Dave Sim's blogandmail #291 (June 29th, 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.

_____________________________________________________

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.