Dave Sim's blogandmail #366 (September 12th, 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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Wrapping up SCOTT "ANUBIS" BERWANGER WEEK HERE ON THE BLOG & MAIL. Scott's dream of hand-crafted boxed sets of the ANUBIS minis to sell at SPX has gone the way of the dodo. So, what is he going to do?

So what am I going to do?

I just said that.

Found a company on the net called Comixpress. They are a full service POD printing house for independent comics. It seems very simple to get signed up, the way they have it set up. You can view their site at www.comixpress.com if you want to. They also sell the actual comics they print from their site. They have categories for action/adventure, superhero, fantasy, alternative, horror, sci-fi, spiritual/religious, and a few others that aren't coming to mind just now. Have a lot of new talent to showcase, too. You can see it all on their site if you go to it. It seems great.

From what I understand, 600-page volumes don't have a good cost ratio for POD pricing. So, I'm going to alter my plan and divide ANUBIS into (roughly) 200-page volumes and get them printed by Comixpress. As of today's date, I have almost enough material for six 200-page volumes, constituting Book I, and about fifty pages left to write and draw before the conclusion of Book I is resolved. And for the next stretch of road that's what I'm going to concentrate on: the art and story. Once I've gotten Book I completed I'm going to begin doing the digital prepress for the Comixpress edition of Book I and get working in the direction of having them print my stuff. 2008 is probably going to be a mix of digital prepress, sketchbook work, script writing and whatever else falls into the act of planning for Book II. I'll be able to release a 200-page volume every two years or so. Also, I'm thinking it might be a very good idea to keep making the mini-comic individual issues. Why? Well, if it's going to take me two years to put out a new volume, it would be helpful to anyone interested in following the story in real-time to be able to get the story in mini-comics form. And I KNOW how to make mini-comics. I've been doing a great job on it just this past year. There's a real art to it, actually. I'll send you the revised Book I in mini-comics format once I'm done with it (but it won't be as a boxed set).

I don't claim to be a revolutionary in the comic book business as you had intoned in your COLLECTED LETTERS book. And maybe, after witnessing how I fumbled through my own ideas of how to disseminate ANUBIS, you will agree with me: I'm not a revolutionary. If anyone's revolutionary, it's the people in the POD business.

I'm just pursuing my dreams.

Ask them how many people walk in the door with six 200-page volumes ready to go. You're a revolutionary, Scott. Deal with it.

Okay, and that brings to an end Year Number One of the Blog & Mail. Hope you're all still having a good time.

Tomorrow: OH NO, NOT...


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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.