Dave Sim's blogandmail #201 (March 31st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

NITTY GRITTY ABOUT

THE INTERNAL WORKINGS

OF AARDVARK-VANAHEIM THAT

ARE A) NONE OF YOUR

BUSINESS AND B) HERE ON

DISPLAY FOR YOUR DINING AND

DANCING PLEASURE!

Jeff Seiler continues:


My next point is that this letter to Wilf clearly was not an actual "Last Will and Testament and Powers of Attorney for Property and Personal Care", but was just your suggestions for same. So, in the ensuing year and three months, has Wilf produced said legal document? If so, I assume that it will be revised soon to reflect Gerhard's departure.


"Soon" is a relative term. It took about two or three years for me to actually arrive at a final Last Will and Testament and I signed it at Wilf's office, literally the day before I flew out for Salt Lake City and Gerhard dropped his bombshell literally his first day back in the office after Salt Lake City. There are two documents. The Power of Attorney for Personal Care is valid and David Carrington will be added to the list when Wilf gets back from Zimbabwe (of all places) the middle of this month. The Will is a more complicated piece of work that I am still composing mentally and which I have been working on mentally since November 1st of last year.


When it is revised, what is your thought as to giving me (and perhaps the other Committee members) a copy of it? I mean, I assume there would be no secrets or surprises in it, particularly with Gerhard out of the picture, right?


I assume that, yes, you would all get copies. The question right now is if the Last Will and Testament would be posted to the Newsgroup which was the plan with the one I signed last October that got scuttled when Gerhard announced his resignation. One of the big questions is: Is Gerhard "out of the picture"? His own first idea was that we would just "wind up" the company, liquidate all assets – sell the house, ditch the inventory and whatever else -- and divide the resulting amount of money. When I made it clear that I intended to keep going he accommodated that by pitching a lump sum payment for this year and subsequent monthly payments for five years. Which I agreed to. However, citing the Peter Laird buyout of Kevin Eastman I said that I thought it was wrong for a creator to not have some participation in his own creativity, however marginal it might be and made the suggestion that at the end of the five years Ger would start getting royalties on the sales of the books that he worked on. Relative to the on-going Creator's Rights debate, this allowed me to demonstrate what I see as correct behaviour for a publisher since Gerhard relinquishing his 40% share of the company would then put us in the relationship of publisher and freelancer. So what I want to do at that point is to establish the Superman Contract that I had been trying to pitch to DC almost twenty years ago now and which Paul Levitz just couldn't bring himself to sign off on or even discuss seriously even in the initial baby step stages. That is, had DC known in 1938 what a goldmine Superman was going to be, what sort of a deal could they have offered Seigel and Shuster that could be deemed fair? And, to me, there you look to the newspaper strip field where the syndicate and the cartoonist split revenues 50-50 with all expenses coming out of the syndicate's half. Book publishing is a little more complicated and has quite a bit more overhead to it, so I wouldn't institute the program from "dollar one" as the newspaper syndicates do. But my intention with DC had been to say, "Cerebus is an established property, so you pick the dollar thresholds – make them as high as you like – but at some point we split all revenues 50-50." Make it a billion dollars if you want, but at some point there has to be an amount of money coming in that you can be happy only getting half of it instead of 90% of it. How can you turn up your nose at making $500 million dollars off of a creative property? That was complete pie-in-the-sky back in the late 1980s, but with the Spider-man franchise now approaching the one billion dollar mark, it's now a lot more real. Anyway, at the end of five years – having accepted Ger's lump sum request and five-year monthly payment request – I'll present him with a Superman Contract that specifies specific thresholds at the maximum of which he will get 25% (half of 50%) of every dollar that comes in if the company ever hits that maximum threshold. And it will obviously be much less than a billion dollars.


Also, (I don't mean to be nosey, but I really do think this question pertains to your estate) how can the two of you possibly divide up the material part of the Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. property?


We couldn't without dismantling it as Gerhard suggested, turning all assets into cash and then dividing the cash 60-40.


Who gets what pages (a tangible and valuable asset, not necessarily just to be relegated to the estate); how do you determine the value and share, page by page (arguably, Ger did more than 40% of the work on many pages and you certainly did more than 60% on others)?


We couldn't. The range of prices on the few pages we auctioned on eBay to test the waters last year means the pages are worth what you can get for them on a given day and depends largely on how much more than two people with deep pockets want them. Ger and I agreed years ago in the event of a split that we would divide the pages 50-50 on a strict "one for you, one for me" basis starting with the earliest page in issue 65 when he started on the book. The randomness of doing it that way would mean it was luck of the draw as to who got what pages. I'd get 1900 and Ger would get 1900. The accountant originally wanted to do a valuation of the pages as a company asset, but that really isn't the way things work in the comic-book field. You get your artwork back. We kept the pages in the company because we were both in the company. If we got paid for a page the revenue got divided 60-40 whether it went towards a company expense or whether it was part of our salaries. It was a convenient way to make sure we shared in our rare art sales. But the understanding was always that Ger was entitled to a fair share of the pages (and it isn't just about the amount of work that went into it – a page with my characters on it: particularly Cerebus or Jaka with backgrounds just at the periphery sells for a lot more than an all background page). What we are tentatively doing now is giving each of us jurisdiction over half of the pages. I can authorize the sale of pages over which I have jurisdiction and Ger can authorize the sale of pages over which he has jurisdiction. Neither of us is particularly interested in selling artwork since the artwork is the thing that has appreciated the most in dollar value over the years. The trade paperbacks still sell for what the trade paperbacks sell for, the house is worth substantially less than what we paid for it at the top of the housing market and the intellectual property rights to Cerebus for movies or merchandising aren't for sale so that point is pretty well moot.


Lengthy digression: Ger considers the Cerebus art market to be dead right now, but I don't agree. I think the artwork is just under-valued. Brian Coppola for several years there was able to buy virtually every page that came on the market for between $500 and $700. Lately, the few pages that have been offered for sale or auction haven't been meeting their reserve and have been withdrawn more often than they've changed hands. But, come on – there are roughly 2,200 pages out there circulating or theoretically circulating. I don't think there's any other art team that has 2,200 pages in circulation. If the Cerebus art market was dead hundreds of those pages would be dumped onto eBay at $200 to $400 a page. The owners would be desperate to sell them for whatever they could get. No, I think it's a case of people believing the pages will go up in value from their present level so they're hanging onto them. If someone starts paying $1,000 to $1,200 a page the way Brian was one of the first to make the jump to $500 to $700 a page, I think they'll be able to pick up the stray pages that come onto the market and probably persuade some owners to part with pages they've been sitting on. I mean, Harry Kremer would barely speak to me when I put the pages up to $100. To him that was a ridiculous amount of money and he wouldn't pay it and he resented it as one of my biggest art buyers to that point. But Ger and I were just as happy not to sell the pages and if we did sell them we wanted to make $100 off of them. At that point if you had offered us $100 a page for the whole lot we would have sold them in a New York minute and carried them over to your house one at a time. Then they started evaporating at $100 a page and we put the brakes on and just let the market set its own price without our participation. People used to anguish and virtually dissolve in front of us at conventions really, really, wanting to buy a page but…a HUNDRED BUCKS! Brian's Cerebus the Artvark website was set up by him to update everyone on what Cerebus pages were trading hands at and, as far as I know, for as long as he's had it up and running you can pretty much count the number of pages he's documented on two hands and have several fingers left over. That isn't a dead market, that's an undervalued market.


Tomorrow: Really having to dig down in the pile for a religious topic

Coming Monday: Meanwhile, Back At the Subject

There's MORE for you

In Today's

Blog &…

…MAAAAIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #200 (March 30th, 2007)

HE'S BEEN WAITING A WHILE

TO HAVE HIS SAY AND TO GET

MY RESPONSE, SO HERE HE IS

FOLKS, CEREBUS READERS IN

CRISIS PUBLISHER AND UBER

YAHOO JEFF SEILER!

Dear Dave,


I hope that this letter finds you fully recovered from your recent lengthy illness. I am just today returning to school after my bout with the flu. As you said, you just have to let it run its course.


As you no doubt had much time to ponder during your sleepless bedridden time, the perhaps coincidental convergence of your illness and Gerhard's departure has raised a few questions, which questions have occurred to me, as well. Thus, today I reread your Thanksgiving Day '05 letter to Wilf which, to my knowledge, is the only extant public statement of your intentions regarding your last will and testament. As I result, I have some questions.


First, I assume that you have, by now, received David Carrington's letter regarding his intent to join the group of those who form the core of the decision-makers in the event of your becoming incapacitated (hereafter to be referred to as "the committee", for lack of a better name --- hmm, how about "The Committee for Dave Sim's Personal Care Decisions"?) Do you now consider him to be such a member?


Yes, but I didn't get a letter from him until just this week (March 12) – a manifestation of synchronicity that makes me think I made the right choice in not replying to you until I got to your letter in the pile. It may seem like an artificially slow way to communicate, but there have been several synchronous instances like that, so I suspect this is probably the pace at which God wants me to communicate. All in good time. And "the Committee" seems like as good a name as any.


Secondly, do you plan to release an official notice (press release or otherwise) regarding Gerhard's decision to leave Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc.? There has been far less speculation on the Cerebus Yahoo group as to the circumstances of said departure than I would have expected; Jeff Tundis and I have kept mum as to the details that you disclosed to us respectively and that Ger has emailed to Jeff. For the record, while I suspect that you would expect the comics industry to be disinterested in the facts, I think this sort of news deserves some sort of joint explanation from both parties to try to prevent rank skewering of you and universal cries of "poor, poor Gerhard, however did he put up with Sim for so long", and such lot.

Well, I've had from November 1st when Gerhard first made his intention clear to assess how I was going to deal with it and the conclusion that I came to was that it was Gerhard's story – that is, his departure was the story, not what he was departing from – so I figured I would let him announce it anyway that he saw fit. I anticipated the, as you put it, "rank skewering" of Dave Sim that would follow and couldn't see any way around it so there wasn't much point of giving my side of things even if Ger had given his side of things: at the end of the day I would still be the Pariah King of Comics. People in comics will latch onto anything bad they can say about Dave Sim in order to avoid discussing the Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. I ended up dictating a short paragraph to Jeff Tundis that he could use as an announcement and from there news trickled out over the next few weeks and, I'm sure, the rank skewering ensued and ensues unabated to this day.


Reading between the lines of my most recent letters which I won't be getting to for a few weeks, there seems to be a minority opinion shaping up that the loss of the Dave Sim/Gerhard art team is a great loss for the comic-book field which – however few people hold it – seems to me a nice albeit "too little too late" acknowledgement. I'm on record as saying that Gerhard was, for twenty years, the best pure pen-and-ink artist in the comic-book field and that it was unfortunate that he got pigeon-holed as a mere inker and that Dave Sim's "pariahdom" extended to someone who never voiced an opinion about anything one way or the other. He was never "of" the comic-book field, was never a comic-book guy so his connection to the field was always tenuous at best. Could that connection have been solidified by some public acknowledgement of his abilities so that we might now have been looking forward to more of his work in collaboration with me (and others?)? Well, now that it's too late, we'll never know, will we?


We made it nine years further along (1983 to 2006) than did Lennon and McCartney (1956 to 1970) but we'll obviously never have the lifelong (however troubled and troublesome) connection of Jagger and Richards (1962 to the present). I suspect that that's both a blessing and a curse.


Tomorrow: Into the real Nitty-Gritty of the Thing

There's MORE for you

In TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAAIIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail EXTRA!: Ultimate Spider-Man #100 cover... in COLOR!

Jim McLauchlin of The HERO Initiative (formerly ACTOR) just sent this over. Dave's colored final version of his Ultimate Spider-Man #100 cover celebrating Bendis & Bagley's run. Will it outsell Mike Wieringo's that went for $500?


___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #199 (March 29th, 2007)

IT'S DAY FOUR OF "JACK

BANEY HELD HOSTAGE"

BY REPUTED MISOGYNIST

AND ALL ROUND EVIL

PERSON DAVE SIM

Jack Baney continues:


Sorry, but I just have to get this in – you told me that you don't believe my statistics about the death tolls in Central America because leftists claimed that 4,000 Palestinians were killed in Jenin but the UN says it was really 28. I think that if you look it up anywhere, you'll see that your own statistics are wrong: the UN report says that 52—not 28 – Palestinians were killed in Jenin while the Palestinian Authority – not American leftists – overestimated the death toll as 500 – not 4,000 – initially. The Israeli government overestimated the death toll as up to 200 initially but now agrees with the 52 figure.


Frankly, Jack, I think I'm safe in saying that these numbers got "massaged" radically on an on-going basis from the first eyewitness Palestinian accounts which were fed to gullible anti-Israeli Western reporters through the independent assessment of on-scene CSI style experts to UN bureaucrats with leftist axes to grind through the initial report to revised reports and so on. Since Israel has chosen to do what I recommended a while back: build a security fence which walls them off from the Palestinians or Transjordanians or Latter Day Philistines or whatever you want to call those mad dogs and left them to tear each other to shreds, I really think the point is becoming moot if it isn't completely moot already. If the PA agrees to live up to its previous agreements with Israel and acknowledges Israel's right to exist then there is something to discuss. Until they do, there's nothing to discuss.


At any rate, I'll admit that I should be reading and thinking more about these issues myself and that since I've reached such disturbing conclusions about my own government's policies, I should be working to change them and not just writing letter about them to conservative cartoonists. After all, I think we would agree that I live in the freest (and, I would say, greatest) country in the world, rather than one in which I'd be persecuted for taking political action.

I'd agree with that. And I would only add that I think you should be working on what you want to change your government's policies into. The Democrats are in desperate need of coherent ideas and alternatives that align well with your country's collective gut instinct of where you're going and how you want to get there. If more of you on the left were engaged in determining future courses of action instead of trying to figure out how to indict Dick Cheney for 9/11 I think you – and the United States – would be a lot further ahead of the game.


I know you're not going to like all of my comments in this letter, especially the ones in the two preceding paragraphs, and that you may want to respond to them harshly. That's okay with me – I won't complain if you call me a Godless-Marxist-feminist-homosexualist-emotion-ruled-woman-with-a-penis-slave-toYHWH. But I will say that if you decide to tear me down personally—as you deliberately refrained from doing in Allen's case, according to your blog entry—it might be more effective to say something along the lines of, "Jack, you're the kind of guy who writes political letters to comic-book magazines. You probably have less sexual experience than the average Amish teenager. And it's quite possible that you're even nerdier than one or two members of the Cerebus Yahoo Group."


See, I would never say anything like that to anyone. People have been tearing me down personally for the last decade or so but that's because they can't refute my arguments in open debate. If you're able to hold your own in open debate with those who oppose you – and I'll flatter myself that I have been able to on the rare occasions when someone is actually willing to discuss my ideas – there is absolutely no need to get bogged down in personal invective and character assassination. And given my current focus on strict morality for myself, even if I did engage in "tearing people down" the last thing I would do is bring up sexual experience. In fact, if you think about it, I'd obviously count a lack of sexual experience as a credential not a liability. You know of any happy womanizer stories? Does Hugh Hefner and his half-dozen girlfriends and bowl of Viagra look like a happy situation? Do you think that ends well? I think Jules Feiffer summed up womanizing -- to the point of having the Last Word -- with the Jack Nicholson character in Carnal Knowledge. There. That's what that is and that's where it leads. Can we discuss something useful now?


Speaking of which – your comments in the Jan. 27 blog entry made me think that maybe I should avoid both reading your blog and posting my own comments on the Internet. I read that entry shortly after I posted some comments about you on The Comics Journal's message board. What I wrote was generally respectful of you (the one exception was a lame joke I made about Noah Berlatsky winning a Pulitzer and rubbing it in your face while taunting you). But something about our comments appearing on the Internet at about the same time reinforced my sense that there's something unseemly about Internet discussions, especially when they involve people who are not taking part in those discussions.


I'd say it's all part and parcel of being a public figure in a day and age and in a context where pretty much everyone is a public figure in one sense or another. I think the Blog & Mail is gradually evolving into a kind of debate forum which (hopefully) bypasses some of the worst excesses of the Internet and the "unseemly" quality you refer to. I've seen very little of Internet discussion and what I have seen certainly hasn't enticed me to participate myself. At the same time I find this to be a reasonably pleasurable (or, perhaps, least painful) way of keeping up communication across the great political divide and to stick to the issues and not get bogged down in personalities and name-calling. And I get to run the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast in front of everyone who tunes in on a daily basis. What could be better than that?


Okay, I guess that's it. Feel free to run this letter in your blog, in Following Cerebus or anyplace else you'd like, although I'd prefer that you run the whole thing or none of it at all. Thanks for telling me (in your last letter to me) that you look forward to my next piece of comics journalism, but I'm actually hoping to move beyond that kind of thing. I'd rather write some books and have you send open letters about my Marxist-Palestinian views to The New Yorker or something. Anyway, I look forward to seeing your future work. And I'd express the hope that you've recovered fully from the flu by now, but then I'd just be trying to "out-polite" you.


But wouldn't that be great? If we all just contended in the forum of ideas with ideas exclusively and on the personal side of things had an unspoken competition to always be trying to "out-polite" each other? Thanks for writing, Jack. I'll look forward to reading your first book.


Tomorrow: At Long Last Seiler!

There's More For You

In Today's BLOG &

MAAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #198 (March 28th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

It's now Day Three

Of Jack Baney Held Hostage

By Reputed Misogynist and Evil

Person Dave Sim

Jack Baney continues:


In total violation of our agreement to disagree, I'll add that my admiration for your idealism and determination to uncover unpleasant truths is part of the reason why I always want to argue you out of your current politics. To me, some of the best aspects of you just don't fit with a lot of the views you've been professing over the last several years. For example, I would think that someone willing to go so far above and beyond for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund would have major problems with the Bush Administration's treatment of terrorism detainees. But it's like you see locking people up on charges of selling obscene comics as reprehensible but locking people up, refusing to charge them with anything whatsoever or to give them fair trials, and subjecting them to psychological and sometimes physical torture for years on end is okay. Yeah, I know that Al-Qaeda needs to be prevented from murdering and that Bush isn't a Stalin or even a Castro, but come on – what he's doing with those prisoners is way, way worse than anything the U.S. government has ever done to anyone for selling or drawing comics (in addition to being much worse than McCarthyism and possibly worse than the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII). Also, it strikes me as unfortunate that while you've reached such harsh conclusions about women, sex, families, music, television, mainstream Christianity, etc., your conclusions about Bush, Reagan, and Israel are almost 100 percent sunny. I hope that those conclusions are at least well considered. I mean, I'd rather think that you've wrestled with your view of Reagan's support of the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador and reached the same conclusion as a conservative co-worker I once had – that this support went to some near-genocidal governments but helped to temper their worst aspects while preventing even worse communists from taking over – than to think you're simply naïve and have never even heard of that support.


Well, no, obviously I have. Most of the time my support for President Reagan and the current President Bush stems from the fact that they are dealing realistically with the issue at hand, facing it square on and deciding between the lesser of two evils, whereas Democratic Presidents tend to indulge in wishful thinking. "I really FEEL like this should work so let's try this." I think President Reagan ultimately dismantled himself over Iran-Contra because he chose not to look at it realistically and went by the FEEL of the thing. By giving military armaments to Iran and then taking the money for those armaments and using it to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, in his own mind he wasn't paying a ransom for the hostages Iran then released. They paid for the armaments and because that money went to fund the Contras (instead of going into U.S. Government General Revenues) he somehow convinced himself that they released the hostages on their own initiative and helped fund fighting the Contras by buying armaments. There was, however, just no way that it added up like that. It was CIA-style thinking (we'll do this thing that would ordinarily be deemed wrong and illegal and treasonous – like buying and selling a half-tonne of cocaine – and make it right by using the money for a good cause). Wrong is wrong. The debits and credits don't balance out in any rational way. But certainly I would agree that it is easier to move a right-wing military dictatorship in the direction of democracy than it is a Fidel Castro or a Hugo Chavez. As a general rule and I think the Republicans have always subscribed to that view.


When it comes to the problem of terrorist detainees there are many different levels to the situation. I think the immediate response after 9/11 was a good one, issuing from a visceral understanding of militant Islam as epitomized by Osama bin Laden's assertion that "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they naturally choose the strong horse" and the fact that, therefore, the United States needed to present itself to militant Islam as the strong horse, which the United States had not been doing up to that point in Lebanon under Reagan in Mogadishu under Clinton or much of anywhere else in the Muslim world for that matter. To me that explains Guantanamo and I hope whoever came up with that one in the early Oval Office meetings got a gold star in his notebook. Guantanamo looks strong. Guantanamo suggests that you might want to think several times before targeting American civilians and then change your mind and choose not to. Or you might end up in Guantanamo. It seemed to me a balanced response not only to 9/11 but to the complete lack of Muslim contrition for 9/11 happening. Whichever way you slice it, that lack of contrition was arrogant and suggested an overall Muslim approach of "Yeah, we took down the World Trade Towers, what are you going to do about it, infidel?" The sheer brutality of the attack which unfolded as a series of disaster films one on top of the other: a Muslim passenger taking out a box cutter and using it to cut the neck artery of the passenger next to him and using that particular brand of terror – an innocent civilian suddenly geysering blood into the aisle of a passenger jet – to get everyone under control and then deliberately smashing into a skyscraper which led to everyone on board and everyone on the impacted floor and the surrounding floors being burned alive instantly in ignited jet fuel which then led to the skyscraper's upper floors being consumed in the resulting inferno which led hundreds of other innocent civilians at 9 o'clock on a workday morning to have to choose whether to sit tight and get consumed by jet fuel ignited flames or jump to their deaths from a hundred storeys up. Then the firemen and the police on the ground with civilians hitting the ground at 32 feet per second per second…well, I don't think I have to go through the whole sequence of overlapping disaster movies but I do confess that I have a lot of trouble with leftists who want to place 9/11 on some sort of scale with the Japanese internment and McCarthyism. I mean, where is your sense of scale? 9/11 is, was and always will be completely off that particular Richter scale which is why it needed to be responded to and which required the United States Government to be, irrefutably, the Strong Horse.


As it stands right now, the biggest moral problem that I see is that all of the U.S.'s allies in NATO and NORAD and other organizations have anecdotal examples of "rendition". In Canada, our most celebrated one was Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Arab-Canadian citizen who our government essentially turned over to the American government back in 2003 as an accused terrorist and who was spirited away to Syria and imprisoned and tortured for a year.


Now, if I had been in those early Oval Office meetings with my notepad and my pen and someone – presumably CIA – brought up the subject of "rendition" I'm willing to bet that I would know nothing about it but I would pretend to know in order not to seem uninformed. Who had even heard of "rendition" in this day and age? It smacks of the worst excesses of French colonialism in North Africa, a very dark skeleton in the closet of the countries formerly known as Christendom. Once explained, though, and facing the challenge of being seen as the Strong Horse in Muslim frames of reference (the same problem the French faced in Algeria) I think there would be a certain appeal, a kind of "having your cake and eating it too" quality very much along the lines of Iran-Contra. We keep our hands clean, because we aren't torturing them ourselves, but at the same time word will spread that this is something that can happen to you besides getting shipped to Guantanamo in handcuffs and leg shackles and an orange jumpsuit with a canvas hood over your head. If we capture you in Iraq or in North America we can turn you over to your own government. That's just the sort of thing that would give a Syrian or Saudi or Jordanian or Egyptian terrorist pause since they would be very familiar with what their government does to political prisoners. It's too clever by half, like most CIA approaches to things but in those first early days of figuring out how to show the Muslim world that the United States is not a paper tiger, that the United States means business, as I say, I think it would have a lot of appeal and I suspect there was a definite level of deterrence which resulted. Whether that factor of deterrence warranted the egregious duplicity in suspending individual civil human rights is a question that can't be answered because there is no control group: No United States where there was no Guantanamo and where there was no rendition. That's a fact of realpolitik. Hindsight is 20-20 and there is no control group.


The problem, of course – in practical CIA terms which have already put aside individual civil rights as "collateral damage" -- is "What do you do when you have a terrorist in custody and you `render' him but you can't reveal how he's connected to terrorism without exposing your own `inside people' to the other side?" And there everything really gets murky. Our Foreign Affairs Minister, Stockwell Day was briefed in Washington – after we had released Maher Arar, apologized to him and paid him 10 million dollars or something – on secret information that the White House considered linked Maher Arar to terrorism. And Stockwell Day was shown the secret information and was not convinced by it and maintains that the American government should follow Canada's lead and remove Arar's name from the FAA `no fly' list. Well, at that point – looking at it in practical CIA terms -- I wondered if they had actually showed Stockwell Day their best evidence. I mean, there you get into the question of how much do you trust the Canadian government with really sensitive information? I'd trust Stockwell Day with my life, but I wouldn't extend that trust to most of his inherited Foreign Affairs department most of whom are lifetime Liberal civil service appointees and, ergo, raving anti-American socialist lunatics (in CIA frames of reference and, I must confess, my own frames of reference as well). Would I trust the name and details of a CIA agent planted inside a North American terrorist cell to a largely anti-American socialist government? I'm not saying that is the situation, I'm saying that these are elements that intrude forcibly when you follow through on a program of "rendition". And I'm saying that I think I could be forgiven as a complete novice in that world for not seeing where it was apt to lead during those early Oval Office meetings on "how to show the Muslim world that we're the strong horse" given that I'm sitting there with my pen and my notepad and, apart from "invade Afghanistan" and "invade Iraq" I haven't got much written down. "Shock and awe". That's about it. And all I can see in my mind's eye is that series of overlapping disaster movies that just took place a few days ago. How do you keep everyone's cover intact and keep your allies on board with partial "safe" information?


We're having the same problem with our "security certificates" here in Canada where a number of accused terrorist detainees have been released by the courts because their human rights are being violated with indefinite incarceration. The headline in the local paper, The Record, was "Justice Trumps Security". We also have laws that prohibit us from deporting anyone to their home country if there's a danger they might be tortured or executed. But the net effect of that is that we can't deport suspected terrorists to a terrorist country. If you're from Saudi Arabia (or Syria or Iran or Iraq or Somalia or Indonesia) and you made it here and you're found with ten different passports under ten different aliases, all that will happen is that you'll be held by Immigration for a period of time and then you'll be released into Canadian society because "Justice Trumps Security". In light of 9/11, the Madrid bombings, the 7/7 London underground bombings I think that's nuts and well into the category of potentially disastrous "wishful thinking". Liberals in Canada and Democrats in the United States think that's the way to go. Trust everyone. Conservatives in Canada and Republicans in the United States think that's a foolish risk to take with your own civilian population. There may well come a day when it makes sense to treat immigrants from Saudi Arabia and Syria and Egypt and Jordan and Iran and Iraq the same as you treat immigrants from the U.K. and Australia and France and Germany but I don't think that day is here. Not by a long stretch. Innocents will suffer. No question about it. But I think Conservatives learn to weigh things in the balance. When the alternative is another 9/11 it only makes sense to be deeply suspicious of anyone trying to enter your country from a radical Muslim state or a state that harbours radical Muslims. Personally – just to extend the argument to its obvious conclusion at the high end of potential consequences -- I think it's better that the U.S. invade Iran and destroy its nuclear capability now at the cost of thousands of lives (and in a perfect world, Canada would be right there with them) than that everyone sits on their hands and waits for Iran to build a bomb and nuke Tel Aviv (not Jerusalem, I don't think – the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock are the third holiest sites in Islam) at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives which would lead to the necessity to invade Iran anyway. You can hope that it just turns into a Mexican Stand-off like Pakistan and India. Both have nukes, neither pulls the trigger. But India and Pakistan don't deny each other's right to exist and both India and Pakistan have lived up to at least some of their agreements with each other. That isn't the case with Islam and Israel.


I just don't see any alternative. If the Muslim world in general begins to denounce terrorism and works to eradicate its own terrorist elements and acknowledges that Israel has a right to exist and lives up to their agreements, then you can start to change policy. But until that time the only choice is to be the strong horse or the weak horse.


Tomorrow: Jack Baney's parting shots

There's MORE for you

In Today's

Blog &…MAAAILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #197 (March 27th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

Addressing the question on the minds

Of (at least) dozens, Jack Baney

(In yesterday's edition)

"About the question as to whether or

Not you've gone nuts…"

It's a difficult question to answer. I don't remember speculating that the completion of Cerebus might have caused the tsunami, but those are instances of a different perception of reality – that we are all contributing to what is going on around us in a larger sense that we don't understand. The lyrics in the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil "I shouted out, `Who killed the Kennedys?' Well, now, after all, after all, it was you and me" points in the same direction and in a direction that makes a lot of people personally uncomfortable: that we are making the world that we live in on an unconscious level where we do things (many of us) and contribute to things that we could never do or contribute to consciously. Who would want to admit that they had a share in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers?


[in some cases, with those of us inclined to think along these lines, this is almost literally true. I remember reading Norman Mailer commenting on the fact that he had been having an adulterous tryst with a woman -- whom he literally called a witch -- at the time that Robert Kennedy had been shot and he had anguished about the fact that the tryst might have been a contributing cause. As Robert Kennedy lay balanced between life and death in a Los Angeles hospital Mailer spent an uncomfortable night June 5 in front of the television with his then-wife Beverly, wrestling inwardly with his gut instinct that he might be able to save RFK by confessing his adultery to his wife. Where I ultimately broke ranks with Mailer was over the fact that although he saw life in these terms he never seemed to seriously consider becoming Completely Good or as Completely Good as he was capable of conceiving himself to be which was ultimately the choice that I made for myself. Yes, I believe that all of our actions of consequences, some of them Enormous and given that I believe that, the only moral – or rather Moral – choice is to err on the extreme side of caution and Goodness and hope that my doing so serves to counterbalance those who are either ignorant of the nature of reality or who, like Mailer, are aware of it but still choose to try to play both sides of the game. I can't help but think that if at any point in his illustrious and influential life Norman Mailer had chosen to Repent – even within his own frames of reference of repentance – that the history of the 20th century might have unfolded very differently.]


Who would want to admit that something they did in 1967 or 1968 was a contributing factor in Martin Luther King being shot to death? We want to externalize those events. It was either a lone nut or a rogue faction in the US government or the CIA or the Mafia – none of which, you will note, "we" are. "We" are just ordinary folks going about our business or "we" are moral beings examining and re-examining the sequence of events from a point very far back on the sidelines. "They" shot the Kennedys. "They" shot Martin Luther King. "We" must investigate what happened. But if we accept the collectivist view that there is no "they" there is only "we" then "we" do share a personal culpability. I mean, you can't have it both ways. To collectivists, "We" are all just "We" until a Kennedy gets shot or planes hit the World Trade Centre and then suddenly there's a "they" external to "we". Now you can say that that's an evil way to think and an evil thing to even enunciate – and all I'm really doing is framing it in your own terms: there is no "they" only "we" – but you'll notice that the Rolling Stones included themselves in the indictment. Mick or Keith or whoever wrote the lyrics indicted himself as well as you. It's either an evil way to think and an evil thing to enunciate or it's taking personal responsibility that we should all be taking. As I've been fond of saying, "I'll take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis of 1956, before that I wasn't born." People laugh when I say it, but I'm not sure that I'm making a joke. Most days I certainly feel (when I let myself) that I'm being made to take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis.


I take issue with your saying that I'm "obviously able to function in this world at a much higher level than I can or probably ever will." I don't think what I'm discussing is a "higher level/lower level" kind of thing. I'm up here and you're down there. The same with people who see the rich as being "up there". You know any happy stories about rich people? How can you see obsessive materialism as being "up there"? Put another way, by the nature of psychiatry, if you and I were to be examined by a team of psychiatrists, I can pretty much guarantee that you would be way "up there" and I would be way "down here". I'd be "badly socialized," I "don't play well with others," etc. etc. Arguably sitting in a room and typing this stuff into a computer for twelve hours a day four or five days in a row is a kind of "psychosis". In psychiatry believing that you are affecting the larger world around you is called "referential thinking" and is a sign of "schizophrenia". Feminists call me "evil" and a "misogynist". See, all of those things are labels and all of those things are used to scare people and make them doubt themselves. Labels don't scare me or make me doubt myself. The difference for me is that Reality and its Core Nature is what is of interest to me. I distil feminism down to its core fourteen (now fifteen!) falsehoods and sleep peacefully every night. I never worry about what people think of me who are not able to face Reality and its Core Nature and it seems obvious to me that feminists can't – otherwise they wouldn't base their lives on inherent falsehoods – so feminists are irrelevant and feminism is irrelevant to Reality and its Core Nature.


Only (contrariwise) feminism, the inherent falsehood, is everywhere believed to be reality or Reality. Everyone either believes in it or pays lip service to it. It's comparable, I think, to life in Saddam's Iraq or Jong-Il's North Korea. If everyone is forced to pretend to believe in an inherent falsehood and a single negative enunciation can cause you to be shunned as a pariah (or worse!) then it becomes impossible to know how many people believe and how many people are paying lip service. I'm the only person (besides Jeff Seiler, Sandeep Atwal, Billy Beach and, now, David Carrington) in this environment who believes in God and that feminism is inherently false. Okay, so I'm crazy. What to do? I can't go anywhere physically – everywhere outside of here (here being the inside of my own head) is basically Bedlam, a lunatic asylum. And that's when I become interested in the nature of reality and Reality, that place next to the "inward smile" place that is so satisfied by entertainment that seems to enunciate truths and Truths but which doesn't make you laugh out loud (not all the time, anyway) (HA! That would be CRAZY!). I write and draw, I think, I do my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and now Luke (just finished chapter eight) because that's where I see Reality.


But, no, it isn't a case of my seeing your views as "being typical of the degenerate mentality for which [you] and [your] pathetic ideological comrades are so justly despised by [your] moral and intellectual superiors." Again, that's "higher level/lower level" thinking which I think for most leftists is a projection (to use a psychiatric term). You're projecting onto people like me your own attributes and "way of seeing". It's YOU who tend to see people who have Strict Morality as the core of their existence as being "degenerate" and "pathetic" (What are two adjectives that describe your view of The Religious Right in the U.S.?) (I'll take Projection for 500, Alex) and you see yourself as "justly despising" them and see yourselves as their "moral and intellectual superiors". Who do you think occupies the intellectual high ground in the debate between Creationism and Evolution? Who do you think is the drooling troglodyte for believing otherwise? I think what has happened since 9/11 is that leftists are still evading looking at themselves in the mirror and evading looking at the sheer level of malice that informs their own natures – just say "George W. Bush" or "Dick Cheney" to them and watch the light of infernal malice flicker to life behind their eyes -- since their perception of themselves (on which their very psyche seems to hinge) is of a people devoid of hatred and malice. So that hatred and malice has to be displaced and the Religious Right seems to be where it goes every time where it isn't absolutely personalized in the form of President Bush and Vice-president Cheney. You may not believe in God on the left, but you surely do believe in Satan and you always see him anytime there's a Republican in the Oval Office. I mean, ALWAYS.


There are certainly idealogues and fanatics who "return fire" from the right, but I don't think that's really the consensus view since 9/11. I think the consensus view that has emerged is that people make their own choices. If you want to discuss your choices and my choices – as we're doing here – I'm more than happy to do that (I gotta fill these postings with something, eh?). If you want to denounce my choices and champion your own choices, I'm more than happy to let you do that and "return fire". What I'm not prepared to do is to pass laws outlawing your choices or to shun you for your choices or call you crazy or evil for what you've chosen. I might call you demonically possessed if I see signs of it (which I don't with you) because I think demonic possession is a Core Reality and particularly for people who don't arm themselves against it with prayer and faith in God. But it would never occur to me to burn people like you at the stake or force you to be subjected to an exorcism. If I started where would I stop? As long as we both respect each other's right to make choices and to act on those choices within the confines of the law I can't see your demonic possession as having any effect on me. If it does have any effect on me – and it does on occasion, I'm only human – then shame on me for letting a garden variety demon make me doubt myself and my faith. And I think that's the point that a lot of people have arrived at here on the right. We aren't just fighting for our beliefs against the beliefs of Fundamentalist Islam, we're fighting for the right to make choices, including the right to go straight to hell if that's your choice. That's the difference between the West on the extreme right and the Taliban on the extreme left. I don't want to go with you and I don't want to watch you go – on television or in public places or read extensively about it in the newspaper – but if you're going and you're going in the privacy of your own home or places that are made for that (bars, sex clubs, strip clubs), I hope you like what you get when you get there. And sincerely: no hard feelings. At ALL.

Tomorrow: Jack Baney demonizes BOTH President Reagan AND President Bush (Weary leftists can just read the italicized parts and skip what I have to say)

There's More For you

In the Always Ideologically Rigid

Blog &…

MAAAILLLL

(YOU LIKE THAT WHEN I SAY "RIGID"?

RIGID RIGID RIGID. Jeez you people are depraved)

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #196 (March 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

Jack Baney continues:


Maybe your perception of my open letter to you was colored by the fact that I once sent you an article, rejected by The Comics Journal, in which I put down your work. The February 17, 1998 letter you sent me in response to that article read in part: "…I think your review probably got rejected by The Comics Journal because it sort of emphasized my point that it's all just opinion. There are things that you like about Cerebus and things that you don't. You wrote a review expressing those opinions. I didn't find your views to be sneering or arrogant. They were just views I don't share."


I'm still impressed that you responded to me so graciously. I regret writing that article and sending it to you, although writing it did make me realize that I'll never be any kind of critic or reviewer.


Well, that's pretty much always been my nature and my approach to debate (although I'll grant you that that's seldom recognized by the vast majority of the comic-book field – it's a core trait of leftists that once they have demonized you they are completely incapable of seeing any good in you whatsoever). Even with your Israeli-Palestinian "screed" I didn't read it and take offence, I just read it and thought "This is just TOO radically left wing to run in Cerebus." And then I tried to think of some place radically left wing enough to run it. The lines that you quote from my letter, again I'm not taking offence I'm just pointing out to you that your conclusions ran afoul of the Journal party line that there is an objective reality to what makes a good comic book and that it isn't just contrasting opinions. It's unfortunate, in my view, that you didn't continue to criticize and review because I think you would have been very good at it.


My respect for Cerebus has increased a lot since I wrote my stupid article, partly because so much of your best work is in the book's final third. Kim Thompson has often said that Cerebus used to be a great comic and that High Society is a classic but that your work started falling apart as you gradually devolved into a misogynistic nutcase. Bart Beaty makes similar remarks in The Comics Journal #263, writing that "Dave Sim ran out talent (and sanity) somewhere back in the early 1990s," that Cerebus used to be funny but eventually became "funny only on occasion," and that Rick's Story was his "personal nadir" in the book. I couldn't disagree with those guys more. I hated High Society and didn't think the first third of Cerebus was funny at all (no offense). But your work in Rick's Story, particularly the bits with the religious imagery and the arguing parts of Cerebus's mind, was a personal high point of the book for me. Also, while your sense of humor is generally a lot different from mine, I enjoyed a lot of the humorous touches in Latter Days, including the shepherd and five-bar gate issues; the clever idea of drawing Woody Allen in the styles of Crumb, Feiffer, etc.; and, especially, your Comics Journal parody (since I disagree with most of your opinions about The Comics Journal and Gary Groth, I was surprised at how right you got them there). And I think that the afterlife sequence in Cerebus #300 did a pretty amazing job of using your entire 26 years worth of work on the book to express the religious beliefs that eventually emerged as the book's main point.


Well, much obliged for the kind words. I think again, this is an example of the Journal attempting to discern an objective reality and since Kim Thompson is perceived as speaking both for (and to) that objective reality, the viewpoint has tended to get entrenched by those who share in the idea that there is an objective reality attached to the medium and that we can all become attuned to it if we just follow the Journal's "logic of the next step" approach. Except for the "This Aardvark, This Shepherd" and "If Five-Bar-Gate Be My Destiny" I had pretty much abandoned my ambition to make people laugh out loud and had moved over into the realm of trying to scratch a different itch. The people I made laugh out loud on a regular basis felt (naturally enough) betrayed by that since there are very few laugh-out-loud things in the world (Kim Thompson was one of them, Peter David was another) as I found when I was trying to do it. What IS laugh out loud funny? Some Warner Brothers cartoons, some scenes in the Marx Brothers' early movies, some Monty Python, Richard Pryor. The list is not long and most of the rest of comedy – or "comedy" – is of the "inward smile" variety. I just re-read my two books of Bloom County strips and only laughed out loud twice, I think. I did read all of them and all of them did produce an "inward smile" that kept me reading. Once I was addressing religious questions, though, it was an area next to "inward smile" that was more of an "inward something else" that I discovered the vast majority of people don't have. If you liked Rick's Story, you have it. If you intensely disliked Rick's Story, you don't have it.


About the question as to whether or not you've gone nuts…


Uh-oh.


…even though I've read massive amounts of your writing, I'm not sure what to make of the way you think. A lot of your statements, like your speculation that the tsunami may have been caused by the completion of Cerebus, suggest to me that at least some of your thinking is seriously off-base. There were even some parts of your replies to me, Allen, and Renee Stephen in The Comics Journal that struck me as very strange – for example, I'm not sure how you deduced from Renee's letter that she is "fundamentally amoral" (although she very well could be, for all I know). On the other hand, you're obviously able to function in this world at a much higher level than I can or probably ever will. I doubt that I'll ever be a respected artist or a successful entrepreneur like you are, and Saturday Night's mention that you live in a "museum-neat" home caused me to reflect that I'll probably never achieve that, either (or even trick a visitor into thinking I have). And whatever else is going on inside of your head it contained enough idealism and determination for you to self-publish a magazine in which you shared your creative efforts and described the truth about the world as you saw it, despite the increasing unpopularity of your descriptions, for 26 years straight. So I guess I'd tentatively describe your mind vs. other people's the same way that you once described men vs. women – you seem to have more of the good and more of the bad. You may think that this view is not only wrong but typical of the degenerate mentality for which I and my pathetic ideological comrades are so justly despised by our moral and intellectual superiors, but that's the way I see it.


Tomorrow: Everyone re-read Jack's last chunk there a few times and I'll take a swing at it tomorrow.

There's More UH-OH

For you in Today's

Blog & MAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #195 (March 25th, 2007)

eBay: Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges



One of the letters which

Went astray was from Comics

Journal freelancer Jack Baney...



…and is dated February 5. I'm not sure if it's a dirty trick but he said he would prefer that I run his entire letter or none of it (which is exactly what I didn't want to read given that I'm trying to keep the Blog & Mail to a manageable size) however his lead section definitely fits the Sunday Edition (saving me the trouble of going "bobbing for Sunday Edition material") and he is a good writer as you'll see. He probably meant that he wanted it to run uninterrupted as well, but at that rate you'd barely remember what he was talking about when I got around to answering him later in the week. So, I'll be answering him within the body of the letter – not exactly 100% fair but, hey, it is my blog, right? Take it away, Jack:



Dave,



I'm writing in response to your Jan. 27 blog entry (an excerpt from your forthcoming Collected Letters 2 volume), in which you refer briefly to your letter exchange with Allen Rubinstein and me in The Comics Journal from a few years ago.



I think you exaggerate when you accuse me of trying to destroy your reputation. After all, my actions consisted not of spreading false rumors about you but of writing a letter that disputed your statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and politics in general, asking you to run the letter in "Aardvark Comment," and – after you declined this request – following your own advice by sending the letter to The Comics Journal. It's true that in writing the letter and trying to get it published, I hoped to show readers of the Cerebus back pages that you didn't know what you were talking about when you wrote about politics and, by implication, that maybe your writing about some other topics was also off-base. So it's fair to say that I was trying to harm your reputation, to whatever extent it existed, as a source of reliable facts and well-considered opinions in your Cerebus back-pages essays. But if you're implying that I hoped to destroy your entire reputation – "good artist," "successful businessman," "supporter of other self-publishers," "non-child-molester," etc. – by writing a letter that disputed your statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and politics in general and having it published in "Aardvark Comment" or (at your own suggestion) The Comics Journal…well, there's no way I could have accomplished all of that with my letter, so positing it as my goal doesn't really make sense.



Also, I don't agree that your were "far more polite" to me than I was to you during our exchange. It's true that I described your insistence that the Palestinians should be called "Transjordanians" as "incredible stupidity," but this description referred to your opinion and not to you. I don't think that "incredible stupidity" as used in that context, was far less polite than your description of my letter as a "screed" and "cant" in The Comics Journal #253 or as "being of the hair-splitting `how many appartchiks can dance on the head of a pin' variety of leftist `debate'" in Cerebus #293. But in case you really thought that I was calling you and not your opinion stupid, I will state for the record that I think you are very intelligent.



Well, let me return the compliment and say that I think you are very intelligent as well. That is, you write intelligently and are able to sustain an argument over several paragraphs without repeating yourself or contradicting yourself (which, I'm sure you'll agree, is pretty rare in this day and age). Certainly when I got your letter in and I was reading it, the extreme leftist tone made me think that there really wasn't much point in running in Cerebus and I offered the suggestions of The Comics Journal as the only extreme leftist publication in the environment that would be interested. In suggesting that you were trying to destroy my reputation, in retrospect, I think that that was more a matter of timing and, also in retrospect, I think that was probably more of a Comics Journal "thing" than it was either a choice by you or by Mr. Rubinstein. Here's an analogy that should appeal to you: it was as if there was this core audience that had been attending a performance of Wagner's complete Ring Cycle for five nights running (or however long it takes to perform the complete Ring cycle) and with forty minutes to go on the fifth night, two guys stand up in the audience and declare "I think we need to discuss Wagner's place in the context of Nazi Germany" and then proceed to do so. Yes, it is probably a discussion worth having but, no, I don't think with forty minutes to go on the fifth night is the place to bring it up. But, again, I think that was probably a matter of The Comics Journal's idiosyncratic sense of appropriate timing – where the ONLY appropriate moment to discuss Wagner's alleged Nazi sympathies is with forty minutes to go on the fifth night of a performance of the Ring cycle. These are, after all, the same people who sat on Colleen Doran's allegations of sexual harassment by Julie Schwartz for YEARS and then finally chose to run them in the same issue as Julie Schwartz's obituary. Obviously, people so dead to basic human sensitivity are not about to decide that there's any more appropriate time to trash Dave Sim's opinions than with two humongous letters on the subject with a dozen issues to go in a 300-issue storyline.



I apologize to you and Allen Rubinstein for failing to recognize that fact at the time. You had both written to me earlier and, although it would be incorrect to say that the Journal sat on your letters for YEARS, there was a period of time between when I heard from you and when the letters were printed.



I do take issue with your politics but I think the fact that the opposing sides will always see their opposite number as spouting "cant" or advancing views of "incredible stupidity" as being something that's in-built with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My point is always that anyone with a lick of common sense would rather be a Palestinian prisoner in the Israeli court system than an Israeli prisoner in the Palestinian court system which (it seems to me) provides eloquent proof of the difference between a functioning democracy and a dysfunctional dictatorship. Whether you call the Palestinians Palestinians or Transjordanians or Latter Day Philistines I think the proof of what they actually are is very much there in the Middle East pudding. I think if the Israelis swerved between dangerous extremes of socialism and communism and totalitarianism and then back to democracy and every once in a while had a rabbi crop up who declared himself to be the Davidic Meschiach and for four years he was crowned King of the Jews until a member of a rival Orthodox faction assassinated him which caused Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to break down into street warfare between rival gangs shooting each other up with Uzis during high holidays, then I think you might have a case to make for co-equivalence and "a pox on both your houses".



But, Jack, there are very well-regarded Palestinians who are elected members of the Knesset. When a Prime Minister fails to hold a coalition together and loses a vote of confidence, an election is called which is certainly filled with mud-slinging and name-calling, but which is PEACEFUL and then if the succeeding government falls to a rival party that party takes over PEACEFULLY. Until the Palestinians or the Transjordanians or the Latter Day Philistines can manage the same thing for a period longer than a few weeks or a few months, I don't think their supporters, including yourself, have a leg to stand on.



But, I do accept that intelligent people can disagree vehemently on these very subjects and I disavow any intention on my part to confuse the timing of your letter's appearance in the Comics Journal with its content. As will be seen in one of the volumes of Collected Letters you and I did arrive – off-stage – at an agreement to agree to disagree. And that was what I saw in your letter when it first came in. We can go around and around the Palestinian-Israeli conflict circle – as so many have and as so many will continue to do – but we're just going to end up back in our entrenched positions. Until the opposing side agrees that Israel has the right to exist and agrees to abide by its previous agreements, there really isn't much left to say from my side of the fence. George W. Bush arrived at that conclusion pretty early in his administration in contemplating the 100% unreliability of Yasser Arafat to fulfill even one act to which he had committed the Palestinian "nation" and I don't see any change – and I don't think any person with common sense would see any change – in the subsequent Hamas/Fatah mutation. In fact they both explicitly refused to even address either condition – Israel's right to exist and their obligation to fulfill their previous agreements – at the recent Mecca Summit convened by Saudi President Abdullah.



To me, there's nothing left to say. That says it all.



Tomorrow: On to other subjects with the always-engaging Jack Baney

Oh, and this being the 25th:

"Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society".

Remember! You heard it first Right Here on

Today's Blog & Mail

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #194 (March 24th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

It's Blog & MAAILL time!

So what do you think of our new Intro Music for actually answering the letters that have come in? Notice the subtle emphasis on the word "mail"? And the tune is (spoiler warning for those who don't want to be haunted by it for the next two or three days) (last chance – just scroll through) (I'm about to tell you, seriously) (don't say I didn't warn you) it's Ta RA RA boom de yay!. It's WHAT? Just read the words out loud and you'll get it right away. Annoying as hell isn't it? Don't say I didn't warn you.


Okay, first up I've got four letters that went missing. Remember when I finally found the Robin Snyder letter and I said that worried me because when I find a missing letter I remembered there are probably four that I didn't remember? Well, that's what happened all right. Turned over the last letter last time and these four were right there facing the other way.


Michael J. Wood


Michael is the author and artist of Love in a Time of Super-Villains (Not Wonder Woman gets drunk and marries Not Superman in Las Vegas). I plugged the book already but the letter was nowhere to be found. And here it is (part of it anyway):


This lack of response is at times both discouraging and a bit of a relief. I suppose it could be worse. I could have been bombarded with negativities and insults to my character but, luckily, there have been none of those (save for the random e-mail from my ex-girlfriend, but that's ANOTHER story altogether). I began wondering if it was worth it to even continue with the book, which is depressing, as Love is something I'm very proud of.


But then my wife handed me that envelope emblazoned with the stoic and, dare I say, dead sexy (as aardvarks go) image of your creation that contained a piece of paper that, at this point, is tacked up in front of me serving as a reminder to get moving. Let's face it, man. You are the (for lack of a better word) granddaddy of `indie' comics. You successfully published your own title consecutively for 300 issues and never bowed to the industry, the critics or even to your own fans and if YOU liked it, well, hell…I get to tell people Dave Sim is a fan (which, of course, brings to mind the inevitable question: Can I reprint your comments for the purposes of shameless huckstering?).


Mm. More like "for the purposes of shameless career suicide" – especially if it's a case where the only favourable comment was from The Pariah King of Comics. This is getting really funny at this point. I wish I could keep a straight face or communicate a straight face: YOU DON'T WANT ANYONE TO ASSOCIATE YOU WITH THE PARIAH KING OF COMICS! [Look, man – he's laughing, he's not serious]. Well, I am serious. But, I am laughing as well. Troy Little phoned to see if he could change my mind about writing an introduction for his Chiaroscuro collection that IDW plans to publish and I had to tell him the same thing: wait until your second printing when you're established in your own right (or in your case until you have a finished story published and out there). These people do not mess around and taking out their fury and frustration with the Evil Misogynist (especially since I'm sure word has leaked out by now even to the vast majority of the field for whom I have officially ceased to exist that I'm running the Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast with every column) on someone's work that the Evil Misogynist likes is definitely not beyond them. And Troy is laughing at me over the phone. So, I said to him, why don't YOU write the introduction explaining why Dave Sim ISN'T writing the introduction and, you know, stand up and declare that it's wrong to label an anti-feminist as a misogynist. Well, he stopped laughing then. Sorry, but I really think you guys need to know what's at stake here. Even though I can't stop laughing because it really amounts to "how scared of women are you?" The answer is, universally in the comic book field, "pretty damned scared". Well, yeah, and with good reason. I reiterate: these people do not mess around. I talk about a lot of books here but this is, like, Siberia as far as the comic-book field is concerned. A handful of open-minded retailers and the Yahoos and for everyone else I've ceased to exist except as their caricature of me. If I can plant a seed with some of the retailers and Yahoos to keep an eye out for your book, I'm more than glad to do it from my appointed place here in the Comic-Book Gulag – hiding in plain sight as I've always done – but…


Okay.


But, if you REALLY want to use my comments to promote your book out there in the overall market, be my guest. Grab that red scarf and wave it in front of the she-bull. Just don't blame me when you get the reaction I'm pretty sure you're going to get.


And here's a letter from our old friend,


Scott Berwanger


(writer, artist, publisher of Anubis, his magnum opus) from the beginning of February.


The battle of comics vs. painting still rages on in my head. But the sound of a woodpecker making notches in a tree this afternoon, outside my studio, led me to believe that I should just follow the rhythms of my intrinsic nature, not question my motivation, and let whatever come out come out. The woodpecker doesn't question why it is making a hole for a nest in a tree, so why should I question my motivation to paint? Woodpeckers wood-peck. Painters paint. Comic-book artists write and draw comic books. I just happen to be two of the three. An unlikely scenario, but like I said, why question it?


Well, because the woodpecker is programmed by God to perform a very limited number of functions. The woodpecker can't and doesn't think to itself "Maybe I should try gathering nuts and storing them for the winter, instead." You're programmed by God to program yourself particularly when it comes to the work that you choose to do and where you're putting in your time.


Spoiler Warning: I got another letter from Scott shortly after where he had decided to abandon the painting because it was cutting into his comic-book writing and drawing time. So, let me just say that I can understand the rationale of writing and drawing a comic book and doing gallery-style paintings that are derived or thematically linked to that comic book with the idea of trying to make gallery art and comic books, as John Lennon put it, Come Together Right Now Over Me. I think the problem that Scott is facing is that there would have to be a balance struck where both aspects were taking up a comparable amount of time and delivering comparable results in terms of the satisfaction of one's innermost creative sensibility. And I think that balance would be almost impossible to strike – inevitably one aspect would tend to succeed at the expense of the other or devour time better spent on the other. And I mean "succeed" in the sense of that really finely-calibrated inner sense of satisfaction: "This Is What I Was Meant To Do". Contrariwise, I think it would be hard not to lapse into a sense of retreating from one to the other whenever a roadblock presented itself which would tend to compound that sense of defeatism that is never very far from any of us on any given day. Now I can't do EITHER of them. But, hypothetically, I think it's something that someone was bound to try someday and I hope Scott is, at least, preserving the paintings that he has done so there is at least a possibility that he could do it on a limited scale when Anubis is done.


Steve Peters


Written January 26 and revised (you guessed it) early in February. That's why all these little lambs went astray to the same place I guess. He writes:


Thanks so much for the "Steve Peters Week" on the blogandmail and all the kind words; that was a pleasant shock. I noticed a surge in hits to my site; normally I get a little over 100 hits a month, but that week alone I got 73. Haven't received any orders, but hey, at least we got the name into some people's heads. God willing, that'll help somewhat with the orders on Sparky in Love, which I plan to solicit in the April Previews (so I can promote it at SPACE).


See? Steve Peters, the recipient of the 2006 Howard E. Day Memorial Prize is going to be there, too. If you live in Columbus, Ohio or if you live near Columbus, Ohio (or you're just flat out crazy like Matt and Paula Dow and Jeff Seiler and you're willing to – ROAD TRIP! – drive in from Wisconsin and Texas respectively) why not check out the Friendliest Little Small Press Show in the Continental U.S. of A.? How friendly? APE is the same weekend and Bob and Kathy Corby just aren't paying that one bit of no never-mind and Wishing Everyone All the Indy Best. THAT'S how friendly. For details check out www.backporchcomics.com. Back Porch Comics. See? You can't get much down-home friendlier than that! Steve continues:


Very much looking forward to seeing a copy of your 60's-style Marvel parody. You can't possibly not send it now after getting me and Margaret all excited about it like that. Naturally, I'll keep it strictly to myself if that's your wish.


Um, no-can-do, Steve. Having works-in-progress-and-possibly-aborted-works is obviously a new thing for me and I have no idea if I'll pick it up again or if it's genuinely DOA – but, I do have a gut instinct that showing it to someone else would, for good or ill, lock it into its present form which would more or less guarantee that it would be DOA if there was some other direction I could have taken it in. I used to think that Chester Brown was crazy with things like actually considering re-writing and re-drawing Ed the Happy Clown in its entirety, but I realize now that it's something of a built-in quality of having a number of works that are complete and a number of works that might be complete or might be completely misapprehended. The main element, as far as I can see, is the TIME involved if you have a 200-page graphic novel or the seed of a 200-page graphic novel and you can only produce 6 pages in two weeks or 6 pages in four weeks or whatever. You have to be sure (or reasonably sure) of what you're working on. You're the one who's going to be sitting in a little room by yourself doing this story for months and even years and – particularly here in my early fifties – there's only likely to be a few more of them in the hopper. I think I know what I'm doing next after my secret project but both of them were a long time in the gestation period.


And congratulations on being the recipient of the 2006 Day Prize!

Tomorrow, Monday and possibly Tuesday: Jack Baney gets a whole three days practically to himself! Is it a dirty trick or a legitimate request? YOU decide!

There's MORE for you

(Relatively speaking)

In Today's

Blog &

MAAAIIILLL

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #193 (March 23rd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________

As I mentioned earlier, a logjam

Prevented me from making any

Forward progress on my secret project…

…which has seemed rather "ill-starred" from the outset. In this case it was a matter of needing a certain number of photographs from a certain museum in order to do my photo-realism style. I could either get quality prints of the photographs or I would have to go the laborious route of tracking them down individually and clipping them out of hardcover books (everyone except Eddie Campbell screams in agony at the prospect). So I sent them a letter of application and then heard back from the supervisor of the woman that I was in contact with that she had some questions about how the photographs were to be used and what was the "message" of my book. Well, I'm really not a "message" guy – not in terms of putting it down in so many words, anyway – but I did my level best and then thought, "Well, that's that." There's just something about Dave Sim that so severely "doesn't play well with others" that I can't even get along with a museum (for heaven's sake). But then I guess my "message" passed the test and I was able to get the photographs I requested about a week later. And they are really good quality, well worth waiting for and jumping through a few hoops for. But, by the time they came in, my two weeks of lead time had been used up and here I am back doing the Blog & Mail thing for another four or five days before I can get back to my secret project.


But, I am making progress. I'm pretty sure the whole script is done at this point and I've got a list of everything I need to draw and a mental image of the photos that I need to draw it-them from. It was just a very long process to get to the point where that was the case especially for a guy who always had a pretty clear mental snapshot of what each Cerebus issue was going to look like at least a month before I drew my part of it. "Okay, now I know what this is going to look like and what I have left to do. Now I can micromanage it from here on in."


Interestingly, Chester is in somewhat the same boat. He finally got the script finished for his next book (roughly 200 pages) and the breakdowns done and has finally started actually drawing the thing. He was six pages in as of March 5. Let the record show, your honour. And almost immediately he got an offer to do a very large prestigious piece of commercial work for mega-bucks. No guarantee but a big enough brass ring that he's got to make a try for it. Seems to be a natural symmetry to it. When it's time to load up the old bank account, something comes along which will help him do that but it means stopping work on what he actually wants to do to do something else.


The toss-up in my mind right now is: do I use the next two weeks of lead time to finish sorting and labelling the cover negatives for whoever is going to be putting the book together someday (either me or someone else) and bagging and boarding and filing the last pile of Cerebus Archive material that needs to be put in chronological order (a project that ground to a halt months ago when I found that my latest batch of magazine-sized bags and boards didn't fit standard letter-sized papers) which are really the last two things I need to do to put everything in order (well, not everything in order):


Dave: (indicating the top shelf of a glass-fronted cabinet in the library) And up there is all of my Chester Brown material.


Chester: If that's all of your Chester Brown material on the top shelf, what's this copy of Louis Riel doing on the bottom shelf?


Dave: Listen: You should just be glad they're in the same cabinet.


I mean, it's more than I can say for my collection of Norman Mailer books which are still in various locations on the bookshelves I brought over from the apartment four years ago.

See, the thing is, having seen what a dedicated seventeen hours of ploughing had done for the cover negatives situation on one Saturday, I'm now tempted to finish all (ALL!) of my organizing so that when I have lead time built up in the future I can just sit down and write and draw with a completely clear conscience. I'll let you know what I decide next time. This time it's time to hit the ol' mailbag.


Tomorrow: Take THAT, you ol' mailbag.

There's MORE for you

Relative to what is on offer

From most People's blogs

In TODAY'S

BLOG &…MAAAILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #192 (March 22nd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________


If you're looking for a scapegoat,

You can all blame Sandeep Atwal

Who told me…


…that most people who "blog" don't have something new on there every day and a lot of times they might just have a paragraph or two. And here I was picturing myself competing against Neil Gaiman's "Screenplay Thursday" (click here to download Neil's previous fifteen "Screenplay Thursday" offerings) or Eddie Campbell's Lettering in Comics Part the Twelfth (click here to download the previous 875 pages) thus the 71 pages last time and thus Sandeep Atwal's snorting derisively at Everyone's Favourite Evil Misogynist & Largely Clueless Luddite.


Anyway, there are other problems with a nice hardcover book of the covers. Just to outline a few of them: I have several of the covers in frames that would have to be de-framed and re-framed in order to be photographed and my mind and the company's bank account is sincerely not in a place where something as self-neutralizing as de-framing and re-framing pieces of art is being seriously contemplated as a prudent short-term investment. Some of the covers I have preliminary work, sketches, hand-done colour guides, etc. which really has that expensive art book quality about it but which also involves adding pages to a book that is already at least 600 pages long (if, in classic art book style, a cover is printed on one page with a description of it on the facing page). The description on the facing page would probably be a more sensible use of my time than the FREE WRITING I'm doing here, but there's no guarantee of that. Sales are up since I started doing the Blog & Mail (which would make this NON-DIRECT PAYMENT WRITING rather than FREE WRITING) – my best guess is that there are roughly between a half-dozen and maybe two dozen retailers reading this who actually go and check their inventories when I ask them to and who actually then order the book they are out of…and THANK YOU to those who do…and that's boosted sales roughly 25% since November) and there's every possibility that the demand for the book of covers is coming from a half-dozen people all of whom are only willing to pay $19.95 or less and only if it contains ALL the covers and the covers of Swords and the BWS cover from Swords, Bill Sienkiewicz's Cerebus Jam cover, and all of the colour Epic stories…you get the idea. I would be obligated also to write about each cover (EXTENSIVELY! And EXHAUSTIVELY!) so do the mental math yourself. And then everyone would complain because Gerhard hadn't written anything about his part of the covers without stopping to consider that Gerhard never wrote anything about his own work and is probably not going to start now that he has made a clean break from all things Aardvarkian. I'm also in negotiations with a company that has some kind of MegaByte Camera Worth Tens of Thousands of Dollars to photograph my artwork (starting with the Collected Letters cover). If it makes that big of a difference in the reproduction then it would make sense to have all of the covers for which I have the original artwork re-shot using that MBCWTTD at a cost of roughly $25 per shot. Which brings us back to how many people would buy the book versus how much money and time I have to sink into it.


So, essentially, I'm doing the groundwork for a book of covers that may not be published until long after I'm dead. But, for me, it's still worth doing in order to get it done either "right" or "as close to right" as I can get it and to save whoever ultimately does the book a certain amount of time and aggravation. It's really an old discussion as some of you new arrivals might discover if you check out the "Policy" discussion sections here on the Yahoo Newsgroup site. I did want to let you know that I'm not completely unmindful of these things and – since I had to get the drawers and the negatives out of the library at some point (or keep tripping over them) -- I did realize that now was the time to do the groundwork. And, unfortunately, to also keep you from getting your hopes up that you were going to see such a book at this summer's big conventions or something. No. Collected Letters 2 is going to be about it for 2007. There's a new printing of Form & Void from Lebonfon that you will be seeing (as soon as Diamond orders the last 13 copies of the previous printing still at the warehouse in Leamington) but it looks exactly like the previous printing except the indicia says "Lebonfon Printing" instead of "Preney Print & Litho". Which I'm obviously happy about and proud of – the first printing of a Cerebus trade that I shepherded through entirely on my own and the first non-Preney printing of a trade paperback and a complete match of Preney's own work – but not something I would expect the direct market to join hands and start singing about. I've also had my first overture from an entirely new market for the trades and part of me thinks I should be getting the presentation package together instead of doing all this NON-DIRECT PAYMENT WRITING but, for the time being, my gut instinct tells me that this is the place to put my time in.


Just not as much of my time as I have been putting in.


Tomorrow: More updates on what I'm working on right now


There's LESS for you

In Today's

(and for the next five years')

Blog &…

MAAILL

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #191 (March 21st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________


So facing a logjam of impediments on

My secret project, my next commission

And my possibly-for-Marvel work…


…I basically decided to read a book (a largely if not completely unheard of occurrence in my newly complicated life). Just in case you were getting the impression that I was panicking, well, no, not really. I'm just not the panicking type. And the book I decided to read was Robert (The White Goddess) Graves' King Jesus, as it turns out which I had treated as something of a joke when it came in (D.B. Little sent it to me, as I recall) in the same vein as Jesus in India. I think I might discuss it in one of the upcoming Sunday Editions. But, anyway, it made a nice break from work and I ploughed through it on the same 12-hour day basis that I do everything and was through it and done by the end of the second day at which time the logjam still hadn't broken so I started in on the Collected Letters back cover which really didn't need to be done until the end of March (giving the new Aardvark-Vanaheim printer Lebonfon all of April to print the book for shipping, God willing, in May). And then I started cleaning out Gerhard's closet in what used to be his office and which is now my office. It turned out to contain a metric tonne of empty file folders and very little else. There's probably a message in that, I thought, but what message could there be in a metric tonne of empty file folders? Patience, Dave, patience. Anyway, at that point, I started transferring some of the outside artwork envelopes (Cerebus 1-300 "non-story artwork", pre-Cerebus artwork, other people's Cerebuses, other people's artwork, the Chester Brown jam strip, Cerebus lettering, etc.) from the hall closet to the newly emptied Gerhard closet which led me to do a serious run at the enormous pile of negatives that were sulking in a sloppy pile in front of and blocking access to the over-sized artwork cabinet in the library…


(which, in themselves, had been winnowed from the ten drawers of filed negatives which had taken over the library since last August – I didn't tell you when I had done that part. They're all in the form of "flats", 8 negatives to a "flat" constituting 8 pages of a given comic book or trade paperback. The drawers are from the flame-retardant cabinet that Preney had bought to house the trade paperback negatives and which I've now inherited. Kind of back-breaking work, lugging around the contents of those drawers and the thirty odd three-feet by four-feet cardboard folders also full of negatives and at the same time trying to treat them carefully)


…to which I devoted pretty much all my time and attention for several days after Chester Brown and John Tranh came for a visit (March 5) and helped me unload and store all of the trade paperback negatives in the cabinet (a two-man, if not three-man job). This past Saturday (March 10) I worked pretty much from 7 am to 11:30 pm to further winnow the pile and put them in order. The ten drawers' worth of negatives had been largely made up of Bi-weekly issues which mostly involved rolling them up and throwing them away since I had all the story pages in the trade paperbacks and the only "new" material was the Single Pages which I didn't have the right to reprint, anyway. The winnowed pile consisted of Cerebus Jam pages where I thought most of them had been lost (only THREE flats!) And it wasn't until I got down to that part of the pile again that I realized they were all there (it was a 24-page comic, Dave, 3 times 8 is…? Duh.). And the rest of the negatives are cover negatives, some with logos and type and some without logos and type. Every once in a while someone mentions how great it would be to have a book of the covers (someone at Fantagraphics started it as I recall and since they are not exactly huge Cerebus fans it was worth making note of) so I was face-to-face with, "Well, if I'm ever going to make a start on it, this would be the place." So there I am with these huge flats (Preney would print two covers per flat for a while since it would cut in half the press time and then they would go back to printing a single cover for a while) trying to discern which is Cyan and which is Magenta and which is Yellow and which is Black and trimming or unsticking them from the flats and putting post-it notes on them with the colour they are. And I'm thinking: okay, there are different problems with different sets of negatives so I can't just put them all in one big folder. What can I put them in? Say, WHAT ABOUT THE METRIC TONNE OF FILE FOLDERS FROM GERHARD'S CLOSET?! Patience is its own reward.


The basic problem right now is that I don't know how damaged some of the negatives are. There is extensive yellowing on some and there are signs of moisture damage and dust on some of them. Being a publisher and not a printer I don't know the extent to which the damage is repairable or the extent to which it isn't…or if it even NEEDS to be repaired. Negatives are funny things that way. There can be layer of dust on there that looks like hell but can just be "tuned out" when you make the printing plate and there can be an almost invisible scratch that can look like someone ran a blue pen over the artwork that can't be eliminated no matter what you do – although computers are becoming very advanced in that area. Lebonfon did the new printing of From Hell and their computer guy did an amazing job restoring a lot of Eddie's linework that had been lost in previous printings. There are also cover negatives that didn't have colours assigned to them which is going to be a headache for a printer and might require a Cerebus Archivist with a computer to figure out what the right combination is. Although it would be very Andy Warhol to just randomly pick which is Magenta and which is Cyan and which is Yellow and which is Black and just live with what comes out ("Oh, that's FAAABulous") I think people paying good money for an artbook on slick paper might take a rather dim view of such an innovation. Early on – down around the issue numbers in the 30s and 40s – the colour overlays are actually cut from Rublilith (let's have a show of hands from all the dinosaurs in the crowd who even know what Rubilith is – Chester the Dinosaur knew!) by hand with the colour percentages marked on them. The Palaeolithic Era of Colour Separation. I also found all the negatives for Free Cerebus and then hit a strata that had pretty much all the negatives for the covers of Jaka's Story and Melmoth, all with type on them and I know we have a batch of negatives from that run which don't have type on them in the Archive upstairs. So all of that is now in a nice, neat pile in what used to be Gerhard's studio instead of sulking in a big pile in the library. But there's also another ten or twelve folders of cover negatives to go through before I even start looking into places to send them to do either an autopsy or a resuscitation.


So the upshot of all of this is that it is looking as if a covers volume IS possible although probably not a high priority since I'm getting dangerously low on Reads and Guys and both will probably have to be reprinted by the end of the year or early next year. Also, much of it is Gerhard's work and until I'm done paying him his asking price for his 40% of the company, I don't think it's quite kosher to use his own work to pay him. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Tomorrow: Getting back behind myself where I belong.

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #190 (March 20th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

NEW! 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.

_____________________________________________________



Flies in the Ointment!

Beware, Cerebus Readers!

Flies in the Ointment!


It seems that I'm still getting used to the structure here and came to an unhappy realization earlier this week that, even though I can produce three weeks' worth of Blog & Mails in a four- or five-day period, that still only buys me two weeks of lead time until it's time to produce the next batch of Blog & Mails (since it takes me four or five days to produce them). So instead of having a 5:20 days ratio of Blog & Mail-to-actual work ratio it's closer to a 5:10 ratio or half of my life spent doing the Blog & Mail. This came to the forefront when it took me three days to produce the latest commission, then an additional three days to produce the back cover of Collected Letters volume II. Then I found myself stymied, ready to do either another commission or to start work on whatever-it-is I've been discussing with Marvel or work on my secret project. On all three there were impediments that I'd just have to wait and see if the logjam broke?but it did seem clear that if I was ever to produce anything of value for the rest of my life I was going to have to scale back the Blog & Mail in some way (I mean, Sandeep snorted quite derisively when he showed up last time to download it onto a disk to e-mail to Jeff Tundis and saw that it was 71 pages long)?

The Recipient of the

2006 Howard E. Day

Memorial Prize:


Chemistry

By Steve Peters

Ordinarily I'd write a long, glowing report on Chemistry at this point, as well as some nice words about runners-up Jim Coon's Beaver Dusty Neal and Christopher Studabaker's Under the Midnight Sun Pat Lewis' Abominable and One Horse Town, Michelle Arcand's Being Different, Mike Dawson's Guitar Solo and Chad Lambert and Tom Williams' "Too Much Matheson" but then I would be faced with the choice of either just reading the same comments out loud at the Day Prize Ceremony at SPACE (coming up on the third weekend in April: more info at www.backporchcomics.com including hotel and directions to the show) and having all the Yahoos in the audience go "Wow, couldn't have written something different? This was already on the Blog & Mail WEEKS ago." OR having to come up with a whole new set of comments which really amounts to a double load of FREE WRITING which is something I'm trying to phase out around here now that I'm having to balance the books AND pay Gerhard his asking price for his 40% of the company. I mean, I really LOVE all you guys, you know I do, but I'm afraid I have to cheat on you folks for the next five years or so with people who have, like, BANK ACCOUNTS and who aren't afraid to use them. I'm sure you understand.



Tomorrow: More FREE WRITING about the logjam?

There's LESS for you

In Today's (and for the next

Five Years') Blog &?

?MAAIILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #189 (March 19th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

KITCHENMANIA CONTINUES

AS MIKE KITCHEN FINALLY GETS

AROUND TO TALKING ABOUT

COMICS

Moving on to comics…


Within the next few years, my plan is to attempt doing my black-and-white self-published funny pages full time. Of course, I've been planning this for years, while dabbling in the Spy Guy one-shots. Currently I am running about three years behind schedule. God knows if in the end it will be at all successful enough to make a full-time job out of it or not, but it's worth a shot. The secondary plan is to, at the very least, leave behind a stack of newsprint funny pages when I'm dead. Either way, it's a doable goal. The next comic I make is Spy Guy #1 of the unlimited series. We'll see what happens.


I have always been hesitant in sending these comics to you, as they are still amateurish. Admittedly, not ready for "prime time". So I didn't want to waste your time with them, as I'm assuming you get your fair share of amateurish indy books. I know I have a long way to go (on page 80 or so, of my 2,000 bad pages, yeah – long way to go).


The Catch-22 being: to reach a professional quality level, I need to get my 2,000 bad pages out of my system, meaning I need to spend more time drawing comics, meaning I need to make money, meaning I need to get good. A problem compounded by being a husband and father who is pigeon-holed into clicking away at a computer instead of honing my skills as an artist. But you knew that already.


Well, I wouldn't describe your comics as amateurish. They're maybe at a semi-pro level which is pretty good considering how few pages you've been able to draw. They're a little pricey at $3.50 US and $4.10 Canadian, but I can understand that you have to make some money while you're holding down your day job. You quote Chuck Palahniuk as saying "The moment you think when you're writing you've probably gone too far, is probably the moment when you've gone just far enough." I think that's probably true and it certainly seems to me something that is more of a question in the comic-book field than just about anywhere else since – if you're self-publishing your work – there is no gatekeeper to tell you when you've crossed the line so, at the very least we tend to, at least potentially, get a lot more honest material. "This is actually what I have to say." I think there were a few strips here – the 4-part "The Dog, The Bitch, and The Gimp" in particular – where you probably didn't do yourself any favours. I mean it's really over the edge into bad taste and strikes a jarring note compared to what came before and what comes after. I mean, it's funny – or, at least, I thought it was funny – but I think it was probably an example of raising the stakes too high too early with little chance of a payoff. You would probably drive away more people way early on here where you're trying to establish an audience than you would be attracting people who would go, "Whoa, dude. I thought you were just funny. But this is EDGY stuff, man!" Of course, you may end up deciding to go all the way over there, instead. Lenny Bruce started out doing much milder comedy than he ultimately got known for. You're only able to get so much drawing done with your other responsibilities and commitments so you have to decide what you're putting that limited time in on.


I'd certainly recommend both of them. Check them out at www.ultraist.net. See? I recommended them.


This comic was inspired while writing this letter. It was mostly drawn in the U.S. Embassy. The rest was finished on the GO Train, and then digitized in my basement. [very funny cartoon about the "Self-Publishing Marathon" check it out on Mike's website]


Cerebus has prepped me for what marriage would do to my comic-book plans. The Pro-Con speech spelled it out nicely. Of course, I never would have dreamed that it would be ten years of setbacks. All you can do is to keep plugging away at it. Like Chinese water torture. Drip, drip, drip.


Comics was something that I used to think of as a young man's game. However, with the acceleration of time, I am now forced to look at comics from a different perspective. Yes, at this rate, taking a shot at comics for me will have to be looked at as my own personal "old man's game". Still I consider it a game worth playing.


Hey, me, too. I'm definitely enjoying working on my secret project and being able to take some real time and care with it. Ideally, I'm hoping to counterbalance the impression I seem to have left everyone with that unless you can do a 6,000 page story your efforts aren't worth anything (definitely not what I think) by going all the way back the other way and doing a self-contained comic book story, beginning middle and end in forty pages or so. I hope it will be well-received but I also hope that it might revive what I see as one of our "best feet forward" in the comic book that sells perennially. We never had that much of that in the mainstream or indy end of things but it was a big part of the underground comics' success. Head shops and "comix" stores ordered and re-ordered and re-re-ordered the early issues of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. It was inconceivable that you wouldn't have them in stock. And the ones that sold the best (Freak Brothers, Zap) made a place for the marginal and infrequently published ones. At least you got your shot at becoming a perennial seller. If you didn't make it you could try with something else.


My argument is that one of our big pluses is that comic books – not graphic novels, but comic books – are a quick read in a world where time is more and more at a premium. It takes less time to read the average comic book than to watch a situation comedy as an example. About the only thing shorter is a music video and look at how popular those are. And the price can be kept to a reasonable level (who flinches at $3 for anything these days?).


If I can do it with my secret project or if someone else can do it with a self-contained comic book then I think the stores would have something to use as a gateway experience into comics. Here, this is what comics can do. If you like this, I'll show you some other stuff the next time you're in.


As for your latest endeavours I am finding the most interesting are the Creators' Rights debate and the religious Discussions. Figures, they are two that most seem uninterested in. Regarding the Creative Manifesto II, I am still interested in discussing The Audience portion, though I will save that for a separate letter (as this one has predictably spiralled out of control).


I don't want to waste any more of your time. It would be better spent on your secret project and Gospel of Mark commentaries. Both of which I am looking forward to. It's been too long since we've seen a comic by Dave Sim. Immediately, I wanted to read the politically incorrect 1960s Marvel Comics parody. So, yeah! Keep going with it! There are some of us that won't hate your guts for it.


It's sort of in the same category as "The Dog, The Bitch and The Gimp". For the sake of where the story was going on and whatever entertainment value it had, it was about to raise the stakes too high and leave me stranded: I'd lose the people who would like a good Marvel Comics parody because it was "intentionally offensive" and I'd have no chance of attracting the people who would like something that edgy because it would just look like a 1960s Marvel Comics parody. It takes way too long to do these things to devote weeks and weeks to something even I can't picture as having even a potential audience. It's okay where it is right now because I stopped so maybe I can go back at some point and re-think it. Ger definitely thought it should have been the next project and we had a long discussion about it. His point was that South Park is politically incorrect but it has a large audience. I disagreed. From what I've seen of South Park it's pretty much tailored to liberal sensibilities and liberal prejudices. It pushes the boundaries of bad taste, but that's a liberal thing, too: how much bad taste can you take without flinching? The more bad taste you can take without flinching the better a liberal you are. But that's very different from being politically incorrect.


I appreciate all that you've done for both comics, and for the intellectual quest for truth. You said on the Friday January 19 Blog and Mail:


"No one really pays attention to anything that we're saying so it's all `reading into the record' at this point. It's a matter of `putting things right.'"


However, that's not true. What you need to know is that your words do resonate with readers in this generation. What that number is, I can't tell you. However, I can say for certain that I am one of them. I look forward to your future endeavours.


Well, thanks. You're right, I do need to know that and the only way I can know is if someone tells me so I appreciate your doing so. I'm looking forward to my future endeavours, too, win, lose or draw.


I just heard about Gerhard leaving Aardvark-Vanaheim. I've always considered the Dave `n' Ger's business partnership as the pinnacle of an artistic collaboration.


The inner workings of Aardvark-Vanaheim is something I've always been interested in, however with this recent development, I'm all the more curious about what happened, and how things will be resolved. I was also thinking that this would be an article (if not a full issue) I'd like to read in Following Cerebus.


Best of wishes to you both.


Much obliged. Well, there are a lot of financial and legal implications of me re-acquiring Ger's 40% of the company and we're just at the start of that process. There are things we can't do because of accounting/tax implications and there are things we can't do because of legal implications so there's a lot of bouncing back and forth between Mark, our accountant and Wilf, our lawyer up ahead. I'll try and keep everyone updated on my side of things – Jeff Seiler has a long letter here which gets into a lot of the nitty-gritty of my own situation and I'll try to answer as much of that as I can. I really can't speak for Gerhard and Gerhard doesn't do a whole lot of speaking on his own behalf and I can't see that changing especially now that he's able to walk away from the Cerebus spotlight. I mean, it's really no big problem since Cerebus is such a marginal thing to begin with. If he doesn't come into the office and he doesn't follow the Yahoo newsgroup, he can already be leading a completely Cerebus-free existence. If that's what he wants (and I suspect that is very much what he wants) then it's unlikely that he would want to discuss "where it all went wrong" from his point of view.


There's a big part of me that really envies that. Like the guys with nine-to-five-jobs where when they punch out at the end of the day they can stop thinking about it.


I don't think that's who I am or who I could ever be, but a big part of me really envies that.


Tomorrow: The Day Prize Short List – only a few days behind schedule, too!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #188 (March 18th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________



Interesting article Jeff Seiler sent me that appeared in the Dallas Morning News for 21 January. A tribute to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese – who had passed away earlier in the month -- by her friend Cathy Young, documenting Fox-Genovese's journey from Marxist feminist to conservative Catholic. They're obviously both first- or second-generation feminists and there are a number of good observations contained in the article which illustrates both many of the pitfalls that feminism has faced in getting a free ride from society and the reason "you can get a free ride from society and still not end up very happy."



Going back to the early days of their friendship, when Young was asked to write a review of Fox-Genovese's 1991 book, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism, Young remarks that at the time Fox-Genovese, who was director of the women's studies program at Emory University in Atlanta



…urged her fellow feminists to acknowledge their debt to Western individualism – but also to formulate a new vision of "collective social life" that would protect members of the community, including women whose self-reliance is circumscribed by motherhood.



This is interesting to me because it is euphemistic – which is to say, evasive -- as so many feminist writings are. If you don't address the specific problem -- in this case the fact that being a mother means that you have your hands full 24/7 being a mother, that is if you're doing the job properly – and instead use overblown phraseology to evade the specific problem (in this case making it seem that "self-reliance for women" is the societal norm and easily achievable except where it is "circumscribed" by an external state of being known as motherhood which is, by inference, not the societal norm) then all you're doing is creating the illusion that you're addressing the problem. And, obviously, the problem is: Who is going to take care of the mothers 24/7 while the mothers are taking care of the children 24/7? Feminism Without Illusions sounds like a great idea, but it seems clear that it's just paying lip service to the idea as a catchy title. The illusions are all still being preserved.



This isn't to say that Fox-Genovese doesn't have her moments: as an example when she is quoted as saying "Those who have experienced the dismissal by the junior high school girls' clique could hardly, with a straight face, claim generosity and nurture as a natural attribute of women." This is astute and very well expressed, but pretty much undermines the suggestion that some "new vision of a `collective social life'" is attainable, at least in my view – middle-aged women are no less susceptible to cliquishness than they are in junior high school and a woman whose "self-reliance is circumscribed by motherhood" and who also fails to share the tribal shibboleths of the "collective" delegated to protect her would be apt to find herself outside of the warm confines of the henhouse in pretty short order and the "collective" all cheerfully ignoring that fact in happy cliquish mutual self-deception.



Young documents that "we shared many of the same concerns about the direction of feminism, particularly the intolerance toward dissent, the demonization of men, and the tendency to cast male-female relations as a male "war against women." I don't think this is intentionally disingenuous – the Raging Feminist Collective all seemed to arrive at the same insights in the early 90s – but it reads the same to me. This is just cliquishness, again. You can try to establish another way for women to behave and for women to think, but once you're got the vast majority of women on board, the behaviour and the "thought" is really just going to come down to: who's in and who's out? Intolerance toward dissent is cliquishness (she doesn't "get it", so she's OUT) The demonization of men is cliquishness (men don't "get it", so men are out). The tendency to cast male-female relations as a male "war against women" is fear of cliquishness (men are saying "we don't get it" and men are trying to exclude us! SCREAM!). And, of course, this leads to counter-cliquishness (people who are intolerant of dissent and who demonize men and who cast male-female relations as a male "war against women" -- unlike me and my good pal Elizabeth -- don't "get it" and they're out). At its ludicrous extreme it attempts to find a way that everyone can be "in" by trying to find the one right way to think, ergo the adoption of the Marxist term "politically correct".



The further along this compounded cliquishness goes, the longer the book titles get. In 1996 Fox-Genovese evidently wrote a book called Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life: How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women. The first half of the title can be paraphrased as "Who wants to belong to your stupid clique anyway? I've got tons of better things to do" and the second half as "Not only that: your stupid clique is so stupid it doesn't know anything about anything".



It seems sensible to me (but what do I know?) that at some point women would tire of these compounded "clique casting out clique" purges as a way of life and at least take a look at the fact that things worked a lot better the old-fashioned way. Instead of devoting great swaths of prime child-bearing years to nebulous theorizing about "a new vision of `collective social life' that would protect members of the community, including women whose self-reliance is circumscribed by motherhood" why not just recommend attracting a husband who will see you and your prospective baby as his responsibility to protect and care for, to see you as an individual human being and his life-mate rather than as just one woman among many "whose self-reliance is circumscribed by motherhood"? I'm anticipating the ending on this particular story, for as Young then writes



I was startled to see in her articles a growing sympathy toward arguments for distinct sex roles, rooted in female domesticity and submission. Later, I learned that in 1995, Ms. [sic] Fox-Genovese converted to Catholicism, partly as a result of her opposition to assisted suicide and, increasingly, to abortion. Hers was a strongly traditionalist faith that rejected any liberalization of women's roles in the church.



In her final years, she passionately embraced the ideal of self-sacrifice as a feminine calling, and she denounced feminists for undermining that ideal and replacing it with individual pride.



Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, after years of listening to and debating with other feminists, a woman who started with the suggestion of "a new vision of `collective social life' that would protect members of the community" finally had to face the fact the top priorities of the people she was listening to and debating with were all exclusionary – cliquish? Is it also too much of a stretch to suggest that, at the end of the day, she at last saw how futile it was to debate the protection of members of the community with people whose secondary priorities were always abortion and assisted suicide? Cliquish exclusion taken to a more permanent extreme, in other words ("you just don't `get it', so drink your Kool-aid.").



Cathy Young concludes:



Ms. [sic] Fox-Genovese's journey from Marxism to Catholic traditionalism – shared by her husband, historian Eugene Genovese – could be seen, from a classical liberal point of view, in starkly negative terms: as a full-circle transition from one anti-individualist, anti-liberal philosophy to another.



Yet when it comes to women's issues, her critique of individualism contains an important kernel of truth. Reconciling women's pursuit of their new roles, freedoms and opportunities with the needs of families and children has often been a rocky road, as several generations of feminism's daughters have found out.



Again, I find this euphemistic and evasive and, consequently, self-revelatory. It is the needs of families and children which need to be reconciled to women's pursuit of their new roles, freedoms and opportunities in Young's view. I think Elizabeth Fox-Genovese finally recognized that the needs of her family – not families in a general sense – and of her children – not children in a general sense are the only sensible priorities for her, as an individual woman to hold. All else is the madness of "cliquish-exclusion-as-lifestyle" in its many and variegated forms that is second nature to women in any group consisting of more than two members.



But the questions she confronted are ones feminists will continue to confront for a long time to come.



As we race develop new forms of typography and graphic design which can accommodate longer and longer and longer feminist self-help book titles.



eBay: Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges to benefit the Food Bank of his hometown Kitchener.
___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #187 (March 17th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Are the Democrats and the

Republicans Just Two different

Mob families? Was 9-11 an Inside Job?

KITCHENMANIA SAYS YES!

Now it's Dave's turn:

I'm not saying the United States hasn't made mistakes. I think one of their biggest mistakes that goes back at least to the beginning of the last century was in thinking that they didn't need to understand Islam in order to understand Arabs. If you could find an Arab and westernize him enough – "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch" The theory behind Shah Palavi in Iran -- Islam would be irrelevant. It took over a hundred years, but it finally caught up with them on 9-11, in my view.


The motive of the Reagan Administration – which I think dovetailed with American popular opinion of the time – was that the U.S. needed to get back at Iran for the Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981 and if helping Iraq to wage war on Iran was the way to do that, Iraq was the way to do that. I would doubt very much that they gave Saddam biological weapons -- I just don't think the United States would do that -- but when fate makes you the prime "Watchman on the Wall of Freedom" as the United States is and has been since the end of World War II you have a lot of different arenas you have to keep track of and make decisions about. The Democrat theory of the time, as epitomized by Jimmy Carter, was to reduce tension by pulling back around the world – which, arguably, led to the Shah's ouster and encouraged the students in Iran to press their advantage with the "Paper Tiger". Reagan was the opposite, crowding in where Jimmy Carter had withdrawn, closer in some places than in others. But I think both operated in the same long-standing U.S. Islamic policy vacuum of misunderstanding that this wasn't just one Arab fanatical despot against another Arab fanatical despot. "Pick your partner and let's tango."


It was only the enormity of the 9-11 atrocity that finally put Islam on the United States' and the West's radar screen as the Core Issue to be dealt with. Suddenly Mogadishu and Lebanon and Iraq and Iran and Indonesia showed up as all being part of the same fundamental (make that Fundamentalist problem). Whether the thinking on the Iraq invasion was "Well, we have to pick one and dive in and kick ass, so which one?" or not, to me that was the net effect and to me the net effect was a good one. We're five years past 9-11 and the average person (and I suspect the average Western government) is just starting to understand the parameters of Sunni versus Shiite and how much more important that is in the Middle East, structurally, than Iran versus Iraq or Lebanon versus Syria. Saddam was about the worst of the worst since his party, the Baathists, were a sick hybrid of Islam and Nazism. If you don't understand Islam, you can do a lot worse than accidentally picking the guy whose political forebears chose to wed Islam with Nazism as "first boy to go." So, yeah. "We Got Him". Major thumbs up from Dave Sim.


And, I think that given that the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and everyone else on down to the commanders deploying forces in Iraq are starting to understand Sunni versus Shiite – that this isn't a civil war, this is a religious war that has been raging everywhere in the Muslim world since the seventh century – that they are, thereby, however inadvertently, reinforcing the consensus Western Christian viewpoint which is at odds with both the Sunni and Shiite Muslim viewpoint of "What Is God's Will?" and is the Largest Over-arching Concern and the thing that really interests me the most as a result.


What WE the people of The Democracies Formerly Known As Christendom are saying (although we don't seem to be at all aware that we are saying it) is "God's Will is that people are entitled to live in a peaceful world. If you make that world dangerous for innocent civilians, you are toast. If we have to stay here fifty years and kill every last one of you sick bastards who doesn't understand that basic core fact of God's Will then we will do so. We have the men, we have the armaments and we have the know-how. We will sacrifice Christian blood to make you understand and to bring you and to bring Islam to a better place. And we don't give a flying you-know-what whether you're Sunni or Shiite. If you make New Iraq a dangerous place we will kill you. Because THAT's God's Will. The only good Sunni or Shiite is a peaceful Sunni or Shiite. And the only good dangerous Sunni or Shiite is a dead dangerous Sunni or Shiite."


People are basically good, and that includes Muslims. The vast majority of Iraqis are peace-loving people, as the vast majority of people are peace-loving people. Instead of withdrawing from Iraq, if all of the democracies would pour troops in there and just jump on every warlord who puts together his own Fundamentalist Crips or Bloods gang with hob-nailed boots and grind them all into little red spots in the sand -- Sunni today, Shiite tomorrow, what's on the menu for Wednesday? -- I think the point would eventually get across over the course of a decade or two. God's Will is that everyone is peaceful. You can argue as much as you want but if you start shooting up the suburbs you are going to regret it and I mean a) immediately and b) fatally. There are a lot fewer people dying in Iraq now than were dying during Saddam's reign of terror or during the war with Iran, so presumably the vast majority of peace-loving Iraqi Muslims are cluing in. This is going to take a while and there are many years of tears and blood to be shed by Americans and by Iraqis but the United States is, indeed, making this a better place to live. It's wrong to target civilians and the only solution to people who target civilians is to kill them. I can't imagine that that would be anything but the majority Iraqi view as the situation improves.


I'm pretty sure that that's what President Bush is up to, so at least we'll have two years of common sense and a workable program before we have to start worrying.


As for the conspiracy stuff that 9-11 was in inside job, well, you know. I wish you luck with this in a way. If there's really something here then I don't think the "inside job" people are ultimately going to get away with it. But, I was definitely of the generation that obsessed about the Kennedy assassination. I must've read a dozen books on the subject and I could quote you chapter and verse of what did and didn't add up. And then at some point in the mid-seventies it just got out of control. The Congress did hold hearings on the Kennedy assassination – in fact on all the assassinations on Jimmy Carter's watch if I'm not mistaken – and reading the coverage of them, it was all over the map because the volume of information had gotten out of control. If you want a legislative body to do something about something you can't just present them with an entire library of facts and then sit blinking at them. "What is it that you want us to do with this?" Those of us in the first generation of Kennedy assassination "buffs" always thought that the power of subpoena would do it. Here are the files we want to see, here are the witnesses we want to hear from. But it didn't really add up to anything besides "Boy, it sure is a confusing mass of facts, isn't it?" As with a court trial you have to be telling the jury – in this case a Senate Committee – a story: you have to put the pieces together for them and say, "Look this is the only way that this adds up logically" if you're prosecuting or "There are too many holes in this to qualify as `beyond a reasonable doubt'" if you're defending.


World Trade Centre 7 came down at 5:20 PM as a classic controlled demolition job. Well, okay. So Vice-president Cheney sent the CIA in to WTC 7 to wire it for controlled demolition and someone gave the go-ahead roughly seven hours after the two primary towers came down. Well, what went wrong? Was another plane supposed to hit WTC 7 and never made it? Where is the evidence for a failed hijacking that necessitated triggering the demolition of WTC 7? With the rest of the "inside job" going off like clockwork, why did it take them seven hours to figure out that they better cover their tracks and bring down WTC 7? See, there's no story there. If it takes ten years for 9-11 "Inside Job Conspiracy Theory" to go mainstream, as it took ten years for Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory to go mainstream, what are you going to present when you get there? It really needs to be not only a matter of "The Government's story doesn't add up" – the mistake that was made by Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists – but also "This story does add up, and here are the culprits." Hey, you've only got five years left to get it together if the earlier investigation is an accurate template.


"Hillary Heralds 30-Year Plus Control of America By Interlocking Crime Family" – that is, the Bushes and the Clintons. "Pro-war Clinton candidacy success would mean same mob bosses have ruled U.S. since 1980" Well, again, I think that's just a loony way of looking at it and that anyone who does look at it that way is so far beyond the realm of civilized discourse as to be completely off the map. But, if you insist on me taking a run at it:


No, it seems self-evident to me that Bill Clinton looked at Ronald Reagan's success and wondered "How does he do that?" Republicans were so thoroughly discredited in the post-Watergate era that everyone just assumed the Democrats would have a lock on the White House for a good thirty years. Instead you had four years of Jimmy Carter and BOOT he's gone and you've got twelve years of Republican rule that's further to the right of Richard Nixon. And Bill Clinton is a realist or a pragmatist or whatever you want to call him and he sees that the way to beat the Republicans is to steal some of their program and use that as cover to get back in the White House and institute Liberal programs. "It's the economy, stupid." The economy is not a Democratic program, it's a Republican program. So Bill Clinton outflanks Bush, Sr. and the Democrats have the White House back. But the key point is that, in the larger scheme of things, Bill Clinton pulled the Democrats much farther to the right than they had ever been before. MUCH farther to the right. Which was a tactical thing to do but not a strategic thing to do because essentially what he did was to acknowledge that the Republicans were right all along and the Democrats were wrong all along. "It's the economy, stupid." That was an enormous concession to make just to get some watered down Gays in the Military legislation and a few really good glittery black-tie parties that leftists were invited to.


I'm not surprised that the Clintons and the Bushes are chummy. Bush Sr. was very much a squishy Republican and Clinton moved way over in that direction. But as we're seeing now, all that's done is to divide the Democrats who want to get back to where they were in the center, but Bill Clinton moved the center over into squishy Republican territory which the Republicans visit only on very rare occasions and then move back to the right. Anything the Democrats try to build in proximity to Clinton is going to disappear into the Republican vortex. So the Democrats are forced to hold down two positions: the Clintons in squishy Republican land and Obama over on the extreme left. There's nowhere for a centrist or moderate Democrat to go anymore. In Democrat terms you're either a raving hawk or a cringing dove.


So this item, to me, just looks like the cringing doves trying the only thing that they see as giving them a hope of winning: they have to destroy the Clintons. Which is really stupid, trying to destroy your best campaigner, your top fund-raiser and a popular former President and the husband of your leading candidate. You can have a spirited competition but when you start trying to destroy your own hierarchy – and the Clintons, at the moment, are the Democratic hierarchy – then you're over in Stalinist purge territory which is something leftists are always susceptible to. The Republicans if they haven't got a hope will just go through the motions and run Bob Dole or somebody. Let him get his ass kicked and wait until you have some logical chance of winning. But don't tear your party apart in a year when you should just be going through the motions. And 2008, the only sensible thing is to let Hillary run virtually unopposed and get her ass kicked so you have a chance in 2012. The Clintons with all they've done for the Democrats have earned a completely unopposed Hillary candidacy. Instead, the Democrats are going to demonize her as pro-war and the Clintons as too far to the right and tear the party apart.


It's for the best, in my view – the more years of Republican rule and a firm commitment to stay in Iraq the better the future looks – but it sure is amazing to watch otherwise sensible people getting ready to shoot themselves in the foot, then in the shin, then in the knee, then in the thigh…

Tomorrow: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese


Monday: Talking Comics with Kitchenmania

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #186 (March 16th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________


Psst. Quiet. We're talking about…

HEY KEEP IT DOWN – THE WALLS HAVE EARS Y'KNOW

TURN OFF YOUR BOLD FACE…

"Operation Northwoods"


Ray Earles sent me a bunch of this stuff a while back and pretty much my bottom-line comment to him was "I just don't think this is possible." Both the Operation Northwoods conspiracy theories and the idea that the government of the United States and the political structure of the United States is that corrupt or that the individuals who hold high office have that much…extreme latitude…to do what you're accusing them of. Government, compared to the corporate sector is a very low-paying profession relative to the amount of time and energy it requires and the amount of oversight and checks and balances within which you have to function. It's also an enormous population of people. The idea that you could plan 9-11 as an inside job and have no one catch wind of it and blow the whistle…That was the same conclusion I came to with the Kennedy assassination. I think it's just a fundamentally Adversarial (as in God's Adversary) view of reality that is taking hold to a degree but which is founded in very base human instincts and a completely jaundiced and wholly if not complete inaccurate overview. For Americans – or Westerners of any kind -- to think that Americans who have chosen to sacrifice more lucrative private sector jobs to serve in Government in a Gold Fish Bowl Existence where the odds are very good that you will end up with your personal reputation in tatters after putting in 15- and 16-hour days, seven days a week for years on end would do that just to line their own pockets and that they would knowingly plot the deaths of other Americans…


All I can say is that it strikes me as an Infernal View of Reality. The net effect is to lend aid and comfort to Extremist Muslims and to reinforce that their worst opinions of the infidels are accurate and to divide the Western house that should be showing a united front in the War on Terror. I'm not talking about suppressing any of these views or websites and I don't think the White House is either. It just seems to me an unfortunate downside of democracy that so many of us have that low – and you can't get much lower than Infernal – an opinion of others of us. I can fundamentally disagree with Bill Clinton, but I would never in my wildest dreams imagine accusing him of plotting to kill American citizens for his personal aggrandisement. The thought is inconceivable to me as a civilized human being. As I think it is inconceivable to virtually every Republican.


In that sense, I do think it is a Left vs. Right thing. For some reason, Leftists seem to entertain a large constituency of people who really do think that people who don't share their political views or who are at the opposite end of the political spectrum are capable of mind-boggling human atrocities and that they commit them on a regular basis and use all of the resources of government to cover up those atrocities – meaning that virtually everyone in elected office is complicitous and duplicitous in those atrocities. As a civilized human being, you try to maintain a level of decorum in the face of these sorts of…(I'll be charitable here)…intellectual excesses, but if you're wondering why the Democrats are losing the political mainstream of the U.S. I think you don't have to go too much further to see why. If your Tent is Big enough to accommodate people who believe Americans plot to kill innocent Americans, then your Big Tent is Too Big, in my view.


I wrote on the Cerebus Yahoo! Board that I was curious as to your views on the Saddam Hussein execution, as I viewed the invasion and execution, in light of the above, as a mob hit. Below is a snippet from my comments:


What bothers me about all of this isn't the death penalty, or the fact that Saddam Hussein probably deserved a death sentence [PROBABLY?! – Dave] but rather, in my opinion, the whole thing comes across more as a Mafia hit.


In the 1980s, top officials in the Reagan administration saw Saddam as a useful surrogate. After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments, tanks and other military hardware and bacteria cultures to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The United States backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of munitions. http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/09.18A.neswk.us.iraq.htm


I'm really curious what Dave's view is on this. Especially given the "We Got Him" photo and all.


Given the current government of Iraq was essentially created by the United States and its coalition allies, I saw the Saddam trial as them just rubbing his nose in it.


If it was a UN trial, that would be a different story…[if it was a UN trial Saddam would die of old age like Milosevic did before it was halfway through – Dave]


This brings us to the crux of the problem I have with death penalties. While I certainly think there are evil people in the word deserving of death (Saddam Hussein being a good candidate) ["WHEW" – Dave], I have little faith in human institutions making morally correct "life or death" judgements.


In regards to my earlier "mob hit" comments (which is the big problem I have with this particular execution), the way I see it is this: It is a fact Saddam was being used as an asset by the Reaganites against Iran (Bush I was Vice-President at the time). Then in recent years he became a liability, so they whacked him. We've seen that story over and over again on the Sopranos. Only this story is on a global scale.


"In your face!" "Don't mess with Texas!" Et al.


My problem with the current politics in general continues with Corporate welfare, our fiat economic system, and especially the World Bank, Secret societies such as the Yale Skull & Bones Society and its offshoot Bohemian Grove (where they, among other things, practice the pagan Cremation of Care ritual). Add to that the current trend of selling out the country, thus gradually lowering us towards third world status, the effect is chilling.


I was debating whether I should send you some additional information regarding the above and, in the end, decided not to. Though I decided I would send you some additional information regarding the Twin Towers and NORAD (which I see as the smoking gun in the 9-11 conspiracy) and as a bonus, a little article on Hillary Clinton. Take them for what they are, and while these internet printouts are not the extent of my research, they do nicely sum up my major views or objections to the official White House story. I am guessing that others have most likely already send you this information, or at the very least, that you are not at all interested in reading it. However, since all my research keeps sending me back to these points, and the Administration has not addressed these points sufficiently to the public, they have been included here.


I'd like to challenge you on the 9-11 and Gulf War issues, because that's one of the few, if not only, areas where I outright disagree with your thinking.


And hey, if your thinking is right, then I'd like to be convinced!


And if my thinking is right, well, then maybe I can convince you.

(of course, probably not in this letter…)


So that is my thinking on politics.


Go ahead and rip into it.

Tomorrow: Ripping into it but in as kind and gentle a way as possible

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #185 (March 15th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

KITCHENMANIA IS SWEEPING

THE INTERNET! EVERYONE WANTS TO

KNOW "WHAT'S MIKE KITCHEN GOING TO SAY NEXT?" KEEP IT TURNED ON THE BLOG & MAIL, YOUR MIKE KITCHEN HEADQUARTERS IN THE TRI-CITY

AREA…

…AND AROUND THE WORLD!!!

Also, as you said on the blogandmail #143 (February 1, 2007)


"The problem, of course, is refuting the counter-revolutionary charge of mindless jingoism. And it seems to me the way to do that is to say, "Well just for the sake of argument let's say that Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore are right. It's really that bad. The United States in toto is this entirely loathsome and irredeemable mess and the central source and catalyst for everything that's wrong in the world. What do they suggest instead?" And it seems to me that their suggestion is always really good parties with lots of interesting people and witty conversation and composting and trying to live the way the Indians did before Europeans came to this continent. And the implicit point (to me, anyway) is that they misunderstand what the question is in the first place. What do they suggest should be done on a global scale? And the answer is the same: All countries and all governments should be having really good parties with lots of interesting people and witty conversation and composting and trying to live the way the Indians did before the Europeans came to this continent."


This is an astute comment, and there is really no arguing it.


That doesn't keep the academics and the champagne socialists from arguing it, though. Again, there are very few actual workers who are socialists or who are interested in actually running things or who understand that the things that they want to do are not "do-able". The sort of people who are still trying to get the Kyoto Accord implemented even though in Canada's case it would cost us a good 35% of our economy at all levels (35% of all cars OFF the road for starters) to accomplish. A socialist or anarchist government just means that the amount of money government siphons from workers and from employers goes up to pay for a "managed economy", large increases in welfare payments, curbs on industry, nationalized daycare, nationalized industries. Instead of the employer having to shell out $900 to the government and the employee so the employee can take home $400, the employer has to pay, say, $1100 so the employee can take home $350 ("There will of course be short-term temporary income fluctuations, comrade, until we are able to fully implement our program. We all have to do our part for the People's Republic of Ontario").


Still, my own political views are becoming polarized as a Yin Yang between far right conservatism and far left anarchy as I cling to the ideas I perceive as truth, placing me so far as I can tell, somewhere outside the whole political spectrum. Though, as I try to better understand all of this, ultimately I am thinking that it is less about left and right wing politics and more about morality. I view our current political structure as a one-party system masquerading as a two-party system. This makes me think that the issues are less about left and right wing politics and more about what is the greatest benefit to society? What is morally right? What is the will of God? I can't shake the notion that current world politics are in place to make the rich richer and to create a control system to suppress the rest of the world population. The conflict in human society, as I see it, really comes down to class war.


Left-right politics is the lower chessboard. The real game is happening on a chessboard much higher.


Oh, and before I go any further, let me clarify right now, for the record, that I despise Liberal thinking and their netherworld of gray areas.


Living in the Socialist Republic of Canada, this is made crystal clear, in the animation industry where the studios are more interested in government handouts than they are in running an animation studio. As a result, Canadian animators get bottom-of-the-barrel projects where the horribly mismanaged productions companies are looking to get work made on the cheap. The projects lacking a creative vision come to Canada. Then, add to that, inexperienced women in high positions in production management, and you get an unbearable working condition. Yet I digress…


Well, I think the flaw in your reasoning as I see as being the flaw in the reasoning of most people on the extreme left is that you aren't seeing rich people as just being part of the equation. Try looking at it this way – there is a whole section of society that is pulling its hair out and giving itself ulcers and grinding itself up in a self-created spiritual meat-grinder because they are obsessively interested in making money and that's all that they're interested in. Money can't buy happiness. At one level or another, as a God-fearing man, you know the truth in that. Money is the root of all evil. At one level or another, as a God-fearing man, you know the truth in that, as well. So rich people should really be off of your radar screen in the same way that a porn star who is getting laid eight times today is off of your radar screen. To envy a rich person's wealth is just another form of the disease that rich people have: the secret suspicion that money can buy happiness and that money is the root of all goodness. Instead of sitting here debating these issues with you for the last couple of days, I could be doing a lot of high-priced commissions. I could be shopping Cerebus around to animation studios for the highest-priced option I could get. Well, I know better than that. As a spectator to my career and an aspirant in the same field, you know better than that.


I think the Blog & Mail might be helping to sell trade paperbacks, but I also think that if it is it is more in the way that this is The Right Thing To Do and that the increase in sales is one of those trickle-down blessings that results. If you do the right thing, God will provide. Right? That doesn't mean God will give you your own animation studio and a fifty-room mansion in Holmby Hills. And you're right. That's about morality. But all morality is individually chosen. I think that discussing politics and faith in God at considerable length for four or five days out of every three-week period and dumping it on the internet on a Make of That What you Will basis is the right thing for me to do. It will make me happier and will accomplish more good in a general sense and help me sleep better at night than getting a six-figure option deal from Dreamworks is going to do. In your own case, this letter you've written wasn't knocked out in twenty minutes. You could have put in some overtime doing your animation work you have no respect for and have a lot more money to show for it. God knows exactly how much money you need and if you play square with Him and do the things that are right, He'll see that you get every penny exactly when you need it. As it says in the Koran, "God will not wrong you so much as the husk of a date stone." Money is a very small part of each individual's personal equation, as I see it. If you do what's right God will make sure you have enough money in your pocket and bank account. I think this extends to the mill and factory worker. If you do a good job of your job you'll get a better job or another opportunity. If you just keep manufacturing further entitlements for yourself through a union and slack off every chance you get, yeah, you're probably not going to end up very happy in the long term. But that's your fault, not God's or the fault of the economic system we have.


Now, the BIG notable difference where I know our views clash and conflict in politics comes down to the Bush Administration and the War in Iraq. My point of contention is; I think the ultimate intentions of the Bush Administration were disingenuous and dishonourable. The morality behind the Iraq war I strongly disagree with, on the grounds that 9-11 was an inside job to create a false pretext for war. All of the facts and evidence I encounter keeps pointing me back to the same things. And I don't see this as a "Left" vs. "Right" issue, but rather the elite ruling class attempting to control the world's resources. Or, a "Top" vs. "Bottom" issue.


Well, as I just observed, I think money is a very small part of each person's personal equation so I think suggesting that the "elite ruling class" is the "Top" by virtue of being rich and everyone who isn't rich is on the "Bottom" is a misapprehended way of viewing reality. But don't let me interrupt.


9-11 is the catalyst for war that the think tanks have been dreaming up for decades. Their "New Pearl Harbor" as called for the Project For A New American Century (Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century pg. 51). As well many of the events we witnessed in 2001 were spelled out in the 1962 Operation Northwoods documents.


James Bamford summarized Operation Northwoods in his Body of Secrets as follows:


"Operation Northwoods, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, DC, Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war."


It plays out as a mob protection racket. There is really no other way to describe it. Which brings me to the idea that our politics are being run by international gangsters.


The following is a quote from Michael Ruppert, which best sums up the idea:


"People talk to me about the issue of Republican versus Democrat as if they don't get it. And I say; look, here's the way you get it. It's organized crime. All you do is you call the Republicans the Genoveses and you call the Democrats the Gambinos. The people at the top, they treat it like a crap game, like it's their crap game, like they're making lots of money. Occasionally somebody at the table shoots each other. But the moment anything threatens their crap game, they all unite to protect it. They're both controlled by the same financial economic corporate interests."


Tomorrow: I give my best assessment of the opinion that the Democrats and Republicans are just two mob families at heart.

There's more for you

In TODAY's

BLOG &…

MAAAIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #184 (March 14th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

TODAY'S BLOG & MAIL

WHEREIN THE REDOUBTABLE MIKE KITCHEN (THE LATEST BLOG & MAIL MANUFACTURED INDY COMIC BOOK CARTOONIST CELEBRITY) IS ABOUT TO ASTONISH EVEN THE MOST WORLD-WEARY OF BLOG & MAIL DEVOTEES BY ASSERTING THAT HE IS A HAPPILY MARRIED MAN WITH CHILDREN! CAN IT BE TRUE? A CEREBUS FAN/READER WHO IS HAPPILY MARRIED AND WITH CHILDREN? SHHHH. LET'S LISTEN IN, SHALL WE?

I consider myself blessed, as a man, married with children, to have a wife who has chosen to make a stand against the grain of current society and place the care and upbringing of our children as her top priority, as a full-time mother. She also is a rarity who sees the difference between the gender specific roles of mother and father. In a day and age where socialist daycare is the expected norm, she is quick to point out that the feminist ideal of an "independent woman" working mother is an oxymoron. A mother using daycare to raise her children is NOT independent. As a result of her views, my wife has trouble socializing with other women who do put their careers above their children's upbringing: the opposition she encounters from other "mothers" who don't see things like pre-kindergarten as a socialist form of daycare – and Montessori schools as being little more than a cash-grab on working parents naïve enough to think it will better their children's education.


To mothers who say "I'm going back to work because I love my job" she is quick to point out that they can't say "I'm NOT going back to work because I love my children", and they don't understand that being a mother should be their most important job.


In an age where two-income families are the norm, its effect on society is to simply raise the cost of living to the point where two incomes become required. Corporations win by getting more labourers. Mom and Dad win by getting more spending money. The ones who pay for all this are children who end up without proper parental supervision and guidance. And people wonder why our society is in such a sordid state.


You certainly do sound blessed. I've been asked by people "But, what if you found a woman who was just a devoted to God as you are and believed in the conservative social views that you hold?" The problem I see with that is the bait-and-switch. You can marry a woman like that and then have her tell you ten years later that she's discovered she's actually a lesbian truck driver at heart. And I end up having to pay alimony to someone who isn't remotely like the person I married.


I'm also not sure how necessary two incomes are these days. Add up how much it costs to keep two cars on the road and already you're into the tens of thousands that would be cut in half if only one of you was working. And it depends on what you call material necessities which most people today would say would include a DVD player, winter vacations to sunny climes, expensive lessons for the kids, massive clothing allowances for the females, etc. The best news I saw recently came from a VERY unexpected source, Quebec, where they have instituted income splitting into their tax code. Basically the spouse earning the most money can split his or her income with the non-earning or lesser-earning spouse on their taxes thus putting him or her in a lower tax bracket (i.e. if you're making $80,000 a year and your wife isn't working you can file a return declaring you both made $40,000). The big innovation Quebec has come up with is incorporating children into that, where you can split your income with your spouse and your child, treating an only child as half a taxable person. But each additional child is treated as a full person with whom you can divide your taxable income on paper. That makes a great deal of sense since it gives the largest wage earners more of an incentive to have more children and to have a stay-at-home wife. Needless to say the feminists are both appalled and divided – the women who are making the most amount of money are obviously in favour whereas the socialists who want to be subsidized by society (Quebec is also the Fruitcake Park of nationalized daycare: they subsidize daycare so that parents only have to pay $7 a day for daycare that costs the government…well, they aren't too specific about that for obvious reasons…so let's just say exponentially more than $7 a day per daycare space) are appalled since most of them are single mothers without enough income to split with anyone.


It seems to me a remarkably innovative idea for a society that has been flirting for some time with a negative birth rate that used to (by virtue of being a Roman Catholic stronghold) be a leader in rising population figures. To defeat socialism you just need to come up with rational ideas that undermine the "free ride" syndrome and I really think this is one of them.


Turning to politics…


My interest or "quest" to unravel politics is a part of my greater personal quest for truth. To make sense of the world we live in.


As of late, I find myself agreeing with many ultra right-wing views (as I perceive them) specifically regarding family and religion. The problem I see with capitalism in its current state is that people are reduced to serfs. You have to turn no further than to mainstream comics to see how the capitalist system pillages its workers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that par for the course in right-wing business?


It tends to be. Less so now than was the case with the Robber Barons of old. The difference as I see it is that, unlike serfs, you aren't forced to work for anyone specifically or – if you're willing to risk it as someone who is self-employed – anyone at all. I looked at the capitalist pillage construct of the comic-book field and said, "No, there has to be a better way." And then I found it and worked at it.


Having been an employer, part of the dynamic that I think leftists miss out on is how much money you have to give the government in payroll taxes in order to have a full-time employee. The average worker might be making $600 a week and they get to take home $400 a week out of that (arbitrary numbers). But in order to pay that $600 a week, the company is having to shell out, say, $900 a week with $300 of that going to the government. This creates the pressure to have fewer employees doing more work and the natural resentment on the part of the employee that they're only getting $400 a week at a job where they're "snowed under with work". But to the employer, that employee is costing them $900 a week and they have to justify the outlay. If you take what the employer pays AND what the employee pays, you'll find that the government is usually making more than you are off of your job. The government taxes part-time employees at a lower rate so there's that dynamic as well. Essentially government is saying "We want you to employ two people at 20 hours a week instead of one person at 40 hours a week." Well, I mean, no you don't. Not really. You have a much more reliable and productive workforce if someone can say "This is my job" than a workforce where people are saying "This is one of my jobs. This week, anyway." It depends on what you think government brings to the table as a Full Third partner (at least) in every employment context. If you're a single mother with no job skills, they bring quite a bit to the table relative to what you contribute. I just take it as a given that all of my expenditure is one way: I pay three levels of government large chunks of cash to finance various forms of socialism that are unworkable and can only be exponentially widening bottomless money pits as the years go by – as well as legitimate things like the post office, the military and good roads (even though I don't have a car).


I am split on what is best for an economic system. However I am certain that a non-fiat currency is a good start.


I have been reading a lot of anarchist literature, some of which I find agreeable. Specifically:


Chomsky, noting that mainstream democratic principles date back hundreds of years, said it was the corporatization of America at the turn of the century that led to the repression of fundamental democratic principles. Wage labor may be a staple of our economy, he said, but the concept of selling a worker's time to a boss is a form of slavery. "Those who work in the mills should own and run them."


In fact, it seems to me that the Aardvark-Vanaheim business model borders on the verge of anarchism as described above. Though I'm sure you'd disagree with the semantics, my mind can't grasp it any other way.


Now, the problem I see with anarchy as a foundation for society is that there is no motivation for people to pull their own weight in society. So chances are you will end up with a society of freeloaders. Not to mention the feminism (destruction of the family unit), and atheism that automatically get attached to it.


Well, look closely at what Chomsky is saying. How are you going to have, say, 800 mill workers run the mill? How are they going to make decisions? For starters you're going to need a very large boardroom. One of the major flaws with anarchy and socialism is that they don't factor in that one of the big incentives to work in a mill or a factory is that you put in your eight hours and when you're done, you're done. It's certainly something I envy and always have envied. Instead of working twelve hours a day on the Blog & Mail, I just go in to wherever it is at 8:30 and punch in and then punch out at 5:00 and that's the last I have to concern myself with work until tomorrow or until my next shift. Most anarchists and socialists who have a program in mind that they want instituted have never worked in a mill or a factory. Most of them are academics and theoreticians. You tell the average mill worker or factory worker that they now own the mill so, after they're done their shift would they please report to the gymnasium-sized boardroom for the three-hour meeting to decide production quotas for the next quarter and you'll be lucky if all they do is give you a dirty look.

Tomorrow: Even More Mike Kitchen

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #183 (March 13th, 2007)

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Fourteen 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.

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Today's RED HOT Blog & Mail

With EXCLUSIVE SCREEN-TO-SCREEN

COVERAGE OF

MIKE KITCHEN

DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY

"IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT

STAY AWAY FROM MIKE KITCHEN!"

TODAY'S BLOG & MAIL: MANUFACTURING COMIC-BOOK CELEBRITIES AS IF WE WERE THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF INDIES!

Continuing with Mike Kitchen's recent letter:


I enjoyed (and agreed) with "Tangent" in Cerebus #265. At my time of first reading, I had lived my first four years of marriage, where I had blissfully managed to avoid (and continue to avoid, I might add) many of the "Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast" (admittedly, number 5, at times, needs to be refuted). In recently re-reading the essay, I am surprised that it ever received the reaction that it did. The only caveats I had over any of it were minor ones relating to some allegorical stories used to back up the overall thesis of the essay. Minor stuff, that isn't worth mentioning as it would take away from the vast bulk I agreed with.


Cerebus 300. What can I say? A landmark in my life as a comic-book fan, picking up that issue on March 10, 2004 from Comic Relief in Berkeley. It was a milestone experience. For years I had told myself that I would make my way on a pilgrimage (for lack of a better word) to Kitchener, to be there for the Cerebus 300 bash! But instead? Nothing. Silence. Honestly, I was in shock at the lack of fanfare surrounding Cerebus 300. This was both disturbing and disappointing.


Often I've wondered what degree of ostracism you've received from the comic-book community. When I read some of your comments, I can't help but think "he's gotta be exaggerating". Then things pop up, either in print, or online, with the token disclaimer or pot-shot that makes me think "You know what? Maybe Dave isn't exaggerating after all…" I mean, it baffles my mind. It's comics. Do people really feel that threatened by these ideas? By this commentary on life? Besides what happened to the right to freedom of speech? I know that feminists are collectivists by nature, group consciousness, it's part of the feminine psyche. But we're not just talking females here. These are comic fans. 90% male. This baffles me.


It might be a little easier to understand if you realize that a lot of those 90% don't have much contact with females except for the "Adoration from Afar" bit. This tends, in my experience, to cause them to really lean into the "misguided chivalry" approach to women that effectively makes them female doormats because they put women on such a high pedestal (in the hopes of getting somewhere with them) that even though there are very few women in the comic-book field, they virtually control the thought processes of the male population of the comic-book field. That is, males with little or no experience with women tend to out-feminist the feminists as a means of (as they see it, anyway) competing with each other for the few women that there are to go around. If you've ever seen the drooling and kowtowing and currying favour that goes on in comic-book stores with a female clerk (most of whom have a boyfriend or a husband and in any other environment would be understood to be off-limits for that kind of courtship/mating dance), you know what I'm talking about. Tearing Dave Sim and Cerebus down and throwing them in the gutter was a way of demonstrating feminist bona fides…and, as you've noticed, still is for the most part. It also allowed most of the women to have clean hands. With a handful of notable exceptions they didn't have to tear down Dave Sim and Cerebus, they had legions of fanboys currying favour to do their dirty work for them.


And it isn't just fans. Incorrigible Erin at Night Flight Comics told me that she asks every visiting professional if they'll sign a book "to Erin - I'm your bitch". Evidently Bill Willingham and I are the only two to decline her request so far. All she's doing is making full use of what I see as the extremes of "misguided chivalry": instead of ignoring or rationalizing away the drooling attentions of the customers (as most female clerks do, in my experience – and Incorrigible Erin has a boyfriend) she's "leaning into it". To say that I see that as an unhealthy way for the environment to conduct itself is an understatement. But I also realize that "delusional non-existent relationships" issuing from "misguided chivalry" are a very potent force on the side of feminism and I doubt that Incorrigible Erin is the only one of her kind in the field at this point.


In my view, every time women crank up the dial on feminism, men have to crank down the dial on chivalry. Otherwise we just end up being doormats pretty much universally.


I thought your views on gender got more accurate as the series progressed. One of my favourite gender themes in Cerebus is Fruitcake Park [see pages 362-63, Latter Days], an idea, to this day, that I can't get out of my head as I walk down the streets of Toronto, thinking, "she belongs in Fruitcake Park…she belongs in Fruitcake Park". I was also interested in the idea of a model wife in Latter Days. Which was always a caveat I had about the gender views presented up until then. However Latter Days cleared things up for me and put us on the same page (or at least how I perceive it).


I have always been justifiably wary of women, and especially so in choosing a mate. Interesting that it was a first generation Canadian, with an old-school European father (despite a liberal-thinking European mother). My hunch was always that it would take a foreigner to dodge the typical North American mentality as my experience was that typical North Americans always bothered me.


Well, I'm a first generation Canadian on my father's side – he was born in Glasgow – but second-generation on my mother's side – she was born in Hamilton. If I had to pick the thing that most shaped viewpoints on women and feminism, it was hanging out at Peter's Place and the Athenian in the 90s, which was run by a Greek (Dino) and mostly inhabited by Greeks, Romanians and various Europeans. It was really the first environment I had been in where the guys didn't take women at all seriously. They were chivalrous, up to a point, but not up to the point of being doormats for women. The women carped at them, hectored them, but it was "in one ear and out the other" ("yeah, yeah, yeah"). I'd go to Stages and the other nightclubs looking to get "lucky" and then end up at Peter's Place and the Athenian (it was really the after-hours restaurant downtown) where I could forget about all that. And, in retrospect, that was more often where I would get "lucky", although still very infrequently largely because I wouldn't take women seriously when I was there. So, I went from someone who thought that women should be taken very seriously to examining "okay, WHY should women be taken seriously?" And, in examining what they wanted to be taken seriously about – which really amounted to the Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast – the whole scaffold started coming down at that point. And, being a writer, it made sense to pass all that along in the form of entertainment and (hopefully) art.


In my attempts to understand marriage, (before getting married), I read through the Bible to try and get God's take on the whole marriage thing: figuring if there is a definitive view on anything, THE place to start is Scripture. What I found (and was surprised by) was it had nothing to do with love, as is told to us by society. What it had to do with was children (Leviticus 21:15, Deuteronomy 25:6, Jeremiah 29:6, Malachi 2:15, 1 Cornthians 7:14, I Timothy 5:14). That was interesting to me.


That was what I noticed, too, since I was pretty much "sold" on the authenticity of it very early on. Only, I was looking for God's take on fornication (as can be seen in Guys and Rick's Story) since that was what I was doing at the time and I sure didn't want to give it up. But I was struck by the fact that most of the husbands and wives just show up in the book already married (with the notable exception of Isaac and Rebecca) and the only marriage that's documented is the marriage in Cana of Galilee in John's Gospel. And even there it's just drinking wine at the reception! "Where's the marriage ceremony?" was one of my biggest questions since I assumed "Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife…" etc. had to be Scriptural, otherwise what was it doing in church? As you say, all of the Scriptural references are about children…or divorce. No marriage or courtship or "fooling around" rules and advice at all.


Tomorrow: Hey, wait a minute. What is this? Sunday? No Bible talk! Just a little more and then Mike Kitchen is off to greener pastures, folks.

There's MORE for YOU

In Today's BLOG &…MAAAAIIIILLL

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #182 (March 12th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

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Keep It Turned On

The FABULOUS BLOG & MAIL:

ALL MIKE KITCHEN!

ALL THE TIME!

OR AT LEAST FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS

Okay, hitting "rewind" on Mike Kitchen's letter brings us right back to the beginning. And, now I'll just hit "play" and…


Dear Dave,


First off, let me say (3 years after the fact), congratulations on reaching 300. Month after month Cerebus had been the highlight of my comic-book buying experience. Many of the comics currently on the shelf, I quickly lose interest with, primarily because, though they may be a fun comic-book romp, rarely do they have anything of substance to say, or insight to offer. It's obvious they are designed as entertainment time wasters and ad filler, rather than as thought provoking art. Cerebus is everything that comics should be, and you and Gerhard have set the watermark for everything I creatively aspire to. Yes, Cerebus is a tough act to follow.


I am apologetic for not having gotten one of these fan letters out to you sooner. When writing one of these, the sheer amount of things to say spirals out of control to the point where wrapping words around it all becomes incomprehensible.


Yes, and it probably serves me right that I have to type all this. I could have just ignored the lack of reaction to Cerebus coming to an end, but nooo, I have to provoke you into spiralling out of control. Sorry, Mike, go ahead.


There are numerous pages of first draft letters that have been started, and then ultimately abandoned, due to my inability to get thoughts in proper order and put into words (a severe handicap for someone who wants to eventually turn creating comics into a full-time job). In fact this letter came dangerously close to suffering the same fate. There is too much to say, and anything written has seemed inadequate. I mean, seriously, what can I say to Dave Sim? THE Dave Sim, Creator of Cerebus, Godfather of Self-Publishing, the Evil Misogynist, the Pariah King of Comics!


Roughly…let me do a quick count here…eleven pages worth.

Sorry, Mike. Go ahead.


And is it worth wasting Dave Sim's time with this? Before answering that…


Never had I realized, before starting my own comic, how important it is to get feedback in the form of comments and letters. I understand now, when you talk about reading into the record for history, and like the Following Cerebus guys talking of their lacklustre response compared to Wrapped in Plastic:


As was the case with Cerebus and as is the case with the Blog & Mail, there's virtually no response to Following Cerebus so all content questions tend to be guesswork. I think it creeps Craig out a little bit since he got a lot more response to Wrapped in Plastic and Spectrum but I told him it's just like an old Western: "Maybe TOO quiet." But, what are you going to do? You keep moving forward and if a horde of Apaches suddenly descend on you, you deal with that when you get there.


Blogandmail #129 (January 18th, 2007)


As a reader and fan, I can say that for myself, I never felt (sic) a need to write in. Partially due to the fact that what interests me the most is the weighty subject matter that is over my head and/or that I haven't spent a sufficient amount of time pondering over to the point where I have a solid opinion, and can communicate on the matter (especially an opinion fit to see in print). Instead, I am content to simply absorb and digest the work as a whole.


That's a good point. As I said in my response to Robin Snyder a few days back, I've been privileged to be given a life where I have a lot of time to mull things over and put things together that fall well outside of the "basic survival" mode that most guys live in – and which tends to limit the time they have for speculating and assessing "weighty subject matter". And also I've been privileged to remain pretty isolated so I've never had to endure the peer pressure to keep my thinking limited to what was on television last night or who I think is going to win Best Actor on the Oscars.


It was also a conscious choice after I broke up with my last girlfriend. I stood out on the balcony of my old penthouse apartment and resolved that I was going to dedicate myself to thinking from then on and stop rationalizing away things that I knew to be false and to seriously examine the nature of reality with open eyes. And, of course, not having a girlfriend my thinking from that point on was uninterrupted. If it took me four or five days or a week of uninterrupted thinking to arrive at a conclusion to something I was uncertain about, I took the four or five days or the week, examined all of the angles on the problem and then weighed all of them in the balance and came to a conclusion, instead of chasing around the same problem halfway over and over and over again without ever coming to a conclusion which is what happens when your thinking is continually being interrupted.


My view was always that the creator of a given work does not require a fanboy response, (especially/specifically my fanboy response) and that the given work will generate a momentum of its own to continue.


Which is still, I think, true and accurate.


However, in creating my own comic, I now understand that without feedback, without that fanboy response, it feels (sic) as though your voice is being lost into the void.


"Hello? Is anyone out there? What am I doing here spending hours a day slaving over this if no one is listening anyway? Hell-oo? Someone has got to be out there…anyone? Even an echo would be nice…can I get an echo? No? I guess it's just myself here. Okay, then…here's one to read into the record of history…"


Yeah, I get that.


Yes, and particularly in your own situation where you have other claims on your time including a full-time day job, a lengthy commute and, therefore, limited time to spend with your wife and kids. One way or the other the cartooning time comes out of the latter category. The key is the "hours a day" which, you're right, is something you can't fully appreciate until you see exactly how much of your life drawing, say, a five page story is going to eat up. But, I think you're still a cartoonist at heart since most guys in that situation would say, "Okay, now that I understand the extent to which drawing comics is the Great White Shark of devouring time, that's enough of that. I've got a life to lead." No, instead you're trying to figure out how to amputate the lengthy daily commute.


And it's the reason that I feel (sic) obligated to respond to the comic books that get sent to me and to be as positive as I can be. It was no real big deal for Frank Thorne, I'm sure, to respond to the early issues of Cerebus that I sent him. He was a hot cartoonist on a hot book (Red Sonja) so my letters and issue of Cerebus would have just been in his stack of fan mail to deal with when he got an issue done. And that's what he would have done: dealt with it. I would have been far down the gratification list from, say, any photos of young girls in Red Sonja costumes he had gotten in that month. His praise was probably excessive and/or forensically accurate ("This is the best work of yours that I've seen" diplomatically didn't include what he thought of the sincerely amateurish stuff that I had been doing Comic Art News & Reviews and other fanzines which would…honestly?...have been "You used to really suck but this, this doesn't suck nearly as badly.") It gave me enough of a lift to think of myself as a peer of Frank Thorne rather than an aspiring fanzine guy and it might have made the critical difference at the critical time. Of course, if God's ultimate intention for me had been for me to settle down and get married and have kids, then Frank will probably have to account for that on Judgement Day.


Anyway, let me just rapid fire here, and say some of the things I've been meaning/wanting to say for years.


Shoot.


Starting with Cerebus.


My first issue of Cerebus was Mothers & Daughters #16, issue #166. The one with Cerebus sleeping with the chessboard on the cover. Add me to the legions of classic new Cerebus readers who opened the book saying "I had no idea what was going on, but I was hooked."


On my first back-issue buying binge, I picked up Cerebus #111 and #116 containing the beginnings of the Creator's Rights discussion, which reinforced a lot of hunches I already had, even at that young age. When I was in high school, I contacted United Features Syndicate to see what the process was for getting a newspaper strip, and after reading the legal forms, I knew "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."


Mothers & Daughters covered my college years. It was an eye-opening experience watching the guide to self-publishing unfold [much of what would turn out to be The Guide to Self-Publishing was serialized on the inside front cover of Cerebus through "Mothers & Daughters"]. As for issue 186, I never did understand the backlash. The only thing that disturbed me at the time was that it seemed as though Aardvark Comment was spilling over into Cerebus "The Comic". However I did observe it as being an interesting artistic experiment in the story, especially after reading Minds and seeing how Reads fit into the novel as a whole. The gender views confirmed a lot of my own hunches, and provided me with an endless amount of ammunition to defend my own stance on the subject.


Tomorrow: More positive feedback on 186 and "Tangent" so fair warning to all the feminists to get ready to get your fingers in your ears and to go "LALALALA I'm not Listening!"

There's MORE for you

In Today's Blog &

MAAAAIIILLLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Dave Sim's blogandmail #181 (March 11th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Mike Kitchen Writes:



The Sunday Jan. 21 edition of the Blog and Mail really hit home for me. Starting with the prayer bit, followed by Steve Peters' story about the car and commuting, and God's will. I've been suffering a GO Train commute every day from Burlington to Toronto, for the past 2.5 years. Which has been a time killer for my personal work. The Spy Guy webcomic has been an attempt to make use of that time to hone my comic-book skills. Drawn primarily on the GO Train, the webcomic I am working on is being done in the spirit of getting faster, and more productive, and in an attempt to get some more bad drawings out of my system. I am beginning to notice a positive effect on my current Spud & Harry pages.



In addition to that, earlier this week I had the "one" "two" punch of being scolded by the women of the production management for having a "bad work ethic" (translates into "not communicating with them, and feeling like I'm not sensitive to their needs" – huh?), and at the same time having an old friend from Montreal contacting me, and offering me a $10K pay increase to work from home (on a temporary project). The switch would save me 4 hours a day. A lot of comic can be drawn in 4 hours a day.



Which results in the trade-off: Security+slavery for independence+insecurity. And idea that ironically happens to be the key them of Spy Guy #1. Coincidence?



My last experience with regular prayer was back in my teens. Ultimately I abandoned it, because I found myself falling into the trap of "God, I'll be really good if you do this for me." Which, even at the time, I found to be a dangerous and self-destructive habit. Prayer is a practice I've been meaning to pick up ever since, though haven't managed to find a system that works for me, that is intellectually sound and doesn't fall into the above trap. How did you come up with your prayer? Any suggestions would be appreciated.



Basically, it seemed to me that all prayer breaks down into two categories: "Thank you, God" and "I'm sorry, God". Under those two umbrella classifications there is a lot of territory to cover. Until you get sick or have a series of things go wrong in your life in a major way, it's very, very difficult to appreciate everything that you have. The miracle of hot water is one that gets to me all the time. "Thank you, God. Every time I turn this tap on steaming hot water comes out of it. I know it's basically a human invention and not that complicated, but when I think how difficult it would be to get myself clean if I had to come up with my own way to get hot water, well, Thank You, God for making it possible." Refrigeration, central heating, insulation, fresh food, blood that coagulates properly (not everyone's does, you know). Just make up a list of all the things that you take for granted and that SHOULD be on any list where you thank God every day and you would have on very, very, very long prayer. So whether you thank God for specific things, you should always be bearing them in mind when you are praying. I tend to think in terms of Large Scale – what really made all of this possible and in that case I tend to think that thanking God for His Scriptures makes the most sense. These are the writings which, until very recently in historical terms, guided men in their lives and in their thinking. They aligned themselves with the thinking of Prophets by being familiar with the words of the Prophets, by studying those words and holding them in the highest level of esteem in their own lives. Consequently, they were blessed with the insight to come up with things that would benefit mankind. So it makes more sense to me to thank God for the Book of Isaiah than to thank God for the steam engine or the pop-up toaster. There's a large distinction between Divine Revelation and the blessings which result. Billy Beach gives me a hard time about the fact that my prayer is by rote since he opts for prayer that is specific to the moment and usually expressed differently each time out depending on what he has to say before the family eats lunch or dinner. Again, to me, prayer is a large scale thing. I want to make sure that I've got all of the Largest Things of which I'm aware covered and that I reinforce that five times a day. That's just a difference in people, I think. My prayer is my Contract with God and I think myself obliged to live my life in such a way that each time I kneel down and recite it what I'm doing is confirming that nothing has changed since my last prayer time, these are still the truths that I hold to be self-evident and the commitments that guide the way I live.



I think the problem with "I'll be really good if you do this for me," is that it constitutes bargaining with God, as if you have something to bargain with that He needs. As it says in the Koran, God is the Self Sufficient and the All-Knowing. You can't benefit God and you can't injure God. Everything in the heaven and the earth is His already. You only have what you have – or what you think you have – by His beneficence. If you do good, it's to your own benefit and if you do bad it's to your own detriment. So, what you're saying to God is "God, I'll improve my situation if you do this for me." Well, that doesn't follow logically. You should try to improve your own situation because an improved situation is better than a worsened situation, right? And it depends on what it is that you're asking him to do for you. As it also says in the Koran we want a lot of things that are bad for us and we shun a lot of things that are good for us. If you're not perceiving accurately and what you're asking God to do is to give you something that you really want but that is actually bad for you, then what you're saying to God is, "God, I'll improve my situation if you give me this thing I want that's bad for me." Read that a few times and see why it's more than a little screwy and a very strange thing to say to your Creator. That's why, for me, everything leads back to the definition of Islam: submission to the will of God. "God, please guide me to those things that will improve me and improve my situation." And then start throwing anything overboard that you either know or suspect is bad for you. The effect is pretty much instantaneous. But prayer has to be a confirmation of behaviour, as far as I can see. "God, here's my commitment to you. Here's what I believe and here's what I intend to live by." And then you have to live by it. If I recite my prayer to God five times a day and then go out to a strip club on Friday night and get wasted then the prayer doesn't mean anything or, at the very least, it erodes from a statement of fact into wishful thinking: from "this is who I am" to "this is who I want to be". Another easy trap to fall into is "God, help me to…" whatever: quit drinking, stop womanizing. The problem with that one is that you go out and find yourself drinking and think "I guess God decided not to help me" or "I guess I'm beyond God's help". No, personally, I think it's more important to realize that you have all the resources that you need to improve exponentially whoever you are. In my experience, God will "fill in the cracks" a lot of the time. You don't have to get everything 100% right if you keep everything moving in the right direction. But, that's definitely God's call: what cracks get filled in and when as a pleasant surprise for you and a "thumbs up, hey, you're doing okay". That's very different from "God, can you fill in this crack for me?" which is what I see in "God, help me to…" God made you as he made all of us. To me, asking Him to fix something for you or in you is, in a real way, insulting His handiwork, like He made you wrong for some reason and you don't have what you need to improve and make The Big Climb up to Judgement Day.



And then, "I'm sorry, God" and asking forgiveness. In my own experience, it's a very good way to identify for yourself the stuff that has to go overboard. I used to ask forgiveness of my drinking and smoking and masturbation until finally it just started sounding really stupid to me. If I transgressed I would ask forgiveness for the next day, five prayers. Jeez, I was just asking forgiveness for masturbation two days ago. Am I really that weak? Is my nature really that divided that I can surrender with whole-hearted enthusiasm to whacking off, be disgusted with myself afterwards and then ask forgiveness for it for the next day and 48 hours later I'm right back in the same loop? It helps to realize that God is omniscient. That isn't hype. He's watching you while you pray and he's watching you while you masturbate and he's watching you while you talk yourself into masturbating. I mean it is a proactive process. Your dick doesn't get hard and go spooey all by itself. It takes some doing mentally – and he knows exactly what you're thinking to get yourself there -- and physically. And you're doing all that in front of God. The divided nature is the key element because that's really the source of erosion from Good into Evil and the source of most anxiety: you attempt to sequester your thoughts and behaviour as if you can go from arousing yourself with illicit fantasies and then, later, pray to God as if you haven't really done anything or that what you did and what you were thinking about while you were doing it doesn't have any relevance or importance. And then you wonder why you just have this uncomfortable feeling about your life, a sense of futility, a sense of meaningless and why am I here and what's the meaning of life, anyway and you WONDER where that psychic discomfort is coming from.



Yeah, gosh, I wonder. Couldn't be that you're trying to play both sides of the street, could it?



It sounds harsh to modern ears which are raised to believe that everything is okay, none of us is perfect, blah blah blah but a good rule to live by is: "Don't apologize, improve." Apologizing to God out loud every day for the things you think you should be apologizing to Him for is a good way to ensure that that dividedness becomes untenable because you're addressing your vice out in the open, out in that other area of your life, addressing it to God and to yourself. No, it wasn't your evil twin that did it. And, no, it doesn't mean you didn't do it if no one saw you. You saw you. God saw you. You thought that and pictured that and God heard you think that and saw what you were picturing. If you think it's wrong, stop doing it and (here's a good one) if you can't do it while thinking of God then it's probably wrong.



More than anything else, recognize that you have to dig deep inside yourself to even come close to perceiving yourself accurately and as deep as you can go isn't a fraction of the depth to which God knows you. Prayer isn't like therapy where you can keep parts of yourself hidden from the therapist. You can go as far back into your past as you want and dredge up as many esoteric areas as you want, all of the stuff that you try to hide from yourself, the stuff you would never dream of telling ANYONE. God knows. God remembers. Say it out loud. Apologize for it. Get it off your chest. And then improve yourself.



Those are personal guidelines. A lot of people would disagree with what I'm saying, but I think if you make a mental list of the top 10 items on your "Thank you, God" list and your "I'm sorry, God" list (from the home office in Scottsdale, Arizona) and compose a prayer combining the two you'll find that it leads you in positive directions and makes self-improvement a lot less difficult than it can be.



Tomorrow (and probably Tuesday as well): The Rest of Mike Kitchen: Who is He? Where Does He Come From? What Are His Powers?


___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #180 (March 10th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________


OH YEAH I FORGOT

HERE'S MORE STUFF

I PUT ASIDE TO TELL THE

YAHOOS ABOUT FROM

THE DAY PRIZE SUBMISSION

PILE


I have seriously got to get more organized about this. I promise, starting with the next batch that I will be answering the mail in the order in which it was received instead of just pulling things out and going, "What's this all about?" So this time out I'm pretty sure that I've found all of the Day Prize items that for one reason or another didn't make the cut but that I thought warranted a heads-up to the Yahoos leading up to the Short List later in the week (I announced the Finalists in January, SPACE is April 21-22 – see www.backporchcomics.com for details -- so I thought the Short List should go up in the middle of March and we're pretty much there).




Plastic Farm


Was it last year or the year before that I went down to the exhibit room when everyone was setting up – it was the year before, I think, the last year we were at the hotel, yup, that was it. The year before last – and I came across this table with, like, eight or ten comic books on it, all of which said "Plastic Farm" on the front, but none of which looked remotely similar. Each one the logo was different, the design was different, which was really attention-getting (which is half the battle in the comics field, right?). So, I remarked on it and introduced myself to Rafer Roberts, writer/artist/publisher and he either gave me a set of them on the spot or sent me a set later on and I read them and I thought, "That's one of the strangest comic books I've ever read." Jeff Chon of Savant magazine wrote, "This comic is a garage band on the verge of rock superstardom, and those of you who miss out will, well, hopefully you'll die rotten horrible deaths. Which would be really tragic, I guess." Incoherent as that might be, it does seem to communicate the overall tone of this title. I mean, my first reaction was "Oh, man, complete amateur in the execution department – just happens to have a good instinct for design and packaging." But, I've learned not to let that be the last word on the subject. Always try reading it and if it goes nowhere you'll know pretty soon. And this was the opposite situation. I got engrossed in it and devoured however many I had. Now the problem with it relative to the Day Prize is that I couldn't really single out an individual issue and Short List it and it seemed kind of unfair to nominate issues 1-8 or 1-9 or whatever I had. And, of course, that's only later and more so now that he has 12 of them out. So, I've got one of the Tom Williams' specially designed SPACE shopping bags here with the first 12 issues that Rafer submitted (he even signed issue 1 "Thanks! Rafer 2006", so I really thought that I should do something with them. Every week or so I'd run across the bag in my room or in the office and I'd go, "What's in there again? Something important." And I'd open it up and go, Oh, right. Plastic Farm.


It's a really strange, really engrossing good comic book and the guy obviously knows what he's doing even though a comic book with each individual issue having a completely different look is probably something that works better on your table in Artist's Alley than it's going to work when they're seen one at a time in the comic-book store. So, it seemed to me that the best I could do was to promote it to the only people I know of who are interested in strange, really engrossing comic books especially now that he's up to issue 12. That and actually pay for a copy of issues 13 and 14 if they're out at SPACE this year since up to now I've been freeloading pretty good. And having decided to do that, I can now take them out of the plastic bag and put them on one of the shelves in the Off-White House Library without feeling completely as if I came by them dishonestly.


Plastic Farm #1-12, $2.95 each

3856 Shadywood Dr. #3C, Jefferson, MD 21755 www.plasticfarm.com




Zombie Preschool

I already picked Jim Coon for his Beaver mini-comic and thought I really shouldn't nominate two of his minis the same year. And then I went ahead and nominated two of Pat Lewis' digests in the same year. D'OH! I really do have to get organized. Anyway, it's a great title and a real bargain for a buck.

Zombie Preschool

Eight Ball Graphics (Jim Coon) 174 Madison St. Cortland, NY 13045

www.ebg.bizhosting.com




Doctor Dremo

Disqualified this one partly because Matt Dembicki who coordinated the whole thing has already been nominated for a Day Prize with Attic Witt and partly because it's a jam strip with all the inconsistencies that that tends to lead to. But, I read it right around the time that I was writing about Dr. Strange here on the Blog & Mail and, as Matt says on the inside front cover of issue 2:


A few words about Vol.1: I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Neilalien.com, the premiere website for all things Dr. Strange, for reviewing the book and honouring it with the coveted 2005 Neilalien Award for Best Appearance of a Dr. Strange-Affiliated Character, Accoutrement, Parody, etc. The review and consequent award resulted in numerous Dr. Strange fans from across North America ordering copies of the blue-faced shaman's debut book.


So, I thought I should at least mention it to you guys so I could let you know that Neilalien.com exists in case anyone wants to check that out and also to mention that the book is a production of D.C. Conspiracy, a collaborative of comic book creators in the Washington, D.C. area who meet monthly in Arlington, VA at Dr. Dremo's Taphouse, "a fairly inconspicuous microbrew bar and pool hall that was once a car dealership showroom." I'm not sure if they allow spectators or if they're interested in new contributors but if you're in the vicinity of Washington, you can check out http://home.dcconspiracy.com/blog.html or just stalk Dr. Dremo's Taphouse until a bunch of cartoonists show up and start jamming.


The two volumes are $3 each.


Okay, that takes care of that. Let's see what I have left here. Long letter from Jeff Seiler that really needs to be dealt with separately and in some depth. REALLY long letter from Mike Kitchen which will probably take up the better part of a week. I was going to get them typed but then Steve Peters wrote and told me that there are scanners you can buy for $100 that will scan text and turn it into word files. Get out of Dodge. No, I'm sure he's right so that made actually paying to have stuff typed seem wasteful but I still have enough inertia that I'm not going out and getting one right, you know, today but I'm trying to finish this up in a hurry so that means that I'll have to type it out myself. THANK YOU, STEVE!! I really must come out to your grocery store sometime and tell you something that ties you up in knots and leaves you having a lot more work to do that you thought someone else was going to do.


I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Sort of.


And this is Saturday, is it not? I need a co-host or a band leader or something. Yes, it is, it's Saturday. So that means Scriptural Subject for tomorrow. It's a toss-up between the article Jeff sent on Elizabeth Fox-Genovese from the Dallas Morning News ("Cathy Young analyzes the journey of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese from Marxist feminist to conservative Catholic") and the middle of Mike Kitchen's long, long letter – without establishing who Mike Kitchen is. What the heck, I've done everything out of order so far this time around, let's go with that.

Tomorrow: Mike Kitchen actually reads this Sunday stuff. Are you sure you want to know any more about him?



___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #179 (March 9th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

THERE'S

BRIAN LEE MOORE

FOR YOU…IN

TODAY'S BLOG &

MAAAILLL

Sorry for the terrible pun. Hey, Remember Brian Lee Moore from the last Aardvark Comment in issue 300? Army sergeant just back from a tour of duty in Iraq who was looking to make his own independent films? Well, here's an update:


Dear Dave:


I never got around to sending Christmas cards this year, but if I did you would have been first on my list of Christmas cheer delivered by post. I really appreciate all the help and support you have given me on Demon Joe from the advice on the screenplay to the logo for the restaurant scene. I hope that you enjoyed your Holiday Season and that things are going well for you.


The letter's dated January 2, so as you can imagine, that last sentence struck an inadvertent sour note as I descended into Illness Hell. Actually it was a lot of fun working on the screenplay and making suggestions. That happened at a time when I was going out and seeing movies reasonably often where I would always be sitting there going, "Well, THAT part didn't work," and re-writing it in my head instead of just sitting and watching the movie. When somebody sends you a screenplay you get to do it for real. "Well, THAT part didn't work…why don't you try phrasing it this way, instead?" I was just glad that Brian was amenable to having someone do that to his work. The "Sum Burger" logo, as far as I'm concerned, Paul McCusker did the heavy lifting on with his computer colouring (a combination that Jim Waley helped coordinate).


I haven't written since June, so I figured that I was way overdue in giving you an update. The logo actually makes it into the movie even though I cut the restaurant scene. Barry wears it in one of the scenes. I guess he saved his uniform shirt from when he worked there. I am still not finished. Money troubles plague me, but they always do eventually. So no biggie. I am almost done. I hope to be finished by the end of February. If I am wrong about the completion date I'll have to tell you about it then. I am very happy with it so far. It isn't word-for-word what was written in the fourth draft of the screenplay. There was a lot of improv that went into some scenes. Sometimes scenes were edited down into one shorter scene. Sometimes I cut scenes that were shot or were shot AND edited. Sometimes I cut scenes just by scratching them out of my working copy of the script. But all of this was to the benefit of the movie in the long run. I don't regret a single cut.


That would be tough for me. On my secret project which is the closest to this that I've ever worked, I don't see things in terms of what needs to be cut or what needs to be left in. I tend to see it as either "this is working" or "I give up". Probably all those years of sheer forward momentum on Cerebus where I just couldn't afford to cut anything because of the time constraints.


I have learned a lot about what it takes to be an artist in terms of craft and discipline and I think I have begun to pave my way for a successful career if I can just complete this project with precise planning. In retrospect, I probably should have listened to my teachers and just made a short film and then beg a lot like they do…


Had to laugh at that. There's a military guy looking at the movie business. "Jeez, where's your self-respect?"


…but I had this fear that I would spend the rest of my days shooting weddings or filming training videos. I would hate that. I keep telling friends that I went to an arts college because I wanted to tell stories and that if all I wanted to do was to get a job I wouldn't have gone to college, I would have just drove a forklift in a factory.

A theatre opened in my home town. I went over there hoping to steal talent from them, but I ended up being part of their talent.


Had to laugh at that. There's what happens when the military guy meets the theatre world head-on.


I got cast in a musical adaptation of "A Christmas Carol". I would have taped it and sent you a DVD of it, but the guy who wrote the music is very paranoid. He got ripped off by the BeeGees a long time ago. He refused to let anyone record it. Which is cool in a way. Less work for me. I play Scrooge's nephew Fred, the ghost of Jacob Marley, and young Ebenezer. I sing also. I had forgotten how good I sing, actually. That and my vanity is what led me to the Marley part. No one else could sing the song. I had way too many lines to memorize and got little done on the movie in November and December. However, I can never get a lot done while the Holidays go on anyway.


They were trying to talk me into playing the sheriff in "Bus Stop", but I don't think so. Last night, we talked some other guy into it.


Had to laugh at that, too. Picture some poor bastard getting it from both sides from the military guy and the theatre people. He wouldn't know what hit him.


So I will be in a cheerleading capacity for the next play. I have to finish my movie. And that's all there is to it. I had to tell a friend that I couldn't do his documentary he wanted to do. This is the same deal.


Once Demon Joe is finished, I have other plans in the works for 2007. I really don't want to perform in a lot of shows at the Warehouse Theatre, but I would like to do some shows of my own that I would have control of. I want to do a one-man show about "The Terrible Two-Year Old". I want to dress up as a toddler in a blue pajama suit with over-sized sets. I might also do a stand-up routine based on my relatives on Comedy nights. There's talk about me playing Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. I am going to adapt A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It will have the darker elements of satire that the book had, but all of the adaptations lack. I also want to write my next two screenplays for next year. So it will be busy. I am not sure how much of that I'll get done, but I'll have a more concrete idea of what I'll shoot for in 2007 in a couple of weeks.


In March, I am determined to be finished with Demon Joe, if not by February. I will mail you the restaurant costume and a DVD of Demon Joe on March 15, 2007. I will live up to that promise. Happy New Year, Dave. May God bring you happiness.


Hey, you too, Brian. I asked if I could have the restaurant costume for the Cerebus Archive to go with the draft of the Demon Joe script and he said sure. I'll let you know if I see anything late in March. Oh, and if there are any rich Yahoos in the film business who want to give Brian a hand with distribution or take a look at a rough cut, you can contact him at mooreinstore@sbcglobal.net. Who knows? Demon Joe may be the sleeper hit of the decade!

Tomorrow: Okay, I've been at this since 10:30 this morning (Feb. 21) and it's almost 6 pm and I'm finally getting to the bottom of some of these stacks and tomorrow is Saturday March 10 so that's roughly sixteen days of lead time. I can do this. I can do this.

There's MORE for YOU

In Today's BLOG &

…MAAAILLLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #178 (March 8th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Hold STILL YOU…nnngh…

RETAILER…I'M ALMOST DONE

JUST…nnNNNGGhhh…four MORE

…TRADE PAPERBACKS…

oh THAT DIDN'T HURT…

STAR10981 GOING HOME

STAR13500 FORM & VOID

AUGO31920 LATTER DAYS

APRO42189 THE LAST DAY

I was kidding with the "wee Timmy Corrigan" reference. As a fellow SPACE Lifetime Achievement Award winner, we both officially qualify as being "older than dirt" (come to think of it, the other winner of the award, Matt Feazell, probably does, too, but gets a pass because of the porkpie hat and Elvis Costello glasses). Anyway, I've got a whack of stuff of here from Tim, starting with the Mighty Guy: The Vintage Collection and The Best of Fred `N' Marvin volume one [Fred (reading a copy of the book): "We actually DID all this stuff?! I don't remember ANY of this!!"] which are from my "Bring to the Attention of the Yahoos From the Day Prize submissions box". I already decided Tim doesn't qualify for the Day Prize at SPACE because he won the SPACE Lifetime Achievement Award. Which he can look at as a "Don't be greedy, you already got your award" or as a "you got a LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT Award: that means the only thing left for you is to DIE!" I have to admit it was hard for me not to look at it in the latter context, myself. Anyway, as the designation indicates, in the run-up to the announcement of the Day Prize Short List next week, I've got a few items that I thought I should bring to your collective Yahoo attention for one reason or another.


The premise of Mighty Guy, like the premise of Static, is that all the power is in the suit. If you have the Mighty Guy suit on, you have all of Mighty Guy's powers, see? And Fred and Marvin are comic-book publishers who own the suit. This is how Fred explains it to Mike McZiltcho in the first episode:


Fred: It's easy!! All you gotta do is put on this suit. It'll give you fantastic powers!! You go out and fight psychotic villains who have the strength of ten men, get your brains beat in and report back here!! We publish your adventures and get rich! It's that simple!


And it really is. It's that simple a concept but it's pretty funny. And Tim's been milking it for all it's…that is, developing and refining it since 1984, all as a sideline to his regular sign-painting business in Houghton, so there is a massive amount of material which Tim is reprinting starting with that first episode and "200 pages of Classic Stories!" and starting in this first volume which sells for $16.95 US and two $8.95 volumes of 100 pages each – the Fred `n' Marvin volume one (short back-up strips, as Tim describes them on the back cover)…:


During the Small Press/Independent boom of the late 80s, I sent 1 or 2 page contributions to dozens of publishers all over America. Many of these featured Fred and Marvin, which included a running series of strips for Allen Freeman's Slam Bang digest which are collected here for the first time! Also collected here are several all-new strips which have never before been seen by Human eyes (which does not include my own orbs, obviously).


…and Mighty Guy Summer Fun Spectacular (which features Mighty Guy and Marvin changing a tire on their van in a raging snow storm) (which I assume is a comment on the track record of comic book publishers to miss their deadlines badly on "seasonal theme" titles – one of those things you notice when you're older than dirt like me and Tim and remember when Hallowe'en Specials didn't used to come out the following Easter).


Tim will take checks or money orders at Tim Corrigan, POB 25, Houghton, NY, 14744. You can also email him at timcorrigannewvoicemedia@hotmail.com


Still not convinced?


Well, how about this: Mighty Guy is being published MONTHLY in black-and-white digest form. It's true. And I've got issues 2, 3, 4 and 5 of TIM CORRIGAN'S COMICS AND STORIES right here to prove it with parts I, II and III of "Big Book Signing" where Mighty Guy and Fred and Marvin do a signing at a comic book store. 12 issues for $12.


See, that's why I put these aside in my "straight to Yahoo" pile. There really aren't any monthly comics now that Cerebus is done, right? So maybe you won't like Mighty Guy. On the other hand, if you try and it and you do like it, then at least you'll have a monthly comic book to read! I know, I know. To quote Peter Bagge "I scream, you scream we all scream for HEROIN!" But, heck, give wee Timmy Corrigan's methadone a try. It might at least get rid of your runny nose and the shakes.


Oh, right. This one was supposed to come after the pitch from Mark Innes at Blind Bat Press in the category of I Really Should Know Better (than to take on any more work) but then I found the Robin Snyder letter and forgot what I was doing:


Dear Mr. Sim:


I hope this letter finds you well and without incident – I assumed that the Box 1674 one was still the best to use. My name is Aubrey Sitterson and we actually met fairly recently at a Big Apple Con in New York City about a year ago, you were signing and fund-raising at the time, so I'd be shocked (and impressed!) if you remembered. I'm a big fan of your work – Cerebus Phonebooks being one of the things that kept me reading comics through college. I've also been enjoying Siu Ta:So Far though I have to say that your lettering is missed in those instalments.


Well, it's always fun to shock and impress people just by remembering them, so I was hoping it was the cop with the Green Lantern sketchbook or the guy I talked to about religion for a while.


Currently, I am employed as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics.


Well, THAT was easy. How often is an assistant editor at Marvel Comics going to talk to the Pariah King of Comics?


In fact, when we initially spoke, the subject of you doing some work with us came up. This was soon after DC had tried the same (on an issue of Fables, I believe?) and you directed me to the website that housed the scans of the contracts you marked up. As I'm sure you've noticed, I never contacted you regarding Marvel work – this, however, has more to do with finding the right project than with your contract requirements.


Well, that's good – and surprising -- news. Of course, I had assumed that as soon as he saw what I had done with the Fables contract that would have been "all she wrote" – and no hard feelings on my side.


In fact there have been times in the past that we have had larger discussions about contracts & we pride ourselves in being more flexible than our friends across town. So, I'm sure you can see where this is leading:


And, I'm sure you can all see where this is leading as well, but I'm going to have to cut it off there since I don't know how much is public knowledge about the project that he's talking about and I would be uncomfortable blowing the lid off of anything here. Anyway, I just called him and we talked about the idea in a general way and I explained that I'm really only doing the Blog & Mail and my secret project right now – which are non-negotiable for the moment in terms of where I'm putting my time -- and apart from that I'm doing one commissioned piece a month (and I told him exactly what I had been getting for them) so I would have to justify sacrificing that income or edging it out of the way temporarily.


So, there you go. The danger of being a terminal fanboy and theoretically ha-ha retired cartoonist. We'll see what comes of it.

There's MORE for

You in TODAY's

BLOG &…MAAAILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #177 (March 7th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Here we are again in our

THIRD BIG DAY OF IRRITATING

ALL YOU RETAILERS OUT THERE

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CHECK YOUR SHELVES AND SEE IF YOU

HAVE A COPY OR TWO OF

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Oh, hey, here's the letter from Robin Snyder I thought I had lost. Dated 19 January:


Dear Dave,


Thank you for your order of 5 January.


You asked for "Ditko stuff and a sub to the newsletter." The check was in the amount of $123.67. I've sent you a package containing eight of our books. This amounts to $99. The postage and insurance came to $19.95 and that makes $118.95. I have enclosed a sample selection of recent numbers of The Comics!


This is the newsletter founded by Robin back in 1990 ("The original first-person history est. 1990 by Robin Snyder) where Steve Ditko and a number of other creators sound off on various subjects of interest. I hadn't realized that Robin's bank was going to take that much off of a Canadian cheque so this is his very diplomatic way of saying vis-à-vis a subscription "how much of a subscription do you expect for $4.72?" Which is a good point. The fact that he sent me four of them is definitely a deal for me, especially since they're from the last few months and include the first three parts of a multi-part essay by Steve Ditko entitled "An Issue, Question" that I'm still in the midst of reading (I find with Steve Ditko's writing, as I said before, I have to keep doubling back to make sure that I read what I thought I read and that there isn't more than one way to read what I read). Here I go using Ditko without permission again, but I think the first few paragraphs will give you an idea of the subject matter:


How is it that World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were featured in the comics but the Iraq war is not?


A more basic question: Why are there no authentic heroes in comic books today when we had authentic hero comic books during WW II, less in the Korean and Vietnam wars?


What explains, answers, both questions?


The issue also has a deeper problem: An external war of antagonistic minds and bodies and an internal "civil war" among an individual's beliefs in his own mind.


Copyright 2006 Steve Ditko.


That'll start the ol' mental wheels a-turning, won't it? You betchum, Red Ryder. Very interesting experience to be reading Ditko's best absolutely current thinking. The third part of the essay is dated February, 2007. Having immersed myself in his work ranging from the early 60s to the early 90s it has the strange "super-reality" quality to it. Holy smoke! And here he is TODAY! This certainly calls for me to hang some more feeble Canadian paper in Robin's direction. Unless Robin is being diplomatic about your domestic currency, the subscription rates are $28 US or $35 foreign for 12 issues. Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, WA, 98225-1186.


Robin continues:


I rather enjoyed your letter and your thoughts on property, literature and, speculation. You have been thinking of these matters, haven't you? Not just off-the-cuff thoughts but doing some digging.


Yes, it's all part of the self-chosen job description. When you find yourself in the fortunate position of not having to go out and labour in the workaday world and, after thirty years, to still be able to say "I never had a real job" I think there's an implied obligation to take advantage of (make that: "make full use of") a life without traditional distractions and make a full bore effort to try to get to the bottom of the nature of reality and then try to convey that to others (however misapprehended the perception might be) (owing to the fact that there are different levels of distractions that we can never be consciously aware of and which always influence and distort our thinking? Food for thought?). If for no other reason than I sense that such a privileged life can be easily taken away if you don't make full use of it.


You write "I doubt very much that I understand what Steve Ditko is about."


Perhaps you are trying too hard. There is no need to read between the lines. The fundamental idea in the "The `Stolen Art Page' Problem and the Error of Non-Principled Thinking" is explained in the title. Ditko is writing of ALL pages not simply his own and, even more than that, all property. He defines property rights and observes that the owner sets the terms. And that only by adhering to rational principles can one determine how to address the problem of who owns what.

You may better understand Ditko after you read and study the material in the books you have ordered.


Yes, I think that's true. There are still areas of disagreement and I think that feeds the sense of misunderstanding: I'm such a fan of Ditko's work that I want to agree with him but he makes it clear that you can only do that on his own terms and in his own frames of reference. I think a lot of the Yahoos reading this will identify with that: they take offence that I describe them as Cerebus readers rather than Cerebus fans because the distance between my beliefs and conclusions is so dramatically separated from their own by such a wide distance in almost all cases. The same could probably be said that Dave Sim is a Steve Ditko reader rather than a Steve Ditko fan because of a comparable distance. The part of you that wants to be considered a fan bristles at that.


Because of my primarily Islamic faith, as an example, where one of the pillars of that faith is the zakat it is very difficult to rationalize that with Ditko's low opinion of the "non-productive" who (when not checked) can tend to bleed the "productive" white in an unrestricted welfare state. I know what he's talking about firsthand having lived through the nightmare of Bob "Norma" Rae's NDP Socialist rule here in Ontario back in the 90s. But I do think the zakat is sensible in that it establishes that it is God's Will that the poor in society have an entitlement to a percentage of the wealth in that society. Since we have no comparable idea in the West, there isn't a Western term that fits it. It isn't charity and it isn't alms-giving, per se, which I think would fit Ditko's perceptions more closely: it's my money and I decide how much or how little I give to the poor and, frankly, having decided in most cases that the issue is laziness and not deprivation, I choose to give little or nothing. In Islam, there is a minimum standard of 2.5% of total wealth (which is where it differs from tithing: it isn't based on income, it's based on total wealth – you have to add up the cash value of everything that you own and donate 2.5% of that amount every year) which the faith holds is God's declared amount to which the poor in society are entitled. Where it works best is a situation where you would thank a poor person for the opportunity to pay your zakat by giving him money. He's the one doing you the favour which is why "charity" or "alms-giving" doesn't cover the concept and are really diametrically opposed to the concept. In execution, it's far from perfect. There are a lot of extremist Muslims who view financing Hezbollah and other terrorist groups as a means of paying the zakat (because they have their social benefit arm in addition to their civilian homicide arm), but obviously I don't see that as invalidating the zakat as I understand and practice it. As it says in the Koran, "You to your religious and me to mine". We'll see what God thinks of your decision to finance anti-personnel mines in Iraq as part of your zakat come Judgement Day.


But, in reading the books, particularly Static and a lot of the Package material, it's remarkable how early Steve Ditko staked out his territory of what he considers right and wrong and how relevant it is today: particularly when it comes to liberal fence-sitting: finding a middle-of-the-road course between Good and Evil and taking up residence there. I can't think of anyone else who was that definitive in his belief that middle-of-the-road is still Evil and, in my own case, that was one of the first insights I had after 9/11, but it took 9/11 to put me firmly in that frame of reference. When I was first reading the viewpoint back in 70s when I was a liberal, I was appalled. So, it's always very impressive to see someone who saw reality that clearly years before I was able to work myself around to that very viewpoint.


I don't see any connection between Orwell and Kafka and Ditko.


Having read as much Ditko as I have at this point I would go along with except for some cosmetic aspects on the short stories in the first Package. Orwell and Kafka were leftists with a sense of futility as if someone can make all the right choices based on sound morality and still end up getting "the green weenie". I think Ditko's view (and mine) is that if you got "the green weenie" it's because you made wrong choices.


Max Brod was no friend of Kafka and was no competent executor. The "definitive course of action" for Brod was simple: Agree to Kafka's terms and act accordingly or disagree and bow out.


I would probably add: "or act contrary to Kafka's terms and suffer the consequences of doing so". I take it as a given that any act of bad faith (however ambiguous it can be portrayed to be – and I think the variety of good faith viewpoints people of intellectual integrity can hold and do hold regarding Brod's decision that it can at least be portrayed as ambiguous) means that the perpetrator is going to suffer consequences from it. If you're a God-fearing individual like myself that goes all the way up to and includes Judgement Day where that's apt to become capital "c" Consequences.


Who owned the material? Kafka? Or "literature"? Or "posterity"? Or modern readers who do not care for him? How much? How little? Who had all rights to the material? Kafka or some possible future reader who might or might not enjoy seeing and reading the work?


To me, the definitive answer is "Kafka" but I accept the fact that intellectually honest people can, in good faith, arrive at a different conclusion based on their own beliefs of what constitutes the "larger interest" or Larger Interest involved. Free Will is always the wild card particularly when coupled with questions of legality. Kafka owned the material and was its sole custodian, but by transferring oversight of custodianship to Brod he had to factor in Brod's "Free Will" as part of the equation. "Knowing Brod as I do, can I trust him to incinerate what I tell him to incinerate and spare what I tell him to spare?" Arguably, Kafka guessed wrong – what level of culpability is there in that? -- but (also arguably) even Brod didn't know that he would flinch when it came time, so you have two overlapping free will wild cards: Kafka's best assessment of Brod and Brod's existential dilemma when it was time to "pull the trigger". That raises another question: when Brod took the work to a publisher why didn't the publisher execute due diligence and research the legal state of the stories? If there was a written will specifying which works were to be spared and which works could be published, didn't the publisher have a legal obligation to say "I can't publish these: these stories were supposed to be incinerated." There you get into the problem of corporate mentality as construed in our society versus the ethical right of the owner of an intellectual property. A lawyer could argue successfully in that context that Brod was the legal custodian and by offering the work to a publisher and/or signing a contract was taking legal responsibility for doing so. It would require someone to sue on behalf of the estate to keep that from happening and, even there, the courts would probably indemnify the publisher and make Brod the fall guy because the courts are always going to err on the side of business against the individual.


Maybe there is at least a persuasive argument to be made for publishing a volume called The Valid Kafka which would include only the works that he had authorized Brod to retain and that would serve as a kind of litmus test separating the Kafka readers from the Kafka fans. If you're a Kafka fan you only read the works that he chose to be published and that's all that you read. It would be interesting to read an essay on Kafka's work based solely on what he wanted the world to see written by someone who used their free will to choose to read only those works and to draw their conclusions solely from those works. Question: does that become The Valid Kafka or The Kafka Façade?


Thanks again for your interest and your order.


Oh, no. Thank you and Steve Ditko. Here's my cheque for a subscription to The Comics.


Tomorrow: It's Wee Timmy Corrigan of Houghton, NY and a whole whack of stuff for me to review

There's MORE for you

In TODAY's Blog &

MAAAILLLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #176 (March 6th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Just think of it as a Public Television

Membership Drive except you only get yelled at at the beginning of the show.

WELCOME BACK RETAILERS!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

CHECK YOUR SHELVES AND SEE IF YOU

HAVE ALL SIXTEEN CEREBUS VOLUMES IN STOCK INCLUDING:

STAROO359 JAKA'S STORY

STAROO431 MELMOTH

STAROO543 FLIGHT

STAROO849 WOMEN

The day before I fell ill in December I had written a letter to the National Post. I've written a few of them as you'll see if you order the Collected Letters volumes as they come out, but none of them have ever been printed. My name has only appeared once in the National Post and that was in an article about Seth by Jeet Heer some years ago. Anyway, this letter was in response to an article "Understanding the Hajj":


Having checked my own copy of a translation of the Koran, I take issue with Faisal Kutty's quotation of Sura 3:195 as "I shall not lose sight of the labour of any of you who labours in My way, be it man or woman, each of you is the equal of the other." According to my Koran, the passage reads, "One of you is the issue of the other," an altogether different – and far less feministic – meaning. As a practicing Muslim, I sincerely believe that it is worth reaching a point of understanding and accommodation between the West and mainstream Islam, but I genuinely hope that state can be achieved without mutilating God's Word in the name of misguided political correctness.


I identified myself as a practicing Muslim because I was writing to a Western newspaper where the fact that I conform to four of the five pillars of Islam would qualify me as such. Had I been writing to an Islamic publication I wouldn't have done so in deference to their stricter guidelines: it's not just praying five times a day, it's HOW you pray. Same reason that I wouldn't attempt the fifth pillar, the Hajj to Mecca, at this point: my own method of prayer with my own prayer that I've written would qualify me as an infidel and for me to learn the Muslim method of prayer JUST for the Hajj would, in my view, be hypocritical.


Anyway, this was one time I was really pretty irritated that they didn't print my letter.


What else have I got here?


More stuff from CAD, Clark Dissmeyer. I had an envelope with his name on it from the last piece of his that I printed (remember? The guy who works in the bakery and there was the power failure across most of Nebraska) but, I thought, what if CAD isn't Clark Dissmeyer? That way I'll just irritate both of them! So, I'd give you his address here in case you wanted to write and see about getting on his mailing list of text and (mostly) blasphemous but funny cartoons (Have a HELL of a good laugh with the GOD-DAMN FUNNY PAGES: "Yes, it was a miracle! The Good Lord was watchin' over us when that tornado came through. He sure hated those people up the street, though – he squashed `em like bugs!"), but there are two different addresses. Clark's is an apartment and CAD's is a post office box, so I'm going to hold off until I get the post office box one again. Bad manners to give out an address to a cartoonist's secret civilian identity, I think. As he writes, "I've been in good health but bad mood, so once again I'm going after the Christians." Next time I'll get you his post office box address.


Here's a couple in the I Really Should Know Better category:


Hi Dave,


Thank you very much for mentioning My Romantic Eye in your blog last Fall, the thoughtful response was much appreciated!


This year with Blind Bat Press, I'm releasing a trade paperback of comic strips, where each strip contains a story or plot that revolves around comics, comics fans, life experiences involving striving for a career in comics. The strips will be both non-fiction and fictional plots with comics references. The book will be called The Comic Eye.


Basically, I'm shopping around for a cover artist, who can provide a drawing, penciled and inked for the front cover. Bernie Mireault will colour and logo the cover, all I want is the drawing itself in black and white.


I have $100 to pay for the drawing, and I want rights to use as the cover of his book for the duration of its print run. The drawing would be sent to me as a high quality photocopy or computer file on cd or via the internet. The theme is comics and all the related topics I mentioned above. The size is standard comic size, to be safe sending the drawing a little larger than print size. The deadline is May 15, 2007.


Do you think you and Gerhard might have time to come up with a striking image to serve as cover art for this project?


Drop me a line if you think you might be able to work on this art by the deadline.


This is one of the built-in dangers of being both a theoretically ha-ha retired cartoonist and a raving fan boy. I've wanted to work with Bernie Mireault on something ever since I read his great super-hero comic, BEM and I've always wanted to find a way to support Mark's Blind Bat Press (couldn't have been happier to find out he was still going!) and now here's a chance to do both. Sensible theoretically ha-ha retired Dave Sim goes, "You have your secret project to work on, you have to finish the back cover for Collected Letters vol.2, you have to write your next article for Sandeep's Versus magazine, you have two commissioned drawings to do, you have to completely revise your Last Will & Testament, you have to keep up with the Blog & Mail, you have your own publishing company to publish your work."


Oh, well. Flakey Dave Sim the Raving Fan Boy Without Perspective can rationalize it this way: the hundred dollars Canadian will allow me to buy back roughly .000035% of Gerhard's shares in Aardvark-Vanaheim. I'LL DO IT! (percentage is entirely fictitious, you can all put your Yahoo calculators away).


Just talked to Mark on the phone and (career diplomat that I am) asked how his eyesight is doing. Mark's legally blind, so that's where he gets the name of the company from. Good news I hadn't been aware of – his blindness is a birth defect, not a disease-source blindness so there's really no degeneration: he can see as well now as when I met him (mumble mumble) years ago. THAT explains why he's still able to do this. He even does some of his own cartooning – puts out a mini every once in a while. Anyway, I pitched him on the idea of doing an EC parody splash page as the cover since I've been itching to use the EC lettering font that Mike Lindsay sent me. So this way I get to use the font and do my best Graham Ingels impression with a horror host ("So you think you want to have a career in comic books, you cock-eyed optimistic FANBOY…?) and everything and then leave all the other stuff for Bernie to do. I'd probably pay Mark $100 to let me do it (but don't tell him that). This will be Blind Bat's first foray into trade paperback land with a projected publishing date of later this summer. Check out some of Mark's work at www.markinnes.com or email him at m.innes@sympatico.ca for more information on Blind Bat Press.

Tomorrow: Oh, hey, here's the letter from Robin Snyder I thought I had lost. Dated 19 January!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOG &

MAAAILLLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #175 (March 5th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Hey! It's that REALLY ANNOYING TIME again when Dave Pleads with HOWEVER MANY of the retailers are reading this to

Check their shelves and make sure they have

All Sixteen Cerebus Volumes in Stock!

Remember "They Don't Sell If They Aren't All There"

STAROOO70E VOL. 1 CEREBUS

STAROOO71E VOL. 2 HIGH SOCIETY

STAROO271E VOL. 3 CHURCH & STATE I

STAROO322E VOL. 4 CHURCH 7 STATE II

(I'll do them four at a time all this week in an effort to be less annoying)

Got a nice note dated 1/15 and several of Jeffrey Brown's books in response to my defending him against Noah Berlatsky's review of Every Girl is the End of the World For Me in last month's Comics Journal:


Hi Dave


Thanks for sending me the printout of your blog – I had not seen it, as I try to avoid spending much time reading on the computer, because it easily sucks up extra time. (I must confess to occasionally perusing the TCJ message board for news – a place where Noah Berlatsky seems to spend a decent of time attempting to make a name for himself in `comics'). I do, also, remember talking with you at TCAF…as I think I may have said then, reading Cerebus was a revelation in comics for me, and marked the beginning of moving on from X-men and the like for me, although it wasn't till 2001 that I really started making comics.


It's very possible you did mention it and it slipped my mind, but it's certainly gratifying to know.


Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts on Every Girl… -- it wasn't an ambitious book, just an attempt to sketch out an idea or two, and I was certainly surprised to find TCJ thought it warranted a full two-page review. I guess that's more a reflection of what they think of my status rather than the books.


Always hard to tell but the idea of doing a modest book does seem to be a red flag to them if they've put you in the pantheon or the on-deck circle for the pantheon. If you got onto their radar screen with something the size of Clumsy (224 pages and thank you for the free copy) then I think you're expected to always shoot for that fully-developed a project every time out.


As for Berlatsky, well, he's a failed mini-comics creator himself, and his reviews depend on unnecessary and judgemental metaphor rather than objective criticism, and often he needs to quote someone else's words out of context to express his sentiments. That review in particular was full of inaccurate assumptions, from his misinterpretation of a Chris Ware quote to a rather flimsy blanket statement about autobiography…I think he has a personal vendetta against me, because in his article about alternative cartoonists trying to emulate Charles Schulz and failing he cites me as an example even though I've never claimed Peanuts as any kind of significant influence (I was a bigger fan of Garfield). That said, his point about "aesthetic constipation" had some merit, even if he undermined it with his venomous wording. But I view my work as a whole as work in progress; the failings of a book can be corrected over time. I still have a ways to go before I reach my potential (I hope).


I don't remember seeing the article on cartoonists "trying to emulate Charles Schulz and failing" but that seems to me to be a residue of the old Gary Groth yardstick model of The Comics Journal, that what he saw the magazine as doing was, over time, creating a yardstick of standards for comic books that we could all measure ourselves against. My opinion was – and is – that that isn't possible since it's all just opinion. "I like this" and "I don't like that". You can dress it up whatever way you want, it's still "I like this" and "I don't like that". And since that yardstick a few years back determined that Peanuts was the highest achievement in the comic book field (which suddenly included comic strips for some reason) it would make sense from Berlatsky's standpoint to write an article that would basically use that "fact" as the springboard for an opinion piece. Maybe he isn't a failed mini-comics creator, just a mini-comics creator who hasn't succeeded yet. Somewhere (and I wish I could find where) I've still got original stapled copies of your fellow Chicagoan Ivan Brunetti's Misery Loves Comedy that he used to send me on a regular basis. Laugh out loud funny material, but you talk about a drawing style that had failed cartoonist written all over it. And now look at him today: a critically acclaimed starving cartoonist. There's hope for Berlatsky yet.


I thought I'd send you some more of my books. I hope you're at least a little amused by them; I've always made my comics to be funny rather than sad, and whatever angst is there is there for self-deprecation's sake.


Best to you,


Jeffrey Brown


PS: As for character in my books – it's not part of any feminist influence, nor is it the weakness Berlatsky seems to think it is. I'm just not as interested in character, generally, and am more curious about moments/situations/atmosphere. I think this is actually one reason my work appeals to such a variety of people, both male/female and young/old and gay/straight. Which is not to say I won't develop character better someday.


Thanks for the books and I meant no offence with my comment on your having capitulated to feminism, it's just one of those things that I tend to see when I look at the next generation coming along particularly when it's someone like yourself who is documenting his love life as you did in Clumsy. I think it's very honest and authentic material and that's more the reason that it appeals to a broad cross-section of people. It's certainly one of the things that comics are well positioned to do best, to actually document what we're like "right now" as opposed to the most lucrative way we can portray ourselves for the sake of selling more laundry soap. I certainly experienced "déjà vu" with a number of the episodes in Clumsy, but there were a few things that were kind of "over the androgynous edge" relative to a guy who is fifty-years-old. I turned down the page corners on "Toenails" and "Clean" where you let your girlfriend paint your toenails and where you shaved her legs for her, respectively. Hey, we all make our choices and I don't doubt that you don't see things like that as feminist-influenced but I think that has more to do with absolute immersion in feminized society. "A fish doesn't know he's swimming in water." More revelatory for me (and again, I'm speaking as a senior citizen of fifty in our youth-dominated culture) was your Be a Man mini where you redid a lot of the Clumsy episodes but changing yourself into a (to quote your pin-up on the last page) "RRRR, beer, sex, sports, ungh, unh, porn, kick ass, fuck, explosions, trucks, breasts, meat, bitch" MAN and as you write in the intro page: "This is a parody and mostly not true and if you can't take a joke, fuck you." But the thing is, the masculine caricature you're trafficking in is, frankly, pretty much the same as the way feminists caricature men. I mean, don't get me wrong, a lot of it is very funny -- when you re-do "First Times", the first time you have sex with her, and finish it with "Here, you can wipe yourself off with this sock" I definitely laughed out loud – but I had the same reaction that I used to have when Joe Matt would tell me about his fear of big, tough guys coming towards him when he was walking on the street in Toronto. I used to tell him, What's the worst that could happen? They pick a fight with you, you get some licks in and you get your ass kicked. If you look at them as if you're terrified that usually just strikes them as funny because they're just, you know, walking down the street. So making you even more scared is even funnier and that might lead to some genuine slapstick. Joe's the same height I am, he maybe weighs a little bit less than me, but he obviously saw MEN as this scary, alien life form and, to me, that just suggests that you've capitulated to the feminist side: you see men the way women do. I don't think in relativistic terms, but in those situations you can't help but slip into it. Is Joe Matt too feminized or am I too "masculanized"? I don't really think about it too much anymore because it all seems to have more to do with just being old and the world I knew (or I thought I knew) passing away. If you don't think like a woman, you're a fossil and you'll be dead soon. It's hard to find a persuasive argument against that.


Anyway, I would agree that you haven't hit your cartooning peak as yet – there's such a huge difference between the iconic imagery in Clumsy and your updated and refined versions which would suggest that there's still a lot more refining going on. I forget which book had the strip which showed you trying to figure out how many of your notebooks to bring with you on a trip and that interested me and that I found encouraging: having that many projects "on the go" at the same time (which I could never manage after going monthly on Cerebus) certainly makes me think we've got a wide variety of Jeffrey Brown projects to look forward to.


Anyway, I enjoyed the books and appreciate you sending them to me. The two big beefy ones are Clumsy (10 dollars US) now in its second printing and Little Things (no price but let's say 10 dollars US as well) and can be ordered from Jeffrey Brown, PO Box 120, Deerfield, IL 60015-0120. The smaller books include Be A Man (3 dollars US) and I Am Going To be Small (5 dollars for 96 pages of sketchbook stuff). I turned down a couple of corners in the latter book.


So, Jeff, did you find a new girl yet?

Yeah, Jeff, when are you going to settle down with a girl?

When they start making sense.


And


She's too cute to be a ball and chain. She's more of an ankle bracelet.


I also liked the cartoon of you introducing someone to a girl and asking "Have you met my next book yet?"

There's MORE for you

In Today's Blog &…

MAAAAILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #174 (March 4th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Trevor Grace is on his way to Portugal

Even as you're reading this, so we're

Taking a break in the Scripture Readings

But we'll pick up right where we left off:

I Samuel

When he gets back.

Review: Jesus in India: An Account of Jesus' Escape from Death on the Cross and His Journey to India by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad



I have to admit that I thought the book was a joke when it first arrived. You know, Jesus in India, Jesus Goes Hawaiian, Jesus Crosses the Alps. Where might you go if you were spared death on the cross. Jeff apologized on the phone if I took offence at the book or thought that it was blasphemous. As I told him, I thought the Kennedy assassination was intricate until I started finding out exactly how many different interpretations of scripture there are. I have no specific idea of what's blasphemous anymore. Is Sikhism blasphemous? Is Wahabbism? Is the Mormon faith blasphemous? All I can do is read a given text and try to figure out what the author's angle is and how I react to it, so that's what I'm going to do here, starting with the back cover.



Jesus in India is an English version of an Urdu treatise written by the Holy Founder of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908). The main thesis expounded in the treatise is Jesus' escape from an ignominious death on the Cross and his subsequent journey to India in quest of the lost tribes of Israel whom he had to gather into his fold as mentioned in the New Testament.



This is mentioned several times in the book as well and struck an immediate sour note with me because I'm reasonably familiar with the New Testament at this point and, offhand, I can't think of any reference to the "lost tribes of Israel" anywhere in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John's Gospels or any instruction for the Synoptic Jesus or the Johannine Jesus to gather them into his fold. I mean, not even an oblique reference that you could manipulate to suit your own purposes. The closest I could get was John's Apocalypse where 144,000 of each of the tribes is saved in the New Jerusalem but it doesn't anywhere specify that any of those 144,000 of any tribe were "lost". I'm also not familiar with any Judaic tradition of any "lost tribes of Israel" managing to get so lost that they ended up in India (Ethiopia/Cush I can understand because of the King Solomon/Queen of Sheba connection). It wouldn't surprise me that there is such a tradition, but I've never run across it.



Abundant evidence has been furnished from Christian as well as Muslim Scriptures, old medicals books and books of history, including ancient Buddhistic records to illustrate the theme.



The copyright is for "Fredonia Books" in Amsterdam, The Netherlands which had my spider-sense tingling as well. "Fredonia" as in the Marx Brothers Duck Soup "Fredonia"? Someone could be pulling my leg on a very high level here and I don't mean Jeff Tundis.



There are parts of the book that read as if they were written by a Muslim, if you take it as a given that someone who has founded an Islamic movement is going to have more than a passing familiarity with the Koran (which I do), but there are other parts that read as if he hasn't read the Koran and (even worse) is actually making up parts of it. On page 16 there's a really convoluted attempt to address "compulsion in religion" that strikes me as authentically Muslim in the way that it tries to have its cake and eat it too:



When, however, the mischief of the enemy went to extremes and when everybody started exerting himself for wiping out Islam, the Jealous God thought it fit that the people who had wielded the sword should be annihilated by the sword. Except as such the Holy Quran has not approved of compulsion.



I really find it impossible to believe that anyone who can write a paragraph as full of holes as that one could be speaking on behalf of God as the author claims to. There is much talk of a Bloody Messiah and how ridiculous it is to be waiting for a Bloody Mahdi or a Bloody Messiah when everything is at peace. This suggested to me that in some way this is a counter-incarnation of Wahabbism which was emerging on the Arabian Peninsula around the same time and the military leader who would eventually carve out the territory that the House of Saud holds to this day. It seems an attempt to arrest the perception of that military leader (whose name escapes me) and to keep it below the Bloody Mahdi or Bloody Messiah threshold by merging Jesus and his message of peace with a subcontinent context and a lot of Buddhism and making a kind of bastion out of him. But even as a narrative it really doesn't hold together.



Here on page 62 is a good example of what I'm talking about:



Likewise the Holy Quran contains the verse:

i.e. O Jesus! I shall clear thee of these charges; I shall prove thy innocence and shall remove the accusations brought against thee by Jews and Christians.



Trust me, there is no verse remotely like that anywhere in the Koran. So that raises obvious questions about who this book was intended for. It couldn't have been Muslims because they'd know right away that he was making up verses from the Koran. Likewise he is most emphatic in insisting that "Muslims, moreover, do not believe that Jesus was put on the cross at all or that he received any injuries as a result of crucifixion." Which is true. I'm paraphrasing the verse, but what it basically says is that Jesus wasn't crucified "they had only his likeness." And yet this guy who is pretending to be a Muslim messiah has, as his central message, that Jesus was crucified but that he was taken from the cross "in a swoon" and then revived. He does have an interesting theory that this is why the crucifixion was left for late in the day, the day before the Sabbath so that Jesus couldn't have been left on the cross long enough to die and that the reason that the darkness covered the earth was, with God's assistance, to further compress the time frame. But that's all, really, Christian theorizing based on a very close reading the Synoptic Gospels. At no point does he address the meaning of "they had only his likeness". And it's hard for me to picture any Muslim audience not bringing it up to him if he was really the founder of a Muslim movement. I mean, it's an explicit scriptural reference. On page 79 he has a fully developed travel itinerary for Jesus. He knows exactly where he went and how long he stayed and where he specifically ended up and chose to live. Then he suddenly interrupts himself to assert:



There is no doubt, however, that the Afghans are Israelites, like the Kashmiris. Those who have taken a contrary view in their books have been misled in the extreme; they have not made a minute study of the matter. The Afghans admit that they are the descendants of Qais; and Qais belong to Israel. It is, however, not necessary to prolong this discussion here. I have already dealt with this question thoroughly in one of my books; here, I am giving an account of the journey of Jesus through Nasibain, Afghanistan, the Punjab and on to Kashmir and Tibet.



There is a lot of this brand of "any fool can plainly see" scholarship. Things are stated as being definitively true but there's no proof offered to shore up what has been stated just "I have already dealt with this question thoroughly in one of my books" and comparable evasions. On page 94, he's addressing a rumoured link between Jesus and the Buddha:



It must be noted that Professor Max Muller in The Nineteenth Century, on page 517 of the issue of October 1894, supports the aforesaid statement by saying that popular writers have pointed out many a time, that Jesus was influenced by the principles of Buddhism and that attempts are being made even today to discover some historical basis by which the principles of the Buddha's faith should be proved to have reached Palestine in the days of Jesus. This supports the books of the Buddhist faith in which written that Yasa was the disciple of the Buddha, for, when Christians of such high standing as Professor Max Muller have admitted that the principles of Buddhism had had an influence over Jesus it would not be far wrong to say that this amounted to being a disciple of the Buddha.



You see what I mean? The scaffold of his argument is built on what this person asserted or that person wrote which consequently supports that view that this thing must be irrefutably true. A lot of opinions and theories are written by a lot of people but opinions and theories aren't proofs: they can't support each other in establishing the nature of reality. The only thing I can see here is that whoever the author was he had a vested interest in trying to merge Christianity and Buddhism with Buddhism in the superior position. As if he catches himself in what would certainly be a glaring inconsistency for a Muslim, he continues:



Nevertheless, I consider the use of such words in respect of Jesus (on whom be peace) disrespectful and impertinent.



Well, which is it? If you've established to your own satisfaction that there is a factual link between Christianity and Buddhism and that "it would not be far wrong to say that this amounted to being a disciple of the Buddha" then how can the assertion of that fact be disrespectful and impertinent? I mean, it's either factual or not factual, true or untrue, real or not real.



And the statement which is to be found in books of the Buddhist faith that "Yasu" was the disciple of the Buddha, is only an example of the confirmed habit of the priests of these people to mention a great personage appearing at a later time as if he were the disciple of one appearing earlier. Apart from this, there being as has been stated a great resemblance between the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha it would not be far wrong to speak of the relation of master and disciple between the Buddha and Jesus, although it might not be consistent with feelings of respect.



So, I don't think the book is the joke that I thought it was when it first came in, I sincerely doubt that it was written by a Muslim scholar for a Muslim audience. I suspect it was a Buddhist or a Christian or someone attempting to meld Buddhism and Christianity who thought the best route towards doing so was to use the Jesus of the Koran – which would be less familiar to a Christian audience -- and an assumed Muslim identity to forge a link between Buddhism and Christianity that just isn't there, at least not on the basis of the snake-eating-its-tail form of circuitous and self-referential "scholarship" illustrated by the examples above.



In conclusion, Jeff, I'd have to say that the fatal shots could not have been fired from this particular grassy knoll.

There's More for YOU

In Today's Blog &…

MAAILLLL!!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #173 (March 3rd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

We don't have a Diamond Order Code Yet

BUT!

Don't MISS James Turner's FIRST

REX LIBRIS COLLECTION

COMING SO SOON FROM SLAVE LABOR GRAPHICS YOU'LL SWEAR YOU WERE JUST READING THIS YESTERDAY

(or something like that)

James Turner continues:


And speaking of awesome, I do hope to learn from your use of type, especially for sound effects. I have also been noticing that people in comics generally don't use the … (ellipses?) when they break up sentences into different word balloons, which is an innovation I'm interested in adopting.


It would certainly make an interesting article or roundtable to get different cartoonists' views of what constitutes good comic-book punctuation. I think what you're referring to here is the "stand-alone" ellipses at the bottom of a word balloon. I'm not sure where I got that from, but I'm pretty sure I didn't come up with it myself. It's intended to serve two functions, its traditional function from prose which is that there is a natural pause where it occurs more elaborate than the semi-colon would indicate and its comic-book function which basically establishes that the thought is continued, so it's intended as a little added "forward momentum" for the reader. Whether the reader actually registers that consciously or not or what percentage of readers register that consciously is another question, but that's the idea behind it: you see the ellipses occupying its own line at the bottom of the word balloon and that means that there's elaboration up ahead or a visual that runs contrary to the train of thought or something that further develops what you're reading. So, if the words you've just read didn't explain what was being discussed thoroughly, it causes you to "kick" a bit into the next word balloon. So you have two contrary functions: the prose mind registers it as a pause while the comic-book mind registers it as a narrative propellant.


I talked to Chester about the dilemma of rendering noses a month or so ago. All sorts of problems, as he said, that only cartoonists are aware of. Tintin, for example, has a sideways rendered nose even when facing frontally. It has always worked, I generally don't even notice it, but now that I'm working on a comic it's an issue, especially when I'm adding shadows to the face. How does a shadow work when falling over a sideways nose on a frontally facing face? An interesting question.


Yeah, I think that's more of a problem in the iconic end of cartooning where you're trying to distil faces and features into a series of simplified pen strokes or, in your case, computer lines. The closer you get it to looking accurate while stripping it down to its basics, the fewer things you can "add back in" without throwing off the entire look of the panel or page. Shadows are a particular problem if you're doing a night scene or a darkened room or something. If you just draw the iconic character and throw solid black in behind him, he's going to look self-illuminating like a light bulb. If you put hatching on the face it attracts too much attention to itself – the eye is drawn to where most of the lines are. If you use a solid black then you have to pick your meridian line and that raises a whole new bundle of questions. I've been drawing this guy's head as a pure oval but is that how the eye perceives it once the facial features are factored in? I used to have those problems in the first couple of years of Cerebus where I was trying to draw him as an animation cell, with no density or contour to his outline. If I'm drawing a shadow on the side of his head, at what point does the snout begin to "pull" the contour of the face to the front? How far does the shadow move in from the side of the face until a separate shadow appears on the snout and where does that shadow first appear?

As Chester says, problems only cartoonists are aware of.

We really should have terms for them. Like, when you brush in an area of solid black and then you go to ink an area next to it when you think it's dry, but it isn't dry, there's one or two little "wet spots" and you either smear them or you get them on the side of your inking hand. I mean we should have terms for those wet spots and the smear and the blobs on the side of our hands. Because we all do this isolation, we don't need to communicate it so we never came up with terminology.


Things plod along with Rex. Issue 7 has the most ambitious extras section I've ever done, complete with faux academic tone, while issue 8 is an action extravaganza. I've had to draw out most of the action poses and fight scenes in my sketchbook first and then scan them, otherwise there's no way I could do such complicated poses and sequences. I'm two thirds of the way through it now. Been taking me a hell of a long time. I don't think I'll have another all action issue for a little while after this.


Actually, thanks to the miracle of Luddite Time Distortion, I just got the copy of issue 7 that you sent me yesterday. You're doing pretty good with the sound effects in this one. I particularly liked the "Zaoosh" sound effect on whatever those flaming projectiles are on pages 3, 4 and 5. That's really all that's involved in doing good sound effects. You just have to translate the auditory into the visual. If that sound was a picture, what would it look like? And, of course, "Zaoosh" – how do you spell that? And you've also got the look of the projectiles right. Considering it's all done on computer, it's pretty amazing.


The comic continues to evolve. Right now I'm trying to add texture to it, make it more visually accessible to people, and explore a look that a mixture of film noir, Tamara de Lempicka, and 1920's posters. Film noir was dark for practical as well as aesthetic reasons: they had no budget and used darkness to cover it. I hope to use darkness in much the same manner. It will let me breeze through scenes shot entirely in silhouettes.


I see what you mean, having just finished reading issue 7 (getting paid to read funnybooks in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. What a great job) about the film noir. I thought it was interesting that you flinched away from using silhouettes. I had a comparable experience doing Cerebus where I was experimenting with harsh, unnatural lighting in the scene where Weisshaupt dies (page 504-506 of Church & State I), telling Gerhard, "Just do your regular backgrounds, don't try to follow the lighting that I'm doing" which he always found difficult because it seemed inconsistent. It was only much later that he was able to link it to movie lighting which often doesn't make any sense either. I did, like, three silhouettes on page 506 and then had Gerhard just put the library in behind them and I thought, "Wow, that really works well!" As an emotional effect, the spectrum of light sources and intensities really communicate the emotional roller coaster the two characters are on. But I don't think I used multiple silhouettes more than once or twice after that – Judeo-Christian work ethic. If it's that easy it can't be good. I thought the best shot was the upper right panel on page 9 of Circe where her face blends into the white background. You flirt with it in a few panels before that but this is really the panel where you just let the glasses and the mouth and the nose tell you where she is. It seems to me that white-on-white is a big part of the film noir look as well. Of course you don't fool me for a minute: you're doing the film noir approach just so you can watch 1950s movies all day and call it research.


The French tanks below are from Issue 8, and are engaged in fighting a rampaging umlaut. Beware the umlaut!


Son of a gun if that isn't what it is, right on the bottom of his letter. Very clever these computer fellows.


Tomorrow: No Dave's Prayer! But as a further concession to Jeff Tundis, I'll be reviewing the book he sent me through Amazon Canada, Jesus in India.

There's more for you

In Today's

Blog &…MAAIIILLL!

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #172 (March 2nd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

_____________________________________________________

Static, The Lonely One ($10.95 US) and

Ditko Package 3 ($13.00 US) are all available from

Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Ln. #81

Bellingham, WA, 98225-1186

Ditko Package 3 clocks in at 160 pages and reprints 20 different short stories from the old Charlton Horror line, most of the stories written by Joe Gill. I think it's worth quoting his and Steve Ditko's reciprocal introductions to the book (even though, not having asked permission to do so, I know is WRONG and I expect a visit from Mr. A in my dreams tonight):


I'm delighted to introduce a collection of Steve Ditko's wonderful stories. While Steve's art is always up to the Ditko standard of excellence, my scripts are not prize-winning material.

Steve and I and all the other great guys at Charlton during the years of glory (?), worked for extremely low rates. A few of us accommodated ourselves by working fast in order to make as much moolah as possible. This accounts for my enormous volume of pages. When I worked for other NY publishers I was paid much more; Steve, too, worked for more generous publishers.


But Steve's work was the same, no matter for whom he worked or how much he was paid. Steve denied he was driven to always do his best. He swore he was only in it for the money. I told him if he had no market, no pen or pencil or paper, he'd be creating masterpieces in bare dirt. I never knew my friend to deliberately do less than his best in order to grind out pages.


Many of us worked as fast as we could move. There was little criticism and that suited us just fine. Steve moved at his own pace, doing his brilliant best, and he made my work shine.


Steve's got a quiet sense of humor and he's more well-mannered than I but we got along very well and imbibed a few martinis together from time to time. After a day in `the shoe factory' we explored the delights of night life in Derby, CT.


Steve was always the best and he stayed that way come Hell of high water. I have fond memories of those Charlton years and now you will, too.


It's very true. One of the things Joe Gill doesn't mention is how atrocious the Charlton printing was. Anyone who goes back to those distant times knows what I'm talking about. If you bought your Marvel and DC comics and picked up a couple of Charlton's, back in the 60s and 70s there was no question that the printing standards dropped off precipitously. Which is very funny since, as Neal Adams pointed out, Marvel and DC were basically printing their books on toilet paper and had no production standards whatsoever. Still, their comic books looked like world class magazine slicks when placed alongside Charlton's books. And yet, flipping through this volume, you see absolutely no sign of Steve Ditko letting that affect his work even though he obviously knew what it was going to print like. That's an amazing level of integrity to exhibit over the course of 160 pages. None of it looks "hacked out".


And then it's Steve Ditko's turn to introduce Joe Gill:


Joe Gill is one comic book story/script writer who understands a comic panel. Most other writers believe a single panel is a long, continuing strip of a movie film containing numerous, changing, point-of-view frames.


I read the screenplay of Gorgo. From the first reading to this day, I marvel at how well Joe adapted the character to comic books. I didn't read the Konga screenplay but that comic script was a treat.


As for Captain Atom, Charlton (like many companies) gave up too soon on the new feature.


Joe may have been partly responsible for my long stay at Charlton. (Actually Charlton left us and the comic field.) I know Joe's scripts made my stay and the work enjoyable and worthwhile. Our efforts are worth saving and still enjoyable in reviewing with a long list of favourites.


The comic book story/script writer? It doesn't matter who follows the first. That first choice is Joe Gill.


Speaking from the experience of having broken into the comic-book field on the short horror story end of things, I'd have to say that Joe Gill is a little hard on himself. These eight-pagers are not the easiest things in the world to write basically because it's so hard to hide the twist ending when you have so few pages to work with. The veteran horror reader is finely attuned to any plot development or line of dialogue that just reeks of twist ending and if they've guessed what your twist ending is before they get there then you've basically failed as a horror writer. I must have several dozen plots for short horror stories in the Cerebus Archive that I submitted to Skywald and Warren, all of them rejected. I sold two: "Cry of the White Wolf" to Skywald and "Shadow of the Axe" to Warren. Some of the stories are pretty lame, but then the batting average in the Warren magazines wasn't anywhere close to 1.000, either. As I say, these things are tough to write and very easy to pick apart. One of the Gill stories is credited to Jack Daniels and another to Johnny Walker. They're still readable and, as Ditko says, he knows exactly how much you can get into one panel and how you move the reader through the story and exactly the right pace for an eight-pager so it doesn't feel rushed or padded.


Gene Day and I submitted a story to Charlton back in 1974, maybe '75, "The Gravedigger's Banquet" which I pencilled and wrote and Gene inked. You know, the most basic advice for the freelancer is to learn about the publications you're submitting to. "Gravedigger's" had been intended for some other venue and I basically just redrew it incorporating Baron Weirwulf, one of the Charlton horror hosts at the top of the first page. Never actually read a Charlton horror comic. Reading these, I noticed that they incorporated the horror hosts into the stories. They play bit roles and comment on the action as its unfolding. Which is actually pretty clever and sets Charlton apart from all the other horror titles with narrators that only appear in the first and last panel. I might have had a better shot at selling a story if I had known that. Stupid, arrogant, know-it-all eighteen-year-old.


Anyway, I was sorry when I came to the end of this volume. It's a steal at $13 US.


All of this stuff is in no particular order, to say the least, so please bear with me. I'm hoping to get organized now that I've realized that I've got this empty file drawer next to me (that I think I cleaned out sometime last summer) and that that would be a good spot to put the mail as it comes in.


Okay, this is theoretically March which means we should be getting close enough to the release of James Turner's Rex Libris trade reprinting the first five issues of The Librarian Without Fear (for which I've written the introduction), so here's his letter from a while back:


Hi Dave


Sorry for being so tardy with writing back. It was good to see you at the Wright Awards. They certainly made it into an occasion. It was worth it to see Chester in a suit alone. There was some stuff up on the net about it afterward which linked it to your weblog. I think you're probably the only person who has a weblog but no email or internet. I also saw your on-line photo-realism comic about the actress which, of course, looks awesome. I look forward to seeing your other, secret projects when they come out.


It's true and a very strange experience to have an internet presence while still not having access to the internet. With email, well, it's all I can do to keep up – or, rather, keep from falling too much further behind – with my escargot mail without adding another level of access. With the six-month trial period for the Blog & Mail coming to an end in a couple of weeks, at this point I'm leaning in the direction of continuing with it. I'm not sure that I'm really saying much that's of interest or worth the three or four days every two or three weeks I put into it in a conventional sense. But I do think it has helped to undermine the perception of Dave Sim as this raving lunatic which has been kept alive by the Comics Journal and the feminists for the last decade or so. That seems kind of wrong to me – that you have to have an internet presence just to keep character assassination from "sticking" if you're going to hold strong viewpoints outside of the mainstream – but, at the same time, there's no point in arguing with reality. As long as they don't pass a law forcing me to have email or forcing me to get internet access, I think me and cyberspace can probably get along (however uneasily) at least for the next while.


Tomorrow: More From James "Rex Libris" Turner
___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #171 (March 1st, 2007)

(Dave again created two entries for the same day, in this case February 28th. So, first that short entry is posted - then the March 1st post. - Jeff)

Wednesday February 28 -

The Blog & Mail

Documenting the free ride

Feminists get in our society

For, oh, nigh on six months now!

Jeff also sent along a copy of an e-mail from Craig R. Johnson, the Managing Editor of www.silverbulletcomicbooks.com dated Mon. Jan 29 and whose subject line is "At last, something from FoL":

Here's what I just received from FoL:

I would be happy to make sure this is brought to the attention of the rest of the board. However, since, after reading this over, it appears that all these decisions were originally made by people who were board members almost 10 years ago, I'm not sure how enlightening our answers might be. It seems that Sim DID receive a response, if I am reading this correctly:

"Dear Dave: Thanks for your offer of four pages. We are grateful, but we would prefer not to accept. We will not be continuing this correspondence. Sincerely, Friends of Lulu Board of Directors."

If you have tried to contact Jackie to get an explanation from her, and she has failed to communicate with you, I'm not sure what else to do, since none of the current board members were in any way involved with FoL 10 years ago. As I said, I will make sure this brought to Shannon Crane (the current Fol Board President's) attention. J

Leigh Dragoon

Craig is barely able to conceal his exasperation (which probably qualifies as harassment):

I've replied to Leigh stating that she's missed the point somewhat, the issue is that Sim made his offer again, when the board members who had a vested interest in kicking him in the balls had long since gone, and it was ignored. The second issue is that Flowers asked why Sim was ignored and got ignored. The third issue is why was I ignored when I asked why they were ignored!

I asked Jeff Tundis to relay my sincere and deep appreciation to Craig R. Johnson for daring to stand up to the feminist hegemony in the comic-book field on my behalf. I think the obvious answer to his question is that he's a guy and under the present frames of reference in our society a guy has no validity when compared to a feminist, consequently there is no need for a feminist to respond to a guy. If she ignores him, for all intents and purposes, he ceases to exist. This syndrome, evidently, is compounded when you are dealing with a feminist organization. The 1996 FoL Board, by asserting that they wouldn't be continuing a correspondence with me effectively assured that both my suggestion and myself would cease to exist. And, effectively, that is pretty much what happened. I don't think it's a sensible way to conduct a society but at least for the moment, that seems to be how we have chosen to conduct this one. Hopefully, the fact that you received a response, however belatedly and however tepid, might be a small sign that things might be changing. From experience, however, I would not be holding my breath waiting.

Depending on how honest any of them are capable of being about their feelings towards me, there is a possibility that there was one or more 1996 "board members who had a vested interest in kicking [me] in the balls". I certainly hate to think that personal animosity would play that large a part (or any part at all) in what was basically the goodwill offering of what I considered to be a sensible suggestion that might assist in the betterment of everyone's situation in the comic-book field by lending aid to the only organization dedicated to defending our First Amendment rights. I just don't like to think that anyone could be that small-minded and myopic and not see that how I felt about them or her or how they or she felt about me didn't amount to a hill of beans compared to the importance of jointly defending freedom of expression.

Only Jeff Smith knows for himself and only I know for myself how much residual animosity there might be between us from our own contretemps of a few years back. But when I contacted him to donate artwork for auction to benefit the Red Cross and Tsunami Relief, he stepped up to the plate and donated a Bone cover (the first time he had ever offered a Bone cover for sale) which raised an enormous sum of money—which was the reason that I contacted him and Neil Gaiman and Will Eisner. I assumed that whatever each of them donated would raise the most money in the shortest period of time. Tsunami Relief was a larger issue than our personal feelings towards each other and, obviously, Jeff recognized that.

If Craig is right and personal animosity was any kind of a factor, I only wish that the 1996 Friends of Lulu board of directors and the current board could recognize that the defence of freedom of expression was and is in the same category: a larger issue beside which any kind of personal feeling should subside to insignificance.

Okay, all done with "feminists get a free ride in our society" for this month. Tomorrow: Let's tackle some of this mail, shall we?

There's MORE for you

In TODAY'S Blog &…

MAAAIIIILLL!

_____________________________________________________

Fourteen 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.

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Thursday March 1 –

It's a BRAND NEW MONTH

So let's see what Dave's been up to

(apart from referring to himself in the third person)

since the last time he was writing these!

Okay, now that we have all of the unpleasantness out of the way for another month, I thought I'd update you on the secret project. I had one large background to do and another small background to do and figured if I got those two done in the two weeks of lead time I built up by working ahead on the Blog & Mail that I would consider that pretty successful (as you can imagine I'm pretty rusty when it comes to backgrounds). Anyway, I got both done and also managed to get a much clearer view of what it is that I'm trying to do here (thanks to my computer scanner/research assistant Lou) which is probably the more important development since I think I'm now officially past the "this just ain't working, let's just pack it in" stage. I also managed to get two large figures pencilled and inked on subsequent pages and (hopefully) nailed the ending structurally so now all I have to do is work backwards and hook up the pages I just finished (23, unless I decide to change something) with the ending. It looks as if I will be able to keep it the size of a comic book, albeit a rather large comic book: 40 pages, possibly 48 and possibly 56.


I'm eager to get back to it, naturally enough, but I have a bunch of Blog & Mails and a commissioned piece to do first, so let's get rolling:


Pardon? Oh, my health. Yes, I'm writing this February 20 and I'm almost back to 100% (did the ten flights of stairs at City Hall once last week and twice so far this week – first time since December). The only thing left to clear up is my hearing. Whatever the massive congestion was all about, it lingers in my ears so I've been virtually deaf for about six weeks at this point. Since I spend all my time alone, and I don't have any electronic media the only time I really noticed was trying to talk on the phone or when I went out for coffee and a muffin with Sandeep, all I could hear was myself chewing. Even sipping my decaf was deafeningly loud and drowned out everything he was saying. It's coming back gradually so that I can now hear what someone's telling me without lip-reading (as much). I can finally hear what's on the radio if I'm in a taxi but I still can't hear the music if I'm in the grocery store. I'm always convinced that it's just an ear wax build-up but this time I was clever enough to only put ear drops in my left ear and take decongestants. My right ear has finally started crackling and popping but my left ear hasn't. So it's definitely a congestion problem, not an ear wax problem. Now what I need is ear drops that will get rid of ear drops or something. But I am fully functional, fully mobile and putting in my standard 12-hour day, all for you, the discerning Blog & Mail reader.

2007

CEREBUS

RARITY!

Well, I can't say for certain that it's a Cerebus rarity or the absolute rarest Cerebus related item ever to appear but…


This guy called me up last fall who said his name was Matt Ingraham and he told me that he was a student at Cameron Heights Collegiate here in Kitchener and would I be willing to be interviewed for his student newspaper? You can't be too fussy about local publicity, in my experience, so I said "Sure!" And then made arrangements to meet him at Now & Then Books the following Saturday (doing an interview elsewhere makes it easier to terminate when the time comes – you just start putting on your coat and the interviewer gets the idea).


So I showed up at Now & Then and asked Dave Kostis if it was okay if I used his office and he said "Sure". So that was a very interesting experience – first time I ever sat in Harry Kremer's old office chair and realized, looking at Matt, that he was about the same age that I was when I first started doing interviews with comics professionals for Now & Then Times and Comic Art News & Reviews shortly after the store opened in 1971. I then realized that I'm now twice the age Harry was when he opened Now & Then. Wondered to myself if my first interview subject, Jim Mooney, had been fifty years old when I interviewed him in 1972.


Anyway, it was a good couple of months later when I got a call from Rich Payette, the school librarian and newspaper patron telling me that the newspaper crew had finally gotten the first issue done and asking where he could send me a copy, so I gave him the post office box address. And then there it was: five sheets of paper stapled in the one corner, The Cameron Heights Student Newspaper SERIOUSLY…er…that's the name: "Seriously…" And just as promised, there's Cerebus on the front page under the headline "Local Legend: David Sim" occupying more space than "History made on Election Day '06 In the U.S." (a mere sidebar! Mind you it was mid-January by then) and "Christmas and More?" And the article continued inside for three full uninterrupted pages. So, it's officially a Cerebus item, right? I mean, quite apart from Jeff and Margaret, some other people are completist enough to want a copy, right?


Well, I don't know how many copies they printed or how many copies are left (it did come out more than a month ago) but you could always write and ask if you could get a copy, right? Write to Matt Ingraham, c/o Rich Payette, Library, Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute, 301 Charles St. E., Kitchener, Ontario N2G 2P8 and see if you can't make a deal.


Now which is worse: that I didn't tell you about this and you had this gaping hole in your Cerebus collection you knew nothing about or that I did tell you about it and needlessly complicated your life as a Cerebus completist? I know, tough call, eh?


This one got misplaced in the course of my Lost January, dated 1/19/07:


Dear Aardvark-Vanaheim:


As a child, my mother (Claudia G. Gilman) learned to read thru comics. Because of her love of this genre she also became a comic-book and non-sport card retailer and dealer in the 1990's. She also sold super-hero statues and toys. Her distributors were Heroes World, Diamond and Comics Unlimited. She and my older sister would sell at conventions. They were one of the few mother/daughter dealers at the time. When I became older, I joined them. We enjoyed having tables at ComicFest and Wizard World in Philadelphia.


Last summer in June, she was diagnosed with tongue cancer and had to quit work. In September she had a 12 and a half hour surgery & tongue reconstruction surgery, in which they had to remove two thirds of her tongue. Presently she is undergoing radiation sessions.


We would like to have a benefit auction to help her with her finances. We were wondering if you would be able to donate a few books, cards (or whatever you would prefer) to help us with the auction.


Her tax exempt # is: 39206507


I look forward to your reply,


Sincerely,


Kira G. Gilman

Lost River Caverns

PO Box M

Hellertown, PA

18055

Phone 610.838.1150

Fax: 610.838.2961

I called and gave Kira a few phone numbers of retailers that I was pretty sure would be glad to help and told her to give me a call when the auction had been arranged and I'd be happy to donate a page of original artwork. Haven't heard anything so I don't know if this is on the up-and-up but, jeez, how can you err on the side of caution in a situation like this? If there's anyone in the Hellertown area that can confirm this one – hey, that's what the internet is for, right? -- for the Doubting Thomases in the crowd I'm sure there are a lot more folks who would be glad to help.


Let's see what else we have here.


I got another letter from Robin Snyder which I can't find for the life of me. Which worries me because if I'm missing a letter that I remember getting in then that usually means that it will turn up in a pile of paper somewhere with a half dozen other letters I've forgotten getting in.


Anyway, Robin seriously questioned my comparing Steve Ditko to Kafka and I'd have to say that that was probably more of a first impression from the Ditko Package that I read first that Sandeep loaned to me.


[And it turned out that I hadn't dreamed up the whole "Max Brod being ordered to destroy all of Kafka's papers" thing which I found out when I ran across Introducing Kafka on one of my bookshelves. Written by David Zane Mairowitz and drawn by Robert Crumb, it was published by Kitchen Sink Press back in 1994 and the point is covered in the afterword:


"A Hunger Artist" was one of the few stories Kafka exempted from his instructions to Max Brod that all his work, all his manuscripts and papers be incinerated after his death. So, he was still trying to dispose of himself; although, as the writer J-L Borges rightly points out: if he really wanted a bonfire, why didn't he just strike the match himself?


Chester's exact words. Maybe he read the book as well and, unlike me, retained that part.


In any case, Brod, as we know, did not comply, and went on to edit what was, at that time, a confused jumble: chapters unnumbered or out of order, multiple versions, crossings-out, some works untitled (many of the titles we have were later provided by Brod).


An unenviable task, depending on how much or how little of a Kafka enthusiast he was. I certainly wouldn't want to condemn anyone who wasn't interested in my writings to make sense of all of my own papers. Maybe that was a factor in Kafka's decision: realizing what a jumble everything was and realizing that there was no such thing as a Kafka enthusiast and not wanting to stick Max Brod with having to wade through everything, he picked the writings that he wanted to represent him to posterity and instructed that the rest were to be burned. It's a theory.]


Having read most of the Ditko material that I ordered from him by now, I'd have to say that Steve Ditko has an amazing range to his post-Spider-man work. In terms of what would be called a graphic novel, Static struck me as the most entertaining and engaging. Although I think I'll have to re-read The Mocker now that I'm not sick anymore and see if it doesn't read a little better when I can read more than two pages at a time. Both are interesting in that they appear on the surface to be standard trademarked super-hero fare but that they are actually addressing a lot of the inherent assumptions about the trademarked super-hero and calling them into question. It's an interesting moment when Stac Rae basically backs off and agrees not to wear the Static suit outside the laboratory, acknowledging that since it was created by Dr. Ed Serch he should call the shots over its use. It's one of the better examples of Ditko applying his own clear-cut definitions of right and wrong to a character he has created. When did the guy in the super-powered-suit even acknowledge the existence of the scientist who invented it once you got past page 3 of the origin story?


In the "goofy fun" category, there's The Lonely One by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko, a kind of haphazard collection of Konga stories from the early-1960s Charlton title of the same name. Little monkey gets turned into a Godzilla-sized gorilla and accidentally causes problems wherever he goes. I don't know how the stories were selected from a handful of issues (Gill and Ditko's favourites? The only ones they had the original artwork for?) but I definitely enjoyed it. We may or may not have gotten more sophisticated in our story-telling over the years, but one of the things I remark on to myself all the time is the ability the older talents exhibited in getting the story told. The transitions are choppy (looked at one way) but (looked at another way) you sure get a lot of bang for your buck. This was one of the things that I noticed when I was working on my 1960s Marvel Comics parody. I'm trying to make fun of this, but the fact is I don't know how to do this. I'm on page 7 and I haven't even gotten the origin out of the way. Too much information. "The kids don't need to know all this stuff," I can hear Jack Kirby saying. "Cut 90% of the explanations and get to the action."

Tomorrow: Ditko Package 3

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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.