Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #415 (October 31st, 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.

_____________________________________________________

The Mysterious Mr. D continues:

"In fact, it's funny that I'm writing you now under the guise of the free-Sandman issue. I'm not too into the internet and only recently found your blog (and Neil's for that matter – no offense, because you and Neil are just about the only people I'd be interested enough to know about that I would actually read your f—kin' diary – but I think the entire concept of `blogs' is abhorrent and clearly an indication of what kind of silly and miserable little world us modern folks are making). A while ago I think I found out that you were selling art on-line and that really surprised me. Now I've tried to go to eBay a couple of times (another scandalous invention – it takes all the fun out of visiting obscure comic, record and book stores in random cities looking for cool, weird s—t. Nothing will ever equal finding a beat-up poster of the Countess and Cerebus reading together in a 50-cent box in Walla Walla, Wa., or a whole run of SWORDS (minus the BWS #5) for cover price in Berkeley to get a preliminary sketch from issue 300 but I guess I always miss the correct time. I'm one of the only people I know who doesn't use little boxes on computers to remind them to visit their favourite websites every day and see what stolen music is available or how much something I don't need could be on a world-wide auction."

See, to me eBay is a good example of God's inherent open-mindedness when it comes to free will. It's really the best example of why capitalism is nothing to be afraid of, because it basically expands the pool of capitalists to include just about everyone. You can go to a pawnshop or you can try your luck on eBay. A lot of people who have been raised as Marxist-feminists over the last forty years are finding out that very lesson and a lot of them are either making part-time buying-and-selling part of their professional lives or are moving over into it completely when they find that they have the aptitude. That's a giant leap forward for capitalism and one for which I don't think we're going to see the full effects for a long time to come. It also means that storefronts have to learn to compete with people who have virtually no overhead which means a lot of brick and mortar capitalists are having to take a more realistic look at what constitutes a reasonable profit margin.

The "stolen music" thing, I think, is just a result of the uber capitalists at the record companies getting too greedy for words when CDs came along, pricing them higher than they priced records even though it's dramatically cheaper to produce a CD. You can't hide that information forever. What does the hunk of plastic cost? 20 cents? What does the jewel case cost? 30 cents? What does the illustrated insert cost? 5 cents? And you charge 20 bucks for it. Had they dropped the price of an album on CD to, say, $8 – which would still be an enormous profit margin – I think they would have seen sales going up and far fewer people would even have considered ripping off the record companies.

"As I meant to say, it's funny to write you now (today) because I think I'm only doing it because I have a decent sense that you're going to read this letter. I wrote you sometime in 1999 or 2000 essentially saying much the same stuff, thanking you for your lifetime of inspiration. I figured you were really busy and probably not really reading mail too often (with your publishing of the COLLECTED LETTERS books, I can see how wrong about that I was). But I wanted to tell you how great 6,000 pages of work is and how much it can mean to someone who begins to witness it at the age of 16 or 17 and follow through with it for the rest of his life – as I will certainly re-read CEREBUS over many more times than I have already.

"But even if I didn't, your effect on me would still last my entire life. Again, mostly because of the example you set. Intellectually, there are MANY, MANY ways in which you've influenced me. I wouldn't say that I agree with all of your world-view these days. But I hope you can still appreciate that you've helped me learn to think rationally, struggle to be creative, and attempt to look at the world in ways that go against the norm. Reading READS (and then passing it around to my 6-8 best friends in college, all of whom read and loved CEREBUS from 1-something around 200 when we left college and one guy even bought every phone book eventually) was monumental. I/we didn't "believe" in all of it but we talked about it…for years. For my part, I never intend to get married and want to live out my existence shining as a bright creative light. Are you the only person who has helped me to come to this conclusion? No. But you DID give me many of the best metaphors and stories with which to understand and appreciate the importance of artistic creativity. And, again, a lot of it has to do with the way you lived YOUR life and then presented it publicly in the back of your monthly comic. Your dialogue with Alan Moore had a huge effect on me as did your sense of politics, demagoguery, and what was `right and wrong' even as those things changed [for you] over time."

Well, much obliged. Personally I find it hard to believe that famous and "famous" people don't actually read their mail. I would assume that even Hollywood stars have an arrangement with their service that sends out the autographed photos to pass on anything that's interesting. I would guess that the only difference is that there's so much of it that answering it would constitute a full-time job so they just take it as a given that they don't do that. A lot of them work on a movie and then take months off or even years off so I think that gives them a different perspective on work. Life becomes at least 50% fun and games and 50% work and if you can get the 50% work down to, say, 15% so much the better. And even then, their "work day" consists of lounging around in a trailer larger and better appointed than the average person's apartment watching videos or listening to tunes or reading a book until their scene is ready to be shot. Then they do the scene two or three times with the cameras rolling and it's back to the trailer until they're needed again.

When Don Murphy invited me to the set of SHOOT `EM UP in Toronto, we were sitting and talking and he gave me a tour of the facility while they were setting up a scene. Somebody phoned Clive Owen in his trailer and he strolled in nodding to everyone "hello" "hi" "how are you?" Don quietly snuck me up to where they were shooting the scene and I watched it. CUT! Out wanders Clive Owen. "Nice to see you" "thanks" "bye for now". Maybe twenty minutes had elapsed. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

Me, it's twelve hours a day six days a week. I think of myself as clever for finding this way to answer the mail AND do promotion at the same time. I'm still having trouble getting it coordinated. I go to TCAF and think "It would have been nice of me to talk this up a little more on this week's Blog & Mail." I'm usually just typing so fast that I don't even noticed where I "am". Let me think.

Oh, right. This will be the first week in November, so I really should be mentioning the opening of the comics "LitGraf" exhibit November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. As a special bonus offer for all Yahoos (both the ones who have been "outed" and the ones who are still in the Yahoo closet lurking), Martin Mahoney, who is my contact at the Museum has generously offered to conduct a pre-opening tour on November 9 at 2 pm. That's right – after the press preview tour and the day before they let the general public in. All you have to do is send him an e-mail at mmahoney@nrm.org (add the line "LitGraf Tour" to the subject line) and you're "in".



As you can see from the Blog & Mail, I don't get an overwhelming amount of mail. I answer pretty much all of it right here, so it's not as if I don't notice when someone goes out of their way to say something nice as you have.

Tomorrow: Finishing up with the Mysterious Mr. D



___________________________________________________

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 #414 (October 30th, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Scott's update on ANUBIS

"The handcrafted "shoe box" version of boxed minis is a complete success. I've finally figured out the right design! So now, I have a temporary format to work with along the way to completion. And I can exhibit it in a limited sense as I go. I think at this point, having a bit more hindsight, I'm ostensibly not far from the position I was in a little over a year ago with my plan for delaying publication (although, now in possession of a much-needed temporary format for my graphic novel). I really don't think of the boxed sets as a vehicle for publication. It's more a form of printmaking than anything else. It is a temporary format, no more. And I have streamlined my operation to the point that the ANUBIS graphic novel proper is going to be the only creative purpose that I will be tending to from now until the day it is done. There will be no more painting schemes or nebulous down-the-road creative plans between here and the last pages of ANUBIS. I've packed up by ox-hair brushes, canvas and hand tools. My catalog of paintings is stowed away. The future is a blank slate: reserved for ANUBIS. And although I do not know how I will get it digitally adapted, I know that I will somehow get it done, and hopefully be able to self-publish in the conventional sense of the word someday."

A blast from the past from Mr. D.:


"I first met you almost exactly half of my life ago in [deleted] 1993 when you gave a signing at [deleted] (I've always thought it weirdly-timed if not quite synchronistic that I lost my virginity about 5-7 hours before coming into work the day of your signing…an event that only grew more synchronous as sex and women began to play larger thematic roles in your story). I was the `kid worker' at the shop and it was really cool to meet you at the time – you drew some Elrod bunnies and Cerebus trees for me along with a head sketch. You probably remember the manager, [deleted] better than the owner because [deleted] was pretty hip to the radical changes going on in the industry in the early/mid 90s. As I recall, you printed one of his articles concerning the impending distributor consolidation crisis in CEREBUS. I saw [deleted] about a decade ago…married in L.A. – wonder what he's doing now."

Yes, it's really amazing how people come and go in this business. I remember having a lot of discussions with [deleted] through all of the convulsions going on. As it turned out, we were all pretty well informed about what was happening, in what order and for what reason. There just turned out to be nothing we could do about it as individuals when the time came.

"I am kind of writing for the Sandman parody issue but mostly just using the opportunity to say "Hi" and thank you for all you've done. In fact, don't bother with CEREBUS 161 as I have every issue from 50 on and all of the trades except the GOING HOMES (which is weird because I've gone back to re-read through the footnotes of both of those stories). [deleted] told me to start reading CEREBUS the day 151 came out – the beginning of the Second Half – astutely knowing that that would be a good place to jump on board. Then he gave me the first trade for my birthday and that about all it took. I know you're readership changed a lot over the last few years (maybe a decade for all I know) but I eagerly awaited every single issue for many years. It was very rewarding to read THE LAST DAY trade once it was all over.

"I think that's why I'm writing actually. I wanted to tell you that you have had a profound effect on my life and I don't imagine that effect will ever wear off. I don't agree with all your ideas, I'm not ascetically minded at all, and I have nothing to do with the comics industry short of reading and supporting the alternative creators that I like. While I certainly hold CEREBUS in very high regard as one of the greatest stories I've ever read and gained immense satisfaction out of your panel layouts, word balloons, and dialect-laden lingo (not to mention humor, themes and narrative structure), it's really more your artistic integrity that has improved my life so much. And it's not like my life has ever sucked (so far as I've noticed) and has needed improvement – it's more the idea that your example has always been for me a high-water mark of what we humans can achieve in this life, on this world. (At the risk of disappointing you, I'm gonna stick to `on this world' for the time being because I don't share your spiritual inclinations…yet. I'm 32 so I do have a lot more growing up to do…if I start conceiving of the highest echelons of the increasingly ascending chess boards of life in ways that reflect your Islamic-Judeo-Christian view of the universe, then I may just write you another letter).

"But here and now I live and breathe my influences – I think we all do. People with serious drives, creativity, and the will to see things through are the inspiration that makes me excited to wake up every day and to be creative, thoughtful and life-loving every moment. When I think about it, there are really only a few people who have had such profound effects on me. I'm a musician so people like Frank Zappa and Miles Davis are a few who would come to mind. As you no doubt notice, those guys are some of the only creative figures in pop music who have had career-spanning creativity and – importantly – malleable, changing and developing approaches to their life's works. I don't imagine you're too into Miles and Frank (as I recall you've gotten less and less into music and got rid of your stereo years – a decade? – ago). I know comparisons to Eisner, Eddie Campbell or *maybe* someone like Alan Moore would speak more your predilections and artistic ideals. But I see the world as being full of beautiful possibilities and I cherish having found influences that have led to certain aspects of life-enriched experience. And CEREBUS has always been that. And so have Dave Sim's ideas, writings, interviews and pictures."

Well, obviously, my perspective has changed over the years and I now see that creativity needs to be in service to God to have any kind of actual meaning. But for people who aren't there (or, perhaps, aren't there "yet") I think the example of Miles Davis or Frank Zappa or Alan Moore points in the direction of always giving a 110% so that you set your name apart from those people who were just "putting in time" on their creativity and settling for what they settle for. The biggest lesson is: Pass It On. "Measure up". It's very easy to dig down a few layers and find your inner professional musician and produce work that puts food on the table and a roof over your head. It's a very different thing to dig down to your inner Miles Davis or Frank Zappa and find that vein of work that will inspire future generations the way they inspired you.

Tomorrow: More with the Mysterious Mr. D


___________________________________________________

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 #413 (October 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.

_____________________________________________________

Three weeks later, I'm making a concerted effort to actually make it to the bottom of the pile of mail, I'm going to lead off with that this time and then move on to updates on my (non) progress on the Secret Projects.

This is mail only in the most technical sense: two sample issues of THE 99 NINETY-NINE that came in with Diamond Dateline from Teshkeel Media Group. This is the Muslim super-hero comic book that I had read about a while ago. Part of me thinks that I should at least do a pin-up of one of the characters or volunteer to do a cover but, frankly, I find the whole thing kind of suspect since the "99" is a reference to the 99 attributes of God, an area of Islamic belief that, to me, swerves dangerously in the direction of blasphemy. I can certainly get behind the idea of God being The Knowing, as an example. But if you start treating The Knowing as a thing separate from God, one of God's "emanations" then, to me, you are "joining gods with God" albeit from the other side of the equation. And then to take those emanations and have them incarnate in "gems of power" which give their owners super-powers which duplicate the attributes of God…well, at that point I think you're a long way from Islamic "home".

Still I thought it was worth mentioning.

A couple of letters from Scott Berwanger, one dated August 18 and the other September 27.

"But as I recall, one day not long after that misplaced childish glow had abated, finding myself on the cusp of becoming a master myself, I realized that the Print On Demand model was for the cliques, not the masters. Had I had a revelation? Or was I putting the child to bed?

"It isn't an arrogant sort of thing at all. All it means is that I have matured, or perhaps cracked the master code, and that, although I am really still in the domain of the gates of my life (herein lies a hope for longevity), it's been made immaterial, this thing about the public perception. We have all been made small by the mercilessness of technology, and there is nothing any of us can do to change that. There are no more big hits."

I'm afraid I would disagree with that. Dave Petersen's MOUSE GUARD started as a Print On Demand book and is now a certifiable big hit in the comic-book field. I got Andy at Carry-On Books to pull out $50 worth of comic books that he considered to be the best things coming out right now and/or his best-selling titles (just to see what environment I was jumping into) and MOUSE GUARD was in there. That has to tell you something.

"My only hope for genuine expression now comes from boxed-up batches of mini-comics; that would be the only possible true record of Anubis developed in real-time, as a solo flight. The printed pages of the digital version would turn yellow as I charged into the night with the rest of the story, and it would all be an incongruous tangle dispersed unevenly in bombardments every so often. I'd be struggling to remind them that I lived.

"So I've resolved to redesign the box, making it more like a shoebox than a slipcover, and hoping for the best. If I take my time, it should be feasible. And so it will be done in SIX volumes, and not ten, or sixteen. That's the original vision without any compromises. And perhaps one day when my breath has become soft yet deeper, ANUBIS will appear as a set of six bound tomes. A more refined, but less manageable design, something that would serve more as a summing up, not so much a record of time. But it would come to me as no surprise if, in the end, I chose not to bother with that conventional version, and let things be – taking the opportunity to move further into unexplored territory, rather than getting ANUBIS digitally adapted. I'll probably still be able to make comics by then. That's not something easily taken away from someone like you or me."

No, the ability to make comics doesn't get taken away, but the ability to produce them quickly – which is really the core element of successful comic books: not only being able to produce them but being able to produce pages in sufficient volume to hold an audience between issues -- does erode as you move from your thirties into your forties. The idea that you will always be able to produce comics at the same pace originates in the sense of immortality that everyone in their twenties and thirties possesses. "I will always be like this." Well, no you won't. The decision to do CEREBUS as a monthly until I was 46 was a decision only a twenty-three year old could make.

"For now I don't have time for digital justice. There is too much writing and drawing to do. It will likely have to be work farmed out to some wire-head by an old man such as myself, or not be done at all. And I don't think I will have anything to regret, not with a life as fully lived as my own. As a boy, happy wild-eyed and feral; as a young man, rebellious and lustful; as a grown man, fulfilled with his work, and still just as much the rebel as when he was young, if not a bit more subtle over the matter. It brings a smile to my face, this promise of privacy and shadow. That, and a mysterious dream. And all of this joy and love of what I do in my home, is the song of a craftsman.

"Or did I mistake that for the way to start stretching a canvas?"

A little too lyrical for my sensibilities, Scott. I can only reiterate that drawing comics in your forties is a very different deal from drawing them in your thirties and if you leave too much of ANUBIS to be completed in your forties, you're asking for trouble, speaking from experience. At the age of 51, I'm hoping that I have enough juice left to produce a bi-monthly title for an indefinite period of time but monthly is definitely beyond me at this point – and, really, was beyond me for at least the last two years of CEREBUS. I would hate to think that ANUBIS would never get done because you underestimated the facts in the matter, as I did.

Then the September 27 letter:

"Well it hasn't been long since I first logged on to your blog & mail site. And I must thank you for releasing me from the burden of knowing you as a `friend'. Being the silly, kind-hearted soul that I am, it has been all too often that I stumble into someone's life only to find that I have unwarily complicated my own beyond the point of comfort. Something to keep in mind for the future, I guess. So, it's two points for a renewed sense of caution. I seem to recall you being of the opinion that one should never fully trust another. And given your political loyalties, well…I think I need not say more. "

Well, yes, that's the problem I've always found with your team. "Friend" is always in quotation marks, pending absolute capitulation to Marxist-feminism as the quid pro quo for becoming a friend. No thanks. To reiterate: you didn't stumble into my life. You know nothing about my life and I know nothing about yours. We both have a shared respect and interest in the success of the comic book medium and (to one degree or another) the industry and that's all that we have in common. Unfortunately, your team always wants to get this all wound up in emotional constructs like friendship, still labouring under the delusion that everyone is, at heart, a Marxist-feminist like yourself. The ANUBIS experiment is, to me, valuable because it potentially serves as an option for wannabe's as to how to bring their work to market. That's the extent of my interest in you, Scott. I've learned through hard experience not to trust emotion-based people any further than I can throw them.

"Wanted to drop you a line, though, and give you the update on ANUBIS."


Tomorrow: Scott's update on ANUBIS


___________________________________________________

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 #412 (October 28th, 2007)



_____________________________________________________

Short one this time out. Sandeep's on his way and I've got a
prayer time in about twenty minutes.

In his column "Get a Life, Middle East" (7 August 07) Victor Davis
Hanson (yes, thanks again, Darrell Epp) writes "Supposedly Western sins,
such as drugs, bribery and rampant consumerism, turn out to be as common
in the Muslim world as they are here. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality
even seems to be tolerated as long as it is not overtly discussed in
public. Indeed, the only real difference may be our Western tendency to
talk freely in a secular context about controversial topics rather than
hide or repress their presence."

Well, certainly, but it depends on how you look at it as to whether
that's a good thing or not. The Muslim view tends to be to see their
culture as a personality in and of itself, a person who is either
collectively "continent" (for want of a better term) or "repressed" (if
you want to skew the argument in favour of the Western view). As with
the individual, where the cultural personality begins "spilling over"
into vice and treating vice as "lifestyle" or "preference" the problem
isn't necessarily immediate, but it isn't necessarily "not a
problem" either just because the negative ramifications don't show
up immediately or obviously. Speaking as someone who came back in the
other direction, what you tend to notice is that it isn't move to an
adjacent square on the chessboard that causes the trouble, it's the
square that's adjacent to the adjacent square on the chessboard. If
you repress drug use, as an example, you will have less drug use
(especially if you can be beheaded for trafficking). Well, that's
unenlightened, you say, let the druggies do drugs, where's the harm?
Well the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver is a good example of where's
the harm, where an entire section of the city has been taken over by
junkies who now shoot up in the street and where you have to step over
used condoms and syringes when you walk down the street. Why? Because
the area was already leaning in that direction but instead of cracking
down on it, the city chose to accommodate it and introduce a safe
injection site, to be non-judgemental. So the problem is getting worse
instead of better. Now the question (as far as the leftist authorities
are concerned) is how much of the downtown do they allow to go like this
or do they just take it as a given that a big part of window-shopping
involves watching someone injecting heroin into their neck or next to
their eyeball if that's what they happen to be doing when you come
around the corner. Hey, it's the new normal. Get used to it.

I don't think that represents sound thinking. But if you deal with
the problem incrementally on the basis of "How much of this can I stand
before I start screaming my head off" you'll find out that the
regression moves pretty swiftly once it gets up a head of steam. Feeling
a little stressed or depressed or just too bored for words? Hey,
there's a ten block area everyone knows about where you can go and
score some heroin and then head for the safe injection site where
they'll give you everything you need for a safe clean injection and
to give that nice monkey a leg up onto your back. They're supposed
to screen for "rookies" but there's been a few cases where a rookie
or two has fooled them and is now in the junk scene up to his or her
eyeballs.

Sandeep just got here so I'll pick up from there next Sunday. See
you then.

___________________________________________________

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

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #411 (October 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.

_____________________________________________________

Sandeep's going to be here in about five hours, so let's see if I can actually GET THROUGH THE REST OF THE MAIL before he gets here! That would be a first.

Letter from Jeffrey G. of Miami, Florida.

"Dear Dave

"I received the books I ordered from Aardvark-Vanaheim recently (I ordered all of the signed and numbered volumes in stock). A slim package that appeared to contain, at most, one book arrived a day before the package with the remainder of the books. On receiving that first package, before opening it, my first thought was, "Oh, well, I guess Dave was wrong and the warehouse only had one signed and numbered book left in stock."

"Well it turns out I was wrong and the first package contained a "special" signed edition, with a great drawing of Oscar on the title page. Realizing you simply could have sent the other books and said forget about Melmoth, I wanted to thank you for the gesture and the nice drawing of Oscar in my copy of Melmoth."


Oh, you're quite welcome. It was a bad month. First the Roberta Gregory fiasco where she said she had never gotten any comp copies. Flip through the freebie list and, yup, it's not there. Then I tell Jeffrey on the phone what books I have signed and numbered copies of and send his order to Recker. Julie phones a half hour later. "I haven't GOT any signed and numbered Melmoth". Pull out the latest inventory list. "Jeez, Julie, according to this, you don't have any signed and numbered Melmoth." "I just said that." Then I got the fax from Gary Groth with the end of Jeff Smith's interview where he says "We went on with our weekend and forgot about it." I don't know where I wrote about it before, but I was sure he had said – and I quoted him as saying -- "I proceeded to enjoy my weekend."

More than a little worrisome for someone who read the dialogue "Everyone dies in the end." "No. In the end everyone is dead. It's not the same thing at all." in a Roger Langridge story, what? Seven years before, ten years before I needed to use it in the front of CEREBUS 268? Recited it to Gary over the phone and asked if he could look it up for me (I've really got to start paying him as a research assistant) so that I could get the phrasing exact and I think I was off by one word.

It's a one-man operation and if the brain cells go bye-bye, that's all she wrote, brother!

Hey, I TOLD you I had another letter from Bryan Douglas in here somewhere:

"Dear Dave

"The one thing I've taken away from the Roberta Gregory affair is this: creators send each other copies of their stuff. Somehow this never occurred to me before. So without further ado, Last year's best selling Alphabet of Manliness!...including some illustrations by me. It is, for the most part, a silly, light-hearted book. But I also like to think of it as post-feminist literature (of a very low order when compared to CEREBUS) and am therefore proud to have been involved in it at all."


Well, thank you, Bry! Hate to belabour the Roberta Gregory situation but I had been wracking my brain trying to figure out why I would have given her a trade paperback (which I didn't usually do) instead of trading comp subscriptions (which is what I usually did). But now that you brought it up…

It was part of the '92 Cerebus U.S. Tour which had been built around Fred Greenberg's Great Eastern Convention on Sunday, a store signing on Friday and/or Saturday and media interviews Wednesday and Thursday. A few hours before I was getting on the plane to Seattle, Fred phoned to say that all or most of his dealers had bailed on the show and he was going to have to cancel it. Emergency. I asked him if he was going to be on the hook for the room rental and, yes, he was, he was cancelling too late. So, I suggested that he have them go ahead and set up the room with the 30 draped tables or whatever it was and I would phone (I think) Colin Upton in Vancouver and see how many cartoonists he could get to come out on Sunday with their books and sketch pads with an offer of a free table. I then left for the airport and by the time I got to Seattle, I think there were about a dozen cartoonists who were up for it – Roberta Gregory and Donna Barr among them.

That's really where the idea for the Spirits of Independence came from. It was definitely weird, walking into this dealer's room that didn't have any dealers in it and the turn-out was probably a couple of dozen people at most, but everyone had a good time and sold some books and did some sketches. The weirdest thing was the dead silence. No one had ever been to a convention where everyone was dead silent: the cartoonists were all doing sketches in silence and the patrons were all from the quiet end of the spectrum since they were grown-up, indy fans. Finally, somebody said, "Jeez, it's awful quiet. We need some music or something." And everyone laughed. And then someone started singing "The Star-Spangled Banner". And then EVERYONE was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner". And then everybody applauded at the end. That was when Colin started singing "O Canada" and I joined in and it was funny because it was only the two of us. Nobody else knew the words.

Anyway, part of the deal with the store signings (Perry Plush's Zanadu Comics, still going strong, hi Perry) was that the retailer got a whack of trade paperbacks fronted to him in exchange for hosting the signing and then selling the books at the Great Eastern show on Sunday. So, what happened was, Perry ended up getting probably three times as many trades as he could hope to sell in his store and there was no convention per se. He was going to be overstocked for months as it was. So, as I now recall, at the end of the "show" I basically just handed out trade paperbacks to everyone since it was either that or pay to ship them all the way back across the country. And that's when Roberta got her copy of JAKA'S STORY.

Thanks again for the book and the great sketches (which should be around here somewhere, right, Jeff?).







I've made a sacred promise to God that I will work hard, keep up with my prayers and pay the zakat if He promises that I'll never have to illustrate five pages of fart jokes as you have here (beautifully I might add, but still…) just to put food on the table. You can order a copy from www.kensington.com. But, seriously, folks, think it over before you do.

Mel Smith sent along a nice big packet of Gumby comics, postcards and trading cards (I got four each of Mike Mignola, Mike Golden and Bill Sienkiewicz so I can't wait `til recess to see what I can trade `em for). I gave the duplicate comic books to Andy at Carry-On to see if he can't drum up a little Gumby action in his store. Congratulations to Bob and Rick Geary on their Eisner wins this year. Well deserved and long overdue.

If you aren't reading Gumby what are you waiting for? www.gumbycomics.com

Nice note from Jim McLauchlin at Hero Initiative. You might remember that I did a Spider-Ham riff on Steve Ditko's cover to SPIDER-MAN 24 as part of the ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN 100 PROJECT where Marvel printed up 100 copies of USM 100 with a blank space and got 100 cartoonists to do drawings on them to support Hero Initiative.

Well, according to Jeff Tundis (who was bidding, so he should know), it went for around $1500. Jim sent along a list of the winning bids. Todd McFarlane was Top Dog by a wide margin with a bid of $6,701 (it was that last dollar that killed somebody I guess). Frank Cho was just a little bit back of him at $5,116.88 (which looks as if the winning bidder drained his bank account and then went scrounging for change in the sofa cushions as the clock was winding down). Joe Quesada/Danny Miki clocked in at $3,000, Tim Sale at $2,500, J. Scott Campbell at $2,247, Joe Benitez at $2,000 Ty Templeton at $2,000 (so there went my chance to be Top Canadian Resident), Tone Rodriguez at $2,000, Neil Gaiman/Joe Rubinstein at $1,945, Joe Linsner at $1,682, George Perez at $1,526…

The grand total was $81,475.21. I even got a Noncash Charitable Contributions form with it (#8283). I can't use if for anything, but it makes a lovely souvenir from Uncle Sam. It's a great book, too (I got a free hardcover). I had it sitting out on the coffee table and I picked it up frequently the first week just to thumb through it. You can order it in hardcover or softcover at www.HeroInitiative.org. Tell `em Spider-Ham sent you.


___________________________________________________

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.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #410 (October 26th, 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.

_____________________________________________________





I really should mention (and hopefully Jeff Tundis can do some scans of these) the "Giants of the North Hall of Fame" inductees besides Rand Holmes.



George Feyer (1921-1967). He was a television cartoon sketch artist. The only one I was aware of. Back in the 50s and early 60s before the structure of television was better understood, it was considered entertaining to have a cartoonist who could sketch as fast as Sergio Aragones do cartoons on camera in response to an interview question or to illustrate a children's story narrative. Hard to believe when you see old kinescopes of it. It's the living incarnation of Dead Air. I wonder how many cartoonists got the bug from watching guys like Feyer "doing their thing"? I wonder if I did?



Doug Wright (1917-1983) still a phenomenon and a total original. I interviewed him for the first issue of the NOW & THEN TIMES back in '72. I had a chance to talk to his widow, Phyllis, at the ceremony. We used to have family friends in Burlington, the town where he lived and worked and he must've lived nearby because I sure recognized a lot of the backgrounds he did from the Guelph Line area. I think Seth and Brad have a bunch of his strips on the www.wrightawards.ca website. Check them out. An amazing ink line and an amazing sense of humour.



Albéric Bourgeois (1876-1962) created one of the first comic strips in Canada – evidently, the first Canadian strip to use word balloons regularly Les Adventures de Timothée in 1904. He retired in 1954 which would have made him 78 at the time. Sort of puts me and Gerhard to shame, doesn't it?



Peter Whalley (1921- ) was a favourite of mine in high school, mostly because he illustrated a number of books written by Eric Nicol who used to do parodies that mimicked the flat linear tone of high school text books (which is probably why he was a favourite of mine in high school) and had a very edgy sort of sense of humour for the time (edgy for a Canadian, anyway). "They left in a huff, a favourite means of transportation" is an Eric Nicol line I use to this day. I had no idea Peter Whalley was a self-publisher (or, as the boys would have it, "self-publisher" – you know like a "chapel"). They've got a list of at least four books here. I'm getting to that age where I find it gratifying just to see that there's no year after the hyphen. Congratulations, Peter Whalley, wherever you are!



J.W. Bengough (1851-1923) rose to prominence through the publication of Grip, a humorous weekly magazine he published in Toronto (which would make him a… "self-publisher"… too, wouldn't it?) where he served as editor and cartoonist for 21 years and gave us "a lively visual record of the era of John A. MacDonald and Louis Riel". That might make a nice companion booklet to Chet's Louis Riel, the Riel Cartoons of JW Bengough. I had no idea I only beat my nearest…"self-publishing"…competitor by five years!

I actually went to the party Saturday night at Bar Mercurio which was quiet enough so that even I could hear the conversation. Glommed onto James Waley and Kevin Boyd at the bar, so we ended up forming our own little Torontocon/Shuster Awards clique. Turns out Kevin has gone over to The Dark Side – The Other Bigger Toronto Convention Which Must Not Be Named (ahem Hobbystar). I'm kind of hoping that this brings about a rapprochement between the two sides. "A.G." didn't try to kill Torontocon this year by scheduling a one-day free show the week before and, so far, that's the closest either side has come to "making nice" as long as I've been aware of the situation. It's one of those weird things where it's a natural fit. "A.G." is good at the pop culture, multi-discipline thing and brings people in in their thousands but completely falls down when it comes to the treatment of the comic book guests (I can name two very big names who will never come back to Toronto because of the way they were treated), Canadian comics, comics in general and the dealer's room and Paradise has trouble bringing enough people through the door, but they treat their guests like royalty, they have a solid Canadian comics representation, they're focused on comics in general and all of their dealers tend to go home happy. I don't know all the details and nuances but when you get right down to it, I think there's a very big DUH! in there somewhere.

Mark Askwith came over and joined us which meant we were now the SPACE TV/Torontocon/Shuster Awards clique. We passed an interesting half hour or so going over all of the scandals attached to my name (and Deni's) in Canadian Comics. Mandy Slater. Good heavens. I had completely forgotten Mandy Slater. Chris Claremont and I should BOTH be ashamed of ourselves. Mark came to comics by way of politics where there's an unspoken agreement that access=discretion. No discretion? No access. So, you'll never get the stories out of him and on the record, but boy does he have some good ones to tell. That was when we got into "I can top THAT!" And that's when I figured it was getting to be time to leave.

T.J. Behe who had had a few by that point came up and struck up a conversation and gave me his business card. He's doing a title with Phil Elliott (there's a blast from the U.K. past) called Contraband which will be coming out from Slave Labor "in early `08".

Turned out he used to drive a cab here in town and we started reminiscing about Lulu's. Used to be a K Mart and they gutted the place and turned it into a bar. That's right, a K Mart-sized bar so you know it was the 80s. It was in the Guiness Book of World Records for The World's Longest Bar. I saw Jerry Lee Lewis there, James Brown…a very unhappy Bay City Rollers revival (missed that one did you?), Elvis, Elvis, Elvis (three impersonators). It was absolute heaven for cab drivers since it was way out on the highway so, as he said, wherever the customer was going it was going to cost at least $20 to get there. It wasn't unusual to have 50 cabs lined up at closing time.

The thing that really bothered me was that the place was so huge (how huge was it, Dave?) it was SO huge that if you downed a drink and just walked from one side to the other, you had sobered up by the time you got there. The thing I liked about it was it was mostly civilians who didn't get out much so you could usually get pretty close to the stage without having to step on anyone. I was about ten feet away for Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown. Anyway, T.J. is probably hoping that I've completely forgotten him (as you always do when you meet someone when you've had a few) and lost his business card, but no such luck, mate. Check out the work in progress at www.contraband-comic.com

I came by the Doug Wright Awards table and Jillian Tamaki had just sat down to do her signing (they had all of the nominees do an hour at the table), so I bought a copy of GILDED LILIES a collection of comics and drawings. A few too many of the latter and not enough of the former for my personal preferences and some where it's hard to tell. If you put a bunch of drawings on a page inside of panel boxes, but the drawings don't really seem to form a distinct narrative, is it still comics? Or are they just drawings? Interesting question.

There's a two-pager of seemingly unrelated faces and figures, but when you turn the page, there's a silhouette of all of them with a number attached to each and then over the next two pages, there are typeset descriptions of each of them. Some of my favourites:

4. Gretchen had excessively curly blond hair, a comically high voice, a lock on First Chair trombone. All of which doesn't usually suggest someone who had successfully navigated her way to that Tween-age social apex: The Back (and naturallyBest) Seat on the Bus. She was a firm but benevolent alpha female who kept her small kingdom in check with judgmentally squinty eyes, rarely having to resort to more extreme (or humiliating) tactics. I think we got along because I made her laugh, which, I have to say, felt f--ing fantastic.

18. Stephanie was from Montreal and exuded sex in a way only Montreal girls can.

21. Owen Hargreaves (his real name) is now a very famous soccer player living in Europe. He probably makes millions of dollars and lives a fabulously glamorous lifestyle. I think the girls in elementary could sense his potential because he was generally deemed very crush-worthy. He used to make fun of my name; my mother rather unhelpfully suggested "Owen the Farmer" as a rebuttal.


There are 23 more that are definitely worth the price of admission ($17 US). I even got a nice drawing of a fish in mine. www.jilliantamaki.com or www.conundrumpress.com. She's got a book called SKIM coming out that she's working on that he cousin, Mariko Tamaki, is writing which is supposed to be out in March. www.groundwoodbooks.com.



TCAF came to an end for me when Suley Fattah came to get me when Julie arrived and they gave me a lift downtown to the bus station. September 5 he faxed me

Call it serendipity, irony or co-incidence, but as of the 28th of August I'm working with the Ministry of the Attorney General [province of Ontario] which is in the SAME building where the pub is that Julie, you and I had drinks after TCAF!!! What a small world, heh?

If you were wondering, my drinks were ginger ale, by the way.

Congratulations, Suley!


___________________________________________________

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.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #409 (October 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.

_____________________________________________________



I asked him if he still had the negatives for the HAROLD HEDD material. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Somewhere." There had been a lot of Last Gasp's printers go bankrupt over the years and in that situation (as Chris Staros and I found out with Preney) you just make sure you get the negatives out of the environment and under your own roof as fast as you can. I pictured the mound of cabinet drawers that dominated the library downstairs for months and the folders I still haven't gone through. And I only had one title to be concerned about. Same situation with Bob Chapman at Graphitti Designs and the "Young Cerebus" negatives he rescued from Epic Magazine…or the WATCHMEN negatives he had when DC was getting ready to do the deluxe anniversary edition. "They're here somewhere." Subtext: Listen, Dave, if you want to fly out here and go through the metric tonne of negatives I have sitting in piles looking for the Young Cerebus stories, you just let me know and I'll have a nice lawn chair waiting for you out in the warehouse.


I hate to be Johnny One Note about this, but it really does point in the direction of self-publishing. It was pure happenstance that Bob was in the right place at the right time to rescue the Young Cerebus negatives. When Epic Magazine became a moribund property for Marvel Comics, the negatives became expendable from the corporation's point of view. All the more so because the material was creator owned. A corporation's first question is always going to be "What's in it for us?" particularly when it comes to storage space and prime Manhattan real estate and looking at the remains of Epic Magazine, it didn't take a PhD in business management to figure out that the answer was "Not a whole lot". Marvel probably pays per square foot in rent what I pay in property taxes on the average room here at the Off-White House.


The situation was very different with Preney Print. Having sold the vast majority of my artwork over the years, I was always aware that Cerebus' future was housed in those negatives and the Preney Brothers were made aware of that. They invested in the flame retardant cabinet that houses the negatives to this day because of my emphases on the subject. They knew they were personally and professionally liable and, given that A-V was their biggest customer, took steps to minimize the risk to whatever extent that was possible. When their own bankruptcy became imminent, they focused on the negatives and made sure that they were a top priority…and that communicated indirectly to the From Hell negatives as well. After Kim and Ger and I had unloaded all of the negatives and stacked them in the library and Ger's former studio, I snapped Kim a salute and told him he was relieved of his command. It wasn't a joke. He heaved an enormous sigh of relief that the weight of those negatives was off his shoulders for the first time since the 1980s and we all went out for a coffee.


So where does that leave Ron Holmes and Rand Holmes' legacy?


It's not the easiest of situations that Ron Holmes finds himself in. It could be worse but it could be a lot better. My suggestion to him was to put together as close to a COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF HAROLD HEDD book as he could with what was there and then figure out what wasn't there and see about tracking it down. From there I suggested Print on Demand for the sake of testing demand. If the demand is there, you can always go to a prestige hardcover coffee table format up ahead. If the demand isn't there then you don't want to get caught with a printing bill for 1,000 hardcovers and orders for nine of them.

From what Ron Turner told me, this isn't an especially unusual situation. Not naming any names, he told me a couple of anecdotes about several famous underground cartoonists who never bothered to get divorced although they left their wives decades ago and now Ron is having to deal with these not-quite-ex-wives with nothing to support his own position but the handshake agreements he had with the guys in question and his word that he paid them for every copy in his warehouse (the shift to books from periodicals finally put an end to his being able to pay the cartoonist for the whole shot at the time of publication and that's caused some ruffled feathers as well among some of the guys who liked doing business the old way). It comes with the territory, but it's another example of how being a "free artistic spirit" with no interest in "boo-jwah" oink-oink The Man legalisms like Legal Final Decrees can look like the most ethical way for a sincere revolutionary cartoon equivalent of Che Guevara to go through life and end up, instead, causing enormous headaches for someone it has no business causing enormous headaches for. Where do you think the not-quite-ex-wife is going to go looking for her "fair share" of the money that was spent on dope back in the early seventies? Your dope dealer?

Surprisingly, Ron isn't bitter about any of this stuff. He reminisced about Rand: how he had come and lived with Ron for a period of time after he broke up with someone, things like that. I hope Ron and Ron can work something out because, at the very least, I think Ron Turner can fill in a lot of the blanks in Rand Holmes' life story as chronicled in the proposed "Art of" book that no one else can. I told Ron that at the tribute I had said that I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Spain and Crumb and all those guys first saw Rand Holmes' work: what it was like for all those bred-in-the-bone EC Fan-attics to see a fellow underground cartoonist who could actually DO (as opposed to fake) Wally Wood. And not just a cover or a one-time "what the heck" panel. No, Rand could DO Woody page after page after page. All that meticulous feathering and the beautifully spotted blacks, the clean edges, the double lighting on faces.

"Oh, they were jealous," Ron said, laughing. "You better believe they were jealous."

Well, if anyone is interested in contacting Ron Holmes or Rand Holmes' widow Kathy and getting on a mailing list for information about the forthcoming book or maybe buying a print or two, I'm sure the interest would be appreciated. I mean, don't be a pain in the neck, but if Rand Holmes and Harold Hedd were as important to you as they were to me and Chester and Chris, it's always nice to hear it when you have as much of a personal stake in it as Ron and Kathy do. Looks like they haven't changed the email address, it's still randholmes@hotmail.com.

And if anyone wants some copies of "Hitler's Cocaine" or ZAP's or any of the other undergrounds Last Gasp published, they are still in business and completely computerized. You want 20 copies of ZAP #8, Ron will be able to tell you in a few seconds whether he's got them and where they are.

And thanks to Ron for being another old coot in this business that I had so much to talk about with. And (like I say) on his nickel! You can't beat that with a stick.

Tomorrow: Last few notes on TCAF


___________________________________________________

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.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail: Addendum: "IN DIALOGUE WITH GARY GROTH"



October 5, 2007

Hi Gary:

Sorry, after a month I thought it had run its course. Jeff phoned and told me that I was missing the Thursday and Friday editions last week and wondered if he could put the correspondence on there. It's a lot bigger than the usual blog entry, but I figured that was okay and certainly easier then writing two new entries and then figuring out how to get them to Jeff in time. Again, I apologize.


Can you e-mail this latest salvo to jctundis@cox.net (if you haven't already)? I'll leave it up to you as to what we do about this, but I would suggest either
Adding your latest fax to the end of the Friday post so you have the "last word" until I can get around to writing a response and we'll just move forward on that basis. Your salvo goes up immediately and mine goes up the next time I'm doing the Blog & Mail (usually every three weeks or so) OR


Tell Jeff that I said he should pull both the Thursday and Friday editions from last week from the online archive and post a notice that they weren't supposed to be posted yet and that they'll be returned to the online archive once the entire discussion has been completed.


Is it okay with you if I number your bulleted points and get Jeff to put my numbered responses after them? I think this will be a little easier for people than having to scroll back and forth between the two to figure out what points are being addressed.


Hope you get to play some more soccer tonight.

Best,

Dave
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October 8, 2007

Dave,

In the event, I'll choose Option 1.

I wasn't quite sure why you jumped the gun and started running our correspondence; I thought maybe you thought it had indeed run its course, but I also thought you would've called or faxed me to confirm this rather than just assume it. I was also puzzled that you were dribbling it out when I made a point of stipulating that I wanted it run in its entirety — which I guess it would be, eventually, but I meant in its entirety all at once. Sigh. Well, maybe I was unclear.


One reason I wanted it released all at once and not dribbled out is because I have so many irons in the fire I was unsure how quickly I would be able to respond and I didn't want it go on forever, on­line, like some ongoing soap opera. I guess that's an irrelevant consideration at this point.


I just checked and the last letter I saw on your blog was mine. I assume you'll put both of ours up next, though it doesn't make much difference to me if there's a gap between yours and mine. At this point.


I very deliberately didn't number my points because I didn't want to lend that much importance to them, if you know what I mean. They were more or less listed randomly and I'd just as soon not give the impression that they were carefully structured. (I know that doesn't help.)

More later, I'm sure.

Gary
_______________________________________________________________

October 17, 2007

Did you ever post our last correspondence? I haven't noticed and your blog is a bit too difficult for me to navigate. You did get my last fax, right?


One of the problems with just assuming our exchange is "over" (without confirming it with the other party) is that fax transmission is not 100% reliable.

Thanks.

Gary
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October 18 2007

Gary:

Yes, I got your last fax and mailed my fax and your fax to Jeff Tundis to scan and post so, again, you'll have The Last Word So Far until I get around to actually answering your previous fax. When that will be...?


Right now I'm in the middle of figuring out if I can actually do a bi-monthly comic and (this being the early twenty-first century) it isn't just the comic book. Having finished issue one, I'm now having to put together a website for it in blueprint form. That was supposed to take two days and took a week and a half. Next is designing the promotion package/campaign. Next week is a Blog & Mail week where I hope to get through the last of my current backlog of mail as well as telling a (hopefully) funny story about Roy and Dann Thomas and Fitzgerald biographer Matthew Bruccoli. As soon as I'm actually through all that and (after hopefully squeezing in a day trip to Toronto to have lunch with Chester) when I'm actually working on issue 2 I plan to answer your long fax as a lead-in to my reply to Asa M. Larsson's attack on the Fifteen Impossible Things.

All in good time, all in good time.

Dave

Dave Sim's blogandmail #408 (October 24th, 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.

_____________________________________________________

It's an interesting experience not having a table at TCAF. Basically I can do whatever I want which involved taking in some of the panels but mostly just wandering around and looking at all the books and artwork that were for sale. I saw most of "Finding Nemo and Searching for Skeezix" with Peter Maresca being interviewed by Jeet showing off the new oversized Little Nemo collection and previewing the Little Sammy Sneeze collection. The premise of the latter strip is pretty funny, a little kid who sneezes with such volcanic ferocity that it has the effect of an earthquake in his immediate vicinity. Of course one of the recurring visual gag punch-lines was this little kid getting his ass kicked by one of his elders so hard he would go flying across the room. One of those "disconnect moments" for civilians such as when an image of Ebony comes up in a SPIRIT slide show or Connie comes up in a TERRY & THE PIRATES presentation or one of the "Crumb Girls" in an R. Crumb slide show. It's an effect that always interests me because the comics environment either isn't aware of how far out of step it is with all other forms of entertainment when it comes to this stuff

[you will never find any of the old racist Bugs Bunny cartoons in a commercial release from Time-Warner as an example and Chester and I are verging on having a big argument about whether the Jack Lemmon film HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE where he plays a cartoonist has been "deep sixed" by the studio that owns it because of the title – which I maintain is the case (another example of better living through feminist dictatorship) -- or if it's just mysteriously unavailable at the well-stocked video store he patronizes: "You're lucky the store clerk didn't report you to the Metro Toronto Police just for asking about it" I teased him ]

…or it's chosen to just ignore carved-in-stone Political Sensitivities in the interests of more thorough-going scholarship. I mean, I agree with that. I really loathe all forms of Marxist-feminist revisionism for whatever reason it's being perpetrated. But I can always hear (or imagine I hear) a sharp intake of breath in one of those moments. I even pointed it out from the audience since Jeet was making a great point of Winsor McKay's profound love for small children and up on the screen this little kid is getting his ass kicked. And Jeet answered that it was a different time period and that there were different standards then. Well, yes, I know that, but…but…oh, well, there's no arguing with Marxist-feminists when they have such long practice at holding two completely contrary opinions simultaneously.





Apart from my one-hour signing (and thanks again to all five people who showed up) the only other thing I was scheduled for was the Tribute to Rand Holmes panel Saturday morning with Jeet Heer and Rand Holmes son, Ron. Very small turnout – the place really emptied out after the Finding Nemo panel -- but among the audience members were Robert Fulford, Chester and Chris Oliveiros, the Drawn & Quarterly publisher. The panels were all held in the second floor chapel (or "chapel" as the boys would have it in the program booklet). Odd to think that it's less than a hundred years since the day when no self-respecting gentleman's college would be without its chapel. Jeet started things off by explaining that the artwork in the presentation featured nudity and explicit sex, so if anyone was of a strict religious persuasion and was apt to be offended he suggested that they should probably leave before we got started. So, I got up to leave. Which I think might have gotten a laugh, but my hearing's so bad, I might have imagined that part.

Ron had a lot of artwork done in powerpoint format and since I really only knew the oversized "Collected Adventures" tabloid collection (which I bought new at Now & Then Books back in '72) and the comic-book sized "Hitler's Cocaine" second issue it was quite an eye-opening experience to see all of the alternative newspaper Georgia Straight covers Holmes had done during the same time period in that same amazing, meticulous Wally Wood style (Georgia Straight is a play on Georgia Strait, the body of water between the mainland and Vancouver Island) On stage, I basically just described how difficult the Wally Wood style is to do and attempted to point out the feathering on one of the covers but (I've had this problem before) you can't get it with slides or scans or enlargements. So I tried to describe it as best I could.

I had no idea that Rand Holmes was a real Daniel Boone back-to-nature type. I knew he had bought a place on a remote island off British Columbia (north of Washington State on the "left coast" for the geographically challenged among you) only because I had gotten an invitation earlier this year to a retrospective that included the notation "Please RSVP if you plan to come as this is a remote community and transportation and accommodation need to be pre-arranged." Had this been back in the "gravy train" days I would have been there like a shot. Alas, it was about four months into having to run this whole operation solo and there was just no way I could justify the expense.

It turns out that Holmes used to work on his comics for six months of the year and then basically would just live off the land for the other six months of the year. Since my idea of "roughing it" is black-and-white television, I found that pretty impressive. There is an "Art of" book in the works right now and Ron talked about that a bit, as well as showing slides of Holmes' later paintings which he had switched to pretty much completely from comics work in the last decade of his life.

After the panel, I was standing and talking with Chester and Chris and asking if they were interested in grabbing some lunch somewhere (a complete novelty: I never eat at conventions until the day is over) and Ron came up right at that point so I invited him to come along. So we got a chance to talk to him some more about his dad and look at his own artwork (he had a sketchbook with him). He had a big meticulously crafted picture book of photos from the Rand Holmes retrospective on Lasqueti Island that I hadn't been able to get to. Everybody in their homespun clothing, a big communal meal laid on for a few dozen folks, the whole thing looking like every hippie commune from the 1960s I had ever imagined. I pictured me in the middle in my sports jacket.

"Hey, how about that George W. Bush, eh? Doesn't he have this whole Iraq thing by the short-and-curlies or what?"

And then we started talking about a Complete Harold Hedd volume and how that might sell. I guess Rand had to sell some of his artwork toward the end there but the oversized Harold Hedd has clean enough reproduction that you could probably get away with filling in the blanks with scans from it. Then we got into the whole Ron Turner at Last Gasp, Denis Kitchen at Kitchen Sink thing. Rand Holmes went from one to the other at some point and I guess Denis was pitching Kathy (Rand's widow) to have the same kind of relationship he has with the Eisner and Kurtzman Estates. Ron didn't know what the situation was with Ron Turner. Well, I said, I'd be happy to muck in a bit if he thought it would help

(one of the advantages of being Crazy Dave Sim: I told him if he wanted he could tell Ron Turner that Dave Sim was ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth at TCAF about him ripping off Rand Holmes. Chester and Chris laughed) It was a very enjoyable lunch and certainly made me wish that I had actually met Rand Holmes at some point.

What we finally agreed on was that I would write Ron Turner a letter and Chris could do the same and just see what that did. So this is what I wrote:

28 August 07

Hi Ron:

I met Ron Holmes, Rand's son, last week at TCAF – I was part of a panel saluting Rand on his induction into the Doug Wright Awards Hall of Fame – then went out for lunch with Ron and Chester Brown and Chris Oliveiros of Drawn & Quarterly. Basically Ron was asking my advice on what the estate should do about Rand's posthumous relationship with LAST GASP and the now-defunct KITCHEN SINK. He said that youh ad contacted the family a while back when they had the celebration dinner/fundraiser out on the island but he was kind of vague as to what it was that you had to say.

Evidently Denis Kitchen is pushing hard to become the same kind of rep that he is for the Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman estates, both in terms of intellectual property rights and original artwork. What I told Ron is that I think he has to get a clear statement in writing from you as to where everything stands as you see it and where you see it going from here and then he and the estate have to look at that and see if that aligns with their own thinking.

I frankly told him that this is why I push for self-publishing. My best guess is that you deal with the HAROLD HEDD material the same way that most underground material is dealt with and has been dealt with from day one. You print up a batch and when those are gone you print up a batch more and you pay people when you can afford to do so. I told him that thought it was unlikely that there were untold tens of thousands of copies being pumped onto the market that you haven't paid royalties on and that it's just as likely that you ran off a thousand back in 1982 and those are still trickling out the way most underground comix are still trickling out. Ones and two's here and there when someone who is interested notices that he (or she) is out of them. Or the reality could lie somewhere between the two. My point on self-publishing is that if you don't have access to the actual orders, print runs and profits then you have no way of knowing what is actually going on.

He and the estate do seem inclined to put out a definitive COMPLETE HAROLD HEDD COLLECTION at some point. My advice there was to do a POD version first to test the waters. If you get orders for a grand total of 28, then you're probably best to just leave things as they sit, with Ron printing up a batch when he runs out of the current batch and maybe get something in writing about getting custody of the negatives if (God forbid) something happens to Ron or LAST GASP.

I'll be writing about the situation on my daily Blog & Mail which has a time lag of roughly two months between when something happens and when I actually get around to writing about it. I do move things up to the head of the line and out of order if they seem like they are in the This Calls for An Emergency! category. I don't see this situation as being like that. It seems to me just another "Here's why I think you should self-publish" cautionary tale for cartoonists. If you're at all worried that someone is ripping you off, self-publishing is the only way to make sure that that isn't the case.

I'm not sure if I'll hear from Ron again – people come to me for advice all the time and when they don't get the advice they want that's usually the last I hear from them – but it does seem like an important enough issue to warn cartoonists about. If you want to contribute anything to the piece, as I say, you have at least a good month-and-a-half to do so. I'll let you know if I do hear from Ron or the estate. I told him I would be happy to at least send you a fax on this (I still don't have e-mail: one of the last hold-outs) and discuss it on the Blog & Mail but apart from that I figured it was just a matter of everyone putting their cards on the table and seeing how everything shakes out that way. At that point, I can't see me or anyone else having anything valuable to contribute.

Hope you're well and that you're still able to make a go of it in these dry-as-dust days. I might be contacting you about the protocol for reprinting Jaxon's "Testicles the Tautologist" from SKULL No. 3 as part of a series of "Where the humour in CEREBUS came from" articles in FOLLOWING CEREBUS. I haven't heard back from Craig Miller, the publisher (who is a real All-Mainstream Guy) but I thought I would give you a heads up .

Sincerely,


Ron called a few days later and we ended up talking for a good hour or so (on his nickel!) about our experiences at the opposite ends of the 1970s. Unexpected names we had in common like Mike Friedrich whose Star*Reach experiment really constituted the bridge between the underground and the Direct Sales market ("He used to come around here a lot and pump us for information about printers, discounts, all the technical nuts and bolts"). It turned out that the situation was pretty much as I guessed it was. All of the Last Gasp books were basically done on a handshake deal and (this I had not known) the artists were paid in advance for the entire print run on a given issue. He had finally sold the last of the oversized COLLECTED ADVENTURES OF HAROLD HEDD the year before and still had a few hundred of the comic-book sized #2 in inventory. He went through the sales history for the last few years and it was pretty meagre. By way of comparison, he went through the sales history for the latest issue of ZAP – which is really the gold standard for undergrounds – and it wasn't a whole heckuva lot better. This is Crumb, Spain, Shelton, Mavrides we're talking about here.


Tomorrow: It Always Comes Down to the Negs, doesn't it?


___________________________________________________

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.