Dave Sim's blogandmail #247 (May 16th, 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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Adam Beechen checks in

From Los Hangalayze

Adam was a little bit put out when he saw that I printed my answers to him in Collected Letters Volume One saying that he would have to be more cautious with what he wrote me in the future – as if he was writing to an editor or something. I'm hoping he remembered that when he wrote this letter and that I'm cleared to run these quotes from it.



All's well here out California way…considering it's mid-February and I got sunburned at the beach this weekend, I really don't have too much to complain about.



I'll say. It's April 26 here and everyone is still walking around with heavy overcoats on if they have a lick of common sense. I spoke to Siu Ta yesterday and she thought she was coming down with a cold, having just gotten back from Los Angeles she had made the mistake of walking around dressed as if it was, you know, spring or something. Hopefully when this runs and I'm down in Toronto celebrating Rob Walton and Chester Brown's mutual birthdays today and mine tomorrow it will be slightly more seasonable temperatures.



It's been a busy year for me already…I'm still working on the same cartoon as last time we corresponded – it's been over a year now to complete this single season, and it's been a bit wearing. I'm anxious to move on to other television projects. Prospects are decent for another season of the show, and if they'd ask me back to story edit again, I'd consider it if there were no other prospects, but a) I don't think they'd ask me back and b) I think there'll be other prospects which is a nice feeling.



I'm working on a video game for a company in Vancouver, which necessitated a trip to the city (my first time) in January. It was pretty much non-stop story conferencing for three days, so I never got much of a chance to see the city, unfortunately, but it's probably best, since it was raining and snowing the entire time. Working on video games is pretty new to me, and I don't pretend to understand the terminology or the process, but it's good to open up some new avenues of employment.



If someone offered me a chance to write a video game I think the only thing I could say would be, "You're kidding. Someone actually writes those?" One of the reasons my job prospects if this self-publishing thing doesn't pan out are pretty much limited to janitorial work and/or flipping burgers at McDonald's. So, I'm really kind of hoping that this self-publishing thing pans out.



Hench [Adam's graphic novel, highly recommended] isn't any closer to being a motion picture anytime soon. The closest it got was last fall, when I pitched it to the number two guy at Warner Bros., which was quite an experience, but ultimately, they didn't bite. Now, supposedly, it's under consideration by a couple of production companies belonging to directors as a television series, but we haven't had any meetings on that yet.



When I visited Don Murphy on the set last year he said that he had tried to get the rights to Hench, but he was told that someone else had them. You want I should give him your number or your agents' number?



Still doing work for DC…Leaving my first two assignments there (by choice) for two others, as two books is realistically all I can do a month with the other commitments. One of them will be the Teen Titans book, which is very surreal, since that was one of the books I followed most avidly (along with the rest of the superhero comics-reading world) when I was a teenager. I still find the work fun, probably because I've managed to stay in my little corner of the world and avoid whatever politics are out there. Hopefully, it'll continue that way.



I assume you're talking about the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans. Missed those because I was hacking and slashing my own way into the comic-book field at the time. For me George Perez will always be the nice fanboy type guy who talked really fast and wore these great Hawaiian shirts. He told me once that he drew his comics lying on the couch in front of the TV with a lapboard. I could never figure out how he could do all of those meticulously detailed figures and backgrounds while lying on a couch. He made a point of coming up to say hello and congratulate me on getting to issue 300 at the Paradise Comics Torontocon last year which is something the Pariah King of Comics is always grateful for when it happens. It was particularly nice because I was talking to a bunch of guys from Kitchener when he came up and I was able to introduce them all to George Perez. So, it went from them hanging out at my table because no one else seemed to be to "Wow! The George Perez actually came over to say hi to Dave!"



The other big thing that's happened since last we corresponded is that I finally went to Italy. You may or may not remember I was planning a trip there to coincide with the Phoenix Suns' training camp in October in Treviso. Well, I made it, spent three days with the team, and the remainder of my two-week trip seeing other parts of the country, including Venice, Florence, Rome and Trieste. It was an amazing trip, of course, and many times (particularly when in Piazza San Marco) I thought of your comments about the incredible number of pigeons that seem to be in the country. You were certainly right on that score.



It's not just the number. Maybe I'm delusional but it seems to me that the pigeons – and the swifts – fly differently in Italy than they do elsewhere. There are a lot of pigeons in Trafalgar Square as an example but you never get the same sense of all of them taking off at the same time and swooping and cornering at the same time and landing at the same time.



The issue of Following Cerebus containing your conversation with Neal Adams kept me company for part of the trip – in addition to being interesting and thought-provoking, it was nice to see the commission I purchased from you reprinted on the inside front cover.



Eat your hearts out folks, yes, Adam Beechen owns my "best Neal Adams parody piece to date".



Anyway, my time with the Suns, and the resulting article I wrote about it for the team website (enclosed for your amusement) has led to an irregular column for the site. They let me write about anything team-related I want, which is just about a dream come true for this die-hard fan, so that's mostly what I wind up writing about – being a fan. Growing up with the team, favourite memories, etc. It's great and I really enjoy it. I've also included a photo of me with Arizona's favourite Canadian, Steve Nash, the NBA's two-time defending MVP. He looks like he's patiently waiting for someone from NBA security to drag me away (actually, he was very nice).



Those Adam Beechen completists out there will want to go directly to www.Suns.com and download Adam's November 2, 2006 piece "The Suns Went to Italy and All I Got was the Time of My Life". Don't follow the NBA at all myself—except this year with the Raptors in the playoffs. Went downstairs to look up in the Post's Sports section to see how the Suns are doing. They're up 2-0 on the Lakers so I guess Adam's a happy camper right now. Quietly happy (if he's smart) since he's living smack dab in the middle of Lakers territory.



Thanks for writing, Adam, and I hope to hear from you again soon.

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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.