Dave Sim's blogandmail #322 (July 30th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Okay, 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.


___________________________________________________

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.]

___________________________________________________

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.]

___________________________________________________

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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #317 (July 25th, 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.]

___________________________________________________

ELEPHANTMEN WEEK now threatens to become THE TEN ELEPHANTMEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE INTERNET or TWO WEEKS IN CYBERSPACE WITH THE "UNHUMANS" or "MEET THE MUNTS" or whatever you want to call it. Get comfy folks.


So, okay. Where angels fear to tread but, also, hopefully an intelligent review of ELEPHANTMEN #001 for those of you who have already mentally "tuned out" as you always do when Dave decides to enter Angelic NO GO territory (which, as far as I can see is most of you). I'm still interested in ELEPHANTMEN, but I have to say that the monthly version swerves off into areas that I find disconcerting. That's going to take some explaining.


"See the Elephant". It's interesting that they establish the structure of the ELEPHANTMEN comic book right at the outset. Having lived "behind the scenes" in comic books for the better part of three decades now, you can usually tell when someone has a distinct game plan and when they're just making it up as they go along, play by play depending on where they end up on the field. The "flip cover" is one of them. Of the eight issues so far, five of them have had "flip" covers – second covers drawn by different artists to supplement the primary cover done by Ladronn and printed upside down relative to the front cover. And in most cases, the flip cover is followed by a separate story.


It's an interesting structure because it basically turns the ELEPHANTMEN into an "anecdotal" book. The space isn't really enough to get into anything too "in depth" so what you get is a little slice of life episode that brings out the character of Hip Flask and helps to develop a supporting cast. The problem with that is that the supporting cast can start getting out of hand and your readership divides into those who are getting fed (whose favourite characters dominate the anecdote selections) and those who are getting starved (whose favourite characters disappear for an extended period right at an interesting point in their development). Strategically there are potential problems but tactically (at least up to issue #008) it's sustainable.


And speaking from experience, it's almost impossible to tell how it will play in the collected form until you see the collected form. Usually "a lot better" which is why people who aren't 100% sold on a title usually go from a regular buyer to "I'm waiting for the collected volume". Instalment by instalment, a book that is seriously losing its way out in the woods and a book that's coherent but not obvious about how it all ultimately "hooks up" look the same (uh, TELL me about it). Neil's audience -- whether they admitted it or not – thought several times through the 75 issues, "he's lost it." DREAM COUNTRY. What's the deal with these short stories all drawn by different artists? The core audience is completely under the spell and I was certainly in the core audience. It never even occurred to me to question the short stories as short stories. "These short stories are great". And then reading the collected DREAM COUNTRY at the appropriate place when I read the whole story (Oh, that's how the short stories fit in). My best guess is that Starkings, Ladron and Casey are too good at what they do to have done the first two volumes and then said, "And, uh, now we're just going to make up a bunch of cool but pointless stories to fish you in further."


As often happens when I'm reviewing material (and I try to read every scrap, all the stories and all the editorial content which I've done with HIP FLASK) something will stick with me that seems overwhelmingly pertinent later on but is just one among many little mental post-it notes I've filed away at the time.


[This happens a lot with the NATIONAL POST on Wednesday and Thursday. I'll read an article and not really think much about it and only 24 or 48 hours later go, "Wait a minute. That was a major jigsaw puzzle piece. How could I have missed that? I need to quote from that!" The recycle box gets emptied early Friday morning, so that can be that if realization dawns on Friday afternoon about a piece I read Wednesday morning.]


[I know what you're thinking: if I was on the Internet I could just click on www.nationalpost.com and the article would be archived there. Just to keep all of this thematically linked, I'd venture to say that if I was on the Internet I probably wouldn't have been thinking about the article in question – I'd probably still be clicking through 128 studio shots of Natalie Wood or Audrey Hepburn taken by Richard Avedon back in 1959 or 1960 that someone had posted and in that case I can guarantee I wouldn't have been thinking at all.]


So, I spent the better part of last night going through all of Richard Starkings' editorials. "Where is it? It's in here somewhere. I know I didn't make it up. Where is it?" And it turned out to be in "Pulp Science Fiction" the temporary name for the letters page in the first issue, second column.


"I created HIP FLASK and the ELEPHANTMEN with the intention of filling a series of comic books full of implausible ideas and impossible characters. Evil scientific genius? Check. Mutant hippos and elephants? Check. Robotic frog? Check. A cybernetic assassin? Check. Hot girls hanging around misunderstood male leads with deep dark secrets? Check…"


He goes on from there, but that was what I was looking for. "Hot girls hanging around misunderstood male leads with deep dark secrets". There's even a shot of Hip Flask with one of those "hot girls" in the corner of the page by way of emphasis. Even a half-inch tall and dressed in skin-tight super-hero spandex I can see that her breasts look like glued-on soccer balls, her waist is impossibly thin and her eyes are huge. Image Studio Look.


I think Richard might be onto something here. "Hot girls hanging around misunderstood male leads with deep dark secrets." To quote Henry Higgins, "By George, I think he's got it." It's the choice of the nouns and the adjectives and verbs that give it away. "Hot" rather than "pretty" or "strong" or "independent" or "devoted" or "caring". "Girls" rather than "women". "Male" rather than "masculine". "Hanging around" rather than "lusting after" or "sleeping with" or "helping" or "caring for" or "following" or "learning from". It's my thesis that popular fiction always strives to both reflect the real world and to try to set a course for it and always has the "Battle of the Sexes" as its core interest. It documents battles, truces, capitulations, war, spying, armistices, annexations, occupations, pacts of convenience, etc. etc. ELEPHANTMEN might very well be the first fiction to genuinely document the uneasy permanent truce as viewed across the insuperable divide. Hence the "hanging around". It's a complete fiction, in my view, created to offer consolation where none actually exists, of a piece with such divergent (but thematically linked) fictional relationships as that between the thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical Terry Zwigoff "Creepy Old Record Collector Guy" character and the two teenaged girls in GHOST WORLD and the Marv and Nancy relationship in Frank Miller's SIN CITY movie (Jessica Alba becoming the first stripper in history since Jaka to keep all of her clothes on while onstage just to give you an idea of the hallucinatory level of male delusion that we're discussing here). Pretty young girls don't, as a rule, "hang around" COGs (Creepy Old Guys). COGs "hang around" while trying not to appear to "hang around" pretty young girls and left to their own hallucinations and waning sexual powers can talk themselves into the reverse being true.


Which is, you know, sick. Sorry to put it that abruptly, but there you go, Creepy Old Guy to Creepy Old Guy. That's sick. [Need some more convincing? Okay. While you're ogling the girl young enough to be your daughter in the coffee shop or the supermarket and thinking to yourself "Maybe she'd go for a more…MATURE…guy…not like the unsophisticated boys who are always pawing at her. Maybe she'd go for someone misunderstood but sensitive and intelligent like me." Okay. Now picture the woman in her forties or fifties still dressing and acting like a teenager scoping YOU out and thinking "Maybe he'd go for someone more MATURE…not like these usually unsophisticated, brainless children. Maybe he'd go for someone misunderstood, but sensitive and intelligent like me."


Now what's your reaction? Unless I miss my guess something along the lines of "Lady, you are free to think whatever you want that keeps you warm at night and able to face the dawn, but keep it to yourself." Well, same deal. Check them out surreptitiously and intermittently – we all do – but don't get obvious about it and whatever you do don't even dream about going across the line of scrimmage unless you really, really REALLY want to ruin her month ("OMG! I LOOK LIKE SOMEONE THAT CREEPY OLD GUYS THINK THEY CAN HIT ON!") if not her entire year ("I HAVE TO GO HOME AND BURN ALL MY CLOTHES AND GET ALL MY HAIR CUT OFF!"


Okay, I've just made a lot of Creepy Old Guys feel bad way, way, WAY down deep inside, so let's not tackle #001 "See the Elephant" right away. Let's circle around and deal with the "flip" story "Just Another Guy Named Joe".


Tomorrow: "Just Another Guy Named Joe"



___________________________________________________

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 #316 (July 24th, 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.]

___________________________________________________

Tuesday July 24 – ELEPHANTMEN WEEK continues here on the Blog & Mail and it is now officially "Ladronn's Cute Chick Tuesday" if you haven't already designated it as such on your Crackberry.


Page 17 of CONCRETE JUNGLE introduces us to Miss Vanity Case. Yeah – "Miss" (can you believe it?) (I'm not sure if that's just because Jeremiah Granger is as old-fashioned as I am) (you'd sort of expect a giraffe to be a little "stiff-necked" though, wouldn't you?). And she IS a cutie. White hair and – judging by the proportions Ladronn uses very or perhaps VERY early teens. She's Hip Flask's charming female assistant. I mean, the politically correct "beard" is that she's been assigned by the Information Agency to keep an eye on him "because no one else wanted the job" but how likely is that? We need someone to "keep an eye" on this gigantic mutated Hippo and the only one willing to volunteer in the entire government agency is the drop-dead gorgeous teenager. No, what we have here is Batman and Robin – Frank Miller's Batman and Robin where Robin is a girl in her VERY early teens. What does a gigantic mutated hippo need with a charming female assistant in her very or VERY early teens? My guess would be the same reason Frank Miller's Batman needed a female Robin in her VERY early teens: higher sales on his comic book.


I read the whole book and then doubled back to have a closer look at Vanity and I thought, "I know this face. Where do I know this face from?" And that was when it hit me. Colleen Doran. Not Colleen herself, but her girls' faces that she draws which are a) very VERY pretty and b) very VERY expressive. I learned more about drawing girls' faces from Colleen's inks on "The Applicant" than I learned anywhere else. Ladronn isn't quite in Colleen's league with the girls faces (it would be a surprise if he was) but Vanity sure dresses up the pages she appears on. He gets a little TOO cute late in the book with a shot of her wearing Hip Flask's overcoat and hat (the overcoat is a stretch but the hat is totally impossible. All you would see is the hat sitting on top of the coat not her cute little Vanity face peeking out from under it). I'll forgive him that one, though, because of the shot of the headlights catching her cute little tight-faded-jean-encased bum cheeks on page 31. I'd be willing to bet that was one of those "I can't believe I get paid to paint this" days.


The second book works very well. These guys know what they're doing: make the introductory book small enough to tempt people and let the last 9 pages and the pin-ups fish them in. Same thing here, only expanded. More stories, more pin-ups – a lot of the pin-ups end up being covers for the monthly comic.


IS it a monthly comic? The latest one I have here is March (#008) and they came in in April so they're either keeping the pace or staying pretty darn close to it.


The bad news (at least as far as I'm concerned) is that when we make the leap to the monthly comic, we lose Ladronn. Well, not completely: he does still provide covers and pin-ups and I assume he'll be back from time-to-time with new stories but you could sort of call it from the sidelines that this painting style is not going to be compatible with a monthly schedule.


This is where the earlier analogy I drew to Moore, Bissette and Totelben's SWAMP THING, Neil's SANDMAN and Bill's FABLES comes into sharper relief. I mean, I hate to be an absolute PURIST about these things but I don't think anything really compared to knowing that you were going to get Bissette and Totelben in every issue. Veitch did some remarkable stuff on the title, as did Alfredo Alacala, don't get me wrong but there was no doubt in my mind that there was a "bait and switch" going on. Same as when I was reading SANDMAN. It was not the happiest day of my life when I found out that Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III weren't going to be doing every issue. Again, don't get me wrong. I would never undervalue Kelly Jones' "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and P. Craig Russell's "Ramadan", Charlie Vess' "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Colleen's "Façade" but, given my druthers…


And Neil really established that as a Viable Option with SANDMAN. I'd be willing to bet that FABLES was an easier sell for Bill with that structure in place. DC didn't have to wonder if the artist or artists were going to "stick it out". If they didn't, you got new artists. An intellectual property could stand on its own two feet, consisting of a) the property and b) the writer-creator. And that's definitely what has happened with ELEPHANTMEN.


The good news in this case is the same as the good news in those previous cases. You get to see other artists' "takes" on HIP FLASK and the other ELEPHANTMEN. Justin Moritat gets the nod on the first issue and my first reaction is "Oh. Image Studio stuff." That's probably more to do with my age than anything. In the mid- to late-nineties there was this sudden profusion of guys who were all massively influenced by Michael Golden (or, more to the point, influenced by Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, Jim Lee and those guys being massively influenced by Michael Golden) right around the time that each of the Image Studios started putting out a profusion of books. As is usually the case they left the actual Michael Golden drawing ability (which was considerable) alone and just adopted the tropes – huge, huge eyes on the little kids and the cute girls, impossibly thin waistlines on the girls…and, uh, breast implants.


That last one I always found very funny (in a rueful, morbid "God, I am so old" way). All of the Image guys had grown up in the Golden Age of Breast Implants in girlie magazines so that was what they knew and that was what they drew: breasts wildly outside of natural proportions that looked like flesh coloured-soccer balls glued to the girl's chest. Breasts so unnaturally large (HOW unnaturally large were they?) Breasts SO unnaturally large that they formed cleavage even when they weren't being pushed together in a bra. Guys my age would just go "Oh. Implants. I wonder what they looked like when they were real?" Guys Todd's age would go "HUBBA! HUBBA!" I think if you go back and look at Michael Golden's work you'll see that he was in the former camp and not the latter camp.


Implant fetish.


Bizarre.


So that's usually what I see. If you draw unnaturally large eyes, unnaturally thin waists and breasts like glued-on soccer balls then I just lump you in with that time period. No offence and nothing to worry about. I'll be dead a lot sooner than you will.


UPDATE 28 JUNE 0640 HOURS EST – Off-White House Overnight Cable Traffic from Craig Miller at Win-Mill who has faxed through transcripts from the June 27 Rush Limbaugh radio program "What Feminism Hath Wrought". I have to admit that I'm not a big Rush fan. He's just a little too relentlessly and acerbically and insultingly sarcastic for my tastes…


(which is probably a necessary thing to be when combating the excesses of feminism considering how impervious the members opposite have proven to be to anything LESS than relentless, acerbic and insulting sarcasm: I still tend to, foolishly, err on the side of believing that reasoned discourse -- restricted to purely factual distillations like the Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast -- is still possible)


…so I'm just going to give you the Reader's Digest version, which is that the Virginia Pilot newspaper has reported a campaign in Hampton Roads to report and stop suspected sexual abuse "Campaign advocates recognizing, reporting suspected abuse". Part of the campaign consists of billboards showing an adult hand holding a child's hand and a giant quote "It doesn't feel right when I see them together."

"A national help line number is listed, and through it callers can get advice about what to do. Rebecca Odor [you couldn't make a name like that up] who directs the sexual and domestic violence prevention division for the state Department of Health, said officials hope to reach people who might feel uncomfortable reporting a relative or acquaintance to law enforcers."


"`We want to teach them to trust their instinct and, if it doesn't feel right, take action,' Odor said."

Craig's copied the "FEEL uncomfortable" and "doesn't FEEL right" into the margin and has written a note at the top


"Dave – Thought you might find this interesting. Oh no – I hold Jennifer's hand all the time when I'm out running errands. I'm doomed! If I go to Virginia, anyway…"


Oddly enough this ties in directly with ELEPHANTMEN #001 and a subject I had pretty much decided to steer away from, but the serendipity of Craig's cable would suggest that SOMEONE thinks I should have a go at it. So, okay. Where angels fear to tread.


Tomorrow on the Blog & Mail: Where angels fear to tread



___________________________________________________

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 #315 (July 23rd, 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.]

___________________________________________________

Monday July 23 –


HEY, GANG! It's ELEPHANTMEN WEEK here on the Blog & Mail. You KNEW you felt different when you woke up this morning, didn't you?


UPDATE 27 JUNE 1930 HOURS EST - Okay, so we had just hit pages 26 and 27 of HIP FLASK UNNATURAL SELECTION and I was now a full-blown fan of the book. The last 9 pages were pretty much a blur but definitely set the tone and the shape of the intellectual property.


I have to say that HIP FLASK has to count as one of the most amazing "bait and switches" ever perpetrated on the comics-buying/comics-reading public. The bait, of course, was this GIANT BAD HEAVY METAL MEETS JACK KIRBY RIFF war between humans and these mutated anthropomorphic creatures (called "Unhumans" and "Elephantmen"). KAMANDI told sideways, in a way. "The Island of Dr. Moreau" for the Pepsi Generation.


What you THINK you're getting is a really, really tired cliché about the mad scientist who mutates all these creatures and plans to use them to take over the world. Yawn. The switch was that it wasn't going to be about the war. The war was just the set-up, the actual story, the actual series of anecdotal stories, was going to be about What do you (you, as a society, that is) do with these creatures now that the war is OVER? Where and how do they fit in since they pretty obviously don't, you know, fit in anywhere?


Giant humanized hippos and giraffes and zebras, all trained to be mindless psychotic killing machines and now having to be acclimatized to and grafted onto human society. It works beautifully. As a reader, you've already (grudgingly) suspended your disbelief that it is even possible (in a Marvel and DC over-the-top kind of way) to take over the world with mutated giant humanized hippos and giraffes and zebras and rhinos and then, with the switch, you find that you don't have to. Here's Richard and Ladronn and Joe Casey looking back at you from behind the printed page and saying, "C'mon – take over the world with a bunch of mutated killing machine anthropomorphics? How likely is that?"


I mean, you "GET" all that in the last nine pages and then you get a series of pin-ups of HIP FLASK who obviously gets acclimatized as a detective. And they're gorgeous pieces, moody, evocative and (yes) definitely looking for all the world like a Big Screen Summer Blockbuster Motion Picture.


So Volume 2, HIP FLASK CONCRETE JUNGLE (volume one of HIP FLASK: THE BIG HERE AND THE LONG NOW) is quite literally a cakewalk. I mean, no doubt there is a lot of blood sweat and tears that went into this. These things don't just land on the page, but in terms of the way that it connects with the reader, the nearest analogies I can come up with are Alan and Steve and John's SWAMP THING, Neil's SANDMAN and Bill's FABLES. Once you "get" the context, you just want to see what the creators do with it next. Having nailed the context, all the creators have to do is to NOT SCREW IT UP. If it doesn't actually write itself, it's the nearest thing to it. The proof is that, at least for the foreseeable future, anytime I'm in a comic-book store, I'll be checking under "E" and not just waiting for the collections to come out…Yeah, you would THINK that I would be looking under "H" for HIP FLASK, but you'd be wrong. I'll be checking under "E"…


[er – for ELEPHANTMEN. It's a good example of how creative people can do really UN-rocket science like things with their intellectual properties that would give any marketing director the heebie-jeebies even to contemplate.


"Let me get this straight. You've built this brand, step-by-step over a period of years and now you want to…"


"Completely change the name. Or actually add a different name and use both of them."


(rifle shot sound of marketing director's pencil snapping in two)


Obviously the property per se evolved way beyond its point of origin which, I suspect, was "Okay, I've got this Raymond Chandler Hippo called HIP FLASK that I've been using as a mascot for my lettering fonts company. Now, how do I make that concept plausible when I turn it into an actual comic book?" And all three guys brought so much of their best game to the table that the original idea, the Raymond Chandler Hippo isn't really in the same league. Believe me I can relate – try turning the Funny Animal Conan into a political and religious satire. So, what to do? Well, you have to rethink it and call it something that's a little closer to the Big Screen Summer Blockbuster it's evolved into. What would you call it if it was an ACTUAL Big Screen Summer Blockbuster? ELEPHANTMEN. Yeah. I can see that on the trailer now. ELEPHANTMEN. Coming to a theatre near you. Summer 2009.


But, meanwhile, you've just spent years establishing that the brand, the core of the intellectual property is HIP FLASK the Hippo. And not only that, the collections are called HIP FLASK UNNATURAL SELECTION and HIP FLASK CONCRETE JUNGLE. The Big Story Arc is HIP FLASK THE BIG HERE AND THE LONG NOW. Or will it end up being ELEPHANTMENT THE BIG HERE AND THE LONG NOW? What you're doing is setting up an Abbott and Costello routine that stores are going to be living with for a long time to come.


"Hi do you carry the ELEPHANTMEN collections?"


"yep. They're right over there. HIP FLASK UNNATURAL SELECTION and HIP FLASK CONCRETE JUNGLE."


"No, no, no. What I'm looking for are the ELEPHANTMENT collections."


"Well, uh, see that's what they're called. The comic book is ELEPHANTMEN but the collections are called HIP FLASK."


"Excuse me. Can you tell me where I can find the HIP FLASK comic book?"


"It's right over there, under `E'".


"HIP FLASK is under `E'?"


If you're laughing right now, you probably don't actually work in or own a comic-book store.


It's quite a book and we haven't even gotten to Ladronn's cute chicks yet.


[I mean apart from Sahara who appears late in the first volume and is pretty much just a regal-looking black version of H. Rider Haggard's SHE, a politically correct cipher in my books with all the personality of a NOW brochure. Even when she appears mostly naked or in a completely translucent gown to me she has absolutely zero sex appeal. According to the latest issue she was nominated as Best Female Character in the Glyph Awards which are awarded for the best in comics made by, for and about people of color which I think sort of makes my point for me.]


But be here tomorrow when I make up for that.


Tomorrow: Hey, let's talk about Ladronn's Cute Chicks!



___________________________________________________

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 #314 (July 22nd, 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.]

___________________________________________________

Sunday July 22 –

Sometimes a letter comes in that just seems to make everything worthwhile, so I'm going to run this without comment except to say: Sometimes a letter comes in that just seems to make everything worthwhile:


"Dear Dave Sim,


"My name is Zack Rosenberg and I am living in Sunny California. The reason I am writing you a letter is because I am a huge fan and want to thank you for all the wonderful stories you created with CEREBUS.


"I first want to tell you about myself. I am 18 years old, almost 19 (August 24). I am attending college in New York to become a chef. If it weren't for your stories, I would not be at the successful place where I am today. I have a rare disorder called Tourette Syndrome. Tourette Syndrome consists of involuntary physical (that are both internal and external) and vocal spasms. On a bad day, I look like a fish out of water. When I was ten, I was diagnosed and my life started to fall apart. I have one of the worst cases in the state of California, but now I have complete control thanks to the help of many friends, family, and you!!!


"About the age of 15 I was in the hospital for a life-saving operation on my lung. I almost died but what kept me going was comic books and my family. One book that I started at the time was CEREBUS. After the operation and recovery, I decided to go to boarding school to learn to conquer my disorder. Every day when I thought I would give up, I turned to comic books and especially your stories. I am now done with my first successful year in college and have complete control over my Tourette.


"Thanks for all the stories because they were the ones that brought me out of the pain of the real world and put me into a world of action and adventure. But most importantly the stories you wrote helped me cope with the difficult times with my disability.


"In the Jewish religion you performed a mitz-vah or good deed. Thank you for performing a mitz-vah for me because you truly changed my life around. I would love to talk to you some time and become your friend. The dream is to get the very first issue that started it all, CEREBUS #1 (1977). I lack the funds but I show the determination and I know I will achieve it (but probably in the NEXT lifetime) (Laughs!)


"Thanks for being who you are and creating your stories and I know one day I will get that issue.


"Yours truly, Zack Rosenberg


PS. E-mail me!!!"


Say, Jeff – can you e-mail him and get his address so I can write to him – hopefully before his birthday? Much obliged.

___________________________________________________

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #313 (July 21st, 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.]

___________________________________________________

Saturday July 21


UPDATE 27 JUNE 1700 HOURS EST – Seriously, 1700 Hours. You missed my "Not Enough Caffeine in The World To Keep Me From a 1525 to 1700 Hours Power Nap". Fortunately I didn't. It happens with this 14-hour day stuff. Every once in a while I just have to fall asleep kaboom.


Speaking of which, with two US military guys calling in one 24-hour period, you'd think I would have asked one of them "All week I've been typing 0704 HOURS or 1045 HOURS and that's not right, is it? If you have minutes included it's just 0704. You only use `Hours' when it's rounded off to the hour as in 1500 Hours and 0700 Hours, right?" And I bet they would have agreed that, yes, it is wrong to do that. Oh, well, I'm 53 pages in doing it the other way, so let's just pretend that never occurred to me.


UPDATE 27 JUNE 1504 HOURS EST – So you remember back a while ago when I was getting paranoid about dying broke and I started phoning around trying to drum up business and one of the places I called was Richard Starkings' Comicraft, the lettering font folks to see what they would pay me to pimp my lettering style(s) to them? And when I talked to Richard he said they usually pay people with a free font of their own style in exchange for a piece of art for their HIP FLASK comic book? Remember what a RELIEF it was for me to find out that although it was pretty much a lock that I was now DEFINITELY going to die broke at least I would die with a Comicraft lettering font in my style and the opportunity to draw a picture of an anthropomorphic hippo who was also a futuristic private detective?


Well, in that case you can well imagine my profound level of near-ecstatic ambivalence carrying this honking great box full of books and comics back from the post office that I had just paid customs charges on. Now, I was easily a good NINE DOLLARS closer to dying broke then I had been when I walked in there. What luck!


Anyway, I put the books in with the mail. Two oversized hardcovers and a bunch of funnybooks with the Image logo on them and I didn't really plan to crack them open (literally in the case of the hardcovers – they were shrink-wrapped) until I got to that layer. But, at some point I ran out of reading material and I thought, well, okay, let's start at the beginning which in this case was HIP FLASK UNNATURAL SELECTION, a roughly forty-page-plus over-sized introductory hardcover, fully painted colour.


[You must have seen the ads for these. There's a full colour one on the back cover of this month's COMICS JOURNAL (an ad placement which is -- in itself -- just, you know, too rib-ticklingly perverse for words considering the kind of avant garde `Oo-la-la' limp-wristed en Euro-extremis material the JOURNAL has been reviewing and interviewing people about lately and pretending their readership is actually interested in. And here's this ad on the back screaming "BLADE RUNNER MEETS TAXI DRIVER: GRITTY, REAL, AND POISED FOR SOME SERIOUS EXPLOSIVENESS". "MORE LIKE WATCHING A HIGH-BUDGET BLOCKBUSTER FILM THAN A COMIC BOOK" "TOTALLY KICK ASS"


STICK THAT SIDEWAYS UP YOUR WINE-AND-CHEESE PARTY, FELLAS! That's one high-priced brand of witticism, but my hat's off to Richard for deciding "What the hey!"]


So, anyway I started reading it and right away I figure I've got the range. It's HEAVY METAL. It's not, you know, TERRIBLE HEAVY METAL (not ALL of it, anyway) (and there's a LOT of terrible HEAVY METAL I've flipped through over the years since Kevin put me on his comp list so it's not as if I don't know the difference) but it's, well, HEAVY METAL.


Page two dialogue: "One must wonder if this is how God felt on the sixth day."


ROGER, HOUSTON. WE'VE GOT A PERVERSE KNEE-JERK ATHEISTIC HEAVY METAL HERE. DO YOU COPY, OVER?


WE COPY DAVE. ABORT?


UH, NEGATIVE THAT, HOUSTON. LET'S GIVE IT A COUPLE OF MORE PAGES.


ROGER, DAVE.


Next panel: "…or in the incalculable moment when He decided to give the earth a son, needing nothing but His own omnipotence to create."


ROGER, HOUSTON. WE'VE GOT A NICE ALBEIT AWKWARDLY PHRASED RECOVERY IN THE NEXT PANEL. DO YOU COPY, OVER?


COPY YOU LOUD AND CLEAR, DAVE.


The nice recovery is followed by a two-page spread that puts it into another ho-hum category: Ridley Scott's ALIEN. Gritty, battered up, dimly-lit futuristic space-barge looking interior. Lots of greasy-looking cables and pipes snaking all over the place. Innovative in 1978 (I saw it in the theatre the night it opened, so, NYAH!) but seriously WAY beyond cliché in 2007. Next two-page spread. Yep, here's the ALIEN right on schedule.


"Commence embryonic termination immediately. Prepare a new ovum screening and let us move on to Phase Two. When God created Adam…"


"Let us"? "LET us?"


You're losing me, here, guys. Next page, ALIEN. Page after that [yawn] ALIEN. Page after that. Oh, hey, that's pretty good. Branding the infant hippo with a laser. But there's a ghost image/light expulsion of the brand projected to the left of it and someone has put some serious time into making it look exactly like a high-tech laser-meets-hippo-hide searing emulsification effect. Look a little closer. Look A LOT closer. All three panels. Some SERIOUS time. This is so far beyond the context of the previous pages, I am seriously thrown for a loop.


Next page, ALIEN. Next page. Two-page spread. ALIEN. Okay, the branding must've been a fluke. Next page. HEAVY METAL. Next page BAD HEAVY METAL. Next page BAD HEAVY METAL. Next page BAD HEAVY METAL MEETS JACK KIRBY. Next page…


oh, hey this is good. Futuristic tank coming up over a rise at twilight. Same deal as the branding. Ladronn (finally check for the name) has put in some serious time getting the light right. Don't want to kill the detail on the tank but you want to get exactly the right air density of high-powered lights through battlefield smoke. Look a little closer. Look a lot closer. Still looking. Still looking. Two pages out of eighteen but the two pages on their own are almost enough to make me buy the thing (at 46 Honking Dollars Canadian!). That isn't a joke, by the way, and I seriously don't have a precedent for this. 23 bucks each for those two pages on a book that is so far out of my thematic interests that it is really just 46 bucks for two examples of really cool comic-book pages. I don't buy ANYTHING just because it looks like a cool comic-book page!


Next page GOOD HEAVY METAL. Particularly the muzzle flashes on the mounted guns on the UN combat helicopter (seriously delusional. The UN? As in the United Nations? piloting something that looks like it eats Blackhawks and Cobras for breakfast? This is going to give Greenpeace serious palpitations. Keep the inhaler handy). Next: two-page spread. AVERAGE HEAVY METAL (nice understated mortar explosions, though). Next two-page spread. BAD HEAVY METAL MEETS JACK KIRBY (again). Next page BAD HEAVY METAL. Next page AVERAGE HEAVY METAL followed by…um…what would you call this? INTERESTING HEAVY METAL?


It's a medical evacuation of a seriously wounded anthropomorphic elephant from a combat zone. Okay, this is the third time I've been thrown off. SERIOUSLY thrown off. BAD HEAVY METAL MEETS JACK KIRBY doesn't usually concern itself with medical evacuations. BAD HEAVY METAL MEETS JACK KIRBY can't even SPELL medical evacuation. Here I go again. Look closer. Look still closer. Nine soldiers involved in the medical evacuation with two civilians trailing, one with an IV drip and one carrying a huge container of whole blood. Yep, that's what it is all right. All of them SERIOUSLY HUSTLING with an enemy combatant. What the heck IS this?


The next two-page spread is all muted pinks and earth tones with red highlights. The battle long over, earth-moving equipment is excavating the site. SAY AGAIN, HOUSTON? The next two-page spread is all muted pinks and earth tones with red highlights. The battle long over, earth-moving equipment is excavating the site. COPY THAT, HOUSTON, BUT I DON'T THINK I BELIEVE MY OWN EYES.


"What is that…ANOTHER one?"


"Looks like a human female…"


"That brings the count to OVER two hundred."


"What in God's name were they doing here?"


That's where it happened, all right. As of pages 26 and 27 of UNNATURAL SELECTION I was now (and remain) seriously, irretrievably, incontrovertibly HOOKED on HIP FLASK.


Tomorrow: The Sunday Edition


Monday: You thought it was just another week, but it turns out to be ELEPHANTMEN WEEK on the Blog & Mail (hope you got your ELEPHANTMEN WEEK greeting cards out in the mail!)



___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #312 (July 20th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Dear Mr. Tundis, Sir:


Well, I've been at this two and a half days now so I'm ready to stoop low enough as to actually use a cover letter for a FedEx package as part of the Blog & Mail instead of putting it over in "Correspondence 53A" where it belongs. Hope you are the same.


Sandeep's sister I assume KNOWING that I would need him to e-mail the Blog & Mail to you this week has planned her wedding ALSO for this week just to, you know, irritate me. I will now demonstrate that I am a much larger person than that by wishing her and her husband a long and happy life together. One of the miracles of masculine friendship that it only took me a little over twelve years of knowing Sandeep and a wedding for me to find out that he has a sister. When he gets back, I must make a point of asking what her name is.


I run out of Blog & Mail's on Monday (although I believe you got an incomplete July 2 with the last batch) and Sandeep will be in Cambridge through then and possibly over at his parents' place after that eating a) high off the hog and b) free off of all those reception leftovers for a couple of days. If he doesn't he's a bigger fool than I have taken him to be heretofore and I hope he saves me some smoked salmon or a side of beef or something.


With that in mind I'm sending print-outs with this of the July 2, 3 and (just in case the curried chicken and jumbo shrimp hold out that long) 4 postings on the assumption that scanning printed text and grafting it onto the Internet in digital form is as easy as Steve Peters says it is. Feel free to firebomb the www.awakeningcomics.com website if that isn't the case. I know he would do the same for you if the situation was reversed. I'll try and get hold of Sandeep on Monday or Tuesday so, don't bother scanning in the 4th's posting until we find out if that's needed or if he can just e-mail it to you. It's also that peculiar time of year where I only have today or tomorrow to FedEx this. Canadian FedEx will be closed on the Canada Day holiday Monday and won't deliver anything they pick up on Friday and American FedEx will be closed for the 4th on Wednesday and won't deliver anything they pick up on Tuesday.


I don't know why the world can't just do what I do and work 14 hours a day six days a week. Maybe it has something to do with this "getting a life" thing I keep hearing about. Another Internet fad?


Enclosed please find a sample Chester Brown panel with Greek lettering by yours truly constituting a first look at my COMMENTARIES ON THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK (with comic-strip illustrations by Chester Brown) for inclusion with the JULY 8 Posting. You will notice that I intentionally didn't clean the glass on the photocopier thus giving you the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to digitally clean up all of that dust and crap including the slipshod whiting-out job that I did of Chester's original lettering on the original photocopy. A momentous event in the life of any man and you are to be congratulated.



Enclosed please also find my guest badge from the Paradise Toronto Comicon. I wasn't actually a Guest of Honour on the original list (I don't know what the rest of us are in that case – Guests Without Honour?) so this seems like a suitably pretentious way to decorate the entry for JULY 10 which will also boost my Canadian content for the month so the CRTC hopefully won't revoke my artistic license when it comes up for renewal in '08. As you can see from the back of the badge it is unlawful to duplicate or resell it. So what am I bid? Just kidding. If you can send this back at some point it will find a happy home way at the back of drawer number six in the Cerebus Archive.







Enclosed also please find the coloured and logoed cover for THE COMIC EYE which you said hadn't yet been posted at Mark Innes' BLIND BAT PRESS the last time I spoke with you but which was probably posted there shortly thereafter once again making me look like the Luddite So Far Behind The Learning Curve That I Might As Well Be A Throwback to Another Age that I, in fact, am. I actually had a larger, clearer version than this which is sure to turn up as soon as I get back from the FedEx drop-off box. The advantage of this one is that it has mark's website address at the bottom sparing you the trouble of having to forge a link to it which I am sure would consume several hours at the least and which is probably no more difficult than a mere keystroke, but then it's the thought that counts even with us Luddites.



Enclosed also please find two cassette tapes which contain (as far as I know) the only extant interview with Gene Day which were entrusted into my care at the Toronto show by James Waley. The sound quality is supposed to be absolutely awful but I figured if anyone could fix that it would be you. No rush on it and I'd appreciate an opinion on whether it's interesting enough to send to Craig for transcription and possible inclusion in FOLLOWING CEREBUS. At the very least it would be nice to give it to the indyspinnerrack guys and/or to Margaret for cerebusfangirl.com or your own site if you're so inclined.


While I'm just chewing up Blog & Mail space here in such a cheesy fashion, was the complete rendition of "My Way" on the '06 Shuster Awards DVD I sent you? I couldn't help but noticing that the :09 version on YouTube outranks all of the other Dave Sim clips over there by at least a thousand "hits" (although why folks aren't breaking down the doors to get at that hot footage of you and Other Jeff and Margaret and Matt and John playing Diamondback in a Motel 8 lobby is as complete mystery to me as I'm sure it is to you). Assuming this actually has something to do with the quality of my singing and isn't just a testament to the vast size of Heidi Macdonald's audience (a dubious prospect at best), I thought we might run it up the cybernetic flagpole and see who clicks on it. Anything over 200 hits and I'm bringing my tux next year and singing "Under My Skin" to Liana K while leaning on the Sock..


Once again, hoping you are the same, I remain yours, for the most part, sincerely,


Okay That Takes Care of Friday the Twentieth


Tomorrow: If This Be Saturday, This Must Be HIP FLASK.



___________________________________________________

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 #311 (July 19th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Wrapping up the "frank exchange of viewpoints" (at least until Brian responds – he'll be out of the country for another week or so):


The problem with your "What I wrote was what I would say to you over lunch" is that it presupposes that I would ask you "So, what do you think about my new colour pieces?" if we were having lunch somewhere. Believe me, I wouldn't. I take it as a given after long experience that asking anyone's opinion of anything that I've done is just going to elicit an entirely negative response and I get enough of that without going looking for it. To give you an idea of how universal a policy that is with me now, I asked Chester Brown if I could use his art to illustrate my COMMENTARIES ON MARK'S GOSPEL but I didn't ask him what he thought of the Commentaries themselves. I assume his response would be completely negative. If he offers his opinion somewhere up ahead and it is, indeed, completely negative then I'm no further ahead or behind. If it's anything besides completely negative then that will be a very unexpected and happy bonus.


I think I ultimately made the right choice in just putting your fax in with the pile of mail and leaving my response to when it actually surfaced here three months later. Whatever I might have said about you possibly or possibly not drying up my commission work back in the third week in April pretty much sorted itself out – basically in the form of Matthew E. arriving out of a clear blue sky and single-handedly kicking the Cerebus art market up to a new level -- practically synchronous with the time arriving to address the situation here and that has seemed to be the case with all manner of glitches and bumps in the road since I started doing the Blog & Mail last September.


Obviously, all I can do is state my case as best I can, which I have done here. I would ask you to keep in mind that the "Alan Greenspan of Cerebus original artwork" is, I think, a valid model for what your situation has evolved into (whatever your intentions might have been) and that you take that into consideration when you decide whether to comment or not comment on the private commission pieces that I'm doing and have done. Of course, that still leaves it entirely up to you to take it into consideration and dismiss it out of hand if that seems reasonable to you.


UPDATE 27 JUNE 0834 HOURS EST – Time to hit the showers and when I get back It's Rafer Johnson PLASTIC FARM time here on the Blog & Mail.


UPDATE 27 JUNE 0909 HOURS EST – Okay, it's 9 am on a Wednesday and I'm now about to read a comic book as part of my job. This is the coolest, folks. Rafe writes:


"I just wanted to drop you a line to say a quick thank you for the very kind words you said about PLASTIC FARM on the Blog and Mail. That you liked the comic enough to say nice things about it in public means a great deal to me. It is one thing when a random reviewer likes the comic, or mentions it in their column. It jumps to a whole different level when someone whose comics you grew up reading (and idolizing and studying and re-reading over and over) says such positive things in a public forum).


"You should know right now that at no point will I ever accept money from you for my comics, so be aware that your plans to buy something at SPACE this year are going to fail. I figure the monthly education I received from reading CEREBUS is more than I'll ever be able to repay, so you get the book for free."


Well, aren't you nice.


It's one of the funny things about SPACE that there's a pretty good mix of people who a) grew up on CEREBUS, b) people who only know me from the descriptions of me on the COMICS JOURNAL message boards and c) "first timers" who have no idea who anyone is. (someone suggested that they try doing their own comics and here they are. It's a little weird but not unpleasantly so – at least not yet and, uh, here they are).


The thing is: the surface reaction to me that I get to see is pretty much the same in all cases. The first group are striving mightily not to and are terrified that they're going to (as one Cerebus reader's girlfriend put it – explaining why she was getting the autograph FOR him and he wasn't getting it for himself) "geek out" around me, the second group is making sure there's an exit nearby in case I suddenly start frothing at the mouth or mutilating their table display and screaming misogynistic obscenities at them and for the third group I'm just Some Old Guy who has wandered in for some reason (optimistically? somebody's Dad. Pessimistically? Judging by the haircut probably a cop or a narc) and they're just hoping I don't see the panel with the nudity or the defecation and whip out my badge.


You were pretty cool, Rafe. When I stopped to look at your display and chat, I never would have guessed that you had read the book or had a clue who I was.


"Enclosed please find a "dummy copy" of the upcoming PLASTIC FARM INTERLUDE GRAPHIC NOVEL. Since my section of this book is complete, I printed up five of these as go-bys for the other two artists working on the book (hence the truncated versions of the script in the middle). I figure since this book owes its pacing to JAKA'S STORY as much as anything else, I should at the very least send you an early look.


"Thank you again, and I look forward to being able to thank you in person at SPACE."


Which he did. The show started a little slow and he was one of the first to come by and chat.


So: PLASTIC FARM FERTILIZER/an interlude in three aprils


Well, that was really good. He sure knows his way around a comic-book page and he manages to convey that in his own drawings and to the artists (in this case Wendi Strang-Frost and Jake Warrenfeltz) he works with. It is seriously weird stuff but this particular chunk of story – which is definitely JAKA'S STORY-paced – helps to clarify the nature of the weirdness through indirect implication and to really address the adversarial relationship between the Brethren and the Farmland.


I think one of the really interesting things is the way so many guys are starting to clue in to the extent to which you can juxtapose words and pictures in the comics medium. We're all raised on television and movies where the two are kept pretty close together but in comics you can "say" one thing while "showing" something completely different because the eye can double back for clarification a lot more easily. There's no "rewind" button in a movie theatre. We're just starting to explore the boundaries of that. Rafe has picked up on the fact that the sky is, pretty much, the limit.


I think the website is www.plasticfarm.com and if it isn't it should be. If he's got an "everything so far" button and you've got the bucks to spare, I really think it's worth checking out.


UPDATE 27 JUNE 1147 HOURS EST – Must be US Military Week here at the Off-White House and no one told me. Yesterday or this morning I talked with Claude Flowers who is just back from Reserve training Somewhere in Northern California that Looks a Lot Like Iraq (you didn't hear it from me). He's going to send a rough cut of COLLECTED LETTERS 3 so there's a not-half-bad chance that I can get it solicited for a September release depending on how long it takes me to finish up my secret project. Just got off the phone with Shaun O'Hern – my US Navy buddy/reader -- who used to be stationed in Iceland until the navy decommissioned their base up there and who is now stationed in South Carolina? (Georgia? I'm old, the memory is going fast) and who is about to go "on watch" and couldn't tell me what it was that he was "watching" but he did let it slip that whatever he is watching will be leaving soon. If I remembered what American state or base he's in, I wouldn't have mentioned that last part. Anyway, he wanted to know what I knew about Philip K. Dick and I told him pretty much whatever stuck from the package of Dick's papers that Ken Viola sent me a while back. He's reading VALLIS (sp?) and was wondering how much of it was fiction and how much Dick actually experienced. I'd forgotten the part where time had stopped with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and then started again when Nixon resigned. Turns out Shaun was born the day after Nixon resigned – which makes him, what? Twelve? Surprise fellow Baby Boomers – THAT MAKES HIM THIRTY-HONKING-TWO! God, I am old.


UPDATE 27 JUNE 1200 HOURS EST – Prayer time and then I have to get a package ready for Mr. Tundis, Sir.


Tomorrow: Dear Mr. Tundis, Sir:



___________________________________________________

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 #310 (July 18th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


UPDATE 27 JUNE 0625 HOURS EST – Overnight Off-White House cable traffic from Craig Miller at Win-Mill: He picked up a copy of COLLECTED LETTERS 2 at Lone Star (hi to all our long-time supporters at Buddy Saunders' chain of stores "Heap in the Tard of Dexus") (yes, I still have the Cerebus beer steins Buddy did a few years ago: they are the official Off-White House glassware – in fact the only glassware I have) and got an idea for a satirical review of it for FOLLOWING CEREBUS 11 making good-natured fun of the fact that most entertainment "scholarship" tends to imply knowledge of an artist or writer or director's motivation that is non-existent (which, given that no one even alludes to this elsewhere, had me chuckling). As he puts it:


"To be more precise, during at LEAST the last half of WRAPPED IN PLASTIC and SPECTRUM, John and I were very careful never to use phrases such as "Lynch intended…" or "this scene reflects Frost's belief that…" or "here Joss Whedon wants to convey…". Okay, something may have slipped through by accident, but at some point early on we realized we didn't have a clue what Lynch or Frost or Whedon or any other writer or director REALLY thought or what he could have been thinking when he wrote or directed any specific scene or episode. At most, we may have had an interview or quote here or there, but that's not proof. Maybe he was lying, or just kidding around, or being ironic, or sarcastic or just plain mistaken…"


Or he could have been referring to something else completely. That happens a lot. "Here's what Dave said in his 1982 COMICS JOURNAL interview which supports our opinion of a creative decision he made in 2002." Not even a thought given to the fact that the separation of the two by two decades might have some bearing on relevance.


I think Craig has to be careful here not to just make himself look indictable on the same charge since, for the vast majority of readers, this would be their first exposure to the idea.


My best suggestion would be to go really "over the top" with it and use his Philosophy Major background to drag in Descartes and Sartre and Kierkegaard and (for extra flavour) Manichean dichotomies. Then he faxes me the piece to proof-read and I fax back the real, mundane reason the book came out the way it did…and he switches completely to Psychology and the fact that this mundane reason might be it, or it might be a hidden Jungian animus expressing itself, Dave Sim's long-suppressed female aspect lashing out at Craig's insight into his underlying philosophy.


Alas, we live in a singularly humourless time period (particularly when it comes to anything having to do with Dave Sim) and I'm not sure people will "get it". Still, it's a funny idea. Maybe the thing to do is to just label it "Satire" over whatever title he chooses for it. His suggestion is that I could blow the whistle on it in issue 12's "About Last Issue" and he could run a sidebar explaining what he was trying make fun of which means he sees the same problem: how do you make SURE that people know this is supposed to be humorous? Particularly since a lot of the audience is apt to be made up of college students who – unlike Craig who has been away from it for years now and can see it for what it is -- are still playing the "definitive psychobabble scholarship" game for real. It also doesn't help that most scholars when caught with their "psychobabble" pants around their ankles retreat to the position that they were just being ironic. Maybe that could be the joke. Craig then starts researching his own hidden psychological motivations "WAS I being ironic? Or was I just being OSTENSIBLY ironic, my quasi-irony an insubstantial "Id façade" masking a troubled childhood unsuspected and unexamined (and consequently "not worth living"?) still seething beneath my facile (QUASI-facile?) humour and "humour" constructs like a festering cauldron of post-modernist…etc. etc."


Scribble in the margin: "Needs work, but I think you should go for it."


UPDATE 27 JUNE 0704 HOURS EST - Anyway, back to Brian Coppola and the CEREBUS THE ORIGINAL AARTVARK website:


I think you would have to admit that it took me a long time to express the opinion that the Cerebus art market wasn't dead it was just dramatically undervalued. The evidence was pretty plain to me. There are roughly 2,000 pages "out there" and from the time that you started actively charting the Cerebus art market in real time, it was really all you could do to find three of those pages (can we agree that convention sketches and pre-CEREBUS Dave art don't count?) on the market at a given moment, often in a given week and often in a given month and that most of those were being withdrawn because they weren't meeting their reserve.


That's a textbook undervalued market.


A dead or dying market would see hundreds of pages flooded onto eBay all going begging for $200 or $300.


I think I was pretty patient considering that while CEREBUS art is your primary collecting interest, it is (albeit indirectly: only the commissions) my sole source of livelihood and that I think the former was starting to intrude on the latter and particularly in the case where you offered an opinion on the three solo colour commissions I had done to that point. It certainly wasn't anything illegal and it might not even have been immoral but it was decidedly unhelpful from someone who is, at least theoretically, a Dave Sim supporter. And, I think, technically it was outside of your bailiwick which was to chart the fortunes of Cerebus art on the open market. The commissions, in my view, aren't on the open market. If someone suggests that I do Dr. Strangeroach and I do it and then put it on eBay to see what someone will pay for it, that's on the open market or if I do them for someone specifically and that person chooses to Resell the piece at some point, then that piece is on the market and I think at that point they qualify as valid prey for whatever you want to say about them factually. "Dave did this one five years ago, the guy paid him $1500 for it, the guy just put it up for auction and it didn't meet its reserve of $150 – QED Dave Sim solo commissions are a bad investment. Or at least this one was."


Like the sketch that I did for your friend Will. If I do a finished piece and you put it on your website and tell people what you paid for it, I would think it would be out of bounds for someone to say, "Jeez. You sure overpaid for that." (And, having said that, I'll concede that I am a real dinosaur when it comes to propriety which is one of the reasons that I stay away from the Internet). If you commission a piece from me, it seems to me the only issue is whether you like it, whether you think you got good value for the money. What I was saying on the blog entry was "All that matters is what the guys who commissioned these pieces think of them and, unless they're lying to me, they're all very satisfied and happy campers about what they got." In fact most of them make a point of saying that I'm undercharging for what I'm delivering relative to what they're getting from other comic-book creators for the same money. That's certainly my intention when I do a commission. I usually have a good mental image of the minimum I can get away with and I always try to do something at least three times that good. Sometimes it turns out to be only twice as good and sometimes its four times as good (luck of the draw) but I couldn't sleep at night unless I thought I was delivering in just about that ratio. Same as your commissioned recreations of the issue 29 pages. I could have just traced the figures and copied out the dialogue and then "gone through the motions" without bringing any critical faculties to bear. Instead, I looked at the pages and said, "Okay, what was I TRYING to do back then that I just didn't have the chops for?" And to bring another twenty years of experience to the piece in question.


I also thought it was a nice gesture on my part (it offends my sense of propriety to say nice things about myself, but I am aware that the new Internet Theory is that you better get on there and say nice things about yourself because no one else is going to and that's going to leave nothing but negatives about you) both to copy the pieces at various stages "in progress" (which, I can assure you, is a real pain in the ass, particularly in the dead of winter and particularly when you're recovering from an illness) and to post them so even the people who hadn't contributed anything to their production could have a look. That's another "depends on how you look it" thing as well. I think you could successfully argue that as soon as I did that, I made PRIVATE commissions into PUBLIC pieces which then made it entirely within the bounds of propriety for the Alan Greenspan of Cerebus Original Art sales to pass judgment on them and find them wanting.


And I have to admit my first reaction (in seeing that was what had happened) was to say, "Well, screw it, then. I won't post the commissions at all." But that seemed wrong the more I examined it. Why punish people who are interested in seeing my work – and who have expressed sincere appreciation both for my copying the commissions in question and for Jeff Tundis doing the "FLASH" "in progress" supplements which obviously takes a lot of time for him to do and for which he isn't getting compensated -- for something they neither did nor said?


Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Story of my life.


Tomorrow: In conclusion, Your Honour…


___________________________________________________

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 #309 (July 17th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Tuesday July 15 –


The reason that I can afford to be philosophical about the Cerebus art market and Gerhard less so is that I'm definitely of the Will Eisner School when it comes to my artwork. I'd rather have the artwork. If I sell it, I get money, but then I spend the money and I don't have the artwork AND I don't have the money. Ann Eisner was from the other side of things. She'd rather have the money than a lot of artwork that neither of them really looked at. For Will and for me "looking at it" didn't really enter into the equation. The Cerebus artwork is stored in such a way as to preserve it and definitely not in any way that it is easy to access and view.


Recently Matthew E. -- who is really giving everyone including alchemist57 a run for their money as Cerebus art buyers -- bought three covers (issues 153, 166 and 189) for $6,000 each which is a new record for cover art. All three of those covers are under Gerhard's jurisdiction on the "one for me, one for you" basis under which we split up the artwork.. The theory is that we both own our drawings. I own all of my drawings and Gerhard owns all of his drawings. Given that there is no way to get my drawings off of Gerhard's pages or get Gerhard's drawings off of my pages, the only sensible thing I could come up with was jurisdiction. If it's a page or a cover I have jurisdiction over you can make me an offer and I'll either accept it or reject it and then I'll give Gerhard a cut at my sole discretion. And the same on Gerhard's side. With these three covers – all of which were under his jurisdiction -- he'll decide what my part was worth and cut me a cheque – or, actually, Aardvark-Vanaheim a cheque since I am DBA (Doing Business As) Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. Always have been (God willing) always will be -- and that's when I'll find out what I get.


Originally Matthew E. got 153 and 189 and he wanted a third piece so he offered $6,000 for the Cerebus trade paperback cover. No go. Ger and I haven't even discussed who has jurisdiction over the trade paperback covers. They would be the last thing to go. So then he offered me $3,000 for the double-page spread of Cerebus and Jaka from issue 166. And he ran smack up against Will Eisner. "No, I'm not interested in selling any artwork". He bumped it to $5,000. Same answer. So, he asked me, Okay just out of curiosity what WOULD I sell it for? And my honest answer was, It would have to be for an amount of money that I either a) don't have or which would represent b) a substantial on improvement on what I do have.


I'm not rich, but I DO have $5,000.


Gerhard isn't really in the same mental category that I am. He'd like to keep the artwork, but he's also willing to sell if the price is right. So, he has to be a little less philosophical about what the artwork is going for and what is happening in the open market and what you might be doing or might not be doing to prices. It makes sense for him to establish a new benchmark price. Does that mean he would sell all of the covers over which he has jurisdiction for $6,000 each? I don't know. You'd have to ask him. I somehow doubt it. It's one thing to establish a new benchmark price and another thing to open HAPPY GERHARD'S CEREBUS USED COVER LOT AT THE HIGHWAY 8 CUT-OFF INTO DOWNTOWN KITCHENER -- EVERYTHING MUST GO!


If I was selling artwork it would have made a lot of sense for me to sell the double-page spread of Cerebus and Jaka for $5,000 since that would be a "new high" for interior pages, a good new benchmark. Since I'm not selling artwork a new benchmark is meaningless to me. I'm so philosophical about it (how philosophical am I?) I'm SO philosophical about it that if Gerhard blew out all of his pages and covers in one Giant E-Bay Auction, thereby glutting the market and driving the price of pages back down to $100, it really wouldn't make any difference to me. If you're not selling, it doesn't matter whether you don't sell it for $10,000 or $5,000 or $100 or $15.


In practical terms, that means of the 6,000 pages that make up the CEREBUS storyline, roughly 2,200 are already "out there" but aren't really being offered for sale (as you discover – and document -- pretty much on a daily basis). 1,900 of them are under my jurisdiction and aren't for sale at ten times what they're going for right now. Which leaves the 1,900 pages under Gerhard's jurisdiction as the only ones with a question mark (or, at least, a potential question mark) next to them.


UPDATE 26 JUNE 2216 HOURS – Okay. I've been at this for about fifteen hours now, with an occasional break. Time to pack it in and try and again tomorrow.


Tomorrow: Back to the (relatively small, I should think) bone I have to pick with CEREBUS THE ORIGINAL AARTVARK.COM


___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors. Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Collected Letters 2 - $22 MAR073054

Dave Sim's blogandmail #308 (July 16th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Fax from Brian Coppola dated April 19 which means I am making some slow and steady progress here getting back to a little under three months behind. Here we go, folks, with a three-day (or so) frank exchange of viewpoints:


"On February 21 at CEREBUS THE AARTVARK, I wrote, "And, three for three: I simply don't like them terribly much." Do you really think that constitutes dumping all over your solo commissions?


"My reply, from the entry I made at my site, which you might not see for a while:


"DVS, from today's Bloggin' male (re: the most recent commission):


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


"Well, it's never been my way to be a sycophant. I don't like these solo color pieces – simple as that. Which does not at all for a moment take away from the b&w sketches and drawings (including the requested commission for a pair of 50th birthday pieces, one for me and one for Will, that I absolutely still want).


"You come across a word like sycophant and just have to wonder where it came from. Here goes…from Online Etymology Dictionary copyright 2001 Douglas Harper


"sycophant


"1537 (in L. form sycophanta), "informer, talebearer, slanderer" from L. sycophanta, from Gk. Sykophantes, originally "one who shows the fig," from sykon "fig" + phanein "to show". "Showing the fig" was a vulgar gesture made by sticking the thumb between the two fingers, a display which vaguely resembles a fig, itself symbolic of a [vulgar c-word edited from definition by alchemist57, aka one of the favourite words spoken by normalroach] (sykon also means "vulva"). The story goes that prominent politicians in ancient Greece held aloof from such inflammatory gestures, but privately urged their followers to taunt their opponents. The sense of "mean, servile flatterer" is first recorded in Eng. 1575.


"Now, rest assured, if this had been an actual dumping, you would be able to smell it. I would be using words like sophomoric, fetid, vacuous…you know, words that skewer. Or I might even say `Well, the old man's trolley has truly jumped the track, now,' or something. But I did not. What I wrote was what I would say to you over lunch.


"So what you think about my new colour pieces?"


"I don't like them."


"And I would still like to be in the queue for those two 50th birthday requests. The draft that you sketched and faxed for me to give to Will is awesome. ("I like that.")


Well, with all due respect, I always find it disorienting whenever anyone who is a Cerebus reader brings up the issue of sycophancy since my own experience has been that nothing good is said about CEREBUS or Dave Sim unless it is prefaced by at least three caveats to make sure that the listener is aware that the speaker is absolutely and unequivocally establishing from the outset that they couldn't be further apart from Dave Sim and his ideas if they had been shot out of a cannon in the other direction


"BUT…!"


and this is followed by some concession in my direction. i.e. he's nutty as a fruitcake BUT he's a great letterer. He's profoundly evil BUT he did give $100K to the CBLDF. He's a worthless piece of human scum BUT he did write and draw a 6,000 page story. He's obviously deeply mentally disturbed BUT he has helped a lot of young cartoonists.


Which is why I've come to think of my readers as readers and not as fans. The fact that no one seems able to discuss me in any meritorious sense without simultaneously kicking me in the nuts is something I have just had to get used to. But, at least from my perspective, this puts all attitudes towards me very much at the opposite end of the spectrum from sycophancy. A sycophant doesn't feel compelled to dump on the object of his sycophancy at the outset and then balance that with faint praise in another direction (in this case: dismissing works that took two or three days to accomplish while praising a sketch that was knocked out in a little over a minute and a half).


What was of concern back in April (and less so now) was that the commissioned pieces were pretty much my sole source of income at the time and consequently a big element in the equation of whether or not I was going to be able to make ends meet. Because most of my income goes to day-to-day expenses and to Gerhard and will do so for the next five years or so, there was a kind of double-whammy effect. The commissions, which had been coming in steadily at one or two a month, instantly dried up which meant that not only was I officially well below the poverty level, personally, it was now looking as if I was on a collision course with having to liquidate assets just to keep the wolf from the door.


[And let me hasten to add that given my experience with the ___s lurking behind all human endeavour I was not unmindful that this was just another scam – another way of poking Dave metaphorically through the bars of his cage with a sharp stick. "See, here's what we'll do. We'll give him two or three high-paying commissions and then we'll have Brian Coppola say on his website that he doesn't like them and then PFFT! No more commissions for, oh, a good two months or three months. While we also dry up all of his trade paperback sales and right around the time he's having to do the first couple of big payouts to Gerhard. And we'll see if we can make him go ballistic over that." Once you get used to it – as I have – these sorts of things tend to arrive with screaming sirens attached whereas they are supposed to be (or I think they're supposed to be) incredibly subtle and insidious and intended to drive me to the brink of insanity. Sad, really given that they're at least theoretically coming from what I suppose to be higher life forms]


If your website was called BRIAN'S ART PAGE, to me, that would be one thing, but you are definitely using the CEREBUS name and as you well know, on the Internet if you use a name people are naturally going to assume that there is some sort of official sanction attached either real or implied (actually just inferred but "welcome to the jungle"). The fact that you are listed (and, let me add, proudly so!) along with the Blog & Mail, the Yahoo Newsgroup, cerebusfangirl, Jeff Tundis' site and others on an official masthead of links certainly helps that effect. I'm not on the Internet and I certainly don't like the Internet (and I think I'm safe in saying that the feeling is more than mutual), but I think I've been pretty broad-minded in accommodating those who do like the Internet and who want Cerebus to have a presence there.


Here's a good example: Gerhard had definitely gotten the impression from your website that the Cerebus art market was, if not dead, then barely breathing. As a Cerebus art buyer it certainly plays in your favour to have that impression out there. "Whatever you're selling, buddy, alchemist57 is going to get it because alchemist57 gets whatever he goes after because except for a few people with shallow pockets, the only deep pockets are right here."


[That plays in two directions at the same time. Someone told me that you had commented on the auction of "The Frost Giant's Wedgie" original to benefit the Joe Shuster Awards that you thought it would go for about $2,000. His impression was that what you were saying was "I'm going to bid $2,000 for it, so back off." And then the piece went for $1,600. I have no idea if you affected the price and if you affected the price if you pushed it up or down – there's no "control group": no reality where alchemist57 didn't say anything. Is it JUST this guy's impression that when alchemist57 says "I think this is going to go for $2,000" that that means that's what you intend to bid for it or is that the impression of just about everyone who is aware of you as the highest profile and most visible Cerebus art collector?]


[And that gets into related grey areas, i.e. what are your own levels of responsibility in BEING the highest profile and most visible Cerebus art collector? Or are there any? Is it disingenuous on your part to hold the view that you aren't actually affecting the market? I mean, in a sense, you are for good or ill – at least until someone tries to start a competing website -- the Alan Greenspan of Cerebus art. It's one thing if a banker says to another banker over lunch "The housing market looks a little overheated to me. I think something needs to be done about it." And another thing if Alan Greenspan has a website and suddenly announces "The housing market looks a little overheated to me. I think something needs to be done about it." As a Cerebus art collector you can afford to be philosophical about the question. "There's no way of knowing so I'll just call `em like I see `em". And, in a way, I can afford to be philosophical about the question and Gerhard less so]


Tomorrow: Why I can afford to be philosophical about the question and Gerhard less so]


___________________________________________________

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 #307 (July 15th, 2007)

___________________________________________________

UPDATE 26 JUNE 07 1604 HOURS EST – Okay, took a break out front of City Hall with a Diet Coke and two oatmeal raisin cookies. While I was there two teenage girls decided to immerse themselves beneath the jetting plumes of water. I don't know if it was that or the Diet Coke but I'm a good deal wider awake than when I went down there.


I think I'm going to go with a couple of excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson's "Beyond Iraq". Darrell suggests that I just plug his book A WAR LIKE NO OTHER as a trade-off but I'm still going to err on the side of caution and stick to excerpts.


"…the unpopular war in Iraq did not create radical Islamists and their madrassas throughout the Middle East that today brainwash young radicals and pressure the region's monarchies, theocracies and autocracies to provide money for training and weaponry. All that radicalism had been going on for decades – as we saw during the quarter-century of terrorism that led up to 9/11. And rioting, assassination and death threats over artistic expression in Europe have nothing to do with Iraq."


Well, that's forensically true but I think you have to separate the monarchies and autocracies from the theocracies and recognize the extent to which Islam is governed by massive collective guilt. If you aren't living as if you are in the seventh century, every scrap of materialism you have in your life is a reminder that you aren't really striving "on path of God". The net effect of which is that you attempt to bribe God into having a good opinion of you by arming those living closest to the seventh century who are willing to die on behalf of the worldwide Muslim umma which is perceived to be under constant threat. If you're a radical Islamist, you don't have to "pressure" Westernized monarchies and autocracies. All you have to do is show up and they'll go scrambling for their chequebooks.


"Right now, most al-Qaeda terrorists are being trained and equipped in the Pakistani wild lands of Waziristan to help the Taliban reclaim Afghanistan and spread jihad worldwide. These killers pay no attention to the fact that our efforts in Afghanistan are widely multilateral. They don't care that our presence there is sanctioned by NATO, or involves the United Nations, or only came as a reaction to 9/11."


No, of course not, because NATO and the United Nations are non-Muslim organizations and the multilateralism is all pretty much composed of non-Muslim countries. That which is scrupulously NOT Muslim needs to be eliminated so that Islam, as they conceive of it, True Islam, seventh-century Islam, can flourish.


"These radical Islamists gain strength not because we "took our eye off Afghanistan" by being in Iraq, but because Pakistan's strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can't or won't do anything about al-Qaeda's bases in his country. And neither Bush nor Nancy Pelosi knows how to pressure such an unpredictable nuclear military dictatorship."


Aye, there's the rub. Because when you look at Pakistan it's not really clear what it is that you're looking at. Theocracy? Yes, it certainly has elements of that. There certainly won't be a completely non-religious, secular Muslim in the President's office anytime soon as far as I can see. The national character seems to still be going through a "what were we THINKING?" vis a vis Benazir Bhutto. At the same time secular decisions are made. The choice to support the War on Terror in the first place back in 2001 was a distinctly non-theocratic decision. Was it an autocratic decision? Well, we can't say for certain. How strong is Musharraf and how strong is his military faction? Is he a figurehead or a genuine strongman? The question, as I see it, goes beyond the Republican or Democratic ability to pressure "an unpredictable nuclear military dictatorship" and hinges on how much of a dictatorship it is, who is the real dictator and/or dictators and how solid is their stranglehold on the country? It's all guesswork but the evidence seems to suggest that it's shifting on an on-going basis. Sometimes the collective military dictatorship has really had it up to the eyeballs with al-Qaeda and the Taliban and they step on them as you would step on a scorpion: very carefully. Other times they've had it up to the eyeballs with the West and then basically let the Taliban move back and forth at will. Musharraf has survived a number of assassination attempts and is basically riding the tiger and trying to hang on. The longer you last the more solid your footing because the body politic basically arrives at the conclusion that too much thrashing around is a bad idea and the periods between thrashing around get longer. The problem with that is that stability is a fine sounding goal but what you're talking about is a military dictatorship with nuances of a theocracy and shadings of an autocracy. Do you want to make it stable enough that fifty years from now you're dealing with Musharraf's son? The only thing worse than a military dictatorship is a dynastic military dictatorship.

I think the Bush Administration has things right with Musharraf. You try to be as understanding as possible of the untenable situation he's in but when al-Qaeda and the Taliban are pouring back and forth across the border with impunity you fly Condi Rice or someone at that level over there immediately to go screaming through the streets in a ten- car motorcade to the Presidential palace, to see Musharraf personally and immediately and to make it clear that that's unacceptable and that he has to do a better job or else. That is, he will do the right thing but you make it easier for him to do the right thing if you can be shown to be actively giving him no alternative. That gives him "cover" with his faction and his faction "cover" with the overall military dictatorship. "It's not what I WANT to do, but you know the Americans can make things very unpleasant for all of us if I don't order the border closed and if you don't close the border when I tell you."


"Should a peace candidate win the American presidency in 2008, prompting the U.S. to pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized, in the short term we will save lives and money. But as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle. Hamas and Hezbollah will still rocket Israel. Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers. Iran will still try to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb. Ayman al-Zawahiri will still broadcast his al-Qaeda threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan. The oil-rich, illegitimate Gulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone. And jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us."


Yes, exactly. The question is one of: what is the net effect of a Loosened Grip? The stance of the peace candidates is that the net effect of a Loosened Grip is gratitude (on the part of all of those Islamist individuals factions cited) for America choosing to be merciful and take a step back and that gratitude showing itself in a generalized peace. But the evidence doesn't support that view as having any validity – I mean, ANY validity.


It would mean that the peace candidates had learned nothing from Jimmy Carter's experience when he was elected in 1976 and chose to do exactly that: roll American forces back everywhere around the world to give everyone a little breathing room. PARTICULARLY among Islamists this was taken as a sign that God was intervening – which is always what Islamists are watching for -- in flashpoint areas and weakening the infidels' resolve. The Shah is toppled in Iran and the Ayatollah quickly takes them back to the seventh century. Same thing with Israel withdrawing from Gaza and from Lebanon. The Islamist nutcases swarm into the abandoned territory, the sophistication of the overall political context goes back to the seventh century and the temperature of the conflict goes up, not down.


In the Islamist frame of reference, the only reason that a stronger force with better military hardware and more and better equipped soldiers would withdraw rather than stay is because of cowardice, fundamental and innate corruption, the intervention of Allah on behalf of the Islamist side in the conflict or all three.


"In the case of staying on in Iraq, at least, our long term plan is to go on the offensive to confront radical Islamic terrorists on their own turf, and try to foster a democratic alternative to theocracy or autocracy."


And to do so just by proving that America can't be MADE to leave and that, therefore, democracy can't be eliminated as an alternative or even marginalised. It is on the front burner 24/7. All that can be done is to find the means by which and the degree to which Islam is to be wedded to democracy. And the result has to pass muster with American conceptions of human rights.


My own opinion is that feminism is like a spiritual Dutch Elm disease in society. As soon as you have feminism entrenched in any society, the birth rate plummets and, consequently, those cultures susceptible to feminism catch the disease and begin to wither and die and those cultures which are not as susceptible to feminism take over.


White America and black America have both proven susceptible to feminism so their birth rate is plummeting and they are both rapidly being replaced, demographically, by Hispanic Catholic America, as an example, which is virtually impervious to feminism (a larger subject for another time, but basically Hispanic Catholicism is Matriarchal – like the Cirinists -- having devoured the more potent forms of goddess worship by falling big-time for the Mary, Mother of God riff. Matriarchies are completely immune to feminism in the same way that Cirinism was immune to Astoria's Kevillism. To a genuine Matriarch -- which the vast majority of Hispanic Catholic women are -- feminism is "daughter crap" and that's all that it is. You let them mouth off as much as they want, knowing that non-mothers are temporarily crazy until they become mothers -- they always have been and they always will be, may the Blessed Virgin open their eyes – but you keep up the pressure and the guilt until you make sure they get married and you make sure they get pregnant and presto-change-o they turn into Matriarchs. As they always have and as they always will, glory be to the Blessed Virgin).


Muslims procreate at a much higher rate than do infidels because their culture isn't susceptible to feminism so any crowded environment bordering a Muslim country or jurisdiction is going to get encroached upon and taken over. If the border country or jurisdiction has been infected with feminism that only speeds up the process. The Muslim environment expands and the feminist environment withers.


So, in a larger sense what we're seeing, I think, is that there is no way "back" from feminism so the only thing we can do is to try to infect Muslim society with it so that their own birth rate plummets and we have a fighting chance. And I think the experiment will be successful. As long as Muslim women in Iraq and Iran can see that their men are helpless in the face of the feminist infidel – all those masculine women dressed exactly like the men and carrying guns! -- they're going to start infecting their own society with feminism. Once the infection starts, it can't be stopped – truth be told, it can't even be slowed down. The female half of the culture basically chooses to commit collective cultural suicide by choosing to become as masculine as possible and therefore causes the birth rate to plummet and hastens their own culture's eradication in the space of two or three generations. I mean, to the extent that you're not even allowed to discuss White America or Black America as valid cultures even as both are disappearing and, because of waning demographics, being shunted aside. And, of course white feminists and black feminists both consider the humbling and eradication of their respective cultures to be a triumph. Just as Muslim feminists will consider the withering of Islam to be a triumph. And the male half of each culture knows instinctively that (well, apart from me) they can't say anything about it.


That's a very potent disease.


And, to me, from God's perspective that's just everything unfolding as it should. Those cultures which are centrally informed by faith in God flourish and the secular cultures which are opposed to God wither and die. That is, I think God isn't particularly in favour of the perpetuation of White America and Black America. If America becomes an Hispanic Catholic country I don't think God will be shedding a tear over the elimination of those cultures that have turned their backs on Him. I think he just sees it as basic housekeeping. If you leave the larger choices up to the women, they will eliminate your culture from the chessboard. God didn't do that, you did that. You used your free will or failed to use you free will to advocate better choices and you eliminated yourself. Here's your hats and coats, what's your hurry? Now God, having endured a society that poisoned itself with movies and television and rock and roll can now get interested in America again. How is Muslim America going to interact with Hispanic Catholic America and the Bible Belt (which stuck with Him all through the psycho movies and television and rock `n' roll century) now that all those atheistic lunatics have eliminated themselves?

Now, aren't you glad that I only pulled out a few excerpts instead of discussing the whole column?

Darrell also wrote:

"Here's a fun news story from Florida. A guy is going to court asking that the judge cancel the alimony payments he's been forced to make. His ex-wife has had a sex-change operation, and now her driver's license/health card, etc. says M instead of F. The guy's argument is simple: the state of Florida says it's illegal for men to marry men: therefore it must be illegal for men to have ex-wives who are men; therefore the state of Florida can't force me to make alimony payments to a man; therefore I win! What do you think? Sounds simple to me, but the judge hasn't reached a verdict yet, he needs more time to think it over…"


See, I could have discussed that one, as well. Count your blessings.


Victor Davis Hanson, always worth reading. Check him out at www.victorhanson.com. And tell him a cartoonist who wishes to remain anonymous sent you.

___________________________________________________

eBay: 250142714400 Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture read bible dvd First Samuel

___________________________________________________

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #306 (July 14th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

UPDATE 26 JUNE 1154 HOURS EST – Prayer time and still no sign of the fine art folks from Toronto. Maybe they got Kitchener confused with Kingston as John Tran tends to do (Toronto people. Honestly.) and they're now looking for me somewhere up around the Thousand Islands. Anyway, time to post a "Back in 20 Minutes" post-it note on the door and do my noon prayer.

UPDATE 26 JUNE 1217 HOURS EST - Jalapeno and Basil Coleslaw on a whole wheat Kaiser roll again but this time I only have half a glass of V8 vegetable juice to try and douse the fire after the second one (why do I lie to myself every day and say that I'm only going to have one when I know better?). I'm pretty sure that's out of bounds relative to the Kitchener Fire Code bylaws governing the Handling of Hazardous Materials in a Confined Area but what the hey…

UPDATE 26 JUNE 1225 HOURS EST - Very tasty and the scorch-marks on the keyboard are hardly noticeable.

Okay, up next we have Robin Snyder's THE COMICS newsletter Vol. 18 No.3 March 2007 "The original first-person history est. 1990 by Robin Snyder" and -- with a little excavation from further down in the pile -- April, May and June 2007 as well. And from downstairs, November, December 2006 and February 2007. Parts 1 through 7 of Steve Ditko's serialized essay, "An Issue, Question". The lead paragraph/sentence should give you an idea of where he's going with this:

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

Since I really haven't got the room that he does to answer the question or address all of his points, let alone to get into the fact that Robin Snyder has had a kind of huffy exodus of a certain number of subscribers just for bringing the subject up [if you'd like to help plug the holes in his subscription list it's $28 a year in the US, $35 foreign (that's me) to Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Lane, #81, Bellingham, WA, 98225-1186] I thought I'd just sketch in a few broad strokes of my own view on the subject at slightly greater length than the opinion pieces Robin has been running. I think the subject is a good one and an important one that I wish more people would discuss).

Basically, I think it comes down to the enormous progress that anti-war sentiment has made in establishing itself first as part of the societal mainstream and then in taking over the societal mainstream.

It's entirely true that World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were featured in the comics, but it's also true the if you picture them, mentally, World War II was the only one that was dealt with in the comic-book mainstream with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and everyone else pressed into service to bring down Hitler, Mussolini, et al.

Batman and Robin driving around in a US Army jeep telling their readers to buy war bonds and stamps, Superman tearing a Nazi tank apart. That kind of thing.

When it comes to the Korean War, it's only the second string heroes that participated. Superman and Batman don't fight the Red Chinese, but Captain America and the Human Torch do and only for a short period of time, a brief revival. Reading between the lines, the ambition was to revive the Super-heroes at War motif from the 1940s – the only time Atlas/Marvel Comics had been really competitive with DC -- and ride the wave. But if there was a wave (and I would argue that there wasn't) it was a very short-lived wave. On the contrary, I think the wave was in the direction of sequestering war and certainly in trying to keep war and children's media (like comics) as completely separate as possible. My best guess was that Atlas/Marvel was seen as irresponsible and exploitive in their approach, retrogressive in trying to portray a UN Police Action as Just Another War.

By the time Vietnam rolled around, none of the super-heroes had even heard of it. Even while South Vietnam was becoming the primary theatre of operations – America's new "hill to die on" during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations -- even the marginalised super-heroes were still basically fighting the Red Chinese as if hostilities had never ceased in the DMZ between North and South Korea. At least until Stan Lee appeared to get uncomfortable with the idea and then it just became this vague sort of Communist dictatorship (sometimes Soviet, sometimes Maoist) that Tony Stark was building munitions to fight against and even that was a minor motif when compared to the entirely stateless and ideology-free entities like HYDRA. HYDRA was the anti- SHIELD and that was as deep and philosophical as it got. Everything else was costumed super-villains.

In the interim it seems to me that the idea of war IN the comics had collapsed from the medium-wide core element that it had been during World War II to a specific genre – had collapsed around war comics per se which retreated/eroded to the periphery of the field and consisted of and subsisted on self-declarative tropes (you could no more mistake a war comic for anything else just by looking at it than you could mistake a love comic for anything else just by looking at it) – and had therefore become a specialized and marginalised interest for the comic reader. Most of the guys in my neighbourhood might have an occasional GI COMBAT and the Marvel completists would buy SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOES but it really wasn't until I met Gene Day that I even came to know about, say, Russ Heath's amazing work on the war titles. I could count on the fingers of one hand Gene's fellow war comic devotees that I have met since. And even in that genre-specific context, war comics went from being comics that glorified war to comics that presented war as an avertable tragedy and the choice to go to war as a societal failure. From Kurtzman's anti-war FRONTLINE COMBAT to "Make War No More" (as all of the 1970s era DC war comics declared in the last panel), the subtext is pretty obvious – if you're the sort of person who likes this kind of comic book then you need to be preached to about your interest and hopefully have your consciousness raised even while you're trying to enjoy it for what it is.

It had become a societal given (or was portrayed by society to itself – not necessarily the same thing) that no sensible, humane person would enjoy reading about war except as a cautionary tale. Don't Let War Happen To You. This is nothing that military men don't know about peacetime. You keep your head down and your powder dry (sometimes literally) and keep your mind on reality and try not to let the ignorant chatter about your livelihood get you down.

I don't know how large the audience was (or is) for war comics, but the idea that no sensible, humane person is interested in war was as demonstrably untrue at the time as it is today. There is still an audience for war movies but not, I don't think, for War Movies With an Anti-War message which have gradually eliminated the movie genre just as the Anti-war message eliminated the comic-book genre. I don't imagine for most military men that Saving Private Ryan is in any other entertainment category than "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". You can have CGI and computer effects out the whazoo but if the overall point is to show soldiers snivelling then you have effectively chased away your intended audience through ignorance of the nature of that audience.

The core audience for war movies and war comics is obvious: soldiers, marines, sailors, pilots, their families and their friends and their kids. Some watching them or reading them just for a laugh – "Wow! It is really amazing how goofy civilians can get when they're trying to write seriously about the military" -- and some watching and reading them because, hey, you know. Once in a while one of these guys will accidentally get it right and it's good to know that some kid somewhere might get a glimmering of what the military life is all about.

At the point of greatest reduction at least you have a story like Russ Heath's "Easy's First Tiger" and whatever else may be said of its merits and demerits, that is one accurate son-of-a-bitchin' two-page spread of a Tiger tank. Down to the last rivet.

A good war comic is the same as a good police comic or detective comic. It's about the good guys and how tough it can be to be a good guy. It's about the belief that the good guys always win. The going may get tight and the going may get tough, but hands down the good guys win in the end. How they win, how they almost lose, how they dig down deep for the needed fortitude to make it through, how some of them get wounded and some of them die, that's all part of the package. Unfortunately it's very easy to switch sides as Dr. Wertham pointed out, when police comics and detective comics become crime comics, glorifications of criminals and war comics flip over from interesting stories about soldiers into thinly-veiled racist sadomasochism (all those comely young white girls "just about" to be tortured by slavering Japanese on the covers of the wartime Timely super-hero comics)

The fact of the matter, if you come right down to brass tacks, is that most people in arts and entertainment (or Arts & Entertainment) are pacifists, devout believers that there is no good that can come of any military activity of any kind anywhere under any circumstances. They could sense the winds of change in the aftermath of 9/11 and they kept their own counsel but I don't think they changed their minds one iota. You could back them into a corner by saying, "Can you conceive of any situation where military force IS of any good whatsoever?" Some of them might come up with something. Most of them, I suspect, would just get sullen as they tend to do when you try to get them to say what they believe out loud.

So, let's leave all of that to one side. Maybe the core of the question is this: are soldiers -- who in the course of their jobs are laying their lives on the line on a daily basis at the behest of their civilian government and on behalf of their fellow citizens -- entitled to read favourable representations of themselves in the comic books and to know that comic books that treat them favourably are available for their sons to read?

I mean, on a purely human level quite apart from the exalted level of holier-than-thou innate superiority that they like to bring to the table aren't comic-book writers and artists who are NOT being asked to go to Iraq or Afghanistan and shed blood on behalf of liberty and democracy obligated to find some way (them being so all-fired imaginative and all) to tell some ten-year-old boy whose Dad is on his third tour of duty in Baghdad and environs, a Dad that the kid may not actually get to see again until he's twelve:

"Your Dad? Oh, say, listen kid, let me tell you a story about the kind of guy that your Dad is. Let me tell you a story about the kind of hero your Dad is and the other heroic Dads he's over there serving with."

You know, like Robert Kanaigher did, like Joe Kubert did for years, Russ Heath, Jack Kirby. All those guys. Page after page after page. This is what a soldier is. This is what being a good soldier is all about. This why everyone should be proud of our military.

No, I know you don't think there's an obligation there. Well, plain and simple, I think that's wrong. I can certainly understand not having war as an industry-wide motif with Superman and Batman and Spider-man and Wonder Woman doing nothing but kicking Muslim butt in Iraq for the next ten years. But I don't think it would kill Marvel and DC to tell a few heroic stories about American soldiers bringing peace and stability to a region that has only known tyranny and oppression for literally decades. I mean, you know, really bear down and see if out of the literally millions of stories that have taken place and are taking place in the US military over there since `03 you can't scrounge up two or three or four or (heck, throw caution to the winds) a dozen where the good guys win, where the US soldiers do the right thing and something good comes of it.

All right, I'm all done. I'll send a copy to Robin. Maybe he'll be interested.

UPDATE 26 JUNE 07 1440 HOURS EST – the fine art folks were just here. PACART Pacific Art Services Ltd. of Toronto. Ask for them by name. From there it goes to the US ART CO. INC. in Long Island City, New York, then to US ART CO INCO BOSTON and from there (God willing) to the NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM in Stockbridge.


___________________________________________________

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 #305 (July 13th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Friday July 12 –

UPDATE 26 JUNE 1040 HOURS EST

A letter from Jeet Heer from – REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN!? What in the heck is the thoroughly Toronto-ized Jeet Heer doing in Regina? I bet the address is a beard and he's actually hiding out somewhere around Yonge and Eglington. Mm. 306 area code. That's Regina all right. Jeet writes:

"I hope this notes find you well.

"I was reading John Bell's INVADERS FROM THE NORTH, a history of Canadian comics. In this book.. Bell makes use of some of the writing you did for CANAR [Comic Art News & Reviews]. This reminded me that for a while I've wanted to send you a note about your writing about comics, which I've long enjoyed.

"You've been writing about comics for nearly four decades now, in fanzines, in the pages of CEREBUS, in interviews and now on your blog.

"I think it would be good to gather the best of this material in a book, maybe titled DAVE SIM ON COMICS.

"What makes these essays and stray comments valuable is that you have a distinct aesthetic. It's not an aesthetic I necessarily agree with: I'm much more of a Frank King/HaroldGray/George Herriman man, rather than a devotee of Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, Neal Adams, etc. But for that very reason, I like to read a strong articulation of your point of view, because it's different enough from mine to be informative.

"Anyways, I hope you give this idea serious thought. It seems like a good step for you to take in your post-CEREBUS days. It's a way of using your energy and skill without going into another comics project right away.

"Best

"Jeet

"PS. You mentioned on your blog that you wrote a letter to the NATIONAL POST about one of my Seth articles. I've never seen that letter – what did you write?"

Um, actually that must've gotten garbled in the translation. What I said was that the only time my name had ever appeared in the NATIONAL POST (up until I finally had a letter printed a couple of weeks back) was IN one of your articles on Seth. If I'm not mistaken it was the first time we met -- at the lunch before Dylan Horrocks' slide show. You were there, Dylan, Peter Birkemoe, Seth, Chester, Joe Matt. Seth took something out of his jacket pocket – I can't remember what. A lighter? – and it was obviously an authentic antique of some kind, a definite 1930s period piece. I turned to you and said, "That's the thing about Seth. Some people can adopt a 1930s look, but Seth gets everything right down to the smallest details." And at some point you wrote, "As the now-forgotten cartoonist Dave Sim once said…"


No, you didn't say "the now-forgotten". I'm being acerbically jocose.


Thanks for the compliments on my comics journalism. It's not something I would actively put together on my own. The Technical Director on my secret project wants me to write a short essay on photorealism in comics for the secret project's website and I told him it likely won't be much of an essay more of a "Why I Want To Be Al Williamson When I Grow Up." As I discovered when John Tran sent me an Internet article on Johnstone & Cushing and when I talked to Neal Adams about his experiences as a teenager at the tag end of that period I really don't know anything about the history of photorealism just the aesthetic and how I respond to it.


And, seriously, people's eyes glaze over since we're far more in a Frank King/Harold Gray/George Herriman time period even in the super-hero context. Bruce Timm is far more from your side of things than mine.


They're being polite (YOU'RE being polite) but their eyes are glazing over (YOUR eyes are glazing over). Which isn't to say I don't appreciate the gesture. I do.


"Let's not hog the lectern here, there are other aesthetics to consider."


But that's very different from being actually interested and for me to actually explain the difference between Raymond and Williamson and Adams as I see their work you have to go really, really deep into the page to a level that just doesn't exist with King/Gray/Herriman where there really isn't any more to see from an inch away than there is from a foot away or two feet away. From a comfortable reading distance you're going to see everything that they do and have done. From your aesthetic's vantage-point I'm discussing things that at best are beside the point of good cartooning and at worst don't exist because they can't be easily perceived from a comfortable reading distance.


There are interesting idiosyncrasies to my aesthetic. I was looking at John Tran's large collection of HEART OF JULIET JONES tear-sheets and what I hadn't seen before is that, like all newspaper strips, it had that grotesque Buffalo News colour slapped all over it that makes DC Comics in the 60s look like the Sistine Chapel ceiling by comparison. In one of my last phone calls to Neal Adams needed to get the Neal Adams issue of FOLLOWING CEREBUS ready, I remarked on this. It's some of the worst printing imaginable and still you and Stan Drake and Al Williamson and Alex Raymond were doing outrageously fine lines in your work (with a Gilotte-290 no less!) many of which didn't reproduce at ALL.


And he said, "The REALLY fine lines I did for myself." And I thought to myself, well, you'd really have had to. There's a really interesting level of dedication there where you are choosing to draw better than the reproduction can handle. Gerhard and I got into an unspoken fine line competition the last two years on CEREBUS, but that was always within the confines of what Preney could handle. When they started going too dark and the line-work started filling in, we worked at getting them to tone it down. My mind boggles at the fact that Alex Raymond and Stan Drake were obviously going toe-to-toe on a daily basis and only a fraction of what they were doing was showing up on the newspaper page.


You can call that real dedication (my aesthetic) or wasted effort (your aesthetic). Why not draw everything at a comfortable arm's length distance and put more of your energy into doing a touching human drama? I think you can chalk it up to an overpowering shift of emphasis. The leap of technical ability from Alex Raymond to Stan Drake means that that's where you're putting in the hours: on an aerial shot of a sleepy New England town where you know exactly what sort of day it is by the way it's been drawn, exactly what the texture of the trees is, the density of the snow, the period of the architecture. It's the 1950s and early 60s on its own terms instead of seen through a glass darkly of jaded cynicism. When you get way over into Stan Drake land and look back, basically everything just looks like variations on Matt Feazell's stick figures. How difficult is that? Challenge yourself!

But in terms of Heart On The Sleeve Sincerity, yeah, your aesthetic has mine beat all hollow. It was one of the things I had to get used to in reading Little Orphan Annie. "He's KIDDING, isn't he?" No, he isn't kidding. This is the way he sees life and he couldn't be more in earnest if he was spilling his own blood onto the page. It's why he gives a bone-deep Democrat like Art Spiegelman the willies. They aren't just stories, these are Moral Verities That Can Crush You In Your Godless Secularism. An Art Spiegelman character in a Little Orphan Annie strip would either Repent and See The Light or He Would Come To A Bad End For Which He Himself Was Solely Responsible.


I know that you're trying to make a living as much as possible from comics scholarship, so let me say that if you want to put together a rough cut of a DAVE SIM ON COMICS book for me to have a look at, I'll be happy to have a look at it and give you a yea or a nay. If I end up liking it more than I think I will, I might even agree to write commentaries on the pieces and/or publish it. But, I think we both know that your comics scholarship heart lies elsewhere.

Anyway, thanks for writing.


___________________________________________________

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 #304 (July 12th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________



UPDATE 26 JUNE 0920 HOURS EST – Okay. I'm back. Let's see what Santy Claus brung me.

A letter from Mark Innes at BLIND BAT PRESS! Mark was one of the people who came up to say hello and to drop off two proofs of THE COMIC EYE cover that I did that Bernie Mireault did the colour and logo for. He really did a hell of a job, I have to say.



I have a correspondent up ahead who says he thinks Bernie went a little overboard with the red, but that was the thing that amazed me. Marie Severin used to do that on the EC stories on a regular basis and is still doing it with the stories she's re-colouring for the reprints. That was one of the big questions: does Bernie know EC at all? Uh, yeah. Bernie knows EC all right. I'll tell the world. I'm thinking of getting him to do the cover colour on my secret project. I'm going to try water-colouring it myself but my track record is about 25% on colour. I either get it right out of the gate or I spend way too much time fixing it for it to look right. If I don't get it right, I'll just send the black and white and colour version to Bernie and say, "Here, like this, but – you know – BETTER."

He's a colouring genius Bernie is.

Anyway, Mark sends along the line-up for the interior strips: Earl Geier, Fred Hembeck, Terry Pavlet, Robert Pincombe, Tim Tobolski, Ron Kasman, Ron Hobbs, Matt Feazell, Sam Gafford, Scott McClung, Larry Blake, John Migliore, Gord Pullar, Dave Collier, Darrell Epp, Jim Siergey, George McVey, Steve LeBlanc, Bernie Mireault, Sam Ago, Paul McCusker, Noel Tuazon, Jim Ordolis, Patrick Dean Smith, Rob Walton, Oliver Costas, Russ Maheras, Joe Ollamann, Jason Whitley, Tim Corrigan, Larry Johnson, Nick Craine, James Waley, Allen Freeman, Mike Cherkas and Larry Hancock. Also Richard Comely (time permitting).

"I'm in the process of nagging a few more likely contributors and should be wrapping this volume up by the end of June with about 128 pages at least.

"I got an estimate from Lebonfon and was quite pleased with their quote, so that is where the book will be printed. The cover price will likely be $10.95 US, $12.85 in Canada. The ISBN for this book will be ISBN 0-9782197-0-8."

Quite a line-up. Check the BLIND BAT PRESS website at www.markinnes.com for updates.

Speaking of Mike Cherkas and Larry Hancock on the end there, they came up to say hello at the Paradise Toronto Comicon and it was one of the rare occasions when I was actually busy talking with someone else so I didn't get a chance to say hello to Mike at all but I saw Larry later at the après-Joe Shuster Awards party in the hotel bar…

(I don't think the Holiday Inn folks realized exactly how, um, THIRSTY cartoonists can get after applauding and listening for two hours – I finally gave up trying to get a drink at the bar, went up to my own floor, got a ginger ale from the pop machine, some ice from the ice dispenser and a glass from my room, poured my own ginger ale and then casually walked back into the bar with it while everyone else was still waving their money around at the overworked staff) (next year, I think they'll "get it").

…It would be interesting to do an article about cartoonist "day jobs". According to Larry – sorry, D. Larry Hancock's – business card he is actually a Chartered Accountant Cartoonist. Yes, "Cartoonist" and "Anything Having to Do With Math" usually don't go together but Larry's the exception to the rule.

"Small business specialist including accounting, audit, personal tax, corporate tax, estate planning, financial and investment advice

"Providing services to the entertainment industry (authors, comic-book writers and artists, retailers, film productions, commercials)

"I specialize in making your business understandable."

It says so right here on the back of his card. Well, it turned out that he and Mike are officially homeless (er -- in a cartooning sense). NBM cut back on some of their titles and that was it for any future printings of SILENT INVASION. Remember SILENT INVASION? SUBURBAN NIGHTMARES? THE NEW FRONTIER? Hey, me too. Way ahead of the 1950s Homage Learning Curve. Pioneer graphic narratives all, all complete, all looking for a new home. Larry frankly admits that all he needs is a good kick in the ass to get the next batch of stories done and that he should be out actively shopping for a new publisher. Mike's all ready to rock `n' roll. I told Larry that I know Ted Adams at IDW reads the Blog & Mail on a regular basis and he actually picked up a couple of titles just because I mentioned them here. CHIAROSCURO was one of them. The other one was DAVE HAS ALZHEIMERS (i.e. I can't remember what the other one was – somebody who was exhibiting at SPACE this year…I remember that because he came up and…and…and he TOLD me…early in the show. By gum).


Anyway, if you're a Canadian cartoonist and you need a chartered accountant who really and sincerely "feels your pain" or if you're a publisher who reads the Blog & Mail (Hey – your secret is safe with me!) and you're looking for some books with a track record or if you're a long-time SILENT INVASION/SUBURBAN NIGHTMARES and/or NEW FRONTIER fan and just want to say Thanks for the Memories, send D. Larry an e-mail at larry@dlarryhancock.ca.

Tomorrow: Jeet Heer? I thought Jeet Heer's letter was about a mile further down. Maybe I am making progress.


___________________________________________________

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 #303 (July 11th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

UPDATE 26 JUNE 0702 HOURS EST Bit of a late start today which I attribute to the NATIONAL POST actually having a series of interesting articles in its first section. The last few days I've been able to skip most of their coverage as embedded Marxism of the Al Gore strain. This time pretty much everything was worth reading.

Overnight cable traffic from the Technical Director & Research Assistant. I sent him the 6 July posting and offered to let him make any deletions he wanted. RETRO-DELETE the name of the state that he lives in.

"I certainly flinched when I saw you were planning on running that. My comments about Howard [Cruse] and gays was awkwardly stated in a way that would probably give offense to many gays and I'm sure Howard in particular, but I wrote it. Honesty demands that if you want to run it you do so as is. Go ahead with it if you want, and thanks for checking first. If it gets a reaction from the Yahoos it might give us an opportunity to gauge our approach."

Personally, I don't think gays are nearly as sensitive and easily bruised as is popularly believed in some quarters. I think that's just another example of the feminist mythology which consists of trying to cram everyone into their own (tactically) self-pitying, leaky little rowboat of Poor We Who Have Been Oppressed By White Heterosexual Men And Consequently Deserve A Free Ride Everywhere In Our Society. Obviously the blacks got out of the rowboat a long while back and I think the gay men quietly did, as well. Some of them have started to openly make fun of the feminists. There was a gay comedian who wrote a piece in the NATIONAL POST's "Arts & Life" section where he mentioned that for heterosexual women of a certain age, having a gay male friend is "the new handbag". Ouch. That one would cut pretty close to the collectivized feminist bone. "See my new Hermes bag? And look! Here's my matching gay friend!" Then there was the news item about the gay club that banned women because they were showing up as hen parties to ogle all the good-looking men. I can see the point: what is this? A children's zoo? Shoo. Go on. Git!

Wow, I thought. It's going to take a LOT of dry white wine to console that little clutch of wounded hen feelings. "But I RILLY, RILLY respect your homosexuality – I RILLY, RILLY do!" And then to be rejected that vehemently and that specifically. How SAD for them.

He's requesting cut-off target dates. The solicitation is usually due in mid-month, so I'd call it as September 12 (the first day of Ramadan this year) just to be on the safe side. There is some flexibility built in to Diamond's system. Because the descriptions of the different books vary, you need to get those in earlier. The earlier the better since as far as I know they fill the catalogue on a first come, first serve basis. The cover reproductions are all the same size in the "back of the catalogue" where Aardvark-Vanaheim and a zillion other publishers live so you can usually get those in around the third week of the month.

It isn't really carved in stone. I'd like to avoid Christmas shipping which tends to happen with anything you try to print at the beginning of December. Every working environment gets the "giddies" and work slows to a crawl earlier and earlier in the month every year (a residue of Good Christian Fellowship a la A Christmas Carol's "This Festive Time of Year" but having more to do with Christmas party hangovers and psychotic Christmas shopping and family get-together planning uber alles than anything else). Last year, as I recall, nothing got done from about the 18th onward. I'm from the Scrooge school and I'm usually working up until about 6 pm every Christmas Eve and I'm right back at it on Boxing Day.

So, optimistically I'd like to ship in November before all that happens. If November isn't possible then I'd skip right to January. The nice thing is that we can call an ABORT MISSION right up until September 12 just by not sending in a solicitation – and since you're the last one working on the book, it's going to be your call more than it is mine – and that will instantly buy you another sixty days (solicitation for January wouldn't be due until mid-November) until the next INITIATE LAUNCH SEQUENCE date. It's funnybooks. We're not waiting for the skies to clear over Cape Canaveral. It's either next week or five weeks from now or eight weeks from now. And that doesn't even take into account that the comic-book field takes late shipping as a given. I got a little huffy with Lebonfon when it became obvious that COLLECTED LETTERS 2 was going to miss its June 6 in-store sale date by a week – and then by two weeks. They wanted to know when my PO (Purchase Order) cancellation date was which wasn't until July 6. The impression that I got was, "Well, duh, what's the problem, then?" Uh. The problem is that I SAID it was coming out June 6, not June 20.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

UPDATE 26 JUNE 0805 HOURS EST - Time to hit the showers since I have no idea when the fine art pick-up and delivery firm is showing up and then a further EYES ONLY cable for my TD & RA and then it's time to tackle the old mailbag.

Tomorrow : Old Mailbag's Got Me!


___________________________________________________

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 #302 (July 10th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Why did I tell these stories in reverse order? Oh, right. I remember. I couldn't make up my mind how I was going to end this one.


Anyway, the First Interesting Thing on the Toronto trip was that I was talking to Chet about my secret project and mentioned that since it's a photorealism project, I plan on doing a bibliography not just of the books that went into the writing of it, but also of the photographs and where I found them. I frankly admitted that this might be a wise idea or a very unwise idea since I'd be calling attention to my use of copyrighted material. Of course, I tend to fall back on my own open-handed control of Cerebus as an intellectual property. If someone wants to use Cerebus or use panels from Cerebus in their own creative work, as long as it's just as a raw material, I have no quarrel with that. I think the individual creator is the best judge as to whether or not he or she needs "needs" or Needs to use Cerebus. Consequently, I think, in the larger scheme of things I get a certain amount of slack when it comes to my own use of copyrighted material. I always make sure that I'm bringing something new to the table in addition to just making magpie-like acquisitions. I cited a couple of examples from the secret project where I had several options for one person to pick from as photographic reference and the one I picked ended up being a book jacket photo by Man Ray. Well, that only makes sense in a way. If you have several photos to pick from you're going to pick the best photo and the best photo is usually (not always but usually) going to be by the best/most famous photographer. But, what happens if Man Ray's estate really loathes comic books or really loathes my treatment of my subject?


[and I have to say that it's really the estate – read: family – that I worry about in these instances. In my experience creative people are all pretty much aware of that magpie quality and treat lesser degrees of plagiarism and homages, "homages" and Homages as what they are: expressions of appropriated creativity for people inclined towards that kind of thing. However once they're dead it is the heirs – usually on advice of their attorneys – who take crushing people like insects as just part of the cost of doing business if not keeping up appearances].


Did I really think something like that was going to happen? Chet wanted to know.


No, not really. I think all of the sudden "to do" about graphic novels is evaporating pretty quickly and that we're well on our way back to just being "funnybooks" and that puts us "below the salt" when it comes to even being recognized in the real world let alone being allowed to share their reality. Comic-book people exist somewhere between the homeless and commercial artists neither of whom your average suburbanite is going to get caught dead with in any form of societal engagement. That's what social workers and art directors are for.


(I wish I had said all that, but genuine coherence always comes much later at a keyboard when I'm juiced to the gills on caffeine. At the time it was taking most of my attention just to keep from ramming into Chet's bike with my suitcase)


But I'm once again in the unenviable situation of establishing precedents in the comic-book field where none have been set that I'm aware of. I cited another example of a Presidential Library I got three copyrighted photos from. The very nice lady in the audio visual department (who has evidently been there for some time, she's mentioned in the acknowledgements page of most books on this particular President) asked me on the phone if the photos were for my personal use. I explained that I was using them as reference, tracing them and turning them into drawings.


"So, they're for your personal use?" I picked up on the signal. She wanted to let me have the photographs and she'd err on my side in the gray areas involved but by law she was required to ask me if they were for my personal use or for a commercial use. Well, what exactly is a graphic narrative if not a "commercial use"?


"Yes," I dutifully replied. "They're for my personal use."


And a couple of days later I had my photographs.


I'm not sure if I set a precedent there or WHAT the precedent was if I did set it. It could be something as simple as "Dave Sim will lie like a rug to get the photographs he needs for his secret project." I'll be thanking her in my own acknowledgments and sending her a copy of the finished work in care of the Presidential Library in question and then, you know, let the chips fall where they may.


Anyway, Chet started mentioning several of the drawings which he had appropriated for use in LOUIS RIEL. Outright tracing from old engravings. It wasn't something that he tried to hide – someone had recognized his use of the work of C.W. Jeffreys and, being in the midst of doing a documentary on Jeffreys asked if Chet would agree to be interviewed and Chet said sure – as long as his face was completely digitized and his voice altered and the line on the screen said "Homeless Person or Perhaps A Commercial Artist".


I'm kidding. No he was completely open and aboveboard about it.


And then he brought up THE PLAYBOY and I hadn't even THOUGHT about that one. He had made extensive use of copyrighted photographs in that one – I have no idea what the deal is that Hugh Hefner has with his photographers but I would not have bet the mortgage on the farm that it was along the lines of "Oh, hey – swipe away. Knock yourself out." After all it took him YEARS to give Kurtzman back the Little Annie Fanny artwork.


But, yeah, Chet had gone back and drawn a lot of those covers and a lot of those pin-ups from his earliest Playboy experiences. "Hey, Chet, you're on my side in the argument in spite of yourself." Playboy lawyers.


"Yeah, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw the Playboy logo on the envelope. `Uh-oh.'. And then it turned out to be…"


One of those funny Chester Brown moments. I should say one of those funny Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Matt moments because they were all past masters in NOT telling each other anything about what was going on in their lives. As an example, neither Chester or Joe knew that Seth was buying his first car until he showed up with it in Toronto.


"…did I ever TELL you about the letter I got from Hugh Hefner about THE PLAYBOY?"


I was tempted to INTENTIONALLY ram his bike with my suitcase…AND my over-sized portfolio.


No, you DIDN'T tell me about the letter you got from Hugh Hefner. In fact, I'd be surprised if you EVER told ANYONE about the letter you got from Hugh Hefner about THE PLAYBOY.


You know the other funny thing about Chet? If I called him up right now and said, "Chet do you mind if I run the Hugh Hefner letter and your response on the Blog & Mail?" He'd probably say, "uhhh…" as if trying to figure out why I would make such a weird request and then say, "Su…ure." Instead of saying, "Are you kidding? I can build an entire ART OF CHESTER BROWN book around that letter. People would buy the book just to be able to read that letter." It would never occur to him.


So, I'm just going to leave it at that.


It's a great story, but it's Chet's story, not mine.


Get him to tell you someday.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1957 HOURS EST - Time to find something to go with the last third of this here Diet Coke I snuck out and bought without telling you. I've got the perfect thing: Grissol Canape Melba Rounds. What are THEY? I'm glad you asked me that question.


You know those little hard round melba toast crackers they have under the horse ovaries at cocktail parties?


No?


Say, you REALLY don't get out much, do you? That's okay, neither do I anymore. Anyway, they're great. WHY are they great? They are great because there is 1 gram of fat in SEVEN of them. That means I can eat SEVENTY of them instead of having, say, half a chocolate bar. That counts a lot with me at the age of fifty-one. "How many of these can I have if I don't eat half a chocolate bar?" When the answer is "more than ten" hey, count me in.


See, they're not only virtually fat-free, they're also from the primary food group known as INCREDIBLY BORING which means that long before you could eat seventy of them, the flavour of them (garlic it says here) would literally put you to sleep. Trust me, Five of these babies and the last thing you're going to have on your mind is food. They literally give the word "food" a bad name. Ugh. "Chewing." "Relentless…Chewing…" "Largely… flavourless." "Pointless ingestion for its own sake." "What is our concept here?" "Oh, no – not ANOTHER one!" "Isn't that seven YET?" "STOP! STOP! I'LL TELL YOU WHERE THE TREASURE IS!"


"Mustn't." "Black." "Out." [apologies to Frank Miller]


Okay, almost time to answer the mail and see if we can get the level down below the sides of the drawers so we don't have any "mail related casualties" to go with our INCREDIBLY BORING food group. Actually I don't usually eat them plain like this: the idea is that I stand up in my Not a Kitchen and spoon tuna-fish onto them (if you're not particular about your tuna fish – and I'm not, I discovered -- you can get it for roughly a buck a can or less) and then a dollop of Ranch dressing. See, all the calories are in the Ranch dressing. Tuna fish and the melba rounds you can eat up in the low seventies and still be under the number of grams of fat in a chocolate bar. In the tuna fish and Ranch dressing scenario boring comes in with the prep time and the standing. You have to spoon the tuna fish onto the melba round, then carefully put a daub of Ranch dressing on the top and then pop the whole thing in your mouth and then chew for an unnaturally long time to get it down to a size you can swallow. You can TRY eating it in two or three bites but then instead of EATING melba round, tuna fish and a daub of Ranch dressing you will find yourself WEARING a melba round, tuna fish and a daub of Ranch dressing. It really is a marvel of culinary engineering for that reason and you're welcome. However, if you try sitting down to eat it, I won't be responsible. I've never tried that and certainly never in front of, like, a television. When you know that you can eat seventy of them instead of a chocolate bar and with the Core Addictive quality of Ranch dressing (aka the flavour saviour of the caloric challenged)? No, in my mind's eye I see a couch and a person that stinks of tunafish and crumbs and wads of tunamelbafishanddressing stuck to everything for a radius of twelve feet. Mark my words only a man who lives alone (a woman would just know better) would even dream of attempting such a thing and he would deserve exactly what he would get. Yechhh.


But standing up and not trying to read anything? Just carefully spooning tuna fish onto your melba round canapé and carefully putting a daub of Ranch dressing on the top? And then carefully popping the whole thing in your mouth?


[a BIGGER daub? Well, of course, EVERYONE is going to TRY for a bigger daub. Heh-heh. ONCE. Because you know what you get? I'll tell you what you get, Mr. and/or Ms. Smarty Boots: Ranch dressing fingers. You can't just wipe them off, either, because Ranch dressing is sticky. The whole operation grinds to a halt and it's another three minutes before you get another daub of Ranch dressing because you have to wash your Ranch dressing fingers and dry them off before you can grab another melba toast canapé round because, face it, the only thing worse than a completely flavourless melba toast round is a WET completely flavourless melba toast round. And face it, you DESERVE just such Ranch dressing deprivation for being Such A Greedy Guts Ranch Dressing Pig Face (I'm sorry, but it needed to be said).]


Again, by the time you've had five or six you really want to find someplace to sit down. Enough with the tuna fish and the ranch dressing and trying to keep the daub small enough so I don't get Ranch dressing fingers and having to chew for an unnaturally long time to make it small enough to swallow. My leg is getting a cramp here.


As I say, it is a marvel of culinary engineering or "How Else Do you Think a Normally Rotund 51-Year Old Man Can Keep Wearing Jeans With a 34-Inch Waistline?"


Okay, it's now officially 2044 HOURS EST and we are into Hour Number Fourteen which should explain the preceding Psycho Diet for Anorexic Men. Laugh if you want but word of this is going to spread like wildfire. The days of the South Beach Diet are numbered, baby.


Anyway, we got a postcard from a GENUINE FAMOUS PERSON here at the Blog & Mail and we know how often that happens, don't we? When WAS the last time that hell froze over? Let me check my calendar. So, we're going to let him jump the massive queue. It's P. Craig Russell! I had been waiting to hear back from him about the introduction he asked me to write for THE ART OF P. CRAIG RUSSELL. Told him he could take out anything he didn't like. The Pariah King of Comics is always ready for the "bait and switch". I even mentioned in the introduction "What was he THINKING?"

His answer:

"Heh.

" Four reasons I asked you for an intro.

"1. Unlike Windsor-Smith, Kaluta, Vess (peace be upon them), I concentrated almost solely on continuity and wanted to show a lot of that in the book. You are on the shortest list of visual storytellers.

"2. You write very well, so we'd be assured of a lively read. Your being a true iconoclast lent an anticipatory nervousness to it. What WILL he say?

"3. You've expressed an appreciation of my work in the past.

"4. It would piss off all the right people.

"Many thanks

"Craig

"P.S. Did you KNOW I lived on the Upper West Side? If not…fine archery."

And with that, it's now 2057 HOURS EST and that's prayer time this time of year, Bubbah. Say, you don't suppose anyone is actually NERVOUS about my intro to Craig's book do you? Nah…

…well, hunh. Maybe they are, eh? Maybe it'll even sell a few books for Joe Pruett and the Craigmeister. Stranger things have happened.


___________________________________________________

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 #301 (July 9th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


Jeet is a scholar squirrel in the classic mould (right, Jeet?) For those of you just tuning in, through the miracle of blog entries written entirely out of order we have now gone back in time nearly three hours to the Second Visitation of Something Interesting in Toronto: Chester's decision to reformat Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie strips into a virtual comic-book narrative form for Drawn and Quarterly's forthcoming volume. Personally, I think he has the cachet to pull it off, but personally, I think he is also going to need some "cover" in the form of introductory text explaining WHY he thinks this is a form that Harold Gray would have approved of and WHY he thinks he's made the correct deletions in order to avoid the endless redundancies you are going to get by reading strips that were intended to be read one-a-day by readers who might not read each strip each and every day. The "no child left behind" theory of comic-strip narrative, as it were.


My suggestion is that the indefatigable Jeet Heer is the perfect candidate to research those decisions and choices in Harold Gray's own correspondence (which long-time readers will remember is housed somewhere in the Boston area) (oops, make that long-time psychic readers – I haven't gotten to that part, yet) and to provide that "cover" if the "cover" is to be had.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1540 HOURS – Okay, time for my mid-afternoon Oh-hey-that's right-it's-summer-even-in-Canada break. Back shortly after my banana bread and Diet Coke from the Manulife Building's Coffee Time kiosk and soaking up some rays in front of City Hall.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1605 HOURS – Okay I'm back. See, and I knew that Chet wouldn't go for it because that sounds like "using" Jeet whereas I tend to see it as "making use of Jeet" in an area where it would be absolutely impossible to take advantage of Jeet: Little Orphan Annie scholarship. If it was for the sake of Little Orphan Annie scholarship, I feel safe in saying that Jeet would (cheerfully!) walk across red-hot coals carrying a Bengal tiger cranked on methamphetamine (the tiger, I mean, not Jeet). Chester even told me that Jeet has this lecturing gig set up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had this great idea that he and Chet could do it together and then go to whatever-college-it-is in the Boston area that has all of Harold Gray's papers and artwork.. And Chet, of course, wasn't interested because he's started to develop this spider-sense about things that are just going to end up being pointless distractions from his prostitution book having experienced a bunch of them ever since the collected LOUIS RIEL became a hit. What he often tends not to see is that for Jeet there is no prostitution book – whatever participation he's going to have in comics is going to be mostly on the scholarship side.


"Let me put it this way – if someone else gets to be known as the definitive Harold Gray/Little Orphan Annie scholar while Jeet is still alive and kicking, Jeet will be a very unhappy camper. I mean he'll be happy that the definitive scholarship exists but he'll be unhappy that it isn't his. So you would actually be doing him a favour by giving him this problem to solve: what way would Harold Gray have wanted his strips to be reprinted?"


And then Chet started discussing it as a problem separate from turning Jeet loose on it (which is fine – at least Chet stays on topic when I get provocative) and saying that he remembered an article in Rick Marschall's NEMO years ago where they had reprinted an Annie story, not from the original strips but from a condensed version that Harold Gray had done himself where he had taken out redundant panels because they ordinarily wouldn't have space for an entire Annie episode. Well, there you go, I said. As long as you aren't reinventing all that to shore up your own argument (that made him laugh) then you have your cover. The odds are that that would be one of the Cupples and Leon collections because as far as I knew those were the only reprints that came out during Harold Gray's lifetime. All that someone would have to do (and only Jeet would be that interested, but I didn't say that) is go through Gray's correspondence (if Gray was a letter-writin' cartoonist which I would think more likely than his being a non-letter-writin' cartoonist) and find out what he had to say about the condensed version at the time.


Did he condense it himself or was that done by the syndicate?


What did he think of what they did if it was done by them?


If he liked it, then it would be largely a matter of reading the original strips and the condensed version and to draw conclusions about where he erred and why. Did he take the chance of taking too much information out in order to avoid a redundancy or did he leave a redundancy in if it meant preserving a piece of information? Did he leave out whole strips or just individual panels?


Of course it isn't a fail-safe thing. This was during the depression and Gray was enough of a capitalist that even if he thought the redacted version of the story stunk on ice his loyalty to the syndicate and his gratitude for another revenue stream to keep him from having to peddle apples on street-corners could very much colour any observation he might have made at the time.


By that point I had pretty much exhausted Chet's patience I think, so I let the matter drop at least until we got to the Beguiling where I went through the whole thing again for Peter Birkemoe's benefit. The second time through we actually had some strip reprint books to look at whereas before that I had been guessing that the reduction on the Sunday page was different from the daily strips and my suggestion was that you should use the size of the lettering as the gauge. A casual reader going from the Saturday daily strip to the Sunday strip shouldn't have a sense of taking a step down or up in the reading "voice". This is certainly true in the IDW Dick Tracy reprints where the reduction on the Sunday strips is considerable compared to the dailies so the reading "voice" goes quieter on Sunday and then "speaks up" again when Monday rolls around. Of course that's the Letterer in me. Most people would rate page composition and "wasted space" as a higher rank of commodity when weighed in the balance. If you have to reduce the daily strips a LOT to get the lettering the same size as it is in the Sunday then you are going to have a lot of white-space on the daily side of the ledger.


That's true, but I think you'll find the effect on the reader (however unconscious) will be to treat a strip collection as more of a sustained narrative than as a "complete accumulation" if you make the effort to keep the lettering a consistent size. Dave Sim, minority of one. What else is new?


I also have an issue of CARTOONISTS SHOWCASE which reprints Al Williamson's SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN strips in that way – larger images but with daily strips running into each other and I have to say that I'm not crazy about it. I always assume that a strip cartoonist composes his strips as individual pieces of art that go from here over to there, not as panels 45, 46 and 47 of a 386-panel story. Of course Harold Gray is pretty unique in having all of his panels the same size and always having four panels of equal size in his daily strip, so if anyone thought of his work in terms of individual panels rather than individual strips, he would be the guy.


Next: Tuesday July 9 ALREADY? Where DOES the time go?



___________________________________________________

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 #300 (July 8th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


We'll get back to Jeet Heer on Monday. This being Sunday, I thought we would skip ahead to the Third Interesting Thing That Happened in Toronto which was that I had mentioned to Chet the last time that I had been in town that I had meant to bring the (I hope) relatively finished portion of my COMMENTARIES ON THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK with me for him to read. "Well, why didn't you?" he asked. Just plain forgot, actually.


The thing that had brought them to mind actually was that I had been at the library and (as I do once in a while) I clicked on my Wikipedia listing after I had checked the progress on the www.cerebusart.com website, Margaret's latest additions to the cerebusfangirl website and a quick scan to see if anyone on the Cerebus Yahoo Newsgroup had mentioned either me or Cerebus in the last 24 hours. No on both counts.


Anyway, I keep thinking that in the sporting manner of good Internet fellowship (I know it doesn't exist, I'm being ironic) I should go in and edit my Wikipedia listing sometime at least as far as the factual errors are concerned, to put in my parents' names and "born and died" dates, that kind of thing. But then I read the first two paragraphs and I get depressed and give up. Actually this time, I thought maybe I should just skim through and see if there are any, you know, GOOD parts. Well, no there aren't but there was a reference to my doing commentaries on Mark's Gospel and that I had asked Chet if I could use panels from his as-yet uncompleted Matthew adaptation as illustrations for my commentaries and that Chet hadn't given me an answer. That was kind of odd because I was pretty sure that he had said yes, but we just hadn't yet arrived at the best way to do them.


But…but…if it's on the Internet it has to be TRUE, right? Especially on Wikipedia where legions of individuals -- like the mechanical worker drones in THE MATRIX -- labour tirelessly day and night scuttling up and down the interface assuring that each and every fact is entirely and completely accurate.


Clearly I had misremembered and the outcome was yet in doubt. Maybe I could win Chet over by letting him read what I had written so far.


Well, it turns out that Chet is as delusional as I am. He thought he had said yes and I told him he better check my Wikipedia listing the next time he's using the Internet to scope out Asian call-girls in the GTA because evidently he HADN'T given me an answer yet. He could've sworn that he had but, hey, who are you going to trust? Wikipedia or your own memory? So, anyway, this time I brought him a FedEx envelope full of commentaries – roughly 80 pages covering the first three chapters or so of Mark. And then I came home and wrote him a long, long fax outlining the different ways we could do this and offering him carte blanche on the visual side of the project and told him I would phone him next week (earlier this week) to get his answer.


That spider-sense of his is really coming along. I could hear it jangling over the phone line. DANGER! DANGER! It was saying PARTICIPATION IN ANY CREATIVE PROJECT CAN SERIOUSLY JEOPARDIZE THE COMPLETION OF YOUR PROSTITUTION BOOK! AVOID INHALING! So basically he gave ME carte blanche. All I had to do was to tell him what panels I wanted to use and he would dig them up [the spider-sense kicked up at this again, but he just ignored it] and give them to Tiff Preney (Hi, Tiff!) or to someone to scan and I could letter them whatever way I wanted. And he had actually read at least some of the commentaries at that point so it's not as if he didn't know what he was letting himself in for.


So, now, using the 56-page perfect bound (DC's prestige format) package, I now have to figure out how many Chester Brown pages it needs to formally become a comic book. 8 pages? That might be too few. 12? 16?


Chet also pointed out that his Matthew adaptation is still incomplete. Oh, that's right. Where did you leave off again? "He was just getting ready to enter Jerusalem." Right. Much closer to the end than the beginning. Chet and I will never get bored with each other. That's because we're already so old that we just have the same conversations over and over again with only the faintest inkling on either of our parts that we've discussed all this before. Wouldn't the fact that it's incomplete pose a problem for me, he wanted to know – there's no trial scene yet, no crucifixion scene. I had to laugh. Chet, all those pages I gave you are formatted to 8.5 X 11 and there's at least 80 of them (actually there's 95 – I just checked) and that only goes up to the end of chapter three (actually closer to the middle of chapter four – now I know why people carry their laptops around with them: that's where they keep their equivalent of the memories I can only find in the office). By the time it's reduced to comic-book sized pages and your panels are included…


I came up with a better illustration: I just released COLLECTED LETTERS 2 roughly three years after I released COLLECTED LETTERS 1. If I release a COMMENTARIES ON MARK'S GOSPEL volume one next year sometime no one is going to be seriously looking for volume two until at least 2011.


It raised interesting questions now that my own glacial slowness of productivity is starting to match Chester's own. How long would it take him to do his prostitution book? Was his Matthew adaptation next on his list of things to do? Was there any way that I could be up to the point of the Synoptic Jesus entering Jerusalem in my Mark commentaries by the time he was ready to finish Matthew? Won't we all be walking around on the moon in rocket shoes by then and writing and drawing comic books with ray beams we shoot out of our surgically altered eyes, rendering the point moot?


He even surprised me and suggested that maybe I could do layouts for the rest of his Matthew adaptation. I'm still really, really ambivalent about that, particularly the Muslim part of me that just doesn't think it's right to actually draw any of God's prophets and messengers (although I don't have any hesitation about PUBLISHING Chet's drawings of the Synoptic Jesus. Go figure). At the same time I'm not entirely convinced that the Synoptic Jesus was a prophet or a messenger. In the Koran he's called the Messiah Jesus ibn Mariam, that is Messiah Jesus the son of Mary. Maybe Messiah is a term particularly picked out by God to be distinct from rather than co-equivalent with the Judaic term Meschiach. Sounds like it, but a whole different ball of wax. Maybe the Johnannine Jesus is the Meschiach and the Synoptic Jesus is the Messiah. I'm not sure that there was an appropriate title or word to describe the figure that was and is emerging from my commentaries on Matthew, Mark and Luke (still working my way through chapter eleven on Luke as of last Sunday – I can do about four to six verses in about two or three hours of steady writing depending on the number of layers of meaning that I can see within the text).


By that time I was babbling but the above was what I had intended to say. I'm pretty sure we never had THAT conversation before. After I got off the phone, I thought, maybe if I just indicate where the Synoptic Jesus should go and stick to roughing in the disciples and people in the background or maybe just getting out the old Gillotte 290 and inking tiny little fine lines like Chet used on LOUIS RIEL.


And then I thought, This is crazy. It's literally YEARS off in the future one way or the other. But still, with two pages and two panels left to go on my secret project while I was waiting for some white-out to dry so I could ink over it, I dug out my envelope full of photocopies of Chet's Matthew adaptation and took another look at the John the Baptist panels which I had re-lettered in the original Koin Greek.


And there he was: John the Baptist gobbling down a locust (CRNCH) and then some wild honey ("Hmnn?" I left in Chet's original lettering there) and cussing out the citizenry in Koin Greek. IS COMING THE ONE STRONGER OF ME BEHIND ME is what he's saying in the panel that I sent to Jeff .




This IS crazy. But, you know, I think maybe it's crazy in a good way. I'll let you know how it develops.


Coming up on the end of Hour Number Twelve on Day One of Blog Week.


For those of you keeping score at home that's


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1816 HOURS EST


And that means it's time for some more Diet Coke. I finally decided to just throw in my cards vis-a-vis caffeine-as-a-drug this summer having decided that there's a reason that Arabs drink coffee that resembles liquid roofing tar and that reason is Intrinsic Sleep Deprivation which results from keeping up with your hour before sunrise and hour after sunset prayer times at the Summer Solstice.


Inshallah I will consume twice my body weight in caffeinated beverages and Inshallah I will not so much more resemble the zombie I am otherwise feeling like all day.

EBAY: 250140036888 Dave Sim Cerebus Scripture read bible dvd First Samuel $24.99



___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #299 (July 7th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


The Second of Three Interesting Things That Happened in Toronto Whose Coming Was Foretold To You:


All three of them involved chatting with Chester (as I said last time, we don't JUST complain at each other about our old man aches and pains). The first one came up at lunch at Peter Pan where he whipped out a pen and grabbed a napkin and started showing me the way he was planning to lay out the Little Orphan Annie book for Drawn & Quarterly


[Not to be confused with the Complete Little Orphan Annie series that someone else is planning. The goal with the Drawn & Quarterly volume is to produce a single volume combination history of the strip, biography of Harold Gray and one complete story from the hey-day of the strip. The guiding force behind the project in one sense or another is Jeet Heer who is either the pre-eminent Annie scholar on the planet or definitely in the top five. Chester of course is a Little Orphan Annie/Harold Gray fan but something of an Annie scholar himself (but self-admittedly not in Jeet Heer's category). Jeet and Chris Oliveiros (I would guess largely at Jeet's insistence) wanted Chester to design the book and even though Chester would rather be working on his prostitution book, Chester agreed.] [Actually, oddly enough, I've got a letter from Jeet that's down about six fathoms in the mail pile so he might very well be the fourteenth or fifteenth person who actually reads the Blog & Mail and I imagine a) he'll be very interested in this and b) Chester hasn't said a word to him about it.]


So Chester whips out his pen and starts blocking in these panels in rough and asking What do I think of this? Basically what he envisions doing is blocks of three panels across and four panels down on each page. The Annie daily strips are all four panels across, so the strips would be starting and stopping in the middle of each line. Then the Sunday strip (whose panels are larger than the daily strip panels) would start where the daily left off so you would have pages that would be mostly black and white daily strips and then a colour Sunday strip would start in mid-page.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1456 HOURS EST – Prayer time. Hold that thought.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1518 HOURS EST – And he admits to me frankly that he's shown it to a few people and so far he's the only one who likes the idea.


My first reaction is that the audience for classic comic strips is not exactly huge and it does tend to fall along very proscribed collector lines: people want the strips as they appeared at the time. Six daily strips on one page (or two pages) followed by a Sunday page, chronologically exact. But, of course, whomever it is that is doing the Complete Little Orphan Annie, that's their stomping grounds. They have to hope that there's enough interest to sustain the pre-classic 1929-to-whenever strips where none of the characters looks or acts quite the way that we're used to and hope that there's still an audience by the time they get around to 1932 or 1934 or wherever it is that Little Orphan Annie became Little Orphan Annie Classic.


What is being planned with THIS volume is "leading with your best shot" – here is a PEAK Little Orphan Annie strip as well as biographical and historical information. One- stop shopping for someone looking to have a nice visit with Annie but not necessarily interested in, you know, adopting her (so to speak).


I said, Basically what you're talking about doing is turning Harold Gray's comic strip into a Chester Brown comic book. Give Chester points he didn't even bat an eye at that. Yes, basically that's what he's doing. He had even gone so far as to edit the strip to take out the redundant panels that proliferate when you're reading a series of strips that used to come out once a day and which were intended for a mainstream audience that wasn't (let's face facts) widely regarded in corporate newspaper offices for its collective level of rocket science genius.


So, what DO I think of this? Well, if he was asking me personally, my call would be six daily strips followed by the Sunday and running the Sunday in black and white as they've chosen to do with the Dick Tracy reprints at IDW (you're in that mail pile, Ted, I promise! Please, don't leave me off the comp list for volume three!). I'm a collector when it comes to strips. I don't buy that many collections, but when I do I want them all and I want them in order and I want them in black and white so I can actually see the artwork.


But (I said, getting as long-winded as I try not to be) I thought the larger point in this case was "What would Harold Gray have wanted?" Chet's got one way of looking at it, no one agrees with him but everyone trusts him implicitly as the designer of the book. Personally I think he has the credentials to pull it off. He's not only the world's foremost but the world's ONLY Harold Gray clone and he has brought himself to quite a prominent position as an authority on Gray's storytelling. He basically wants to BE Harold Gray, as Seth adroitly pointed out when he interviewed Chet on stage at last year's Doug Wright Awards. That's a pretty unassailable position from which to announce "This is what I think Harold Gray would have wanted."


The only REAL problem with that, of course, is the problem with everything in the avant garde of comics. Everyone lives in terror (whether they admit it or not) of what the COMICS JOURNAL is going to say. When the time comes and even Fantagraphics' own cartoonists have lived on an unassailable pedestal for long enough (a period of time solely determined by the COMICS JOURNAL oddly enough) then it's time to find a pretext to tear them down. There were at least two references in the May issue indicating that Chris Ware's alarm clock as an Unassailable has (as it always does with the COMICS JOURNAL: abruptly and inexplicably) gone the way of all flesh. Chet has been an Unassailable longer than Chris Ware has been published which means all they're really doing is looking for a pretext. What could be better than Failing the Drawn and Quarterly Little Orphan Annie even as Seth Rose to the Occasion on Behalf of the Fantagraphics Peanuts? (Seth took a body shot in the latest JOURNAL as well, but no matter. He might be finished as a cartoonist as far as the JOURNAL is concerned but that doesn't mean he can't be used as a cudgel to beat another cartoonist – particularly his closest friend! The JOURNAL THRIVES on that kind of stuff).


Well, I didn't say any of that (the May issue of the JOURNAL with the newest set of tectonic avant garde shifts hadn't come in yet for one thing) but I got a little provocative in another direction:


Why not sic Jeet Heer on the problem?


Monday: Jeet Heer? Doesn't he write for the COMICS JOURNAL?


Tomorrow: COMMENTARIES ON THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK by Dave Sim with comic-strip illustrations by Chester Brown



___________________________________________________

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 #298 (July 7th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1134 HOURS EST - Time certainly flies when you're old like I am. The subject under discussion is the secret project's Technical Director Five-Point Opinion on whether to address the misogynist charge on the website or ignore feminism altogether.


Had this been the actual White House, I would have just scribbled "OK – DS" in the margin. Basically this is what you have advisors for is their expertise. I explained all of my concerns at elaborate length in as balanced a way as I could find to present them and my Technical Director basically came down squarely on the side of just plain ignoring feminism in promoting my secret project.


Given that I've spent twelve years arguing against feminism – six of them with the neatly distilled Sixteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast – and that hasn't had any impact whatsoever – it certainly hasn't elevated the level or tone of the debate above petty name-calling and character assassination on the part of the members opposite if my Technical Advisor is correct, which I assume that he is -- I figure there is no harm in adopting the adversary's own tactics and just pretending that they aren't there and let's see a) if that works and b) HOW it doesn't work IF it doesn't work (i.e. what cute stunt the feminists choose to pull to destroy the secret project and where and when and how they choose to pull it – around the solicitation date? Around the release date? Using character assassination/innuendo?) The advantage of not addressing them is that the Google list and Wikipedia entry are both pretty much carved in stone by now (as David W. Johnson found out when he tried to delete a few malicious entries) and are pretty obviously their main means of maintaining a 24/7 level of sustained attack. If they're going to "up the ante" I can't think of anywhere else that they could do it


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1150 HOURS EST – Interestingly enough my computer just shut itself down and then started itself back up again and having hit AUTORECOVER it's recovered everything except (even more interestingly) the following:


So basically, I'm looking for volunteers – you, you and you – (who they will have no way of finding even indirectly through me) to download the current list that comes up when you Google Dave Sim's name and the Wikipedia entry for Dave Sim and just out of, you know, curiosity, keep comparing them from now through September and from now through November and let me know if there's anything in the way of suspicious activity – innuendo and character assassination, skewing of numbers like the Dave Sim As Notorious Anti-Feminist Website suddenly jumping up five places on the Dave Sim Google Search Hit Parade in the space of a day or so (not that I would ever accuse feminists of just sitting there and "hitting" on a website a couple of hundred times to, you know, "juice" the numbers and make "Dave Sim as Noted Anti-Feminist" appear to be a more pressing concern for Internet browsers than it actually is – no, far be it from me to ever accuse feminists of such a thing) (but, you know, just to be SURE…)


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1156 HOURS EST: Noon prayer time.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1222 HOURS EST: Lunch. Here at the Off-White House today we're having a delectable Basil and Jalapeno Coleslaw on whole wheat Kaiser roll with a V8 vegetable juice. The great thing about the B & J Coleslaw is that the J scorches the President of Aardvark-Vanaheim's mouth and lets him know when…as the severely appetite-challenged individual that he is…he is definitively finished lunch (i.e. before his entire head spontaneously combusts).


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1229 HOURS EST: President, having devoured a second sandwich now sucking wind to lower the temperature of his mouth from 119 degrees to a more seasonable 98.6 (V8 Vegetable Juice turning to steam on contact)


UPDATE 25 JUNE 1232 HOURS EST: …and if you have the technical expertise to track such things, it might be worth knowing if all of the "hits" to a Dave Sim As Notorious Anti-Feminist Site are coming from, say, two or three computers. I don't think we want to publicly "out" anyone guilty of "juicing" the anti-Dave numbers (but, then, how could I stop you if you were to decide independently that was the wisest course of action?). My personal interest is only in a suddenly suspicious level of activity timed to coincide with the big push I intend to make, promoting my secret project in September when I hope to have the solicitation in the Previews catalogue and with the book's on-sale date sometime in November. Pretty much just because I've been working on it for two years and I'd like it to have a fair chance in the marketplace. Who knows? Maybe this kind of Who Watches the Watchwomen? is just what the doctor ordered and we'll have smooth sailing between here and November. We'll see.

UPDATE 25 JUNE 1244 HOURS EST - More cable traffic. Brian P. Coppola checks in from the University of Michigan Department of Chemistry:

"Hi Dave

"Thanks for the recent series of faxes and the Art-Exclusives for the Aartvark blog.


"I guess this answers the ancient question: if a fax falls in the wood when no one is around, will anyone hear it?

"I was starting up a project at Peking for the last 3 weeks, and left the US on the day of the original fax (31 May)…so I learned about the Rockwell Museum show the same way everyone else did: on the "Blog `n' Mail" site sometime last week.

"I am just returned and picked up 3 weeks worth of mail this morning.

"More later. Just wanted to touch base."

For those of you keeping track at home, it is officially Day 2110 of the Arthur P. Thurnau Chair Held Hostage Crisis. I hope that forcing him to explain that joke will finally compel the otherwise impeccably modest Mr. Coppola to post a description of the signal honour in the chemistry field that the Arthur P. Thurnau chair at the University of Michigan represents (if only for the indirect legitimacy it lends to the fact that he remains curiously and publicly interested in "that weird misogynistic comic about the aardvark" through his own Cerebus the Original Aartvark website and blog). I also apologize for getting the name and spelling wrong in my previous post. I don't know if Brian is sensitive about such things, but I did notice when research had me at the library on successive days last week and I was able to read Craig's first three fill-in blogs as well as scan the Cerebusdom vicinity to find out what everyone has to say about Star Wars these days. That was when I found out that Brian was in China instead of Blowing the Lid Off the Norman Rockwell Museum Story.


Here at the Blog & Mail we still have a sincerely hard time believing that there are more than twelve people reading this stuff on any given day (or, more likely, Jeff and Margaret each "hitting" on it six times a day and using a variety of aliases to discuss STAR WARS in detail) and, consequently, answer to just about anything: Blog and Mail, Blog & Mail, blogandmail, Blog `n' Mail, Dave's blog, Dave's %&$ing blog – even Matt Dow's Bloggy Mail. Okay – Jeff, Margaret and Matt hitting on it four times each.


And it also provides a serendipitous reminder that the Rockwell Museum is sending a fine art professional art-handling outfit from Toronto to pick up the pages tomorrow and I haven't pulled any of them out yet. Excuse the President while he retreats to the Secret Undisclosed Location Housing the Original Artwork with his short list.


UPDATE 25 JUNE 0239 HOURS EST – Okay, that only took WAY TOO LONG and now here I am with twenty minutes until my next prayer time. My pile of mail in the filing cabinet is reaching a dangerous height where, if it tips sideways it will soon be taller than the sides of the file drawer. Around here we consider that a dangerous height. But, the thing is there were three interesting things that happened in Toronto and I wanted to get to those before tackling the mail.


Tomorrow: You Will Be Visited By The Second Interesting Thing That Happened in Toronto!



___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #297 (July 5th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

25 JUNE 0731 EST - Well, it had to happen eventually. The NATIONAL POST finally printed one of my letters to the editor. The subject was actually a pencilled commissioned drawing that I did for Mark S. (a copy of which Jeff Tundis has been patiently sitting on for a couple of weeks now waiting for me to mention it) of Cerebus and Yoda. Mark had sent an e-mail to Ger with the request and Ger had told him that he thought there was a very slim chance given my opinions of Yoda as a character (that I thought he had pretty much ruined STAR WARS in the second film by attempting to make me believe that Fozzy Bear – with a less intelligent command of the English language -- could also be a Jedi Master). That of course is my AUDIO opinion which is different from my VISUAL opinion. My VISUAL opinion of anything having to do with STAR WARS is that Al Williamson used his best stuff on the comic strip adaptation so even if I haven't seen what he did, I know that I'm competing with him when I draw anything related to STAR WARS. So, um, "bring it on". Particularly when you're paying $400 US for pencils only 9" X 12".

http://www.cerebusart.com/Commissions/Yoda.htm



ALTERNATE CAPTIONS:




My biggest mistake was in thinking that I would use Canada Post instead of FedEx which is the hard and fast rule about commissioned drawings around here. "When It Absolutely Positively Has to Get There the Next Day" being less of a concern in a country dominated by Marxist State Monopolies than "When It Absolutely Positively Has To Get There Period". I had actually talked myself into using Canada Post, reasoning with myself that I was being way too hard on our Marxist State Postal Monopoly which is more of a last refuge for overstuffed labour unions (even though postal traffic is only a fraction of what it was before the advent of FedEx and the Internet, if the Canadian Association of Inside Postal Workers and the Canadian Association of Outside Postal Workers has laid anyone off in the last ten years despite eliminating Saturday delivery and expanding the length of time it takes to deliver a letter from one Metropolitan area to another I'll buy each of them a donut) than an actual public service. Hey, unreasoning grasping Marxists are people, too, right? They have families to feed, too, right?


So, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and make full use of the House Than Andre Ouellet Built (or, rather, found more interesting ways to overstuff). Canada Post USA Expedited here I come (to the opening martial strains of "O Canada"). Mark S. (famous last words on the phone the weekend of March 30): "I can't wait to see it."

23 May 07

Re: Ignorance is Canada Post's bliss, Andrew Coyne 23 May 2007

The situation is worse than Mr. Coyne portrays it.

On March 30 I mailed a standard business envelope to Camden, Maine that weighed 314 grams via Canada Post's "Expedited Parcel – USA" service, purporting to take seven to nine business days at a cost of $12.14. When it hadn't turned up by mid-month in April, I was informed that the Expedited rate "isn't guaranteed" and the package wasn't deemed to be officially missing until April 22nd. All hope was given up on that date.


My Maine correspondent notified Canada Post—by e-mail, fortunately—that the package had finally arrived this week, seven weeks after departing Kitchener, Ontario, with no sign of tampering, being detained at Customs or any indication where the package had been all that time.


Canada Post, in turn, notified me—by phone, fortunately. I was gratified to find that they didn't request the $32 back that I had been paid for my "missing item" claim two weeks ago.


Dave Sim

Kitchener, ON


25 JUNE 0751 EST – Okay. Time to hit the showers and then it's (coincidentally) off to Canada Post for my once-a-week visit. When I get back, I'll type the letter as the NATIONAL POST printed it for your compare-and-contrast dining and dancing pleasure here on the Blog & Mail.


Okay, I'm back with a short sidetrack to address my David Peterson MOUSE GUARD fiasco (see July 2 entry for details)


25 JUNE 1112 EST – Here's how the letter appeared on the NATIONAL POST editorial page (right under one from Robert E. Waite, senior vice-president, stakeholder relations and brand) (seriously, that's his title) (Canada Post):


The situation with our postal service is worse than Mr. Coyne portrays it.


On March 30, I mailed a standard business envelope to Camden, Maine, which weighed 314 grams, via Canada Post's expedited Parcel-U.S.A. Service. When it hadn't turned up by mid-month in April, I was informed that the expedited rate "isn't guaranteed" and that the package wasn't deemed to be officially missing until April 22, three weeks after it was mailed. All hope was given up on that date.


My Maine correspondent notified Canada Post that the package finally arrived this week, seven weeks after departing Kitchener, Ont. There was no indication where it had been during that time.


Dave Sim, Kitchener, Ont.


I thought it was probably a mark of how wealthy the average POST reader is that the reference to $12.14 was dropped. I'm probably just old but the idea that 12 bucks doesn't get you guaranteed delivery to anywhere in anything less than three weeks is really the thing that boggles my mind.


After a month of the piece being MIA I called Mark and told him I was doing him another one, traced from the photocopy I had made of it. He said he'd pay me something more for the second one if the first one turned up and I told him, basically, don't be ridiculous. It was my choice to use Canada Post and if I was going to learn my lesson it was better to do so on a $400 pencil sketch than on a $3500 painting. I told him to frame them together if the second one came in and will them back to the Cerebus Archive where – as I hope they would for Mark – they would make a nice conversation piece. When the letter was printed, I also sent Mark a tearsheet suggesting that he frame the whole page (there was a nice nearly full page shot of Miss Canada in a skin-tight Toronto Maple Leafs outfit right next to my letter) (hubba hubba and Go Leafs Go!) and include it in what is now becoming, I'm sure, the Cerebus and Yoda Room in his house.


Okay, back to the overnight cable traffic at


Tomorrow: YIKES! 25 JUNE 1134 HOURS EST


___________________________________________________

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 #296 (July 4th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

UPDATE 25 JUNE 0630 – Just this once I thought I would include the date and time of my "postings" so you could get a better idea of when I'm writing what (even though that impression is going to be overwhelmed by the actual "release date"). I finally decided to pull the plug on the Marvel negotiations even though Blake Bell had told me at the Joe Shuster Awards ceremony that Joe Quesada (no less) had posted something along the lines of "I Want Dave Sim" on his own Marvel blog – which, no doubt about it, was very flattering. VERY flattering.

Malcolm Bourne (hi, Malcolm!) had showed up at Torontocon at the opening whistle on Friday afternoon (and very helpfully assisted me in setting up my five comp tables) and was naturally curious about his commission which is next in the "on deck" circle after the completion of Matthew E.'s Cerebus and Cirin piece. Doing the mental math, the earliest I was going to get to it was early in July. And then Yoram M. came by to ask if we were still on for this July's commissioned piece as a companion to the original "Bonfire of the Super-Heroes" (see "commissions" at www.cerebusart.com) and I told him what Malcolm was offering and asked if he wanted to offer more to take over his spot and, no, he was more than happy to wait his turn. In both cases they were talking thousands of dollars for a single image. I finally had to face the fact that it didn't make sense to put them on hold so that I could do a Spider-Woman or Electra cover for Marvel for a few hundred dollars.

My contact at Marvel took this with very good grace and expressed great interest in seeing my secret project finally come out. Classy guy.

Speaking of which, I have two pages and two panels to go on it. Then I have to do the front and back covers and then redraw a few of the images that I don't think quite measure up to the rest of the project (and, I assume, then see the "next worst" images and fix them and so on – hopefully not to the point of having to redraw the whole thing).



Checking the "overnight cable traffic" (i.e. the fax machine) here at the Off-White House, 1 have a new communique from my Technical Director and Research Assistant in [name of U.S. state RETRO-DELETED at request of TD & RA – he thinks some of the local cartoonists are "on to him" and would like to avoid having to either lie or plead the fifth]. He's got 75% of the website completed (as initially conceived) and had a few requests, one of which was a short author's bio for the site. This in turn provoked a rather lengthy response from me, raising what I see as the biggest impediment to the secret project's success which is feminism in general and feminists in particular. I asked him to Google my name and check my Wikipedia listing and to REALLY READ IT and see what sort of person I am being made out to be. My point is that in 2007 you ARE your Google search and you ARE your Wikipedia listing and that it's futile to try to ignore that. I invited him to take the information found there and to adapt it into biographical form and that I would correct or amend it, but that Google Dave and Wikipedia Dave are, as far as I'm concerned 1) largely fictional feminist constructs and 2) considered 100% factual in a society overwhelmingly dominated by feminism and 3) I have no idea how to write either Google Dave or Wikipedia Dave.

One of the first suggestions that the TORONTO STAR editor (who has volunteered to be a media consultant of sorts) had was to "lead with the awards" which seemed to me to be a very astute way of attacking the problem (and which is a good reason to keep your ears wide open when consulting with a highly-placed mainstream media figure such as he). I kicked his suggestion up a notch by trying on the title of Canada's Most Decorated Graphic Novelist for size (two Kirby Awards, two Harvey Awards, an Eisner Award, a Diamond Gemmie as Small Press Pioneer, an Ignatz Award, a Joe Shuster Award, Joe Shuster Hall of Fame, The Comic Book Legal Defence Fund's Defender of Liberty Award – I notice that one isn't mentioned on my Wikipedia listing: maybe because feminists don't believe an anti-feminist could BE a Defender of Liberty? -- SPACE Lifetime Achievement and the San Diego Comicon's lnkpot Award). So, I hit him with that to balance off the genuine sense of defeatism I have in the face of feminism's ability to destroy anything that I attempt to do.

So, I have here his first draft of the bio along with his thinking behind the decision not to mention feminism:

"I think addressing the Dave Sim Google phenomenon head-on at [name of secret project website] is unwise. Here are a few reasons why:

1. It's going to prompt anyone who hasn't Googled your name to immediately do so, which will probably sway them away from ordering the book. I think it's more likely you'd have a new reader come across the site and order the book than come across the site, Google your name, then come back and order the book if they're still interested.

2. I'm generally assuming that anyone who comes to the site is there because they're interested in either what you're doing or they're interested in the [subject of secret project]. If anyone comes to [name of secret project website] with an axe to grind I don't see the point in catering any of the content of the site to them. From my perspective you're one of the most talented, innovative, dedicated, generous and interesting cartoonists the medium has ever seen. I find it ridiculous that (from what I see) more than half of what's written about you focuses on your views on women, and that the larger part of the material is grossly misinformed and hostile. I think a lot of addressing that nonsense is reducing oneself to a lowest common denominator type of thinking. I've certainly read more than my share of rebuttal to your thoughts on feminism, and I can count the amount of well-reasoned, intelligent arguments on one hand. The bulk of them don't deserve the dignity of a response. You might argue that I'd feel differently if it were my name being slandered, and perhaps you'd be right. You have to acknowledge, however, that in doing this work for you, people are going to make a lot of assumptions about me (assuming they spare a single thought on who I am or what I've done, which they probably won't) and I couldn't give a toss in the same way that many people who see that I'm an enormous fan and supporter of Howard Cruse's work are gonna assume I'm gay. Screw 'em.

3. Another consideration is that you're planning on pitching the book to the education industry, a profession which has an overwhelmingly large percentage of women. Had you the opportunity to sit down with each and every one of these potential buyers and explain to them that you're not a misogynist and you clearly outlined to them how and why you think these accusations arose and then outlined what your views of feminism and women in the workplace are, I think a large portion of them would walk away even more offended. And please don't misunderstand me, your take on feminism has had a strong impact on me personally and I think it's important to disseminate. Just not here. I'm trying to be pragmatic and I think, in this case, it's best to let sleeping dogs lie (as in sleep, not "tell an untruth").

4. Lastly and most importantly I see the [name of secret project website] as having the specific goal of promoting [secret project]. Your views on feminism as I see it have as much relevance to those goals as who you think the best Looney Tunes director was. To that effect, there's barely any mention of Cerebus on the site (currently only in the body of the Q & A you composed and the bio-links to Win-Mill and cerebusart.com). I can foresee a certain number of people out there are gonna draw correlations between [subject of secret project] and what they perceive as your hatred of women. If that turns out to be the case, I have no problem meeting any controversy head on. I just don't think it wise to instigate it."

25 JUNE 0725 EST - Okay, there it is. The end of Hour Number One of Blog Week. apologize to my Technical Director and Research Assistant for violating his confidential communique but word of the secret project has been leaking from unexpected quarters (Claude Flowers was the first to notify me of this – but then I would expect someone employed in US Army Intelligence to ferret out the True Gen faster than anyone else) and like its real world counterpart, here at the Off-White House we believe fighting fire with fire in matching news leak with news leak. The motivation is always access to inside information so it seems to me the best plan of attack is to start leaking selectively between now and the solicitation date which is tentatively set for September for a November release.

Tomorrow, something a little more light-hearted: my first published letter in the NATIONAL POST: what it looked like originally and what they turned it into. Then, my best assessment of the relative merits of the TD & RA's Five Points: Launch a Preemptive Strike Against Feminism to defend the secret project or Attempt to Ignore Feminism and try to sneak the secret project in under the feminist radar.


ON SALE NOW!


___________________________________________________

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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #295 (July 3rd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Yes, there was more good news at Paradise Toronto Comicon even though the show didn't work out the way I thought it would. I THOUGHT I was going to use a giveaway of WORLD TOUR BOOKS with Chet's and my jam strip in it to coerce people into waiting in line for an autograph and that while they were waiting in line they'd be forced to look at the photorealism strips that I brought for display. No go. I was always busy but the state of conventions today has really shifted in the direction of sketchbooks. Some autographs but mostly people just want a drawing in their sketchbook or on a backing board. Since I wasn't really equipped for that (and remembering last year where I ended up staying up until I am Friday night getting my sketch list caught up), I instituted a couple of new policies: 1) no sketch list. I would work on the sketch I was working on and then the first person who came up with a sketch book when I was done would get the next sketch. 2) no fixed prices. Since I didn't plan to do sketches, I left it up to each person to pay me what they would be happy paying for the sketch. Everyone REALLY HATED THIS NEW POLICY. Which I understood completely, but the fact remained I hadn't intended to do sketches and I would have been happy to not do sketches so (as my Dad used to say) "Be reasonable: do it my way." The first one ended up being for Alex, the new kid on the block at Paradise Comics (hiring him just before the Toronto show falls into the category of Trial by Combat) who wanted me to sketch a Cerebus as Captain America on the cover of the DEATH OF A LEGEND or whatever they called it where they left a blank space in the middle of the cover. So, I was sort of sitting there fuming about the fact that no one was looking at the photorealism art I had brought. Fuming but in what I hoped was an intelligent way: Dave, you are the only person in the world who even thinks about Stan Drake and Al Williamson and Rip Kirby and Johnstone & Cushing, et al. You can lead comic book fans to water but you can't make them drink.

Zero super-heroes/zero movies=zero interest.

So I sort of took that out on the background on Alex's sketch using the super-fine ballpoint pen I had with me to dense-pack the area to what was a Reduced Movie Poster density (roughly two inches by five inches so, pretty dense), chatting with Malcolm the whole time. Pretend you fit in here, Dave. Pretend they asked you to do a thumb-nail for a Death of Captain America movie poster and the artist who does the best one in forty minutes gets the commission. Gives you a rough idea of the mental contortions I have to go through to find a way to fit into the comic-book field as constituted in 2007. And, of course, the gag that I came up with was Cerebus as Captain America with a bullet wound in his head going "Ouchie." The larger point being that it is RIDICULOUS to even suggest that you can kill Captain America. You can kill the fictional character on a temporary basis (and I suspect Marvel's actual motivation is the same as DC's motivation in killing Jimmy Olsen or whatever Paul Levitz has decided to do to him: it's a basic capitalized "SCREW YOU" to Joe Simon and Jerry Seigel's family, respectively, for having made progress in recovering their characters under the new Not Made at Disney copyright laws. Basically, you can make progress in recovering your characters but because we own them right now we can mutilate them before your eyes and there's nothing you can do about it. Needless to say, Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor have nothing on these people. How old is Joe Simon? How old is Mrs. Joanne Seigel? You want them to carry this scummy baggage of yours with them for the next twenty years? You want them to carry it with them to their respective graves? Is that the idea?) and make it an ill-concealed Liberal conceit in doing so. As Tom Crippen so astutely put it in the latest COMICS JOURNAL "Together to a New Future" (May, 2007):

"Looking for political allegory in CIVIL WAR is embarrassing. There it is, poking out all over like the band of somebody's underwear. ('Captain America Assassinated!' Yes, we all feel pretty bad about the Bush years.) Viewed charitably, the 'political' stuff is dreamwork.. The subconscious of the super-hero genre has some mighty work to do, so the whole Marvel line sleepwalks through the kind of epic bad night that sometimes goes with personality redirection."

Let me just express reassurance right here to Joe Simon (and I hope that anyone who is in touch with him will see that he reads this) that he needn't worry FOR ONE SECOND about whatever is being done to Captain America right now. When the current proprietors are all at the Old Folks Home with their walkers and wheelchairs pulled in a tight circle mindlessly singing "Give Peace a Chance" over and over again to no one in particular, Captain America will still stand for all that is good and true and decent about America, just the way you and Jack Kirby created him. You can make book on it, sir.

Anyway, Alex paid me $140 for the sketch which was about $100 more than I would have charged him for it and the You Set the Price was established with the result that I made about the same amount of money doing sketches that I did last year on about a quarter the number of sketches. One guy even stood and watched me finish a sketch so he would make sure he was the next in line whereas everyone else when I told them I didn't have a sketch list and I would just do the next sketch for whoever was there when 1 was done this just wandered off without another word (obviously in search of an artist with better manners). Needless to say he got a really good sketch for his patience and interest.

And, along the same lines, sincere THANKS to Billy Tucci and Joe Linsner for dropping by the table to say hello. Ordinarily I wouldn't print their names here because of the potential Association With Dave Sim Backlash, but I asked both of them flat out if they would be willing to be part of the series of prints that I'll be selling over the next while autographed by me and other people (me and Chet on the COLLECTED LETTERS 2 cover, me and Siu Ta on the SIU TA SO FAR strip #4) and they both said sure. I mean, without hesitation. Just send the prints down and they'll sign them and send them back.

Checking the "overnight cable traffic" (i.e. the fax machine) here at the Off-White House, 1 have a new communique from my Technical Director and Research Assistant in [name].

So, keep watching the www.cerebusart.com website under "prints" for further details. The Billy Tucci one will be the double page spread that I did of SHI for the big guest artist book that he did (my original black and white version: all me and no Billy except for the use of his character) and the Joe Linsner one will be a colour piece he did of Cerebus and Dawn from CRY FOR DAWN back in 1992 (all Joe and no me except for the use of my character).

It's now 1100 Hours, EST, and owing to the peculiarities of the Blog & Mail tomorrow we'll be skipping back to the beginning of the day, 0625 Hours, EST, now that we've taken care of the first order of business, apologies to David Peterson and all that that led to.

___________________________________________________

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 #294 (July 2nd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Monday July 2 –

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

DAVE SIM & MARVEL COMICS – WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Yes, nothing really happening there at this point. I made my observation in the last batch of Blog & Mails that they have another BILLION DOLLAR movie in the cineplexes so it seemed a little bizarre to be haggling my way up from this many hundreds of dollars to that many hundreds of dollars for ONE cover. But, that does bring up some interesting points that I'd like to discuss over the next couple of days.

To start with, of course, the BILLION DOLLARS isn't just lying around the Marvel offices in New York. Most of it is in Hollywood and staying in Hollywood. At least with the SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN franchises. Marvel's senior management (way up high over Joe Quesada's head Senior Management) has gotten pretty clever. They had an item in the financial pages of the National Post explaining how they are putting up characters and blocks of characters as collateral to finance the movies they're developing right now. The banks and financial institutions are giving them Big Budget Movie amounts of money with the option to foreclose on "fill in the blank" characters if the movie(s) tank(s). Again, not SPIDER-MAN and the X-MEN but I would suspect with the HULK that is the case. The Ang Lee film made a few million bucks – not enough to warrant a franchise but maybe enough to warrant a sequel which is being worked on so there is dollar value to the intellectual property. "How much" is an interesting question for whatever banking consortium is a) involved and b) potentially "on the hook" if the sequel totally bombs such that they would end up foreclosing on a dead or moribund property which banking consortiums are not much inclined towards. Which is where, from what I understand, the "blocks of characters" come in. They would get a VDH (Virtually Dead Hulk) but they would also get…and that's where it gets interesting again…other intellectual properties. I get the giggles whenever I picture a consortium of bankers and big money men sitting in a glass and steel 128th floor office at a big conference table going

"Hmmm. `The Vision' and the… `Scarlet Witch'. Tell me some more about these two."

"Uhhh. Well, see, The Vision is an android."

"An ANDROID!"

"Yep."

"Fascinating. What's an android?"

And it's not a joke. Or it's not a CONSCIOUS joke anyway. It's a joke in the sense that buddy's wearing a three-piece suit that probably cost more than four months' rent on your apartment and he's really having to understand this stuff because he's got a big stack of poker chips --say a thousand of them and each one worth $100,000 -- that he's going to hand over to someone he hardly knows based on what that guy can tell him about these characters running around in their long underwear.

You couldn't make that up.

UPDATE 25 JUNE – A good example of how days get eaten up around here This should have been the first "posting" for this week but got knocked out of that slot with the "overnight cable traffic" and then Recker had some trouble with their fax machine which took a few minutes to straighten out. But this was definitely supposed to be the lead item:

SINCERE apologies to MOUSE GUARD's David Peterson for my misconstruing his being up to his eyeballs with a hit comic for being one of the Legion of Anti-Daves who just can't bring themselves to cop to it. He made a point of coming up at Torontocon to tell me that he is definitely interested in doing a jam cover for FOLLOWING CEREBUS but that he just hadn't had time to get back to me. Meanwhile I'm standing there smiling with a combination of relief and apprehension because I'm picturing the Blog & Mail entry that's in the hopper for Tuesday June 19. I actually tried to get Craig Miller to do Advance Damage Control for me but he misunderstood what I was asking about and basically just called more attention to the June 19 piece (it was one of Craig's 24/7 weeks with Jennifer where, as he says, he is able to do anything as long as it doesn't take longer than 15 seconds because that's how long a stretch there is between Pressing Needs of a Three-Year-Old who is currently breaking all North American records for sleeplessness). He basically wrote all of the fill-in blog entries in the hour or so that she would sleep on any given night. He did a great job. As Jeff Tundis says, he's a natural when it comes to blogging so I think I'm going to get him to fill in anytime there's a new issue of FC coming out. I basically decided that I deserved to be "called out" on my mis-characterization of David's radio silence. In my own defence, I'll say that it's also an unhappy net effect of feminism that I have to decide these things: I have to be realistic enough to know that there are people who shun me because of my anti-feminist views even while I have to avoid letting that swerve into areas of paranoia.

I'll ALSO say in my own defence that, even when I thought I had run afoul of David Peterson's political beliefs I never stopped saying good things about MOUSE GUARD, most recently the day before the Toronto show when Peter Birkemoe at The Beguiling saw me thumbing through the hardcover and mentioned that he thought the lettering was a drawback to the book, particularly the font size of the ornate script that David was using in some of the captions. As always, I tried to look at it through someone else's eyes.

Was that a fair criticism? – No, no I didn't think so. Even speaking as (ahem) a onetime Harvey Award winner for Lettering I thought the best thing about the font and the size-of-font was that it compelled you to look at the page more closely to make sure of what you were reading. As a result you get a far greater appreciation for the detail and complexity of the art style that David is using because you can't "pull back" fast enough between captions to a comfortable comic-book reading distance. I used the same trick on occasion in Cerebus to call attention to Gerhard's line-work. Not on a regular basis but when I would have a dialogue balloon or thought balloon fade out to tiny, tiny lettering, I was making use of the same effect. The reader's eye which has penetrated deeper into the page than the reader is accustomed to, comes off the balloon and hits Gerhard's line-work and realizes "Holy S__T! Look at all the TEENY TINY lines".

So, tentatively, I have scheduled the jam cover for FOLLOWING CEREBUS 12 (hopefully by the end of the year or early next year) and, again, SINCERE apologies to David Peterson.

Tomorrow: More Good News from Paradise Toronto Comicon
___________________________________________________

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 #293 (July 1st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

Okay, here we are at the Sunday Edition and here's an excerpted question and answer from Victor Davis Hanson's interview with THE JERUSALEM POST (WARNING: THE WHOLE THING GOT A LITTLE OUT OF HAND ONCE I GOT DOWN TO BRASS TACKS)


CONSIDERING ANCIENT ISRAEL'S ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, DOES BEING A CLASSICAL HISTORIAN INFLUENCE YOUR CURRENT VIEWS ON ISRAEL?

Yes, especially the pseudo-claims by Israel's enemies of an eternal Islamic or Arab homeland, as if Jews, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans, and Europeans have not all staked their claims on the Middle East. History is unkind, and does not magically settle mythic claims like Zeus on Olympus. In the case of present-day Israel, it is unique in that the Jews were the first settlers of Israel, and presently they have the legal right, the military strength, and the cultural dynamism to enhance and protect their homeland.

Hanson touches on an interesting point here with the idea of the Eternal Islamic homeland which is one of those core elements of Islam that gets overlooked easily by the "infidel" but which is a key point as far as I'm considered if you want to understand what there isn't a whole lot of communication between Muslims and non-Muslims.

To most Muslims, Islam is pre-existent in the same way that Christians see Jesus as being pre-existent. Before the earth was, Jesus was. Before there was Judaism and Christianity there was Islam. It's a nuanced argument along the lines of Christianity usurping the Logos, the Word from Greek Philosophy. In the Koran, Abraham is referred to as being a Muslim. Jesus is referred to as being a Muslim. King David was a Muslim, Solomon was a Muslim, Mary was a Muslim, Joseph was a Muslim and so on. In what is popularly believed to be Muhammad's farewell address to his people, he says, "Today I have perfected your religion for you." And that's very much the sense that Muslims have of what occurred in the seventh century. The Muslim faith, the notion of submitting to the will of God -- what we would describe today as Monotheistic faith -- had existed throughout human history but was perfected on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. Further, the Koran states explicitly that those who had received the Word of God previously had sold their scriptures for a mean price and moved the words out of their places – "publishing some but concealing most" (my own best assessment is that this is a YHWH-inspired quote in the Koran reflecting what I assume is he/she/it's getting his/her/it's nose out of joint because the interminable ramblings of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy represent only a fraction of what he/she/it wanted to have carved in stone. If you've ever actually read the "How To Build a Tabernacle" and "YHWH's Favourite Mutilated Cattle Recipes" (which I have: many, many, many sincerely stultifying times) this should come as no surprise. YHWH can, indeed, "go on" once he/she/it gets "on a roll".

So this Islamic fact of looking down on Jews and Christians as terminal screw-ups becomes a core problem in addressing the issue of the historical right of the Jewish People to Jerusalem and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). It is bone-deep in the Islamic faith that the histories in the Torah are intrinsically false. It's a most peculiar leap of faith to hold onto for anyone familiar with the scriptures of all three monotheistic faiths since the sense conveyed in the Koran regarding the Torah and the Gospels (sometimes mentioned by name, sometimes just alluded to in a way that you could legitimately infer what is being described is Apocryphal Judaic and Christian texts) is of the Torah and the Gospels being corrupted texts but it is certainly not a sense that they are completely misapprehended from top to bottom. But, as a result of this…I have to call a spade a spade…prejudice on the part of Islam, Islam tends to hold the same views of the Torah that Christians do.

That is, most Christians and most Muslims are ONLY familiar with those aspects of the Torah that their own entrenched priesthoods make use of. Most Christians only know those texts which foretell (or had come to popularly be believed to foretell) the coming of the Davidic Meschiach even though Messiah is only mentioned twice in the Christian "Old Testament" in Daniel 9:25-26 and Daniel wasn't accepted by Jews as canonical until the Maccabean time period (which is roughly the day before yesterday in Judaic historical terms) and Daniel isn't included in the Orthodox Judaic canon. It always boggles my mind all of the ancillary Judaic literature and "literature" that Protestant Christians shovelled in between the scriptural books Ezekiel and Hosea.

[Coincidentally I just finished that part in my Sabbath readings and it's always a funny moment, because I always forget. The Sunday after I finish reading Ezekiel aloud, I find Ezekiel and turn to the next page and then flip through and flip through and flip through "Where in the heck did those wacky Protestants hide the next Actual Jewish Prophet? Oh, finally. Hosea. Here he is."]

And the Christians always bring the same level of…let me again call a spade a spade…pig-headedness to the issue that Muslims do. A virgin will be with child and she shall call his name Emmanuel. Well, she DIDN'T call him Emmanuel: according to Christian theology, she called him Jesus. They know Isaiah 53 and ignore the rest of the book and ignore any context. For most Christians Isaiah starts and ends with chapter 53. Likewise Jeremiah 25. Apart from chapter 25, Christians aren't interested. Micah 5:3. You'd think given that Micah is only seven chapters long that maybe Christians could actually read all seven chapters. Nope. Micah 5:3 and the rest of it might just as well be written in Sanskrit as far as Christians are concerned.

Most Muslims are familiar with the Johannine Jesus' promise that he would send a comforter in his place who would speak all that was said to him. Known as the paraclete, Christians believe this entity to be the Holy Ghost whereas Muslims believe it to be Muhammad.

But that's really the limit of their interest in the Gospels is that one reference. Conveniently and (to me) perversely, they believe that passage to be irrefutably true while believing everything else in the Gospels to be complete fabrications and lies. They also believe – because it says so in the Koran – that Jesus promised that there would come another "like him" who would be called "Ahmad". Of course there is no reference to an "Ahmad" anywhere in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles or even (as far as I can remember) anything in the Apocrypha. But, they make use of the Koran in refuting that: the "Ahmad" reference is one of those "concealed" scriptures that the "infidel" has removed from the Gospels. It's almost mind-boggling in its intellectual dishonesty: using one passage to establish the Gospels as absolute truth and another passage to establish the Gospels as absolute lies.

When (as I attempt to do) you try to keep all three religions in your mind on an even keel, these are the points where you begin to see Islam and Christianity lurching in the direction of…let me call a spade a spade again…clinical insanity.

To me, the Torah is the lifeline of monotheistic faith. Without the proper chronologies (borrowed and added to by the Gospels and mangled and strewn haphazardly through the Koran) dating back to Adam there is really very little for mankind in this Epoch to go on. There is nothing in the same league with those chronologies. We have confidence, as monotheists, in the Judaic Genealogical Record because it is complete as far back as we can document it…and we can document it back thousands of years. The events in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel actually happened. We have independent confirmation of that and of the dates attached to them, the other empires that existed at the same time and the rulers of those empires. Comparably we have empirical evidence of the Judaic experiment with monarchy, in Israel and in Judah. So, we can pretty confidently say that if the historical record is verifiable as far back as we have records then we can pretty safely assume that it is verifiable at the point whe