Dave Sim's blogandmail #322 (July 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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Okay, looking at "See the Elephant," the lead story in ELEPHANTMEN #001 from the women's point of view (and I wasn't going to talk about this until Craig faxed me the transcript of the Rush Limbaugh radio show about the law they're trying to pass in Virginia about reporting things like fathers and their little girls holding hands "IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT WHEN I SEE THEM TOGETHER.")


I REALLY think that guys have been low-balling the impact that unrestricted pornography on the Internet has had on the female world. Not in their female relationship with explicit pornography. I think they satisfy their own curiosity pretty quickly and move on. Pornography is cold and impersonal in female frames of reference and a little of it goes a long way. They sure don't like to examine what it means for theirs (and your) relationship but I think I'm safe in saying that they are better-informed about it than you think. Unless you keep your computer in a locked room, they probably know all of your access codes and all of your hiding places and the websites that you visit on a regular basis. On a percentage basis, I would guess that probably 97% of Significant Others are very informed on the subject but probably only about 20% are very informed because it was your idea. You didn't tell her. She found out. Most women consider it a big part of the wife/girlfriend job description. Unless you keep it under lock and key, she's seen it and she's been mulling it over, whatever it is. There is nowhere that you could hide anything of yours that she couldn't find it.


And I would suspect that the problem is a LOT WORSE than they suspected or even dreamed or hallucinated in their wildest nightmares. That is, you guys are looking at a LOT more porno than they ever imagined that you looked at. And you are looking at a lot WORSE porno than they ever imagined that you looked at. Particularly in the collective sense which they know a lot more about than you do. Face it: you have zero interest in what Women In General Are Like. It's all you can do to keep up with one of them. That's not the way it is with them. And I would suspect in the last fifteen years or so, most of them could be described as seeing:


This Is What Men Are Like. Generally. My Boyfriend Is Not Altogether Different from Men Generally. I Think I Want to Cut My Wrists Now, Please.


Slight exaggeration. To the degree that they can be philosophical about, say, bondage photos if that's what you've been downloading (and the only thing that might be saving you is that ALL of their girlfriends' husbands and boyfriends are downloading bondage photos as well and they've all made a kind of uneasy peace with it and are just trying to "be there" for the one who found out her boyfriend has been downloading photos of women having sex with dogs) they really do draw the line at child pornography or anything that seems even remotely like child pornography. And I suspect that that problem is a LOT worse than they ever imagined it was. When these child pornography rings are getting busted and it's hundreds and hundreds of men, all of whom just seem like regular guys next door. Well. I mean, what's the surprise at the female reaction? I suspect that they thought (as I thought) that child pornography and pedophiles were like that guy in Germany who was into cannibalism. He wanted someone to kill him and eat him. And he found someone on the Internet who was willing and eager to kill him and eat him. And they got together and the guy killed him and ate him.


It would astonish me to find out that there are, say 18 people on the entire planet at this moment who are like that. Actually, I LIKE to think that those were the only two guys who were serious enough about that depravity to actually go through with it and now that one of them ate the other, there's no problem. I'll never know. I stay as far from the Internet as I can. The only time I find out about this stuff is when I read it in the papers. I've said elsewhere that I can't imagine allowing a portal into my home that could access things like that. But I would have said the same thing about the number of guys who are interested in, say, penetrating a three-year-old anally and who do so. And who take pictures of it. And then swap the pictures with other interested parties. I mean, to me, that just suggests a level of implicit sadism that I can't even begin to get my head around it. Even basic questions like: how could you possibly maintain an erection while causing such an extreme form of physical pain to a child? So unless they're making up these newspaper stories, the statistics are proving to be well outside of the category of 18 people on the planet and that means that "cold and impersonal" has a scale of values that are quantum levels above what women could have imagined in their wildest nightmares and well outside of the isolated and the anecdotal. There is a hitherto unguessed at percentage of the population for whom their innermost sexual psychology only starts at "cold and impersonal" and then goes right off the scale when it comes to sadistic desires.


And I don't think women know what to do about this and I think the campaign in Virginia is someone doing her level best to try to figure out HOW do you do something about this? And it's really taking advantage of what women know to be their best artillery. Their emotions. The "bad feeling" that they get even when their conscious mind and visual evidence isn't telling them that something is "out of line". I can't honestly say one way or the other if it's actually going to work because the boundaries of those "bad feelings" are pretty mysterious and are kept pretty mysterious by women themselves. They do tend to pool their information (what else is gossip?) so I would imagine that as they became aware of how serious the problem was, they got a little more serious about "grilling" the women who were in proximity to these atrocities. And I suspect that was the best that they could come up with. No, there was nothing they could put their finger on, specifically, but they had a common emotion-level reaction they described as "IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT WHEN I SEE THEM TOGETHER." And they tried that quote out on other women in proximity to these atrocities and they agreed, yes, that's what it was like. Of course, that only hints furtively at: how can you be in proximity to this and not know? This is what your boyfriend/husband/fiancée is up to and you are just completely clueless about it? Lunatic extremes of sadism coupled with complete normalcy in all other regards…well, I can understand just not being able to believe that. But if it's a matter of "looking the other way" what does that say about the girlfriend/wife/fiancée involved?


Now, the problem is, to just let them institute something like this `IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT WHEN I SEE THEM TOGETHER" as the basis for, say, throwing guys in jail, you have to have every confidence that they aren't going to mistake something else for something else. I remember a young mother of my acquaintance who had the devil's own time with her daughter when her daughter was two, every day was like the Battle of Bull Run from morning to night. Until Daddy came home. And then everything was wonderful. The kid was good as gold. And boy did THAT honk Mommy off. And, of course Mommy was something of a nightmare herself as far as Daddy (and everyone who knew Mommy) was concerned. And that's when I developed my theory that God tends to give women daughters very much like themselves so they can find out what it's like: what it is that they've been putting everyone through since they were that age.


Would Mommy have said about her daughter and Daddy's relationship: "IT DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT WHEN I SEE THEM TOGETHER"? I have no idea. It's very possible that women are reading that and going "Oh, no. Completely different thing." Well, again, you have to have every confidence that beings who spent years selling us on PMS are able to neatly subdivide all of these "Feel Right" and "Feel Wrong" things and get them 95% right every time out of the gate and not have anything interfering like basic jealousy or the bad feeling they get when they aren't able to control everyone in their vicinity and when they sometime aren't the center of everyone's orbit.


I've certainly seen fathers touching their daughters in ways that I would deem inappropriate. Do I say anything? Well, no. Who would believe Dave Sim when it came to recognizing what was or wasn't inappropriate? There's a picture of JFK sitting in his chair on the Presidential yacht with his hand resting on Caroline's ass who was like, 5 at the time. I've never had a five-year-old daughter so maybe casually sitting there with your hand resting on her ass is the most natural thing in the world. How would I know? I had a convention organizer's two daughters (who were like 2 and 3 at the time) show me a nude picture of themselves. How am I supposed to react? And they went in the other room and took their clothes off and started running around. And I'm sitting there making light-hearted conversation with Mommy and Daddy. Then the one flopped down on the couch next to Daddy and started masturbating.


I'm a divorced man who never had kids but I know Dr. Spock when I see it. Don't treat nudity as anything alarming or you'll scar the poor dears for life. Well, okay, but I really think I need to be getting back to my hotel. NOW. Because this is just TOO HONKING WEIRD FOR ME. But, of course, I just pretended I was tired.


Okay, you tell me. What was I SUPPOSED to do?


"Everything's fine, everything's normal, everything's completely healthy. Just let children do what they want to do when they want to do it and just treat everything as completely normal. Don't let anything bother you. Don't act alarmed because you'll cause them a trauma. Just be as one with the Universe and believe that all is unfolding as it should." Well, okay, Mother Nature, I get the idea. But I don't really see how you can have those as complete carved-in-stone hard and fast rules and then suddenly late in the day start trafficking in "It doesn't feel right when I see them together." Personally, I think the latter is probably a much better idea but I also think it violates a core tenet of feminism which is: Everything Is Okay. You Have Only Two Choices: Be Supportive or Shut Up.


Okay, finally done with ELEPHANTMEN #001. Having voiced all my qualms that I have with it – again, I'm not calling any censors I just thought I should discuss what it is that I think they're doing here without pulling any punches – I have to give them MAJOR BROWNIE points for printing the following on the inside front cover:


"A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale."


George W. Bush, STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS 2006


Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear.


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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 #321 (July 29th, 2007)

Jeff Seiler, formerly of Carollton Texas and now of Tulsa, Oklahoma writes:

"Dear Dave,

"I'm sitting here, balancing my checkbook, while watching a re-presentation of the 10-year-old movie, THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, which starred Keanu Reeves, Charlize Theron (yum!) and Al Pacino. The upshot of the story, as you may recall, is that everyone has a chink (at least) in their armour into which the Devil might worm his way.

Or, her way or its way. In the case of Mr. Reeves' character in that movie, that chink was that which goeth before the fall.


"Pride.


"Contemplating that led me to remember the days, recorded by you in the back of CEREBUS, during which you certainly and unabashedly engaged in many acts of chutzpah or, even, prideful arrogance. Pardon my being forward, but you DID put it on record. As I recently was discussing with Kaye; in the past nine and a half years, I had only one sexual encounter before her and since Terri Dawn, and I recorded THAT in a comic book. I remarked to Kaye that you and I are perhaps the only two people I know of who have been so quick to record our foibles in comic books. And, yes, the above DOES make it official; you're back in a club of one male.


"So: Pride.


"How does one avoid indulging in pride when one has accomplished so much; when one is the sole proprietor of the most successful independent comic-book company in the world? When one can look up one's company in the DIAMOND PREVIEWS and know that one's early listing in the book is the only such listing that represents a company that is owned and operated by one man, how does one avoid pride?


"Or is some measure of pride acceptable? Seriously; if one has accomplished some measure of success through honourable effort and ethical practices, shouldn't one be allowed SOME measure of reasonable satisfaction and even PRIDE in one's accomplishments? For the record, I'M proud of YOU.


"But, I don't know. I've struggled with that question over the years. I may not be wealthy or even successful by most people's definitions, but I have had an impact on a lot of lives by virtue of being a mental health worker and a teacher. When someone tells you that they think they might have killed themselves if it weren't for you – and they MEAN it – it makes an impact. But, should you have PRIDE as a result?


"I really do struggle with this, as a God-fearing man. Sometimes, I suspect God has led me down the paths I've chosen so as to limit my susceptibility to pride, knowing, as He must, my weakness in that area.


"And so, I ask again, how do YOU avoid it? And, as I ask, I suspect that you will be first tempted to answer "prayer and fasting". Yes, prayer and fasting and devotion to God. But, even God-fearing men, like David, Muhammad, Peter, Paul and perhaps even Jesus have given in to Pride. One could make a case for the occasion of Jesus' rage at the Temple towards the moneychangers as being a result of pride, though it would be a tough sell.


"Even God, being described in the Torah as vengeful, mighty, jealous, wrathful, etc. could also be described as being prideful. Of course, His would be the exception that proves the rule.


"So, ultimately, I close with the question, once again; how do YOU avoid Pride? Is observing the tenets of Islam enough? Does it take some extra, non-denominational faith in God? And, while I'm at it [and since you are so remarkably open (as am I, regrettably) to probing, personal questions], how do you avoid the more intense, perhaps more damnable PRIVATE pride? You know; the pride that you never let on to with others, but the one that is, all the more, insidious?


"Wondering, without judgement (self-righteous or otherwise), I remain, Yours beyond 300


Jeff


Well virtually all of the vengeful, wrathful emotional stuff in the Torah is about YHWH. When God actually says or does something, which He does very infrequently and mostly at the beginning, He just matter-of-factly does it.


Sorry, I digress.


Hunh. Well, uh, I just don't have a frame of reference for pride in my life to be honest. It doesn't apply to an anti-feminsit in a feminist context. Everyone in the world besides me is in complete agreement that we need to turn the world into PEEWEE'S PLAYHOUSE and they've done so. Put anything that I've done on the set of PEEWEE'S PLAYHOUSE and it isn't going to show up as anything, let alone anything to have pride in. It's like someone asking my reaction to "Would you let your sister marry a black man?" I check it out against my innermost, private response and come up empty. What was the question again? Pride?


Hmm. Pride.


I work hard. I work very hard and I work to try to get things to come out the way I picture them coming out but for a very long time everything that I have done has just gone out into the void as if it never existed and I have to settle for metaphorical crickets chirping as a response. It's been that way for at least thirteen years. As far as I can see no one in the world and the world itself haven't changed one iota in those thirteen years. 9/11 transformed a lot of things, but it didn't even make feminism blink.


Okay, let's take the latest book: COLLECTED LETTERS 2. People bought copies of it. Are they going to say anything to me about the content? Well, uh, no. I already know that. The response is practically guaranteed at this point: Dead Silence. And what's more, THEY already know that. They knew what their reaction to the book would be before they bought the book and before they read the book. "I will say nothing to Dave Sim or to anyone about this book. I will not agree with it and I will not disagree with it. I will read it and I will be completely silent in perpetuity about its content." It's just how things are. Now, if you ask me, "Doesn't that strike you as a REALLY STRANGE WAY to react to a book?" I would have to answer, yes. But I would have given you the same answer about READS, MINDS, GUYS, RICK'S STORY, GOING HOME, FORM & VOID, LATTER DAYS, THE LAST DAY and COLLECTED LETTERS 2004.


That's a REALLY STRANGE WAY to react to a book. As far as I know, I'm the only person who can maintain a perfect record across thirteen years and nine (now ten) books of zero reaction across the board. Having no evidence to the contrary, I'm pretty sure that that will be the reaction to my secret project, to COLLECTED LETTERS 3, COLLECTED LETTERS 4, COLLECTED LETTERS 5 and everything else I write and draw and publish right up to the day I die whenever that might be. I'm not sure how I could be "proud" of that though. It's just how things are.


To me, it was worth doing – it was worth writing and drawing all of those books because to me those books point in the direction of reality. Someday, someone besides me has to re-learn to be interested in reality and they'll probably want something to read when it happens, so creating something for them to read seems worthwhile even though I'll probably have been dead fifty years when they read it. It's very hard to be proud when the best you can say is "I think I will have a good reason to be proud of this fifty years after I'm dead when someone finally reads it and agrees with it."


There was the big exchange of viewpoints with Ray Earles back three years ago, as an example. I forget about things like that until, as in this case, I'm proof-reading the letters from 2004 and then I go, right, Ray Earles. I wonder what happened to him? He did a strip for your comic with me as Lucy holding the football and him as Charlie Brown trying to kick it (at least, I seem to remember that was Ray). Nice to know he's still out there somewhere. Is being seen metaphorically as Lucy pulling away the football something that YOU would take pride in? Even secretly? No. That's not a good character. No one wants to be seen as Lucy Van Pelt. There is a base meanness to pulling away the football, like you aren't holding up your side of an implicit bargain, you are at a base level being mean and unkind, a bad sport. Is that how I see myself and how I see the letters that I invested hours of my time writing to Ray when I could have been doing something I would get paid for? No, definitely not. Is that how Ray sees them? Well, evidently. Am I hurt by it? Well, no. I don't get personally invested in anything or anyone that way. My only investment is in ideas and creativity. I re-read the letters I sent to Ray and I go, "Yeah, I think I got that pretty well. I think the metaphors sustain themselves on at least a couple of levels and sustain my viewpoint as a consequence."


But, to have pride in those letters, well, you really need either something a) collective or b) joint. That is, at one level or another, I would have to be turning to someone and going "How about that? I nailed that one didn't I?" And there's no one there. There hasn't been anyone there for a LOOOOONG time. Truth to tell, there has never been anyone there. And I know that, so there is really only the actual act of accomplishing what the task was. CEREBUS 1-300. There. I'll never have to do that again. COLLECTED LETTERS 2. There. I'll never have to do that again. It has nothing to do with people. Not even in an imaginary sense. Let's picture Norman Mailer reading this someday. What would his reaction be? I assume he would get quiet, sullen, belligerent and resentful just like everyone else does. It might ruin his afternoon. How do you take pride in ruining someone's afternoon? Why would you take pride in ruining someone's afternoon? How do you even PRIVATELY take pride in ruining someone's afternoon? And you have to remember that I don't see what I'm saying as being too terribly difficult to say or explain. If anything I have to keep coming up with more and varied ways of saying "Two plus two doesn't equal five. Two plus two equals four." It's very difficult to take pride in saying something over and over that -- as far as I'm concerned -- everyone over the age of five either already knows and is hiding from themselves or doesn't already know and should. And knows they should.


God is aware of my work and understands it better than I do. I would assume that I am functioning at some fraction of my ability in God's eyes that I could improve upon. So there is no sense of pride there. At the level where you're trying to please God and that becomes your sole motivation and interest (as it has become mine) all you can know for certain is that He could do what you're doing a lot better than you can. He could make far better and more efficient use of the twelve hours (and counting!) that I've been sitting at this keyboard today. So even imagining yourself as being proud of what you have "accomplished" for God is beyond ludicrous, in my view.


It's far more like a military gig. I am writing for a context that either doesn't exist because it has been made not to exist by popular acclaim or something that never did exist and which we only discovered didn't exist in 1970 (and which I don't "get" and everyone else does) or something which never did exist and will never exist or something which doesn't exist YET. Everyone who knows me and everyone who knows of me have a huge stake in believing its one of the first two or a combination of the first two. If they're right then I've spent the last thirty years writing the equivalent of the sound effects of the adults talking on the PEANUTS cartoons. How are you going to take pride in that? But, in my view, what I'm saying is important and actually constitutes a last thread attaching our civilization to some semblance of reality. If that's the case then anything that destabilizes the situation is apt to break the thread and then that's it and the consequences are my fault for allowing the destabilization to happen. It's very difficult to take pride in saying "I don't exactly know what I'm doing here and I'm pretty sure at one level or another it's all up to me and I may be wrong but at least so far I appear not to have done anything irretrievably stupid enough to send the whole works down the toilet."


But that's a lot "edgier" than "pride in a job well done." There's a lot more at stake in that case. If I suddenly go in 2011, "Wow, what was I thinking? You guys were right all along. Feminism is the cat's pyjamas" then, so far as I know everything's down the toilet. Even if I switch back to making sense right away, there's still that moment of weakness, that opening in the matrix, that loophole and everything that I've worked for from 1996 to 2011 goes for naught. "I haven't let that happen yet" isn't something to have pride in when the imperative is: that must not be allowed to happen. And I'm the only one in the world with any sense that That Must Not Be Allowed to Happen.


I mean, for all I know I already have done any number of irretrievably stupid things that I was too stupid to see what they were and as a result the whole works went right down the toilet some time back. That's why I say it's a military kind of thing. This is my post and I think I know what it is that I'm supposed to do and I keep doing it. I try to resist the temptation to stop doing it as you are supposed to resist such temptations in a military situation. "I feel funny so I think I have to run away now." Not an option as far as I'm concerned. I have no idea how much is at stake and I don't expect to know until Judgment Day. I'd hate to think that I get to see the instant replays and there's someone there going, "See, you were doing fine right up until here – you were actually preventing the Whore of Babylon scenario, but then you fumbled this play and you missed this off-ramp and someone ran a really simple scam on you and that cost you this and so on." How could you take pride in whatever you did right from 1999 to 2008 if you screwed everything up in 2009? As far as I know the only way to avoid screwing things up in 2009 is to not make any mistakes in 2007. Running a successful independent comics operation is one way of looking at it, I guess. Adding "most" to anything attached to Dave Sim just means that people get to kick me in the nuts and tell me how many other people are infinitely more successful than I am and well liked as I am not. For that reason, I tend to see my situation on an on-going basis as a bunker with x number of sandbags, y number of rounds of ammunition and z number of rations built up over the last thirty years. If there are enough sandbags and enough rounds of ammunition and enough rations, it's a successful independent comics operation. If all of those run out before I'm dead, then it's not a successful independent comics operation. I would take pride in the former if there was absolutely no chance it was the latter.


"I don't think they've beaten me YET" isn't one of those things that you take pride in, either. The "YET" means anything approaching pride can turn into over-confidence and over-confidence is always a mistake. "I'm alert" is going to help the situation. "I'm so proud of being as alert as I am. I wonder if I'm the most alert person who ever lived?" is just asking for trouble.


Most of the time, it's just a series of tests. I would assume that your period of celibacy was one of those "Let's give Dave the impression that there's someone else out there who takes all of this as seriously as he does and then suddenly have the guy pack it in and move in with his girlfriend and see if that causes Dave to crack.."


Well, again, I'm not personally invested enough in other people's lives to have it venture anywhere into proximity of where I might crack or where I might not crack. Gerhard has to leave. Complete loss of confidence. Well, okay. Goodbye. Jeff Seiler's being celibate. Well, okay, good for Jeff. But, I'm not Jeff, I'm Dave. Jeff isn't celibate anymore. Well, okay, good for Jeff. But I'm still not Jeff, I'm Dave. In fact, Jeff is pretty sure that the girlfriend he moved in with is an Angel! Well, okay, good for Jeff. I hope for his sake she is. But, I'm still not Jeff, I'm Dave and I don't believe a woman can be an angel let alone an Angel. I believe women are just women.


There is this peculiar lunatic illusion of urgency and pressure that people seem to be always trying to build up around me apparently in an effort to make me crack but I don't really see it as something that you can "crack" ABOUT even if I had any sense at all of any inclination to do so. Most of the time the feminism opposing me is like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition. The best they can come up with is "the comfy chair". "NO WOMAN WILL HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU! EVER!" I remark upon and to a degree wonder about the level of sanity of people who are incapable of understanding the difference between genuine urgency and pressure and a "comfy chair" (like having a "woman-ectomy" performed on your life) but it doesn't, you know, make me dread the "comfy chair" by the way it's being portrayed to me. "GASP! NO WOMAN WILL HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH ME? EVER!? YOU, YOU ARCH-FIENDS! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?"


Let me put it this way: if all of your friends abandoned you and you were universally vilified and shunned and disparaged and your livelihood started to evaporate on you and your business partner and creative collaborator of a quarter of a century suddenly announced "I don't want to do this any more," and was gone…


…would that start to convince you that two and two doesn't equal four? Would you start to think, The reason I've lost all of this is because I'm wrong – everyone else believes that two and two equals five. I must be being punished because I'm so very wrong about what two and two is.


Watch my lips:


The one. Doesn't have. ANYTHING. To do. With the other.


If the earth opened up beneath the house and swallowed me alive tomorrow and giant flames lit up the night sky spelling out "DAVE SIM IS SO VERY, VERY WRONG," and every Cerebus trade paperback in the world suddenly collapsed into a pile of maggot-riddled dust…


…Two. Plus Two. Is STILL. Going. To equal. Four.


Do I take Pride or pride in that fact? Uh, no. Why would I take pride in a fact that has nothing to do with me? Two and two equalled four long before I was born and two and two will still equal four long after I'm dead.


I mean, do YOU take pride in two plus two equalling four?


Thanks for writing. Best of luck to you and Kaye.

___________________________________________________

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 #320 (July 28th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Roberta Gregory to Craig Miller [with interpolations by Dave Sim]

Hi, Craig

Thank you for sending me the comp copies of FOLLOWING CEREBUS. I was away for a few weeks and just now got them.

I have no other way of contacting Dave than through you [This isn't true. The office phone number and fax number are both in the JAKA 'S STORY trade paperback]. Can you see that this Pets to him somehow?

I began reading the "Reply to Roberta Gregory":

I only got to the point right after his original letter to me where he states that I was on the comp list for CEREBUS, and since I only mentioned reading JAKA'S STORY, I must have thrown away the others unread because it would make me 'look bad' or whatever

[I wrote in FC 10: "There were strange omissions (from her strip), such as the fact that she nowhere mentions that she had put me on her comp list (at least I assume it was she who put me on her comp list) and that she had been on our comp list pretty much from the time that I met her (which as I recall, was the Seattle stop on the '92 Tour). Her strip suggests that she only read JAKA'S STORY and then issue 186, which sort of begs the question, `What did she do with all of the comp copies she got in the mail? Did she read any of them or throw them away unread? And if she threw them away unread, why didn't she say so?' And I think the obvious answer would that it would make her look bad. I read her work that she sent me. She didn't read my work that I sent to her. Idle speculation, but it seemed a strange omission. She also doesn't mention that I sent her several letters of comment over the years on those occasions when there was something in NAUGHTY BITS I wanted to comment on.]

That is a huge lie. I have NEVER received any comp copies of CEREBUS from him. EVER. I got the copy of JAKA'S STORY when he visited Seattle back when it was the latest book of his, several years ago, when he graciously gave me a copy. If he sent the copies via Fantagraphics they never made their way to me. They would have been put in the mailbox I have had there, and still do. If he sent them to my PO Box address in Seattle, every single one of them seems to have vanished through postal error. The US Postal Service is not THAT bad. Any copies of CEREBUS I read are the ones I paid for with my own hard-earned bucks.

[The earlist issue of NAUGHTY BITS that I have is issue #6 which is dated August, 1992. I know I never bought any myself so assuming that that was the latest issue that was out at the time of the Seattle stop, I think I made a tremendous mistake at the time in thinking that Roberta and I had swapped addresses and said that we would put each other on each other's comp list. Which tended to happen not infrequently. At various times I had reciprocal comp list trades with the Pinis, James Owen, Jeff Smith, Colleen Doran, Todd McFarlane and others.

I had completely forgotten having given her a copy of JAKA'S STORY (actually, the latest book at the time was MELMOTH which had been published in the fall of the previous year) and still have no conscious memory of it whatsoever. I think what happened is that she sent me the copy of issue #6 as a swap and perhaps thought that she should send something more besides that because the next issue I have is issue 10, dated October, 1993 followed by issue 11, dated January, 1994. The next one I have is issue 15, dated February, 1995. And on up through #22. I've gone through all of my two hundred or so unfiled comic books (pretty much 1997 on) and can't find any of the subsequent issues, but I know she sent me each one up to the last one.

So, I sincerely apologize to Roberta for my faulty memory of what happened in 1992 and take her at her word that she never got anything from me except the copy of JAKA'S STORY]

I cannot describe how angry and betrayed I feel, that he would be misrepresenting me and making fun of me in print on something false like this. If he was planning on reacting this way, he should have at least had the decency to contact me to verify the facts he is using to try to make me look bad the rest of the industry.

[Again, I think it was an honest mistake -- which I did identify as "idle speculation" -- based on my having forgotten having given Roberta a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle. I sincerely believed that she had been on the Aardvark-Vanaheim comp list all along and, in fact, made a point of mentioning that on many occasions -- that even though she's an extreme leftist feminist and I'm an extreme right anti-feminist, we both still traded our work with each other. At various points it was one of the few things that gave me hope about the female faction in the comic-book field. I sincerely apologize, again. It was entirely my mistake in misremembering what had happened. I wouldn't have contacted her to verify it because I was so certain that that was the case.

Having gotten Roberta's e-mail via fax from Craig at 6 am today -- July 19 -- I'm FedExing this to Jeff Tundis and requesting that he run it July 21 through July 28 in place of the Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. I encourage anyone who wants to download it and circulate it everywhere in the comics industry to do so.]

No wonder Dave pulled the Roast book, perhaps when he knew I would be involved in it. I had planned a piece that was going to be as (I believe) respectful as the piece I originally wrote for FOLLOWING CEREBUS but now I have absolutely no respect for this man. I don't even want to have to deal with him directly and I do not care what he has to say in reply. I am going to print this out and sent it to him by mail, at least so he knows what I think (so all the responsibility has not been upon you, Mr. Miller, in case you do NOT want to get in the middle of this) and I can at least feel I contacted him, not that I believe he would really care what I have to think. It is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on.

[It isn't true that I "pulled the Roast book". Roberta is referring to a publication called the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST book which Jeff Seiler, Jeff Tundis and Oliver Simonsen had started developing and soliciting contributions for as a benefit for the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND before notifying me that they were doing so. I was notified by phone by Jeff Seiler July 11 and faxed this to Jeff Tundis July 13 to forward to the 20... count 'em 20... cartoonists they had already gotten confirmation from:

"Dave Sim was not notified of this project until 11 July at 9 am in a phone conversation with What Comics Vice-President, Jeff Seiler. Mr. Sim sincerely regrets the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENCE FUND and the First Amendment freedoms upon which it is founded being used as leverage to force him to indirectly endorse (by inference) -- under the masquerade of entertainment — the revival and extension of slander, abuse and vilification of his name and reputation which have been the comics industry norm since the mid-1990s.

"As a firm believer in those First Amendment freedoms, he does, however acquiesce in all particulars to the fundamental right of the participants to legally engage in the activities upon which they have embarked without notification to him.

"He will have no further comment on the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST either before or after publication and has suspended all of his own current projects pending the result of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST publication."

As you can see, I put no impediment in the way of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST being produced or published, I just said that 1 would have no comment on it either before or after the fact. I assume that there is still sufficient interest in such a publication -- the venom directed at Dave Sim runs deep in the comic-book industry -- that the UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST would probably find any number of willing participants and eager readers. The situation remains the same: I will have no unilateral comment on such a publication before or after the fact. In the same way that I had no unilateral comment on Deni's contribution to I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY. I didn't read it because it didn't interest me. To date no one has asked me a direct question about any of the contents of Blake Bell's article just as no one has asked me a direct question about the various smear pieces that have appeared in THE COMICS JOURNAL and as I assume no one would ask me about any factual basis to the contents of an UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST. It is in the nature of some people to indulge in character assassination just as it is in the nature of some people to take character assassination at face value as unvarnished fact.

I still have the greatest respect for Roberta Gregory and her talents but I do think it is intellectually dishonest to say, at any time, "I do not care what he has to say in reply" or "it is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on." With all due respect, both of those views reflect a dangerous form of solipsism which seems to be a core element of all extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- that someone can just unilaterally "resolve" something on their own terms while completely ignoring that there is a dissenting and opposing viewpoint. My own view is that no one should ever feel so "angry and betrayed" that they are unwilling to find out what the "other side" of the argument is.

I was not making fun of Roberta nor was I trying to make her look bad to the rest of the industry. It was an honestly expressed speculation which turns out to have had no foundation in fact. Which is why I have apologized for that speculation while trying to explain the honest mistake in which it originated.]

I AM throwing out the comp issue FOLLOWING CEREBUS with his reply to me, unread beyond that paragraph where he claims he was sending me comp copies all along. I don't want to read any of what he has to say, if this is any indication of what is in his reply.

[Again, with all due respect, I think it is intellectually dishonest -- and a core element of extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- to always take the first opportunity to take personal umbrage and to allow -- or rather use -- hurt feelings both to disengage from a "frank exchange of viewpoints" and to, then, unilaterally use those hurt feelings to justify the disengagement. It's obviously advantageous in a solipsistic sense, allowing the "wounded" party to claim resolution where none exists - in the same way that the 1997 Board of the Friends of Lulu can claim that they "beat Dave Sim" because they unilaterally decided to stop discussing the idea of a Women In Comics petition opposing censorship, but in both cases my fully developed argument in favour of my view still stands unchallenged and unanswered. 1 read Roberta 's strip and replied to it. Roberta read exactly one paragraph of my four-page response and then unilaterally disengaged. I hardly think that any fair-minded person would call that an intellectually honest response.]

I have work to do and I do not need to be the target of somebody who obviously really could use some therapy and I do not need to be poisoned by their mean-spirited attitude any longer. I only care about the opinions of those in the industry for whom I have respect and Mr. Sim has now lost all of mine.

I would never stoop so low as to trash a colleague in print based on something that is not true, that he could have easily contacted me in all these months to verify, if he was truly surprised that I had never mentioned reading those comp copies he claims I was sent.

I guess that about covers it.

Thank you for sending me the comp issue.

[Again, I sincerely apologize for mistaking the arrival of comp copies from Roberta as being a reciprocal exchange, having forgotten that I had given her a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle in 1992. I'm not sure if it's therapy that Roberta needs -- I would certainly never be so blatantly rude as to suggest such a thing about someone I have only met once and exchanged a handful of "chit chat" observations with -- but I do think there is "something missing" that is critically necessary to being a functional member of society if your response is to immediately disengage from a discussion at the first sign of hurt feelings. I can't even imagine losing ALL respect for anyone -- even Rosie O'Donnell or Madonna if you want to go to ludicrous political extremes -- over any issue or disagreement and I certainly can't even begin to imagine what my life would be like if I was capable of being that way.

Why is it that the people who are the most obsessive on the subject of Aretha Franklin's R-E-S-P-E-C-T -- that is, extreme leftist Feminists -- are so incapable of extending just such a base level of human respect to anyone who doesn't share their own peculiar political viewpoints?

Again, I encourage anyone interested to circulate this exchange of viewpoints to do so -- or to cut and paste it back into a "Roberta only" e-mail if you're an extreme leftist Feminist disinterested in exchanges of viewpoints -- as widely as possible in order to counter any advantage I might have over Roberta in having a regular publication and daily blog in which to air my views.

And, considering that I have just now been made aware that Roberta sent me far more comics material than I ever gave to her, I would be happy to send her any and all of the CEREBUS trade paperbacks and both volumes of COLLECTED LETTERS if she expresses an interest in having them.]

___________________________________________________

Okay. The premise in "See the Elephant" is that one of the Elephantmen, Ebenezer is having a smoke out front of Hooters (the "$25.99 Tuesdays" sign is very funny) and a little girl comes up and starts talking to him.


"Are you allowed in there?"


"Um…yeah, I'm, ah -- "


This is good and bad. For me, it works and it doesn't work. It's the racist analogy. Are the Elephantmen allowed in where girls are walking around with very little on? But, again, where it crosses over into the miscegenation theme it's a very awkward fit. We don't want YOUR kind looking at OUR women. But, that attitude goes too far back in history to apply to any context that includes a Hooters restaurant. Apart from little kids who have to be kept out by law, who WOULDN'T they let into a Hooters restaurant?


"Only my Mom told me that Dad wasn't allowed in there any more. She says its `immoral'. And he should be ASHAMED."


It's a nice idea, trying for the bait-and-switch. It isn't racism she's asking about, it's morality. What she was asking was `Does YOUR wife let you go in there?" But, it doesn't ring true. A wife who was that concerned about morality that she wouldn't ALLOW her husband to go into a Hooters (and I'm sure such wives exist) is hardly apt to talk to her eight-year-old daughter about it. I mean, unless the point is that feminism has reached such an extreme point of absurdity by 2259 that little girls are considered higher in the family pecking order than their fathers and consequently the father's "upbringing" is an appropriate mother/daughter topic of conversation. NOTE: she didn't OVERHEAR it, her mom TOLD her.


"Hey, do you pick your nose?"


Again, this just doesn't ring true. Little boys and little girls may ask each other a question like that but it doesn't seem natural addressed to a grown-up and addressed to a grown-up who is a complete stranger. One of the key elements of a kid that age is that they have so little life experience they really don't know what any grown-up is apt to do next so they tend to tread carefully. The question would very possibly occur to her about an elephant's trunk but it would be asked of the mother or father in private. And picking your nose is not a subject that a kid raised in a super-moral household where the father isn't ALLOWED to go into Hooters is going to ask casually about. Bodily function. Taboo. Think twice before asking once or suffer the consequences.


"I don't need to…I can put my nose in my mouth, check it out…"


"TA – DAAA!" [big display lettering, big smile, arms thrown wide]


I don't think anyone's disbelief could be suspended this far. We're being asked to believe that the Elephantmen are regarded for the most part or at least by a significant part of the population the way black people were regarded by white people in the Deep South in the 1930s. So a little white girl comes up to this "big black man" and right away he does something extremely suggestive, something that involves the penetration of a moist orifice by a long appendage and goes "TA-DAAA!" right out loud like that.


It continues in this vein with Savannah making amiable fearless chit-chat


"You're funny.


"But my friend Chase says you guys are monsters.


"Are you a monster?"


You can try and convince me that an eight-year-old girl -- having been told by a friend of hers (and no one has greater credibility than a friend at that age) that these things are monsters -- is just going to fearlessly walk up and start chatting with one of them. In fact, Richard does his level best to convince the reader of this, but I just don't buy it. This is feminist indoctrination run amok: i.e. If only the Evil Patriarchy didn't oppress them so, little eight-year-old girls would be totally and completely fearless. Try taking any eight-year-old – boy or girl -- within spitting distance of a REAL elephant and see how fearless they are. You'll have to pry them off your leg.


"Hey, uh, listen, kid…where's your Mom?"


This is more than a little understated as well, as Ebony looks around and sees that at least one Hooters waitress is watching them. If the analogy is being a "big black man" in the Deep South in the 1930s try something more like:


"WHERE'S YOUR MOMMA, YOUNG'N? DON'T YOU BE TALKING TO STRANGERS! GO ON! GIT! GIT ON HOME! YOU GO FIND WHERE YOUR MOMMA IS AT AND NOW!"


Real loud and theatrical like that and hope it "plays" right in the vicinity. Because if it doesn't play right, you'll be lucky to just get a prison sentence out of the deal and not end up hanging from a lamppost. Deep South in the 1930s? Try anywhere in 2007. If an unaccompanied eight-year-old girl came up and tried talking to me? Two lines of dialogue, max, and then it would be time to get A! WAY! PRONTO! Just keep walking and don't HEAR anything, don't SEE anything from the vicinity of the eight-year-old girl. She belongs to somebody who is probably looking for her or will be in a few seconds and you really don't want to be standing there talking to her when that somebody shows up, whoever that somebody is. But what happens? He starts walking away and she runs up and TAKES HIS HAND. AND HE LETS HER. Oh, Richard, render unto me a BREAK! And they go wandering off, hand-in-hand. Richard, what PLANET ARE YOU LIVING ON?


"Ebony? Do you have a girlfriend?


"Uh, no. No, I don't have a girlfriend." He says, casually sitting down on a bench.


"Good. If you like, I could be your girlfriend. You kind of look like you need one."


Mom finally shows up, going ballistic.


"We were just talking, Mom…I'm his new girlfriend!"

"YOU JUST STAY AWAY FROM HER! If I see you around my daughter again, I'll report you!

"But, Mom…he's an elephant…and you said animals are our friends…"

"Oh – never MIND what I said, Savannah -- "

"Uh, sorry, Ebony. `Bye."

"I'm his new girlfriend?" Oh, that certainly sounds innocent enough. Sure, any and all mothers would just take that one in stride. No, Richard. "I'm his new girlfriend" is not an "If I see you around my daughter again…" line, that's an "Excuse me, can you call 911 for me? This creep is a child molester" line. Or, more likely, a just stand there and scream "RAPE!" at the top of your lungs line. Guilty unless proven less guilty. Innocent would be off the table in our society. "I'm his new girlfriend?" 10 to 20 with no possibility of parole for eight years. That would be my guess.

It's been a pretty sure-footed intellectual property up to this point but if (as I suspect) little Savannah grows up into big hubba-hubba Savannah (the "little Nancy Callahan" trick in SIN CITY) I don't think the proper groundwork has been laid. It also brings a sincerely depraved level of metaphor to Richard's avowed thematic interest in "Hot girls hanging around misunderstood male leads with deep, dark secrets" that could do without further scrutiny, I'm sure. I think I know what story it is I'm SUPPOSED to be reading here – "a child shall lead them" "only the truly young and innocent are good and decent enough to break through the wall of prejudice which surrounds us all" but I'm not sure what it is that Richard is advocating – and the problem with these kinds of stories is that they do constitute at one level or another a kind of advocacy. Are we supposed to be on Savannah's side? Is the point: "Say, let's all just lighten up a bit here people and let our eight-year-old daughters run around a lot more by themselves making friends with big, strange men as a way of breaking down these barriers between us."?

Sorry, Richard, I'm afraid I find that to be even weirder than breast implants and I find breast implants to be really, REALLY weird.

Tomorrow: Jeff Seiler checks in and then he has a question.

Monday: Looking at "See the Elephant" from the point of view of those women in Virginia



___________________________________________________

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 #319 (July 27th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Roberta Gregory to Craig Miller [with interpolations by Dave Sim]

Hi, Craig

Thank you for sending me the comp copies of FOLLOWING CEREBUS. I was away for a few weeks and just now got them.

I have no other way of contacting Dave than through you [This isn't true. The office phone number and fax number are both in the JAKA 'S STORY trade paperback]. Can you see that this Pets to him somehow?

I began reading the "Reply to Roberta Gregory":

I only got to the point right after his original letter to me where he states that I was on the comp list for CEREBUS, and since I only mentioned reading JAKA'S STORY, I must have thrown away the others unread because it would make me 'look bad' or whatever

[I wrote in FC 10: "There were strange omissions (from her strip), such as the fact that she nowhere mentions that she had put me on her comp list (at least I assume it was she who put me on her comp list) and that she had been on our comp list pretty much from the time that I met her (which as I recall, was the Seattle stop on the '92 Tour). Her strip suggests that she only read JAKA'S STORY and then issue 186, which sort of begs the question, `What did she do with all of the comp copies she got in the mail? Did she read any of them or throw them away unread? And if she threw them away unread, why didn't she say so?' And I think the obvious answer would that it would make her look bad. I read her work that she sent me. She didn't read my work that I sent to her. Idle speculation, but it seemed a strange omission. She also doesn't mention that I sent her several letters of comment over the years on those occasions when there was something in NAUGHTY BITS I wanted to comment on.]

That is a huge lie. I have NEVER received any comp copies of CEREBUS from him. EVER. I got the copy of JAKA'S STORY when he visited Seattle back when it was the latest book of his, several years ago, when he graciously gave me a copy. If he sent the copies via Fantagraphics they never made their way to me. They would have been put in the mailbox I have had there, and still do. If he sent them to my PO Box address in Seattle, every single one of them seems to have vanished through postal error. The US Postal Service is not THAT bad. Any copies of CEREBUS I read are the ones I paid for with my own hard-earned bucks.

[The earlist issue of NAUGHTY BITS that I have is issue #6 which is dated August, 1992. I know I never bought any myself so assuming that that was the latest issue that was out at the time of the Seattle stop, I think I made a tremendous mistake at the time in thinking that Roberta and I had swapped addresses and said that we would put each other on each other's comp list. Which tended to happen not infrequently. At various times I had reciprocal comp list trades with the Pinis, James Owen, Jeff Smith, Colleen Doran, Todd McFarlane and others.

I had completely forgotten having given her a copy of JAKA'S STORY (actually, the latest book at the time was MELMOTH which had been published in the fall of the previous year) and still have no conscious memory of it whatsoever. I think what happened is that she sent me the copy of issue #6 as a swap and perhaps thought that she should send something more besides that because the next issue I have is issue 10, dated October, 1993 followed by issue 11, dated January, 1994. The next one I have is issue 15, dated February, 1995. And on up through #22. I've gone through all of my two hundred or so unfiled comic books (pretty much 1997 on) and can't find any of the subsequent issues, but I know she sent me each one up to the last one.

So, I sincerely apologize to Roberta for my faulty memory of what happened in 1992 and take her at her word that she never got anything from me except the copy of JAKA'S STORY]

I cannot describe how angry and betrayed I feel, that he would be misrepresenting me and making fun of me in print on something false like this. If he was planning on reacting this way, he should have at least had the decency to contact me to verify the facts he is using to try to make me look bad the rest of the industry.

[Again, I think it was an honest mistake -- which I did identify as "idle speculation" -- based on my having forgotten having given Roberta a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle. I sincerely believed that she had been on the Aardvark-Vanaheim comp list all along and, in fact, made a point of mentioning that on many occasions -- that even though she's an extreme leftist feminist and I'm an extreme right anti-feminist, we both still traded our work with each other. At various points it was one of the few things that gave me hope about the female faction in the comic-book field. I sincerely apologize, again. It was entirely my mistake in misremembering what had happened. I wouldn't have contacted her to verify it because I was so certain that that was the case.

Having gotten Roberta's e-mail via fax from Craig at 6 am today -- July 19 -- I'm FedExing this to Jeff Tundis and requesting that he run it July 21 through July 28 in place of the Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. I encourage anyone who wants to download it and circulate it everywhere in the comics industry to do so.]

No wonder Dave pulled the Roast book, perhaps when he knew I would be involved in it. I had planned a piece that was going to be as (I believe) respectful as the piece I originally wrote for FOLLOWING CEREBUS but now I have absolutely no respect for this man. I don't even want to have to deal with him directly and I do not care what he has to say in reply. I am going to print this out and sent it to him by mail, at least so he knows what I think (so all the responsibility has not been upon you, Mr. Miller, in case you do NOT want to get in the middle of this) and I can at least feel I contacted him, not that I believe he would really care what I have to think. It is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on.

[It isn't true that I "pulled the Roast book". Roberta is referring to a publication called the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST book which Jeff Seiler, Jeff Tundis and Oliver Simonsen had started developing and soliciting contributions for as a benefit for the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND before notifying me that they were doing so. I was notified by phone by Jeff Seiler July 11 and faxed this to Jeff Tundis July 13 to forward to the 20... count 'em 20... cartoonists they had already gotten confirmation from:

"Dave Sim was not notified of this project until 11 July at 9 am in a phone conversation with What Comics Vice-President, Jeff Seiler. Mr. Sim sincerely regrets the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENCE FUND and the First Amendment freedoms upon which it is founded being used as leverage to force him to indirectly endorse (by inference) -- under the masquerade of entertainment — the revival and extension of slander, abuse and vilification of his name and reputation which have been the comics industry norm since the mid-1990s.

"As a firm believer in those First Amendment freedoms, he does, however acquiesce in all particulars to the fundamental right of the participants to legally engage in the activities upon which they have embarked without notification to him.

"He will have no further comment on the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST either before or after publication and has suspended all of his own current projects pending the result of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST publication."

As you can see, I put no impediment in the way of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST being produced or published, I just said that 1 would have no comment on it either before or after the fact. I assume that there is still sufficient interest in such a publication -- the venom directed at Dave Sim runs deep in the comic-book industry -- that the UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST would probably find any number of willing participants and eager readers. The situation remains the same: I will have no unilateral comment on such a publication before or after the fact. In the same way that I had no unilateral comment on Deni's contribution to I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY. I didn't read it because it didn't interest me. To date no one has asked me a direct question about any of the contents of Blake Bell's article just as no one has asked me a direct question about the various smear pieces that have appeared in THE COMICS JOURNAL and as I assume no one would ask me about any factual basis to the contents of an UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST. It is in the nature of some people to indulge in character assassination just as it is in the nature of some people to take character assassination at face value as unvarnished fact.

I still have the greatest respect for Roberta Gregory and her talents but I do think it is intellectually dishonest to say, at any time, "I do not care what he has to say in reply" or "it is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on." With all due respect, both of those views reflect a dangerous form of solipsism which seems to be a core element of all extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- that someone can just unilaterally "resolve" something on their own terms while completely ignoring that there is a dissenting and opposing viewpoint. My own view is that no one should ever feel so "angry and betrayed" that they are unwilling to find out what the "other side" of the argument is.

I was not making fun of Roberta nor was I trying to make her look bad to the rest of the industry. It was an honestly expressed speculation which turns out to have had no foundation in fact. Which is why I have apologized for that speculation while trying to explain the honest mistake in which it originated.]

I AM throwing out the comp issue FOLLOWING CEREBUS with his reply to me, unread beyond that paragraph where he claims he was sending me comp copies all along. I don't want to read any of what he has to say, if this is any indication of what is in his reply.

[Again, with all due respect, I think it is intellectually dishonest -- and a core element of extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- to always take the first opportunity to take personal umbrage and to allow -- or rather use -- hurt feelings both to disengage from a "frank exchange of viewpoints" and to, then, unilaterally use those hurt feelings to justify the disengagement. It's obviously advantageous in a solipsistic sense, allowing the "wounded" party to claim resolution where none exists - in the same way that the 1997 Board of the Friends of Lulu can claim that they "beat Dave Sim" because they unilaterally decided to stop discussing the idea of a Women In Comics petition opposing censorship, but in both cases my fully developed argument in favour of my view still stands unchallenged and unanswered. 1 read Roberta 's strip and replied to it. Roberta read exactly one paragraph of my four-page response and then unilaterally disengaged. I hardly think that any fair-minded person would call that an intellectually honest response.]

I have work to do and I do not need to be the target of somebody who obviously really could use some therapy and I do not need to be poisoned by their mean-spirited attitude any longer. I only care about the opinions of those in the industry for whom I have respect and Mr. Sim has now lost all of mine.

I would never stoop so low as to trash a colleague in print based on something that is not true, that he could have easily contacted me in all these months to verify, if he was truly surprised that I had never mentioned reading those comp copies he claims I was sent.

I guess that about covers it.

Thank you for sending me the comp issue.

[Again, I sincerely apologize for mistaking the arrival of comp copies from Roberta as being a reciprocal exchange, having forgotten that I had given her a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle in 1992. I'm not sure if it's therapy that Roberta needs -- I would certainly never be so blatantly rude as to suggest such a thing about someone I have only met once and exchanged a handful of "chit chat" observations with -- but I do think there is "something missing" that is critically necessary to being a functional member of society if your response is to immediately disengage from a discussion at the first sign of hurt feelings. I can't even imagine losing ALL respect for anyone -- even Rosie O'Donnell or Madonna if you want to go to ludicrous political extremes -- over any issue or disagreement and I certainly can't even begin to imagine what my life would be like if I was capable of being that way.

Why is it that the people who are the most obsessive on the subject of Aretha Franklin's R-E-S-P-E-C-T -- that is, extreme leftist Feminists -- are so incapable of extending just such a base level of human respect to anyone who doesn't share their own peculiar political viewpoints?

Again, I encourage anyone interested to circulate this exchange of viewpoints to do so -- or to cut and paste it back into a "Roberta only" e-mail if you're an extreme leftist Feminist disinterested in exchanges of viewpoints -- as widely as possible in order to counter any advantage I might have over Roberta in having a regular publication and daily blog in which to air my views.

And, considering that I have just now been made aware that Roberta sent me far more comics material than I ever gave to her, I would be happy to send her any and all of the CEREBUS trade paperbacks and both volumes of COLLECTED LETTERS if she expresses an interest in having them.]

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So? What's wrong with the ELEPHANTMEN having as a core subtext of the pretty girls and the wimpy guys are human beings: the big, strong scary guys are mutated animals?


Well, maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that it mixes uncomfortably with the racism subtext especially when it comes to hidden psychologies. Let's not tiptoe around it, let's address the point that that leads us to: Is the idea of white women sleeping with black men really that terrifying for any white guy anymore that they would frame it in terms of black men being, metaphorically, big, strong, scary mutated animals? Is there some pressing cathartic need that I'm not aware of that has to be addressed, metaphorically, at this late date?


I might be the only person in the world who thinks of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X as having "funny parts". Either people are terrified of what they think it might contain and consequently haven't read it or they have read it and treat it with disproportionate reverence and fear, just because they're white liberals and that's what they, you know, do – anything they're afraid of (and there is very little that terrified white liberals quite as much as big, strong, scary black men) they tend to treat with disproportionate reverence (like George Plimpton all but declaring a street hustler n-word like Don King to be a genius because his dog's breakfast street patter contains passages from Shakespeare he had memorized).


The funniest parts, to me, are about miscegenation. All those respectable white businessmen going up to Harlem to the black clubs to get someone to steer them towards a black hooker. Malcolm X's assessment is a mixture of revulsion (that these masochistic white guys all want to be humiliated by a black hooker) and triumphalism (that the white man is that weak and pathetic). It seems to me he completely misses the point that it is just an example of extreme racism on the part of extreme racists – they are participating in what they see as the most humiliating and degrading experience imaginable: having sex with a black woman. He faithfully documents this and other perversions from his pre-Islam n-word days before he went to prison and got exposed to the Koran. His own world-class married white woman/lover who came up to Harlem regularly and the status that conferred upon him. The other n-word street hustlers all circling wondering if they can take her away from him. It reminded me of the old joke about the black guy who comes up to a white guy in a bar, staggering drunk, and says, "I make $150,000 a year, I drive a Jaguar, I live in a ten-bedroom mansion and I only sleep with white women." The white guy mulls it over and says, "I can see that. If I made $150,000 a year, drove a Jaguar and lived in a ten-bedroom mansion, I wouldn't sleep with black women, either."


Malcolm X writes about a known place across the railway tracks where black women went to get picked up, randomly, by white men. Or was it a place where black men went to get picked up, randomly, by white women? Or was it a place where white women went to get picked up, randomly, by black men? I only read the book a couple of months ago but the details don't really stick. Is it just me that the details don't stick for? Sleeping with someone BECAUSE of their skin colour is racism. So whatever the details of the story that I've forgotten, the actual point of the story is just racism. It's not racism and reverse racism. It's racism. The skin colour becomes the defining element, the object of the desire, ergo it's racist. What the skin colour is and what the gender is isn't really pertinent. I assumed (and maybe I'm wrong) that everyone looks at it that way these days. The humour is the subtext in the book where he is obviously, for the time period, Tearing the Lid Off of Something Scandalous!


And the thing that I found funny and still find funny is that Malcolm X's motivation in telling the story wasn't to combat racism, to say "hey, why don't we have a lot more of this? What's the big deal?" It was (pretty clearly) to humiliate the white man. And the even funnier thing is that he undoubtedly succeeded. In the mid-1960s? Are you kidding me? And he was fully entitled, as far as I'm concerned. They threw the book at him because he was found with two B&E accomplices who both happened to be blond-haired, blue-eyed white women. One of them a MARRIED white woman. The only obvious reason they would throw the book at him is the fact of the miscegenation, his prison sentence both for him and his black male accomplice was WAY, WAY out of proportion for their crimes and status as first-time offenders (first time CAUGHT, anyway). And the white women were basically sent back to Beacon Hill with a slap on the wrist.


So, those parts of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X are obviously sweet payback for the hard time that he did. You railroaded an ignorant n-word who then educated himself in the prison library until he was capable of putting this all down on paper clear as a bell and who had become a big enough celebrity to be able to get it put on every bookshelf in every major bookstore in every major Liberal city in the country.


F**k me? No, no, no. F**k YOU! As a guy, I find that funny.


I find that really funny, but then I have a very weird sense of humour (as you may have picked up on by now) and I also didn't go around the "who is sleeping with whom" block until the 1980s when the subject of black men sleeping with white women just wasn't even remotely humiliating anymore. Like the old chestnut about "But would you let your sister marry one?" The first time I heard that one I tried it on for size inside my head. Would I let my sister marry a black man? I was a child of the feminist age. One thing that I knew for certain from the time I was fourteen was that it was no longer a matter of "letting" women -- especially family members -- "do" ANYTHING. I was well aware that women were going to do exactly WHAT they wanted to do WHEN they wanted to do it and I had two choices: a) shut up or b) shut up.


I also knew from around puberty that white women are capable of just about anything if they think it might cause their mothers to go ballistic and my sister was a white woman. But she was the daughter of a white woman who was a capital L Liberal so anything she chose to do that was intended to make my mother go ballistic…and failed to do so…would just feed my mother major Liberal brownie points in the universe women inhabit and subtract from my sister's total, so there was nothing my sister was willing to bet the farm on and consequently didn't really do much of anything. Part of my mother probably ached for my sister to bring home a black man so my mother could play the Katherine Hepburn part in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER?


I don't know what the question would have done to pre-feminist generations of men (presumably make them go ballistic at the prospect of "their" sisters marrying black men) but in my case it just had no application. I had absolutely no racial or familial proprietary interest: as if white women in general or any white woman in particular was "mine". She was "my" sister only in the sense that we shared a bloodline and a last name. By the rules of feminism, I had no more connection to her or proprietary stake in her well-being than I did in any other woman. Even if I thought she was being an idiot – like the time she was shacked up with a violent offender ex-convict (who as it turned out later on -- after the entirely predictable unhappy ending -- had been threatening to kill her on a regular basis) – by the rules of feminism, all I could do was be completely supportive or keep my opinions to myself. Sure, I thought there was a real possibility that she would be killed. Unfortunately, under the rules of feminism, you have to just take that as a given. 1) Women are going to do whatever they want 2)They usually haven't the first clue about what the guy they're with is like and 3) when 1) and 2) are in effect, a lot of them are going to end up dead.


But the use of the miscegenation subtext in Elephantmen (which I can't believe is inadvertent – the whole analogy-with-racism is just too carefully planned out and too overt in all other ways), I have to admit, surprised me. Particularly coupled with the title, invoking the earlier Ditko story, the point of which was that this guy who tried dressing up as a super-villain was really just an average, typical guy on the street. "There are a million of them out there." That kind of thing. I'm not about to call for the censors but that did surprise me. Is there a level of hidden anxiety out there about THEM sleeping with OUR womenfolk that I've been walking around ignorant of? Similar to the widespread level of anti-Americanism that turned out to be infecting Canada that I thought was just good-natured rivalry with a much larger competitor/good neighbour and which turned out to be virtually systemic (and malicious!) bigotry in the Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois parties?


Does Richard Starkings believe that there's a lot of that out there, carefully hidden from view? Would he admit to it if he did?


Maybe ELEPHANTMEN is exactly what we need to help these hidden legions of phobic/racist young men "get over it". But I still find it hard to believe that you could find more than a handful of white men or boys who think that way in this day and age.


Tomorrow: Okay, back to "See the Elephant"



___________________________________________________

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 #318 (July 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Roberta Gregory to Craig Miller [with interpolations by Dave Sim]

Hi, Craig

Thank you for sending me the comp copies of FOLLOWING CEREBUS. I was away for a few weeks and just now got them.

I have no other way of contacting Dave than through you [This isn't true. The office phone number and fax number are both in the JAKA 'S STORY trade paperback]. Can you see that this Pets to him somehow?

I began reading the "Reply to Roberta Gregory":

I only got to the point right after his original letter to me where he states that I was on the comp list for CEREBUS, and since I only mentioned reading JAKA'S STORY, I must have thrown away the others unread because it would make me 'look bad' or whatever

[I wrote in FC 10: "There were strange omissions (from her strip), such as the fact that she nowhere mentions that she had put me on her comp list (at least I assume it was she who put me on her comp list) and that she had been on our comp list pretty much from the time that I met her (which as I recall, was the Seattle stop on the '92 Tour). Her strip suggests that she only read JAKA'S STORY and then issue 186, which sort of begs the question, `What did she do with all of the comp copies she got in the mail? Did she read any of them or throw them away unread? And if she threw them away unread, why didn't she say so?' And I think the obvious answer would that it would make her look bad. I read her work that she sent me. She didn't read my work that I sent to her. Idle speculation, but it seemed a strange omission. She also doesn't mention that I sent her several letters of comment over the years on those occasions when there was something in NAUGHTY BITS I wanted to comment on.]

That is a huge lie. I have NEVER received any comp copies of CEREBUS from him. EVER. I got the copy of JAKA'S STORY when he visited Seattle back when it was the latest book of his, several years ago, when he graciously gave me a copy. If he sent the copies via Fantagraphics they never made their way to me. They would have been put in the mailbox I have had there, and still do. If he sent them to my PO Box address in Seattle, every single one of them seems to have vanished through postal error. The US Postal Service is not THAT bad. Any copies of CEREBUS I read are the ones I paid for with my own hard-earned bucks.

[The earlist issue of NAUGHTY BITS that I have is issue #6 which is dated August, 1992. I know I never bought any myself so assuming that that was the latest issue that was out at the time of the Seattle stop, I think I made a tremendous mistake at the time in thinking that Roberta and I had swapped addresses and said that we would put each other on each other's comp list. Which tended to happen not infrequently. At various times I had reciprocal comp list trades with the Pinis, James Owen, Jeff Smith, Colleen Doran, Todd McFarlane and others.

I had completely forgotten having given her a copy of JAKA'S STORY (actually, the latest book at the time was MELMOTH which had been published in the fall of the previous year) and still have no conscious memory of it whatsoever. I think what happened is that she sent me the copy of issue #6 as a swap and perhaps thought that she should send something more besides that because the next issue I have is issue 10, dated October, 1993 followed by issue 11, dated January, 1994. The next one I have is issue 15, dated February, 1995. And on up through #22. I've gone through all of my two hundred or so unfiled comic books (pretty much 1997 on) and can't find any of the subsequent issues, but I know she sent me each one up to the last one.

So, I sincerely apologize to Roberta for my faulty memory of what happened in 1992 and take her at her word that she never got anything from me except the copy of JAKA'S STORY]

I cannot describe how angry and betrayed I feel, that he would be misrepresenting me and making fun of me in print on something false like this. If he was planning on reacting this way, he should have at least had the decency to contact me to verify the facts he is using to try to make me look bad the rest of the industry.

[Again, I think it was an honest mistake -- which I did identify as "idle speculation" -- based on my having forgotten having given Roberta a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle. I sincerely believed that she had been on the Aardvark-Vanaheim comp list all along and, in fact, made a point of mentioning that on many occasions -- that even though she's an extreme leftist feminist and I'm an extreme right anti-feminist, we both still traded our work with each other. At various points it was one of the few things that gave me hope about the female faction in the comic-book field. I sincerely apologize, again. It was entirely my mistake in misremembering what had happened. I wouldn't have contacted her to verify it because I was so certain that that was the case.

Having gotten Roberta's e-mail via fax from Craig at 6 am today -- July 19 -- I'm FedExing this to Jeff Tundis and requesting that he run it July 21 through July 28 in place of the Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast. I encourage anyone who wants to download it and circulate it everywhere in the comics industry to do so.]

No wonder Dave pulled the Roast book, perhaps when he knew I would be involved in it. I had planned a piece that was going to be as (I believe) respectful as the piece I originally wrote for FOLLOWING CEREBUS but now I have absolutely no respect for this man. I don't even want to have to deal with him directly and I do not care what he has to say in reply. I am going to print this out and sent it to him by mail, at least so he knows what I think (so all the responsibility has not been upon you, Mr. Miller, in case you do NOT want to get in the middle of this) and I can at least feel I contacted him, not that I believe he would really care what I have to think. It is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on.

[It isn't true that I "pulled the Roast book". Roberta is referring to a publication called the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST book which Jeff Seiler, Jeff Tundis and Oliver Simonsen had started developing and soliciting contributions for as a benefit for the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND before notifying me that they were doing so. I was notified by phone by Jeff Seiler July 11 and faxed this to Jeff Tundis July 13 to forward to the 20... count 'em 20... cartoonists they had already gotten confirmation from:

"Dave Sim was not notified of this project until 11 July at 9 am in a phone conversation with What Comics Vice-President, Jeff Seiler. Mr. Sim sincerely regrets the COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENCE FUND and the First Amendment freedoms upon which it is founded being used as leverage to force him to indirectly endorse (by inference) -- under the masquerade of entertainment — the revival and extension of slander, abuse and vilification of his name and reputation which have been the comics industry norm since the mid-1990s.

"As a firm believer in those First Amendment freedoms, he does, however acquiesce in all particulars to the fundamental right of the participants to legally engage in the activities upon which they have embarked without notification to him.

"He will have no further comment on the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST either before or after publication and has suspended all of his own current projects pending the result of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST publication."

As you can see, I put no impediment in the way of the DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST being produced or published, I just said that 1 would have no comment on it either before or after the fact. I assume that there is still sufficient interest in such a publication -- the venom directed at Dave Sim runs deep in the comic-book industry -- that the UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST would probably find any number of willing participants and eager readers. The situation remains the same: I will have no unilateral comment on such a publication before or after the fact. In the same way that I had no unilateral comment on Deni's contribution to I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THIS GUY. I didn't read it because it didn't interest me. To date no one has asked me a direct question about any of the contents of Blake Bell's article just as no one has asked me a direct question about the various smear pieces that have appeared in THE COMICS JOURNAL and as I assume no one would ask me about any factual basis to the contents of an UNAUTHORIZED DAVE SIM CELEBRITY ROAST. It is in the nature of some people to indulge in character assassination just as it is in the nature of some people to take character assassination at face value as unvarnished fact.

I still have the greatest respect for Roberta Gregory and her talents but I do think it is intellectually dishonest to say, at any time, "I do not care what he has to say in reply" or "it is more for myself so I can feel I resolved this and moved on." With all due respect, both of those views reflect a dangerous form of solipsism which seems to be a core element of all extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- that someone can just unilaterally "resolve" something on their own terms while completely ignoring that there is a dissenting and opposing viewpoint. My own view is that no one should ever feel so "angry and betrayed" that they are unwilling to find out what the "other side" of the argument is.

I was not making fun of Roberta nor was I trying to make her look bad to the rest of the industry. It was an honestly expressed speculation which turns out to have had no foundation in fact. Which is why I have apologized for that speculation while trying to explain the honest mistake in which it originated.]

I AM throwing out the comp issue FOLLOWING CEREBUS with his reply to me, unread beyond that paragraph where he claims he was sending me comp copies all along. I don't want to read any of what he has to say, if this is any indication of what is in his reply.

[Again, with all due respect, I think it is intellectually dishonest -- and a core element of extreme leftist Feminist "thinking" -- to always take the first opportunity to take personal umbrage and to allow -- or rather use -- hurt feelings both to disengage from a "frank exchange of viewpoints" and to, then, unilaterally use those hurt feelings to justify the disengagement. It's obviously advantageous in a solipsistic sense, allowing the "wounded" party to claim resolution where none exists - in the same way that the 1997 Board of the Friends of Lulu can claim that they "beat Dave Sim" because they unilaterally decided to stop discussing the idea of a Women In Comics petition opposing censorship, but in both cases my fully developed argument in favour of my view still stands unchallenged and unanswered. 1 read Roberta 's strip and replied to it. Roberta read exactly one paragraph of my four-page response and then unilaterally disengaged. I hardly think that any fair-minded person would call that an intellectually honest response.]

I have work to do and I do not need to be the target of somebody who obviously really could use some therapy and I do not need to be poisoned by their mean-spirited attitude any longer. I only care about the opinions of those in the industry for whom I have respect and Mr. Sim has now lost all of mine.

I would never stoop so low as to trash a colleague in print based on something that is not true, that he could have easily contacted me in all these months to verify, if he was truly surprised that I had never mentioned reading those comp copies he claims I was sent.

I guess that about covers it.

Thank you for sending me the comp issue.

[Again, I sincerely apologize for mistaking the arrival of comp copies from Roberta as being a reciprocal exchange, having forgotten that I had given her a copy of JAKA' S STORY in Seattle in 1992. I'm not sure if it's therapy that Roberta needs -- I would certainly never be so blatantly rude as to suggest such a thing about someone I have only met once and exchanged a handful of "chit chat" observations with -- but I do think there is "something missing" that is critically necessary to being a functional member of society if your response is to immediately disengage from a discussion at the first sign of hurt feelings. I can't even imagine losing ALL respect for anyone -- even Rosie O'Donnell or Madonna if you want to go to ludicrous political extremes -- over any issue or disagreement and I certainly can't even begin to imagine what my life would be like if I was capable of being that way.

Why is it that the people who are the most obsessive on the subject of Aretha Franklin's R-E-S-P-E-C-T -- that is, extreme leftist Feminists -- are so incapable of extending just such a base level of human respect to anyone who doesn't share their own peculiar political viewpoints?

Again, I encourage anyone interested to circulate this exchange of viewpoints to do so -- or to cut and paste it back into a "Roberta only" e-mail if you're an extreme leftist Feminist disinterested in exchanges of viewpoints -- as widely as possible in order to counter any advantage I might have over Roberta in having a regular publication and daily blog in which to air my views.

And, considering that I have just now been made aware that Roberta sent me far more comics material than I ever gave to her, I would be happy to send her any and all of the CEREBUS trade paperbacks and both volumes of COLLECTED LETTERS if she expresses an interest in having them.]

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Continuing with ELEPHANTMEN WEEK here on the Blog & Mail. And the "flip" story on issue #001, "Just Another Guy Named Joe".


I like the title a lot. Richard Starkings has a good ability to connect with the Baby Boomer audience. If you're my age or slightly older or slightly younger you'll make the automatic connection with SPIDER-MAN 38, the last Ditko issue: "Just A Guy Named Joe". Richard didn't start reading comics until 1971 so that puts him in the slightly younger category but we are "of a piece", "brothers of the spear". Asking us what the last Ditko SPIDER-MAN issue was and the title is about as much of a trivia question as "CAN YOU spell your last name?"


The interesting thing about ELEPHANTMEN is that it is almost all subtext or, at least the series of anecdotes that they're starting with are almost all subtext. In the case of "Just Another Guy Named Joe," the subtext is bigotry, xenophobia, racism. Only instead of black people or immigrants it's the "Munts" (the unspoken pejorative for the Elephantmen, the fictional equivalent of) (are we all grown-ups here? Mm. Experience tells me probably not, so let me wimp out and write) (N-word). The narration is the eponymous Joe's introspections on what the introduction of the Elephantmen has done to society:


"Don't think about the Munts…sorry, the `Unhumans' `The Elephantmen'


"Don't think about Obadiah Horn [one of the Elephantmen] and the corporate empire he built on the backs of sad saps like you."


I wimp out because Richard wimps out. Is someone who is fuming with inner resentment against the Elephantmen really going to correct himself in the privacy of his own thoughts after thinking the forbidden term "Munts"? THERE's an unanswerable question for you. Here's another one: Is it out of bounds to suggest that this can offer encouragement to the Politically Correct Thought Police – that Richard writing a bigoted character like this indicates that we have really made progress when, even in an intellectual discussion about societal issues, we use the term n-word? Is it scarier when I write it as N-Word rather than n-word? Or does that just mean that I'm so old and out of touch that I don't understand what significant progress the use of "n-word" instead of the actual n-word represents? For a long while I've thought there was great merit in drawing distinctions between black people and n-words as, in my experience, black people do. The pin-heads who shot up the Foot Locker on Boxing Day on Dundas Street in Toronto, killing a fifteen-year-old girl in the process over some idiotic "loss of face" gangsta delusion (just as a whattayacall f'rinstance). Is it really an example of bigotry that I think of those moronic teenagers with their pants around their hips and their tattoos and their piercings and their gang colours and their illegal handguns and their vials of crack acting out Gunfight at the OK Corral in the core of downtown Toronto as n-words? Is there any validity to the fact that I think it insults intelligent discourse to describe them as black people? That I sincerely believe you are never going to make any progress on the problem thinking of them and describing them as "disadvantaged and troubled youths"?


Jeez, Dave, I really hate it when you talk about things like this.


I know. And this is the EASY one from ELEPHANTMEN #001.


Returning to our original concept, The Battle of the Sexes and how that enacts itself in popular entertainment, the most pertinent panel to our subject in "Just Another Guy Named Joe" is one that shows one of the Elephantmen, a mutated crocodile, in an inner city alleyway menacing two scantily-clad young ladies. Menacing probably isn't the word (which is the great thing about the inherent ambiguity of imagery as a device of communication) given that one of the scantily-clad young ladies is flirtingly touching his snout with her index finger and both of the girls are smiling. His hands look ready to sweep them both up in one big hammerlock, but given their body language this impression (as it turns out) needs to be revised. He's obviously just gesticulating. It's only the fact that he has the physical features of a crocodile that makes him appear threatening. And he's dressed in cool threads (or what would have passed for cool threads on MIAMI VICE – did I mention that both Richard and I are old?). Both of the girls are white and as I say, our subtext for the Elephantmen is that the Elephantmen are stand-ins for people of colour and (sudden insight) MEN of colour (there ARE NO female Elephantmen). So, uh, here we are. And we're suddenly not sure that we want to be reading what we think we are reading.


Backtrack through the previous three iconic panels. Obadiah Horn being interviewed on a giant screen Times Square-style plasma TV with Joe's "corporate empire…he built on the backs of sad saps like you" interior narration. Then a shot of Jeremiah Granger (remember? The giraffe?) standing in front of his clothing store with "Don't think about all the jobs taken away from honest Americans to provide those…animals with a livelihood. Don't think about the corner stores and small businesses the government assigned to them" as the interior narration.


[See, now we have subtext WITHIN subtext. The location is the United States, but this suggests that a Marxist government is in the offing. Immigrants in our society – presumably the intended metaphor – are running corner stores and small businesses but they weren't "assigned to them" by the government. Or were they? If you have social workers in a given city and those social workers are hired under government program to assist new immigrants and you have Boat People coming into that city and the social workers find a corner store for a family of Boat People to run or help them to find it does that mean that the government "assigned to them" that corner store? How clear does the demarcation need to be between "helping someone" and "assigning someone"?]


Then a mutated zebra cop standing next to his squad car "Don't think about the way they look at you. The way they look down on you…maybe they think you're just another Joe…" then the alligator with the two hookers who are either hookers or just garden variety Image Studio Era "hot chicks" with the mandatory soccer balls stuck onto their chests. Are their partly exposed nipples signals that they ARE hookers or just an indication that we can all look forward to exposed nipples becoming the new societal norm?


"Yeah, maybe they think they're bigger than you, stronger than you…but that doesn't make them smarter than you. It doesn't make them better…"


The "bigger" and "stronger" are interesting. It's another subtext appropriate to the medium: the view of wimpy little guys when contemplating the archetypal alpha male exaggerated to the nth degree. The Elephantmen are every school bully who ever lived running around loose in the streets. Is he still a bully or is he just bigger and stronger than me? "Celebrate diversity, Mr. Bigger, Stronger Alpha Male!" But as subtexts go – if what we are talking about is genuine communication by metaphor – it's more than a bit of a straw man given that the environment where these stories are going to be available, comic-book stores, is one where "bigger, stronger" men as opposed to males don't usually go. And if they do go, they're not apt to look at a giant mutated hippo in a fedora and trench coat on a cover and say, "This is supposed to be ME isn't it?" Another cultural prejudice and presupposition hiding in plain sight. The pretty girls and the wimpy guys are human beings. The big, strong scary guys are mutated animals.


Tomorrow: SO? What's wrong with that?



___________________________________________________

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.