Dave Sim's blogandmail #262 (May 31st, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

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

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All this week:

SHAMELESSLY HYPING COLLECTED LETTERS VOLUME 2…

WHICH, THEORETICALLY, WILL BE IN COMIC STORES EVERYWHERE JUNE 6 THANKS TO DIAMOND COMIC DISTRIBUTORS' SIMULTANEOUS OMNIPRESENCE. COLLECTED LETTERS VOLUME 2, ASK FOR IT BY NAME: MAR073054….

REMEMBER! DIAMOND COMICS…

THEY'RE EVERYWHERE A COMICS PUBLISHER NEEDS TO BE.

Okay, where was I? Oh, right. We were in the middle of David Carrington's 27 February letter (foolish me, I thought I could wrap it up in one instalment) (meanwhile, ten pages later):

"The Army life's been treating me good, as I'm approaching my two-year mark. Did I tell you that in October I graduated (with honors!) from the "Warrior Leader Course"? (Now my civilian boss addresses me as "warrior leader.") There were lots of infantry guys there who had some incredible war stories about Iraq, which I doubt are told outside the circle of Army buddies. I mean, if the liberals against the war heard some of the stuff that really went on over there, especially in the opening salvo in 2003…whoa. An especially gruesome one was how my "cell-mate" would, after shooting up some jihadist, put his boot over his mouth to prevent the guy from praying before he dies. "F—k him, I don't want to hear that s—t!" it's much funnier in their telling, I guess. These guys take great pleasure in the combat. They killed a lot of bad guys."

I'm not sure if David wanted me to print this part of his letter, but, I repeat – if you don't want me running something in the Blog & Mail, don't write it to me. I put myself squarely in the "nothing to hide" camp. If you have something you want to charge me with post-1998 I'll be glad to face the indictment square on. Pre-1998? That was before I was committed to God, but I'll be glad to try to reconstruct whatever atheistic and self-indulgent rationalisation I was labouring under at the time.

In this case, I detect the fine hand of the ___s behind David's writing me about this and what appears to be their (or some of their) whole-hearted efforts to trip me up. If I don't print it, then it would be construed as an admission that I think what he is documenting is wrong-doing by U.S. Forces in Iraq and I would be part of the "cover up" in not discussing it directly. By printing it, I could be indicted for jeopardizing David's standing with the U.S. Military by violating a letter he wrote to me in confidence. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. As always, I err on the side of openness and direct answers and let the chips fall where they may.

I look on what David brings up in the light of the article by Douglas E. Streusand's that I excerpted pretty extensively on Sunday. If you sincerely believe that the insurgency in Iraq is conducting Sinful Warfare against the U.S. Forces and the coalition in Iraq, I can certainly see why you wouldn't allow a participant in sinful warfare to pray to God before he dies. Personally, I don't have that level of self-confidence and I always try to err on the side of acknowledging that anyone could be more fully aligned with God than I am so there's great risk in even cosmetically picturing myself as having some advantage over them. I pray five times a day, but it wouldn't surprise me that anyone who avoided all of the crap I did in my twenties and thirties that made me such a massive reclamation job that I need to pray five times a day wouldn't have to do so themselves. Same as the small uproar that attached itself to Saddam Hussein's execution by the Shiite Iraqi government where they didn't allow him to finish his prayers before springing the trapdoor. To me, when you extend compassion to a conscienceless butcher like Saddam you are extending compassion too far. The jeopardy implied, of course, is that you might have misunderstood Saddam's relationship to God. He may have repented and have become a sincere believer, in which case you are interposing yourself between Saddam and God and, presumably, you will have to pay the price for doing so on Judgement Day.

Likewise the soldier whose story David relates. If he is aligned with God (as I believe the coalition to be: that we, the coalition, collectively believe that self-determination is fully protected and we are at war with those who want to limit or curtail self-determination) and the insurgent he shot is a representative of the forces of oppression who deny the right to self-determination, then he should do okay on Judgement Day. If, however, he's just a smart-ass secular humanist and he killed a devout believer in God who was sincerely fighting on path of God then I wouldn't envy his chances on Judgement Day.

In a more secular vein, the insurgents don't qualify for protection under the Geneva Conventions because they aren't in uniform and they have no military organization. And to me and to virtually all military people suicide bombing and IED's put you beyond the pale of civilized rules. If I'm a member of U.S. Forces and your improvised explosive device -- a modified Iranian artillery shell filled with nuts and bolts and sharpened metal scraps -- blew the legs off of a buddy of mine or tore a fist-sized hole in the small intestine of another buddy of mine or…well, you get the idea…and you have aligned yourself with someone or many someones who uses devices like that, well, that (I think, understandably) puts you outside all boundaries of civilized consideration. That's either Sinful Warfare or illegal warfare. Which puts you in the category of human vermin and it becomes my job, as a member of the military coalition, in uniform and with a recognizable military infrastructure, to exterminate as many of you as I can as quickly as I can.

There are honest disagreements on this point.

Most liberals – where they don't want to commit acts of outright treason and take the side of the insurgents -- want to treat insurgents as criminals and have them tried and imprisoned according to North American criminal statutes, flown to North America, given court-appointed attorneys, given the option of suing the U.S. government for malicious prosecution, etc. etc. I wouldn't give the Iraqi insurgents those sorts of options anymore than I would give the mice that were infesting my house a while ago similar legal protections. Vermin is vermin.

"And all the sex that went on during the course!"

Hey I know a great cliff-hanger when I see it.

Tomorrow: David Carrington lets us in on: All the Sex That Went On During the Course!
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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #261 (May 30th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

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

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Thurber's letter to Ann Honeycutt. See yesterday's Blog & Mail for my lead-in or forget all that and just read it here:



"Over my coffee in the morning, I think colourful thoughts of creative work, I plan stories, I think of plots, I make little lines. Up until noon I am at my best, I get things done. At noon I exchange ideas and thoughts with my friends and if, among them, there be a woman, I content myself with a casual and faintly interested examination of her wit and her intellect. If she be rather more witty and superficial than intellectual and weighty, I like it better. Light badinage, merry banter is the stuff for lunch.



About 3:30 in the afternoon, Sex begins to creep in. It knocks at my door, it rears its ugly head from behind the radiator, it calls on the phone, it whistles in the wind. I drink water, sharpen pencils and write, but Sex comes between me and the page. I fight off erotic revery, a natural phenomenon, but very futile and rather mentally weakening. Erotic revery, as the psychoanalysts know it, is usually reminiscence on departed scenes, memories of certain amorous moments, certain exciting gestures, certain yielding words, certain astounding and indefensible actions. With me it is scarcely revery, because instead of thinking back on women I have "been with", as my mother says, I think forward on women I want to be with; thus the whole thing comes under the general heading of "Planning" rather than of "reminiscing"…



At 8 p.m. after a few drinks, there forms in my mind one crystallized desire, one intention: to get some individual woman around to the theatres and speakeasies as fast as possible in order to get her home and to bed before my wit and my strength and my finesse are so atrophied by liquor and carousing that I begin to get mean rather than loving. I have never yet met a woman who would rather go quietly home with me, at a decent hour, such as 11 o'clock, even for the purpose of talking or communing. Always, she wants to sit in Tony's till she has had her glut of liquor and of seeing people and of wild talk and of being seen. By this time it is a quarter to four and everybody feels like a 1908 Newfoundland dog rug. All inspiration, all beauty, all freshness is gone. Everybody has had his belly filled with glut, the glut of our modern New York nights. Lips begin to ooze out over faces, hair gets wrassled, eyes grow dim and wavy, finer sensibilities are drowned. This is no time for love, but if you're going to get love this I when you're going to get it. You're going to get it and like it, even though by this time you can take it, so to speak, but you can't dish it out. The whole thing is rather unlovely, and just around the edge of the next hour (for by the time you get the girl to her apartment or hotel it is 4:30) lies the damp gray face of morning, morning the charwoman, morning the street-cleaner, morning the house-maid, clearing up yesterday's dirty glasses and cigarette stubs, sweeping away last evening's blithe hopes and happy dreams and wistful desires. Love under such handicaps, becomes a mockery, a routine.



That, in a word, is my day, has been my day. In books and in plays we see, and flutter to, romantic affairs, even though they sometimes carry with them the suggestion of tactual situations, are ordered more sweetly. There is a time for love, or should be – a nice time. Me, I have never found it; me, I have never been offered it. The only times I have ever called on a girl, at her home, in the decent early hours of the evening has been when she was sick in bed from being in the gutters the night before. Speculations upon this modern arrangement naturally, at times, cause me to become morose, and now and again to break glasses, slap ladies down, and sit glumly in taxicabs while doors are slammed on me. Of course, if girls want to go to Tony's I'll show `em how to go to Tony's.



I haven't time, really, for this, and it serves no purpose, except I owed you a letter."



Okay, that's really Thurber at his worst – but I was really hypnotized by it. How can you be as intelligent as Thurber and not see what you're actually saying here and what you're actually doing to yourself? He's in his mid-thirties for crying out loud but this reads as if it was written by a sulking ten-year-old. This is a good decade before he started losing sight in his other eye so it's not as if he had no warning. Of course I went through the same thing and I'm reasonably intelligent. The number of nights, soused to the gills, I'd hear "last call" and desperately order two or three more drinks when I should have knocked it off two hours before that.



Here's part of a funnier one from page 256 – "The Triumphant Years" -- written to his sometime collaborator and New Yorker office mate, E. B. White.



"The basic trouble, of course, is the astounding fact that the offspring of man have not developed the ability to become self-sustaining until their parents are practically worn down and in the grave. The guinea pig is on his own the second he is born – even has his eyes open, leaps from the womb to the nearest carrot or lettuce leaf. Dogs are raising families of their own before the first anniversary of their birth; and so it goes among all the known species of animal except man, whose young are practically no good at all until they have wobbled around the house for almost a quarter of a century! This is perhaps the most fantastic fact about human life, and I imagine the other animals never get over their astonishment at it. Have you never caught your dog giving you that straight, long puzzled look – friendly, of course, pitying, too, but puzzled? What the goddam hell, he seems to say?"



Anyway, I have about a hundred pages left to go on "The Challenging Years" before I hit "The Declining Years." Another letter to Ann Honeycutt, 23 years after the one quoted above. Unbelievable. He had sworn that he would seduce her before she turned 70 and at age 59 he was still discussing it in letters to his cronies.



I've got a touching excerpt from a letter he wrote the day after I was born, but I'm saving that for my review of Jules Feiffer's HARRY, THE RAT WITH WOMEN in the next issue of Sandeep's VERSUS magazine.



Okay, what else have I got here?



"Spiral fluorescents Extended Stay". Oh, right. The hotel room in Columbus had those compact fluorescent bulbs which I had never even heard tell of, not so much as a rumour. I am so far outside the loop on most things it isn't funny. Anyway, I turned on the bedside light the first night and I thought, "Why do I feel as if I'm in a Russian gulag or a Cuban waiting room?" And I shrugged it off. Weird stray thought of some kind. Tried reading my notebook and I thought, No, there is definitely something wrong with the light in here. Looked inside the bedside lamp and thought, Now what in the Sam Hill is THAT? And, of course, they had a nice long article about them in the NATIONAL POST when I got back…seems The PRC (People's Republic of Canada) -- which can never knowingly miss an opportunity to make Her Majesty's Former Dominion look more like Havana or Stalingrad as opposed to, say, Chicago or St. Louis when the opportunity presents itself -- is looking into outlawing incandescent bulbs because they're "wasteful" and replacing them with energy-efficient compact fluorescents. Just give me six months warning, folks, and I swear to you I will fill the basement with cartons of incandescent bulbs. Let's see – I've got about sixteen light fixtures here at the house, say the average bulb lasts ten months to a year, figure I'm going to live to be, say (don't want to underestimate and spend the last decade in Havana) ninety. Forty times sixteen. Four hundred, plus two hundred and forty…hmmm…Tell you what. Let's just make it an even NINE THOUSAND #$%@ING BULBS JUST TO BE ON THE SAFE SIDE.



And the final note that I've got here. Someone mentioned Matthew 5:9 in the NATIONAL POST the other day. Since I've always got my Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Gospels (as well as my King James Bible and Koran) on my bedside table next to my reading chair, I thought, well, let's have a look. See, here's my problem with what the early church fathers did to the Gospels. Matthew 5:9 in the 1611 King James Bible:



Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.



Matthew 5:9 in the Kingdom Interlinear translation from the original Greek:



Happy the peacemakers that they sons of God will be called.



Now how in the heck do you read "happy" and decide that what you are ACTUALLY reading is "blessed"? As I say, this isn't something I have to go digging for in an effort to make anyone look bad. You give me a random verse as happened here and I look it up in the KJV and the Kingdom Interlinear and five will get you ten they can't get through one sentence without completely changing its inherent meaning. There is no question that being called blessed would probably make the peacemakers happy but that's a whole new level of meaning that has just been grafted on. You can see the wheels of the entrenched priesthood grinding from here.



"Hmmm – `happy'. That doesn't sound very…very…devout. Do you think so, Father?"



"Indeed, I don't. In fact it sounds kind of…frivolous."



"That's what I was thinking. Frivolous. Hmm. What's a good word that doesn't sound quite so…frivolous."



But, to me, that's very much the point of the Synoptic Gospels. It's all pretty lightweight stuff and most of it that isn't outright frivolous is ambiguous as hell. The peacemakers will be happy that they're called the sons of God. Does that mean that they ARE the sons of God? Well, it doesn't say that. If you stick to the specific language it doesn't come NEAR to saying that. It also doesn't say "children" (as in "gender neutral") it says "sons". I mean call me Foolish Dave Sim the Evil Misogynist (I know how much it means to you and how it keeps you warm on chilly winter nights) but I don't think that's what the problem is here. It isn't that the original says "children" and Evil Misogynist Patriarch Types like Yr. Obedient Servant have connived and schemed to get that changed to "sons". No, it's the other way around. Someone, somewhere didn't take a hankering to the peacemakers being limited to the masculine gender EVEN THOUGH THAT WAS WHAT THE SCRIPTURE SAID and that someone, somewhere arbitrarily changed that masculine pronoun into a gender neutral pronoun.



I know, I know, the fact that I recognized that just means that I'm an Evil Misogynist. A Good and Decent Person would never have seen that in a million years.



Fortunately my notes end there so tomorrow we can move on to the old mailbag.



Tomorrow: Hello Mailbag My Old Friend
___________________________________________________

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 #260 (May 29th, 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.

_____________________________________________________



Scott McCloud was in Toronto last week (earlier this month from where you are) doing his slide show where I'm acknowledged for my lettering (according to Jeff Seiler who caught the McCloud & Family Show in Dallas) in one of his slides.



There was a nice piece on him in THE NATIONAL POST where he talked about Seth and Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman when asked about graphic novels. Considering that his plane was going to pass directly overhead or his car or train pass within a few miles of the author of the world's longest graphic novel (he was coming in from Ann Arbor) that gives you a rough idea of the status quo "state of play" for foolish Dave Sim the Evil Misogynist in the Scott McCloud Universe. I'm the one using the "Misogynists Only" water fountain and toilet in the bus station. The one with the yellow felt "M" stitched to my jacket. "But…he MIGHT have mentioned you to the POST reporter and the POST reporter just didn't mention you, Dave!" Come on, folks, there's liberal delusional and there's liberal delusional. Scott's kind of weirdly conflicted on the subject, like most liberals. I'm listed in the index for REINVENTING COMICS on pages 60-61 but there's no mention of the footnote on page 104: "Dave Sim's personal misogyny became a public issue in the mid-90s following the publication in his series CEREBUS of a text feature about women." Scott had the chutzpah to say to my face that he hadn't actually called me a misogynist in the book. I don't see there as being a difference. I think it's just Scott trying to have it both ways: One Big Happy Comic Book Family which includes Dave Sim as long as he only uses the Misogynists Only toilet and water fountain in the bus station and understands that he can no longer be considered anything besides a really good letterer.



"Dave Sim. He did some great…lettering."



It's partly that and partly that he's really doing his level best to toe the COMIC JOURNAL party line (Seth, Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and…Dave Who?) in the hopes that the JOURNAL will go back to taking him semi-seriously instead of as the cybernetic crackpot/object of fun they've been treating him as since REINVENTING COMICS came out. Basically Scott appears to have chosen to throw everyone overboard except the approved COMICS JOURNAL names in the interests of achieving a Big Comic Book Tent Consensus that we can all rally around but, knowing the COMICS JOURNAL, I don't think it's going to work.



It'll be interesting to see a) IF they'll run anything about his fifty-state tour or b) what they have to say about his tour and who they assign to write about it. Might make a good JOURNAL Gang Bang like the ones they did on Steve Ditko and me and LOST GIRLS. Five comics journalists caught his show in five different cities and here's the different ways they all thought it sucked.



If they do a puff piece or ignore him then that means either a) they couldn't find enough people to write nasty things about him and his tour and his family for a good Gang Bang or b) he's established enough of a beachhead to make Gary and Kim wary of him and that would certainly be a first. Gary might just do another interview with Scott: Gary seeking to re-establish him as a cybernetic crackpot/object of fun and Scott attempting make Gary part of his extended One Big Happy Comic-Book Family of Scott McCloud Acolytes.



That would be a very interesting traffic accident between the lines of which to read over the course of several dozen pages. Of course if Gary thinks there's any danger that he'd LOSE the argument-masquerading-as-a-discussion and actually have to become or even appear to become one of Scott's Acolytes (unthinkable!) he'll just assign the Managing Editor du Jour to interview Scott and then eviscerate Scott in an editorial or review in the same issue. Sure it's evasive but it's always worked for Gary before (as I recall, that was how he chose to handle REINVENTING COMICS).



18 MAY UPDATE: Chester threw me for a loop when he met me at the bus station and one of the first things he said was, "Scott McCloud says `Hi'". Wow. That was interesting: putting Scott McCloud at least ten notches to the right of where I figured him to be (that is, "Dave Sim didn't show up. PHEW. I can just continue to ignore both him and the fact that I once called him a misogynist -- but which I won't cop to now -- and pretend to myself that he's still happy to be in my Big Comic Book Family and understands that he's only allowed to use the Misogynists Only toilet and water fountain"). Of course, then Chet said, "He gave me the impression that he thought there might be some bad feelings between the two of you about something but he didn't say exactly what." So, he was actually only a couple of notches to the right of where I thought he was ("Gosh, Dave seems to be upset about something but, since I didn't actually call him a misogynist as he claims, it must just be some Crazy Dave Sim the Evil Misogynist thing and nothing that I, Scott McCloud Comic Book Guru and Patriarch of the One Big Happy Comic Book Family actually did or said. So I'll show him how Big a Man I can be by having Chester tell him "hello" and not bringing up a thing about how obviously crazy he is.") Then Chester mentioned that Scott's daughter, Sky, was named after the character Sky in I NEVER LIKED YOU. "Actually," he said, "the last time I saw Scott and Ivy, Scott mentioned that Sky was named after the character but Ivy said, `No, she isn't" and she mentioned who it was that Sky was named after. THIS time Scott mentioned that Sky was named after the character in I NEVER LIKED YOU and Ivy didn't disagree."



I laughed.



"I wonder how long it took them to fight that one out."



"What do you mean?" Queried Chester. I keep forgetting he's never been married.



"Married people do that all the time: fight out whose version of an event is the accurate one. I doubt that Scott convinced Ivy that Sky was named after the character in I NEVER LIKED YOU, it just became a trade-off. She'll agree with Scott's version of who Sky is named after but now Scott owes her one. He'll have to give in on something and go with her version of events even though he knows she's wrong on something else."



Chet laughed and we started talking about his new graphic novel instead.



See, if you want to get down and dirty about who is crazy and who isn't, married people are basically crazy the way that I just described. Reality has nothing to do with what actually happened it's just a series of victories and defeats on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis. It's why married people age faster than everyone else. When you choose to be crazy on a day-in, day-out basis – trading off reality for falsehood and falsehood for reality and having to keep track of which is which (the agreed-upon reality versus what you actually know to have happened)-- it really puts the miles on you.



I would like to get Scott's current media list from his tour to possibly help promote my secret project so if he reads this or someone else tells him about it, I hope that, just like married people, we can trade the fact that he thinks I'm crazy and I think he's crazy and meet somewhere in the middle where reality – apart from me being interested in getting a current media list – has nothing to do with it. Just as if I was a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal or something! If you think I have a snowball-in-hell's chance of hearing from him, I bet you're right. But in the same general spirit as his saying "Hi" through Chester:



"Hiya, Scott!"



What else have I got here?



"PAGES 125 AND 256". What in the heck does…



Oh, right, I'm up to page 592 in THE THURBER LETTERS, James Thurber's collected letters that Jeff Seiler gave me in Columbus. Funny how when I get to the place in a book or a magazine article or in collected letters of people who are turning 50 that it's all pretty much "downhill from here". "The Challenging Years" the section I'm on is called. He's still drinking himself cockeyed once every ten days or so at the age of 57 so it gets pretty inadvertently grim in the same way that Fitzgerald and Hemingway's collected letters got. Same way that the recent biography of Wally Wood went. If you can't give up the sauce in your forties you are pretty much guaranteed to be heading for a singularly unhappy ending. See, they know that and hit the sauce even harder to try to forget it.



Thurber only had one eye from the time he was six – absolute miracle he didn't lose the sight in both eyes in the bow-and-arrow incident (didn't want to know about it and mercifully there are no details on it) and eventually went completely blind. Never once did he consider that maybe getting @#$%-faced in speakeasies where God alone knew what the stuff you were drinking was made from wasn't the best idea in the world for someone who only had fragmentary vision to start with. Never once. That's a pretty potent level of alcoholism.



Anyway, the letter on page 125 is to Ann Honeycutt who, through two marriages, he never quite "got shed of". It's a good example of where alcoholism comes from and how it mixes badly with sexual desire in men and romantic desire in women. You can see, reading between the lines, that the liquor is destroying him and destroying her. It's an ancient story well – albeit "accidentally well" – told between the lines: men looking to get laid, women looking for love and both staying at it too late in the evening fuelled by booze. He tries to be disarmingly, charmingly and seductively honest, then provocatively overt (this was 1930, after all), then morosely disenchanted all to no avail: all he manages to transparently demonstrate is what it is he's actually looking for and that he will either sulk or turn dangerous if he doesn't get it. Not exactly the stuff of Prince Charming but he seems to think he's playing his cards close to the vest instead of telegraphing his punches from over yonder in the next county.



The thing is, both of them don't realize that, by this point, it isn't about sex or romance, it's actually all about the booze. He actually knows he isn't going to get laid and she actually knows she isn't going to find love but as long as they pretend to themselves that that's what it's about they can actually exacerbate and entrench their own alcoholism and pretend to themselves that that's not what they're doing. If "stealth alcoholism" was a capital crime they would have both been hanged at sunrise before Roosevelt became president. "The Wandering Years" the section this excerpt appears in is called.



Tomorrow: Thurber's letter

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #259 (May 28th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

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

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So, meanwhile back at the Center of the Universe, Marvel Comics, I had just reached the point in my discussions with my contact where I was thinking, "I've had this conversation before – about editorial changes and how you can't factor in how much time that's going to take up so it's hard to know what you should be charging for your services or if you should even take the first step down that path.. Who was I talking to about this?" Turns out it was J. Michael Straczynski the night I met him at Torontocon.



"I just tell them, this is what you get, take it or leave it."



He was talking about television now that I think of it, but he was also talking about freelance writing in general. Doesn't "take it or leave it" get you a reputation as "difficult to work with"? Oh, of course, he said (or words to that effect), but the thing is they come to me because they know I can deliver the goods. If they weren't willing to take what I give them they wouldn't have come to me in the first place.



The other part of his argument is that it means he gets work that gets aired or published in pretty close to the form in which he intended it. So he rises or sinks based on the work's own merit and not on what someone else turned it into.



I think that's the viewpoint I'm going to be forced to adopt. You came to me to suggest that I might "do some covers or something" for Marvel. Okay, let's do A cover. Here's how much I charge for a cover. I'll be happy to listen to any suggestions you or Joe Q wants to make but at the end of the day it's my cover. If it works – that is, if it sells copies of the comic book that it's on, we can talk about another cover or maybe four covers. I'll tell you what I want for them and you can pay me that or not pay me that. I mean, you guys have another BILLION-DOLLAR movie in the cineplexes and what I'm asking for is probably a fraction of one percent of what one catered meal on the set for one of the key grips set you back. Don't you think quibbling over a few hundred dollars (or, say, a grand) for a cover is, you know, beneath a corporation of your exalted stature?



And looking on the bright side from their standpoint, I've already worked for Marvel twice: once with the frontispiece for HOWARD THE DUCK magazine and once with the "Original Sim" portfolio in Marvel Fanfare. I haven't done anything for DC.



Checking my notes here: "THE COMIC EYE cover" Speaking of covers, I finished my part of the cover of THE COMIC EYE, Mark Innes' Blind Bat Press anthology trade paperback about creators' experiences in their comic book careers.



"Oh," I thought to myself, "A HORROR anthology." Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.



So that's what I went with – doing my best Ghastly Graham Ingels – for the princely sum of $115 Canadian. As far as I know Blind Bat Press doesn't have any movies in any cineplexes anywhere and I admire Mark Innes for hanging on all these years so, $115 for a cover. Why quibble? He'll let me do exactly what I want sight unseen. And I'm sure he'll let me reprint the cover or do prints of it or include it in an ART OF DAVE SIM book without having to ask legal permission. That, to me, is an example of exalted comic-book publishing stature. You hire the people you have confidence in and you trust them to turn in good work and then you leave them to it and you remain aware that both the person producing the work and the person publishing it have a legitimate claim to ownership and you try to find a working relationship as close to the 50-yard line as you can feasibly get. Same relationship I had with Gerhard for over two decades.



Largely, I said yes because I wanted to use the EC font that Mike Lindsay (Hi, Mike!) dug up for me and doing a horror splash page as a cover was the first chance in the offing.



I'll have my part of the cover at the table at Torontocon June 8 and 9 (see www.paradisecomics.com for details) along with a few of my other photorealism pieces from recent days and the photos I worked from. Bernie Mireault is doing the cover colour and logo. Keep your eyes out for it.



What else have I got here? "website". The secret project is going to have a website and L.C. and I are filling it up like there's no tomorrow. The idea is that retailers will get tipped to the location first while I'm doing the promotion for the book at the same time that it's going to be in Diamond's Previews catalogue. And as long as nobody in the retail community leaks like a sieve it can stay that way – retailers only – until three months later, the week that the book hits the stores when the website will be announced to all and sundry. Shows you the level of confidence I have in comic-book retailers that I'm doing it that way. I hope the confidence isn't misplaced. We'll find out.



18 MAY update – Peter Birkemoe of Toronto's THE BEGUILING store (I showed him the project in rough form the day before yesterday to see if he thought I had met his challenge – to produce a self-contained affordable comic book that could be used to show "civilians" what the comic book medium is capable of: I'm gratified to say that he thinks that I have) thinks I'm crazy and that the retailers will, indeed, leak like a sieve and I'll be peaking too early – a couple of months too early – by doing it that way. Some retailer or several retailers will leak the website location and by the time the book comes out it will be "yesterday's potatoes". Chris Butcher is Peter's in-house Internet expert, so I think I'll be bringing him in on the planning and strategy stage when I go back to Toronto for Industry Night this Thursday from where you are and two weeks from now from where I am.



I'm pleased to say that over the two weeks that I worked on the secret project I got a little over two pages done so I am now between 11 and 12 pages left to go out of 49 pages. I would classify 6 or 7 of those pages as complete nutcrackers, so I can't even hazard a guess as to how long I have left to work on it. It would be nice to have it out in December, a new No. 1 on the thirtieth anniversary of Cerebus No. 1 if everything falls into place.



18 MAY UPDATE: Peter Birkemoe strongly recommends against the new #1 and strongly recommends in favour of square-binding it. At least in terms of format (definitely not content) he strongly recommends in favour of making this Dave Sim's answer to Alan Moore's KILLING JOKE: hopefully a self-contained perennial seller. Batman won't be in it, but Bob Kane makes a cameo appearance on page 2. Before talking to Peter I would rather have rolled around in broken glass than to have switched formats from "saddle stitched comic book" but he talked me into it. The advantage, as he pointed out, is that even if you can only get the name on the spine in 14 pt. type it can be picked up by Diamond's Star System and, because it's the same dimensions as a comic book for those people who just want to treat it as such, there's no problem.



I'm going to the PRT (People's Republic of Toronto) this week and meeting with an editor at the Toronto Star who is a huge Cerebus fan to ask him, as someone on the other political extreme where everyone else seems to be, if he can picture the secret project being worth promoting to the mainstream media (given that the mainstream media are all over at the same political extreme). I just want him to read the rough cut and give it to me straight. I assume his honest answer will be "You couldn't get this into a Canadian daily newspaper even if every editor was staring down the business end of a shotgun". That's fine, then I can go back to thinking exclusively of promoting it in the comic-book field. If he surprises me and his answer is at the other extreme, then that makes my life a good more complicated over the next few months.



Neither answer would surprise me.



18 MAY UPDATE: Well, he was pretty impressed with what I showed him and had some very good advice on how to promote the project to mainstream media which will, indeed, make my life more complicated in the next few months. I was thinking of doing it in stages (comic world first, then the real world if the comic world just doesn't "get it" – "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" as Leonard Cohen once put it) – but he pointed out that for mainstream media the key is to be able to tell people where they can go and get it and just being able to say "Chapters/Indigo" in Canada or Barnes & Noble in a general North American sense is going to be more effective and is more apt to compel mainstream participation than having to say "Well, first look up comic-book stores in the Yellow Pages…" I'm still inclined to give comic stores the benefit of the doubt and an exclusive first try at the project, but he gave me a lot to think about.



As my Technical Director and Research Assistant put it, "It wouldn't surprise me if this sold 3 copies and it wouldn't surprise me if it sold 35,000 copies." I had to remind him of that quote the last time I talked to him on the phone and he said "I can't believe anyone wouldn't want to pick this up." If anything should jinx it that would be it. And no, the TD & RA isn't Jeff Tundis. He isn't lying to you nice Yahoos. He knows nothing about it.



Next note.



"Craig Russell" called. Yes, P. Craig Russell – to ask me if I'd write an introduction for his ART OF P. CRAIG RUSSELL book that Joe Pruett is doing. I said sure. Then I asked if I could get advance copies of the pages. Even just rough print-outs so that I could see what was going on and comment intelligently on it. He wasn't sure but he has referred it to Joe who is one busy guy right now if you've seen the line-up of things he has in the works. The book was in the latest Previews and he hopes to get a couple of hundred shipped to San Diego for Comicon this summer from wherever it's being printed – Singapore or Hong Kong. Incredibly tight deadline. Has to have the introduction in a week to ten days. That was a week ago and I've heard nothing since. The last time I heard that was with Barry Windsor-Smith's NEW GODS collection and the book didn't end up coming out until something like a year later. I am standing by, however.



Craig's still pulling all-nighters to get all his work done. I told him he was too old for that. He said the rent has to be paid. I hear him on that one. "Paying the rent is my Muse," he said. I laughed. It was a very good way of putting it.



FOLLOWING CEREBUS should be back in stores with issue 10 sometime this month or next month. Yes, it's been gone a while. The reason is that Craig Miller was going through a messy divorce and child custody battle. Do you REALLY want Dave Sim to tell you his personal impressions of someone's messy divorce and child custody battle? No, I didn't think so. So let's just say that FOLLOWING CEREBUS will be returning real soon and leave it at that.



What else have I got here? "Confessions of a Global Warming Denier." That's the title I came up with for my latest article for Sandeep's VERSUS magazine (number six). He usually makes up his own titles. Obviously, I couldn't get into the fact that I think the whole Global Warming scam is just YHWH entering menopause and wildly and telepathically communicating every hot flash to all of his/her/its followers. If I had been able to get into all of that, I would've called it "YHWH: The Hypochondria Years".



Tomorrow: Scott McCloud comes to Toronto!

___________________________________________________

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 #258 (May 27th, 2007)

There was an interesting piece in yesterday's National Post Issues & Comment pages, written by Douglas E. Streusand. The credit reads:



"Douglas E. Streusand is a professor at the United States Marine Corps Command & Staff College. His opinions are his own and do not represent any U.S. government agency."



More's the pity since he makes a number of salient observations. I'm sort of hoping that Mr. Streusand isn't one of those writers who is blind to the contradiction between the free exchange of ideas and an over-zealous fear of copyright violation because I plan to quote pretty extensively from his article here – probably more than is warranted by any narrow definition of proprietary interests. He writes:



"In the current conflict known as the Global War on Terrorism or the Long War, the socialization of the conflict – that is, who takes which side – will affect the course of the conflict significantly and perhaps decisively. Al-Qaeda, its competitors, affiliates and franchisees seek to define the conflict as a struggle between Islam and the West, and thus to win the broadest possible support among the world's Muslims. The United States and its coalition partners seek to define their enemies as narrowly as possible, portraying themselves as fighting not Islam but a deviant ideology that is as inimical to Islam as to the West. By doing so, the coalition would deprive the hostile networks of the popular support on which they depend to survive."



This is good stuff, closely reasoned as long as we genuinely believe we are fighting a deviant ideology and not just calling it that. One of the stumbling blocks I see is the use of the terminology "portraying themselves" which, to me, bespeaks Western corruption of feministic origin having a comparable nature to the use of the term "role model" which also originates on the unfairer sex's side of the ledger that holds that portrayal and reality are interchangeable. To me it's an insidious worldview that is growing in the West like a cancer and that's the reason that I think it needs to be rooted out (although I'm pretty much a minority of one in thinking so). We are not, in my view, "portraying ourselves" as "fighting not Islam but a deviant ideology that is as inimical to Islam as to the West." We are actually doing so. Or, at least, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, me, the U.S. military and a handful of others are doing so. It's quite possible, however, that there is a certain amount of portrayal going on: members of the coalition, as an example, who just flat out hate Arabs and Muslims but are happy to keep that fact to themselves and portray themselves as fighting only against Muslim extremists as long as they continue to have a license to kill x number of Arabs and Muslims. A certain number of extremist Muslims might, likewise, just have a "mad on" about Westerners out of envy and are willing to keep that to themselves and portray themselves as fighting in the name of God against only the serious infidel so long as they get to kill x number of rich Westerners in the course of doing so. I think there is probably a higher level of actuality (or perceived self-confidence in actuality) on the Muslim side than on the Western side. Depending on how balanced the forces at work are this could be crucial in arriving at hoped-for outcomes. My own core hope is that the West's (however nebulously construed) core belief is in the inviolability of freedom of choice, particularly in religion and in lifestyle and that that isn't a portrayal in any way, shape or form.



"The Western coalition faces numerous obstacles in achieving this goal. Only Muslims themselves can decide whether al-Qaeda and its outriders represent Islam or not. Islam, like any other faith, becomes what its followers make it. Al-Qaeda's transformation of Islam into a totalitarian ideology is a pronounced deviation from the historical mainstream of Islam in practice and in theory, suggesting that in the long run the vast majority of Muslims WILL reject it. But the West has only limited leverage in deciding how long the run is."



Well, this isn't particularly accurate and tends, in my view, to be a "Christo-centric" way of looking at it, presuming that all religions are pretty much like Christianity in that they start with very high ideals and scrupulous faith and then gradually erode into basic secularism with a certain amount of lip service and religious observance restricted to specific holidays but with the entrenched priesthood quietly marginalized and ignored as the religion advances into modernity. The secular view that when religion is kept to the fringes, a society has finally "grown up".



On the contrary, as I pointed out in my column on The Twelfth Imam, evidence suggests Islam tends to pull itself in the direction of just such flaccid secularism and the erosion of strict observance and then, just before Islam crosses the Rubicon into a marginalised fringe state, it goes through convulsions that take everything back to the seventh century. You have only to look at any given Muslim society to see what stage it's at in that process. Iran has gone as far back to the seventh century as it can and is now working its way "forward" again. Since 1920 Turkey has been struggling to stay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries under the watchful eye of its military without whose interventions in the nation's politics they would have gone back towards the seventh century several times. If you told me that thirty years (heck, THREE years) from now, under the influence of a charismatic Imam, Turkey would return to the seventh century I would be less surprised than if you told me Turkey is fated to remain strictly secular from now until Judgement Day. The current crisis hinges on strict Islam incrementally making a comeback and the United States, at least for the moment, is taking the side of the Islamists over the secularists. Whether you agree with it or not, that (to me) is what makes Islam impressive as a formal religion. It is pretty much immune to permanent marginalization.



Arguably Darfur is becoming the serious problem it is because it has gone back to the seventh century. In Afghanistan we're fighting to bring the Afghans back to the twentieth century (or, maybe the nineteenth) after their recent trip back to the seventh century under the Taliban. Chechnya is going back to the seventh century. One of the overlooked aspects of Israel's war – or, rather, "war" – in Lebanon last year is that when a modern country attacks a Muslim country, the modernists/secularist Muslims flee the conflict and the hard-core Muslims stay and fight no matter the extent to which they are deprived of material comforts and, with material comforts taken out of the equation, the society thereby begins to revert rapidly to the seventh century. The question is which is real? Modern Secularism or the seventh century? To Westerners, it's modern secularism. To Muslims, it's both. No one wants the Taliban dictating to them, but as Muslim society erodes and standards of behaviour become swinish, you can pretty much set your watch by the appearance of the reformer promising a return to True Islam. It's a self-correcting societal apparatus that Jews and Christians either lack or have outgrown.



Trying to look on the bright side, there is one thing that Westerners can do which is to usurp the terminology. The definition of Islam is Submission to the Will of God and of Muslims as Those Who Submit to the Will of God. The West can easily appropriate that by saying that we in the West are those who Submit to the Will of God and the Will of God is that people be allowed to make choices. "You to your religion and me to mine." Except in this case, adding a new interpretation of what Islam means.



I don't think that will happen (and I am personally amused that the reason that I don't think that will happen is because the countries formerly known as Christendom are more Christian than they care to admit and would rather be metaphorically flayed alive and dipped in sea brine than to have any genuine "truck or trade" with Islam) although I do think it's the most tactically sound approach (in the same way that Christianity tore the guts out of Greek philosophy by usurping and redefining Logos -- The Word).



"The West can, however, help itself by doing everything possible to demonstrate that we do not identify Islam as the enemy, or identify the enemy with Islam…"



As Lyndon Johnson used to say (if what is being suggested is a basis for dialogue between the West and Islam – and what other motive could there be?) "That dog won't hunt." The problem is that the West DOES identify seventh century-style Islam as the enemy. If you think that stoning adulterers is wrong, cutting off the hands and feet of malefactors on opposite sides of their bodies is wrong, flaying the whore and the whoremonger is wrong (and all of these, I might hasten to add, are back on the negotiating table in Turkey with the United States at least giving tacit endorsement) – as all sensible people in the West do -- and, conversely, if you are tolerant of those who join gods with God and those who deem men and women to be equal (as everyone in the West, apparently, besides me, Sandeep, Jeff, Billy and David does) and these are issues you are willing to lay down your life for -- opposing what you think is wrong and supporting what you think is right – even where those are at variance with revelations in the Koran -- then you are definitely identifying seventh-century Islam as your enemy. All you've left open is the question of whether you are willing to die for your beliefs as the Americans and the coalition are doing or if you are just going to roll over and die like France had pretty much elected to do (although their recent election that delivered a decisive blow to mealy-mouthed socialist secularism offers some hope).



As to not "identify[ing] the enemy with Islam" this verges on the solipsistic. If Osama bin Laden isn't a devout Muslim, what is he? You can say that he's misguided but it would be a lunatic approach to wonder where his motivation comes from as if that point of origin was somehow in doubt. The doubt is purely Western and purely mythical. "Maybe he was abused as a child or he just has severe unresolved anger issues. Maybe he just needs a group hug or some counselling. Maybe, like Al Franken, he just has to look in the mirror and say, `Darn it, I'm a nice person…and people like me.'"



When push comes to shove I wouldn't put too much faith in the possibility of successfully persuading Muslims to re-imagine Islam through Sigmund Freud's and Oprah Winfrey's bifocals.



"And one way to do this is by changing the public discourse about Islam.

"One prominent example of this is the widespread practice of identifying our enemies as jihadis or mujahidin. English dictionaries consistently define jihad as holy war, but jihad is not an English word. In Arabic, it is a verbal noun that means striving or making effort. (the phrase `fi sabilillah' – `in the path of God' – completes the expression – as in `Jihad fi sabilillah' – though it is generally omitted.)"



This seems at least potentially useful although dramatically unlikely to me. I don't think you even have to go so far as to express it in Arabic, but I do think a frank statement that the West believes itself to be "striving on path of God" -- in advancing the idea that each individual is free to choose his or her own form of striving and to reap the benefits and suffer the consequences of those choices (`God will not wrong you so much as the husk of a date stone') -- and that we consider those who judge and punish the striving of others to be anathematic to our own best judgement of God's will -- would probably communicate the idea pretty effectively. The thing is, I think this would again swerve dangerously in the direction of portrayal. Does the West actually BELIEVE that it is striving on path of God?



Unconsciously, yes, I believe so – on the same level where the countries that make up Christendom are still Christian countries and the inhabitants of those countries are (unbeknownst to most of them) Christians at heart.



Consciously, I would have to say no. I think there exists in our present-day world at least an illusion of consensus in the West that belief in God is little more than a quaint affectation that needs to be sequestered at the margins of society. I think most Westerners would describe "striving on path of God" as "the human urge to do good works" or something equally blandified and secular in the same way that Frank Lloyd Wright said that he believed in God, he just calls Him "Nature". Too glib by half in the context that Islam occupies. Right now most Westerners don't see themselves as having anything in particular at stake in the Clash of Civilizations. Of course as the conflict continues to move forward that's apt to change much as we saw recently in France with the victory of Nicolas Sarkozy who was and is universally despised (within the same consensus illusion that is growing like a cancer in North America) by the feminists and fellow travellers: You can use the feministic approach of shunning Islam if you want, but it doesn't tend to make Islam go away, it just strengthens Islam. You can address the problem now or you can address the problem later but it is as certain as God made little green apples that you will have to address the problem at some point. The feminists, as exemplified by Sarkozy's opponent Royal adhere to the viewpoint that everything unpleasant that they don't want to face can just be ignored to death. That's true of everything except Islam, in my view.





"In the earliest Muslim texts, most notably the hadith, the reports of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, jihad refers primarily to warfare in the name of the faith. And so one cannot deny that its meaning includes holy war. But Islamic law also includes rigorous standards that military activity must meet to qualify as jihad. Engaging in warfare in violation of those standards is sinful. Al-Qaeda and its allies and fellow-travellers assert vociferously that their actions qualify as jihad; their rhetoric uses the term repeatedly. The legitimacy of their actions depends entirely on qualifying as jihad.

Thus, describing them as jihadis or mujahidin (participants in jihad) not only validates their claim to legitimacy but also implies that we consider Islam itself our enemy. From the perspective of strategic communications, calling our enemies jihadis or mujahidin is counterproductive. It makes as much sense as calling Nazi SS units `National Socialist Aryan heroes.'

What term, then, SHOULD we use for al-Qaeda and its activities? In the Islamic legal tradition, the best term for warfare that does not meet the standards of jihad is hirabah, which originally meant brigandage but now denotes sinful warfare in general. Another potentially useful word is irhab, the Arabic word for terrorism. Irhabi is the literal translation of `terrorist'."



Again, I can't really see the West adopting Islamic terminology with the idea of usurping the ability to frame its meaning but if such a thing is possible (even a) remotely and b) in some distant future), it certainly seems useful to me. I have no problem seeing things framed in just such absolutist terms. "I am striving on path of God but YOU are engaging in sinful warfare. I call on God to judge between us and I am prepared to live with His verdict."



Very straightforward in my own frames of reference.



The counter-assertion from Muslim fundamentalists seeking to refute me would be verses and Suras from the Koran – most particular Sura 8 "The Spoils". My answer to that would be that I believe a large part of striving on path of God is reading Scripture critically, that God expects us to judge what in Scripture comes from Him and what comes from His adversary and I believe both are viewpoints are represented extensively in the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran. If they would indulge me (which I don't think they would) I'd be happy to go through "The Spoils" line by line and say "This is from God, this is from YHWH, this is from God, this is from YHWH".



I reserve my right to stake my soul on my choices and to allow everyone else to do the same. Again, I happily call on God to judge between us in that belief and in my own choices and I am prepared to live with His verdict.



I think the average Western mind would come seriously unhinged to even contemplate expressing Western beliefs in those terms. Virtually the entire West (seeing itself as the West and not as Christendom) is still, I think, at the point of denial and labouring under the illusion of hoping that Muslims can be persuaded to understand and negotiate on the basis of secular mythologies if those secular mythologies can just be explained in an attractive enough way. The West is still trying to figure out how to deal with Islam while dealing God out of the card game. We had metaphorical "home field advantage" against the Soviet Union because we weren't entirely godless -- as they were by choice -- even at our worst. Now, as far as I can see, the Muslims have home field advantage because we are trying to make ourselves either godless, near godless or entirely godless and to try to get them to do the same.





"On the other hand, if our goal is in fact to convince the Muslim world that we do not consider Islam and Muslims our enemy, why not declare them non-Muslims? Some analysts advocate doing exactly that. But mainstream Muslims (unlike the extremists) have traditionally refused to condemn other professing Muslims as apostates. They reject the doctrine of takfir, which permits one Muslim to condemn another professing Muslim as an unbeliever (kafir). If Muslims refuse to condemn others as apostates, it would be the height of arrogance for non-Muslims to do so."



Well, yes, because it smacks of gamesmanship rather than belief…as if you are using Muslim frames of reference to tie them up in theological knots rather than having a philosophy more closely aligned with God's will than theirs is. Put another way: Did the West defeat the Soviet Union because we believed in God and they didn't and we believed that freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion were two sides of the same coin? or did the West defeat the Soviet Union because we had better weapons and better nightclubs, movies and television? In 1989, the general Western answer would be "What's the difference? We won and that's all that counts." It seems to me that in going toe-to-toe with Islam there is a great deal of difference and making the right choices both as individuals and as a society will settle whether we win or lose.



"Getting our vocabulary right will not, of course, affect directly the behaviour of our actual adversaries. It is only part of what we need to do to accomplish the mission of weakening their support base throughout the Muslim world. But it is an essential part."



I think this misunderstands both the strategy we need to win The Long War and what is at stake in The Long War. It is, to be sure, a matter of "spin doctoring" (in Western terminology) but "spin doctoring" in terms of how we present the Truth as we perceive it to those who don't share our beliefs (what I see as the core of monotheistic faith: "We hold these truths to be self-evident…") rather than as a way of making a lie appear to be the truth (what I see as being the core of feminism, Marxism, secularism, multiculturalism and all the other Anything-But-God-isms).



I don't think the West is there, yet. When we get to the point of recognizing that we are and always have been "striving on path of God"-- as a society -- then I think the correct vocabulary will be there as and when we need it. As the Synoptic Jesus instructed his disciples. "Take no thought for what you might do or say…" Let God speak through you in a way commensurate with your own faith in Him. I think we can match Islam point for point in any discussion of who is on path of God and who is engaging in sinful warfare. What I don't think we can hope to do or aspire to do is to persuade Muslims to join the West in jettisoning God and erecting all our isms in His place.



If that's the course we insist on and persist in, then I think the West (formerly known as Christendom) has nothing to look forward to but its own 1989 and the collapse of its own metaphorical Berlin Wall.

eBay item# 250119870478
Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture readng bible dvd Judges $17.99


___________________________________________________

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 #257 (May 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.

_____________________________________________________



I did have a phone conversation with my contact at Marvel about the possibility of just doing a cover, trying to get really basic about it and then got in the same nineteen pages that I got in before but now with a page rate for pencils, inks and letters plugged in.



Crossed wires and miscommunication.



I thought he had gotten me bumped up to another level of income and that I would be getting 150% of that new rate for a cover (150% of your assigned rate is, evidently, Marvel's standard rate for a cover). Turns out that he was talking about the standard rate and the 150% would be that much more because it was 150%. Also the powers that be at Marvel want me to sign off on the page rate first before we move on to other elements of the agreement which I'm not crazy about. Purely in the sense of Larger Contexts it seems more than a little foolish to sign my name to an agreement specifying that I am worth about $100 less for a fully penciled inked and lettered comic book page than I am for what I just made from Mark S. (Hi, Mark!) for a 9 X 12 pencil drawing of Cerebus and Yoda…and $3,200 less than I just got offered for a pen-and-ink Cerebus and Cirin fight scene for Matthew E. (Hi, Matthew!). This is what I warned about early on: Marvel essentially wants me to sign an agreement specifying that I'm not worth what I'm making right now and I'm only worth what they say I'm worth.



I tried to do an end-run around that one: Let's just stick to a single cover. Marvel wants me to do A cover and here's what Marvel is willing to pay me for A cover. My contact was under the impression that they were in the ballpark for a cover with the quoted rate. Well, maybe if it was basically just a pin-up shot of the character with an all-black background. Basically something I could knock out as fast as a 9 X 12 pencil drawing of Cerebus and Yoda. If they would rather have a cover with the sort of thinking you would put into a cover, that's going to take longer and cost more. Relating it to the commissions I said, "Are you going to buy it sight unseen?" No, definitely not. They don't buy any cover sight unseen. It would have to go to Joe Q for approval. Well, to me, that's a different category. You come to Dave Sim and you want Dave Sim to do a Dave Sim cover, presumably you have confidence that he will produce something worth the money you are paying him. My contact countered with the fact that there is a $50 sketch attached (I'm also not crazy about rabbits getting pulled out of hats in mid-negotiation, but, okay, let's talk about this sketch). I do a sketch of the cover and I get $50.



I mean, we're not yelling at each other or anything but he was clearly disappointed because he thought he had a clear commitment-in-principle that I would do a cover for the quoted rate and my understanding was that the quoted rate would be bumped up and I would get 150% of that higher amount. Even at that point it wouldn't be a slam-dunk – which evidently he thought it was -- but at least I would have a new dollar amount to contemplate. The quoted rate was very far from making me jump up and down for joy. I'm trying to be conciliatory but that never works very well with me. In my view, it's because I'm never a big fan of outright capitulation and that seems to be what the world primarily runs on. Just sign the agreement and we can move on. Well, uh, (in a word) no. I said one of the problems was the quoted rate getting carved in stone as What Dave Sim is Worth. He pointed out that rates have been increased. Well, yeah, but the BASIS is always the QUOTED rate. Here's what you agreed to and here's, you know, 10% more for your next cover because your first cover sold really well. I tried dealing with the fact that he had approached me on behalf of Marvel, I hadn't gone to him looking for work. Maybe the problem is that Marvel doesn't share his enthusiasm (as a long-time Cerebus fan) for Dave Sim's work. It would certainly account for my getting quoted a rate for a finished page that was $100 less than I was getting for a pencil drawing of Cerebus and Yoda. I'm trying to let him off the hook: no harm, no foul. Call me back when you have Joe Q's job. He pointed out that there is a sense at Marvel that DC failed to arrive at an agreement with me and it would be a feather in their cap if they could succeed where DC failed. I can see that, but that really opened another can of worms. If you want to succeed where DC failed, you have to step back and see why DC failed, which was that they were determined to cram me into their work-made-for-hire context for an amount of money which is far less than I make for a commissioned piece. In a real sense you're asking me to play Judas goat. I sign your agreement and do a cover or a few covers and you get to use that as leverage against other indy creators. Hey, Dave Sim signed our work-made-for-hire contract. How bad can it be? He threw the Warren Ellis card on the table – that Warren Ellis said somewhere that working for Marvel instantly gives all of his non-Marvel work a higher profile. Marvel gets the entry-level audience and their audience pretty much turns over every few years. Yeah, I can see that point AND no one is near to Marvel in being able to stake a claim for doing good for your career just because they ARE Marvel but I'm not sure that A cover or a SERIES of covers is going to have that same effect.



I'm not sure that it ISN'T, either, and Marvel definitely has that going for them.



So then you get into: why not become the new writer on fill-in-the-blank and agree to write ten issues of something and do the covers? Well, because I'm working on my own things, my own things that I own. If I could write something that would be bought sight unseen and do covers that would be bought sight unseen that's one thing: I could then mentally balance the promotional value for my own projects against the working time and the page rate and see if one of the pans can't be made to balance the other. But the odds are I'm going to be spending hours a day on the phone being told what I can do and what I can't do. This cover was accepted, but this one was rejected. Joe Q needs a new sketch by 5 pm. Joe Q saw the new sketch and he doesn't like that one either, can I send another three by 9 am tomorrow? I can't use Iron Man. No, no one said I could use Iron Man and if they did they misspoke. I need to rewrite the middle eight pages on issue 219 using Sub-Mariner instead of Iron Man. You would need a lot of promotional value, in my book, to overcome that kind of (what's a nice way of putting it?) consultative excess?



Monday: I had this discussion with someone once…who was it? Oh, right. Joe Straczynski



Tomorrow: "Don't call them `jihadis'"

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 #256 (May 25th, 2007)

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, we have no headline capability, but it is the twenty-fifth of the month and as all good Blog & Mail readers know, that means it's

FEMINISTS GET A FREE RIDE IN OUR SOCIETY DAY.

Any word from Jackie Estrada or Heidi Macdonald or the Friends of Lulu about my suggestion that they solicit the FOL membership to find out how many female comics professionals would be willing to sign a petition that could be used by the CBLDF denouncing censorship or why that suggestion was rejected by the original FOL board back in 1997? Nope. QED, folks. FEMINISTS GET A FREE RIDE IN OUR SOCIETY. If you have a minute, In honour of FEMINISTS GET A FREE RIDE IN OUR SOCIETY DAY, please actually review the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast at your leisure rather than just scrolling quickly through them as you do every other day of the month, pretending a) that they don't actually exist and b) you could refute them with ease if you weren't so busy doing other more important things and c) who cares anyway? Remember intellectual dishonesty starts on feminism's doorstep and it's up to you (and YOU and YOU) to do what you can, personally, to get society back to a more sensible and genuinely fair (for BOTH sexes) track.



Okay, secure in your intellectual dishonesty, you can stop scrolling down now and actually read this part since it has nothing to do with feminism:



I had had an idea for some visual comedy that could be accomplished in ten minutes or less (the Challenge of YouTube!) that involved me dressing up in a Green Lantern costume and announcing that I was running for President of the United States. That was the first 10-minute clip. The second ten-minute clip would be a mock press conference, again, with me in a Green Lantern costume:



Yahoo #1: I'd like to ask the candidate what his stand is on the War in Iraq.



Dave: [using Bill Clinton's mock sincerity voice and "gesturing with a pointed thumb" technique] ["I did not have sex with that woman, that Ms. Lewinsky."] I'm very glad that you asked me that question. There is no issue that more divides the American people than the War in Iraq. Let me turn that around for a minute and ask YOU, "What is YOUR view of the War in Iraq?"



Yahoo #1: Uhh – Well, I think it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place and I think we should withdraw immediately.



Dave: And I agree with you. One hundred percent. I, too, think it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place. And I, too, think we should withdraw immediately.



(the Yahoos murmur amongst themselves)



Yahoo #2: But…Dave…that's not TRUE. You've said repeatedly that you think the invasion of Iraq was a GREAT idea.



Dave: That's very true. [directly into the camera] But when I expressed THOSE opinions I was expressing them as Dave Sim, CITIZEN. However, now I am campaigning to become the forty-fourth President of the United States. And I intend to be the President not of HALF of the American people. But to be the President of ALL the American people.



Yahoo #2: But…you have to take a stand one way or the other.



Dave: Allow me…with all due respect…to disagree with you on that point. And further, allow me to show you exactly what I mean. [to Yahoo #3] Tell me, what's YOUR opinion on the War in Iraq?



Yahoo #3: Uh. Well. I'm not crazy about it, but …now that we're there, I think we have to finish the job. We can't just leave the Iraqi people hanging in the lurch.



Dave: [with emphatic thumb gestures] And I agree with you. One hundred percent. I too, am not fond of the War in Iraq. But I, too, think that now that we're there. I, too, think we have to finish the job that we have started. And I, too, believe we can't just leave our Iraqi friends and allies hanging in the lurch. [turning back to Yahoo #2, gesturing with arms outspread and raised eyebrows: "See?"]



Yahoo #2: [irritated] But…but…you can't do that for an entire Presidential term.



Dave: [with emphatic thumb gestures] Allow me, again…with all due respect…to disagree with you on that point. [looking directly into the camera] With your help. And with your prayers. And with your assistance. I believe I can do EXACTLY that. Until the third week in January of 2017.



Yahoo #1: Let me…shift gears a bit…here and ask you about a reference to Green Lantern being a CANADIAN super-hero in your announcement yesterday.



Dave: [facing directly towards the camera with emphatic thumb gestures] I am very glad you asked me about that. It's a little known fact that John Broome, the creator of the Silver Age Green Lantern, specified that Green Lantern's alter ego, Hal Jordan, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.



Yahoo #1: The reason I ask is because I'm a huge Green Lantern fan and, frankly, I've never heard of that before.



Dave: [facing directly into the camera with emphatic thumb gestures] That information was contained in a notebook that Mr. Broome kept at the time. Which. Unfortunately. was destroyed in a freak accident shortly after he wrote it down.



Yahoo #1: Then, uh, how did YOU find out about it?



Dave: [completely silent, his mouth a hard thin line, gradually starting to turn red and obviously breathing heavily and grinding his teeth] [strips off his Green Lantern mask and throws it in the direction of the Yahoos] All right. You don't want me to run for President? Fine. I'm not running for President. You HAPPY now? Hanh? Is THAT what you wanted? You know why you can't find good candidates? It's…because of this relentless…grinding…inquisition…



That's about as far as I got with it. When I went to buy the Green Lantern costume at the costume shop it was locked up tight as a drum midday on a Friday. I can take a hint. I mean, I thought it was funny but I'm always guessing wrong about human nature: people are deadly serious when I think they should be light-hearted and light-hearted when I think they should be deadly serious. It's also hard to know what YouTube is actually about this early in its genesis. A lot of the appeal seems to be watching people embarrassing themselves by being unconscious about how bad they are at something or by demonstrating a hypocritical switch in viewpoints (which was part of the motivation for my doing a mock presidential campaign that was less than twenty minutes in length). I thought if nothing else a "lead shot" of Dave Sim in a Green Lantern costume a) sitting at a presidential style desk and b) standing behind a lectern would at least brighten up the "menu" of YouTube clips of Dave Sim. Of course you can't get rid of that once it exists and it would certainly suit the feminist agenda to use the clip of Poor, Hopelessly Crazy Foolish Dave Sim the Evil Misogynist in the Green Lantern costume anytime that I'm discussed anywhere in audio-visual land from now until the end of time. So it's all for the best, right? Uhhh…right?



The Yahoos suggested we should act out parts of High Society and do an interview for indyspinnerrack. Which we did. Whether or not we all embarrassed ourselves will probably be established by the number of hits that it gets. Or maybe not.



Anyway, I thought I'd type out those parts of the Green Lantern bit while it was still fresh in my mind. I have no idea how many people laughed when they read the above and how many people are just aching with false sympathy for Foolish Dave Sim the Evil Misogynist that he thinks any of that was remotely funny. That might yet prove to be what YouTube is about: people not knowing how they're "supposed" to react to things and, so, having a more and more difficult job being politically correct since there's no audience reaction or Gallup Poll or Neilson ratings for stuff on YouTube for them to make sure that they're reacting the "right way" to what they're viewing (of course that will probably change if and when YouTube starts posting – if they haven't already – what are the highest "rated" clips with the most number of hits) . Given enough time and what I see as the inevitable complete collapse of network television YouTube might prove to be the catalyst for a worldwide Personality Meltdown among those people for whom "being politically correct" – i.e. viewing what they're "supposed" to be viewing -- is a high ideal and not God's whoopee cushion.



Hey, let's hope so, eh?



Tomorrow: My Contact at Marvel, The Comic Eye cover and perhaps more

There's more for you in today's blog and…maiillll.

___________________________________________________

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.