Humble origins of the direct market (Dave's weekly update #637)

Hi, Everybody!

THIS:

Click for bigger...

SOLD on the eBays for $2,552.00CAD ($1844.71USD), haven't heard when the next page is going up, so probably after I post this. You can check for yourself.

Anyway, like it says on the Logo:

That little bit on the bottom there...

It's Friday, so that means:

Dave's Weekly Update:

Problems viewing this video? Watch directly on YouTube...

You can get a copy direct from the printer here. (At a price cheaper than Amazon...)

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Cerebus the Aardvark #1 (and Spawn #10) en Español es bueno!

Living the Line's next Kickstarter has TWENTY-ONE pages of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond in it. These are pages Dave has drawn since the wrist started working again. Is goood...

And the Tyrant Kickstarter! Ends in six days.

And I was asked: "Scott Palochik & Dreamscape Publishing has the 4th issue of MARCVS live on Kickstarter now. If you could kindly put it up on the Rigamole, it would be greatly appreciated."

Okay, back to "bizness as usual"...

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A Moment of Cerebus runs Saturday through Friday. 

The past Week in AMOC:

• Saturday: Not NOT Please Hold For Dave Sim 4/2026. So Dave is giving Everybody! an option: He'll either work on Please Hold for May, or his notes on the '82 Tour Book. YOU can decide which he does by donating at CerebusDownloads. There are two buttons, if you want Please Hold, donate with the button labeled as such. If you want the '82 Tour Book, donate with the button labeled that. And if you want both, donate to both. (Dave never said what he'd do if there was a tie...)
• Sunday: that Untitled Jam between Dave and Chester Brown
• Monday: Fluroc!
• Tuesday: Since Jen did the First show, she has two more lined up, I'm back posting on Tuesdays. Still posting to help raise funds on The Strange Death of Alex Raymond GoFundMe, $90 until page 129 of Dave's POST-Carson SDOAR mock-up pages unlocks. Anyway, I'ma post ALL of glamourpuss over the next how many weeks. AND GoFundMe has a MONTHLY option now, so you can schedule a reoccurring donation. And TWENTY-ONE pages of SDOAR drawn by Dave are in CONSIGNED, Living the Line's next Kickstarter
• Wednesday: MORE Weekly Cerebus in Hell? Strips. This one is written by Dave. Follow along on Instagram. And https://www.ebay.com/itm/236664955396 (Somebody was looking for the Vardalorian...)
• Thursday: Margaret has posted ALL of Albatross One. (If you click that link, you can see all the pages of the notebook, OR, you can get a PHYSICAL copy here.) And all of The Last Notebook. Now she's gonna burn through all of Notebook #21. So sit back and get ready for pages and pages and pages of walls of handwritten text... This week,  issue #179!
• Friday: that's this post. You're reading the Friday post right now. This is STILL like that bit in Spaceballs. (Should I link to LAST WEEK'S Update in these things?)

Okay, so that was the last week on AMOC. You're welcome. I do this for free, but if you got a couple of bucks (I don't know how that's possible, given the links to neat stuff in this post, but Hey! I've been wrong before and will probably be so again (real soon)...), and wanna leave Dave a "tip", there's these "donate to the Dave Sim Fund" buttons somewhere on CerebusDownloads.com (I didn't lay out that place, and I didn't have nothin' to do with the latest redesign, so don't come at me if you have troubles over there...), and you can give Dave all the money you care too. (There's also links there that will help you buy all the stuff...) Did I mention Dave turns seventy in May?

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I've decided that the FULL Rigamarole is only running on Fridays now...

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And, coming in February, who knows. Who. Knows. The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch). They've been sharing updates on the Instagram. And since Dave's not "on deck", they have a new project Kickstartering soon.

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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:

Lots of little words, click for bigger.

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The AMOC TeePublic Shoppe

Up to 35% off April 10-12 and 22-26.*

*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...

Back and front.

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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered (but probably NOT Guys) for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)

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Heritage has: 

• Fantasy Quarterly #1 (Slabbed)
• Cerebus #1 (Slabbed in a 8.0 grade. None of those words me $#!* to me...)
• Coming around the 20th, the Original Art to the Envy and Anger plates from the Six Deadly Sins (the cover and two of the plates went for around 10K apiece when they were auctioned, so I hope you've been saving your pennies...) (Dave gets paid for these.), the Original Art to nineteen of twenty pages to issue #239(!), and the cover Art to issue #39 (with the Moon Roach.)

And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:

• Cerebus #35 page 3 (starts May 14th)
• And a list of ALL the issues they got (including a couple of slabbed #1s)

Thanks to Steve for sending the link. 

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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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Next Time: I got something with an Aardvark on it around here somewhere...

Notebook 21: Cerebus #179 and Astoria’s Revelations

MARGARET LISS:

A few years ago I scanned all of Dave Sim's notebooks. He had filled 36 notebooks during the years he created the monthly Cerebus series, covering issues #20 to 300, plus the other side items -- like the Epic stories, posters and prints, convention speeches etc. A total of 3,281 notebook pages detailing his creative process. I never really got the time to study the notebooks when I had them. Just did a quick look, scanned them in and sent them back to Dave as soon as possible. So this regular column is a chance for me to look through those scans and highlight some of the more interesting pages.

We’re continuing our look at Dave Sim’s 21st notebook used during the creation of Cerebus #164 to 187. We’ll be looking at this notebook, which there were 260 out of 300 pages scanned, until we’ve seen every single page of it. Well, the pages scanned. If you want to see all of the notebook #21 posts to date, just use the Notebook 21 tag. 

~*~~~*~

Last week we left off with a post from the past, Dialogue From Reads Part Two, which covered the dialogue on between Astoria and Cerebus in Cerebus #179 page 4, aka Reads page 90. Well, the dialogue from that issue continues on the next page of the notebook. 

Notebook 21, page 161

The above dialogue is on page 12 of Cerebus #179, aka page 98 of Reads. It opens with Astoria’s line of “She’s reasonably certain you could impregnate yourself she - -“. There are revelations on the above page that were edited out for the finished page:

• Cerebus would require Cirin’s help – surgically – to impregnate himself. In the finished comic instead of saying surgically, Astoria says artificial insemination. 
• Cirin has several children all from human sperm, and all human. This is changed to just a “son – human – with no Aardvarkian traits”. 
• The entire bit of Cirin and Cerebus having sex to make their own Aardvarkian kid was removed.
• Astoria never mentions her miscarriage out right, just that she doesn’t know who is infertile: her or Cerebus. Here in the notebook she says “It’s hard to tell – it might mean you’re infertile or maybe after all of my miscarriage I’m infertile.”
• Astoria in the notebook says “Magnus Doran bought you outright from your father. He told you and your mother that you were an apprentice. Whatever you did to him caused quite a stir. Cirin maintained that you attempted some manner of mystical coup against Suenteus Po.”

Whoa. Lots of lore just. . .not part of the cannon.

Unfortuately this dialogue didn’t continue on the next page. But we do get a couple of sketches:

Notebook 21, page 162

We do get a roach page, two actually: pages 18 and 19 of Cerebus #179 (pages 104 & 105 of Reads). 

 CEREBUS IN HELL? WEEKLY STRIP #36

next: Margaret

Since Jen didn't win the Offie, glamourpuss 11: Pretty Girls and Other Subjects...

Hi, Everybody!

THIS:

Click for bigger...

Is on the eBays: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/127781131875 until Thursday night. Then it goes to ONE lucky winner (and presumably the next page will go up. But since this one is currently going for $1325CAD, and Dave made $10K apiece for the Six Deadly Sins pages, I think this experiment is going to end in "welp, THAT didn't work...".)

So Jen's BACK from London because her Show: Woman in the Arena, was nominated for an award. She didn't win.

You'll get 'em next time Jen!

Anyway, the next performance is May 4-5, so I'm back having to "do" Tuesdays until she comes back. IF she comes back... Speaking of which, I received:

Note from the Interim Head of SDOAR Division

"It's *hic*, it's like I said...*urp* 'scuse me, thas what it is, all right..." 

(Lady at the bar Jen's been talkin' at for ten minutes) "It's like what?"

"Whas like wha'?" 

(L.A.T.B.J.B.T.A.F.T.M.) "You said it's like what you said. What's like what you said?" 

"It. It's to'lly like wha' I *urp*, 'scuse me, said. To'lly." 

(L.A.T.B.J.B.T.A.F.T.M. getting up to leave) "well...it sure is. I'll be back." 

Spoiler alert: She never came back.

If you listened to the April Please Hold whatever that was, you know Dave dropped some knowledge. As I posted on the Cerebus Facebook group:

Since December of 2022, Dave Sim has drawn and finished pages 555 through 702 of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond. Sean and Carson published pages 1-205 through Living the Line's hardcover version of SDOAR (with Carson's 30 page epilogue). Pages 587-593 were included in issue #68 of Yeet Presents (Mike Jones might still have copies available...) And page 604 was a Bonus Print on CAN12. Pages 206-554 exist as mock-ups you can get from Jen's GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/sdoar-2023, and her plan (with Philip R. Frey) is to produce print ashcans of those mock-ups. Dave has gone back and produced new finished art for a few of those pages, but he's mostly focused on moving forward (His actual "tagline" is: "Either Dave Sim finishes The Strange Death of Alex Raymond, or The Strange Death of Alex Raymond will finish Dave Sim...")

Sean and Living the Line have 21 pages in their Consigned anthology (Currently being Kickstartered: https://www.kickstarter.com/.../consigned-a-living-the... ), which pages did Sean (who gets the scans of all the pages from Dave) pick?

Why not back the project and find out Spunky?

Just the GoFundMe Facts, Man...ly:

$20,910.00 raised to date from 392 donations
128 pages released so far as mocked up and/or drawn by Dave Sim through 22 Feb 2022, or 2/22/22 for all the numerologists
$90.00 away from unlocking page 129
If you have not donated, a $5+ donation grants you access to all 126 pages and all unlocked pages moving forward >> https://www.gofundme.com/f/sdoar-2023
GoFundMe now offers automated monthly donations!
>> https://www.gofundme.com/f/sdoar-2023/donate?source=btn_donate 

SDOAR GoFundMe -->> https://www.gofundme.com/f/sdoar-2023

Note from the Senior SDOAR Remaster...master, Philip Fry:

So Jay asked: "Remind me again what exactly is meant by “ashcan” and how did such a term come to be applied to such things…"

And Philip replied:

Two questions here:
1) Where does the term come from?
In the olden days of comics, in order to establish a copyright, a publisher had to, well, *publish* a comic with a proper copyright notice. If they weren't ready to go to print, they would produce a comic *just* to establish copyright. These weren't meant to be sold or kept. They were just needed to prove you had ownership of the material. Then it could be "tossed in the ashcan".
In the 1980s, Bob Burden (of Flaming Carrot fame) and other indie publishers would produce "ashcans" of upcoming books to show around, maybe sell at conventions, etc. It then became more widely used to describe promotional comics, mini-comics, etc. Anything not meant for the standard market.
2) Why are these SDoAR comics known as "ashcans"?
When Dave stopped work on SDoAR, as you may know, he left in the middle without any conclusion. This is why Dave refers to the hardcover published volume as "Carson's Version" because Carson "finished" the book so it was, at least, in a publishable state. (And it turned out pretty good, what with an Eisner nom and all.)
When Dave first started working on SDoAR again, he wasn't yet in a position where he felt he could draw, but he still had the mock-ups he had done for Carson and he began producing more mockups, with no real eye towards publishing, I think, just so he could get his ideas on paper.
But he eventually began actually working on the pages, drawing them all by hand. Dave isn't the kind of person to go back (typically), so he didn't start producing those mocked up pages, he just kept going, drawing them this time.
Jen put together the GoFundMe to finance the project with the intention of cleaning up the mockups a bit and publishing them as "ashcans", since they weren't fully produced pages. When I jumped on board to do the "remastering", I very quickly didn't want to just clean the mockups, but to actually bring them to a publishable standard that wouldn't look out of place alongside Carson and Dave's fully illustrated pages.
I must have done a good job because Dave decided they should be published at a size equivalent to the hardcover, hence the term "Giant-Sized Ashcan". He also decided that the pages looked good enough that he wanted to re-draw several sections where there just wasn't good enough material to clean up to his (or my) satisfaction.
---
Well, that's the answer(s) to the best of my knowledge and recollection. Hope that clears things up.

So, This.

Then:

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Cerebus the Aardvark #1 (and Spawn #10) en Español (I know it's in a language you might not read, but it'll be highly collectable if they only do this one Kickstarter... Plus, you aren't a REAL Spawn completist if you don't have a copy of EVERY variant...)

Living the Line's next Kickstarter with 21 pages of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond in it. Now with Archival Cerebus related offerings.

The Tyrant Kickstarter.

Next Time: Cerebus in Hell?

"There might be room for another 'Gott of Thunter' in this army..."

Hi, Everybody!

So, Dave didn't send me a Monday Report.

I guess I'm on my own again...

The laughably named "2019 ReRead":

Issue #1: First, then, then, then. Issue #2: Then, then, then, then. Issue #3: Then, then, then. Passage: Then (in part. I REALLY need to get a decent version of Passage up here one of these days...). Issue #4: Then. Issue #5: Then, then, then. Demonhorn: Then. Issue #6: Then, then, then. Issue #7: Then, then, then. Issue #8: Then, then, then. Issue #9: Then, then, then. Issue 10: Then, then, then. Issue #11: Then, then, then, then. Issue 12: Then, then, then. Magiking: Then. Issue 13: Then, then, then. Silverspoon: Then. Issue 14: Then, then. Issue 15: Then, then.  Issue 16: Then, then. Issue 17: Then, then. Issue 18: Then, 

And then:

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THIS:

Click for bigger...

Is on the eBays: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/127781131875 (Ends Thursday at 8PM (I presume ET, but possibly CST...).)

Cerebus the Aardvark #1 (and Spawn #10) en Español 

Living the Line's next Kickstarter has TWENTY-ONE pages of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond in it. These are pages Dave has drawn since the wrist started working again. 

And the Tyrant Kickstarter! 

Next Time: Is Jen back? Of course not...

Untitled by Chester Brown and Dave Sim

untitled by Chester Brown & Dave Sim
Originally published in the Cerebus 1995 World Tour Book

Dave had this to say in the Cerebus 1995 World Tour Book:

And this to say when the Cerebus 1995 World Tour Book was reprinted as NOT the Cerebus 1995 World Tour Book:

And this appeared to sell the Cerebus 1995 World Tour Book:

This was published in Celebrate Diversity Sampler Collector's Edition by Previews and Diamond Comic Distributor.
Margaret has it as being by Dave, Gerhard and Chester Brown, but I think Dave drew all the characters...

And if you hit Free Comic Book Day in 2005, you may have picked up:

Why should you have?

Because #4.

And that's all there is to the story as far as I know...
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THIS:

Click for bigger...

Is on the eBays: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/127781131875 (Ends Thursday at 8PM (I presume ET, but possibly CST...).)

Cerebus the Aardvark #1 (and Spawn #10) en Español 

Living the Line's next Kickstarter has TWENTY-ONE pages of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond in it. These are pages Dave has drawn since the wrist started working again. 

And the Tyrant Kickstarter! 

Next Time: Mondays!