Dave Sim's blogandmail #424 (November 9th, 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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Looking at the bad news on Secret Project #2:

So, instead of 25-50 copies, I'm looking at 12-25 copies on the second issue, and probably 6-10 copies on my third issue. And that's from the Top Indy Friendly Stores in the country. The mainstream stores, you'd have to divide by 10 – between 2 and 5 on number one and they'll order number two for anyone who has enough monthly titles in their pull file to justify the expense. So that was when I mentally pulled the plug on the project. I'll keep writing and drawing it and developing the website – hey, it's a lot of fun to work on! -- sending out a PREVIEW EDITION to the real-world environment I have in mind. Then it all comes down to how that real world PREVIEW EDITION works based on the response to the website from the real-world environment inside of the first 48 hours after the PREVIEW EDITION "lands".

But if the Indy-friendly comic retail consensus – as it is here -- is 25-50 copies on the first issue, then it just isn't viable in the Direct Market. DOA. Dead on Arrival. DOA I can accomplish just by putting the original art on the shelf in my office on top of the artwork to Secret Project I and forgetting about it and save myself roughly $9,000 worth of cash flow by doing so.

But, like I say, there's the fax from Ralph DiBernardo. Matt and Brian and Jeremy killed the book BOOM dead with their orders (unless the Hail Mary pass to the real world works) but Ralph DiBernardo POSSIBLY breathed some life back into it. You'll see why, hopefully, when I get there.

Hey! Remember Brian Lee Moore, from issue 300? The Iraq vet who was making his own movie, DEMON JOE? Got a nice note from him, dated September 15:

"I'm back to writing on lined paper here. My printer has had its last gasp. I killed it by printing massive quantities of various drafts of DEMON JOE. Four or five cases of paper and about a dozen ink cartridges later, I guess I'm lucky it doesn't just disintegrate in a big cloud of dust."

I go through the same sort of thing with the photocopier. Just running too many copies through trying to get exactly the right reduction of a panel on one of the projects. I'll sort of look at it, thinking, "I'm pushing it, aren't I?" And it's as if it's looking back at me going "You really are, you know. You want clean solid blacks on your copies or do you want dozens of copies of each page?"

"Yesterday, I returned from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I had to make two weeks of pay to cover my rent and utilities that were backed up. So I changed my MOS again to become a Heavy Construction Equipment Operator. Now it's official. I'm an engineer. That doesn't mean what it does in the civilian world. In the army that means we build and shoot. This is my fourth Corps in the Army Reserves. As a Cargo Specialist and, later, as a Truck Driver (as I was in Iraq) I was in the Transportation Corps. When I was promoted to Sergeant I was also joining the NCO Corps. I transferred to a unit closer to my home after my deployment and that led me to a nice cushy job as the NBC NCO (or Chemical NCO) which put me in the Chemical Corps. Now I'm in the Engineer Corps.

"It was pretty laid back. Three meals a day and we sleep in an old World War II barracks. I learned how to operate a dozer, a bucket loader (which was basically a 10,000 fork lift with a bucket instead of a fork so I already knew how to use it i.e. Cargo Specialist Junk), a scraper (which is basically a giant straight truck as long as a semi- only it articulates: has a bowl and a blade to pick up dirt & gravel to spread and fill) and a grader. Now, it'll take me another year to get good at using them. Two days a month and two weeks in the summer and what ever else I can volunteer for to make extra cash.

"I've got Saturday and Sunday off before I do another seven days of work. I'm using the last of my AT days (you get a maximum limit in the budget). Four days followed by a three-day weekend at Fort McCoy to shoot rifles. Fun fun. Not really, though. Actually I think of it as a pain in the ass. I really just want to make my movies (particularly the one I'm finishing) but I need cash to live on to get me by and the Reserves has always been my angle to scrape by. It's just getting harder to stretch $500 or $1200. $1200 used to be able to last a month. Now you need around $2,000 a month to live alone, comfortably)."

Yeah, I think it's all part of getting older. I keep wondering why I can't keep my annual expenses just for myself down around $8,000 a year and still give a good chunk of that to charity. Well, because it isn't 1982 anymore, Dave. 1982 is a quarter of a century ago. Pretty soon I'm going to have to crack and give myself a raise to $1,000 a month. Seems to me I should be able to buy a cattle ranch in Montana for $1,000 a month.


"I'll probably mail this on Tuesday. Monday I'll be at my Reserve unit. I'm going to use their machines to photocopy this. I don't have an Archive, but I like to include correspondence, e-mails, scripts, prose, and actual journals in my journal. I've got four milk crates full of 2-inch and 3-inch binders full of document protectors and most of my scribblings as far back as 1993. Please photocopy that green cardstock I wrote on and mail the copy back to me. I'd like to include it in my journal."

Yes SIR, Sergeant! (it doesn't show up on a computer screen, but that was my niftiest salute I did there: slow up and then SNAP forward). I was a little worried about how the green would photocopy, but it came out fine as you can see.

"I read about your Secret Project on your Blog. I look forward to getting a copy at my favourite comic shop next to my copies of FABLES and whatever else I end up buying that day. I remember writing to you that I thought you should do another comic. I know I plan on following the Clint Eastwood/Kurowsawa method of career progression – just don't stop. I'll retire when I can't get out of bed under my own power."

Tomorrow: Oh, to be the Clint Eastwood of comics instead of the bum I turned out to be




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

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

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

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Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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