The next Dave Sim eBay Auction is live:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/267576287026
Dave Sim NINJA HIGH SCHOOL / CEREBUS (#1) Signed 8/12 (#95/199) 9.8https://www.ebay.ca/itm/267576287026
And the first one: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/127667782252
Dave Sim POSSUM-AT-LARGE VS. SUPER-CEREBUS (CIH? #85) Signed 1/5 (#104/185)
Dave's heritage stuff:
And probably not Dave's:
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Okay, even though I JUST did the Please Hold, and really don't wanna, Please Hold is turning into a never-ending conveyor belt, so I need to get the next batch of questions up to Studio Comix Press, so they can get 'em to Rolly, and HE can get 'em to Dave. So if you have a question, it's the only thing keeping your ears apart, email it to momentofcerebus@gmail.com, or comment here, or I dunno...mail a letter to Dave. If you wanna have my hands anywhere near it, email is best. Deadline is Sunday night when I assemble the Faux and send the email. After that, you're March Matt's headache...
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Anyway, Mondays!
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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1/2026 2/2026
Matt: Oops!
Dave: Ohh… you couldn’t make that up.
Matt: The good news is, when we checked out we said something, and the clerk gave us the most expensive night of the stay off.
Dave: Oh, nice!
Matt:So yeah, it was, I was unhappy, but then I got happy.
Dave: There you go. That’s good, it’s always fine as long as you have a hotel that understands those things. It’s like, you know how to make the guy happy, so make the guy happy.
Matt: Right. My Dad’s doing okay, he accused me of slashing his tire cause he discovered that one of his car tires had an air leak and he went and got it checked today, and there’s a small like quarter-inch cut in the tire, and he’s blaming me. And I’m going, if I really wanted to keep you from driving, I would have made sure it was flat.
Dave: That’s true. That’s true. Did he understand that, that you are more thorough than that?
Matt: Well, I guess, the guy at the tire place was going, “Yeah, you know, it looks like it was cut but it doesn’t look like it was cut.” And my Dad is, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “Well, if it’s an icepick or something it’d be a nice round hole, and this is kind of a one-inch slash. You must have smacked something with the wheel when you were driving.” And immediately, my Dad is like, “Oh, no, no, the kid’s trying to get me.”
Dave: [laughs] Okay, so are we recording here?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: We are recording. “Well, we made it to another month. What's our reward?” I like your attitude, “and the answer is reward? That's right, answering questions.” But first it's your turn to remember Jeff Seiler, and it says here, “this ties into something you axed about the insult Matt Dow AMoC Contest. And you can take it from there. When I announced the contest, Jeff commented, colon.”
Matt: Oh wait, I gotta get that queued up. Hold on a second. Let's see, no, not that thing. Not that thing. Oh, where was it? [silence] I had this almost ready! [more silence]
Dave: No problem, you can edit all of this part out.
Matt: Jesus, it's not even where I thought it was. Let's see. That thing. [silence] Come on. There. [more silence]
Dave: It's page 02 of 13.
Matt: I was gonna print that out ,and then I ran out of time. Come on, work with me, phone. [silence]
Dave: Okay. You keep looking, and I'll do Jeff’s part, but then you're gonna have to pick up on the, “And I said.”
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: It’s right around here! [silence] Hey, I found it!
Dave: You found it? Okay.
Matt: Okay, so what Jeff said…
Dave: When you announced the contest, “Jeff commented, colon.”
Matt: “Okay, so I think you meant in the recent post you sent, ‘reign of terror’ and not ‘rain of terror.’ It's a common error, but I think it shows what a crock of shit we get with AMoC, except for when like the duck, you run amok, so for now alas, you get a pass. My feeble attempt. Do I win?” To which I said, if you read the rules, and follow the rules, yes, Jeff, you have a chance of winning, because the rules were you had to send whatever insult you had to the email address so that I could keep it all together and not have to search around where things were. And of course, Jeff being Jeff, it was, “Oh okay, yeah, I'll do that!” and then he never did.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I think, and I'd have to go back and look when we picked the winner, cause there was only six people that submitted. So I decided, okay, everybody wins. One guy gets the grand prize and everybody else gets a runner-up prize. And then, Rich L from Peoria was the grand prize winner and he never got back to what he wanted me to paint for him. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm not gonna start the runner-up prizes till the grand prize gets done. And then it was one of those, okay, now I almost have time to maybe do this? And okay, now I'm busy, and you know, just went on the back burner, I kept forgetting about it.
Dave: And was this actually like right at the start of the pandemic? It says like 2020, March 2020?
Matt: March 2021.
Dave: 21?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Okay. All right. So, yeah, there you go. That's definitely a Jeff kind of thing. It’s like, he did participate. He was trying to participate, and I'll lay even money he was the only one to do a poem…
Matt: Actually, there was somebody else who, I forget the guy's actual name, but what his screen name was RSS, and he did a bunch of poems. Because Rich commented that he's not very good at this but he'll give it a shot because he'd like to win a painting, and RSS said, “Well, if I win, I'll give it to Rich” and like I emailed him going, okay, you won! You get a painting. “Well, give it to Rich.” I'm like, Rich already is the grand prize winner, you're a runner-up. And I never got a response of, okay, then I want this.
Dave: It’s really a thankless task that you have.
Matt: It's one of the reasons why we don't do contests very often anymore. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: In fact, you sent me the CerebusTV header cards and said use them as prizes for a contest, so I came up with a contest. It was a trivia contest. Question one, do you have money? Question two, will you send it to me?
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So far, one guy has said…
Dave: We're getting really basic here. We're taking “Let's Make A Deal” and “Deal or No Deal” and taking it right down to its logical base.
Matt: Well and, basically it was, $10 for an unsigned one, $15 for a signed one, $5 shipping to cover it, and then the unopened ones, I auctioned off one of them as okay, this is the first one. And I even bought a kitchen scale that I use as a postal scale to weigh them to go, okay, this is the heaviest of the five, so that might have something extra in it ,or it could just have thicker cardboard.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And that one, Larry Wooten won that one for $35, when I auctioned it, so I got to get that money to you. But then I put it on hold because, it's like, well, the fourth's coming up, I'm gonna be out of town for a week, then we're doing Please Hold. Like, after Please Hold we'll resume these auctions.
Dave: Right. But, we really should make a mid-year resolution, no more contests.
Matt: I love contests! I love contests where nobody has to do anything. You can win, but Dave and I don't have to work.
Dave: [laughs] You may already be a wiener!
Matt: You know, we really should get a self-portrait of you doing the Ed McMahon Publishers Clearinghouse and make envelopes for Aardvark-Vanaheim that say, “You may already be a winner from the Aardvark Clearinghouse!” and have the image of you, and you can just send those out, cause that's a prize enough for most people.
Dave: That's true, I could sign it! I could sign it and put an Elrod bunny on it.
Matt: There you go! See, it's almost like the old Marvel No-Prizes.
Dave: But better! But better. You show me a Marvel No-Prize with an Elrod bunny on it. I rest my case, your honour. Are we gonna read this part that… “On Margaret's post yesterday, ‘Anonymous’ commented, ‘Margaret is the only reason for AMoC to keep going. The rest of it is trash.’” And it's like, that's one of those things, that's why I never, first of all, got internet access, and never went on the internet. It's like, that's timed to get under your skin, or to grind something into a very sensitive molar. And as you say, “And I was a tab perturbed when I read it this morning. I get all the comments emailed to me because I'm a masochist.” You must be! But I think most people on the internet are masochists in that sense, would you agree?
Matt: Yes! The rule of thumb on the internet is “never read the comment section.” And every time somebody says that I go, well, you gotta take a look just, you know, there might be something there. And like on Facebook and Twitter, you read the comments, and within five or six comments, you're like, this was a mistake, and then another five and it's like your face starts to melt like the Nazi at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Dave: Right. Right. [laughs] And it's like, I'm doing this to myself. I already told myself not to do this. Now I'm doing this, and I'm remembering why I told myself not to do this.
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: “My first reaction was, okay, I just won't post for a week! And see how he/she/they like it. But I can't do that! It'd be unfair to the vocal minority who like my BS.” And that's an inference that's possibly not compelled.
Matt: No no, every time something like that would happen, I would say, okay, you're not happy. I'll take my ball and go home. And everybody goes, “No no no! We love you, Matt! We love you” and I'm like okay, it's the same six, seven people, but hey, you know, at least somebody likes me!
Dave: That's right! You've still got the six or seven people. You got that in the next paragraph. “Then I thought, okay, I'll make mention of ‘Anonymous’’ comment, and let the usual gang of well-wishers tell me how great I am! That’s kind of shallow, as well. But I'm not doing that because I don't need my ego stroked that bad”. Again, one of those internet balancing acts. “And my third reaction was to take stock and remember that there's something that nobody can take away from me! Mainly that I sold more paintings in my lifetime than Vincent Van Gogh did. He sold one, possibly two, and I’ve sold three. Thanks to Larry, Margaret, and Scott!” And yes, thank you, Larry, thank you, Margaret, and thank you, Scott. “So, with that in mind, I decided to do another A Moment of Cerebus contest. [laughs] Here's the deal, create a meme of how terrible A Moment of Cerebus is, apart from Margaret, remember. Specifically under my reign of terror like this,” [laughs] you’ve got a garbage can with a raccoon sticking out of it, “Matt hard at work on AMoC.” Yeah, the guy did say it was trash. So I guess we're looking at a raccoon and a garbage pail and it should probably have, instead of the AMoC logo, maybe like a picture of Margaret Liss, with a circle and a slash through it.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: There's no Margaret Liss in this picture. If you think there is, you're hallucinating. Okay, [mumbles to self] Right, I mean, you had some great prizes there that people could win. “The contest ends on 30th March. Winner announced on the April 2020.” Okay, so it's not… it says 2020, but this is 2021.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: All right. Okay. Well, you're forgiven.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And… let's see, where… all right, now my pages are out of order. Are they out of order? Nope, they’re okay. Alright, page… Oh, and then we move to, “Now we move on from remembering Jeff Seiler and transition over to remembering Adam J Elkhadem, by answering the next of his questions that he sent you.” Which is actually the last of the questions that he sent me. And for those of you who may not be aware, Adam passed away just about a month back, or maybe a little more than a month back. And you discovered that by searching for his work on the internet so that you could link to it, and linked to his obituary.
Matt: Yeah. I thought for sure it was somebody with a similar name, and when I clicked on the obituary I'm going, no, that's him.
Dave: That's the guy. Yeah. And it's still one of those things that I'm wondering if that's why I was being so meticulously careful to make sure that I didn't lose his letter. I’ve virtually got myself up to my knees in Please Hold for Dave Sim documents, largely because I didn't want to move that because I knew there was no replacing it if we got to the next question and I went, I don't have the next question. So, yeah, this was his question number C, “I am a bit slow now that I'm working on a book rather than a weekly strip.” “Octave The Artist” was a weekly strip that he was doing. “When I worked on that I limited myself a bit because I had a weekly deadline. Once I figured out what I could do in a week, it became easy to do a page or two in that time frame. However, now that I'm trying to do a graphic novel…” I'm having trouble reading it… Oh, “I seem to start slow, taking far longer to create a finished page. Any tips, or just lots of practice?” Well, what Adam's talking about here is really the earliest decision making for somebody who has decided that they're going to do a graphic novel. Adam was past this point and already drawing his new book. So let's get back to, okay, prior to the point that Adam was already at when he wrote to me, if you're gonna do a graphic novel, do a template page design based on what you can write, pencil, ink, and letter in one working day. A page a day. That's the rule of thumb, and if you're asking me, “Okay, what's the magic answer?” A page a day. If you can't do a page a day, you aren't going to make a living at it. You can tell that Adam got that when he says, where is it here, “I limited myself a lot because I had a weekly deadline.” Right, you have to limit yourself and/or work within your limitations. Do you have family obligations, job obligations, a girlfriend, whatever. If all of those obligations leave you two hours a day for your comic art, your working day is two hours long. So skipping ahead to the point that Adam was at, do what you know how to do on the page, so that you're always doing something. Interrupt doing something, followed by something, followed by something, only to sharpen your pencil, dip your pen nib, or wash your brush. As soon as you’ve inked something, erase the pencil under it so you're looking at finished parts of the page. If you're looking at inks over pencil, you're not seeing the page as it's going to be, you're seeing a sort of fuzzy mix of the two stages, the pencil stage and the ink stage. Don't stop or pause until everything you know how to do is in ink. Then look at the half inked page. Picture what the pencil parts should look like in ink, and then ink those parts. Now, the crux of that is really, this is midway stage. You've already inked everything that you know how to ink, and you've already made the decisions on that. Now you've run out of things that you know how to ink, and now you're gonna ink stuff that you don't really know what it is that you want this to look like, and sometimes you haven't even penciled it yet. You just inked the the parts that you know. Once you've made the inking decision, stick with the inking decision you've made. It's two separate stages. Deciding what the inking is gonna look like is one stage. Making that decision going, I think it should be single parallel lines going through this area, or I think this should be cross hatching, or I think it should be reasonably loose cross hatching, or I think it should be really really tight cross hatching. That's all the decisions where you look at it and go, okay, what's the decision on this? Because we're gonna come to a final decision. This is what I want this this inked part to look like. This part needs to be cross hatched, this part needs to be solid black, this part needs to be outlined. Actual inking, like as opposed to that, you’ve made your decision, the actual inking is a matter of doing the technically best looking version of what you pictured. This is my best brush line, this is my best pen line, this is my best cross hatching, this is my best and smoothest outline. So that that's what you're concentrating on doing, not saying, maybe I should do this differently. No, once you've decided, keep going with what you decided, and do the best possible version of what you decided to do. And that's one of those things that if you can separate those, then that's where you start to see exponential improvement because you're going from the overview thing, here's what the page looks like, here's what I want the page to look like, picturing exactly what you're going to do to make the page look like that, and then pulling in and going, all right, now I just have to be consistent about this. I just have to do exactly the line that I pictured when I was at the decision making process. And that's really how you're going to get to the point where you're doing a page a day, is if you're always sitting back and looking at the page, either admiring something that you've done, or regretting something that you did, the one thing that you know for a certain is you're not getting the page done. You're just looking at it. You're just looking at it, you're not getting it done. You're not getting it done, you're not gonna get a page a day done. So that's really best advice on that. “Just lots of practice?” was his last question. Yeah, that's part of it, but being organized and knowing, this is what I'm doing. I'm doing my work, I'm doing the best version of my work that I can do. Do what you know how to do, get to the point where now you're just down to the parts that you don't know what to do, everything else has been inked and the pencil has been erased off of it. Now you've encircled the problem, and now you just have to close in and and solve all of those problems there . Then make the decision what you're going to do and then dive in and do it, and do it as smoothly and accurately and as confidently as you can. Don't second guess yourself at the inking stage, just say, okay, this is what I'm doing. I'm going to do the best possible version of this that I can possibly do.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: So there you go. That's my last word to the late Adam J Elkhadem, and sincere regrets that the graphic novel that he was talking about is never going to exist now.
Matt: Yeah, that's… every time I go to whatever website it was that had “Octave” on it, it's a pre-order for the book version, and I'm like, I thought the book version came out.
Dave: Oh, yeah?
Matt: I don't know if it came out and went out of print, and they're gonna do a second printing, or what. Or if it's just a bad website. You know, it's I'm finding the page to order it but it's actually not the page to order it.
Dave: Right. Right. Uhh…
Matt: Because the mug's still on not their site.
Dave: Pardon me?
Matt: The “Art For Art's Sake” mug is still available to order.
Dave: Oh is it? Okay. All right. Yeah, that's one of those, well if you want a case in point of why you should make your wishes known and put something in place that will make sure that your work continues to be published after you're gone, and you say to yourself, well I'm only in my 20s ,what's the odds that that I would really have to do that now? Hey, you never know. Everybody has a last day, and nobody knows what day that is.
Okay! “And now the pile of things only you know!” How about that. “Matt/Ron and question for Dave, I'm an author who hates marketing himself. Big surprise, I'm not a New York Times best selling author, huh? You have been through all the wars, fanzines, ads in the trades, conventions, promos, live auctions of artwork, findings, jam sessions, your famous letters page, front matter of “Cerebus”, back of “Cerebus”, Yahoo blog, internet TV show, YouTube channel, AMoC blog, podcast. You have done it all. Question finally, did you hate it all? Love any of it?” Okay let me answer those two first and in present tense terms. I would always rather be writing and drawing than marketing myself. Conceiving an SDoAR page and then executing it. Composing the pieces, getting them the right size in place correctly in the right order for easiest, and how would I put this, most pleasurable reading experience so that you have the experience that the page is revealing itself to you as the reader in the proper sequence, caption to caption to caption. Like you're bouncing a basketball with your eyes, and as the basketball is bouncing through here, you're seeing the art that you're supposed to be seeing relative to those captions. That's the ideal. Getting all the inking densities right. This goes back to the answer to Adam's question, where I've made all the right decisions as far as I'm concerned in terms of how the page reads, and from then it's optimal eye candy. Here's what I need to do to do the most eye pleasing inking textures. For me, that's as good as it gets. I mean, that's as good as writing and drawing comics gets. And that's as good as my life gets. If all of those things that I just talked about are a nine on a scale of one to ten, that day is a nine. If they’re six, that day is six. Everything else is just everything else. He goes on, “Marketing, is it a necessary evil?” Marketing is necessary, let's put it that way. Creating a creative work is like generating a baby. If you generate a baby, and your wife gestates it and gives birth to it, and you bring it home from the hospital and put it on a bookshelf then just go back to whatever you're doing, the baby isn't going to live very long. What does the baby need? It's your baby, so when lose, win, or draw, once you're past the oxygen, water, and food category. In other words, the capital “R” Required categories. The baby Requires oxygen, water, and food. It's your call.
I'm going to cite here that, “Unintended Science” is one of the shortest stories in Michael's “Wild Monsters Dance About”, so I'm actually going to read it here. “I rush around the lab. Of course it would happen first shift. No one's here yet and I barely had time to burn my tongue on a coffee before I saw the news. Even I can't believe it. How could regular folks? Is this really an attack? Most people don't even get how 3D printing works, or how fast it's advanced. Only a few years ago we were making little plastic models, created virtually in a computer, and then boom, the 3D printer makes the object. Now we're doing advanced stuff, prosthetic limbs, military applications, body parts. Sure, maybe a few have seen a documentary about it, but civilians can't really understand the technology or how long it can go. Hell, even I don't get all the stuff that they do here. I'm just a tech. If something breaks, I call someone. Now, none of the bosses are picking up their damn phones. I must shut them all down. Of course, every machine is juiced up, I mean, we're busy, you know? No one imagined it would be dangerous to leave them on. I know that some of the guys have been making weapons, but just stupid stuff like crossbows that shoot rubber bands. But an attack? Sure, our government is doing cyber warfare just like China and Russia, but fully formed? No, it's too much to imagine. Focus on the task. Power everything down. Okay, the smalls are down. They just plug into the wall to make self-indulgent plastic crap. These guys aren't attacking us for a custom bobble head. But the bank of the medium Q312s isn't just a matter of pulling the plug or switching a switch. The mediums are for small scale biologics. Making skin for surgical grafts and the like. Two machines can produce small bits of human bone or something just like it. The tech is advancing so fast almost anything is possible now. Luckily no 3D printer in the world can do complex systems yet . Small organs, sure. Prosthetic limbs, yes. But this? It's too much. But there it is on every channel. There are labs all over the world. It's really happening. This is bad. Very bad. I only wish today was just a nightmare. How are they even doing this?! Okay, done. Good. All safe. 3D printers are all dark. Wait. Oh no. The Beast. The room sized PX329L. It was left on twice last month. That's the one machine that must get shut down each night. It draws too much power out otherwise. If the absent minded eggheads have forgotten before, did they remember last night? It’s deep behind security in the second sub-basement. I was so worried about what was in front of me, I hadn't even thought of the biggest threat area. The Beast uses both biologics and hard material. The separate programs are meant to integrate in the same machine to build components one at a time then add other parts. Like… oh God, like an assembly line! Descending down the two flights I just make it to the Beast, I see the real beast now. At least five feet tall. It's fully formed. Strange eyes in places they shouldn't be. One arm looks like a weapon, rough gray skin interlaced with what must be metal. Wait, there's two of them. And I can see the printing of a weird skeletal structure fusing with a circulatory system to make a third. The aliens really are here, through our own technology. They used the 3D printer like a transporter to start an invasion. Oh God, the first one I… it's aiming the weird arm weapon at me… The End.”
Okay. So, where are we here? What… on the first page of the story… oh, this is what I made a note about. The passage where it says “just stupid stuff,” it says “just stupid stiff.” To proofreading purists like Jeff Seiler, that's oxygen, water, and food. But it's your story. How forensically accurate does it need to be? Your call. “Wild Monsters Dance About” has a great cover. I hope you show it a lot when you edit this, Matt. Your baby definitely benefited from Fiona Jayde Media's cover like a good Dad. You can do an audiobook of “Wild Monsters Dance About,” 21 stories, 162 pages. You can do a selected audiobook of five stories. That raises the question then, which five stories will live in audiobook form, and which 16 will perish through failure to provide the audiobook necessities of life? You can dress up as Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany's” and read “Toasting Lester” to b-curious preschoolers at a local library. You’re in California. Many local libraries will be happy to host you. But what does “Unintended Science” need? A movie treatment? A radio dramatization? Computer animation? Or is it an “I generated it, my wife gestated it, it's fine by itself on that bookshelf?” It's a story, not a baby.
Matt: Right. I mean that's… a friend of mine reached out that he's got a friend that wants to make a board game, and he needs a writer, and my friend immediately thought of me. And I'm like, all right. So I sent the guy an email, like, hey, you know, I'm Luke's friend. He kind of gave me bare bones. What are you looking for? And he came back with, he's got a lot of the mechanics for the game, but he just needs a lot of the flavor text and that kind of stuff, and I'm like, okay, you're a lot earlier in this than I thought you were, but yeah, okay I'll meet up, we'll talk, see if we can hammer at a deal. If I get five spare minutes a week, I'll work on a game. I've made games before. But I'm like, how are you planning on printing this? He's like, “I got no idea.” I'm like, ah okay. What do you think, Kickstarter? And he's like, “Yeah yeah, probably Kickstarter.” And I'm like okay, we're a long distance away from even thinking about that, but if that's the goal, then I'll work towards that goal.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean it's JD Salinger. He wrote “The Catcher in the Rye” and everybody knows “The Catcher in the Rye” and he's got a couple other books. But like supposedly every few years he would go to his safety deposit box with a box about the size of a manuscript and deposit it, and it's, “What's gonna happen with those?” And there's some people going, “Oh you know the family will print them all.” It's like, yeah, the family might have be under instructions of “you're not allowed to do anything for 30 years.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: But yeah… creative works are babies, but they're also like plants. If you want to give them the good water and adequate sunshine and see if they flourish, but remember if you're planting them in concrete, yeah, they might grow, but they'll grow better in a nurturing environment. And that's where the marketing comes in.
Dave: Right. And if you are a creative person, it's all decision making, what plants you're going to water. As you say, “I have five minutes a week that I'm not doing anything else. Why not?” But at the same time it's, well, where are you putting your time in, and what are the odds that you're going to get something back out of it? And it doesn't have to a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a Ferrari. It can just be, hey, I really like doing this. I didn't know that I would like doing this this much. It doesn't really pay very well, but the creative satisfaction that I get out of it, that's what I'm getting paid as far as I'm concerned. That's what I was talking about with Strange Death of Alex Raymond. If the page is a nine when [audio drops out] then if it took me five days to do the page, I will remember all of those days as nines. Which, really, for me, doesn't apply to anything else. I may have done other things, I probably did other things those days, but those were just things that I did. They weren't weren't quality of life things. This is what gets me out of the bed and enthusiastic to do the next whatever it is. And I don't know if this is gonna keep going, but doing the manga “glamourpuss” mashup one day, and then doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond page, and then another manga ”glamourpuss” page. I enjoy both of those in the same sense. And lately I'm able to keep them up around, for my purposes and to my taste, up around an eight or a nine, so far as I'm concerned, life doesn't get any better than this.
Matt: [laughs] Well good! I'm glad that it's not the waking up looking at the drawing board and going “I should have took up skateboarding.”
Dave: Right. Right. No, it's not like that, it's, the problem that I get into then is, well you have to make money too. You better be doing stuff that's bringing in actual, grown up, keep your head above water, 2023 amounts of money, which I think we're all having the same experience. Those goal posts are moving all the time. It's, okay, I remember this from 1980s, I'm old. Runaway inflation! Food prices skyrocketing. All you can do is say to yourself, “Okay I need giant piles of money” and then it's like “Uh okay I need even larger giant piles of money than I already thought that I did.” And now we have in the US, the Inflation Reduction Act. And, well okay, Canada is umbilically tied to the United States, so if that's a bad idea for the general population in terms of creating inflation, it's gonna be a worse idea in Canada than it's going to be in most parts of the United States. So it's like, well okay, then I have to go to Defcon 3 levels of, okay, I don't want to sell any parts of the Cerebus Archive, but at what point do I phone Todd Hignite at Hertiage Auctions and go, Todd, I'm gonna send you a list of the things that I really don't want to sell, but I'm going to force myself to sell, so that I can make the most amount of money on that and buy myself the most amount of Strange Death of Alex Raymond working time from it. And then it's like ping pong, and it's already back to me before I've even asked him. And it's like, well, okay, the cover to “Cerebus” #5, let’s say. And it's like, mhmm, don't really want to sell that, but it's also the first full size cover, “Cerebus” #1, 2, 3, and 4, the covers were all drawn actual size so that I didn't have to pay to get a stat made when I was doing the colour separation. I could just do the colour separations right on top of the original. Which is the reason that I did that. So it's like, then it's, okay, well if I'm even talking about theoretically selling the cover to “Cerebus” #5, can I get in the platinum auction catalog? And if I can't get in the platinum auction catalog, can I get in the main art catalog, and can I be in the front of the catalog, and can I have a full page? And it's like, tell you what! I'll send you faxes of of options. How about this one, how about this one, how about this one, and you tell me which ones would go in the platinum auction catalog, which one would go front of the main catalog full page, and I'll make my decision from there, or not make my decision from there. The other alternative is the Turtles money is coming in eventually, and when the Turtles money comes in, don't spend it! [laughs] Because you're not going to see too many more piles of money like that Grandpa, and giant piles of money in 2023, almost all of your piles of money are “giant” in quotation marks.
Matt: Well, it's like the old Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon where they're doing the vaudeville bits and Daffy finally does his dressing like the devil, swallowing the TNT and the nitroglycerin and the dynamite, and then he eats a match and blows up. And Bugs goes, “Oh you know, it's great! They love it!” And Daffy goes, “Yeah, the problem is I can only do it once.”
Dave: Yes. Yes. You can't do three shows a day doing that. It's just not possible.
Matt: And that's, you know, it's gonna come up later, so I might as well bring it up now, I was thinking about the ashcan idea of, you had said that if Gene Day could do what we could do today he would have been in second heaven. I mean, it would have been perfect. From initial idea to finish product within a day or two, or a week. You know, he'd be kicking out ashcans left and right. And I'm going, well is there any ashcan ideas that are floating around that are minimal Dave work, maximum Dave revenue? And Tim W, when I took over, said, “I have an idea for this and I didn't know what to do with it” and it was the IDW covers.
Dave: Right.
Matt: He had all the commentary you’d written, and then here's scans of all the covers. But I guess, cause I found the email that I sent to Birdsong, cause I’d asked, hey, what do we got to do to make a proof to send Alfonso, cause I don't know what formatting we need to do. Aand he's like, “Oh I can take care of that for you!” And I'm like, all right. So here's the email. And I thought that it was a file that had everything together, and apparently the images aren't there, but there was a link to where the images were. But they're the finished covers that were actually printed, and I'm going, well, no it'd be better to do the original covers of “this is what Dave was thinking” and then “here's a small inset of this is what it finally looked like.” And I'm like, this is perfect! The commentary is written, as long as we have decent scans of the art, the artwork’s there. It's just format it, get a proof printed, get it approved, and okay. Because I know the Turtles fulfillment is… this close. Like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's getting printed, it's getting shipped, it won't take long before packages start going out in the mail. And after that's gonna be “The Last Day” Kickstarter, and it's one of those, if the IDW covers ashcan’s ready, when the Kickstarter ends, within a day or two you could throw it up on CerebusDownloads of, okay, $25, $30 Canadian. We'll send you this. You want to pay an extra $5 for a signed copy, or we print them where they're numbered and it's okay, everybody you get a numbered copy. But then you get the the CAN guys going, “Oh, I need #12.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: But it's one of those, it lends itself to the ashcan idea a lot better than I thought it did. Emailing Birdsong and him emailing back, he's like, “This is a really good idea and it's not that difficult! Like we we could knock this out pretty quickly.” And I'm going, that's the intention.
Dave: Right. I mean, I've got one, that was one of the reasons that I was [coughs] going through the upstairs closet with all of the manilla envelopes in it, and pulling stuff out, because I've got the thumbnail for “Cerebus” #4. And it's like, that makes like a companion piece to the Remastered “Cerebus” #4 that we already did. What's the level of demand for that? I also found my Steve Ditko parody, which is about seven pages and then for various reasons, I just can't go any further with this, because there's just too many limitations on what you're allowed to say and do in this day and age. I'm going to leave it where it is. It's an intellectual property, I think it's funny, I think it's a really good, quick seven pages, and I found the pasted up pages of that. I had the tracing paper of each panel. That was the story where I was doing my best Steve Peters, do a panel a day. As long as you do a panel a day on something, before you know it you've got a whole comic book, especially if you're doing Steve Ditko and it's nine panels to the page and they're all the same size. Which I found, I couldn't stick with that. I could try to, but then I start doing pan shots. And it's like, no, Steve Ditko didn't do pan shots. He did nine panels to a page. If you're doing Steve Ditko, each one of the nine panels has to be a different panel, and you start over as soon as you're doing the next panel. What's the level of demand for that? I've got the mock-ups that I did where I pasted up Chester Brown's “Gospel According to Matthew” but did the the actual Greek lettering and then the Interlinear translation underneath it, and went, okay, this is as far as I go before I actually have to start drawing something. And I'm enough of a Muslim that I don't believe in drawing the Prophets or sacred figures in monotheism. I'll let Chester Brown take the rap for that, but I'll just paste up what he's doing. And it's like, like I say, it got about five, six pages in, seven pages in. Well, there's another eight page ashcan. But can you actually fill these things, and how often can you go back to the well before people go, “Uh no, I can't afford to keep buying these at this pace.” But yeah, with the fulfillment time on the Waverly Press stuff, which isn't going to exist on “The Last Day.” All of “The Last Day” hardcovers are printed, they're all packaged, and they're all ready to go out. As soon as he does the Kickstarter on that, as soon as the Kickstarter ends and everybody's credit has proved to be good, boom, it's out in the mail, and it'll be to you two weeks later, and Grandpa gets a cheque for Aardvark-Vanaheim maybe two weeks after that. So that'll be a good thing. Throw that on top of the Turtles money, but again, don't spend it. [laughs] Throw it on top of the Turtles money. 2023 will eat it, and if 2023 doesn't eat it, 2024 is probably gonna eat most of it.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay! And as you say, we have a profusion of Mikes this time. Mike asked, “Hi Matt, I hope you're enjoying your Fourth of July holiday.” Did you enjoy your fourth? Yes, you did, except for the storminess. “I also need two ‘The Last Day’ spine stickers. I'll PayPal the amount for postage and whatever else it cost to get it to me and Brock.” His son-in-law. He bought Brock one of the Remarque Editions of “The Last Day”. “I enclosed two attachments” and we are lousy with triple redundancies here at Aardvark-Vanaheim. Michael, you did get the stickers. If you lost it in the packaging, which is understandable, all of the books when they go out, Rolly puts a “Last Day” sticker in with it in case you want to put the sticker on the spine. Matt has “Last Day” stickers that he can send you, and when I was telling Rolly about it today, he said, “I'll send him two more stickers.” So one way or the other, Michael, we got you covered. You're gonna be up to your eyeballs in “The Last Day” stickers. “Here's my answer and question. My answer for this month is ‘Jack Grimm : Harbinger of Death.’ And the question is, what post-2004 Canadian self-published title holds the record for most consecutive issues written and drawn?” And that's what it is! It's Gary Boyarski's legendary title, “Jack Grimm : Harbinger…” [silence] Where does it go from there? It's a quiz, Matt.
Matt: Uhh, “Harbinger of Death.” And my answer to that question is, the answer is “Jack Grimm”, my question is, who is the creator with the amazing mustache that he shaved off and therefore I'm kind of sad? And the answer is Gary, creator of “Jack Grimm.”
Dave: Aww.
Matt: Gary sent pictures of him holding up his copies of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Cerebi” that he got from you, and he's got a great mustache. And then at one point, when “Cerebus in Hell?” was kind of spinning the wheels and we were asking for cover suggestions, I'm like, you too could be Gary! And I had taken the picture and whited out Gary, so it's just his clothes standing there holding a blank comic, but I had left the mustache, because it was a really nice looking mustache. And Gary commented of, “Oh yeah, I shaved that off. My wife made me.”
Dave: [laughs] That's usually the source of mustachelessness in our society. I hope that's not misogynistic to say that.
Matt: No no no no no, it's called accurately perceiving reality. I know it's not a popular concept, but it's still accurately perceived in reality.
Dave: Right. Right. It's the same as when I go and get my hair shaved at the barber, and a couple of times the guy said, “I wish I could do that, but my wife would kill me.” “Flashback moment! I remember corresponding with you where I was calling…” Oh! “My question is, it’s terrific news that your drawing hand has given you less discomfort where you feel confident to continue to draw where you left off on SDoAR. Has there been a point where you say to yourself, ‘let's see what happens when I take off the wrist brace?’ Or do you think you're not there yet to remove the wrist brace?” I've done it a couple of times. A half day, there was most of the day where I was drawing without the wrist brace on, and the wrist qua wrist is so atrophied at this point that it's just kind of floppy. It needs something there to hold it as firmly in the fixed position as I was able to do just on my own, and I don't know if that ever comes back or if it is just a matter of, you made it this far, but you're not all the way there. It will come back on its own. I got Rolly to pick up a new one. It has been so long since I got a new wrist brace. He said, “I don't remember, do you take a large or a small?” And I usually alternated them, because the large was a little too loose, and the small was a little too tight. So it it tended to balance out in terms of the firmness thing. But putting on a new large brace and the velcro strap, the bottom one, is almost all the way off of the space that holds the velcro. So, I think next time I will be getting a small wrist brace, but that's just the technical side of that. Did you run the the email that Michael sent to Tim W?
Matt: No. No. I haven't run it yet, but I'm gonna put it up when I put the rest of this up. I'll put it in the video and stuff.
Dave: All right. All right. Yeah, that was however many years ago it was, I mean back at 2015/2016, and I hadn't been through the mill on how medical science treats this. And it went pretty much the way that I thought it was going to. I'm trying to explain what the situation is, and they're not hearing it, because to them a wrist is a wrist is a wrist is a wrist. Most of their focus was on money. “We treat hockey players who make millions of dollars a year.” It's like, oh, it's very nice for the hockey players that they make millions of dollars a year, but what they're doing with their wrist with a hockey stick has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm doing with my wrist. Trying to copy and and try to match Neal Adams’ “the really fine lines I did for myself.” I understand what you are saying, but what I'm saying is, the fine tuning of what I'm doing with the wrist is worlds away from what you're talking about. It's the same as, I have no idea if I could go and get my eyes done so that I could see the lines as Neal Adams created them, as Stan Drake created them, as Al Williamson created them. If I just ask them, they'll go, “Oh sure! No problem.” And it's like, as soon as I get the eyes done, it'll be, oh no, this is just, everything is just a big blur. They don't talk to anybody who looks at this microscopic level without a microscope, and consequently with their medical self-importance, which they are well and deservedly known for. “Yes, we've got everything covered. There's nothing special about you. Nothing special about your eyes, nothing special about your wrist.” Well okay, you go with that, but I’ve got only one set of these eyes and I've got only got one of these wrists, and I don't think you know what you're talking about. So like, no offence. So I went all the way to Chicago, got the got the MRI that I wanted to get, paid for it, and then departed with it . And then the next stage was going to be going down to the Austin, Texas area to visit with Dr Troy, and Dr Troy knew a wrist specialist in his circle of acquaintances that he was going to give me an appointment with, and he wanted the MRI from Chicago and whatever else they had to say in the report. And it's like, no no no no, we're not doing that. It's, I've got that from Chicago, now I want to get something from square one in Austin, Texas. And it's like, “medical science doesn't do that. They want all of your records from somebody else.” And it's like, no, to me that's peeking in the back of the math textbook to find out what the correct answer is. You're going to look at that and go, “Oh okay, this is what they're saying, so this is what we're saying as well, and now we have a consensus, so now we want to operate on your wrist.” It's like, I don't trust you enough on that. There are things I will let you repair that aren't idiosyncratic, like when I had the bowel surgery done. I’ll go along with you on that, a bowel is a bowel is a bowel. I think there's all different kind of wrists, and I think there's all different kinds of eyes, and the same as they can't get eyes right in computer animation, you're flattering yourself that you know more than you do. And like I say, I’ve only got the one wrist, and I'm not gonna let you just just play around with it.
Matt: Well, that’s, I still have--
Dave: So, there you go! That’s the best distillation up to this moment. Thank you for asking, Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania.
Matt: Well, I still have a copy of the MRI, cause that was, II can't remember where it got posted, but it was, if you want to download Dave's MRI, and I was like, well you know, I'll download it and then if I get a chance I'll find a local hand man and be like, okay this is the MRI. What are you seeing? And it boiled down to, I just knew that going in it’d be like, so I have a friend, he had an MRI, he'd like to get your opinion on it. And that's when they’re gonna be like, “Who's paying us?” And I'll be like, well, how much is it gonna cost? And that's what stopped me was, cause back when COVID was happening, my Dad came to visit, and they had the vaccines. My Dad wanted the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and I found a place up here that was giving it out, but like, it wasn't as simple as, hey, I want to get the vaccine. It was, “Well, you're a new patient. You have to establish carrier” and I had to go through all these hoops and stuff to get him his vaccine, and then then I started getting stuff in the mail for him up from this hospital going, “Oh you got a schedule this appointment.” No, he doesn't have to do any of that. He wanted one thing, he got the one thing, he's gone!
Dave: [laughs] Right! You all done with him now!
Matt: I mean, it's not a, “We'll see in six months for follow-up!” If something's wrong in six months!
Dave: [laughs] We will follow up with you! But, you go do your hospital thing to somebody who believes this crap.
Matt: My wife's in the medical field, but like, she's out of the hospital aspect of it, now she does home care. And it's a lot of, is this test necessary? Do you really need to be doing this?
Dave: Right.
Matt: She's got patients that'll have appointments and they'll flake out and miss them, and it's like, you can only do that so many times before the hospital's like, “Okay, three strikes, you're out.” And it's like, why can't we reschedule? “Well, we saved a spot just for you.” Well okay, but I'm sure there's a list of people that are waiting for a spot. Call them and say, “Hey, can you come in 20 minutes early?”
Dave: Right.
Matt: It's not like the hospital's not gonna pay you because you didn't see somebody.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. I hear you.
Okay, moving on, we got another Mike! We've got Michael Grabowski on this one. “Dave, I'm curious if you have any insight about the work of Jack Kamen, particularly his EC crime and suspense comics. As seen, for instance, in ‘Three for the Money’ from FantaGraphics, among many other modern reprint editions. Have you seen evidence of him or other comic book artists in the 1940s and 1950s attempting to emulate Raymond's approach or otherwise define their own method of stylized realism in comics art?” [laughs] I like this. “Much thanks to both of you fellows giving your time and attention to this, if even just briefly to say, ‘nope.’” And I'm gonna try to do a little better than that for you there, Michael. I actually decided to type this one out to see if I could get it as accurate as possible to what it is that I'm trying to express. What Raymond did was to invent in 1945 a comic strip style of art that was closer to the naturalistic advertising art that emerged during the war and would dominate the post-war era. Before Raymond did Rip Kirby, the average comic artist, and the average commercial artist, would have looked at the problem of what Rip Kirby is made up of from their respective sides and say, it can't be done. You're talking about taking the style of art where the artist might take three dozen photos. and mix and match the elements, enlarging and reducing them, working and reworking the folds in the clothes, and the facial expressions, before creating a single image over several days on a daily comic strip! By definition, you need to do three or four of those a day. Or a comic book page, five or six of those a day. If you've got a copy of Strange Death of Alex Raymond page 69, is where I'm talking about this, but really just laying the groundwork for it. I go into a little more detail of how I see this actually playing out in our “real” world. So, you're just getting really the first glimmerings where I'm talking about what Raymond was facing, going, “This is the result that I want. I want to draw a comic strip in this style,” and basically, where is he putting his time in? What is going to be the best use of his time to get his comic strips to look like this and still be able to do six of them a week? Which sort of ties back into what I was talking with Adam Elkhadem. It's, everybody's facing the same thing. What can you do? Where are you putting your time in? And how do you get to the point where you can do that comfortably enough so you're able to stay on schedule and maintain the schedule over extended periods of time? Once Raymond did it, and was doing, the evidence in the newspaper every day. I mean guys like Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, Al Williamson, who were enamored of that level of advertising art realism, knew that it could be done only because Raymond was doing it. How was he doing it? And there was only one answer. Hyper accurate intensity of focus. They recognized at a conscious level, because Raymond was picturing what the style would look like, and where you have to put your time in, and how you're going to maintain this over a period of time. They're looking at somebody having done this on a daily basis, and are going, “I want to do that. How is he doing that? And if I can figure out how he's doing it, then I think I can do it.” It's, as Robert Crumb said, “It's only lines on paper, folks.” So it's a matter of, “this is roughly what this figure/figures/background/time of day/theme would look like” has to refine itself into “this is exactly what this figure/figures/background/time of day/scene would look like.” I eventually get to the point where having explained this, and having demonstrated, okay, this didn't happen in comic art until Raymond did it, once Raymond did it and other guys went, “This is going to eat my life but I've got to do this. I want to do comic art at the level that Alex Raymond is doing it.” So it was, Raymond became a metaphysical nexus point for each of them. Kamen being the good example, and the works that Kamen had done that you cited, being a very good example. Top flight, top of the line, in retrospect if we're going to do a big elaborate hardcover edition of Jack Kamen's work. Here's the stuff at the top of our list that this is what we're gonna do. Raymond's intensity of realism depiction focus became their intensity of realism depiction focus, a metaphysical intensity chain reaction, feedback loop, building up over 10 years and multiple lives after Raymond had gone rogue. They were all plugged into Raymond, which had some disastrous effects, which I'll be documenting. And that's as far as I'm going on that particular teaser.
Matt: Well, there's one more thing you have to add. “If you want to find out more, the GoFundMe link is”, and then Matt puts it up on the screen right now.
Dave: Okay! Yes.
Matt: That ties back to Mike Sewall's question of, “how do you handle marketing?” Well, you gotta reel them in. You gotta give them the good bait, and once they chomp down, you just gotta spin that reel till they're in the boat.
Dave: And also, I gotta give JDG major marks on her innovation on the GoFundMe structure, which is every time another $200 US is raised, it unlocks the next page of my Strange Death of Alex Raymond mockups. The mock-ups that I did when the wrist just wasn't capable of drawing at all. And it's a nice democratic and egalitarian solution, because people who definitely can't afford to contribute much to a GoFundMe campaign, are still able to contribute part of the $200, and the people who can afford to unlock a page or unlock most of the page, everybody gets the benefit of that. Everybody gets to read the next page. We're at page 314 right now, of, I believe there's 555 mockups. Or it's between , what did it start at? I think a hundred and… or 210 or 215 or something like that, and went up to page 555. So we're about 100 pages into the 300 pages of mockups that's page 555. This is where it becomes difficult to market it, because they're going, “What are you talking about? Can you run that past me again?” And it's like, I can either be completely accurate, and as the number is completely screwed up, or I can talk more generally and you just get the idea. You get to read page after page after page after page because, to be honest, to people who can afford to unlock the page, they really want to unlock a page because they haven't read a new page in, you know, five days, a week, something like that. It's like, “I really want to read the next page.” And then they read the next page, and then they want to read the page after that. And it's also one of those things that works really well for the people who want to get caught up. If you don't have the money for this or you can only afford to kick in like $5 or $10, every little bit helps. But you can go to the GoFundMe site and you can see it flashing on the screen right now, if Matt can figure out how to make this flash on the screen. And you can go there and actually read all of the pages that have been unlocked. I'm not telling tales out of school on that. That's really how this works, right? You can go there and go, “Oh okay, this is the first page after Carson's version of Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and here's Dave's mockups without Carson's commentary.” This is just Dave's next page, and then next page, and next page, and you get to read straight from whatever it is. Page 209, I think, was my last page, and then through to 555 are all at GoFundMe in mockup form. And then I've done, I've actually drawn 14 pages after that. So we're definitely unlocking pages at just about the same pace that I'm drawing them. So that's kind of cool for me. There's going to come a point where the express train is rushing up behind me, and okay, well, the express train is just gonna have to slam on the brakes when it gets to the end. There's however many pages I've drawn, and then everybody has to wait until I've got the next page done. One of the two most recent pages that I did took three days, and one of the most recent pages I did took a week, so it's somewhere in between there as to how often a new page is getting created. But like I say, I really admire the structure of it, if you don't have any money at all but you've got a computer, you can read along with everybody else. If you do have the money, you can do a favor for all of your other fellow Strange Death of Alex Raymond enthusiasts, and unlock a page or unlock part of a page. And if you unlock a page, you make a donation, and let's say a bunch of other people have gotten the donations up to another $40 or $45, if you donate $155 then that means you unlock that page because you're the one that took it up to 200. So consequently, you get a piece of Strange Death of Alex Raymond production art. Whatever I'm working on at the moment, okay, this is how much the person donated, and I will either just sign the piece or personalize it to you. Rolly will mail it out to you, and that'll happen within a week of unlocking a page. If I keep seeing your name, and I know you've unlocked a few pages, then you start getting some of the better production art. It's like, no, I'm going through the pile of tracing paper out back at Camp David, a lot of which goes back to “glamourpuss” and, oh! Here's a nice page, and here's another nice page. So this person is getting these. Somebody who had unlocked, I think, a half-dozen pages at this point? Well, they got an original piece of artwork from “glamourpuss.” Me doing my best to Stan Drake on some facial expression, as I recall. But those are all, I got plenty of time until I find out that somebody else has unlocked a page and then that's when I go, well, okay, time to down tools and go, what does this person get? Here's where they get it personalized, here's where I write a little description right on the tracing paper of what it is that they're looking at, and which page it's from. And this whole lurching juggernaut just keeps turning over and turning over, and I think we're actually getting better at it these days.
Matt: Well that’s… I got a suggest to Jen, because it's not 100% free. You gotta donate at least a dollar, that's the way the GoFundMe works is you got to put a little skin in the game, but a dollar gets everything that's unlocked, Dropboxed to you. If there's 100 pages unlocked, you get those 100 pages for a dollar. Which is a really really good deal if you can only afford a dollar.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And you know, if you can afford $100, hey, $100 might unlock the next page and you get stuff!
Dave: Right.
Matt: Well one of the things I'm going to suggest to Jen is go back to the first unlocked page, let's format it for A Moment of Cerebus, and then when she does her weekly post say, okay, for those of you that are on the fence, this is the next page after the last Carson page, and you know, you can start following along. but it's gonna be really slow. Maybe every week she doesn't put a new page up, maybe it's every two, three weeks, but just give people a little bit of a taste of “this is the kind of thing you can get for a dollar minimum.”
Dave: Right. I stand corrected in that case.
Matt: Yeah, what I keep trying to, for everybody that that's… you know, if you're trying to solicit donations, you got to give them a taste. Just a taste! Because remember, the first hit is free, it's after that that we start going, “Well, let's hock Grandma's jewelry so you can afford to get your next hit.”
Dave: I don't think anybody's that addicted to Strange Death of Alex Raymond, but I don't know that for a fact.
Matt: Yet! Yet, yet. They're not addicted yet!
Dave: [laughs] Well, we're working on it. We're gonna figure it out how to get them from flavoured smoke, all the way up to fentanyl. We're here to serve your best interests. And our best interests! And trying to make those twointersect.
Matt: Everybody's a winner when we win. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] That's right and you may already be a winner!
“Okay, it's official, we have too many Mikes. Case in point, ‘Mr Man, please let Dave know that I received the book and am terribly pleased with the inside front cover. So I have gratefully donated an additional $111 dollars via CerebusDownloads. Thanks for being the go-between and I hope my shenanigans were not too taxing on you. I'll let Dave address his shenanigans himself. Peace, Mike Hunt.’” And yeah, we're just full of shenanigans here. Still wondering if somebody wants to play “Deal or No Deal” on another one of the Remarque Editions. But we're very patient about that, because the the object on the nightstand is still the object on the nightstand. I was severely tempted to say, this is what Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania could have traded for if he had been inclined to, he declined to, and now, here it is. Here's what he could have had as the nightstand object, but I have resisted that temptation. And now it gets rolled over to whoever the next person is.
Matt: Yeah, I gotta start reminding people of that. I mean, I did plan it pretty good of, I'm going on vacation instead of getting everybody else that's got access to post of, hey you guys got to fill in for me, I was smart and went through and made four or five posts of… because I've been doing six pages of “High Society” at a time, trying to get through all 6000 pages and eventually it's gonna happen when I'm ready to retire, but I did like three or four of those posts of, okay, here's the link to the last one of these. Here's the six pages and tomorrow it's, here's the link to the last one of these and here's the six pages. And then it’s, other things might be happening in the world of Cerebus, but I'm on vacation, so I don't care!
Dave: That's right! “I'm in St Louis!”
Matt: And tomorrow, it's, oh yeah, I'm back, and now, okay, here's Dave's Weekly Update, and here's a whole lot of rigmarole of this is happening and that's happening and the other thing's happening. And some people like that, and some people don't, and that's when I go back to, well you know, if I could please everybody…
Dave: Yes.
Matt: PT Barnum pretty much nailed it on the head with “you can please some of the people some of the time but you can never please all of the people all the time.”
Dave: Yes. And you have to please yourself.
Matt: Well. Yeah. Sometimes. Other times I'm like, well, I'll just get this done and then I'll forget what I'm doing!
Dave: Okay. I also appreciate you forwarding the email from Rodney Schroeter, “I recently assembled and published the following book,” and there you go, there's an internet of things HTTPS colon slash slash www dot BarnesandNoble etc etc etc. It's a real catchy title. “You can see a preview of the book here.” Which, here's a good idea. But I did pick up on the fact “Mission of Benevolent Greed” by Rodney Schroeter. “I will gladly send you a copy if you're interested. No charge, just in appreciation for your work. On the other hand, it should be available through Amazon or Barnes and Noble in Canada if you'd like to order one yourself. If the latter, the few dollars I get from the books sales will go to Bill. And thanks for continuing to compliment Robin Snyder's publication. I have co-published 12 books of Ditko's work with Robin, and more are in the works.” Thank you, Rodney. I will say that since you are asking, I’d really like an autographed Rodney Schroeter copy for the Cerebus Archive, if possible. Matt can give you the Off-White House address. I will send you back some Dave Sim stuff in exchange, which is usually what I do. I look at at the coolness level of what it is that I got from The Rodney Schroeter, and I go, well, okay, as The Dave Sim, I think you're entitled to this, that, or the other thing. And let me say that, thank you for keeping the objectivist side of the Ditko-verse close to the epicenter of the post-Ditko world where it belongs. We're all just doing our jobs to the best of ourselves perceived job description, which, I think we all know Steve would not have been terribly impressed by. But we are obsessive compulsive Steve Ditko fans, and to the best of our self-perceived job descriptions, this is what we're all doing to keep the memory of Steve Ditko alive, and to bring in whole generations of new Steve Ditko fans.
Matt: Right, right.
Dave: Okay! And then, “not-Mike said. We've got a not-Mike? Wait a minute, how did that happen? Yes, it’s a Steve.” Well, if it's not a Mike, it's probably going to be a Steve. It's the comic book field. “My question is for Dave as follow. Some while ago the old AV Warehouse got cleaned out of the ‘Cerebus’ inventory, and from what I remember the comics were going to a shop that would distribute them at cons. Whatever actually happened to that inventory?” That would be Wes's hot Kitchener Comic Book Warehouse, which is exactly what it sounds like, a comic book store the size of the warehouse at the end of “Citizen Kane.” 3310 King Street East, in Kitchener. 519-748-0555. And September 2015 was when Record Distribution in Leamington, Ontario closed, and Sandeep and Fisher and I went down there to clean our stuff out with a number of Cerebus fan volunteers agreeing to show up and help us. It was actually a good three quarters of a semi-truck that we filled that, ran them up from Leamington to the storage unit that we've got here in town now. And trying to remember how the whole thing went. I do remember all those boxes coming in, and it was a ton o’ books that we had that we moved up from Leamington here. It Rolly's first job working for Aardvark-Vanaheim, and Fisher and Sandeep they had a table and three chairs set up at the storage unit, and would bag and board three comics in a plastic bag with a promotional giveaway front on it. And as those were filled up, then we would take them over to Wes at the Comic Book Warehouse. And I phoned Wes today to ask him, how is he doing on those? Does he still have, you know, three quarters of a semi-truck of “Cerebus” back issues at various spots around Comic Book Warehouse? And he reminded me that actually Alfonso got most of those, and that's the guy that you're thinking of, that was taking them to comic book conventions and really used them to sort of make the name of StudioComix Press better known in in Southern Ontario. “Here's the guy that brings ‘Cerebus’ comics to the conventions and hands them out to people.” And as Wes said, that's how most of the books went out. We would have to ask Alfonso, but I think he probably gave away 8,000, 10,000 comics? So Wes said there are probably still boxes of “Cerebus” back issues over there from the Leamington Warehouse and he would be happy to try and take a look for them, and that was when I said to him on the phone, how about this is a deal? That I'm going to be announcing this on Please Hold for Dave Sim, I have people at various times saying, “I'm I'm coming into Kitchener, is there a possibility that I can have coffee with you, or lunch with you? I'm coming up from, you know, wherever, Florida to visit relatives.” And I don't do that very often, because, again, there's only so many hours in the day. I don't know how many years I got left. I don't know how many more pages Strange Death of Alex Raymond is going to be. But if you want a genuine Kitchener experience, definitely you want to see the Kitchener Comic Book Warehouse out on the highway. [laughs] You don’t usually see comic stores out on the highway with the sign Comic Book Warehouse visible from the highway, so that any comic book fan goes, “Huzawha?! Did I really see that? Did that say comic book? Once you're on the highway, you know, you don’t see any kind of sign that says comic book.” Yes, it is the Comic Book Warehouse, and I said to Wes, what we are going to tell people is, if you're coming from out of town, from near out of town, or from distantly out of town, and you go to the Comic Book Warehouse. Just ask for Wes, he's in there pretty much every day. And just say, “Wes, Swordfish.” And that will be your cue to Wes that he's gotta give you a really good deal. All of the really good deals are going to be different depending on, first of all, what your interests are. And if you can't find something that you want to buy at Wes' Comic Book Warehouse, you're not a real comic book fan. So picture a comic book store the size of the warehouse at the end of “Citizen Kane,” picture yourself going in there looking at all of the stuff that you would really like to have, and finding the stuff and going, “here's something I can afford, here's something that I can't afford.” Take those over to Wes, and go, “Wes, Swordfish!” And say,”Yes, I did hear that on Please Hold for Dave Sim, and I understand that I can get a deal. What deal can I get on this comic book, or these comic books?” And depending on whether Wes is in the situation of needing a few bucks, you'll probably get a better deal. If Wes just sold a bunch of mint EC Comics, mhmm, probably not going to get as good a deal. That's all part of the luck of the draw.
Matt: Ahh, that’s good. That’s a good deal.
Dave: Swordfish lives on!
Matt: I'm really happy that Swordfish wasn't a one-time thing, that it just struck the nerve of, yeah that's just Cerebus enough that Swordfish is gonna stay around for a long time.
Dave: Yes, yes. The swordfish will never die.
Matt: One of the things that we had planned on doing with my Dad when we went down to visit him was, he's got a bunch of books. He was cleaning out his apartment, he's got books and he's like, “Do you want these? I have all the Stephen King books, do you want them?” I'm like, well, I have all the Stephen King books, so I don't need them!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And he's like, “Well, I'm getting rid of them.” So he'd box those up, he added a bunch of Tom Clancy books that, “Do you want these?” I'm like, not really, and he asked my brother, my brother's like, “No.” And so, okay, those went in the box. So he had four or five boxes of books and he wanted to take him to the Half Price Bookstore to sell them, but the problem is, that because my Dad only has one eye now cause he had a mini stroke and it cut off the blood to his eyes, so his left eye, he can see a pin prick that's it.
Dave: Yi-ee!
Matt: And he can drive, but the problem is, he gets tunnel vision when he drives, so if he doesn't know where he's going, and he turns his head to see something, you know he misses what's going. He basically white knuckle drives everywhere, and I'm like, Dad, you really gotta stop driving. And he's like, “Yeah, I know.” But he only drives once a week, and he drives up to the bar for steak on Thursday and then he drives home, and he can get there and back, it's only like a mile or two. But the Half Price Bookstore, it’s, nah, this involves getting on one highway, and getting onto another highway, and getting off at this exit, and turning left at this set of lights, and then going this far to find the place on… And it's like, okay, Dad, I'll take you there. So we go there and he brings in his boxes of books to get an offer. We have time to kill and it's a Half Price Bookstore, I could spend all day there and still not see everything I want to see.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I immediately whipped out my phone and went, okay, I had an email I sent myself of, these are the comics I'm looking for from the last time I went to the comic book store. And I'm like, I'm looking for like three issues of “Spider-Man 2099,” cause those are the only three I don't have. And so I'm going through the S's and I found “Savage Dragon” and I'm like, okay and I pull them out because “Savage Dragon” back issues are kind of worth money and these are all really low numbered too. Like I found a copy of “Savage Dragon” #1 the regular series and I'm like, for a dollar fifty, I will buy this.
Dave: [laughs] I would say.
Matt: And my Dad keeps coming up to me, cause he's still waiting here to get his offer, and he's like, “Are you gonna buy all these comics?” I’m like, I don't know, I'm thinking about it. And I'm adding to the stack, and I found a copy of “Shi/Cyblade: The Battle for Independence” #1, and I'm like, even though I own this, I'm gonna buy a copy, cause it's one of them Cerebus rarities that people find out about like, “Well how come I didn't know about this?” Well because you weren't buying “Shi” in the 90s.
Dave: I guess!
Matt: And then, it was one of these, I found the comic, I pulled it up to see what it was, because I was verifying that, yes I am seeing what I'm seeing, and I immediately added to the stack, and I'm like, I'm buying this. And my Dad's standing next to me, going, “Why?” I'm like, well cause I kind of had a hand in it, and it's a copy of “Super Cerebus Vs COVID-19.”
Dave: Wow!
Matt: And even though I have a whole bunch of them, for $2, I have to buy it because it's in the wild!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then there was another “Cerebus in Hell?” one-shot that I found, and I'm like, okay, I'm buying that. And then I'm like, well I'll go over to the C’s and see if they have any Cerebus back issues, and I found like four more “Cerebus in Hell?” one-shots. And I'm going, I don't think I have these, so yeah I'll definitely buy these, and I got home, and I own most of them, but it's like well now I have giveaway copies.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: You know, it's the beauty of digging through old boxes of comics is, you'll find something that you can't live without.
Dave: That's right! Well, what offer did your Dad get eventually?
Matt: Like 40 bucks.
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: Which, the problem is they give you half of what they're gonna make and they sell most of those books for like $8. You're only gonna get two, three, maybe $4 a book depending on what it is. And of course, as we're leaving I walked past the display case that's locked up of “these are the rare first editions that are going for big money,” and I walked past it, saw something, went up to my Dad who was at the check out, I'm like, hey, you got $1500 that I can have? And he's like, “Why?” Like, you want to go in and buy a first edition, first print copy of “Carrie”? And he's like, “I just sold all my Stephen King books, no!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It’s like a first print, man!
Dave: That’s right! [laughs] That’s right. Well, you want to talk about addictions, and servicing the fentanyl people in our society, where they're not specifically fentanyl junkies, there's a good example. I mean, the store could offer, “Bring in a comic book collector and we'll give you 20% more for the books that you're selling us, because we're gonna make out like bandits.”
Matt: My Dad found a couple CDs that he wanted, and then he found, he's into Josh Whedon's “Firefly” TV series, and they made a movie, and he's been asking me to find him the movie, and I'm really lazy, and I've been like, yeah okay, sure, I'll get to it. Well I found two issues of one of the comic book adaptations of this, and my Dad’s like, oh, I’ll buy those. And I'm like, well, if you go look in the graphic novel section, they might have the collected version. And yep, they had the collected version. So he bought those instead, and then when he was checking out, the guy’s, “Oh, we have the movie on DVD if you wanted it!” My Dad's like, “Oh yeah, sure! Give me that.” And then he bought a couple of the books I was gonna buy, so he ended up, out of his 40 whatever offer, he ended up coming out with like 11 cents, cause that's how it works. You bring in a box of books, they buy them from you, and then you spend it in the store. That's their business model.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And I'm a little annoyed because I was going through the comics and they were kind of rushing me and I'm like, okay, but I still wanted to look at the graphic novels, because my rule of thumb is if I walk into Half Price Books and there's a Cerebus trade, I will buy it. Cause I don't find them that often. And of course, I'm in St Louis now, and I haven't been to this store, so there's a good chance they have a wall of Cerebus that people went, “Oh no, we don't need this in our lives anymore.” And I didn’t even look!
Dave: There are so many different kinds of fentanyl in our society. It's the same as the gambling junkies where I finally figured out, okay, I bought, whatever it was $100, $200 worth of tokens, and I've been sitting at the computerized poker machine and playing poker with a machine, and trying to make the money last as long as I can. And even if I had a winning day in the casino, the amount of money that I made, it worked out that I was probably making $2 an hour for all of this heavy lifting, figuring out odds, and okay, I'm gonna stand. Okay I'll take another card. All that kind of stuff, you know, playing blackjack. And it's like, if somebody made that a job and said “we're gonna pay you $2 an hour to do that” it would be, you're crazy! I'm worth far more than that! But here, this is entertainment. It's like, oh! I'm in. Give me another $200 worth of chips.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Crazy, crazy, crazy people.
“And the other not-Mike says, ‘Hello Matt, got a question for Dave. Are the Archive portfolios done? If not, you have any idea when CAN 10 will roll up? Thanks, Tony Dunlop.” And Tony, it's one of those never say never situations. I think we're probably, we've been skewing in different directions up through “Turtles” 8. It's probably time to get back to the CAN portfolios, at least to the extent of going, okay, what are the 10 earliest pages of the 10th book? I think one of the problems is that one of the earliest pages in the semi silhouette of me against the starry background that starts “Minds”, if I'm not mistaken. And it's like, well, okay I always say, it's the 10 earliest pages, but that's not really a page that I would be comfortable charging people money for. It's like, it's not really that good. It would be like charging you for the title page on one of the graphic novels. I don't include those. But it's like, “It is a page! You did say it would be the 10 earliest pages.” So it might be a situation where I have to go, okay, what are the 10 earliest pages? If I take that one off, what's the next earliest page after that? And then okay, what am I going to have to say about these, if anything? And usually it's not a case of, what am I going to say about these, it's like, I know exactly what I have to say about these because I know where the idea came from. I know what I'm doing here. I know what I'm referring to obliquely in my own life, and that gets into Dave Sim’s really unhappy life from those various time periods. Because once I start writing the commentaries for a CAN portfolio, I'm effectively living back there again. And it's like, most of my life, apart from actually working on the pages, I'm very very happy that I will never have to go back and relive any of those. So having to not only relive it, but try to figure out how to express it in words, and then clarify it, and refine the description. And just dig deep, deep, deep, deep. The further along in “Cerebus” I go, the more the more unpleasant that experience becomes. But you can't start doing CAN portfolios and then go, okay, now I'm done. It's like, you may be done, but the people who are buying them aren't done. So at some point, their interests have to supersede your’s, Grandpa, that's just how it goes when you are The Dave Sim.
Matt: You could do the silhouette page as a freebie bonus for everybody that buys the next 10, so it's, the first “10” pages from “Minds”, and actually it's 11. I personally like that page, cause it's riding off the end of “Reads” where you quoted Pink Floyd with “Shine on you crazy diamond.”
Dave: Oh right, right. Okay, I forgot that. I forgot that. And there you go, that writes the page right there.
Matt: And in the silhouette, either you were wearing an earring at that time, or you just decided to give your silhouette a star earring. Because, I mean, it's one of those, as two individual books, it's like okay, yeah, this is the end, this is the beginning. But if you're reading them back to back, you go, “Oh okay, I get what he's doing here.”
Dave: Right. Right. Yes, I was wearing a diamond earring. That was actually a, if not a drunken night, at least not an entirely sober night in downtown Kitchener, and whatever time period that would have been, is that like 1990/91, do you know offhand?
Matt: That sounds about right.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Because that one was, after I broke up with Zolastraya, which was 89, I was scrupulously celibate for at least two years. I decided that I was just, okay, I'm not saying that I'm not doing this ever again, but I'm not doing this right now. And it was, you know, at any time you can use your free will. And uh… [sneezes] Of course I… [silence] Am I gonna sneeze again? I don't know. Well, [laughs] there you go, Comic Art Metaphysics. It was, whatever you may be thinking consciously in those situations, and I was definitely thinking, between May of 1989 and when I stopped being celibate, I think was July of 91? Legally, if you bought a woman a diamond, that's a commitment. I would not want to go into court saying, “I didn't say I was going to marry her.” And it's like, you gave her a rock, buddy. I'm looking at a rock. That's, you know, a promise. That's a commitment, and at what level does that become a capital L Legal commitment as opposed to a small L legal commitment. Even if a court of law couldn't force me to get married, no, as soon as you buy them the rock, that puts you in a different category. And I guess, I had been musing on this, and tippling a bit in downtown relatively early so that all the stores were open, and I decided, well, I'm gonna buy a diamond, but I'm gonna buy one for myself! So, I actually went into one of the jewelry stores. There were actually be several jewelry stores in downtown Kitchener, now there are none. And just said, I want to buy a diamond earring, and ballpark, I forgot what I said, but you know, Dave Sim drunken rockstar money. And sure enough, bought myself a diamond. And it was a good sized rock. The average woman getting that on her left hand would go, “Yeah, that's good. We got a deal here.” I still got the diamond. It's actually in a little cribbage board case that I inherited from my Grandfather, which is in my bedroom at the Off-White House, and I know it's in there somewhere. I always think, oh, I really should sell that. It's like, whatever good it did as an earring, and I stopped wearing it as an earring probably two or three years after that, and the hole actually never healed over, I guess I'm still engaged to myself in some sense. So, I really should just go to a pawn shop and say, what do you give me for this? And it’s like your Dad with the Stephen King books, it's not gonna be what you paid for them. It's not going to be a major piece of that, because they got to turn around and resell it, but it is a diamond. And then I go, well, for whatever it would be, it's fine where it is. And if Eddie's listening to this, when you inherit everything, don't just throw away the cribbage board box without digging through it, because there's a nice size diamond in there somewhere. Along with my clip-on tie for my tuxedo, and my cuffs, and etc etc that all went with the tuxedo, back when I could possibly be Imagined to wear a tuxedo someplace.
Matt: Well, I was gonna say, before you sell the artwork the “Cerebus” #5’s cover, I would get the diamond appraised, because it is a diamond. I mean, Elizabeth Taylor said they’re forever and she wouldn't lie to you, Dave.
Dave: [laughs] That's right! “A kiss on the hand may be so continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend.” Uh something something, [sings flatly] “but they won't pay the rental on your humble flat, or help you at the automat. Men grow cold, as women grow old, and we all lose our charms in the end. But square cut or pear-shaped, these rocks won't lose their shape. Diamonds are a girl's best friend.”
Matt: [claps lightly]
Dave: And on that note, at the exact two-hour mark, I will say a fond adieu to Matt Doe, and Paula, and Bullwinkle, and Janis Pearl.
Matt: Well, thank you, Dave. Once again, this was… it was fun.
Dave: It was a slice! We’ll talk to you again next month, Matt.
Matt: And we'll win again next month and get to answer questions!
Dave: [chuckles] Alright, take care.
Matt: Take care! Bye.
Dave: Buh-bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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And, coming inFebruary, who knows. Who. Knows. The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch... eventually...). They've been sharing updates on the Instagram.
And, coming in
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback)
Wanderland (Hardcover for the guys who get "hard" for hardcovers...)
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
Hardcover
Paperback
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
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Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
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Dave also wanted me to post this:
The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback)
Wanderland (Hardcover for the guys who get "hard" for hardcovers...)
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
Hardcover
Paperback
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
____________
Larry Shell could use a hand to keep his house.
____________
Dave also wanted me to post this:
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Up to 35% off February 16, and 25-March 1.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
Speaking of Merch, if you want a strange near-antique, shoot an email to momentofcerebus@gmail.com, and I'll tell ya where to send the $20USD I want for these. No shipping charge in the States or Canada. Everybody else add $10USD for shipping. I'll send 'em anywhere the postman is willing to go...
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| Back and front. |
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Heritage has: (I talked about this up top...)
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
- Cerebus #39, page 8 (coming in February)
- And a list of ALL the issues they got
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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