Dave Sim's blogandmail #462 (December 17th, 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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The World's Shortest Blog & Mail Entries

EVER as Secret Project #2 Comes to the Direct

Market

Picking up where I left off on Saturday: I have very high hopes for ComicsPRO particularly in light of the coverage of their early formation and first major meeting. Joe Field was one of the big motivating forces behind the organization and he tends to get things done (he's also the one who came up with Free Comic Book Day). They charge dues of roughly $300 a year which makes sense as a way of separating those who are serious about ComicsPRO from those who aren't. It also creates a kind of pressure in the other direction of "What am I getting for my $300?" which in turn puts a lot of pressure on me as being (possibly) one of those things that they are paying for. You get in on the ground floor of Secret Project #2.

As soon as Secret Project #2 went from an intellectual exercise to a scheduled event, everything in my life changed. I had been writing and drawing the book (I have thirteen pages done on the second issue) and instantly I had to switch to promotion mode. It is a fact in the comic-book field that you really have only your one chance to get your sales up and that's on your first issue so that's where I will be spending virtually all of my time between now and February 18, the order time period: trying as much as possible to make sure that everyone has heard of the book and/or seen the covers of the two different editions of #1 (the Comics Edition and the Real World Edition – retailers will be able to order as many copies of each as they wish).

That reminds me of a fax I have to send to Ralph DiBernardo of JetPack Comics telling him that I will be offering both versions of the first issue on a "buy 2 get 1 free" basis. Excuse me.

Okay. I'm back. While I was there, I remembered to mention that I would be over-printing on the first issue by 50% whatever orders I get so that the books will be there and available for reorder. Diamond's pick-up location at Quebecor is just a short drive from Lebonfon. And then I remembered my commitment to do subsequent printings of each issue of Secret Project #2 as long as there's demand for them. All of these ideas have come from conversations with retailers about what makes life easier for them and what makes them decide to order more copies of a book. Unlike CEREBUS I have absolutely no idea how long it will take me to finish this project so I can't give anyone even a tentative idea of when a trade paperback would be coming out. At 6 issues a year, even if the project is HIGH SOCIETY sized, the earliest (EARLIEST!) it could be collected is 2012.

Dave Sim sincerely apologizes for the brevity of these Blogs & Mails and hopes to be back to his usual minimum-two-pages of blithering self by mid-February at the latest once the actual launch of Secret Project #2 has taken place

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR THE FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE TITLE AND SUBJECT OF SECRET PROJECT #2

BOXING DAY 2007

(ER – THAT'S DECEMBER 26 FOR ALL YOU NICE NON-CANADIANS OUT THERE)

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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:

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.