Dave Sim's blogandmail #292 (June 30th, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Actually, not really changing the subject, just answering Margaret's horror at my throwing out the Bi-Weekly negs with some more information:

I still have at least nine massive cardboard folders that need to be gone through that probably contain another two or three hundred negatives – none of which are actually needed in order to keep the trade paperbacks in print or to produce the CEREBUS covers volume at some distant future date, so there is no question that I will be able to send you (and Jeff, if he's interested) SOME Cerebus negatives and I promise to do so – rolled up in a mailing tube. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that they'll stay in the mailing tube and every time you run across it, you'll pick it up, weigh it carefully in your hand, carefully pull out one of the negatives (and end up getting three or four of them instead), look at them for a few seconds, then spend a half hour getting them back into the mailing tube and sit there and wonder, "WHY did I want these again?"

And ULTIMATELY – somewhere up ahead in the distant future – I assume the negatives will get digitized. I can't really justify the expense right now (it's about two or three grand to get Lebonfon to digitize one of the trades) but I assume the expense will come down as it always does with computers and somewhere up ahead I will be able to get the trades digitized at Kinko's for 2 cents a page (and get a nifty Kinko's coffee mug and fanny pack because of the volume of business) and at that point there will be roughly nine hundred two foot by three foot flats that I will no longer need and you will be more than welcome to rent a flat-bed trailer U-Haul and come up here and take them all back to Massachusetts with you. Of course you'll have to rent another apartment just to store and display a fraction of them but (as we all know) if anyone's going to do it CerebusFangirl is going to do it (you really should design a costume).

"Also -- while I've got a moment of your time – I am enjoying the Blog & Mail. Well, except when Jeff was just posting your daily prayer. I understand that you were sick and wanted some time off from it all…but I rather enjoy reading your essays on Islam or your Biblical insights that you usually posted on Sundays. So, seeing that you're feeling better is good on two fronts: 1. you're feeling better and 2. no more repeating of the prayer. Nothing against the prayer – I would say the same if you just repeated the same blog entry again and again. I'd rather have new material to read."

Yeah, that was just one of my little quirks. I figured from the beginning that the Blog & Mail should be a daily thing but that raised the question of Sabbath content. I didn't want to have people even getting the illusion that Dave Sim spent the Sabbath blathering about Spider-man's new costume even though I would have written the material on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. When I got sick, I was able to get Claude Flowers to cover for me with excerpts from COLLECTED LETTERS 2 which he was already working on. That seemed to be more than enough of an imposition on a guy who was scrambling to get a job without croaking at him over the phone "And can you make sure that all of the excerpts for Sunday are faith-based?" So, I decided to share the imposition by getting Jeff to type up my prayer and, of course, when I started getting better a couple of weeks later Jeff rather broadly suggested that for all the time that he had put in typing the prayer (and it's certainly much, much, much longer in cold type than it is in the ten minutes it takes me to recite it) he hoped that I might get more than two "insertions" out of it. I so seldom get a combination "excuse to slack off" and " mandate to Do the Right Thing" that I (in my still wobbly state) metaphorically jumped at it. It shan't happen again, Maggs, unless Dame Indisposition pays another visit.

Synchronistically, as I am writing this section, the clock is ticking down on June 6 with me leaving for Toronto tomorrow and the fact is that Jeff will be out of Blog & Mails come Monday and I'm unable to find Sandeep Atwal -- who downloads the Blog & Mail entries onto disk and then e-mails them to Jeff -- so I have an emergency call into Claude to e-mail Jeff excerpts from COLLECTED LETTERS 3 and have also faxed Craig Miller about e-mailing Jeff excerpts from FOLLOWING CEREBUS 10 which, in either case, is still going to leave me with the same problem of the Sunday Edition and I will (sorry, Margaret) probably just get Jeff to re-run my prayer. Who knows? Maybe Sandeep will turn up in the next seven hours and save the day. And spare you another exposure to my prayer.

"I also had a couple of questions. First: information for the checklist. Do you know how many issues of CEREBUS had second printings? I've found second printings of 152, 163 and 164. Any others?"

I hesitate to even pretend to be the definitive Answer Person on these things (as you will remember, Jeff Tundis asked me a while ago to send him a list for Nate of what printings each of the trade paperbacks is on. Under the natural assumption that the books here at the house would all be the most current printings – supplied by Recker from their inventory – I went through and carefully documented the information and read it to him over the phone. He faxed me a week or so later with at least five examples where my answers were demonstrably wrong.). However, with that caveat, according to my latest inventory list (month ending April 07) from Recker there are second printings of issues 151 and 152 (both in stock), 153 (sold out), 163 (in stock), 164 (sold out – except for the last few copies autographed by Gerhard that I still sign for the occasional letter-writer inquiring three years later about the Neil Gaiman free Sandman parody issue offer and the carton full in the basement which I optimistically had Recker send when it looked as if the free comic book offer was going to hit the 3,000 mark instead of tapering off to nothing at around 2,000) and 165 (in stock).

Don't take my word for it, though. As the gangsters used to say, all I know is what I read in the papers.

"Also, I noticed that XEN MAGAZINE's website went offline – I have all of them on my hard drive as word documents – would it be okay with you if I put them up on the CFG site?"

Sure, but just my own articles. Gerhard's photo about the barn article and any of Sandeep's editorial material you'll have to ask him/them about.

"And one last thing – a project with Marvel Comics, eh? Wow. I know you did the EPIC stories with them a while ago, but I just couldn't see the `Godfather of Self-Publishing' working with the `Kings of Work-Made-For-Hire'. But, hey, if they will work with you on YOUR terms, so much the better for we the readers!"

Tomorrow: Things that tend to irritate me about Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Monday: Hey! What a terrific cliff-hanger: The Marvel Negotiations

ON SALE NOW!


___________________________________________________

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 #291 (June 29th, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Darrell also sends along a couple of Victor Davis Hanson columns including an interview with him from THE JERUSALEM POST. THE POST asks:

But…let's save that for the Sunday Edition (no, that wasn't what THE JERUSALEM POST asked). We'll get back to Victor Davis Hanson, but first let's check in with Margaret Liss (only three months ago – 21 March). Margaret writes;

"Oh boy. I just read the blog and mail today…and oh boy. Almost gave me a heart palpitation. Well, okay, yes, I do exaggerate. But this line:

The ten drawers of negatives had been largely made up of Bi-weekly issues which mostly involved rolling them up and throwing them away since I had all the story pages in the trade paperbacks and the only `new' material was the Single Pages which I didn't have the right to reprint anyway.

"GAH! Next time, I'll take them off your hands. I can sort thru them for ones that you/AV could get some cash for by putting them up on eBay (i.e. splash pages, Cerebus using his powers, etc.) Currently people are putting up just the colour art from Marvel & DC and getting anywhere from $5 to $80 for them – just for the 8.5" X 11" pages of line art which the colourist coloured. These may be only mylar negatives, but there must be a few other diehard Cerebus readers out there that would be willing to spend a couple of bucks on a couple of negatives – especially those of us with original artwork. It would be cool to have the negative short from that page(s) framed alongside the original art page.

"Or even putting them up on cerebusart.com with a "buy now" link. It could be set up like I set up Jeff Seiler and Larry Hart's CEREBUS READERS IN CRISIS "page" with a link to a Paypal "pay now" button which allows the buyer to electronically pay and sends the seller a notice that payment has been received and an address to ship to. It would take me ten minutes to set up and I could mail out the items on the weekend.

"So, in the future – there are Yahoos! out there willing to help out, not only myself and Jeff Tundis but a few others you could give a shout out to and we'll go through any Cerebus/AV stuff before it gets tossed. And as Matt Dow not-so-eloquently put it: "Dave, you coulda suckered Margaret and Tundis out of money with those things." I'm sure there a couple of other Cerebus fans out there who would purchase some. I wouldn't want to saturate the market, but a couple of hundred extra bucks is a couple of hundred extra bucks for Aardvark-Vanaheim.

"And yes, there is some self-interest involved as I'm interested in what those negatives look like. Working in the photochemical etching business, we work with negative artwork on Mylar film (and sometimes large 24" X 32" glass if the process requires it) and the engineer in me gets curious about the comic artwork negatives. Plus, it is a bit of Cerebus/AV history that I'd be willing to hold onto – if not other Cerebus fans.

"Wow, that little diatribe was longer than I thought it'd be. I hope I didn't come off as too pushy – I just wanted to let you know that there are a few of us who would be willing to help out with some of this stuff."

See what I mean about Margaret having a "blind spot" when it comes to Cerebus and Dave Sim? I talked about it with her in Columbus and explained that there really is absolutely no value in the negatives. Even if you back them with a white sheet of paper, unless they are absolutely flush with the backing paper you aren't going to be able to see anything. I'm with Matt Dow on this one: I could have "suckered" you and Jeff out of money for them but certainly in my own mind that would be what I was doing: "suckering" you and that's something that I just don't like to do. And I really think it would have just been you and Jeff. The biggest problem for ME is that there is labour involved on my part – all of the negatives are stripped up on huge two-foot by three-foot "flats" that expand dramatically when you roll them up (which is the only rational way to mail them – in mailing tubes: to send the negatives to a specific trade paperback to Lebonfon, the new printer, flat and protected, I have to get a special box constructed that costs somewhere on the order of fifty bucks at a box-making place way to hell and gone out in Waterloo). Or I have to take each of the negatives off the flats individually, put sheets of paper between them, find sheets of cardboard to brace them, put them in envelopes…

I'm already working 12 to 14 hours a day just to keep from falling too much further behind than I already am and at a specific point that requires making hard choices about where and into what I'm putting my time. No offence, but there was no way I was going to put in the hours making sure I had preserved and packaged upwards of 2400 negatives (in ADDITION to the 6,000 negatives that needed to be preserved) for you and Jeff.

No, you weren't too pushy, Margaret – you were just trying to communicate the sense of urgency you felt and that you managed to do -- but for me it's in roughly the same category as the time the guy picked up my cigarette butt off the sidewalk out front of Jim Hanley's Universe on the '92 Tour and asked me to sign it. Which I did. A lot of guys wouldn't, but I could see the humour, so I did. If I'm not mistaken it's even turned up on eBay from time to time. But that's very different from me choosing to get little Mylar snugs made for all of my cigarette butts and making sure that I signed and dated and numbered them sequentially (to make sure I had a "complete set" categorized by package of 25) every time I stubbed one out and then getting Jeff Tundis to make up a special "cigarette butt" page at cerebusart.com and paying him for all his hard work in cigarette butts.

I've been slowly cleaning out Camp David out back of the house and there was a whole whack of what are presumably now Ultra Rare Dave Sim Viscount 1 cigarette butts (since the supply ends at March 17, 1999) back there but I wasn't tempted for one minute to sit down and sign and number and grade them. Whoosh. Into the garbage. I would estimate that what Jeff has posted and is selling on my behalf (and thank you, Jeff) of the tracing paper drawings represents about 25% of the available supply. Up until I started saving them they were just considered garbage on studio clean-up day. So, okay, I persuaded myself to look at them as more than garbage and there is any number of successful bidders over the last few years who are glad that I did. But it really doesn't require me having to let my mind's eye go too far out of focus to know that BASICALLY what I am doing is getting Jeff Tundis to sell my garbage and paying him with my garbage to do so. Obviously, it's better if I don't "go there" mentally so (changing the subject)…

Tomorrow: Changing the Subject

___________________________________________________

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 #290 (June 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.

_____________________________________________________

It's Darrell Epp! Canada's Not-So Littlest Poetry Hobo Week here on the Blog & Mail. We're sending in a Ringer to insert Maurice Duplessis references (en Francais!) into Darrell's latest poems and chipping in for a College Street in Toronto mail drop in a transparent attempt to get him a Governor-General's Award for Poetry this year. Either that or a Canada Council Grant or a Senate seat. We asked about Speaker of the House but that was a little pricey. Anyway – now, HEEEEERE's DARRELL!


"Interesting to hear about that movie producer encounter, and I was very pleased to hear that you didn't lowball yourself. Artists are always so quick to fall to pieces/fall to their knees when faced with a Big Shot Hollywood Producer, but people shouldn't worry about making an outrageous offer, since these are the sharks that have the big money. Remember the story about when Hollywood offered Raymond Chandler the job of writing the screenplay for DOUBLE INDEMNITY. He psyched himself up and went in and said, `All right you bastards, but I won't take anything less than a thousand dollars, and it won't be finished until next Friday, take it or leave it!' And the money men are, like, `What are you talking about?' and offered him $1300 a week for five months. And he's, like, "Um. Right. That's what I meant to say."

That's a great story. I hadn't heard that one before. I really think that YHWH is behind everything that goes on in Hollywood so there has to be some potential pay-off for he/she/it for you to get work out there. You have to pass the "smell test" – testing positive for adultery, infidelity, alcoholism, drug addiction, megalomania, criminal exploitation, compulsive lying, disloyalty or various other psychoses in really interesting combinations – in order to even get a day pass. If you're actually normal and happy and well adjusted the whole environment is completely impervious to you. So, yes, I always treat any Hollywood overture the same way that I do any form of low-grade demonic possession: play along while sticking to my own side of the fence and eventually they'll get tired and go away in search of easier and more interesting prey. They're nothing if not predictable.

"I hope you aren't just answering all your letters on your blog now. I still like getting `real' mail. I'll try to write a longer letter soon. Nice to hear you are doing well. I hope you can come to Hamilton in the summer. And my King Street address will expire May 1."

You mean "526 King St. East"? The only address that I have for you (and which you never write on your actual letters, anyway) writing this June 4? Well (Gosh darn it) the way I look at it, there is no sacrifice too great for THE LIFE AND TIMES HINTERLAND WHO'S WHO OF THE CANADIAN POETRY LEGEND THAT IS DARRELL EPP so I will be mailing out TWO copies of this Blog entry: one addressed "Darrell Epp, c/o Hamilton, Ontario" and another with just the little drawing David Collier did of you taped to the envelope where the address would ordinarily go over a small photo of Sheila Copps. Let me know whether you get one or both of them. Or you can just tune in to the Blog and Mail June 28th.

HEY! THAT'S TODAY!

Okay, this is my last-ditch attempt to finally achieve some small measure of Canadian fame as THE GUY WHO INTRODUCES THE POETRY BY THE LIFE AND TIMES HINTERLAND WHO'S WHO OF THE POETRY LEGEND THAT IS DARRELL EPP!

Here's a good one:

Living With Melanie

Now

"i don't want to take the pill anymore" she

says. tomorrow's garbage day if we don't

clean up now the trash will just sit here all

week long, there's a banana peel on the floor.

i wish one of us i don't care who would take

out the garbage. i wish i was reading raymond

chandler right now. i wish he'd written more

books. who do i wish i was? robert mitchum.

Then

melanie and me went up to the roof and

danced like robots, it's harder than it

sounds. The constellations were better

than fireworks, we wished we could fly.

later there was no hard news anywhere,

the britney spears haircut was on every

channel as I wondered: why don't any

girls think the three stooges are funny?

Hey! I think I'm going to write my own poem:

Darrell's Poetry

i'd run a lot more of darrell's

poetry if i didn't have to keep

changing his i's and the

first word on each line

from upper to

lower case.

the poetry is wonderful

it's playing badminton with

the computer that is getting

me down.

IN STORES NOW!


___________________________________________________

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 #289 (June 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.

_____________________________________________________

When last we had espied Darrell Epp (the Blog & Mail's erstwhile Bard of Hamilton Harbour) he was doing the EI Shuffle out the door at Dofasco. Tune in today as the Minstrel of Main Street steps up to the microphone to ask the musical question:

"Interesting what you were saying about not begrudging someone reading your stuff for free. With me, the "poverty era" lasted so long and the Hamilton Library is so great that even once I had money, I didn't feel like going on a spending spree but kept on being super-frugal/miserly. I also became more concerned about folks who are far, far poorer than I ever was. So now, when I get the urge to spend well over five bucks for a comic that'll take less than ten minutes to read, I don't bother. I try to order it from the library, and try to up the `giving to the poor' accordingly. My last splurge was buying some mint condition Totelben MIRACELMANs in a pawn shop downtown last summer. I thought they were pricey at the time but it turns out people are selling them for NINE TIMES as much on eBay, so maybe I'm just a value investor."

Or a greedy capitalistic swine (kidding. I'm kidding) I don't think you can go wrong buying MIRACLEMAN back issues both because of the low print runs and the fact that the material hasn't been reprinted (yet) and shows no signs of doing so in the foreseeable future. From what I understand it's still just sprawled in one big forlorn heap under Neil Gaiman's bed and you can't get less inclined to reprint yourself than that. As it is said in Minneapolis and environs: "The MAN OF MIRACLES – he sleeps with the dust bunnies."

I'm actually pretty impressed on those rare occasions when I'm surfing the Cerebus Internet World at the library to see how much Free Dave Sim stuff there is on there. Sandeep's had the interesting experience recently of dumping ALL of his Malcolm X audio and video stuff onto the Internet for free downloading and experiencing a spike in sales as a result. Which is possibly screwy/possibly not screwy. Greater specific Internet gravity? It could be that or it could be that Sandeep obviously doesn't have any legitimate claim to ownership of Malcolm X's material so the only way that he would be allowed (allowed by the ___s involved) to make money off of it is if he offered it for free for those who can't afford it and for a reasonable price to those who are willing to pay him to do the "hunting and gathering" for them. What he couldn't legitimately do was to WITHHOLD Malcolm X's material in a custodial sense.

"Actually I just stopped and thought about it and it is pretty breathtaking. Who would ever have thought that someday I could go to ye olde librarie and freely borrow compilations of STEVE CANYON and Kirby's BLACK PANTHER and JIMMY OLSEN? If you had told me that when I was a kid, I'm sure I would have swooned. But, hey, nobody thinks they have any reason to be quiet in libraries anymore – that's one of my pet peeves now – "

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!

"….so bring on the free comics!"

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!

"Seriously, when I was a kid, if you had asked me to describe libraries, I'd have said ONE, they're quiet and TWO they have every kind of book except comics. Now they stopped being quiet a while ago, so…And I hope you're getting money from the gov't. through the Public Lending Rights program."

Not me. I'd be willing to bet Seth and Chester Brown are but, as I was saying earlier in this series of Blog & Mails I think the consensus in Canada is that Seth and Chester are being groomed for Governor-General Awards or Orders of Canada and Dave is supposed to just count himself lucky that he hasn't been arrested (yet) for not being a feminist. And I still do, most days – count myself lucky, I mean.

"I was just told that a poem of mine that you read three years ago will be appearing in a magazine in New York City in the fall, so you definitely qualify as a poetry `insider'. Tell the neighbours, make them jealous. And one from your last batch will be appearing in the next HOMESTEAD REVIEW published by a college in Salinas, California."

I think we both just have to face the fact at this point that the odds are pretty good that Dave Sim and CEREBUS will ultimately prove to be little more than walk-on comic relief in THE LIFE & TIMES HINTERLAND WHO'S WHO OF THE CANADIAN POETRY LEGEND THAT IS DARRELL EPP (as seen on CBC Newsworld and The Passionate Eye CUE THE THEME SONG TO "THE LITTLEST HOBO"). There are less ignominious fates for a comic-book creator but, offhand, I can't think of any.

Tomorrow on the Yahoo News Group: Can someone explain what "The Littlest Hobo" is for our Canado-Challenged Brethren and Cisterns? Or file share the theme music and a photo of a German shepherd?

In stores now!

___________________________________________________

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 #288 (June 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.

_____________________________________________________

Sad but true. Darrell Epp got laid off!

"Dofasco got bought by a French company that's going to be tightening things up, cutting back big time. Long-term, all the steel manufacturing jobs are leaving Hamilton and they're never coming back. At the same time Arcelor was buying Dofasco, Arcelor was being bought by Mittal Steel, a company from India run by Lakshmi Mittal. He's the world's third richest man and this move gives him control of something like 90% of the world's steel. Lakshmi Mittal spent $65 million on his daughter's wedding. Yes, you read that right. It looks like I'll be getting a good job with CN Rail, now…"

Bob Corby and I talk about steel every time I'm in Columbus. He's an architect and he says it's become almost impossible to get steel and every time you do get it the price is through the roof. He also says most of the steel being bought and sold is scrap steel. What I don't get is why capitalism works with oil (the price goes through the roof and it suddenly becomes worth the investment to do things like extracting oil from the Alberta Tar Sands) but it doesn't seem to work with steel (the price goes through the roof and you should have, relatively speaking, a lot of Mom and Pop steel mills opening up. Why don't you? Why is it still just this little clique of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie-style "Engulf and Devour" Steel Corporations – "Our bathrooms are nicer than most people's homes" – engulfing and devouring each other? How expensive does steel have to get before it makes sense to start making NEW steel?

Anyway, Darrell shifts gears:

"It seems like the library can't make up its mind, or it WANTS to love comics but doesn't know HOW. They have a shelf full of graphic novels, some really good stuff, but the shelf is sequestered at the back of the young adult section, so if a librarian sees you going back there she'll look at you funny. The shelf might have [Joe Matt's] THE POOR BASTARD placed right next to SAILOR MOON…"

Now there's a hot combo to conjure with!

"…or a GARFIELD collection right next to MAUS. And every graphic novel has the word `TEEN' taped to the spine, including SAFE AREA GORADZE. Like teenagers love reading non-fiction books about Balkan politics. If only it were true!"

Yes, I think the Graphic Novel Revolution is once again running out of steam in mainstream environments like the Library. There's an inherent bigotry in libraries against anything that isn't a book. However, first music "got" them and then movies on videotape and DVDs "got" them. Since there are no forms of expression more degraded than those two, that basically means the library has to carry everything or appear to carry everything. We've all noticed the same thing at the library and in the mainstream bookstores. The really BIZARRE juxtapositions and the really BIZARRE selection of titles. If you consciously sat down to make the LEAST attractive and LEAST interesting graphic novel section imaginable at, say, Barnes & Noble you couldn't have done a better job than they have already. It looks not so much like a graphic novel section as it does a manifestation of deeply rooted Acute Pop Culture Psychosis. You feel (as at the library) as if you want to sit the buyer down with a nice cup of tea and some soothing music and a box of Kleenex and try to find out what colour the sky is in their world. A lot of comic book stores were worried about them but now most stores look at graphic novel sections in libraries and mainstream book stores as living, breathing advertisements for Why We Need Comic-Book Stores (i.e. just LOOK at what non-comic-book store environments do. I mean, just LOOK!). In a world where the last thing you want to have said about you is that you don't "get it" (particularly when a multi-national corporation has hundreds of millions of dollars at stake), these places are absolute poster children for "Don't Get It R US!" It's enough to make a comic-book person feel downright sophisticated.

Tomorrow on The Blog & Mail: Darrell Epp, The Poverty Era

___________________________________________________

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 #287 (June 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.

_____________________________________________________

A.P. Fuchs and his wife are pregnant with their second child (no, I already did that joke on Saturday):

"We'll find out within the next couple of weeks the actual due date but we're estimating it to be somewhere between late October to early November. This also means that we'll begin house-hunting sometime in May to allow room for the newest addition to the family."

Again, sincere congratulations.

"On the self-publishing front, I crossed a milestone in my career on September 29, 2006, when I released my independent superhero novel entitled AXIOM-MAN who was a character I created back in my high school drawing days and finally, after all these years, decided to actually do something with him other than fantasize heroic tales about him in my head. The reason the release was a milestone was because of the wonderful media attention – not to mention sales – that resulted due to the character being Winnipeg's own superhero. TV, Radio, Newspaper – very exciting as most self-published authors are usually swept under the rug because they're not "real" publishers. What I always found interesting about that argument was that, in the end, the reader doesn't care if you've been published by a "real" publisher or not. They just care about getting a good story.

"At the beginning of March, the first draft of the sequel was completed, coming in at about 119,000 words, which is nearly double the length of its predecessor. It's called AXIOM-MAN: DOORWAY OF DARKNESS and takes place right where the first one left off. This second book is planned to be released at the end of July along with a short novella called AXIOM MAN EPISODE #0: FIRST NIGHT OUT which chronicles, you guessed it, his first night out. The Axiom Man "episode" series is there for those stories I wish to tell that aren't large enough scale-wise to warrant a full 80,000 plus words to make it a "feature". I'm viewing them more like half-hour cartoon episodes a la BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES where, though there's a couple of plotlines going on, it's more light-hearted and simple compared to the depths of character and story I can get into with a full-length novel (for example, Book Two carries five plotlines).

"Which brings me to stating what an honour it will be for our two characters to stand side by side in 2008's WAR OF THE INDEPENDENTS, which I understand Cerebus will be participating in. I think the project will do well and the premise of the mini-series sounds interesting. We'll see. I trust Scott Lobdell, who is writing the project."

Well, this is the first I've heard of it. Now that Cerebus is dead he never tells me WHAT he's been up to lately. I'm kidding again. Yeah, I hope the project does well. I don't expect it to outsell CIVIL WAR or THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA but it would be nice if we could post some respectable numbers and I'm sure Scott Lobdell will be doing his level best to make it happen. I just hope it doesn't involve anyone's gorgeous wife or gay sidekick getting tortured and mutilated and then having their body parts grafted onto the police commissioner who then gets gang-raped. I mean, ho-hum, you know?

"I wanted to ask you about how you went about writing and drawing the CEREBUS storyline? That is, how you planned out the 25-or-so issues for a particular arc and what a day in the life of Dave Sim was like? It's one thing if a person was only the artist or writer on a series. Pretty straightforward in regards to their day-to-day tasks. But when you link a few creative tasks together, time management is critical. I love hearing about how other artists approach their craft – habits, routines, etc. – regardless of medium so, please, spill your guts as I'm all ears."

To badly mix a metaphor. That's a good way to get your ears full of guts. Oh, and speaking of ears, I think my left one is finally making incremental progress. I heard the fax machine "ping" -- all the way from downstairs -- for the first time since last December. We'll see if that keeps up or if I go back to "No One Expects…A FAX!" on every third or fourth trip up to the office. For now, it's back to the good old days:

PING!

Dave (automatic thought): I'll bet THAT's bad news.

I think it will be easier to see how I approached creating the Cerebus storylines when the CD Rom of the notebooks becomes available. In a nutshell, I'd just start out jotting down ideas either in the form of short phrases or little iconic drawings to figure out how much space I need for things, shorthand facial expressions, the general sense of what an individual page needed to convey the idea behind it, getting from point A to point B. Sometimes I'd do a more detailed version of the page in question but not very often. Whether it was true or not, I would usually feel that I was losing a lot of the creative "juice" in the sketch, a dynamism or spontaneity that I couldn't recapture on the finished page. But drawing is a pleasurable experience so if I didn't rein myself in I'd just start pouring the juice into the sketch, using different sized markers to ink it, pencilling it first. It was one of the reasons that I would try to write outside of the studio where all I had was the notebook and a ballpoint pen. It wasn't really dark enough to any real inking and it was too thin to fill in anything but the smallest solid blacks so I could only use it for iconic sketches – the IDEA of a face or figure, what order it comes in on the page, how big it is relative to the other faces and figures on the page, where the word balloons go, how many panels, what general shape. And I'd leave rough sketches half done and switch to pure writing if that's what was required. It was all in service to the rhythm of the dialogue and the layout and faces can come later. So I might only have two panels roughed in in a sketch and then suddenly I have blocks of dialogue with the panel numbers written overtop of them

5
WHAAAT!?

6
You heard me.


That kind of thing. I was working with a "base 6" most of the time so if I wrote 30 lines of dialogue in conversational pace then I'd count them up and know I had roughly five pages "in vitro". If I had roughed in page 4 before I did that, I would now have pages 1 through 9. Not time yet to start worrying about wrapping things up (page 16, which I used to call "coming around the horn") or getting to a natural cliff-hanger so I'd try to figure out a good full pager or something more condensed than "base 6" so people would think they were getting their money's worth. Or an interesting camera angle or an interesting narrative device or a clever use of lettering or dialect.


Condense, condense, condense is the key to good comics. You use every technique at your disposal to make them forget how short – because of the inherent nature of the medium -- the reading experience is. The most obvious one is LOTS OF PAGES – as in 500 PAGES or 1200 PAGES. If you read 500 pages you will forget that it is the world's shortest reading time for 500 pages outside of art books, photography books and children's books. Wannabe's hate to hear that because they have usually just found out how bleeping long it takes to do 20 pages and the idea of doing 500 pages causes their innards to contract. Just considering how much time away from video games its going to represent is enough to give them palpitations.


In terms of an average day, I don't think I ever had too many of those. I certainly haven't had very many since. The most important thing with writing and drawing comics is to treat it as a job. With a job the idea is to get the job done. Don't lose track of time, make every minute count, stay focused, work hard. The average grown-up works at least eight hours a day at a job where their work habits are monitored and they are expected to perform so they either train themselves to be productive or they train themselves to be alternately employed and unemployed and how to get by with little or no work. All you have to do is "import" the former work model into the comic-book world and resist falling into the latter work model and monitor yourself and take your job seriously and that's going to put you ten steps up on just about everyone else who is trying to figure out how little work they can get away with and still keep a roof over their head and food on the table.


Tomorrow: Darrell Epp Gets Laid Off!

IN STORES NOW!


___________________________________________________

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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Collected Letters 2 - $22 MAR073054

Dave Sim's blogandmail #286 (June 24th, 2007)

___________________________________________________

Sunday June 24 –

THE NATIONAL POST has been running a series of reader-written articles on "Faith: Lost and Found" about people documenting their own experiences with religious faith. It's a peculiar series in that one of the ground rules is that it can't advocate any particular religion or faith, just faith in a general sense. Of course the result is a lot of "Well, I thought I felt SOMETHING" and "it seems to me that even rocks can be God if you think about them the right way" kind of articles. Most of them (no big surprise) written by women. One of them asked for answers, so here's an hour-and-a-half out of my life that I'll never get back and which – if she's been living in Canada longer than two weeks -- I would imagine hit the old circular file before she had finished the first page.

TO THE EDITOR: Since Sheila Luck requested answers, I was wondering if you could forward this to her in some way? I'm afraid that I don't have e-mail. I don't imagine it qualifies for "Faith: Lost and Found" since it actually (HORRORS!) mentions Judaism, Christianity and Islam by name. If you want to run it as such, feel free. Thanks for running my letter on Canada Post a week or so ago.



30 May 07

Re: Can you will belief into your heart? Sheila Luck, 30 May

"I am an artist and it is only sometimes when painting that I feel totally sure of my place in the world, that I am doing what God made me for. I know that I am ignorant and that it is humility that opens my heart and eyes to the wisdom of others. I know that life can be over in an instant without any possibility of negotiating a different ending. Like the day my father's aorta ruptured.

"Notwithstanding the premise of this series, I haven't `lost' or `found' faith. I've examined in, but from the outside, like some fox happening upon a turtle. I have stared at it, and rolled it over, and poked at it. Curious: How does one get inside? Does the Holy Ghost appear one day and grab you by the shirt collar and convert you? Can you will belief into your heart? Do you earn it? Or pray for it? Or is it a gift?

"Send me your answers. I really want to know."

In my opinion, all you can get will be opinions. Anyone in this world who says that he or she can provide you with definitive answers is lying. The only being who could give you definitive answers is God. But, for what it's worth—writing as someone who holds Judaism, Christianity and Islam in equal regard and who believes that rabbis, priests and imams have no greater claim to definitive knowledge than do any other human beings—here are my own best opinions on your questions.

To use the frame of your own Aesop-like reference: you aren't the turtle. You're the fox. A fox can no more get "inside" the nature of being a turtle than a turtle can get "inside" the nature of being a fox. Accept that you are a fox and aspire to being the best fox that you can be. Know the difference between who you are and what and who others are.

"Does the Holy Ghost appear one day and grab you by the shirt collar and convert you?" In my opinion, no, since from my understanding (possibly misapprehended) that would constitute interference with free will. Unless, of course, you have been using your free will—either consciously or unconsciously or both—to earnestly and devoutly plead with God to send the Holy Ghost to take you by the shirt collar and grab you and convert you in which case that might be the agent and agency through which He would respond. But I think the response would be to your own pre-existent, on-going free will choice which you would have already made to "convert" to faith.

In my opinion, God acts through many different agents and agencies. To cite an exalted example from the Age of Prophets, Angel Gabriel who came to Prophet Muhammad, constricting him painfully and demanding, "Recite!" would come the closest to the scenario you envision and I would suppose that that was in response to Muhammad's own supremely earnest pursuit of a revelation from God.

My best guess as someone who believes—as most Muslims do—that the Age of Prophets ended in 632 AD with the death of Muhammad would be that God would find a less melodramatic way to respond, commensurate with your own level of interest. If you are consciously desirous of "conversion" but unconsciously resistant—loathe to abandon secular pleasures, vices and vanities, as an example—well, God is by definition omniscient so I would doubt that He would ignore your greater underlying reservations ("You'll have to pry my bottle of dry white wine from my cold, dead fingers") and take your cosmetic histrionics ("Please, God, give me faith!") at face value if the former outweighed the latter. My best guess would be that His attitude would be "Come back anytime you want to be serious about this."

The definition of Islam is "submission to the Will of God" and of Muslims as "Those Who Submit". In my own experience, all you have to do is recognize that and recognize that everything you think of as real is just a temporary illusion—"vibrating electrons flying in loose formation"—that your relationship with God is all that you actually possess, all that will survive your own physical demise and for you to acknowledge that in your own personal covenant with Him (reiterated through prayers on a daily—or five-times-daily—basis) and God will take care of the rest.

As an example, God, as an omniscient being, knows you in a way that your sons never will and God knows your sons in a way you never will: that what your sons know of you is purely cosmetic and what you know of your sons is purely cosmetic when compared to the actual depths (or, more to the point, Actual Depths) to which God knows every human being. Which leads to my opinions on the answers to the rest of your questions:

"Can you will belief into your heart?"

Well, in my opinion, no. I don't think faith in God is like a `New Age Self-Help" book or an "I Am Woman Hear Me Roar/Triumph of the Psychobabble Will" fad. In my experience you have to decide to use the free will He gave you to decide to submit to His will (as opposed to trying to understand His will or to have His will explained to you by someone who only has the same uninformed opinions about His will that you do: that is everyone) and show Him that you submit to His will by making Him pre-eminent in your life. If, as an example, you decide on an 8 pm prayer time and miss your prayer time four times in the first week because of a meeting at work or a dinner date with a friend or a glass of white wine or you decide to "bump" your 8 pm prayer every Tuesday night because of a favourite television show then I don't think it takes an omniscient being to see that you aren't really serious about faith and you are still enmeshed in and foolishly adhering to the world of "vibrating electrons flying in loose formation". All those electrons started as dust and all of them will ultimately return to dust, so adhering to them is inherently foolish.

Right?

"Do you earn it?" Well, yes, but not in a way that some earthly authority can appoint it to you like a job promotion or a blue ribbon or air miles such that you can decide that you are now entitled to Divine Revelation because you prayed for three weeks straight without missing a day and you've cut down to nine glasses of white wine a week. In my experience you nurture faith with prayer and through your making God uppermost in your life—superseding your love for your own sons to illustrate the perception change required—and God reveals your new life to you as you go along. You "earn" rewards that come unexpectedly because you aren't doing it to earn rewards. You're doing it because it's the only sensible choice in a world where everything you think is there is just a magician's illusion of "vibrating electrons flying in loose formation".

"Or pray for it?" In my experience, it's a bad idea to pray FOR anything because that presupposes that you know what you need which I don't think any of us do. Despite yours or my or anyone else's best and most sincere efforts we are completely clueless about what it is that we need. Submit yourself to the Will of God and allow Him, through (primarily) His Grace and (secondarily) your free will acceptance of the nature of reality (your relationship with Him is all that actually exists – everything else is just "vibrating electrons flying in loose formation") to show you what it is that you need by showing you who you are. Pray in an attitude of submission rather than in an attitude of a labour negotiator trying to strike the best deal you can with God or a child trying to "get around" a parent with transparent artifice (to an omniscient being, all artifice is transparent). There isn't anything of yours that God needs or wants. All that is in the heavens and the earth are His because he created them.

"Or is it a gift?" Yes. I can only speak from personal experience, but praying five times a day, fasting in Ramadan, observing a Sabbath alone, reading the Torah and the Gospels and the Koran, fasting four days out of every three weeks—my own best effort at submission to God's will—nurtured my own faith and now my life abounds, not in a single gift but in gifts (plural) without number and beyond my ability to put into words.

As I say, these aren't answers, but opinions formed from experience. My best advice for anyone is to turn to God and let Him give you the answers. I'm just a human being like you. I don't have any answers.

Dave Sim, Kitchener, Ontario
___________________________________________________

EBAY:

250133271738 Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges

$17.99


___________________________________________________

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #285 (June 23rd, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Before A.P. Fuchs checks in, this is a good chance to mention that a grand time was had by all at the First Annual Canadian Graphic Novelists Birthday Dinner (yes, we will be lobbying Parliament to make it an official holiday, possibly taking the place of the Two-Four Weekend holiday Monday) exactly one month and one week ago on May 16, Chester Brown and Rob Walton's mutual birthday with my own falling on the 17th. I stayed at the King Edward Hotel and while Chester was waiting in the lobby, one woman rushed up to another and gave her a big hug and said, "Happy Birthday!" Then the Toronto Star editor showed up and it turned out that it was also HIS birthday. I had phoned Siu Ta to ask her the name of the Greek restaurant she and John and Han and I had dinner at on the Danforth and the address if she could find it. It turned out to be 516 The Danforth. Get it? May 16? 516?

We were a table that was all guys – Chester, Rob, me, James Turner and Suley Fatah (of the DRAWING THE LINE benefit comic)—and one female, Suley's wife Julie Eng. The next table was all females and one guy and they were celebrating a birthday as well. Then there was another table celebrating a birthday.

It was all getting just a little too creepy around the edges.

The capper on the night came when Julie, who is a professional stage magician (magicianess? Sorceress? I'm trying to avoid calling her a witch) did some impromptu card tricks and sleight of hand. I always think if I'm that close, I'm going to be able to see how it's done. The capper on the capper came when she fanned out the cards and told me to pick one. Okay, so I pick one (look at it) I look at it. It's the two of hearts. (put it back in the deck, don't let her see where) I put it back in the deck and don't let her see where. Actually, I'm lying, I pretended to put it back in the deck and hung onto it, but everyone ratted me out – so much for masculine loyalties – so I put it back in the deck and didn't let her see where. So she sifts through the cards and turns one of them face up. The three of diamonds. (is that the card?) Uh, no that isn't the card. She sort of turns and looks at Suley and says "You have to give me better signals." Then (like she's had an afterthought) she's goes rooting through her purse (see?) and she pulls out the local weekly newspaper (see?) and she pages through it slowly (see?) until she finds another smaller newspaper inside and the headline on the little newspaper reads "Julie Eng fails to find DAVE SIM's TWO OF HEARTS on Chester Brown and Rob Walton's b'day!"



Now how are you going to top that? Hanh? You can't. You can't beat that with a stick.

I mention all this because, coincidentally, tonight (God willing) I'll be at the Extreme Magic show at Centre in the Square right here in Kitchener with Suley and Julie. I don't know if they have any tickets left at the box office, but if you're reading this in Kitchener you can always try to get in because the prices are pretty reasonable.

SINCERE APOLOGIES – THAT WAS LAST WEEK (THE 16TH BUT EVERYTHING GOT BUMPED A WEEK BECAUSE OF FOLLOWING CEREBUS WEEK

I got mine in the fourth row way, way on the outside. I figure from way over there, looking at them from the side, with the performers playing to the folks in the upper deck…

…I'll be SURE to see how it's done!

A.P. FUCHS WRITES:

"Dear Dave:

"How have you been? The last I wrote you was July, 2006, so quite sometime ago. Man, has it been that long? Guess so.

"Anyway

"I'm about 30 pages away from completing COLLECTED LETTERS 2004. I would have been done much sooner but had misplaced the book for several months and finally recovered it about a week ago. Very intriguing material all around. One thing that kept popping up in your letters was the question of when/if the mail would taper off and you'd finally have some actual retirement time. Aside from this letter taking up space in your mailbox, has your letter-answering load lightened since, say, May of 2004? I know it hasn't dropped off altogether since you now post at Dave Sim's BlogandMail (speaking of which, is that where I should find a reply to this letter, if you do reply? I must admit, I don't check the blog all that often, namely due to there not being enough hours in the day to read through everything.)"

The letter answering has lightened considerably and I think that's attributable to the Blog & Mail. It scares the cookie dough out of practically everybody to think that I might answer their letter here. Which is very peculiar since no one ever had that reaction to being published in Aardvark Comment (which I'm sure had an exponentially higher readership than the Blog & Mail even at the book's lowest circulation). There is just something about Being On Television that absolutely gives folks the heebie-jeebies and to most people, that's what the Internet is: television for Not Famous People. And because most of them have read Cerebus they think of me as a Famous People. So, it's like being on Letterman or something. Dave's going to embarrass me in front of the Whole World. And, like, the Whole World is Jeff, Margaret, Matt Dow, twelve retailers and the occasional ex-girlfriend who wants to make sure that I'm suffering without her. (Yes, I am. LOOK! LOOK! I'm suffering, I'm suffering! As the t-shirt says, "I'm so miserable without you it's almost like having you here!") (of course I have to believe that that's what the Whole World consists of or I'D start getting the heebie-jeebies). And, yes, this is the only place that I answer the mail now. I used to write and tell people they were going to be on the Blog and Mail and send them a print-out but, hey, I'm already working twelve hours a day (nineteen last Saturday), so who needs the aggravation? If I was smart I'd send them a print-out and tell them it was going to run "soon" and then not run it for three weeks so they start to get the Blog and Mail habit and soon need their Blog & Mail "fix" even after the item about them ran.

Naw, like you say: there's not enough hours in the day.

"Things have been going well over on my end. Just the other week my wife and I found out we're pregnant with our second child."

You're BOTH pregnant? With the SAME child? That's…why, that's…AMAZING! How does that work exactly? Do you carry it for four-and-a-half months each? And how do you manage the hand-off? I bet it's like the Quarterback Sneak in football, isn't it? You both stay hunched way over and then…

I'M KIDDING, I'M KIDDING! Congratulations to both of you. (See why no one wants me to print their letter on the Internet?)

Tomorrow: The Sunday Edition

Monday: A.P. Fuchs comes back for more punishment And I finally get a letter printed in THE NATIONAL POST!

IN STORES NOW!

___________________________________________________

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 #284 (June 22nd, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Here's a little bright light in the Pariah King Darkness that showed up late in March. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA (which has me humming James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James" all day whenever I read it even though I'm not sure if the line is "From StockRIDGE to Boston" or "StockBRIDGE to Boston"). Naturally, being the Pariah King of Comics I smelled a trap when they asked for the loan of High Society and Church & State Vol. 1. Usually in that case it's a set-up. I'm supposed to get all excited that someone wants to exhibit my artwork and then I find out that they just wanted copies of the books to flesh out an "Other Graphic Novels You Might Enjoy" part of the show while the actual artwork that's exhibited is the usual Fantagraphics suspects. So, I basically gave them the Comic Shop Locator number and suggested they find a store in their area who can order the books for them. Then intentionally forgot all about it.

Well, no, they did want to exhibit artwork and they actually wanted to exhibit a fair number of pieces. I gave Brian Coppola an exclusive on the story for his CEREBUS THE ARTVARK website which I hope he has run by now so you can click over there for all the details. God willing I hope to be there for the opening November 10. When I told Margaret at SPACE that there was a Cerebus Event coming up right in her home state of Massachusetts SHE WAS SINCERELY PUMPED! So pumped, I didn't have the heart to tell her that the party's at her house.

(I kid, I kid – Stockbridge is clear on the other side of the State so unless all you Yahoos are into driving the equivalent of the distance from Boston to NYC on the Massachusetts Turnpike it's still going to be a cerebusfangirl road trip)

It is extremely gratifying, given that Norman Rockwell was the Pariah King of Painters most of his adult life, looked down on and sneered at as a magazine illustrator by the likes of Jackson Pollock. Fortunately he had a few years there where people with a lick of common sense could see the difference and actually began to treat him with the respect he deserved all along and, of course, today the ranks of those who look down on Norman Rockwell are probably as thin (but no less vocal) as they've ever been.

Gives a Pariah King hope, it does.

Okay, it's Brian Coppola's exclusive so please go read about it over there and goose up his number of "hits" for this week.

<< Nothing up there yet, but in case you missed the post about this from April 25th - here's the url: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/message/118903 - Jeff >>

What else have we got here? Oh, Verne Andru's 420 Chapter 001. Verne who was one of the Phantacea crew on that short-lived publication gave me a call out a clear blue sky to ask me about how I started Cerebus since he was starting his own comic book. We talked around rather than to the point and I think he hung up a little dissatisfied with me – but he had said he would send me a copy of the first issue and he did.

I just got off the phone with him (he lives out in Vancouver) and told him I'd be doing a short review and that I had called to find out how the book was coming along. Good. He had tried to do it sequentially, as comic books are done, but he's also doing it as a movie. He has a finished script and the idea is that he would storyboard the movie and do a thirteen-part comic book from the storyboards at the same time. Of course movies don't tend to work that way…

(he told me when he was working at Nelvana that Frank and Ollie had come up from Disney to…I don't know…advise in some way? They had said that the policy at Disney was always to start with some insignificant scene from the middle of the film and to do that one first. They said the first scene on the screen in a Disney animated film was usually the last one finished. Which makes sense. If your characters are going on- and off-model and you don't have all the elements of the look of the production in place quite yet you want that buried in the middle of the film where people, already used to all of your characters, aren't going to notice if things are suddenly a little "off" because at that point they're immersed in the story and aren't really looking at it as a mixture of different kinds of creativity but as something that is Happening and Unfolding Before Their Eyes)

…so he's had to move off of the comic book and onto the storyboarding of the film full-time (he's up to issue 005 in the story-boarding end of things). Once the film is story-boarded then he can double back and start doing the comic again. Optimistically? He thinks he can get #2 out sometime this fall.

It's an interesting book as you would imagine it would be in that it's a storyboard AND a comic book evolving simultaneously. It's maybe a little too far over into the tradition of "Sex, Drugs and Rock `n' Roll" for today's comic-book audience (even Last Gasp isn't setting any box office records these days and they wrote the book on "Sex, Drugs and Rock `n' Roll") with not enough "eye candy" to sustain it on a comic-store shelf. It could just be me since Sex, Drugs and Rock `n' Roll as theme leave me pretty cold these days. Not as cold as MY GOD THEY'VE RAPED AND MUTILATED AND DECAPITATED MY GORGEOUS WIFE AND GAY SIDEKICK AND GRAFTED THE BODY PARTS ONTO COMMISSIONER GORDON! But, you know, pretty cold.

It also has a movie kind of pace to it which has a tendency to just strike the comic-book receptors as "way too slow". Is that insurmountable? I don't know. I could THEORIZE a film that moved at a comic-book pace or a comic book that moved at a movie pace but I'm not sure if you would even know if you had done it properly (if you did it) depending on your frames of reference. It would be especially hard to picture a financial success in either case. The best you could hope for is a critical success that "made a few dollars". A movie-paced comic book isn't going to outsell CIVIL WAR and a comic-book paced movie isn't going to outsell SPIDER-MAN (the movie version, I mean, which is movie paced). Of course I'm also the guy who once explained in meticulous detail why the comic-book field could never attract a writer to the writing side of comic books who was on the same plateau as Neal Adams was on the drawing side of comic books. And, a few years later, Alan Moore came along and blew that theory rather definitively out of the water.

It's interesting watching someone labouring behind the page on "HOW do I do this?" Verne obviously knows movies and he knows movie pacing and he knows comic books and he knows comic-book pacing and he's obviously picked the former over the latter. There are interesting moments when the word balloons fall in the wrong order. Everyone is posed in the panel (that is, on the "screen") as they would be in movie storytelling, a natural segue of one shot to another but, as a comic book, it leaves someone standing on the wrong side of the person they're talking to. That leaves the unsolvable problem of "duelling word balloon tails" that look like crossed swords, or running the conversation out of sequence.

In comics, the writer calls the shots (literally in most cases) by who speaks first and to whom. Unless you're working the Marvel method where the fact of who is on the left and who is on the right is going to dictate who speaks first and the writer has to work within those confines depending on where the penciller has put the characters relative to each other (and how much of the panel is left over for words). There is no comparable boundary in film-making.

Most of the first chapter is about Hal, he's our point of identification, so he dominates most of the panels as would the star of the movie. But that means we're mostly looking at him "square on", head and shoulders and since he's just a fat guy who drinks a lot and smokes a lot of pot it raises the question: WHY are we looking at this guy this much (and) WHY isn't he doing anything interesting? Well, that's what ACTING is and that's usually what storyboards not only don't supply but aren't supposed to supply. In comics you can see more clearly in the overall page when you turn to it that there are four or five large panels with this big fat guy doing nothing. The impression – that the "camera" is moving around to accommodate him and to indicate his dominance in the context – is far less subtle in six panels on a page than it is in six seconds in a film. Watch a movie on fast forward and you'll see the same effect – the camera favouring the star -- but with sound, acting, pacing and camera movement you don't notice it as readily.

The comic book is definitely taking off slowly which Verne is aware of. I would suspect as he gets more issues out the same thing is going to happen that happens with anything else that has the air of a new form about it: you will gradually forget the form and just look at the substance, you'll become immersed in the story. Coincidentally enough, the first chapter is called "I Can't Wait That Long".

While all you lucky people ARE waiting you can check out black and white "webisodes" – detailed animation layouts – at www.oKee.com and www.CaptainCannabis.com and see what the other half of the project is like.

Coincidentally, Verne told me on the phone that he had been in Gananoque visiting Gene Day September 22, 1982, the day before Gene died,. He said Gene had seemed really down about comic books, recommending that if Verne had any other options he should look into anything besides comic books as a way to make a living. I explained to Verne about Gene having been thrown off of MASTER OF KUNG-FU shortly before and how that pretty much tore his guts out (which Verne had not been aware of). I say this is coincidental because in a few days I'll be presenting David Day with Gene's posthumous JOE SHUSTER HALL OF FAME AWARD. And I finally come to 420 in the pile of mail for this week's Blog & Mail.

I'll be checking in every time Verne sends me another issue and letting you all know how he's coming along.

Tomorrow: A.P. Fuchs checks in!

IN STORES NOW!


___________________________________________________

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.