Dave Sim's blogandmail #451 (December 6th, 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 #9 - 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.

I bet you thought we were all done with Matt Dembicki as well and, again, you would be just plain wrong. If you're big into ecology, then have I got a self-contained graphic novel for you. Matt and his wife Carol created an entire graphic novel out of a pond located near their home. As Jay Hosler writes in the introduction:

This is an unlikely place to experience the wonders of nature. A supermarket is only about 100 yards away. The Doppler Shifts of car wheels hum on the road up the hill and the ground is littered with miscellaneous rusting bits of metal.

Carol and Matt just ignore all that and tell a great story – it took them five years to finish, serializing it in six issues, the seventh only appears here in the collection -- filled with drama and adventure and excitement. Completely self-contained. Believe me, I'm very far from an ecology nut and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Check it out now at www.littlefootcomics.com. And don't miss the MR. BIG CONCEPTS AND SKETCHES mini-comic they also did. The ladybugs on the front cover alone are worth the price of admission.

HATE YOUR FRIENDS has got to have one of the catchiest titles around. Created by Kristin Blank, written by Kristin Blank and drawn by Michael Wood, the unrelated-but-tolerant-of-each-other-presumably-dual-prides of Beautiful Downtown Latrobe Pennsylvania they are still chugging along here at issue #6, four years after issue #1 came out. There's even a full page of recap for the terminally disorganized (like me) who KNOW they have the first five issues around here SOMEWHERE. If you were never cool enough to hang around with the band and always wondered what that was like, well, it seems pretty authentic to me (of course I was never cool enough to hang around with the band and by the time I was cool enough to hang around with the band I was too old to hang around with the band). The cover is especially good this time with a mock-up CD Release Party poster on an authentically grungy looking bar wall (I was always cool enough to see actual bar walls). Check out www.spacemonkeyonline.com. The back cover has an ad for LOVE IN THE TIME OF SUPER-VILLAINS (remember when I plugged the first issue? Not Superman and Not Wonder Woman get drunk and end up getting married in Vegas?) No.2 suggesting that it's coming in the Summer of '07. I'm sure it must still be the summer of '07 somewhere. Maybe on Earth-2. Anyway, it's another great DC Love Comic pastiche cover.

According to the inside front cover of HATE YOUR FRIENDS, "When Kristin grows up, she's going to be a pretty princess!" Even if it's intended ironically (and I'm pretty sure it's intended ironically) it's always nice to see that sensibility making a comeback, however temporarily. But, then, I used to love it when the bubble gummy "Barbie" song used to come on in the nightclub I went to.

I'm actually thinking of inaugurating a SHORTEST COMIC DAY PRIZE. If I do T'DIRK TODURKEY (yes, I've checked the spelling a half dozen times and that is, indeed what it says) THE SUFFERING by Nate Higley has the inside track. A whopping 2.5" high by 4" wide and a (further) whopping six pages long, this one has a lock on the Mighty Tiny Sweepstakes horizontally, vertically and page count. Just to tell you what it's about I'd have to do a SPOILER WARNING. According to the back cover it's dedicated to Noelle Barby (the most kick-ass girlfriend ever), Coheed and Cambria, and the real D'Dirk Todurkey…Dirk Mai. Click on www.natehigley.com and see if he'll tell you any more about it (let me know if there are any photos of Noelle Barby (kick-ass girlfriend – that's a good thing, right?)

Hey, here we are at the bottom of the pile and it's SYMPHONY OF THE UNIVERSE Book 1, Chapter 1: "The Mad Prophet" written and illustrated by M.A.D. who turns out to be Molly Durst of Never-You-Mind-Phone-Directory-Boy, Ohio. Don't know what the "A" stands for but obviously Mum and Dad were just asking for trouble giving her those initials.

This time there is a website so I don't have to call and ask if I can run her address as I had to do with Maria "Wakka" Ciccone (her phone message said to leave a message and she would call back in six months) (I'm trying not to take it personally even though she hasn't called back yet) (what am I going to tell her if she really does call back next May?) (why is it these parenthetical thoughts breed like rabbits when there's a female involved?).

Molly's been busy. She's got a mini-poster in the book with little cover reproductions of the first five issues and a very nice "YOU ARE BEING WATCHED" (like I didn't already know that) eye-in-the-pyramid graphic inviting me to uncover the secrets of the universe. This is, again, infernal stuff but well back in this direction from TWISTED TOTS. Molly needs a little work in all the vital areas, but stranger things have happened. You can take a look at the "work in progress" and maybe order an issue or two at www.symphonyoftheuniverse.com.

Holy smokes. That's it. That's all of the Day Prize submissions. And I'm not even at two full pages yet.

Maybe I could just run STOCK INTRO INSERTION #10 - 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.


Kind of cheesy, but it did fill out the second page.

Tomorrow: At Long Last, Sweden's Own Asa M. Larsson





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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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