Dave Sim's blogandmail #201 (March 31st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________

NITTY GRITTY ABOUT

THE INTERNAL WORKINGS

OF AARDVARK-VANAHEIM THAT

ARE A) NONE OF YOUR

BUSINESS AND B) HERE ON

DISPLAY FOR YOUR DINING AND

DANCING PLEASURE!

Jeff Seiler continues:


My next point is that this letter to Wilf clearly was not an actual "Last Will and Testament and Powers of Attorney for Property and Personal Care", but was just your suggestions for same. So, in the ensuing year and three months, has Wilf produced said legal document? If so, I assume that it will be revised soon to reflect Gerhard's departure.


"Soon" is a relative term. It took about two or three years for me to actually arrive at a final Last Will and Testament and I signed it at Wilf's office, literally the day before I flew out for Salt Lake City and Gerhard dropped his bombshell literally his first day back in the office after Salt Lake City. There are two documents. The Power of Attorney for Personal Care is valid and David Carrington will be added to the list when Wilf gets back from Zimbabwe (of all places) the middle of this month. The Will is a more complicated piece of work that I am still composing mentally and which I have been working on mentally since November 1st of last year.


When it is revised, what is your thought as to giving me (and perhaps the other Committee members) a copy of it? I mean, I assume there would be no secrets or surprises in it, particularly with Gerhard out of the picture, right?


I assume that, yes, you would all get copies. The question right now is if the Last Will and Testament would be posted to the Newsgroup which was the plan with the one I signed last October that got scuttled when Gerhard announced his resignation. One of the big questions is: Is Gerhard "out of the picture"? His own first idea was that we would just "wind up" the company, liquidate all assets – sell the house, ditch the inventory and whatever else -- and divide the resulting amount of money. When I made it clear that I intended to keep going he accommodated that by pitching a lump sum payment for this year and subsequent monthly payments for five years. Which I agreed to. However, citing the Peter Laird buyout of Kevin Eastman I said that I thought it was wrong for a creator to not have some participation in his own creativity, however marginal it might be and made the suggestion that at the end of the five years Ger would start getting royalties on the sales of the books that he worked on. Relative to the on-going Creator's Rights debate, this allowed me to demonstrate what I see as correct behaviour for a publisher since Gerhard relinquishing his 40% share of the company would then put us in the relationship of publisher and freelancer. So what I want to do at that point is to establish the Superman Contract that I had been trying to pitch to DC almost twenty years ago now and which Paul Levitz just couldn't bring himself to sign off on or even discuss seriously even in the initial baby step stages. That is, had DC known in 1938 what a goldmine Superman was going to be, what sort of a deal could they have offered Seigel and Shuster that could be deemed fair? And, to me, there you look to the newspaper strip field where the syndicate and the cartoonist split revenues 50-50 with all expenses coming out of the syndicate's half. Book publishing is a little more complicated and has quite a bit more overhead to it, so I wouldn't institute the program from "dollar one" as the newspaper syndicates do. But my intention with DC had been to say, "Cerebus is an established property, so you pick the dollar thresholds – make them as high as you like – but at some point we split all revenues 50-50." Make it a billion dollars if you want, but at some point there has to be an amount of money coming in that you can be happy only getting half of it instead of 90% of it. How can you turn up your nose at making $500 million dollars off of a creative property? That was complete pie-in-the-sky back in the late 1980s, but with the Spider-man franchise now approaching the one billion dollar mark, it's now a lot more real. Anyway, at the end of five years – having accepted Ger's lump sum request and five-year monthly payment request – I'll present him with a Superman Contract that specifies specific thresholds at the maximum of which he will get 25% (half of 50%) of every dollar that comes in if the company ever hits that maximum threshold. And it will obviously be much less than a billion dollars.


Also, (I don't mean to be nosey, but I really do think this question pertains to your estate) how can the two of you possibly divide up the material part of the Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. property?


We couldn't without dismantling it as Gerhard suggested, turning all assets into cash and then dividing the cash 60-40.


Who gets what pages (a tangible and valuable asset, not necessarily just to be relegated to the estate); how do you determine the value and share, page by page (arguably, Ger did more than 40% of the work on many pages and you certainly did more than 60% on others)?


We couldn't. The range of prices on the few pages we auctioned on eBay to test the waters last year means the pages are worth what you can get for them on a given day and depends largely on how much more than two people with deep pockets want them. Ger and I agreed years ago in the event of a split that we would divide the pages 50-50 on a strict "one for you, one for me" basis starting with the earliest page in issue 65 when he started on the book. The randomness of doing it that way would mean it was luck of the draw as to who got what pages. I'd get 1900 and Ger would get 1900. The accountant originally wanted to do a valuation of the pages as a company asset, but that really isn't the way things work in the comic-book field. You get your artwork back. We kept the pages in the company because we were both in the company. If we got paid for a page the revenue got divided 60-40 whether it went towards a company expense or whether it was part of our salaries. It was a convenient way to make sure we shared in our rare art sales. But the understanding was always that Ger was entitled to a fair share of the pages (and it isn't just about the amount of work that went into it – a page with my characters on it: particularly Cerebus or Jaka with backgrounds just at the periphery sells for a lot more than an all background page). What we are tentatively doing now is giving each of us jurisdiction over half of the pages. I can authorize the sale of pages over which I have jurisdiction and Ger can authorize the sale of pages over which he has jurisdiction. Neither of us is particularly interested in selling artwork since the artwork is the thing that has appreciated the most in dollar value over the years. The trade paperbacks still sell for what the trade paperbacks sell for, the house is worth substantially less than what we paid for it at the top of the housing market and the intellectual property rights to Cerebus for movies or merchandising aren't for sale so that point is pretty well moot.


Lengthy digression: Ger considers the Cerebus art market to be dead right now, but I don't agree. I think the artwork is just under-valued. Brian Coppola for several years there was able to buy virtually every page that came on the market for between $500 and $700. Lately, the few pages that have been offered for sale or auction haven't been meeting their reserve and have been withdrawn more often than they've changed hands. But, come on – there are roughly 2,200 pages out there circulating or theoretically circulating. I don't think there's any other art team that has 2,200 pages in circulation. If the Cerebus art market was dead hundreds of those pages would be dumped onto eBay at $200 to $400 a page. The owners would be desperate to sell them for whatever they could get. No, I think it's a case of people believing the pages will go up in value from their present level so they're hanging onto them. If someone starts paying $1,000 to $1,200 a page the way Brian was one of the first to make the jump to $500 to $700 a page, I think they'll be able to pick up the stray pages that come onto the market and probably persuade some owners to part with pages they've been sitting on. I mean, Harry Kremer would barely speak to me when I put the pages up to $100. To him that was a ridiculous amount of money and he wouldn't pay it and he resented it as one of my biggest art buyers to that point. But Ger and I were just as happy not to sell the pages and if we did sell them we wanted to make $100 off of them. At that point if you had offered us $100 a page for the whole lot we would have sold them in a New York minute and carried them over to your house one at a time. Then they started evaporating at $100 a page and we put the brakes on and just let the market set its own price without our participation. People used to anguish and virtually dissolve in front of us at conventions really, really, wanting to buy a page but…a HUNDRED BUCKS! Brian's Cerebus the Artvark website was set up by him to update everyone on what Cerebus pages were trading hands at and, as far as I know, for as long as he's had it up and running you can pretty much count the number of pages he's documented on two hands and have several fingers left over. That isn't a dead market, that's an undervalued market.


Tomorrow: Really having to dig down in the pile for a religious topic

Coming Monday: Meanwhile, Back At the Subject

There's MORE for you

In Today's

Blog &…

…MAAAAIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #200 (March 30th, 2007)

HE'S BEEN WAITING A WHILE

TO HAVE HIS SAY AND TO GET

MY RESPONSE, SO HERE HE IS

FOLKS, CEREBUS READERS IN

CRISIS PUBLISHER AND UBER

YAHOO JEFF SEILER!

Dear Dave,


I hope that this letter finds you fully recovered from your recent lengthy illness. I am just today returning to school after my bout with the flu. As you said, you just have to let it run its course.


As you no doubt had much time to ponder during your sleepless bedridden time, the perhaps coincidental convergence of your illness and Gerhard's departure has raised a few questions, which questions have occurred to me, as well. Thus, today I reread your Thanksgiving Day '05 letter to Wilf which, to my knowledge, is the only extant public statement of your intentions regarding your last will and testament. As I result, I have some questions.


First, I assume that you have, by now, received David Carrington's letter regarding his intent to join the group of those who form the core of the decision-makers in the event of your becoming incapacitated (hereafter to be referred to as "the committee", for lack of a better name --- hmm, how about "The Committee for Dave Sim's Personal Care Decisions"?) Do you now consider him to be such a member?


Yes, but I didn't get a letter from him until just this week (March 12) – a manifestation of synchronicity that makes me think I made the right choice in not replying to you until I got to your letter in the pile. It may seem like an artificially slow way to communicate, but there have been several synchronous instances like that, so I suspect this is probably the pace at which God wants me to communicate. All in good time. And "the Committee" seems like as good a name as any.


Secondly, do you plan to release an official notice (press release or otherwise) regarding Gerhard's decision to leave Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.? There has been far less speculation on the Cerebus Yahoo group as to the circumstances of said departure than I would have expected; Jeff Tundis and I have kept mum as to the details that you disclosed to us respectively and that Ger has emailed to Jeff. For the record, while I suspect that you would expect the comics industry to be disinterested in the facts, I think this sort of news deserves some sort of joint explanation from both parties to try to prevent rank skewering of you and universal cries of "poor, poor Gerhard, however did he put up with Sim for so long", and such lot.

Well, I've had from November 1st when Gerhard first made his intention clear to assess how I was going to deal with it and the conclusion that I came to was that it was Gerhard's story – that is, his departure was the story, not what he was departing from – so I figured I would let him announce it anyway that he saw fit. I anticipated the, as you put it, "rank skewering" of Dave Sim that would follow and couldn't see any way around it so there wasn't much point of giving my side of things even if Ger had given his side of things: at the end of the day I would still be the Pariah King of Comics. People in comics will latch onto anything bad they can say about Dave Sim in order to avoid discussing the Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. I ended up dictating a short paragraph to Jeff Tundis that he could use as an announcement and from there news trickled out over the next few weeks and, I'm sure, the rank skewering ensued and ensues unabated to this day.


Reading between the lines of my most recent letters which I won't be getting to for a few weeks, there seems to be a minority opinion shaping up that the loss of the Dave Sim/Gerhard art team is a great loss for the comic-book field which – however few people hold it – seems to me a nice albeit "too little too late" acknowledgement. I'm on record as saying that Gerhard was, for twenty years, the best pure pen-and-ink artist in the comic-book field and that it was unfortunate that he got pigeon-holed as a mere inker and that Dave Sim's "pariahdom" extended to someone who never voiced an opinion about anything one way or the other. He was never "of" the comic-book field, was never a comic-book guy so his connection to the field was always tenuous at best. Could that connection have been solidified by some public acknowledgement of his abilities so that we might now have been looking forward to more of his work in collaboration with me (and others?)? Well, now that it's too late, we'll never know, will we?


We made it nine years further along (1983 to 2006) than did Lennon and McCartney (1956 to 1970) but we'll obviously never have the lifelong (however troubled and troublesome) connection of Jagger and Richards (1962 to the present). I suspect that that's both a blessing and a curse.


Tomorrow: Into the real Nitty-Gritty of the Thing

There's MORE for you

In TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAAIIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail EXTRA!: Ultimate Spider-Man #100 cover... in COLOR!

Jim McLauchlin of The HERO Initiative (formerly ACTOR) just sent this over. Dave's colored final version of his Ultimate Spider-Man #100 cover celebrating Bendis & Bagley's run. Will it outsell Mike Wieringo's that went for $500?


___________________________________________________

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 #199 (March 29th, 2007)

IT'S DAY FOUR OF "JACK

BANEY HELD HOSTAGE"

BY REPUTED MISOGYNIST

AND ALL ROUND EVIL

PERSON DAVE SIM

Jack Baney continues:


Sorry, but I just have to get this in – you told me that you don't believe my statistics about the death tolls in Central America because leftists claimed that 4,000 Palestinians were killed in Jenin but the UN says it was really 28. I think that if you look it up anywhere, you'll see that your own statistics are wrong: the UN report says that 52—not 28 – Palestinians were killed in Jenin while the Palestinian Authority – not American leftists – overestimated the death toll as 500 – not 4,000 – initially. The Israeli government overestimated the death toll as up to 200 initially but now agrees with the 52 figure.


Frankly, Jack, I think I'm safe in saying that these numbers got "massaged" radically on an on-going basis from the first eyewitness Palestinian accounts which were fed to gullible anti-Israeli Western reporters through the independent assessment of on-scene CSI style experts to UN bureaucrats with leftist axes to grind through the initial report to revised reports and so on. Since Israel has chosen to do what I recommended a while back: build a security fence which walls them off from the Palestinians or Transjordanians or Latter Day Philistines or whatever you want to call those mad dogs and left them to tear each other to shreds, I really think the point is becoming moot if it isn't completely moot already. If the PA agrees to live up to its previous agreements with Israel and acknowledges Israel's right to exist then there is something to discuss. Until they do, there's nothing to discuss.


At any rate, I'll admit that I should be reading and thinking more about these issues myself and that since I've reached such disturbing conclusions about my own government's policies, I should be working to change them and not just writing letter about them to conservative cartoonists. After all, I think we would agree that I live in the freest (and, I would say, greatest) country in the world, rather than one in which I'd be persecuted for taking political action.

I'd agree with that. And I would only add that I think you should be working on what you want to change your government's policies into. The Democrats are in desperate need of coherent ideas and alternatives that align well with your country's collective gut instinct of where you're going and how you want to get there. If more of you on the left were engaged in determining future courses of action instead of trying to figure out how to indict Dick Cheney for 9/11 I think you – and the United States – would be a lot further ahead of the game.


I know you're not going to like all of my comments in this letter, especially the ones in the two preceding paragraphs, and that you may want to respond to them harshly. That's okay with me – I won't complain if you call me a Godless-Marxist-feminist-homosexualist-emotion-ruled-woman-with-a-penis-slave-toYHWH. But I will say that if you decide to tear me down personally—as you deliberately refrained from doing in Allen's case, according to your blog entry—it might be more effective to say something along the lines of, "Jack, you're the kind of guy who writes political letters to comic-book magazines. You probably have less sexual experience than the average Amish teenager. And it's quite possible that you're even nerdier than one or two members of the Cerebus Yahoo Group."


See, I would never say anything like that to anyone. People have been tearing me down personally for the last decade or so but that's because they can't refute my arguments in open debate. If you're able to hold your own in open debate with those who oppose you – and I'll flatter myself that I have been able to on the rare occasions when someone is actually willing to discuss my ideas – there is absolutely no need to get bogged down in personal invective and character assassination. And given my current focus on strict morality for myself, even if I did engage in "tearing people down" the last thing I would do is bring up sexual experience. In fact, if you think about it, I'd obviously count a lack of sexual experience as a credential not a liability. You know of any happy womanizer stories? Does Hugh Hefner and his half-dozen girlfriends and bowl of Viagra look like a happy situation? Do you think that ends well? I think Jules Feiffer summed up womanizing -- to the point of having the Last Word -- with the Jack Nicholson character in Carnal Knowledge. There. That's what that is and that's where it leads. Can we discuss something useful now?


Speaking of which – your comments in the Jan. 27 blog entry made me think that maybe I should avoid both reading your blog and posting my own comments on the Internet. I read that entry shortly after I posted some comments about you on The Comics Journal's message board. What I wrote was generally respectful of you (the one exception was a lame joke I made about Noah Berlatsky winning a Pulitzer and rubbing it in your face while taunting you). But something about our comments appearing on the Internet at about the same time reinforced my sense that there's something unseemly about Internet discussions, especially when they involve people who are not taking part in those discussions.


I'd say it's all part and parcel of being a public figure in a day and age and in a context where pretty much everyone is a public figure in one sense or another. I think the Blog & Mail is gradually evolving into a kind of debate forum which (hopefully) bypasses some of the worst excesses of the Internet and the "unseemly" quality you refer to. I've seen very little of Internet discussion and what I have seen certainly hasn't enticed me to participate myself. At the same time I find this to be a reasonably pleasurable (or, perhaps, least painful) way of keeping up communication across the great political divide and to stick to the issues and not get bogged down in personalities and name-calling. And I get to run the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast in front of everyone who tunes in on a daily basis. What could be better than that?


Okay, I guess that's it. Feel free to run this letter in your blog, in Following Cerebus or anyplace else you'd like, although I'd prefer that you run the whole thing or none of it at all. Thanks for telling me (in your last letter to me) that you look forward to my next piece of comics journalism, but I'm actually hoping to move beyond that kind of thing. I'd rather write some books and have you send open letters about my Marxist-Palestinian views to The New Yorker or something. Anyway, I look forward to seeing your future work. And I'd express the hope that you've recovered fully from the flu by now, but then I'd just be trying to "out-polite" you.


But wouldn't that be great? If we all just contended in the forum of ideas with ideas exclusively and on the personal side of things had an unspoken competition to always be trying to "out-polite" each other? Thanks for writing, Jack. I'll look forward to reading your first book.


Tomorrow: At Long Last Seiler!

There's More For You

In Today's BLOG &

MAAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

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 #198 (March 28th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________

It's now Day Three

Of Jack Baney Held Hostage

By Reputed Misogynist and Evil

Person Dave Sim

Jack Baney continues:


In total violation of our agreement to disagree, I'll add that my admiration for your idealism and determination to uncover unpleasant truths is part of the reason why I always want to argue you out of your current politics. To me, some of the best aspects of you just don't fit with a lot of the views you've been professing over the last several years. For example, I would think that someone willing to go so far above and beyond for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund would have major problems with the Bush Administration's treatment of terrorism detainees. But it's like you see locking people up on charges of selling obscene comics as reprehensible but locking people up, refusing to charge them with anything whatsoever or to give them fair trials, and subjecting them to psychological and sometimes physical torture for years on end is okay. Yeah, I know that Al-Qaeda needs to be prevented from murdering and that Bush isn't a Stalin or even a Castro, but come on – what he's doing with those prisoners is way, way worse than anything the U.S. government has ever done to anyone for selling or drawing comics (in addition to being much worse than McCarthyism and possibly worse than the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII). Also, it strikes me as unfortunate that while you've reached such harsh conclusions about women, sex, families, music, television, mainstream Christianity, etc., your conclusions about Bush, Reagan, and Israel are almost 100 percent sunny. I hope that those conclusions are at least well considered. I mean, I'd rather think that you've wrestled with your view of Reagan's support of the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador and reached the same conclusion as a conservative co-worker I once had – that this support went to some near-genocidal governments but helped to temper their worst aspects while preventing even worse communists from taking over – than to think you're simply naïve and have never even heard of that support.


Well, no, obviously I have. Most of the time my support for President Reagan and the current President Bush stems from the fact that they are dealing realistically with the issue at hand, facing it square on and deciding between the lesser of two evils, whereas Democratic Presidents tend to indulge in wishful thinking. "I really FEEL like this should work so let's try this." I think President Reagan ultimately dismantled himself over Iran-Contra because he chose not to look at it realistically and went by the FEEL of the thing. By giving military armaments to Iran and then taking the money for those armaments and using it to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, in his own mind he wasn't paying a ransom for the hostages Iran then released. They paid for the armaments and because that money went to fund the Contras (instead of going into U.S. Government General Revenues) he somehow convinced himself that they released the hostages on their own initiative and helped fund fighting the Contras by buying armaments. There was, however, just no way that it added up like that. It was CIA-style thinking (we'll do this thing that would ordinarily be deemed wrong and illegal and treasonous – like buying and selling a half-tonne of cocaine – and make it right by using the money for a good cause). Wrong is wrong. The debits and credits don't balance out in any rational way. But certainly I would agree that it is easier to move a right-wing military dictatorship in the direction of democracy than it is a Fidel Castro or a Hugo Chavez. As a general rule and I think the Republicans have always subscribed to that view.


When it comes to the problem of terrorist detainees there are many different levels to the situation. I think the immediate response after 9/11 was a good one, issuing from a visceral understanding of militant Islam as epitomized by Osama bin Laden's assertion that "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they naturally choose the strong horse" and the fact that, therefore, the United States needed to present itself to militant Islam as the strong horse, which the United States had not been doing up to that point in Lebanon under Reagan in Mogadishu under Clinton or much of anywhere else in the Muslim world for that matter. To me that explains Guantanamo and I hope whoever came up with that one in the early Oval Office meetings got a gold star in his notebook. Guantanamo looks strong. Guantanamo suggests that you might want to think several times before targeting American civilians and then change your mind and choose not to. Or you might end up in Guantanamo. It seemed to me a balanced response not only to 9/11 but to the complete lack of Muslim contrition for 9/11 happening. Whichever way you slice it, that lack of contrition was arrogant and suggested an overall Muslim approach of "Yeah, we took down the World Trade Towers, what are you going to do about it, infidel?" The sheer brutality of the attack which unfolded as a series of disaster films one on top of the other: a Muslim passenger taking out a box cutter and using it to cut the neck artery of the passenger next to him and using that particular brand of terror – an innocent civilian suddenly geysering blood into the aisle of a passenger jet – to get everyone under control and then deliberately smashing into a skyscraper which led to everyone on board and everyone on the impacted floor and the surrounding floors being burned alive instantly in ignited jet fuel which then led to the skyscraper's upper floors being consumed in the resulting inferno which led hundreds of other innocent civilians at 9 o'clock on a workday morning to have to choose whether to sit tight and get consumed by jet fuel ignited flames or jump to their deaths from a hundred storeys up. Then the firemen and the police on the ground with civilians hitting the ground at 32 feet per second per second…well, I don't think I have to go through the whole sequence of overlapping disaster movies but I do confess that I have a lot of trouble with leftists who want to place 9/11 on some sort of scale with the Japanese internment and McCarthyism. I mean, where is your sense of scale? 9/11 is, was and always will be completely off that particular Richter scale which is why it needed to be responded to and which required the United States Government to be, irrefutably, the Strong Horse.


As it stands right now, the biggest moral problem that I see is that all of the U.S.'s allies in NATO and NORAD and other organizations have anecdotal examples of "rendition". In Canada, our most celebrated one was Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Arab-Canadian citizen who our government essentially turned over to the American government back in 2003 as an accused terrorist and who was spirited away to Syria and imprisoned and tortured for a year.


Now, if I had been in those early Oval Office meetings with my notepad and my pen and someone – presumably CIA – brought up the subject of "rendition" I'm willing to bet that I would know nothing about it but I would pretend to know in order not to seem uninformed. Who had even heard of "rendition" in this day and age? It smacks of the worst excesses of French colonialism in North Africa, a very dark skeleton in the closet of the countries formerly known as Christendom. Once explained, though, and facing the challenge of being seen as the Strong Horse in Muslim frames of reference (the same problem the French faced in Algeria) I think there would be a certain appeal, a kind of "having your cake and eating it too" quality very much along the lines of Iran-Contra. We keep our hands clean, because we aren't torturing them ourselves, but at the same time word will spread that this is something that can happen to you besides getting shipped to Guantanamo in handcuffs and leg shackles and an orange jumpsuit with a canvas hood over your head. If we capture you in Iraq or in North America we can turn you over to your own government. That's just the sort of thing that would give a Syrian or Saudi or Jordanian or Egyptian terrorist pause since they would be very familiar with what their government does to political prisoners. It's too clever by half, like most CIA approaches to things but in those first early days of figuring out how to show the Muslim world that the United States is not a paper tiger, that the United States means business, as I say, I think it would have a lot of appeal and I suspect there was a definite level of deterrence which resulted. Whether that factor of deterrence warranted the egregious duplicity in suspending individual civil human rights is a question that can't be answered because there is no control group: No United States where there was no Guantanamo and where there was no rendition. That's a fact of realpolitik. Hindsight is 20-20 and there is no control group.


The problem, of course – in practical CIA terms which have already put aside individual civil rights as "collateral damage" -- is "What do you do when you have a terrorist in custody and you `render' him but you can't reveal how he's connected to terrorism without exposing your own `inside people' to the other side?" And there everything really gets murky. Our Foreign Affairs Minister, Stockwell Day was briefed in Washington – after we had released Maher Arar, apologized to him and paid him 10 million dollars or something – on secret information that the White House considered linked Maher Arar to terrorism. And Stockwell Day was shown the secret information and was not convinced by it and maintains that the American government should follow Canada's lead and remove Arar's name from the FAA `no fly' list. Well, at that point – looking at it in practical CIA terms -- I wondered if they had actually showed Stockwell Day their best evidence. I mean, there you get into the question of how much do you trust the Canadian government with really sensitive information? I'd trust Stockwell Day with my life, but I wouldn't extend that trust to most of his inherited Foreign Affairs department most of whom are lifetime Liberal civil service appointees and, ergo, raving anti-American socialist lunatics (in CIA frames of reference and, I must confess, my own frames of reference as well). Would I trust the name and details of a CIA agent planted inside a North American terrorist cell to a largely anti-American socialist government? I'm not saying that is the situation, I'm saying that these are elements that intrude forcibly when you follow through on a program of "rendition". And I'm saying that I think I could be forgiven as a complete novice in that world for not seeing where it was apt to lead during those early Oval Office meetings on "how to show the Muslim world that we're the strong horse" given that I'm sitting there with my pen and my notepad and, apart from "invade Afghanistan" and "invade Iraq" I haven't got much written down. "Shock and awe". That's about it. And all I can see in my mind's eye is that series of overlapping disaster movies that just took place a few days ago. How do you keep everyone's cover intact and keep your allies on board with partial "safe" information?


We're having the same problem with our "security certificates" here in Canada where a number of accused terrorist detainees have been released by the courts because their human rights are being violated with indefinite incarceration. The headline in the local paper, The Record, was "Justice Trumps Security". We also have laws that prohibit us from deporting anyone to their home country if there's a danger they might be tortured or executed. But the net effect of that is that we can't deport suspected terrorists to a terrorist country. If you're from Saudi Arabia (or Syria or Iran or Iraq or Somalia or Indonesia) and you made it here and you're found with ten different passports under ten different aliases, all that will happen is that you'll be held by Immigration for a period of time and then you'll be released into Canadian society because "Justice Trumps Security". In light of 9/11, the Madrid bombings, the 7/7 London underground bombings I think that's nuts and well into the category of potentially disastrous "wishful thinking". Liberals in Canada and Democrats in the United States think that's the way to go. Trust everyone. Conservatives in Canada and Republicans in the United States think that's a foolish risk to take with your own civilian population. There may well come a day when it makes sense to treat immigrants from Saudi Arabia and Syria and Egypt and Jordan and Iran and Iraq the same as you treat immigrants from the U.K. and Australia and France and Germany but I don't think that day is here. Not by a long stretch. Innocents will suffer. No question about it. But I think Conservatives learn to weigh things in the balance. When the alternative is another 9/11 it only makes sense to be deeply suspicious of anyone trying to enter your country from a radical Muslim state or a state that harbours radical Muslims. Personally – just to extend the argument to its obvious conclusion at the high end of potential consequences -- I think it's better that the U.S. invade Iran and destroy its nuclear capability now at the cost of thousands of lives (and in a perfect world, Canada would be right there with them) than that everyone sits on their hands and waits for Iran to build a bomb and nuke Tel Aviv (not Jerusalem, I don't think – the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are the third holiest sites in Islam) at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives which would lead to the necessity to invade Iran anyway. You can hope that it just turns into a Mexican Stand-off like Pakistan and India. Both have nukes, neither pulls the trigger. But India and Pakistan don't deny each other's right to exist and both India and Pakistan have lived up to at least some of their agreements with each other. That isn't the case with Islam and Israel.


I just don't see any alternative. If the Muslim world in general begins to denounce terrorism and works to eradicate its own terrorist elements and acknowledges that Israel has a right to exist and lives up to their agreements, then you can start to change policy. But until that time the only choice is to be the strong horse or the weak horse.


Tomorrow: Jack Baney's parting shots

There's MORE for you

In Today's

Blog &…MAAAILLL!

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #197 (March 27th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________

Addressing the question on the minds

Of (at least) dozens, Jack Baney

(In yesterday's edition)

"About the question as to whether or

Not you've gone nuts…"

It's a difficult question to answer. I don't remember speculating that the completion of Cerebus might have caused the tsunami, but those are instances of a different perception of reality – that we are all contributing to what is going on around us in a larger sense that we don't understand. The lyrics in the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil "I shouted out, `Who killed the Kennedys?' Well, now, after all, after all, it was you and me" points in the same direction and in a direction that makes a lot of people personally uncomfortable: that we are making the world that we live in on an unconscious level where we do things (many of us) and contribute to things that we could never do or contribute to consciously. Who would want to admit that they had a share in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers?


[in some cases, with those of us inclined to think along these lines, this is almost literally true. I remember reading Norman Mailer commenting on the fact that he had been having an adulterous tryst with a woman -- whom he literally called a witch -- at the time that Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had anguished about the fact that the tryst might have been a contributing cause. As Robert Kennedy lay balanced between life and death in a Los Angeles hospital Mailer spent an uncomfortable night June 5 in front of the television with his then-wife Beverly, wrestling inwardly with his gut instinct that he might be able to save RFK by confessing his adultery to his wife. Where I ultimately broke ranks with Mailer was over the fact that although he saw life in these terms he never seemed to seriously consider becoming Completely Good or as Completely Good as he was capable of conceiving himself to be which was ultimately the choice that I made for myself. Yes, I believe that all of our actions of consequences, some of them Enormous and given that I believe that, the only moral – or rather Moral – choice is to err on the extreme side of caution and Goodness and hope that my doing so serves to counterbalance those who are either ignorant of the nature of reality or who, like Mailer, are aware of it but still choose to try to play both sides of the game. I can't help but think that if at any point in his illustrious and influential life Norman Mailer had chosen to Repent – even within his own frames of reference of repentance – that the history of the 20th century might have unfolded very differently.]


Who would want to admit that something they did in 1967 or 1968 was a contributing factor in Martin Luther King being shot to death? We want to externalize those events. It was either a lone nut or a rogue faction in the US government or the CIA or the Mafia – none of which, you will note, "we" are. "We" are just ordinary folks going about our business or "we" are moral beings examining and re-examining the sequence of events from a point very far back on the sidelines. "They" shot the Kennedys. "They" shot Martin Luther King. "We" must investigate what happened. But if we accept the collectivist view that there is no "they" there is only "we" then "we" do share a personal culpability. I mean, you can't have it both ways. To collectivists, "We" are all just "We" until a Kennedy gets shot or planes hit the World Trade Centre and then suddenly there's a "they" external to "we". Now you can say that that's an evil way to think and an evil thing to even enunciate – and all I'm really doing is framing it in your own terms: there is no "they" only "we" – but you'll notice that the Rolling Stones included themselves in the indictment. Mick or Keith or whoever wrote the lyrics indicted himself as well as you. It's either an evil way to think and an evil thing to enunciate or it's taking personal responsibility that we should all be taking. As I've been fond of saying, "I'll take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis of 1956, before that I wasn't born." People laugh when I say it, but I'm not sure that I'm making a joke. Most days I certainly feel (when I let myself) that I'm being made to take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis.


I take issue with your saying that I'm "obviously able to function in this world at a much higher level than I can or probably ever will." I don't think what I'm discussing is a "higher level/lower level" kind of thing. I'm up here and you're down there. The same with people who see the rich as being "up there". You know any happy stories about rich people? How can you see obsessive materialism as being "up there"? Put another way, by the nature of psychiatry, if you and I were to be examined by a team of psychiatrists, I can pretty much guarantee that you would be way "up there" and I would be way "down here". I'd be "badly socialized," I "don't play well with others," etc. etc. Arguably sitting in a room and typing this stuff into a computer for twelve hours a day four or five days in a row is a kind of "psychosis". In psychiatry believing that you are affecting the larger world around you is called "referential thinking" and is a sign of "schizophrenia". Feminists call me "evil" and a "misogynist". See, all of those things are labels and all of those things are used to scare people and make them doubt themselves. Labels don't scare me or make me doubt myself. The difference for me is that Reality and its Core Nature is what is of interest to me. I distil feminism down to its core fourteen (now fifteen!) falsehoods and sleep peacefully every night. I never worry about what people think of me who are not able to face Reality and its Core Nature and it seems obvious to me that feminists can't – otherwise they wouldn't base their lives on inherent falsehoods – so feminists are irrelevant and feminism is irrelevant to Reality and its Core Nature.


Only (contrariwise) feminism, the inherent falsehood, is everywhere believed to be reality or Reality. Everyone either believes in it or pays lip service to it. It's comparable, I think, to life in Saddam's Iraq or Jong-Il's North Korea. If everyone is forced to pretend to believe in an inherent falsehood and a single negative enunciation can cause you to be shunned as a pariah (or worse!) then it becomes impossible to know how many people believe and how many people are paying lip service. I'm the only person (besides Jeff Seiler, Sandeep Atwal, Billy Beach and, now, David Carrington) in this environment who believes in God and that feminism is inherently false. Okay, so I'm crazy. What to do? I can't go anywhere physically – everywhere outside of here (here being the inside of my own head) is basically Bedlam, a lunatic asylum. And that's when I become interested in the nature of reality and Reality, that place next to the "inward smile" place that is so satisfied by entertainment that seems to enunciate truths and Truths but which doesn't make you laugh out loud (not all the time, anyway) (HA! That would be CRAZY!). I write and draw, I think, I do my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and now Luke (just finished chapter eight) because that's where I see Reality.


But, no, it isn't a case of my seeing your views as "being typical of the degenerate mentality for which [you] and [your] pathetic ideological comrades are so justly despised by [your] moral and intellectual superiors." Again, that's "higher level/lower level" thinking which I think for most leftists is a projection (to use a psychiatric term). You're projecting onto people like me your own attributes and "way of seeing". It's YOU who tend to see people who have Strict Morality as the core of their existence as being "degenerate" and "pathetic" (What are two adjectives that describe your view of The Religious Right in the U.S.?) (I'll take Projection for 500, Alex) and you see yourself as "justly despising" them and see yourselves as their "moral and intellectual superiors". Who do you think occupies the intellectual high ground in the debate between Creationism and Evolution? Who do you think is the drooling troglodyte for believing otherwise? I think what has happened since 9/11 is that leftists are still evading looking at themselves in the mirror and evading looking at the sheer level of malice that informs their own natures – just say "George W. Bush" or "Dick Cheney" to them and watch the light of infernal malice flicker to life behind their eyes -- since their perception of themselves (on which their very psyche seems to hinge) is of a people devoid of hatred and malice. So that hatred and malice has to be displaced and the Religious Right seems to be where it goes every time where it isn't absolutely personalized in the form of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney. You may not believe in God on the left, but you surely do believe in Satan and you always see him anytime there's a Republican in the Oval Office. I mean, ALWAYS.


There are certainly idealogues and fanatics who "return fire" from the right, but I don't think that's really the consensus view since 9/11. I think the consensus view that has emerged is that people make their own choices. If you want to discuss your choices and my choices – as we're doing here – I'm more than happy to do that (I gotta fill these postings with something, eh?). If you want to denounce my choices and champion your own choices, I'm more than happy to let you do that and "return fire". What I'm not prepared to do is to pass laws outlawing your choices or to shun you for your choices or call you crazy or evil for what you've chosen. I might call you demonically possessed if I see signs of it (which I don't with you) because I think demonic possession is a Core Reality and particularly for people who don't arm themselves against it with prayer and faith in God. But it would never occur to me to burn people like you at the stake or force you to be subjected to an exorcism. If I started where would I stop? As long as we both respect each other's right to make choices and to act on those choices within the confines of the law I can't see your demonic possession as having any effect on me. If it does have any effect on me – and it does on occasion, I'm only human – then shame on me for letting a garden variety demon make me doubt myself and my faith. And I think that's the point that a lot of people have arrived at here on the right. We aren't just fighting for our beliefs against the beliefs of Fundamentalist Islam, we're fighting for the right to make choices, including the right to go straight to hell if that's your choice. That's the difference between the West on the extreme right and the Taliban on the extreme left. I don't want to go with you and I don't want to watch you go – on television or in public places or read extensively about it in the newspaper – but if you're going and you're going in the privacy of your own home or places that are made for that (bars, sex clubs, strip clubs), I hope you like what you get when you get there. And sincerely: no hard feelings. At ALL.

Tomorrow: Jack Baney demonizes BOTH President Reagan AND President Bush (Weary leftists can just read the italicized parts and skip what I have to say)

There's More For you

In the Always Ideologically Rigid

Blog &…

MAAAILLLL

(YOU LIKE THAT WHEN I SAY "RIGID"?

RIGID RIGID RIGID. Jeez you people are depraved)

___________________________________________________

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 #196 (March 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________

Jack Baney continues:


Maybe your perception of my open letter to you was colored by the fact that I once sent you an article, rejected by The Comics Journal, in which I put down your work. The February 17, 1998 letter you sent me in response to that article read in part: "…I think your review probably got rejected by The Comics Journal because it sort of emphasized my point that it's all just opinion. There are things that you like about Cerebus and things that you don't. You wrote a review expressing those opinions. I didn't find your views to be sneering or arrogant. They were just views I don't share."


I'm still impressed that you responded to me so graciously. I regret writing that article and sending it to you, although writing it did make me realize that I'll never be any kind of critic or reviewer.


Well, that's pretty much always been my nature and my approach to debate (although I'll grant you that that's seldom recognized by the vast majority of the comic-book field – it's a core trait of leftists that once they have demonized you they are completely incapable of seeing any good in you whatsoever). Even with your Israeli-Palestinian "screed" I didn't read it and take offence, I just read it and thought "This is just TOO radically left wing to run in Cerebus." And then I tried to think of some place radically left wing enough to run it. The lines that you quote from my letter, again I'm not taking offence I'm just pointing out to you that your conclusions ran afoul of the Journal party line that there is an objective reality to what makes a good comic book and that it isn't just contrasting opinions. It's unfortunate, in my view, that you didn't continue to criticize and review because I think you would have been very good at it.


My respect for Cerebus has increased a lot since I wrote my stupid article, partly because so much of your best work is in the book's final third. Kim Thompson has often said that Cerebus used to be a great comic and that High Society is a classic but that your work started falling apart as you gradually devolved into a misogynistic nutcase. Bart Beaty makes similar remarks in The Comics Journal #263, writing that "Dave Sim ran out talent (and sanity) somewhere back in the early 1990s," that Cerebus used to be funny but eventually became "funny only on occasion," and that Rick's Story was his "personal nadir" in the book. I couldn't disagree with those guys more. I hated High Society and didn't think the first third of Cerebus was funny at all (no offense). But your work in Rick's Story, particularly the bits with the religious imagery and the arguing parts of Cerebus's mind, was a personal high point of the book for me. Also, while your sense of humor is generally a lot different from mine, I enjoyed a lot of the humorous touches in Latter Days, including the shepherd and five-bar gate issues; the clever idea of drawing Woody Allen in the styles of Crumb, Feiffer, etc.; and, especially, your Comics Journal parody (since I disagree with most of your opinions about The Comics Journal and Gary Groth, I was surprised at how right you got them there). And I think that the afterlife sequence in Cerebus #300 did a pretty amazing job of using your entire 26 years worth of work on the book to express the religious beliefs that eventually emerged as the book's main point.


Well, much obliged for the kind words. I think again, this is an example of the Journal attempting to discern an objective reality and since Kim Thompson is perceived as speaking both for (and to) that objective reality, the viewpoint has tended to get entrenched by those who share in the idea that there is an objective reality attached to the medium and that we can all become attuned to it if we just follow the Journal's "logic of the next step" approach. Except for the "This Aardvark, This Shepherd" and "If Five-Bar-Gate Be My Destiny" I had pretty much abandoned my ambition to make people laugh out loud and had moved over into the realm of trying to scratch a different itch. The people I made laugh out loud on a regular basis felt (naturally enough) betrayed by that since there are very few laugh-out-loud things in the world (Kim Thompson was one of them, Peter David was another) as I found when I was trying to do it. What IS laugh out loud funny? Some Warner Brothers cartoons, some scenes in the Marx Brothers' early movies, some Monty Python, Richard Pryor. The list is not long and most of the rest of comedy – or "comedy" – is of the "inward smile" variety. I just re-read my two books of Bloom County strips and only laughed out loud twice, I think. I did read all of them and all of them did produce an "inward smile" that kept me reading. Once I was addressing religious questions, though, it was an area next to "inward smile" that was more of an "inward something else" that I discovered the vast majority of people don't have. If you liked Rick's Story, you have it. If you intensely disliked Rick's Story, you don't have it.


About the question as to whether or not you've gone nuts…


Uh-oh.


…even though I've read massive amounts of your writing, I'm not sure what to make of the way you think. A lot of your statements, like your speculation that the tsunami may have been caused by the completion of Cerebus, suggest to me that at least some of your thinking is seriously off-base. There were even some parts of your replies to me, Allen, and Renee Stephen in The Comics Journal that struck me as very strange – for example, I'm not sure how you deduced from Renee's letter that she is "fundamentally amoral" (although she very well could be, for all I know). On the other hand, you're obviously able to function in this world at a much higher level than I can or probably ever will. I doubt that I'll ever be a respected artist or a successful entrepreneur like you are, and Saturday Night's mention that you live in a "museum-neat" home caused me to reflect that I'll probably never achieve that, either (or even trick a visitor into thinking I have). And whatever else is going on inside of your head it contained enough idealism and determination for you to self-publish a magazine in which you shared your creative efforts and described the truth about the world as you saw it, despite the increasing unpopularity of your descriptions, for 26 years straight. So I guess I'd tentatively describe your mind vs. other people's the same way that you once described men vs. women – you seem to have more of the good and more of the bad. You may think that this view is not only wrong but typical of the degenerate mentality for which I and my pathetic ideological comrades are so justly despised by our moral and intellectual superiors, but that's the way I see it.


Tomorrow: Everyone re-read Jack's last chunk there a few times and I'll take a swing at it tomorrow.

There's More UH-OH

For you in Today's

Blog & MAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #195 (March 25th, 2007)

eBay: Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges



One of the letters which

Went astray was from Comics

Journal freelancer Jack Baney...



…and is dated February 5. I'm not sure if it's a dirty trick but he said he would prefer that I run his entire letter or none of it (which is exactly what I didn't want to read given that I'm trying to keep the Blog & Mail to a manageable size) however his lead section definitely fits the Sunday Edition (saving me the trouble of going "bobbing for Sunday Edition material") and he is a good writer as you'll see. He probably meant that he wanted it to run uninterrupted as well, but at that rate you'd barely remember what he was talking about when I got around to answering him later in the week. So, I'll be answering him within the body of the letter – not exactly 100% fair but, hey, it is my blog, right? Take it away, Jack:



Dave,



I'm writing in response to your Jan. 27 blog entry (an excerpt from your forthcoming Collected Letters 2 volume), in which you refer briefly to your letter exchange with Allen Rubinstein and me in The Comics Journal from a few years ago.



I think you exaggerate when you accuse me of trying to destroy your reputation. After all, my actions consisted not of spreading false rumors about you but of writing a letter that disputed your statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and politics in general, asking you to run the letter in "Aardvark Comment," and – after you declined this request – following your own advice by sending the letter to The Comics Journal. It's true that in writing the letter and trying to get it published, I hoped to show readers of the Cerebus back pages that you didn't know what you were talking about when you wrote about politics and, by implication, that maybe your writing about some other topics was also off-base. So it's fair to say that I was trying to harm your reputation, to whatever extent it existed, as a source of reliable facts and well-considered opinions in your Cerebus back-pages essays. But if you're implying that I hoped to destroy your entire reputation – "good artist," "successful businessman," "supporter of other self-publishers," "non-child-molester," etc. – by writing a letter that disputed your statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and politics in general and having it published in "Aardvark Comment" or (at your own suggestion) The Comics Journal…well, there's no way I could have accomplished all of that with my letter, so positing it as my goal doesn't really make sense.



Also, I don't agree that your were "far more polite" to me than I was to you during our exchange. It's true that I described your insistence that the Palestinians should be called "Transjordanians" as "incredible stupidity," but this description referred to your opinion and not to you. I don't think that "incredible stupidity" as used in that context, was far less polite than your description of my letter as a "screed" and "cant" in The Comics Journal #253 or as "being of the hair-splitting `how many appartchiks can dance on the head of a pin' variety of leftist `debate'" in Cerebus #293. But in case you really thought that I was calling you and not your opinion stupid, I will state for the record that I think you are very intelligent.



Well, let me return the compliment and say that I think you are very intelligent as well. That is, you write intelligently and are able to sustain an argument over several paragraphs without repeating yourself or contradicting yourself (which, I'm sure you'll agree, is pretty rare in this day and age). Certainly when I got your letter in and I was reading it, the extreme leftist tone made me think that there really wasn't much point in running in Cerebus and I offered the suggestions of The Comics Journal as the only extreme leftist publication in the environment that would be interested. In suggesting that you were trying to destroy my reputation, in retrospect, I think that that was more a matter of timing and, also in retrospect, I think that was probably more of a Comics Journal "thing" than it was either a choice by you or by Mr. Rubinstein. Here's an analogy that should appeal to you: it was as if there was this core audience that had been attending a performance of Wagner's complete Ring Cycle for five nights running (or however long it takes to perform the complete Ring cycle) and with forty minutes to go on the fifth night, two guys stand up in the audience and declare "I think we need to discuss Wagner's place in the context of Nazi Germany" and then proceed to do so. Yes, it is probably a discussion worth having but, no, I don't think with forty minutes to go on the fifth night is the place to bring it up. But, again, I think that was probably a matter of The Comics Journal's idiosyncratic sense of appropriate timing – where the ONLY appropriate moment to discuss Wagner's alleged Nazi sympathies is with forty minutes to go on the fifth night of a performance of the Ring cycle. These are, after all, the same people who sat on Colleen Doran's allegations of sexual harassment by Julie Schwartz for YEARS and then finally chose to run them in the same issue as Julie Schwartz's obituary. Obviously, people so dead to basic human sensitivity are not about to decide that there's any more appropriate time to trash Dave Sim's opinions than with two humongous letters on the subject with a dozen issues to go in a 300-issue storyline.



I apologize to you and Allen Rubinstein for failing to recognize that fact at the time. You had both written to me earlier and, although it would be incorrect to say that the Journal sat on your letters for YEARS, there was a period of time between when I heard from you and when the letters were printed.



I do take issue with your politics but I think the fact that the opposing sides will always see their opposite number as spouting "cant" or advancing views of "incredible stupidity" as being something that's in-built with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My point is always that anyone with a lick of common sense would rather be a Palestinian prisoner in the Israeli court system than an Israeli prisoner in the Palestinian court system which (it seems to me) provides eloquent proof of the difference between a functioning democracy and a dysfunctional dictatorship. Whether you call the Palestinians Palestinians or Transjordanians or Latter Day Philistines I think the proof of what they actually are is very much there in the Middle East pudding. I think if the Israelis swerved between dangerous extremes of socialism and communism and totalitarianism and then back to democracy and every once in a while had a rabbi crop up who declared himself to be the Davidic Meschiach and for four years he was crowned King of the Jews until a member of a rival Orthodox faction assassinated him which caused Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to break down into street warfare between rival gangs shooting each other up with Uzis during high holidays, then I think you might have a case to make for co-equivalence and "a pox on both your houses".



But, Jack, there are very well-regarded Palestinians who are elected members of the Knesset. When a Prime Minister fails to hold a coalition together and loses a vote of confidence, an election is called which is certainly filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, but which is PEACEFUL and then if the succeeding government falls to a rival party that party takes over PEACEFULLY. Until the Palestinians or the Transjordanians or the Latter Day Philistines can manage the same thing for a period longer than a few weeks or a few months, I don't think their supporters, including yourself, have a leg to stand on.



But, I do accept that intelligent people can disagree vehemently on these very subjects and I disavow any intention on my part to confuse the timing of your letter's appearance in the Comics Journal with its content. As will be seen in one of the volumes of Collected Letters you and I did arrive – off-stage – at an agreement to agree to disagree. And that was what I saw in your letter when it first came in. We can go around and around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict circle – as so many have and as so many will continue to do – but we're just going to end up back in our entrenched positions. Until the opposing side agrees that Israel has the right to exist and agrees to abide by its previous agreements, there really isn't much left to say from my side of the fence. George W. Bush arrived at that conclusion pretty early in his administration in contemplating the 100% unreliability of Yasser Arafat to fulfill even one act to which he had committed the Palestinian "nation" and I don't see any change – and I don't think any person with common sense would see any change – in the subsequent Hamas/Fatah mutation. In fact they both explicitly refused to even address either condition – Israel's right to exist and their obligation to fulfill their previous agreements – at the recent Mecca Summit convened by Saudi President Abdullah.



To me, there's nothing left to say. That says it all.



Tomorrow: On to other subjects with the always-engaging Jack Baney

Oh, and this being the 25th:

"Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society".

Remember! You heard it first Right Here on

Today's Blog & Mail

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #194 (March 24th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

_____________________________________________________

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

So what do you think of our new Intro Music for actually answering the letters that have come in? Notice the subtle emphasis on the word "mail"? And the tune is (spoiler warning for those who don't want to be haunted by it for the next two or three days) (last chance – just scroll through) (I'm about to tell you, seriously) (don't say I didn't warn you) it's Ta RA RA boom de yay!. It's WHAT? Just read the words out loud and you'll get it right away. Annoying as hell isn't it? Don't say I didn't warn you.


Okay, first up I've got four letters that went missing. Remember when I finally found the Robin Snyder letter and I said that worried me because when I find a missing letter I remembered there are probably four that I didn't remember? Well, that's what happened all right. Turned over the last letter last time and these four were right there facing the other way.


Michael J. Wood


Michael is the author and artist of Love in a Time of Super-Villains (Not Wonder Woman gets drunk and marries Not Superman in Las Vegas). I plugged the book already but the letter was nowhere to be found. And here it is (part of it anyway):


This lack of response is at times both discouraging and a bit of a relief. I suppose it could be worse. I could have been bombarded with negativities and insults to my character but, luckily, there have been none of those (save for the random e-mail from my ex-girlfriend, but that's ANOTHER story altogether). I began wondering if it was worth it to even continue with the book, which is depressing, as Love is something I'm very proud of.


But then my wife handed me that envelope emblazoned with the stoic and, dare I say, dead sexy (as aardvarks go) image of your creation that contained a piece of paper that, at this point, is tacked up in front of me serving as a reminder to get moving. Let's face it, man. You are the (for lack of a better word) granddaddy of `indie' comics. You successfully published your own title consecutively for 300 issues and never bowed to the industry, the critics or even to your own fans and if YOU liked it, well, hell…I get to tell people Dave Sim is a fan (which, of course, brings to mind the inevitable question: Can I reprint your comments for the purposes of shameless huckstering?).


Mm. More like "for the purposes of shameless career suicide" – especially if it's a case where the only favourable comment was from The Pariah King of Comics. This is getting really funny at this point. I wish I could keep a straight face or communicate a straight face: YOU DON'T WANT ANYONE TO ASSOCIATE YOU WITH THE PARIAH KING OF COMICS! [Look, man – he's laughing, he's not serious]. Well, I am serious. But, I am laughing as well. Troy Little phoned to see if he could change my mind about writing an introduction for his Chiaroscuro collection that IDW plans to publish and I had to tell him the same thing: wait until your second printing when you're established in your own right (or in your case until you have a finished story published and out there). These people do not mess around and taking out their fury and frustration with the Evil Misogynist (especially since I'm sure word has leaked out by now even to the vast majority of the field for whom I have officially ceased to exist that I'm running the Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast with every column) on someone's work that the Evil Misogynist likes is definitely not beyond them. And Troy is laughing at me over the phone. So, I said to him, why don't YOU write the introduction explaining why Dave Sim ISN'T writing the introduction and, you know, stand up and declare that it's wrong to label an anti-feminist as a misogynist. Well, he stopped laughing then. Sorry, but I really think you guys need to know what's at stake here. Even though I can't stop laughing because it really amounts to "how scared of women are you?" The answer is, universally in the comic book field, "pretty damned scared". Well, yeah, and with good reason. I reiterate: these people do not mess around. I talk about a lot of books here but this is, like, Siberia as far as the comic-book field is concerned. A handful of open-minded retailers and the Yahoos and for everyone else I've ceased to exist except as their caricature of me. If I can plant a seed with some of the retailers and Yahoos to keep an eye out for your book, I'm more than glad to do it from my appointed place here in the Comic-Book Gulag – hiding in plain sight as I've always done – but…


Okay.


But, if you REALLY want to use my comments to promote your book out there in the overall market, be my guest. Grab that red scarf and wave it in front of the she-bull. Just don't blame me when you get the reaction I'm pretty sure you're going to get.


And here's a letter from our old friend,


Scott Berwanger


(writer, artist, publisher of Anubis, his magnum opus) from the beginning of February.


The battle of comics vs. painting still rages on in my head. But the sound of a woodpecker making notches in a tree this afternoon, outside my studio, led me to believe that I should just follow the rhythms of my intrinsic nature, not question my motivation, and let whatever come out come out. The woodpecker doesn't question why it is making a hole for a nest in a tree, so why should I question my motivation to paint? Woodpeckers wood-peck. Painters paint. Comic-book artists write and draw comic books. I just happen to be two of the three. An unlikely scenario, but like I said, why question it?


Well, because the woodpecker is programmed by God to perform a very limited number of functions. The woodpecker can't and doesn't think to itself "Maybe I should try gathering nuts and storing them for the winter, instead." You're programmed by God to program yourself particularly when it comes to the work that you choose to do and where you're putting in your time.


Spoiler Warning: I got another letter from Scott shortly after where he had decided to abandon the painting because it was cutting into his comic-book writing and drawing time. So, let me just say that I can understand the rationale of writing and drawing a comic book and doing gallery-style paintings that are derived or thematically linked to that comic book with the idea of trying to make gallery art and comic books, as John Lennon put it, Come Together Right Now Over Me. I think the problem that Scott is facing is that there would have to be a balance struck where both aspects were taking up a comparable amount of time and delivering comparable results in terms of the satisfaction of one's innermost creative sensibility. And I think that balance would be almost impossible to strike – inevitably one aspect would tend to succeed at the expense of the other or devour time better spent on the other. And I mean "succeed" in the sense of that really finely-calibrated inner sense of satisfaction: "This Is What I Was Meant To Do". Contrariwise, I think it would be hard not to lapse into a sense of retreating from one to the other whenever a roadblock presented itself which would tend to compound that sense of defeatism that is never very far from any of us on any given day. Now I can't do EITHER of them. But, hypothetically, I think it's something that someone was bound to try someday and I hope Scott is, at least, preserving the paintings that he has done so there is at least a possibility that he could do it on a limited scale when Anubis is done.


Steve Peters


Written January 26 and revised (you guessed it) early in February. That's why all these little lambs went astray to the same place I guess. He writes:


Thanks so much for the "Steve Peters Week" on the blogandmail and all the kind words; that was a pleasant shock. I noticed a surge in hits to my site; normally I get a little over 100 hits a month, but that week alone I got 73. Haven't received any orders, but hey, at least we got the name into some people's heads. God willing, that'll help somewhat with the orders on Sparky in Love, which I plan to solicit in the April Previews (so I can promote it at SPACE).


See? Steve Peters, the recipient of the 2006 Howard E. Day Memorial Prize is going to be there, too. If you live in Columbus, Ohio or if you live near Columbus, Ohio (or you're just flat out crazy like Matt and Paula Dow and Jeff Seiler and you're willing to – ROAD TRIP! – drive in from Wisconsin and Texas respectively) why not check out the Friendliest Little Small Press Show in the Continental U.S. of A.? How friendly? APE is the same weekend and Bob and Kathy Corby just aren't paying that one bit of no never-mind and Wishing Everyone All the Indy Best. THAT'S how friendly. For details check out www.backporchcomics.com. Back Porch Comics. See? You can't get much down-home friendlier than that! Steve continues:


Very much looking forward to seeing a copy of your 60's-style Marvel parody. You can't possibly not send it now after getting me and Margaret all excited about it like that. Naturally, I'll keep it strictly to myself if that's your wish.


Um, no-can-do, Steve. Having works-in-progress-and-possibly-aborted-works is obviously a new thing for me and I have no idea if I'll pick it up again or if it's genuinely DOA – but, I do have a gut instinct that showing it to someone else would, for good or ill, lock it into its present form which would more or less guarantee that it would be DOA if there was some other direction I could have taken it in. I used to think that Chester Brown was crazy with things like actually considering re-writing and re-drawing Ed the Happy Clown in its entirety, but I realize now that it's something of a built-in quality of having a number of works that are complete and a number of works that might be complete or might be completely misapprehended. The main element, as far as I can see, is the TIME involved if you have a 200-page graphic novel or the seed of a 200-page graphic novel and you can only produce 6 pages in two weeks or 6 pages in four weeks or whatever. You have to be sure (or reasonably sure) of what you're working on. You're the one who's going to be sitting in a little room by yourself doing this story for months and even years and – particularly here in my early fifties – there's only likely to be a few more of them in the hopper. I think I know what I'm doing next after my secret project but both of them were a long time in the gestation period.


And congratulations on being the recipient of the 2006 Day Prize!

Tomorrow, Monday and possibly Tuesday: Jack Baney gets a whole three days practically to himself! Is it a dirty trick or a legitimate request? YOU decide!

There's MORE for you

(Relatively speaking)

In Today's

Blog &

MAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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