in and that their cardio-vascular training compares favourably with any in which competitive male athletes participate. I'm sure that Rudolf Nuryev and Mikhail Baryshnikov and all of their fellow ballet dancers are remarkable individuals deserving of all manner of respect and accolade and the millions of dollars which showered upon them in their hey-day. I'm sure they are socially responsible role models for children the world over who inspire generations—and will inspire generations yet unborn—to the dizzying heights of accomplishment upon which they trod with infinite delicacy and grace. I am equally certain that my own meagre accomplishments pale to insignificance beside their own and that I am unworthy to even type their names in light of that dramatic contrast between their exalted politically correct selves and their stellar accomplishments and foolish Dave Sim the evil misogynist, the Pariah King of Comics. While certainly agreeing with all of these points, categorically and irrefutably, and the empirical evidence which informs them, in the spirit of True Democracy and my belief in the freedom of expression and freedom of belief, let me state again that I firmly believe that a grown man tippy-toeing across a stage dressed in a tutu or full leotard is, inherently, humorous and that linking that mental image to super-heroes is, inherently, funny.

Or, it was until I had to write all this, anyway.

Another victory for Humourless Feminists (pardon the redundancy) everywhere!


I didn't get the effect I was looking for, though. It just looks like a garden variety super-hero (who—I hate to break this to all you super-hero fans who might've strayed over here—spend a great deal of their time in really, REALLY gay-looking poses) particularly since both feet were going to be in a solid black leotard. I could stretch a point and do little white highlights on the ankles and toes but the solid black leotard is a defining characteristic of Dr. Strange (not that there's anything wrong with that) so you don't want to stray outside of that in a parody if you can help it. On the next drawing, I decided to really lean into it and redrew the left arm in a REALLY gay-looking gesture with the hand pointing to the top of his head (do they do that in ballet? Or is that one of those things that people, like myself—whose exposure to ballet is pretty much limited to the Nutcracker Suite and Warner Brothers cartoons—read into these things?).



Missed completely with the feet again: although I managed to get the point to the toe, it's still not pointed distinctively enough in an overt ballet look to make it look otherwise than like a super-hero stance (not that there's anything wrong with admiring men who look natural with their feet posed like that, super-hero fans! You fellows stick to your guns and go right on admiring your pointy-toed heroes! Celebrate diversity!) and trying to interlock the two feet did nothing to make it look less like a super-hero and more like a ballet dancer. I might have to go and look at a book on Rudolf Nuryev at the library. I tried curling the other arm in and that seemed to "up" the ballet quotient a little bit but not as much as I needed it to. I traced it off again, this time with the Roach saying something hopefully ballet and Dr. Strange-like. "By the Hoary Cod-Piece of Nuryev!" Or something similar.



I hope, at this point, that I'm not getting too far outside of Sean M.'s comfort level as a Dr. Strange/Steve Ditko/gay archetype/super-hero fan.

I also make the late decision to make the ballet figure Dr. Strangeroach's ectoplasmic self. In Dr. Strange his ectoplasmic self (completely white with black outlines—thus eliminating the black leotard problem) would either "emerge from" or "transform from" his corporeal form (Stan Lee would write it both ways as he juggled the specific mythologies of the dozens of characters he was suddenly responsible for: just as he started by describing it as the "ethereal" self and then switched to "ectoplasmic" later) and go off and get things done in otherworldly environments or on the other side of the planet, passing through walls and so on. Usually he would get trapped and use his amulet which would fix everything (which led my old jaded self to wonder, Why didn't he just use the amulet in the first place and save the wear and tear on his ectoplasmic self?). Anyway, the ectoplasmic self, for reasons that were never explained didn't wear a cape, so I did one quick, lousy drawing of his corporeal self wearing a cape and then it was time for the Community Services meeting.

Tomorrow: Putting the pieces together

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610

___________________________________________________

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 #83 (December 3rd, 2006)

And the YHWH met Balaam and put a word in his mouth, and saide, Goe againe vnto Balak, and say thus. And when hee came to him behold, he stood by his burnt offering, and the Prince of Moab with him. And Balak said vnto him, What hath the YHWH spoken?

And he tooke vp his parable, and said, Rise vp Balak & heare; hearken vnto me thou sonne of Zippor:



God not a man that he should lie, neither the sonne of man, that hee should repent:

hath he said, and shall he not doe? or, hath hee spoken, and shall he not make it good?

Behold, I have received to blesse: and hee hath blessed, and I cannot reuerse it. Hee hath not beheld iniquitie in Iacob, neither hath he seene peruerseness in Israel: the YHWH his God with him, and the shoute of a King among them.



God brought them out of Egypt: he hath as it were the strength of an Vnicorne.

Surely there is no inchantment in Iacob, neither is there any diuination against Israel: according to this time it shalbe said of Iacob, and of Israel, What hath God wrought!

Beholde, the people shall rise vp as a great Lion, and lift vp himselfe as a yong Lion: hee shall not lie downe vntill he eate of the prey, and drinke the blood of the slaine.

And Balak said vnto Balaam, neither curse them at all, nor blesse them at all.

But Balaam answered and said vnto Balak, Told not I thee, saying, All that the YHWH speaketh, that I must doe?



Fourth Book of Moshe 23:16-26

I am assured that this works so forgive me if it doesn't—Shabad Atma whom I responded to here at the Blog & Mail on October 23 has started his own Blog and his lead item "Anything Done for the First Time Releases a…D'oh!" constitutes a continuation of our dialogue which is a very interesting experience for the Pariah King of Comics who is far more used to being read by people who prefer to hide behind metaphorical rocks and trees and pretend that they've never heard of the Pariah King of Comics, and even though they have never heard of him and have no idea what it is that he talks about on his Blog & Mail they want everyone to know that they vehemently disagree with it even though they think he has a perfect right to his own opinions. So for those of you interested in reading Shabad Atma's follow-up to my October 23 Blog & Mail, you can just click on http://shabadatma.blogspot.com/



So…that's supposed to work, right? I don't have to retype everything he sent me here, I can just follow up on his follow up and we can actually have a sort of public conversation for those people who are interested in reading it (i.e. those Blog & Mail readers who actually read the Sunday editions—i.e. both of you or all three of you as the case may be)? Forgive the Pariah King of Comics for being a little dubious about this whole thing since he is far more used to just talking to himself here.



Anyway, on page 2, Shabad asks if I fast every Sunday now and asks me to describe my routine.



Yes, I do. My routine is that the Sabbath begins at midnight on Saturday and goes until midnight on Sunday so I try to make sure I'm back at my hotel if I'm out of town by midnight on Saturday and that I have some sort of muffin and orange juice combo on hand (orange juice will usually keep overnight without a fridge—depending on how ambitious I am I'll pack the ice bucket full of ice and retrieve the juice from the ice water the next morning) since most hotels don't start their room service until well after dawn except in the dead of winter. In Salt Lake City I was about ten minutes over on the Saturday night, a condition I have come to think of as "Dave turning into a pumpkin." First prayer is about an hour before dawn so I get up, do the ritual ablutions, change into my prayer clothes and then read a chapter or two from whatever part of the Torah that I'm on (at the moment, The First Book of the Kings—or I Samuel as us goyim tend to call it—Chapter 15) do my prayer and then go back to bed. Depending on the kind of week it's been I'll sleep until 10:30 (good week) or 11:30 am (bad week) and then get up and continue with my Torah reading. After my noon prayer I'll read some more of the Torah and then either just before or just after my afternoon prayer I'll start writing my commentaries on the Gospels (Luke chapter seven at the moment) and I'll do that usually until about eight or nine o'clock at night and then I'll switch to reading aloud from the Koran starting with whatever Sura I'm on (at the moment Sura 29 "The Spider").



No water, no food between sunrise and sunset. It wasn't so much the urge to "connect the dots" of Ramadan fast with the rest of the year as it was to try and get an idea ahead of time of what fasting in the middle of summer is going to be like when Ramadan gets there. That and the fact that I do tend to see myself as a massive reclamation job and fasting for one month seemed like just a larger version of the problem I had with the Anglican Church where as long as I showed up on Sunday morning for an hour or two, the rest of the week I was free to get in as much trouble as interested me. That's far more the motivation behind the Sunday fasting and the fasting Sunday to Wednesday every third week. I don't see myself as pious, I'm afraid, but more as someone you need to keep under the strictest confines if you have a hope of redeeming him or at least keeping him away from the more obvious pitfalls that make up what we laughingly describe as modern life. I'm not sure that I haven't overdone it over the period of time that I've been keeping up that routine because I've sure noticed an exponential rise in demonic possession (people suddenly talking to me about things they couldn't possibly be aware were of great significance to me, probing my defences, levelling accusations and insinuations, using terms I know they don't know the meaning of, claiming they didn't say things to me that they did, in fact, say to me) or maybe it isn't so much a matter of overdoing it as it is a matter of having accomplished a certain portion of the reclamation job I set out to do. Beset on a daily basis by the demonically possessed. How gratifying. Fortunately, having been around feminists all my life I'm more than used to it. Just nod and smile and mentally calculate how long it is until your next prayer time.



I have to say that I have found summertime fasting something of an ordeal. I'm writing this in late November so fasting is pretty much a cakewalk. I have breakfast around 6 am and eat after my last prayer around 6:15 pm. I'm usually just in the "Yeah, I could eat something" category by that point. My Sunday to Wednesday fast that's closest to the summer solstice, on the other hand is a very big deal. I am profoundly aware that I have gone through my third longest fast, my second longest fast, my longest fast and then my second second longest fast, my third third longest fast and so on from about mid- May to late July. It's a little further over into the borderland with genuine hunger. Not quite Hunger, but definitely hunger as opposed to just "being hungry". It's destabilizing mentally, particularly the last two and a half hours or so from say 8 pm to 10:15 pm which is about the latest the night prayer goes (I've also got this personal quirk of fasting until after the night prayer instead of eating after the sunset prayer—mid-summer is about the only time I've been severely tempted to break that rule and have something to eat after the sunset prayer: so far I've managed to keep a perfect record there over the last seven years). I've often wondered when Ramadan took place in the northern hemisphere at the time of the revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah—if it wasn't mid-summer I would guess it was pretty close to it. I try to extrapolate from the edgy mid-summer experience what thirty days is going to be like instead of four days, but it isn't really a fair comparison given the transformational quality that hits you about ten days in. I'm really not looking forward to those ten days, though, in 2012 or 2013 or whenever it is.



I agree with you that if Alistair Crowley's last words weren't "Magic that is used for anything other than fully giving yourself over to the Will of God constitutes a poor use of magic" they should have been.



On the subject of the Hebrew people begging God for a king, yes I do think that that was actually directed at and responded to by YHWH but I think it was more a net effect of Moshe's Egyptian father-in-law (I assume at the behest of YHWH) persuading Moshe to appoint surrogates in the form of the Judges to assist him in instructing and adjudicating the people. As soon as you had human beings instead of prophets running the show then the people were bound to experience an over-whelming desire for something greater which is, I think, what led them to desire a king. I think there's a schism in society that's epitomized in the aftermath of the Pentateuch by Joshua/Judges and Samuel/Kings and which has been endlessly recurring since then. A good example is the American Revolution which replaced the English crown (King) with a Supreme Court (Judges). And I agree with you that it does lead to a Denial of God as a core characteristic of human society because we can all see that these are not exalted beings they're just people we've chosen to cast in that role (and, of course, as the erosion continues allows atheists to put the prophets inappropriately into the same category). Your average truck driver has about as much claim to judicial excellence as does anyone on Canada or the US's Supreme Court. If you could sit down and explain to him the issues at stake in a given case, he'll probably come up with a comparable judgement and most Supreme Court decisions are split. Which, if you're dealing with a concept of Justice means that a 6-4 decision means that either six of the judges are completely wrong or four of them are. Neither is exactly reassuring in the "Is this any way to run a railroad?" sense. It seems to me an example of demonic possession on a grand scale. It's one thing when your Supreme Court Justices are all devout believers in God and realize that the only hope they have of not making a total mess of things is by cleaving tight to the idea "In God We Trust". But, once you have primarily or exclusively atheists, feminists and Marxists on the Court (which we do in Canada and which I think you will soon in the United States) then you really have a recipe for disaster: the institutionalizing of profound humanist misapprehensions that then become a "carved in stone" part of the fabric of society because at that point you are dealing with collectivist dictators who are unable to conceive of anything larger or more important than themselves, most of whom have no life experience outside of the rarefied atmosphere of the legal profession which is not exactly a breeding ground for basic common sense.



Oh, no, housing your story in the Cerebus Archive is hardly a problem and I'm flattered that you would think that highly of being included so consider it a permanent part of the collection, at this point.



And happy belated 38th birthday (November 17).



On the subject of issue 289/290, I appreciate your enthusiasm. Right now I'm just waiting to hear from Colin Longcore in Michigan about whether or not he's been able to get an institution interested there. Mimi and Alan still have the artwork at Night Flight in Utah. I'm not sure what your situation is like but I'd certainly be interested in trying to find some place to exhibit the material that's a little more…deistically…inclined? Mimi managed to drum up a fair amount of coverage but it's all pretty much in the Cerebus the barbarian/Cerebus the Pope/300 issues/Oh and Dave Sim isn't a feminist but to a degree that's okay. I mean the media is exclusively made up of atheists so atheism is all that they're really able to perceive and all that they think people are interested in. The idea that someone could think that the Bible could be of any greater interest than as either a church artefact or a "great work of literature" leaves everyone flat-footed and makes any attempt to promote something like The Last Day as a valid explanation of creation—"Who we are and how we came to be here"—pretty much useless.



If you can find any environment in Southern or Northern California that's interested in The Last Day on its own terms and which isn't going to attempt to shoehorn it into a secular-humanist context (and I imagine it will take some looking) I'll be happy to consider authorizing you to exhibit Ye Bookes of Cerebus.



I mean, a big reason that I was so enthusiastic about it being at St. Bonaventure University was because I was interested in the school's religious affiliation. I even got Jason to send me a book on St. Bonaventure so I could speak intelligently about him. Then I got to St. Bonaventure and I found out that pretty much everyone there—everyone that I met, anyway—is a devout secular humanist. Even the priests!



Thanks for sending me the print-out of your blog so I could respond to you here.



2 DVD sets of "Scripture at the Registry Theatre"

Are available from Trevor Grace at tgrace2001@sympatico.ca

Currently available:

The Books of Moshe, One through Five

(also called Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy)


___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail - Special Ragmop Party Edition!

This is sort of a "teaser" for the short film Trevor Grace is working on, which should find itself on YouTube in the next couple of weeks. The following is a collection of photos from the Ragmop Launch Party on November 30th.

Here's some text from Ragmop creator Rob Walton's blog:

http://planetlucypress.blogspot.com/



Wow! What a night. What a day. It began with meeting Dave Sim for lunch along with his cartoon sidekick, Chester Brown. Dave wanted to video an artist on the day of his launch, so Trevor was along with camera and mike in hand to record the events of the afternoon. The resulting film will appear on Dave's blog and YouTube sometime next week.

After lunch Trevor and I went off to pick up my daughter Grace --the inspiration for Ragmop's "Little Miss Universe". We headed downtown to World Salon where Grace had her hair cut and styled by the beautiful and delightful Aki. While in between shampoo and cut I interviewed Grace on camera about being a character in the book and what it was like watching me put the book together over the past two years. She handled the interview like a seasoned professional.

Once coiffed, Grace, I, and Trevor headed to the Victory Cafe for dinner and the launch. Grace changed into a floor length gold gown and I slipped into my tux. As I met and greeted people as they arrived Grace got up on stage for an interview with Dave. When he asked her if she thought the Three Stooges were funny,



Grace replied, "What? You think this is funny?" and grabbed Dave's nose with a pair of pliers.



You could hear Dave shouting "Moe! Moe!" for blocks.





Presentations got underway around eight with my reading two sections from Ragmop.









Then Grace and I read a portion of the book with her character, Little Miss Universe.



Also present was Duck-Duck although she shied away from the microphone and preferred I speak in her stead.

All in all it was a great time. I was so proud of Grace who captured everyone's hearts and co-signed the books with me --often putting her name ahead of mine since the crowd generally asked for her signature first. Everyone was very generous and accepting of her contribution to the book and the evening. It made me feel very good to be part of this community. You all gave comics a good name.

Other news is that independent bookstores around Toronto have been enthusiastically welcoming Ragmop on their shelves. If you're around Toronto and can't find Ragmop through the comics outlets, try Pages, Book City, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, and Another Story.

I'd like to thank Chris Butcher, Dave, Chester, Trevor, and everyone who came out to the event for making the return of Ragmop such a special day and night for me and Grace.

Thank you all for welcoming Ragmop back with open arms. Think I better dance now.

__________________________________________________

Panel To Panel is currently offering a special edition RAGMOP (w/EXCLUSIVE SIGNED, FULL-COLOR BOOKPLATE)

http://www.paneltopanel.net/store/productview/107118/

For more info, you can email Rob Walton at robwaltoon@sympatico.ca


The initial Diamond order code was: AUG06 3113

Dave Sim's blogandmail #82 (December 2nd, 2006)

For the next two weeks, the Blog & Mail revisits

Ditkomania

In honour of Steve Ditko's 80th year coming up in 2007 and in the hopes of drumming up a little business for his post-Marvel work published through Robin Snyder's RSCOMICS.

Order direct from Robin Snyder at

RSComics@aol.com

Or write to him at

3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, Washington 98225-1186




Beginning the


BIOGRAPHY OF A COMMISSIONED PIECE:

Dr. Strangeroach!


As you may recall, I got a commission to do an 11 by 17 Doctor Strangeroach and, having been somewhat immersed in Steve Ditko lately, I jumped at the chance. Not having any Ditko Dr. Strange reference worth mentioning, I waited until I went to Toronto to stay with John and Siu, confident that John would have what I was looking for. And had it he did: Marvel Masterworks Volume 23: Dr. Strange, starting with the Doctor's first appearance in Strange Tales 110. Of course, all I really needed was visual reference for the character but, having borrowed the book I figured I might as well actually read all of the material since I sort of had a built-in excuse. It's really quite a bizarre idea, structurally. Each episode is about seven pages long and, when you know that they were produced in the Marvel method—laid out and pencilled by Steve Ditko and then scripted by Stan Lee—you begin to appreciate exactly how difficult it was to work within those confines particularly in a short story context. Essentially Ditko would draw a series of moody looking pictures with Dr. Strange studying his ancient texts, then in jeopardy—imprisoned within some mystic construct or trapped in an otherworldly dimension (the other appeal of the commission)—where all looks fundamentally hopeless and then he falls back on his amulet which can basically do anything (including change its basic shape and look from episode to episode) and it was up to Stan Lee to ladle on the dramatic narration and dialogue to try and make the whole thing appear less cheesy and contrived than it obviously was. Some of this is so "over the top" as to qualify as an extreme form of self-parody, a characteristic of Stan Lee's writing that is often overlooked—hyperbolic extremes weren't the result of an occasional lapse of authorial judgement, but rather were one of the primary forms which informed his work and arguably a primary source of his success: the more pressing the deadline, the more extreme the forms of his literary expression. The Doctor Strange instalment in issue 122 of Strange Tales leads off with


Once again, the Mighty Marvel Group proudly presents Dr. Strange, the widely acclaimed smash sensation who has made black magic the most fascinating new subject in comicdom!


Even the most unsophisticated reader had to be aware, at one level or another, that it was Stan Lee himself who was writing these rave reviews as part of his own story's content but the fact that it had never been done before rather overwhelmed that fact and allowed it to be taken at face value. You weren't just reading a cheesy back-up story in a second-string Marvel title, you were reading the latest instalment of the "widely acclaimed smash sensation" after you had already gotten your twelve cents worth out of the solo Human Torch story in the front of the book!

I never saw the Ronald Coleman version of Lost Horizon, but I get the distinct impression that much of Dr. Strange was lifted whole from there and then modified on an on-going basis. Not for the first time, I was terrifically impressed with Stan Lee's ability to maintain a high-pitched dramatic edge while also indulging shamelessly in overwrought hyperbole. Over the long term it was unsustainable but in its day, it was the closest comics had come to achieving a real-world phenomenon unrivalled since the creation of Superman. Not that the early Marvel Comics rivalled the creation of Superman—they were still selling a couple of hundred thousand copies unlike the million or so that had been achieved in the 1930s—but by contrast with the rest of the field that had been dying on the vine over the course of the 1950s, it was an extraordinary achievement. What stands out most of all for me is how much the whole thing was composed of the quirky abilities of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others when hitched to the Stan Lee style of narration and dialogue and hyperbole. Almost all of the concepts are, at best, ill-considered, cheesy and contrived but from the adjectival emphases on out (the AMAZING Spider-man, The INCREDIBLE Hulk, the FANTASTIC Four, the MIGHTY Thor, the INVINCIBLE Iron Man—who besides Stan Lee recognized that the flat declaration of superlatives could provide such forward momentum?) they were inescapably idiosyncratic. The fact that the superlatives were extended to the creators of the books seems an obvious affectation in retrospect but, again, provided a remarkable impetus to the dramatic goings on. Jack KING Kirby, STURDY Steve Ditko, JAZZY John Romita. Marvel creators had adjectives, DC creators only had their own names very occasionally mentioned on the letters pages.

Dr. Strange is a peculiar one, part of the momentum of the time, roughly synchronous with the first issue of Spider-man. It's as likely as not that he was created to take some of the load off of Jack Kirby who was pencilling pretty much everything at the time, including the Human Torch solo stories which had started in Strange Tales 101. He drew

101 to 105, 108, 109, 114, 120, as well as the covers. Dr. Strange appeared in 110, 111 and then again in 114 (along with vocal declarations about how popular the character was that the Marvel offices had been deluged with mail demanding his return—which I assume was just hype to try and pump up a character designed primarily to give Kirby some breathing room). I had always known Dr. Strange as the "Master of the Mystic Arts" so it was a bit jarring to have his earlier connotation recalled right there on page one of the book: "Dr. Strange Master of Black Magic". It was jarring enough to make me wonder, What on earth was Steve Ditko doing drawing this thing? He of Mr. A fame ten years later with its clear demarcation between good and evil and the half white and half black calling card. Either or. No shades of gray. You choose Good or you choose Evil and you live with the consequences of your choice.

Which in turn led me into interesting alternative areas of thought. As a follower of Ayn Rand, libertarianism and empiricism, black magic would fall into peculiar fictional areas for Ditko. A ghost story is a ghost story is a ghost story. Anything that isn't real is fictitious and consequently harmless. The same sort of view would inform Stan Lee writing that Doctor Strange "has made black magic the most fascinating new subject in comicdom."

Only one of my two dictionaries—The Funk & Wagnall's Standard College Dictionary, 1980—even lists "black magic" and refers the reader directly to "witchcraft" (which draws an ironic smile). "The practices or powers of witches or wizards, especially when regarded as due to dealings with evil spirits or the devil: also called black magic." The reader is then referred to the synonymous "magic". Among the range of synonyms footnoted there is the assertion "The study of natural phenomena, called white or natural magic developed into the modern natural sciences. Distinguished from this was black magic or sorcery the attempt to use or invoke supernatural powers for personal or sinister purposes. Witchcraft was sorcery as practiced by a woman possessed by a demon." The flat assertions are interesting to me. The fact that there is acknowledgement that the natural sciences evolved out of white magic certainly suggest that magic is real (or is considered real by the dictionary's authors). They then hedge their bets with the use of the term "attempt to use or invoke" rather than defining black magic as the "use or invocation of supernatural powers". White magic is real, in other words, because it evolved into the natural sciences, while black magic remains hypothetical, unproven and consequently un-indictable. Not to belabour the point to my audience full of atheists (who really hate discussions of such things) these early adventures of Doctor Strange were being read by a twelve-year-old boy named Alan Moore who decided some thirty years later to become a necromancer and who would maintain that he has used and has invoked supernatural powers and I don't see any great clamouring in the comic-book field to disabuse him of that notion. What you think of the facts of the case would really hinge on whether you believe there is such a thing as a human soul and whether it was worth the sacrifice of Alan Moore's soul for all of us to have Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

[I think it's also worth noting that Neil Gaiman's Morpheus—Sandman—has a direct antecedent in the Doctor Strange villain, Nightmare, who reigns over the realm of dreams and even resembles Morpheus physically].

It's an unresolved issue that, as far as I can see, isn't an issue to anyone but me. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for what (I suspect) are differently nuanced reasons evidently saw the creation of a character billed as "The Master of Black Magic" to be a harmless enterprise in the traditions of, say, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Alan Poe. Thirty years later the comic-book field produces its first self-declared necromancer, something (I would hasten to point out) that you wouldn't see, say, in the automotive industry. In the case of Stan Lee, it's easy to see how he looks at it. At various points in Doctor Strange's adventures he refers to certain of the Doctor's adversaries as "omnipotent" or "all-powerful"—there are repeated references to the Omnipotent Oshtur, and Asti the all-seeing—two attributes which are reserved only for God Himself. These reaches a peculiar culmination with character called Sattanish the Supreme. To Stan Lee, obviously, they're just words with a mystic flavour to them. In the heat of deadline pressure, by his own admission, he tended to fall back on quasi-biblical phraseology even though he seems to have no religious sensibility himself to speak of. A word is a word is a word. A ghost story is a ghost story is a ghost story. It's just comics, etc. The incidence of Steve Ditko aligns in different directions, for me. What is the net effect of seeing, as Steve Ditko seems to, a) the world divided into clearly demarcated absolutes of Good and Evil and b) seeing anything outside of the empirically real as fictitious? For me, it means that you can end up participating in something in category b) that undermines and acts in a contradictory fashion against your primary beliefs as espoused in category a). Given that Steve Ditko is an Absolutist on the subject of Good and Evil—as I am, albeit in a different context—and that both of us are deemed to be "beyond the pale" extremists by the vast majority of people in the comic-book field, I found this previously unexplored context of Dr. Strange vs. Mr. A particularly interesting. When the dichotomy occurred to me I wasn't sure how deeply I was going to bother going into the subject. In the comic-book field 99.9% of the people are clustered around Alan Moore and Steve Ditko and I exist (barely!) at the outer fringes of the field with our own marginally interested readership (.01%? .001%?) so there didn't seem to be much point in discussing what I was seeing any more than there is performing a symphony at a school for the deaf.

Coincidentally, however—synchronistically, in my view, given what was churning around in my brain and the fact that I have found the will of God to be anything but subtle when it comes time for something—while John and I were watching the Leafs game (they lost to Boston, 2-1 in overtime) he brought in a box full of fanzines that we were going through with one eye on the game. I was particularly captivated by two issues of Larry Ivie's Monsters & Heroes from the late 1960s that I had owned when I was about twelve or thirteen. Hard to keep up my conversation with John or keep my eye on the Leafs thumbing through those long-ago publications.

And then, there it was, the first full comic book of Steve Ditko's Mr. A adventures that had been published by Phase magazine and with an introduction by Joe Brancatelli back in '73 (one of two it says on the hand-written sticker on the plastic bag, identifying it as part of bp Nichol's collection of fanzines which John purchased: I wonder where the other one is?). It's a natural mistake to class the magazine as a fanzine: there was some strange sequential connection between the newsstand tabloid The Monster Times, Joe Brancatelli's short-lived experiment with a similar magazine devoted to comics called Inside Comics and the one-shot Phase magazine (most notable for having published Neal Adams' "A View from Without"). Mr. A has black and white interiors and a really beautifully drawn off-register colour cover that makes it look like an issue of the Rocket's Blast Comic Collector, the pre-eminent fanzine of the day which often had just such a slip-shod off-register colour cover. That and the cover price of fifty cents. Too expensive to be a comic book, too cheap to be a magazine.


"Can I borrow this, too?"

I'm not sure I would lend the first issue of Mr. A to anyone if I owned a copy (in fact I'm pretty sure I wouldn't) but fortunately John is of a more open-handed nature than I am, so BIOGRAPHY OF A COMMISSION is going to stray back and forth between Dr. Strange to Mr. A as we proceed over the next week or so. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your personal prejudices.

Viewers of the www.cerebusart.com website have probably noticed by now that the calendar has been taken down. It turns out that two commissioned pieces a month is going to be a little optimistic over the next while. So, instead, I'm inviting interested individuals to contact me by phone (519.576.0610) to discuss any commission that they are interested in. When you phone, I can let you know what the current high offer is for the next commissioned piece after Dr. Strangeroach is and which I will be beginning probably after Christmas or early in the New Year (so I can get some uninterrupted working time on my secret project and commentaries on Mark). If you want a Gerhard background, you can let me know on the phone and then negotiate with Gerhard separately. The best rule of thumb on a Dave Sim commission is that you will get the best results if you are paying roughly $400 to $600 per figure. That is, a $1,000 commission of Cerebus and Jaka is going to look better than a $1,000 commission of Cerebus, Jaka, the Roach, Lord Julius, Astoria and Konigsberg. If you let me know what you're interested in, I can let you know what part of your picture is going to be the most time-consuming and then leave it up to you as to whether you want to stick to your original request or modify it in order to get more picture for your money.

That number again is 519.576.0610


___________________________________________________

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 #81 (December 1st, 2006)

Saturday December 1 -

Colin Longcore sent a very nice letter on his 37th birthday which I won't be printing here (although I'm sorely tempted—he just broke up with someone and I think with break-ups becoming more the norm than the exception we need to get past the idea that they are something to be ashamed of or sensitive about. And I think it's helpful for those going through a break-up to know that a lot of folks are going through it. Colin doesn't strike me as the sensitive or ashamed type, but I'm going to err on the side of caution and leave that part out of it). He also sent a couple of issues of Fan Scene ("The Fanzine about Fanzines") from 1985 issues 3 and 4. I had never even heard of this magazine which was obviously Michigan based. Colin writes:

What prompted this letter initially was that I came across this old issue of Fan Scene with Paul Curtis on the cover. In 1993, Paul was an editor at Marvel. I imagine if he stayed in with that organization, he might have had a chance to get pretty high up on the ladder by now. Or maybe he got chewed up and spit out like so much roughage. Who knows? That issue seemed in unusually good condition and when I flipped through it, I thought, "Oh dear, I ought to send this to Dave." Is that really Chester Brown? THE Chester Brown? I'll leave it to you to decide.

It is indeed. The "Namedropper" column in issue 3 mentions

TORTURED CANOE PUBS released a "Yummy Fur" compilation in February, and publisher Chester Brown notes that #7 will be out as soon as he redraws some missing (lost) pages.

I can't wait to take this to Toronto next week and show it to Chet and John and Siu. I had been making a living in comics for eight years at that point and Chet was still considered a "zine" publisher. The whole magazine is amazing from that standpoint. Jeff Nicholson's Ultra Klutz is still a digest sized zine (big cross-over coming up with Tim Corrigan's Mighty Guy). Issue #4 of "Whispers and Shadows" might include work by Erik Larsen and Tim Corrigan. Escape #6 had just been released in the UK "Paul Gravett told us". A Battlestar Galactica oriented fanzine—"Pyramids" #1 with illustrations by Lela Dowling (I'm sure she doesn't include that on her resume much these days). Photo of Matt Feazell looking about twelve years old. Here's a gem:

T. Casey Brennan continues his crusade to get smoking of tabacco [sic] out of comic books. Brennan will be mentioned and his cause in Who's Who in American Comic Books as promised by Editor Jerry Bails.

Tim Corrigan is mentioned in about every third item. List of artists contributing? Yep, there's Tim. A photo of Erik Larsen (I don't think I've ever seen him with hair before) looking about twelve. He's in "Equinox" #3 along with Colin Longcore and sixteen other guys who didn't eventually become Image partners. Gary Panter interview in Artie Romero's Cascade #24 (I've definitely never seen Gary Panter with hair before either—and a LOT of it).

This is too much fun. What's in #4?

Half page ad from Tim Corrigan's C&T Graphics (then in Rochester). 30 different publications. Serious Comics #1-10 are 25 cents each ("Postage: please include 1 stamp for each three (3) 25 cent comics ordered! Books priced over 25 cents require one stamp each). No wonder he never made a nickel in comics. A letter from Erik Larsen:

Dear Kevin

About Giff's column. It is intended for beginners, but it's just that sometimes there's not enough in there for even a beginner to learn from! More meat in this column would be nice.

Erik Larsen, Bellingham, WA

And here's the picture of Chester Brown Colin was asking about. Chet has literally twice as much hair as everyone else in both issues combined and looking about nine years old. "TORTURED CANOE's Chester Brown relays the new `Yummy Fur' book soon to be released is perhaps the `most disgusting' issue yet as some friends have said who previewed the pages for it. Brown is also doing a jam pub with cartoonist Steve Willis." Steve Willis of Morty the Dog fame. Steve always took pride in the fact that he never made a nickel from Morty the Dog. I wonder if the jam pub ever happened?

DITKOMANIA #13 published by Bill Hall is a zine dedicated to Ditko fans [sic]. It strikes home with me. Very informative, nice writing and articles from Rodney Schroeter, Don Martinec and more. There does seem to be a strong lack of contributors however. A shame. I had a problem with the articles, too (not content) for entire pages were nothing but type. Illos stuck in there related to stories would break up those seas of grey. The Brian Waters cover is nice, but awkward. Nice little zine, but basically Ditko fans only. 16 pages, digest, $1.00 ppd.

Chet's got an AD in here! Oh, this is too good. Chet will never live this down. "The Fur Collection. The first six issues of Yummy Fur under one cover. $1.50 plus 5o cents postage. Money orders in Canadian funds preferred. 48 pages, digest size, no new material, grey paper." Fortunately he repented of his self-publishing ways shortly thereafter.

Anyway, Colin concludes:

By the time you read this, I will have completed my proposal for "Ye Bookes of Cerebus" for UICA, The Urban Institute of Contemporary art here in Grand Rapids. As Jason may have told you "Ye Bookes" is also being considered for exhibition venues on the campus of the University of Michigan

Much obliged, Colin. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

And that FINALLY brings me to the end of this week's mail that I picked up on Monday the 6th of November and have finished writing about and answering on the 10th of November and which will be concluded in the Blog & Mail December 1st.

This is getting terribly, terribly confusing.

See you all tomorrow or three weeks from now depending on how you look at it.


___________________________________________________

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.