Dave Sim's blogandmail #294 (July 2nd, 2007)

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Monday July 2 –

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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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DAVE SIM & MARVEL COMICS – WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Yes, nothing really happening there at this point. I made my observation in the last batch of Blog & Mails that they have another BILLION DOLLAR movie in the cineplexes so it seemed a little bizarre to be haggling my way up from this many hundreds of dollars to that many hundreds of dollars for ONE cover. But, that does bring up some interesting points that I'd like to discuss over the next couple of days.

To start with, of course, the BILLION DOLLARS isn't just lying around the Marvel offices in New York. Most of it is in Hollywood and staying in Hollywood. At least with the SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN franchises. Marvel's senior management (way up high over Joe Quesada's head Senior Management) has gotten pretty clever. They had an item in the financial pages of the National Post explaining how they are putting up characters and blocks of characters as collateral to finance the movies they're developing right now. The banks and financial institutions are giving them Big Budget Movie amounts of money with the option to foreclose on "fill in the blank" characters if the movie(s) tank(s). Again, not SPIDER-MAN and the X-MEN but I would suspect with the HULK that is the case. The Ang Lee film made a few million bucks – not enough to warrant a franchise but maybe enough to warrant a sequel which is being worked on so there is dollar value to the intellectual property. "How much" is an interesting question for whatever banking consortium is a) involved and b) potentially "on the hook" if the sequel totally bombs such that they would end up foreclosing on a dead or moribund property which banking consortiums are not much inclined towards. Which is where, from what I understand, the "blocks of characters" come in. They would get a VDH (Virtually Dead Hulk) but they would also get…and that's where it gets interesting again…other intellectual properties. I get the giggles whenever I picture a consortium of bankers and big money men sitting in a glass and steel 128th floor office at a big conference table going

"Hmmm. `The Vision' and the… `Scarlet Witch'. Tell me some more about these two."

"Uhhh. Well, see, The Vision is an android."

"An ANDROID!"

"Yep."

"Fascinating. What's an android?"

And it's not a joke. Or it's not a CONSCIOUS joke anyway. It's a joke in the sense that buddy's wearing a three-piece suit that probably cost more than four months' rent on your apartment and he's really having to understand this stuff because he's got a big stack of poker chips --say a thousand of them and each one worth $100,000 -- that he's going to hand over to someone he hardly knows based on what that guy can tell him about these characters running around in their long underwear.

You couldn't make that up.

UPDATE 25 JUNE – A good example of how days get eaten up around here This should have been the first "posting" for this week but got knocked out of that slot with the "overnight cable traffic" and then Recker had some trouble with their fax machine which took a few minutes to straighten out. But this was definitely supposed to be the lead item:

SINCERE apologies to MOUSE GUARD's David Peterson for my misconstruing his being up to his eyeballs with a hit comic for being one of the Legion of Anti-Daves who just can't bring themselves to cop to it. He made a point of coming up at Torontocon to tell me that he is definitely interested in doing a jam cover for FOLLOWING CEREBUS but that he just hadn't had time to get back to me. Meanwhile I'm standing there smiling with a combination of relief and apprehension because I'm picturing the Blog & Mail entry that's in the hopper for Tuesday June 19. I actually tried to get Craig Miller to do Advance Damage Control for me but he misunderstood what I was asking about and basically just called more attention to the June 19 piece (it was one of Craig's 24/7 weeks with Jennifer where, as he says, he is able to do anything as long as it doesn't take longer than 15 seconds because that's how long a stretch there is between Pressing Needs of a Three-Year-Old who is currently breaking all North American records for sleeplessness). He basically wrote all of the fill-in blog entries in the hour or so that she would sleep on any given night. He did a great job. As Jeff Tundis says, he's a natural when it comes to blogging so I think I'm going to get him to fill in anytime there's a new issue of FC coming out. I basically decided that I deserved to be "called out" on my mis-characterization of David's radio silence. In my own defence, I'll say that it's also an unhappy net effect of feminism that I have to decide these things: I have to be realistic enough to know that there are people who shun me because of my anti-feminist views even while I have to avoid letting that swerve into areas of paranoia.

I'll ALSO say in my own defence that, even when I thought I had run afoul of David Peterson's political beliefs I never stopped saying good things about MOUSE GUARD, most recently the day before the Toronto show when Peter Birkemoe at The Beguiling saw me thumbing through the hardcover and mentioned that he thought the lettering was a drawback to the book, particularly the font size of the ornate script that David was using in some of the captions. As always, I tried to look at it through someone else's eyes.

Was that a fair criticism? – No, no I didn't think so. Even speaking as (ahem) a onetime Harvey Award winner for Lettering I thought the best thing about the font and the size-of-font was that it compelled you to look at the page more closely to make sure of what you were reading. As a result you get a far greater appreciation for the detail and complexity of the art style that David is using because you can't "pull back" fast enough between captions to a comfortable comic-book reading distance. I used the same trick on occasion in Cerebus to call attention to Gerhard's line-work. Not on a regular basis but when I would have a dialogue balloon or thought balloon fade out to tiny, tiny lettering, I was making use of the same effect. The reader's eye which has penetrated deeper into the page than the reader is accustomed to, comes off the balloon and hits Gerhard's line-work and realizes "Holy S__T! Look at all the TEENY TINY lines".

So, tentatively, I have scheduled the jam cover for FOLLOWING CEREBUS 12 (hopefully by the end of the year or early next year) and, again, SINCERE apologies to David Peterson.

Tomorrow: More Good News from Paradise Toronto Comicon
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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.