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.

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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!


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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:

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

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

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Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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