Dave Sim's blogandmail #422 (November 7th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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A CEREBUS reader suggests that the Woody Allen stuff in LATTER DAYS "worked":

Well, to be honest, you're the first person to say anything positive to me about the Woody Allen stuff. "Doing" Woody Allen was really my response to the complete radio silence on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Okay, they don't want meticulously researched authors, how about a meticulously researched comedian? Nope they don't want that either. So, in all the thinking that went into Secret Project I and Secret Project II I really didn't have much to go on. I haven't done anything good since HIGH SOCIETY and everything after 186 completely sucked. That seemed to point in the direction of trying something completely new.

"I think the consumer demands a self-contained, 49-page Dave Sim Secret Project that has Peter Sellers in it, or possibly the equivalent of Ultimate Roach, along with whatever else inspires you.

"So, maybe not `the consumer' so much as me, and perhaps rather than `demands' more sort of hopes for, but be fair, it's only human to want more of the same only different, isn't it? Certainly in the comic book shops it is.

"I suspect that we cannot have a 49-page secret project about an aardvark scamming people, but given that, 49 pages of whatever Dave feels like doing featuring a Bill Murray character would be pretty freaking awesome. How couldn't that sell in comic shops, while giving people a hunger for another fix?

"I may not be the best judge of these things, however.

"Anyway, I remain, as always, eager to purchase the next issue."

Well, I appreciate that, Mike, I really do. But, you know, maybe if you…and, say, three or four other people…had said something positive about the Woody Allen stuff when it was coming out, I might have factored that into my thinking on what I was going to do next. The Woody Allen stuff flopped completely – sales continued to go down and no one had anything to say about it, good or bad at the time or since -- despite all the work I put into it. So doing the same thing for Peter Sellers or Bill Murray, to me, would be like saying, "Let's intentionally follow a flop with another flop."

I hope you can understand that I'm TRYING to give the comic-book field the benefit of the doubt. I really am. I'm trying to believe that a new project from me will get a fair hearing. I'm trying to overlook the fact that everything I've done for the last thirteen years has been universally ignored. And that starts to seem a little psychotic to me. Why am I ignoring the fact that my work is being ignored? I can understand all of you being cowed into submission by the Marxist-feminists – they're very good at it. So, in a sense, you want me to entertain you but you also want me to understand that you can't applaud or say anything nice publicly about anything I do – or if you're a store owner that you can't order too many of them or the Marxist-feminist Boogeyperson Come Get You. I can, in a way, understand you being that way, but really what you're asking me to do is to join you in your psychotic state and UNDERSTAND why it is that everything I do has to be met with complete radio silence and ACCEPT that as if it is normal and sensible.

Can YOU understand why that doesn't exactly light my fuse and make me feel like I just HAVE to spend thousands of dollars getting a comic book into your hands that I know, already, you and everyone else is going to ignore? While expecting me to work twelve hours a day, six days a week doing the NEXT thing that you're all guaranteed to ignore? I'm not that needy and I don't feel a sufficient kinship with anyone (no offence) to feel compelled to ENABLE the psychotic state that you've chosen for yourselves. Why would I help you to maintain a psychotic state? I mean, what's in it for me?

Right now, the only thing that has improved sales is the Blog and Mail, so right now that's the only guaranteed thing I'm going to do.

The best I can say about possibly publishing any future comics work right now is: miracles do happen. I sent Dann Thomas a copy of GOING HOME and FORM & VOID and she overcame her ambivalence and talked to Matthew J. Bruccoli about them. If you had asked me about the likelihood of that happening before it happened, I would have put it in the vicinity of 12,000,000,000 to 1. First of all that she wouldn't have taken offence that this book had been written by an evil misogynist and it didn't portray Zelda Fitzgerald and Mary Hemingway as Strong, Independent Admirable Women. Any time I send a woman any of my books, it's really just my way of saying "Good-bye, no hard feelings, it was nice knowing you, however briefly."

Second of all that she would think the material worth "going to bat" over and thirdly that she would risk a contretemps with a long-time friend in doing so.

But, make no mistake about it: that was an "outside comics" event. The only thing that puts it remotely near the comic-book field is that Dann Thomas is married to Roy Thomas. So that means a miracle happened with Dave Sim's work in a place adjacent to the comic book field. That's still worlds away from a miracle happening in the comic book field.

Wish I could be more optimistic than that, Mike, but there is absolutely no paper trail for any level of enthusiasm for Dave Sim and his work in the comic book field. My work has been universally ignored in the comic-book field and everyone who pretends to be a fan of my work has been a party to it. The only way that someone can be a Pariah is if everyone goes along with treating him as a Pariah and so far, as with everything else having to do with the Marxist-feminists, their success rate is 100%.

If I saw a little more basic courage and human decency of the kind exhibited by Dann Thomas IN the comic-book field instead of ADJACENT TO the comic book field, I might seriously think about publishing some more of my stuff IN the comic-book field.

Tomorrow: a glimmer of light in the darkness



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

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

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