Dave Sim's blogandmail #354 (August 31st, 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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Rick Veitch has got a new short story collection out, called SHINY BEASTS that he was nice enough to send to me The credit line on the cover reads "Rick Veitch with Alan Moore and S. R. Bissette". That's pretty gutsy, I thought. Kind of like meeting John Lennon at the door and saying, "Oh, by the way. Did I mention I invited Paul McCartney, as well?" Will this patch things up between Alan and Steve? Well, that's up to Alan, so I guess all I can say is, I sure hope so – and repeat that Steve's and my discussions of individual creator responsibilities for the business aspects of their own work was the reason that Steve cited Alan's choices as being somewhat wanting in a long-ago and now completely forgotten (except, evidently, by Alan) COMICS JOURNAL interview. Can someone point out to Alan that a) Steve doesn't listen to me about anything anymore and b) it makes a lot more sense for Alan to not have any contact with me as a matter of principle than it does for Alan not to have any contact with Steve as a matter of principle? Okay, Rick. We both tried. It's in the court of Comics' Most Charming Necromancer now.

Anyway:

With the exception of one HEAVY METAL story, these are all stories that Rick had published in Archie Goodwin's EPIC MAGAZINE. In fact, Rick's participation pre-dates Archie's, Rick got in under the Rick Marschall administration. Who even remembers that Rick Marschall was the first editor on EPIC? A handful of old people like me and Rick would be my guess.

If Rick was getting paid an hourly rate for the time that he's obviously putting in at the computer "re-mastering" these stories (you'll remember he did the same thing with his ABRAXAS AND THE EARTHMAN serial from EPIC that I reviewed favourably earlier in the year) he'd be a very wealthy Veitchmonster by now. It must be very gratifying for him. Did anyone else have worse luck with the reproduction of his work in EPIC? If they didn't run pages out of order, they ran them upside down (!) or added a blue shade to the black-and-white part of a story whose entire point is that part of it is in colour and part of it is in black-and-white. That would certainly have me making "Curly" Howard noises anytime I opened up an issue to see how my story came out. Particularly if you're a "thinking man's" cartoonist.

And make no mistake that Rick is a "thinking man's" cartoonist and always has been. If he learned his short-story storytelling skills at the knee of Joe Kubert and Robert Kanaigher

(little known fact: from 1959 on they shared a single right knee – Joe got it Monday, Wednesday and Friday) (that's a joke) (I keep forgetting this is the new entirely humourless funnybook business)

– and he freely admits that he did – and hewed pretty close to the mainstream companies in doing so, he was always looking for greater depths to what he was saying, looking to produce work that would have an impact on the thinking of others: and not just his peers, but future generations of cartoonists.

[We were really the first generation of comic-book cartoonists to have a sense that there might even BE future generations of comic-book cartoonists. Jack Kirby's generation couldn't allow themselves that luxury. Not consciously. Their entire history with the medium was one of catch-as-catch-can – fly-by-night publishers and fads that came and went. Slippery stone to slippery stone in the river with the unmistakable sense that as soon as your foot left a stone it sunk out of sight and there was never more than one or two stones visible up ahead of you. Joe Shuster, who co-created Superman, was a New York messenger. That didn't exactly point in the direction of Funnybook Immortality. Even the newspaper strip cartoonists who dominated the personal Mount Olympus of Kirby's generation – the Raymond school, the Foster school and the Caniff school – got quite savagely kicked to the side by television when Kirby was in his prime. Comics won't even be here in five years, everyone had been saying since 1938. It was easy to see where they got that from.

But to a kid of mine and Rick's generation, the steps from Red Raven to Captain America to the Newsboy Legion, to pioneering romance comics to monster stories at Atlas to the Challengers of the Unknown to the F.F. and single-handedly creating most of the Marvel Universe just looked like a dazzling series of career moves where everything Simon and Kirby touched turned to gold and job opportunities rained down upon them like Autumn leaves. Once we had conventions and fanzines that got slicker and slicker and comic-book stores, the question was no longer if comic books were going to be around in five years. Sure they were. Comic books will be around in a hundred years. The question was one of: WHOSE comic books will people be reading in a hundred years? Mine? Or someone else's? In a lot of ways it created even more pressure than thinking that comic books would vanish in five years. For comic books to carry on into the future but MY comic books to vanish! Unthinkable. We had to make our mark and keep making our mark.]

So, there was no such thing as "just a gig" for someone like Rick Veitch. No telling where the iron was hottest – the field was getting wider and more diffuse all the time – but there was no question that you needed to strike the iron, strike it as many times and in as many ways as you could. "Solar Plexus" which is one of the stories contained herein was designed around airbrush effects. Don't laugh. Airbrush artwork was a huge part of the commercial art field in those distant pre-Photoshop days and the surface of its potential had barely been skimmed in comics. We had one brilliant practitioner in Rich Corben (who is actually one of the most brilliant airbush artists of all time in any environment, period – and that was part of the problem. If you couldn't beat Rich Corben -- and no one in comics could come close -- the airbrush end of comics ended up being a one-man nation, Corbenland) and a handful of other guys who oscillated in and out of what was left of underground comics and designing record covers. As Rick writes

I did the splash page, with Sun Tap One floating in orbit near the sun, and brought it in to show [Rick] Marschall along with the script. When I pulled the board out of my portfolio, Rick just about did handstands. He immediately showed it to Stan [Lee] who was sufficiently taken [with the piece] to request that I leave the board in his office for a few days.

And that was the only way that you knew how, exactly, you might be doing. The editor just about does handstands and Stan Lee wants to have the piece in his office for a few days. This could be it. This could be where the iron was hottest and you might just be striking it at the exact right moment with the exactly right amount of force. It might be just as easy as that: developing airbrush variations on comic-book visual tropes (the Kirby Krackle as Rick calls it) and building from there.


When I next spoke with Rick, he said Stan loved the script but…he wanted stories that were more character-driven. It was suggested I add a guy emotionally linked to the sun from an early age. Happy to land the job, I agreed.

It's not a step down, it's a step…sideways. Yes, that's it. Remember the editor practically did handstands and Stan Lee wanted to have the piece in his office for a few days. This still COULD be it.

When I delivered the finished story a few months later, it was to Archie Goodwin who had replaced Rick Marschall. EPIC was re-evaluating everything in its pipeline and "Solar Plexus" had to stand muster before the new editor. Archie read the story and said he really liked parts of it, but…he wished I'd left out the "guy linked to the sun" bit. When I told him it came from Stan, he gave me one of his patented sighs and went on to accept the story as is.

There's a great lesson there in how you have to deal with the comic-book field on its own terms in the upper reaches of Marvel and DC. If it's the mid-80s and Stan Lee makes a suggestion, you use it even if it might not be in the best interests of your story. It's all perception so as eager as you are to see yourself as having made the Big Breakthrough (the editor practically did handstands and Stan Lee wanted to keep it in his office for a few days!) when the ground shifts out from under that, you have to follow the perception and realize that you have to compromise on your original intention and try something else. Had Rick the option not to use Stan Lee's suggestion, had he been able to do the story as originally conceived and had Archie Goodwin had the option to tweak it with an idea or two, what are the odds that "Solar Plexus" might have actually been the Big Breakthrough? See, there's no way of knowing because there's no control group. Rick always had faith that the Breakthrough would come in cooperation with the companies and what they wanted changed or added to your work was just part of the process.. I was always convinced that a real Breakthrough wasn't possible unless you had complete control of the creative decision-making. Rick's is still the majority viewpoint by a wide margin. Arguably Image's multi-million dollar sales in 1993 occurred on the borderline between my viewpoint and Rick's.

Tomorrow: Rick's reaction today in looking back at "Solar Plexus"


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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 #353 (August 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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14 August 07 -

Dear Kit Pasold:

Thanks for your fax yesterday. As you can see from the attached, a) I at least got some mileage for an upcoming Blog & Mail posting – which I happen to be writing at the moment -- out of it (and hopefully helped you to establish some early "buzz" as well) and b) I'm afraid I'm still more than a bit wary. If it's basically a video version of WIZARD magazine, I'm definitely not interested. I think I would actually have to see what you mean by a "stylized documentary" – that is, I would have to actually see an episode or at least see and hear what the non-interview parts are going to be like before I could agree to participate.

If you have any footage that you could show me at TCAF, I'll be glad to have a look at it and if it's definitely good (in my opinion) I'll be happy to give you some interview time at the show. If it isn't definitely good (again, in my opinion), I'll have to think about it… or if it is borderline bad or it's absolutely terrible (again, in my opinion) then you'll just have to do without me.

I come down to Toronto reasonably often and I could meet you at The Beguiling or maybe at your studios to look at footage if and when you have something to show me if nothing is going to be ready at TCAF.

So, it's not a definite no and it's not a definite yes and it's not even a definite maybe. But, I'm afraid that's the best I can do with what I have to go on.

Best,

So, I get that all typed out and print out the Blog & Mail references to INK, throw them in the fax machine. And the line's busy. Yep, this is television all right.

Okay, onward and upward.

Hey! Remember Mike Kitchen of SPUD & HARRY? Did you know he has a brother who is also a self-publishing cartoonist? It's true! Blair Kitchen. I had a nice chat with both of them at the Paradise Toronto Comicon and Blair was nice enough to give me the first two issues of his comic book THE POSSUM. As he writes on the inside front cover of issue 1:

I was in grade ten and a friend and I were killing time in English class, inventing the lamest super-hero ever. He had no super-strength, he couldn't fly, he didn't have super speed or heat vision…His special power was that he had no vital signs. Bad guys could beat the heck out of him, until they were positive he was dead. They would check his pulse to make sure, and then when their backs were turned, he'd attack them from behind, and the beatings would begin all over again.

After working for other people and drawing the way other people tell you to draw, doing something your way, and for yourself feels so good. No one can tell me to redo a hand, or say that Stuart [Spankly, the Possum's alter-ego]'s eyes are off-model. I am the one who calls revisions, and I am the one who gives the final approval. I'll take all the credit, as well as all the blame.

He's got a great cartooning style that reminds me a lot of Sergio Aragones – and you really can't get much better than that as far as easy-reading cartoon styles go -- and considering that, as he says, this is really the lamest super-hero ever (playing possum, get it?) he's really got that Chester Gould forward momentum thing nailed. And what's more the first issue is 72 pages long. You read that right, fanboy: 72 honking pages for five bucks U.S. Lots of good physical comedy and something I don't think anyone else has come up with before – the Possum's alter-ego, Stuart Spankly, is an aspiring comics artist, so in addition to all the regulation super-hero parody stuff, you've got lots of great parodies of the life of the aspiring cartoonist at comic conventions and in comic book stores. And there's a t-shirt available! Be the first kid on your block. The second issue's story is only 24 pages but it has an even more hectic pace than the first one as the Possum takes on a marauding gang of midget Mexican wrestlers in their souped-up Volkswagon bug. EL OPOSUM Y LOS 7 DEADLY DWARFS! as it says on the cover. Depraved, politically incorrect, action-filled humour the way you like it. Click on www.possumpress.com and check it out.


This title is a good example, to me, of something that should have nice, long shelf life in the comic-book stores, in the same way that ZAP Comics was a perennial seller in the head shops. Issue 2 is continued, but issue 1 is self-contained. Is there any sensible way to make that a separate category in the stores? I think there has to be a lot of Wednesdays when nothing comes in that's to a particular customer's taste or that he has checked off for his pull file when it might be worth having a rack of self-contained comics to browse through. Like, he's not looking for a graphic novel and he's not looking for another regular title to add to the regular titles he's already got, but he's come all this way and he doesn't really want to leave empty-handed. For the sake of $5 US or $5.50 Canadian he gets a good funny 72-page comic to read when he gets home. Likewise the customer who isn't really a comics fan per se.

Of course that's a problem that would have to be tackled at both ends of the equation. On the self-publisher side, one of the problems with shelf life that they usually aren't aware of is that the average traditional comic book doesn't "wear" well. That was one of the reasons that I asked Peter and Chris at the Beguiling about that with my secret project. Pick out a few formats that "wear" well in the long term (because the Beguiling is a Fantagraphics/Drawn & Quarterly store a lot of their stock that is still sitting out at cover price can be there for literally years at a time – which is, ideally, what Blair Kitchen is looking for: someone who will display THE POSSUM for years on end). The formats they picked sure didn't include a CEREBUS back issue, let's put it that way. Individual CEREBUS comics are about the worst in terms of shelf life. If your comic book looks like it can still be in mint after it's been picked up and thumbed through by a few dozen people over the course of a year or two, your more apt to find a retailer willing to keep your book in stock at all times. And it really is a buyer's market. The wannabe self-publishers need the retailers a lot more than the retailers need self-publishers.

There's another aspect to that that I'll address when I get to the Steve Peters letter and SPARKY IN LOVE comp somewhere up ahead, but for the time being, it is definitely worth thinking about as a starting self-publisher if you're hand-selling your title to specific stores.

Tomorrow and Saturday: Whence Commeth the Veitchmonster?


___________________________________________________

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 #352 (August 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.

_____________________________________________________

Still can’t make up my mind if I’m going to do this INK thing. I can never decide if these things are good for comic books, so I’m obligated to participate, bad for comic books so I should stay away from them or neutral for comic books, so don’t worry about it. Did the CRUMB film do any good? Did AMERICAN SPLENDOR? Not for Robert Crumb and Harvey. I assume it did some good for them. But for comic books in general. Or is it just this freak show gig. Look at this WEIRD GUY AND HIS FAMILY that we found and followed around with a camera watching him be weird! Look at this other WEIRD GUY AND HIS FAMILY and the LESS WEIRD guy we got to play him and the animated character we turned him into! If you believe movies are capable of content, I guess you can see that as content.

But, most people do. See movies as being and having content, I mean, and their estimation of a person goes way up if he or she has been the subject of a documentary of any kind. In a world that actually takes Al Gore’s AN INCONTINENT TRUTH seriously there is a distinct possibility that the Independent Film Channel is where you want to be. Hmm.

While I’m making up my mind, here’s a funny one, dated 05/28/2007 and addressed to me in “Kitchner” and scrawled in ink by Robert H. of Aberdeen, WA on “Storm Surf Rock Band” notepad stationery:

Hi. I have a concept script you might be interested in. If so, please mail me info. Thank you. It’s a razzo.

I have to confess I don’t even know what a “razzo” is. Okay, this is the cue for an entire generation of post-adolescent rock band enthusiasts to flood my mailbox with DUDE! THE STORM SURFERS ARE THE ULTIMATE! IF ROBERT H. SAYS HIS CONCEPT SCRIPT IS A RAZZO U DEF9TLY NEED 2 DO IT!

Pass.

What else have we got here. Oh, a note from Mimi Cruz. I called Night Flight on their 20th Anniversary and talked to her and Alan. She said that James Vance had showed up for the party and they had the new printing of his KINGS IN DISGUISE book in. She volunteered to send me one and I asked her to get Mr. Vance to sign it for me and she did. And he did.

To Dave with awe and amazement at your accomplishment.

Kitchen Sink originally published the series and now W.W. Norton, the same outfit that has the rights to the Will Eisner Library (his graphic novels) has published this new edition, sporting an introduction by Alan Moore, so Vance definitely has friends in the right places. KINGS IN DISGUISE has its origins in a play that he wrote in 1979

The result was a bizarre pastiche of Depression-era leftist melodrama called ON THE ROPES. Set in 1937, it was crammed with characters drawn from icons of that period: WPA artists and performers, labor agitators, messianic Communists, sociopathic strikebreakers, and the inevitable tough-but-tender-hearted female journalist…It worked. Over the next year, the play was revived and toured so often in regional and college theatres that I grew good and sick of it.

KINGS IN DISGUISE explores the origins of a favourite character of his from the play. It’s very interesting to watch a playwright write a comic book. The start is a little shaky and it has its weak moments where he tends to overload each panel with dialogue, still thinking with his stage mind that as long as the characters haven’t significantly changed their positions “on stage” they can just keep talking and not affect the pacing. Dan Burr with his background in underground comix (Death Rattle, Grateful Dead Comix, etc) tends to work with him in much the way that, say, Gary Dumm works with Harvey Pekar. Most of the job is to make it look as if the volume of dialogue is intentional (which it is) while finding a way to balance it with the graphic elements. If you haven’t actually had the experience you can’t really appreciate how difficult it is to achieve that balance and to maintain forward momentum in the narrative which Burr manages VERY effectively.

A couple of things stood out for me: it’s very hard to tell if Vance is actually a leftist and I wondered throughout, having read his introduction, if he was signalling something to the reader with the fact that he was “good and sick of” the original play. If you are documenting the hobo lifestyle of the 1930s -- the contention between the haves and the have nots where a good chunk of the North American population suddenly found themselves slipping from the former category into the latter category – it’s very difficult not to get boxed into the category of polemicist and flag-waver even if all you are trying to do is to document the human condition and including in their ranks the inevitable polemicists and flag-wavers. This was all Herbert Hoover’s fault and the author is really commenting on the evils of capitalism and the (Nixon/Reagan/Bush Sr./Bush Jr.) White House. I’m from very far over on the right, but as a writer I can certainly see that the bottom dropping out of the free market and the effect that had on the average person is great fodder for a human drama. If nothing else, the debates about communism vs. capitalism around hobo campfires is inherently interesting subject matter that would practically write itself. How you keep that from reading like an irate and incoherent screed such as that typical of your average self-pitying, self-righteous college student (of any generation) would be the challenge. The fact that there are sympathetic and (greater surprise) heroic Christian characters in the narrative suggests to me that Vance takes a much wider view than does the cover copy promoting his book:

When his father suddenly disappears and his brother gets arrested, Freddie finds himself homeless and adrift, trying to survive the Detroit labour riots and the furor of violent, anti-Communist mobs.

Well, yes, there is that to it. But, as I say, that isn’t ALL there is to it. Still W.W. Norton is a mainstream book publisher and a quick look around any mainstream bookstore will tell you that you’re going to move more “product” by skewing your cover copy hard left than you are through a more balanced presentation (or, God forbid, skewing your cover copy to the right). Still I wonder if Vance himself looks at it that way. Having struggled to achieve balance in his narrative, his own publisher is dressing him up in the garb of hammer and sickle victimology and all but promising a good “Dearborn bashing” for those who long for the good old days of Labour Good, Management Evil absolutism.

The other interesting thing was the pedophile/homosexual subtext, the number of hobos preying on young boys. There are female characters in the book, but, to me, a clear sign that Vance isn’t a leftist polemicist is that they don’t dominate the proceedings and they aren’t inherently good (“the inevitable tough-but-tender-hearted female journalist” he sneers at in the introduction, recalling his original play). It was mostly men riding the rails and, like convicts, with an absence of access to female flesh, there is a substitution of young male flesh. Any port in a storm. It’s a subtext in the book, but a persuasive argument could be made that it is also a core theme and that this might well be Vance’s largest point. Where lawlessness holds sway and there are no women, young male flesh becomes currency. Not exactly what you would call an attribute you’re going to see on The Top Ten Leftist Hit List of Literary Themes.

Bring on Henry Ford! Bring on the police! Bring on the strikebreakers! This is starting to make us look bad! Major, major bonus points to James Vance for moving that particular chess piece to the center of the board. Okay, NOW let’s talk about the Depression, he seems to say.

In fact the only serious criticism I would have of KINGS IN DISGUISE is that Vance plays more than a little coy with the relationship between Freddie and Sam. They’re inseparable through most of the book but there isn’t a conversation or a gesture or a single scene which would lead you to believe that they were doing the horizontal mamba off-panel. Which colours the story a specific way – they’re just two regular guys, one older, one younger, both looking out for each other even though the older one is desperately ill and, as a result, not very useful for the protection that the older hobo/younger hobo configuration is indicated in the subtext as providing. So Freddie becomes noble in sticking by Sam. Sam becomes noble in not taking sexual advantage of Freddie. There is some good in the world. They could be played by Jimmy Stewart and a young Mickey Rooney in an MGM musical version.

And then very late in the proceedings (page 182 of 184 – which is about as late in the proceedings as you could hope to get) (yes, that is a SPOILER WARNING) having returned to Sam’s home (or, rather, “home”) to the good woman he had left behind when he hit the road, Sam’s dying of pneumonia and the good woman, Elizabeth, and Freddie have a chat and she says, “I don’t care what you’ve been to each other – he came back to me.”

I think she’d told me that for Sam’s sake, she would accept me. All I had to do was maintain the lie that everything would be fine. Many lies ago I might have been able to.

In the silent hours that followed, I tried to make my mind a blank, to feel nothing – but the chaos in my head made that impossible. By nightfall, the walls of that house were closing in on me.

He writes a postcard and leaves it with the unconscious Sam.

Dear Sam,

I guess it’s time I lit out for the territory. Ha ha. Good luck to you and Elizabeth.

Your pal,

Freddie

And then, in the next panel, as Sam stirs and coughs in his sleep, Freddie leans over and kisses him on the cheek.

It doesn’t, to me, have the necessary quality of a revelation to it so much as it tries to have its cake and eat it, too. Freddie has no response to Elizabeth’s “I don’t care what you’ve been to each other – he came back to me.” Call me old-fashioned, but if someone implied something like that between Jimmy Stewart and Mickey Rooney, I don’t think Judge Hardy’s boy would have taken it lying down. “Say, sister – what do you mean by a crack like that? ‘What we’ve been to each other’?”

Conversely, if that IS what was going on throughout the story – completely off-panel and with so few hints that you’d have to be a complete and utter homophile to find them – then the postcard is just a little too casual and off-handed considering what they had Been To Each Other (as opposed to what they had been to each other). And the kiss on the cheek. Well, it wouldn’t matter if mountain lions had torn out Jimmy Stewart’s guts and he had only seconds to live – it would never occur to Mickey Rooney to kiss him on the cheek. “Heck no. That’s sissy stuff.” I might be a member of the last generation to think that way (Vance is three years younger than I am) but, trust me, its an insurmountable barrier.

It’s particularly unfortunate to strike just so anachronistic a note in a book that takes such pains elsewhere to really make you believe that this is all taking place in the 1930s and a book that really gets the tone and ambience of a more innocent time and innocent way of life on pretty much every page and in pretty much every panel. But it certainly doesn’t undermine (not completely anyway) Alan’s assertion that “This is simply one of the most moving and compelling human stories to emerge out of the graphic story medium thus far.” For 181 of the 184 pages I go along with Alan on that one 100%.

Thanks to Mimi for sending it along and particularly thanks to Jack Vance for signing it for me. Definitely a great permanent addition to the Cerebus Archive

Tomorrow: Reply to Kit P. at INK


___________________________________________________

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 #351 (August 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.

_____________________________________________________


Okay, so here we have INK. I might as well run the whole press release AND letter, eh? I sometimes forget that I'm supposed to be a real Jimmy Olsen about these things now that I R. a Blogger. This is hot breaking news, I'm sure, for…uh…somebody. GOOD EVENING MISTER AND MISSUS COMIC BOOK AND ALL OUR SHIPS AT SEA. LET'S GO TO PRESS!

"Synopsis – INK is a new, 10-part, stylized-documentary series exploring the world of comic book culture and its impact on popular culture. The series takes [a] mature look at the comic book medium in all its forms: its creators, writers, artists and editors and anybody else who's [sic] business is comic-book related."

"The series will be examining the world of comics through themes like: Hero Worship, Social Relevance, Life, Death, and Resurrection and Pulp Fiction: Heroes of Yesterday, as well as many others. This ten-episode, stylised documentary series begins airing winter 2008 on IFC Canada."

Am I being cruel in pointing out that the thing I love about press releases having to do with television shows is that they are guaranteed to be functionally illiterate? There's a certain admirable insouciance, about it though. We're TELEVISION, Bubbah! Correct spelling is BENEATH us! Anywhere else and it would make the use of the adjective "mature" ring rather hollow, but here, it's like a declaration that they have their priorities and heads on straight, their ducks in a row. We don't give a s—t that we spell it "stylized-documentary" in the first paragraph and "stylised documentary" in the second paragraph. We have footage to edit, sound levels to adjust, computer animation to add in, green screen trickery to partake of. HYPHEN OR "NO HYPHEN" IS A GEEK CONCEPT! Stylized and stylised – hey, they're BOTH RIGHT, aren't they? DUH, GEEK BOY. Get out of my editing suite.

Oh, it's you, Mr. Sim.

And so to the letter:

Dear Mr. Sim,

Peter from The Beguiling may have mentioned our television series "INK" to you and that we were hoping for an interview at the TCAF. We certainly understand your decision to let Cerebus speak for itself and not try to condense a discussion of your epic work into a series of meaningless TV-friendly sound bites.

But, and you knew that was coming, our show does take a different approach than you may be expecting. The fact is we were not planning to focus on Cerebus as much as discuss your own insights into the medium of comics as a whole, for which you are an important voice to be heard. The story of Cerebus would be referenced more as a jumping off point to a broader discussion of some of our show's comic-related themes which include Hero Worship, Life, Death and Resurrection, Social Relevance, Politics and Propaganda, the Independent Market, etc….

We plan to speak to an eclectic roster of comic creators about these themes, having already interviewed the Hernandez Brothers, Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, Brian Azzerello, Adam Hughes, Bill Sienkiewicz, Mike Carlin, Matt Wagner and others.

I've attached a short synopsis of the series which should give you the broad strokes idea of what we're up to. If there is any way you'd reconsider a sit-down with us during the event or at another convenient time for you, please let us know.

All the best,

Well, now. What to do. What to do.

The "stylized documentary" thing sets off alarm bells. That usually means chintzy computer effects like what they did to the Will Eisner documentary, trying to translate comic book tropes onto film on a) a low budget and b) a tight deadline. "its impact on popular culture" usually means clips from Hollywood super-hero movies while they play the latest pop song that has a "Superman" or a "Lois Lane" or "Solomon Grundy" reference in it. WIZARD magazine, only now it's a television show!

I'm tempted to fax them a questionaire

"How many times does INK intend to use the word `cool' or `awesome' within a typical episode: ___ not at all ____ between 5 and 10 times ___ Dude, we can't count that high: that's why we're, you know, in TELEVISION!"

Can I write my own sound bytes? I mean I already know the answer to that one. Television people hate that. It's not a matter of them wanting a good show, the good show has to be the result of me blathering for an hour and them getting to decide what is and isn't usable. I can do it, guys. I've played Dave Sim on television many, many times. I can write the material and then deliver the material as if I just came up with it off the top of my head. I can give you different readings of it and you can pick the one you like. No, in TeeWee land, the only thing you're not allowed to fake is on this side of the camera. Faking stuff? That's THEIR job. Take a completely unrelated sound bite and give it a contradictory lead-in so that you appear to say the opposite of what you were actually saying? That's what makes it a "stylized documentary". That's good television. Actually writing your own sound bites and delivering them? No, that's…that's DISHONEST!

This is kind of funny. Brad Mckay of the Doug Wright Awards phoned earlier today and left a message (I haven't been answering the phone. The day started with a weird message and that's usually a sign that I can't go wrong not answering the phone). So Brad wants to know if I'm coming in for the Doug Wright Awards so he can put me on the guest list and if I'm coming alone or if I want someone ELSE on the guest list with me.

I'm Dave Sim the evil misogynist, the Pariah King of Comics. Who would I bring with me? A ha-ha friend? I just thought he was being funny. Then Chester just left a message. He had talked to Brad earlier and he understood that Brad had asked if I was bringing my friend with the camera again to film the Awards. Oh, right, I'm thinking. Trevor. Trevor taped the Awards last year. I had just started the Blog & Mail and decided, what the heck, I might as well make my own television programs, too. So Chet said, "Brad made it sound as if he's hoping you WILL bring him with you and, personally, I'm hoping you're NOT bringing him with you because I don't want to end up on YouTube again." I cracked up. So I called him back and told him Trevor was bringing three cameras this year and three cameraman. And one of the cameras had a telephoto lens to get nice tight close-ups of everyone. Then I told him I was kidding. And he cracked up. I asked him if he was doing this INK thing. He didn't know what I was talking about. So, I read him part of the press release. Two sentences in, he goes, Oh right. No, I'm not doing it. Are you? he asks me. I said, I don't know. I'm getting a funny Blog & Mail segment out of the invitation, though. "There WILL be cameras filming at the Awards," he said, "But that's the NFB, they're doing a documentary on Seth."

See? The National Film Board got the memo. THEY were at the Marxist cabal meeting of the Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and CBC like they were supposed to be. NATIONAL Film Board, get it? As in "nationalize"? I was pretty sure the word had gone forth to friend and foe alike: Seth is Canada's Comic-Book IT Guy, THIS YEAR AND EVERY YEAR! Tell all the other comrades. DA! Chet gets to play boy sidekick just by sitting next to him. You GO, Chet!

Half an hour to my last prayer. I told you. Doing the Blog & Mail on a fasting day it flies by like the wind.

Tomorrow: To INK or not to INK…


___________________________________________________

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 #350 (August 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.

_____________________________________________________


A letter from Mike Dawson. Mike Dawson. Where do I know that name from? Don't mind me, folks, I'm old. I do that a lot. Mike…Dawson.

"Dear Dave Sim,

Just wanted to drop you a note to thank you for the Day Prize nomination and plaque, which as you know I wasn't able to receive from you in person at this year's SPACE."

Oh, hey. Mike DAWSON, the FREDDIE & ME guy. Graphic novel about what a big influence Queen and Freddie Mercury were on his life. If I'm not mistaken it was the middle bit of the graphic novel that he had submitted in the form of a digest/ashcan. THAT Mike Dawson. Well whattaya know about THAT, as Jimmy Stewart used to say.

"I enjoyed reading the transcript of what you said when you mentioned my comic, and I really like having the plaque to hang up in my studio. We met briefly at last year's SPACE. I'm good friends with Alex Robinson, and we chatted with you for a little while at the bar on the night before the convention."

Oh, the notorious chat at the bar with Alex. So you were there. That'll be the last time that happens. I can't even pretend to hear well enough any more to carry on a conversation in a bar. I remember you included Alex in your story. That was interesting because you didn't call him Alex, but you drew him the way he draws himself so everyone knew that it was Alex right away. That was another interesting part because you and Alex, in your story, were talking about Queen as this distant, long-ago event and (if I remember rightly) you were wondering how they performed Bohemian Rapsody live. Another "Jeez I feel old" moment because (with Deni and Bob and Karen) I saw Queen live in Toronto at the old Exhibition grounds bandshell (I think that was what they called it)…

Hang on. Another fax coming in. IFC. What does that stand for again? Peter Birkemoe told me. Inside Front Cover but that isn't it. The fax is fuzzy. Oh, The Independent Film Channel. Right. Wanted to do an interview with me at TCAF this weekend. It's a new show on comics called "INK". They wanted Seth, Chester, Joe, Darwyn Cooke and me. How Chester, Joe, Darwyn and me ever got way up there on the "must have" list with Canada's Greatest Graphic Novelist, Seth, I don't know. Somebody didn't get the memo again. I thought all this got sorted out at the CBC/Toronto Star/Globe & Mail quarterly Marxist cabal meeting: Seth is Canada's Comic-Book IT guy, AGAIN. THIS YEAR AND EVERY YEAR. Tell all the other comrades. DA!

One of the guys involved was a CEREBUS fan. That's it. That's how I got in, anyway. It's all coming back to me. They're doing the old Commander Rick trick where Mark Askwith would interview you about fifteen different subjects and then make fifteen different shows by splicing your comments in with the other twenty guys he had interviewed. Neil used to say you could get whiplash just wondering where Mark's next question was coming from. You gave him his thirty-second TV sound byte on the CBLDF ("Remember that we EDIT OUT the questions, so you have to incorporate the question into your answer") and then he'd say, "Okay, tell me about Will Eisner." Thirty seconds on Will Eisner. "Okay, tell me about the importance of inkers." To a born "ease up on your subject" storyteller like Neil it was like putting electrodes on his genitals. Talk, Limey. Tell me about Will Eisner.

I kid. Neil still sends his novels to Mark for an opinion as he used to send him the SANDMAN stuff to critique. As Chester used to show his stuff to Mark back in the YUMMY FUR days. Mark knows his stuff. PRISONERS OF GRAVITY (as the show was called) was just a funny experience and one I avoided for that reason. You were at the complete mercy of the editing process and weeks later there you would be wincing in your living room as you saw what was left of what you said. I always found it interesting that Canada never had its own fanzine, but it always had its own television show about comics thanks for Mark and Rick Green and (now) the Space Channel.

Okay, let me finish up the Mike Dawson story and then we'll get back to "INK".

Anyway, yes, I saw Queen in concert whatever year that was. Before 1983 because, as I said, I was still with Deni. They weren't a HUGE band because it was the "bandshell" format where they would only use half of Exhibition stadium. Unlike the Who or the Rolling Stones who could fill the whole joint. And, as Alex suggests in the story, they just played a recording of Bohemian Rhapsody. Whoever it was on keyboards would start the thing off and, of course, the crowd went nuts and then they just sort of left the stage and we all sat there listening to this recording. I'm a real troglodyte when it comes to music. I wouldn't have noticed if HALF of the music and the singing was a recording if they had all just stayed out there pretending to do PART of it. That was really it for me with Queen.

It wasn't a particularly sophisticated time period. I don't think anyone I knew had any idea about the Queen=Gay Reference thing that's so completely obvious now. We were all just completely clueless -- like Mike Myers as Wayne. Oh, hey, GREAT TUNE. It was a one-two punch. Rock Hudson and Freddie Mercury, one after the other. They're WHAT?! Does Doris DAY know about this? You can't get much more unsophisticated than that, can you?

"I'm really glad you're looking forward to reading the completed FREDDIE & ME. I probably was working on it on this year's SPACE weekend – I'm getting close to completing it. It'll be just shy of 300 pages, and will be published next year by Bloomsbury."

I really am. Genuine enthusiasm for a subject is something that communicates in the comic book medium like – well, like electrodes on Neil Gaiman's genitals ("Talk, Limey!"). You definitely have that in spades, even down to the fact that the enthusiasm is largely inexplicable to yourself as you're writing about it. I hope you'll be sending copies to the surviving members of the band and (while you're at it) I hope you'll send one to me and I'll plug it here on the ol' Blog and Mail.

"Again, thank you for the nomination and the plaque – I look forward to potentially running into you again at SPACE 2008."

I'll look forward to it, as well, Mike, thanks. If I get that "Mike…Dawson?" look on my face, just remind me. Remember. I'm old.

Tomorrow: Back to Comics on TeeWee!


___________________________________________________

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 #349 (August 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Sunday August 26 –

A very nice letter from Mike Lovins of Mike Lovins Illustration in Midvale, Utah.

"Dear Dave:

"Thanks for your return letter sent a few months ago. I've been busy with family and work concerns or I would have written you sooner. I've enjoyed FOLLOWING CEREBUS from time to time and think it to be an excellent publication. I thought you had mentioned doing another kind of comic book one day. I wonder what shape it will take."

"I've appreciated your dialogue on religion, and appreciate your interest in this kind of conversation. I've appreciated your views also. There were some thoughts I wanted to present this time out."

"The apostle Paul said that `The gospel has not come in word, but in power.' This statement suggests to us that the transforming power of Christ is not an idea or philosophy, but an actual power, which has an actual effect on us and enables us to overcome our appetites and passions and obtain mastery over us."

That's certainly an interesting thought. As you may have read elsewhere, I view Paul as a commentator. He's certainly the commentator with the most wide-ranging effect on human history of any commentator I can think of – which is why I give thanks for his epistles five times a day in my prayers: where would Christianity be without them? -- but still a commentator. I'd be cautious about subscribing to the view expressed if he meant it (or if the entity informing him at the time meant it) as an undermining of the Word, the Logos, as expressed in the first chapter of John's Gospel. I'm also leery of anything "obtaining mastery" over men when I see men as all having the aptitude necessary to have mastery over themselves and their appetites and their passions. I think there's a real danger there of inadvertently undermining God's Word as the source of all the "reality" we see around us and substituting for it an un-attributed power. There's a lot of power demonstrated in the Synoptic Gospels but most of it, it seems to me, doesn't originate with God but rather with YHWH who I consider to be His adversary. To me it's less important whether Paul said something than it is which entity was whispering in his ear when he said it. Likewise with the Synoptic Jesus.

"David O Mckay said that spirituality is "the conciseness of victory over self and communion with the infinite."

Yes, see: that would be closer to my own view of rightly directed spirituality. You have to be very concise to achieve a victory over your self and it's only through achieving victory over your self that communion with the infinite becomes possible. That assumes that God is the only Infinite Being, but I tend to think that's a safe assumption.


"Jesus said, "But when the comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me". Through the Holy Ghost, we can be sanctified in our nature and commune with the Father. I can bear witness of this experience. The spirit is a calm, affirming experience and does not lend itself to fanaticism. Paul said that no man can know that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Ghost, and this is true of any spiritual principle. In other words we can be illuminated by that higher power and become transformed in such a way that we gain power over our appetites and passions."

Okay, well there, that's quote from the Johannine Jesus, but that's a rare instance when I don't think that he's speaking "my lips to God's ear". "The Father" to me is the core Christian corruption because it implies that God is a carnal being and that He engaged in a carnal act at least once in order to produce the Synoptic or Johannine Jesus. For most Christians the fact of Mary's virginity refutes the charge of carnality. If there's no penetration, then no carnal act was committed. But, I think all that does is to move the carnality up the scale into the realm of the higher natures where it becomes even more abhorrent – as if God penetrated Mary's womb with His Spirit. To suggest that the "Spirit of Truth…proceedeth from the Father" is to further compound the blasphemy, suggesting as it does that a Spirit of Truth can issue forth from a carnal being. It's insulting to Truth as an absolute concept that it can find its source in carnality and is insulting to God in that it makes of Him a carnal being. Of course women take to it like ducks to water because it means all males all the way up to God are carnal animals and all women are pristine virgins like Mary.

See, to me, this is one of the core arguments between God and YHWH. YHWH maintains that God had a Father God and a Mother God and He came into being just the way the offspring of all fathers and mothers come into being. The idea that a Spirit of Truth proceedeth from the Father is just too fully aligned with the inherent prejudices of he/she/it for me to give it any credence. The Father is the he, and the Spirit of Truth is either a she or an it or both. YHWH is completely intransigent on the subject so, as I see it, all God could do was to allow a grandiose he/she/it enactment to take place in order to move the discussion forward. The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost points in the same direction. No, my belief is that God is our Creator, not our father. He created self-regenerating life out of dust at the beginning of each epoch. He didn't have sex with the dust. He didn't ejaculate into the dust. As it says in the Koran, He has only to point at a thing and say, "Be" and it is.

Conceptually, God fulfills the function of a good father. I can see nothing wrong with saying "Thanks be to God for His great mercy upon his servants, He who is like a good father to His children and a good shepherd to His flock." There are a lot of good metaphors for the relationship God has with us. But finding a metaphor for that relationship to me is very different from calling Him God the Father or God the Shepherd. To me, Christians aren't nearly wary enough of the kind of blasphemy involved in dragging God down to their own level.

Left untreated (as it has been, in my view, left untreated) it ultimately leads to lunatic things like that Joan Osborne song "What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on a bus." When you get to the point of calling God a slob I think you're coming pretty close to sunset on the whole Christian enchilada.

God is Great. As it says in the Koran, High may He be exalted over that which the infidels seek to join with Him – many of them with the best of intentions. And we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

"I respect your devotion to the Koran. I had roommates from Iraq for two years and became acquainted with their culture. In my reading of Islam, Muhammad had run into a sect of believers through his wife, that wanted to return to the true worship of Abraham. That true worship is that he sought God, found him, and that through his posterity, the nations of the earth would be blessed. Our belief in eternal life stems from this belief."

Doesn't strike a resonant chord with me. According to non-Prophetic, non-scriptural Muslim tradition it was Angel Gabriel who came to Muhammad on God's instruction, crushing Muhammad in his grip and telling him "Iqra!" "Recite!" and Muhammad proceeded to recite the first revealed Sura, "Clots of Blood".

There was a residue of Abrahamic faith at the time. Perhaps that's what you're referring to. The Kaba in Mecca, the Sacred House was reportedly (again according to non-Prophetic, non-scriptural Muslim tradition) built by Adam and then rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael, Abraham's first son. According to the same traditions the sacred house was rebuilt in Muhammad's time before he experienced the first revelation.

But by that time, the Grand Mosque which surrounds the Sacred House contained 360 idols – reportedly including a portrait of Jesus and Mary -- and had basically become a pagan cesspit. The Arabs of Mecca had gone from monotheistic faith to the sort of "everybody into the pool" faith that Mother Theresa believed in. Anyone who had a god was welcome to put an image of him or her in the Grand Mosque and join in the annual pilgrimage, the Hajj. An early example of tourism trumping monotheism since the more gods in the Grand Mosque the more followers showed up spending their bucks in town.

"I felt a good spirit when I talked to you here in Salt Lake. That must mean you're living right. I hope we can keep in touch."

I'm certainly trying to live right. I'll find out for sure one way or the other the same time you will, Mike. On Judgement Day.

"As far as Will Eisner goes, while it's too bad there weren't more people there at Pro Con on that workshop, it was my gain, because it was pretty much like an interview. I got to ask pretty much any question I wanted. The man was a class act. One time, on the shuttle back to the hotel, he took time to direct me. I recall all the times he talked, trying to get creators to understand that if they wanted to have good business experiences, they needed to take responsibility for it."

Yes, it's a very tough lesson to impart and one of those where the listener's eyes just start to glaze over because they just want to hear about the magic brush or the magic pen that will make everything easier. It's probably why Will's talk was so poorly attended. People pick up on the fact that what you're teaching is grown-up responsibility and reliability and they tend to steer a wide path around that and seek out people who say "cool" and "awesome" every fourth word instead.

"He will be missed."

He certainly will. Hard to believe he would have turned ninety this year. Just wasn't meant to be.

"I have been working on my own self-publishing project. I ramped up on Photoshop, Quark and bought Illustrator. I had a friend walk me through Photoshop for a year, so even though it's been an adjustment, I wanted to become digital ready. I have four issues penciled and inked, with the help of an inker and have lettered four of the five pages in Quark. So it's gone well, but there's a lot more left to do. Your GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING was helpful also."

Glad to hear it. My own experience with drawing a comic book that would then be assembled on computer – Secret Project I – is that all of the time I would have saved in actual drawing is taken up with logistics and the perverse nature of the computer itself. I think the computer is one of God's opportune little jokes in that it actually takes four times as long to do something on computer as it does to do it by hand – twenty times as long if you factor in the learning curve but it looks like a time-saver. I say "opportune" because I think God timed the computer's arrival to be synchronous with the arrival of feminism so that there would be instantly between four and twenty times as much work for everyone to do because of our faith in computers. That was the only way we could effectively double the size of the workforce with all the women coming in and still have enough work to go around. I suspect, in the same way, we'll "get over" computers around the same time that we "get over" feminism and all future generations can have a good laugh at our expense. COMPUTERS? Dude and dudette – what were you THINKING OF?

"I hope all is well for you and hope the coming month goes well."

I'm not sure what month that would have been. June or July by the looks of it. I got through them okay, I guess. Let's see where I'm at at the end of August when this gets posted.

Tomorrow: a letter from Mike Dawson



eBay item#

250156794557

___________________________________________________

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 #348 (August 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.

_____________________________________________________


WIZARD magazine? What have I got WIZARD magazine in here for? Oh, right. Issue 190 with the Shock Surprise Cover revelation that Elektra is a SKRULL: "Comics' Greatest Deaths". Seriously. "The 50 Greatest Deaths in Comics History". 26 years of my life and I managed to come up with the #48 death on the Top Fifty (I did manage to beat out Osiris and The Doom Patrol). #38 to 50 are crammed into a single column. "The existential aardvark," it says here, "survived countless adventures…only to fall out of bed and snap his neck like a stupid old woman." Do you get the feeling they ONLY read issue 300? . #1? Superman, of course! Greatest Death, EVER!

Anytime I think I might try and sell something through the comic-book stores, I just read WIZARD magazine or a few pages of IMAGE COMICS: THE ROADTO INDEPENDENCE and I'm MUCH better, t'ank youse for askeen'. Keep them freebies comin', you wacky WIZARD boys and much obliged!

Only two responses to the plug for a free comic on Neil's blog this week. Last week there were a few though. In no particular order, a Big Blog & Mail hello to Katie W. of Philadelphia, PA., Benjamin H. of Melun France, Enzo R. of Gozo, Malta, Chan Shee K. from Borneo (seriously!), Rick W. of Alpharetta, GA, Madeline Carol M. (who lives on Hard Tymes Road in Roach, Missouri and who informed me on her card that I "may now stop laughing" at her address and "downgrade it to a chuckle")

Rudi E. of Hauge I Delane, Norway, Betsy O'D. of Monroe, NC (she of the lurid purple ink), Robert M. of Bethpage, NY, Suzi C. of Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia…

…and that finally brings us to Suley, Julie and Magic, which I foolishly promised was next up at the conclusion of festivities last time out and here it is four days later and I'm finally getting around to it. Anyway, it's a postcard they sent when they were out in B.C. Suley writes first:

Yesterday we celebrated (early) the double birthdays of Julie's Granny and Dad. Both are on the 29th of May! A Strange trend in the month of May. Best Suley

He's referring, of course, to Canadian Graphic Novelists Day, May 16 when we celebrated Rob Walton and Chester Brown's mutual birthday, the day before my own.

Then Julie (espresso-powered as usual by the look of it) writes

Hi Dave! Well I'm back on the road doing the magic thing…but this time visiting family as well. Has been a wonderful visit for us & we are eating far too much. I need to do your Toronto tour walk now!

She's referring to the marathon walks that Chet and I do whenever I come down there. From the bus station to Peter Pan and from Peter Pan up through Chinatown and the University of Toronto to the Beguiling – which included a lengthy jaunt from the Beguiling to the Greek restaurant on the Danforth that time.

Thanks again for inviting us to celebrate your birthday & for the absolutely delightful company. Hope to see you soon! P.S. Save the date: June 16 for the KW show. My treat!

See, Julie isn't IN the comic-book field so she doesn't know that I'm an evil misogynist and that she's supposed to hate my guts so she has this weird idea that I'm "absolutely delightful company". So is she. Walking back downtown with her and Suley, I made a reference to the Off-White House and she laughed delightfully. "Oh, I love that," she says. I had forgotten, living in the humourless world of funnybooks that, yes, Way Back When it could actually excite a certain level of amusement that would often express itself in the form of a small chortle or, perhaps, even a guffaw or two. Hey, I'm going to start using that again. The Off-White House. Which I have been doing. So, if it really irritates you, blame Julie.

Whoops. Fax coming in. Ted Adams wants to know if he can use a quote from my review of THE COMPLETE DICK TRACY volume 2 on the back cover of volume 3. Well, sure. It's his funeral. Guess he didn't get the memo everyone else got.

[That's actually a funny story. When I went to Toronto for the Paradise Comics show and Chester told me about some unnamed female editor at Slave Labor giving James Turner a VERY hard time about having me write an introduction for his REX LIBRIS collection and how it doesn't say "Introduction by Dave Sim" anywhere on the cover. So, Dave being Dave as soon as James walks up at the show, I say, "So, what's the name of this female editor who gave you a hard time about my introduction?" And he would not tell me her name. I wonder if he killed Chester later on for spilling the beans. Memo to everyone who DID get the "Ixnay on Dave Sim" memo: don't tell Chester because he WILL spill the beans. I still haven't gotten a copy of the book, so I hope he wasn't naïve enough to have her send me one. And then the IMAGE COMICS: ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE books comes in and it doesn't say "Introduction by Dave Sim" on the cover, either. See? THEY got the memo. I wonder why Ted Adams didn't?]

So anyway, yes Julie did spring for a free ticket to see Extreme Magic which is this biannual show they do at Center in the Square here in town attached to a big magicians' convention so not only do you get to see a half-dozen world class magicians in one show, you get to see them in the company of an auditorium full of magicians! Next one is in 2009 so if you hear about it here in town, definitely check it out.

Suley came over the house beforehand for the nickel tour (which almost made us late) and he had a birthday present for me. He had gift-wrapped two copies of EYE WEEKLY from the week AFTER the one that was out when I was in T.O. for Canadian Graphic Novelists Day, the one Julie had planted the JULIE ENG FAILS TO FIND DAVE SIM'S TWO OF HEARTS ON CHESTER BROWN AND ROB WALTON'S BIRTHDAY! headline in and which actually listed Chester as one of the Canadian celebrities having a birthday that week in the CITYSCOPE horoscope column. Well, this was the issue for the following week and I was one of the Canadian celebrities having a birthday. The others were Chantal Kreviazuk, Howard Hampton and Dave Thomas – which is why "Canadian celebrity" is something of an oxymoron. Dave Thomas? Doug Mackenzie of Bob & Doug Mackenzie? Yeah, see. He IS a Canadian celebrity. Just not under his own name. Although he was on that sitcom. GRACE UNDER FIRE or GRACE UNDER PRESSURE or whatever it was that they appropriated the Hemingway quote for and turned into feminist propaganda.

Suley had even gone to the trouble of going down to the EYE WEEKLY offices to get a MINT copy for the Cerebus Archive. Clearly performance above and beyond the call of duty and Much appreciated. It's going in with the EYE WEEKLY post-it note on the cover: "To be picked up by Sue Lee". They picked up on the multicultural aspect, they just picked the wrong multi-cult. The reference is in very tiny type, so this should give future Cerebus scholar squirrels absolute fits. "There's two intact copies, so he HAS to be in here SOMEWHERE!" Oh, well, I'm sure they'll enjoy all the nude call-girl ads in the back while they're looking around for me and Cerebus.

The postcard, the program from Centre in the Square and my intact ticket are bagged together and go in the 8.5 x 11 and smaller Archive. The intact ticket? I had already bought one before the postcard came in. I was going to just surprise Suley and Julie by showing up. You know how many couples there are that Dave Sim the evil misogynist would dare to surprise like that? Let's just say I wouldn't run out of fingers counting them if I had one glove on. "Hi there. Just thought I'd show up and surprise you and yer missus!" I'll grant you there is a great deal of humour to derive from watching a guy you know turn chalk white and to see a female face lock into a rictus grin while dropping to sub-Arctic temperatures before your very eyes, but a little of it goes a long way.

Besides it's just, you know, cruel.

Tomorrow: Mike Lovins of Mike Lovins Illustration


___________________________________________________

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 #347 (August 24th, 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 wife and mother wrote to order a copy of LATTER DAYS, CEREBUS 0 and THE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING…FOR HER! Completely unheard of. Of course eventually she revealed herself to be part of the Donna Barr Scam, named after the STINZ, DESERT PEACH creator who used to tell people that Dave Sim IS a feminist because he's helped so many women cartoonists to self-publish. Check yesterday's Blog & Mail for her complete letter. Here's my response.

Well, "Critty" (she told me I can call her that), I appreciate all your kind words about my work, but I have to say that I think you're on the wrong track here. You have, indeed, chosen to be a wife and mother but now you seem to be trying to back out of it and you seem to be looking for my endorsement for doing so. The fact that you talk about how many things you have to "juggle" is, to me, a bad vital sign. Speaking from experience, a family member knows when they are a family member and valued as such and when they are simply being "juggled". My mother "juggled" her family and wifely obligations all the time that I knew her and everyone was quite aware of the fact that we were being "juggled" for the sake of her secretarial duties and that her secretarial duties weren't being "juggled" for our sake. I can tell you right now, the end of that line is not a happy one. She was almost completely unresponsive at the end there, but she would answer a direct question if you asked her a direct question. One time I asked, "How often do you think about the people you worked with at Queensmount School?" She answered "Not very often" and returned to staring in rapt fascination at everyone bustling up and down the hospital hallway, listening to every snatch of conversation she could overhear.

Well, yes. Nor did the people she worked with at Queensmount – or Laurentian or Forest Hill – think of her. She had been a co-worker. She got a send-off at her retirement that would have made Princess Diana blush for its effusiveness, mounds of letters and cards raving about her abilities, how important she had been in their lives, what a difference she had made.

And then they all forgot her and moved on with their lives.

As she forgot them. Co-workers are not family, the MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW aside.

You see, "Critty", the way the whole thing is set up is that women are intended to be wives and mothers and they do this by being homemakers. They MAKE a home. They don't FAKE a home. We non-mothers are not as unsophisticated as you mothers take us to be. If you are cooking and cleaning and doing whatever else just to get it out of the way so you can get to what interests you then you aren't making a home and if you aren't making a home you don't have a home and no one who lives there thinks of it as a home. Everyone is just going through the motions and living under the same roof pretending to be feminists with either male or female genitalia.

I had no connection with my mother whatsoever. My connection was to comic books. My mother had no connection with me. Her connection was with Queensmount School. This only stood out in sharp relief after she retired and suddenly realized that there was no place for her. Not in a hostile, aggressive way, but just in a "this has always been the situation, why would it change now?" way. I had my life, my sister had her life, my Dad had his life and my mother had…well, she didn't have a home in the sense that her mother had a home, because she hadn't made a home. She thought she would just be included in my Dad's golfing outings with his pals from Budd Automotive from which he had retired some years earlier. She brought up the subject in front of me -- years after the fact -- when I was over there, I suspect hoping that I would arbitrate and tell my Dad that he has to take her with him when he and his friends go out to shoot a bucket of balls. Sure, if the other guys were bringing their wives, then it was a husband-and-wife gig. But it was just the guys. You could put bamboo shoots under my Dad's fingernails and, understandably, you couldn't make him bring his wife along on a guy's-only golf gig. You could put bamboo shoots under my own fingernails and you couldn't make me tell him to do so.

Part of her hoped I would hire her as the company secretary. She was certainly competent – unbelievably competent -- but as I explained to her, I didn't think that would be fair to Gerhard, anymore than it would be fair to me if we had hired Gerhard's mother (assuming she had been a secretary and not a homemaker): whoever had the job had to be unrelated to either of us. She said the reason that I wouldn't hire her is because I was ashamed to work with my mother. All I could do is repeat what I had to say. It wasn't a cover story. I don't DO cover stories. You ask me a question, I will give you a completely honest answer. It was strange to see her thinking that there was some connection between us in a traditional sense such that any emotion like shame would enter into my response or that shame would lead to guilt would lead to capitulation. Which, had she been the person who made my boyhood home, it might well have done. But she wasn't. She was just one of the four people who lived at 282 Westmount Rd. E. and "did their own thing".

I wasn't ashamed to work with my mother. I was wary of maternal favouritism, that she would favour me as her son over her other boss, Gerhard, who wasn't her son.

When we hired Carol West, after a few weeks my mother said something like, "So you like her." And I said, "`Liking' doesn't enter into it. She's got a certain number of jobs to do and she does them efficiently." Whereupon she repeated, "So you like her." This time my father had to repeat what I had said. Years later, I realized that what she was saying was "You like her better than me." No. I liked them about the same but I knew they were both feminists so I trusted them about as far as I could throw them.

She and my father lived under the same roof and my sister and I counted ourselves lucky that we didn't have to.

Are homemakers taken for granted? Oh, unquestionably. That's a big part of being a homemaker. If you expect people to come home and rave about how clean the living room is, you're definitely in the wrong line of work. From a very early age, human beings naturally quest outside of the home, finding their pleasures where and when they can find them and taking the home for granted. It's literally true that you can start cleaning at one end of the house and by the time you're done it's time to start cleaning back at the beginning again. "A man works from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done." If she does it properly, that's entirely true. But most women don't do it properly. They do it the way your mother did it: largely, not at all.

In your own case, if you put all of your time and energy into making a home there are any number of occasions when you're going to feel completely unappreciated, passed over and ignored. But, in the case of your daughter, let's say, it's a matter of Being There. For months if not years on end she can tromp right past you without even noticing that you're there. The point is not to have her come home every day and say, "Gosh, Mom. The house looks swell." No, the point is to be there on that occasion when her attempt to conquer the world in a masculine fashion went wrong, when instead of coming home in full-strong-and-independent-woman-mode she comes limping home…or, rather, limping Home. Because that's where it gets its capital letter from. When you Need Someone to be there, someone Is There. And, if you've chosen to be a full-time homemaker, you'll actually have something to tell her: making a home for my husband and daughter is what's important to me. God gave you free will and if you think something else will make you happy, hey, go for it. But, in the long term, as Dorothy said, "There's no place like home." It's surprising how much every woman in our culture identifies with Dorothy and yet completely ignores the core lesson that she, ultimately and quite tearfully, learned.

If you live your life as if your job is to discharge your cooking and cleaning obligations and from that point on it's just a matter of where and when your itinerary meshes with your child's – oh, if only you could have had a crisis yesterday: yesterday I was home from three o'clock on – then all you can hope to produce is a child who thinks the same way. If you "juggle" someone, they will "juggle" you. Not out of revenge, but because it's the only reality that they know because it's the only reality they've experienced.

I don't think it was like this before, "Critty". Men knew they were men and women knew they were women, children knew they were children and everyone had a Home to go to and it was the wives and mothers who made it that. You're certainly welcome to delude yourself that you "juggle" your husband and daughter on a priority basis (my mother would have said that she did the same: she didn't. She lived for getting to her secretary's desk in the morning and everyone who knew her knew that was true.) while you secretly make time for what you actually care about: your self-published comic book, but you really do need to prepare yourself for being absolutely alone when you're old. Even if you and your husband are still living together. Picture what that will be like.

I hate to ask how old your daughter is because it may already be too late. Everyone needs importance in their life. Some people are important to their mothers and some people aren't important to their mothers but I think I'm safe in saying that everyone knows whether they are or not. Those who know they aren't important to their mothers learn very young to seek that necessary importance elsewhere. "I may not be important, but I can make this thing over here important enough to compensate for that."

Assuming that it isn't already too late – and I hope it isn't -- I really can't be a party to helping you to make something more important to you than your husband and your daughter. If you hadn't told me your situation, I would have sent you THE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING, but now I just can't. So, I'm sending you a gold logo CEREBUS 0 with a sketch in it instead of a white logo with no sketch in it – I even found one in the pile that Gerhard had signed!.

I hope this makes us even, but if you don't think it does, let me know if there are some back issues that you want or something like that and I'll be happy to send them to you.

Tomorrow: Back to answering the mail chronologically.



___________________________________________________

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.