Dave Sim's blogandmail #208 (April 7th, 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.

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"CEREBUS READER IN CRISIS"

WILLIAM BEACH OF PORTORECANATI ITALY

HAS A REQUEST REGARDING MY COVER

DRAWING OF HIM ON CEREBUS READERS IN

CRISIS #2

The only request/suggestion that I would make in doing the cover would be that (in line with the message of my comic and my own religious view) [Billy is a Jehovah's Witness] as you are going to include my face and the Catholic Shrine on the same page, that you try to make it apparent that though I have no problem visiting such a place, I do not approve of the form of worship being carried out there nor the particular appropriateness of that place over any other as a place for worship. To do that I would like either a thought-balloon and/or (this would be even better, if possible to achieve based on the attached photographic reference) a telling facial expression that would emphasize my thoughts on the place.


Let me know what you think, and please discuss with Jeff about where you will need to send the artwork once complete so as to get it published as the cover of CRIC #2.


Thanks for having accepted to do this artwork. I really appreciate being given the opportunity to receive the unmerited privilege of having my pages of poorly written and poorly drawn amateur comic within a cover drawn by my favourite professional comic artist!


I certainly appreciated Billy's vote of confidence that I could actually change the facial expression successfully on a piece of photo reference. I think I'd rather be locked up in a tower and made to spin straw into gold. I briefly considered throwing the ball back into his court and asking him to send another photo, this time with him exhibiting the facial expression he had in mind. That, however, would have been needlessly cruel since that involves a level of professional acting to achieve and I knew that what I would be doing is tying Billy up with his cell phone for hours if not days as he tried to capture on film the facial expression that would best epitomize his view of the Catholic Church and the Santa Casa. It would be a pretty subtle business.


Anyway, the piece is all drawn and is being reproduced even as you're reading this, in time for its debut at SPACE the weekend of April 21-22 in Columbus, Ohio. Check www.backporchcomics.com for details and tune in to tomorrow's Sunday Edition of the Blog & Mail for more on the Santa Casa.


Letter from Shabad Atma:


Dear Dave,


This letter bears two requests. Let's get the first one out of the way immediately: I would prefer that we keep our correspondence private from here out. I don't much care for the public eye when it comes to corresponding with you, because in my mind it cheapens it. The idea of having a correspondence with you has been a life-long dream, and the novelty of having it published isn't as meaningful to me as the evolution of the correspondence in and of itself. To put it simply: I'd rather we write to each other, not the public. It won't crush me if the idea of interacting with me as a "peer" causes you to spray your morning OJ out of your mouth in a fit of howling laughter. These two thoughts – that we might eventually become friends and that we might eventually interact as peers – are hopes of mine. It's interesting to me that the motivation for these hopes has changed over the years, that from being a fan of Cerebus to identifying with you from a spiritual, philosophical and even political vantage (in as much as I do). All that said, if you would prefer to keep it public, I am certainly game.


I'm afraid that's the case. I'm still fine-tuning the Blog & Mail but it has become more apparent in the last couple of months that this is replacing, rather than supplementing, my personal correspondence. I now write letters only when it's absolutely necessary and communicate almost exclusively through this venue. At this point I am pretty close to having produced four weeks' worth of Blog & Mails in roughly three days. They're maybe coming out a little short but the last batch was way too long and, of course, the fact that last time I carved out for myself three weeks of lead time but forgot that I would have to start writing again after two weeks took me by surprise. I really would like my secret project done by the end of this year or very close to done by the end of this year (in fact I hope it can be published sometime this year) and that involves clearing everything else out of my way given how long it takes me to do a comic book page these days. And I also have to start thinking of ways to make money now that I have the onerous task of buying back Ger's 40% of Aardvark-Vanaheim. I enjoyed my three years of not having to worry about such things, but the three years are up. Mostly I have to produce work and publish it. The commissioned pieces are fine as one-time cash infusions but no one is going to be paying me next year for the commissioned piece they bought from me this year, whereas I comic book that I draw at least has the potential to keep selling over the years and producing a revenue "stream" as opposed to a "one off" cheque. I'm still interested in doing commissions but the emphasis needs to be on things that I write, draw and publish myself.


I'm very glad that I started my secret project when I did with the ambition to let it take as long as it needed to take to be exactly the way I pictured it in my head. I've always wanted to do something like that and the fact that I'm now roughly halfway through it means that I'm obligated to keep going on that same basis. But, when I'm done, my thinking is going to have to switch back to something much closer to Cerebus mode, where I have x amount of time in which to produce this page and that's as good as the page can be allowed to get. I've got a few ideas I'm picking away at but nothing definite.


But that's the direction that I'm going on: paying work has to take precedence over fun work and (where they overlap) over the secret project, the secret project has to take precedence over the Blog & Mail in a ratio closer to 3-to-1 rather than 2-to-1 and the Blog & Mail takes precedence over any kind of socializing or personal correspondence.


It's nice to think that five years from now when (God willing) Gerhard is all paid off that I can take another approach but right now the above program is the only thing that makes sense.


Tomorrow: More on the Santa Casa

There's MORE FOR YOU

In TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAAIIILLLL!

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

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

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

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Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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