Dave Sim's blogandmail #192 (March 22nd, 2007)

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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.

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If you're looking for a scapegoat,

You can all blame Sandeep Atwal

Who told me…


…that most people who "blog" don't have something new on there every day and a lot of times they might just have a paragraph or two. And here I was picturing myself competing against Neil Gaiman's "Screenplay Thursday" (click here to download Neil's previous fifteen "Screenplay Thursday" offerings) or Eddie Campbell's Lettering in Comics Part the Twelfth (click here to download the previous 875 pages) thus the 71 pages last time and thus Sandeep Atwal's snorting derisively at Everyone's Favourite Evil Misogynist & Largely Clueless Luddite.


Anyway, there are other problems with a nice hardcover book of the covers. Just to outline a few of them: I have several of the covers in frames that would have to be de-framed and re-framed in order to be photographed and my mind and the company's bank account is sincerely not in a place where something as self-neutralizing as de-framing and re-framing pieces of art is being seriously contemplated as a prudent short-term investment. Some of the covers I have preliminary work, sketches, hand-done colour guides, etc. which really has that expensive art book quality about it but which also involves adding pages to a book that is already at least 600 pages long (if, in classic art book style, a cover is printed on one page with a description of it on the facing page). The description on the facing page would probably be a more sensible use of my time than the FREE WRITING I'm doing here, but there's no guarantee of that. Sales are up since I started doing the Blog & Mail (which would make this NON-DIRECT PAYMENT WRITING rather than FREE WRITING) – my best guess is that there are roughly between a half-dozen and maybe two dozen retailers reading this who actually go and check their inventories when I ask them to and who actually then order the book they are out of…and THANK YOU to those who do…and that's boosted sales roughly 25% since November) and there's every possibility that the demand for the book of covers is coming from a half-dozen people all of whom are only willing to pay $19.95 or less and only if it contains ALL the covers and the covers of Swords and the BWS cover from Swords, Bill Sienkiewicz's Cerebus Jam cover, and all of the colour Epic stories…you get the idea. I would be obligated also to write about each cover (EXTENSIVELY! And EXHAUSTIVELY!) so do the mental math yourself. And then everyone would complain because Gerhard hadn't written anything about his part of the covers without stopping to consider that Gerhard never wrote anything about his own work and is probably not going to start now that he has made a clean break from all things Aardvarkian. I'm also in negotiations with a company that has some kind of MegaByte Camera Worth Tens of Thousands of Dollars to photograph my artwork (starting with the Collected Letters cover). If it makes that big of a difference in the reproduction then it would make sense to have all of the covers for which I have the original artwork re-shot using that MBCWTTD at a cost of roughly $25 per shot. Which brings us back to how many people would buy the book versus how much money and time I have to sink into it.


So, essentially, I'm doing the groundwork for a book of covers that may not be published until long after I'm dead. But, for me, it's still worth doing in order to get it done either "right" or "as close to right" as I can get it and to save whoever ultimately does the book a certain amount of time and aggravation. It's really an old discussion as some of you new arrivals might discover if you check out the "Policy" discussion sections here on the Yahoo Newsgroup site. I did want to let you know that I'm not completely unmindful of these things and – since I had to get the drawers and the negatives out of the library at some point (or keep tripping over them) -- I did realize that now was the time to do the groundwork. And, unfortunately, to also keep you from getting your hopes up that you were going to see such a book at this summer's big conventions or something. No. Collected Letters 2 is going to be about it for 2007. There's a new printing of Form & Void from Lebonfon that you will be seeing (as soon as Diamond orders the last 13 copies of the previous printing still at the warehouse in Leamington) but it looks exactly like the previous printing except the indicia says "Lebonfon Printing" instead of "Preney Print & Litho". Which I'm obviously happy about and proud of – the first printing of a Cerebus trade that I shepherded through entirely on my own and the first non-Preney printing of a trade paperback and a complete match of Preney's own work – but not something I would expect the direct market to join hands and start singing about. I've also had my first overture from an entirely new market for the trades and part of me thinks I should be getting the presentation package together instead of doing all this NON-DIRECT PAYMENT WRITING but, for the time being, my gut instinct tells me that this is the place to put my time in.


Just not as much of my time as I have been putting in.


Tomorrow: More updates on what I'm working on right now


There's LESS for you

In Today's

(and for the next five years')

Blog &…

MAAILL

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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