Mondays!
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How are you doing?
Matt: Uh, tired, but otherwise okay.
Dave: Good! Good. I think we're all getting a little tired. There's something about this time of year where you just never get enough sleep.
Matt: Well, Tuesday, I got out of work and it was snowing and I'm like, it's Halloween! This sucks. And we had a bunch of stuff that I had to put away for the winter, and I got home, and I'm like well, it's snowing now, I need to get it put away now. And I think I wrenched my shoulder too hard.
Dave: Uh-oh!
Matt: So for the past two days it's been, don't look up, don't lift your arm that far, don't lift anything heavy. I'm like, I just need to sleep on the heating pad, but I've just been busy.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Sure sounds like October/November to me, apart from the snow part. We haven't had snow yet. I shouldn't say that out loud.
Matt: Well, a week ago I took my car in and the dealership had the Weather Channel on, so for an hour and a half I watched The Weather Channel and I'm going, I understand the purpose of the Weather Channel. I also understand it's the poster boy for, you have a TV channel, you have no content. You're just gonna have people talking about nothing, and one of the things they were saying is there's an arctic front that's coming down, but there's a warm front from the last hurricane coming up, and it's going to hold everything off. And I'm looking at the 7-day forecast, I'm like, yeah, it's gonna hold it off till Halloween when it's gonna snow! [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Alright. Man, oh man, that's hardcore Wisconsin stuff.
Matt: Well, four years ago, we got 6 inches of snow Halloween morning. So we just had a light dusting that mostly melted the next day. So I'm happy about that.
Dave: That's definitely looking on the bright side. This is also weird time of year for the prayer times. The sunset prayer time is going to be 6:14, and then the night prayer time is 7:34. So we're probably going to have two interruptions because we've got 17 pages of questions here to get through. So, let's just skip to, oh and uh, happy fifth anniversary on this!
Matt: I looked back and I'm going, it's only four years. No, 2018, it's five.
Dave: Yeah, 2018’s five years ago now. “And it's-a my turn to remember Jeff.” It is indeed. So, you go.
Matt: Piggybacking off of last month's Jeff's cat Yousuf and how the cat got the name, and the weird ways Jeff's mind worked. At one point, he told me, “I'm gonna get vanity license plates the next time I get plates.” And I'm like, okay. He says, “Can you guess what am I gonna get?” And I'm like, Cerebus? And he's like, “No, but you're close.” I'm going, okay, I mean, I can't think of anything that would fit in seven spaces that's Cerebus related other than Cerebus. And he's like, “Zerbuz!” Like, what? “What Graus called Cerebus. It's gonna be Z, E, R, B, U, Z.” And I'm going, that's a deep cut that even like Margaret would have trouble going, “Wait, why would you get that?”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I'm like, did you try to get Cerebus first to see if it was available? He's like, “No, I'm not even gonna try. I'm just gonna skip right to the alternate spelling.” I'm like, okay, Jeff. That I mean, it's the stereotypical, okay Jeff, that's the way your mind works.
Dave: That was issue 18, wasn't it?
Matt: It was 18 and 19, cause it started in Fluroc.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then the next issue was when they went to sell everything to the fence, and Cerebus ends up getting drugged at the end, which leads in “Mind Game.”
Dave: Right. Well, that’s definitely an interesting Jeff Seiler recollection. Like you say, even Margaret wouldn't have guessed that and if you told her, would probably have to think for a couple of minutes going, “Where is that from?” And isn't it Zernus in the comic book? Like, end up on an S. Z, E, R, B, U, S?
Matt: I'll look because I'm gonna put the images up from it, but it may have an S at the end, but I know it starts with a Z.
Dave: Right. Well, this is why I'm thinking this might be one of those weird Jeff Seiler things, where it's two endings, because it starts with a Z and it ends with a Z, and he might have been cutting his own throat metaphysically in that sense. You don't want to have your license plate begin with a Z and end with a Z if you're somebody that contemplates implications like that. Which Jeff really wasn't. He spent fair amount of time just blundering around in in that territory.
Matt: [laughs] True. True.
Dave: Okay! We got, “unless we have anything ongoing from last time.” We do, but I'm gonna pass on that one. We'll pick up on that the next Please Hold. That was Lank Stephens, the guy that was gonna do the backgrounds on his book and get somebody else to actually draw the characters, and wanting to know how Gerhard and I did things. And it's like, mhmm, what he's talking about doing gets more and more interesting the more you think about it, so I'm trying to keep that limited, but still do some thinking about it. And yes, I think it'll keep until December. Then you write, “Last month, right after I sent the question fax, VGDC Maroro sent in these questions. And I read number one and said, uhh, next month! So here we go. This is a bit heavy so Dave…” I'm gonna say that he really pushed the outer boundaries, he's got seven questions. Like, we've gone from, “you can ask one question” to “you can have supplementary questions within your questions as long as they relate to it” and now we've got seven separate questions. So I think we're gonna have an arbitrary cap of three questions from now on for anybody, and if somebody sends you, as VGDC did, seven questions. Just take the first three, and email the other four back to them and say, “Only three questions. You can send these next month if you want to get in on the ground floor for the following month.” So, in looking at it and going, alright [laughs] we've already got 17 Pages here. So I tell you what, I will type out my answers to the seven questions and then I read them out loud, and then read VGDC Maroro's questions aloud, timing myself on the bedside clock in my bedroom, and I think I got it down to 22 minutes. So if I start right now, we can maybe get all of VGDC in before the sunset prayer time. And wouldn't that be an accomplishment?
Matt: It would be a Pleas Hold miracle!
Dave: [laughs] Well let's not go that far. We'll see how we do. So anyway, “This is a bit heavy so Dave doesn't need to publicly answer this one if he doesn't want to. Or if you don't want to. I feel like the only way you're (Dave, not you) going to be able dispel the stuff about Judith Bradford that got you kicked off of Van Skiver’s ‘Cyberfrog’ is if you were to record and upload video of you and Judith in the present day speaking to each other about what happened and her side of what it all was. Since you bringing up the Mann Act in your letter feels like it means what happened in that hotel room was at best ‘delinquency of a minor,’ at worst explicit photography.” Okay, I'll interrupt there to say, delinquency of a minor, I will plead guilty to. If anybody wants to charge me with that, dating back to 1984/1985, I will plead nolo contendere and whatever the sentence is, two years in jail or whatever. That's it. No, let's save everybody the court time and cost and I will just plead guilty. “And at worst explicit photography”? Uh no, there was no explicit photography. I did set the timer on my camera to take a selfie of the two of us. I do have some pictures of Judith in the hotel room, but they're all fully clothed. I did have a nude photo of Judith that she sent me when she was 21, and I don't have that. Any nude photos I had of Deni or any of my girlfriends after I broke up with them, I destroyed the photos. Because I think that's the only legitimate thing that you can do. You can have nude photos of whoever it is if you're going out with them, and when you're not going out with them, they definitely need to be destroyed. He writes, “I don't really care about ‘Cyberfrog,’ that's just an example of something you got ousted from.” So my answer to that, “Dave doesn't need to publicly answer this one if he doesn't want to.” I really wish that you, and by you I mean scandal mongers, and I tried to find a synonym for that that didn't sound as bad, but it didn't really cover it. Wouldn't act as if I avoid answering questions. The whole point of Please Hold is that I'll answer whatever question anyone wants to ask. I think Matt will attest to the fact that in five years, I've never not answered a question because I didn't want to. Right, Matt?
Matt: The only questions you don't answer are the ones you don't know the answer to.
Dave: [laughs] Which, yes, I think that's legitimate. Okay, the phrase “dispel the stuff about Judith Bradford.” Dispel in what sense? My computer dictionary says, “to make a doubt feeling or belief disappear.” That isn't possible. Doubts, feelings, and beliefs are individually held. Every Cerebus fan aware of the situation has an individual set of doubts, feelings, and beliefs about Judith Bradford. Because everybody has their own set of doubts, feelings, and beliefs. That's what makes us the snowflakes that we are. The Ethan Van Sciver “dump from ‘Cyberfrog’” situation appeared, and appears, to center on the pejorative term, “grooming” which was slapped on me with no interest in my side of it. As I said five years ago, there was no grooming with Judith. We “had” each other at hello. Had in quotation marks, because she was underage. What, if anything, am I going to do about this, being the question for me as the technical grownup? Tread carefully. As I understood tread carefully in 1984, when I first saw Judith, to 1992, when I last saw Judith, which was “carefully” only in the sense that atheists, which is what I was at the time, understand it. The heart knows what it wants. 50 Shades of Gray. All of that stuff. I've been celibate since 1998. Zero contact with, and zero interest in women. The only legitimate form of sex, I concluded as I was reading the Bible, is “married in the sight of God” I.E. in a church, synagogue, or mosque, sex. So there are, in my post 1996 opinion, no shades of gray. There's only married sex, and adultery, and fornication. Any attempt to complicate the question to me is rationalizing prurient self-interest. If you aren't potentially a husband, and I'm not potentially a husband, and I haven't been since 1983 when Deni, left any interest in women can only take the form of adultery or fornication. To me, masturbation, if you are fantasizing about adultery or fornication, is adultery or fornication. This is worlds away from what is believed in our society to be a healthy attitude towards sex. Society's opinion is an opinion I don't share. Like I say, worlds away. Sex and masturbation are, to me, both unhealthy, in the same way that smoking cigarettes is unhealthy. If Judith is still alive and remotely interested, which I doubt, and wants to record a video or write a book telling her side of the story, that's up to her. The same as Susan Alston wa/is free to write and publish
”Dave Sim’s Last Girlfriend .” Diana Schutz was free to write and publish her take on “Reads.” And Deni was free to participate in, “I Have to Live With This Guy”, years after she had any contact with this guy whatsoever. I was the only “husband” so honoured in Blake Bell's book. As I told Chester Brown and Joe Matt at that time, if you want to read it and ask me questions about it, I'll be happy to try to answer your questions. But no, I have no interest in reading it myself. To respond to a lady's version of relationship events is ungentlemanly. As is lowering oneself to divulging a lady's intimate confidences in a tit-for-tat exchange. A lady gets the last word, and then the chips fall where they may. Depending on your doubts, feelings, and/or beliefs, those chips never, and can never, fall. That's the situation in which I find myself. Which is, never changed, and I assume will never change.
So then we move on to… question #2 from VGDC. “May I request a sort of ‘list’ of exercises for one to learn how to ink lines, specifically for learning the techniques to animate Calvin's Mom's head, and specifically her hair rotating in space under a lamp without the lines all wobbling or going off-model? The reason I specified Calvin's Mom is that there's a bunch of very specific brush tilts and pressures done to subtly imply lighting and her hair is less of a crapshoot to figure out than Calvin. Since, one, Bill lights the top of her hair, which shows how it's kind of what form is it. While Calvin is usually flat white/yellow. Two, Bill constantly cheats Calvin's hair to be drawn the same at different angles, like Vicky's ears. Three, Calvin's Mom's head is closer to a human head, while Calvin's head is a trapezoid, so there's more ‘reality’ to how it would naturally fall upon the head. Four, Calvin's hair is supposed to be messy, which adds a layer of complexity.” Uhh, that's number two… hold it, I just scrolled right through it. Cartooning is more forgiving than is animation, and animation is more forgiving than is photorealism. If you're doing comic art, it starts with the question of materials. Pen or brush, and which pen, or which brush? I have a Princeton art of brush collection brush, item 3050R size 4 that I've been using for “Narutobus” and Cerebus cartooning. It's no Winsor-Newton Series 7 #2, but it's reasonably sharp, and holds its shape, and cleans up nicely. Between it and and a new Hunt 102 pen nib, and a slightly worn Hunt 102 pen nib, I have two of them on the go to all times, both in separate pen stocks. The brand new one marked with masking tape on the top of the pen stock so that I know which one is which. I can do reliable cartooning all the way up to a good aproximation of photorealism. On Strange Death of Alex Raymond, I'll use a Winsor-Newton Series 7 #2, because I'm going deeper into the page, and being way way more accurate. Because cartooning is black and white, and you are talking about cartooning, I mean Calvin and Hobbs is brilliant, but it's not photorealism. Because cartooning is black and white, there's a more distinct penumbra than there is in, as an example, painting. Penumbra translates as “almost shadow” from the original Latin. Cartooning is capital S Shadow and capital NS Not Shadow. You have to look at a two-dimensional pencil drawing and imagine it in three dimensions. Where is the shadow, and how far over does it go on the hair, face, arm, etc. The more accurate the placement and width, the more lively the cartoon image, and the more lifelike the photorealism image. So it's not really an exercise, but I would suggest photocopy a blue pencil drawing, and by inking it in a variety of different ways with different line and brush widths, you'll eventually figure out what your ideal line weight and brush to pen balance is by trial and error. Let's say that you do six of them, one drawing in blue pencil, photocopy it six times, and ink it in in different line weights, and then leave it for a day or so, and then just come back and lay them all out and look at them. And go, “Okay, which one do I like the best?” It's your style, so all that matters really is which one you think is the best Maroro line weight and brush.
Okay, #4, we are cooking with gas now, here…
Matt: Wait, #3.
Dave: #3?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Oh yeah! I just did 2, right right right right, thank you, thank you. “How does one figure out how far one can push the expression of a character until it becomes off-model? Specifically where it looks off to the point where the average viewer can notice it, since technically any deviation from the model sheet is off-model? Or are off-model and expression two different areas entirely? Since you've done” and then there's missing a line, but think he was just using the examples of the sketch and the “Spawn” cover that, you know, are these off-model or expression? Well, yeah, then he goes on, “While these two are very similar methods of showing anger done in the same issue, but the right one's face looks just off to where it feels like someone tried to copy your art style, instead of being drawn by you. Or is it that there's a bunch of ways you can go off-model without it being noticeable, but a few key ways that you have to be on-model to sell that it's all on-model.” A lot of that is subjective, I'll say, before getting to my, yeah and then he's got, “The other one feels distinctly close to the Golden Age of Japanimation in the expression.” That's subjective. You're not describing what you're looking at, you're saying, “this is what this looks like to me.” There are other people who would say, “Ah no, this looks like it was drawn by Dave. I don't know what you're talking about.” So yeah, #3… oh I did just do that! That's “the cartooning is more forgiving than animation” but then it follows on to, Once again, art is seeing. Leonardo's expression that art is seeing. If you're drawing your charac--” oh, no, now he's skipped on ahead. Yeah, that's [laughs] you'll just have to edit that one. I answered that as #3 because it was it seemed it was straying off of what he was talking about on #2, so #2 and #3 are basically answering his #2. Okay! Yeah, then he writes, “A lot of these are, well, they stick out like a sore thumb but it was outsourced but the only thing that gives me--.” No, then he's talking about the “Scooby-Doo” animation. I think that the problem that he's getting into, is that he's talking about comic book art, which is what I'm doing, or graphic novel art, whatever you want to call it. Isn't animation, and animation isn't comic art. There's no real such thing as on-model in comic book art. You have to have that, I did answer this somewhere but I can't see where it is. Well, off-model is more of an animation term where you need to keep to a very narrow and simplified parameters, so that the entire five minutes, or 30 minutes, or 90 minutes, the character doesn't noticeably change in front of the viewer. If you're copying Calvin's Mom, then you need to study the parameters that Watterson stuck to over time, and see where the evolution took place. If you're doing your own character, and again, art is seeing. I let the look of Cerebus evolve one page at a time, rather than slavishly sticking to a model sheet. I don't think Bill was cheating with Calvin's hair, he was being spontaneous. The Zen kicks in if you let it in comic book art, particularly when you're inking the same character for years and/or decades. That isn't the case in animation. Like I say, in animation if you're not sticking to the model sheet, and you've got God knows how many animators working on the same cartoon, you know that character is just not going to look like that character to the average viewer. They're gonna go, “Like what happened to his head between the previous scene and this scene?” Well, because that scene was drawn by this person, and this other scene was drawn by this other person six months apart. And the person who did this one did mostly in-between and this person was the master cartoonist on the animated film. So I think you're comparing apples and oranges. If you're doing comic art, do comic art, and if you're doing animation, do animation.
“How did you go about making the rock climbing scene from ‘Church & State’ so heart-poundingly thrilling, that it took me all the way to five paragraphs of the brick wall that is ‘Chasing YHWH in like two days.” Once again, art is seeing. If you're drawing your character climbing a sheer rock face, what you're trying to draw is a vertiginous experience. The ultimate three-dimensional experience in two dimensions. To do that, the horizon line and vanishing point has to be directly behind the character, and the character foreshortened so only the uppermost parts of the figure are fully visible. Then you stay within those parameters and sharpen them. The less of the figure that's visible, the more vertiginous the experience. Moving on to #5, “If you had the ability to draw without any pain in any bit of your arms tomorrow, would you attempt a second magnum opus like ‘Cerebus’ was? I feel like things in comics suck to the point where someone who makes something at the level of ‘Cerebus’ back when it first started out could succeed really well, if not in sellout ‘Turtles’ success, then in at least underground success. ‘Helluva Boss’ did it for animation for a single season, and only because 2D animation also sucks nowadays, as a high enough skill barrier that starting blind isn't that good of an option. So I think someone who's actually competent, and not just hiring competent people, could pull it off for the comic world.” Well, again, I think you're comparing apples and oranges to be talking about comic book pages and animation. I would say, like I disagree with your premise. I am doing two Magnum opuses, “Cerebus in Hell?” and Strange Death of Alex Raymond. Both are very far away from genre works, which is really what you're asking about. I.E., “why don't you do another magnum opus with lots of genre tropes, but done in brand new ways.” The answer to that is because genre qua genre, and its tropes don't interest me. I'm interested in documenting reality, not turning away from it or enabling others to turn away from it. “Cerebus in Hell?” illustrates, for me how choosing OCD feminist-based id as the default societal setting on everything, turns everything into a living hell. Here's the parody cover idea, and here's what OCD feminist-based id does to it. The parodies originate in non-ironic heroism, but in an OCD feminist-based id hell, heroism doesn't exist, only OCD feminist-based id exists, because it eradicates or delegitimizes anything that isn't OCD feminist-based id. I think I can say, although it’ll happene after I’m dead, what the “Mad” comic book and magazine were to the 1950s and 1960s, “Cerebus in Hell?” is going to be to the earliest years of the 21st century. Someday that will be seen clearly, I think.
“What is your take--”, oh sorry, I missed the sub-question. “If you don't have those injuries, could you pull off writing a story at the level of ‘Cerebus’ high. Not at the level of length, and probably using less explicit plot threads than the many paths Cerebus’ en songe took, but I'm fine with ‘Akira’ over ‘The Godfather Part III.’ Very well expressed. I'll take a slice of hope if the whole cake would cause mental anguish to create.” Well, that's, again, part of my answer is, I'm not a genre guy, and it's like, that's what you're talking about is, you know “Why won't you do another genre magnum opus?” is because I'm not interested in genre escapism, I think escaping has been one of the biggest problems in our society. Stop escaping and start facing reality square on.
Okay, now we're down to #6, “What is your take on the ethics of artists using an AI trained non-consensually on the work of other artists as a tool to help them, as opposed to taking what the AI shits out and selling that with minor modifications since that's the big storm of competition artists are worried about? As examples, using an AI that changes the voice of an audio clip to George C Scott's voice, one still needs to perform the audio clip for it to have a semblance of emotion, but it's still cheapening the work a voice impressionist would do. Using an image AI to figure out how to create the effect of a CRT screen in ink without relying on gray or half tone or copying the effect off a photograph that's been run through a filter. Using an image AI to generate character designs in the style of an artist that are then drawn by a person and thereby steals the job of character designers. Using an image enhancement AI to degrade an image to look like it was run through the same undisclosed analog processes ‘The Simpsons’ went through to look the way it was. These can all be done with technology today, and as long as they don't explicitly compete with the originals, it's all legal, according to Author's Guild v. Google.” Living inside your little telephone television is the only thing that makes these seem like relevant instead of entirely pointless questions. You can live inside your little telephone television or you can make art. It's an either/or. It's the Tin Woodsman side of OCD feminist-based id “ thinking” prefigured in “The Wizard of Oz”. Turn your back on God and trust instead in animals, the Cowardly Lion, dolls, the Scarecrow, and/or machines, like the Tin Woodsman. The consequences of those choices are visible everywhere, but not if you choose to inhabit them and have them inhabit you. It's individual choice. There's good choices and there's bad choices, and like I say, all of the questions that you're asking me there seem completely irrelevant to reality.
#7, “Does Glenn Vilppu's technique work for cartoon characters that were constructed two-dimensionally like Fred Flintstone, rather than the ones made of 3D forms like Mickey Mouse?” And my answer to that was, I don't know anything about animation post-Roger Rabbit, which, personal opinion, I think destroyed the animation field with too much tech and too much Tex Avery, and not enough Robert McKimson and Friz Freleng.
And there we go! [laughs] It's a Please Hold miracle with almost nine minutes to go until my prayer time.
Matt: Okay. That's, I mean I didn't read most of these questions because I started reading them I'm like, like as I said, having to reformat all of the email into a document I can send up, I'm like, I think I hate this guy! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] No, you said you think that you don't like him.
Matt: True. True.
Dave: So, that's one of those, I don't think Maroro and I would have too much to say to each other at a party, assuming I would ever go to a party again for whatever reason. But he's definitely a thinker. He's definitely got his own take on things, and was looking for my feedback, and he seems to be a deep enough thinker that I don't think he's going to be offended by what I said to him. Like, [offended voice] “Well! Catch me ever coming to Please Hold for Dave Sim again! You're gonna talk about blah blahblahblahblahblah.” No, he's not himself an OC feminist-based id type, but he does live in the same world with them, which seems to me reflected in a lot of his concerns. It's like yeah, the feminists are very very keen on the Tin Woodsman, and they would definitely trust the Tin Woodsman more than they would trust God, and the further along that goes, the more ridiculous and the more destructive it becomes. So, yeah, it was, I think I would definitely like to see him back here asking more questions, but if he can ask them three at a time next time, please.
So I'm gonna go and do my prayer time, and I will be back momentarily, Matt.
Matt: Okay. I will talk to you then.
Dave: Talk to you then, buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[guitar music]
Matt: And we’re back!
Dave: And we're back. Okay! I'm going to print out my answers from the previous set that I did type out and you can post them. and you won't have to unravel everything that I messed up reading it. You can just say, “Okay, this is what happened. Dave numbered these the wrong way, so if you just read them in this order, you'll get everything that you were supposed to get out of it.”
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Okay! And Dodger got in second with, and this was October 17th, “To the Manliest of Matts and the Uber (in)famously polite Dave Sim,” neatly phrased, Dodger. “Apologies for my previous question, ‘how do you ‘feel’ about Wally Wood's inking and art legacy?’ I have since instructed Microsoft Word to immediately delete itself if I ever again attempt to use the F word in a question to Dave Sim.” It doesn't bother me, I just [laughs] I do tend to correct people when they do that, the same as I tend to put a little box around the word “feel” in any newspaper article that I'm reading. It's like, I don't care how you feel. I'm interested in what you think, if you think. But how you feel? That's up to you. It's got nothing to do with the price of tuna in Venezuela. “I took your advice and ordered secondhand copies of the Marvel Essentials ‘Tomb of Dracula’ phonebooks. Being printed in black and white shows off the inking, and I think is the proper way to read these particular comics. Marvel and DC started their one volume black and white reprints around 2004. Question, did you get a chuckle out of this when Marvel and DC stole your brilliant idea? Did it remind you of the famous Steve Geppi fight?” And then he's got a side note, “Some of the Essentials are very hard to find, and go for upwards of 50 to $75. I got these for about $20 each. 2004 cover price is $16.99. Marvel has since launched a full color reprint Epic line that collects 16 issues instead of the Essentials’ 24 issues. They retail for $44.99. And sorry for the long question.” And Matt says, “Oh, Mike, you don't know from long questions.” Yes, this is not the edition of Please Hold for Dave Sim where you need to apologize for a long question. No, well you know, you say “did you chuckle about it?” No, sometimes things just work out nicely. I really wasn't aware of what Marvel and DC were doing, like by 2004 it would be a very very rare situation for me to go to a comic shop and actually look at what was on sale, unless it was a back issue that I have a sentimental attachment to behind the counter or something like that. So, when I say that things work out very nicely, we're talking about very very very separate things here. There's the endlessly rebooted intellectual property, which is how Marvel and DC see it. You try to make sure that you're capturing that new group of 12 year olds or 14 year olds by any means possible, but the endlessly rebooted intellectual property isn't how fans see it. The fans see it as its own fictional history. It starts at point A and keeps going until it stops. I mean, it's a stretch to read, you know, “Spider-Man” #1 through 425 and go, “Alright, I have read an actual history.” But most fans do see it that way. It's like, if you want to know Spider-Man's history, you read all of the Spider-Man comics in order. The “in order” was a critical element, so there was a confluence of, the corporate endlessly rebooted intellectual property, and the fans’ perception of this as a sequential fictional history of a character that is “very important to me”. And me attempting a novel length comic book, which Will Eisner had just christened at the time the graphic novel. Obviously, if you're doing a novel, you have to publish the novel in the right sequence, which is what I did with “Swords” and then with “High Society.” So you've got a confluence of of those three things. Where the fans’ perception and motivation is very different from Marvel and DC's corporate motivation and sensibility, and my attempting to go, okay, I'm going to do this, how am I going to incarnate it in physical form? And “Swords” was the first way, until I went, okay, it doesn't make sense to do 75 four-issue graphic novels. So then I started thinking, okay, let's do “High Society” as a separate book. But what I did in order to incarnate a comic book in novel form, that length, that dove-tailed not only with the endlessly rebooted intellectual property, but also with the corporate “buy low, sell high” default setting. Black and white on newsprint is cheap, so the profit margin is enormous at scale, the numbers that Marvel and DC produce. So they didn't steal my brilliant idea, they applied their own perceived needs and corporate free market needs to what I was doing, and went, “This makes a lot of sense. This is definitely going to help our bottom line not only this year, but for years to come. We've got a nearly bottomless supply of what this guy is doing.” Which, again, it wasn't what this guy was doing. I wasn't going, I need to figure out a way to reprint issues 26 through 50. It was, I need a format that will hold “High Society,” which is different from what they were doing, where it's across all of Steve Ditko Spider-Ma, Spider-Man was still roughly the same age. So that's the endlessly rebooted intellectual property, coupled with the “buy low, sell high.” “If we do this in black and white, we're going to make more money off of the individual issues in a Spider-Man Essentials volume than we make off of the color ‘Spider-Man’ comic book. This is great! This is what little corporate dreams are dreams are made of.” And the more esoteric point is, they didn't do it so you could see what the artwork looked like. They did it to maximize the profits, which, doing it in black and white, like I say, maximized the profits. But from my point of view, it was, oh this is a great idea because now we can see what the artwork looks like. The same, particularly with things like “Tomb of Dracula” where so much of the artwork is missing, with the World Color Plant colour on top of it. That, no, you didn't steal my idea, you applied my idea to your market, your business model, but incidentally you also did something that I think is a great idea. Which is all, you know, Gene Colan inked by Tom Palmer, or Steve Ditko inking himself in the prime Spider-Man years. You want to see what that actually looks like. You don't want it through a glass darkly with the World Color colour on top of it.
My reaction, since that's part of what you're asking about, Mike, like I said I wasn't really aware of what Marvel and DC were doing. I would guess it was circa 2012/2014 was, it was this sudden “Dave some exists” anomaly, where, when you've been made to not exist completely, which had certainly had happened to me in the comic book field. You know, “Dave Sim has become unspeakable and consequently his work is unspeakable.” When you suddenly and inexplicably exist again, it's really really noticeable. It was, the first that I heard of it was, “Dave Sim created this. Without Dave Sim you wouldn't have have Marvel Essentials. And consequently, this is a major gold star in Dave Sim’s notebook.” Like I say, [laughs] it was, by that time I didn't have a notebook. It's like, I don't have a notebook now. It was, what happened there?! Why now? The closest analogy that I come I could come to was when “Cerebus” showed up in the 2018 Guinness Book of World Records 14 years after “Cerebus” ended. It's, the only reaction is, what happened there, and why now? And those are really the only two things where that did happen, and it's, okay, well, I don't think anybody is making me exist. There are these little black holes attached to Dave Sim or probably stars of morning or whatever and “Okay, the only time you're going to hear Dave Sim’s name is that he created the Marvel Essentials format when he did Cerebus Collections. And Dave Sim was in the Guinness Book of World Records for most consecutive issues written and drawn.” And it's, there's so few and far between that it doesn't really register with me. It's like, I've never seen my ex-wife again, and I've never seen any of my ex-girlfriends again, but it would be very much like that if I just suddenly saw one of them, it would be, what happened there and why now? I'm glad that it happened. I mean, I'm pretty sure we're all in agreement that Marvel didn't do Essentials out of an aesthetic or fan-friendly budget consideration, it was, “No, we can make hand over fist money on this and that's why we're doing it.” But I don't know. I think it's one of those, because I was doing it out of what I would consider a higher motivation, how do you package a graphic novel that is 500 pages long? With, well, if you do take that idea and and use it for your own purposes, it's very possible that you're accidentally going to do something really really good that you didn't intend to do. And that's always good when that happens in our world.
Matt: Well, a couple of Matt thoughts here. First off was, the “Swords” collections were “how do you keep the series in print?” Which came from Mike Friedrich of, “You got to keep it in print because if they can't get issue 2, they're not going to buy issues 4, 5, and 6.” That's the theory.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then, like you said, you get done with the first 25 issues and okay, you got six volumes, it'll work. You can keep them in print, but at the same time then it's, well, the next book is the same size as those six, and that's, okay, we'll do “High Society” and then all the other books, you know, and then you kind of started to write the comic with the idea of “this is going to get collected.” So, you can do weird stuff like “Guys” where the cover is the first panel or the first page for that issue, and continue on the inside front cover, and stuff.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: The second Matt thought was, given the history of Marvel, specifically Marvel's reprinting, it's like in the 70s they had the Pocket Books, where they signed a deal of, okay, well, it's going to be a few issues. Like, I think they did one with the first six Hulk stories, the first six issues of the “Hulk” as a Pocket Book, and then they did “Fantastic Four” and “Spider-Man” and stuff, and yeah they sold, but it was, you know, well, you're not gonna keep doing “Spider-Man” until you get caught up to this month's issue.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then there was the Stan Lee “Origin” books, where it's “here's the first appearance of the character, here's a recent appearance of the character, and here's Stan talking about creating the character, because as we all know Stan Lee created the Marvel Universe all by himself, Jack and Steve who?”
Dave: Now, now, now. [laughs]
Matt: I mean, that's the part I love is in the 90s they reprinted those books, and they put in new versions of the modern issue, and you read them and you're like, “This is kind of a whiplash of, here's the first Iron Man story and here's ‘Iron Man’ 300.” Like, there's a bit of a, like, none of the characters in the first story are in the second story except for Iron Man.
Dave: Well yeah, and in my time period, there was also “Collector's Items Classics” and “Marvel Tales” where they reprinted pretty close to sequentially, and they had the original covers on the cover as insets, and that was kind of hit or miss as far as I was concerned. They would probably have been better served to do, you know, “Marvel Tales” and do first four issues of “Spider-Man” and reprint the first four covers. That was kind of the thing where I went, Marvel and DC I think have been doing this wrong all along relative to what fans are interested in, which is getting the whole story starting again from point A, and whether you reprint four issues or eight issues or 10 issues, you got me sold on following these, just because I want all of them and I can't afford to buy the back issues.
Matt: Well that was my next point, because Marvel evolved, eventually they started doing where like the Spider-Man Alien Costume stories, those eight or nine issues got collected as a trade. And Marvel would issue those, but like, it wasn't like they were doing, “Okay, here's the storyline. Here's the next storyline.” It was all hit or miss of what was popular. And then they started the Marvel Masterworks of, where, “Okay, this is a year's worth of ‘Spider-Man,’ in color with the covers, an introduction by somebody related, either Stan or somebody else involved in it.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: But the problem with the Masterworks was, it started with “Fantastic Four” and the first volume was the first year of “Fantastic Four”, and the next volume was like the first year of “The Hulk” and the next volume was the first year of ”Spider-Man,” and the next volume was the next… and then when they got through the first years of all the characters, then it was, “Okay, here's the next, the second year.” So like I have four of the Spider-Mans, but they're not sequential. It's like, #9, #20, # like 30-something…
Dave: Right.
Matt: And the other one is, they were $50 a piece cause they were hardcovers.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And and that was 1980s $50 when that was real money.
Dave: Right! Right.
Matt: And so, I think, I'm assuming somebody at Marvel who was aware of Dave Sim and “Cerebus” and the phone books went, “Why don't we try this, where it's volume one of X-Men, followed by volume two of X-Men, followed by volume”, you know and because the Claremont/Byrne run as classic as everyone thinks it is, those issues are cost money when you want to go to the back issues.
Dave: That’s right.
Matt: For $17, you can get the first two years of “Tomb of Dracula,” and it's in black and white. The problem with the black and white though was they were taking the files and stripping the color out where they could, and there's a famous, I think it's the first “Thor” volume in the Essentials, and the reprinting was so uneven. Like some pages it looked like it was shot from the original art, other pages had gray tone cause they just took the the color files and put them in grayscale. And others, somebody tried to digitally manipulate it so it didn't look like that and lightened the colors up when they turned it to grayscale, and so it looked muddy. And like, everybody's going, “You're not getting our $20 if this is what you're going to do.” And like they froze the program for a year, and that's when they started coming out with, “Okay, this is the high-end best versions of these files that we can get.”
Dave: Right. Right. This looks like a job for Sean Robinson!
Matt: Oh, if Sean was doing remastering back when they started the Essentials, he probably wouldn't know your name because he'd be a millionaire.
Dave: [laughs] Very very definitely. Yeah, it's interesting that it unfolded the way that it did. I understand the problem, I think we all understand the problem. It's just one of those, it's very easy to ignore at the corporate level where a lot of the people who are making the Ron Perelma- level decisions have absolutely no respect for the material. So consequently, they make really really bad choices, not out of any level of malice, it's just, “No, we're making sausages. If sausage #1 sold, let's get sausage #2 put together and get it out there.” Not knowing that, well, if you don't pay attention to the quality, you're cutting your own throat. And you know, “Sitting here across the corporate meeting table with you in in our special you know 79th floor office, and trying to explain that to you, I can see that you just have a blank expression on your face.” And it's like, “I don't want to lose my job, so I'm probably not going to keep talking about this. And I'll just sit here and let you cut your own throat.”
Matt: True.
Dave: Okay! And Steve! Steve is bringing us back to Jeff Seiler with, “How’s about revisiting the Seiler copy of Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing, and did either of you figure out what Jeff wrote around the outside edge of that page?” And as you say, “We did this one, we did it in September 2022, it's actually just a little over a year ago. But I'll grab it off the desk and take another look I guess.” So, did you do that?
Matt: Yeah, I have it right here.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And I took a look at it and even, you know, right in my face, I have trouble reading some of his little scribbles.
Dave: Right. Right. I think we got it to a, “theoretically this is what it said” stage. I had hoped that I could see more looking at the actual copy through my jeweler's loupe, but that didn't happen. That's always the faint hope, and sometimes not faint hope. Sometimes that's exactly what's required is good strong light and a jeweler's loupe, and when you can see the actual topography of what you're looking at in physical space, this is Jeff Seiler's Guide to Self-Publishing copy. He actually wrote in it. I can see the evenness and unevenness of the ballpoint pen that he used, but I'm not able to read what he wrote right at the spine. Right where he wrote Into the spine. And it's probably just one of those eternal mysteries. Until we come up with some sort of atomic level magnification that can really crunch the whole topography and say, at the very least, this is what is there that you couldn't possibly see either with your naked eye or with a jeweler’s loupe.
Matt: That's, I mean, I looked at it again, and I mean the easy to read stuff is easy to read, but you know, when you flip it upside down, it's “good thing his creator didn't”, “also it's a good thing that most people who will read this will realize that I ran out of space even though I have” and that's where it's squiggles. I just, I cannot figure out for the life of me.
Dave: I think what's particularly funny is, I think it's pretty obvious that Jeff was three sheets to the wind writing in his own personalized copy with a sketch in it, and I'm willing to bet if you found him the next day and said, “Jeff, what did you write here?” [laughs] He would look at it and go, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Matt: [laughs] I know he ends up saying something about that we’ll laugh, and it's like, well yes, Jeff, we are laughing!
Dave: Yes. Yes, he was at least a prophet in that sense that he knew that this this wasn't the last time anybody would be addressing his handwritten comments. I don't think he understood how many years later and how many different times we would go back to that well, but there you go, Steve. An unsolved mystery and perhaps we can get it on television on “Unsolved Mysteries” and they can tell us what it said.
Okay! Moving on to “Margaret has one of them Notebook questions. Hey Matt, in my column for this week, check it out in draft, it looks like Dave did most of what looks like ‘Cerebus’ #70 in December of 1984 in Notebook #8, but then that issue is dated January 1985. I'm only thinking that the calendar is for ‘Cerebus’ #70 due to the other items in the Notebook around the calendar. Was he only working a month ahead? Was the date on ‘Cerebus’ #70 different from the date it actually was in comic shops? How the heck did he do two pages a day and everything else he had going on? Youth, eh?” I dug out my Off-White House Library copy of issue #70 and went through it this afternoon. No, I wasn't working 12 hours a day, but I was working eight or nine hours a day just on “Cerebus.” And the reason that I am emphasize that is, issue 70 is Deni is last editorial. Which meant all of the other AV titles were exclusively her problem at that point, and that all had been decided a month before? Two or three months before? I'm trying to think, it wasn't an enormous amount of lead time, but Deni does say that she had been trying to figure out how to write this last Note from the Publisher. And had finally woken up Christmas morning and had come to the conclusion what she was going to write and how she was going to write it. So as I say, the significance for me was by that point I no longer had to discuss everything that was going on at Aardvark-Vanaheim. By the time I was mapping out issue 70 and deciding what was going to happen, Deni's gone. Out of my life, out of “Cerebus”’s life, out of Aardvark-Vanaheim's life. So I could do things like, okay, we're gonna do an overpriced portfolio called The Fiirst Fifth to pay off a chunk of the Animated Cerebus debt, which was around $16,000. I agreed to assume the entire debt and Deni could walk away from that, free and clear. And then, you know, just sit down and and do my part of plate #1, and hand it Gerhard, say here throw a background behind this, and do the same for plate #2, while working on issue #70, and then advertise it and get it printed. That's why I swore I would never publish anyone else ever, ever again. Because I knew the difference at that point. I knew, okay, this was what doing “Cerebus” was when it was just me and Deni and “Cerebus,” and this was one level of engagement, and one level of complexity. As soon as we were publishing whatever it was, like six other titles, something always needed to be discussed and decided, and when you're discussing [laughs] and deciding, you ain't writing and drawing. I could do more work on the page, instead of in the Notebook, because I got to the studio and sat down and started writing and drawing a “Cerebus” page. I didn't go to the office to find out if I got any mail, and then Deni says, “Okay, we have to decide this.” Or, you know, phoning down to the studio, “Can you come up here, because we have to discuss this?” Instead of spending 25% of my day in the office as President of Aardvark-Vanaheim, I was writing and drawing “Cerebus.” It wasn't, “Do we publish ‘normalman’ or do we publish ‘Megaton Man’?” Well, I think “Megaton Man”'s the better book, but, “Well, Cat Yronwode says that if we don't publish ‘normalman,’ Eclipse is gonna publish ‘normalman.” Well okay, that doesn't seem like a persuasive argument to me, but I can tell talking to you, that's a persuasive argument to you. So okay, figure out what's involved in doing a colour comic and we'll spend more hours talking about this. “What order do the books get printed in at Preney? ‘Flaming Carrot’ just came in.” And Ger and I have another week of work to do on the issue of “Cerebus” we're working on. No, it was just “Cerebus.” As soon as it's done, you get it printed. So [laughs] it definitely looks like I was working 12 hours a day and living off of coffee or whatever. No, it was just that I was writing and drawing at the same speed I had been writing and drawing where I was part writer and artist on “Cerebus” and part President of Aardvark-Vanaheim. And suddenly there was just tons and tons of time to do things. It's like, you know, let's do “Cerebus Jam!” Let's do stories with other guys, and I'll just… ya know, Terry Austin Squinteye, I'll do a Popeye parody with him and I can sit down and knock out my part of the page when I get into the studio, and then switch over to working on “Cerebus” #71 or whatever it was. And it's like, mhmm, yeah, that I wanted to leave behind as quickly as possible and never pick it up again. Which I got tempted back in where I went, okay, okay. Well, I'll just do “Puma Blues” and I'll set up a whole separate company Aardvark One to do “Puma Blues.” And I had learned enough at that point to go, okay, only publish books where you don't have to discuss stuff, and you don't have to say, okay, when is this coming in? How far along are you on it? Yeah okay, I'll have a phone conversation with you about promotion or whatever else. It's, no, you're gonna make all of the decisions for “Puma Blues.” Don't bother me, just make sure that it gets to the printer, and you can do whatever you want. And they thought they died and went to heaven. It's like, no, I've just learned that if you don't have people who can produce everything and do it completely autonomously, you're just asking for more of your workday taken up with their work.
Matt: Right. Right. That's, I'm just thinking back to, you know, the San Diego Con where you had the Aardvark One portfolios printed up, and the story about handing one to Howard Chaykin, who looked at it like it was a dead fish, and went, “No, thank you.”
Dave: [laughs] Yes! The “are you hustling me, Dave?” And it's like, uhh, well, I’m showing you a proposal. And it was, “I remember you when you were a pimply-faced teenager, and you said some very unkind things about me in print. Let's resolve never to work again. And now I'm going to go into your party and enjoy myself.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That was very Howard, and it was like, it was very abrupt, and arguably cruel, but fair. But it was the best way that you could possibly handle that, which is usually what you got from Howard.
Michael R! Is Michael R closing out the show?
Matt: I don't think so…
Dave: I'm just looking here. Uh… no no, we still got Christon coming up after that. I apologize, and Philip Frey. [laughs] Sewall again! Okay, and he has…
Matt: Bottom of page 12.
Dave: Bottom of page 12…
Matt: I actually printed out all 17 pages this month!
Dave: You did? I know. I know. I couldn't believe that when I saw them. “Yes, Zipper is doing the ‘Jeopardy’ bit again. Starts bottom of page 12. Hi Matt! Hope all was well with you and yours and that you enjoyed your vacation in Florida.” And you did, right?
Matt: Oh yes! The worst part was coming back.
Dave: [laughs] “And now my question and answer for Dave. Hi Dave, my answer for this month is Roy Crane.” And the question is, who was the hands down unparalleled master of duoshade comic art in the comic strip field for decades? And the only answer to that one is Roy Crane. If you get a chance to look at Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Google searching those, Google Image, and there's some real showboat pages thathe would do a background and it was so gorgeous and so beautiful in duoshade. It's an establishing shot but it just stops you dead in the story, it's just absolutely unparalleled. First thing that I check when “Comics Revue” comes in is the Captain Easy… was it Captain Easy? No, it was.. doesn't matter. It's the Roy Crane strip, and the first thing I do is go through it looking for the showstopper background, and even when they're not reproduced very well, and a lot of it is first/ second/third generation from newspapers, it’s still hands-down some of the best material. “My question for this month is, I noticed with the latest issue of ‘Cerebus in Hell?: WildP.I.G.S.” #1 signed edition, that my copy was signed and numbered, but it didn't have the print run on it. I was just wondering if this was a misprint or something new moving forward?” Uh, no, it's not something new moving forward. It's something that I'm gonna be checking from now on, because I just blow through the signed editions when Rolly picks them up from Studiocomix Press, and Rolly bags and boards them, and takes them over to the Packaging Too to ship to Diamond. I can tell you that there was a hundred of the “WildP.I.G.S.” $15 Edition, as opposed to the 1165 $4 Edition. So that brings us indirectly to the “Akimbo” Kickstarter, which we're scheduling for January 16th 2024. Where we're going to be sticking, as we did with the “MarvelManVark,” with three covers. It's going to take us a while to figure out which three covers, but there's still gonna be three covers. And just in the last couple of days I've been thinking, okay, I've already done sketches of at least five covers for “Akimbo.” So I'm now wondering what the level of legitimacy is to doing a fourth cover, but actually restricting it, severely restricting it. Like if you look at the ratio between the $15 signed copy, and thank you for buying those. $15 where there's hundred of them, and $4 if there's 1100 of them. That's actually a pretty favourable ratio, arguably it should be $40 because it's 1/10th as rare as the unsigned copies. So having dipped our toe in the waters of the Photo-Journal Guide to Comics listing of scarcity, where “very rare” is defined as six to 10 copies, “rare” 11 to 20 copies, “scarce” 21 to 50 copies, “uncommon” 50 to 200 copies, “less than average” 200 to a 1000 copies. And this is, I have to point out, that's guesswork on their part. They don't know how many Golden Age Comics. They have heard of only six to 10, which would make it “very rare,” but they don't know if there's six to 10. And I'm saying, well, okay, I'm going to use your criteria but say okay, what if we only print six of them or seven of them or eight of them, and it becomes the Very Rare “Akimbo” cover, and we auction them on eBay or through Heritage Auctions and say, okay, there's only six of them. If you want one, then you got to bid on them. Like we're at the point where I'm losing several hundred dollars an issue on 1165 copies of “WildP.I.G.S.” even with the 100 copies at $15 each. So it's like, now we have to actively pursue the rare side of it and go, if I do an “Akimbo” cover where there's only 10 of them and auction them, what do they auction for and what does that do to the bottom line? So that I don't have to worry about trying to make money from Diamond. I can't make money from Diamond the way things are set up with the cost of shipping and with the cost of printing what it is. If you're selling rarity, and I can guarantee you, okay, there are only 10 of these. I don't have any of them, Birdsong doesn't have any of them, Benjamin Hobbs doesn't have any of them, but anybody who wants to bid on these, you can get one of them and just see what that does. So just fair warning, that's something we're probably going to be experimenting with on the “Akimbo” Kickstarter. And special thanks to Michael R, Easton, Pennsylvania, I now know something that I've got to check while I'm signing the $15 signed copies for Diamond. Does it have the print run on it? It's supposed to, and if it doesn't, then much as it's going to break my heart I just have to destroy all of these and get Alfonso to print a new batch with the numbers on the front. So it's something we're going to be watching. So far Michael, you're the only one that noticed that. That includes everybody who works here .
Matt: [laughs] I made a note to email the Cerebus in Hell? Brain Trust of, hey fellas, let's check the files a little closer next time.
Dave: [laughs] It's supposed to have the print run on it! That's part of what we're selling these nice people. Okay, and then Christon, “As an admitted ‘Cerebus’ #1 obsessed fan, I'm extremely excited to see your upcoming recreation pages heading to Heritage Auctions. It is just my opinion that auctioning them one page at a time should produce the most lucrative results.”
Matt: Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: The latest “Narutobus” page that closed, I forget if it's page six or not, was $280. I haven't sent that fax yet, I'm like, well, I'll just tell him when I talk to him.
Dave: Right. Right. Yeah, famous last words. Both on the one page at a time thing, and should you do multiple pages one day at a time. “That said, I'm gonna stay on my favorite topic, that legendary
‘Action Comics’ #1 of the indie world. How many copies of ‘Cerebus’ #1 do you currently own?” Uh. I don't own any. The Cerebus Archive has in its possession four CGC graded copies, which were signed March 13th, 2004, the day “Cerebus” 300 came out. Paradise Comics in Toronto has the rest of the “Cerebus” #1 Dave Sim file copies, which include copies that Aardvark-Vanaheim purchased which, mhmm, not sure how legit that is. I don't think any of those have been actually graded and slabbed, and the reason that that hasn't happened is because, the more copies of something you get slabbed, the more copies show up in the census, and the more the price drops. So we don't want to do that, and that's a balancing act. But that was one of those, well okay, we can talk about this somewhere down the line. And I’m pretty sure I haven't talked to Pete Dixon about it in 10 years? 12 years? Because there's no more easy answer now than there was back then. It’s all guess work. Heritage is definitely key. It's like, they can't remember ever actually auctioning a “Cerebus” #1, which when you’re Heritage Auctions, anything that you've never had to auction is something notice by its absence. My question is, do I go downtown to the bank to the safety deposit box and get, not the 9.4 out, but maybe the 9.0, and send it to Heritage Auctions on the assumption that, yes, it's been so long since a graded #1 has been auctioned and since a Dave Sim file copy of of #1 has been auctioned, which the last time it happened it went for $10,000 US back in 2004. You can still only sell them once, and once you sell it, 10 years after that you go, “I sold that for $22,000 and it's now going for I don't even want to hear what it went for, because it's gonna break my heart.” And I'm gonna have to interrupt there. It's another prayer time, and I will be back momentarily.
Matt: Okay! That works perfectly.
Dave: Okay, talk to you in a little while.
Matt: Talk to you in a while. Bye.
[guitar music]
Matt: Ah, jeeze, you again?! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, it's that time a year. [laughs]
Matt: It's okay, it's always a pleasure, Dave.
Dave: Please Hold just seems to go on and on and on, and sometimes it does. We've gone longer than this. We've gone longer than this.
Matt: I think our record's three and a half hours.
Dave: Is it? Okay, well, fifth anniversary, we'll probably have to try and break that record in spite of ourselves. Let's see, where are we? We were with Christon…
Matt: Christon was asking about how many copies of “Cerebus” #1 you currently own. I think we covered that completely.
Dave: Right. We covered that part. “It's well storied that many copies of the original 2000 print run were damaged. Did they all actually make it into society? Do you believe that there are 2000 authentic copies still out in the world? Unfortunately, a few years ago I came to the realization that I own a counterfeit copy of ‘Cerebus’ #1.” Aww! “The good news though, when researching for identifers to determine authentic versus fake, I ran into AMoC, and with that website I've been here and happier since. I appreciate you, Manly!”
Matt: Thank you, Christon.
Dave: You are appreciated. Okay, no, they weren't damaged. They were misprinted. There was too much black ink on the press and it smudged the line between Cerebus' right hand and the sword hilt, and around one of the horns on his helmet. This was the thing that I noticed, back in the day when I had a ferocious temper about things like this. Going through all of the copies, sitting in the living room at 48 Weber Street East, and it's like, this is just unacceptable. This is, like when you compared them to a good copy, it was, this is just complete incompetence. And it was, all Moir Press was doing was the covers. They had farmed out getting the guts done to Fairway Press, and all you're doing is the cover, and this is the job that you deliver? Like, it's just no, we're gonna have a set-to about this. So it, I think, if you can Google search “Cerebus” #1 online, Google Image, individual copies, you're bound to find good copies that went to Big Rapids Distribution and Now and Then Books, and you can see the difference between those and the Sea Gate copies. Like I say, just look at where Cerebus' hand is holding the sword hilt, and then look up at his helmet, and there's like smudging right around where one of the horns is is attached to the helmet. In terms of how many of them still exist, ehh, that would be guesswork. Guesswork based on, virtually all of them still exist, in so far as they all went to comic book stores, or the vast majority went to comic book stores, and they were number one. Like, by 1977, people in comic book stores definitely knew the number one's going to be the most valuable, if it's going to ever get any value to it, so if you're going to hang on to anything, it's going to be the number one. That would be the virtually-all-of-them argument. The most-of-them argument? They would have been perceived as fanzine in most places. Star*Reach Publications existed, but not top of mind in comic book stores, but most stores sold fanzines. And they wouldn't even have been perceived as prozine, because I hadn't been published too many places. The average comic store would have seen, and… like, I wasn't considered a pro. Nobody would automatically go, “Oh, Dave Sim. Comic book pro.” It would be, you'd really have to know some esoteric environments to even know that Dave Sim had been published, which would make me a fan artist, and anything that I published a fanzine. In California, they were mostly seen as undergrounds, because that was the distinction there. There were overground comics and underground comix. Comics and comix. CS and X on the end, was, that's a California distinction. And undergrounds were less disposable than fanzines, but more disposable than comic books. The vast majority of people got their underground comix, read it and went, “Oh wow far out man” and then, you know, used it to light a fire or whatever else. It's like, “Ehh, it's a comic book. Comic books are for reading. Only weird geeks put them in plastic bags and keep them in perfect condition.” But those are all completely speculative. You could check the CGC consensus, which would tell you how many of them have been slabbed. But the problem with those is sometimes books get re-slabbed. Somebody goes, “Uh, I think this is a higher grade than 8.5. I'm gonna crack it out of the case and send it in again.” Well, you send it in again and that gets on the census as another copy. And it's not another copy, it's the same copy has been graded twice.
That led into another question, oh yes. “I don't expect you to reveal any specific information, but did you ever actually find out who it was that counterfeited your book? Perhaps where it was printed from? Again, I don't want details, I'm just curious if you found some answers.” Did anyone confess or was tracked down and arrested? No. Do I have my own theory as to who did it? Yes, based on access to a printing press, knowledge of the comic book field, how comic book stores worked, and prepress capabilities. This ties in with with your comment, “We answered number two back in the last five years? I don't remember when, but there were slightly more than 2000 copies of #1, about half were damaged and sold to Sea Gate.” Again no, they weren't damaged, they were misprinted. ”I believe Deni's office copy with the handwritten corrections that Sean got for the remastering was one of those, and Sean has said that the counterfeits are slightly better printing than Deni's office copy. So I suspect that the counterfitters had one of the good 1000.” Uh, yes. They sourced the counterfeit from either a Big Rapids or Now and Then copy. It would have been too difficult to correct the smudging for the rocket scientists who couldn't figure out how to imitate the register mark on the back cover, or how to keep the dust from the copying that they did of the newsprint from the interior pages. Like, that's pretty basic prepress stuff, so we're not talking about world class counterfeitters. It's like, “Oh hey, this should be pretty easy to do. We'll just do this and we'll do this and we'll do this.” Going back to talking about recreating “Cerebus” #1, the fact that you're saying that you would bid on recreated “Cerebus” #1 pages, and I got two of them done, well, that helps. I have a bidder, now I just need one other bidder. I have to decide whether I'm gonna do page three before the middle of this month, because if I'm gonna do a tryptic of the first three pages, and that's really the direction that I would be leaning in with the experience with the “Narutobus” pages auction one at a time. Probably do the three pages, do it as a tryptic, but I'm still inclined to wait and see before sending them to Heritage Auctions to see how the Wolveroach tryptic does. And part of me is going, okay, all we're talking about here is early “Cerebus” #1 cover recreations, so just recreate an easy early cover, like #1 or #16, that the Cerebus Archive has the originals of, and say, okay, that's gonna take maybe an afternoon on either one of them, and if it goes for 4000 or 5000, well, that's a well spent afternoon. But also thinking, well okay, Christon, I'm leaning in the direction of doing the third page. I'm leaning in the direction of doing a tryptic. Fall back position, auctioning the #1 and #2 page through Heritage Auctions. With the the bad experience on the market dropping out once you get past page three or page four, what would you pay for me to recreate “Cerebus” #1 just for you?
Matt: [laughs] Oh, to have money.
Dave: [laughs] Well, that's the thing. Well, I don't know, Christon is definitely one of my top art patrons, particularly lately. So it's one of those, well, #1 and 2 pages do exist. What would you pay to not have them go to Heritage Auctions, where you would be saving the buyer’s premium, which is enormous, right?
Matt: Oh yeah. It's, I mean, they say, oh you know, the buyer’s premium is I think 20% or whatever, and you're going, okay that's fine, and then you bid $50 but it tells you, “well with the buyer’s premium it's $79”, and you're like, that's not $50!
Dave: [laughs] No, that's some pretty healthy percentages there.
Matt: I mean, that's, you quickly turn into one of the Marx Brothers looking at, you know, it's going for how much?!
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. [as Chico Marx] “You say 50, I say 75. You say 100, I say 125. I got a lot of numbers!”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So, I will throw it over to you, Christon, in terms of, if you want to make a credible offer saying, well, you know, you can't afford to buy all 22 pages right now, but all 22 pages don't exist. So, you want to keep it out of the hands of Heritage Auctions and actually buy them yourself. Okay, well, whatever you would have offered, however high you would go in Heritage Auctions bidding, add another 20% to that because that would be going to me instead of Heritage Auctions, and say ”Well, okay, this is what I'll pay for page one and page two.” On my side I'm willing to go through “Cerebus” #1 and go, okay, some of these pages would go for more money than others; you know, the petunia page. Okay, here's what I think are the A-list pages, which I would expect you to pay more for, and here are the B-list pages, which I would be willing to let go for less than that. Obviously the splash page would go for more than just about anything else. It's, we're both looking at the same chess board. It's just, I'm the guy with the art, you're the guy with the money.
Matt: Well, and then there's the skeleton fight pages which are, Dave recreating these, well, ya know. Fill in your blacks and see how much drawing’s left!
Dave: Right. Right. And I actually know how to draw skeletons now. It's like, you can make the call of, “I want this ‘Cerebus’ #1 page to look exactly the way it does in ‘Cerebus’ #1,” and then go “Uh, if you want to do better skeletons, I'm up for better skeletons,” because it's your page. You know, have it your way, at Burger King.
Matt: [laughs] Again, if only I had money.
Dave: Yes, that kind of money. We've all got money but it's uh…
Matt: Well, there's money and then there's Money.
Dave: Capital M Money, yes.
Matt: There's the, “I have enough money that, yeah, let's go and buy something that no one in their right mind should be buying” money, and then there's “hey, I can afford groceries this week” money, and I'm very much in the ladder.
Dave: Right. Right. And Heritage Auctions is just this mindboggling, “that's a really nice copy of ‘All-Star’ #8, and it's the first appearance of Wonder Woman, but it costs as much money as I could scrape together everywhere that I could get cash on hand and I wouldn't have money for anything else.” And somebody else has obviously money that's in that category who goes, “Well okay, it's not exactly couch change, but it's not life or death money either. It's, I can afford to buy this ‘All-Star’ #8 and still keep up with all of my other expenses.” The mind boggles!
Matt: Well it's, what’s driving me nuts, cause I get the emails, cause I signed up for Dave Sim Cerebus Gerhard, you know, that's my watch list, cause that way I know when stuff’s up, so I can let people know. But I also get just their weekly “hey this is what we're auctioning” and I go through and I'm like, got it, got it, got it. But you know, it's like the first appearance of the Hobgoblin slabbed. It's like, well I have it, mine's not slabbed, and if I took it to get it slabbed they'd probably laugh me out of the building.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cause that's one of the issues I got in my year subscription that used to be stored in a old shoe box…
Dave: Ohh, yes!
Matt: Before, I mean, it's, the appropriate malphorism is, “well loved.” [laughs]
Dave: Yes. Yes.
Matt: And you know, but their new thing is they're doing video games, and I'm going, okay, I understand baseball cards. Slabbing a baseball card makes total sense to me. You can flip it over, you can see both sides, you own and can possess the baseball card and still get a little bit of functionality of it. Slabbing comics is where I go, ‘kay, but now you can't read it. And well okay, yeah, most things are reprinted, blah blah blah. But now it's like, slabbing video games, and I go ‘kay, there's no way you can, I mean I get it a vintage 1982 Spider-Man Atari cassette in the box unopened.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. Right.
Matt: Like, there's some Spider-Man fan who has to have that in his life. I own that game, I in theory have access to a possibly working Atari 2600. I could play Spider-Man if I wanted.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: It's like, but like my copy again, they'd laugh me out of the building, cause it's like, “Well, it's not in the box blah blah blah.” And like when my Mom was moving out of her house, my brother and I had the boxes the video game systems came in, with the original styrofoam, and the only thing wrong with them was that we cut the UPC off to send in for the warranty. And it's like, we're cleaning the house out and they went in a dumpster because these are worthless. And then a few years back I went into the game…
Dave: [laughs] They’re not worthless anymore!
Matt: I went into the video game store and a guy had a Nintendo in the box, the Nintendo didn't work, but the guy at the store bought the box for $200 cause he could repackage a working Nintendo in it and sell it for a couple grand. I'm going, and I threw the boxes away, cause they're quote unquote worthless. You know, the collector/hoarder mentality, that's when you start going, I have to save everything. It's like, you're saving crap everyone else is saving. It's “Youngblood” #1, nobody is gonna make money on this.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. And it it turns into a lottery ticket thing. You're using up all of your living space on the idea that one of these lottery tickets is gonna bring in billions of dollars, but meanwhile you don't have any living space.
Matt: I just, I mean that's, I get the email, like the big one was, it was trading cards and I'm like, okay, yeah, I know that trading cards are worth money, blah blah blah. But at the bottom it's, “And now we're doing Funko Pops!” And I'm like, Heritage, you need to start saying no when people bring their boxes of crap! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] No, I don't think so. Because they have got all of the most sentimental deep-pocketed people on the planet, where just about anybody, anybody is gonna look at one of those things and go, “It's a 9.8, I've got to have it. That's mine. No one else is gonna win this auction, no matter how much money I have to bid.” And God bless Heritage Auction that they started early and built that “if you build it, they will come” if you're Heritage Auctions.
Okay! “Philip Frey, who’s doing the Cerebus Wiki.” Yes, he is. He's not only doing the Cerebus Wiki, he's doing the Strange Death of Alex Raymond 2023, soon to be 2024, Giant Ashcans, remastering those. And thank you on both those things. I've been meaning to give you a call, Philip, but I've been meaning to give a lot of people a call. Once again, that comes down to, you can give people a call or you can write and draw. “Any chance he'd like to give names to the unnamed wizard from ‘Cerebus’ #1 and the unnamed magician from ‘MagiKing’?” [laughs] At this late date? No, let's not go asking for trouble.
Matt: When I was reading over the question during the last break, I went Bill and Ted. They're Bill and Ted!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then I was thinking, no, wait wait, Canadian! Bob and Doug!
Dave: Well, I'm not gonna say anything, because I am unfortunately the authority that gets to decide those things. Ever since the episode with Floyd George, I've been regretting naming Pink Floyd on the cover of “Cerebus” #1. I didn't do it for that, but you never know what the metaphysical universe is listening to and channeling in directions that you don't want it to go. Particularly, particularly when it comes to wizards and magicians.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So we're leaving that one alone. That's it. Thank you, Philip, for the question. Anybody else wants to ask about that, save your breath. Not gonna happen.
Mike Sewall, [laughs] you write, “Hey, wait a minute!” asks, “How many pages does he envision the Strange Death of Alex Raymond finishing with total?” I typed out the answer to this one. Not really there yet. I'm within a few pages of being done the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell section. Mhmm, looking like 25 to 30 pages, so that should help with my guesswork. I'm getting better at condensing the raw material, but it's still just guesswork. I just finished page 579 , next is Ward Greene's reaction to Margaret Mitchell's death in Rip Kirby. Trying to minimize, as I read him, the metaphysical blowback, 1949 to 1952. If I can keep that part to Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell length, I would guess I'm somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/5ths of the way through. So final total, based on that, would be 900 to a 1000 pages? 1100 pages? 1200 pages? At some point, I shift from forward momentum to reformatting and enhancing the “glamourpuss” SDoAR pages, working backwards from September 6, 1956 which is where I left off, to 1953, and then bridging 1952 to 1953, and then post-1956 to the modern day. Having a section finished, actually written and drawn, the Many Deaths of Margaret Mitchell is going to be a major psychological lift and will definitely give me a different perspective on what still needs to be done. That's as far as I am in addressing that mentally. So there you go, Dodger, your second appearance. We've been here so long, Dodger’s showed up again!
James Windsor-Smith asks, “Is Dave aware of Alex Toth ‘Cerebus’?” No, I wasn't, and he really does, it says Cerebus right on it. “Did he know that he was drawing Cerberus for the ‘Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends’ cartoon, or do you think he was just having a joke at the animation company's expense? They won't realize that it says Cerberus, they'll think that it says Cerberus and it says Cerebus, because it was 1981. He was definitely aware of Cerebus by then.” And I gotta tell you, only Alex Toth could do model sheets of characters this effectively. I mean Cerberus in action, 3/4 forward view, rear view, 3/4 rear view, looking in the other direction, closeup, and probably had to figure out what to do with the rest of his morning. And that would take me forever. I mean, everything's simplified but everything exactly where it's supposed to be. Is there some way to track down the “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” episode to see, did they call it Cerebus or did they call it Cerberus?
Matt: Looking at the picture, I know the episode, I don't know if they even made…
Dave: You know the episode?!
Matt: Dave, I was born in 1979. By 1982, “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” was the beginning and end of my life. Every Saturday was, I'm plopped down for 30 minutes to watch “Spider-Man” and then asking my parents when does “Spider-Man” come on again, and them trying to explain that it's a Saturday morning cartoon, you have to live a week without “Spider-Man.”
Dave: Noooo! You're torturing me! This is child abuse!
Matt: In the 90s, they repackaged the show as Marvel Action Universe, and it was an episode of “Spider-Man” and an episode of, I want to say “Robocop”, and it was an hour long block early morning on Saturday, like at 6:00 in the morning. And I had a paper route, and if I was good at my paper route, I could get home in time to watch it, and if I was bad at my paper route, I missed it. And it was, you know, it's “Spider-Man!” You're never going to see this again, cause DVD, VHS, they're never going to put this out, and 99% of the time I missed it cause I really was bad at my paper route.
Dave: [laughs] But very good at Spider-Man.
Matt: Disney bought Marvel, so they own everything Marvel owns. Marvel produced the cartoon, so it's on Disney+, and I started watching “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends” with my kids, going, this is the greatest show you're ever gonna see. Just trust me. And we watched like two episodes, and the girls looked at me like, “Not only are you insane, but we think you might be going senile!”
Dave: Yes. Yes. And you have very very bad taste in cartoons!
Matt: No no! “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends,” it was the ultimate introduction into the Marvel Universe, because in one episode it's called, the “Seven Little Superheroes” and the Chameleon is has invited superheroes to come to his castle in the middle of nowhere, and they've shown up because they're, you know, it's not a really intellectual show, I admit it. But they show up and the Chameleon’s taking them out, one by one, and it was Spider-Man, and Firestar and Iceman, you know, his Amazing Friends, but it also had Captain America, Namor, and Shanna the She-Devil. Oh, and Doctor Strange. And like, the Chameleon's taking them out, and I'm going , Shanna the She-Devil was obviously added because somebody at the production studio went, “We need another female” and they went through the model sheets and went, “The girl in the leopard bikini. Her. Put her in the show.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And, I mean, as a kid it was, who's this? Who's that? And like, you know, I watched it as adult, I'm like, they put in some pretty B and C List characters, but this particular episode was Cerebus, it's Dr Doom has managed to harness some cosmic power that will make him a god, and it's coming down to the Latvarian Embassy in New York, and Spider-Man and his friends show up and make the beam miss and it hits this guy named Frump, who walks around New York idly saying things and like a dog comes barking at him and he conjures Cerebus to chase the dog away, and he doesn't realize what he's doing because he doesn't know he has these godlike powers. And I don't know if they actually call the three-headed dog anything in the episode, but it's one of those, I'm looking I'm like “Frump”? I know the episode “Frump!”I just watched it in this past year. So I will rewatch the episode, and I will let you know if they say it either way, or because I also watch with the subtitles, so what the subtitles say.
Dave: Aha! Aha, the legendary subtitles rear their subtitle heads again.
Matt: I mean, if anything, if it says Cerebus I will let you know, that according to Alex Toth it's copyright Marvel, and you're open up for this giant lawsuit that you're never gonna win because Disney has all the money in the world. I know, I just gave them some.
Dave: Right. And I stole their three-headed dog, and turned it into an ardvark, and who do I think I am?
Matt: Well, you know, they were to sue you, I very much expect you to go to court going, “Deni did it!”
Dave: [laughs] Well, it's sort of the natural thing. It's sort of the natural thing.
Okay, Wayne Thomas asks, “I'd like a confirmation on my Cerebus books four and five, where he and Deni both signed their last name as Sim, and maybe a brief explanation.” No no no, this is Please Hold for Dave Sim, we don't have brief explanations of anything!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: As witness, “Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.” “As to how long or how often she signed her name that way, it seemed to be of interest to other members, as well.”
Matt: Okay I'm gonna pause for a second just to explain. I put on the Cerebus Facebook Group, anybody have any questions for Dave? Because somebody had a question, but I couldn't remember who or what the question was, I think it was Wayne, but I'm not sure. I looked back, he has 4 and 5 signed by you and Deni, and when he post posted it, somebody's going, “Are you sure that's actually Deni's signature? Cause she was an ardent feminist and there's no way she would have taken a man's last name.” And then somebody else commented going, “She changed her name in the Notes from the Publisher. She signed her name Deni Sim for a number of years. This isn't up for debate, like we know factually this is what happened.” And other people are going, “Yeah, but Deni was really feminist. I don't think she would do that.”
Dave: Uhh, she wasn't that feminist, and particularly, it looks like the these were signed on the 82 Tour. Deni did have a tendency on the tour to start signing “Dave Sim,” because I'd sign “Dave Sim” and then hand whatever it was over to her, and then she'd sign it, and you can tell by the way that the
”Sim” is done, she was sort of copying the way that I signed “Sim.” So there there was a lot of influence in that sense. And, yes, she never went by Loubert after we were married. I think she did switch back to Loubert. She wasn't one of those people who went, “I'm the one who married him and I get to call myself Deni Sim from now on. Nyah!” Which is also a feminist thing. It was, no, she was married to me, she was Deni Sim, and if she was not married, she was reverting to Deni Loubert. It was also on the Tour posters, Deni and Dave Sim. Or was it Dave and Deni Sim? So it was one of those. I can go down the stairs and check that, but, it's [laughs] you'll find it out and post it. Because that that was one of those, if yours is the complete name on the poster, I just get called Dave, and then she gets called Deni Sim, it's like you're kind of obligated if you're gonna do autographs on the tour to sign “Deni Sim.” And I'm pretty sure that was the case, she would have signed “Deni Sim” starting in October 1978 when we got married, and would have stopped signing Deni Sim August 1983, which was when she left. That would be interesting to check, to see if, I think she was just signing Deni in the Notes from the Publisher. And was she, she wasn't in the credits. Yes, she was in the credits. That would be worth checking, because she was still here through to “Cerebus” #70 and August 1983, that was like issue 55/56. So what was her credit line after August 1983? And when did she switch to that?
Matt: I will put my top people on it!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I just wrote a note to check, and I put down, “Ask Margaret.”
Dave: There you go! It's, we will leave no black box on the inside front cover unturned, in finding an answer to this. But, yes, Wayne, the the short answer, brief explanation, yes, those are both authentic signatures.
Aaron Wood asked, “How does Dave like his eggs?” [laughs] Okay, we are getting late in the batting order at this point. Scrambled! I'm a scrambled eggs kind of guy, or I'm not totally impartial to an umlaut. Uh, no, those are the two dots over top of the E. Um, it's, uh…. omelette! That's the word that I'm looking for. A nice cheese omelette. Cheddar cheese, not fussy about too many vegetables. Spinach in anything, I'm very fond of spinach in anything. “And does he like American bacon, or just the Canadian stuff?” I'm far more partial to American bacon than back bacon, eh? But I haven't had bacon since the late 1990s, because that's one of those “best two out of three” things as a monotheist. One of the things that Jews and Muslims have in common is no swine flesh. Absolute abomination to consume swine flesh. Only Christians consume bacon and ham and and stuff like that. And do it on religious holidays, which makes all Jews and all Muslims go, “Eww!” “Seriously though, and if he's covered this, someone let me know and I'll withdraw. Dave has discussed some ‘Superman’ comics in his collection on his YouTube channel. Two thoughts, A, what would be his favorite standalone stories or arcs besides the gifted comics he talked about?” Um. I'm trying to remember the title of the book. It’s around “Superman” 168/167, and it's Superman and Luthor on a Red Sun planet having a big boxing match. And it's a book length thriller, three parter, and it's written by Jerry Siegel, and it's one of the great Jerry Siegel stories. When he came back, they let him write Superman again, he definitely meant it, and meant it hardcore. I still get a lot of pleasure out of that story, and any of the, it was the planet they were on became called Lexor, because Lex Luthor actually helped the residents of the planet to recover their lost technologies, and pretty much saved the whole civilization. And of course, Superman shows up, and it's like, you know, he's the enemy of this guy. And it's like, “Well you're the enemy of our planet's greatest hero.” So Superman became the Lex Luthor of the planet Lexor. And it sounds contrived, but it's really really well written, and was definitely very very grabby for me. I would put that as the top 10 Superman stories from my childhood. I'll look some of them up!
Matt: Because you described an issue that I know I have reprinted, I grabbed my copy of “Superman in the Sixties” off the shelf. “The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman” originally presented in “Superman” #164, October 1963.
Dave: There you go. There you go.
Matt: According to the credits in this book though, story was Edmond Hamilton, pencils Curt Swan, and inks George Klein.
Dave: Oh, I think it's Jerry Siegel, but I'll defer to greater experts.
Matt: Well, this is a DC reprint book, where they've started putting in disclaimers saying , “As far as we know this is…” you know, “The uncredited stories we're crediting based on the information we have but we may be wrong.”
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: Jerry Seigel did write ”Superman” 165 the following month, “The Sweetheart Superman Forgot.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: According to this. I jus,. I mean, it's one of you said, Luthor and Superman on Lexor, and I'm going, oh I know that story, I have it in the “Superman in the Sixties” book.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: And you're right, I mean, it's one of those stories that, on describing the plot of it, does not do the story justice, because the story really is, I mean, it's not the final showdown between the two of them, but it very well could have been written that way as, “This is it. We're never gonna have Lex fight Superman again”, Lex is a hero on Lexor, Superman's a hero on Earth, and they're just going to keep them apart. My favorite part about Lexor is, in the 80s when George Perez redesigned, gave Lex Luthor the battle armor, it was a George Perez design. And the story behind it is that the people of Lexor gifted him this super suit so that he could beat the crap out of Superman! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right. Right. That was, the follow on question, or it ties in with that. “Well we all have reboot fatigue.” Really, there should be like government programs to support people, comic book fans, who are suffering from reboot fatigue. “A few decades ago it was quite the novelty! Looking back did he enjoy John Byrne’s take on Superman or any arc thereafter?” It looked really good! And it was nice to see the book selling at level that it hadn't been selling at in a long time. But, I looked at John Byrne’s Lois Lane, and it's like, mhmm, that's not Lois Lane. It's, that was one of those, capital OCD capital F Feminist versions of a character where I just go, uh, this character was a specific character for X number of years. Do you really have to turn all of them into Germaine Greer? Or what is our concept here?
Okay, I have been fasting all day and I had my last prayer an hour ago, which is ordinarily when I would get to eat. So [sings poorly] I’m so glad we had this time together. Not to finish this song… and all the best to Paula and Bullwinkle and Janis Pearl, and we'll do this again next month.
Matt: With one question a piece, guys! One question a piece! [laughs]
Dave: Thank you, thank you. You can be the bad cop.
Matt: Oh, oh I will. I'll just start editing stuff out. Everybody's question is, “What's your favorite letter?”
Dave: [laughs] Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: Have a good night, Dave. Enjoy your dinner.
Dave: I sure will. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
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The CAN13/CiH? Kickstarter ends on the 27th. So, if you're watching the campaign and waiting for the last minute, it's getting closer...
Friend to the Blog, Steve Peters has a new Comicverse issue on Kickstarter, with a variant cover from OTHER Friend to the Blog, James Banderas-Smith. HE'S added more rewards including more sketch covers which could in turn end up in future issues. That Steve's a genius... I'm gonna get one. You should get one too. Come on, it'll be neat. You could choose a Cerebus cover. Or Iron Man #55. Ooooh! How about that issue of Batman where the Joker makes him pull a boner (google it.)? And James has offered a free sketch to all backers: Take a screenshot of your pledge, and James will draw any Awakening Comics character for free! Free Art!
And, while not a Kickstarter, I'm making the attempt to get the Pud's Tavern Logo on the kid's Dance team's merch.
Next Time: Jen SAYS she's gonna do an Update, but I've heard that before...