Dave Sim's blogandmail #324 (August 1st, 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.

_____________________________________________________


Of course, as the outright declaration of war continued, the other thing that happened was that Sandeep Atwal (who was scanning the drawings which would make up the next eight pages of the secret project – and who had disappeared for a week for his sister's wedding, as you'll recall in our last exciting episode) left here on Wednesday with the eight pages and a FedEx envelope, promising to send the disk of the scans to my Technical Director the next day so he would get them on Friday. He then proceeded to disappear for another week finally turning up just in time to FedEx the scans the following Friday – the day my TD had taken off of work to devote to the secret project – just in time to get the scans to him on Monday when he was back at work and no longer working on the secret project. Had the intention to schedule the book for a September solicitation and a November release been actual and not a "feint" to test the Adversary's abilities and intentions, this alone would have been enough to guarantee that the project would not be done on time. And, of course, the Monday of Sandeep's disappearing act a draft version of my Last Will came in from Wilf asking if I was naming Sandeep as my executor.


As, I say, a pretty amazing show of force. Everyone In Proximity To You Is Actually Under My Control. Nothing I didn't suspect but it's always nice to know these things for certain.


So, the situation as it stands now is that I have completed everything that will go into the final production of the secret project but the project itself is on hold as I wait to see if this DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST thing is actually dead or just resting and waiting for someone else to take up the baton at YHWH's behest. And, of course, I now have to consider whether or not the show of force effectively exhausted the opposing team's abilities or if it was just one of a variety of Trickster Fox gambits that can be executed each time that I attempt to schedule the secret project.


It's no small question.


The actual publication won't be that expensive but will be easily ignored and the project itself will vanish without a trace as soon as it hits the stores. I have no doubt of the opposing team's abilities on that score: "make things go bye-bye poof" is one of their specialties. So there's a certain pointlessness to publication – spending thousands of dollars just to have something vanish without a trace. Which is why I had been developing promotion ideas to try to minimize that possibility. Of course that raises the stakes. Each thousand dollars that I invest in promotion has to result in roughly an additional thousand sales in order to make sense and, as far as I know, I'm buried deep in the "2,000 copy" sales figure category by virtue of the on-going campaign of slander and vilification which is the Dave Sim Status Quo here in the funnybook field which means that every thousand dollars I invest in promotion just increases the cost per unit from $1.22 to $2.22 to $3.22 and so on with no effect possible on the brick wall of "Dave Sim Sells 2,000 Copies And That's It". The DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST as far as I can see was the means of countering whatever positive sales effects there might have been from whatever promotional effort I might be able to mount. "Here read this thick book full of slander and vilification and just forget about Dave Sim as anything but an industry joke and fourth-rate creator." At that point, any amount of money I spent on promotion could just as easily be torn up in the form of many small bills and flushed down the commode for all the good that it was going to do. So my Technical Director got his SCRUB LAUNCH notice roughly three weeks ago and that's where things are at this point.


And I have to admit that I am now "past" any interest in how the secret project might do given that the over-arching reality of the comic-book field is of universal Feminist Prejudice against Dave Sim and, as I say, that that universal Feminist Prejudice controls everyone and everything in proximity to me. I'm really very happy with the way the project turned out but now that even the cover and back cover are done and quickly disappearing in my rear-view mirror, there seems very little reason to go through the ordeal of publication and fighting upstream against universal prejudice. "I'm glad I did that. It was well worth the two years and four months I put into the 49 pages." But now I'm working on the cover for my next project, Pretty Girls & Other Subjects, a collection of writings from 2004, including all of the Neil Gaiman form letters that I sent out in the months of August and September of that year which everyone seemed to like at the time. I'm really enjoying working on it. Every once in a while I glance over at the wall full of secret project and think, "Yes, that was a lot of fun to work on, too, at the time. But the time of creation is past and publication is probably better left for after my death. I'll just put it in the Cerebus Archive and someone will find it there someday."


After I'm done the cover for Pretty Girls & Other Subjects, I want to do my half of the Mouse Guard jam cover for some future issue of FOLLOWING CEREBUS and send it to David Peterson to work his computer wonders with. And then, I think, I'll start on my next secret project.


After all of the travail and aggravation of the last two weeks with everyone and everything working to impede my progress on the secret project…I ended up getting a very nice $5,000 purchase order for Cerebus trade paperbacks from Tonie Jackson (Hi, Tonie!) at the Diamond Star System. So it's nice to know that THAT part of this operation still works. It's completely inexplicable, but somehow the handful of retailers who are reading the Blog & Mail have managed to keep selling enough of the Cerebus trade paperbacks to maintain the sales bounce that I've been experiencing all year. Maybe it's just Joe Field and Calum Johnston but if it is they're certainly doing land-office business.


So, seriously, thank you to all the retailers who continue to order the trade paperbacks. I was going to bug you this time around with a complete list of the trades and their Diamond order codes but now, with this new purchase order, I don't think I have to. Maybe next time. And thanks again.


And how's your week going?


Tomorrow: So what have I been up to since I've officially scrubbed the launch of the secret project?



___________________________________________________

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.