Saturday 8 March 2014

Weekly Update #21: Eddie Campbell's Comics Remastered

Previously on 'A Moment Of Cerebus':
Dave Sim, working with George Peter Gatsis, has remastered the first two collected volumes of Cerebus to restore details and quality in the artwork lost over the thirty years since they were originally published (as detailed here and here). After Cerebus' original printer Preney Print closed its doors, Dave Sim moved his printing to Lebonfon in 2007 as at that time they were still capable of working with photographic negatives and making printing plates as Preney had done. And then Lebonfon switched to digital scanning and printing - a technology which struggles to faithfully reproduce Cerebus' tone without creating moire patterns (as detailed in Crisis On Infinite Pixels). Dave Sim continues to work with Lebonfon to ensure the print-quality of the new Cerebus and High Society editions (as detailed in Collections Stalled). Now read on...
DAVE SIM:
Thanks to Barry Deutsch for the suggestion and to Tim, our gracious host, for implementation it is now possible to pledge monthly amounts to "Dave Sim" at Patreon.com. Every little bit helps, so thanks in advance to everyone who chooses to participate. Working 12 hours a day six days a week, you are at least guaranteed that the money will not be going on riotous living!

I've been reminded of the Dave Sim Societal Pariah Lunch that took place in Toronto with all of the contributors to LOW SOCIETY who had signed the petition -- me and Rob Walton and Sean Menard and Devon Wong (Rina Rozas couldn't make it because of illness). Devon was very interesting on the subject of vinyl records. He's taken to sitting his friends down, putting a vinyl record on his turntable, putting the needle on the record, putting ACTUAL HEADPHONES on them -- NOT ear buds -- and saying "HERE. LISTEN to this." And they're perfectly astonished at the amazing sound quality. Which is the reverse of what we all went through back in the 80's when everyone was buying their first CDs and going gaga over the UNBELIEVABLE SOUND QUALITY. The only vocal dissenter I remember back then was Bob Dylan. He thought digital sound was awful and preferred analogue.

At the same time, Paul McCartney and George Martin spent untold hours remastering all of The Beatles songs digitally. Presumably, thinking that what they were doing was making the songs better. I'm moved to wonder how many artists on the spectrum between Dylan and McCartney/Martin agreed with Dylan but didn't say anything because CDs were such a goldmine.  No more "singles" -- you want the "single" you have to buy the whole "album". You had to re-purchase all of your favourite artists entire catalogue at the cost of roughly three vinyl records per CD.

I don't have a dog in that fight. Music is music to me. Moon June spoon. Tinkle tinkle plink. But, obviously for the HUGE number of people for whom music is the closest thing they have in their lives to a religion, you're not likely to have a calm discussion. Segue into:
Alec: The Years Have Pants (Top Shelf, 2009)
by Eddie Campbell

Thanks for Eddie Khanna for the copy of Eddie Campbell's THE YEARS HAVE PANTS -- he even sprang for the hardcover! What a guy! --  I was interested to see it because I had earlier printings to compare it to, in particular THE COMPLETE ALEC (the joint Acme/Eclipse reprinting of the material from 1990).

It's a valuable thing to look at because of artistic choices that Eddie was making at a particular time with the Alec material.  He used a lot of tone, and very fine tone and a number of different shades of tone that verged over into the "extremely dicey area" when it comes to darkness and density.  Ger and I would only occasionally use anything above a 40% tone but Eddie did use what appears to be 50% if not higher and a very fine screen.  LT25?  LT26?  Then he also used tone scraps for special effects (when you cut the tone you ended up with little odd-sized bits on near-empty sheets), often layering them:  sticking them on top of each other.

So looking through THE YEARS HAVE PANTS, I can see a lot of the decision-making that has gone on with restoration.  Did Eddie do it himself?  I seem to remember reading or hearing something saying that he did.  It's a LOT of work if he did.  Or a LOT of work for someone else if he didn't.
Page 118, The Complete Alec (1990)
Most of it is either neutral or an improvement.  If you've got a copy, comparing page 120 of TYHP and page 118 of TCA, in panel 1, the tone looks more 10% now than 20%.  Which makes the gaseous stream part of the illustration (cut into and whited out on the tone) less visible, but drops the tone back and brings the ink lines forward.  So, it's a trade-off:  which is the more important information? How accurate is it?  Well, inaccurate compared to the 1990 TCA but possible more accurate depending on what's on the original artwork: 10% tone or 20% tone?  Or, more accurate, because Eddie looked at it and said "I think it'll work better as a 10% than a 20%" and changed it digitally. Those are three different "answers", though.

Staying with the same page, in panel 2, Eddie has added a TINY little scrap of tone to the crease between Danny's cheek and his mouth.  In the 1990 version this has definitely caused a moire but in TYHP the moire is gone.  Which I can't believe is an accident, but would rather be a case of taking advantage of the computer ability to cut out that tone and replace it with a tiny equivalent fulfilling Eddie's original intention:  he wanted a sharp tiny little darker shadow in that spot.  But he didn't want a strobe on it.  So he took the strobe out.

In panel 3 on that page, there is a LOT more definition in the tone on Danny's sleeve, which is a very dark tone but not as fine as some Eddie was using.  So I'd call that an improvement.  You can see the demarcation between the tone and the artwork much, much more clearly and the tone itself is clearer.

Panel 4 is another instance of 10% or 20%?  10% in the TYHP edition and 20% back in 1990.

Panel 6 -- and there's a bunch of them in TYHP -- definitely qualifies as "most improved".  It's a very dark tone over the drawing and in the 1990 version a lot of the drawing detail has disappeared as a result.  It's also noticeable in the 1990 version that Eddie "patched" a small strip of tone over the bulldog.  This happened a lot in toning. The carrier film was so thin that it was easy to have it tear -- particularly when you were peeling up the excess -- and we ALL have those occasions when we just stick the torn piece back where it belongs even though it doesn't align perfectly with the tiny dots around it.  In the 1990 version, this "patch" went almost completely black so it looks as if the bulldog has a stick balanced on his head.  That's all cleaned up in TYHP.

(which suggests that there's a lunatic extreme possible here:  anywhere that tone is being restored and there's an obvious "patch" where that happened, you should be able to just clone the surrounding tone and fill in the area in question. But a lot of times that's going to require the artist doing it himself or herself because they're the ones who know the difference between an accidental tear-and-patch and an artistic choice. In my case, it's not going to happen because I'm not a computer technician.  Maybe in the long-term, depending on what I choose to do with keeping the material in print, I could flag it for someone else. But doing that with thousands of pages is a debilitating prospect.) As someone noted, GOING HOME is THE tone-heavy Cerebus book but I can't picture it as a good use of Gerhard's current illustration time/life to go through all of the pages and restoring/asserting his original intention(s) on each page. His original intention being to get the page done and get the hell out of the studio as close to 5 pm as possible   :)

Eddie also whited out something overtop of the dog's owner's head and that tended to cause tonal problems:  whiteout doesn't add a LOT of "height" off the page but definitely enough to show up under really fine tone.  There's also a certain amount of discolouration that results with tone on top of white-out.  But that was also fixed in panel 6.
Page 104, The Complete Alec (1990)
I'm not sure what was done with page 104 (TCA) page 107 (TYHP) the last panel where Alec is asleep.  It seems to have been digitally manipulated to eliminate the moires of the overlapping scraps but it's almost become it's own special effect as a result of everything being carefully cut out and reassembled...and intentionally lightened?...perhaps to emphasize the "falling asleep" quality?

Page 103, The Complete Alec (1990)
Same with the "funny notion..." panel of Alec "drowning" on page 103 (TCA) page 106 (TYHP).

Page 80, The Complete Alec (1990)
One of my favourite Eddie Campbell panels is the "Penny age 17 who Alec sees as Athena".  There are two small tone scraps on the figure that were moired in the 1990 version and are still moired.  So, was that an artistic choice?  Presumably.  I can't say that it diminished my appreciation -- after all, it was on there when it became one of my favourite panels. 

Page 31, The Complete Alec (1990)
There are also artistic changes that have been made like the sky over Charles De Gaulle airport on page 31 (TCA) page 37 (TYHP).  It APPEARS on the "original" that there's an accidental tear in the tone over the tail section of the jet that -- to my eyes -- was a happy accident.  I like the effect, like metal glinting.  But it's been replaced by cloud effects over the whole area.  I don't revisit my work but that's a personal choice.

Long-winded way of saying, I would guess that -- had Paul McCartney and George Martin sat down and played the remastered White Album for Bob Dylan and explained everything they had improved on it, I doubt he would have been convinced.  But, then he didn't work on the White Album originally, so it really doesn't matter what he would have thought of it.  As someone who has no interest in the medium in question, I'd still, I think, find such a discussion interesting.  But more from the standpoint of "this computer business has brought us all to a funny turn and I don't think we're going to have any hard answers anytime soon."

Dave Fisher has stuff stored out back of the house, including a lot of photographic development equipment which he doesn't know whether to keep or throw out.  With Kodak out of the photographic paper business, there's no such thing as cheap photographic paper, a mainstay of traditional photography.  He'd prefer to develop his own pictures but in the Digital Age, that's just another casualty.  Can a "boutique industry" spring up around photographic paper making it possible again?  Yeah, probably.  Where is the Kodak paper formula among the crushed-beyond-recognition-shards-and-fragments left by the Digital Deathstar?  Can photographers get it and make paper for themselves?  Or will they just  get blown to shards and fragments themselves by whatever is left of the legal Kodak?

I'm on the inside front cover of THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND #5 with page one composed and ready to be drawn.

Weirdly, there were about 20 new names, as I said, on the petition right after I posted my comments on the Alan Moore business.  Boom.  That dropped off to nothing.  Which, I have to say, is pretty amazing in that Digital Deathstar "Feel Our Power" sense.  I mean, 20 names is completely unheard of in a two week period.  20 names is a three month to six month period.  And then, as if everyone was collectively Smacked Upside They Digital Heads.  Zip.  Not a single name in the last three weeks.  In fact it even dropped from 533 names to 532. Damian Lloyd's comment about my "ridiculous Comic Art Metaphysics theories" made me go, "Ohhhhhh, right.  I forget how capable they are of doing that stuff.  Crazy Dave Sim."  I was NOT crazy for about three days and then the Collective Darth Vader reasserted control.

No problem.  It would probably be more helpful if you could, you know, refute the Fifteen Impossible Things To Believe Before Breakfast but, you know?  In your...collective...situation I'd probably do the same thing.  "Crazy Dave Sim" being much easier than "Here's why these things aren't impossible and are really the Only Sensible Way to run a society."  

Another $100 donated at cerebusdownloads.com in the last couple of weeks, so thanks to everyone for pitching in on that.

See you next Friday.

Help finance Dave Sim to complete 'The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond' 
by making a monthly donation at Patreon or a one-off Paypal donation.

Originally serialised within the pages of the self-published Glamourpuss #1-26 (April 2008 to July 2012), The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond is an as yet uncompleted work-in-progress in which Dave Sim investigates the history of photorealism in comics and specifically focuses on the work of comic-strip artist Alex Raymond and the circumstances of his death on 6 September 1956 at the wheel of fellow artist Stan Drake's Corvette at the age of 46.

18 comments:

Eddie said...

ha ha. I DID order the softcover. That must have been Chris Staros's doing from when I contacted him about ordering the volume and asked him about shipping it directly to Dave instead of sending it to me (and told him Travis spoke pretty highly of him). So Thank You for the upgrade Chris.

Of course I only thought of shipping it directly AFTER I ordered the ADS books from Colleen. DUH. I should be getting Vol 1 soon, and Vol 2 is expected to be shipped in April.

Eddie Khanna

Anonymous said...

I didn't say "crazy", I said "ridiculous". Dave may have mental problems, but he isn't insane. He also can't be taken seriously. So: ridiculous, not insane. He's a joke, not a lunatic.

Glad to see work is progressing on Strange Death, though.

-- Damian T. Lloyd, mcp

Michael said...

I'm pretty sure it was Neil Young and not Bob Dylan who was vocal in his disdain for the sound of CD's

Michael

Birdsong said...

Musicians get accused of re-re-re-releasing cds as a cash grab, but I think it is more of a "Oh my, what were we thinking" moment when they compare the vinyl to the first, second or even third cd release.

Occasionally you get the rare digital remastering that evens up to the original as is the case with Steven Wilson's remastering of the King Crimson catalog and his outstanding work on the Yes album Close To The Edge.

I think Dave Sim's attempts here are skirting a fine line for sure and as in the case of the better analog to digital conversions you have to make an artistic choice that will often lie between the two. It's a new choice. The closest thing I have seen to the original comics is the digital High Society, but as we all continue to see it cannot easily be printed to look like the real thing and eventually a compromise will have to made if it is to go forward.

Anonymous said...

There is an implicit obnoxiousness in Dave continuing to assert that the "fifteen impossible things" are in some way a masterstroke of philosophizing that his critics have failed to refute, when the reality is that they require no refutation, because they say virtually nothing.
Consider my personal favorite, number 6, declaring that cars work equally well with multiple steering wheels/brakes/etc., which is why marriage should be an equal partnership. I'll assert that marriage should be an equal partnership, but not for the reasons Dave is assigning it. And no one - not a single person, good feminist or otherwise - assigns that specific reason to the notion that marriage should be an equal partnership, so why does anyone need to refute it? Dave has created an asinine scenario, declared it a lynchpin of his opposite numbers' argument, and then declared it something that must be addressed by his opponents. Well, Dave, it doesn't work that way.
So keep on wondering why no one refutes your dopey list, Dave. But don't wonder why I don't buy your work anymore, when I used to buy pretty much anything with your name on it. It isn't that you're a misogynist (you may be, but I'm in no position to say), it isn't that you're a pariah king of comics. It's that your smug self-righteousness is so off-putting that I wish you'd just, to quote the Dixie Chicks song in semi-ironic fashion, shut up and sing.
Godspeed, Dave. Enjoy all those self-inflicted wounds.
-- Bill Kremer

Anonymous said...

Ya know, I get not wanting to give someone money because they're irritating or say things you don't agree with.

That said... Roman Polanski drugged and raped a tweenage girl, Dr. Dre beat the living shit out of Dee Barnes (female rapper) in front of a crowd and then later laughed about it in his rap lyrics, Mike Tyson raped and beat a woman, William S. Burroughs fatally shot his wife, Woody Allen might have molested his daughter, Rick James kidnapped and sexually abused/ physically tortured a woman for several days while on a drug bender, Teddy Kennedy's drunk driving got his secretary killed, Chris Brown beat Rhianna till she was ugly and even got a tattoo depicting same on his neck... Dave Sim writes disagreeable stuff in between turning out incredible comics.

I'm not saying people have no moral grounds to reject the work of people they disagree with, but in the grand scheme of things, an artist's strange philosophy doesn't really do much (if any) harm. One could make an argument about polluting the culture or spreading the acceptance of deviant ideals, but to me that sounds rather like the rhetoric of folks like Fredric Wertham or Jack Thompson. Dave's not advocating violence or harming anyone. He's just a weird Canadian, living alone, drawing and writing comics and commenting on topics that intrigue him. It's also worth noting that he's given quite a bit of his money and time to charity and the advancement of comics as a medium (helping to popularize non-superhero comics, being an important part of the black-and-white boom, assisting and publishing up-and-coming artists, standing up for creator's rights, spreading knowledge about self-publishing) and is currently working on a book that will help preserve a little-known part of the history of comics. He's even celibate, so no worries that any little Daves may terrorize the countryside one day.

Egh, I'm rambling. Sorry, but this sort of thing's been on my mind lately. Dave's not entitled to an audience, Alec Baldwin's not entitled to multi-million dollar endorsement deals, Mel Gibson's not entitled to be beloved by millions, Roman Polanski is not above the law, and Bill Burroughs... is dead, actually. I don't have the moral high ground because I'm just so cool and open-minded that I can put up with dissenting opinions or watch movies/read books made by rapists/murderers. It's just strange to me that this is the sort of thing that will turn an audience away, or that some can get away with so much (thinking Dre and Polanski, here) with little consequence.

I dunno.

- Wesley Smith

Anonymous said...

Bill, I think you've hit it when you say, "Dave has created an asinine scenario, declared it a lynchpin of his opposite numbers' argument, and then declared it something that must be addressed by his opponents. Well, Dave, it doesn't work that way." Dave battles valiantly against an army of straw women of his own creation!

David, you said, "Occasionally you get the rare digital remastering that evens up to the original". Not a fan of remastered albums, I take it? Certainly a quick read of articles about the "loudness war" points up one way remastered albums might be inferior: the diminished dynamic range.

Sometimes the remastering process allows the artist to correct mistakes. Was it with Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells that they discovered, when remastering, that one section of the original mix had flipped the stereo channels -- right for left, left for right? This seems a direct parallel to Dave's discussion of some of the corrections Eddie Campbell made in Alec.

Creators have to take into account the final medium of distribution. I remember when HDTV first came in; some shows had to redo their sets, because the Ductape holding them together was suddenly visible in the higher resolution, and what was good enough suddenly wasn't good enough any more. Cerebus which works fine when printed by photographing the original artwork, but not so fine when digitized.

So Paul McCartney and George Martin remastering The Beatles' albums for might be a case of them saying, "Okay, this is how people are going to listen to these songs. How can we best present them for that method?" I've known movie-makers obsessed with the silver screen and the theatrical experience, but (as Dave once pointed out) there is only one mass medium; most people will watch most movies at home on their TVs, so you've got to take that into account.

A big question when remastering a work is the matter of "I want the digital version to be as much like the original version as possible," versus "I want the digital version to be the version I would have made at the time if I'd had these tools." With the Cerebus restorations, Dave chose the former.

-- Damian T. Lloyd, pdq

Anonymous said...

Have to agree with Damian on McCartney and Martin's probable motives in remastering the Beatles material.

I'd just add that it's a both richly ironic and a show of a surprising lack of empathy that Dave, in yet another posting about his ongoing struggle to get his own work restored through a new technology, in which he is open to the very same criticism that he will be producing an inferior reproduction using inappropriate technology, imputes only cynical motives to McCartney and Martin in doing much the same thing, rather than recognizing the same perfectly understandable desire to preserve and promulgate their work.

- Reginald P.

Anonymous said...

On a second reading, it might be closer to say that Dave was suggesting that only some artists cynically looked at CDs as a cash cow, and not Martin and McCartney.

I think my objection remains though; It takes chutzpah for an artist who is struggling to keep his own work in circulation despite changing technologies/ways the public consumes art to impute cynical motives to other artists doing the same thing.

- Reginald P.

Michael Grabowski said...

It would seem that both Neil Young and Bob Dylan have more than made their peace with digital audio technology, given the very expensive sets each has made available in recent years of music that never made it to vinyl.

S. Craft said...

"Dave has created an asinine scenario, declared it a lynchpin of his opposite numbers' argument, and then declared it something that must be addressed by his opponents"

Interesting coincidence that this comes up in a post about Eddie Campbell, who summed up Sim's debate style in KING BACCHUSS:

"Before you go on, you know of course that you can't argue against me without proving my position to be correct."

And (as he's being beaten up):

"I told you! You're only proving me right! I fixed it so I can't be wrong!"

Travis Pelkie said...

I don't know about Dylan's position on digital music, but I know that in recent years, Neil Young has been irritated with digital music (particularly mp3s and such, I believe, as they compress the music even more than CD files and there's more loss of...stuff. Not sure of the technical details). Young's been SO irritated, he's worked on creating his own music playback system, called Pono, I believe.

Interestingly enough, in the music industry, sales are down across the board in all categories, even digital downloads

...except for vinyl. Vinyl sales have an uptick, and even the uptick that there is is a bit disputed -- a lot of independent record stores don't report sales to Soundscan, I think it's called, and therefore record store owners think that sales are going up even more than is reported.

There's even something a bit similar to Free Comic Book Day called Record Store Day (some time next month, not sure exactly), where special vinyl releases are put out in "collector's item" amounts and many of the indie stores have sales. I got some decent stuff cheap last year.

And to quote pop-punk band Screeching Weasel from their early '90s CD debut and the song "Compact Disc":

"But no one cares that a record sounds better 'cuz you just can't find them so it just doesn't matter at all. And that's common sense."

There's also a similar issue happening with movies now: Now that the big movie companies have "persuaded" theaters to switch to digital projection, they apparently aren't creating master film reel versions of their releases. So basically the movies exist only as digital files, if I understand right. There was an article sometime last year in the NY Times about this issue, and they talked with a film historian, I think, and she discussed that it's dangerous and shortsighted not to have another, more stable medium to keep film on. I think another issue brought up was that storing current movie files on certain devices requires that they be "upgraded" every 5 years or so, and moved on to a different system of storage, as the old one becomes obsolete. And who knows what loss of quality might result in the transfer.

And then of course on a similar note there was the stupid, stupid changeover by libraries in particular from print copies of old newspapers to microfilm and microfiche, which "preserved" them at the cost of having to destroy them in order to preserve them. Nicholson Baker has written about this and started a newspaper repository in order to preserve old newspapers (which I wonder if any of his collection has been used in any of the more recent books reprinting old comic strips, where the originals have been lost).

Wow, that's a lot of stuff about "dead" tech.

I'm sure, too, that photographic paper making will become hip sometime soon. Just tell some hipsters in Brooklyn to make "artisanal" photographic paper, and they'll twirl their old timey mustaches and have at it. :)

And cool, Eddie, that getting in touch with Chris Staros led to Dave getting a HC of TYHP. I'm amazed that dropping my name led to anything ;) but I'm glad I gave the suggestion. Thanks to Chris for the upgrade from me, too.

I would say "I guess it didn't hurt to ask", but if you've seen and held that Alec HC, you know that if Dave accidentally drops it on his foot, it will hurt that Eddie asked :) It's good to prop up busted table legs, to stand on to reach something high up, and it's also good if you have some toes that are currently unbroken. ;)

Anonymous said...

Wesley-
You're certainly not wrong about Dave's non-place in the constellation of reprehensible artists. He's a solitary guy with an oddball view on life, which is his right, and not hurting anyone.
Where I part ways with him - literally - is the place at which those oddball ramblings infect the work. That includes the comics, and that includes the discourse. I have in the past found Dave to be a pleasant, thoughtful guy and good conversationalist. And I liked his books.
But nowadays, everything is a bear trap. If I want to buy his comic work, why do I have to risk his whining? If I want to read his thoughts about the digital remastering of music/his own work, why do I have to run aground on the stupid 15 impossible things argument?
His inability to stay on-topic makes any conversation with him - consumer to artist or guy to guy - fraught with peril that he'll throw in the freakin petition and who hasn't signed it and how his embarrassing list is an ironclad feat of logical legerdemain. And I just don't want to sweat my comics reading that much.
So no, he's not a monster. But his public life is so diminished, so...infected...by his failed philosophical gambit, it makes the things he offers less worthy of the effort to consume them than they could - and should - be.
-- Bill Kremer

Geoffrey D. Wessel said...

I personally don't see the problem with remastering - Rick Veitch did it with BRATPACK too, between issues and paperback collection. Mind you, sometimes you just prefer it The Old Way. It happens.

Not getting into Sim's philosophizing, it's too early for that...

--- Geoffrey D. Wessel

Tony Dunlop said...

Actually, Damien - you said "ludicrous."
Just to get in my 2 cents' worth: Anyone who thinks a marriage can ever be an equal partnership has never been married. SOMEONE is in charge (it may be a different "someone" at different times), whether the parties are aware of it or not.

Anonymous said...

I just looked back, Tony, and you're right: I did say "ludicrous". Yeah, I'll stand by that; I think "ludicrous comics metaphysics" is more accurate than "ridiculous comics metaphysics". Dave actually believes that comics -- and only comics -- can have effects out in the world by means other than being read and/or passed along, perhaps by "comics energy" being sucked into some sort of sci-fi wormhole and then spewed out at a target somewhere/when else. As I've also said, I do find such writing of Dave's to be amusing -- always good for at least a giggle.

Also, I think your statement "Anyone who thinks a marriage can ever be an equal partnership has never been married," reflects perhaps more your personal experience than a universal truth. Your "whether the parties are aware of it or not" gives you an out that makes your claim unfalsifiable.

Travis, you make a good point "that it's dangerous and shortsighted not to have another, more stable medium to keep film on." I know librarians and archivists who are concerned that historians 500 years from now will be able to look at works from the 17th century more readily than works from the 21st. Even if the digital files survive, will we have the software to read them, or the hardware to run the software? It's been a topic of concern for a long time.

If Dave had kept every page of Cerebus original artwork, perhaps he would find it easier to reprint today, and the loss of the High Society negatives would not have been so devastating. (We can only say perhaps.) He opined at one point that the artwork was just raw material, and the negatives were the necessary resource to keep the work in print. Then the technology changed around him. Back-up is a process, not an accomplishment.

-- Damian T. Lloyd, mon

Anonymous said...

Tony -
I consider my marriage to be an equal partnership, and have been married for the better part of 20 years. Sometimes I lead, sometimes is follow, sometimes I go along to get along. But ultimately, it's an equal partnership. My wife has as many voting shares as I do - honestly, that circumstance is as often as not the cause of conflicts in the marriage, but it doesn't mean anyone ever loses their decision-making or veto power.
An UNequal partnership would be much more manageable - at least then I'd know who is supposed to be in charge.
-- Bill Kremer

Eddie said...

You mean like driving a car? (sorry Bill. I couldn't resist)