Dave Sim's blogandmail #348 (August 25th, 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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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


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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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

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