Dave Sim's blogandmail #449 (December 4th, 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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STOCK INTRO INSERTION #7 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

Sepia tones must be hot this year and no one thought to tell me. Here's another book done almost completely in sepia called the SPINDLETONS by Indianapolis' Josh Johnson, pretty close to a square format on glossy stock, squarebound. Like MOUSE GUARD, it looks more like a children's picture book than a classic comic book. There are lots of interesting borderlands opening up when you have a form basically made up of words and pictures. What makes a publication a children's picture book and what makes it a comic book. The distinctions become very fuzzy particularly when you don't use any word balloons. How many images do you need per page to make it a comic book? Of course, if you just stay on the borderland in between, you can be a children's book when you need to be and a comic book when you need to be. Although it's from Vei Publishing, it has it's own website at www.spindletons.com.

Of course, then you have books that could only be comic books: like Matt Dembicki (previously a Day Prize nominee) Andrew Cohen and James West's SPADEFOOT #1, good old-fashioned space opera with Matt writing and inking, James and Andrew doing pencils and colours. It's been up and running as a weekly webcomic since last fall. Other commitments eventually meant James had to take a hiatus from the strip and Andrew stepped in to take his place. You can check out the webstrip at www.waspcomics.com or order the comic from www.twistedgate.com …or do BOTH!

Allen Freeman is back with the latest instalment of his anthology title SLAM BANG #2 Vol. III. He gets a good group of folks together every time out. One of the funniest things in the book is Allen's intro drawn by Michael Wurl. Apart from that there are some long-time favourites of mine like John Lustig's "Last Kiss" (www.lastkisscomics.com), Anton Bogaty, Brad Foster, Mark Martin and some folks I never heard tell of before like Gilbert/Dougherty/Humble/Rickaby with a beautifully balanced black and white and gray-toned detective story. There's even an interview with Tim Corrigan illustrated by yours truly. "Over 200 pages of Mind-Morphing Comics". The cover alone is worth the $12 ($10 plus $2 postage) admission charge. www.fanaticpress.com

From Cleveland Heights and editor Jonathan Hodges of Bad Place Productions comes SAFEWORDS 2007 an esoteric and eclectic "Anthology of Illustrated Works" including "Should" (Brendan Firem) "City of Iron (Preview)" (Hodges and Carey Maynard) "(expletive)" (David Watt) "In Between" (Giles Johnson and Jennifer Gordon) "Mr. Boo" (Hodges and Jay Fife) and "Woodboy and the L'il Lites" (David Watt). It's a very sophisticated package, handsomely produced from way over on the avant garde end of things. Check out www.badplaceproductions.com to see what they're up to in 2008.

ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE #3 is a squarebound digest-sized anthology with a gorgeous cover by Amane Kaneko (www.amanekaneko.com). Unfortunately, apart from a couple of Stoopid Pigeon strips it's entirely made up of poetry and under the International Blog & Mail Free Trade Plug regulations, I'm not allowed to tell you that you can order a copy of it at www.zygoteinmycoffee.com. Sorry about that.

LOOKING OUT TOWARD THE SEA from Michael Wood at Space Monkey Comics of Latrobe PA is a bargain at $1.00 including postage. Digest sized and only four pages long (you were expecting, maybe, WAR & PEACE for $1.00 including postage?) I'd have to say that this is one of the best attempts I've ever seen at integrating photos and drawings and word balloons.


ERIK EVENSEN'S SKETCHBOOK DIARY THE COMPLETE SERIES, as you might have gathered from the title is Erik Evensen's sketchbook diary, the complete series. This is where a life in comics gets a little weird. Erik started his daily sketchbook diary in February of 2003 after being challenged by Matt Talbot, co-writer and inker of JOHNNY RAYGUN which is published by Jetpack Comics which is the publishing arm of Ralph DiBernardo's Jetpack Comics in New Hampshire (remember? The guy who bought hundreds of copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1?). So Matt's all over this book as a character, as is his longtime girlfriend Jen who is also published by Jetpack Comics (Squarecat Comics, her own autobiographical strips). Good easy reading fun from Studio E3 (www.studio-e3.com) and a new strip every day from Feb 5 to October 23 2003. Maybe that'll light a fire under your procrastinating ass.

Those wacky Columbus, Ohio Panel guys get me every time. PANEL TRAVEL FALL 2005 TWO DOLLARS. What does this look like? I know this format. It's a passport!

They've done a mini-comic the exact size and shape and texture as a U.S. Passport. Get it? Special Travel Issue – and it looks like a passport? 9 stories by the usual suspects. I'll give Dara Naraghi and Andy Bennett the nod this time out for "best of show" with "Bystander".





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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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