Dave Sim's blogandmail #368 (September 14th, 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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OKAY, IT'S "OH, NO! NOT JEFF SMITH AGAIN"

WEEK HERE ON THE BLOG & MAIL

I always try to do the right thing. The only time it becomes really difficult is in a case of severe demonic possession where I am presented with a Gordian Knot which presents me with one of several unpalatable and unacceptable options. In the case of Jeff Smith's interview in the Trilogy Tour issue of the JOURNAL, I have to admit that it took me about a year to try to untangle what the right thing to do was. If someone is running around saying that he threatened to deck you when he did no such thing, is it the same thing as threatening to deck you? Ultimately, I decided it was infinitely worse, particularly since it was only in the COMICS JOURNAL in 1999 that this delusion on his part had become public. However, it was pretty obvious that this was the story he had been telling people for five years whenever they asked him about the split with Dave Sim. It was also pretty obvious that everyone believed him. There was certainly an urge to correct the misinformation right away, but there was also the awareness that five years worth of damage to my reputation had been done, that the damage was irreparable and that six months or a year wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. I was already universally hated and if I dared to suggest that Jeff Smith hadn't been wholly consistent with the truth (to say the least) it would only serve to make me that much more universally hated. The coward's way out was obvious: let Jeff Smith's version stand for all time and hope that grovelling before and capitulating to Marxist-feminists would allow me to retrieve some sort of status in the comic-book field.

[Okay, I got to this point in the narration of events and I started realizing how much of the back-story I have to relate in order for people in the distant future to understand. I mean, I know that my generation is a write-off and the generation after that is a write-off and the generation after that is a write-off – the best I can hope for, at least for the next two or three decades, out of this explanation is a completely feminized "Violence is so ICKY! Only an evil person would commit an act of violence in this day and age" coupled with "Jeff Smith can't possibly be at fault so whatever Dave Sim did to provoke him to threaten violence must have been REALLY, REALLY EVIL!" Witness the reaction to the Sixteen Impossible Things. You can't discuss things sensibly with a block of cement. But, for the sake of those people in the far-flung future who once more take an interest in reality:]

When I read the interview in the Trilogy Tour Issue, my primary response was to feel sorry for Jeff Smith as I feel sorry for anyone who has completely let go of reality in order to embrace a manufactured delusion in place of reality (i.e. feminists). I mean, I knew what I had written in issue 186 and comparing what I had written and what he was claiming I wrote in his COMICS JOURNAL interview the extreme variance was glaring.

It's nothing I wasn't familiar with.

My ex-wife and several of my girlfriends were in the category in question. They literally couldn't relate an incident the same way twice. It's an easy thing to check. If they tell you a story and it just doesn't sound right, wait a couple of days and get them to tell it to you again. If it's one of the unreal stories that they feel compelled to tell (and it is a psychological condition: or, as I prefer to call it now, demonic possession) it will be inconsistent from beginning to end every time they tell it. I couldn't find my copy of the Trilogy Tour issue of the COMICS JOURNAL (#218) when it came time to write "Dear Jeff Smith", but I basically said, look, just read what I wrote and read what Jeff is claiming that I wrote.

"Ultimately, Jeff's going to look really bad out of this," I thought, and I felt bad about that on his behalf, as I always felt bad when I saw that someone Deni had befriended had twigged to her condition and was now putting a lot of distance between them. The fact that these people can't help themselves is really saddest part of their natures.

What I failed to reckon with (as usual) was the extent to which facts and reality have nothing to do with what the comic book field -- universally dominated by Marxist-feminists -- responds to and how it responds to it. It is already immersed in the same condition so it tends to perceive reality based on its own prejudices (i.e. anyone who isn't a Marxist-feminist is evil) and to ignore anything a Marxist-feminist does wrong so long as they remain a card-carrying Marxist-feminist. Obviously, Jeff was and is very much in that category. It meant that "ultimately" kept getting pushed further into the future. At first "ultimately" was "when people compare the text in READS with what Jeff is claiming that I wrote." Then "ultimately" was "when CEREBUS fans compare the text in READS with what Jeff is claiming that I wrote." Then "ultimately" was "when someone who is interested in reality compares the text in READS with what Jeff is claiming that I wrote." That's where it stands now. My conservative estimate being that interest in reality – as opposed to Marxist-feminism – probably won't arrive for at least fifty to a hundred years.

[To this day, I don't want to call anyone bad names – I trade off "Marxist-feminist" for "misogynist": you call me a "misogynist", I will call you a "Marxist-feminist" – but even someone whose…distortions…effectively ruined my career and my professional reputation…well, let's just say that Jeff didn't completely invent out of nothing the "Big Johnson" Bone Tall-Tale-Telling character who compulsively blows everything out of proportion in STUPID, STUPID RAT TALES (if you catch my drift)]

Well, returning to reality (which I always like to do) no one compared the two texts. It was then that I realized that this was what the comic store environment had degraded itself into: a high school girls' clique. Jeff was a Marxist-feminist and was therefore IN and Dave Sim was an anti-feminist and was therefore OUT and, consequently, facts had nothing to do with it. As with a high school girls' clique. The dominant female decides who is going to be excluded and everyone goes along with it if they know what's good for them. If you ask them WHY the one girl was excluded they couldn't tell you. There are no facts, no reasons, just a natural compulsion to exclude someone that is a core part of female nature, a soul-deep delight in the harshest forms of emotional sadism of which they can conceive, the same sort of female nature that has, obviously, been running the comic-book field at least since 1994. I mean, to the extent that even CEREBUS readers – many of whom still claim to be fans of mine (with fans like this, who needs enemies?) – didn't bother to read the two versions.

To this day.

So, okay, I phone the Fantagraphics 1-800 order number to buy a copy of the Trilogy Tour issue. It's been eight years and I'm still the only person interested in reality and it's a matter of face it, Dave, if you don't do it, it isn't going to get done. The 800 number doesn't work from Canada. So I send Gary Groth a fax asking if he can fax me the relevant quote from Jeff's 1999 interview and – just for the sake of explanation – I faxed him the actual text from page 241 of READS. I also thanked him for not editing out the favourable reference to me in Andrew Langridge's interview in the latest issue of the JOURNAL.

Definitely a surprise but the return fax comes in, like, the next day. Full of sneering sarcasm about my reviving this "nonsense" and letting me know that I had absolutely no stature or credibility in the field – how else would I know it was actually from Gary? – but, give the devil his due, with the excerpt requested. I was flattered considering that I am universally viewed as the lowest form of scum in existence in the comic-book field. I figured I would get a snotty phone call from an underling and I could give them my VISA number over the phone for the copy of issue #218. Or maybe they would just fax me the information. I really didn't think I was still in the category of meriting an actual letter from Gary Groth.

Why? Well, this is The Big Reason right here. You ready for it? For those of you who have been never quite sure of WHY you're supposed to vilify and ignore and disparage Dave Sim – I mean, you've read 186 or READS and you've been left wondering exactly what the big deal is supposed to (even theoretically) be, as some people were starting to do by 1999 – let Jeff Smith clear up the confusion for you. Here, right here. This is why Dave Sim is an evil misogynist who deserved to have his career ruined, his character assassinated and to ensure that no good and decent person would speak to him (if they knew what was good for them) or acknowledge his presence ever again, amen:

Oh, heck. We're out of time. Hey, why don't you track down your own copy of COMICS JOURNAL #218 and look it up yourself so you'll be prepared to rationalize it away tomorrow and thereby restore what you know to be true: Dave Sim is EVIL!

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COMING SOON! DAVE SIM IN DIALOGUE WITH GARY GROTH – A BLOG & MAIL SPECIAL!

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AUCTION ALERT!!

The auction by The Hero Initiative for Dave Sim's "Ultimate Spider-Man" #100 tribute cover is now underway on eBay.

300151501136 HERO ULT SPIDER-MAN #100 ORIGINAL: DAVE SIM



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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.