Hi, Everybody!
As we do:
Mondays!
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As you all should know by now, Dave's CONTINUING the Please PAY For Dave Sim format. If you want more '82 Tour Book discussion, go HERE, and pay for "Dave Sim 82 Tour Book". But if you'd rather hear more stereotypical Please Hold (*shudder*) "content", go HERE and pay for "Please Hold For Dave Sim".
Speaking of Please Hold...
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.
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Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Now it’s 5:40!
Matt: [laughs] Now that we’re not please holding for pants, we're ready to go.
Dave: Okay! Good. Okay, here we go. “Please Hold for You time. Okay, it's like the Seiler days. We have guest voices.” Yes, we do. You got them all queued up?
Matt: Oh, well, technically yes, we're just going to put a pause and I'll insert them later.
Dave: Okay. We're not going to try and fool anybody here.
Matt: [laughs] We're gonna use the beauty of editing.
Dave: Okay, so the first one is George Peter Gatsis.
George Peter Gatsis: Hey David, it’s George Peter Gatsis. I just thought it'd be a good gag to respond back to you in voice, because you asked the question in voice. I did respond back to Eddie's email and it's highly detailed. I think enough for you to say yes to it. Just wanted to let you know that. Here's my voice response to your question. Yes, well everything that you asked for I'm already doing it! I'm already doing it, I've been doing it with my partner RJ Carter, Critical Blast Publishing. We've been doing it for the last four years now, printing multiple books, multiple creators. Splitting up multiple talents, contributors per book, in terms of payments, and all that stuff. It's a wonderful thing. Talk to Eddie, review the email I sent you, and get back to me, and that's it. Thanks. Take care.
Dave: Thank you, George! And moving on from there, we've got Dan F.
Dan F: Hello, Dave! This is Daniel F, short for Daniel Fonov. I was listening to the latest Please Hold for Dave Sim, and very appreciative that you answered my question about the Off-White House tour options for the Cerebus Archive Kickstarters, and I did a little bit of research. So I did confirm from the last time that the Off-White House tour was claimed, that was by Gabe in 2018, that was from the $900 . Matt said that same thing in the podcast. So using USInflationCalculator.com, adjusting for inflation for current currency in 2024, $900 equates to $1,112 and 25 cents. I still think that's a very fair price for a day of hanging out with Dave and doing the Off-White House tour. So I think it'd be really cool starting with the next Cerebus Archive Kickstarter for Guys and for “Narutobus.” If you did offer that, I think that'd be really cool. I don't want to make any promises that I would immediately be hopping onto that offer. It would be pretty big commitment for me, especially since I'd be coming from Alaska and I'd have to take time off work. And that would actually be, if I did that, that would be my first time in Canada. But I would definitely consider that if you offered that with the next Cerebus Achive Kickstarter. So yeah, there's the info and yeah, if you need anything, if you need any more info, feel free to call me back…
Dave: This could get to be a trend.
Matt: [laughs] Makes life easier for us! Less to read,
Dave: [laughs] Please Hold for Everybody Else, we're going out for a snack and a coffee. Okay, “Speaking of Seiler, it's your turn. Sure, that's the ticket. It's your turn to remember Jeff. Yeah, I remember Jeff. I remembered him real good. Why, I'd say no nobody has ever remembered Jeff like I did. Yeah, that's what happened. I bet I get an award at the end of the year for how well I remember Jeff. Anyway, your goal.” And, thank you, Matt. I've been trying to distill this for probably about six months now. So here's my best, off the top of my head, remembering Jeff and trying to relate this to all of the earlier references of things that I found unusual about Jeff. The number of phone messages that he would leave for me, the fact that he got into the whole, ‘why did I name my cat Yousef?’ and that was a Cat Stevens reference, and referencing the karaoke bar that he used to go to, and it's, all of this stuff seem to be to me pointing in one direction, which mentally, I have no problem with saying, yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's the direction. Explaining it is another matter entirely, but it really does hinge on the pagan comic book world addressing the monotheistic Dave Sim comic book world. Jeff, I think he believed in God, but he was definitely not an observant believer in God. He didn't observe a Sabbath, he didn't read scripture. He had gone to Oral Roberts University and had actually gone to the the morning sessions where you got addressed by Oral Roberts, which, pretty significant stuff, but it's not something that he carried with him later in life. And so, it was always this strange kind of, Jeff having this attitude of, “you and me, Dave, you know, we're on the same page” sort of thing. And it's like, mhm, well not really, Jeff, in the ways that I find most significant, and monotheism is definitely the most significant. We couldn't be on more different pages, as far as I'm concerned. But it's, I understand that you, Jeff Seiler, don't think that way. And that's fine. But as long as you, Jeff Seiler, understand that I do think that way. The same as Jeff wanting to consider us friends, and it's like, mhmm, well, having been cancelled,I I know the difference that there is no such thing as friendship. Everybody will throw you under the bus in the feminist age if they have to throw you under the bus. And it's like, that's also a thing that I take in stride, and that I'm aware that that's just how things are going to go if it comes time to cancel Dave Sim yet again. So all of this was just sort of like alerting me to, I don't know why this is, but this definitely seems to be something, and it seemed to link to Neil Gaiman, who lived in the Minneapolis area before Jeff did. It's like, Jeff was was moving into that context after Neil Gaiman moved out of that context. And again, the paganism versus monotheism thing, I went, okay, all of this seems to have gotten up a head of steam when Alan Moore came to prominence in the late 1980s. And definitely Alan Moore wasn't just a “not a monotheist, kind of pagan”, he was a fullbore pagan. When you decide that instead of believing in God, you're going to believe in a Roman Snake God, that's definitely a different brand of paganism. And then, Alan Moore begat Neil Gaiman [laughs], and Neil Gaiman's brand of paganism with “Sandman” and The Endless. You know, if they're endless, and we're going to assume that Dreaming is endless, and Death is endless, it always exists, then the compelled inference is, ”Isn't that a form of immortality? And as a form of immortality, doesn't that qualify as deistic?” And it's like, well, I can understand that that seems that way to you, and it's certainly an argument that I didn't share or have very much interest in, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, but no, I don't think things that are endless qualities of physical existence qualify as God. That's the thing that's warned about in the Quran, joining Gods with God, but I do understand that there are a lot of people that do that, and foremost Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman among them. And then, it seemed to me, because I was always having my attention being called to this, that this was constituting some sort of negotiation on the part of comic book pagans that, “At some point we're going to have to have this conversation with Dave Sim, and Dave Sim will have to be forced to admit that we're all the same. We're all the same, we're all in this together.” And it's like, mhmm, no, by the time I had read the Bible and the Quran, and was fasting in Ramadan, which is the late 1990s, no, those are very very different things. And then, Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore begat Rick Veitch, where, “Okay, if you don't want to acknowledge Neil Gaiman as the Sandman, as the Master of Dreams as Joseph in Genesis and as Joseph in Surah 12 in the Quran, and you're also on a different page from these mainstream guys.” Alan Moore was a mainstream guy who did occasional visits to independent comics, Neil Gaiman was a mainstream guy dabbling in independent comics. So, again it's being on a different page. So then, what got extruded was Rick Veitch, who started as an indie comics guy, and in fact arguably an underground comix guy, then became a mainstream guy when he took over “Swamp Thing” from Alan Moore. And then extruded into indie comics with “Rare Bit Fiends”, and doesn't this qualify as something that definitely, if I can't see eye to eye in terms of belief systems with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, what about Rick Veitch? Because he's not doing a fiction about dreams, he's doing actual dreams. So isn't that another level of actuality even closer to objective reality and monotheism? And it's like, [laughs] again, uh no. In my frames of reference, I really don't see it that way. I understand that you see it that way, I understand that you really really really want me to see it that way, but I don't see that see it that way. And then this all seemed to come to a conclusion last year when Rick Veitch sends me his work. He sends me the collected “Rare Bit Fiends” and sends me the Heroica books when he brings them back into print, and when he gets new stories done with his Superman knockoff… why am I drawing a blank on that? What's his Superman analog?
Matt: Maximortal.
Matt: Maximortal. Thank you.. Yes, and Boy Maximortal more recently. And The Last Day had come back into print, which has the lengthy preamble basically fusing monotheism and science, which is the best I can do I in terms of, yeah okay, there's verifiable science and I don't think it's at odds with monotheism, and here's why I don't think it's at odds with monotheism. And Rick sent me, I think the latest volume of “Boy Maximortal” and I sent him back The Last Day. And got a rare letter from him, basically saying, “Right, yes. This is what the Alchemists and the great thinkers of the ages call the Demiurge.” And it's like, [laughs] well no, I don't think I'm talking about the Demiurge here, I'm talking about God and YHWH. And that compelled me to sit down and go, okay, it's now 35 years since the Northampton Summit where we put together the Creator’s Bill of Rights and at that time I was going, okay, I don't really know why Rick Veitch is here, apart from the fact that he came out of underground comix and did indie comics. He's a mainstream guy. But Steve Bissette really wanted him there, so okay, Rick Veitch is there. We'll see what he has to say. So I wrote to Rick what I thought was probably the best summing up of the situation that I could do, which was saying, I'm writing this letter to you, but I think this is a letter that you could be writing to me, and free free to correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm not summing this up correctly. But basically saying, I'm always interested in your work. I never think that your work should be banned or in any way cancelled in the comic book field, and I will always send you my work. But I have to say that I think your ideas have Zero Validity. And it's like, I was hoping the fact that I'm saying, okay, I think we're saying this on both sides, would mean okay, it's not, I'm not insulting you any more than you're insulting me. I don't intend to insult you, and I don't intend to insult your beliefs, I'm just saying that I don't think they have any validity. And I realized that that's what you think looking at my idea. And it was like, I got that done, and sent it off in the mail with the latest “Cerebus in Hell?” whatever that was, and went, [laughs] okay, having 35 years of all of this, we're not getting anywhere in this discussion, but I do sense this urgency on the other side of the volleyball net to really really intensively maintain this and always have somebody else getting in Dave Sim's face about this. That, okay, I think that pretty well settles it. I hope that Rick will continue to send me his work, and if he does send me his work, I'll always send him whatever I've just had published most recently. And I went, okay well, if metaphysics is going to produce any outcome out of this, it's probably going to produce an outcome out of this.
And literally the next day, I went to the place where I buy my newspapers every Monday and Wednesday. I buy the Waterloo Region Record and the Toronto Sun, and on Wednesday I buy the Waterloo Region Record and the Toronto Sun and the International Express from England. And I went in and grabbed my Waterloo Region Record and my Toronto Sun, and I was paying for them, and I have to say that I've been going to this place buying my newspapers for years now, probably a decade, and I've never seen anybody else buy a newspaper. There's really just like a handful of newspapers there, because newspapers have just completely died as a vehicle of communication for most people. The guy that owns the plac,e Pete, says,”You know, I used to bring in a good 20, 25 pounds of newspapers every morning, and now they all fit in one little rolled up package that's maybe an inch thick, and that includes the racing form.” So, I was paying for my newspapers and he goes, “This guy's buying the same thing, the Toronto Sun, and the Waterloo Region Record.” I thought that's wildly implausible, the guy behind me in line. The Waterloo Region Record is extreme extreme leftwing, thinks it's middle of the road, and the Toronto Sun is extreme extreme rightwing, and thinks it's middle of the road. I couldn't picture anybody in Kitchener that would buy both of those, and I turn around and look at the guy and he's my age or maybe older, and he literally has a bandage on his head with a giant swelling visible under the bandage, and blood trickling out of it. [laughs] And I went, oh come on! [laughs] All I did was state the basic facts. I did not do this to Rick Veitch, I did not do this to Neil Gaiman, and I did not do this to Alan Moore. But there you go, enactments are enactments. So I paid for my newspapers, the guy behind me paid for his newspapers, he's walking out behind me and I said to him, what does the other guy look like? [laughs] And he didn't really say anything, which is unusual. A guy my age usually knows if you've got a visible wound of some kind on you, a black eye or something like that, that's a guy joke to another to another guy joke, which is, you know, “What does the other guy look like?” So we didn't really exchange any more pleasantries, but I went my way, he went his way. And then, I've been seeing him constantly since then. Never saw him before, but now as I said to him, I see you more than I saw my parents when they were alive. And finally went, okay, at some point I've got to ask him, what's your name? And I'm gonna go, if it's Alan or Neil or Rick, then I'm not going to be surprised, but I'm certainly curious as to which one of those three this ridiculous histrionic display is has manifested. So like I said, you know, I see you more than I saw my parents when they were alive. What's your name? And his name was Barry.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And I went, well, there you go, because there's only one Barry in that category, as far as I'm concerned, and there you go. I look at Barry Windsor-Smith the same way, which is, if Barry ever sent me a piece of his work, he used to send me his work, but if he ever sent me a piece of his work, I would be very very interested in reading it, although I don't share his beliefs. He's definitely got a lot more experience with very very unusual metaphysical occurrences, which anybody who's read “Opus” knows that. But you know, again, you get to the point where there's nothing to be said. Barry, if you don't choose God, you're choosing YHWH or Satan, or whatever name you want to attach to it. Or the Demiurge, if you're Rick Veitch. And I would hope that I would always be interested in reading your work, and I hope that you would always be interested in reading my work, and that we would never want the other guy or his work to be cancelled, or made illegal, or anything like that. So, there you go! That's what I've been trying to condense remembering Jeff, and it's one of those monotheism versus paganism things. It's not as if I don't understand the other side of the argument, I was a devout atheist for the first 40 years of my life, but now that I'm over here on this side of the volleyball net, it's, no, I don't see there being a Alan Moore style bridge between worlds, or “Isn't the Endless the same thing as Gods?” No, once you're over here, you're over here.
Matt: Well, I was going to say, years ago at S.P.A.C.E. there was a guy that was selling refrigerator magnets of one panel comics, and I bought a bunch of them because there were a bunch of them, that were really funny. And one of my favorites that I still have, it's four monks, and one guy's got a clipboard, and the other three are lined up. And it's “A vow of silence for Brother Mark, a vow of poverty for for Brother Luke, and yet another vow of chastity for Brother Vince.” And Brother Vince has this ear to ear grin. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it's one o,f I bought it because it was funny, but then when Jeff was talking about you and he were “partners in celibacy” and you were like, “No, Jeff, there's a difference between celibacy and not getting any.” And that was one of the times where Jeff was, “I don't understand why Dave doesn't see it the way I see it.” It's like, Jeff, it's not a club, it's not a race, it's not the two of you against the world type thing. It's Dave's beliefs, and you're just not getting any. And everybody had kind of talked to him about it. Aand then it was one of those, for like six months, Jeff was not necessarily on a high horse about it, but it would come up, and then he got some, and it was, “Yeah, no, no, I understand what Dave was saying now.” It's like, okay, we told you this 6 months ago, Jeff!
Dave: [laughs] There's celibacy and they're not getting laid. Yeah. Okay, moving on from there. And it'll be your turn to remember Jeff next time. “Then, because he gets his questions in practically the minute we answered his last question, very very efficient Dodger aka Mike aka MJ Sewall asks, ‘Hello there, Manly Matt ‘Ron Essler’ Dow, and the far less complicated Dave Sim, ‘Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon’ was famously the first issue with backgrounds by Gerhard. It began the era of Dave and Ger, but it's also one of the best titles of any individual issue in my opinion. I love the other title homages to hit songs, ‘Sane As It Ever Was’, etc, but this is a true Dave Sim original. So 40th anniversary questions for Dave, where did this unique title come from?” That is in the category of, when you ask a writer ”where do you get your ideas?” The honest answer is. I don't know. That, you don't have the idea, and then you do have the idea. Sometimes it's triggered by something. You saw something and that linked to you thinking about this, and then you thinking about that, and then it follows the neural pathways, and you can say, okay, this is where I got that idea, or I read this in a book, or I saw this in a movie. That would definitely be in that category. “Was it merely trepidation about change?” And, no, at the time it was… trying to find distillations of reality. Learning to demarcate in my own mind, okay, that's just a phrase that, there's a bunch of phrases. We all need phrases strung together in order to communicate with each other. But in terms of, there are phrases that have more significance, that seem in and of themselves pregnant with significance, and as somebody who was writing a 6,000 page graphic novel, it was, okay, this is something that I'm aware of myself watching for, and I'm more aware of myself watching for it than I ever was before. And anytime that I would get something like that, that would come into my head. A few issues after that, there was “Another Thing Coming”, which that issued from hearing somebody using the expression in terms of, “If you think X, Y, and Z, you've got another thing coming.” And thinking, yeah, if you sit down and look at that, that's a very interesting way to Express that. “Another thing coming”, because there's always another thing coming. It's the nature of reality. I was just going about my day today, and then a thing came, whatever it was. Something in the mail, a phone message, something I saw out in the streets, something I read in the newspaper. So I had another thing coming. We always have another thing coming. “Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon” is definitely an atheistic way of looking at it. From this side of the volleyball net that I'm on now, I would say, well okay, let's take paying the Muslim Zakat. You've never paid the Muslim Zakat, and suddenly today, you went to the food bank, or you went to a charity and gave them a cheque for 20% of your earnings. So that's, you've done that for the first time. I would have a great deal of difficulty seeing that as unleashing a demon. Also, there's a quality to the term “demon,” in terms of, presumably there are things that unleash malignant spirits, but then there are probably also things that unleash benign spirits. And over from benign spirits, where it's not helpful or hurtful, beneficent spirits, and consequently, would be probably more accurate to say “anything done for the first time unleashes a spirit, or an aspect of spirit.”
“Were you worried about ‘Cerebus’ having more than one creative person on board?” Uh no, although I don't remember exactly where it came from, I wasn't really relating anything to Gerhard at the time. Because it was, you know, Gerhard and I had done a colour story for Epic Magazine, and then I had talked to Arn Saba coming back from an Ottawa convention, and saying, I've always done everything on my own, but Gerhard is obviously really good. So I am thinking about collaborating with him. As a person who collaborates, and Arn Saba had a number of different collaborators, Dave Roman and Barb Rausch and so on, he said, “You know, as long as it's my comic book and I'm the one calling the shots, I see anything that's done on it as as being essentially my work.” We were going to try that out, and certainly issue 65 was where we were going to try it out. But, it wouldn't have surprised me to find out, mhmm, no, I think we can maybe do some more Epic stories or other things like that, but Gerhard just doesn't have what it takes to work on a monthly book, and the only way we're going to find that out is to have Gerhard working on a monthly book um. So, that's your bonus question, “Is there even more to this 40 year old story?” And yeah I'm sure that there is, or I would imagine that there is, but it's not something that would be accessible to me. It was part of God's Clockwork Mechanism of, this is this, this will be the perfect time for you to encounter this title in your head, and you won't really see the multiple resonances attached to it until much later on, but that's just the way reality works. And then Mike says, “Thanks as always and especially for all the extra goodies included with my recent CAN shipment. Wishing you California style sunshine, MJ Mike Dodger CAN #211 Sewall.” So it's not just you that is a far more complicated name guy. And then you wrote, “Uh, carry the one, plus two. Hey! That's four questions! You're only allowed three, Dodger. Dave, feel free to skip one of these. Rules is rules, Mike, if we make an exception for you without significant financial remuneration, it'll be chaos. Chaos, I tell you! Make checks payable to cash.” Now, I forgot something here. So, thank you, Mike Sewall. Where's my… yeah, remember Lank Stephens? That was I going to do answers for self-publishers that I hope it would help Lank Stephens and help others. Here's one that, if it's not right at the top of the list, it should be should be right at the top of of any list. Which I'm finding out as I'm doing the Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, if you want to ink more accurately, and we all want to ink more accurately, I don't think there's any cartoonist when inking who doesn't finish inking a face or a figure or whatever, and go, “Uh, okay. Not the way it looked in my head, but I can live with it. I wish it was more the way that it looked in my head.” Here's how to make it look more the way it does in your head, whether you're inking on illustration paper, Strathmore, illustration board, anything that you're working on, when you're inking, hold the page against the drawing board as hard as you can with whatever isn't your inking hand. In my case, my left hand. Get it right around where you're inking, and literally put as much weight behind your hand and hold that sucker down as tight as you possibly can. Because that reassures the inking side of your brain, the part of your brain that inks, this is exactly where the art paper is. All I have to do is refer over to the right side of my brain, holding the page down, and go, yep, that's exactly where that page is. It's not bubbling up, it's not curling, it doesn't have a natural warp to it. Hold down as firmly as you can, and then when you start inking, the left side of your brain and your right hand will actually ink more accurately, because it goes, I know exactly where this page is. If I know exactly where this page is specifically, and I know it because it's being held very very firmly against the drawing board, I can put this line exactly where it's supposed to go. Because it's a really fine line in Strange Death of Alex Raymond, if there's any kind of warp, or woof, or bulge, or anything like that, at one level or another, you're asking your inking part of your brain to guess where the page is, and then get surprised by where the the ink line or the brush line goes. So, can't emphasize that one enough, if anybody is going to be inking tonight or tomorrow after they listen to this, give it a try. Give it a try, I think you'll see exactly what I'm saying, and you'll be surprised at how much how much better the results are that you're going to get with that.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Wait a minute.
Matt: We finished up the first Dodger…
Dave: Oh there we go! That's why I was having trouble with it. Okay, and then moving on, Dodger says, “Hey Matt, I sent Dave a birthday present. Yeah, I know it's early. If Dave asks about it, I had to send it early. My May is going to be a nightmare. Thanks for all the momenting you do, Mike Dodger.” And, did you get my long long reply to Dodger on his birthday present?
Matt: Yes, and I've posted it.
Dave: You did?!
Matt: I posted that on Sunday and/or Monday.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: There was there were a number of faxes and I was like, okay, we're just going to plow through these, and I wanted to double check with Steve Peters to make sure he was okay with his letter going up. So I skipped him, but then I just was going down in order of, okay, this is what I got, and this is what's going on. And I got through everything. The problem, of course, is I did it over two days, so the second day I had to go, okay, which one of these have I already put up?
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: I'm getting better at when I save the individual pages of the fax, instead of just saying, this is Steve Peters one, it's, this is Steve Peters, this is the day it came in, this is page one.
Dave: Aha! Aha.
Matt: Couple more years at this, I'm gonna be a professional.
Dave: [laughs] That's right. As the Germans say, we get too soon oldt, and too late schmart. Yeah, a wonderful birthday president. Having brand new Al Williamson to thumb through, particularly when I had a panel that I was working on that just screamed for Al Williamson, and Al Williamson thinking. Definitely really helped. It was, I really can't thank you enough, Dodger. And what was the other Dodger thin? He was asking about the tipped-in plates, the “The hell it's yours! Put it back! This trade paperback belongs to”, that those labels got remastered, thank you, Sean, and printed by Studio Comixpress, and Dodger was wondering, “Okay, are you ever going to offer these, because I'd like to get 16 of them for my 16 trade paperbacks?” And as I said to Rolly, when I did those, the wrist was still 100%, and I'm not sure if I want to be using a wrist on hand lettering people's names on to 16 book plates. And Rolly said, just without missing a beat, “Why don't you letter one of them and then we'll just get Studio Comicxpress to print 16 of them?” Aha! So that’s…
Matt: What was that German saying?
Dave: [laughs; German accent] We get too soon oldt and too late schmart. So, that's what's being worked on right now, and we've actually got another variation on that one, which is Studio Comixpress scanned the signature, and then did it a little smaller on one of the book plates. Did I want it the full size that I had done it, or a little bit smaller? And I went, well, 16 book plates don't cost that much to do. Let's do two sets, and we can send Dodger two sets, and he can decide for himself if he wants slightly smaller MJ Sewall or the slightly larger MJ Sewall. Did you get a scan of that from Rolly?
Matt: Not yet, but that might be coming through tonight.
Dave: Okay. Or I forgot to ask him to do it. [laughs] Either one. Anyway, because Dodger was the one that provoked this, this will be entirely complimentary, and we'll be sending those out to him. But it will, I think, be something that we will offer with CAN 11. We just have to figure out what's an appropriate amount of money in 2024 for that. [laughs] “Well, that's half of the Please Hold for Dave Sim team sufficiently plied, where's my graft, Dodger? Where's my graft?!” That's a good point. That's a good point. It's not enough to just thank Manly Matt Dow for all his momenting that he does, at some point you have to cross his palm with silver.
Matt: [laughs] I mean, I'm trying to remember, but Mike, I think, has sent me stuff. Or else I have to send him stuff and so it's kind of sort of a, well, you know, I owe him one. I don't know. I have a desk that's got a bunch of stuff on it that I really need to clean off, and dig to the bottom of and find the AMoC prize box, and then consolidate that with the AMoC prize drawer, and then figure out who all is owed what, and get it out. I just really hate mailing stuff.
Dave: Right. Right. If you could just snap your fingers, which in my case is pretty much how it is. Rolly package this stuff and mails it, which is why I send a lot more stuff out in the mail than I would if I had to package it myself. Well, the one thing we know for for certain with Dodger is, he's already said “My May is going to be a nightmare”, so if you do send him stuff, you're probably not going to hear from him until June.
Matt: I'm thinking I might not get a question from him till almost June.
Dave: That's possible, as well. Unless he gets on it right now, early in his nightmare.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uh, “While we wait for a dump truck to full of cash to hit my front lawn, Zipper checks in from the home office in Easton, Pennsylvania. ‘Hi Matt, I hope you're enjoying the spring season so far.’” Are you?
Matt: The other day I got out of work, and it was in the 70s, and I took off my winter coat and went, okay, this is fine. And the next morning I got up and it was in the 30s, and I'm going, just make up your mind, Mother Nature! You're obviously drunk, just make up your mind!
Dave: [laughs] Wisconsin is not too far from Canada, in that sense. You see the real hardcore optimist walking around in shorts and t-shirts, and the people who would rather deal with reality on its own terms going, “I got my hat and my hoodie and my winter coat on. When it actually gets warm, I'll start dealing with that.” And that changes through the day. Like, you can have the in the 30s when it's 8 o'clock in the morning, and then by four o'clock in the afternoon you just look like some sort of a weird headcase who's still walking around with a winter coat. And it's like you say, back up in the 70s.
“And now for something completely different, here is my top 10 list for Dave on why we should keep the numbering sequence and total print run on future Kickstarter CANs. I've added photos over two emails. I'm thinking that you can add the kickstarter CAN numbers photos to the countdown.” [laughs] And Matt says, “Gee, that sounds like woik.” “Hi Dave, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone else listening to Please Hold for Dave Sim this month. Here is Michael R from the home office in Easton, Pennsylvania with the top 10 list for continuing the numbering sequence and total print number for future Kickstarter CANs. Number 10, why stop something that was working so good? Number nine, we can finally talk about something important on Please Hold for Dave Sim. Hey, wait a minute… Number eight, chicks will dig me even more.” We'll keep that one a secret from Grace. “Number seven, liberal feminists just don't get it.” Yeah, that's true. And we will site, most recently McGill University in Montreal, Columbia University, and now the Southern California… what’s the University in California that's going nuts right now? Anyway, this is where if you ever think liberal feminists just don't get it, just wait for those universities to weigh in. “Number six, it helps everyone sleep better at night.”Ah, that's a good point. Anything that helps us all sleep better at night. “Number five, because who doesn't like to see their CAN number over and over on every damn page? Number four, hey aren't Kickstarters about getting something you wanted? Number three, it's sure beats looking at those darn silly Albatross #1 notebooks. Number two, everyone knows that Michael R from Easton, Pennsylvania has #26 on every page of every Kickstarter CAN. And the number one reason for continuing the numbering sequence and total print run number for future Kickstarter CANs is… because Michael R is the only one who cares!” “Was that a glass breaking noise?”, as you wrote on, “Unless David Letterman has a trademark on that, then who is this? What are you doing here? No habla engles.” Okay, talked it over with Rolly today, and here's what we're gonna do. I've approved the CAN 11 proof pages for each plate today. They look really really good, and we're just going to go ahead and print all of those, and just as if CAN 11 was CAN 10, if anybody drops out or anything gets rearranged, we'll fix that on an anecdotal basis. But, this way CAN 11 will be printed and ready to be packaged even before the CAN 11 Kickstarter launches. And! And, what we're going to do for any and all listeners on Please Hold for Dave Sim, May 2024. What we're going to do is, if you want your CAN number out of whatever the total print run is going to be, I talked it over with Rolly, we decided it should probably be somewhere between 120 and 130. So we're going to air on the side of caution and make it 130. If you want your CAN number out of 130 handwritten on each plate, I will do that. All you have to do is say “Swordfish” in your comment section, or leave a phone message saying, “Yeah, I would like my CAN number handwritten on each plate in CAN 11.” And Michael R, this is your doing. You will get #26 out of 130 on each plate in CAN 11.
Matt: I love the “Swordfishes”.
Dave: [laughs] Well, it's, we're trying to prove that Pavlov is right. And if we just keep offering really cool stuff, if you say “Swordfish”… oh, and you have to say “Swordfish CAN number” because otherwise there's going to be people who will pick up on the fact that if you say “Swordfish” you get cool stuff, but they still won't listen to Please Hold for Dave Sim. So we're cutting that one off at the knees by saying, you have to put in your comment section “Swordfish CAN number” and that will mean that you will get your CAN number on each plate. And yeah! Who couldn't possibly love “Swordfish”?
Matt: I'm flashing back to the “Tales of the Silverfish” story you did, where it's old Cerebus, and you just got to walk up and shout, “Tree sketch!” with a piece of paper under his hand, and he'll do one real quick, as long as you yell it.
Dave: [laughs] That’s right!
Matt: And the one silverfish is just, non-stop, “Tree sketch! Tree sketch!” cause he's gonna sell it and make money.
Dave: Okay, Steve, one of them, says, about the First Fifth prints, “If nothing else, it's generous of Dave to pass these leftovers on to Gerhard.” [laughs] That's possible, or Gerhard could possibly be saying, “Shelly and I are completely out of storage room here, why do you keep sending me this stuff? I don't want this stuff! Don't send me this stuff.” But, against that, Steve goes on to say, “In all my years of watching eBay, and more recently but still years, Heritage, I don't believe I've ever seen either the colored or plain set of prints listed.” Now that's interesting! I thought that, well they're probably not common, but I would be willing to bet a bunch of them have been on there. "And Dave doesn't say, but did the sale of the First Fifth clear Aardvark-Vanaheim of the Animated Cerebus Portfolio debt? Steve.” And Manly Matt Dow chimes in, “Well Dave did it?” If you do the math, there were 30 of the coloured sets, and as far as I know, I got one set in the Cerebus Archive, and then sent Gerhard a couple of loose ones that obviously got separated from the others. 30 sets, charging $300 for the set, that's $9,000, and 100 sets, and I'm guessing that we didn't sell 90 sets, but we probably sold pretty close to 90 sets of the black and white at $100 each, that's another 9,000. And the debt on the Animated Cerebus Portfolio was 16-17,000? So, pretty darn close! I don't know what the exchange rate was back then on the American dollar, I think we were charging in American dollars. But yes, in terms of, we're turning a page here with Aardvark-Vanaheim, let's see if we can turn the page and get rid of all of this five figured debt. My God! I don't think my parents ever had a five figure debt. I don't know how much their house cost, but I'm willing to bet it was low to middle five figures. That's when you know that you’ve become a grown-up, is when you've racked up a debt that your parents can't clear for you.
Matt: It reminds me of, my Grandparents sold their house years ago, and my Grandpa was starting to have memory problems. And that's one of the reasons they were moving was that he had a series of micro-strokes. They didn't figure this out till later, but he was losing his short-term memory. And so, it was, “What are we doing?” “You're moving.” “Oh, did we sell the house?” “Yeah.” “Well, how much did we get?” And we told him, and he went, “Oh okay.” It was one of those, like, I forget what they paid for the house, but they sold it, I mean, 30 years ago for like 80 or $90,000, and it was one of those, they probably paid 2,000 for it when they bought it back in the late' 40s.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And so, he was, “Oh okay”, and he was alright with moving for a while because it was, “Well, we got paid” and it's one of those, every time I think about it, just a shocked look on his face when we told him, yeah, you made like $85,000 . And he just kind of looked at us like, “Okay, I guess I'm not mad about her selling the house out under me.”
Dave: [laughs] That's right. That's right. That greases a lot of wheels for Grandpa, right there. Yeah, the same as my Dad saying to my Grandfather when they sold their house in Stony Creek, $100,000. And saying, and this was 1976, and it was, “You couldn't spend $100,000 in the rest of your life.” [laughs] It's like, boy, we're in a whole new time period now, where it's, how long is that $100,000 expected to last, and can I make it last that long, or am I going to be one of the legion of of homeless people out there?
Okay, Daniel F… wait a minute! Yes, here's Daniel F again. Hello, Daniel F! Asks, “Preface to Manly Matt, if anyone else has asked about a collected ‘glamourpuss’ reprint for this month's Please Hold, feel free to ignore this email. Hello Dave, would you have any interest in doing a reprint of ‘glamourpuss’? Perhaps in a phonebook format? I think a Kickstarter to fund it would work well. Thanks, Daniel F.” And Matt says, “You'd think that, Daniel, but here's where Dave tells you you're wrong.” And I'll add in your parentheses here, and then we'll repeat this at the end, “And as a reminder to all of the fine folks in Please Hold land, anybody wants digital copies of ‘glamourpuss’, email Manly Matt Dow at momentofcerebus at gmail dot com, and he'll hook you up.” Which is very nice of you, it needs to be said. “Glamourpuss” is, I really don't see it having that level of popularity. I mean, I was vehemently opposed to doing a “glamourpuss” collection because I didn't want it to get confused with Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and people saying, “I've already read this.” No, you haven't already read this. You've seen it as a raw material, parts of it, in Strange Death of Alex Raymond, but this is a completely different thing. I don't have all of the pages from “glamourpuss” anymore. I have a lot of them, but I did sell a bunch of them, and I did give some of them away as gifts. It's one of those, the people that would find a fashion magazine parody funny aren't the sort of people that would buy a fashion magazine parody. I could say from the experience on “glamourpuss”, I think probably the only compromise that I could see on this would be, it wouldn't be remastered, but the scans that Matt did of “glamourpuss”, it's pretty clear printed. I mean, it was printed on slick paper and Sandeep Atwal knew a great deal about how to manipulate images to get them as clear as possible. So it's not a heavy lifting thing like remastering “Cerebus” #1. You could try it as an experiment, just saying, here's Manly Matt Dow's scans of the pages. Get either Studio Comixpress or Sean to remaster the pages. Like I say, just a test, just do like “glamourpuss“ #1 or something like that, and then get it printed out and go, okay, can you live with this? Is this as someone who's interested in a “glamourpuss” phonebook, is this clear enough and sharp enough that, “Yeah, if this was offered to me, I would buy it.” In which case, I would say, as opposed to the Cerebus Archive portfolios, where we're talking about being able to sell 100 or 110, maybe a little fewer than 100, and be able to turn a profit on it, that wouldn't be as clear with “glamourpuss.” So we can test it and see what you think and then be able to say, putting it over in the Albatross category, if anybody wants one of these, it's $100 or $150, or whatever it would be for the complete “glamourpuss”. The complete “glamourpuss” would be between 500 and 600 pages, so it's going to be at least two times, two and a half times, what the Albatross is going for. So we’re talking $200 US, $250 US. Mhmm, I'm not really sure that it would be that popular, but I'm certainly glad that you're interested. “glamourpuss” was a lot of hard work, and a lot of very ungratifying work, in terms of the response to it. So I'm glad that it exists. I'm glad that the raw materials exist, and it will be possible to do that somewhere up ahead, if it ever becomes a sensible thing to do financially. The other extreme, of course, is the CAN 10 portfolio approach, where I would say, okay, here's what's in the Cerebus Archive “glamourpuss” originals, and putting them all in order and just say, okay, it's $100 for a CAN 10 portfolio and you get 10 pages. Here's ”glamourpuss” and it's again $100 for 10 pages. You want 100 pages? Okay, well, that's going to be $1,000, that's going to be $1,500 . But if you're that interested, and you're willing to spend that kind of money, I can always take it under consideration, saying… and I've thought about this about the “Cerebus” pages as well. If it wasn't for the logistics of having to dig out the pages from the off-site storage, and do the scanning, and do the printing, I was curious as to, if I said, if the page is in the Cerebus Achive and you want it as a specially printed portfolio, 10 pages are $500, but you get to pick which 10 pages that you want that are in the Cerebus Archive. Like I say, that would be one of those, somebody wants to try that as a trial balloon, we can try that. Send me a cheque for $500 US and say, “These are the 10 pages I'm interested in” and I'll see, okay, how difficult is this to do? And if it's not that difficult to do, and it is $500 in 2024, you can have “glamourpuss”, you can have Strange Death of Alex Raymond, you can have any of the pages from “Cerebus”, you can have the backup stories in “Swords of Cerebus”, all of those are options. But in terms of, just barreling ahead and doing a “glamourpuss” phonebook and Kickstartering it? Mhmm, not gonna happen I'm afraid, Daniel. But I appreciate your interest. And so, I will repeat, and as a reminder to all of the fine folks in Please Hold land, anybody wants digital copies of “glamourpuss”, email Manly Matt Dow at momentofcerebus at gmail dot com, and he'll hook you up.
Matt: So just to clarify, if people want to send you a big check to get scans of the original artwork that's in the Archive, they send you a list of 10 pages, they're only going to get the pages that are in the Archive so they should probably send a list of, “These are the top 15 I want but I'm only getting 10 .” Include alternates just in case you want to buy the page that Dave sold for $20 back in 1982 so he could get weed.
Dave: [laughs] Oh, not in 1982, but definitely in 1978, and 1979, yes.
Matt: I mean like, I know the two pages that I personally would love to have copies of, are the death of Death from Flight, but the last two pages of it got sold back when you guys did that issue. That's why they weren't in the CAN portfolio for Flight.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And at that point it's like, yeah, it'd be great to have that, but I mean we can give you a remastered print, but it's going to be a remastered print, it's not going to be the original art, it's going to be cleaned up. And that's when you get to the guys that go, “Well, you know…” Like, Michael R has his portfolios and all of a sudden he's got pages in there, but these aren't scans of the original, these are remastered, and then what does he put a post-it note on it so that people flip through it, and is anyone who flips through it gonna notice?
Dave: [laughs] All these questions come to mind, I'm glad that because we do Please Hold for Dave Sim and I do try to find a way to make these things work, that people are starting to appreciate, yeah, there is nothing in this world where you can just snap your fingers and make it happen. Whatever you come up with, where you go, “Hey, I've got a great idea.” It's like, yeah, it's a great idea, but once you start working out, what is it going to take to make this great idea actually happen? The list gets a lot shorter. So yeah, which is why I'm saying in this case, if somebody wants to try this out and go, “Well okay, here's my cheque for 500 US made out to Aardvark-Vanaheim. Here's my shopping list.” I will do one that way. The first one that comes in, I will do that way, and either go, okay, this is like pulling teeth but it was like pulling teeth with novacaine, I can live with this. Then, okay, I'll move on to the next $500 cheque. Or, I go, okay, tried it out. Completely unworkable. Not going to happen. Here's your $500 cheque back. Here's your 10 pages, where you came in first in the build-your-own-CAN portfolio derby.
Matt: And there's that third possibility that I know, it's the equivalent of Babe Ruth pointing at the Moon smacking the ball and it hitting the Moon is, you get two checks with two lists, they're the exact same pages, so you only had to scan them once.
Dave: [laughs] There you go.
Matt: I mean, the odds of that happening are so astronomical as to be virtually impossible, but I'm thinking maybe Margaret and Jen will email each other, “Hey, let's do the same 10 pages and blow Dave's mind!”
Dave: There you go! There you go. For the sake of a thousand dollars, I'm always open to having my mind blown. And Christon asks, “Hola senor Dave e el Manly.” He's from California now. “Todd McFarlane is very proud of his ‘Spawn’ series, as he should be. It is a great character created by a legendary artist. Since ‘Spawn’s 300th issue, the book has been advertising itself as ‘record-breaking.’ As all AMoC fans know, this is because at issue 301 ‘Spawn’ became the longest running independent comic series of all time, passing, of course, our beloved ‘Cerebus.’ While yes, the book did in fact pass ‘Cerebus's 300 issue mark, the body of work just isn't the same. It is, of my opinion, that Dave Sim's effort on ‘Cerebus’ far exceeds McFarlane's on ‘Spawn.” I do not have exact numbers, but I believe that Todd may have only worked on half the series writing duties, and covers, and even much less than that on the interior art. Erik Larsen's ’Savage Dragon’ is soon approaching 300 issues. His contributions may be more admirable to his book than McFarlane to ‘Spawn’. Just my thoughts. So with that, I am curious as to what are Dave's thoughts on that independent book record. And best of regards, Christon Hunwardson.” “Ahem! ‘Doing 300 issues of anything is a monumental task. Welcome to the 300 Club, Todd and Erik”, Dave Sim when ‘Spawn’ 301 hit the stands,” Matt says, “I mean I'm all for being pedantic, but I haven't even finished ‘Vark Wars 3’ much less the next 297 issues. So like, who cares about my opinion, eh?” Well it does keep coming up. What is the prevailing viewpoint in the field? Do you have any awareness of there being a prevailing viewpoint on this?
Matt: Back when I was on more social media, and I think it may have been on Twitter when it came up, I was following Erik Larsen, and somebody brought it up, and Erik basically said, “Well, yeah, Todd's done 301 issues, but he didn't actually write and draw all 301 of them. So it kind of sort of doesn't count.” I mean, it was one of those, it's the playful Image guys poking each other thing. And it’s, technically, Erik Larsen has drawn more consecutive issues of “Spawn” than Todd McFarlane.
Dave: Uh, consecutive issues of “Savage Dragon”, right?
Matt: No no no, “Spawn.” Erik was working with Todd on “Spawn” for a little while, and like apparently, oh no, it was Erik has written and drawn more consecutive issues of “Spawn” than Todd McFarlane, cause when Erik was working, he was writing it, and then Todd co-scripted it. Basically like, it was, Erik would turn in pages, and then Todd would tweak them, but Erik was writing and drawing the book, and he did like 12 issues, and Todd only wrote and drew seven issues before he brought in the guest writers. And I'm going, well, see that's the part where if you want to be pedantic, you can go, well you know Todd's records not really 300, and then you start whittling it down of how many issues did Todd have a hand in, versus different writers, different artists. Was Todd just inking? Was Todd just proofreading? And everybody pretty much goes, Todd can have the record of the longest running. But then people bring up, there's manga series that one guy has done more issues than anybody, and like, I know “Ninja High School” is hitting the 300 record. And it's the point, I don't think people care, because as Brian Michael Bendis proved with Mark Bagley when they did “Ultimate Spider-Man” that the Stan Lee / Jack Kirby “Fantastic Four” number is the only one anyone cares about. Anybody that breaks their record it's, “Oh okay, you broke their record.” It's like, okay, what about Dave and Gerhard doing 200 and some issues together? And, “Yeah okay, yeah that's a record, but Stan and Jack’s, you know, Mount Olympus.” And it's like, ‘kay, but what as a fan is your focus? Is it just a big number? Is it the quality of the work? Is it who did what? Is it one guy, two guys, the same two guys, two guys in a series of third and fourth guys? You know, and that's, like I said, I can be as pedantic as the next guy, but I've done one and a half books, and at a certain point you know that's very much being the peewee softball kid going, “Well, I can hit a home run.” Yeah, in peewee softball. Let's put you at the majors and throw a 90 hour fastball at your head and see what you do.
Dave: Right. Right. There's also, I mean I just got “Comics Revue” in today, thanks to Rick Norwood for keeping me on the comp list. And that was where this first came up, was when Rick Norwood said, “I'm going to break your record for most consecutive independent comics with ‘Comics Revue’.” And the issue that came in today is 455/456. And it's like, well, it depends on how you define it again. It is comics, it's reprints of comic strips, and it is 455 issues of it, and Rick Norwood has been running Manuscript Press on his own, and with help from a couple of other people, for decades. And I would be very uncomfortable saying to him, well no, it's two different things. It's “Cerebus” is “Cerebus” and “Comics Revue” is “Comics Revue”. The same as, the Stan and Jack’s record. I don't think your average industry person would see it as being in the same category. It's like, uh no, “Cerebus” is halfway between a fanzine and a professional comic book, so it doesn't qualify. And there's a persuasive argument to be made there as well, that you really need the stars aligning in a very specific pattern to ever have somebody doing a 100 issues of an industry comic book, just because there's so many other moving parts. You know, an editor comes and goes, and then as soon as the editor goes, the new editor wants to bring in a new creative team. Or the guy that's working on the book, John Byrne being a good example, okay, you let him do “X-Men” because “X-Men” wasn't selling really well, and he was a talented newcomer. Now “X-Men” is the gold standard, so he's not going to want to stay on “X-Men”. It's like, no, higher up in the pecking order is “Fantastic Four”, and higher up in the pecking order than that is “Superman”, “And that's where I'm going.” So it's, well okay, thatwas never an issue with “Cerebus”, where is the top of the pyramid here? There is an industry pyramid. And the other thing is, I said to people from 2017 on, I'm in the Guinness Book of World Records because that's a different category. If the Guinness Book of World Records says the category is most consecutive issues written and drawn, and they say “Dave Sim has the record because we've arbitrated it. We've had the whole thing explained to us by people in the comic book field and we've gone, okay, we understand.” They must have lots of hair-splitting arguments with a lot of different people about the Guinness Book of World Records, but whatever their hair-splitting arguments in house or with other people in the comic book field amounted to, they did say Dave Sim, “Cerebus”, most consecutive issues written and draw. I have no idea if I'm even still in the Guinness Book of World Records, or if they still have a record under that description, andt what the criteria is. Has the criteria changed that, theoretically, if I am in the Guinness Book of World Records as most consecutive issues written and drawn, then Erik Larsen will be breaking that record. But will the Guinness Book of World Records people acknowledge that? Because it's their sandbox. Records are a lot like awards, it's so much opinion based that it's very very strange the extent to which people say, “This guy is in the Guinness Book of World Records. That ends the discussion.” [laughs] It's like, well, I'm not sure what planet you're living on, but very few discussions come to an end if you really want to get people talking about “Did Roger Maris break Babe Ruth's record?” Well, he had an asterisk next to his name for years and years.
Matt: Well, and the way that Guinness does it now is, every year when they come out with the new version of the Book of Records, it kind of sort of is understood now that it's the abridged version because there's so many records that the book would be 15 times as thick. And so, because of the internet, it's all online. You can go to their website and type in whatever record you're looking for, and it'll bring up the results. And Dave Sim is still most consecutive issues written and drawn with 300 issues. And I'm sure that if somebody submits Erik when he does it, and they look into it, it'll either be a slight worded slightly different record, or it'll be okay, yeah, your record is now broken and now he's the record holder. And the other one is, it's the Guinness Book of World Records, guys. I mean, it was created to settle bar bets!
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: I mean, it's why it's the Guinness Brewery Book of Records, you know. It's goes back to what's the record for most buckets of scotch drunk in a day.
Dave: Yeah. Let's all get a grip here.
Matt: I mean, that's part one of the things I love about Guys is when you did that bit, it was so perfect cause as a kid you hear about the Guinness Book of World Records and you think, okay, it's some organization that they record and and document achievements in whatever. And you flip through the book, and there's always the picture of the guy with the world's longest fingernails, and you're going, what? And as a kid, I remember seeing it, and it described that his job was he was a photographer, and I'm going, how does he work a camera with a hand that's got three- foot fingernails? And he admits that, yeah, it kind of puts a damper on his job. It's like, then cut your damn nails!
Dave: Right.
Matt: And as a kid, you're thinking okay, but it's a like an international standard, like obviously there's some government body behind this. And then you grow up, and you find out it's a brewery. They've made this book as, “Hey, buy our book, cause you buy our beer and you can settle bar bets.” And that's the whole thing. It's not so much who can run the fastest 100 meter dash, it's who can eat the most hard-boiled eggs. Like, it's a useless skill. You have this record and nobody cares except for that one guy that goes “I can eat more of them” and then the next time the book comes out, his picture’s on the page.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Every time this comes up, my inner comic book nerdy fan goes, well, the record is this, and then you start putting qualifiers on it because you get the guys who get really pedantic of, “Well, the two double issues only count as one issue.” It's still 20 pages, guys. I mean, 6,000 pages…
Dave: Right, 298 comic books, it's 300 issues. It is an overview overview overview overview thing of, the closer that you get to it, or the more myopic you're being about it, is maybe the better way of putting it, the more absolute a viewpoint that you're going to have. And then the further back that you get, okay, let's try and adopt an overview of that circumstance that we just looked at, you're going to get a slightly different answer and than if you have an overview of the overview of the overview. You’re gonna have, again, a qualified answer. In the case of Erik Larsen, well, in a lot of ways, it's a much more impressive achievement that most consecutive issues written and drawn solo, as opposed to “Cerebus” was solo issue 1 to 65, and then a team effort from 65 to 300. So it's, I think probably it depends how important is this to Erik, and how important is this to anyone that knows Erik and thinks highly of the Guinness Book of World Records? I mean, the fact that “Cerebus” 300 came out in 2004, and the listing didn't come out in the Guinness Book of World Records until 2017, that should tell you something right there.
Matt: Well, and I know that he's said that there's people going, “I bet you're really looking forward to issue 301” and he's going, “I look forward to every issue.” I mean, that he's going to keep going until he can't go anymore. And he said that flat out, like when he's no longer physically able to do it, then the book will probably stop. There's a good chance the last issue of the “Savage Dragon” is going to be blue line for the last few pages cause that's as far as he got. And he has mentioned the “Cerebus” record of, yeah, he wants to get 301 just to say that he did it, but then in the last issue of “The Walking Dead” Robert Kirkman in his editorial said that, yeah, he ran out of story. I think it ended like 194 or somewhere around there, but he does say that “Cerebus” #300, there was a part of him that was going, no no, we can push for this. We can make it happen, and there's a part of him that felt bad that he wasn't getting to beat the record, and it's like there are guys who go, “He did how many? 300? I can do that.” Okay, good luck, let us know what life's like for you in 26 years when you're done.
Dave: [laughs] Right, right.
Matt: My all-time favorite was in the late 90s, early 2000s, John Romita Jr was drawing “Amazing Spider-Man” monthly and then they relaunched “The Mighty Thor” and he was also penciling that. And I was at a convention, he was there, and everybody was coming to him and going, “Wow, it's amazing that you're doing two monthly books a month. Full length pencils on both. Ataboy, way to go, Johnny!” And he's like, “Jack Kirby drew the entire Marvel line for years, eight books a month. Like, two books a month is nothing.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I kind of was like, you really feel that way? He’s like, “Yeah, I mean it's I can do it, so I'm doing it. If I couldn't do it, I wouldn't do it.” But at the same point, it's that thing of, you're at this peak on the mountain, and everybody's congratulating you for how high you've gotten, and you're standing there looking up going, “There's higher peaks if you just keep going up.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: And as a fan, I'm like, it's kind of cool that he's humble enough to go, “Yes I'm doing something that you think's impossible, but from my perspective, Jack did something that was impossible.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And John Romita saw that in real time, in terms of, “Nobody can do that”, and it's like, well, he is every month! All of these titles are are coming out and if they aren't completely penciled by Jack Kirby, he's laid them out, and laid them out in a strong enough sense that there's no question that it looks like a Kirby book. And not just the superheroes, it was like “Two Gun Kid” and everything else. I think that for Kirby, it was the matter of having been in the business for so long, and as Will Eisner said, “I've watched the comic book business die four times.” I think each time that that happened to Jack Kirby, that just makes you more determined next time, while there's still breath in your body, and you're still capable of doing this. “Okay, if I ever get another shot at this, it's going to be flat out pedal to the metal, and let's let's absolutely make this happen. Because I never know when one of these times is going to be the last time and I don't get the shot again.”
Matt: Right. I remember in the Kirby book that Mark Evanier wrote, he was talking about how when Jack got drafted and he knew he was going, he was penciling up a storm so that there would still be income coming in when he's in Europe trying to kill Hitler.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Whenever the record thing comes up, like I said, there's that inner nerd part that goes, well, you know. And then you that's when you start deli slicing, and well, yes, Todd's published more issues, but Todd didn't do this or Todd didn't do that. It's like, and I come back to what you said at the time of, doing 300 of anything is difficult as possible. So kudos to the guys that do it.
Dave: Right. Right. I think you have to keep it in perspective exactly that way, in terms of, like you said, I think it's more on the part of the general audience for whatever it is. Not “Cerebus”, but comic books generally. As you said, with seeing John Romita and his reaction to people going, “Wow, you're doing two monthly books.” If you are in that category and you are aware that there's always higher peaks to climb, you're the one who's apt to keep it in perspective. The audience is blown away, not just the audience, but the semi-pro guys. Like, you at least know now what it takes to put together a comic book. And the idea of doing that monthly for 26 years, it's, now that I know what it is that that I'm talking about in terms of personal experience, it's not much more impressive. And same thing with me doing Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and it's like, I look at page after page after page of “Rip Kirby”, and going, six strips a week at this level of ability when nobody else was doing this. Nobody else even understood that it was possible to do this, and only a handful of guys there as well. It's like, when Alex Raymond died, he died September 6, and the last strip that he had done was September 30th, so they were really under the gun. And at the same time, the only two real possibilities to take over “Rip Kirby” were Leonard Starr and John Prentice, and most of the people knew that. King Features was trying people out on doing “Rip Kirby” but everybody who knew anything about the newspaper strips, and knew who was doing what, and knew what John Prentice was doing at DC in comics, and Leonard Starr was doing at DC and comics, it was, these are the only guys that can do the “Rip Kirby” Alex Raymond reliably and make it look like that style. So that there's no gap there, so there's no, “Well, I don't know what happened here, but this isn't the same comic strip that I was reading.” There's a number of examples of that, and it's a very very idiosyncratic thing to do for a living. And there's no end of experts to tell you what it is that is the reality that we're all looking at, but it's, no, no, we're all looking at the same chessboard but there are a handful of people who know what the chessboard is, and most other people, it's largely theoretical enthusiasm.
And finally, Steve Peters lobs this softball, “If I'm in time for Please Hold, please ask Dave how many copies of ‘Ghosts of Rabbit Hell’ includes a different version of the Dave Sim variant cover inside, sans the word ‘of Rabbit Hell’ and the ‘Ghosts of Rabbit Hell’ Dave Sim variant cover is a color scan showing the blue line outline with the words ‘of Rabbit Hell’. signed by both of us on a tipped-in plate, limited to 30 copies, he'd like me to send along.” I'm surprised I could do that all in one breath! “And please tell him I'll send his check for the printing of the ‘Akimbo: Love and Rockets’ variant print together with the comics.” And I got to tell you, Steve, if it's limited to 30 copies, I'm happy enough with one, or I'm happy enough with none, because that gets into the ultra rare thing that we're doing with “Cerebus in Hell?” and “Akimbo” and “Narutobus”. I'm definitely uncomfortable at Aardvark-Vanaheim having my own copies of any cover that's rare enough, so that there's only 30 of them. So I tend not to take them. Maybe hang on to the proof copy, so I'll leave it up to you. One, I would be happy with zero, I would be happy with. Anything beyond that, there's going to be better uses for the only 30 copies. This ties in a little bit with the first day thing that we're going to be trying out on the “Narutobus” CAN 11 Kickstarter with the photo covers, the three photo covers of the cosplay girls, and it's experimenting really with how rare can we get this? And I'm assuming that a $30 cover price, and it's only available on the first day, not sure how many copies we're going to sell, but we're going to sell very very few, and then I have to come up with another way to see if we can come up with something where there's only eight copies of this, or 10 copies of this comic book. I figured that's what variant covers are for, and that's what variant covers and Kickstarter in my book are for, when you are down to your last 96 paying customers. This is a big part of what we're selling, and what we're going to be selling in the future as long as we can keep this going. So,let's find what the absolute extreme is on it.
Matt: Well I had a thought. It's one of them “Matt thoughts that really really shouldn't come out of my mouth” but I'll say it anyway. Cause I got all the pages of “Narutobus” because you were sending me the scans and I was shrinking them down so that they fit on the blog easier because the scans were the original art huge scans that I share with Margaret, cause if I don't she'll come and find me and beat me up…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because I've looked at it, it's essentially an issue of “glamourpuss”, kind of. I mean with the with the photorealism.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I'm like, what if you did it where it was the base story of “Narutobos”, cut out the favorite “Naruto” pages at the end, and then slotted in as many pages of SoDAR as you got done, the most recent ones that would fill it up to be in like a 20 or 24 page book, and then print a version that's “glamourpuss” number whatever issue “glamourpuss” would be on if it didn't get canceled at #26.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So it would be the “Narutobus” “glamourpuss” variant where we're only printing these up for the Kickstarter and that's it. And you know conceivably someday in the future when Eddie gets that big movie check or something so that Aardvark-Vanaheim is flush with cash, and/or the fifth administration where somebody with more brains than money has finally managed to get a hold of the company and has Elon Musk money and can do whatever they want, and goes back and makes all the previous issues of ”glamourpuss” that don't exist. It's one of them ideas I had and I'm like, ah, no I shouldn't say it. No no, screw it, I mean worst that can happen is you print it up and everybody goes, “So wait a minute, this is ‘glamourpuss’ #207?” Yeah, yeah, it's “glamourpuss” 207. “So where is all…” No no, they don't exist. It's kind of like when Shannon Wheeler skipped two issues of “Too Much Coffee Man” because he just didn't want to draw them.
Dave: [laughs] We are the arbitrators and we are the ones to make make those choices. Yeah, I will take it under advisement.
Matt: Well, and the only reason I suggest it is, because that way the newest pages, that I'm sure are dynamite, I mean when when you send pictures of you holding stuff up and they're in the background, I have to take the big photo and and shrink it down to fit on the blog, but then I go back to the big photo and I enhance the backgrounds. And like, you really can't read what the pages say, but you can see the art, and I put them up so that Margaret doesn't have to squint at the small picture.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Because I know she's one of the people that be like, “Give those to me now” and it's, well, you got to wait, Margaret. He's not done yet.
Dave: Well, you know, all of this is in the same category of cross my palm with silver. There's no question about it, I'm very very enthusiastic about the fact that, I had hoped, okay, I'm coming up on the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell. I'm going to try drawing this. I hope I can actually draw this. I hope I'm able to compress all of the material into the space that I have allotted for it mentally, and I hope I'm able to keep going after that. And as of today, there's only one page left of the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell on the wall, and the rest of them are all Recoil, Recoil, Recoil which is the next section, which is, yeah I'm very very pleased with the way that it looks. If somebody wants to pay Cerebus Archive portfolio prices, which is pretty much $10 a page for the last 10 pages. Let's work backward and say, okay, I finished page 599 this morning. If you want pages 591 through 599, that's going to cost to $100. And it'll just be sent in, not in a decorated Stayflat, it will just be a Stayflat with your address on it. We could experiment with that! But I pretty much guarantee, as soon as you get 591 through 599, you're going to go, “Okay, I want 600 through 610. I want 580 through 590.” And as soon as you get 580 through 589, you're going to go, “Okay, I gotta find out what's going on before this.” We got a lot of interesting gaps here. The latest unlocked page at Jennifer's Strange Death of Alex Raymond GoFundMe page is, I think 335 or 336, and the latest page done is 599. So, that has to be opened up as well. It's one of those, it really is a curse to be a fan of somebody as productive as I am.
Matt: [laughs] Well, me being me, it's $10 a page for 10 pages $100 US, and an extra $80 US if you would like two pages of commentary on any of those 10 pages.
Dave: Ah, no, commentary that's something else.
Matt: [laughs] I was kidding!
Dave: We stop at the commentary. We comment on the CAN portfolios, and that's as often as I want to do that. I am living the dream right now, where I get up in the morning, and I go to the drawing board, and I work on Strange Death of Alex Raymond. And I'm pretty much caught up on everything else. And I know how many things I'm committed for that, okay, I have to slot this in somewhere, but I am zealous, zealous on the idea of, I just want to do Strange Death of Alex Raymond. If I have to comment on “Cerebus” pages, which I do every four months or every five months for four pages so that there's commentary in the CAN portfolio, that's part of the agreement on that. But commentary, I have absolutely no urge towards commentary at all. Exactly the opposite, the more commentary I have to do, the less happy a camper I am.
Matt: Or for 80 bucks you get the commentary, and then when they get their packages, they open it up, and it's page 591, “That's a good one!” Page 592, “That's a good one!” Page 593, “Hey, that's a good one too.”
Dave: [laughs] “I really like this one. Yes, yes.” Okay, looks like that'll do it for Please Hold for Dave Sim for May 2024.
Matt: And we had two questions came in today, and I'm kicking them to next month, but one of them I'll give you real quick. Rich Lux emailed and said, “So when is the required by Canadian law French language edition of ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ going to come out?”
Dave: [laughs] Well, we don't have that in Canada. It's, yeah, you have to have French on just about anything, and all government documents have to be translated into French. The biggest decision on that one would be, do I want it in French French, like Parisian French, or Québécois French, which was, I think, neatly summed up by a journalist who was visiting me from France years and years ago, and had just come from Quebec, and said he had to keep asking people, “Could you please talk to me in English?” Because they were their French, he said, it sounded like “Quack quack quack quack quack.” And that was a horrible thing to do to the language of Molière as far as he was concerned. So, it would be a choice, I could either do Québécois French or Parisian French.
Matt: So, I forwarded the email to the “Cerebus in Hell?” team, and all I said on the forward was, does anybody know French? I think I can count to three and that's spoken, writing I have nothing. And a couple of responses came through, and I was at work when the email came in on break, and I sent mine and then I thought about, I'm like, you know, wait a minute, there's 24 pages in a “Cerebus in Hell?” issue. There's four panels per page on the standard setup. You do the math of 4 times 24 that's 96, there's less than 96 issues of “Cerebus in Hell?” We could pull one panel from each issue, and put them in, and then just translate those panels, and that would be the gag because it would be, the first page would be the recap page from I think Zero of, “This is what happened and now Cerebus is dead.” And then after that it would be all the panels, and the captions would slowly but surely not be translations, they would just be someone complaining about having to do this in French.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Or…
Matt: And I started writing it in my head, so I emailed the team and said, if you guys get me 96 panels, I will do the translations. I will get this done and we'll have another issue. I even have a cover in mind and everything. And it's one of those, I really don't have time for this, but if someone else does the leg work of finding the panels, then it's just going, okay, you know, typing stuff up, putting in Google Translate, and putting the response. And as Blair Kitchen taught us, sometimes it's right, and sometimes it's not.
Dave: Yes. Yes. Like bringing up the Google Translate thing, it would probably be worth an issue of “Cerebus in Hell?” to take one panel and translate it from English into French, and then plug it back in and translate it from French back into English, and then plug it back in and translate it from English back into French, and just see what that panel looks like by the end of the issue. You talk about broken telephone?
Matt: Well, that's kind of what I was thinking. I'm like, I think I could make it really funny. The problem is, everybody who buys the issue like, oh I don't know, Michael R, would be going to Google, typing in what is in the word box and getting the English and going, “What?!” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. It’s, we're all playing in the same sandbox, and there's a reason that they call that kind of intelligence artificial. It's the most Artificial Intelligence on the planet. Okay! That'll do it for this time, Manly Matt Dow. Say hi to Paula, say hi to Janis Pearl, Bullwinkle, Buddy, and Bonnie and Clyde for me.
Matt: I will definitely do that. I closed the bedroom door and Clyde is on the other side staring at me.
Dave: I knew that! [laughs] Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave! Take care.
Dave: Buh-bye.
