Dave Sim's blogandmail #444 (November 29th, 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An interviewer has asked Einstein if his idea of God is Spinoza's God. [Baruch Spinoza, 18th century philosopher who taught that reality is one substance with an infinite number of attributes of which only thought and extension are capable of being apprehended by the human mind]

I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.

Obviously, I consider any form of pantheism to be misguided and I think if you believe in the soul and body as being one (which I definitely don't believe) instead of two then you have effectively turned your back on monotheism. The quick leap from "fascination" to "admiration" I find troubling as well and I see it as a systemic poison in our society. There are many fascinating theories of creation and the nature of reality but I think the core reality is which one of them do you believe? Otherwise you just go through your life successively fascinated by Mother Nature, Kali, the Easter Bunny and whatever science fiction novel you read last week. Which leads into the next question:

Do you believe in immortality?

No. And one life is enough for me.

I'd see that as having a couple of different comedic layers to it. I think "No" is Einstein's sincere answer to the question, both as a human being and as a soul. The second part of the answer I think comes from the demon that would have been inhabiting him because of his atheistic/agnostic ways which left him vulnerable to incursion which then became permanent because of his choice not to pray or engage in any sort of acknowledgement of God's sovereignty. The demon was obviously prevailing (easily!) over Einstein's God-given soul and was therefore in the pilot seat and could say that his/her/its only concern was Einstein's one life. If he/she/it prevails (as he/she/it presumably did: Einstein never shifted his focus to prayer, Scripture or any other than a "dim awareness" of God, then Einstein's soul wasn't going any further) ("One life is enough for me."). Even in terms of forensic accuracy, the correct answer would be "As a human being, I think one life is enough for me." That might not, however, have been how God planned it. Einstein's life in this world might have been just the first stage in a multi-stage upward progression that Einstein's aborted through his conscious choice to do so.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

Well, in that case I wouldn't describe him as devoutly religious at all. As I keep trying to emphasize, submitting yourself to the will of God isn't the same as understanding God or (as Einstein suggests here) "grasping" God. Wonder and standing "rapt in awe" are good first steps, but if the entirety of your life unfolds and all you've managed to do relative to God is stand in wonder and awe at the immensity of His works then I don't think you will have fulfilled your potential in His eyes. I think you have to start with submission to His will and then aspire to fulfilling your potential there and to keep your eye on the ball and to realize (as Einstein must have consciously realized better than most) that virtually everything you see that appears real is strictly illusory and transitory. If you can mentally eliminate all of those things from your top priorities and replace them with He whom "our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly" then I think that can take you in a far more positive direction.

Boston's William Henry Cardinal O'Connell addresses this pretty directly (as he is quoted in the article):

The outcome of this doubt and befogged speculation about time and space is a cloak beneath which hides the ghastly apparition of atheism.

It's a good way of putting it. Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish leader in New York sent a very direct telegram to Princeton, "Do you believe in God? Stop Answer paid Stop 50 words Stop" That is, he prepaid for a return telegram. Einstein answered

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself (sic) in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Well, in that case, you don't believe in God, as far as I can see, at least not in a Scriptural God who revealed Himself to man through His Scriptural revelations. The use of the male gender pronoun is a convenience that you can use or dispense with because you take it as an agnostic given that the answer is impenetrable. There is no difference between that God and Mother Nature. Or Nature as a neutral reality of symmetrical and orderly happenstance. Your God can be a he… a she…or an it…or all three simultaneously. And to me that's the point of the (presumably) cosmos-spanning debate in which, here on our lonely little blue pearl of an outpost, our local YHWH is the primary proponent of the infernal view. If you believe in the Scriptural God, the infernal view isn't possible. Definitively in the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran, God's gender is definitively masculine which rules out "she" and "it" as accurate pronouns.

A Bronx rabbi asserted that "Cardinal O'Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory. Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his non-belief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction."

I would disagree with that because I believe that belief is within each individual's jurisdiction. Einstein pronounced "What I Believe" which to me is sacrosanct. If he sincerely believed in the "unknowability" of God and could bring himself only to believe in a nebulous unknowable force behind "the lawful harmony of all that exists" well that's a free will protected choice, however uninformed and self-destructive I – or any Cardinal or Rabbi – might deem it to be. It was Einstein's choice and he'll pay the price for it if there's a price to be paid (which I think I and the Cardinal and the Rabbi would agree that there will, indeed, be a price that needs to be paid). Just as the Cardinal will pay the price if his beliefs prove to be unfounded, as the Rabbi will and as I will. I also think the Cardinal was on solid ground establishing that – whatever else it may be -- "speculation about space and time" constitutes "a cloak" for intrinsic atheism (I thought he was being diplomatic in keeping it as an "apparition"). In Einstein's case, his conclusions led him to infer that there was no need to have a relationship with God and to advocate that as the sensible way of dealing with reality.

The Theory of Relativity=Spinoza's God. QED.

Well, by stating it that overtly what Einstein is doing is endorsing a viewpoint and tipping however many people in a direction away from God, or at least away from Orthodox Catholic or Judaic observance and, arguably, away from a conscious sense of morality. I don't think he meant to do that but most people at the time just assumed that Einstein was the smartest person who ever lived so if he told you that God was this remote unknowable force uninvolved and unconcerned with mankind that carried a lot more weight than I think he intended it to carry (and a late realization of that might account for his anecdote about his uncle "Ah, but you never know," that is, admitting that he had no actual knowledge on the subject himself, one way or the other). Even if my own theories of the structure and nature of reality prove to be unfounded, I think I'm on safer ground counselling submission to the will of God as a first priority: counselling a reality which holds God as a complete irrelevance to individual men and to mankind in general seems to me self-evidently infernal in nature. No good can come of it, in my view.

There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.

Tomorrow: My view of Einstein's assertion: There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.





___________________________________________________

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 #443 (November 28th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

The million-dollar question posed to Einstein around his 50th birthday by an interviewer: Did the great physicist believe in God?

I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

I think it would have been more accurate for Einstein to say, "You're asking the wrong person. You're assuming that because I figured out one little contradiction/glitch in our perceptions of space/time and the fact that that solution led to the creation of the atomic bomb that I know all of God's secrets. I haven't really figured anything out of any great significance since I came up with the Theory of Relativity and that's almost thirty years ago now, almost half a human lifespan. A Complete Unified Theory has escaped me and I was working on it before and I've been working on it since." The more you know in the maths and the sciences, I think he was saying, the more you realize that you have only a dim understanding of how the whole of reality is put together. You can figure out how space/time works and from that an atomic weapon can be built – or a nuclear power plant -- but that doesn't even begin to solve or even address the idea of whether, say, interstellar travel is possible. All that he had been able to figure out had only established for him just how an immense a proposition even perceiving the nature of reality was. Einstein only dimly grasped the immensity of the metaphorical library we are in and could only perceive just how limited his own perception and capacity was, while most people thought of him as the New Librarian who would be able to assimilate and explain all of the books to us or at least figure out whatever we wanted figured out: how to change lead into gold, how to create a car that ran on bottled water, how to create a 100% effective means of birth control, how to teach monkeys to talk and play chess and so on.

The larger point for me is submission to the will of the Actual Librarian, God, who wrote all of the books and understands every word and every nuance in them. That brings me back to Scripture. The limitations of the human mind and the human lifespan are a given, the immensity of the Library is a given, the ultimately futility of however many man hours Einstein devoted to the Unified Theory is a given. From that I extrapolate that everyone is better served by having the Actual Librarian direct them since we are, as Einstein said, dramatically limited in every meaningful aspect of effective action. No one but the Actual Librarian is going to know the best use of our 70-or-so years given our severely limited grasp of the nature of reality.

Is this a Jewish concept of God? the interviewer next wanted to know.

I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew.

I think Einstein's defining himself as a determinist originates in his discovery of the underlying nature of space/time that, in effect, everything that will happen has already happened if you expand the context far enough. Einstein was born when he was born and died when he died and in the context of the fifth dimension of time he is, as Alan Moore has pointed out, a metaphorical millipede or snake-like being that begins here and ends there and was doing, has done and, for all space/time, will do only the things that he was doing, has done and will do all along the winding millipede like track of his life. Einstein, probably more than anyone, perceived that more accurately and earlier than anyone else did. Alan Moore could only come up with the metaphor because of the work that Einstein did.

But that in no way refutes the reality that Einstein did actually make choices. Every Friday that he chose to work after sundown he violated his (residual?) Orthodox Judaic faith. Every Sunday I choose to do the opposite, to not work, to rest, to read and comment on Scripture from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday. That doesn't mean that I shape my own life (so far as I know) but it does mean that I shape a part of my life, and it does mean that there are choices that I make that I believe are significant: significant for the exact reason that I don't inhabit the larger context. Although linear living is illusory, that is how I perceive my life, that is the context I inhabit, so I try to make good choices instead of bad choices. Whether there are alternate realities where my better choices have a net positive effect even while in the main reality I continue to drink and to womanize and so on, that is beyond the limitations of my mind to perceive. But choices I perceive. Choosing to fast for four days every three weeks, to fast in Ramadan but not to choose Islam OVER Christianity and Judaism, those are all choices. Arguably the only person who would know if I broke Sabbath would be God. I never see anyone I know in town and most of them have no idea of my observance. But breaking Sabbath – going out and eating in a restaurant, having a glass of wine, taking in a movie – would be, to me, a significant negative act so I don't do it. It is now true that Dave Sim has only broken Sabbath a handful of times since the late 1990s, that he always did and always will observe a Sabbath in the larger context of space/time from the late 1990s to 2007. But the decision still has to be made next Saturday night, next Sunday morning, next Sunday afternoon, next Sunday evening, next Sunday night. And the one after that and the one after that and the one after that until, metaphorically speaking, my millipede is completed and it can be said that I observed a Sabbath from the late 1990s to the point of my death with a handful of exceptions. And I do think that that decision would shape my life and would have a larger net positive effect than whatever Einstein was doing from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday for the last forty or fifty years of his life.

The interviewer next wants to know: Is this Spinoza's God?

Tomorrow: Is Einstein's idea of God Spinoza's idea of God?





___________________________________________________

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 #442 (November 27th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, in answer to the question "Should Jews try to assimilate?":

"We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform."

My assessment of this would depend on what he means by "idiosyncrasies" and what the interviewer (whom Einstein evidently misbelieved to be a Jew and who, instead, "proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser and (who) would later become a Nazi sympathizer") meant by the term "assimilate". I think you can change your mode of dress, as an example, and remain a Good Jew but I also think that surrendering religious observance -- observance as mandated in the Torah -- is a far more serious matter. Of course, I'm strictly a "Scripturalist". Orthodox Jews would disagree with me vehemently on any subject covered in the Talmud. You can't be a Good Jew unless you obey the Torah the way the Talmud tells you to. To me the Talmud are commentaries, like the Hadith in Islam or Paul's Epistles in Christianity. A lot of Germans of the time would see assimilation as naturally including apostasy: you haven't assimilated until you've given up the Synagogue for the Lutheran Church. In fact, the next question seemed to point in that direction.

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?

As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

This strikes me as either disordered thinking, an attempt to occupy contradictory positions or (I think more likely) simple Jewish self-preservation in a context where the next Christian pogrom against the Jews was never far away (in this case less than a decade). Einstein did attend a Catholic school (his parents were complete atheists) so presumably what he means is "I received instruction both in the Gospels and the Torah," unless he's being forensically accurate and is using "The Bible" as a way of avoiding a direct answer. As I say, it might be simple self-preservation. To the Christian ear of the time, "in the Bible and in the Talmud" would translate as "the Gospels and the Torah" since the Bible was seen by (and still is seen by) most German Lutherans as consisting of a true New Testament and a false or discredited Old Testament. Just calling it "the Bible" would provide a certain amount of cover if Einstein suspected that his interrogator was a Christian – "I've been influenced by Christianity at least to the extent that I call it the Bible" – and would likewise provide an appropriate nuance if the interrogator was a Jew – "I call it the Bible, but I also studied the sharper intricacies of Mosaic Law in the Talmud".

"Enthralled" could be comparably forensic and euphemistic. You can be equally "in the thrall" of John F. Kennedy or Adolf Hitler. It really just denotes an inescapable charisma or force which the Jews had certainly experienced at the hands of Jesus' successors (the endless Christian pogroms against the Jews, again). "Luminous figure" would translate differently to the Christian and Judaic ear. To the Christian ear, it would come across as a derivation of "I am the way and the light" which would compel the inference that Einstein was a convert to Christianity or was bordering on becoming a convert which was the stock-in-trade of being a Jew at a time when you were always, in one way or another, under a Christian death sentence and how you phrased your assessment of Christianity could mean the difference between life and death. In a Judaic sense, "luminous figure" could denote a marginalized political figure along the lines of the Apocryphal "Sons of Light and sons of Darkness" of later non-scriptural Judaism (such as were being found at Qumran – the Dead Sea Scrolls – around that time). That is, Jesus was probably more of a son of light than a son of darkness, but no big deal except for the way it's worked out for the Jews. Likewise calling him the Nazarene. To the Christian ear it would denote a level of familiarity with the Gospels that would likewise denote interest which they always tend to read as borderline, virtual or actual capitulation to Christianity. To know him is to love him, kind of thing. To the Judaic ear, I don't think much would have changed since Philip inquired regarding the Johannine Jesus "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" That is, Nazareth was about the lowest of the low Judaically speaking and the natural assumption was that anyone coming out of Nazareth was probably a shyster or something similar.

You accept the historical existence of Jesus?

Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

This would be a DUH question for any Jew who had experienced or heard of Christian treatment of Jews which Einstein would have known intimately. If Jesus hadn't existed, then how do you explain this astronomical level of poisonous animosity directed against Jews by a religion founded on his teachings? If you had studied the Torah and the Talmud and then read the Gospels, it would be pretty clear that this is where the gross Christian hatred of Jews originated from. I experienced it myself having read the entire Torah and Apocrypha before reading the Gospels:

Oh. Christianity is about profound hatred and unthinking malice directed towards Jews. I get it. I certainly don't agree with it, but I get it.

(There's a lot of that in monotheism that I never dreamed existed: A letter writer in the National Post this morning says that the Koran says in three different places that Muhammad changed the Jews into monkeys and pigs. I've read the Koran dozens of times, twice through most recently during Ramadan. I can assure you that it doesn't say anything remotely like that anywhere. Just as the Jews can assure you that virtually everything the Synoptic Jesus says about the Torah is misquoted or quoted out of context. Doesn't do any good when it originates in the emotionalism of profound hatred and unthinking malice.)

Do you believe in God? the interviewer next wants to know.


Tomorrow: Did Einstein believe in God?





___________________________________________________

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 #441 (November 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

We left off yesterday with this quote from Albert Einstein in the April 19 issue of TIME magazine:

The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.

This is presumably revelatory for secular humanists and will cause more than a few of them sleepless nights (did Einstein really say that?) but in terms of faith, again, there is nothing alluded to here that couldn't be Mother Nature, Kali or the Easter Bunny. "Dim consciousness" is a freely protected free will choice: if you choose not to believe in God and not to read Scripture and not to pray I think it's pretty much a given that your awareness of God will remain in your "dim consciousness" and your life will instead be dominated by your pleasure centers, vested interest and whatever "particles/waves flying in loose formation" self-hypnotism to which you choose to actively or passively submit. You can believe that nature is "in no way an accidental game" without coming near to believing that there is any purpose to life, and you can believe that life is "not accidental" while still believing that morality is an arbitrary cultural prejudice, that all morality is relative and that all ethics are situational and so on. There is any number of antonyms for "accidental" before you come anywhere close to ethical and moralistic interpretations of the term lawfulness. Newton's laws of motion are very different from Thou Shalt Not Kill but I don't get a sense that Einstein sees it that way. This appears to be as close as he ever came to a religious sensibility and he came to it late in life. The next quote from Einstein is

Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was crushing impression.

This is Timestyle again: putting the early youthful rebellion against faith in Scripture after the closest proximity to religious faith that Einstein achieved decades later, obviously to prejudice the article in favour of the former view. To devout secular-humanists like the editors of Time, "a fanatic orgy of free thinking" is the thing devoutly to be wished so long as it steers people away from religious faith. The next quote from Einstein is an anecdote where a dinner guest has lumped in religious faith with astrology as pure superstition and is apprised of the fact that Einstein himself harbours religious beliefs. Disbelieving, the dinner guest seeks verification, to which Einstein replies:

Yes you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

Again, the secular-humanist mind will totter on its foundation at this, but Mother Nature, Kali and the Easter Bunny are equally subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration can also mean different things for different people and I assume that Einstein's form of veneration was for that which his own empirical scientific mind and philosophy could not encompass, explain or dissect while in no way dealing Scripture and prayer into the game. It has as much to do with the "limited means" of human beings as it does with any kind of Higher Nature. Drawing a distinction between Einstein's views and my own, I don't find God be to either subtle (although He can act with great subtlety), intangible (although He certainly isn't tangible in any human sense) or inexplicable

[that's what Scripture is for as far as I can see: explication of God and YHWH and what the context is in which we find ourselves: to cite to immediate modern examples, feminism and gay liberation are just two manifestations of YHWHist nature, he/she/itism. The fact that Scripture is and has been so widely misinterpreted as to make God and YHWH into the same being doesn't, to me, mean that Scripture is inexplicable any more than the Theory of Relativity is inexplicable because you refuse to apply yourself to understanding it or because you have misunderstood it on your first or one hundredth time through an explanation of it]

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein gave an interview where he offered these views:

On whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. "It's possible to be both. Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind."

I find that interesting but glib since the point of the question is really whether it is possible to be a Good German and a Good Jew simultaneously. Einstein attacks the former instance in what I see as a "too general" way. German nationalism hadn't yet hatched out into Nazism and when it did it would change the thrust of the question. And by attacking Nationalism rather than the popular concept of the Good German at the time, he dodged the question entirely on what makes a Good Jew. Eschewing military service, as an example, would have made him a Bad German but a Good Jew (in an Orthodox sense), an irresolvable dilemma particularly when Judaism itself became a pariah reality during the Third Reich.

Should Jews try to assimilate?

Tomorrow: Einstein on "Should Jews try to assimilate?"





___________________________________________________

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 #440 (November 25th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


Just as we were leaving the Norman Rockwell Museum the Saturday night of the opening ceremonies, Matt Dow gave me a copy of Time magazine which contained an article on Albert Einstein's views on God ("Einstein & Faith" April 16, 2007) and suggested that it might make a good Sunday Edition piece for me to comment on.

It's an exclusive excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography of the great physicist. I imagine the piece has been "Timestyled" to a fare-thee-well, so I'll try to limit my extracts to Einstein's specific quotes. Here's an example of why I'm doing so:

In his later years Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, "Ah, but you never know."

I would consider the "old joke" reference to be pejorative, prejudicial and classic Timestyle. It's not a joke, it's an anecdote or a family tradition that the unnamed agnostic uncle would say what he did. To call it a joke is to compel the inference that agnosticism, as opposed to atheism, is intrinsically humorous, which again prejudices any discussion about faith in God.

Another hallmark of Timestyle is that we hear first from his "worshipful (!) younger sister" before this lengthy quote from Einstein:

When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance: The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.

It's an interesting passage, but, shorn of its Timestyle "spin" (the lead in to the paragraph and the drawn inference of the succeeding paragraph) it's readily apparent that the passage has nothing to do with faith or God and is, in fact, introduced to prejudice the discussion away from faith in God. The subsequent paragraph concludes with two quotes from Einstein:

spirit manifest in the laws of the universe

again, without the Timestyle "spin" bracing the embedded quote it doesn't really mean much of anything and certainly tells the reader nothing of Einstein's views. This is followed by

God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.

This at least tells us that Einstein was of the "Nebulous God" theological school. The problem that I see with a quote like this is that – like those who see God as love rather than love as a manifestation of and implication of God – it tends to diminish God. I would certainly agree that "the harmony of all that exists" is a manifestation of God and a direct implication of the universal reality of God but I think it far more sensible to believe that God reveals Himself primarily and more specifically through Scripture, the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran. If His primary revelation is through natural harmony (the Theory of Relativity, the geometric and symmetrical purity of the planets' orbits around the sun among other things) then there is nothing to differentiate Him from Mother Nature or the Hindu goddess Kali or Some Mysterious Natural Order which is remote from and/or ignorant of human affairs, whereas Scripture (which is really all that we know Him through) is very specific in terms of gender (He is He) and very specific in terms of His role in human affairs: central, or rather Central.

The next quote from Einstein is

a work which I read with breathless attention

regarding the 21-volume People's Books on Natural Science which, of course, has nothing to do with God or religious faith. The next quote from Einstein is

The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.

Tomorrow: Get Comfy this may take a while

___________________________________________________

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 #439 (November 24th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #5 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

THE INEFFABLES: POLITICAL SCIENCE trade paperback is by Craig Bogart, another member of the Panel Collective (Tom Williams helps out with the cover colour and Dara Naraghi does the lettering on "Political Asylum"). If you're a) an atheistic secular humanist and b) a fan of early 60s Marvel Comics, this collection is for you. The Ineffables are Chet Burnett, a sometime journalist, Mason, a scientific genius animated Easter Island head, Clarity, a living piece of artwork, and the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln (who joins in the course of the "Patriot Act" storyline). It really is extreme leftist/atheistic stuff but it's very, very funny. Funny enough that I'll forgive Craig for misappropriating a Republican President for his shenanigans! Check it out at www.theineffables.com

WEIRD MUSE MINI COMIX has hit its third issue which is Dan and Carrie Taylor's joint effort and submission for the Day Prize this year. The first page is Carrie's and includes household hints, a "no bake cookies" recipe and a cute photo of three kittens. A 7-pager by Dan, "Think Twice and Be Nice", follows. Get the whole story at http://weirdmuse.ecrater.com

A STOOPID PIGEON TREASURY collection of Stoopid Pigeon strips written by Brett Neveu and drawn by Richard Sparks. There's Stoopid Pigeon, Aubrey the Robot, Strappy (a squirrel with a bad attitude and a permanent erection), Susan, a pretty girl with a skull head, a pumpkin and Josh, a disembodied head. You know, the usual. Sparks writes in the back: "Ten years ago Neveu walked up to me and said, `We should do a comic strip called Stoopid Pigeon.' I said, `Okay, as long as it's not funny.' We did, it wasn't, and now it's today. These are real tears. Don't look at me." Actually, it is very funny but I guess Sparks has "issues" so Neveu hasn't, you know, told him yet.

Jason Butler contributes HOME a black and white digest comic that contains four stories: "The Transformation", "Crosswalk", "The Last Time" and an untitled effort. He's still a ways from hitting a professional level, but he has a lot of ability in the composition/storytelling/pacing end of things. You can see his work at www.jasonbutlerart.com

Boy, between The Ineffables, Stoopid Pigeon and now Mr. Happy Pants, this is the year for unusual groups: this time out a cartoonist named Robby who buys a movie prop from They Saved Hitler's Brain that turns out to actually be the head of a still living college student who died while dressed up as Hitler at a Halloween party, a starving lab rat with a nose growing out of his back, Donald, a fish with narcolepsy and Mr. Happy Pants a psychotic clown and the cartoonist's friend Gus. You know, the usual. Tony Miello of Wyandotte, MI draws and writes it. His website is www.boneyardstudio.com. You think Tony Miello is done with you now? Foolish mortals! No, he also has a title from Twisted Gate Entertainment called GAPO THE CLOWN. Like Crusty the Clown only a little more over the top which you can check out at www.gapotheclown.com. "There are new strips every Tuesday and Friday. And over 250 comics to read in the archives. It's be a drunken, greased painted good time." That pretty much sums it up. 5 strips to the page and 24 pages so you're definitely getting your money's worth for $3.95.

Matt Dow has some major competition in the MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER category with THE ADVENTURES OF MARKY #1, written and drawn by six-year-old Maddie Shires with some help from her Dad, Ian Shires and published by Dimestore Productions. So Maddie wins a special Junior Day Prize reserved for cartoonists born in this century. As does Zach Flippo even though, because he's 10 he's actually a "last century" cartoonist. We've been missing a RAM (Really Adorable Moment) at the Day Prize Ceremony up `til now, but I think handing out two Junior Day Prizes just before the Day Prize itself should do it, I think, and give me a leg up on becoming the Art Linkletter of Independent Comics.

Hey, here's another Truly Infernal Comic called TWISTED TOTS. Explicit sex and extreme graphic violence. It all started with SR & JC Griffith's Twisted Tots website, TWISTED TOTS ("Rotten to the core horror dolls custom made to scare the hell out of you. And you thought your kids were bad…Zombies, vamps, demons, evil clowns, gory and autopsy tots") http://www.twistedtots.net. Well, it seems that it wasn't perverse enough taking innocent little dolls and modifying them infernally, no, now they needed a comic-book version of them with, as I say, explicit gruesome horror and sex. I figured this would make a great follow-up to 6 year-old Maddie Shires' and 10 year-old Zach Flippo's Junior Day Prizes since there's obviously nothing you folks like better than perverse corruption of innocent images purely for its own sake. www.twistedgate.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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #438 (November 23rd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #4 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

PANEL 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck How can you not love a title like that?). Yes, it's them wacky Panel Collective guys from Columbus, Andy Bennett, Steve Black, Craig Bogart, Tim Fischer, Tony Goins, Tim McClurg, Sean McGurr, Dara Naraghi and Tom Williams. Since I'm launching my own title this year, I'm cutting down on the 9-plaque nominees, which is a shame. This one comes with it's own 3-D glasses for the front cover by Tim Fischer and the back cover by Tom, both of which are really, really good. See what the Collective is up to at www.ferretpress.com

MINI RING KING from Jury Rigged Comics a digest comic with a boxing/wrestling theme with three of the Panel guys doing the honors, Sean "The Equalizer" McGurr, Tim "No Palooka" McClurg and Steve "Not a Tomato Can" Black. Has a full colour painted cover and four-page colour story by Steve Black. Includes pin-ups of Hulk Hogan, King Kong Bundy and Andre the Giant among others. Very nice package, stylish and (as a ring fan in recovery) it attracted my attention. Can they overcome the potential "3-plaque nomination jinx"? Stay tuned. Remember this is just the submissions stage right now.

FL!PPED: JOURNEY TO SPACE. I guess it had to happen eventually. Terry Flippo at 8-Ball Graphics contributes a 24-page digest part autobio, part fictional piece about him and the family coming out to SPACE. He's been here four times all the way from Mt. Airy Maryland. Good clean semi-pro/verging on pro style. He includes Jim Coon in his story who was one of the short-list nominees for 2006. FL!PPED was inspired by Jerry Smith's autobiographical comic SOUTHERN FRIED which you can check out at skybot99@yahoo.com.. He also submits ZACH FLIPPO'S MONSTER BOMB from Little Big Man Productions. Zach is his 10 year old son who has been drawing monsters since he was 8 and Dad gave him a hand with this digest-sized 24-pager. The inking's even better than on FL!PPED! No website for Terry (or Zach) but you can write them at 205 Breezewood Ct. in Mt. Airy, MD, 21771

High concept Hard center would describe BREAK-UP BOTS a fat mini-comic from Robert James Algeo's absentia press. Very funny. Basically each page is a different robot and a different break-up line (i.e. "Stop calling me at work." and "But you're the one who wanted to see other people" and "How can you expect me to compete with a dead person?") As it says on the indicia page: "The robots depicted in this book are fictitious. Similarities between them and any robot, living, dead, operational, decommissioned or disassembled are completely coincidental. Several robots were harmed emotionally during the making of this book."

This one has real break-out real world potential written all over it.

In an obvious effort to keep from getting typecast as the "Break-Up Robots" guy, Robert also produced a colour comic this year on high gloss paper with very high production values called SKULL PEN No.1. It's a really very straightforward title about really ordinary happenings: two friends playing video games, a computer store where they do repairs and in comes…SKULL PEN. A six foot ballpoint pen with a skull on the top of it who talks like Dr. Doom even while he's trying to just deal with the world on its own terms.

SKULL PEN: My, it seems as though you are quite the video game warrior, James. With a score of 10 to zero to your advantage, one wonders if Marshall's mind is truly focused on the matter at hand.

JAMES: Yeah, it's like he didn't even show up.

SKULL PEN: Yes…Well, on that note, I am off to participate in the drudgery of consumerism. I shall return later this eve.

JAMES: Cool. See you later, pen.

Check out both titles at: www.inabsentiapress.com

Rickey Gonzales of Pretentious Comics offers up VICTIMS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, a graphic novella, 75 pages, squarebound, digest sized. It's very accomplished material in the "Lives of Quiet Desperation" category with a multi-character cast that he manages to keep tightly reined in even as he goes to town with the narrator's introspection. A very difficult balancing act and I was very impressed. You can check it out at www.pretentiouscomics.com and this one definitely enters the graphic novel section of the Off-White House Library between Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's ALIENS adaptation and Jimmy Gownley's AMELIA RULES volumes.





___________________________________________________

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 #437 (November 22nd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #3 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

Christopher Dunsmore writes, pencils and inks OZARK MEAT #1. If the SOUTH PARK creators ever decided to do a slasher film comic book, it would probably read a lot like OZARK MEAT. Not quite "there" in terms of finish, but some interesting computer effects, soft focusing the backgrounds and so on. "Horror never tasted so good" it says on the cover. Some nudity and explicit extreme violence. www.quidndunz.com

RUFFIANS #6 from Brian Canini's DRUNKEN CAT comics out of San Diego. Regular SPACE patrons probably remember the Drunken Cat costume Brian had someone wearing a year or two ago. That had to be a first for indy comics. "Cancer Worn Soul" is a very interesting experiment in the character meets the creator field, this time done with drawings and photographs (by Patrick O'Dell) edited by Aaron Groch. A 14-pager with newsprint cover and interiors for $1.50. Check out Brian's work to date at www.drunkencatcomics.com

Hey, remember when I told you about Matt Dow's RACECAR? Well here it is again. Your choices for the next Mouseskull Entertainment pop culture icon include Fluffy the Jungle Bunny, Barry, "The Freak Who Has Had Too Much Damn Coffee" (Shannon Wheeler might name you in the lawsuit), Break-dancing Buddha, Stand-Up Comedian Hitler, Austin the $ix Billion Dollar Cat, Joe the Paper Boy from Hell and "Sexy-Sexy Go-Go Kitty". Vote at mouseskull@gmail.com. It's your duty as an American, as Matt reminds you.

As you can well imagine, there's usually a generous share of Truly Infernal Comics in with all the Day Prize submissions. THE HAUNT OF HORACE ("Everyone's favourite Vampire Boy!) is definitely in that category. Includes "My Big Dumb Hell", "Journey into ADHD", a Cthulu Pinup, and the debut of Horace's pet vampire unicorn. www.thehauntofhorace.com

DAYBREAK Vol. 1 by Brian Ralph of Jersey City, NJ is an interesting balance between mainstream indy and avant-garde indy. With its post-apocalypse motif it's more mainstream indy but the drawing style and production look wouldn't be out of place at Drawn & Quarterly. Interesting experiment in making the reader into one of the characters that doesn't always work 100% but Brian definitely knows what he's doing here. This is Episode One (magazine size, squarebound, 48 pages, sepia tones). It originally appeared on the New Bodega Blog newbodegablogspot.com and in the magazine THE DRAMA. If you just pretend it's an avant garde comic, it's pretty much self-contained.

Ed "2 Hugs from Joining the Trenchcoat Mafia" Piskor of Munhall Pennsylvania (www.myspaceedpiskor.com) contributes a 24-page revenge fantasy mini-comic that starts with him surfing MySpace and ends with "Understand this kids! MySpace is a spot for superficial, ignorant automatons to appeal to other drones in attempts to acquire friends, popularity and acceptance. A kiddy pool of internet culture if you will. But hey, this is only the opinion of someone smarter than you and if you don't agree be sure to post your rebuttal on your LiveJournal." Nice drawing style, though.

He follows that up with episode 1 (of 8) of THE W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. TECHNICAL PAMPHLETa black and white digest comic. Here it's a little more clear that Ed is a huge fan of Joe Matt and Chester Brown but with a far greater compulsion for doing detailed backgrounds that comes more from the Wally Wood/Rand Holmes/Dan Clowes end of things. Avant garde but with a bonus helping of "eye candy". It's a full 32 pages (including the "Misadventures of Steve & Steve" back-up) telling the story of Boingthump (aka Kevin J. Phenicle Jr.). In terms of the balance of art and story and making it clear that he knows what he's doing with this 200 to 300 page biography of a criminal genius "Who he is and how he came to be" you can't do much better. Take a look for yourself at www.edpiskor.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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #436 (November 21st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #2 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

L'IL DUDE is a digest zine created, written and drawn by Randolph Gray II out of Louisville KY, two daily strips to a page (and printed by a printing traditionalist where each page faces "out" whereas comic strips always work better if you can just read two and two top to bottom). Not quite a slick enough finish (yet) but good iconic newspaper strip style character designs and some genuinely funny strips with an edge to them as well as Family Circus-style fun for the whole family. I really liked this one. http://lilduecomics.comicgenesis.com

Two mini-comics from Kris Lachowski's Mean Goat Comics, one a 24-hour comic called CHEETAH STORY ("his third one so far because he is a masochistic idiot"). Doing an all-animal 24-hour comic? I'd have to go along with the masochistic idiot thing. NEW VENUS is a more finished piece, 14 pages with colour cardstock covers and good use of computer graphics. He knows what he's doing. John Buckenmeyer came up with the original concept. Check out more of Kris's work at www.webcomicsnation.com/krislachowski

Clint Basinger's BACKSEAT DRIVERS is issue #1 of a four issue mini-series from his Cosmic Moustache Comics (edited by Tonya Northernor, asst. editor Ross Boswell). It stars a 1,000 year old Viking Hero, The Cosmic Norseman (he of the star-bespangled cosmic moustache) and including The Laundry Archer ("Are my space retinas failing me? – or was I knocked from the sky by a stinky tube sock?"), Dr. Herman, The Foxez. A very funky Alex Nino drawing style. "See pics and get updates at www.myspace.com/clintbasinger" issue 2 was supposed to be out in the winter of 2006 so caveat emptor.

SAKI THE PANDA by Stephen Plczynski. Digest zine. I've got issues 2 and 3 here, "Stork Raving Mad" and "The Mother of All Problems". Good funny, all ages, all-funny animals title as Saki tries to go on a date and to get the local Rave Culture venue to turn the volume down. As with Randolph Gray II, the "finish" isn't quite there yet, but the expressions, storytelling, story density, etc. are really good. Great colour cover on issue 2 by Jill Habing. www.sakithepanda.com

APE Entertainment's OMNIBUS #2 collection (APE is keeping Chad Lambert's POINT PLEASANT in print, wonderful 32 page self-contained work that no comic store should be without) contains one of Chad's two submissions for this year, "Possum At Large: The Origin of Flyboy". I've got to give Mike Hall the Managing Editor credit, all of these entries are at least semi-pro. The Possum at Large story introduces the Incontinent Five, including Men's Room, the iconic black male figure used to designate a men's room. Don't want to give away the ending but, it's pretty funny. www.apecomics.com for their complete catalogue.

Chad also submitted "Bliss" a short story printed in Digital Webbing Presents #16 with art by Amanda Morley who does a very creditable job. The rest of the stories and the cover aren't too shabby either. Check them out at www.digitalwebbing.com

Chad ALSO submitted "American Patriot: The Enemy Within" (with great art by Ryan Scott) as his contribution to HOPE NEW ORLEANS, a nearly 200 page anthology of stories and art to raise money for flood relief in New Orleans. 80+ creators. The one I have is a Wizard World Chicago 2006 Convention printing. Chad's is about the best contribution in here, in my opinion and worth the price of admission. Find out more at http://www.ronin-studios.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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #435 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #1 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

Okay, I'm back from the opening of the Graphic Lit exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. As promised, here (and for the next couple of weeks) are Dave Sim's Capsule Reviews of all of the Day Prize submissions for 2007. Well, except for Matt Dow's RACECAR COMICS. I just saw Matt and Paula in Stockbridge (they drove sixteen hours from Wisconsin!) and Matt said submitting RACECAR COMICS was Jeff Seiler's idea. So Matt wins the MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER AWARD (a politically correct way of saying "don't quit your day job") which has no cash prize and no plaque. But, hey, at least he won something. And my vote for the newest Mouseskull Entertainment character sensation is Break-Dancing Buddha. More on this later.

Matt had this idea for a super-hero story (he has way too much time on his hands at his day job, by his own admission and that tends to spill over even when he's socializing in my suite at the "Since 1773" Red Lion Inn) so I'm toying with the idea of submitting Matt's ideas to Marvel and DC as my own and then splitting the money with him. You know, in all of my ha-ha spare time.

I intended to answer Asa M. Larsson's letter first but that's going to require re-reading all of the news clippings I've got stuffed in her envelope and, as far as I know, there's still no reply to my most recent letter to Gary Groth which means that if you clicked to go over there when I suggested it in the posting for 15 November you just saw his most recent response which has been up for about a month now.

There's always a danger of my capitulating structurally to Marxist feminism in the popular imagination just by continuing to allow Marxist-feminists like Larsson and Groth to dominate the debate and, consequently, the Blog & Mail which could otherwise be the comic world's only Marxist-feminist-free zone. So, ultimately it seemed more sensible to reply first to Groth (which I've done and which will be posted when his reply comes in) and then to do my promised capsule reviews of the Day Prize submissions this year before getting around to Asa M. Larsson's multi-page letter.

So, starting with the biggest and thickest of the Day Prize submissions (and the last one I read), Rafer Roberts' PLASTIC FARM volume one, SOWING SEEDS ON FERTILE SOIL, has been collected as a (wait for it) 300-page graphic novel. Assisting Rafe on the book is (ladies first!) Danielle Corsetto (chapter 16) Wendi Strang-Frost (chapter 10) (returning the favour: Rafe illustrated DOPE FIENDS OF THE ZOMBIE CAFÉ written by her husband Sean for Wendi's Hula Cat Comics imprint http://www.hulacatcomics.com) Nan Roberts (Muse and Proof reader), Dave Morgan on chapters 2 and 13 and Dennis Culver on chapter 11 (what sort of bad financial luck do you have when you draw "Chapter 11"?), Jake Warrenfeltz (chapters 3, 5 and 7).

Rafe would have qualified as a MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER on the PROLOGUE to the first volume, but it's still pretty interesting and engaging material, very low on the "eye candy" quotient. It's something I've gotten used to in reading a lot of amateur and semi-pro material and I never rule something out purely on the basis of the quality of the artwork (although I understand why Diamond has to). Danielle and Dennis are about the most professional of Rafe's team (although you might forget that because Danielle – who has done some inking for Marvel -- also draws the ultimate gross-out drawing assignment) (she writes and draws her own, presumably LESS gross-out webcomic "Girls with Slingshots" Tuesdays and Thursdays at www.girlswithslingshots.com ).

PLASTIC FARM remains innovative although sincerely demented. As the back cover quote of Johanna Draper Carlson says, "I have to admit I still don't get it…and what I do get disgusts me."

That's okay, Rafe, she hates my guts too.

PLASTIC FARM officially enters the Off-White House Library between Joel Priddy's PULPATOON PILGRIMAGE and Alex Robinson's TRICKED. Check it out at www.plasticfarm.com

Next up, we have Book #1 of 19TH CENTURY DETECTIVE: THE GRAYBRIDGE TERROR and Book #2 AN INSANE ARMY featuring Lane Brain. Story and pencils by Larnad Justin (and inks by our old pal Tim Corrigan on Book #1). I'm afraid that this is in the same MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER category vis-à-vis the artwork, although the storyline is pretty intricate and as a writer who draws rather than an artist who writes, I always tend to make allowances (and often picture how I would have drawn it). It even comes with an "Open ONLY after reading Book one" stamped envelope with a sheet inside explaining what Larnad was driving at which is a very funky extra touch. www.candidcartoons.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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #434 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

What would a session of Blog & Mails be without poetry by Darrell Epp? I'd use the "day without Anita Bryant" line but I used that one last time.


Purgatorio


after church a shivering junkie

curses me for looking at her.

she's lost her incisors and other

things. on the way home i see

the green on the leaves bleed

into red. a prayer just won't

come. the tap in the bathroom

never stops dripping like a

countdown to i wish i knew

what. i look under the bed for

dust bunnies and vampire bats.


For the Days


when nothing's done for the first time.


traffic's so slow even the

snails are passing me now. i'm late horny hungry. the

antenna's gone, my radio's

caught between two stations, heavy metal on one, tomorrow's

genocide on the other. I adjust

the dial like surgery, like it matters.


i know this song I know it from before—


you think you got it rough, said

the spider to the fly, try being a

calendar salesman in january.


The Pie in The Sky


both our dirty forks

lying in the sink their

handles overlapping

to form a flattened x.


a room away after

playing naked twister

we dream of a road

leading to a city built on

a cloud where nobody

ever has to kiss a lover

goodbye since everything

hasalreadybeenpaidfor.


Ask Your Pharmacist


it's the longest night of the year

and I need to hear her approaching

footsteps like a toothache needs a tooth.


i see an empty hotel room, the fact that

there's no record of the catastrophic

winter nights we spent there bothers me

more than world wars 1 and 2 put together.


i see a strange man holding a cup of coffee,

smiling at her with dazzling too-white teeth.


if only (big if) I could remember how to

spell xanax backwards, the gates might hold.


The Skunk


A dead skunk on the road split

in half by a truck delivering

citrus all the way from florida

the driver didn't even notice i

just get a glimpse between a

nano- and a split-second but

i can't stop thinking about the

millions of tiny insect ghouls

already rushing to the scene

of the crime and the children

left behind to grow up with

no daddy that's no picnic just

read the papers…--driving

requires a lot of concentration

i focus my eyes just

blink blink drive blink drive.


Saturn Ate His Children


The days bleed together, maybe if we'd given

them different names i might have had a chance.


we carpool together, the subdivision slows

us down. i turn to you and say, `do you often

find yourself thinking about saturn's rings?'


`um, not lately,' you say, without a trace of

mockery so polite it hurts, `why, what's up?'


so i risk it, i tell you about the day i found out

they weren't solid smooth discs you could walk

across but just pieces of ice and rock of random

sizes with irregular spaces between them, i can't

explain how disappointed i was it hurt so bad just

one more straw for the camel's back and what am

i gonna do with all this straw anyhow, my mouth

opens and just closes it's humiliating to even try,


sometimes. you say, `i think i know what you

mean.' hope rises. `you do?' `yeah' you say,

`i always thought i'd be rich by now, myself'

as we pull into the parking lot condors screaming

above us, no, not even, just a stupid discount 747.


A Mystery


how to walk, how to talk, how

to wear a suit, how to shoot,

film noir really can teach a man

everything he needs to know.

most folks say double indemnity

but i say out of the past; it makes

me sadder. it's sweet perfection

but a mystery nags, if i could ask

robert mitchum's character one

question it would be: why did you

so yearn to be joe average with

a stepford wife and a house in the

country, instead of remaining the

coolest hard-boiled dick

in the world? i don't understand.

why not just do what you're good

at? why not just be who you are?




Tomorrow: oh heck i don't

know. that's a month from

now for

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 #433 (November 18th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


I'm going back to the August 7 Victor Hanson column "Get a Life, Middle East" – the one where I tried to draw an analogy between what is happening in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and what the Taliban was doing in Afghanistan prior to the invasion by the Coalition of the Willing. To me, they're both lunatic extremes and they're neither of them "any way to run a railroad". The other part that attracted my attention was


"In contrast, the peculiar furor at the U.S. in the radical Islamic world arises because our culture, when viewed on DVD, satellite television and the internet, is judged to be incorrect in the ideal world of 7th-century Islam – and impossible for conflicted Muslims to enjoy fully in the 21st.


"Of course, our foreign policy, or even the crassness of Western pornography, can inflame this pre-existing anti-Americanism [in the Muslim world]. But, ultimately, there remains this divide between vibrant modern life that is the product of the Western Enlightenment and a static tribal order that is not."


Well, [WARNING Dave Sim minority-of-one opinion coming up:] I think this sort of unfairly stacks the deck in favour of the West while ignoring the fact that it is really impossible to be fully aware of the negative effects of a negative construct if you – and everyone you know – is within that construct. To refer to the "crassness" of Western pornography, it seems to me, is to diminish what pornography actually is. Wearing a polka dot tie and a plaid jacket is "crass" but I think pornography is actually more destructive than that. I haven't had any experience with heroin – the illustration I used last time – but as I said then, the recidivism rate for smoking cigarettes is even greater than it is for heroin. Well, speaking from personal experience, the only thing in my life that had as profound an effect on my life as giving up cigarettes back in 1999 was giving up masturbation back in 2003 (and, arguably, giving up television in 2001).


Having been raised in a society that takes masturbation as a given (and, thus, implicitly if not explicitly, endorses pornography as an inherent public good) I can tell you for a fact that the effect of leaving that construct and the fact of how long it took to actually have an awareness of having left that construct – "I am now beyond the reach of porn" – illustrated for me that if there is a higher recidivism rate on cigarettes as compared to heroin, there is probably an even higher recidivism rate on pornography and that it's very much in the same category. It's something that you do to yourself.


And it's NASTY. I don't mean it's a little embarrassing or private or socially sequestered, I mean, it has a lot in common with the junkie who is injecting the stuff between his toes or into his neck or next to his eyeball because he's running out of veins that aren't collapsed. It has a lot in common with living in a residence where everything has the stench of tobacco on it: your clothes, the upholstery, your skin, your hair and not even being aware of it because your tobacco jones is so bad it can block it out. And, as a society, as far as I can see, pretty much everyone beside me is THERE, up to their eyeballs in NASTY S—T because it's universally accepted, universally winked at, as if there are no consequences of being immersed in the stuff from the age of (in my case) 11. Age 11 until the age of 47. That's a lot of NASTY, folks. NASTY in the sense that it distorts all of your thinking so that an orgasm becomes this core need. Whatever else you can say about your life, if you are a modern Western male, you are likely to take it as a given that you need to have an orgasm on a regular basis (once a day, twice a day, three times a week, twice a week, whatever it is). It's like those families that pledge to give up television for a month. You've been a television junkie since before you were able to form coherent sentences and you're now in your thirties and forties and you haven't been away from the TV for a 24-hour period in over a decade (and then only because you were on a camping trip where you couldn't get to a TV: it wasn't that you chose not to watch TV it was that you couldn't watch TV. If there had been a TV there you know you would have switched it on at some point). And you look on the wrenching process of giving it up for a month as some kind of accomplishment. I mean, what do you think of this sentence: "Yeah, I've been shooting and snorting smack since I was 12 and you know what? Three years ago I actually quit for an entire month. Did me a world of good"


Uh, no. It's smack. Giving it up for a month is pointless when compared to shooting and snorting it for thirty years. Giving up masturbation for a month is pointless for the same reason. Believe me, you aren't even going to start to get it for at least a year. It was probably two years before I went, "This is like cigarettes, isn't it? It's not a matter of `Oh, well, I'll just whack off once'. If I whack off once I'll be back up to three or four times a week in a month or so."


See, that's what I think of when I read a pejorative line like "impossible for conflicted Muslims to enjoy fully in the 21st" because it presupposes that being conflicted about masturbation – or television or cigarettes or fornication or heroin – is the abnormality and that normality is a healthy enjoyment of a whole spectrum of vices simultaneously, sequentially, daily and if possibly hourly.


"The problem is that you're conflicted right now about shooting junk. Shoot junk for a few weeks and believe, me that `conflicted' quality just goes away."


It's the adjacent square that I was talking about. When you take up residence on the porn square as I assume all men in our society have, to one degree or another, done, you are no more able to see porn accurately than the junkie who is living on the junk square can see heroin accurately. And consequently you can't see the way a devout Muslim views pornography which, given that he is outside the construct, I think is definitely more accurate than the way you see pornography.


Do I think pornography should be banned? No, definitely not. As soon as you've invented the technology that we've invented that would be impossible even if we decided it was the best idea for society in general. Same as you could never ban television. Whatever 99% of the population is a junkie about is here to stay and if you want to get away from it, you have to summon up the wherewithal to do so on your own.


But, I can tell you right now that having come from the Pornography Is A Societal Blessing and a Human Need end of things and having lived there for nearly forty years – not visited there, lived there – it's in the same category as cigarettes and television. It's something people need to be educated about as to exactly how harmful and destructive it is in the same way people need to be warned about alcohol and tobacco and television. Do it if you want, but at least be aware of the fact that it's in the same category as heroin. It's a monkey on your back.


And that doesn't have a hope in hell of happening, does it? How far away as a society are we from teaching school children about the perils of television and porn?


So what does that say about us?


Exactly.


The distance that we are from understanding that teaching school children about the perils of television and porn is a DUH in a society where both are ubiquitous and protected free will choices is the exact distance from where we will be able to have a sensible discussion with devout Muslims about either. Decades easily. Probably centuries. To put it another way, how sensible a discussion do you think you could have with a $75-a-day-habit junkie about the merits of heroin? How long would he have to have "kicked" the stuff before you would think you could have a sensible discussion with him about the merits of heroin?


Well, that's exactly the way a devout Muslim looks at discussing the merits of pornography with you.


Tomorrow: Some of Darrell's poetry

___________________________________________________

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 #432 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Oh, hey! Mark Steyn! Bonus! High Fives.


The NATIONAL POST is very weird on the subject of Steyn. He was far and away their best columnist and then he was gone. But to this day, when they run a piece about him or a piece quoting him, they'll (obviously) get a bunch of letters wondering when he's coming back and they'll print one or two of them. And then he doesn't come back. Which always makes me wonder, Why are you running these letters asking when he's coming back if he isn't coming back? I mean, there must've been a reason that he split, so instead of just repeating this charade every couple of months, wouldn't it make sense to just say, "Here's what happened. This is what we did or said to tick off Mark Steyn and this is why he isn't coming back" and then stop referring to him or say, "This is what we did or said to tick off Mark Steyn and this is what we've offered him to come back and it just isn't enough" or say, "This is the REALLY PHENOMENALLY STUPID thing we did to tick off Mark Steyn so he's already told us he's never coming back and he's a man of his word and we really just can't cope with that, so we continue to pretend that at some point he'll prove to be just as venal and two-faced as most of the world and succumb to our overtures and we run these letters just to keep our hopes up and delude our readers that there's a snowball's chance in hell that they'll ever read his columns in here again."


Check out "Thinking Globally" from the NATIONAL REVIEW (http://www.steynonline.come/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=566&pop). Since I promised that I would just do interesting paragraphs this time around, how about the beginning and end of the article?


"My little grade school in New Hampshire recently introduced an exciting new fun project for its pupils: it will be tracking its carbon footprint!


"Sorry, let me make that even more exclamatory: It will be tracking its carbon footprint!!!!!!!


"Do even impressionable seven-year-olds still get excited about this racket? The easiest way to reduce the school district's carbon footprint would be to return to the one-room schoolhouses my older neighbors attended and which are still standing around town, with their blackboards and even the desks mostly intact. Aside from cleaning out the woodstove, you'd need nothing more than a fresh box of chalk and some new slates – and, although those 19th century Grade Four history exercises are a bit daunting for those weaned on the graphics-enhanced pabulum of "Social Sciences", it if shrivels our carbon footprint, I say let's do it!


"But I don't expect that's what the school has in mind. Instead there'll be some marginal going-through-the-motions-type stuff that'll make everyone feel virtuous and Gore-compliant, and that'll be that."


That's the beginning. Then he finishes off with


"NEW YORK TIMES readers must have choked on their brunch the other day when confronted with a Sunday magazine devoted to the return of `The Politics of God': `Our problems again resemble those of the 16th century,' says Mark Lilla, arguing that the two centuries between the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall were a mere interlude of Reason, and that traditional politics of `competing revelations' is reasserting itself. The careless presumption that our moment – the social democratic `civilized society' – is permanent and inevitable is a delusion. The obsolescent boomer pieties that are now the core curriculum of our grade schools will be a laughingstock by the time those children graduate high school."


Then there's a few really good paragraphs from a discussion with Steyn (http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Common/Print.aspx):


(On the trial balloon being floated of an invitation for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero when he was in New York) "If he wants to see the results of Islamist terrorism, there are a lot of places he can visit much nearer to home. In fact, [then-Massachusetts governor] Mitt Romney, one of the best things he ever did was to deny the state troopers protection facility to Ahmadinejad's predecessor when he was invited to speak at Harvard. And Mitt Romney had the right line on this. If Harvard wanted to issue these idiotic invitations, that's up to them. But the taxpayers of Massachusetts are not going to fund the visit by providing protection for these guys. And in the end, the event was cancelled. And that's exactly the line that the state of New York should be taking, too.


(On Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid's claim that a million Iraqis had been killed since the invasion) "The fact of the matter is that there are no million dead in Iraq. He has essentially flown the coop. He has now embraced the nuttiest of nutso theories, that in effect, his country's troops have been responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale throughout Iraq. And it's disgusting. This is the man who is Senate majority leader, and he's doing more damage to the image of his nation at a time of war than the wackiest kook writing in the most hostile anti-American newspaper on the planet. This is simply something that is beyond any reasonable policy difference, and I do think it's not a question of questioning his patriotism. God forbid we should do that, because they're so touchy about it. I would question his sanity making statements like that…You know, the American people are not defeatist. They're not where the Democrats are, but they'll end up where the Democrats are if they don't understand the game the Democrats are playing. The Democrats are relying on the kind of, what Niall Ferguson, the British historian, calls America's attention deficit disorder, that, in effect, the `talking down' of the mission in Iraq will develop its own momentum, and people will end up embracing Harry Reid defeatism just out of sheer exhaustion. And if [they do] that, it's going to be Vietnam to the Nth degree in terms of its domestic consequences."


(On the mysterious "work accident" in Syria) "You mentioned that second incident, the so-called Syrian work accident in which, according to reports, some Syrians and Iranians were trying to strap a chemical weapon onto a scud or something, and wound up getting the nasty chemical stuff all over themselves and dying. The fact of the matter is that Iran and Syria both make explicit what they plan to do, and we should take them at their word."


Mark Steyn, always available to you on-line, au courant hipsters at www.steynonline.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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #431 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

I've got a whole pile of Victor Davis Hanson columns here courtesy of the Hamilton Hammerlock, the Bard of Burlington Bay, Darrell Epp, so I'm just going to select over the next couple of days some interesting paragraphs at random.


From "Newsworthy Reconsidered: Paris Hilton or Colonel Sean McFarland?" (12 Oct 07): Hanson makes the excellent point that the headlines are still dominated by Paris Hilton, O.J. Simpson, Brad and Angelina, George Clooney showing off the "boo-boo" on his elbow from his motorcycle spill while nothing is heard about Colonels Rick Gibbs or David Sutherland or J.B. Burton or Paul Funk or Michael Kershaw who are turning things around in Iraq's former "Triangle of Death". I've thought the same thing: that what's missing in the War on Terror is information through the media about what's going on. Not the anecdotal "embedded" first person account stuff – it's interesting, but it all smacks of Battlefront Tourism -- but the coverage they used to have during World War II where there would be a map of Europe on the front page and a description of the most recent battles, who came out on top, where the action appeared to be shifting to next. Obviously such information has to be on a delayed release basis. There was no "Coming Next Week: D-Day!" But why is it that we need to know exactly what step in the process of their next walking UN family adoption Woody and Mia – sorry, Brad and Angelina -- are at but the disposition of the "Triangle of Death" is just a vague map and a lot of mealy-mouthed Vietnam quagmire hyperbole? You're never going to engage the attention – and court the approval -- of the civilians who ultimately control the military if you don't let them in on what's going on, whether it's four steps forward, two steps back or three steps forward three steps back. Of course, I'm the only one who is reasonably certain that the reason we don't have this is because of totalitarian Marxist-feminist control of the news media which only allows coverage of any military conflict as long as its framed in "Vietnam quagmire" terms. I don't know what other explanation there could be of something that has always been of interest to men throughout human history unless it's the inescapable fact that women have taken over. Certainly every military conflict in human history since the rise of broadsheet journalism dealt with every military conflict in meticulous detail right up to our Feminist Age when it suddenly vanished. What ELSE do you think could account for that vanishing act?


And then there was this:


"I don't wish to suggest that our present titillation on the home front, or amnesia about those fighting overseas, is entirely foreign to the American war experience. In 1942, Americans kept their business-as-usual East Coast cities lit up at night, apparently oblivious that their resulting silhouetted freighters meant German U-boards would sink a fifth of the entire U.S. merchant fleet in the first year of the war, along with slaughtering 5,000 Americans, usually right off the American shoreline."


Now, there's a sobering paragraph. Okay, feel free to go back to talking about Star Wars now. I know how important it is to you.


Another issue he tackles in "No More Anonymous, Please!" (20 Aug 07) is the overuse of anonymity in news stories these days. Certainly, you have to protect "inside" whistleblowers or people in a situation where there's the chance of genuine physical harm or career meltdown in retaliation. But too often it's a way of creating an illusion that there's an authoritative voice behind the story by describing the source as "high placed" when the source turns out to be anything but.


"Michael Isikoff wrote a story in 2005 for NEWSWEEK, apparently based on an anonymous but "solid, well-placed" source who told of callous military guards at Guantanamo flushing a Koran down the toilet.

"The account turned out to be false, but the supposed blasphemy may have caused riots in the Islamic world – and untold damage to the prestige of the U.S. military in a time of war. Yet Isikoff never identified from whom he got such a tale or why he rushed to print something so explosive on evidence so shaky…anonymity gives them free rein as judge and jury, exempt from cross-examination. This `trust me' practice goes against the very grain of the American tradition of allowing the aggrieved the right to face his accusers."


The lead section of "Why Study War?" Hanson's piece from CITY JOURNAL (http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2299) sets the tone for what is to follow:


"Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You'll provoke not a counterargument – let alone an assent – but a blank stare. Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether…This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war – and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever."


It's a longer piece, running eight printed-out pages which is really pushing the envelope of what people are willing to read on the Internet these days (unless it's about Paris Hilton or Star Wars), but it's definitely worth checking out. He starts with his own experience wanting to write his Ph.D. on the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War and the scepticism of his advisor. "It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts."


"Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. `What difference does it make,' in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, `to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?'"


Hanson allows the question to stand as if (as Gandhi intended it), it was purely rhetorical. But it isn't. What it is is myopic, feminine and suicidal. After the battle venue is reconstructed, presumably the orphans who will grow up to have children of their own and the homeless who will now have homes are going to be a lot happier in the rebuilt context if it is founded on liberty and democracy, the rule of law and guarantees and protections of human freedom than if it is rebuilt as a Soviet puppet state or under the iron rule of the Taliban and Sharia Law. Like all Marxist-feminist views, Gandhi's moral relativism which makes totalitarianism and democracy interchangeable, adopts a zero sum view of the world. All battlefields are the same, all battlefields have casualties, casualties are bad, ergo all battlefields are bad, ergo utopia can only be achieved through pacifism. In actual fact, one-sided pacifism is just a synonym for suicide.


Tomorrow: Hey! Darrell's got some Mark Steyn in here!





___________________________________________________

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 #430 (November 15th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

I'm replying to Michael B.'s fax from yesterday, the only support I've gotten from anyone on the latest go-round with Jeff Smith and Gary Groth:


Well, let me refute your argument in reverse order.


The nature of the "facts" since society has been taken over by Marxist-feminism is that facts no longer apply, or rather non-facts are deemed to be facts. Unless you believe that the genders are interchangeable and equal, you are deemed to be insane, ergo, I am insane. That would be the verdict in any court of law. I'm forcing a choice between feminism and sanity and, as we've seen in the comics field, given a choice, everyone is going to opt for feminism over sanity on a 100% universal basis, judges and juries included, at least so far (hope springs eternal)


Even if it were possible to get a fair hearing in a court of law and even if I was to have a verdict rendered in my favour, by successfully suing Gary and THE COMICS JOURNAL all I would manage to do is to take food out of the mouths of the Fantagraphics creators who are already being paid late. I don't think the structure of Fantagraphics has changed appreciably since the time they had to go begging to the comics community to get enough money to make up for all the money they lost they last time they had a distributor go bankrupt on them. As far as I know most of their sales are still in the mainstream bookstore market which means all of their money is tied up for at least 120 days and even that is pending returns of however many books they've had to ship to the mainstream bookstores over the last however long a period of time. It's not Jaime and Gilbert's fault that Gary has actively worked to sabotage my career, but they – and the other Fantagraphics creators – would be the ones to pay the price if I was to recover damages.


I also, personally, don't believe that these things have a place in a court of law. I don't believe in going and finding the Big Policeman and getting him to punish the bad man and kiss my boo-boo and make it better. I've taken a major hit over opposing feminism. Well, okay, presumably I was picked for that by God because He knew I wasn't going to cave in and that I knew it was my own choice to get involved in the dispute so win, lose or draw I have to live with what happens. I think I was also picked because I'm a fast typist and I'm pretty eloquent, so I can leave a paper trail. Not only for the future generations that will presumably bring Marxist-feminism to crashing ruin because you can only build so large a castle on unstable sand before the unworkability of it eventually brings it to crashing ruin, but also for the overall lesson that it will teach: here was an environment where everyone except Dave Sim was a Marxist-feminist or an abstainer who consequently was a Marxist-feminist supporter. Here's the paper trail. Here's the whole 800 million words over (twenty years? Thirty years? Forty years?) where Dave Sim was the only one taking the side of scientific evidence, irrefutable facts and common sense. To me, it will be a valuable lesson to the human race. "You always think you have everything figured out and you never do and you always try to destroy people who point that out to you instead of learning from them".


The Courts were the first place the Marxist-feminists targeted for takeover, Mike: after that the institutions of higher learning, then the media. The political arena is proving a tougher nut to crack because you have to be elected which means you have to know how to compete to win against your opponents, persuade those who share your own ideology and earn the trust of the electorate, both those who share your ideology and those who don't. That's not the Marxist-feminist way. The Marxist-feminist way is totalitarian. Capitulate or we will crush you. The courts capitulated, the universities capitulated, the media capitulated. Structurally, elected office can't capitulate even though right now it desperately wants to.


It's certainly popularly believed among a certain constituency that "anyone in [my] life who has actually spent time with [me] on a professional level has said that [I'm] an outstanding human being" but not out loud, and certainly not publicly. If they had my situation now would be different. No, the best that happens is that they first say that they disagree with everything that I think but they believe I have a right to my misguided, hateful, poisonous opinions. What they are doing is establishing that they have capitulated to Marxist-feminism, they know the "right way" to think and they are scrupulous in thinking that way. So what's the next effect? Dave Sim is a lone nut and the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast are actually the Fifteen Shining Truths Which Guide Our Society.


"What good does a war of words do?" Well, for the last thirteen years no good at all. Possibly for the next fifty years, no good at all. But my assumption is, and always will be, that if you can make a persuasive case and when your case is supported by the facts then even the most impenetrable concrete skull must, at last, be penetrated. But let's bear in mind that a vast majority of the human population still believes that Marxism will ultimately prove to be our salvation as a society even though Marxism has failed and been discredited everywhere that it has been attempted. That's a lot of concrete to break through. Whether you graft Islam onto Marxism (Hamas, Hezbollah, The PLO) or feminism onto it (the infrastructure of our society at present) or capitalism onto it (Today's All New China!) it's still fundamentally unsound because it's a zero sum construct. It can't actually survive without constant replenishment of its resources from outside sources. Hamas and Hezbollah are only viable because the EU continues to pump billions of dollars into both. Feminism is only viable because of alimony, affirmative action, Marxist government subsidies and lowered standards. China is only viable to the extent that it exerts Draconian oppression on its populace and to the extent to which it adopts market economy practices. The market economy is sustainable. Imprisoning anyone who disagrees with you isn't sustainable in the long term but as long as you're willing to eradicate all opposition it is sustainable in the short term. I never thought I'd see myself agreeing with Mia Farrow on anything, but I agree with Mia Farrow. Let's call the Beijing Olympics the Genocide Olympics. Let's bring huge Genocide Olympics signs with us and carry them in the big opening ceremonies parades. GO, DALAI LAMA signs FREE TIBET signs REMEMBER TIANNAMEN SQUARE signs.


Obviously, there is a great deal at stake, so I seek to lead as close to an exemplary life as I can manage. For one thing it's the right thing to do, but for another thing it means that the focus stays on Marxist feminism. The only thing I can be indicted for in our society is for choosing not to be a Marxist feminist and for opposing Marxist feminism publicly and specifically.


If I ever chose not to do that, I think my sleep would be very troubled. Because I choose to stand up for what I think is right, I sleep like a baby.


And just to be completely clear, at no point do you take issue with Marxist-feminism in your fax. Which means I'm still entirely alone in this. Which means the construct still holds: the comic-book field is, universally, a Marxist-feminist construct which applauds, endorses and encourages the vilification, shunning and denunciation of Dave Sim: there are no exceptions to that statement.


As always, I just want to keep the historical record 100% accurate.


Okay, that gets me all caught up on the mail and I can assure you, that will about do it for the good news this time out. Next up, I'll be addressing a couple of members of your Marxist-feminist team: first, Gary Groth and then Asa M. Larsson.


Those interested in the latest exchange of viewpoints with Gary Groth can click here and thanks to Jeff Tundis' prodigious efforts it will take you right there.





I'll start the next batch of Blog & Mails with Asa M. Larsson's letter regarding the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast.


Tomorrow: More Darrell Epp & Victor Davis Hanson





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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #429 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

I think my subscription to Robin Snyder's THE COMICS is about to lapse, so I'm sending him a cheque for $35 (foreign 12-issue subscription). It's $28 in the U.S. Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Lane Apt. 81, Bellingham, WA 98225. The latest issue starts a new essay by Steve Ditko, "Toyland". The most interesting thing for me in this issue is Jim Ivey's memoir where he mentions


"What a sight: Harvey Kurtzman lecturing Les Turner, Mel Graff and Morris Weiss on the merits of R. Crumb's underground comix. Glazed looks and gapped mouths…"


There are also good anecdotes about Will Eisner, Jack Davis and C.C. Beck. All short and punchy and "to the point".


Fax from Michael B.:


"I've been trying to find the words…


"Reading Gary Groth's most recent entry on your Blog and Mail left me a little nauseated. The man clearly has no sense of perspective. He claims to have stronger grasp on reality than you, and yet here is a mere publisher treating one of the seminal artists of our day like a common piece of dirt. THAT, my friend, is RISIBLE. He has no sense of his place, or an entirely bloated sense of his place."


Well, with all due respect Michael, I think Gary Groth has an entirely accurate sense of place relative to Dave Sim. How long has his posting been up, as you say, treating me like a common piece of dirt? A couple of weeks now at least. Has anyone besides you attempted to defend me? I'm not on the Internet so I can't say for certain, but let's take the entire Cerebus Yahoo Newsgroup membership of, what, several hundred people? I think the message is clear: they all believe that Dave Sim should be treated like a common piece of dirt and that Gary Groth should be deferred to when he does so.


"If I may ask, why even bother to concern yourself with Gary Groth, Jeff Smith, etc.?"


Well, because I'm being attacked. If you're being attacked you have to defend yourself and stand up for what you think is right. Most particularly when you're completely alone in doing so and no one will rise to your defence no matter what calumny and vilification is directed your way.


"These people couldn't hope to walk in your dust (or maybe that's all they can hope for), in terms of how history will view you. You're one of the greats. I may be alone in thinking this…"


Well, yes, so far you are if we're going to go by the evidence before us on this go-round. Michael Zulli called and left a message when I was defending myself against Jeff Smith – and pointing out that he was the one who claimed to have threatened me with physical violence for not sharing his opinions -- and that was it. Did any of the Yahoos come to my defence? No, of course not. Thirteen years this has been going on and except for an isolated voice here or there – yours this time – I think the evidence is clear: Dave Sim is considered to be a common piece of dirt and everyone in the comic-book field considers that to be just peachy.


"…and my thoughts may mean very little to you…"


Oh, no. Your thoughts mean a great deal to me. Are you kidding? Thirteen years later on and you're the only one who will speak up on my behalf? Your thoughts mean a great deal to me. Wouldn't my support mean a lot to you if you found yourself in the same situation?


"…but I can't understand why these people would concern you."


Again, because I'm being attacked. The reason that things like Marxist-feminism can achieve absolute control over all debate in our society is because I'm the only one in our context who will stand up and say, No, I think you're wrong, I think you're misguided and I think you're leading our society in a very foolish direction no matter how often or how severely I'm attacked and no matter how much you can intimidate everyone else. If no one speaks out against Marxist-feminism then there is no hope of turning back in a more sensible direction. If a consensus emerges that the only people who oppose Marxist-feminism are rightwing talk radio nuts and Dave Sim – which is what is perceived if no one speaks out against Marxist-feminism except rightwing talk radio nuts and Dave Sim – then the Marxist-feminists infer that everyone agrees with them and that the Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast aren't, in fact, impossible but are sensible. Which they're not if you are advancing the thesis that the genders are equal and interchangeable. If the genders were equal and interchangeable, none of the Fifteen Impossible Things would be necessary.


"If you ARE going to pay this much attention to these people, if you're going to fine tune your focus to every detail of every action they've taken, why not do it in the context of a lawsuit? In my view Gary, those he employs and various people in the industry are guilty of career-damaging libel and slander against you, plain and simple. You could say – `hey, there's your answer, that IS my concern with these people.' But what good does a war of words do? Prove your case in a court of law. Do you really think you can debate and/or complain your way above them? The only way to deal with them in writing or conversation is to dip down to their own level, as evidenced by your recent conversation with Gary. I think your assessment – that your career was severely undermined, resulting in a dramatic reduction of orders – can be effectively proven. The thing is, the kind of character attacks, sniggering, bias and deflating commentary that Gary et al are known for will not hold water in any court. Anyone in your life who has actually spent time with you on a professional level has said that you're an outstanding human being. That you ARE an outstanding human being is, to some of us, clearly evident. So all that Fantagraphics Bias crap goes out the window, and we look at the numbers, we look at what's on paper, we look at your character, and we see that a single, self-published author has been bullied and mocked and sabotaged by an entire industry…for expressing himself in the context of the longest sustained narrative in the history of the human race. (Pause to take that in…) You could argue that The Law is flawed from the inside out and you will stand no chance to win because you are alone in your grasp on reality, but I think you stand a chance to win whether or not the courtroom is overrun with Marxists, feminists, or what have you, simply because the evidence is so clear. I'm not suggesting you do it for honor. Do it to get back all the money you lost. You'll have to get a superb, proven Lawyer who knows how to prepare (on all levels) for a case – who can match your own capacity to prepare for success – that's essential. All the defense would really have to bank on is their mistaken impression that you're insane, and once you effectively get that little line of B.S. out of the way? Then you crush them with the facts.


"Best to you, Michael B."


Tomorrow – Dave Sim replies





___________________________________________________

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 #428 (November 13th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Okay. I'm almost through the mail now. Here's a short letter and clipping from Jeff Lageson.


"Dear Dave –


"Saw this and thought of Going Home…Hoped to see it, won't be happening…bummer that."


The clipping is from THE STRANGER (Seattle's premiere alternative paper) and it's called "Enduring Gatsby: The Whole Thing, Cover to Cover, in One Night". It's a play where one of the characters runs across a ragged old copy of THE GREAT GATSBY in the clutter on his desk and starts reading it aloud. "And doesn't stop". It runs about six hours. As Christopher Frizzelle writes:

"You become convinced that, what with all the things [the actors] are f--king up, they're going to f—k up the end, but then the end comes and the writing is more brilliant than you remember and they don't f—k it up one bit…[Scott] Shepherd, with half a dozen pages to go, stops reading. He just talks—the "five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor," the Dutch sailors looking at the "fresh, green breast of the new world," the smashing up of creatures, the capacity for wonder, the blue lawn, the rolling republic."

That would certainly have been an amazing experience. Coincidentally, the clipping came in the same day as my three signed books from Matthew Bruccoli, so I mentioned it in my thank you fax and offered to send him a photocopy. No word back yet.


Bob Corby sent me a copy of the PANEL book which was supposed to be in with the SPACE Day Prize entries, hoping that it got to me on time, which it did. I'm about halfway through the Day Prize entries at this point and just about ready to do capsule reviews of all of them in the next batch of Blog & Mails.


Seems like a good excuse to plug SPACE, the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo held annually in Columbus Ohio at the Shriner's Auditorium. In 2008 it will be held on March 1 and 2 and (God willing) I'll be there to hand out the Day Prize short list plaques and the plaque for the Day Prize recipient as usual. Interested Yahoos are welcome to come in the day before (Friday 29 February) for our Mass Tour of the James Thurber House where I plan to read aloud "The Night the Ghost Got In" on the second floor (unless security throws us out first). Contact Bob Corby at Bpc13@earthlink.net or www.backporchcomics.com. There's a discount for paying for your table ahead of time and the last three years all the tables have been gone long before the event, so "word to the wise."


Secret Project #2 Update


Okay, trying to stay as optimistic as possible about the possibility of Secret Project #2 actually coming out, I had come up…well, not quite empty: there's always the possibility that the ComicsPRO retailers are going to get behind it, but that's a tough read at this point. I have the "pitch" to them done, which runs about 13 pages. Now I'm just waiting until Jeff Tundis has the website up and running so they can read the pitch and then see the website. The earliest it looks as if that's going to happen is December. As I said earlier in this Blog & Mail session, I had pretty much arrived at a "Scrub Launch" decision based on the fact that I only heard from two retailers (and thanks again, Jeremy and Matt!) as well as Brian Hibbs at Comix Experience and they were all talking about orders of 25 to 50 on the first issue, depending on what it was. Divide that in half for the second issue orders and in half again for the third issue orders and it's pretty much a lock that I would be losing a lot of money. When the top Indy Friendly stores are ordering 6 copies of your book, your book just isn't viable.


But, as I say, trying to stay optimistic about this, I then got a fax in from Ralph DiBernardo, the owner of JETPACK COMICS at 112 Portland Street in Rochester, NH, 03867.


"Hello Mr. Sim,


"My name is Ralph DiBernardo and I am the owner of Jetpack Comics, LLC. We've corresponded in the past, on my small publishing projects (JOHNNY RAYGUN, SQUARECAT COMICS). You've sent me comics to give away at my conventions (PBBZ Small Press Fest) and I am now contacting you about your offer via ComicsPRO.


"I just joined ComicsPRO, as full-on member (yep – I can vote and everything) and I would support your project with a minimum order of 100 copies at a $2.95 cover price (with a minimum 45% discount) and a maximum of 250 copies. Once I knew what the project was and the plans for it, I might increase my order but I would absolutely purchase 100 sight unseen. This might not seem like much, given your success, but for me that is a very healthy order. Just as a point of reference my best-selling monthly comic is about 75 copies (currently WORLD WAR HULK/INCREDIBLE HULK) Stephen King's DARK TOWER sold approximately 175 copies an issue for me and ANITA BLAKE hits about the 100 mark, when it comes out. My best selling indy title does not hit 25 copies (sorry).


"I appreciate what you're offering to do for us (comics retailers in general) and I am more than happy to support that in a qty that far exceeds my average sales numbers. I only hope that my small order is a part of a much larger recognition of what you are trying to do. No matter what, please count me in. I would prefer it was a ComicsPRO endeavour but would see it through no matter what. I would join another organization to be a part or would support it just as an individual comic retailer buying direct.


"For the record, I have been retailing for about 25 years and NONE of the `scams' (as I like to call them) put any more money in my retailing pocket, nor do they sell more copies of the book for me. Every one of them puts extra inventory in my store – devalued inventory as I end up selling it at or below cost to move it.


"Thanks again for thinking of us and please feel free to use this in any way you see fit."


So, there you go. Secret Project #2 is DOA and one fax from Ralph DiBernardo and it's (at least tentatively) come back to life. With his commitment to order 100 copies, I can cut that in half on #2 (50 copies) and in half again on #3 (25 copies) and still have viable numbers to work with. I find it particularly encouraging because Ralph DiBernardo has the same relationship to the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES that Harry Kremer did to CEREBUS. That is, he bought literally hundreds of copies of the first issue from Kevin and Peter when they were still living up in New Hampshire and pushed the book heavily, cutting up copies to make ads (of course he cringes at the thought now). Pete Laird has stayed very loyal to him and printed up a special commemorative edition of Turtles No.1 for one of Ralph's comic shows a year or so ago. IF Secret Project #2 is a go, I'm definitely going to ask Ralph how many copies of TMNT #1 he bought and if it's okay to do a PREVIEWS ad that says, "I bought ___ copies of TURTLES #1 back in 1984 when it first came out. THIS year I'm buying 250 copies of [Secret Project] #1."


And then to be fair I'll print another add with Matt and Jeremy and Brian all saying "We're buying six copies each of [Secret Project] #3!"


Just kidding.


The question becomes: how many Ralph DiBernardo's are there in the ComicsPRO ranks and how many Matt Lehmans, Jeremy Shorrs and Brian Hibbs are there? I assume that the consensus is going to run in the latter's 25-50 range which means orders of 6 copies on issue #3 (not viable). Is my pitch to ComicsPRO and the website and the promotion program going to drive those numbers up, or are the quantities locked in?


Well, one way or the other it has definitely made the Real World Environment promotion at least SEEM more viable, so the pitch to ComicsPRO will get downloaded onto disk when Sandeep comes in to download this batch of Blog & Mails – that part is a definite "Go" thanks to Ralph DiBernardo -- and the website and the REAL WORLD PREVIEW EDITION are both a tentative "Go" at this point. I'll be writing the next batch of Blog & Mails roughly three weeks from now, at which time I hope to be able to make all three of those into definite "Go"s, leaving only the actual comic book as a tentative "Go" for the time being.


I'm bearing the Roy and Dann Thomas/Matthew Bruccoli situation very much in mind. Miracles DO happen in the real world. Now I just have to find out if they can happen in the comic-book field.




___________________________________________________

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 #427 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Nice fax from Ted Adams at IDW – who was also nice enough to send me the honking great first volume of THE COMPLETE TERRY & THE PIRATES he's doing. I did manage to read all the Sunday strips in the front, but I had to switch to the Day Prize submissions in the meantime (the clock is ticking down toward March 1 and 2 2008). As soon as I finish reading all the Day Prize submissions, the dailies are next on my list of things to do and I'll be running a review after that. The colour is absolutely amazing. If it was possible to do colour like that in this day and age, I'd be doing colour.

So he was serious about running my quote on the back cover of THE COMPLETE CHESTER GOULD'S DICK TRACY Volume 3. He even sent me a fax to show me what it would look like.

"Hi Dave, Here's the back cover of THE COMPLETE CHESTER GOULD'S DICK TRACY, Volume 3. Thanks for letting me use your quote. Please let me know if you see any errors.

"Let me know if you'd like me to add a descriptive line after your name (like `Creator of Cerebus"). I assume everyone knows what you've accomplished but I'm very happy to add something if you think it would be helpful."

Umm. How about "Noted Misogynist Who Isn't Making a Nickel From This, So Please Don't Take It Out on Us"? Or maybe D**E S*M to show that you got the memo and you understand that printing the name is like printing dirty words? Oh, you mean helpful to ME?

No, I can tell you're serious about this, Ted, and I appreciate it. I haven't seen any sign of the REX LIBRIS book I did the intro for (I did see James at TCAF in passing and he said Slave Labor was supposed to send him a bunch of copies but nothing yet) (couldn't be a certain female editor who would rather roll around in broken glass than send out any copies when she knows one of them is going to yours truly, could it?) and the P. CRAIG RUSSELL book I did the intro for hasn't turned up yet.

(note: The Art of P. Craig Russell has been delayed from its initial July 2007 release date. -J)

Yes, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Good luck with volume 3, anyway.

Robert Gavila sent along a copy of NISHA 2.7 of 4. I had to laugh when I saw that. Robert does the book as a hobby and he's still climbing a steep learning curve so they take him a LONG time to do. I saw the envelope and I went "All right, Robert! Number Three!" Not out loud or anything, but that was definitely what I thought. Nope 2.7. See the way he planned it was to be 42 pages, 42 pages, 33 pages and 33 pages in issues 1 through 4 and this issue only has 23 pages, ergo, it's #2.7. The idea is that he can make the issues an annual event and embarrass Diamond into carrying his book. Well, it doesn't work that way. I mean, he has part of the argument right in that his work is now getting to a level where Diamond would be willing to carry it, but now they want him to redraw the first two to bring them up to snuff. That's not unreasonable. I mean, there are still a number of rough panels in here and it is really pushing the outer boundaries to the limit to expect that stores are going to carry a semi-pro, verging on pro comic that is a continued story when it takes a year to get 23 pages done. There is no question that CEREBUS was a semi-pro book when it started out (one of Robert's big beefs is that there are a lot of books, like CEREBUS which were given time to evolve and develop) but it also came out every other month regular as clockwork and at the time there really wasn't any competition to speak of. It's not as if Elfquest, Cerebus and Star*Reach were playing musical chairs with one slot in the comics stores. Now there are literally dozens if not hundreds of books all competing for the same shelf space so, now, more than ever you have to be better than the best that's out there, not better than the worst.

My best business advice to Robert is: keep going and get this story done, improving every step of the way and then start your next book as a semi-pro artist and do something self-contained. There is just no way that you are going to break in with an annual continued storyline book: no one can keep track of the plot that long. In fact arguably, one of the skills that comic store patrons are developing is the ability to "get over" comic books more quickly. If two issues came out six months ago and #3 hasn't shown up, yet, then "get over" it: stop waiting for #3 and buy something else and when #3 comes in, ignore it. It's like an unreliable girlfriend or boyfriend. Unreliable every once in a while, well okay give them the benefit of the doubt. Unreliable as a way of life – nobody is worth dealing with whose LIFESTYLE is being unreliable.

That's why I suggest a self-contained work that can be judged on its own merits and where the question of reliability doesn't enter in. It's here, it's self-contained, that's as reliable as the store and the customer need it to be. As Robert writes in his cover letter, "I definitely suck less!" There's no question about that, Robert, and my hat's off to you: but that's progress, that isn't a destination. Check it out at www.gavila.com

Struck a nerve with somebody. There's three postcards here from (it might be David but it looks more like Darl). Card #1:



"You asked for a flood of letters/cards if you would continue Sunday scripture. I say Please! Keep us from going to Hell. Card 1 of 3."

Well, I don't remember asking for a flood of letters and cards. As I recall I think I admitted that the only two people who were likely to be interested were Steve Peters and Margaret Liss.

Anyway, as you can see, (if these got to Jeff on time) the front is a terribly ironic-looking 1950s couple with the slogan "We're all going to Hell". How very droll. See the fact that they look like 1950s people is a way of indicating that going to Hell is something that people used to believe in back when they were concerned about their physical appearance and tried to look nice. The morons! What they need to do is get some piercings, some tattoos, and some hair dye.

Card #2:



"Second postcard regarding scripture on Sunday. I read every Blog & Mail but especially look forward to Sunday (This is ironic postcard 2 of 3). Don't let us look like monkeys."

And as you can see, the side-splittingly hilarious image is of a chimp holding a copy of Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Get it? "Don't let us look like monkeys?" See, he's pretending that he doesn't know that the image is actually of a chimp, not a monkey. So it's like a double dose of "post modern" irony.

Card #3:



"(Ironic post card 3 of 3) Don't even know what to say about this card. If you want recognition – try channelling less rage + more creating actual art. Is this really such a pasé idea? More scripture please."

See, the IRONY here, is just as he pretended to actually want more Scripture (Irony #1) and not to know that the "monkey" was actually a chimp (Irony #2), here he's pretending that he doesn't know that there are two s's in passé (Irony #3) – even though he (or she) got the accent right. And then there's the front of the card "some advantages of being a woman artist" where the IRONY (Irony #4 through 8) is that none of them are even remotely funny. See, you look at it and you go, "Oh, it's going to be a funny list to read". But then you read it and it isn't funny. In fact, it's pretty much insulting to women artists, but then it's apparently signed at the bottom "guerrilla girls – conscience of the art world." So that's, like, Irony #9 through 12. So it's just loaded with irony. Is it supposed to be funny? We don't know, so that's ironic (Irony #13). Is it supposed to be serious? We don't know, so that's ironic (Irony #14). And then David or Darl went ahead and bought it and even says, "Don't even know what to say about this card". So there's double Irony there! The fact that he or she bought it even though he or she doesn't understand it any better than we do…and then sent it to me JUST AS IF IT ACTUALLY SAID SOMETHING (Irony #15 and 16).

Wow. That's SURE a lot of irony, ISN'T it, folks? Irony in words AND pictures! Like comics, only in this case the words are on the back and the pictures are on the front. See: that's ANOTHER level of irony. The words and pictures are together but they're actually apart, too (Irony #17). Oh, how IRONIC!

Tomorrow: Almost through 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 #426 (November 11th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


Greg S. writes from all the way over in Kitchener's twin city, Waterloo:



"Hi Dave - I'm not sure if you're familiar with the writings of the 19th Century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, but I thought I would run this passage from his Journal by you to see what you make of it:"



2734 No prophet, no historian could find a more descriptive expression of Mohammedanism than the one Mohammed himself has given in the suspension of his sacred tomb between two magnets, [*] that is, between the divine which did not become human (incarnation) and the human which did not become divine (brothers and co-heirs in Christ"). Here there is neither individualized polytheism nor concretized monotheism (Jehovah), but abstract monotheism – "God is one" – in which it is specifically the number which must be affirmed, not unlike the Jewish God who, to a certain degree, was unpredicated, yet still more concretized: "I am who I am." [+]. It is not incarnation (the Messiah), not merely prophet (Moses), for there were many prophets among the Jews without difference in power even though with a difference in degree; but Mohammed demanded a specific superiority (approximating an incarnation but, of course, like everything else in Mohammedanism, stopping at the halfway point.).

II A 86 June 3, 1837

Well, first of all, the term Mohammedanism betrays a fundamental ignorance of Islam because it presupposes Islam to be analogous to Christianity. Christianity is based on Christ and Mohammedanism is based on Mohammed. It's purely a Christian coinage. In fact Islam intentionally avoids the deification of Mohammed that is the core of Christianity: Christ is God. In Islam raising a man to the level of God is joining gods with God and that's strictly forbidden (haram).



The suggestion that Mohammed would even refer to himself as having a "sacred tomb" would have been abhorrent to him. That's idolatry, the worship of inanimate objects. One of the reasons that Muslims bow in the direction of Mecca is to avoid exactly those sorts of misapprehensions. They bow to the center of their religion, the Ka'aba, which was built by Adam on God's instruction and rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael and then rebuilt in Muhammad's time with his assistance and that's all that they bow to, the Sacred House, not to substitute altars and images and icons as Christians do. If Muhammad did refer to his tomb, he didn't do so in the Koran, so the only possible place for the reference would be in the Hadith, which are non-scriptural and should therefore, in my view, be ignored.





Since you only have one set of quotation marks here, I don't know where the quote theoretically begins but it certainly has a Christian flair to it. The equivalent of the sentiment in Islam is that the Jews fell short of what they should have accomplished and the Christians overreached themselves, blaspheming against God in claiming that He had a son and that Jesus was that son and that Jesus was the equivalent of God. Islam adopted the mean, neither falling short nor over-reaching.



Muhammad could arguably have been said to have demanded a certain superiority, but only in the sense outlined above: don't fall short and don't overreach. Submit yourself to the will of God. Muhammad is only a plain-spoken warner, he doesn't claim to know the things unseen, he doesn't know when the Day of Judgement will be. He walks the streets and eats plain food just as all God's prophets and messengers did. That's who Muhammad is in the Koran. Having never read the Hadith I don't know if Kierkegaard is just making this part up or if he's extrapolating from the Hadith, but it sure isn't the Muhammad who is in the Koran.



My own reading of the Gospels would tend to confirm what Muhammad is told to say in the Koran. I've just finished chapter 14 of Luke and the Synoptic Jesus says a lot of things that would compel the inference that he was the Son of God, or Second Only to God or God's spokesman (hey, any port in a storm) – particularly when they're mistranslated so that they say directly what the actual Greek terms manage-to-not-quite- say-while-seeming-to-say. Unless there's anything dramatically different in chapters 15 through 24 that I didn't see in Matthew or Mark or the first fourteen chapters of Luke, then I think I'm pretty safe in saying that that was very much the point (or Point or "point") of the Synoptic Jesus.



I'd also argue against the "stopping at the halfway point". He was told to say that he was "God's last messenger and the seal of the prophets." That doesn't sound "halfway" to me, that sounds like The End, Full Stop. And I think the evidence post-632 would tend to support that.





2735 [*] In margin of 2734 (II A 86): An attempted ascension, but no one ascends to heaven except him who descended from heaven.



Okay, "but no one ascends to heaven except him who descended from heaven" that's a paraphrase of the Johannine Jesus.



There is a certain amount of playing around with the term heaven that got out of hand, as far as I'm concerned, and all three religions indulge in it. Heaven is earth's atmosphere, the insulating layer between outer space "the waters above the expansion" and the seas "the waters below the expansion". It's a holding pen, from what I can see that some souls inhabit until Judgement Day while other souls inhabit the inner confines of the earth or the earth's surface and some just stick to their own graves. It became a convenient shorthand for paradise, as an antithesis of Hades, the fiery inferno at the earth's core, but I think the scientific evidence tends to support the view that it's earth's atmosphere. I mean, we know that now. There's this layer between the earth and outer space that keeps us alive. Being able to breathe instead of exploding in a vacuum, yes you could certainly argue that that constitutes paradise but the extrapolations have gotten way out of hand. It's a good example of not re-reading Genesis in light of new information. Okay, we know the earth is round now, we know it's covered by insulating layer. I think, if we let ourselves, we have figured out what the Heaven – as opposed to the Earth – is, if we just look at our new information with an open mind.



Muslims would maintain, based on legends of the Prophet that he did ascend into the seven heavens. Not when he died, but when he was still alive. That's what The Night Journey (Sura 17) is theoretically about. I say theoretically because the only actual reference in the Koran to Muhammad's miraculous journey on a magical horse from Mecca to Jerusalem, ascending into heaven where the Al-Aqsa mosque, the Dome of the Rock is now, where he met and prayed with a number of the prophets and got the word that Muslims were supposed to pray five times a day directly from God is:



Glory be to Him who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Temple of ___ to the Temple that is more remote, whose precinct We have blessed, that We might shew him of Our signs! For He is the Hearer, the Seer.



And that's it. Well, to me this is the Synoptic Jesus gig all over again. The verse certainly compels the inference that what is being discussed in the first instance is the Sacred Temple of Mecca and in the second instance, the remains of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, but it doesn't say that. So, if you insist on believing that the blank is supposed to say Mecca and you won't accept that it says anything else (which Christians and Muslims seem to be absolutely pathological in doing, never once stopping to say, "Hey, wait a minute, maybe there's a blank there for a, you know, Good Reason." Well, DUH! Sorry, Christians, sorry, Muslims but…WELL, DUH!!) you could very easily be committing yourself to a blasphemous way of thinking. My own assumption is that this is a YHWH verse and the first blank is the Sacred Temple of Jerusalem and the Temple "that is more remote" is the theoretical Seven Heavens which were actually just YHWH constructs. So by getting Muslims to accept the sacredness of something that isn't even named, well, YHWH just loves that sort of crap from what I can see. And if you look at all the grief it has caused right up to the present day with the contention between Muslims and Jews at the Temple Mount, well, hey, with good reason YHWH loves that sort of crap. YHWH didn't lie to you, he/she/it left the blank there and let you blasphemously fill it up with whatever you wanted and now, as John Lennon put it, "we have all this."



I discuss the seven heavens more in my dialogue "Getting Riel" with Chester that was in the last few issues of CEREBUS that nobody read. Drawing the inference that Muhammad ascended into the seven heavens and actually met God and got the word that Muslims were supposed to pray five times a day – Moshe theoretically keeps telling him to go back and negotiate downwards. At first it's fifty prayers a day, and then 30 prayers a day and then twenty-five prayers a day. Well, to me that's the major clue right there. It mirrors Abraham's negotiation with the YHWH in Genesis over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Muhammad didn't meet God, he met YHWH and then proclaimed that he had met God. That's blasphemy. If there's a blank, leave it blank. Don't automatically worship it if you don't know what belongs in there. Like I say: DUH!



2736 [+] In margin of 2734 (II A 86) It is therefore very interesting to see the Mohammedans in a curiously ironical manner bearing the coat of arms which so appropriately characterizes their relationship to Christianity – the moon, which borrows its light from the sun (From a scrap of paper dated Jan. 5, 1837, which I found in my desk drawer)





Just as in a curiously ironical manner, it also features a star which is what the sun is and which appropriately characterizes Christianity's relationship to them: Islam contains the sun and the moon, but you have to have a certain level of sophistication to "get" that and you also need to be patient and submit to God's will for a number of centuries until science develops to the point where it understands that that's the hidden meaning of the star and crescent and that gets revealed to you. God is the Wise, the Knowing.



2737 [+] in the margin of 2734 (II A 86): In the words, "I am who I am", the personal eternal consciousness has already taken precedence and therefore does not develop a fatalism as does the cold "unity". Furthermore, these words, "I am who I am," are an excellent answer to out-of-place questions.





That's a very Christian way of putting it. Note that Kierkegaard doesn't cite any of the "out-of-place questions" to which "I am who I am" (I think the original Hebrew translates more directly as "I am THAT I am") is deemed to be an excellent answer. This would be familiar to all of my readers who were driven from the Catholic Church by its strict adherence to the idea that any question posed in opposition to accepted dogma is, by nature, impertinent. I think it's always been more accurate to say that it is a vice of Judaism and Christianity to always deem questions to which one doesn't know the answer to be "out-of-place". You can pretend that "I am who I am" answers them all, but you're just playing a variation on the Emperor's New Clothes in doing so.



My own interpretation of "I am that I am" is that in chapter 3 of Exodus, Moshe starts out talking to YHWH. In verse 4, YHWH sees Moshe turn aside to see the burning bush. God calls to him from out of the burning bush and says, "Moshe Moshe." Moshe says "Here am I". God says, "Draw not nigh hither." What God is saying is "This is bad news, don't come any closer." Then YHWH interrupts and says, "Put off thy shoes from off thy feete, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Well, no it isn't. It's a burning bush. Treating the ground in front of it as holy is idolatry. That's what God knows is up and that's what God's warning against. Oh, well. Too late now. So then YHWH rabbits on for a while, verses 5 through 10. It's all YHWH. Moshe thinks it's God, so in verse 11, Moshe addresses God: "who am I that I should goe vnto Pharoah, and that I should bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt?" So God answers, "Certainly I will be with thee, and this shall be a token vnto thee, that I haue sent thee: When thou has brought foorth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God vpon this mountain." Do you catch the intonation? "Certainly I will be with thee." Like, Oh, are you talking to Me? "Certainly I will be with thee." Excuse us, YHWH, it seems Moshe wants to talk to Me. And Moshe keeps talking to God. "And Moshe saide vnto God, Behold, I come vnto the children of Israel, and shall say vnto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me vnto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them?" See, I think what Moshe was alluding to is the God vs. YHWH discrepancy. This has come up before many times among the Hebrew people, I think. Not in the last two thousand years, but prior to Moshe I think it was a hot topic. Why does He call Himself God sometimes and YHWH other times? Moshe is looking to get the answer from the proverbial horse's mouth.



And what does God do? God's a perfect gentleman about it. No need to deal YHWH out of the game with a definitive "my Name is God, Now and Forever". No, YHWH has to come to that realization his/her/itself in his/her/its own time.



"And God saide vnto Moshe, I AM THAT I AM: And he said, Thus shalt thou say vnto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me vnto you." It's very diplomatic. It's saying that there are two of us here, both of us considering ourselves to be I AM. So one of the I Am's is sending you.



And then YHWH jumps right in pretending to be God and saying "The YHWH God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob hath sent me vnto you: this is my name for euer, and this is my memorial vnto all generations." He/ she/it always does that. God makes allowances and concessions to YHWH and is the very soul of diplomacy and YHWH immediately tries to deal God out of the game. As far as I can see that starts happening at the beginning of Genesis and it proceeds all the way through to the end of the 114th Sura in the Koran, called MEN (oddly enough):

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Say: I betake me for refuge to the Lord of men,

The King of men,

The God of men,

Against the mischief of the stealthily withdrawing whisperer,

Who whispereth in man's breast –

Against djinn and men.

The Lord of men, the King of men and the God of men, is God. "The stealthily withdrawing whisperer" is YHWH.



See God is your Lord, but the Lord (that is YHWH) is not your God.



Okay, Greg, I've been at this since 3:30 this morning and it's now 10:40 pm. I'm an old man. I'm going to bed. Hope this was what you were looking for. The quotes according to Greg are from Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers Vol.3 pages 205-206, published by Indiana University Press.

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

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

___________________________________________________

If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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


___________________________________________________

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

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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #425 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Sergeant Moore plans on following the Clint Eastwood/Kurowsawa work `til you drop career trajectory.

Yeah, I pretty much came to the same conclusion except that it looks as if I'm finally getting to the point where I really will have enough money to see me through to the end of my life so publishing is starting to look a little suspect to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'll keep writing and drawing. I'm a comic-book creator. It's what I do.

But the idea of just throwing money away on ads and printing bills and promotions for comic books that I know people are just going to ignore…that looks more and more to me like a guy who just can't walk away from the blackjack tables, you know? Look at how much money you're ahead by, dude! – WALK AWAY! But no, the putz just stands there and loses every nickel back to the house until he has to walk away because he's busted flat. If I was in Clint Eastwood's situation – if I had the equivalent of his stature in the comic book field, that would be one thing. But I'm like a guy who has had a half a dozen flops in a row or a complete rookie.

Listen, bud, are you SURE you want to bet your nest egg that "Seventh Time's the Charm"?

I like to think I'm not that stupid. Fortunately if I JUST write and draw comics all it costs me is for the art board and the ink, nickels and dimes. I can pay for 120 artboards a year and all the pencils, erasers, pen nibs, brushes and inks I need to cover them, no problem. You can't do that in movies. Shooting the movie is your biggest expense. In comics publishing and promotion are your biggest expenses.

Tell you what, if I end up not publishing either of the two secret projects, I'll swap you photocopies of them for a copy of your movie. Then all I have to do is find someone with a DVD player so I can watch it.


"I'll give you another update in November. All of October will be very busy finishing DEMON JOE. I should reach a conclusion. If not it will be due to my money problems and having to do army stuff to pay the rent. I'll write again in November with either an update or a DVD. Good luck to you"

"P.S. In a small irony (I have been reading your blog) the woman who published Bryan Talbot's book also sells me my comics. Moonstone and AF Books and Comics are owned by the same people. I still haven't bought any Moonstone products, though – even with the bigger discount a Moonstone book will get me. Anyway, it's just a `small world' irony I thought I'd share. I never read "licensed" comics. That's about as much as I can say about Moonstone. I just like their comic shop. My Dad would pick up my subscriptions for me and mail them to me when I was deployed. Your phone books are all in stock so they can't be all bad."

Oh, no. I don't think there's anything wrong with the stores. I mean I can get resentful if I want that even though the CEREBUS trades keep selling that isn't going to translate into first, second or third issue sales for me. It's one of those glass half full, glass half empty deals. How many guys have work from thirty years ago that's still paying their grocery bill? No, I come at it from the other direction: pushed to the wall and forced to face facts, I am more than willing to admit that I did my only good work when I was in my early twenties and everything I've done since that has been complete crap. The good work (CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY) sells the best and all the crap (the stuff I did with Gerhard) sells between a half to a tenth that well based purely on momentum. It's a "how did your last project do?" environment. They don't add up how many copies of your work they've sold in total, they just look at what they're selling of, say, an individual issue of FOLLOWING CEREBUS and that's what you're worth to them.

At least I OWN CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY. How many guys can honestly say that they own their best-selling material? Alan Moore sure can't.

"Of course, you must judge that with the fact that I won't write anything bad for fear that you will post it on your blog and I'll have to hear about it from Lori. Y THE LAST MAN is about to be cancelled and I'll be short my 4 monthlies minimum to keep my 10% discount. Not the best time to talk trash about your local retailer. It brings dread to the words, `Let us haggle!'"

She wouldn't REALLY cut an American War Veteran's 10% discount because he doesn't have four monthly titles on it, would she? C'mon, say it ain't so, Lori. How about this. Sergeant Moore gets to keep his 10% discount and I promise not to sue you for publishing criminal libel about me in Bryan Talbot's book.

No, wait. That isn't going to work, is it? Thanks to the universal code of silence (and thank you ALL again, for that!) Kicking Dave Sim in the Nuts is considered a fundamental human freedom in the comic book field. Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom to Kick Dave Sim in the Nuts. They all go together. You just watch: Lori publishes criminal libel about me, I offer to let her off the hook for the sake of 10% off on three funnybooks a month and everyone's going to jump onto her side, same as they did with Jeff Smith and Gary Groth (with the exception of Michael Zulli in the former case and Michael B. – your fax is coming up, Michael, patience, lad, patience – in both cases: thanks for being the only ones to jump onto MY side I owe you both BIG TIME, guys.)

Okay, how about this. What are funnybooks going for these days? Three bucks each, isn't it? Tell you what, Lori, you let Sergeant Moore the American War Veteran keep his 10% discount and you send me a bill for $36 and I'll pay you annually to LET him keep it.


How's that for fairness? Yeah, I know. Universal silence. What else is new?

Keep `em flyin', Sarge. And good luck wrapping up your movie.

Monday: Ted Adams at IDW checks in

Tomorrow: Not a whole lot of Sunday Edition material coming in these days, but here's a good one from right around home




___________________________________________________

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 #424 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Looking at the bad news on Secret Project #2:

So, instead of 25-50 copies, I'm looking at 12-25 copies on the second issue, and probably 6-10 copies on my third issue. And that's from the Top Indy Friendly Stores in the country. The mainstream stores, you'd have to divide by 10 – between 2 and 5 on number one and they'll order number two for anyone who has enough monthly titles in their pull file to justify the expense. So that was when I mentally pulled the plug on the project. I'll keep writing and drawing it and developing the website – hey, it's a lot of fun to work on! -- sending out a PREVIEW EDITION to the real-world environment I have in mind. Then it all comes down to how that real world PREVIEW EDITION works based on the response to the website from the real-world environment inside of the first 48 hours after the PREVIEW EDITION "lands".

But if the Indy-friendly comic retail consensus – as it is here -- is 25-50 copies on the first issue, then it just isn't viable in the Direct Market. DOA. Dead on Arrival. DOA I can accomplish just by putting the original art on the shelf in my office on top of the artwork to Secret Project I and forgetting about it and save myself roughly $9,000 worth of cash flow by doing so.

But, like I say, there's the fax from Ralph DiBernardo. Matt and Brian and Jeremy killed the book BOOM dead with their orders (unless the Hail Mary pass to the real world works) but Ralph DiBernardo POSSIBLY breathed some life back into it. You'll see why, hopefully, when I get there.

Hey! Remember Brian Lee Moore, from issue 300? The Iraq vet who was making his own movie, DEMON JOE? Got a nice note from him, dated September 15:

"I'm back to writing on lined paper here. My printer has had its last gasp. I killed it by printing massive quantities of various drafts of DEMON JOE. Four or five cases of paper and about a dozen ink cartridges later, I guess I'm lucky it doesn't just disintegrate in a big cloud of dust."

I go through the same sort of thing with the photocopier. Just running too many copies through trying to get exactly the right reduction of a panel on one of the projects. I'll sort of look at it, thinking, "I'm pushing it, aren't I?" And it's as if it's looking back at me going "You really are, you know. You want clean solid blacks on your copies or do you want dozens of copies of each page?"

"Yesterday, I returned from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I had to make two weeks of pay to cover my rent and utilities that were backed up. So I changed my MOS again to become a Heavy Construction Equipment Operator. Now it's official. I'm an engineer. That doesn't mean what it does in the civilian world. In the army that means we build and shoot. This is my fourth Corps in the Army Reserves. As a Cargo Specialist and, later, as a Truck Driver (as I was in Iraq) I was in the Transportation Corps. When I was promoted to Sergeant I was also joining the NCO Corps. I transferred to a unit closer to my home after my deployment and that led me to a nice cushy job as the NBC NCO (or Chemical NCO) which put me in the Chemical Corps. Now I'm in the Engineer Corps.

"It was pretty laid back. Three meals a day and we sleep in an old World War II barracks. I learned how to operate a dozer, a bucket loader (which was basically a 10,000 fork lift with a bucket instead of a fork so I already knew how to use it i.e. Cargo Specialist Junk), a scraper (which is basically a giant straight truck as long as a semi- only it articulates: has a bowl and a blade to pick up dirt & gravel to spread and fill) and a grader. Now, it'll take me another year to get good at using them. Two days a month and two weeks in the summer and what ever else I can volunteer for to make extra cash.

"I've got Saturday and Sunday off before I do another seven days of work. I'm using the last of my AT days (you get a maximum limit in the budget). Four days followed by a three-day weekend at Fort McCoy to shoot rifles. Fun fun. Not really, though. Actually I think of it as a pain in the ass. I really just want to make my movies (particularly the one I'm finishing) but I need cash to live on to get me by and the Reserves has always been my angle to scrape by. It's just getting harder to stretch $500 or $1200. $1200 used to be able to last a month. Now you need around $2,000 a month to live alone, comfortably)."

Yeah, I think it's all part of getting older. I keep wondering why I can't keep my annual expenses just for myself down around $8,000 a year and still give a good chunk of that to charity. Well, because it isn't 1982 anymore, Dave. 1982 is a quarter of a century ago. Pretty soon I'm going to have to crack and give myself a raise to $1,000 a month. Seems to me I should be able to buy a cattle ranch in Montana for $1,000 a month.


"I'll probably mail this on Tuesday. Monday I'll be at my Reserve unit. I'm going to use their machines to photocopy this. I don't have an Archive, but I like to include correspondence, e-mails, scripts, prose, and actual journals in my journal. I've got four milk crates full of 2-inch and 3-inch binders full of document protectors and most of my scribblings as far back as 1993. Please photocopy that green cardstock I wrote on and mail the copy back to me. I'd like to include it in my journal."

Yes SIR, Sergeant! (it doesn't show up on a computer screen, but that was my niftiest salute I did there: slow up and then SNAP forward). I was a little worried about how the green would photocopy, but it came out fine as you can see.

"I read about your Secret Project on your Blog. I look forward to getting a copy at my favourite comic shop next to my copies of FABLES and whatever else I end up buying that day. I remember writing to you that I thought you should do another comic. I know I plan on following the Clint Eastwood/Kurowsawa method of career progression – just don't stop. I'll retire when I can't get out of bed under my own power."

Tomorrow: Oh, to be the Clint Eastwood of comics instead of the bum I turned out to be




___________________________________________________

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 #423 (November 8th, 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 subject is, as usual, the complete lack of a paper trail for anything I've done being approved of after CEREBUS and HIGH SOCIETY. I mean I'd like to help you folks out and CREATE a paper trail so it doesn't look as if you've all been scrupulously ignoring me for thirteen years but, uh, no can do. Or if any of you can come up with a paper trail: some huge stack of rave reviews and letters with everyone beside themselves with ecstasy at How Dave Sim Nailed Woody Allen and how amazing that was – you know, I misplaced them somewhere around the Off-White House, but there they are, plain as day, absolute stacks of them.

Woody Allen? NOW you're going to tell me that you thought the Woody Allen stuff was GOOD? That was four years ago. Okay, now one guy is willing to admit four years later that the Woody Allen stuff didn't blow chunks. And THIS I'm supposed to build the rest of my career around?

There is an occasional glimmer of light in the darkness. I'm hoping to get to a fax I got from Ralph DiBernardo which, a mere two weeks ago (October 10: I'm writing this October 22) actually switched Secret Project II from "Definite Scrub Launch" to "Possible Go Launch" status.

If you want to see Secret Project II, well right now it's hanging by the thread provided by Dann Thomas and Ralph DiBernardo. Looking on the bright side, that thread wasn't there a month ago.

I always try to look on the bright side. Thanks for writing, Mike.

A letter from Alessandro Bottero in Rome, Italy:

"Dear Mr. Sim, I'm Alessandro Bottero, an Italian comic-book publisher.

"I have worked with projects like USAGI YOJIMBO, A DISTANT SOIL, NOWHERESVILLE, DIORAMAS, HEAVEN'S WAR. I've published some young Italian authors, too. In 2007-2008, I will publish USAGI YOJIMBO, NEXUS ARCHIVES and some Oni Press titles (LITTLE STAR, LOVE FIGHT, CHEAT, and others).

"I've read CEREBUS and I've always found your stories and articles very interesting.

"I hope all goes well for you, and I hope we could talk about a little project I'd love to do.

"I believe in self-publishing (or in a mutual cooperation between author and publisher) and I'd be very glad if I could publish the Italian version of your CEREBUS GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING. Do you believe it could be interesting for you?"

"I found it very interesting because every year I write a little book on publishing, self-publishing and more called `My Way'. I've published `My Way 2005', and `My Way 2006' so far. I make a very small print run (maybe 200 copies) and I sold it directly at the comic convention or by my site.

"I was wondering if I could do the same with your guide.

"If you are interested maybe you could contact me."

I appreciate the offer but right now the GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING is in the middle of being updated. Unfortunately, it's at the same point in being updated that it was two years or so ago and, at least for the foreseeable future, I can't see where I would find the time to devote to it.

Good luck with `My Way 2007".

David Banks sent me a breakdown on the costs involved in producing the 300-cover volume and the 50-cover volume including the royalty for Aardvark-Vanaheim and the royalty for Gerhard. I suggested that he let everyone know what the costs are involved since both books are going to be incredibly expensive and the lion's share of the money is going into printing. I assume what will happen at this point is that someone is going to try to steer him in the direction of a cheaper printer in order to get the costs down.

That'll be up to David since the project was his idea in the first place and he was the first one to send me a mock-up of it.

As I said, Matt Lehman sent me a fax from Comicopia in Boston saying that he would take between 25 and 50 copies of Secret Project #2 sight unseen. Which is also what Brian Hibbs at Comix Experience in San Francisco said and what Jeremy Shorr at Titan Comics in Dallas said. It's not especially good news because first issue orders are always going to be roughly 200% of what second issue orders are going to be and the retailers all basically order what everyone else orders. You got three guys with the same orders, you might as well have orders from all 3,000 stores. It's like the exit polls in elections. It's not the happiest news in the world that we're so predictable that 2% of the polls are going to tell you the same thing 100% of the polls are going to tell you, but it is, indeed, a fact of life.

[That 200%, by the way, is a point worth emphasizing, I think, that often gets overlooked in the comic-book field. Your first issue orders don't represent what the retailer thinks he will be able to sell of your title. Your first issue orders represent about TWICE what the retailer thinks he will be able to sell of your title. Call it the First Issue Premium Effect. There is a whole constituency in the comic-book stores who, in addition to their regular purchases, buy first issues of comic books – sometimes multiple copies, sometimes of every first issue that comes in (this hit a lunatic extreme with Image Comics where a lot of these guys bought 100 copies of each Image first issue which is what led to sales in the million-plus range in an environment that only consisted of roughly 100,000 -- if that -- paying customers) sometimes just of first issues they like the look of. As investments go, it isn't a REALLY terrible idea. Roughly the same odds as blackjack (i.e. not REALLY terrible, as compared to playing slot machines, say). Even a first issue that has no long-term potential investment value can often have a flurry of "heat" in the first couple of weeks after it comes out and be suddenly selling for $50 until it cools off and settles back to $5 or $10. If you bought ten of them and you dump them when they hit $50, selling them back to the retailer for $250 it's really no different from any commodities market where you "go short" or "go long" on your investments. Or lottery tickets, where people who buy a LOT of lottery tickets and win $50 will often just turn around and buy $50 worth of lottery tickets. (Seriously, I just saw someone do that in a variety store I was in and my jaw dropped open).

You "made" roughly $220 so you buy $220 worth of first issues. But – and this is the important part for self-publishers – a lot of the people who will buy your first issue on that basis, won't buy your second issue. The track record isn't REALLY terrible on first issues, but it's even worse on second issues (as in, you would have the same level of success tearing up $100 bills and then wishing fervently that they would glue themselves back together again). So there is this built-in exponential drop-off in sales. If you do three variant covers, all that's going to do is exacerbate the situation. The sales on your second issue will usually be a fraction of what your smallest selling variant cover was. I think there would be a lot less disappointment in the field if publishers and self-publishers would just divide their first issue numbers in half and use that as the basis for their expected sales on number two and then divide that number in half and use it as the basis for their expected sales on number three. If you can't make a go of it with your number three sales, save yourself some money and aggravation and don't put the book out]

Tomorrow: So, let's look at how bad the news is on Secret Project #2




___________________________________________________

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 #422 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

A CEREBUS reader suggests that the Woody Allen stuff in LATTER DAYS "worked":

Well, to be honest, you're the first person to say anything positive to me about the Woody Allen stuff. "Doing" Woody Allen was really my response to the complete radio silence on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Okay, they don't want meticulously researched authors, how about a meticulously researched comedian? Nope they don't want that either. So, in all the thinking that went into Secret Project I and Secret Project II I really didn't have much to go on. I haven't done anything good since HIGH SOCIETY and everything after 186 completely sucked. That seemed to point in the direction of trying something completely new.

"I think the consumer demands a self-contained, 49-page Dave Sim Secret Project that has Peter Sellers in it, or possibly the equivalent of Ultimate Roach, along with whatever else inspires you.

"So, maybe not `the consumer' so much as me, and perhaps rather than `demands' more sort of hopes for, but be fair, it's only human to want more of the same only different, isn't it? Certainly in the comic book shops it is.

"I suspect that we cannot have a 49-page secret project about an aardvark scamming people, but given that, 49 pages of whatever Dave feels like doing featuring a Bill Murray character would be pretty freaking awesome. How couldn't that sell in comic shops, while giving people a hunger for another fix?

"I may not be the best judge of these things, however.

"Anyway, I remain, as always, eager to purchase the next issue."

Well, I appreciate that, Mike, I really do. But, you know, maybe if you…and, say, three or four other people…had said something positive about the Woody Allen stuff when it was coming out, I might have factored that into my thinking on what I was going to do next. The Woody Allen stuff flopped completely – sales continued to go down and no one had anything to say about it, good or bad at the time or since -- despite all the work I put into it. So doing the same thing for Peter Sellers or Bill Murray, to me, would be like saying, "Let's intentionally follow a flop with another flop."

I hope you can understand that I'm TRYING to give the comic-book field the benefit of the doubt. I really am. I'm trying to believe that a new project from me will get a fair hearing. I'm trying to overlook the fact that everything I've done for the last thirteen years has been universally ignored. And that starts to seem a little psychotic to me. Why am I ignoring the fact that my work is being ignored? I can understand all of you being cowed into submission by the Marxist-feminists – they're very good at it. So, in a sense, you want me to entertain you but you also want me to understand that you can't applaud or say anything nice publicly about anything I do – or if you're a store owner that you can't order too many of them or the Marxist-feminist Boogeyperson Come Get You. I can, in a way, understand you being that way, but really what you're asking me to do is to join you in your psychotic state and UNDERSTAND why it is that everything I do has to be met with complete radio silence and ACCEPT that as if it is normal and sensible.

Can YOU understand why that doesn't exactly light my fuse and make me feel like I just HAVE to spend thousands of dollars getting a comic book into your hands that I know, already, you and everyone else is going to ignore? While expecting me to work twelve hours a day, six days a week doing the NEXT thing that you're all guaranteed to ignore? I'm not that needy and I don't feel a sufficient kinship with anyone (no offence) to feel compelled to ENABLE the psychotic state that you've chosen for yourselves. Why would I help you to maintain a psychotic state? I mean, what's in it for me?

Right now, the only thing that has improved sales is the Blog and Mail, so right now that's the only guaranteed thing I'm going to do.

The best I can say about possibly publishing any future comics work right now is: miracles do happen. I sent Dann Thomas a copy of GOING HOME and FORM & VOID and she overcame her ambivalence and talked to Matthew J. Bruccoli about them. If you had asked me about the likelihood of that happening before it happened, I would have put it in the vicinity of 12,000,000,000 to 1. First of all that she wouldn't have taken offence that this book had been written by an evil misogynist and it didn't portray Zelda Fitzgerald and Mary Hemingway as Strong, Independent Admirable Women. Any time I send a woman any of my books, it's really just my way of saying "Good-bye, no hard feelings, it was nice knowing you, however briefly."

Second of all that she would think the material worth "going to bat" over and thirdly that she would risk a contretemps with a long-time friend in doing so.

But, make no mistake about it: that was an "outside comics" event. The only thing that puts it remotely near the comic-book field is that Dann Thomas is married to Roy Thomas. So that means a miracle happened with Dave Sim's work in a place adjacent to the comic book field. That's still worlds away from a miracle happening in the comic book field.

Wish I could be more optimistic than that, Mike, but there is absolutely no paper trail for any level of enthusiasm for Dave Sim and his work in the comic book field. My work has been universally ignored in the comic-book field and everyone who pretends to be a fan of my work has been a party to it. The only way that someone can be a Pariah is if everyone goes along with treating him as a Pariah and so far, as with everything else having to do with the Marxist-feminists, their success rate is 100%.

If I saw a little more basic courage and human decency of the kind exhibited by Dann Thomas IN the comic-book field instead of ADJACENT TO the comic book field, I might seriously think about publishing some more of my stuff IN the comic-book field.

Tomorrow: a glimmer of light in the darkness



___________________________________________________

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 #421 (November 6th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________________

Here's my latest letter to Matthew J. Bruccoli, the world's foremost F. Scott Fitzgerald expert:

Dear Professor Bruccoli:

Thank you for the copy of your book Classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald which I finished reading last night. It was quite a pleasure revisiting the whole subject of FSF for the first time since I completed Fall and the River all those years ago. I particularly enjoyed your thesis on the "clumping" of Fitzgerald's short stories around his novels – as a kind of practice run on various subjects being attempted on The Saturday Evening Post's nickel. Very astute, I think, and I'm a convert to your way of thinking.

In that regard, concerning your perplexity about the origin and thematic placement of Fitzgerald's famous short story "A Diamond As Big As The Ritz": I only read the story once and remembered being terrifically unimpressed with it at the time but had retained nothing of its content so I went back and re-read it after reading your classroom meditations on it. I suspect that it's an instance of the "clumping" you describe, a parallel train of thought to Fitzgerald's use of Beauty and The Voice in The Beautiful and Damned.

That is, I think the latter was part of his romantic and, presumably, short-lived notion that Zelda must have been sent to him from Paradise, that thought itself being an extension of the thinking that had led him to call his first novel This Side of Paradise. Being a member in good standing (and, in fact, one of the early definers) of the first really secularized generation in history, I think he still tended to cling to simplified Christian symbolism while stripping it of moral imperatives (an "innovation" which has really led to the theological gutting of most North American churches over the last century). He believed there was a "Next World" but it was Paradise, rather than Heaven; there were larger intelligences in that context, but they were The Voice, rather than God or the Holy Spirit. As I say, symbolism without moral imperative.

I suspect that "Diamond as Big as the Ritz" was another parallel track in his thinking answering the question: "If Zelda came from Paradise, where did I come from?" The answer (I think he decided) was Hell but, again, not a theological Hell, but a secularized Hell, a geographical place called Hades which served as Fitzgerald's personal idea of Hell which amounted to "poverty" or more precisely, "non-wealth": his childhood stature (in his own eyes, anyway) which weighed so heavily on him in being born on the Summit Avenue borderland of wealth in St. Paul (THIS side of Paradise).

The Donahoe family's Montana ranch was the model for the ranch in "Diamond" and if I'm not mistaken, that was his first real exposure to material wealth from "inside" the context. For Fitzgerald it was, literally, Heaven. Although the story starts as "Diamond in the Sky" he ends up bringing Heaven (a really big diamond you could live within your entire life) down to earth (a mountain that is one big diamond that you could live off, materially, for the rest of your life).

As a monotheist, I believe that God responds to these kinds of conceits — if that's the best you can do in the way of theology, that's what God will work with — and attempts to answer the underlying theses to the best of His abilities. While Fitzgerald was never granted the indescribable wealth he imagined in "Diamond" he was paid exorbitant amounts of money for his short stories and was led to post-war France in the 1920s where, as you pointed out, you could buy a multi-course meal with wine included for roughly 18 cents. The lesson was half-learned. In a context where you are indescribably wealthy relative to the native population, there are always going to be others whose wealth dwarfs your own (Gerald and Sara Murphy) and wealth doesn't implicitly bring with it the maturity to use it either wisely or sparingly. Wealth and the use of it is a kind of magnification of more important attributes, not the means of solving all your problems.

Again, the Murphys were the exception rather than the rule to the expatriate American enclave where most, like Fitzgerald, were wrecked on the shoals of their "relative to" indescribable wealth.

Anyway, thanks again for your book (I REALLY wish you would have signed it!) and I hope this provides some food for thought in exchange.

Sincerely,

Extra special thanks to Roy and Dann Thomas for even broaching the subject with Prof. Bruccoli having no idea what sort of a response they might get. I'll keep you posted on the story as it develops.

Mike F. Somewhere in Ohio writes:

"Good morning!"

I don't know how he KNEW I was going to be reading his letter in the morning. That was amazing, Mike!

"I will react to comments you have been making on the Blog & Mail:

"There is that bit in HIGH SOCIETY where the map says Fort Palin and Fort Cleese, but I always read the guy rambling on and on as Eric Idle from the Travel Agent sketch. Am I wrong?"

Afraid so. It's supposed to be John Cleese in the Dead Parrot sketch, but then they all had a "go" at being long-winded in one sketch or another, didn't they?

"See I was reading your comments about Secret Project II, and the move from realism and how close you think it will have to be to Marvel and DC Superheroes to thrive in that environment, and I was thinking…"

"Well, Dave…

"Is there any reason Secret Project II COULDN'T have Eric Idle?

"I mean to say, when our assignment was reading through all that little teeny tiny text that was Cerebus' Genesis commentaries, which turn out to be very funny if you actually read them, even then you gave us Woody Allen.

"Is including Woody Allen what you mean by less realistic? We had R. Crumb Woody Allen and photorealistic Woody Allen, in the same book, and it worked."

Tomorrow: MORE Woody Allen? NOW you tell 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 #420 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Got a comp copy of Roy Thomas' all-time great zine, ALTER EGO #71, a special Canadian Comics Issue reprinting the entirety of the text and most if not all of the illustrations from THE GREAT CANADIAN COMIC BOOKS, 1971. Hard to imagine, but yes, they did manage to get the entirety of a book into one magazine! Very much appreciated since my own copy of TGCCB is getting a bit delicate almost forty years later on so this means I don't have to crack it open as often.

Hey, remember a while ago when I told you to remind me of the story about Roy and Dann Thomas from the dinner we had with Will Eisner? Well, now you don't have to. Basically Roy had invited Will to come out for dinner with him and Dann and Michael T. Gilbert and his wife and Will said that would be fine as long as I got invited too (since he and I had had dinner the night before as I wrote about in FOLLOWING CEREBUS #4). One of those awkward Pariah King of Comics moments where obviously Will didn't know that you don't invite Dave Sim anywhere these days for fear of offending someone. But, it was one of those Whatever Will Wants Will Gets things that comes with the Living Legend territory. Even if nobody wanted me there besides Will, I was going to be there.

Out of deference to Roy and Michael, I took a place at the other end of the table, having had Will all to myself the night before with the intention of entertaining the ladies so that the boys could talk Comics Comics Comics all night (which is, obviously, what you wanted to do with Will Eisner). Well, at some point, I said something about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Dann expressed an interest, so I developed the thought a little more thoroughly than I might otherwise have done at table (not wanting to be a social bore about my obsessions). Well, she was genuinely interested in Fitzgerald, but she could see that I was sort of beyond that point so she very politely said, "You should meet our friend Matt. He's probably the world's biggest expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald." And I flashed on the Thomas's address in South Carolina and I remembered that Matthew J. Bruccoli taught at the University of South Carolina. And I thought, "You have to be kidding me." So I said, "Not Matthew Bruccoli." And she goes, "Yes, you know him?" Well, I don't KNOW him, but I certainly know his research on Scott Fitzgerald having pretty much lived with it for a year or two while I was doing GOING HOME.

So, I told her that and she said, "Oh, you should send him a copy." And I said, "I already did and I never heard back from him." Oh, that didn't sound like Matt, she says. He's the most polite person in the world. Not realizing she had more to say, I started saying, "Well the only thing I could think was he was offended by the dedication…"

And she said, "No, that doesn't sound like Matt. The only thing I've ever known him to be sensitive about is…"

And I said, "I dedicated it to a veteran from a novice…"

"Scholar squirrel," we both said in unison. She gasped audibly. I told her I'd send her a copy of the book if she was interested in reading it and she said, yes, she was. So that's what I did.

I always thought that my "non-answer" from him had been unfortunate (but understandable and as far as I could see now verified) because if there was anyone I wanted to have read GOING HOME it was Matthew J. Bruccoli. Even if he hated it, he would probably be the only one of a half dozen people on the planet who would have "gotten" everything I had put into it. But, once a Pariah King always a Pariah King. I have to tie a pork chop around my neck to get dogs to play with me. Anyway, it was one of those stories I liked to tell on the rare occasion that I was in a social situation, most recently having dinner with Chester and John Tranh and Siu Ta the night of the Shuster Awards this year because, hey, what are the odds? Of me and a long-time friend of Matthew Bruccoli ending up across a dinner table from each other, I mean.

So, three years go by and flash forward to a few weeks ago and I'm in the post office and there's a package for me. So I go up to the counter and I get the package and I look at the label and I go (again) "You have to be kidding me." Bruccoli Clark Layman Inc. containing a copy of CLASSES ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD and a nice note:

"Dear Mr. Sim:

"Four days ago Dann Thomas told me that you were disappointed or hurt because I failed to acknowledge your gift of GOING HOME dedicated to me. She reported that you thought I was offended by the description of me as a "scholar squirrel." Not at all. I never received the copy you sent. Anyone who fails to recognize a dedication as a great compliment is a dope or a nut.

"Dann and Roy—the most generous of friends—gave me today copies of GOING HOME and FORM AND VOID. I will read them carefully soonliest and respond. The purpose of this note is to thank you for the dedication.

"I'd very much like to have an inscribed copy. May I impose on you to provide it and tell me how much IOU for the book and postage? Cordially,"

How about that, huh? Six years later. Tell me miracles don't happen. So I sent him the inscribed book as well as about a dozen tracing paper drawings of F. Stop Kennedy and told him to share them with Dann. And shortly after that I got back an inscribed copy of the CLASSES book as well as an inscribed copy of CLASSES ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY and an inscribed copy of his book on the FITZGERALD/HEMINGWAY friendship (or, most of the time, "friendship").

Anyway, tomorrow, I'll run the latest letter I sent him while I'm waiting to hear what he has to say about GOING HOME and FORM & VOID as the world's foremost expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald and one of the world's foremost experts on Ernest Hemingway.




___________________________________________________

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 #419 (November 4th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


See one of the things that you tend to figure out about vice when
you've been an actual participant rather than a theoretician like
the sociologists who are making the calls upon the Downtown Eastside in
Vancouver is that it really does replace your personal will. It
doesn't do it immediately and it doesn't do it all at once, but
whether it's pot or alcohol or fornication or whatever it can, over
time, without you noticing it move from "something I like to do" to
"something I need to do".

The problem with the way non-participants are looking at the Downtown
Eastside is that heroin, which is the biggest problem, is the KING of
that effect. The only thing that has a higher recidivism rate than junk
is cigarettes, so I think I can speak from experience about addiction
having quit cigarettes and gone back to cigarettes dozens of times.

So, with all the best of intentions in the world, they look at these
people who are destroying their lives because the monkey on their back
is the one running the show and they say, "Well, what they need is clean
needles." No, I don't think what they need is clean needles. What
they need is to be put into a room that is really cushion-y so they can
go cold turkey and inescapably find out what sort of a situation
they've put themselves in and gradually get out of it.

At least theoretically, if you have to go through hell coming out of
there, you'll think twice about going back in. But you have to stay
in the cushion-y room for a long time because if you've gone a long
way in, you have to come out a much longer way than you're going to
try to persuade the guy with the key you need to come out.

But, for the sociologists, they look at someone who is being run by the
monkey on their back and they say, "Oh, they have mental issues.
It's a psychiatric thing. They just need some love and
understanding." Well, again, I don't think they need love and
understanding. They have no more awareness of love and understanding
than they have of particle theory if they've been doing junk a
while. All they know is junk. All they want to know is junk. If playing
the psychiatry game will get them a fix, they'll play the psychiatry
game. They'll tell you whatever you want to hear.

Now, when you compare that to the Muslim world (as in trying to see it
from the Muslim side) the psychologist or the sociologist has the same
problem the junkie does. The psychologist or the sociologist is just
doing the junk in a different way. The junkie has moved from the normal
person square to the junkie square and the longer they're on the
junkie square, the more likely it is that they will end up on the junk
square. When you're a normal person and you haven't done any
junk, there's no danger in being on the junkie square. It's just
the square next to the square that you're on. It looks like the
square that you're on but it's actually tilted almost upright.
The moment you step onto it you are going to slide towards the junk
square. And the psychologist or sociologist has moved from the normal
person square to the junkie square. The psychologist or the sociologist
is addicted to the junkie. They start out wanting to help the junkie and
then they needing to help the junkie so they adopt the junkie's
frames of reference. The junk is a given for the psychologist because
the junk is a given for the junkie, so the junk can't be dealt with
except in the junkie's frame of reference, so the issue becomes
clean needles.

See, to a Muslim, this is lunacy. What are you doing way over there with
the junkies? What are you doing adopting the junkie's frame of
reference? You are dragging your entire society over onto the junkie
square and the next square is the junk square. To save your society, you
have to eliminate the junkie. The junkie knew what he or she was doing
and he or she knew that what she was doing was wrong. If you don't
execute the junkie, what you are doing is making being a junkie normal.
Which is what has happened and is happening in the Downtown Eastside of
Vancouver. There is no place on the planet where they talk more freely
about junk and where junk as a controversial subject is neither hidden
nor repressed (to return to Victor Davis Hanson's view of the
West's Highest Attributes).

But I don't think it has made for a better society. All it can do is
worsen society.

But if your guiding vision of a good society is one that is open and
free about everything and where nothing is hidden or repressed, then
there is really nothing to keep the entirety of North America from
turning into the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. It's the logic of
the next step. If it's okay for junkies to shoot up out in the
streets and drop their syringes wherever they want (hey, they can get a
clean one easier than they can buy a phone card) and for prostitutes to
ply their trade in the middle of the street in broad daylight (because
they really don't care: the only thing that they're interested
in is junk. If you don't want to watch them giving somebody a blow
job out on the sidewalk, you're the one who's being judgemental,
you're the one with the problem) in this ten-block section of
Vancouver, why can't they do it out in the suburbs if they want? Why
can't they do it on your front lawn if they want? Why can't they
do it in front of your kids if they want? If you stop anyone from doing
anything, you're being judgemental and that's wrong, right?

From the Muslim standpoint you have to be judgemental. You have to
decide what it is that God wants people to do. There is no question that
the Taliban and al-Qaeda go way, way overboard with that, so that no one
can do anything unless it's specifically mentioned as being okay in
the Koran. Cutting people's hands off for stealing a loaf of bread
and flogging adulterers. I am 100% in agreement that that is no way to
run a railroad.

But, to me, being so scrupulously non-judgemental that you get fished
in, one step at a time, into deciding that it's okay for anyone to
shoot up junk anywhere and anytime that they want to because it's
wrong to judge someone else and to pursue that theory to the extent that
people are actually living that way…well, to me that's just as
crazy in the other direction and, at least in loony-leftist British
Columbia, I don't see any awareness of that. I mean, none. Zip.
Nada. What they want is more safe injection sites all across Canada,
more free syringes for junkies, wider geographic areas where shooting
heroin in public is the new normal and we'll all just have to get
used to it in the interests of multiculturalism.

I don't think that, either, is any way to run a railroad and if you
believe that talking freely about everything and that nothing should be
hidden or repressed, that is, indeed, the kind of railroad you're
going to have.

___________________________________________________

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 #418 (November 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.

_____________________________________________________

Yesterday, if you'll recall, we were discussing Todd McFarlane metaphorically kicking some kid in the chest.

Different guys have different approaches to reviewing portfolios. I remember showing my own portfolio to Mike Kaluta back in 1973 and everything he said was instantly engraved in my mind as if he had taken a knife and carved it in there. That's really the case I would make for "finding something nice to say": all you have to do is remember how vividly you remember what a pro said about your work when you were an amateur to realize how careful you have to be in those situations.

Of course the guys who kick guys in the chest are often the ones who got kicked in the chest themselves, so they always figure that's the best approach. That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. If the kid doesn't have the wherewithal to shake it off and get determined to prove you wrong, then he isn't going to make it very far. I think that's more true in the mainstream where they tend to be absolutely brutal so you have to develop a thick skin early on. But in self-publishing all you really have to do is find an audience large enough to support you. With a little talent and lot of hard work that's always going to be possible even if there isn't an editor anywhere in New York who would give you the time of day.

In the convention context, I think you always have to keep reminding yourself, "I'm seen as a famous person, as if I have the power of life or death over some young guy showing me his portfolio. I don't, but he thinks I do." I wouldn't want to carry the karmic debt of shooting someone down in cold blood. Especially when all you're going to be able to give them is maybe two or three minutes of your time even under the best of circumstances. It's going to take just as much time to say something positive as it is going to take to shoot them down in cold blood.


"It wasn't until high school when I picked up the pencils again. I wrote my first story

Called `typical Sunday' which was a bizarre murder mystery. I had only been back in action a

Few months when I got beaten up by some people at school and left with nerve damage in my

hands. I had to give it all up a second time. For a few years I worked at various jobs

Nothing

Seemed to work. I got a girlfriend and things were ok. I wasn't very good at doing regular

Jobs due to limitations. I would fight as hard as I could but fall short. What I wanted was to

Be in comics and make a living at it. So I struggled to draw again. I wrote every day. I

Crafted a lot of things over 10 years. I was never trained at art. My work still comes off a

Little quirky and unrefined but it had emotional context. In my quest to come back I lost my

Girlfriend…in hindsight…not much of a loss. This failed relationship helped forge bigger

Stories. One being a book called MISERY MACHINE…which I'm working on in graphic novel

Format. A book that's taking forever to finish as it requires a lot of research into

Science, religion, and mythology in general – along with some history. I'm also working on a book

That will hopefully be released somewhat soon called THE DEAD WITCH which is my take on the

Action adventure horror dark comedy. When I finally release these books, I'd love to send you

Copies of them. Though I'm not sure how you'd react to them. The language and violence being a

Sticking point. My feeling with these works is that I could go in censored. I don't use

Things in exploitive fashion, but it's there.

It has always been a goal of mine to bring in audiences that usually don't read comics.

Primarily the female fans. Through my deviantart page I built an almost completely female base

Which shocks me given the nature of my work. Another goal being the recruitment of new talent.

As I make money (god willing) and expand I want to bring up talented people who would

Otherwise not get a shot in comics. But, first things first. I need to stabilize my situation as

I currently have no income and a stack of hospital bills. I feel that suffering as I do now

That if I work hard enough I can make it. I just have to get the books in the right

Hands. Make some friends in the industry. I'm not looking to make a fortune…I'm just looking

To sustain myself and do what I want. To live to the ideal you wrote about in that SPAWN. It's the outer fringe of comics that appeals to me.

So, yes, I'm a late starter…I have nowhere else to go. I have it really hard in the world

Doing the usual things people do. I have no prospects in any other career. So comics is all I

Have left and I understand full well the risk associated with it. With no options I have to

Turn to my dreams. Failure isn't really an option that this point.

Getting the copy of CEREBUS from you with those words on the cover means a lot. I feel like

Even in a small way I can do this. All hope was drained from things and you lifted me up a bit

So I can keep fighting. So for that I'm very grateful."

Oh, you're quite welcome. You know things are never quite as bleak as they seem when you're young. Everything's magnified because you're going through it for the first time. There was certainly a period of time when I thought `If THE BEAVERS doesn't catch on, I might as well kill myself – this is my chance, my only chance.' Well, it wasn't, obviously. It was part of the training I needed to go through, part of the learning experience, but I had no idea that CEREBUS was just around the corner. Always give 110%, resist the urge to feel sorry for yourself and you'll get your shot. If might not even be in comics. The world is full of very happy guys living fulfilling lives who thought they couldn't live if they didn't make it in comics. It ain't for everybody, that's for sure.

"I really hope I don't come off like a complete nut. I'm just really serious about what I do

As an artist. Sometimes it can be a little much."

Oh, hey, TELL me about it. The crazy thing is how seriously all of us take being "in comics" when it has about the same cachet in the real world as being a champion tiddlywinks player. MOST of the time "it can be a little much."

"Thank you,

"Rob. M http://maddoxmisery.deviantart.com

http://maddoxmisery.blogspot.com"

You're welcome, Rob.

"P.S. Sorry, the printout is terrible. Also…I wasn't done in time but I am making some art for you."

I'll look forward to seeing it. Thank you in advance.

Monday: Roy and Dann Thomas

Tomorrow: picking up where I left off last Sunday



___________________________________________________

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 #416 (November 1st, 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.

_____________________________________________________

Finishing up with the Mysterious Mr. D

"Having a sarcastic view of the world as an outsider without dismissing the moments of beauty, irony, and synchronicity that revolve all around us – noticed only by those who work and learn to notice – is a wonderful gift and you, as well as your work, have given some of these skills to me. Art helps us to realize and conceptualize the world and CEREBUS has given tens of thousands of people some of the most artistic perspectives of the twentieth century. I'm sure I was not alone in having my own mess of a brain validated by watching Cerebus spend years in a bar either drinking, not drinking, or talking himself into/out of drinking. And that's only one example."

Yeah. It really is a foundational aspect of creativity that most creative people mention but which most people – creative and non-creative – tend not to register. While I was going through my own wrestling match with the bottle, spending literally years on end sitting on the same bar stool at Peter's Place, it did occur to me, "I can't be the only person in the world who is going through this or who will ever go through this." And that usually means you have a point of identification that is the basis of art. As opposed to CHEERS where no one ever seemed to get absolutely stink-o or to be actually wrestling with alcoholism. The difference between art and entertainment, I guess.

"Well that's it. Just wanted to say Hi and thanks. As someone writing in as a fan, I think I would appreciate you not really mentioning me on the Blog. The quotes from the Sandman fans are funny but I don't really want my own fanboyness plastered on the infranet. Maybe this could just be a (shudder) private correspondence between artist and fan?"

Sorry, I can't really do that anymore. However I have gone back and deleted anything that might give away your identity. It's one way of cutting down on the mail around here. Everyone who was fine about having their letter printed in CEREBUS is absolutely terrified of appearing on the Blog & Mail. Too much like being on television, I suspect – that is, being seen in Ultra Reality.

"Man, I was gonna sign off with `Enjoying FOLLOWING CEREBUS, too' but I can't stop without telling you how MUCH I loved the Neal Adams issue. What a great dialogue – from comics history to the expanding earth theory, that stuff was terrific. The magazine is nice, your art is great. I'm generally a little disappointed in the criticism/commentary about CEREBUS. I guess I don't know what I expect but they say if you don't like how it's done, do it yourself…I'll let you know if I get around to analyzing thematic coherences or dissecting symbolic formations (ay yi yi) in my free time. `Cerebus, author, reader, point of view' is what I'd be getting into. Your shifting narrative perspectives throughout READS is a real high-water mark of writing as far as I can tell…don't know if it's really `modern', `post-modern' or what and I really don't care. Nothing like really making the reader feel a concert stadium, a Lucasfilm spaceship and falling off the grey and into the black all in a few pages…s—t, man, I love that s—t."

Well again much obliged for saying so. In our present world there's only one accepted adjective for READS and that's "misogynistic" so I appreciate the fact that even though you don't share my views, you could acknowledge that I did something really interesting there. It was certainly a lot of hard work. Craig Miller is always wide open for people who want to write about Cerebus, but people are (justifiably) cautious, I think. The consensus in the field is still that Dave Sim needs to be shunned and that means anyone that has anything nice to say about him is going to get shunned as well. As you can see from my on-going dialogue with Gary Groth there's a definite wilful blindness on the part of the Marxist-feminists. He still maintains that because I've been the interview subject in the JOURNAL more times than anyone else that that makes it a good vehicle for expressing my opinions. I don't think that's the case. If a Marxist-feminist is interviewing you and you aren't a Marxist-feminist, all it's going to amount to is an on-going indictment of you not being a Marxist-feminist. It would be nice if someone could write an appreciation of READS and issue 186 somewhere but I suspect that's still years, if not decades, away in our society.

Maybe you could do it under a "Mr. D." by-line so that no one knew that it was you who wrote it.

Dan Fogel has been a busy guy lately. He called me a while ago to offer me a free full-page ad in the next edition of his UNDERGROUND COMIX PRICE GUIDE & SUPPLEMENT (which took me back to the days when the late Jay Kennedy first published his THE NEW WAVE AND UNDERGROUND COMICS PRICE GUIDE with its Ground Level Comics supplement guide in the back – I think there was a period of a few months or a year there where CEREBUS was the only comic book in both the Overstreet and Underground Price Guides). What's weird is that CEREBUS isn't in here, but there are a lot of books that are like LOVE AND ROCKETS, EIGHTBALL, ED THE HAPPY CLOWN and Don Simpson's BIZARRE HEROES. So he's not only been a busy guy, he's been a trend-setting guy, setting new rules for UG comics and, hey, more power to him. The undergrounds have been hiding out from the whole Price Guide end of things for years even while the prices have been going through the roof and a lot of research is being done. From the introduction:

By the time UGs like Zap Comics 1 ran its first print and made its commercial debut on Haight Street in the late 1960s, the print runs and rights to that series would go berserk in the following years, sending that title's total print output into well over two million copies over the next decade.

He has illustrations attached, showing the "hair line artefact" in the letter "Z" on the cover of Zap Comics 0 which only exists on the first printings, the 25 cent cover price and "Printed by Charles Plymell" found only on the first print copies of Zap Comics 1. Why is that important? Well, because Dan also has an "HRP" column on the highest profile books – Highest Recorded Price – and the first print of Zap 0 is standing at $2,760. The HRP on Zap #1 is $12,000. The second printing on Zap O drops down to $100 and the second printing on Zap #1 drops down to $3,450, so if you're paying those kind of prices, I assume you'll want to know the difference.

Tomorrow: More with Dan Fogel



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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

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