Dave Sim's blogandmail #142 (January 31st, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.



Today: Pages 101 & 102:


Douglas A. Jeffrey


22 June 04


Dear Mr. Jeffrey:



Thank you for your note of earlier this month welcoming me as a subscriber to Imprimis. I have already sent a photocopy of the first issue you sent, the April number, to one of my reader/correspondents and have quoted it to another. A most extraordinary, thoughtful and clear-thinking publication. I enclose my contribution and the addresses of two more possible subscribers.



I have to admit that the only thing that dismayed me in reading about your institution was the statistic that you have 51% female enrollment and 49% male enrollment. This was the only area where I saw you as violating your mandate as a liberal arts college in the original sense of the term. Female representation is certainly something to be acknowledged and accepted everywhere and by everyone in a free society, but I would maintain that a one-to-one ratio can only be achieved through the skewing and lowering of standards. After all, even the United Nations is only calling for 30% female representation in the world's legislatures — and is everywhere falling well short of that goal because of the (to me, anyway) self-evident overall lesser aptitudes, interests and inclinations of the female of the species in the required areas of genuine achievement.



I only remark upon this because I noted with great interest and approval that Hillsdale refused to adopt affirmative action in the 1970s, was the only college to publicly refuse to sign the Title IV compliance forms and has chosen to forego all federal funding — even indirectly — in order to maintain this principled stance.



To go through all that and then to have a nearly exact 50-50 gender mix in your study enrollment, strikes me as being about as sensible as going eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviets in 1962 until they blinked and then spending the next 20 years trying to find ways to appease them.



I enclose one of my more controversial essays, "Tangent" from 2001. Mr. Seiler is a reader of mine of long standing and I'm sure that he (quite rightly) guessed that — apart from the above-mentioned foundational disagreement between our positions on gender — Hillsdale College and its publication would be exactly my "cup of tea."



Jeff Seiler


22 June 04

Dear Jeff:

Thanks for your note of June 14. And thanks as well for putting my name in for an Imprimis subscription. What a gratifying breath of fresh air was the speech by Maurice P. McTigue in the April number, particularly in the middle of a federal election campaign here in the Land of the Pink and the Home of the Quavering. I'm enclosing my letter to Douglas A. Jeffrey, the Hillsdale College Vice President for External Affairs. This will be the acid test as to whether they get all huffy and indignant about my not believing in gender interchangeability. Just have to wait and see.



Also, thanks for the Internet print-out of the text of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's eulogy for President Reagan. I would be willing to bet that it was Mrs. Reagan's idea. I suspect she was dropped like a hot potato by most of the people she would've considered friends — which just wouldn't have been in Mr. Mulroney's nature — when the President fell victim to Alzheimer's. And I think that Mr. Mulroney's staying in touch on a regular basis, justifiably, brought him up to a higher level in her eyes and probably motivated her to give him the signal honour for which any number of Republicans she hadn't heard from in ten years would've traded their eyeteeth.



Mr. Mulroney is something of a mixed bag, a labour negotiator by background, which is to say a horse trader of the LBJ school. It can be a valuable quality in government — we wouldn't have gotten the Free Trade deal without him — but it can also verge on the ridiculous. He was the architect of the failed Meech Lake Accord which was supposed to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold and which largely foundered because it ended up looking like the most over-stuffed and half-baked omnibus pork-barrel bill in North American history — as if the American Constitution was rewritten by getting all 50 senators to write down a wish list of demands. Yeah, picture that. He's also a complete and total feminist as can be seen by his references to men and women ("wise men and women") as if they were interchangeable commodities on the world stage. He really thought that passing the reins of government to Kim Campbell would obviate the disasters of his second term and bring about a Canadian golden age. In Canada they are (hopefully were) called Red Tories — socialists who are conservatives, for the most part, in name only who believe that Conservatives can only get elected by imitating Liberals and socialists as closely as possible. The fact that the party was called the Progressive Conservatives for decades is a good clue as to how bad the situation had gotten. But there is no question that Brian Mulroney was a good and loyal friend to the United States of America which, unfortunately, makes him very much the exception that proves the rule and, fortunately, guarantees him a place in history.

___________________________________________________

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 #141 (January 30th, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 86 & 87:

It's the book. Of course, if you call manga comic books — which I don't — I think that lets us out. They've got hundreds of 10,000 page stories just as a matter of day-to-day business, from what I understand. You can do that with a sweatshop. Besides it would take away a major enjoyment for me — the fact that no one can figure out how to explain what we did. I mean, it's a central reality that has led to system meltdown. I find it funny to just shrug and go, "Well, I guess we didn't actually do anything." Because that just gets people more irritated.


"Well, come on. You did SOMETHING!"


"Really? What?"


And then watch them stumble around trying to find words for it all over again.


As to your outline of your proposed and/or imagined project, my best advice would be to try doing a self-contained issue. This is the biggest karmic burden I have to bear at this point are the number of people who want to start off doing 150 issues. I started off trying to do three on a bi-monthly schedule. Same format, same character, same logo, letters page, note on the inside front cover. I managed to accomplish it. So then I decided to keep going. But I can pretty much guarantee you that if I hadn't kept to the bi-monthly schedule on the first three I would've rethought what I was doing from the ground up. I don't see that in the generation of aspirants. They want to do a monthly comic. They sit down and do the first issue and it takes them eight months. Well, you know, as John Lennon said in Help!, "You've failed, haven't you, scientist?" I mean, face it head on. You failed. Don't work another year on issue two and say, "I'm still going to issue 150." You're torturing yourself needlessly. Scott Berwanger with Anubis has thirty-two issues done. It's taken him about ten years to get there. At least theoretically he's a little less than halfway. Well, okay. There's one guy. And he's given up on trying to publish them until he's done. That's decision-making. Something has to go overboard and its publication. It's speeded him up a bit and is devouring less money than it was when he was publishing them. Do you see what I'm saying? That's decision-making. He's breaking for the opening, looking for short yardage, calling an audible on the field. The odds are still not anywhere near great that he'll finish, but they're better than they were.


So my best advice is to start with your first issue and see how long it takes you to do. If it takes you a year, I'd really recommend against doing any story longer than three issues and take it as a given that it will take you three years or more to finish it. If it takes you three months to do the issue, you can possibly do four [a] year and can start thinking about doing eight or twelve issues. Even if everything had gone wrong with Cerebus from the beginning, I would've had three self-contained issues. "Not brilliant material but, huh. That was okay." Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. "Hunh. That one was okay too. But I liked the first one better."


There's value in that. But don't expect that people are going to be collapsing to the ground because you've taken their breath away and your 150-issue story is now the center of reality. A comic book is a comic book. If they read your first issue and it cost them what a beer would cost and they come to the end and don't say, "I should've bought the beer instead," that's as big as it gets in the comic-book field. You're a hit! Why? Because you don't totally suck. Try not to totally suck and try to give them something self-contained in the first issue.


Take it as a given (because it is a given) that no matter how good your first issue is, no one is going to be on the edge of their seats waiting for the next one. It's not an "edge of the seat" thing. It's a comic book. First issues that don't suck are a dime-a-dozen with a cover price of $2.95. I could've paved downtown Kitchener twice over with first issues of comic books that didn't suck that people sent to me or gave to me. I didn't, as an example, when I read the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, think that I had seen the promised land. It didn't suck. The cover was Frank Miller's Ronin cover done with Turtles. Now, that's funny. The title was funny. And when you read it, it didn't suck. And it flew off the shelves.


I mean, that's a whole other category. The story you're describing to me is a lot more like Cerebus. "I think I see the world differently and I think I have something to say that's worth listening to and I think I can do it in an entertaining way." Great. It's not going to sell much. You have to not even secretly hope that it's going to sell much. And you have to realize that IF you get to issue 150 and it takes just about everything out of you getting there, no one is going to care and no one is going to say anything. You'll have an audience and with any luck a number of patrons with very deep pockets who are going to be your best hope for a secure retirement. But that's all you're going to have. Do you. Really. And. SERIOUSLY want to go there? Well, great. Have fun. Smoke `em if you still let yourself.


I answered all of your questions that you sent me in the Guide, including how to solicit Diamond. That's a really bad sign. That means you aren't paying attention and you think you are.


For someone who still hasn't found a paper he's comfortable using and hasn't got finished pages in hand, you're getting way ahead of yourself. Before you can pay attention, you have to wake up. So wake yourself up, pay attention and start moving forward. And recognize that it's been several months already and you still haven't even gotten to the starting point. Pay attention to that, Nick. Reality is reality. It is the way things are, not the way you want them to be in your head.


Sincerely...

___________________________________________________

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 #140 (January 29th, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 59 & 60:

Ray Earles


16 June 04

Dear Ray:


Thanks for your letter of April 22 through June 7, inclusive. As you write in your opening sentence, "There is just too much news happening out there, all over the place, like some kind of incredible exploding elephant leaving a mess all over the living room." You are a most precocious individual. At your age of twenty-six, my only real interest in the world was where within it I was going to find my next bag of marijuana and how I was going to pay for it and then where I was going to find my next bed partner. It wasn't until my early forties when I was getting within shouting distance of being stone cold sober that I finally awoke to just what an intricate puzzle the world was in the current events category — and not until 9/11 that I started getting even a laughably cursory overview of the interlocking pieces. There is definitely a selection process that is on-going. As an example, yesterday I had my latest five questions from the Yahoo group to answer (a full day's work, done properly) and had therefore hoped that the mailbox would be as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard when I got there. Instead there were about seven letters including multi-page offerings from yourself, Sonny Strait and the first installment of D.B. Little's promised treatise on "people who mean well" in their worship of God. I returned to the studio and put my newspaper in the recycle box, virtually unread. And without regret, I might add, even given that we're in the middle of an election campaign up here. A very interesting assortment of input and ideas-on-view that I figured would be more interesting than the paper, and which proved to be the case.


REPLY: your April 23 segment


"Every moment away from reading the news, though, means more of the world slipped through my fingers and lost forever. You see, the news has a way of changing after it's first been reported."


As I say, you are precocious. This is something that I never noticed until late in the day. The first major instance that I saw of it was one of the major anniversaries of the Kennedy assassination when PBS chose to rebroadcast CBS's file tapes of the entire day's news coverage starting at 1:30 ET when the network had first broken in with the news bulletin umpty-ump years before. What was interesting (among other things) was that about two hours in they had the first reports of Oswald being sought, but simultaneous with that they had another all-points bulletin for another fellow, whose whereabouts were of equal importance for a period of about forty minutes until word came in that J.D. Tippit had been shot. At which point, the other fellow vanished into the mists of hypothetical history and it was all Oswald from then on. Now, I used to have a major Kennedy assassination jones and used to own at least a half dozen books on the subject. I had never heard this fellow's name before and have never heard it since.


"The further you get from the moment of impact, the more that is lost and replaced and lost and replaced again, until, are you even reading about the same thing — whatever happened all that time ago? No one seems to notice this; remember; or care much either, for that matter. For my part, it makes my hair turn white."


Well, yes, certainly as, to a lesser degree, it does mine. There is a lot of vested interest at stake, particularly with television factored into the equation. Norman Mailer used to say, "Don't try to understand me too quickly." And, it seems to me, that that's a good working definition of television news: Because of the nature of the medium, it is compelled to understand things too quickly. In a way, Survivor is television seeing itself in Caliban's mirror. TV news is produced by "voting all other ideas off the island" on the assumption that that leaves you with the truth. Which is pretty funny. This whole outfit balanced on a single individual who sincerely wants millions of people to watch them do their job as bingo caller is charged with determining the nature of reality. Which is then conveyed to the unwashed masses in predigested two- and three-minute chunks. As an example, your letter is the first I'd heard of the Diebold electronic voting machine scandals — that Republicans have statistically swept traditionally set-in-stone-Democrat districts which have recently switched to Diebold electronic voting machines. It's certainly something to conjure with. The hanging chads of recent memory alone confirmed for me that we might be on to something here in Canada with our slips of paper, three-sided-cardboard-box on a card table "voting booths" and paper ballot on which we place an x with a futuristic device known as a pencil. Say what you will about the pencil, it is very difficult for the CIA to rig. My own view is that this is pretty typical of the Democrats, devoting a lot of time to finding a conspiracy theory to explain why they're losing elections instead of looking at the more obvious reasons: like the complete takeover of liberalism, leftist and centre-left politics by feminists who just keep moving further and further left.


As Ronald Reagan once said, "I didn't leave the Democratic party — the Democratic party left me." The Democrats have chosen to become the pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage party, as have the Liberals in Canada. The pro-choice euphemism has been stripped away by ideological zealotry. The Democrats aren't, in practical terms, pro-choice, they're pro-abortion. Those are extremist views. They are only mainstream views to people who have voted all other viewpoints off the island and therefore only talk to each other. The island is getting smaller by the day.


But, let me try to pull back to an overview situation: I quite agree that staying current with the news, being well-informed is an impossible task. The news is like our ever-expanding universe and like the sun, with interior elements breaking forth into the exterior and then subsiding into the interior to be replaced by other elements, all shifting...


___________________________________________________
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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Dave Sim's blogandmail #139 (January 28th, 2007)

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the
Most Merciful:
There is no God but God
& Muhammad is His last messenger and seal
of prophets.
Almighty God
One God having One Name, One Face and One
Aspect which is God:
Glory to God in the Highest, Glory to God Most
High
God Who is the Most Gracious and the Most
Merciful.
Great is God and there is no other god but He.

Almighty God, I thank You for having revealed
Yourself to men.
I thank you for Your Presence in the world
and Your presence in my life
through Your Living Word, preserved for all
time within Your Sacred Scriptures;
Your Living Word which is like unto a shining
beacon, illuminating the path You have made
straight before me.

Almighty God, I thank You for the book of Genesis,
I thank You for the book of Exodus,
I thank You for the book of Leviticus,
I thank You for the book of Numbers,
I thank You for the book of Deuteronomy.
I thank You for these books and revelations which
You imparted to Your great prophet, Moshe
Peace be upon him.

I thank You for the book of Joshua,
I thank You for the book of Judges,
I thank You for the book of Samuel,
I thank You for the book of Kings,
I thank You for the book of Isaiah,
I thank You for the book of Jeremiah,
I thank You for the book of Ezekial,
I thank You for the book of Hosea,
I thank You for the book of Joel,
I thank You for the book of Amos,
I thank You for the book of Obadiah,
I thank You for the book of Jonah,
I thank You for the book of Micah,
I thank You for the book of Nahum,
I thank You for the book of Habakkuk,
I thank You for the book of Zephaniah,
I thank You for the book of Haggai,
I thank You for the book of Zechariah,
I thank You for the book of Malachi,

I thank You for the testimony and the records
of these prophets and messengers to
Your Chosen People,
Israel.
Peace be upon them.

I thank You for the Gospel according to Matthew,
I thank You for the Gospel according to Mark,
I thank You for the Gospel according to Luke,
I thank You for the Gospel according to John,
Peace be upon them

I thank you for the testimonies and the records
of Jesus, the Lamb of God,
Peace be upon him.

I thank You for the Acts of the Apostles,
I thank You for the Epistles of Paul,
I thank You for the testimony of the disciples,
I thank You for the Revelation of John.
Peace be upon them.

And I thank you for your glorious Koran.

Almighty God, after the instruction of Your
last messenger and seal of prophets,
Muhammad, peace be upon him,
who counselled that a man must submit himself
to the Will of God, wilfully and peacefully, I
renew my vow (this morning) that I do so: that
I submit myself to You and I submit myself to
Your Will. If it be Your Will, please grant that
I might be brought to the fulfillment whish
You intended for me from before my birth.

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God
Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and
the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is
no other God but He. God Who created all
the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is
the only Source of salvation, God Who is the
only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only
good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God
Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most
high,
In excelsis Deo.

Almighty God, I thank you for allowing me to
be born in Canada in the last half of the
twentieth century: pampered, coddled,
insulated, sheltered and protected
from so much of the world's genuine hardship
& pain, misery & strife, famine & poverty,
disease & dispair, hunger & need, want &
dread, fear & violence, suppression &
oppression which are the yoke & the burden
under which so much of the world's
population yet labours.

Through these sufferings are the dust of this
earth -- from dust they came and to dust they
will return -- still I know that I have been
spared them, only by Your Grace and by Your
Mercy, and I am profoundly grateful to You
for that.

May God's will be done in the earth, and on
the earth, as it is in all the worlds and all the
heavens.

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God
Most High, God who is the Most Gracious
and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is
no other god but He. God Who created all the
worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the
only Source of salvation, God Who is the
only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only
good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God
who is my only safe harbour from the storm.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God
most high,
In excelsis Deo.

Almighty God, if I am worthy of forgiveness
in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness of my many
sins, transgressions, iniquities and vanities
which are abomination before your Eternal
Laws, Morals and Ethics. If I am worthy
of forgiveness in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness
for all my sins of commission and of
omission: those sins which I have
committed and which I commit, out of
wilfulness, out of ignorance,
out of spite, out of misery, out of
self-absobtion, out of self-pity,
out of self-destructiveness or out of
misundertsanding or
misconstruing Your Living Word.

Almighty God, I accept all consequences and
repercussions of my own choices, decisions,
self-imposed inadequacies, actions, deeds,
words and works. For God is the Sure Judge
over all the earth and all the worlds and all
the heavens, slow to anger, measured and
temperate in Your Judgements, sparing and
merciful in Your chastisements.

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God
Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and
the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is
no other God but He. God Who created all
the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is
the only Source of salvation, God Who is the
only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only
good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God
Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most
high,
In excelsis Deo.

Almighty God, I commend into Your Care and
Your Custody, my soul, my mind and my
heart, knowing as I do so that free will is
God's greatest gift to man. And while I
entrust myself only to You and while I trust
only You, still I know that there are choices
and decisions which lie before me in my life
which are mine alone to make. If it be Your
Will, please grant that those choices and
decisions might be informed by the common
sense, the good judgement and what wisdom
You have seen fit to bestow upon me, by Your
Grace and by Your Mercy.

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God
Most High, God who is the Most Gracious
and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is
no other god but He. God Who created all the
worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the
only source of salvation, God Who is the only
hope of redemption, God Who is the only
good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God
who is my only safe harbour from the storm.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God
most high,
In excelsis Deo.

Almighty God, I also renew my vow (this
morning) that I will never again marry and I
will never again cohabit with a woman. I vow
further to exercise all caution , all restraint, all
common sense, all good judgement and what
wisdom You have seen fit to bestow upon me,
by Your Grace and by Your Mercy and to
exercise all these to the utmost in all of my
dealings with womankind.

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God
most High, God who is the Most Gracious and
the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is
no other God but He. God Who created all the
worlds and all the heavens, God who is the
only Source of salvation, God who is the only
Hope of redemption, God who is the only
good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God
who is my only safe harbour from the storm.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God
most high,
In excelsis Deo.

Amen.

_________________________________

Scripture readings resume today with the complete Joshua.

1PM

Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Deuteronomy

eBay Item number: 250077327390


___________________________________________________

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 #138 (January 27th, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 42 & 43:

All that thought and effort and brain-power and that's what he has to show for it. "Dude. You're scaring me." Bill and Ted's Excellent Civilization.


I know what you mean that I go too easy on people most of the time, but you have to remember that I'm trying to make a larger point and attempt a societal course correction in trying to get people to be less afraid of ideas that aren't their own. I mean, "Dude. You're scaring me." really sums it up. That was the larger point I was trying to make in answering the two open letters in The Comics Journal {Original letters printed in TCJ #253, replies in #255 and 258}. I mean, obviously I wanted to get my ideas across but more than that I wanted to point out: "Look, see? I'm not angry. I'm not offended. These two guys are as far away from me on the opinion spectrum as they could possibly be and they are attempting to destroy my reputation and I've answered them far more politely than they've addressed me."


I have gone through Rubinstein's letter sentence-by-sentence and refuted his points. But I'm not unsympathetic. I can't even imagine what it would be like to read a story for TEN YEARS and have the writer abruptly move off of the spot that I thought he was on. The level of disappointment has to be immense. But I'm not going to help the situation by tearing the guy down personally. That would only make it worse. The same with writing the review in the recent issue of The Journal {"Sim Goes to Fantagraphics Land," renamed "Making Space for Comics in the Real World," Comics Journal #260 May/June 2004, pp. 20 — 21. Cartoonists were Peter Bagge, Jessica Abel and Gary Panter}.


There are larger issues here that a vendetta is just going to get in the way of. Here's my review of three Fantagraphics creators. See? I got my turn. They were on public display and I was in the audience. Here's my chance to tear each of them a new asshole. But, what's the point of that? At the very least what I think I'm gradually communicating is how intolerant and exclusionary liberalism became the moment it was taken over by feminism. The idea of trying to make abortion a closed issue. We settled that back in 1973. A societal issue that every society in the world is divided on 50-50 and you think it was decided for all time by the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade? No, no, no. The only way you can make that stick is through Stalinism, pure and simple. If an issue is a 50-50 split issue you are going to revisit it practically on a yearly basis whether you want to or not.


The fact that, as a society, we can't even bring ourselves to recognize that tangential truth, let alone the core argument, is really terrifically amusing. I mean, appalling, sure, but life is a process. How stupid do you want to look in twenty years' time? Treating abortion as a closed issue it's a lock. Really, really, REALLY stupid. "We'll elect Hitler, but then we'll control him" level of stupid. The sort of ranting that I see in the Internet print-outs that people send me. Wow. Better you than me. You actually submit yourself to this? It would be like going to an all-candidates meeting where anyone was allowed at any point to shout whatever they wanted from the floor and everyone did. To my way of thinking it would completely beggar any definition of communication or even the term "interesting". Bedlam isn't interesting to me, even conceptually.


Ah, well, it's gratifying to see Ronald Reagan finally getting his due, post-mortem. Same sort of deal. All through the `80s he was considered divisive, idiotic, a jerk, simple-minded, a throwback, etc. etc. But the hostages came back from Iran, the Berlin Wall did come down, the Soviet Union did collapse, and you'll have job getting any Americans anywhere to agree to higher taxes since the Reagan Revolution. Most of the time I'm just "reading into the record" now. The job I saw myself as having to do was between 1977 and 2004. Realistically, no one is going to even be able see what it looks like for another thirty years minimum, in the same way that you couldn't really see the Reagan Presidency from 1981 to 1989 until you got to 2004. You have to be far enough back so that there are other things on the screen to compare it to, like the Clinton years.


But, I have to say that this bunch that you sent was a pretty gratifying collection, two months before issue 300 came out. According to Craig Miller, he's got orders for 5700 copies of Following Cerebus No.1. That seems like good news to me.


My best guess on whether I will ever do any more creative work is "not likely." A lot depends on what happens on the feminism front. It's not because of the critics, per se, it's more a matter that it's really pointless to attempt to attract the attention of a roomful of kids all shaking tambourines and communicate something to them. I read a relatively conservative paper in Canadian terms (Pravda relative to the US). If people start surrendering their feminist delusions and start thinking, I'm pretty sure I'll have a front row seat. But, right now, it's as if you've leaned over and shouted in my ear, "JUST IGNORE THE TAMBOURINES, DAVE! TELL `EM A STORY!" It takes a long, long time to write and draw even the most basic of comic-book stories. Right now I'm happy to just leave it to the guys who are part of the Tambourine Concert — as you say, soft-core porno about strong independent women. I'm far more interested in having another month off like I had between December and January where I can just sit around and read books all day. I'm sure not even going to begin to consider writing or drawing anything until I've had a chance to get bored with retirement. The earliest I can see even getting back TO retirement would be 2006 or 2007. So the earliest I'd be sick of doing nothing all day would be 2009 or so. Those are my best guesses. And I really hate drawing. Hated every minute of the three days I've had to spend since December fulfilling commitments. So it seems unlikely that that would follow taking six months or year off. Say, that was fun. Now I really should do something I hate.


Unlikely.


Anyway, on to your screenplay, Demon Joe....

___________________________________________________

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 #137 (January 26th, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 31 & 32:

Yes, I did get nominated for another Harvey Best Letterer award and an Eisner if I'm not mistaken. I wrote to the Eisner Awards panel and informed them that I was having my name legally changed to "Todd Klein Sandman And Various" and that I would appreciate it if my nomination next year could appear under my new name. No response.


I had forgotten that I had included the metal plate and The Place the Wind Comes From in an issue of Cerebus. I think it was in Church & State, either just before or just after the break between volume one and two. That's going to happen a lot, from now on. I don't have to retain things, so I don't. Someone recently asked about the memorial ceremony where Iest used to be in Going Home and I dug it out and read it and went, "Oh, right, the Cirinists trying to co-opt Isaiah and Jeremiah." That's pretty clever. And I reread it and thought, "That's not too bad considering I'd only been reading the Bible about a year and a half at that point."

"I'm amazed by the immediate effect of trying to extract women from your life. Deliberately trying to get them away from you seems to draw them to you. I've noticed it in restaurants and even on the street. Being cold, prickly and rude to women in an effort to get them away from you seems to be exactly what they're looking for."

Yes, exactly. This is why I am unfailingly courteous and cheerful when dealing with women in person — you can literally feel yourself disappearing off the side of their radar screen. Over-tipping helps in restaurants and bars. Same effect. If you want a waitress to get interested in you don't leave her a tip. I usually go for a straight thirty percent which keeps everything on a strict waitress/customer basis. Otherwise you have to keep switching restaurants.


You're quite welcome for the copy of Aphasia. Still no sign of issue 3 and, you're right, it is a bad sign that he's explaining everything to his girlfriend and his Mom. I assume that that was his girlfriend he was with at SPACE. She wasn't a supermodel, but she wasn't exactly hard on the eyes, either, so…Ray actually posted a reading list on the Cerebus Newsgroup of recommended places to find the original — unedited — correspondence of the Founding Fathers. A number of them were a good deal closer to, say, Karl Marx than Billy Graham on the Christianity scale. And, of course, it has taken a couple of centuries of very selective reading and revisionist Twister-style history to keep them all on the Billy Graham side of the ledger. The letters of Jefferson's that Ray sent me put him solidly in the Tolstoy/Doestoevsky camp: did his own set of the Gospels that excised all of the miracles and supernatural episodes. Gulag Christianity in its Age of Reason cradle. Ray is a doubter's doubter as you could see from this first part, so it should be quite a show.


If I had a nickel for every person who has asked if I'm a Philip K. Dick fan, I'd have change for half a dollar by now. I'm always interested in reading about him and his experience of 1974. Yes, I had heard about the amphetamine psychosis. Drugs are just one of those things you can only dabble in for a little while and then it's time to get yourself out of the pool and get majorly antibacterial. When I think of all the crap I used to pump into my body thinking that it was helping in some way, my mind boggles. He did have it "together" in a few ways — one of which was the realization that he was largely invulnerable because his condo, his car and his stereo were paid off (the last one makes me laugh, of course) so he didn't need to write the Bladerunner screenplay (abusing one of his own children) because of a voracious need for money.


I'll tell you what: I'll trade you for photocopies of the Weirdo 17 story with my Journal review enclosed and in its original form so you can compare for the editing. I told Michael Dean he could take out anything he didn't like or didn't have room for. As it was it was about 500 words longer than most of their gallery reviews.


Documentary:


1) All right we'll make a point of doing it on a Saturday sometime before Labour Day (there are about eight Saturdays left in the summer) (CANADIAN GOTCHA!). I should know by about 3 pm on Friday if I'm going to have a spillover of letter-answering into the weekend or if I can get it wrapped up by Friday night, so I'll call you on a Friday and we'll just hope for the best.


2) Yes, the sneak attack sounds interesting — just playing off the "given" that a documentary is a Marxist-feminist format, ergo, all roads lead to Leftist Rome. As you say, the more gradually you can steer them into new areas the more effective the point is going to be, particularly if you don't have any narration or text or interview footage that explicitly makes the point. As you say, "driving something through people's brains without actually seeming like you're being didactic." You just read the excerpts from the Harlequin romance novels or maybe even just post it as text… nice segue to…


3) …blocks of text. Yes, I quite agree and I think you're really onto something here. The Internet has trained people to read blocks of text on a screen, particularly if the typeface is clear enough and large enough to read comfortably. I also think it would be worth experimenting with the length of time the text is on the screen. A rape scene, you'd actually benefit from not actually leaving it up long enough to really intently read the whole thing. Make sure the most provocative part is in the first two sentences and that you title card it. That is:


excerpt:

The Baron's Mistress

Harlequin Romance

2001...

___________________________________________________

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 #136 (January 25th, 2007)

Dave Sim’s Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 25 & 26:

Yes, I could buy one of those old comic books for $20 or so (they weren’t in very good condition), but isn’t it more sensible to give the $20 to a panhandler on King Street? Understand that I mean that completely as a rhetorical question and understand that I am aware that I am dealing with a sensibility that would find it to be a question of intricate nuance. Your belief in the totemic would doubtless lead you to believe that if one of those comic books was of interest to my Papawolf, a vital missing component in some magic ritual with which I needed to connect in order to…well, you know, whatever (the perils of attempting to find words in dealing with your team) then it would be of far greater importance that I buy that comic book than that I give the $20 to someone who is going to need it to buy food. This is what I mean by our differing perceptions of scale and Scale. Connecting with something in my childhood, to me, can never be higher than a mere "scale" item. Feeding the poor is a Scale item.


When we are children, childish things interest us. When we grow into men, we put childish things away. Your team’s view is that that is where the fundamental mistake is made. If we were all permanently four years old, mentally and spiritually, everything would be vastly improved. My team’s view is that it is possible for society to support a minority of people like that in the interests of variety, diversity and a certain charitable-ness. But the greater good for the greater number requires that the vast majority of us have to be 4 when we are 4 and 48 when we are 48. The problem that results from staying permanently four years old, in my view, is a skewed perception of reality.

"I can’t tell you how many times I said to God, "This or Nothing." It did not feel like "tempting" Him [and feeling…makes all the difference]; this was my proof to Him that He was.

Everything in those two sentences is inverted. What you are doing is admitting to me that you put yourself in a preeminent position over God. One doesn’t say, "This or Nothing" to one’s superior, nor even to an equal. You are dictating terms to God. By His grace and His mercy you’ve gotten away with it to this point. But that doesn’t mean that you bluffed Him or boxed Him in or forced His hand and it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re going to get away with it from now on. His patience and tolerance are vast but a little catastrophe goes a long way toward awakening individuals to differences of "scale" and Scale. That you have chosen to behave this way, to me, it just means you’re being a willful and stubborn child. The fact that it doesn’t feel to you as if you were tempting Him is, to me, a perfect example of the inherent problems which result where emotion is given preeminence over thought. As you say, "feeling makes all the difference." Because if you thought about it, there is no way that you could see it as anything besides "tempting Him." "This was my proof to Him that He was."


Again, this is complete inversion, which is always the centerpiece of your team. It’s not your job to prove to God that He exists. It is your job to prove yourself worthy of God’s grace, to submit yourself to His will. As it says in the Koran, it is not you who will aid God. God doesn’t need your help, or your submission to His will, or your prayers or your alms-giving. It is your completely protected free-will choice not to pray or to give alms to the poor or to submit to His will. As it will be only you who will suffer the consequences of your choices. You have been apprised of the requirements and you have been apprised of the consequences. The rest is up to you.


When you say "Dave, your words about God…growl…but you don’t glow," I consider that to be high praise indeed. Read the Koran — the voice of God growls throughout it. And given that it is, to date, His last word on a variety of subjects, I think it behooves us to pay attention. I understand that you don’t wish to pay attention. There are many different ways to glow. For my team, the radiance of common sense in this world is the most attractive light of all, far outweighing that which is enlightening emotionally, that which provides a temporary inner emotional radiance whether warranted or not by external events.


Yes, I fear God — in the sense that I think everyone is supposed to fear God. But I do think that fear of God is actually fear of the possibility of our own flawed decision-making and choices. I have chosen not to join one of His churches. My reasoning may be entirely faulty in that area and so, yes, I fear for the judgment of the Great Day and the eternal consequences which will result. I choose to believe that Jesus was not the son of God, but only one of God’s messengers. I choose to believe that God and YHWH are separate beings. I have no idea if either of those is a right choice and, if either or both are wrong choices, what degree of wrong choice they represent. Are they minor misinterpretations or major cardinal sins? I do believe that we are each of us living in an on-going test of our decision-making abilities and choices. I understand that you don’t believe that to be the case. I understand that your choice has been to listen to an inner voice and to try to remain as close to how you were as a child as you can. I think it’s safe to say that we fundamentally disagree with each other on the actual nature of reality at just about every level that we, respectively, perceive it.


"Do you fear…love?"


I assume the ellipsis is in there to create a tonal drama to the question, which I’m afraid I don’t see the question itself possessing. Do I fear agape? The Greek term denoting full openness to the glory of God, with the concerted exertion of all human faculties along lines of excellence that is implied? The notion of being Toward God, living one’s life, as St. Paul introduced the concept to Christianity, Godward? No, of course I don’t fear that. I aspire to that. The notion of spending my life running flat-out towards God in all areas of my life where I see Him most present and self-evident to me. I fear falling short of my potential abilities in that area. I fear the Day of Judgment when I might find out that relaxing my efforts for a single day had cost me the chance to make a greater contribution. This only reiterates my previous point that fear of God is actually the fear...

[Reminder—September 25, October 25, November 25, December 25 and now January 25th that Claude & Craig haven't gotten a non-evasive answer from the Friends of Lulu or Jackie Estrada, and no one has yet heard from Heidi Macdonald on why they rejected my idea of an all-female comics professional petition against censorship to assist the Comic Book Legal Defense 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 February 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 SPECIAL: 2006 Day Prize Finalists announced!

The Howard E. Day Memorial Prize

____________________________________________________________

While laying flat on his back, sick in bed, Dave Sim has decreed the following comics have made the

2006 Day Prize Finalists



Abominable
Lunchbreak Comics
Pat Lewis
5326 5th Ave. #24
Pittsburgh PA 15232
http://www.lunchbreakcomics.com/
$5.00



Beaver
Eight Ball Graphics
Jim Coon
174 Madison St.
Cortland NY 13045
Ebg.bizhosting.com
$2.00



Being Different
Michelle Arcand
434 Colorado Ave.
Kansas City MO 64124
$1.00



Chemistry-Comic & CD Soundtrack
Awakening Comics
Steve Peters
17 N. York Rd. #3
Willow Grove PA 19090
http://www.awakeningcomics.com/
$3.00-Comic
CD-$7.00
Both-$8.00



Guitar Solo
Mike Dawson
17 Berkeley Pl #2R
Brooklyn NY 11217
mikedawsoncomics.com
$3.00



One Horse Town
Lunchbreak Comics
Pat Lewis
5326 5th Ave. #24
Pittsburgh PA 15232
http://www.lunchbreakcomics.com/
$2.00



Potlatch #5 "Too Much Matheson"
Angry Dog Press
Chad Lambert-writer
Tom Williams-artist
2982 Calusa Dr.
Hamilton OH 45011
Possumatlarge.com

angrydogpress.net
$6.95



Under the Midnight Sun
Christopher Studabaker - Writer
Dusty Neal - Artist
8810 Arbor Lake Court, Apt. 1115
Indianapolis, IN 46268
chris@chrisstudabaker.com

____________________________________________________________

Past Day Prize Recipients

2005




The Lone and Level Sand by A. David Lewis & mp Mann / Caption Box www.caption box.net

A retelling of the story of Moses and Aaron from the Pharaoh's side. Gorgeous front and back covers and a spare graphic style neatly complement this austere treatment that "tells the story of a man trying to rule wisely, love his family well, and deal justly in the face of a divine wrath."

$9.95 (plus $5 s&h)

2004




Owly: The Way Home by Andy Runton
Andy Runton- Artist, Writer
5502 East Wind Dr.
Lilburn GA 30047
www.andyrunton.com
$6.00

2003




Askari Hodari #3 by Glenn Brewer
www.askarihodari.com
$3.00

2002




Misa by Tom Williams
Inkblot Farm Studio
Tom Williams
730 Riverview Dr. Apt. #C7
Columbus OH 43202
www.Opencrashcomics.com
$4.50

2001




Faith: A Fable by Bill Knapp

Carbon-Based Books
1270 Jackson Avenue
Lakewood, Ohio
44107
bknapp1@juno.com
http://www.carbonbasedbooks.com
(ten dollars and twenty five cents)
____________________________________________________________

For more information on the Day Prize (including a full list of past winners and nominees) and the annual SPACE Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo happening April 21-22 in Columbus, OH please visit:

http://www.backporchcomics.com/aboutdayprize.htm

http://www.backporchcomics.com/space.htm

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________

Dave Sim's blogandmail #135 (January 24th, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 18 & 19:

It seems to be a centerpiece of Marxist-feminism that anytime a Marxist-feminist wants to evade reality and the implications of free-will choices, they blame society. Personally, I don't pretend to have emotions that I don't feel. I don't pretend to like people that I don't like. I keep the lines that I see between right and wrong sharply drawn in my mind and I try as much as possible to stay on the right side.


Personally, I don't see there as being any "we" in it. You, individually are either an emotionally dishonest creature or you, individually aren't. Dishonest is always a free-will choice. It can't be forced on you. That's where it helps to remember that everything we see around us is a temporary stage set that, in a cosmological sense, is only going to last long enough for us to "strut and fret our hour upon the stage" as individuals, as a civilization, as a planet.


Given that, all we really have are our thousands and thousands of individual daily decisions which, to me, are headed up by "pray" and "not pray." "Pray" is right. "Not pray" is wrong. I can't see anything else that this temporary reality would be for. Anywhere in reality if you have a temporary place it is because you or some part of you is being tested. Why would overall reality be any different, given that your own awareness is the only thing you can be certain is not composed strictly of oscillating energy wave/particles flying in temporary loose formation?


2) Fiction reflects our emotional landscape much more precisely than our lives do.


C'mon, B. Reread that sentence and think about it. I mean, really think about it. I would maintain, again, that this is Marxist-feminist reality. This is Woody Allen hunched down in the movie theatre watching Casablanca un-spooling before his eager eyes and deciding that the fictional reality that Humphrey Bogart was pretending to enact on a soundstage in 1942 is more real than his own life. I mean, I can see that that whole constituency believes that and lives that way — fiction and movies are more real than reality. To me, that just means that you're living upside down, choosing that which is demonstrably less real — movies — than your own life and choosing both movies and your own life over the super-reality represented by God. It brings a whole new and appalling level to grasshopper behaviour.


Bad enough that the grasshopper just fiddles away the time when he should be storing food for the winter. How much worse if he sat hunched down in a movie theatre watching another grasshopper pretending to be still yet another grasshopper.


To me, mind-boggling.


Take care,




George Bailey



9 June 04


George: How's yourself?


Thanks for the copies of Sins of the Past: intimidation and Eden 3. I remembered reading the first part of Sins of the Past so, I have to tell you that that's a very good sign considering the amount of work that I see and how few things stick.


I would have to agree with you that your artwork is not quite at a professional level yet. It's hard to tell in some ways because you have a very idiosyncratic drawing style, but, yes I would agree with you. I'd say one of your problems is that your pages are too crowded right now. You're trying to put too much information — verbal and visual — in the many panels that you're using. It certainly makes for more story, but it also makes it more difficult to read. There's a major difference between the inside front cover and the rest of it, just as an example. On the inside front cover everything is nicely differentiated, the grays are used to create compositions within the overall composition which is what comic books are all about. This is almost totally missing from the interiors where the grays seem to have been added arbitrarily and never to establish an interior composition but (it seems) just to keep the pages from being straight black and white. I mean, one of the problems with going by my reaction is that I got these free and you're looking for some kind of feedback on them. That's very different from attracting a casual browser/buyer which I suspect was the reason for your despondency at the Bristol convention this year that you allude to.


I think I'm safe in saying that "upping" your game plan at this point is perhaps a bad idea. I think you might be better served going into a comic-book store with your eyes wide open and looking at who your actual competition is and what you are going to need to do to attract attention. One of the things you might reconsider is the size of the project given that it doesn't appear you're going to be able to keep to a monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly schedule. Like Jacob Marley's ghost, fated to wander the earth, I sometimes think that for my 6,000-page perfidy, I'm condemned to wander the earth cautioning wannabe self-publishers: start small. Start self-contained. If you only do one book a year, you really need to make it a self-contained story. Even doing Cerebus bi-monthly, I didn't actually do continued stories until issue 14. Before that they were pretty much self-contained. It's an enormous challenge because it means you're betting on the here and now instead of two years or five years from now when you figure you will have improved and will have built a following.


Start with the idea that the comic book you produce that's twenty pages long is the only comic book you will ever produce. This is what you will be known for. You might even...

___________________________________________________

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 #134 (January 23rd, 2007)

Dave Sim's Collected Letters Volume 2 will be released in late spring/early summer 2007. Until Dave (who currently has the flu) is feeling better – and to whet your appetite for the book! -- The Blog & Mail will run two-page excerpts from the manuscript each day.

Today: Pages 12 & 13:

To me, what you and most of our society is doing — particularly the liberal or Marxist-feminist part — is navel-gazing. You are attempting to find meaning in that which is meaningless: your own sensations, your own emotions, your own desires, your own feelings. You focus on them so intently and to the exclusion of most everything else in your life that you magnify them to a disproportionate degree. No wonder, as you say, you didn't really feel anything on 9/11. It didn't affect you because it didn't affect you. It took place in New York City, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania and nowhere intruded between you and your navel. Therefore, as you say, all it did was to distract you from yourself, your emotions, your feelings and your navel for an extended period afterward. That, I would maintain, was one of the break points that took place. One half of our society experienced Meaning on 9/11, profound Meaning, and the other half of society just saw a reality-TV disaster movie that distracted them temporarily from their own navels. They were shaken, but their best trick — arguably their only trick — is getting over things. That's what makes them liberals. Nothing upsets them. You could break into their house and rape their wife and murder their kids and the biggest problem they're going to face is how to get over it, move past it and get on with their lives. It's a complete disconnect from reality. This was what my team never understood about your team until the aftermath of 9/11. You are so self-insulated from outside reality, so far immersed in contemplating your own navels, that there is no common frame of reference for us to have a discussion about most things. Even your own possessions oscillate between being included with your navel and being excluded from your navel.


"I hate myself because I have so much and so many people in the world have so little," is arguably the noble-sounding sentiment which underlies all socialism and all liberalism. Historically, there are very few blue-collar socialists, particularly in positions of leadership. Most socialists are comfortably or well off as compared to the workers they purport to represent. So, it seems to me that socialism and liberalism are largely the "acting out" of guilt feelings over abundance. Well, fine. Figure out how much you think you need to keep and give the rest to the poor. But, it doesn't matter whether it's Muslim fundamentalists or communists, liberals, it seems to me, spend their lives preparing themselves for the day when someone ELSE is going to come and take everything away from them and anguishing because they know, in order to be the people they're pretending to be — the Woodstock generation — they should be the ones taking it away from themselves. It is as if being prepared to have everything taken away and hating yourself for owning an over-abundance of material possessions is the same thing as giving that over-abundance to the poor. It isn't.


Just because you feel more guilty about being rich than a rich conservative does doesn't make you a better person. I mean, I'm trying not to be offensive here, but virtually everything you've written in your letter strikes me as a way of evading central realities in your life. Your seeing significance in Patricia Smith Churchland's seeing significance in all of the different ways that other species perceive — bees and bats and what-not — and all we have are our five senses…I just don't see any…actual…larger point. What I see (or what I think I see) is someone attempting to establish a larger point, like a child who becomes absorbed in everything going on in the dining room except for the bowl of strained vegetables and the fork attempting to find its mouth even though at some level it knows the strained vegetables are far more important than the interesting way the bib is stuck in the corner of the high chair. All is not as it seems! The bees and the bats shall lead us! Hearken unto these hitherto overlooked citizens of Starship Earth! They see things we don't see! They're bees and bats, B. For crying out loud.


Well, obviously, I think you're trying to get me to walk around in liberal circles with you when you take umbrage at being declared a member of a team. Not a "team" (in quotation marks) to me. A team. You write, "Just for the record, I don't give a whit how many women artists there are — or aren't." Well, of course you don't. I'm the one trying to draw your attention to how few there are and the fact that they are all pretty much second stringers. You seem to be suggesting that I'm somehow forcing you to evade reality. And I don't think that's the case. I think you're evading reality just fine on your own. You acknowledge the preeminence of men in exactly the way that I have for the last ten years: "Virginia Woolf isn't James Joyce; Anais Nin isn't Henry Miller; Flannery O'Connor isn't William Faulkner; and Anne E. Proulx isn't Cormac McCarthy." Well, yes. Exactly so. And, may I say, very nicely paired thematically and motivationally all down the line. And then you finish with, "But, quite simply, so what?"


My answer would be, "So: reality." The reality that your team is determined to evade, the reality which led to my being ostracized just for pointing it out. That, to me, is "so what." The plain fact of the matter is that the team on which you find yourself — there really is no middle ground — believes fervently that there is a co-equivalence in each of those pairings. In fact, most of the team on which you find yourself would consider the reverse to be true. That if all of those pairings were fairly and accurately judged with a loving heart, the women would all come out on top. Which they would. There is no reality so demonstrably self-evident that it can't be overturned by a loving heart determined to embrace a lie in the interests of making everyone feel good. A loving heart is the ultimate tyranny. If you feel badly enough for second stringers, you will change your perception so that they are first stringers and decide that you have wrought a great act of justice upon the Lands of the Quality Lit Biz. We don't do that over here on my team. My team does not make sure that for every male name on any list there is a female name. My team acknowledges quality in women where and when we find it. If that's one in ten, that's one in ten. If that's one in twenty, that's one in twenty. You would have to pry my copy of [Muriel Spark's] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from my cold, dead fingers. But if we come up with five male names, we don't automatically go scrambling for five second stringers and knock them up several weight classes in the interests of numerical parity. That's what makes the two teams. I think one of the reasons you're writing to me is that you are coming to understand that you're on the wrong team and you have been for some time. Other times you think that I'm on the...

___________________________________________________

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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Dave Sim's blogandmail #133 (January 22nd, 2007)

The End of the Mail Trail

For this Month


Okay, finally coming to the end of the mail about a month later than I thought I was going to. I did want to mention that I was talking on the phone with George Khoury about the introduction to the book he's writing about the Image partners (the introduction is all done and ready to be e-mailed to him by Sandeep) and suddenly he says, "Are there any TwoMorrows publications that you want?" And I sort of went, "You mean, for free?" And he says yes. Uhhhh. For free, yeah a bunch. So I asked him to hold on and went and got a copy of Roy Thomas' Alter Ego and while we're sitting there chatting, I'm thumbing through the ad section at the back and every time I see one that I REALLY want (with limited storage space and all) I just tell him. Forgot all about it and (Thank you, God) the great honking box came in the Friday before Christmas. God's way of telling me that, no, I'm not actually going to work 12 hours on Friday and 12 hours on Saturday. I'm going to try, but basically what I'm going to do is Keep It Turned On The Mighty TWOMORROWS PUBLISHING --- ALL THE HITS ALL THE TIME CLICK ON: www.twomorrows.com


until my brains are darned near leaking out my ears.

So I figure the least I can do is mention what they sent me and what the big attraction turned out to be in each book.


Michael Eury Justice League Companion - I was always a big Mike Sekowsky fan. To me there was no other JLA artist. I was the only one I knew who liked his stuff. Looking up the first one I bought, it was issue 25, Feb. 1964 so it was very early on in my comic buying. Got me with Superman on the cover. Mike Sekowsky and Murphy Anderson covers reproduced in black and white from the original artwork without all of that third-rate colour slapped all over it. Cover to issue 55 on page 4. Credited to Infantino and Anderson. The figure of Robin in the foreground might be Infantino, but the rest of the figures are definitely Sekowsky. Sekowsky splash page from that first issue I bought on page 13. Joe Giella inks. Covers to issue 21 "Crisis on Earth One". Three Alden McWilliams Twin Earth strips, beautifully reproduced. What are they doing in a JLA book? I don't know. I spent an hour studying them but I haven't read the caption yet! Cover to #29. Page 14 from issue 21 ("Terry Austin who contributed this original art to page 14 of JLA #21, recalls `I purchased it from Jerry Bails at the first comic con I went to, in 1970, I think. JLA was my favorite comic as a kid—I could hardly believe I was holding a page, much less buying it to own forever!'"), Gene Colan Adam Strange commission piece from 2004. Gorgeous! Neal Adams cover to #66. Just dazzling


The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 1 - I've never been a huge Kirby fan but John Morrow is such a HUGE Kirby fan it almost seems rude not to ask for something, so I picked the first collected volume. Hey, it's free. Lots of pencilled pages. LOTS of pencilled pages. Page from Days of the Mob. I don't know why but every time I flip through a book about Kirby and something catches my eye it turns out to be a page from Days of the Mob, the magazine he did for DC. That amazing two-page spread from "Street Code" in the Streetwise collection. 1940s stuff that I still prefer. Two page Simon and Kirby spread from Boy Commandoes No.2. Boy Explorers covers. Newsboy Legion. Jack Kirby Joe Sinnott piece on the cover of #9. Original art for a half-page Fantastic Four ad from Hulk #1. That was a show stopper. Dick Ayers or Chic Stone inking? I don't know but I've never seen the unimpeded linework from something that early before. Very nice balance of brush and pen.


Comic Book Artist #16 the Atlas/Seaboard issue. With an interview with Howard Chaykin! This should be good. Best line when Atlas revamped his The Scorpion character without his knowledge: "I walked across the street to Marvel, I said, `Hey, would you like to do a version of this?' So I did `Dominic Fortune' for them, got a major bump in my rates at Marvel and DC and everything was fine." I laughed.

Sal Amendola's stuff in black and white. Who knew? Jim Craig tells his Neal Adams story in full. Dick Giordano's cover for Targitt #1 in black and white.

Wish the Chaykin interview had been longer.


Comic Book Artist #11 – Alex Toth issue. Cover for CPL #11 on page 19. Should have been a full-page. Batman pages on page 33. Four-page Toth romance story owned by Terry Austin and I wish I could say that. Page 35-36, Toth on photo-realism. Amazing stuff in the sense that he doesn't outright denounce photo (or foto) realism (I couldn't have been more surprised!) while making sure that he trashes Alex Ross, Muth, Hamptons (Scott AND Bo) (I couldn't have been less surprised!). I've gotta go through that part with a fine toothed comb and find out what, exactly, he IS saying. Interview heavily edited in his terse hand-lettered post card style ("See it all? Keep trying! Worth it! Break it all down, separately, as flat color shapes. Paint them as just shapes—they'll need little embellishment"). It would be funny to get a comedic actor to perform it as if that's really what Toth sounded like on tape. Two-fold! Entertainment plus education for bright artists. Follow the plot. Surprises/insights.

If only Victor Borge was still alive.

Alex Toth's Maverick adaptation sent in by Terry Beatty.


Alter Ego #51 – "The Secret Saga of Lew Sayre Schwartz" one of the great Batman ghost artists from 1946 to 1953 who Eddie Campbell interviewed and discussed at length in Egomania. He still has notebooks full of his Batman splash pages, thumbnail layouts from the time period. Jerry Robinson/George Russos Batman page from Batman No.13 scanned from the original art. Wish it was bigger but went over it with the magnifying glass anyway. Schwartz was a friend of Milt Caniff and Alex Raymond and he never told either one of them he was ghosting Batman. Didn't want to be associated with comic books "At that particular time it was beneath my status…or my objectives." There's a jaw-dropper for you.


Comic Book Artist #24 – National Lampoon Issue. If you were ever an avid reader of the National Lampoon, you have got to read this one especially the Michael Gross (he was the art director through the peak years) interview. "I'm at the point where I don't want to be, ten years from now, talking about Lampoon. It's the time to put that to rest. Here it is, thank you." No, no. Thank YOU, Mr. Gross.


Streetwise – BWS's strip, Sal Amendola's strip (Sal Amendola in black and white—who knew?), Sergio Aragones' strip, Kirby's strip, Evan Dorkin's strip.


Alter Ego #56 – "Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster". "Jack Adler" interview. Neal Adams: "Coloring Really Started to Come Back With Jack Adler". More great Neal Adams stories about he and Jack Adler bringing DC into the twentieth century, production-wise—including all the stories I ran in Following Cerebus six months later. D'OH!


Alter Ego #54 – Andru and Esposito. A couple of Metal Men pages shot from the original artwork. Worth the price of admission considering it was a freebie. Haven't had a chance to read it yet.


Thanks to George and TwoMorrows! Hope you guys like my introduction. George tells me the book should be shipping in May.


There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY's

BLOG AND…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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Dave Sim's blogandmail #132 (January 21st, 2007)

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the

Most Merciful:

There is no God but God

& Muhammad is His last messenger and seal

of prophets.

Almighty God

One God having One Name, One Face and One

Aspect which is God:

Glory to God in the Highest, Glory to God Most

High

God Who is the Most Gracious and the Most

Merciful.

Great is God and there is no other god but He.

Almighty God, I thank You for having revealed

Yourself to men.

I thank you for Your Presence in the world

and Your presence in my life

through Your Living Word, preserved for all

time within Your Sacred Scriptures;

Your Living Word which is like unto a shining

beacon, illuminating the path You have made

straight before me.


Almighty God, I thank You for the book of Genesis,

I thank You for the book of Exodus,

I thank You for the book of Leviticus,

I thank You for the book of Numbers,

I thank You for the book of Deuteronomy.

I thank You for these books and revelations which

You imparted to Your great prophet, Moshe

Peace be upon him.


I thank You for the book of Joshua,

I thank You for the book of Judges,

I thank You for the book of Samuel,

I thank You for the book of Kings,

I thank You for the book of Isaiah,

I thank You for the book of Jeremiah,

I thank You for the book of Ezekial,

I thank You for the book of Hosea,

I thank You for the book of Joel,

I thank You for the book of Amos,

I thank You for the book of Obadiah,

I thank You for the book of Jonah,

I thank You for the book of Micah,

I thank You for the book of Nahum,

I thank You for the book of Habakkuk,

I thank You for the book of Zephaniah,

I thank You for the book of Haggai,

I thank You for the book of Zechariah,

I thank You for the book of Malachi,


I thank You for the testimony and the records

of these prophets and messengers to

Your Chosen People,

Israel.

Peace be upon them.


I thank You for the Gospel according to Matthew,

I thank You for the Gospel according to Mark,

I thank You for the Gospel according to Luke,

I thank You for the Gospel according to John,

Peace be upon them


I thank you for the testimonies and the records

of Jesus, the Lamb of God,

Peace be upon him.


I thank You for the Acts of the Apostles,

I thank You for the Epistles of Paul,

I thank You for the testimony of the disciples,

I thank You for the Revelation of John.

Peace be upon them.


And I thank you for your glorious Koran.


Almighty God, after the instruction of Your

last messenger and seal of prophets,

Muhammad, peace be upon him,

who counselled that a man must submit himself

to the Will of God, wilfully and peacefully, I

renew my vow (this morning) that I do so: that

I submit myself to You and I submit myself to

Your Will. If it be Your Will, please grant that

I might be brought to the fulfillment whish

You intended for me from before my birth.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all

the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is

the only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most

high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I thank you for allowing me to

be born in Canada in the last half of the

twentieth century: pampered, coddled,

insulated, sheltered and protected

from so much of the world's genuine hardship

& pain, misery & strife, famine & poverty,

disease & dispair, hunger & need, want &

dread, fear & violence, suppression &

oppression which are the yoke & the burden

under which so much of the world's

population yet labours.


Through these sufferings are the dust of this

earth -- from dust they came and to dust they

will return -- still I know that I have been

spared them, only by Your Grace and by Your

Mercy, and I am profoundly grateful to You

for that.


May God's will be done in the earth, and on

the earth, as it is in all the worlds and all the

heavens.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious

and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other god but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the

only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, if I am worthy of forgiveness

in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness of my many

sins, transgressions, iniquities and vanities

which are abomination before your Eternal

Laws, Morals and Ethics. If I am worthy

of forgiveness in Your Eyes, I ask forgiveness

for all my sins of commission and of

omission: those sins which I have

committed and which I commit, out of

wilfulness, out of ignorance,

out of spite, out of misery, out of

self-absobtion, out of self-pity,

out of self-destructiveness or out of

misundertsanding or

misconstruing Your Living Word.


Almighty God, I accept all consequences and

repercussions of my own choices, decisions,

self-imposed inadequacies, actions, deeds,

words and works. For God is the Sure Judge

over all the earth and all the worlds and all

the heavens, slow to anger, measured and

temperate in Your Judgements, sparing and

merciful in Your chastisements.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all

the worlds and all the heavens, God Who is

the only Source of salvation, God Who is the

only Hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

Who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God most

high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I commend into Your Care and

Your Custody, my soul, my mind and my

heart, knowing as I do so that free will is

God's greatest gift to man. And while I

entrust myself only to You and while I trust

only You, still I know that there are choices

and decisions which lie before me in my life

which are mine alone to make. If it be Your

Will, please grant that those choices and

decisions might be informed by the common

sense, the good judgement and what wisdom

You have seen fit to bestow upon me, by Your

Grace and by Your Mercy.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

Most High, God who is the Most Gracious

and Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other god but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God Who is the

only source of salvation, God Who is the only

hope of redemption, God Who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Almighty God, I also renew my vow (this

morning) that I will never again marry and I

will never again cohabit with a woman. I vow

further to exercise all caution , all restraint, all

common sense, all good judgement and what

wisdom You have seen fit to bestow upon me,

by Your Grace and by Your Mercy and to

exercise all these to the utmost in all of my

dealings with womankind.


Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God

most High, God who is the Most Gracious and

the Most Merciful, Great is God and there is

no other God but He. God Who created all the

worlds and all the heavens, God who is the

only Source of salvation, God who is the only

Hope of redemption, God who is the only

good, God Who is my only sanctuary, God

who is my only safe harbour from the storm.

Glory to God in the highest, glory to God

most high,

In excelsis Deo.


Amen.

STEVE PETERS ON THE

SUNDAY EDITION

BLOG & MAIL



My car broke down completely in August, and I decided not to shop for a new one. If God wants me to have a car, I'll get one (the two cars I've owned were both hand-me-downs from family members, and I always thought that in both cases receiving a car was a case of God looking out for me). In October, my company bought several new supermarkets from another company that went out of business. Almost all our more experienced employees who get a higher rate of pay have been forced to go to work at the new stores. I was slated to go as well. This would have been a huge inconvenience; a half-hour drive and I'd no longer get exercise from walking 2 miles to work every day. I would have to buy a car. I might've even had to get a second job. It certainly would've made working on my comics more difficult. Fortunately, I was ultimately able to stay at my own store because of not having a car. As far as I'm concerned, God wants me to have as much time as possible to work on my comic. When He got me my car 10 years ago, he timed it to last just as long as it did and it expired just before all this business with the mandatory company transfers went down. God is merciful.


He is, indeed. Virtually all of the people reading this are going to think you ridiculous for thinking that way, but since I think the way you do, let me say that in those situations I usually try to recognize that there's a large sense of obligation to God implied. The fact that it was such a near thing that made the difference between a life that accommodated your cartooning and a life that would have made your cartooning all-but-impossible means that you're supposed to make the most of your gratitude and be productive: having seen how easily it can be taken away and how important it is to you. And, of course, that implies a further obligation to do important work, right? In order to be worthy of the special attention you got, I mean.



As for Dr. Strange – I always loved Ditko and had an affinity for his extra-dimensional stuff, and I love those huge abstract characters like Eternity and the Living Tribunal. A few years ago, I discovered some beat-up copies of Strange Tales and started collecting it, always keeping an eye out for cheap, beat-up copies (as long as all the pages are all there so I can read it, that's all that matters to me – I have no interest in the collecting aspect). I recently realized I cold fill the holes in my collection by buying them on eBay. I bought a nice batch that arrived recently, and reading it after three years of praying, was dismayed by how demonic it is. I mean, this Strange character must be damned for sure. Half of his spells invoke some demon or other – Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, indeed. Do the ends justify the means? Is it OK to use black magic if you're using it to save the world from cosmic crises on a regular basis? You keep writing how you think nobody's interested in what you're writing about – the Neal Adams issue, the Ditko analysis – but you seem to keep writing about stuff I'm very interested in or that I'm thinking about. Maybe I'm just in that 1% of fans you talked about.



Well, I think that's a given, Steve.



Now that you've had a chance to read The Origin of Sparky, I thought I'd make one more try at getting you to do a jam for my upcoming Sparky in Love comic (your reply last time was "I should say no"). You talked in your blog about a romance comic someone was putting (or already has) put together, and how interesting it would be to explore that theme in this day and age. I think you'll find the other jams in Sparky in Love pretty amusing; not surprisingly, most of them take a pretty pessimistic tone. I met Lee Thacker through you; he did a lovely color solo piece for it (which, unfortunately, will have to be rendered in gray tones). I had several ideas for it which might either make you more likely to change your mind or make less work for you if you do change your mind.



No, it's not the jam itself—you're great to jam with—it's the fact that, really, the subject of love doesn't interest me now that I know what love has been turned into. Love—familial love and romantic love—is what women use to make men into feminists. I've been trying to come up with an analogy to explain my reaction when you ask me to do a jam about love. To me, it would be like doing a jam about the sort of compulsion in religion that the Islamist government in Somalia is indulging in: forcing people to pray on pain of death. That, to me, is what love is like in our society. Love is the cudgel I've been beaten over the head with since I was 14 to compel me to become a feminist. To me it's not something I can parody or deal with affectionately or try to ignore the core of what it is in favour of the attractive surface veneer anymore than I could do that with the Islamist government in Somalia.



Incidentally, I'm also enclosing a couple of Origin of Sparky CDs for the Archive. I think it's a nice curiosity since, as far as I know, no one else has done a song with Dave Sim lyrics. Unfortunately, it's home-burned, and I've heard that home-burned CD's only last about 10 years. I haven't been burning CDs long enough to verify this. I do think I'll have some copies made by a print-on-demand service at some point, so I'll send them along when that is done. I do hope you'll give our song a listen if you visit someone with a CD player. When my former friend Paul (the one who didn't come to his door when I went to pick him up for our trip to SPACE this year) and I sat down to write it, we first watched the movie Crumb for musical inspiration (I wanted a `30s-style feel for the music to go with Sparky's `30s animation look).



I'm pretty much staying away from playing music apart from the occasional Sparky-related project.


Much appreciated. I'm not sure that I'll ever listen to it but that's nothing against you. I haven't owned anything that would play music since 2001 and I still spend the vast majority of my time with pop songs playing in my head. Certainly far, far more often than I think of alcohol, not having had a drink since 2003. I'll hear a song in the grocery store I haven't heard in ten years and I'll know all the words, but for the most part I can't remember two consecutive lines of scripture to save my life. I can't recite Isaiah 40 off the top of my head but I could sing the theme song to Car 54 Where Are You? without a single mistake. That's pretty sad. Funny, but sad.



Whatever you want to do, or if you don't want to do anything, is fine with me. I feel like a heel for even asking when I read on your blog how busy you are. But I got some good responses to our jam in the first one, and it always gets "oohs" and "ahhs" when I show it to folks in person. The next one wouldn't feel complete without something from you, so I thought I should give it one more try.



Again, sincere apologies. It's not you, it's the subject matter. Let me know if you decide to do a jam about something else.



So now you know some of the sad details of my life in the 21st century. Actually, I suppose I'm not doing so bad – no girlfriend in six and a half years (breaking my previous record of just under five years), regular prayer for three years and (I hope) submission to God's will, fasting on Sundays, no intoxicants or mind-altering substances in over six months (and not particularly missing them, oddly enough). Hopefully I'm moving in the right direction.



Hopefully, we're both moving in the right direction.



God bless.



May God see fit to bless you as well, Steve.



Steve mentioned on his inside front cover a bunch of great stores that have supported him all along—a very good habit to get into for those of us whose fortunes rise and fall on the efforts of those in the brick-and-mortar trenches. Here's Steve's list (unleash the 14 pt. Bold Face Italic WITH underlining!):



Commuter Comics in South Orange New Jersey; Brave New Worlds in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania; Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan; Jim Hanley's Universe in New York, New York, the Graham Crackers Comics chain in Illinois; Comix Experience in San Francisco, California; Mile High Comics in Thornton, Colorado.



Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture reading bible dvd Deuteronomy Item number: 250073477062

___________________________________________________

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.