Dave Sim's blogandmail #231 (April 30th, 2007)

Alex Robinson, Alex Robinson

Does whatever a…

Uh.

Let's see. What's a three-syllable word

Like "spider can" that rhymes with "Robinson"?

Oh, DASH IT ALL – I'm NOT

Matt Dow and I NEVER WILL BE!

Alex continues…

I was pleased to read that the second volume of Collected Letters will be coming out. I confess I enjoy reading your blog but don't really like reading large chunks of text on the monitor (especially white text on black background—and I told you I patented that black background idea, right?)


White text on a black background? The Blog & Mail? Really? Where are you reading it? I know Jeff has it posted in at least two different places. Maybe he can mention something here about a venue that's a little easier on the eyes.

(Already done. - Jeff)

… so I'm really hoping most of it will be reprinted into a proper book someday. I know you've got a backlog of potentially reprintable material, but I've learned to be patient.


Wow! A book? Of the Blog & Mail? This is, seriously, as close as I get to Truman Capote's observation about Jack Kerouac "That's not writing, that's just typing". I get myself hyped up on a small coffee and a chocolate donut and away I go. The way I look at it, it's just to keep Cerebus and me in the public eye for those people for whom there's just no such thing as too much television. People are getting it for free and I'm embarrassed to be charging them that most of the time. But, I'll keep my ears open and if enough people think it's a good idea, I can do it on the same basis as the Collected Letters volumes: just enough to meet the initial orders and then a box left over or something.


Anyway, I was very surprised to read that you'd excerpted portions of my last letter on your blog and admit that I was a little put off.


Oops.


I had figured with the demise of Aardvark Comment, letters to you were pretty much letters to you, and I was worried that the section you quoted (about me feeling like a "star" at S.P.A.C.E.) made me look kind of jerky. There seemed to be no impact on my end, so I forgive you, Dave.

Much appreciated. It became pretty obvious in the first month or so that there was no way I would be able to maintain the Blog & Mail and maintain the level of correspondence I had been maintaining through 2004-06 so the two got melded together. Also, you're about the biggest name in comics who still writes to me, so it's nice to have a "dialogue" on various subjects—like WHY we even bother to write and draw comics that we aren't 100% enthusiastic about. Is it something about being writers as well as artists? It seems to me that when you're exclusively an artist, you're more inclined to just draw what you want to draw. When you're a writer and artist, you end up with the artist doing the writer's bidding a lot of the time. What really interests the writer doesn't a lot of times really interest the artist but the artist ends up having to draw it anyway. The Siu Ta strips (www.siuta.com) that was me putting my foot down as an artist. THIS is what I want to draw.


Oh, and I did try to pick and choose in your letter those things that seemed pretty harmless as subjects and to leave alone anything that might get you in trouble with anyone (you did discuss another cartoonist and I left that part out, as an example). It would help if you could just mark anything you don't want me to run here or you'd rather I not run here.


Your comments on John Lennon and his humiliation in Manila were very interesting. I tend to see his abdicating power within the band (almost every A-side after 1967 or so was a Paul number, compared with the early years which were more John-heavy) in more personal terms—he was always looking for a mother substitute, especially after fame turned out to be the empty experience everyone who gets super-famous says it is.


I would agree with that. But I think a lot of that is the winnowing process of figuring out what love actually is, given that in our society love is seen as the universal panacea. If you're a rock star to whatever extent you've confused compliant sex with strangers—women eager to have sex with you because of what you do for a living—with love (which most of the male population does mentally), you're going to find out the difference pretty quickly and pretty emphatically. If that's what you thought was going to fill in the big blank inside of you, when it doesn't fill in the big blank inside of you then you have to go looking for something else and how many other things in that category are there? Heroin. Mother substitute. It took me years to figure out that the big blank wasn't actually a big blank it was just infantile desire and the way to fill it in was with Grow. Up. i.e. Stop focusing so much on "wanting" and focus instead on "choosing not to let myself have".


I think musicians also get trapped into "selling" themselves on their own love songs, a potent brand of self-hypnosis. Imagine the level of emotional masochism attached to writing a song about a girl who broke your heart and then having to perform it and relive it night after night after night in front of a crowd of people. Of course, the Beatles never had that performance problem after 1967.


One obligatory Cerebus item: I wanted to address the end of Reads, specifically the part where you tell Cerebus what could've/should've been, and how he screwed up his destiny and how echoes of that permeated his life. This is an odd question, but were you lying to him? Since you've stated a bunch of times in interviews that the big Cerebus picture didn't come until you'd been doing the book for awhile (with the Cockroach, I think?) there really was very little chance of him fulfilling his destiny because the events you describe—trading his helmet for the vest, losing his sword, destroying the Pigts' statue—occurred before you'd even worked it out. Did the fact that you came up with it later make it no less "true" or was "Dave" purposely misleading his miserable gray creation? "Dave" also claims that Cerebus could've gotten back on track somewhat with the appearance of the Thrunk, but I also suspect that is not really true.


As I reread the above, I'm not sure it makes sense but I can't think of another way to phrase it. If it doesn't make any sense, feel free to ignore it (I'm sure you're relieved to have my permission).


Tomorrow: IGNORING IT is not an option at the Blog & Mail because that would be…crass? That would be…?(what's one of Dave's favourite words?) Answer tomorrow!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOG &…

MAAAIIILLLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #230 (April 29th, 2007)

Okay, I promised to do a bit of a review of Robert Graves' King Jesus a while back.


It's an interesting book. If there's a greater expert on all things pagan who strode the earth in the twentieth century I don't know of him. I read his White Goddess years ago (well, most of it anyway) -- which was certainly useful in my preparation for Mothers & Daughters and also his I, Claudius series of books. So, once I got the idea of what he was driving at with King Jesus, it was certainly worth the full day or so that I spent reading it. I had expected that he would be making the attempt (now pretty common) to paint Jesus in pagan hues -- there's even a Da Vinci Code style bestseller called The Pagan Jesus, evidently, which always strikes me as being about as intellectually dishonest as trying to turn Zeus into a prototype of the Prophet Isaiah.


But, no, Mr. Graves is nothing if not intellectually honest and here he doesn't disappoint: he definitely grasps the fundamental "ne'er the twain shall meet" dichotomy between Christianity and paganism and also (and I found this admirable) was able to confront head-on that the former had kicked the latter's ass fair and square. No playing the victim for him, no suh. He documents pretty carefully and at length all of the Greek and Roman precursors and the popular adherence to those precursors, the Unconquered Sun, The Sacrificial King -- here's a particularly interesting conversation around a caravan's campfire where Jehovah and God are discussed in Greek and Roman frames of reference made all the more interesting by the fact that, even as the participants are asserting all of the by now-familiar theories of derivation, Jesus says... exactly nothing. Which was apropos. And the sense that I get of Mr. Graves behind the narrative is This Was Not the Way to Do It. We Made a Fundamental Mistake Here. Which I might just be reading myself into it, but I would agree that once you make your gods into archetypes and start "splitting the difference", rounding off your own corners in order to fit with other systems of belief, you've made an irretrievable error. Of course, in my case, my own faith tells me that this process was inevitable and that all God was doing in the course of human history was waiting for that inevitable erosion to take place, for the pagans to exhaust themselves against their own cleverness, knowing His own creations and knowing not only roughly but specifically how long they could last with pagan gods of their own invention before they got to the "What's the diff?" stage.


But Mr. Graves does seem to know (how could a scholar of his standing not know?) that Christianity didn't succeed as it did and defeat his pagan gods and goddesses as the result of some manner of happy (or in his case, "unhappy") accident. He knows his scripture inside and out which, combined with his knowledge of the structure of the Roman Empire and pagan religious observances of the timeƒwell, I sure wouldnÕt read it on Sunday, but it was pretty darned good for a weekday read.


Good moments, like the young Jesus debating with the doctors in the Temple with that rapid-fire "no quarter asked, no quarter given" Talmudic hair-splitting sophistry which has as much to do with your ability to come up with the right answer on the spot as it does with genuine piety and devout observance. God -- like Chance -- favours the prepared mind. Another good moment with the young Jesus' warm glow of pride when he hears indirectly that one of his freelance judgments has been endorsed by the legendary scholar Hillel: now that's a fine piece of writing, to strike that human note perfectly and to know that the lives of Jesus and Hillel overlapped (barely). And that he has to hear indirectly. In his own Judaic context Jesus was a nobody -- a smart kid and little else -- without the remotest chance of getting an audience with Hillel himself.


In his afterword, entitled "Historical Commentary" he has some good lines that made me laugh out loud. "A detailed commentary written to justify the unorthodox views contained in this book would be two or three times as long as the book itself, and would take years to complete; I beg to be excused the task." What a point to arrive at in a life spent immersed in scholarship! You've got all "the goods" but the complexity makes justification too large a task to contemplate let alone execute. Of course, I suspect the old pagan found himself being "drawn in" and thought, "I've done the most honest treatment I could of HOW they beat us, I'll be damned if I'm going to spend any more of my precious time justifying my conclusions TO them." From the other side of the chasm, it seems to me another example of how pagans (as an Israeli Foreign Minister said of the Palestinians) "Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity": redemption beckons. You've already done all the hard stuff, now you just have to stick with it and your intellect will do the rest for you. Nope. Off to greener -- and more sybaritic -- pastures, presumably.


"Perhaps the greatest hindrance to a reasonable view of Jesus is not the loss of a large part of his secret history but the influence of the late and propagandist Gospel According to John. Though it embodies valuable fragments of a genuine tradition not found in the Synoptic Gospels, the critical reservations that have to be made reading it are proved by the metaphysical prologue, which makes no sense whatever in the original context; by the author's willful ignorance of Jewish affairs; and by the Alexandrian Greek rhetoric unfairly ascribed to a sage and poet who never wasted a word."


Again, you can't do much better when it comes to inadvertent intellectual humour than giving God's Writing a bad review where you accuse God of willful ignorance of Jewish affairs. You literally couldn't make that up.


"Alexandrian Greek rhetoric? Who? Me?"


The "metaphysical prologue... makes no sense whatever in the original context" because, I suspect, it was Genuinely New as befitting the Creator. Not even so much Genuinely New as an elaboration of that which had been almost entirely overlooked for untold generations, the first chapter of the first book of Moshe. "Then began men to call upon the name of the YHWH" and that was pretty much it for God's Truth for literally hundreds of pages and thousands of years, until the first chapter of John's Gospel came along.


"Here, let me put it to you another way."


And then THAT was it for God's truth for literally hundreds of pages and (so far) two thousand years. Alexandrian Greek rhetoric. Oy.


Anyway, a highly recommended novel. For reading during the week, anyway.

___________________________________________________

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 #229 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Long-time reader and Yahoo

In good standing, Larry Hart

sent me a sneak preview of his contribution to Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2, "Following Larry" which speculates on his own Afterlife experience. He's asked me to use discretion so as not to give it away, so I'll just say that it's pretty good. He's going to be at SPACE as well! Oh, uh, I mean, he was at SPACE last week. Very nice…uh…seeing him again.


A nice letter from Alex Robinson dated 18 February:


Dear Dave,


I hope this letter finds you well. I was sparked to write (or more accurately write back) after stumbling across your blog on the internets and reading about how you have been ill. You've obviously made it to the post office and picked up this letter, so at least there's that.


I was also surprised and saddened to read about how Gerhard has decided to end your long term partnership, since you had seemed like the ideal team, both artistically and creatively. I'm sure I'm not the only one who envied the idea of having a background artist as good as he was. It would be nice to think of you guys parting amicably after all you've been through together, but given the pattern of departures at A-V I have my doubts.


Hey, Alex! Well, on my part "amicable" or "not amicable" didn't really enter into it. As I wrote earlier in the week, there were and are larger "creator's rights" issues at stake once Gerhard made it plain that he was leaving, so my only real concern is that it be done properly and ethically in case anyone in the future is in need of a template of the best way of doing these things. I don't think we were the ideal team but I definitely worked very hard to make sure that the professional relationship was structured in as close to an ideal (that is the most highly ethical) way that I could manage. I like to think that the fact that Gerhard stuck it out for the duration and for three years after meant that I did at least a tolerable job in that area. Also there's the fact that I got through more than two decades without the extremist left wing Comics Journal even once suggesting that I was exploiting him as A Comic-Book Worker. Considering they've accused me of virtually everything else, I'll take that as a credential.


I'm sure I've mentioned that my first issue of Cerebus was Gerhard's too (and it was called "Anything Done For the First Time Unleashes a Demon!" which definitely seems like the kind of coincidence [Coincidence?] you'd like, especially considering what an impact you guys had on my life and art).


It's somewhat belated, but I'm enclosing the latest issue of HUSKY for your reading pleasure. The odd part is that I always seem to send you these right before the new issue comes out (we plan on having #3 ready for the New York Comicon next weekend). If I was a more frequent correspondent this wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. Anyway, it's the next three chapters of my new graphic novel 2 COOL 2 B 4GOTTEN. I've actually gotten distracted from it, lately, with what is probably the equivalent of your drawing-cute-girls-in-Al-Williamson mode. I got stuck on 2 COOL so I decided to do something fun as a break: hot barbarian girl fighting various monsters in dark caves (using my patented "blackgrounds" technique). I haven't had this much fun drawing since I was twelve. I have a rough idea where the "story" is going to go but it's pretty simple (and no talking!) so it's pretty much just drawing for drawing's sake. I'll make sure to send you one when it's done (if you like).


I LIKE, I LIKE! 2 COOL is coming along nicely as well. Did you and Tony decide to do the tandem package to force each other to work? I mean, you'd sure hate to be the guy holding up the works if the other guy was finished a week ago. Of course, if you've gotten stuck on 2 COOL that sort of gives him license to get stuck (or "stuck") on Titanius. Early on, that would happen with Ger and I where I'd be looking at the pages on the wall and see that I was, say, four pages ahead, so I'd slow down figuring that I didn't have to get any more pages done until I saw that Ger was only a page behind. But Ger would be looking at the pages and going, "Well, I'm still only four pages behind, so I don't really need to pick up the pace until Dave is, say, six pages ahead." Also, he could futz around on two pages for a week and then suddenly rip through four pages in four days so I learned never to think of myself as having a comfortable lead. Even when I was two issues ahead, I'd still keep producing pages and sure enough by the time we got to issue 300 it was all I could do to stay a page or two ahead of him.


Yeah, I have to work on that cute-girls-in-Al-Williamson-mode thing on my next project after my secret project. I've already figured out how to incorporate it and I've started pulling pictures out of magazines when I run across them. I've got a great shot of Avril Lavigne. It's really true that drawing comics is so time-consuming you better make sure you enjoy what it is that you're drawing a good percentage of the time.


Monday: More Fun With Alex Robinson!

Tomorrow: SUNDAY!

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 #228 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

LAAAARGER DOINGS!

GETCHER LAAAARGER DOINGS

RIGHT HERE!

[FREE FOR THE ASKIN', GUV'NOR!]

LAAAARGER DOINGS!

This kind of ties in with what I was talking about yesterday: the fact that there are larger doings at stake most of the time that, to me, make individual human personalities largely if not completely meaningless. Jeff Tundis' faxed response to my last major 25th of the month "Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society" is next up in the pile, dated February 28 and actually faxed from his workplace. I had questioned his assertion that he "picks his battles" and asked what battles he thought were as important or more important than holding men and women to the same standards instead of always letting women off the hook. He replied something along the lines that he didn't see my dredging up old business with the Friends of Lulu as being worthwhile in terms of positive net effects or even potentially happy outcomes. It's an interesting way of looking at it: What good can this possibly do? What good result can this lead to?


But to me that was evasive, centering as it did on the fact that it made personalities and their emotional reactions more important than the larger ideas that are theoretically the underpinnings of civilized society. If pointing out that something is wrong makes someone unhappy, to me it's more important that the wrong be pointed out in the (however distant) hope that it might be made right either immediately, soon, or a hundred years from now depending on the level of intransigence opposing the observation. "Happy" and "unhappy" are minor side issues when you take it as a given (as I do) that accurate perception is always going to make you happier in the long term and inaccurate perception is always going to make you unhappier in the long term and that the reverse holds true in the short term.


Anyway, seeing that someone as intelligent as Jeff was capable of turning my argument sideways and skewing it so as to make happiness more important than right behaviour was what led me to ask him to include The Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast in each of the Blog & Mails. "If you're all going to ignore reality, I'll at least make sure that it's right there in front of you on a daily basis WHILE you ignore it and presumably that will make you, to one degree or another, unhappy, but maybe you will at least understand what I'm saying a little more clearly: i.e. It is more important for accurate perception to be given a fighting chance (however remote) of making a comeback in our society than to be concerned about x number of people being made unhappy on a daily basis." Put another way, unhappiness in and of itself isn't as important as the reason for that unhappiness. In this case: the daily enunciation of some of the inherent falsehoods which underpin feminism makes feminists unhappy because it makes the falsehoods more difficult to maintain and makes it less likely that feminists can continue to dominate society and to overrule common sense indefinitely as they have been doing up until now. But, to me that is obviously a good thing. The less likely I can make it that irrationality and inherent falsehood can continue to be maintained as the governing principles of our society indefinitely, then the better off our society is going to be in the long run even though that implies the inevitability of profound, short-term unhappiness for a large segment of our society. The larger point, it seems to me, is that we are now running society on the basis that there is nothing more unacceptable, nothing that demands greater redress and, in general, no greater crisis in our society than a woman being made to be unhappy. Anything that makes a woman unhappy (or angry) needs to be changed or amended so that the woman becomes happy. It's the reason that women who kidnap their own children in the midst of a custody dispute are always dealt with leniently, as are women who kill their own children (which women do exponentially more frequently than men). Clearly a woman who kidnaps her children is an unhappy woman. The problem isn't the kidnapping, the problem is her unhappiness. What we have to do is find out what made her so unhappy that she felt compelled to kidnap her children (probably a judge's ruling giving the father access to them) and eliminate it is so that she will be made happy instead of unhappy. The problem isn't that she killed her children, the problem is that she's unhappy. What we have to do is find out what made her unhappy (probably her husband) and eliminate it so she will be made happy instead of unhappy.


At the very least, by posting the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast on a daily basis I can make the point that This Is What All of You Either a) Destroyed My Career Over or b) Stood By and Let Others Destroy My Career Over. Up until now, that has been refuted by a sentiment that probably best expresses itself as: "Well, we destroyed your career because what you were saying made women unhappy and there is no larger or more unforgivable wrong in our society than making a woman or women in general unhappy." But, obviously, the larger point is that what I'm saying makes women unhappy because it points out where women are wrong and where women are taking society in fifteen wrong directions and that they can't refute that these are Impossible Things to Believe. It's a clear case of "killing the messenger". And that's wrong. Right? Are we not at least all in agreement that "killing the messenger" or "destroying the messenger's career" because we don't like the messenger's message—even though the message is just an irrefutable fact—is wrong?


Deafening silence.


I used slavery as an analogy: something that was deemed for centuries to be inevitable and an inherent good or at least a necessary evil and that it requires both courage and outside support if an inherent wrong is going to be undone. In his reply Jeff said, "However, if you are going to reference Lincoln…" Well, I wasn't referencing Abraham Lincoln. I was clearly talking about that first individual who had the guts to stand up in his place in the British Parliament and say "I think slavery is wrong" and that was a long time before Abraham Lincoln and it certainly wasn't in the United States. And I can pretty much guarantee that however primitive we might seen the context as being, at least no one was sitting there thinking, "But, if you end slavery, you're going to make women who have slaves for their maids and ladies-in-waiting and governesses and nurses unhappy."


Okay. Short post today. With the time left over why don't you all scroll back up to the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast and effortlessly refute them one after the other as a means of indicating to yourselves that destroying Dave Sim's career was The Right Thing To Do and not an example of "killing the messenger."

There's More for You

In Today's Blog &

MAAAIIIILLLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #227 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

MAIL'S IN.

THANK YOU, THING.

The latest two missives from Scott Berwanger of the still-in-progress Anubis mega-project fame. First one is dated January 27:


Dear Dave,

Here we go again! I sent a letter to an old musician friend of mine that cements my position as having left painting behind for good. I had to say the heck with it. Too hard to do it all. Just the way it is. You MUST be getting sick of all my vacillations by now, Dave. But I've hit a threshold with it, I think. I've cracked the master code. I've become a rock solid, uncompromisingly devoted comic-book artist.


My musician friend was one of the people who was encouraging me to paint, but I told him that I just had to let go of it. Forget painting shows, man! Sure, it would've been nice, but screw it! I just wanna make Anubis the best damn comic book possible at the expense of everything else I ever wanted to do artistically. And yes, I am almost equally dead set on doing it with micropress mini-comic boxed sets. I'm going to do everything I can to save up for that photocopier, use the color cover designs that I was gonna use for the self-published trade paperback version to emblazon the boxed volumes with, and hit small press shows as a mini-comics maniac! I don't know if it will ever get beyond the boxed sets into a conventional format or not, but I've promised myself that I will never surrender Adventure Comics' lawful claim in order to do it. I'm just gonna deal with what I've got going for me now, and we'll see what else comes to fruition.


Think about it…with my boxed sets, even though I will never achieve widespread recognition, I will be able to promote Anubis in real time! It just ain't healthy to be holed up for nineteen more years waiting to self-publish the whole enchilada at once. I'd probably go crazy writing and drawing a 3,000+ page story with no audience at all. Having even a very small audience is something I never dreamed I'd be able to do during my studio years. SO WHAT if I'm not artsy enough for the small press crowd. They'll just have to put up with me, `cause I'm in the game whether they like it or not. And hey! I'm easy enough to get along with, right? I even set up a special savings account for working towards the photocopier.


PS I believe the micropress has nearly as much potential as POD. I'm basically using the same tactic, and just going in the opposite direction with it. And I don't run the risk of becoming a sell-out doing it this way, either! I won't even have the chance to sell out! (good for me) I'll be the real deal mini-comics meal. So many of the bigwigs sell out…It's really disappointing to see.


The whole idea of "selling out" is an interesting one. I mean, has Frank Miller sold out with the Sin City and 300 movies? I haven't seen 300 but Sin City was so faithful a translation of graphic-novel-to-film that it verged on slavish. I mean, I wouldn't do it and from what I understand Frank had to be talked into it (if you call Robert Rodriguez basically capitulating to all of Frank's terms being "talked into" something: an ancillary question to whether it's "selling out" when you not only get a pile of money but you're also given absolute creative control) which would seem to indicate that there's at least a potential `gone wrong' quality there. I do tend to come down on your side of the fence, though. If it's just a comic book and stays a comic book you haven't sold out, if it becomes a movie, you have. We're in a distinct minority thinking that way, though.


Scott's next—and most recent—letter was dated February 11:


Dear Dave

Painting's a bust. I think I've let go for good finally. Just gonna try and spend as much time in front of the drawing board as I can. After all, I've got another shorter graphic novel in mind beyond Anubis! Better get crackin'. No time to fool with paint and canvas; I've got a life in comics to live (and a day job to hold down).

Best, Scott


Well, I hear you on that. I've just gone through a comparable situation. Two years in on my secret project and only halfway through it and suddenly I get this idea for what it is that I'm doing next after the secret project. Even assuming that I can do the other half of my secret project in, say, half the time it took me to do the first half (there's a good sentence in there somewhere), I'm still talking about a minimum of a year from now before I even start the next one. You've certainly got the location right: a life in comics is spent mostly in front of the drawing board if you're doing it properly. Not a lot of people would call that a life or even a "life" though. That also leaves open the question of whether you can stay in comics exclusively and still "sell out". Is getting CGC to slab and grade the Dave Sim file copies "selling out"? Is the idea of doing incentive editions of my secret project to get sales up "selling out"?


Good questions. No idea what the answers are.


Matt Dow went to all the trouble of e-mailing Jeff Tundis and getting Jeff to fax me a letter back on February 26. Hey, Matt, it's really not necessary since all the mail and faxes are answered in chronological order. You could have just sent a letter. Anyway, he had a number of questions about the Dave Sim/Gerhard split mostly centering on what happens to Gerhard between the time that I die and Gerhard dies, most of which (I hope) were answered to everyone's satisfaction at the end of last month here in the Blog & Mail. Matt's biggest concern was that Ger might be getting "pulled back in" to Aardvark-Vanaheim against his will because of his vested interest. I really don't think that's the case. I think one of the problems that people have trouble understanding is Gerhard's level of complete disinterest and complete disconnection from the comic-book field. Believe me, you Yahoos are infinitely more interested in and concerned about what happens with Cerebus than Gerhard is or (as far as I know) ever was. I suspect that the way Gerhard views the whole thing is as a job that he didn't really like but which had some redeeming features and that he progressively liked less and less the further he went along and which ultimately, for him, had virtually no redeeming features and which really came to an end in December of 2003 even though he continued to get paid and to work a much shorter week for three years after that. But, for those three years, mentally he was already gone. Ultimately, being able to live his life having absolutely nothing to do with Cerebus or me or the comic-book field became worth whatever price he had to pay or whatever he needed to give up in order to achieve it.


As far as I know most of my Last Will and Testament is still going to be completely valid and not require that much tinkering or revisiting just by performing a Gerhard-ectomy on it. Gerhard is just no longer part of the "post-Dave" equation: instead we go straight to the "winding things up" scenario. In terms of creators' rights, I have to factor him into my own thinking and my own planning, but it isn't about Gerhard as a person, it's about Gerhard as a concept. What is the Right Way for a person in my situation to behave towards a person in Gerhard's situation? Once again, I'm in the situation of blazing the trail and I have to take it seriously for the same reason that I think Elvis and the Beatles should have taken their situation and their business dealings more seriously. Elvis should have figured out a way to stay at Sun Records instead of just dutifully going to RCA because the Colonel and his mother told him he needed to go to RCA, as an example. It was Elvis' call to make and because he made what I see as the wrong call—choosing to make it the Colonel and his mother's call—pop music from then on took it as a given that you had to go with the big company and led to the corporate domination we see in the music field today. But that has everything to do with Elvis as a concept, Sam Phillips as a concept, Sun Records as a concept, Colonel Tom Parker as a concept, RCA Records as a concept and the fact that Elvis was the one in the driver's seat. `I have to get this right the first time out because I'm in the situation of deciding how the music business is going to be run from now on." It had nothing to do with the people AS people. Sam Phillips AS a person didn't begrudge Elvis AS a person going to RCA for one minute. But that didn't make going to RCA the right decision. And it certainly didn't make going to RCA the right decision because Tom Parker and his mother told him to do it.


Just by virtue of how corporate law is set up in Canada, Gerhard could have walked away with virtually nothing. But the fact that "Gerhard walking away with virtually nothing" being entirely legal wouldn't make it right. Far from it. And I'm the one in the driver's seat making those calls. "I have to get this right because I'm in the situation of deciding how artistic and business collaborations are going to be run in the independent comic book field from now on." I might very well make the wrong call but at least I'm aware that the call that I'm making regarding Dave Sim and Gerhard AS concepts is infinitely more important than just the immediate concerns of Dave Sim and Gerhard AS people


I suspect that the Larger Forces at work here—the ___s sticking their noses in where they either don't belong or they do belong: that's above me and out of my field of expertise—are basically trying for a major squeeze play: making use of my belief in creator's rights to try to engineer the destruction of Aardvark-Vanaheim in the name of feminism by compelling Gerhard to tear the company apart on the assumption that the company can't be maintained with half of its present resources and that—and there I hit the `I really don't know' wall, because that intrudes on what feminists at all levels perceive as being of significance and requires thinking (or "thinking") like a feminist i.e. Dave Sim is going to die of loneliness or something because his opposition to feminism has driven everyone away. A worst case scenario for people who are obsessive about needing to be up to their eyeballs in friends and relatives and emotions 24/7 but which strikes me as being like the "comfy chair" torture device in the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch. The problem is that I just don't see feminism as a large enough force that it needs to be taken either a) into account or b) seriously. It's more like a joke that only I seem to "get" right now: a kind of self-deluded trickster fox that assumes that everyone shares its frames of reference. In this case that if Dave Sim's life can be made unpleasant enough and empty enough in feminist frames of reference that he'll capitulate or, again, die of loneliness or something.


Frankly, the complete opposite is true. It's only when I allow people into proximity to me that the trickster fox out of wounded vanity at my not taking it seriously has an on-ramp to try and cause trouble which is why I've always strictly kept people in the category of concepts based on the larger idea of doing what is right and not doing what is wrong. Otherwise I'm just playing the trickster fox's game by the trickster fox's rules. When I'm in complete isolation there is no on-ramp, no access point and life becomes largely effortless. Or as largely effortless as it can be when you're working twelve hours a day.

Tomorrow: More Big Doings

___________________________________________________

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 #226 (April 25th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

One Dead Light Table

One Ticking Clock

Way Too Much Time on His Hands

And Dave Starts Obsessing:

"How Am I Going To SELL This Secret Project in

Today's Comic Book Market?"


[Oh, and by the way, happy 25th of the month:

Feminists Get a Free Ride

In Our Society

More on Friday]

Anyway, as luck would have it, my light table having died on Saturday, Monday Pete Dixon of Toronto's Paradise Comics and Paradise Conventions (check out both at www.paradisecomics.com) was coming up for a visit so that we could discuss how the auctions of the CGC-graded Dave Sim file copies of Cerebus were coming along (pretty good! One of the non-file copy Cerebus No.1's in the lowest grade we had, 3.0, went for $400 which is roughly what Overstreet has on it in 9.4) and go over some future strategies. We did that and then we got into some questions I had about "What works and what doesn't work in today's comic-book marketplace with selling new comic books?" I had been hearing a lot about incentive editions of comic books: basically if a retailer orders x number of copies of a new comic book, they get one limited edition copy of the same comic book with a different cover—essentially a rare collectible. Now, automatically most people are going to shut down having read that. That isn't a luxury I have, given that I have to figure out how to break what I see as a monolithic, largely unassailable and completely understandable indifference to independent comics in today's market. Just putting my secret project out there and hoping for the best falls under the heading of Wishful Thinking. To me, it makes more sense to deal with Reality. And, right now, a Comic Store Reality is incentive editions of "hot" comics.


The way it works is that the publisher guesses roughly what each retailer is going to order without the incentive and then makes the incentive dependent on ordering a number above that. Let's say the best guess is that the retailers will each order 20 copies. The publisher has to decide if the incentive threshold should be 30 copies or 40 copies or 50 copies. If you put the threshold too high you don't get enough retailers participating. If you set the threshold too low then you lower the resale value of the incentive copy because it's not as rare. I asked Pete how this works in practical terms with his ordering. It seems to work pretty well. Depending on who did the incentive cover (always a different artist from the one who did the regular edition cover and usually an artist with more comic store "cachet")(interesting), Pete can literally order 100 copies of a book that he's pretty sure he can only sell 40 of and, if he gets two incentive copies (at a one-incentive-for-every-50-regular-copies ordered threshold) he can make his money back just selling the two incentive copies on the aftermarket. In one sense he's "eating" 60 copies, but in another sense—a real world dollars and cents sense—the extra 60 copies are irrelevant. He can throw them out or give them away or sell them at a nickel each and he's still turning a good profit.


Essentially what the incentive program does is to make use of the Comic-Store Principles' Prime Directive:


Successful comic books immediately go up in value in the aftermarket


And uses that as "leverage" to get more copies of a given comic book into more comic stores. I asked Pete if there are instances where he had guessed he could only sell 40, he ordered 100 to get the incentives and he ended up selling more than 40. Yes, definitely. He could think of one book where he sold 75, other books where he sold out and had to reorder. Well, okay, that makes perfect "real world" sense, then. One of the big problems in today's market with money being universally tight in the stores is that you have to illustrate to store owners that they are not always right when they say that they know how many copies of something to order.


Which is tough because They ARE Good At It. Guessing how many they need of something, I mean. As someone said to me recently, quoting a Diamond rep, "Most comic-book stores are one bad business deal away from bankruptcy." If you've lasted longer than a year, you're entitled to be a little arrogant—like a Vegas gambler who never loses money at the blackjack tables. Whatever system you have, if you have a winning percentage you are the exception in the field rather than the rule. What someone figured out was that you need an effective crowbar to pry successful retailers out of that "I know how many I need" position and the incentive copy seems to be the way to do it.


But it doesn't work for independents or, at least, the track record for independents isn't nearly as good because there isn't built-in cachet—or the perception of built-in cachet—in order to get store owners to risk investment capital in ordering what they see as "too many copies". The key is that the incentive book has to go up in value immediately in order to offset even the possibility of losing money "over-ordering" books. The store owner technically pays 80 cents or a dollar for the incentive—the same amount he pays for the regular books—and then sells the incentive for, say, 75 dollars the week after it comes in. "Wolverine" or "Batman" or "Jim Lee" or "Michael Turner" (or, better yet, Wolverine/Batman by Jim Lee and Michael Turner) minimizes the perceived risk. And the rarity is only technically artificial. Do the math. If the incentive threshold is 50 copies and the total orders are 20,000 (which is actually high in today's market) then there are only going to be 400 incentive copies. 400 copies isn't as rare as say Action #1 but it is a very small number when measured against the combined audience of, say, Wolverine, Batman, Jim Lee and Michael Turner. Let's say 10,000 core enthusiasts chasing 400 books. That's what drives up prices and rising prices is Comic Store Principles #1 and 2.


So the question I'm facing is: is Dave Sim even remotely at the low end of that "cachet" category when it comes to his secret project? Given that the secret project isn't a super-hero comic and it isn't from Marvel (it's more of a Historical Polemic and we all know how white-hot Historical Polemics are with the crowd at, say, Wizard Los Angeles) it's difficult to know even what a reasonable threshold would be for an incentive copy. I asked Pete, having shown him the artwork I had done already, how many he would order for Paradise. 25, but mostly because he already knows me and because of the CGC file copy connection. How many did he think the average store would order? Five. Did he think an incentive copy program could push that number higher? He really didn't know but the way he said he really didn't know it seemed worlds away from WELL, GOSH I CAN'T SEE WHY NOT! I can make the threshold 10 but if my total orders are 3,000 that means there are 300 incentive covers and maybe only 1,000 core enthusiasts. I have a higher ratio of core enthusiasts but the hard numbers are smaller. And you have to factor in that my audience is probably 80% Reading Uber Alles types who wouldn't buy an incentive cover if their lives depended on it versus an 80% Investment Uber Alles percentage in the Wolverine, Batman, Jim Lee and Michael Turner camps.


And then he explained sketch covers to me. Sketch covers are to incentive books what incentive books are to the regular edition i.e. if you have to order 50 copies to get the incentive edition, you have to order 100 copies to get a sketch cover. Even Pete admits that it doesn't make sense. Presumably it should be the other way around, the sketch cover (being unfinished) should be less valuable than the finished cover on the incentive edition. But, again, you want to talk about Wishful Thinking (how things should work?) or about Reality (how things actually work)? Obviously I'm far more interested in Reality. Sketch covers: gold, Incentive covers: silver or bronze. Got it.


My best guess, mulling it over the next couple of days after Pete had left, was that this might be the Sketch Cover Era (which might only last for less than a year as the foil covers and hologram covers did in their respective "Eras") and if I could get a hot enough creator to do my sketch cover, I might be able to use the inherent cachet of the sketch cover (and the Pavlovian reaction it excites in most retailers here, today, at the end of the first quarter of 2007) to generate higher or slightly higher sales, my (entirely egocentric) assumption being my secret project will sell if the books are in the stores in quantity. No guarantee of that. Egocentric thinking—particularly in the independent end of things—is usually just Wishful Thinking called something else. If I had to place an actual bet, I think it would probably be more in the Wishful Thinking category, verging on the Severely Unlikely rather than a slam-dunk in the Reality category. And that was when I started thinking about ways that I might be able to get around that while I went about my regular office chores including weighing a package for mailing.


The weigh scale was dead. I couldn't believe it. I went over and checked the power bar. Yep, plugged in as tight as it can be plugged in. And that was when I looked at the wall socket the power bar was plugged into, and there the power bar plug was, the prongs mostly "out" rather than "in". I had obviously dislodged it while I was trying to extricate the 11 by 17 sheet from the photocopier.


D'OH!


A quick trip over to the small appliance place to get my light table back—"Heh! Turned out to be a blown fuse!" (you don't think I was actually going to admit to the truth do you?)—and I was back in business light-table wise with a couple of days left to go in Secret Project Week.


So that brings you all up to date and now I can actually get to the Mail Answering part of the Blog & Mail tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Smack! Bam! Pow! Hitting that old Mailbag!

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 #225 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

In our last stomach-churning episode,

Dave's light table died right in the middle of

his secret project, leading him to wonder

"How the heck am I going to SELL this thing

in today's market?"

The Pan-Corporation Year-Long Crossover Story used to be the exception back in the Secret Wars days when Jim Shooter invented it, then it became a fad and then it faded away for a while but now it's back and now it's the Carved In Stone Current Reality subject to Comic Store Principle rules. As sure as God made little green apples, Marvel and DC are working on year-long pan-company crossovers. If the story takes a year or two years to come out and the early issues continue to go up in value ("Civil War tie-in!") then the high-end has been attained. Civil War is officially a good comic. Two years from now, if those early issues continue to appreciate in value in the aftermarket and the hardcover and trade paperback collections sell well, Civil War will officially become a great comic. It's one of the reasons that I think the future of independent comics is in individual self-contained comic books.


"Feel free to argue that point if you wish…" but a core reality is that there's no way that the independents can compete in that context unless they do a genuinely engaging story and come out on time and on a more regular schedule than twice a year—and have enough money in reserve to keep them going while waiting for their value in the aftermarket to actually climb and (more importantly) to actually be noticed. Cerebus wasn't accepted in the Overstreet Price Guide until well into the 1980s and the values attached to the early issues continue to be in the "extreme lowball" category. My innovation of keeping all the early issues in print in trade paperbacks was deemed "anti-aftermarket"—I was killing my back issue values by keeping the stories in print and available—and caused the aftermarket to basically lock the 1980s prices in and to not revisit them. Which is why Cerebus back issues are genuinely scarce these days and command prices far higher than their "established' value.


As for "regular publication", our past independent history tells us it's possible but the Comic Store Reality is that it isn't likely or more than a handful of people would have done it and would be doing it. No comic store owner worth his salt is going to seriously believe that Indy Tales #1 is going to be followed anytime soon by issue 2 or that he will ever see issue 3 and he or she is not going to bet heavily in that direction. Certainly not to the tune of buying 20 or 30 or 40 copies. In a market which has as thin a profit margin as the comic-book field does the hard choice is between Reality and Wishful Thinking. The former gives a store a chance to keep going, the latter is a recipe for suicide.


What I had hoped would happen (that is, Wishfully Thought) when I championed independent publishing in the 1990s was that independent creators would learn to be reliable so they could compete with Marvel and DC: that reliability was the one chance we had to make a level playing field. Instead, the opposite happened; mainstream creators learned from and adopted the slovenly work habits of the independents and suddenly virtually everyone became unreliable. If a store is going to bet on an unreliable creator, he or she is going to bet on an unreliable creator who is drawing Spider-man or Batman and falling months and sometimes years behind schedule and even there, the speculation bug is only going to last so long. If a hot book is eight months late, Principle #1 has been met—the comic book has gone up in dollar value immediately—but Principle #2 has been violated. The comic book hasn't continued to go up in value and not only the aftermarket value is destroyed, so is the pre-market value: issue 2 isn't worth what the retailer would have to pay for it when it turns up, so the retailers are going to return issue 2 en masse without even looking at it when it comes in hanging on to a small fraction of the original order for the only market for the book: the most devoted collectors who don't care how late it is, they have to have it (a smaller and smaller minority of customers).


My new advocacy of the individual self-contained comic book stems from the choice between Reality and Wishful Thinking. It removes the latter to the extent that that's possible. The retailer doesn't have to wonder what issue 2 will do while contemplating issue 1. The retailer doesn't have to wonder if it's actually going to come out. It is out. It exists. You don't have to "trust me" on that as you would if I told you I was going to do a bi-monthly series where you have to order issues 2 and 3 before you've even had the chance to see how issue 1 sells. And I hope it removes Wishful Thinking from the creator/publisher side of the equation, as well. You invest x amount of time and energy in a single comic book and then you find out what the response to it is. If it tanks you do something else. If it does okay or really well, you can expand it into a graphic novel or do sequels or just print some more.


Of course, the individual self-contained comic book brings its own logistical problems with it. Mr. Boyle objects to the $3 comic that represents only 15 minutes of entertainment. But I think I'm safe in saying that that's pretty much a fixed commodity as well, a Comic-Store Reality. Try selling a comic book with over-abundant use of text (relative to the perceived "right" amount of text) and you'll find yourself dismissed just as readily for your book taking too long to read as for it not taking long enough to read. If you challenge the store owner/collector/reader's suppositions—in terms of content, story-telling, theme—you limit your sales. "Too many words" is the kiss of death for a comic book. "Feel free to argue that point if you wish…" (i.e. no literate person should ever see any comic book as containing "too many words") but do so at your own peril. If you can push the 15 minutes to 20 minutes or 25 minutes you are scratching the reader's itch for "more value for the money". Push it beyond the 25 minutes and you are encroaching on his comfort zone and taking up too much of his time. The name of the game, now more than ever, is "delivering the goods". The collectors and readers don't know what they want, but they'll know it if and when they see it. And if the comic book isn't—not only A super-hero but one of the High Iconic Marvel and to a lesser degree DC super-heroes—the odds are that 98% of comic store patrons won't even look at it even if you do make it to the shelf. So it seems to me a nice long comic book (not TOO long, but longer than the average Marvel comic) at a reasonable price (the same as the average Marvel comic or only fractionally more expensive) strikes the right competitive note: more reading value for the money, a self-contained package so there's no chance of future disappointment and (hopefully) those two offsetting a lack of colour.


There are ancillary considerations that have caused me to revise parts of my secret project that would have been deemed innovative visually but which were unfamiliar territory for the average comic-book reader. My decision was: I'm already swimming upstream by being an indy, there is already massive sales resistance because it's not a Marvel or DC book. Conclusion? Don't make things needlessly difficult for the reader, don't make your work difficult or impenetrable, don't venture too far outside of the accepted comic book "tropes" don't occupy too much of his time so that he wants to give up or too little of his time so he feels cheated. Whether we want to admit it or not—and I think the only sensible thing to do is to admit it—the track record of independent comics being roughly 98% unreliable in all of those areas (not enough value for the money, too many words, not enough words, too esoteric story-telling, not enough content, uninteresting themes, irregular schedule) is something every (EVERY!) independent comic, as a consequence, carries with it into Diamond Previews. As an independent you have to compete with a clear awareness that—because of the almost 100% failure rate: the unreliability of your predecessors and peers—you are metaphorically down by five runs and have two strikes against you before you even get up to the plate. The consensus view in the environment is that you and your book are unnecessary without even having to look at what you've done. You basically are going to have one swing at one pitch and you're either going to make it to first or you're going to be out. Don't fritter away that one swing of the bat by doing something that is pretty much guaranteed to rub people the wrong way.

Tomorrow: Now that I know THAT what do I know? And how does it help me sell copies of my funnybook?
___________________________________________________

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 #224 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

More on the NEW WORLD

OF THE DIRECT MARKET

And what I see this as meaning for

My Secret Project I've been

working on for two years

Cerebus has proved itself in the "aftermarket value" category over the years, but the secret project isn't Cerebus and it isn't a continued series so I'm definitely staring down the barrel of "Does a Dave Sim indy comic have aftermarket value or is it only Cerebus?" You can do a monthly comic book reliably and on-time for 26 years, but the ultimate question is going to be the same: what have you done for us lately? I can point to the Cerebus trade paperbacks and their perennial sales, but only if I'm selling a new trade paperback, or a new trade paperback that is "like Cerebus" which I'm not.


Leaving that imminent catastrophe aside, there is a major schism in the field, it seems to me, that has taken place, "major" to the extent that the opposing sides, "indies" and "mainstream" don't even have common frames of reference in which to discuss much of anything. "Indies" have gotten more entrenched in the view that comics should be exclusively a reading experience, taking it as a given that the more you can eliminate speculation and collectibility the better the market will become. But the indies -- and the core belief that it is better to read than to collect a comic book -- are and always have been the branch and not the tree. At one level or another, the vast majority of comic-store patrons know the value of what they are buying by whether or not the comic they bought last week is selling for more money than they paid for it the week after. It seems to me less pertinent to automatically disagree with Mr. Boyle in dutiful "Reading Uber Alles" fashion (which I suspect most independent publishers and creators would and which Mr. Boyle anticipates when he says "Feel free to argue the point if you wish...") than to recognize that it's always the height of foolishness to disagree with reality (see "The Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast").


Principles of Comic Store Reality

1) Successful comic books immediately go up in dollar value in the aftermarket

2) The most successful comic books continue to go up in value in the aftermarket while less successful comic books level off or decline in value

3) Fewer and fewer comic books are in either category these days

4) Virtually all comic books in either category are from Marvel (and, as Mr. Boyle puts it, DC to a lesser degree)

Mr. Boyle's line in his article, "DC to a lesser degree" is significant. It represents a dramatic retrenchment in perception from even five years ago. It's no longer "Marvel and DC and Imageƒ...and Dark Horse to a lesser degree" as it would have been through most of the 1990s and the early part of the twenty-first century. If you're an indy and Mr. Boyle has made you feel bad, maybe what he had to say about Image will cheer you up:


There was a great moment at Comedy Central during an awards show they did for themselves. They started by showing clips of everything that made Comedy Central what it was to that point; every clip was of South Park. If Image held those same awards, Robert Kirkman's Invincible, Walking Dead and Battle Pope would be the only clips shown. Image moves into 2007 as a company without a direction. They've launched one creator-owned series after another until the publisher now looks like a clearinghouse for unknown talent. Yes, such talent should have a place to go but as I stated about a comics store in this same column some months ago, a store without a focus is a store without an identity. Robert Kirkman: [graded] A. Image: C-


I mean, "ouch", eh? The universal perception is reverting to what it was in the early 1970s; to what it was in the pre-Direct Market days. There is Marvel, to a lesser degree there is DC and then there's everything else which is pretty much not worth discussing (then: Charlton, Gold Key and Archie). What has taken place is Principles #1 and 2 Writ Large. Only those publishers whose books go up in value on the aftermarket are on the Big Radar Screen. Ergo, Comic Store Reality consists of Marvel and, DC to a lesser degree. Consequently Independents not only don't exist for most stores, they don't even have the advantage of regular publication and newsstand sales which their pre-Direct Market predecessors like Charlton and Gold Key had or regular publication which the early Direct Market titles (like Cerebus and Elfquest) took as a necessary "given" in order to be granted space and attention in marginal comic-book stores, "quirky" stores: stores outside the paradigm where readability was given credence secondary to aftermarket value ("sort of quirky"), equal to after-market value ("really quirky") or greater credibility than after-market value ("Twilight Zone quirky").


Given that these are the Comic Store Realities that are emphatically reasserting themselves after thirty years of the "tree" being bullied by the "branch" into believing that "comic books as investments" was a shameful way to look at the medium, it seems clear that I can't just "release" my secret project and just, you know, hope for a good sale. Just by being an indy creator and a indy publisher I'm (I think justifiably) tarred with the same negative indy brush: I'm swimming upstream against the direct market tide. If I want an honest answer to "What should I do?", the sincerely honest answer, founded in the unshakeable and now reasserted reality of the Principles of Comic Store Reality would be: You want to be noticed? Go to Marvel and do a really cool Wolverine mini-series.


And, truth be told, I see a lot of that in Diamond's weekly Direct Market "snapshot" newletter, Diamond Dateline these days: creators I've never heard of who are using a Marvel or DC credential to try and sell an independent or self-published book. I don't think it works. The overall momentum of the market is towards a Marvel comic being real -- what could be more real, more verifiable than something that goes up in value immediately after you buy it? -- and therefore the creators of any Marvel comic are real, the degree of that reality being directly attributable to the extent that their work goes up in value immediately in the aftermarket. But that reality for the most part is not transportable or extendable. If you do your Marvel project and then do an independent project, you exist and then you cease to exist -- independent comics don't go up in value. You basically "vanish" like an infant's game of peek-a-boo: if I can't see you, you don't exist. If you move from the DC section or the Marvel supplement in Previews to the General Comics & Graphic Novels section I can't see you because I don't look back there. Then you do Batman and suddenly you exist again. I SEE you!


So the question becomes, "How do you do a commercially viable project in that context?" And, again, the frames of reference are so radically divergent that there's no way to even communicate as an "indy" addressing the "mainstream" because they mean something very different by the term "context". To the market, the vast majority of the market -- probably 90% or more -- the answer is obvious. You do a Marvel comic and make it really good. To even discuss the idea of a project being commercially viable that isn't a Marvel comic automatically pushes you completely off the radar screen.


You don't "get it" with all that "not getting it" entails.


"As a collector, fan or store owner, I can sympathize with you "not getting it" and if I'm the compassionate type, I might commiserate with you for a while, but ultimately you're going to have to face the fact that you're like King Canute ordering the tide not to come in. The tide is coming in. Your indy book because it is an indy book isn't going to sell very well. You can try to discuss an indy project with me, but if the "me" you are talking to is a comic-book fan, collector or store owner, while you're talking about your esoteric comic book, my mind is thinking about Batman, Spider-man, Thor, the Hulk. I'll try and agree with you to be polite, but I'll cite a Marvel or DC title in doing so."


The Mass Direct Market Mind doesn't accommodate Batman at its high end and modern-day versions of Elfquest and Cerebus at its low end as it used to. There's no longer even the urge to pay lip service to "Celebrating Diversity" or to feel guilty when the rising tide floats only Marvel's (and to a lesser degree DC's) boats. Now the high end is Civil War and the low end is Wonder Woman. Reality is reality and reality is never a thing you should feel guilty about.


Tomorrow: More Good News!


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 #223 (April 22nd, 2007)

Package of photos and a nice letter from Alexandre Tremblay of St.-Jean-Richelieu dated Feb. 20.


Dear Dave Sim,

I meant to write this letter and to send the enclosed package, a (great) deal sooner. I'm afraid that procrastination was raised to a new level, as the pictures included are those from the first Bible reading that you did last summer. You might call the laminate a very late "end of Cerebus" gift. I like to call the picture: "God's Chair". (Don't worry, by God I do not mean Dave Sim. It would also be fitting to call it: "Dave Sim's chair", but that would be a tad less artistic).


Another reason why I did not write sooner is that I always have a million things to write you about, but I don't take the time to actually do it. So I will just write this short letter, but at least send you the pictures.


The regular pictures will, I presume, be at least of some use for the Cerebus Archive. I will be keeping my own copies, as they may be useful later. I will be attending University in the near, near future, studying in psychology, driven by the sole intent of having "official" credentials to put into effect my plan to reorganize and revolutionize the world of education. If God wills it, you may, before the end of your days, witness the Dave Sim Wing of an institution, at which point the picture of my brother, you and I would proudly hang upon its walls. (Ya gotta think big!)


The only point that I will bring up in this letter is again the Cerebus Archive. We bought Collected Letters after the Bible reading (we ran into your friends at Now and Then Books). So my brother Fred and I just wanted to say, (in regards to the custodian aspect of the Archive, and the related difficulties of work visas and such), that we are both Canadian citizens and would at some point in the future be glad to take up the job of protecting the Archive.


As ever thank you for your time.


Before I forget, let me mention that Now & Then Books, the World's Oldest Comic-Book Store is still in business as of this writing (April 5). Give Dave Kostis a call when you get a minute to congratulate him. The betting was that he couldn't make it past Christmas.

NOW & THEN BOOKS - 519-744-5571





Well, the "Dave Sim Wing" of an institution seems further and further away three years after I was writing those letters, Alexandre. Thank you for the laminate, over-sized picture of the rocking chair that I used at the Registry Theatre and the other smaller photos as well. It was kind of poignant getting them and looking at the picture of the "crowd" that first time out where I had thought, well, you have to start small and build from there -- little realizing that the eight people who showed up was going to be the largest turnout for one of the readings and that two of them would leave about fifteen minutes in. Seriously Failed Experiment was what I was thinking looking through the photos (also funny that you would take a photo of The Regency Apartments -- obviously for the High Society connection, however they're only a few years old -- if you had told anyone why someone from Quebec was taking the picture they wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about). I had been really sure that the "No Preaching" Scripture Readings were a good idea, that it would work. In retrospect it might have worked somewhere else but not in Kitchener. In Kitchener, if you're interested in scripture you go to church and get it there. And, as I discussed last week, I'm the only person who sees scripture as being narrative. The only reaction anyone could have would be "wow, too many disconnected anecdotes all at once." People referred to it as Bible Study, again conforming to the idea that what you do with scripture is to grab a disconnected anecdote, put it under the magnifying glass and study it, syllable by syllable.


I left the chair and the carpet there for the Registry Theatre to use. Community Theatre isn't exactly known for having enormous budgets for set decoration. I still plan to continue with the readings, but Trevor's just going to record them here at the house and, since I'm not having to rent the premises, we can do it at something less than the grueling three-hour sessions I was doing at the Registry.


But, it's a funny thing how these things work. A couple of weeks after your reminders of my Seriously Failed Experiment came in, I got a letter from David W. Johnson and inside there were two $1,000 money orders for the Food Bank of Waterloo Region with a little parenthetical note that he hoped some of the money could be used for hygiene and showers. I mailed them to Katharine Schmidt at the Food Bank along with a suggestion that she might want to share some of it with Joe Mancini at The Working Centre where they do have a clothing/hygiene/hot showers program for the disadvantaged as per David's request. She faxed me back that that's what she would do and wished me good luck with getting the scripture readings going again.


$2,000 for the poor of Waterloo Region. Not bad for a Seriously Failed Experiment.

___________________________________________________

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 #222 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________




Meanwhile Back at

SECRET PROJECT

HEADQUARTERS

In a fortified bunker

Somewhere beneath

Southern Ontario


So, the secret project went really well this time out, for two of the three weeks, anyway. First of all I sat down and went through all of the text that I had and started breaking it down into pages and figured out that, yes, I will be bringing it in at exactly 48 pages. So that made a big difference in working on it. Now it was just a drawing exercise, trying to make each page look the way it did in my head. For the past two years, a good deal of the work on it consisted of sitting and staring and trying to envision what the finished package was going to look like and assessing whether the drawing I was looking at fit the bill or not. I was up to page 23 or so and that's just about the outside limit of what I can do without having my paranoia about pacing overwhelm everything else that's going on. Some material had to be cut and those were long days. What's my best shot? I had been living with all of it for two years so all of it seemed like an inextricable part of the project itself. No, no, what's my BEST shot? That's a different way of looking at it, establishing a pecking order. By the time I had the best captions lined up, it was just a matter of cutting the ones that weren't in the upper echelon (and trying not to re-read them too closely: I'm sure that when a hockey coach cuts a defenceman from the roster he doesn't make a point of going to watch the guy practice the next day).


And, as I say, at that point it was a drawing exercise, apart from digging up the last few items of photo reference that I needed. There was a couple that I thought were going to be easy to find and…four hours later I was still combing the library and used bookstores. I was torn at that point between continuing to look and going back to the studio and actually drawing some pictures. I wanted to emphasize that quality of it just being a drawing exercise and to have all of the photo reference in-house. No more library or used bookstore for me until this puppy is DONE. Well, I'm still not at that point, so I'm shifting gears when I get these Blogs & Mails done and drawing what I do have photo reference for and postponing the final photo hunt until I've drawn everything that I have in hand.


Hit a glitch on page 26. Two quotes that my Tech Support Guy had come up with—which were great, just what I was looking for—were just not reading right. They smelled funny. You read a piece of text the hundreds of times that I've read these pieces of text and it's like a sour note on the piano. You can't cover it up. It's either the right note or it isn't. Particularly when it comes time to draw that page which is what had happened. Page 24 and 25 went quickly, but I just couldn't bring myself to start page 26. I contacted TSG and asked him if he could do an Internet check on the two quotes and at least see if the books they were supposedly from actually existed (he's strictly volunteer so I wasn't going to ask him to find the books and read the whole damn things). He got back to me a day or two later. Sure enough, both quotes were hoaxes and notorious ones at that. Two years in is a hell of a time to find out something like that, but it's better to find it out before publication than after publication, right?


There wasn't much work left to do on a two-page spread so I got that done in less than a day which put me at 30 pages (not sequential pages, but 30 pages nonetheless) done of the 48. Which gave me the sense of being "almost done" but I had to remind myself that each page was taking an average of four to six days to do. This wasn't like Cerebus where, if I had 18 pages to go, I had roughly 18 days to go. Factoring in the Blog & Mail days and the outside work days, I would be VERY lucky to be done in two or three months and that's only if nothing went seriously wrong in the interim.


Which was a really stupid thing to even think to myself and a week ago Saturday (week two of the three weeks) I was photocopying one of the drawings and hand-feeding the 11 by 17 sheet into the office photocopier when the sheet pulled sideways and promptly jammed the whole works. It took about a half hour to even get AT the sheet of paper, another half hour to tear it in half (so it would be two separate problems) and about twenty minutes per half sheet to extricate them and get the photocopier put back together again. I managed to get the enlargement done without further misadventure and slapped it down on the light table and clicked the toggle switch. No light. The toggle switch had been "tetchy" for years but there was something about it at this point that was dead—as if it had never even heard of the word "electricity". I checked to see if the light table was fully plugged in to the power bar on the floor. Yep. But still dead. I felt like a racehorse at the Kentucky Derby whose chute "at the post" had failed to open. The whole point of the project is absolute photo-realism, not a line out of place, faithful reproduction. For that you need a light table. I tried changing the bulbs. Nope that wasn't it. Tried putting a flashlight in instead. Not bright enough. Well that was it. With a full week to go in my painstakingly amassed secret project working days I was dead in the water. Okay, maybe God is trying to tell me something. I mean, besides "Stop doing this story" which might be the message I was failing to get all along. So I decided to sit down at the computer and do the back cover and inside front cover which were not technically part of the story, but they did need to be done at some point. I decided to make the back cover something a little more traditional, something that would help explain the contents and hopefully get a comic shop browser to seriously consider buying a copy (or at least getting them to look inside). At that point, I thought, "Two years into this I should probably be starting to think more about these kinds of things instead of just barreling through the drawing exercise that remains." It's a very different market these days. The latest issue of Comics & Games Retailer wouldn't come in for another week, but in an article entitled "A growing community: state of the Comics Industry 2007" Phil Boyle seemed to sum up what I had been sensing in his section on Independents:


Take a moment to consider a discussion that rears its head every once in a while—collecting vs. reading. Even if a new DC comic is not that great, chances are it will be more valuable than an independently published comic two years from now. That value may be 50 cents versus birdcage liner, but mainstream comics tend to hold higher value in most collector circles. (Feel free to argue that point if you wish but look around at the booths at the next convention you visit and see what has value and what is missing). This means that now the independent comic is strictly reading material with no further value which, at $2.99 a copy, makes it a very bad entertainment choice by the formula fun time/dollars spent. A movie is about $9 for two hours (or six hours if you show up early for the commercials)—a comic is about $3 for 15 minutes (or six hours if you read all the ads in a Marvel comic). The comic is two and a half times more expensive as an entertainment form, which means in turn that it's becoming a much harder sell in today's techno-oriented market. This leaves indies fighting an increasingly steeper slope as more begets more and right now, Marvel, and DC to a lesser degree, have more PR, more releases, more shelf space, and more recognition in the mass market. Overall grade: D, and falling.


I took my light table to a local small appliances fix-it shop nearby, wondering if I should just skip that and order a new one. Meanwhile, I had a lot to think about when it came to whether there was even potentially a place for my secret project in today's market.


On Monday: More on Today's Comic-Book Market

Tomorrow: Goodbye to the Registry Theatre


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 #221 (April 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________


Quoth the Contact:

What OTHER Marvel

Character would you like to

do, Dave?


And there I draw a blank. I had an idea for a Spider-Ham story. It's really the only time I've had an idea for a Marvel or DC character. Also, what character I'm going to do, to me, is a minor element that comes much later in the negotiation process. "Real world" Dave is once again trying to figure out a way to work in the "work-made-for-hire" context but tweaking it a bit. That part has to be decided before we start talking about specific characters. "Ask not what Dave Sim can do for the Scarlet Witch, Ask what the Scarlet Witch's bank account can do for Dave Sim". Or something like that.


When I suggest that maybe I could just draw something someone else would write he quickly asks who I would want to work with. I laugh and tell him, "Stan Lee," and the phone connection hollows out completely. Oxygen go bye-bye. He's trying not to say it—"You and everyone else on Planet Comic Book"—but I'm aiming too high. But something gets established for me right there. We're thrilled to possibly work with Dave Sim but you're not on that level of importance. Again, that's the point that I got to with DC. Who else? What about Chris Claremont? I laugh again and tell him that he's trying to find my fanboy hot button—the Marvel character I want to do, the writer I want to work with. He sincerely apologizes because it sounds as if I'm accusing him of something unethical. No, not at all. You have your artillery. If you think something is going to hit me below my waterline, you're sort of obligated to take your best shot. I would guess that most of the time it works. You hit the right character or the right collaborator and most guys will fold like a cheap suit. He laughs, realizing that there's nothing personal in this. This is business and this is negotiation and I haven't got a hot button in any conventional sense but if he thinks he can find one, he's welcome to keep probing.


The overall sense, what he seems to be conveying to me, is that "tweaking is do-able". Marvel does "tweak". There are several instances of Marvel "tweaking" that he describes, some in general and some in more specific terms. That still leaves open the question of whether Marvel will "tweak" for Dave which (at least as I found at DC) was a different question entirely. Obviously Marvel would "tweak" for, say, Frank Miller, but, in 2007, Dave Sim is definitely aware that he is not in Frank Miller's league. He assures me that, at least in the Direct Market context, there is an awareness at Marvel that Dave Sim agreeing to do a Marvel character would be an [insert nebulous positive term]. A "coup" would be stretching the point, I think. My contact is a Cerebus fan, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that this fact is distorting the reality of the negotiation. The "awareness at Marvel" might be his alone. He might think that it would be a positive to have Dave Sim do a Marvel character. That doesn't mean that Marvel as a corporate entity can see it as any reason to "tweak" anything in a major way for a creator one of their employees is enthusiastic about and who is definitely not Frank Miller. As I say, from what I can see, that's ultimately what happened with DC. It was, at least theoretically, a big deal for Bill Willingham to have Dave Sim do a Fables short story. I was on a short list he gave to Shelly Bond, his editor, who was at least portraying herself as thinking it was a big deal, but that portrayal is a big part of the corporate job description. I got a big pile of Fables graphic novels and comic books and a nice handwritten note from Shelly which had essentially the same tone as the notes I used to get from Jeanette Kahn. As long as we all stay ostensibly enthusiastic and positive maybe Dave Sim will get swept up in that and just sign on the dotted line and capitulate without a peep because he's really just a fanboy who wants to work at DC and he's having such a good time talking with us.


What we're sort of at loggerheads about, my contact at Marvel and I, is that what I want to do is to write and draw and publish my own stuff and the Blog & Mail seems to be helping sales, so I have to maintain that for the foreseeable future (I mean, I dearly love doing this, you all know that) and what that adds up to is that I have four or five days a month to do outside work basically for money to supplement the trade paperback sales. I get $800 or $900 for a commission that takes me two or three days to do. Two days, preferably. That's for a single picture. If Marvel wants me to do a multi-page story (five to eight pages), well, a comic-book page takes longer to do than a single illustration, substantially longer. The odds are it will take up four or five days just to do one good comic-book page. I already know that Marvel isn't going to pay me $1600 to $1800 a page. So the dispute comes down to the likelihood that the powers that be at Marvel are going to look at what I'm making doing commissions and decide that I'm not worth half that. Which is kind of funny if you think of it.


At some point in this situation, Gerhard had to come into the office for something and he told me he had gotten an e-mail from Mark S. who was really quite ardent about wanting a drawing of Cerebus and Yoda as drinking buddies and Ger tells me that he tried to warn Mark how I feel about Yoda and not to hold his breath. Am I really that far out of step? I have nothing against Yoda personally (I never met the Muppet!) and what I do have against him is the Frank Oz /Fozzie Bear voice. It still perplexes my real world self. Usually Hollywood is scrupulous about keeping those kinds of associations out of big budget films. It's the reason that most actors known for situation comedies can't get work in serious cinema. No one wants to have millions of dollars at stake and have the entire audience wrenched out of the movie at an inopportune moment because The Fonz or Barney Fife or Ed Norton just walked onto the screen. And yet nobody tells Frank Oz to use something WAY WAY far AWAY from Fozzie Bear or any of the other Muppets. But that has nothing to do with the look of Yoda which is great. Any qualms I had about anything having to do with Star Wars visually are swept away by the fact that Al Williamson drew the newspaper strip. So I call Mark and we talk it over and I explain what I'm getting for a commission these days and I say that it sounds as if he isn't talking in that ballpark and, no, he isn't. But then he suggests that I just do it in pencil—he prefers pencil anyway—and that he'll offer me $400. Hey, sold. You're in the "on deck circle."


Well, you know, I'm willing to bet that that isn't far off Marvel's top rate for a fully penciled and inked multi-panel comic-book page that I am duty bound to change if anyone from the janitor on up doesn't like anything about it. So like I say, we're at loggerheads. And then I get a fax from a guy who has just read the correspondence on Al Nickerson's Creator's Rights page between me and DC and he's very jovial but perplexed. "What are you negotiating with Time-Warner for? I thought you published your own stuff. What's the relationship between you and Aardvark-Vanaheim, anyway?" Which has Interesting Timing written all over it. He has a script for a graphic novel and would I be interested in drawing three sample pages that we could use to pitch it to various companies? He offers a straight 50% of all profits. Well, as I wrote back to him, no. 50% of nothing is nothing and all that he has to offer right now is nothing. I explain (and it's the first time I've assessed it) that it only seems polite to me to entertain offers of work. Marvel and DC are the biggest comic-book companies in North America, so when they contact you, the least you should do (as a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying comic-book person) is to hear them out. But, as I explained, they really aren't in the ballpark of what I'm getting paid and my best guess with the current negotiation with Marvel is that there is a chance I would do a cover for them (assuming that their rates for covers are substantially higher than the rates for interior pages and that they would offer me their top rate) because I could justify it as a single illustration and, hopefully, get it done in a day or two. But even that possibility seems remote when I can get $400 for a pencil drawing with no possibility of being asked to redraw it because the editor thinks the "right arm looks funny". Then I thanked him for his interest, wished him good luck with his project and went back to what I was doing. So another fax comes through from him and this time he admits that he's a movie producer but right now all anyone cares about in Hollywood is graphic novels (this was the third week of 300 being at #1 at the box office), so everything he does now in pitching a movie, he packages as a graphic novel. He didn't want me to actually draw an entire graphic novel, he just wanted me to draw three pages that he could present as being from a graphic novel and we would split the profits 50-50 on any deal that he could make.


Am I the only one who finds this terrifically amusing? I imagine so.


So I write back to him that I'd be willing to read his script for two days and charge him $500 a day for two twelve-hour days where I'd read it, analyze it and make suggestions as a "famous graphic novelist" (you can Google me if you want) if he makes me Co-Producer. Basically what I did for Brian Moore on his Demon Joe screenplay for free. Since that's all that he really needs is "graphic novel cachet" why not get more direct about it? He could then read my suggestions and decide if he wants to buy another two days next month when I'm into my next week of doing outside work. So, latest fax I got from him, he's contacting his "money people" and recommending that they go for it.


And, at that point, it was back to my secret project.


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 #220 (April 19th, 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.

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 You May Remember from

Yesterday's Thrill-Packed Episode,

Dave has been playing telephone tag with

his contact at Marvel…

Evidently he does have a rate offer that he's gotten approval on from "upstairs" so I just have to wait and see what the number actually is. Haven't heard back all week and again I'm in the situation of having to decide whether to give him the benefit of the doubt or if this is the mainstream comics pressure tactic again of trying to figure out how desperate you are by how long they can keep you hanging. Hm. How desperate am I? I got in absolutely no money in the entire month of February so I was in a different frame of mind back in March when we first started talking and now I've just had two very big weeks of trade paperback orders, last week in March, first week in April (THANK YOU, RETAILERS!) and Monday I got in the first two big cheques from Diamond of the Dave Sim Solo Administration (THANK YOU, DIAMOND!). It's a very awkward way to make a living. Revenue dries up, so I start thinking about ways to make money and sending out metaphorical messages in a bottle and just as those reach their intended recipients, I get a nice big dump of money and orders and I think, "I don't want to do any commissions or any outside work. Sales are fine. Revenues are fine. Let's stop doing the Blog & Mail or any outside work and just work on the secret project. The books sell themselves." Of course then revenues dry up again. And there's no discernible pattern. Ger would print out all the crunched numbers for each of the trades, month-by-month. How many sold and what month they sold in. Bar graphs showing overall sales month-to-month. If you set the computer on "random play" I don't think you could get a less predictable sales profile.


The problem with the Marvel situation…well, there are a couple of problems already. First of all, I said, I think what went wrong at DC was I treated their work-made-for-hire contract as an initial overture. When Shelly Bond's assistant told me I could direct any questions to so-and-so in the Legal Department, I figured, okay, this is the guy I talk to about what I have problems with: here's what I'd like changed. Nothing was "do-able". End of negotiation. Bye-bye, DC. So I suggest to him, Why don't you fax through the Marvel contract and put a check-mark next to any non-negotiable point. I'll read what you have checked off and if I can't live with them, we'll call it a day. So he faxes through the Marvel contract. Nineteen, count `em, nineteen honking pages. Nothing checked off. So the next time I talk to him he says that he didn't know which clauses would apply in my case and which wouldn't so he decided to just fax everything over from their boilerplate work-made-for-hire contract on up. "Oh, well," I said. "Whatever else happens I'll have a lot of material to talk about on the Blog & Mail." I would describe the ensuing silence on the other end of the line as "pointed".


One of the problems is that what I pictured doing was Spider-Ham. I have a definite approach in mind but Marvel has a Submissions Waiver form (supplemental to the 19 pages, it came in the next day masquerading as an afterthought) which you have to sign which says that this indemnifies them if you pitch them an idea that they're already working on. There's a lot of trust involved in signing something like that. I mean, what's to keep them from CLAIMING that they were working on that idea already after they read the proposal? BWS pitched them on his Hulk graphic novel about Bruce Banner having been molested as a child. They rejected it, but a year or two later it turns up as a Jim Shooter script. Yes, that was a long time ago and, yes, that was a different Marvel administration. It's certainly possible that Jim had already been working on that but, even if you allow for that possibility, obviously the BWS story is going to be that much better just because it's BWS. And BWS gets bupkis.


So, I faxed my contact "I really can't sign this, so how about instead I'll tell you half of my idea, the half where there's no jurisdictional risk to Marvel at stake. What I want to do is Spider-Ham but it's a completely different approach to what Marvel has done with the character. So what I'm proposing is that Marvel gives me a stake—nothing huge—but a stake in my version of Spider-Ham and if it turns into a series or Hollywood wants to make a movie out of it, I make a small percentage. If you do YOUR version of Spider-Ham I don't get anything." Given that it's going to cut into my own writing and drawing time and I'll probably be making substantially less money, I have to come up with a scenario, however remote, that would potentially make this a cagey move. Even the outside chance of getting 1% of a 75-million or 200-million dollar movie would justify a certain encroachment on how I do things (is the uneasy underpinning of my rationalization).


Well, he went and ran that past whoever he had to run that past and phoned back a couple of days later and said, "No, Joe Straczyinski just did Spider-Ham in Civil War, so Spider-Ham is out." This is one of the things I have trouble understanding about mainstream comics. I'm not talking about Joe's Spider-Ham, I'm talking about Dave's Spider-Ham. It has something to do, I would guess, with creating the illusion that they're actually documenting real-life characters and if Dave's Spider-Ham shows up too soon after Joe's Spider-Ham that will make Spider-Ham less believable in an overall Marvel continuity sense.


The real world part of me thinks "We're discussing a cartoon pig in a Spider-man costume. `Believable' is a relative concept with very, very big quotation marks around it." You know. "Let's get a grip, here." But Dave Sim, fanboy, understands perfectly. Mark "Marvel Universe" Gruenwald (God rest his soul) has been dead and gone for some years, but the urge to make everything conform to One Giant Marvel Comics Flow Chart of Internally Consistent Reality has survived him in spirit if not in fact (a die-hard Marvel fan would know better than I would). Dave Sim, comic-book writer, who has a foot in both the real world and the fanboy world thinks, "I made twenty-six years of a cartoon aardvark plausible to an audience made up largely of grown-ups. Send me what Joe did and I'll figure a way to turn his Spider-Ham into my Spider-Ham in two panels that will have Mark Gruenwald weeping in the great by-and-by at the sheer symmetrical and internally consistent inventiveness of it all." But "real world" Dave understands that that's VERY unlikely to happen. "Real world" Dave is "new around here". When in Rome do as the Romans tell you to do.


"What other Marvel character would you want to do?"


Tomorrow: Well, what other Marvel character WOULD I want to do?

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 #219 (April 18th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

What Else I've Been Up To

Peter Dixon came up from Toronto (more on this next Wednesday on our Extra Special 25th of the Month Feminists Get a Free Ride in Our Society Edition where [SPOILER WARNING] still nothing has been heard from Jackie Estrada or Heidi Macdonald or The Friends of Lulu about my idea for a feminist petition denouncing censorship that our good buddy Charles Brownstein at the CBLDF could use) and mentioned that he had been talking to Jim McLauchlin at Hero who had told him that they still have a few of the Ultimate Spider-man 100 covers trickling in and that he's been auctioning 10 or so at each convention he goes to while also displaying all 100.


I understand that you can see them all at www.comicbookresources.com, which I haven't been able to do what with my 12-hour a day workload and the one-hour time limit at the library. That would work out to about 40 seconds per book or something. Anyway, it made me feel "less late" than I already am and serendipitously, I had recently found my copy of Spider-man 24 which I had traced the cover from…


[see, that was another thing when I checked the discussion group and Brian's website. Someone was ragging on the fact that I had traced the cover. I mean, to me, it was like going the extra mile. Jim had said in his cover letter that all I needed to do was a quick con sketch thing, nothing elaborate expected or demanded. But it's for charity, so not only do I decide to do a drawing, I decide to do a whole cover…and in colour. What I get out of it is getting in there and actually seeing how a Ditko cover is put together. And it's amazing. There is no fat on there, no "spinach" or technical effects, just a solid black and white comic book drawing, perfectly balanced. The thick lines are just thick enough, the thin lines are just thin enough. Because the colours I'm using are incompatible with India ink, I have to colour the whole thing before I ink it and all along I'm thinking "There's something missing here. I don't know what it is, I'm matching colour for colour and ink line for ink line, but all I really have left to do is the thin straight lines that indicate where the walls go, the air vents, the desk and it's just not pulling together". But as soon as I did put the thin straight lines on, KABAM, there it is, 100%, everything doing what it was supposed to do. You couldn't remove a single line or pen mark or brush stroke without the whole thing collapsing. As I said to Lenny Cooper on the phone the other day, you really have to admire that. These guys had to turn out pages like nobody's business because they didn't have original artwork sales or royalties or advances to fall back on. If your expenses are $900 a month and you're getting $40 a page you have to draw 23 pages a month just to stay current. If you want to get ahead you have to draw more than that. EVERY month. Not for eight months and then take three months off and live off your royalties. EVERY month. So you really had to know what you were doing, you had to know exactly how much was needed and you had to limit yourself to that. Of the modern coterie of artists, Ger and I were pretty close to that in terms of productivity, but we were both still in the "if it looks wrong add more lines" school, add some feathering, add some Mort Drucker finesse edgings. On that entire cover, the only spot where Ditko possibly did that was along the base of the inverted ceiling where he possibly turned a thin line into a white square/black square broken line just to give it a bit more definition. Turning Spider-man into Spider-ham—given the Cerebus connection—well, excuse the heck out of me, I thought it was a good idea. What can Dave Sim do on a Spider-man charity drawing that might fetch a better price given that there is no connection between Dave Sim and Spider-man? I also thought it was a good idea to link Spider-man's co-creator (however indirectly) to the Ultimate Spider-man 100 celebrations. It's for charity. Char. I. Ty. This is what I thought would sell for the biggest bucks. Doesn't that seem like a sensible question to ask yourself when you're doing a piece for charity? "What do I think is going to bring in the most amount of bucks?" And here's someone dumping on that. Dumping on me for tracing an entire Ditko cover – SIZE AS! -- as if that was the easy way out or meant I was "dogging it" and…what?...doing a Flare pen head sketch of Spider-man was somehow more credible? And then dumping on me for writing a nice caption for Bendis and Bagley! And THEN dumping on Bendis and Bagley for this run of books that "didn't do anything but make a lot of money," as if it's hypocritical or "un-cool" to applaud someone for doing something difficult that very few people have accomplished and as if it's something to be ashamed of that you did 100 issues (one HUNDRED issues) of a title that sold really well. I mean, I really and sincerely Do Not Get The Point of Dumping On Any of That. Not theoretically. Not hypothetically. And no one posted anything about it! I mean, what WAS the reaction? "Huh. Here's a guy dumping all over a charity drawing and every creative person involved. That's nice. Nothing that concerns me, though." The non-Internet mind boggles. Oh, well. Now I have a nice three-month vacation before I have to face the decision of whether to read any of this stuff again or not. You'd think I'd learn by now] [or maybe it is just luck of the draw and people only do things like that on the day that I'm going to be "tuning in"] [yeah, let's pretend that that's it]


Whoops. Prayer time again. Think I'll read Exodus 12 to 14 out loud (yes, again. Hey, it's Passover and I don't have a seder to go to. Humour me.)


Okay, I'm back. Well, it turned out that my Spider-man 24 had been filed with the Following Cerebus #3 parody covers. I had picked it out at random from my period Marvel Comics to get a close look at how the corner seal was done, what the "12 cents, Marvel Comics Group" typeface was actually made up of for the Avengers 4 cover parody. I think the closest approximation I came up with was Arial Black, oddly enough the same font that DC was using for the months on their covers (No.123 FEB.) around the same time which I had discovered in doing the Rabbi cover parodies in Latter Days (pages 274-275). Did typesetters offer a discount on Arial Black for some reason, or was it just something in the comic-book zeitgeist?


Anyway, it was a relief to find it. The idea that one of my few original Ditko Spider-man issues could just get up and wander away was making me consider putting the alarm system on even when I was in the house so I would know if any of my other comic books was making a break for it.


Speaking of Marvel, I've been playing telephone tag with my contact there…

Like I say, I know a good cliff-hanger when I read it or write it…

Tomorrow; Speaking of Marvel…

___________________________________________________

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 #218 (April 17th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Okay! I'm Wide Awake Again

And Heavily Caffeinated*

(I TYPE LIKE THE WIND!)

SO IT'S TIME TO GET CAUGHT

UP ON WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO!

*YES IT'S TRUE! THE INTERNET HAS LED ME INTO THE

DEPRAVITY OF USING CAFFEINE AS A DRUG THREE OR FOUR DAYS A MONTH!

Actually, it's hard to remember back that far since I did four weeks' worth of Blog & Mails last time. Let me see.


I guess the first thing was the commission for James S. in New Jersey. He wanted a $900 Bonfire of the Super-Heroes having seen the ENORMOUS Bonfire of the Super-Heroes I did for Yoram posted at www.cerebusart.com. It wasn't a bad idea. Any artist will tell you that he learns so much about a piece while working on it that he can always do a better job as soon as he's done. And this was really my third kick at the cat; the first time was Cerebus on the pile of dead Smurfs that Ger and I did for Tony B. (who used to work for Jim Henson back in the Sesame Street days) in exchange for a life-sized Cerebus Muppet. I started with the Frank Frazetta figure but decided to modify it to a Bernie Wrightson `side lit' figure which I had considered doing on Yoram's and then decided that I needed to stick close to pure Frazetta—which proved to be a bit of a mistake because the proportions are wrong: Cerebus just isn't a Frazetta body type. Also this time I didn't have to worry about incorporating Red Sophia and Jaka who really emphasized just how small Cerebus is, whereas the whole point of Frazetta's Conan the Adventurer picture is that Conan dominates the whole scene. I could also use a more monochromatic colour scheme, the warm yellowish orange that I pictured in my head but which would have made Jaka and Red Sophia look as if they had jaundice. As I said to James on the phone I wonder if Frazetta ever finished the painting. If you've ever seen his books that he sells at his gallery (I have Legacy: Selected Paintings & Drawings by the Grand Master of Fantastic Art published by Underwood Books www.underwoodbooks.com which I think is a "front" for Bud Plant) you can see how he's gone back in on paintings that were published decades ago and put in all the time-consuming details there just isn't time for when someone wants a paperback or magazine cover by a week from Thursday. It would be nice to know how he had intended to finish the archetypal girl wrapped around Conan's leg without violating his own colour scheme. In the published version there's just enough diluted paint there to know, yes, that is a girl and she blends in beautifully with the pile of corpses and skeletons and things. If he did finish the painting at some point, I'm sure I'd take one look at it and go "Oh, of course, that's how you finish the girl without violating the colour scheme." But, I ain't Frazetta and the answer escaped and escapes me. And Yoram wouldn't have been a very happy camper if I had presented him with a finished picture where Jaka was an indistinct blob with blonde hair and Red Sophia was an indistinct blob with red hair. I also realized that there are problems with trying to imitate the fuzziness of the original oils when what you are doing is a coloured pen-and-ink drawing. That was when I came up with the "bonfire" approach: that the pile of dead super-heroes is smouldering. I thought it would be fun—and it was for a while—but ultimately on Yoram's version it ended up taking the lion's share of the drawing and colouring time. My artistic gut instinct told me to do the super-heroes in monochrome but my fanboy gut instinct told me that unless you do the colours of the costumes, super-heroes aren't super-heroes and I ended up with an uneasy balance of monochrome and colour. So doing James' I had a much clearer idea of what the picture needed that I didn't need to negotiate with myself while I was working on it. These are the "givens" and as long as I didn't violate the "givens" I could do whatever I wanted.


In a perfect world, James should probably cut Yoram a nice cheque to pay for all the learning I did on Yoram's piece so I didn't have to learn on James' piece. Last year Yoram said that he wanted to commission three pieces, one a year for the next three years (that is, this year and next year: his birthday presents from his wife), which I'm still game for. I think I would have to see where he has the picture hanging and what amount of space there is on either side of it. I gave him a rough sketch last year of how all three would fit together, but I've had a year to think about it and I think I could come up with something more interesting.


Anyway, James phoned and absolutely raved on the answering machine about the picture and the tracing paper sketches (which I threw in for free, having forgotten to put the thought balloon in that he had wanted: "That was easier than Cerebus thought it would be") saying that I had made his framer very happy since he was getting the whole works framed and that I'm pretty much going to have a room to myself. So that helped offset Brian C. dumping all over my solo commissions on his website. I don't know if it's just my bad luck but on the rare occasions when I do check the Yahoo discussion group or Brian's website…


[as usual because I'm checking www.cerebusart.com to see what Jeff Tundis and I can do to fix it—right now we're going to try working on the preliminary art/tracing paper drawings category: I just shipped him a hundred of them and he and Margaret are going to sort them and identify them by trade paperback page number so the discerning Cerebus art connoisseur can know what it is that they're buying and so there's an assortment to choose from]


I always tell myself "Don't do this. Don't check to see what's going on. All it's going to do is make you go `What's the use?'" but I figure, hey, it's only once every three months or so and sure enough everyone's talking about something completely unrelated to Cerebus or me or to anything I've written on the Blog & Mail (Bruce Springsteen? I wrote something about Bruce Springsteen? I don't remember writing anything about Bruce Springsteen and if I did it certainly wasn't the core point of whatever I had to say) OT, OT, OT.


I really shouldn't complain though: it's a very active environment. I've never checked it where the lead post was more than four or five hours old which is pretty impressive considering that I'm doing a totally random spot check once every three months or so. I have checked other sites devoted to other books and creators and found a lot where the latest post is from early 2003 and that's complaining that there's no discussion going on, just people trying to sell him real estate or concert tickets or something. It just seems bizarre to me. What must a new Cerebus reader think when he clicks on to find out what they're talking about at The Premiere Cerebus Discussion Group and it's Watchmen or Bruce Springsteen or Law & Order or 24 and how badly they suck vs. how they used to suck but now they suck less vs. how they used to really not suck but not they suck really, really badly and why. But, maybe I just find that bizarre because I'm not on the Internet and the new Cerebus reader wouldn't think anything of it. Or they would think it was really cool. Hey Cerebus readers talking about Bruce Springsteen! COOL!


Anyway, James' full-bore enthusiasm on the answering machine got me off to a flying start for a change. I could look up at my full-sized colour photocopy and go "Yeah, it DID come out pretty good."




Tomorrow: What Else I've Been Up To


There's MORE for you

In Today's BLOG &MAAAIILLL!
___________________________________________________

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 #217 (April 16th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

BRINGING THE HALF-DOZEN OR SO ROOKIES READING THIS UP TO SPEED:

FIVE QUESTIONS I AGREED TO GIVE

THEM…FIVE QUESTIONS A MONTH

AND, AS I SAY, SUDDENLY THEY'RE ASKING THREE QUESTIONS INSIDE EACH QUESTION AND THEN (EQUALLY SUDDENLY) A BATCH SHOWS UP A WHILE

AGO WITH A "WILDCARD" QUESTION

ATTACHED. "WILDCARD" QUESTION?

WHO SIGNED THE AUTHORIZATION FOR A

"WILDCARD" QUESTION? I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE WHAT

THEY CALL THE SEVENTH ONE WHEN THEY

DECIDE TO TACK THAT ONE ON.

MORAL: THERE ARE NO RULES AMONG YAHOOS

I'm teasing. But I am serving notice that the Five Questions are a part of the Blog & Mail, not in addition to the Blog & Mail. I have to draw the line somewhere.

WILDCARD: You mentioned in the Swords introductions, that you viewed yourself as a writer who draws rather than an artist who writes. Who were some of your influences? We know that you were influenced by Barry Smith, Neal Adams, your friend Gene Day, etc., but which writers may have shaped your writing at its early stages?

That would be way too long a list. At the earliest stages, there was no sense of my writing being shaped because I never thought of myself as writing, so it's hard to attribute specifically.

There were good Superman stories and there were REALLY GOOD Superman stories. "Superman's Return to Krypton" (Superman No.141) "The Death of Superman" (Superman No.149) the "King Superman" two-parter in Action Comics and various others. They never had credits on them, but years later, reading the reprints I would notice that most of the REALLY GOOD ones were by Jerry Seigel although the occasional REALLY GOOD one would be by Edmond Hamilton. Page turners.

I do remember being impressed with Jim Shooter's writing when he was still just a teenager and writing the Legion of Super-Heroes for Mort Weisinger, things like "The Super Stalag of Outer Space" (I think that's what it was called) where he did what was basically "The Great Escape" as a Legion of Super-Heroes story, "The Moby Dick of Outer Space" which is basically just what it sounds like. He was bringing things into comics from outside of comics and playing it straight and he had obviously studied Weisinger's books so he could "do" Weisinger from the cover on in just on plain sheets of typewriter paper which Weisinger could then just send to Curt Swan as blueprint/script since Shooter had obviously studied Curt Swan as well, so he knew exactly what the panels should look like even if he didn't have the drawing "chops" to actually draw the pages. And I think Shooter was also influenced by those later Jerry Seigel stories and sat down to write stories with that same higher and more literary tone to them. It would have been interesting to hear what Weisinger and Swan's first reaction was to seeing themselves "done" by a thirteen-year-old. It must've been quite a trip in those pre-fanzine, pre-convention days. And you have to give Mort Weisinger major brownie points for reading these stories instead of just balling them up and throwing them in the trash. When I talked to Jim about it he said that he thought Mort was surprised at HOW young he was when he finally met him—Jim's mother brought him to New York from Pittsburgh and Mort took them both to see Superman The Musical on Broadway—but I'm not so sure about that. How old could you have been in 1966 to be sending story ideas to Superman Comics? Apart from the high schoolers that Julie Schwartz was connecting with on the letters pages—Roy Thomas, the late Jerry Bails, Guy H. Lillian, Mike Friedrich and others—it was pretty much a given that comic-book readers were little kids. Anyway, I was reading them at the age of nine or ten and for me they were definitely a trip. And it was a big reason that I didn't think it odd when, at the age of fifteen, I sent Julie Schwartz a Justice League script on spec. The way I looked at it I was two years behind the curve measured against Jim Shooter.

There was a full-length (apart from a very creepy back-up story) issue of Brain Boy from Gold Key which impressed me, about a vacation resort where the people were being hypnotized by alien organisms in the water. I don't know which issue it was but according to Overstreet there were only six of them (1962-63) and the first issue had Gil Kane art. This one definitely didn't have Gil Kane art. I think it was drawn by Lee Elias.

Anyway, it was probably the first full-length narrative I read that wasn't broken up into eight-page chapters each with its own splash page like the Superman Family "Full Length Novels". Whoever the writer was, he was very adept at transitions and the length of individual sequences and keeping the resolution secret to the very end, so it felt more like reading a book than a comic book.

Reg Smythe's writing on Andy Capp was very good and very influential—I've been re-reading them the last couple of weeks—and Cerebus the self-absorbed drunken layabout ("God knows I don't ask for much…just my own way!") owes a great debt to him. Microscopically small cast and simple, simple premise that flourished for decades. By way of illustration, Charles Schulz's writing was very good and very influential on Peanuts, but I still have all of my Andy Capp collections and I got rid of my Peanuts collections decades ago. I would assume that Smythe was a pariah in England by the time of his death like Benny Hill and Dave Allen and like so many other English comedians (and like Dean Martin over here) who dared to make a living being politically incorrect before we even had a term for it. As I've said before on other occasions, I feel for those guys more than I feel for myself because I was never any big deal—just this marginal guy barely above the fanzine level but pretty solidly above the fanzine level so there was only so far that the feminists could demote me. For a Reg Smythe or a Benny Hill or a Dave Allen, though, it meant going from being a Top Name and Beloved English Icon to living out the rest of your life in the gutter because your society just made a 180-degree turn and you didn't. That's a long way to drop without a net. And, as I keep saying, when these people decide you need to be destroyed, they don't mess around (or "muck about" as Smythe and Hill and Allen would have put it).

Those would be the absolute earliest writing influences.

Tomorrow: I'm not sure, yet. I'm tired and I'm going to bed now.
___________________________________________________

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.

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 #216 (April 15th, 2007)

A very brief update on my Gospel commentaries.


I had intended to work on a finished version of my Mark commentaries while I was also spending the Christian portion of my Sabbath doing my rough Luke commentaries, but then I happened to hit the same story in Mark that I was working on in Luke and realized that the two versions read very differently in their respective contexts. This surprised me in a way and didn't surprise me in a way, but definitely compelled me to abandon the finished version of Mark in favour of the rough version of Luke. I quickly lost track of which narrative was moving in which direction and started confusing the two. In fact I had to abandon both for some weeks and then come back to Luke and reread what I had written to that point in order to make sure that I was following the thread of Luke and not confusing it mentally with Mark.


I do suspect that this was an intentional effect in the debate between God and YHWH, at least as YHWH had intended it: that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke are very much at variance with each other and therefore violate the Judaic cornerstone of faith that if two or more accounts don't agree then the accounts are self-evidently false. There is overlapping material in Matthew, Mark and Luke that tell roughly the same story but usually with one or more details at variance. And then there are anecdotes which only appear in Matthew or only appear in Mark or only appear in Luke. To YHWH it must have seemed like a "no brainer". If the Synoptic Jesus was going to be hailed as the Davidic Meschiach and if the foundation of his church (the "proto-synagogue" as I've come to describe it) was Judaic in nature, then it was a given that the reformed Judaic proto-synagogue would experience schism between the adherents of the three different accounts. The "Matthewists" would separate from the "Markites" would separate from the "Lukeists" and there would be wholesale conflict and destruction as a result. It was a distinctly YHWHist way of looking at things which assumed that human nature could be overridden by fiat of what YHWH assumed would be an on-going dominance of faith and definition of faith by a tripartite mutated Matthew Mark and Luke based Aaronic priesthood (or Matthewist Pharisees as against Markite Sadducees as against Lukeist Something Elses) as dominated and/or defined by the subsequent equivalent of the Rabbinate and Talmudic scholars.


Men would do and be what the priests (and later rabbis) told them to do and be and the only recourse would be to pick your account of the life of the Meschiach and fight to the death against those who held an opposing view. What YHWH failed to see is that God can tell a story -can have men enact a story - which is so compelling at its essence that it would override any attempt to assert a single specific stringent ideology directed by the priesthood centering on the specific details of the accounts. Schism would come eventually, but along the lines of how much Jesus was a man and how much Jesus was God, a far larger question than what Jesus specifically said on a given occasion: whether the phraseology of Luke was accurate or whether Mark was accurate. The fact that all of the accounts are roughly the same - the term Synoptic comes from synopsis; that is, that the respective synopses of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke tell roughly the same story - satisfied base level human nature and never really became an issue as the disparity between the accounts isn't really an issue to this day anywhere in the Christian Church.


Focusing on the details was a clear example of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The forest was the birth, life and death of Jesus Christ, God's only begotten son and the redeeming power of that life enacted as it was. The Devil is in the details - but only in the details: the individual trees of when in the sequence of his ministry Jesus declared Peter (or Peter's words) to be the rock upon which he would found his church. Or whether he in fact said that at all. Or how he said it. Or what he said afterward. It allowed for a very neat schism, but between Judaism and Christianity, not within Christianity itself. Any Orthodox Jew worth his salt would read Matthew, Mark and Luke and say "There are literally dozens of internal contradictions here which can't be rationalized logically and which point in three different directions. Whatever this is - and it looks like warmed-over Roman and Greek mystery cult stuff - it definitely doesn't pass even the meanest test of what scripture is and isn't." There was just no way to participate in something so self-evidently wrong and remain a good Jew.


The only Jews who could go along with it were bad Jews or fundamentally ignorant Jews or willfully rebellious Jews or corrupt Jews: in short, any Jew who could ignore the fact that the three (and, later, four) gospel accounts were internally self-contradicting. The goyim, having no background in the importance of accounts having to conform to each other in order to be regarded as Scriptural, instead came from the Greek and Roman tradition that still dominates faith and atheism today, holding that scriptural stories are archetypal and not literal. That is, that there never was a capital "f" Flood, just manifold Jungian stories of The Flood, that God and YHWH and Zeus and Odin were just different names for the same archetypal non-existent Jungian being. As a result the goyim could participate in what was (from a Judaic standpoint) a corrupted form of Judaism which married Judaism with Greek and Roman mystery cults just as the bad and ignorant Jews did: on the basis of the overall sense conveyed in the Synoptic Gospels. "This is a really good mystery cult and it works really good!" I think this was all intentional on the part of God, an exercise in devotional housekeeping to get the debate back on track (God's version of reality versus YHWH's version of reality) by making use of YHWH's own corruption (that the debate was archetypal and hypothetical and not concrete and actual) to subsume the Greek and Roman mystery cults - and Goddess worship and all of his/her/its other delusional digressions - back within this primary debate by making the new overall issue What Christianity IS: a Judaic Corruption (as far as Orthodox Jews were concerned) or a Judaic Corrective (as far as Christians were concerned). Try and have a debate with a woman about a serious subject that she feels strongly about and you'll understand why the strategy became necessary. She will avoid being proven wrong by expanding the parameters of what is being discussed until everything is meaningless, it's all just words and names and made up things and she wants to stop talking about it now. The enactments of the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus made that impossible by being both actual and being All Encompassing Archetypes. All Goddess worship in Latin countries was subsumed within the Cult of Mary, Mother of God (and now the Cult of Magdalene, Girlfriend of God or Wife of God or Mother of God's Children which always makes a big comeback when "harlot" becomes a protected lifestyle choice) as an example.


What the Jews and Christians did have in common from the beginning was a perception of Scripture as a series of unrelated anecdotes. Abraham did this, Abraham said this, then Abraham went over here and did this, then Abraham went over here and did this other thing, then Abraham said this and then Abraham died. It isn't treated as a specific narrative where each event builds on the previous event and makes a larger point. Jesus did this, then Jesus said that, then Jesus went over here and did this, then Jesus came back over here and did this other thing, then Jesus said this and then Jesus died. As far as I know, I was the first one to treat the Torah as a narrative rather than a series of disconnected and unrelated anecdotes in my commentaries in Latter Days - the story of the eons-long argument between God and YHWH, which, to me, continues into the Synoptic Gospels and the Johannine Gospel, reaches an uneasy conclusion in John's Apocalypse and then resumes in the Koran. As a result, I think I'm the only one who sees Matthew, Mark and Luke as being entirely separate narratives, diametrically opposed to each other in many key areas just because I see them AS narratives and it really makes a fundamental difference to the sequential logic of the narrative if this episode takes place at the beginning of the Synoptic Jesus' ministry or somewhere in the middle or if it doesn't occur at all.


Excuse me, I'm writing this on April 3, Passover this year, so I have to go and start my noon prayer a little early with a reading of the Passover account in Exodus 12-14.


Okay, I'm back. Where was I? Oh, right. So, it should be interesting if I can get to the point of publishing my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and Luke to hopefully get the two or three people interested in reading them to see what it is that I'm talking about, how the same basic roster of events when they're told in a different sequence fundamentally change the nature of the narrative-as-scaffold where this story point builds upon the previous story point which builds upon the story point before that one.


I'm not sure where or when it would be published but I think it would be/will be interesting if and when I get there. God willing.

___________________________________________________

This may also be viewed at http://davesim.blogspot.com/

___________________________________________________

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=25ED8C60667D0A95

___________________________________________________

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

___________________________________________________

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 #215 (April 14th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

What Does Dave Think of the

Feminist content of "The Applicant",

The jam story he did with Colleen Doran

(SPECIAL LIMITED TIME OFFER!

copies of Cerebus No.91, autographed by Dave Sim and featuring

"The Applicant"

are available for $10 … mmm….no, make that $15 each

from the Aardvark-Vanaheim address. I have no idea

if Colleen would autograph it, but you could certainly ask her)

And would he still publish it today?

Oh, sure. I mean, I don't consider "The Applicant" to consist of "feminist content". Unwelcome sexual attentions are always going to be a very serious problem for attractive young women (and Colleen was a VERY attractive young woman) and in a perfect world all sexual attentions paid to them would only come from welcome individuals. I don't think there's any way of resolving what is, basically, a universally unhappy situation which has resulted from nearly 100% effective birth control and the wholesale abandonment of a) religion and b) the attendant belief that fornication is a serious offence. Had men been what women thought men were, that should have led to a Golden Age of Romance and has led instead to a Golden Age of Rut with every guy from teenager to dowager lined up waiting for someone to give them the high sign and a percentage of males who just cross the line and "get grabby" at every opportunity because, hey, why the hell not?

Women have essentially opted for extreme societal disapproval and legal intimidation to try to keep the worst offenders at bay: which works on roughly 90 to 95% of the male population—I suspect "too well" in a lot of cases as women desperately want sexual attentions from some men who are, alas, fully responsive to the general disapproval and intimidation and are afraid to breathe in the direction of a female for fear of being brought up on charges—while still leaving the creeps who consider themselves God's gift to women completely unscathed and largely immune and bestowing their unwelcome sexual attentions wherever they feel the urge (pretty much everywhere for those boys). I mean, the indignation on the part of women is real and legitimate. Someone answering an ad for a live-in housekeeper as in "The Applicant" shouldn't be subjected to a physical going over just as Colleen didn't deserve a physical going over because Julie Schwartz was holding out the promise of work. No one should have to sit there and wonder "How much of this should I put up with in the interests of my career?" Or the ancillary questions like: "If I kick this creepy old man in the nuts—which is definitely what he deserves—how much damage can he do to my career behind my back? This is, after all, the legendary and universally beloved Julius Schwartz. Who is going to believe my side of things?" Well, me for one since Julie was crazy enough to make his moves in front of Jo Duffy (whom Colleen had brought along to dinner for the precise reason of making it "all business"). It was a particularly tough situation because Julie had very high standards when it came to artists—as can be seen by the amazing roster of artists he edited and from whom he got the best work most of the time—so it was a definite compliment that he considered Colleen's work to be in that league, but it also meant that Colleen got what I see as the full brunt of "I've been waiting for a female cartoonist to come along who measured up to my standards." I assume Julie had been waiting for exactly that and couldn't wait to pounce when he found it.

Also the vast majority of comics' female population thought Julie Schwartz was the cat's pyjamas which certainly fed his self-perception that he was the consummate Lady's Man and made him even more…(I'll be diplomatic here) provocative…in his behavior…and made Colleen the "odd girl out" in objecting to that behavior. I did have other women tell me about being lured to his hotel room where he would show them pictures of his deceased wife in order to incite their compassion and then use that compassion to see how far he could get with them. That's just plain, flat-out, inexcusably sleazy in my books. But, then, I always saw Julie as a sleazy character (who edited great comic books) and I could never understand how any female could allow herself to get within a barge pole's distance from him let alone going to his hotel room with him and was constantly amazed at the number who practically (and in some cases actually) hurled themselves at him. "Foxy Gran'pa" this isn't. Of course, I could never understand why women would confide in me about him, either, since I was (quite justifiably) considered a notorious womanizer myself at the time. Maybe it was because I was very up-front about it. If I was hitting on you, you could never mistake it for something else and I never tried to pretend it was something else. And I always took "no" for an answer. As I did with Colleen.

I'm probably committing career suicide here by talking about all this as up-front and honestly as I can and, in the process, defying The Comic-Book Consensus (Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Julie Schwartz) but then, when don't I? I didn't think it appropriate to say anything when he died and I pleaded with The Comics Journal to leave it alone in the issue with his obituary, but three years have gone by, and it was YOU that brought it up, not ME.

Did YOU, personally (whoever you are—the questions are never attributed) bring it up in order to try to destroy me? No, I don't think any of the Yahoos would do that consciously. Do I think it was done consciously through you? Oh, yeah. Definitely.

5. Why did you delay the true epilogue to Jaka's Story until the end of issue 138? Its inclusion in the collection is somewhat confusing as it is unclear whether these are Oscar's words, or Jaka's. (Inclusion at the end of "Like-A-Looks" suggests the words are Jaka's, while omitting the comedic sequence and inserting only the epilogue (to the epilogue) in the collection suggests the words are Oscar's).

I've never heard that criticism voiced before. I don't think it makes a difference, to be honest, since that question hovers over the whole novel. Are these Jaka's words, Jaka's words as Rick heard them and conveyed them to Oscar or are they Oscar's best guess at what Jaka would say? Or are they Oscar's idea of what Jaka should have said it order to make for a better story? And how much are the two—what Jaka said and what Oscar wrote—at variance?

There's an enormous urge towards compassion for an attractive young woman just seeing her gazing mournfully out of a window but, in the real world, really all that does (on the masculine side of things) is to mask the urge to have sex with her which 99 times out of 100 would just make things worse. As we are finding out now, there were a lot of the Best and the Brightest in the Kennedy Administration who thought of themselves as at least potentially "next in line" with the beautiful young widow (starting with the brother-in-law), which I assume didn't make getting over the trauma of November 22 any easier and probably just compounded the nightmarish "This can't be happening" quality over the ensuing months and years. So, most of the time it's best (most judicious, kindest, most therapeutic) to just leave her to work through whatever it is she's going through on her own—and leave her innermost feelings to her.

So, given that that's the best approach in the real world, I suspect it's the best (most judicious, kindest, most therapeutic) approach to a fictional character. So, let's just leave the Jaka at the end of Jaka's Story to it, shall we?

There's MORE for you

In Today's Blog &MAAAIIIILLL

___________________________________________________

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 #214 (April 13th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Okay! Hands up everyone who

Thought I was just going to re-run yesterday's

Blog & Mail for an entire week!

Just as I thought. You not only all believe I'm

An evil misogynist, you think I'm a sadist as

well. No, we're on to question 2 (but thanks, as always,

for that vote of confidence)

2. In "The Girl Next Door," did Cherie represent the first echo of Jaka? Were you thinking in those terms even then, and just never followed up on the obvious fact that even Jaka was a "Girl Next Door" substitute? Or, perhaps, did Michelle play this role? Was she Cerebus' first true relationship with a woman, creating the template for his future ones?

For those of you keeping score at home, that's four questions masquerading as question 2.

Well, it depends on whether or not you subscribe to that view which is terrifically unromantic—the idea that we "imprint" a member of the opposite gender and that's the template we're stuck with. If you believe in Love in the traditional sense then there is no template, there's just The One Individual Intended For You. That's certainly how Cerebus looked at it and he cast Jaka in the role. Charming thought on the surface of it but also the foundational thinking of a thousand psychopathic obsessive stalkers. On the male side of the ledger, I think we got and get backed into acting as if "The One Individual Intended For You" is the way we think because we're aware that that's how women think (even as women are starting to realize that they don't actually think that way—mostly they look for someone who resembles a famous heart-throb and get by on the fact that the guy has Jude Law's eyes or something, make it last as long as you can and when it's over, switch to a guy who has Johnny Depp's mouth). Men are very direct in their thinking. Here's point A and there's point B. The more obsessive you can portray yourself as being about The One Individual Intended For Me the better it's going to work, is the theory. When she sees how crazy I am about her she'll have to give in. Men tend to really exert themselves along those lines all the way up to the ___ level and before they know it, they've sold themselves on the exact bill of goods that the objet of their amour just ain't buying. In chick flicks, obsession is just the coolest, but in the real world "Obsessive" of any kind wears thin in a hurry and then you're just a psychopathic stalker.

It also depends on whether you think that the "imprinting" of females is the same pre-puberty and post-puberty. I think they're two different experiences, the former being the closest that a male is going to experience Love (because sex doesn't enter into it) and the latter a charade best expressed by "I think you're an absolute bimbo but my dick seems to like you." That was why I used the name Cherie for the Girl Next Door because she had been my only love interest from like grade four until puberty hit around grade seven. I'm pretty sure her older sisters' names were Lynn and Bonnie which is why I used them on page 130 of Going Home, although the box of chocolates incident was entirely made up. And she lived a number of blocks away, not next door. That was love. If you never did anything more than kiss a couple of times and forty years later—having never met them— you still remember her sister's names, that's love. After that it was just trying to get laid but portraying it as a love or at least passion. There's no going back from post-puberty to pre-puberty, though. Not in a feminist age. Not in my opinion. Once a thing is seen it can't be unseen. If you're visiting Kitchener, you might want to swing by 115 Sweetbriar Drive out in the Forest Hill subdivision. That poor house probably hasn't been stared at in forty years the way I stared at it. Cherie's bedroom was the one over the garage.

3. In "Squinteye The Sailor" the Popeye parody is obviously intended to be Squinteye, yet in the Guys Party Pack your illustrations in the notes section indicate you switched things around and now the Bluto parody is referred to as Squinteye. Why did you decide to do that? Does this reversal represent some new type of two-in-one-echo where roles are reversed?

I had no idea what you were talking about and had to go and look it up.

Yes, if you look closely at the dialogue of the Popeye character, he refers to himself as Pluto. What I was toying with was the idea that Cerebus' misspent life, culminating in his little sojourn on Pluto (which he keeps misidentifying as Juno) changed any number of things in the context of the world he left as compared to the world he came back to: one of them would be that his boyhood idol, Squinteye (the good guy), is no longer Squinteye, now Bluto (the bad guy) is Squinteye and Squinteye is Pluto which sounds like Bluto. It seemed to express a lot of what I was trying to get across about cumulative effects and the way that the lives of others can metaphorically seem to reflect our own and tell us valuable lessons. And also the fact that I think reality changes in minor ways that can leave you with the inescapable impression that you have been transported to another world entirely. Reading "Cerebus's" in Jo Duffy's introduction to "His First Fifth" in Epic magazine and thinking "Well, that's functionally illiterate. It's supposed to be `Cerebus'' no ifs ands or buts" and then realizing that I was the only one on the planet who still remembered when it was that way. So I wanted Cerebus to experience that but even more dramatically, with Squinteye (remember Cerebus' eye surgery on the way out?) having suddenly become Pluto and Pluto having suddenly become Squinteye. But in the cold literal-minded light of day all I saw that all I was letting myself in for was another lifetime full of "Is the Oscar of Jaka's Story the same Oscar as the Oscar of Melmoth?" style questions. So, I put them off-panel and no one needed to know that it was Bluto doing the Squinteye dialogue and Squinteye doing the Bluto dialogue. If I'm the only one who would get it (and I assumed I was the only one who would get it) then no one else needed to know.

4. Given your evolved views on women in society, what do you think of the feminist content of "The Applicant" and would you have still published it if you had teamed up with Colleen on it today?

WHOAH! I know a great cliff-hanger question when I read it. Y'all come back tomorrow and I'll try and answer that one.

There's MORE for you

(CAREFUL YOU ALL DON'T FALL OFF

YOUR CHAIR NOW)

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 #212 ADDENDUM: "Effing Magnifier"

Sent this as part of a fax to Dave today:

4) This is the funny one:) There seems to be a little
misunderstanding concerning the "Effing Magnifier" phrase as it
applies to Jeff Seiler's project. The nickname applies to Jeff
Seiler, not to you. At SPACE 2005 we met up with a young woman who
was crying over her boyfriend. She had gotten leave from the
military and spent all her money on a bus trip from, I think,
Illinois -- only to be blown off by her boyfriend who had apparently
moved on. She was at the hotel because that's where said boyfriend
worked. So, Jeff Seiler befriended her, apparently because he likes
short blonde girls with double jointed knees -- hey, who doesn't?
Anyway, we (Jeff, me, Margaret, Matt Dow and Paula) became
responsible for this "lost soul" and our morning turned into an
effort to raise money for her return trip bus ticket, and Matt Dow
ended up giving her a ride part way home on the way back to
Minnesota. During this time I turned to Seiler and, in joking
fashion, called him a "f#@%ing magnifier" because, obviously, we
were all in super geeked out Cerebus mode.

Amusingly (to me anyway) your post from yesterday threw Seiler into
a tizzy for neglecting to tell you the inside joke/story behind
the "Effing Magnifier" company name and having possibly offended
you, or at least caused you to reach an incorrect conclusion through
the power of assumption. And now it's a matter of public record that
Seiler was an unwitting tool of YHWH, etc, etc, etc

Anyway, I tried to tell him that it would at least be an interesting
topic for conversation at SPACE and not get all worked up over it,
but, well... you know Seiler:)

______________________________

Dave called me back almost immediately and instructed me to make a
post to the blogandmail offering his profound apologies to Jeff
Seiler for the misunderstanding. He said he did, indeed, make an
incorrect assumption because Seiler had never told him the origin of
the company name and that the phrase, being obviously Cerebus
related, caused him to reach for what he thought was a likely
conclusion.

No harm. No foul.

On with the show...

Dave Sim's blogandmail #213 (April 12th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Quoth the Yahoos: Why is Cerebus'

Magnifier nature only addressed directly

In what is basically a throwaway short story,

"Magiking"?

Well, because there's so little TO the occult in its literal sense, "the hidden". Usually whatever is "hidden" once it's revealed lets all the air out of anything purporting to be occult. It's why horror films can't sustain the horror once the actual nature of the horror has been revealed. Cerebus' magnifier nature helps to explain why all of these weird things kept happening around Cerebus without having to fall back on the real reason: it was a comic book and unless weird things happen in a comic book it isn't going to sell very well (hey, don't bust my chops: even Joe Matt made up a lot of his purported autobiographical stuff). If I was going to keep doing weird things in the book in a context which was supposed to be just a modified Middle Ages, there had to be a reason for it and I knew that early on—this environment is made up of continuity junkies so you better have an explanation for EVERYTHING—so early on I came up with something. That was the other part of the deal: you can't bring in a "god out of the machine" twenty years later—it was an interesting mystery but not interesting enough to warrant twenty years of speculation (like the ancient mysteries which, when you actually get into the secret chamber, amounts to "the wheat grows from the seed, then it dies, then it's reborn". The only sensible response—unless you have practically been killed getting there and consequently have to sell yourself on the fact that it was worth it) (see: "Make use of the rube's own urge toward the otherworldly…")(—is `I shaved my legs for this?") so the best bet was to do it in a short story that would only appear in a children's annual twenty-three years ahead of the end. Had the children's annual come out in 1981, there's a good chance it would have been overlooked until the 1990s: remember we're talking about a time period when Cerebus Yahoos Did Not Yet Walk the Earth. When the children's annual went bye-bye that meant it had to get put out as soon as possible, which meant putting it in chronological order in Swords of Cerebus and hoping everyone overlooked it, which everyone pretty much did ("When's Jaka coming back? When is he going to go back to being a barbarian?" Hide in plain sight).

The most honest response is "This was an attempt by an atheist to create a genuine Large albeit totally fictionalized Mystery, realizing the consequences of building something up for too long when you don't have the goods to deliver (see 2001: A Space Odyssey the movie) (but fast forward through the `spacey' ending )"


Finally, was the reference to aardvarks being the "most powerful of the ____" a

reference to magnifiers? Or something else?

I don't remember the reference, but I assume that it was in one of these "Five Questions" things and of recent vintage. In the course of doing my Gospel commentaries, there is a quirk of Common Greek whereby the definite article "the" appears by itself without a noun attached. It has a lot the same meaning as "this" or "these" (plural) in English which can also stand alone but it's more specific in…intonation. It's like a magnified definite article. More Definite Than Usually Definite. "The ____". You can see that I made use of it in my quote from John's Gospel. It strikes such a strange note in the syntax—you can try and leave it as is, but it makes passages read funny: in this case the passage would have read "The having been bathed not is having need if not the feet to get washed." The WHAT having been bathed? The more that I read of the word-for-word Koin Greek translation into English the more I thought "What's being implied is something inexplicable but still having a specific—in fact super-specific—definition." That is, otherworldly, something easily understood in the realm of spirit or in the fourth dimension but completely inexplicable in the physical world or three-dimensional space. The Gospels are a way of communicating with both realities. Which would only make sense. If God and YHWH are having an argument (which is, to me, mostly what the Gospels are) it is, presumably, going to consist at least in part of concepts beyond our direct understanding. I assume that in the realm of spirit, "The ____ having been bathed not is having need if not the feet to get washed" has a specific meaning. Only one noun (inexplicable in three-dimensional terms) after "the" would be appropriate. It's the spirit world—or the ____ world—equivalent of "a stitch in time saves nine." A shorthand way of understanding a larger concept. God through the Johannine Jesus expresses it to YHWH who is inhabiting Peter and YHWH immediately understands and compels Peter to capitulate. To us, it is very nearly if not completely inexplicable—using all of the words and not just some of them, explain what the Johannine Jesus said to Peter—which is why the Church fathers changed it to "he that has bathed does not need to have more than his feet washed". That's fine, but it certainly doesn't express the full idea in that it leaves out "if not" which, to me, is a no-no. "Thou shalt not edit scripture." But to incorporate the idea behind "if not" into the full idea makes the whole thing completely unwieldy for a three-dimensional brain.

So, that's why, instead of using heaven or Heaven or the Heavens or the realm of spirit or The Next Level Up or The Angels or Our Guardian Angels or Emanations of God, I just use ___ now, taking it as a given that that's more accurate than anything else I could attach to the concept.

You can see particularly in Minds, pages 186 to 188 that I understood the concept long before I read the Bible. We are observed and we are "participated with" by entities on the next level up. Certainly one of the opinions that holds sway in this area (particularly in the Orient and in North American Indian tribes) is that those entities are our ancestors and that's what I depicted here. That could be it or that could not be it or that could be part of it. It swerves dangerously close to the idea of deification of human beings which is "joining gods with God" and as a devout Muslim, that's a definite no-no. My best current thinking on the subject is that a lot depends on the number of strata between us and God. Conventional Oriental, Indian and Judeo-Christian thinking assumes either that there is no God or that, once we die, we are all pretty much in direct communion with Him or in communion with His Angels or we become Him or collectively, all glued together, we are Part of Him which is kind of Us-centric as far as I'm concerned. I've been at this ten years and I don't feel like I'm just this side of the Angels or a heartbeat away from hanging out with God or that I Am God's Pancreas. Whether it's the distance from the Big Bang (considerable) or the really gross nature of human existence (snot and feces alone), I suspect it's a very, very long climb from here to anywhere close to God or (to put it another way) a very, very long climb until you can be said to have actually left snot and feces permanently, ahem, behind you.

So the suggestion that aardvarks were the most powerful of the ____ is kind of a double-edged joke in that I don't think `powerful' would be considered complimentary on any but the bottommost rungs on the ladder. I don't think you have to go too high up before "powerful" becomes a definite pejorative. Which suggests that even though there are ___s on the next level up, that doesn't mean that they understand what's going on any better than we do. They probably wrestle with the idea of "are we gods or Gods?" just because they are superior to us or more aware than us when my own best guess is that there are ___s above them and ____s above them: many, many, many ____s above them before you get anywhere close to God. But I think Us-centricism is probably pretty ubiquitous and you will always have a substantial faction that believes itself to be the top of its context and Just This Side of Paradise.

Tomorrow: Oh, come ON! That's more than enough to chew on for one day, don't you think? I should just re-run this one for the next week.

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 #212 (April 11th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

BELIEVER IT OR NOT…SOMEONE

WAS FOOLISH ENOUGH TO ASK A QUESTION WITH "YHWH" IN IT, AND NOW EVERYONE HAS TO BE MADE TO SUFFER!

And, obviously, up until 1996 that was exactly who I was, so you have an inadvertent "magnifier" effect at work. I smoke a joint, listen to the White Album or whatever I was listening to at the time and write and draw a story that aligns with that sensibility. What would the White Album be like if it was a comic book? Music and lyrics that Lennon and McCartney had written a decade before (while under the influence of Chuck Berry and others and the music and lyrics he and they had written a decade before that) compels me to write and draw something that (whatever else it is) is explicitly Not God and Not Scripturally based. Ten years after I write and draw it, some fan artist gets seriously hooked on what I'm doing and, in turn, becomes devoted to writing and drawing that which (whatever else it may be) is explicitly Not God and Not Scripturally based. In writing about a magic magnifier, I also align myself with the core of magical theory: Invoke Often. If I write about a character that magnifies magical properties in proximity to himself, maybe that will make me a magical magnifier in my own context. Changing metaphor into reality: another core element of magical theory. Even a devoted God-fearing man like Jeff Seiler calls his fictional publishing company "Effing Magnifier" which is based in a response which he had to encountering me in person so, hey, mission accomplished with one reader, anyway. If you want to see a thing badly enough you will see it even if it isn't there: another core element of magical theory. "Cerebus isn't the magnifier, Dave is". Another core element of magical theory: Make use of the rube's own urge toward the otherworldly and let him do all the hard work himself in convincing himself.

In my own case, I like to think that it was inadvertent misidentification on Jeff's part. I'm not an Effing Magnifier, but I do have a coherent worldview as against the major feminist delusion that the world is supporting that has no basis in reality (see "Make use of the rube's own urge toward…"). To describe that as an "Effing Magnifier" is to try to incite self-doubt—I'm not actually God-fearing, I'm still working the other side of the street—or to try to incite self-doubt on the extra-conscious level that I'm dealing with 90% of the time: super-reality, over-arching reality, the realm of spirit or whatever you want to call it. All's fair in love and war. Did Jeff do that intentionally and consciously? No, I don't think so. Was it done intentionally and consciously through Jeff? I would suspect so.

I'm pretty confident that I'm not working the other side of the street but there's no way of refuting the accusation since it has to do with larger realities that I can't suddenly yank out of their context and wave in people's faces. It's just another accusation, it's just more name-calling (and, I assume, an attempt to make me doubt Jeff's sincerity). I'm not evil and I'm not a misogynist and I'm not an effing magnifier but there's no way of refuting that in a world turned upside down. My prayer times are my top priority and that's all I can really do in a physical context to reinforce who and what I believe myself to be in the hopes that that IS who and what I am. Speaking of which, it's noon right now so…PRAYER TIME!...

See? Prayer is a greater priority for me than discussing magic.


Is it connected to the "Something Fell" motif?

Let me answer the question at an oblique angle: every time I do the ritual ablutions before prayer—washing both hands up to the elbow, right one first, then washing the face, then inhaling water into the nostrils and daubing it inside the ears, rinsing out the mouth and then wetting the scalp and then washing the feet (right one first)—I'm always reminded of John 13:8 to 10 where the Johannine Jesus at the Last Supper announces his intention to wash the feet of his disciples and Peter protests (word-for-word translation from the Common Greek) "Not not you should wash of me the feet into the age." Double negatives like "not not" in traditional translations are usually turned into single negatives, thus inverting the meaning, in this case, "You should wash of me the feet into the age." The "into the age" part is omitted in traditional translations, I suspect because the entrenched priesthood didn't know what it meant and if they didn't know what something meant in the Gospels they omitted it in translation nine times out of ten or changed it into something that matched their almost exclusively Pauline presuppositions about who and what the Synoptic and Johannine Jesus were.

And the Johannine Jesus answered "If ever not I should wash you, not you are having part with me." To which Peter replies (suitably chastened) "Lord, not the feet of me only but also the hands and the head." To which the Johannine Jesus replies: "The ___ having been bathed not is having need if not the feet to get washed, but he is clean whole; and you (plural) clean you (plural) are, but not all." You can compare that to traditional translations to see exactly how oversimplified the Church fathers made it. Examine it as closely as you can and try to discern the inner meaning—particularly the "if not" part which seems to me the cornerstone of the mystery. What does "if not" usually mean? What does it do to the sentence if you take it out? What does it do to the sentence if you put it back in?

I think, basically, Peter won his point in the long term—we are a massive reclamation job—and when Angel Gabriel revealed the ablution rituals to Muhammad some six hundred years later, the head and hands were specifically included.

I point this out not to tax your patience (although I'm sure I'm doing that) but only to illustrate that there are Great Mysteries in Scripture in which to involve yourself and that discussions of magic—particularly fictionalized magic like my invention of "something fell"—I believe issue from the sensibility that has the urge toward those Mysteries which has become detrimentally misdirected by those who have allowed themselves to become alienated from scripture by the entrenched priesthood whose spiritual predecessors mutilated it in the first place.

But, since 99% of you have been so thoroughly "snookered" by the demonically possessed among the entrenched priesthood that you find any reference to Scripture abhorrent and who want to pass their time, instead, in discussing fictionalized magic:

"Something fell."

This is along the lines of referential thinking (in psychiatric terms) and external influence (in spiritual terms). There are times when "something fell" and that's all that happened. Something fell.

However, there are also times when it serves as a signal of an imminent step down on the ladder at minimum and Lucifer's fall from heaven at maximum. You have attained to a certain "height" spiritually over a period of time and then you hear "crash" and if you are inclined in the direction of thinking that everything happens for a reason, every event is a consequence of all previous events (you don't have to be religious to think that way: Woody Allen, for one, believes that "nothing happens without a reason") you think, "Something fell" and it has a level of significance attached to it. You "rewind tape" (if you're wise you do, anyway, in my opinion) to examine what you were saying or thinking at the moment the event took place in order to assess if you contributed to the "falling" or engineered it however inadvertently. It might be a form of compromise you seriously considered or a rearrangement of priorities that leads unbeknownst to your conscious mind —or would lead, without the warning—in disadvantageous directions. What fell can be a pertinent question (but not, I don't think, as pertinent a question as "What was I thinking or saying or doing just before something fell?") as can why did it fall, where did it fall to, where did it fall from.

In the case of Cerebus (see folks, I TOLD you we were going to talk about Cerebus!) it was a matter of his larger nature participating in a larger context than he could even begin to perceive partly and, perhaps, mostly because of his willful ignorance of anything not directly applicable to himself (getting all the gold, getting drunk, getting Jaka). I used storytelling tricks to emphasize "something fell" in a way that Cerebus didn't directly experience it—illustrating both its importance and his profound ignorance of its importance simultaneously. It's the combination of importance and profound ignorance of importance that appeals to the atheistic mind, I think (I think this is at least the fifth time you've asked me about "something fell"). It's genuinely horrific in a way that, say, gory horror films aren't. Gory horror films are just about physical pain, death and bleeding which scares the cupcakes out of you but which is largely if not completely meaningless to your soul. What if there are things I'm not aware of that are exactly like giant wet footprints coming out of the uninhabitable swamp? What if whatever it is that I don't know about is coming to get me? That'll scare the cupcakes out of you and your soul.

Put another way: "Something fell" is an evasion. "Something is fallen" is less evasive. "Someone is falling" is less evasive. "I'm that someone" is pretty much on the money. Like the TV ad "I've fallen and I can't get up." Atheists found that hilarious and it became a touchstone punch-line in stand-up comedy for a year or so but then atheists generally find humor in things that turn their higher natures—and sometimes themselves—either literally or metaphorically grey-headed.

Also, why is this important concept only directly referenced in a short story that is not part of the Cerebus novel proper?

Good question!

Tomorrow: Hopefully: Good Answer!

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 #211 (April 10th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Hey, Boys and Girls! It's

"CEREBUS YAHOO GROUP

MISCELLANY Q's FOR DAVE"

We're actually going to discuss

CEREBUS

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS!

(NO I DON'T THINK IT'LL CATCH ON EITHER, BUT HECK! LET'S GIVE IT A TRY ANYWAY)

1. In "Magiking," we learn that Aardvarks are magnifiers and concentrators of magic. You have discussed how the effect of the magnifier quality also affects non-magical aspects of a situation, infusing them with magical traits. Please discuss the evolution of the magnifier concept and its application within the novel. What inspirations did you draw upon in its development?

I don't think that there's really very much to say on the subject but I am aware of your recurring collective curiosity about it. Obviously when you're starting with a premise of "sword and sorcery" you have to cover the "sword" aspect which is relatively easy—you just have to stick to pre-gun powder and decide where you are relative to armour. I decided to cover it humorously with "The First Invention of Armour" that Ger and I did with comics legend Murphy Anderson in Cerebus Jam. Armour got invented but one slip out on the bridge and that was all she wrote for the next however many years until the next time a guy invented armour.

On the "sorcery" side of things it's not quite as easy because you have to first decide if sorcery actually exists in the context of your story and then how efficacious it is. I opted for the idea that in the Aardvarkian Age, sorcery is on the wane, gradually turning into alchemy/science with pockets of residue here and there but I decided to goose that up by having Cerebus be a magik magnifier which meant that the reader—since we pretty exclusively follow Cerebus—is getting a distorted view of Estarcion. It's actually a very conventional Middle Ages environment with a far greater emphasis on "sword" than "sorcery" except wherever Cerebus happens to be where the emphasis goes back the other way: more "sorcery" than "sword". In a lot of ways I came up with the concept because the idea of magic just seemed wildly implausible to me so I needed to come up with something that allowed the mystical to exist in proximity to the real without putting everything into thematic proximity to "tiny ladies with butterfly wings".

It was actually living with Deni that first pushed me over the edge into thinking that there was a real-life quality to magic. For her, when I drew a picture, that was magic. When George Harrison wrote a song and played it and sang it, that was magic. It was a very difficult theory to refute and the more I examined it the more difficult it became to refute. "Where do you get your ideas from?" There still isn't any sensible answer to that in real-world terms. I don't have an idea for a story and then I think about it for a while and I do have an idea for a story. To Deni, that was magic in no small part because when she sat down to come up with an idea for a story she didn't come up with anything, or, at least, nothing that she would have deemed magical or "magical" or Magical. Of course in my present context it has more to do with what you choose to participate in. If you're a God-fearing individual who prays regularly then you "get your ideas" from one place. If you hate God and religion and anything related to them (as I pretty much did up until 1996) then you "get your ideas" from another place.

Does it tie in with a larger YHWHist spell?

(for the half dozen or so of you who are not full-fledged card-carrying YAHOOS and therefore have never experienced The Five Questions, They do this all the time, folks—ask "five" questions but manage to ask several questions inside each question)

Well, right away when you use the term "spell" you're prejudicing my answer in favor of something that I have no interest in participating in at this point in my life. I'm not sure though if that wasn't God's intention: to stack the deck in favor of the opposing viewpoint with my life (completely atheistic family as far as the eye can see, wife who believes in magic, complete ignorance of scripture, complete materialist) and letting that play itself out for a couple of decades before exposing me to the Bible as a means (my best guess) of indicating that no one is ever completely hopeless no matter how degraded the time period (1977 to 1996) and how degraded the individual (me). You can be a massive reclamation job, but when you're ready to turn and amend, God is right there waiting for you.

But, arguably, yes a 6,000-page comic book story could be seen as a "spell" particularly in that it draws you in and if it gets a hold of you then it can be a real tar baby. Relative to "working that side of the street" (YHWH's) it seems to me, in retrospect, that the content isn't particularly relevant as long as it's in the ABG (Anything But God) category. I'm not sure that that wasn't YHWH's contention: give me my own 6,000 page "spell" to play around with, no grounding in belief in God, no religious background and I'll use my "spell" to try to control people.

However addressing your question directly, arguably, everything that isn't scripture or prayer is, at least technically, a potential "spell". Deni wasn't alone in her generation of females in believing that The Beatles represented a doorway to a New and Greater Reality than the Catholic Church—which, much to her mother's chagrin, she had turned her back on in favour of The Beatles—had on offer.

Way back in the days when the church was being seduced with the advent of hymns and choirs there was obviously a great deal of debate about whether this was a good idea (David's Psalms and psaltery being a good cudgel for the musically inclined). The Church ultimately capitulated, which of course led directly to music being made use of outside the context of worship and was soon actively "working the other side of the street" as it does almost exclusively today. Essentially the Church had, inadvertently, endorsed the casting of musical spells. People who otherwise would never have picked up a musical instrument could now do so as a mean of worship and assisting worship. But, as we have seen, there is no way to keep that sequestered within the confines of faith because essentially music is anti-faith. Those opposed to the idea of music as a general concept (a view I now hold and which is shared in our day-and-age only by extremist Muslims) had they been able to see far enough ahead to jazz and to Elvis and The Beatles (which arguably is exactly what they were seeing in opposing music on principle) would have swayed the argument in favor of music being entirely dispensed with. As the Koran says about alcohol and gambling: they have their advantages and their drawbacks but their drawbacks outweigh their advantages. Like alcohol, music is a bad idea that makes itself seem like a good idea the more you participate in it. Any time you get concerned about the state of your soul or your ultimate fate as a disbeliever, you can just slip the headphones on and listen to "Dark Side of the Moon" two or three times and…poof…all concern with your soul or with God vanishes like a morning fog. David Gilmour is God, as my former brother-in-law used to contend with only a slight nuance of irony attached. The Bible is just fairy tales but Floyd (FLOYD! FLOYD! FLOYD!) will show us the way. PRAISE Floyd.

Tomorrow: Had enough? Join the CEREBUS YAHOO CHALLENGE and try to come up with a question that won't lead Dave directly to his religious beliefs!

There's MORE for you in

Today's BLOG & MAAAIILLL!

___________________________________________________

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 #210 (April 9th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Just a reminder that the

Cerebus t-shirts

CEREBUS FOR DICTATOR

And

CEREBUS: HE DOESN'T LOVE YOU

HE JUST WANTS ALL YOUR MONEY

Are back in print from Graphitti Designs

And can be ordered individually from

GRAPHITTI DESIGNS

TOLL FREE 800-699-0115

OR CLICK ON

www.graphittidesigns.com

$17.95 each ($20.95 for XXL) plus postage

Nice letter from Chad Lambert:


Hi Dave!


Hope you're recovering from your illness. Every member of my family has been grounded with some form of flu virus, so I can relate. I actually wound up with a double ear infection out of the deal. I haven't had an ear infection since I was six years old, so it has been an enlightening, albeit muted, experience.


WHAT'S THAT, CHAD? YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP!! Just kidding (sort of).


I wanted to drop you a line to again thank you for another nod as a Day Prize Short List finalist for 2006. I am again humbled and honored that someone "gets" what I'm doing. Especially this time around.


Too Much Matheson marks a turning point for me, and it is a very personal one. At some point in 2006, I came to the realization I was writing some major crap. I guess I was trying to make what I thought everyone else wanted. In short, I wasted a lot of time creating other people's visions.


So I took a stand: no more crap.


If I'm not making comics for myself, why bother? I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I think Too Much Matheson was a moment of realization for me: I found my voice. It was also a moment of discovery: I'm an Indy guy to the core.


I can't express how much it means to me to have this short story included in such wonderful company this year. I was terrified in 2003 that Possum at Large was beginner's luck; I was terrified at the very thought of making Point Pleasant in 2005 because it was so far removed from my comfort zone as a writer; I was terrified to even send Tom Williams the script for Too Much Matheson last year because it was the first time I've pulled from all that good stuff that makes us human.


Blathering aside, I can't wait to be a part of the 2006 ceremony. Thanks again! It really means the world to me. Especially this time around.


No problem. I'm looking forward to it myself and I hope we see some new faces come out this year to the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) in Columbus Ohio. Click on www.backporchcomics.com for details. They've got a great room rate at Extended Stay America 4200 Stelzer Rd. in Columbus -- $69.99 a night – but you have to call 614-428-6022 and ask for the "SPACE Event room block.". The special rate isn't available on-line or at their 800 number. Extended Stay America your Yahoo Home Away From Home in Columbus Ohio!


I'll be coming in Thursday to catch the Will Eisner: Storyteller exhibit at Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library's Reading Room Gallery (it's on from April 2 to June 8 and features two complete Spirit stories from the 1940s as well as examples of Will's later work). Hope to see you there as well!

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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #209 (April 8th, 2007)

A Brief Examination of the

Sanctuario della Santa Casa

at Loreto, Italy



This was my first exposure to the Santa Casa, purportedly the childhood home of Jesus, in the tourist literature sent to me by Billy Beach along with an invitation to visit him and his family back in 2004 just after Cerebus finished:



The great dome of the Sanctuario della Santa Casa dominates the countryside for miles around; below [the English is a little flawed as is often the case in Italy: what they mean is "under" in the same sense that the burial place of St. Peter is reputedly "under" the Vatican's Dome of St. Peter] it stands the focus of piety – the rustic cottage from Nazareth that witnessed the Annunciation and the childhood of Jesus (see the tradition of the Holy House below).



Although the Santa Casa arrived, according to tradition, in 1294, it was not until 1507 that the Church finally approved of Loreto as a place of pilgrimage, though work on the church had begun in 1468. It was Pope Julius II who decided to pull out all the stops and give the primitive cottage a fit setting.



The result is a showcase of work by many of the most celebrated names of Late Renaissance Italy and gives even the unbeliever good reason to come here. Started on gothic lines, later architects including Bramante and Sansovino gave the church a thorough Late Renaissance treatment.



Inside, under the dome, is the great marble facing that protects the Holy House, carried out in the 16th Century to Bramante's designs by the great medal-designer Gian Cristoforo Romano, Andrea Sansovino and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Note how around its base centuries of kneeling pilgrims have worn furrows in the marble.



The curious statue within the walls of the Santa Casa of the Black Madonna of Loreto is a modern copy of the original destroyed in a fire in 1921; some claim that the tradition of the Black Madonnas to be found in the many famous shrines is a reference to the prophetic line referring to Mary in the Song of Solomon, "I am black, but comely"; others more prosaically point out that the statues were often carved in dark hardwoods, later further blackened by the smoke of votive candles.



I always admire the artfulness with which the Church circumnavigates these kinds of things. "Curious" is usually a discrete euphemism for "suspect" or "possibly suspect". And it is certainly a jarring note to arrive within the confines of the Holy House and find it dominated by a statue of a black woman with a black baby. "What must the pilgrims of the Late Renaissance have made of that?" It almost has a quality of the pagan mystery cults about it in that way, where the innermost sanctuary would contain something that would reveal a Large Secret when you got there (which usually wasn't much of a secret). In this case: "Mary was a negro? Jesus was a negro?" would certainly qualify as a major secret if it was true or if it was taken that way. The "dark hardwoods" cover story you could maybe get away with but "further blackened by the smoke of votive candles" to me smacks of clutching at straws in order to scrupulously not see what is self-evidently there: "Mary was a negro? Jesus was a negro?"



At the bottom of the right nave are the church's greatest artistic treasures – gem-stone coloured frescoes in the Sacristy of St. Mark by Merlozzo da Forli' and Luca Singorelli's noble frescoes in the nearby Sacristy of St. John. Piazza della Madonna, the elegant set-piece square with a delicate Baroque fountain that fronts the Sanctuary is flanked on two sides by the arcades of the 16th Century Palazzo Apostolico.



The Museo-Pinacoteca inside preserves a fine group of late works by Lorenzo Lotto (the Venetian master retired and died in the monastery here in 1556) [I think what they mean is "The Venetian master retired to the monastery here where he died in 1556"] and an unusual collection of Renaissance ceramic pharmacist's jars. Hidden away in a corner are also some 70 carved blocks of box-wood used until the 1940s to stamp designs on pilgrims' bodies which were then indelibly tattooed as permanent souvenirs of their pilgrimage to Loreto.



I'd have to call that a Wayne's World "E Squeeze Me?" moment. They stamped designs on pilgrims' bodies which were then indelibly tattooed as souvenirs and they did this up until the 1940s? The Catholic Church did this? Things like that make it very hard to see the whole enterprise except through Billy's eyes where he notes that the arcades of the Palazzo Apostolico are taken up almost entirely with gift shops selling what are basically icons and other permutations of idolatry and where, presumably, there was also housed a tattoo parlour or two up until the 1940s where they could make your souvenir body design stamp permanent. Maybe they could revive it with "I went to the Holy House and all I got was this lousy tattoo" body designs.



The simple cottage at Nazareth where the Annunciation took place and where the Holy Family lived, so the legend goes, was borne away by angels in 1291 as the Saracens [i.e. Muslims] descended on the Holy Land.



It first arrived in Dalmatia. Here it stayed until the 10th of December 1294, when it was again miraculously moved, this time across the Adriatic Sea to a laurel grove (Latin lauretum, hence Loreto) infested by bandits.



Its final resting place, though, was a few miles away in the middle of a public highway on the top of the hill of Loreto. Experts in our more skeptical age now suggest that the bricks of Mary's house were brought from Palestine in the ships of the retreating Crusaders. To this day, the marchigiani light enormous bonfires on the eve of the 10th of December, the Feast of the Translation of the Holy House, to help the Santa Casa on its way.



Loreto is the centre of devotion to the blessed Virgin Mary, thanks to the famous shrine enclosing the Holy House (Santa Casa).



It is a very finely nuanced faith. "Devotion" to the blessed Virgin Mary which might or might not constitute "worship" or Worship. Finely nuanced and capable of being a little disconcerting. A woman entered the Holy House a few minutes after Billy and I had arrived (it will comfortably hold maybe a half dozen people at a time if three of them are praying) and promptly started weeping loudly. The walls of the "ancient cottage" are very distinctive. What is remarkable is the many varied colours of stone and brick that make it up (and which made me, even at the time, realize that I wanted to draw and/or do a small painting of a section of it some day). The photos that Bill had sent were interesting in particular because in them the walls are flood-lit – I mean they really cranked up the wattage to shoot these babies. As I said about my Star Wars commission, when you are working on something for that long you tend to get immersed in very deep questions about its content.



"How in the world did an Italian bank get permission, first of all, to photograph the interior of the Holy House and second of all to use high-ampage flood lighting in proximity to the fading frescoes?" The frescoes themselves – there is a definite enthroned (!) Madonna and child with an unnamed figure (Joseph?) and another figure (Archangel Gabriel?) adjacent that look like they `re from 900s to 1100s when images in paintings were all very flat and stylized -- pose interesting questions. I assume that they weren't there originally (Mary: Here's a shot of me with Jesus when he was about six months old. Joseph: Isn't he cute?) which raises the question: when WERE they put there?



An obvious guess is that Mary's house after her death became a natural site of Christian worship and veneration and pilgrimage and someone in the early Church at some point decided that it should contain an image of Mary and Jesus for the same reason that Churches ostensibly made paintings a core element of their altars over the years, as a focus of prayer (which can easily become a form of idolatry which is why such images are shunned in Judaism and Islam). Of course the frescoes – which are created by painting directly onto wet plaster -- are fragmentary and irregularly shaped which perplexed me for a long time since they look as if they are partly hidden by the bricks and stonework. It was only while drawing them that I thought about it the other way around: at some point part of the facing walls had started to give way or crumble and needed to be plastered and the early Church fathers decided that as long as patches needed to be plastered on they might as well be decorated with frescoes at the same time.



One of the other things I noticed while working on the cover that had escaped me when I was there is that the upper parts of the walls are pretty much intact, regular rows of bricks balanced one on top of the other. The further down the wall you get the further apart the bricks and the stones are and the more mortar (or whatever it is) is needed to fill in the spaces between them. Could it be that the Saracens were descending on the Holy Land a little faster than anyone expected them to? And that the patient brick-by-brick removal and preservation and numbering system eventually gave way to "Just grab a bunch of them and throw them in the cart and let's get the %$#@# out of here!" Inquiring minds want to know and, consequently, end up speculating.



Is it the childhood home of Jesus? It would be nice to think so. It does seem more likely to me that it would be the home of the blessed Virgin where she lived out her days after the crucifixion since that could probably be more definitively placed by the adherents of the early church which was coalescing in those years. Maybe they're the same place. Maybe Mary always lived there from the Annunciation through to her own death at whatever age (did she live to see the sacking of the Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D.?). Its unique character in Christian lore – I can't think of any other building that underwent "Translation" – would seem to suggest that there is at least a kernel of truth or several kernels of truth to the legend and maybe that's all that needed or needs to be communicated from generation to generation.



It's certainly the only instance where I felt compelled to do an exact portrait of a wall. And I imagine it will be the last time that I do so.



Jeff Seiler's always on here so get in touch with him if you want to order an advance copy of Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2 with my cover illustration.







___________________________________________________

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 #208 (April 7th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

"CEREBUS READER IN CRISIS"

WILLIAM BEACH OF PORTORECANATI ITALY

HAS A REQUEST REGARDING MY COVER

DRAWING OF HIM ON CEREBUS READERS IN

CRISIS #2

The only request/suggestion that I would make in doing the cover would be that (in line with the message of my comic and my own religious view) [Billy is a Jehovah's Witness] as you are going to include my face and the Catholic Shrine on the same page, that you try to make it apparent that though I have no problem visiting such a place, I do not approve of the form of worship being carried out there nor the particular appropriateness of that place over any other as a place for worship. To do that I would like either a thought-balloon and/or (this would be even better, if possible to achieve based on the attached photographic reference) a telling facial expression that would emphasize my thoughts on the place.


Let me know what you think, and please discuss with Jeff about where you will need to send the artwork once complete so as to get it published as the cover of CRIC #2.


Thanks for having accepted to do this artwork. I really appreciate being given the opportunity to receive the unmerited privilege of having my pages of poorly written and poorly drawn amateur comic within a cover drawn by my favourite professional comic artist!


I certainly appreciated Billy's vote of confidence that I could actually change the facial expression successfully on a piece of photo reference. I think I'd rather be locked up in a tower and made to spin straw into gold. I briefly considered throwing the ball back into his court and asking him to send another photo, this time with him exhibiting the facial expression he had in mind. That, however, would have been needlessly cruel since that involves a level of professional acting to achieve and I knew that what I would be doing is tying Billy up with his cell phone for hours if not days as he tried to capture on film the facial expression that would best epitomize his view of the Catholic Church and the Santa Casa. It would be a pretty subtle business.


Anyway, the piece is all drawn and is being reproduced even as you're reading this, in time for its debut at SPACE the weekend of April 21-22 in Columbus, Ohio. Check www.backporchcomics.com for details and tune in to tomorrow's Sunday Edition of the Blog & Mail for more on the Santa Casa.


Letter from Shabad Atma:


Dear Dave,


This letter bears two requests. Let's get the first one out of the way immediately: I would prefer that we keep our correspondence private from here out. I don't much care for the public eye when it comes to corresponding with you, because in my mind it cheapens it. The idea of having a correspondence with you has been a life-long dream, and the novelty of having it published isn't as meaningful to me as the evolution of the correspondence in and of itself. To put it simply: I'd rather we write to each other, not the public. It won't crush me if the idea of interacting with me as a "peer" causes you to spray your morning OJ out of your mouth in a fit of howling laughter. These two thoughts – that we might eventually become friends and that we might eventually interact as peers – are hopes of mine. It's interesting to me that the motivation for these hopes has changed over the years, that from being a fan of Cerebus to identifying with you from a spiritual, philosophical and even political vantage (in as much as I do). All that said, if you would prefer to keep it public, I am certainly game.


I'm afraid that's the case. I'm still fine-tuning the Blog & Mail but it has become more apparent in the last couple of months that this is replacing, rather than supplementing, my personal correspondence. I now write letters only when it's absolutely necessary and communicate almost exclusively through this venue. At this point I am pretty close to having produced four weeks' worth of Blog & Mails in roughly three days. They're maybe coming out a little short but the last batch was way too long and, of course, the fact that last time I carved out for myself three weeks of lead time but forgot that I would have to start writing again after two weeks took me by surprise. I really would like my secret project done by the end of this year or very close to done by the end of this year (in fact I hope it can be published sometime this year) and that involves clearing everything else out of my way given how long it takes me to do a comic book page these days. And I also have to start thinking of ways to make money now that I have the onerous task of buying back Ger's 40% of Aardvark-Vanaheim. I enjoyed my three years of not having to worry about such things, but the three years are up. Mostly I have to produce work and publish it. The commissioned pieces are fine as one-time cash infusions but no one is going to be paying me next year for the commissioned piece they bought from me this year, whereas I comic book that I draw at least has the potential to keep selling over the years and producing a revenue "stream" as opposed to a "one off" cheque. I'm still interested in doing commissions but the emphasis needs to be on things that I write, draw and publish myself.


I'm very glad that I started my secret project when I did with the ambition to let it take as long as it needed to take to be exactly the way I pictured it in my head. I've always wanted to do something like that and the fact that I'm now roughly halfway through it means that I'm obligated to keep going on that same basis. But, when I'm done, my thinking is going to have to switch back to something much closer to Cerebus mode, where I have x amount of time in which to produce this page and that's as good as the page can be allowed to get. I've got a few ideas I'm picking away at but nothing definite.


But that's the direction that I'm going on: paying work has to take precedence over fun work and (where they overlap) over the secret project, the secret project has to take precedence over the Blog & Mail in a ratio closer to 3-to-1 rather than 2-to-1 and the Blog & Mail takes precedence over any kind of socializing or personal correspondence.


It's nice to think that five years from now when (God willing) Gerhard is all paid off that I can take another approach but right now the above program is the only thing that makes sense.


Tomorrow: More on the Santa Casa

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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #207 (April 6th, 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.

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'll remember from yesterday

("literal yesterday", not "the golden days of your joyous youth", by the way)

Matt Dow had just asked if me and Gerhard were interested in being characters in the next issue of

Racecar Comics. With only two weeks to go until SPACE (check it out at www.backporchcomics.com)

This seems like the perfect time to say "Yes" if only to see if Matt can write, draw and print the whole thing by then. Remember this is the same guy who wrote the Entire Warren Commission Report as a song parody to the tune of "Green Acres" in three hours. Is there nothing he can't do (I mean besides remember to pick up his socks and underwear off the floor)?

Okay, meanwhile we've got a letter from Billy Beach in Portorecanati Italy dated 13/02/07:


Hi Dave


How are you after your nightmarish ordeal with prolonged sickness? I sincerely hope that all the effects of that have worn off by now or are in the process of doing so.


I'm writing this in the middle of March and as of now the only noticeable after effects are that I am still mostly deaf in my left ear. I'm susceptible to ear infections which in my case cause the tissues of the inner ear to swell up and to, basically, stay swollen up unless I take a lot of decongestants. It's mostly a winter thing. Any trace of winter air on my left ear and KAFLOOMP the tissues swell up. So it'll probably get better gradually over April and May when winter in Canada – eventually – comes to an end. The only other side effect is that for some reason while I was bedridden there was a period of a day or two when if I stretched my right arm to pick something up I would tear tiny muscles in my right shoulder, right shoulder blade and back. Severely enough so that I have about a half dozen spots along there that are now completely numb. That was one of the things that made me think that I might have had a stroke.


This is great, since I never go to the doctor or a hospital I never before have had a chance to document my health problems at excruciating length. And it's all available exclusively right here on The Blog & Mail.


As we discussed on the phone before your illness struck, and as Jeff Seiler has told me he has discussed with you since, I am enclosing the best possible images I was able to find of the inside of the "Holy House" at Loreto…


The Santa Casa which is housed within the Basillica of the Santa Casa at Loreto which is a town neighbouring Billy's Portorecanati. According to legend, sometime around 1294 Angels moved the childhood home of Jesus (and the house where Mary experienced The Annunciation) to the Adriatic Coast of Italy in advance of the Levant being overrun by forces inimical to Christianity. It's pretty widely accepted now that the house was dismantled and transported aboard ship by retreating Crusaders…but, you never know. It was formally acknowledged by the Vatican during the reign of Julius II as a valid place of Catholic worship and was visited several times by John Paul II (a devoted Marianist) during his own reign. The literature is somewhat coy about whether or not the Vatican believes the house to actually be Jesus' childhood home and I would really like to see how the formal acknowledgement was both phrased and arrived at back in the 15th century. For me, this was one of the big selling features when Billy offered to host me on a vacation trip back in 2004.


…to use for photographic reference in doing the artwork for the cover of Cerebus Readers in Crisis #2. I was able to get some decent copies of photos that make up a panoramic of one side of the inside of the "Holy House" from a large book that my in-laws have on their bookshelf. They give an idea of what you and I saw when entering the other door on the opposite side of the room. The effect is walking straight into the room (covered externally by all that sculpted marble, as you will remember) and looking across the room to the ancient internal wall with the other door in it directly opposite, then moving one's head to the right towards the altar. Sounds like exactly what you are most interested in drawing for the cover based on what Jeff S. has said in an e-mail to me:


"He has in mind doing a montage of the inside of the shrine that would transition from the old walls (of Roman or whatever time) to the hanging lamps and the Renaissance style altar. He wants to highlight the contrast between the walls of the house and the Renaissance architecture. To do that he would need a high quality, high contrast photo of the inside that you could blow up into one or more (he said more like three) eight and half by eleven pages to mail to him."


The detail and contrast look sufficient to me, what do you think? I really don't think I'll be able to get anything better. I was really surprised to find photos of this size and quality and to have been able to keep enough of that quality having scanned and reprinted them.


The photos weren't ideal, but I was asking a lot, since as far as I could remember there was no photography allowed inside the Santa Casa whatsoever (and Billy confirmed that recollection when we spoke on the phone). In all the material that he had sent me before the visit and the brochures I collected while there and others which he sent to me afterwards, I could only remember one pretty much "square on" shot of the altar that was about the size of a postage stamp. Most of the publicity photos are of the sculpted marble "dressing" in which the Santa Casa is housed dating from the reign of Julius II. Basically, it's a big marble box, roughly three storeys high inside the church with an entrance on one side and an exit on the other decorated with dozens of bas relief scenes and a half dozen or so marble statues – all of which have that Michelangelo look to them since, as I say, it was during the reign of Julius II that the Vatican first gave explicit rather than tacit approval of Loreto as a place of pilgrimage.


I'm going to be devoting this week's Sunday Edition to the Santa Casa.


As I say, the photos weren't ideal – what I envisioned was the exact borderland where the ancient cottage merges with the altar and the photos were "square on" which would mean having to extrapolate perspective on a piece of art I wasn't getting paid for! But, then, Billy wasn't getting paid as my research assistant either. When I spoke to him on the phone later on he said that he was as surprised as I was that the book his in-laws had (which, evidently, they had gotten as a premium from their bank!) contained photos of the interior of the Santa Casa. And the photos were a big improvement of the low resolution images he had found on the Internet and emailed to Sandeep. As soon as Sandeep tried enlarging them on his laptop they went severely pixilated very quickly.


There's also a photo of me that I took on Saturday afternoon. The focus isn't perfect as it was taken using a cell-phone, but I think it will do, and the contrast between light and shade is reasonable.


I wanted to do a drawing of Billy as well since he is the "Cerebus Reader in Crisis" – my vacation visit being the crisis in question.


Tomorrow: Billy Requests

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 #206 (April 5th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

Well, we've had a wave

Of emails come pouring in since yesterday all of them talking about Matt Dow's

Singing debut but we're going

Ahead and doing it anyway

And here he is now:

Matt Dow!

Post it now...

Just sent it to Dave and let HIM post it...

Post it now........

Just sent it to Dave and let HIM post it........

Post it now......................

Just sent it to Dave and let HIM post it......................

Ah heck, post it now:

Latter Days (AUG031920)

To the theme song for "Green Acres"

LATTER DAYS (AUGO31920) is the phonebook for me.
Bible commentary is the life for me.
Three Stooges parody in the front of the book.
Keep your "Watchmen", just give me that "Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck".

HIGH SOCIETY (STAROOO71) is where I'd rather stay.
I get allergic reading commentary all day.
I just adore the Moon Knight parody.
Dah-ling I love you but give me the Regency.

...Spore's Spores.
...The "wuffa wuffa" guys chores.
..."Cerebus Bound".
...Elrod's around.

You are my wife.
Good bye, Iestan life.
LATTER DAYS (AUGO31920) we are there.

That was great, Matt. Just swell.

You can write ANYTHING into a parody of "Green Acres".

Seriously? I heard that the Warren Commission Report doesn't "scan" properly on the "goodbye city life" part.

(ignoring me) When I first saw the "challenge", Darth Vader's voice popped into my head and said, "All too easy."

So your lobotomy incision still hasn't healed properly.

(ignoring me) And it was. As I said, writing anything into a parody of "Green Acres" is easy. So here's a parody using (AUGO31920) sung to the tune of Billy Joel's "For The Longest Time":

Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"


Hey have you read Cerebus "Latter Days"?
Thirty Five bucks is all you gotta pay
That's a steal to me
Guaranteed hilarity
That's what you get in "Latter Days"!!!


First Cerebus is a shepherd guy
Then he plays five bar gate until "Coffee" Dies
The Three Stooges appear
We bet you'll laugh off your rear
When you purchase a copy of "Latter Days"!!!


Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"


Then Cerebus is bound until he could plotz
The next was untitled (hey Dave thanks a lot!)
Then there was "Uh Oh"
(Gee Dave sure is a pro)
You can see it all in "Latter Days"!!!


Then came Todd "Far lane" McSpahn
He tried ta make
Cerebus his pawn
But Cerebus came up with a plan
A gift for the land
And that gift's name was Spore's Spores


We don't want to give the whole thing away
Otherwise why would you pay?
So give it a shot
You will thank us a lot
When you buy a copy of "Latter Days"!!!


If you're worried about the "Chasing YHWH" stuff
(The Bible commentary)
It is not that rough
You might think that Dave's theories are $#!*
Just work your way through it
And you'll be at the end


And hey what about Gerhard's backgrounds
When we first saw them we said "Oh Wow!"
So buy a copy
Tell them you were sent by me
And you really want to own "Latter Days"!!!


Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"
Augo three one nine two-oh "Latter Days"

So there ya go.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Ya said I could probably do it and I did.

It was as if you were channeling Christie Brinkley or something.

Took me three hours.

Three hours to write a song parody and according to Paula you still can't remember to pick up your socks and underwear off the floor.

Sorry about the "You might think that Dave's theories are $#!*" line, I couldn't think of anything to rhyme with the next line.

Oh, no, that's fine. I've never known how to pronounce $#!* and now I do. I always read it as having the dipthong on the #. Good thing this is the Internet by the way.

If you wanna tweak it, go for it.

Pardon me? Oh, the song. I was going to say, I haven't tweaked anything since 1998.

I did all the hard work.

Three hours worth from what I understand.

Jeff (Slambo Asscrap) Seiler and I are getting a table at SPACE. We were thinking of asking to be placed near you and Gerhard again. Any objections? Now's you're chance to run for the hills screaming.

None that I can think of. Here, let me just mark you as being set up right at Gerhard's table. By the way, is "Slambo Asscrap" pronounced with the dipthong on the $ or the #?

I'm sending Ger an e-mail since he'd have to put up with our shenanigans on Sunday.

Not to mention Rose. I'd sure like to be there to see the look on her face when she comes downstairs to Sunday brunch and finds "Iguana and Beer" first issues all over the breakfast nook.

And speaking of indecent proposals, I sorta asked Ger this in Salt Lake City -- thanks again for being there --

Oh, not at all. If you're going to break up a two-decade creative partnership I can't think of a better major metropolitan city to do it in.

… but never got around to asking you. So to ask (and re-ask), how would you guys like to be in the next Racecar Comics? The "Origin of Iguana and Beer (America's Favorite Comedy Duo*)" issue?

Sounds good to me. According to my script here that asterisk indicates that that "Favourite Comedy Duo" title is "disputed".

Basically, the issue is a news program investigating Iguana and Beer and trying to find out why they keep trashing Placeopolis the city where they live.

Maybe we should just send them to Salt Lake City. That might work.

You'd appear in an interview. The dialogue:

Newscaster: But this insane duo doesn't just confine their antics to our fair city, we've received reports of sightings in Canada.

Caption: Dave Sim, Illustrator

Dave: They…they just keep showing up. I'll go get the mail, and there they are. Sometimes they show up when I make an appearance somewhere.

Cut To: Iguana and Beer standing on Dave's chest as fans run away in the background.

Iguana: What the hell's the deal with Sir Gerrick?

Beer: You throwing a party this year? `Cause I heard about this one time in San Diego…

Cut back to Dave. Ger in background

Dave: I…I don't know what I did to deserve this.

Ger: Heh. Tell `em about the birthday cake.

Dave: (sits in shock)

Newscaster (voiceover): Mr. Sim provided us with this Artist Rendition of what happened

Dave's drawing of Iguana and Beer from the Cerebus Zero he sent me. With Artist Rendition written in block text under it.

So, what do you think? Jeff Tundis is gonna be in it. He's "Jeff Tundis: Filthy Hippy"

Well, it's no "Slambo Asscrap" but it does seem to capture Jeff's basic Neil Young But With Sharper Ink Outlines quality.

You guys interested? Tomorrow: Final Jeopardy

___________________________________________________

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 #205 (April 4th, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

BEGINNING HERE AND

THROUGH UNTIL FRIDAY

(SATURDAY TOPS)

MORE MATT DOW THAN YOU COULD

POSSIBLY KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH!

Hi Mr. Dave!

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the Blog & Mail and…uh…something wrong?

Sorry, had a momentary flashback to my childhood. Mr. Bill was the guy who delivered bottles to the liquor store next door when I was young. Strangely, the liquor store is now the local St. Vincent de Paul store.

As with almost everything you say, I'm not really sure how to take that. So, what have you got there?

Anywoo, the latest and greatest package I've sent you yet.

Anywoo?

Whatcha getting:

(anywoo?)

A reprint of Amazing Fantasy #15! (crowd noises: ANYWOO! ANYWAA!)

Now you've got them doing it.

Yeah, I know "The Origin of Spider-Man", you've seen it a hundred times. But, this isn't just that, it's a reprint of (nearly) the whole issue. The "special message from the editor" advertised on the cover is missing, and all the ads are updates. It's from this Spider-Man action figure I got. (waiting for me to say something)

Which is where the Dr. Strange comic I sent last time came from. Look on the back cover. See the ad for the "Build Your Own Galactus"? Yeah, let's just say I built my own Galactus. (waiting for me to say something)

You look as if you're waiting for me to say something [crowd laughs]

All four stories are by Lee/Ditko. I thought the second one, "The Bell Ringer", was an odd story for where and when it first appeared. I figured a Ditko fan like you would enjoy it (er, the comic, not the second story. I figured a God-fearing man like you would enjoy that.)

Well, you've got that right. Thanks to the miracle of the Blog & Mail Time Lapse Cam I was able to read it while you were on your way over from the hotel (Guests of the Blog & Mail stay at the Fabulous Luddite Arms Hotel in beautiful Downtown Kitchener. The Luddite Arms where smashing advanced technology out of profound ignorance isn't just a way of life, it's a life STYLE!). They're like salted nuts those old Lee/Ditko short stories. Blake Bell sent me a bunch that didn't make the cut for his Ditko book coming out next year from Fantagraphics.

The DC Millennium edition of Mysterious Suspense #1 (crowd noises: ANYWOO! ANYWAA!)

Oh, stop that.

The Question's solo debut. Another Ditko fan favorite (I hope.) I remember not liking it when I first got it, but upon rereading it now, I find it quite enjoyable. But the lettering is awful.

I had not read this before. (tapping my pencil and trying to look like Johnny Carson) (Matt just stares at me. I think he's too young to know who Johnny Carson is) Yeah, it's that machine lettering that Ditko used on some of his self-published stuff and that they used for a lot of Charlton stuff. You can really see Mr. A isn't too far off. When did it originally come out? 1968 it says here. I was twelve at the time. And you were…?

(ignoring me) The DC Millennium edition of Brave And The Bold #85. This was next to Mysterious Suspense in my longboxes, and I only pulled it out to read, when I read the introductory text piece. "Neal Adams for Dave?" Sure, why not?

Actually I bought Brave & Bold #85 off the newsstands and I still have my original copy. "The Senator's Been Shot!" 1969. There was a real frisson of horror reading a comic book called "The Senator's Been Shot" the year after Bobby Kennedy was killed. Can they DO this? The great shot on the second last page of Bruce Wayne bursting into the Senate to cast the deciding vote with his skinny Kennedy-style tie and tailored Kennedy-style dark suit. Yeah, Neal knew what we wanted to see long before we did.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Matt. What else have you got there?

And let's see: The Complete as-far-as-I-know-so-don't-blame-me-if-I-missed-something-I-did-a lot-of-crap-drawings-back-in-the-day Boner The Runt Dog (With creator commentary!). Basically all the stuff I showed you and Ger in Utah. (putting them up on the Blog & Mail monitors in the studio) With a commentary where I translate all the strips into English. Also where I explain any joke that I think only I get. Hey! Maybe I'll make some more of these up and sell them at SPACE.

(no reaction from the crowd) Or, not. (crowd laughs) And, the strip I remember you laughing at the most, recreated just for you.

Yeah, this is the one. "Get away from me, skank" (laughing again and theatrically stuffing it down the front of my shirt). I still want to use it in the screenplay to I don't want anyone else getting a good look at it.

I think this is the one Ger laughed at too that you mentioned in a recent-ish Blogandmail. If not, let me know which one Ger enjoyed the most, and I'll send up a recreation of that too.

Oh, in a recent Bloggy Mail…

BLOGGY mail?

…you asked me to post a copy of the picture of you and Ger, and Mimi, and Jason Trimmer. Well, I can't. I just "pusheded" the button. It was Jason's camera. But here's a drawing of what I remember the picture looking like when I took it. Speaking of the Bloggy Mails.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. BLOGGY mails?!

On 1/12/07, Dave Sim wrote:

Friday January 12 –

LATTER DAYS (AUGO31920)

No. I quite agree. There is no way to write a song parody about AUGO31920 unless there was a theme song to Beverly Hills 90210 with lyrics. Actually, I bet Matt Dow could do it.

To which I done replied:Whoa! Whoa! Let's save that one for tomorrow. Come on back tomorrow for Matt Dow's singing debut. (looking at Matt). BLOGGY MAILS?

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOGGY MAILS!

Now cut that out!

___________________________________________________

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 #204 (April 3rd, 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.

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.

_____________________________________________________

MEANWHILE, BACK AT

MY LAST WILL & TESTAMENT

THINGS WERE HEATING UP

Jeff Seiler continues…


Back to the Last Will, etc. suggestions letter: I was "talking" on the group today with Sgt. Flowers who said that he had emailed some churches in Kitchener to see whether any pastor/s could recommend a God-fearing doctor who could have perhaps helped you in your illness.


Yeah, Claude mentioned that to me after the fact and I told him in no uncertain terms that it wasn't something I was interested in. First of all, I doubt very much that there is such a thing as a God-fearing doctor and second of all my wariness is of the overall context of what medical science IS. I mean, in the horror movie part that I didn't tell any of you about there was a period of about a day and a half where I had to ask myself if I was going to the hospital next because I had pretty much hit the glass ceiling of self-treatment and had started picturing what it would take to make me go to the hospital. If I started haemorrhaging. That was a good one because of the mess and the fact that you can't just lie there in a pool of your own blood bleeding and praying and telling yourself you will get through this. But anything short of that and going into the hospital you get immediately into the faith-based context of "Well, we think it might this so we want you take these pills, two with each meal for the next two weeks or so." I've watched too many people who never took pills start taking pills and then just floor it down the exit ramp. But if you're not willing to take the pills they tell you to take, what are you doing in the hospital? If you go to their church you have to observe their forms of worship – including the nature and quantity of their sacraments -- and at least pretend to have faith in it. I really don't think that I can do that. I really think I would rather just go out on a very natural exit ramp than make myself ridiculous by taking pills that just make everything worse. I need to address what happens if I get hit by a car and I'm unconscious and someone has to make decisions which is what the Committee is about OR in a situation where I've accepted that I can't just lie and fester in a pool of my own blood and shortly after check-in I'm unconscious and someone has to make decisions. But when it comes to pain and illness short of those extremes – which is what January was about – no, I don't think a doctor, God-fearing or not, is what's called for.


That led me to wonder whether any medical practitioners had stepped up and volunteered to advise the Committee on medical questions in the event of your being incapacitated, as you suggested in your letter to Wilf. I speculated that none had, as medical practitioners don't seem to be the type to have read Cerebus and certainly not the type to hang out on the Cerebus Yahoo group, thereby effectively eliminating themselves from having knowledge of this desire on your part. That, of course, leads me to wonder how to "get the word out" and Claude's idea seems the best approach right off the bat. What do you think? Also, you made suggestions of how such a proposed panel of medical practitioners could advise the Committee. If Wilf has drafted your Last Will, etc., did he enclose some sort of legal stipulation about this? This would go a long way in aiding the Committee, of which I am an active and interested member, in coming to a final majority vote on what steps to take for your personal care. You mentioned "mandating (italics mine) that any and all parts of my treatment (or, rather, "treatment") be posted to the Yahoo discussion group". Well, as the Committee is comprised, at this point, of either three or four members, it wouldn't have to be posted there, as our email and phone network would be just as fast if not faster. Nevertheless, it would be on the record if, as you wrote elsewhere in that letter, the Committee reached a tie vote (if not likely, at least possible, if David Carrington is now part of the Committee) and you would then open up the question to the entire Yahoo membership. So, has such a mandate been written up as part of your Last Will, etc.? Will it be? Furthermore, has the indemnification of all concerned against any charge of malpractice or malfeasance been drafted? I guess a good question to ask at this point, encapsulating all of the above, is whether Wilf has ever responded in any way to your suggestions of 15 months ago. Did he come back and say that's ridiculous or legally impossible to anything? Did he come up with any better ideas? And, of course, what does Ger's departure do to all of this, if anything?


Matt Dow's wife, Paula, is a nurse and she said she could probably get someone to look at whatever my situation was and offer comments on my treatment. I got letters from several doctors when I was soliciting Cerebus Archive testimonial letters and I'm pretty sure at least a few of them are irregular lurkers. I'm pretty sure as well, though, that this gets into dicey areas of malpractice and culpability and that's one of the areas that I want to discuss with Wilf. What I'm thinking is required is some kind of iron-clad legal agreement that I would sign which would waive any possibility of my taking legal action against anyone who followed my instructions. That is, if they have a course of treatment in mind and the Committee consults with whomever you've got to consult with and they recommend something else and you take a vote and go with the second one instead of the first one and I end up paralyzed on my left side as a result, I can't take any legal action either against the doctor whose opinion was overridden or the doctor whose opinion you chose to go with. I would suspect, however, that medicine is a different church from that and that they don't permit legal documents to override their form of worship since that would be giving the legal priesthood precedence over the medical priesthood and that if I put the question to Wilf directly he'll fudge his answer because the legal priesthood doesn't like to acknowledge that there's any area where they aren't pre-eminent. And of course there are even more basic legal questions like: Do I own my hospital records of treatment and diagnosis? Again, I suspect the medical priesthood would have this covered. No, you don't. You can't post what we say you have and how we want to treat it on the internet and solicit opinions because that means that you're bringing your own priests into our church. If you come into our church, you can only be ministered to by our priests. I suspect this is even further exacerbated because Canada is a socialist country. If the doctors are Cerebus fans, they are probably Americans and to Canadian socialist doctors that would be like bringing your Anglican priests into our Orthodox Synagogue. Oy! Over our dead Orthodox bodies.


The upshot of it is that I distrust the medical profession in Canada for the same reason I would distrust the medical profession in Cuba or Russia. Anyone who limits his medical practice to what a socialist government tells him he can and can't do and relies on medical equipment that is being paid for and updated on the timetable of government…well, I'd probably have better luck playing Russian roulette.


Wilf can, I'm sure, get legal opinions on all of this but it's really up to me to narrow the frames of reference and set the whole thing out in its component parts which I suspect might end up being separate documents. One, the Committee will be functioning in place of the role that would ordinarily be filled by next-of-kin. I think I have to start with that because it gives me and the hospital a common frame of reference. Next-of-kin they understand. That document essentially already exists and is filed with the letters that you all sent to Wilf so it is legally binding. How it works in practical fact is another question assuming that I'm a) incapacitated and b) it takes time for Sandeep Atwal to find out and get to the hospital with the document. I would want to check the efficaciousness of the document. Will it open the necessary doors in a timely fashion?


Two, we have the nature of my treatment and diagnosis and the question of whether I a) have jurisdiction and b) if my jurisdiction extends to public dissemination. That might have to be dealt with in three stages a) my jurisdiction, b) my ability to extend that jurisdiction to the Committee and c) the Committee's ability to extend that jurisdiction to the Internet. Here are these four guys who are functioning in place of my family. Would you make treatment and diagnosis available to next-of-kin? If so, then you can make them available to the Committee. Once the Committee has them it can be as easy just posting that information to the internet or e-mailing it to any doctor willing to volunteer to participate even if we're unable to get a legal ruling that that's allowable. If not (and I suspect not) then we do have a problem that either can or can't be bypassed legally. Which is why I think it needs to be a separate document with Wilf "on call" to back it up. That is, if Sandeep gets static at the hospital, he calls Wilf and if Wilf has a strong legal opinion backing it up a phone call from him is going to work better than a document that Sandeep is waving around. If none of that works – if the medical priesthood ignores the legal priesthood – then we need the original document to fall back on giving Sandeep and the Committee legal standing as my Attorneys for Personal Care in the place that would ordinarily be occupied by my family.


I don't really expect that this is the sort of letter that you would want to answer in the blogandmail, so I realize that it may represent a quandary for you. I really do want an answer to this letter; even if you prefer not to answer these questions at this time, a short note in the blogandmail or by snail mail to that effect would be appreciated so that I'm not left hanging. Sorry to add to your workload, especially since you're no doubt playing catch up, but I think that this is a fairly serious matter.

No problem and actually this is exactly the sort of thing that I would want to answer on the Blog & Mail. You have to realize that in my situation absolutely nothing that is done in private can possibly benefit me since the central tactic of the people opposing me is to gain wide acceptance for the view that I'm crazy. My only hope is to counter each of their moves publicly and on the record. If nothing else it gives them advance notification that it isn't going to work if they try to engineer some circumstance by which I'm hospitalized so that they can use medication or something else to disable me. You can do that, but if I get a legal opinion that says I am allowed to publicize my treatment and diagnosis, that becomes part of the public record and you will be found out sooner or later if my system proves to contain excessive amounts of some drug that my condition didn't warrant. I repeat, in my experience, these people do not mess around.


I don't think Ger's leaving has any effect on this. These are all strictly precautionary measures. I've been very careful every step of the last thirty years always trying to anticipate what or who might prevent me from moving the ball further downfield. I don't want to leave any loose ends if I can help it and I want to do it publicly so that anyone who chooses to follow in my footsteps gets an idea of the thoroughness that's called for any time you make the decision to actively challenge the accepted orthodoxies of your context.


Thanks, Jeff and sorry you had to wait so long for your answer. It's going to be a long process one way or the other so I didn't think a few weeks would make that much difference.


Tomorrow: Aren't You Glad You Use Matt Dow? Don't You Wish Everybody did?
___________________________________________________

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 #203 (April 2nd, 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.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Cerebus Readers in Crisis

Publisher Jeff Seiler & Everything

You Always Wanted to Know about the

Sim/Gerhard Split*

*but were afraid to ask

What part of the value of the house does Ger get, since he did a fair amount of upkeep, etc.?


As I say, his call was a lump sum and then five years of monthly payments. His only real interest outside of his share of jurisdiction over the artwork was to get as much money as he could get and that was what he asked for so that’s what I’m giving him.


Even more pertinent, once this split is effected in full, is the question of whether you will leave anything else to Gerhard?


Well, no. Just by virtue of what he was asking for, I think it’s obvious that he wants to remove himself completely from the company. Anything that I "left him" in my Will would just be sticking him back onto the Aardvark-Vanaheim tar baby.


And moving perhaps more into Policy and away from Last Will, what is your intent regarding any possible reconciliation of Gerhard and the property and/or archive after your death?


Again, I have drawn the inference that Gerhard doesn’t want to be "reconciled" to the property or the archive. This does move into Policy areas because it touches on Creator’s Rights. On the one hand I don’t think any creator should be divorced entirely from his creativity, he should always have a stake in it (the Peter Laird/Kevin Eastman situation – Kevin’s name is nowhere to be seen on the new Turtles movie poster which I think is wrong, personally). On the other hand this is a lot like the dispute between Steve Bissette and Alan Moore where Alan told Steve, "Do whatever you think is best" with From Hell. And Steve wouldn’t because From Hell was Alan (and Eddie’s) intellectual property. It was immoral in Steve’s view (and I agreed with him) for him to make the calls on Alan’s and Eddie’s behalf. With the Superman Contract I think I’ve gone as far as a person can reasonably be expected to go to make sure that a strictly non-participatory creative partner continues to be compensated even after he has traded his 40% stake for cash. But, as you say, what happens when I’m dead? At that point I think we might be looking either 1) for Yahoo volunteers to take over the management of Aardvark-Vanaheim after I’m dead strictly for the purpose of providing Gerhard with an income or 2) allowing Cerebus to go into the public domain with the proviso that anyone making use of Cerebus has to compensate Gerhard with a fixed percentage of any sales as long as Gerhard is alive (which is going to be very difficult to enforce) or 3) allowing Cerebus to go into the public domain and making compensation for Gerhard strictly voluntary (the "Kindness of Strangers" clause if you like).


There’s probably a danger with point 1) that whoever(s) volunteered to do it, depending on how long they did it would probably develop a taste for it and would attempt to keep Aardvark-Vanaheim going as a corporate entity in one form or another after Gerhard was dead. It’s the Kafka/Alex Brod thing, in a way. I can instruct someone to run the company just as long as Gerhard is alive and instruct them to wind things up as soon as he dies, but do I know them well enough to have confidence that they can actually "pull the trigger" on Aardvark-Vanaheim when the time comes? The longer they ran the show, the more ways they could find to keep post-mortem control of some kind would be my guess. "Dave and Ger would have wanted it this way." The advantage of the previous set-up was that my beneficiary, if Gerhard went first, would just come in and wind things up and never really experience running the company.


I mean, if there is a Museum of Canadian Graphic Novels or even just an ongoing display of your archives, doesn’t it stand to reason that Gerhard would be sought out by interested parties? Or does he really intend to just fade into obscurity? Honestly I don’t mean to pry into things that are not my business, but some of us should know these things and perhaps other things that I haven’t yet thought of, don’t you think?


It would stand to reason, yes, but reason has very little to do with this. Gerhard is an indirect Pariah King of Comics and has been until very recently scrupulously ignored by everyone to an even greater extent than I’m ignored (which, I think you’ll agree, Jeff, is really saying something). He isn’t so much "fading into obscurity" as calling it a day and accepting the obscurity that everyone decided he deserved and which is really all that he has ever known or experienced in his professional life. In rare instances someone would volunteer to pay his airfare and hotel room for a signing or a convention but very, very rarely and only for a short period of time. Considering that his drawing abilities buried virtually everyone else who was getting their airfare and hotel room paid for I suspect that must have made his molars grind more than once. As you can see from his sailing article in Following Cerebus and his gallery walk in St. Bonaventure when someone did make the effort to include him and actively solicited his participation he would deliver 110% every time. It only happened a handful of times though in the course of a quarter century and, as I say, I think now it’s too late. He’s done, he’s gone. What would his response be to someone wanting to do an Art of Gerhard book or artwork exhibit? I have no idea. That would be up to him. There’s certainly a whole shelf full of exclusively Gerhard material in the Archive and at least 3,800 pages to pick from that I’ll be happy to waive my proprietary interest in for the sake of the context – it’s about Gerhard, not Dave Sim or Cerebus. Do we have to wait for me to die for someone to entertain the idea seriously? Sadly, given the comic-book field’s attitude towards me, towards Cerebus, towards Aardvark-Vanaheim and towards Gerhard, I suspect so. As I say, reason has very little to do with it and I have my own projects to do with whatever time I have left on my clock.


Tomorrow: Meanwhile, Back at my Last Will & Testament

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 #202 (April 1st, 2007)

Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges


Sunday April 1 –



Okay, it's resident Blog & Mail poet Darrell Epp to the rescue with a religious topic. In this case he sent me print-outs from Private Papers, which would appear to be the online archive of Victor Davis Hanson's columns for Tribune Media Services. I have no idea how sensitive Mr. Hanson is to having his work reproduced without permission, so I'll confine myself to a few excerpts and TV Guide style descriptions.



December 15 – "Israel Did It! When in doubt, shout about Israel"

Some excerpts from an interview with Al-Jazeera editor-in-chief, Ahmed Sheikh conducted by Pierre Heumann, Middle East correspondent of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche. We really need more raw transcripts like this one to communicate the extent to which the Palestinian political position is really just pathologically anti-Israel. Just watch the flawed leaps Ahmed Sheikh makes in his sequential reasoning:



Sheikh: In many Arab states the middle class is disappearing. The rich get richer and the poor get still poorer. Look at the schools in Jordan, Egypt or Morocco: You have up to 70 youngsters crammed together in a single classroom. How can a teacher do his job in such circumstances? The public hospitals are also in hopeless condition. These are just examples. They show how hopeless the situation is for us in the Middle East.



Heumann: Who is responsible for the situation?



Sheikh: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.



Heumann: Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?



Sheikh: I think so.



Heumann: Can you please explain to me what the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?



Sheikh: The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.



Heumann: In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?



Sheikh: Exactly. It's because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West's problem is that it does not understand this.



Hanson observes: This is utter nonsense, precisely because Arab detestation of Israel is a symptom, not the malady, of the current Arab crisis of the spirit. Ahmed Sheikh himself stumbled onto that truth. To gain the necessary maturity and self-confidence that would mitigate scapegoating Israel, the Arab Middle East would have to make vast structural changes in traditional Islamic society that would usher in freedom, prosperity and security.



In other words, new Arab consensual societies would have to create the sort of landscape that they see elsewhere in Europe, Asia, North America, and Israel when they turn on their satellite TVs and browse the internet – and understand that such success came from within, not merely from foreign aid or the accidental discovery of oil beneath their feet.



Ouch. I'd only qualify my support for this one by saying that what Arabs -- or anyone else -- see on TV isn't necessarily genuine success or genuine prosperity but a very seductive tinsel-and-glitter exaggeration of same which doesn't, in fact, actually exist as it is portrayed. Money can't buy genuine happiness whether that money comes from found oil wealth or from capitalism let off its leash. I keep thinking that there must be a way for Muslim countries to provide fresh food, running water, toilets that work, central heating and air conditioning, education and a market economy to the general populace without all of the "hell in a handcart" accoutrements that go along with it in the West. Can you have prosperity without vice, basically? Am I able to live a comfortable stripped down Orthodox Muslim life shorn of the tinsel and glitter and vice only because tinsel and glitter and vice is the norm rather than the exception in my context which is secular North American? I would find it really disturbing to think that that was true and equally disturbing to think that Muslims wouldn't attempt to find a way to make more comfortable and civilized living conditions the norm rather than the exception while retaining the largely non-materialistic and devout core aspects that make Islam so intrinsically different from the West.



January 22 "Club America". This was a good one. He points out that many of the same Arabs who loudly and vocally deplore the United States and everything about it also have most of their family living and being educated there. I thought it was an interesting thesis because it calls attention to the dichotomy between the Muslim politician and the Muslim family man. The politician has to adhere strictly to the idea that nothing is better for a Muslim than a Muslim country – the worldwide Muslim "umma" -- while the family man, wanting the best for his children and relatives, knows that the United States is a better bet than, say, Egypt or Syria.



"…the wide gap between what many in the Middle East say and do should be a reminder that much anti-Americanism is poorly thought out or mostly for show. Many who decry America to the press and cameras privately prefer to send their loved ones here to take advantage of our success brought about by secular education, gender equality, meritocratic democracy and the primacy of law."



Well put and I agree – except for the gender equality part. I don't think you can make the genders equal (see the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast weekdays here on the Blog & Mail) but certainly we are far closer to treating men and women as equal before the law than they are treated under Shariah Law. We still have a ways to go with female criminals getting much lighter prison sentences and easier treatment than their male counterparts, but Rome wasn't built in a day.



February 5 – "The Ugly American" My favourite part of this one was where he takes a run at John Kerry for declaring "When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy": the part where he says



Remember we are at war [italics his] Kerry's criticisms are hauntingly similar to al-Qaida's own talking points. Both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have preposterously claimed that America's past inaction on Kyoto was a good excuse for going to war. In various ways, they have long blamed America for the spread of AIDS, and insisted that the United States is an international outlaw. When Kerry makes similar charges, it only enhances the jihadist propaganda, and weakens the United States in a war that is largely to be decided by relative resolve.



I agree. Obviously you don't want to censor anyone who wants to put forward viewpoints that offer aid and comfort to the enemy, but you can at least advocate that they not do so and try to get them to see that that's what they're doing. The same concern that I have with the 9/11 conspiracy theories. It's basically a bolt hole for every Muslim who doesn't want to admit that Muslims committed the terrorist acts of 9/11. Very difficult to make progress if you keep providing bolt holes like that.



Thanks Darrell. Those interested can check out more Victor Davis Hanson at http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson121506PF.html



___________________________________________________

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.