Dave Sim's blogandmail #289 (June 27th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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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!

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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