Dave Sim invited the self-publishing cartoonists Kitchen Bros. - Mike (Spy Guy) and Blair (The Possum) - to participate in a discussion to coincide with a Possum special on Cerebus TV. The conversation took place between 28 March and 8 April, 2011: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.
Highlights from the discussion include:
DAVE SIM:
On Collaborating With Gerhard (Part 3):
I can't say that I lost any sleep over it but, at the same time, it wasn't a decision that you take lightly when you've already done six years and 64 issues on your own. Particularly when you're of a mind to be seen as the Comic Book Elvis or the Comic Book Frank Sinatra. Being Half of the Comic Book Simon and Garfunkel or Comic Book Everly Brothers seems like an obvious giant step down. That weighed very heavily in the one balance pan. On the other hand, I had the results on the His First Fifth strip for Epic magazine which were really astonishing for a complete rookie and which Gerhard had finished very quickly.
On Glamourpuss (Part 7):
...I'm not doing a Glamourpuss trade [collection]. The sales are so far down that I can make roughly the same amount of money doing POD [Print On Demand] periodicals as I can doing a bi-monthly comic book... I make my money from commissions and the Cerebus trades, some licensing and some foreign reprints. It would have been nice if Glamourpuss had been a hit, but its not... I make as much off of the 15 issues of Glamourpuss and 13 issues of Cerebus Archive available 24/7 from ComiXpress as I do from the latest issue of Glamourpuss Diamond is selling. Not much.
On Cerebus (Part 11):
Fiction seems crazy to me as a thing to do. There are degrees of insanity in doing fiction. An aardvark in the world of humans is pretty crazy. If -- as I tried to do -- you see it as a metaphor for alienation (we're EACH of us an aardvark in the world of humans) then it becomes less crazy. Kafka doesn't believe that a human being evolves into a cockroach. Orwell didn't believe that animals would walk on their hind legs and take over a farm. It's using crazy metaphors to comment on a world that is mostly insane but views itself as sane.
On Ink (Part 19):
...GET RID OF OLD INK. Particularly if you're using Speedball Super-Black. Diluting it and letting it evaporate to thin it and darken it was taking up a lot of time and something in the back of my head kept saying "It's the ink -- it's past its best before date"... It seems incredibly wasteful. I have a 16 ounce bottle that's still half full if not three quarters full. Yes, but for the sake of being afraid to throw away $9 worth of ink, you're adding a good half hour to forty minutes to each working day.
On Falling Sales (Part 21):
My job is to just calmly fly straight into the ground doing everything that my nearly forty years of training have taught me and, as always, trying to learn new things every day that I haven't crashed. "Keeping a tight "as***ole" as the guys put it who have been in a real firefight. No matter how bad things get, sh***ing your pants isn't going to improve them.
Other 'Now I'll Ask You One' Conversations:
Dave Sim & Steve Bissette
Dave Sim & Jimmy Gownley
Highlights from the discussion include:
DAVE SIM:
On Collaborating With Gerhard (Part 3):
I can't say that I lost any sleep over it but, at the same time, it wasn't a decision that you take lightly when you've already done six years and 64 issues on your own. Particularly when you're of a mind to be seen as the Comic Book Elvis or the Comic Book Frank Sinatra. Being Half of the Comic Book Simon and Garfunkel or Comic Book Everly Brothers seems like an obvious giant step down. That weighed very heavily in the one balance pan. On the other hand, I had the results on the His First Fifth strip for Epic magazine which were really astonishing for a complete rookie and which Gerhard had finished very quickly.
On Glamourpuss (Part 7):
...I'm not doing a Glamourpuss trade [collection]. The sales are so far down that I can make roughly the same amount of money doing POD [Print On Demand] periodicals as I can doing a bi-monthly comic book... I make my money from commissions and the Cerebus trades, some licensing and some foreign reprints. It would have been nice if Glamourpuss had been a hit, but its not... I make as much off of the 15 issues of Glamourpuss and 13 issues of Cerebus Archive available 24/7 from ComiXpress as I do from the latest issue of Glamourpuss Diamond is selling. Not much.
On Cerebus (Part 11):
Fiction seems crazy to me as a thing to do. There are degrees of insanity in doing fiction. An aardvark in the world of humans is pretty crazy. If -- as I tried to do -- you see it as a metaphor for alienation (we're EACH of us an aardvark in the world of humans) then it becomes less crazy. Kafka doesn't believe that a human being evolves into a cockroach. Orwell didn't believe that animals would walk on their hind legs and take over a farm. It's using crazy metaphors to comment on a world that is mostly insane but views itself as sane.
On Ink (Part 19):
...GET RID OF OLD INK. Particularly if you're using Speedball Super-Black. Diluting it and letting it evaporate to thin it and darken it was taking up a lot of time and something in the back of my head kept saying "It's the ink -- it's past its best before date"... It seems incredibly wasteful. I have a 16 ounce bottle that's still half full if not three quarters full. Yes, but for the sake of being afraid to throw away $9 worth of ink, you're adding a good half hour to forty minutes to each working day.
On Falling Sales (Part 21):
My job is to just calmly fly straight into the ground doing everything that my nearly forty years of training have taught me and, as always, trying to learn new things every day that I haven't crashed. "Keeping a tight "as***ole" as the guys put it who have been in a real firefight. No matter how bad things get, sh***ing your pants isn't going to improve them.
Other 'Now I'll Ask You One' Conversations:
Dave Sim & Steve Bissette
Dave Sim & Jimmy Gownley
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