Dave Sim's blogandmail #231 (April 30th, 2007)

Alex Robinson, Alex Robinson

Does whatever a…

Uh.

Let's see. What's a three-syllable word

Like "spider can" that rhymes with "Robinson"?

Oh, DASH IT ALL – I'm NOT

Matt Dow and I NEVER WILL BE!

Alex continues…

I was pleased to read that the second volume of Collected Letters will be coming out. I confess I enjoy reading your blog but don't really like reading large chunks of text on the monitor (especially white text on black background—and I told you I patented that black background idea, right?)


White text on a black background? The Blog & Mail? Really? Where are you reading it? I know Jeff has it posted in at least two different places. Maybe he can mention something here about a venue that's a little easier on the eyes.

(Already done. - Jeff)

… so I'm really hoping most of it will be reprinted into a proper book someday. I know you've got a backlog of potentially reprintable material, but I've learned to be patient.


Wow! A book? Of the Blog & Mail? This is, seriously, as close as I get to Truman Capote's observation about Jack Kerouac "That's not writing, that's just typing". I get myself hyped up on a small coffee and a chocolate donut and away I go. The way I look at it, it's just to keep Cerebus and me in the public eye for those people for whom there's just no such thing as too much television. People are getting it for free and I'm embarrassed to be charging them that most of the time. But, I'll keep my ears open and if enough people think it's a good idea, I can do it on the same basis as the Collected Letters volumes: just enough to meet the initial orders and then a box left over or something.


Anyway, I was very surprised to read that you'd excerpted portions of my last letter on your blog and admit that I was a little put off.


Oops.


I had figured with the demise of Aardvark Comment, letters to you were pretty much letters to you, and I was worried that the section you quoted (about me feeling like a "star" at S.P.A.C.E.) made me look kind of jerky. There seemed to be no impact on my end, so I forgive you, Dave.

Much appreciated. It became pretty obvious in the first month or so that there was no way I would be able to maintain the Blog & Mail and maintain the level of correspondence I had been maintaining through 2004-06 so the two got melded together. Also, you're about the biggest name in comics who still writes to me, so it's nice to have a "dialogue" on various subjects—like WHY we even bother to write and draw comics that we aren't 100% enthusiastic about. Is it something about being writers as well as artists? It seems to me that when you're exclusively an artist, you're more inclined to just draw what you want to draw. When you're a writer and artist, you end up with the artist doing the writer's bidding a lot of the time. What really interests the writer doesn't a lot of times really interest the artist but the artist ends up having to draw it anyway. The Siu Ta strips (www.siuta.com) that was me putting my foot down as an artist. THIS is what I want to draw.


Oh, and I did try to pick and choose in your letter those things that seemed pretty harmless as subjects and to leave alone anything that might get you in trouble with anyone (you did discuss another cartoonist and I left that part out, as an example). It would help if you could just mark anything you don't want me to run here or you'd rather I not run here.


Your comments on John Lennon and his humiliation in Manila were very interesting. I tend to see his abdicating power within the band (almost every A-side after 1967 or so was a Paul number, compared with the early years which were more John-heavy) in more personal terms—he was always looking for a mother substitute, especially after fame turned out to be the empty experience everyone who gets super-famous says it is.


I would agree with that. But I think a lot of that is the winnowing process of figuring out what love actually is, given that in our society love is seen as the universal panacea. If you're a rock star to whatever extent you've confused compliant sex with strangers—women eager to have sex with you because of what you do for a living—with love (which most of the male population does mentally), you're going to find out the difference pretty quickly and pretty emphatically. If that's what you thought was going to fill in the big blank inside of you, when it doesn't fill in the big blank inside of you then you have to go looking for something else and how many other things in that category are there? Heroin. Mother substitute. It took me years to figure out that the big blank wasn't actually a big blank it was just infantile desire and the way to fill it in was with Grow. Up. i.e. Stop focusing so much on "wanting" and focus instead on "choosing not to let myself have".


I think musicians also get trapped into "selling" themselves on their own love songs, a potent brand of self-hypnosis. Imagine the level of emotional masochism attached to writing a song about a girl who broke your heart and then having to perform it and relive it night after night after night in front of a crowd of people. Of course, the Beatles never had that performance problem after 1967.


One obligatory Cerebus item: I wanted to address the end of Reads, specifically the part where you tell Cerebus what could've/should've been, and how he screwed up his destiny and how echoes of that permeated his life. This is an odd question, but were you lying to him? Since you've stated a bunch of times in interviews that the big Cerebus picture didn't come until you'd been doing the book for awhile (with the Cockroach, I think?) there really was very little chance of him fulfilling his destiny because the events you describe—trading his helmet for the vest, losing his sword, destroying the Pigts' statue—occurred before you'd even worked it out. Did the fact that you came up with it later make it no less "true" or was "Dave" purposely misleading his miserable gray creation? "Dave" also claims that Cerebus could've gotten back on track somewhat with the appearance of the Thrunk, but I also suspect that is not really true.


As I reread the above, I'm not sure it makes sense but I can't think of another way to phrase it. If it doesn't make any sense, feel free to ignore it (I'm sure you're relieved to have my permission).


Tomorrow: IGNORING IT is not an option at the Blog & Mail because that would be…crass? That would be…?(what's one of Dave's favourite words?) Answer tomorrow!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAIIILLLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #230 (April 29th, 2007)

Okay, I promised to do a bit of a review of Robert Graves' King Jesus a while back.


It's an interesting book. If there's a greater expert on all things pagan who strode the earth in the twentieth century I don't know of him. I read his White Goddess years ago (well, most of it anyway) -- which was certainly useful in my preparation for Mothers & Daughters and also his I, Claudius series of books. So, once I got the idea of what he was driving at with King Jesus, it was certainly worth the full day or so that I spent reading it. I had expected that he would be making the attempt (now pretty common) to paint Jesus in pagan hues -- there's even a Da Vinci Code style bestseller called The Pagan Jesus, evidently, which always strikes me as being about as intellectually dishonest as trying to turn Zeus into a prototype of the Prophet Isaiah.


But, no, Mr. Graves is nothing if not intellectually honest and here he doesn't disappoint: he definitely grasps the fundamental "ne'er the twain shall meet" dichotomy between Christianity and paganism and also (and I found this admirable) was able to confront head-on that the former had kicked the latter's ass fair and square. No playing the victim for him, no suh. He documents pretty carefully and at length all of the Greek and Roman precursors and the popular adherence to those precursors, the Unconquered Sun, The Sacrificial King -- here's a particularly interesting conversation around a caravan's campfire where Jehovah and God are discussed in Greek and Roman frames of reference made all the more interesting by the fact that, even as the participants are asserting all of the by now-familiar theories of derivation, Jesus says... exactly nothing. Which was apropos. And the sense that I get of Mr. Graves behind the narrative is This Was Not the Way to Do It. We Made a Fundamental Mistake Here. Which I might just be reading myself into it, but I would agree that once you make your gods into archetypes and start "splitting the difference", rounding off your own corners in order to fit with other systems of belief, you've made an irretrievable error. Of course, in my case, my own faith tells me that this process was inevitable and that all God was doing in the course of human history was waiting for that inevitable erosion to take place, for the pagans to exhaust themselves against their own cleverness, knowing His own creations and knowing not only roughly but specifically how long they could last with pagan gods of their own invention before they got to the "What's the diff?" stage.


But Mr. Graves does seem to know (how could a scholar of his standing not know?) that Christianity didn't succeed as it did and defeat his pagan gods and goddesses as the result of some manner of happy (or in his case, "unhappy") accident. He knows his scripture inside and out which, combined with his knowledge of the structure of the Roman Empire and pagan religious observances of the timeƒwell, I sure wouldnÕt read it on Sunday, but it was pretty darned good for a weekday read.


Good moments, like the young Jesus debating with the doctors in the Temple with that rapid-fire "no quarter asked, no quarter given" Talmudic hair-splitting sophistry which has as much to do with your ability to come up with the right answer on the spot as it does with genuine piety and devout observance. God -- like Chance -- favours the prepared mind. Another good moment with the young Jesus' warm glow of pride when he hears indirectly that one of his freelance judgments has been endorsed by the legendary scholar Hillel: now that's a fine piece of writing, to strike that human note perfectly and to know that the lives of Jesus and Hillel overlapped (barely). And that he has to hear indirectly. In his own Judaic context Jesus was a nobody -- a smart kid and little else -- without the remotest chance of getting an audience with Hillel himself.


In his afterword, entitled "Historical Commentary" he has some good lines that made me laugh out loud. "A detailed commentary written to justify the unorthodox views contained in this book would be two or three times as long as the book itself, and would take years to complete; I beg to be excused the task." What a point to arrive at in a life spent immersed in scholarship! You've got all "the goods" but the complexity makes justification too large a task to contemplate let alone execute. Of course, I suspect the old pagan found himself being "drawn in" and thought, "I've done the most honest treatment I could of HOW they beat us, I'll be damned if I'm going to spend any more of my precious time justifying my conclusions TO them." From the other side of the chasm, it seems to me another example of how pagans (as an Israeli Foreign Minister said of the Palestinians) "Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity": redemption beckons. You've already done all the hard stuff, now you just have to stick with it and your intellect will do the rest for you. Nope. Off to greener -- and more sybaritic -- pastures, presumably.


"Perhaps the greatest hindrance to a reasonable view of Jesus is not the loss of a large part of his secret history but the influence of the late and propagandist Gospel According to John. Though it embodies valuable fragments of a genuine tradition not found in the Synoptic Gospels, the critical reservations that have to be made reading it are proved by the metaphysical prologue, which makes no sense whatever in the original context; by the author's willful ignorance of Jewish affairs; and by the Alexandrian Greek rhetoric unfairly ascribed to a sage and poet who never wasted a word."


Again, you can't do much better when it comes to inadvertent intellectual humour than giving God's Writing a bad review where you accuse God of willful ignorance of Jewish affairs. You literally couldn't make that up.


"Alexandrian Greek rhetoric? Who? Me?"


The "metaphysical prologue... makes no sense whatever in the original context" because, I suspect, it was Genuinely New as befitting the Creator. Not even so much Genuinely New as an elaboration of that which had been almost entirely overlooked for untold generations, the first chapter of the first book of Moshe. "Then began men to call upon the name of the YHWH" and that was pretty much it for God's Truth for literally hundreds of pages and thousands of years, until the first chapter of John's Gospel came along.


"Here, let me put it to you another way."


And then THAT was it for God's truth for literally hundreds of pages and (so far) two thousand years. Alexandrian Greek rhetoric. Oy.


Anyway, a highly recommended novel. For reading during the week, anyway.

___________________________________________________

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 #229 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Long-time reader and Yahoo

In good standing, Larry Hart

sent me a sneak preview of his contribution to Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2, "Following Larry" which speculates on his own Afterlife experience. He's asked me to use discretion so as not to give it away, so I'll just say that it's pretty good. He's going to be at SPACE as well! Oh, uh, I mean, he was at SPACE last week. Very nice…uh…seeing him again.


A nice letter from Alex Robinson dated 18 February:


Dear Dave,


I hope this letter finds you well. I was sparked to write (or more accurately write back) after stumbling across your blog on the internets and reading about how you have been ill. You've obviously made it to the post office and picked up this letter, so at least there's that.


I was also surprised and saddened to read about how Gerhard has decided to end your long term partnership, since you had seemed like the ideal team, both artistically and creatively. I'm sure I'm not the only one who envied the idea of having a background artist as good as he was. It would be nice to think of you guys parting amicably after all you've been through together, but given the pattern of departures at A-V I have my doubts.


Hey, Alex! Well, on my part "amicable" or "not amicable" didn't really enter into it. As I wrote earlier in the week, there were and are larger "creator's rights" issues at stake once Gerhard made it plain that he was leaving, so my only real concern is that it be done properly and ethically in case anyone in the future is in need of a template of the best way of doing these things. I don't think we were the ideal team but I definitely worked very hard to make sure that the professional relationship was structured in as close to an ideal (that is the most highly ethical) way that I could manage. I like to think that the fact that Gerhard stuck it out for the duration and for three years after meant that I did at least a tolerable job in that area. Also there's the fact that I got through more than two decades without the extremist left wing Comics Journal even once suggesting that I was exploiting him as A Comic-Book Worker. Considering they've accused me of virtually everything else, I'll take that as a credential.


I'm sure I've mentioned that my first issue of Cerebus was Gerhard's too (and it was called "Anything Done For the First Time Unleashes a Demon!" which definitely seems like the kind of coincidence [Coincidence?] you'd like, especially considering what an impact you guys had on my life and art).


It's somewhat belated, but I'm enclosing the latest issue of HUSKY for your reading pleasure. The odd part is that I always seem to send you these right before the new issue comes out (we plan on having #3 ready for the New York Comicon next weekend). If I was a more frequent correspondent this wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. Anyway, it's the next three chapters of my new graphic novel 2 COOL 2 B 4GOTTEN. I've actually gotten distracted from it, lately, with what is probably the equivalent of your drawing-cute-girls-in-Al-Williamson mode. I got stuck on 2 COOL so I decided to do something fun as a break: hot barbarian girl fighting various monsters in dark caves (using my patented "blackgrounds" technique). I haven't had this much fun drawing since I was twelve. I have a rough idea where the "story" is going to go but it's pretty simple (and no talking!) so it's pretty much just drawing for drawing's sake. I'll make sure to send you one when it's done (if you like).


I LIKE, I LIKE! 2 COOL is coming along nicely as well. Did you and Tony decide to do the tandem package to force each other to work? I mean, you'd sure hate to be the guy holding up the works if the other guy was finished a week ago. Of course, if you've gotten stuck on 2 COOL that sort of gives him license to get stuck (or "stuck") on Titanius. Early on, that would happen with Ger and I where I'd be looking at the pages on the wall and see that I was, say, four pages ahead, so I'd slow down figuring that I didn't have to get any more pages done until I saw that Ger was only a page behind. But Ger would be looking at the pages and going, "Well, I'm still only four pages behind, so I don't really need to pick up the pace until Dave is, say, six pages ahead." Also, he could futz around on two pages for a week and then suddenly rip through four pages in four days so I learned never to think of myself as having a comfortable lead. Even when I was two issues ahead, I'd still keep producing pages and sure enough by the time we got to issue 300 it was all I could do to stay a page or two ahead of him.


Yeah, I have to work on that cute-girls-in-Al-Williamson-mode thing on my next project after my secret project. I've already figured out how to incorporate it and I've started pulling pictures out of magazines when I run across them. I've got a great shot of Avril Lavigne. It's really true that drawing comics is so time-consuming you better make sure you enjoy what it is that you're drawing a good percentage of the time.


Monday: More Fun With Alex Robinson!

Tomorrow: SUNDAY!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOG &

MAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

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 #228 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

LAAAARGER DOINGS!

GETCHER LAAAARGER DOINGS

RIGHT HERE!

[FREE FOR THE ASKIN', GUV'NOR!]

LAAAARGER DOINGS!

This kind of ties in with what I was talking about yesterday: the fact that there are larger doings at stake most of the time that, to me, make individual human personalities largely if not completely meaningless. Jeff Tundis' faxed response to my last major 25th of the month "Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society" is next up in the pile, dated February 28 and actually faxed from his workplace. I had questioned his assertion that he "picks his battles" and asked what battles he thought were as important or more important than holding men and women to the same standards instead of always letting women off the hook. He replied something along the lines that he didn't see my dredging up old business with the Friends of Lulu as being worthwhile in terms of positive net effects or even potentially happy outcomes. It's an interesting way of looking at it: What good can this possibly do? What good result can this lead to?


But to me that was evasive, centering as it did on the fact that it made personalities and their emotional reactions more important than the larger ideas that are theoretically the underpinnings of civilized society. If pointing out that something is wrong makes someone unhappy, to me it's more important that the wrong be pointed out in the (however distant) hope that it might be made right either immediately, soon, or a hundred years from now depending on the level of intransigence opposing the observation. "Happy" and "unhappy" are minor side issues when you take it as a given (as I do) that accurate perception is always going to make you happier in the long term and inaccurate perception is always going to make you unhappier in the long term and that the reverse holds true in the short term.


Anyway, seeing that someone as intelligent as Jeff was capable of turning my argument sideways and skewing it so as to make happiness more important than right behaviour was what led me to ask him to include The Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast in each of the Blog & Mails. "If you're all going to ignore reality, I'll at least make sure that it's right there in front of you on a daily basis WHILE you ignore it and presumably that will make you, to one degree or another, unhappy, but maybe you will at least understand what I'm saying a little more clearly: i.e. It is more important for accurate perception to be given a fighting chance (however remote) of making a comeback in our society than to be concerned about x number of people being made unhappy on a daily basis." Put another way, unhappiness in and of itself isn't as important as the reason for that unhappiness. In this case: the daily enunciation of some of the inherent falsehoods which underpin feminism makes feminists unhappy because it makes the falsehoods more difficult to maintain and makes it less likely that feminists can continue to dominate society and to overrule common sense indefinitely as they have been doing up until now. But, to me that is obviously a good thing. The less likely I can make it that irrationality and inherent falsehood can continue to be maintained as the governing principles of our society indefinitely, then the better off our society is going to be in the long run even though that implies the inevitability of profound, short-term unhappiness for a large segment of our society. The larger point, it seems to me, is that we are now running society on the basis that there is nothing more unacceptable, nothing that demands greater redress and, in general, no greater crisis in our society than a woman being made to be unhappy. Anything that makes a woman unhappy (or angry) needs to be changed or amended so that the woman becomes happy. It's the reason that women who kidnap their own children in the midst of a custody dispute are always dealt with leniently, as are women who kill their own children (which women do exponentially more frequently than men). Clearly a woman who kidnaps her children is an unhappy woman. The problem isn't the kidnapping, the problem is her unhappiness. What we have to do is find out what made her so unhappy that she felt compelled to kidnap her children (probably a judge's ruling giving the father access to them) and eliminate it is so that she will be made happy instead of unhappy. The problem isn't that she killed her children, the problem is that she's unhappy. What we have to do is find out what made her unhappy (probably her husband) and eliminate it so she will be made happy instead of unhappy.


At the very least, by posting the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast on a daily basis I can make the point that This Is What All of You Either a) Destroyed My Career Over or b) Stood By and Let Others Destroy My Career Over. Up until now, that has been refuted by a sentiment that probably best expresses itself as: "Well, we destroyed your career because what you were saying made women unhappy and there is no larger or more unforgivable wrong in our society than making a woman or women in general unhappy." But, obviously, the larger point is that what I'm saying makes women unhappy because it points out where women are wrong and where women are taking society in fifteen wrong directions and that they can't refute that these are Impossible Things to Believe. It's a clear case of "killing the messenger". And that's wrong. Right? Are we not at least all in agreement that "killing the messenger" or "destroying the messenger's career" because we don't like the messenger's message—even though the message is just an irrefutable fact—is wrong?


Deafening silence.


I used slavery as an analogy: something that was deemed for centuries to be inevitable and an inherent good or at least a necessary evil and that it requires both courage and outside support if an inherent wrong is going to be undone. In his reply Jeff said, "However, if you are going to reference Lincoln…" Well, I wasn't referencing Abraham Lincoln. I was clearly talking about that first individual who had the guts to stand up in his place in the British Parliament and say "I think slavery is wrong" and that was a long time before Abraham Lincoln and it certainly wasn't in the United States. And I can pretty much guarantee that however primitive we might seen the context as being, at least no one was sitting there thinking, "But, if you end slavery, you're going to make women who have slaves for their maids and ladies-in-waiting and governesses and nurses unhappy."


Okay. Short post today. With the time left over why don't you all scroll back up to the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast and effortlessly refute them one after the other as a means of indicating to yourselves that destroying Dave Sim's career was The Right Thing To Do and not an example of "killing the messenger."

There's More for You

In Today's Blog &

MAAAIIIILLLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #227 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

MAIL'S IN.

THANK YOU, THING.

The latest two missives from Scott Berwanger of the still-in-progress Anubis mega-project fame. First one is dated January 27:


Dear Dave,

Here we go again! I sent a letter to an old musician friend of mine that cements my position as having left painting behind for good. I had to say the heck with it. Too hard to do it all. Just the way it is. You MUST be getting sick of all my vacillations by now, Dave. But I've hit a threshold with it, I think. I've cracked the master code. I've become a rock solid, uncompromisingly devoted comic-book artist.


My musician friend was one of the people who was encouraging me to paint, but I told him that I just had to let go of it. Forget painting shows, man! Sure, it would've been nice, but screw it! I just wanna make Anubis the best damn comic book possible at the expense of everything else I ever wanted to do artistically. And yes, I am almost equally dead set on doing it with micropress mini-comic boxed sets. I'm going to do everything I can to save up for that photocopier, use the color cover designs that I was gonna use for the self-published trade paperback version to emblazon the boxed volumes with, and hit small press shows as a mini-comics maniac! I don't know if it will ever get beyond the boxed sets into a conventional format or not, but I've promised myself that I will never surrender Adventure Comics' lawful claim in order to do it. I'm just gonna deal with what I've got going for me now, and we'll see what else comes to fruition.


Think about it…with my boxed sets, even though I will never achieve widespread recognition, I will be able to promote Anubis in real time! It just ain't healthy to be holed up for nineteen more years waiting to self-publish the whole enchilada at once. I'd probably go crazy writing and drawing a 3,000+ page story with no audience at all. Having even a very small audience is something I never dreamed I'd be able to do during my studio years. SO WHAT if I'm not artsy enough for the small press crowd. They'll just have to put up with me, `cause I'm in the game whether they like it or not. And hey! I'm easy enough to get along with, right? I even set up a special savings account for working towards the photocopier.


PS I believe the micropress has nearly as much potential as POD. I'm basically using the same tactic, and just going in the opposite direction with it. And I don't run the risk of becoming a sell-out doing it this way, either! I won't even have the chance to sell out! (good for me) I'll be the real deal mini-comics meal. So many of the bigwigs sell out…It's really disappointing to see.


The whole idea of "selling out" is an interesting one. I mean, has Frank Miller sold out with the Sin City and 300 movies? I haven't seen 300 but Sin City was so faithful a translation of graphic-novel-to-film that it verged on slavish. I mean, I wouldn't do it and from what I understand Frank had to be talked into it (if you call Robert Rodriguez basically capitulating to all of Frank's terms being "talked into" something: an ancillary question to whether it's "selling out" when you not only get a pile of money but you're also given absolute creative control) which would seem to indicate that there's at least a potential `gone wrong' quality there. I do tend to come down on your side of the fence, though. If it's just a comic book and stays a comic book you haven't sold out, if it becomes a movie, you have. We're in a distinct minority thinking that way, though.


Scott's next—and most recent—letter was dated February 11:


Dear Dave

Painting's a bust. I think I've let go for good finally. Just gonna try and spend as much time in front of the drawing board as I can. After all, I've got another shorter graphic novel in mind beyond Anubis! Better get crackin'. No time to fool with paint and canvas; I've got a life in comics to live (and a day job to hold down).

Best, Scott


Well, I hear you on that. I've just gone through a comparable situation. Two years in on my secret project and only halfway through it and suddenly I get this idea for what it is that I'm doing next after the secret project. Even assuming that I can do the other half of my secret project in, say, half the time it took me to do the first half (there's a good sentence in there somewhere), I'm still talking about a minimum of a year from now before I even start the next one. You've certainly got the location right: a life in comics is spent mostly in front of the drawing board if you're doing it properly. Not a lot of people would call that a life or even a "life" though. That also leaves open the question of whether you can stay in comics exclusively and still "sell out". Is getting CGC to slab and grade the Dave Sim file copies "selling out"? Is the idea of doing incentive editions of my secret project to get sales up "selling out"?


Good questions. No idea what the answers are.


Matt Dow went to all the trouble of e-mailing Jeff Tundis and getting Jeff to fax me a letter back on February 26. Hey, Matt, it's really not necessary since all the mail and faxes are answered in chronological order. You could have just sent a letter. Anyway, he had a number of questions about the Dave Sim/Gerhard split mostly centering on what happens to Gerhard between the time that I die and Gerhard dies, most of which (I hope) were answered to everyone's satisfaction at the end of last month here in the Blog & Mail. Matt's biggest concern was that Ger might be getting "pulled back in" to Aardvark-Vanaheim against his will because of his vested interest. I really don't think that's the case. I think one of the problems that people have trouble understanding is Gerhard's level of complete disinterest and complete disconnection from the comic-book field. Believe me, you Yahoos are infinitely more interested in and concerned about what happens with Cerebus than Gerhard is or (as far as I know) ever was. I suspect that the way Gerhard views the whole thing is as a job that he didn't really like but which had some redeeming features and that he progressively liked less and less the further he went along and which ultimately, for him, had virtually no redeeming features and which really came to an end in December of 2003 even though he continued to get paid and to work a much shorter week for three years after that. But, for those three years, mentally he was already gone. Ultimately, being able to live his life having absolutely nothing to do with Cerebus or me or the comic-book field became worth whatever price he had to pay or whatever he needed to give up in order to achieve it.


As far as I know most of my Last Will and Testament is still going to be completely valid and not require that much tinkering or revisiting just by performing a Gerhard-ectomy on it. Gerhard is just no longer part of the "post-Dave" equation: instead we go straight to the "winding things up" scenario. In terms of creators' rights, I have to factor him into my own thinking and my own planning, but it isn't about Gerhard as a person, it's about Gerhard as a concept. What is the Right Way for a person in my situation to behave towards a person in Gerhard's situation? Once again, I'm in the situation of blazing the trail and I have to take it seriously for the same reason that I think Elvis and the Beatles should have taken their situation and their business dealings more seriously. Elvis should have figured out a way to stay at Sun Records instead of just dutifully going to RCA because the Colonel and his mother told him he needed to go to RCA, as an example. It was Elvis' call to make and because he made what I see as the wrong call—choosing to make it the Colonel and his mother's call—pop music from then on took it as a given that you had to go with the big company and led to the corporate domination we see in the music field today. But that has everything to do with Elvis as a concept, Sam Phillips as a concept, Sun Records as a concept, Colonel Tom Parker as a concept, RCA Records as a concept and the fact that Elvis was the one in the driver's seat. `I have to get this right the first time out because I'm in the situation of deciding how the music business is going to be run from now on." It had nothing to do with the people AS people. Sam Phillips AS a person didn't begrudge Elvis AS a person going to RCA for one minute. But that didn't make going to RCA the right decision. And it certainly didn't make going to RCA the right decision because Tom Parker and his mother told him to do it.


Just by virtue of how corporate law is set up in Canada, Gerhard could have walked away with virtually nothing. But the fact that "Gerhard walking away with virtually nothing" being entirely legal wouldn't make it right. Far from it. And I'm the one in the driver's seat making those calls. "I have to get this right because I'm in the situation of deciding how artistic and business collaborations are going to be run in the independent comic book field from now on." I might very well make the wrong call but at least I'm aware that the call that I'm making regarding Dave Sim and Gerhard AS concepts is infinitely more important than just the immediate concerns of Dave Sim and Gerhard AS people


I suspect that the Larger Forces at work here—the ___s sticking their noses in where they either don't belong or they do belong: that's above me and out of my field of expertise—are basically trying for a major squeeze play: making use of my belief in creator's rights to try to engineer the destruction of Aardvark-Vanaheim in the name of feminism by compelling Gerhard to tear the company apart on the assumption that the company can't be maintained with half of its present resources and that—and there I hit the `I really don't know' wall, because that intrudes on what feminists at all levels perceive as being of significance and requires thinking (or "thinking") like a feminist i.e. Dave Sim is going to die of loneliness or something because his opposition to feminism has driven everyone away. A worst case scenario for people who are obsessive about needing to be up to their eyeballs in friends and relatives and emotions 24/7 but which strikes me as being like the "comfy chair" torture device in the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch. The problem is that I just don't see feminism as a large enough force that it needs to be taken either a) into account or b) seriously. It's more like a joke that only I seem to "get" right now: a kind of self-deluded trickster fox that assumes that everyone shares its frames of reference. In this case that if Dave Sim's life can be made unpleasant enough and empty enough in feminist frames of reference that he'll capitulate or, again, die of loneliness or something.


Frankly, the complete opposite is true. It's only when I allow people into proximity to me that the trickster fox out of wounded vanity at my not taking it seriously has an on-ramp to try and cause trouble which is why I've always strictly kept people in the category of concepts based on the larger idea of doing what is right and not doing what is wrong. Otherwise I'm just playing the trickster fox's game by the trickster fox's rules. When I'm in complete isolation there is no on-ramp, no access point and life becomes largely effortless. Or as largely effortless as it can be when you're working twelve hours a day.

Tomorrow: More Big Doings

___________________________________________________

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 #226 (April 25th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

One Dead Light Table

One Ticking Clock

Way Too Much Time on His Hands

And Dave Starts Obsessing:

"How Am I Going To SELL This Secret Project in

Today's Comic Book Market?"


[Oh, and by the way, happy 25th of the month:

Feminists Get a Free Ride

In Our Society

More on Friday]

Anyway, as luck would have it, my light table having died on Saturday, Monday Pete Dixon of Toronto's Paradise Comics and Paradise Conventions (check out both at www.paradisecomics.com) was coming up for a visit so that we could discuss how the auctions of the CGC-graded Dave Sim file copies of Cerebus were coming along (pretty good! One of the non-file copy Cerebus No.1's in the lowest grade we had, 3.0, went for $400 which is roughly what Overstreet has on it in 9.4) and go over some future strategies. We did that and then we got into some questions I had about "What works and what doesn't work in today's comic-book marketplace with selling new comic books?" I had been hearing a lot about incentive editions of comic books: basically if a retailer orders x number of copies of a new comic book, they get one limited edition copy of the same comic book with a different cover—essentially a rare collectible. Now, automatically most people are going to shut down having read that. That isn't a luxury I have, given that I have to figure out how to break what I see as a monolithic, largely unassailable and completely understandable indifference to independent comics in today's market. Just putting my secret project out there and hoping for the best falls under the heading of Wishful Thinking. To me, it makes more sense to deal with Reality. And, right now, a Comic Store Reality is incentive editions of "hot" comics.


The way it works is that the publisher guesses roughly what each retailer is going to order without the incentive and then makes the incentive dependent on ordering a number above that. Let's say the best guess is that the retailers will each order 20 copies. The publisher has to decide if the incentive threshold should be 30 copies or 40 copies or 50 copies. If you put the threshold too high you don't get enough retailers participating. If you set the threshold too low then you lower the resale value of the incentive copy because it's not as rare. I asked Pete how this works in practical terms with his ordering. It seems to work pretty well. Depending on who did the incentive cover (always a different artist from the one who did the regular edition cover and usually an artist with more comic store "cachet")(interesting), Pete can literally order 100 copies of a book that he's pretty sure he can only sell 40 of and, if he gets two incentive copies (at a one-incentive-for-every-50-regular-copies ordered threshold) he can make his money back just selling the two incentive copies on the aftermarket. In one sense he's "eating" 60 copies, but in another sense—a real world dollars and cents sense—the extra 60 copies are irrelevant. He can throw them out or give them away or sell them at a nickel each and he's still turning a good profit.


Essentially what the incentive program does is to make use of the Comic-Store Principles' Prime Directive:


Successful comic books immediately go up in value in the aftermarket


And uses that as "leverage" to get more copies of a given comic book into more comic stores. I asked Pete if there are instances where he had guessed he could only sell 40, he ordered 100 to get the incentives and he ended up selling more than 40. Yes, definitely. He could think of one book where he sold 75, other books where he sold out and had to reorder. Well, okay, that makes perfect "real world" sense, then. One of the big problems in today's market with money being universally tight in the stores is that you have to illustrate to store owners that they are not always right when they say that they know how many copies of something to order.


Which is tough because They ARE Good At It. Guessing how many they need of something, I mean. As someone said to me recently, quoting a Diamond rep, "Most comic-book stores are one bad business deal away from bankruptcy." If you've lasted longer than a year, you're entitled to be a little arrogant—like a Vegas gambler who never loses money at the blackjack tables. Whatever system you have, if you have a winning percentage you are the exception in the field rather than the rule. What someone figured out was that you need an effective crowbar to pry successful retailers out of that "I know how many I need" position and the incentive copy seems to be the way to do it.


But it doesn't work for independents or, at least, the track record for independents isn't nearly as good because there isn't built-in cachet—or the perception of built-in cachet—in order to get store owners to risk investment capital in ordering what they see as "too many copies". The key is that the incentive book has to go up in value immediately in order to offset even the possibility of losing money "over-ordering" books. The store owner technically pays 80 cents or a dollar for the incentive—the same amount he pays for the regular books—and then sells the incentive for, say, 75 dollars the week after it comes in. "Wolverine" or "Batman" or "Jim Lee" or "Michael Turner" (or, better yet, Wolverine/Batman by Jim Lee and Michael Turner) minimizes the perceived risk. And the rarity is only technically artificial. Do the math. If the incentive threshold is 50 copies and the total orders are 20,000 (which is actually high in today's market) then there are only going to be 400 incentive copies. 400 copies isn't as rare as say Action #1 but it is a very small number when measured against the combined audience of, say, Wolverine, Batman, Jim Lee and Michael Turner. Let's say 10,000 core enthusiasts chasing 400 books. That's what drives up prices and rising prices is Comic Store Principles #1 and 2.


So the question I'm facing is: is Dave Sim even remotely at the low end of that "cachet" category when it comes to his secret project? Given that the secret project isn't a super-hero comic and it isn't from Marvel (it's more of a Historical Polemic and we all know how white-hot Historical Polemics are with the crowd at, say, Wizard Los Angeles) it's difficult to know even what a reasonable threshold would be for an incentive copy. I asked Pete, having shown him the artwork I had done already, how many he would order for Paradise. 25, but mostly because he already knows me and because of the CGC file copy connection. How many did he think the average store would order? Five. Did he think an incentive copy program could push that number higher? He really didn't know but the way he said he really didn't know it seemed worlds away from WELL, GOSH I CAN'T SEE WHY NOT! I can make the threshold 10 but if my total orders are 3,000 that means there are 300 incentive covers and maybe only 1,000 core enthusiasts. I have a higher ratio of core enthusiasts but the hard numbers are smaller. And you have to factor in that my audience is probably 80% Reading Uber Alles types who wouldn't buy an incentive cover if their lives depended on it versus an 80% Investment Uber Alles percentage in the Wolverine, Batman, Jim Lee and Michael Turner camps.


And then he explained sketch covers to me. Sketch covers are to incentive books what incentive books are to the regular edition i.e. if you have to order 50 copies to get the incentive edition, you have to order 100 copies to get a sketch cover. Even Pete admits that it doesn't make sense. Presumably it should be the other way around, the sketch cover (being unfinished) should be less valuable than the finished cover on the incentive edition. But, again, you want to talk about Wishful Thinking (how things should work?) or about Reality (how things actually work)? Obviously I'm far more interested in Reality. Sketch covers: gold, Incentive covers: silver or bronze. Got it.


My best guess, mulling it over the next couple of days after Pete had left, was that this might be the Sketch Cover Era (which might only last for less than a year as the foil covers and hologram covers did in their respective "Eras") and if I could get a hot enough creator to do my sketch cover, I might be able to use the inherent cachet of the sketch cover (and the Pavlovian reaction it excites in most retailers here, today, at the end of the first quarter of 2007) to generate higher or slightly higher sales, my (entirely egocentric) assumption being my secret project will sell if the books are in the stores in quantity. No guarantee of that. Egocentric thinking—particularly in the independent end of things—is usually just Wishful Thinking called something else. If I had to place an actual bet, I think it would probably be more in the Wishful Thinking category, verging on the Severely Unlikely rather than a slam-dunk in the Reality category. And that was when I started thinking about ways that I might be able to get around that while I went about my regular office chores including weighing a package for mailing.


The weigh scale was dead. I couldn't believe it. I went over and checked the power bar. Yep, plugged in as tight as it can be plugged in. And that was when I looked at the wall socket the power bar was plugged into, and there the power bar plug was, the prongs mostly "out" rather than "in". I had obviously dislodged it while I was trying to extricate the 11 by 17 sheet from the photocopier.


D'OH!


A quick trip over to the small appliance place to get my light table back—"Heh! Turned out to be a blown fuse!" (you don't think I was actually going to admit to the truth do you?)—and I was back in business light-table wise with a couple of days left to go in Secret Project Week.


So that brings you all up to date and now I can actually get to the Mail Answering part of the Blog & Mail tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Smack! Bam! Pow! Hitting that old Mailbag!

There's MORE 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 #225 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

In our last stomach-churning episode,

Dave's light table died right in the middle of

his secret project, leading him to wonder

"How the heck am I going to SELL this thing

in today's market?"

The Pan-Corporation Year-Long Crossover Story used to be the exception back in the Secret Wars days when Jim Shooter invented it, then it became a fad and then it faded away for a while but now it's back and now it's the Carved In Stone Current Reality subject to Comic Store Principle rules. As sure as God made little green apples, Marvel and DC are working on year-long pan-company crossovers. If the story takes a year or two years to come out and the early issues continue to go up in value ("Civil War tie-in!") then the high-end has been attained. Civil War is officially a good comic. Two years from now, if those early issues continue to appreciate in value in the aftermarket and the hardcover and trade paperback collections sell well, Civil War will officially become a great comic. It's one of the reasons that I think the future of independent comics is in individual self-contained comic books.


"Feel free to argue that point if you wish…" but a core reality is that there's no way that the independents can compete in that context unless they do a genuinely engaging story and come out on time and on a more regular schedule than twice a year—and have enough money in reserve to keep them going while waiting for their value in the aftermarket to actually climb and (more importantly) to actually be noticed. Cerebus wasn't accepted in the Overstreet Price Guide until well into the 1980s and the values attached to the early issues continue to be in the "extreme lowball" category. My innovation of keeping all the early issues in print in trade paperbacks was deemed "anti-aftermarket"—I was killing my back issue values by keeping the stories in print and available—and caused the aftermarket to basically lock the 1980s prices in and to not revisit them. Which is why Cerebus back issues are genuinely scarce these days and command prices far higher than their "established' value.


As for "regular publication", our past independent history tells us it's possible but the Comic Store Reality is that it isn't likely or more than a handful of people would have done it and would be doing it. No comic store owner worth his salt is going to seriously believe that Indy Tales #1 is going to be followed anytime soon by issue 2 or that he will ever see issue 3 and he or she is not going to bet heavily in that direction. Certainly not to the tune of buying 20 or 30 or 40 copies. In a market which has as thin a profit margin as the comic-book field does the hard choice is between Reality and Wishful Thinking. The former gives a store a chance to keep going, the latter is a recipe for suicide.


What I had hoped would happen (that is, Wishfully Thought) when I championed independent publishing in the 1990s was that independent creators would learn to be reliable so they could compete with Marvel and DC: that reliability was the one chance we had to make a level playing field. Instead, the opposite happened; mainstream creators learned from and adopted the slovenly work habits of the independents and suddenly virtually everyone became unreliable. If a store is going to bet on an unreliable creator, he or she is going to bet on an unreliable creator who is drawing Spider-man or Batman and falling months and sometimes years behind schedule and even there, the speculation bug is only going to last so long. If a hot book is eight months late, Principle #1 has been met—the comic book has gone up in dollar value immediately—but Principle #2 has been violated. The comic book hasn't continued to go up in value and not only the aftermarket value is destroyed, so is the pre-market value: issue 2 isn't worth what the retailer would have to pay for it when it turns up, so the retailers are going to return issue 2 en masse without even looking at it when it comes in hanging on to a small fraction of the original order for the only market for the book: the most devoted collectors who don't care how late it is, they have to have it (a smaller and smaller minority of customers).


My new advocacy of the individual self-contained comic book stems from the choice between Reality and Wishful Thinking. It removes the latter to the extent that that's possible. The retailer doesn't have to wonder what issue 2 will do while contemplating issue 1. The retailer doesn't have to wonder if it's actually going to come out. It is out. It exists. You don't have to "trust me" on that as you would if I told you I was going to do a bi-monthly series where you have to order issues 2 and 3 before you've even had the chance to see how issue 1 sells. And I hope it removes Wishful Thinking from the creator/publisher side of the equation, as well. You invest x amount of time and energy in a single comic book and then you find out what the response to it is. If it tanks you do something else. If it does okay or really well, you can expand it into a graphic novel or do sequels or just print some more.


Of course, the individual self-contained comic book brings its own logistical problems with it. Mr. Boyle objects to the $3 comic that represents only 15 minutes of entertainment. But I think I'm safe in saying that that's pretty much a fixed commodity as well, a Comic-Store Reality. Try selling a comic book with over-abundant use of text (relative to the perceived "right" amount of text) and you'll find yourself dismissed just as readily for your book taking too long to read as for it not taking long enough to read. If you challenge the store owner/collector/reader's suppositions—in terms of content, story-telling, theme—you limit your sales. "Too many words" is the kiss of death for a comic book. "Feel free to argue that point if you wish…" (i.e. no literate person should ever see any comic book as containing "too many words") but do so at your own peril. If you can push the 15 minutes to 20 minutes or 25 minutes you are scratching the reader's itch for "more value for the money". Push it beyond the 25 minutes and you are encroaching on his comfort zone and taking up too much of his time. The name of the game, now more than ever, is "delivering the goods". The collectors and readers don't know what they want, but they'll know it if and when they see it. And if the comic book isn't—not only A super-hero but one of the High Iconic Marvel and to a lesser degree DC super-heroes—the odds are that 98% of comic store patrons won't even look at it even if you do make it to the shelf. So it seems to me a nice long comic book (not TOO long, but longer than the average Marvel comic) at a reasonable price (the same as the average Marvel comic or only fractionally more expensive) strikes the right competitive note: more reading value for the money, a self-contained package so there's no chance of future disappointment and (hopefully) those two offsetting a lack of colour.


There are ancillary considerations that have caused me to revise parts of my secret project that would have been deemed innovative visually but which were unfamiliar territory for the average comic-book reader. My decision was: I'm already swimming upstream by being an indy, there is already massive sales resistance because it's not a Marvel or DC book. Conclusion? Don't make things needlessly difficult for the reader, don't make your work difficult or impenetrable, don't venture too far outside of the accepted comic book "tropes" don't occupy too much of his time so that he wants to give up or too little of his time so he feels cheated. Whether we want to admit it or not—and I think the only sensible thing to do is to admit it—the track record of independent comics being roughly 98% unreliable in all of those areas (not enough value for the money, too many words, not enough words, too esoteric story-telling, not enough content, uninteresting themes, irregular schedule) is something every (EVERY!) independent comic, as a consequence, carries with it into Diamond Previews. As an independent you have to compete with a clear awareness that—because of the almost 100% failure rate: the unreliability of your predecessors and peers—you are metaphorically down by five runs and have two strikes against you before you even get up to the plate. The consensus view in the environment is that you and your book are unnecessary without even having to look at what you've done. You basically are going to have one swing at one pitch and you're either going to make it to first or you're going to be out. Don't fritter away that one swing of the bat by doing something that is pretty much guaranteed to rub people the wrong way.

Tomorrow: Now that I know THAT what do I know? And how does it help me sell copies of my funnybook?
___________________________________________________

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 #224 (April 23rd, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

More on the NEW WORLD

OF THE DIRECT MARKET

And what I see this as meaning for

My Secret Project I've been

working on for two years

Cerebus has proved itself in the "aftermarket value" category over the years, but the secret project isn't Cerebus and it isn't a continued series so I'm definitely staring down the barrel of "Does a Dave Sim indy comic have aftermarket value or is it only Cerebus?" You can do a monthly comic book reliably and on-time for 26 years, but the ultimate question is going to be the same: what have you done for us lately? I can point to the Cerebus trade paperbacks and their perennial sales, but only if I'm selling a new trade paperback, or a new trade paperback that is "like Cerebus" which I'm not.


Leaving that imminent catastrophe aside, there is a major schism in the field, it seems to me, that has taken place, "major" to the extent that the opposing sides, "indies" and "mainstream" don't even have common frames of reference in which to discuss much of anything. "Indies" have gotten more entrenched in the view that comics should be exclusively a reading experience, taking it as a given that the more you can eliminate speculation and collectibility the better the market will become. But the indies -- and the core belief that it is better to read than to collect a comic book -- are and always have been the branch and not the tree. At one level or another, the vast majority of comic-store patrons know the value of what they are buying by whether or not the comic they bought last week is selling for more money than they paid for it the week after. It seems to me less pertinent to automatically disagree with Mr. Boyle in dutiful "Reading Uber Alles" fashion (which I suspect most independent publishers and creators would and which Mr. Boyle anticipates when he says "Feel free to argue the point if you wish...") than to recognize that it's always the height of foolishness to disagree with reality (see "The Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast").


Principles of Comic Store Reality

1) Successful comic books immediately go up in dollar value in the aftermarket

2) The most successful comic books continue to go up in value in the aftermarket while less successful comic books level off or decline in value

3) Fewer and fewer comic books are in either category these days

4) Virtually all comic books in either category are from Marvel (and, as Mr. Boyle puts it, DC to a lesser degree)

Mr. Boyle's line in his article, "DC to a lesser degree" is significant. It represents a dramatic retrenchment in perception from even five years ago. It's no longer "Marvel and DC and Imageƒ...and Dark Horse to a lesser degree" as it would have been through most of the 1990s and the early part of the twenty-first century. If you're an indy and Mr. Boyle has made you feel bad, maybe what he had to say about Image will cheer you up:


There was a great moment at Comedy Central during an awards show they did for themselves. They started by showing clips of everything that made Comedy Central what it was to that point; every clip was of South Park. If Image held those same awards, Robert Kirkman's Invincible, Walking Dead and Battle Pope would be the only clips shown. Image moves into 2007 as a company without a direction. They've launched one creator-owned series after another until the publisher now looks like a clearinghouse for unknown talent. Yes, such talent should have a place to go but as I stated about a comics store in this same column some months ago, a store without a focus is a store without an identity. Robert Kirkman: [graded] A. Image: C-


I mean, "ouch", eh? The universal perception is reverting to what it was in the early 1970s; to what it was in the pre-Direct Market days. There is Marvel, to a lesser degree there is DC and then there's everything else which is pretty much not worth discussing (then: Charlton, Gold Key and Archie). What has taken place is Principles #1 and 2 Writ Large. Only those publishers whose books go up in value on the aftermarket are on the Big Radar Screen. Ergo, Comic Store Reality consists of Marvel and, DC to a lesser degree. Consequently Independents not only don't exist for most stores, they don't even have the advantage of regular publication and newsstand sales which their pre-Direct Market predecessors like Charlton and Gold Key had or regular publication which the early Direct Market titles (like Cerebus and Elfquest) took as a necessary "given" in order to be granted space and attention in marginal comic-book stores, "quirky" stores: stores outside the paradigm where readability was given credence secondary to aftermarket value ("sort of quirky"), equal to after-market value ("really quirky") or greater credibility than after-market value ("Twilight Zone quirky").


Given that these are the Comic Store Realities that are emphatically reasserting themselves after thirty years of the "tree" being bullied by the "branch" into believing that "comic books as investments" was a shameful way to look at the medium, it seems clear that I can't just "release" my secret project and just, you know, hope for a good sale. Just by being an indy creator and a indy publisher I'm (I think justifiably) tarred with the same negative indy brush: I'm swimming upstream against the direct market tide. If I want an honest answer to "What should I do?", the sincerely honest answer, founded in the unshakeable and now reasserted reality of the Principles of Comic Store Reality would be: You want to be noticed? Go to Marvel and do a really cool Wolverine mini-series.


And, truth be told, I see a lot of that in Diamond's weekly Direct Market "snapshot" newletter, Diamond Dateline these days: creators I've never heard of who are using a Marvel or DC credential to try and sell an independent or self-published book. I don't think it works. The overall momentum of the market is towards a Marvel comic being real -- what could be more real, more verifiable than something that goes up in value immediately after you buy it? -- and therefore the creators of any Marvel comic are real, the degree of that reality being directly attributable to the extent that their work goes up in value immediately in the aftermarket. But that reality for the most part is not transportable or extendable. If you do your Marvel project and then do an independent project, you exist and then you cease to exist -- independent comics don't go up in value. You basically "vanish" like an infant's game of peek-a-boo: if I can't see you, you don't exist. If you move from the DC section or the Marvel supplement in Previews to the General Comics & Graphic Novels section I can't see you because I don't look back there. Then you do Batman and suddenly you exist again. I SEE you!


So the question becomes, "How do you do a commercially viable project in that context?" And, again, the frames of reference are so radically divergent that there's no way to even communicate as an "indy" addressing the "mainstream" because they mean something very different by the term "context". To the market, the vast majority of the market -- probably 90% or more -- the answer is obvious. You do a Marvel comic and make it really good. To even discuss the idea of a project being commercially viable that isn't a Marvel comic automatically pushes you completely off the radar screen.


You don't "get it" with all that "not getting it" entails.


"As a collector, fan or store owner, I can sympathize with you "not getting it" and if I'm the compassionate type, I might commiserate with you for a while, but ultimately you're going to have to face the fact that you're like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in. The tide is coming in. Your indy book because it is an indy book isn't going to sell very well. You can try to discuss an indy project with me, but if the "me" you are talking to is a comic-book fan, collector or store owner, while you're talking about your esoteric comic book, my mind is thinking about Batman, Spider-man, Thor, the Hulk. I'll try and agree with you to be polite, but I'll cite a Marvel or DC title in doing so."


The Mass Direct Market Mind doesn't accommodate Batman at its high end and modern-day versions of Elfquest and Cerebus at its low end as it used to. There's no longer even the urge to pay lip service to "Celebrating Diversity" or to feel guilty when the rising tide floats only Marvel's (and to a lesser degree DC's) boats. Now the high end is Civil War and the low end is Wonder Woman. Reality is reality and reality is never a thing you should feel guilty about.


Tomorrow: More Good News!


There's MORE 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 #223 (April 22nd, 2007)

Package of photos and a nice letter from Alexandre Tremblay of St.-Jean-Richelieu dated Feb. 20.


Dear Dave Sim,

I meant to write this letter and to send the enclosed package, a (great) deal sooner. I'm afraid that procrastination was raised to a new level, as the pictures included are those from the first Bible reading that you did last summer. You might call the laminate a very late "end of Cerebus" gift. I like to call the picture: "God's Chair". (Don't worry, by God I do not mean Dave Sim. It would also be fitting to call it: "Dave Sim's chair", but that would be a tad less artistic).


Another reason why I did not write sooner is that I always have a million things to write you about, but I don't take the time to actually do it. So I will just write this short letter, but at least send you the pictures.


The regular pictures will, I presume, be at least of some use for the Cerebus Archive. I will be keeping my own copies, as they may be useful later. I will be attending University in the near, near future, studying in psychology, driven by the sole intent of having "official" credentials to put into effect my plan to reorganize and revolutionize the world of education. If God wills it, you may, before the end of your days, witness the Dave Sim Wing of an institution, at which point the picture of my brother, you and I would proudly hang upon its walls. (Ya gotta think big!)


The only point that I will bring up in this letter is again the Cerebus Archive. We bought Collected Letters after the Bible reading (we ran into your friends at Now and Then Books). So my brother Fred and I just wanted to say, (in regards to the custodian aspect of the Archive, and the related difficulties of work visas and such), that we are both Canadian citizens and would at some point in the future be glad to take up the job of protecting the Archive.


As ever thank you for your time.


Before I forget, let me mention that Now & Then Books, the World's Oldest Comic-Book Store is still in business as of this writing (April 5). Give Dave Kostis a call when you get a minute to congratulate him. The betting was that he couldn't make it past Christmas.

NOW & THEN BOOKS - 519-744-5571





Well, the "Dave Sim Wing" of an institution seems further and further away three years after I was writing those letters, Alexandre. Thank you for the laminate, over-sized picture of the rocking chair that I used at the Registry Theatre and the other smaller photos as well. It was kind of poignant getting them and looking at the picture of the "crowd" that first time out where I had thought, well, you have to start small and build from there -- little realizing that the eight people who showed up was going to be the largest turnout for one of the readings and that two of them would leave about fifteen minutes in. Seriously Failed Experiment was what I was thinking looking through the photos (also funny that you would take a photo of The Regency Apartments -- obviously for the High Society connection, however they're only a few years old -- if you had told anyone why someone from Quebec was taking the picture they wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about). I had been really sure that the "No Preaching" Scripture Readings were a good idea, that it would work. In retrospect it might have worked somewhere else but not in Kitchener. In Kitchener, if you're interested in scripture you go to church and get it there. And, as I discussed last week, I'm the only person who sees scripture as being narrative. The only reaction anyone could have would be "wow, too many disconnected anecdotes all at once." People referred to it as Bible Study, again conforming to the idea that what you do with scripture is to grab a disconnected anecdote, put it under the magnifying glass and study it, syllable by syllable.


I left the chair and the carpet there for the Registry Theatre to use. Community Theatre isn't exactly known for having enormous budgets for set decoration. I still plan to continue with the readings, but Trevor's just going to record them here at the house and, since I'm not having to rent the premises, we can do it at something less than the grueling three-hour sessions I was doing at the Registry.


But, it's a funny thing how these things work. A couple of weeks after your reminders of my Seriously Failed Experiment came in, I got a letter from David W. Johnson and inside there were two $1,000 money orders for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region with a little parenthetical note that he hoped some of the money could be used for hygiene and showers. I mailed them to Katharine Schmidt at the Food Bank along with a suggestion that she might want to share some of it with Joe Mancini at The Working Centre where they do have a clothing/hygiene/hot showers program for the disadvantaged as per David's request. She faxed me back that that's what she would do and wished me good luck with getting the scripture readings going again.


$2,000 for the poor of Waterloo Region. Not bad for a Seriously Failed Experiment.

___________________________________________________

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.