Monday 24 September 2012

HARDtalk: The Virtual Tour #8

Will the Cerebus Digital 6000 project prevent you from producing new comics work, or are you happy to take a break from that for a while?

To be honest, I have no idea what's going to happen or IS happening.  It's very possible -- in the largest possible sense -- that I'm bumping up against the end of my life when it comes to annotating all of the CEREBUS notebooks and the Archive. Might well be God's way of telling me, "Uh, Dave -- life expectancy for a North American male is like 71, 72.  Either YOU annotate the stuff or it doesn't get annotated. If you start now and work hard, you can be done issue 300 the week before you kick off."

On my part, it's all guesswork.  Putting HIGH SOCIETY AUDIO DIGITAL together has been a real ordeal because of the crushing deadline.  It definitely took me much of July and all of August, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day to finish my side of the project -- and all of June if you include co-directing the Kickstarter campaign.  It's a debilitating experience, to be honest, spending an entire month in 1981 to 1983. So, if CEREBUS DIGITAL 6000 is even possible I really have to do an honest assessment of how I plan to do my part of this.  How many hours a day, how many days a week.  There are just too many variables right now.

If we launch HIGH SOCIETY AUDIO DIGITAL #1 on October 10th and get 100,000 free downloads and the following week the #27, 28, 29, 30 "ships" 5,000 "units" at $3.99, well, okay that becomes QUITE viable.  By January I should know if anyone bought it on Comixology, iVerse or Diamond Digital at a percentage of $3.99 and $1.99 for the subsequent weeks.  

Right now the problem is getting the word out. I've done a bunch of audio tweets -- me doing the HIGH SOCIETY characters voices with little blackout comedy dialogue -- for John Scrudder to use to attract attention to the launch on Twitter (which was our primary source for people finding out about the Kickstarter campaign).  I FedExed them to him yesterday and I'm going to be writing and recording more today, Monday and Tuesday and FedExing however many that turns out to be on Tuesday.

Then I'm just going to be here doing the HARDtalk interview. Maybe with 3,000 viewers, maybe just the -- however many are reading this right now.  The audio tweets need to get OUT THERE somehow, to new people, not just the 1,140 Cerebus supporters who are already getting HIGH SOCIETY AUDIO DIGITAL as part of the Kickstarter campaign (or who already weren't able to buy the whole package ahead of time because of financial constraints and might not even be able to afford anything besides the free download).  That's why I say that there are too many variables to answer your question.  Are the major news sites going to sign up for the Virtual Tour sometime during launch week?  Is some hitherto undetected pop culture site going to cover it? Finally get Cerebus out to the Big Bad World?

I've made the tweets as funny as I know how to make them, but as I told John, I have to block out 2012 -- which I find to be a completely humourless society -- in order to do that.  I've given him carte blanche to deep six or censor any of the tweets:  launder them right down to inoffensive pablum if need be.

So here all-however-many-of-us-we-are sit, staring at each other.  If it's still just us and we're still all just sitting here and staring at each other when the clock ticks over from October 9th to October 10th, I'll probably have a much better answer to your question.
Here's our Virtual Tour question for today over at the CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE:

It's a silly thing and forgive me for not seeing it 'til now, but does Red Sophia intentionally have a "Byrne-girl" face or am I imagining it?  Thank you.  

Hit the link to the CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE for the answer to that question, and be here tomorrow for more HARDtalk Q&As.

HAVE YOU GOT A QUESTION FOR DAVE SIM?
Already signed up for the HARDtalk Virtual Tour are Bleeding Cool, Millar World, Terminal Drift, Canadian Comics Archive, The Comics Journal, The Beat and Mindless Ones. Add your question for Dave Sim at one of these fine websites before 10 October and if your question is chosen (they'll need to be tough, interesting questions!) you'll receive a personalised, autographed copy of a Cerebus back-issue, with a Cerebus head-sketch by Dave Sim!

1 comment:

Rocky C. said...

Isn't international-rate FedEx'ing a package of "Tweets" the most expensive, time-delayed, inefficient and completely counter-productive way one could possibly conjure for sending them?

Even faxing, as absurd as it is, is a better way to send Tweets for submission by someone else - but they both have to be manually re-typed in by the particular volunteer, creating even more work, and obviating the very heart of the concept!

Considering that Dave Sim has said he has WiFi internet access at the Coffee Shop, why not Tweet them from there? Or via some proxy, at least!

As Stan Lee (someone far older than Dave Sim and still going from strength to strength and Tweet to Tweet) opined during the Marvel Age of Greatness, "By Odin's beard! What madness be this?"