Benjamin Hobbs:
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David Birdsong is hard at work on a new CIH? Cover. Here it is in Black and White:
And in Color:
Matt: Hello, Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How
are you doing?
Matt: I am fine. How are
you doing?
Dave: Good. This is
about as late as my prayer time goes. This is still the hangover from the
winter solstice. 6:29 is actually the earliest, I should say, of the last
prayer of the day. I gotta couple of questions for you. Are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Okay. Actually,
the first one isn’t a question, it’s thank you for signing the “Hermann” #1.
Matt: You’re welcome.
Dave: Um, why did you
sign them on the back cover?
Matt: Because that way
the front cover’s pristine. That was the intention. I also signed them on the
page I wrote.
Dave: Oh, you did? I
didn’t see that.
Matt: And I had my
brother sign on the pages with his name on it.
Dave: Okay! Alright.
It’s all coming together now.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Well, I won’t be
able to see those last two if I get them encapsulated by CGC, but we will work
on that. Benjamin signed on the front cover, so I’m gonna sign on the front
cover, and then generations of Cerebus fans will be asking, “why did Matt Dow
sign the back cover?”
Matt: As I said to
Benjamin Hobbs when I sent him the 25 that I had gotten, I said, I signed on
the back cover and the intention is that if you sign on the back cover and then
Dave signs on the back cover, someday somebody can try to track down all of us
to have us sign one copy, and good luck getting Gustave Dore and Dante
Alighieri, but ya know, if you can do it! [laughs]
Dave: Hey, go for it! We
have no idea what future technology is going to bring. The other thing is, did
you do anything on “Spider-Whore” #1? I know I put your name on the cover.
Matt: No, I did not.
Dave: You did not? Like
absolutely nothing?
Matt: Uhh, if I remember
correctly, we did “The Amicable Spider-Vark” and then I think it was Hobbs
suggested it, and I went oh yeah I have that comic, and I think I may have
suggested some wording for the cover, but it wasn’t used.
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Yeah, cause sales went up on that one. And the rule on “Cerebus in Hell?” is if
the sales go up from the previous issue, then everybody gets a royalty check,
and I was going to cut you a royalty check, but better find out if he actually
did something on it before I go through on that.
Matt: It was one of
those, we had kicked around ideas and then when your drawing for Spider-Whore
came in over the fax, it was, yeah I can’t think of anything to write for that,
so I’ll bow out for this one, guys.
Dave: Okay. Benjamin did
let me know it was Laura McFarlane who came up with the name, so she gets a
royalty, Benjamin did some work on it, he gets a royalty, David Birdsong gets a
royalty, Sandeep Atwell, of course, gets the 4% co-creator royalty, and that pretty
well wipes out all of the profits.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s not quite
that bad, but anyway.
Matt: Eddie asked me,
“you didn’t have anything to do with this one, did ya?” and I’m like, no, but
I’ll take free copies, so he sent me 15 copies, so I signed 5 and they’re
coming up to ya as soon as I get to the post office and mail the big box of
“everything I need to send Dave”.
Dave: Okay. Maybe I owe
you a royalty for using your name on the front cover.
Matt: No, no, no, no,
cause if that were true, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would owe me a
million.
Dave: [laughs] This is
true. This is true. You should your last name… divorce Paula and marry somebody
named Jones, so your last name is Dow-Jones.
Matt: For years, it’s
been, “are you related to the Dow chemical people?” No. “Are you related to Dow
Jones?” No. “Are you related to Dow Canvas?” which is a local company, and I’m
like, no. And then I’m like, well, maybe, but not enough that they’ll lend me money.
Dave: Right, so who
cares? If it’s not close enough to lend you money, we’ll just skip that part. I
got something from before. I don’t remember who it was that asked about the
reference that Matt Wagner had done to Dave Sim in the last issue of “Mage”,
and they were talking to Dave Sim, was this a collaboration or whatever? As I
said when I answered the question, I think it was Matt Wagner toying with the
idea of self-publishing that I had talked to him about it at the End of Mage
party and there’s a part of me in my 60s that goes, “did that actually happen?
Did I actually go to an End of Mage party in Philadelphia? It’s not something
that you would make up. But it sounds implausible.” And then I was looking in
the archive room, as usual, for something else, and I found the big legal book
that incorporated Aardvark-Vanaheim back in 1981 with Deni’s signature on it,
my signature on it. And under that was a three ring binder that appears to be
Karen McKiel’s “appointments for Dave Sim” binder, where I would tell her
something. Like it’s got the planning for the Hawaii trip in it, with various
places that we could stay, the pluses and minuses of them, how much it was
gonna cost, flying out December 30th, 1986, flying back in April 1st,
1987. I forgot that we visited with Harlan Ellison when stopped over in Los
Angeles on New Year’s Eve, we over to Ellison Wonderland, and Gerhard and I
both went over there. Hard to believe that that would slip my mind, but it
slipped my mind. So it’s definitely one of the pluses of having all of this
stuff written down and not throwing anything out. Anyway, on one of the pages,
stapled to the page, is a postcard, which says, “Comico Christmas Party” and
one of the Mage characters has spray-painted over the top of it, “last issue of
Mage party” and Mage is in the foreground going, “hold.” The date was Saturday
December 13th. Going from 8pm to question mark, and the address that
the party was at, Queen’s Street Court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1806 to
1814 Green Street #206. What’s that Google Earth thing, where you can actually
look at the building?
Matt: Uh yeah, Google
Earth.
Dave: Google Earth, but
it’s like Google Street or uhh…
Matt: You go to Google
Earth, you type in the address and then it’ll give you the option of looking at
street view.
Dave: Oh, street view.
That’s what I was trying think of. Thank you. Okay. So, I’m curious if anybody
out there is curious, as to where Matt Wagner and Joe Matt and several of the
Comico “Mage” people were living at the time. I don’t know if 1806 to 1814 Green
Street still looks the same as it did then, but watch for the second floor, and
look for a Steve Ditko style window. I don’t think I imagined that part, and if
it still exists, that would be pretty cool to say, it still exists! Somebody
lives there who probably doesn’t do comics at this point.
Matt: Maybe. Or maybe
somebody who was into comics was looking to buy a place and went, “a Steve
Ditko window!”
Dave: [laughs] That’s
very possible! It’s never strayed out of the comic book field, because anybody
who works in comics isn’t looking at where the bathrooms are, or how large the
bedrooms are, or how big the closets are, it’s, “hey, a Steve Ditko window! Man
oh man, let’s live here.” Okay, I think we’re moving onto… no, we’re not moving
on to the actual questions yet. What’s the other thing that I had to get to?
Oh, the “High Society: Regency Edition”, and I checked in with Dagon to say,
I’m getting ready to do “Please Hold for Dave Sim” for January, the last that I
had heard was the “High Society: Regency Edition” was going on sale January
13th. And could he confirm or not confirm that that was the case. And he wrote
back, this is January 6th, yesterday, 7am, “the pre-sale window will
open sometime this month.” What do you suppose a pre-sale window is?
Matt: I don’t know!
[laughs]
Dave: I don’t know
either, but it sounds like one of those, you might get a couple of chances
here, like there’s a pre-sale window, and then a window window. But what
happens if they all sell in the pre-sale window?
Matt: This is one of
those, somebody somewhere is gonna start crying and yelling at you and at me,
and it’s like, we have very little to do with this.
Dave: [laughs] That’s
right! It’s like, I’m giving you the information that I’ve got. I’ve underlined
it in the fax, “the pre-sale window will open sometime this month”, so it is
January. There’s 23 days where it could be the pre-sale window will be opening
sometime this month. I guess you ran a teaser for the “High Society: Regency
Edition” in the last little while?
Matt: Uhh… Dagon redid
the website for the Waverly Press and for the Cerebus Overstock…
Dave: That’s what it
was!
Matt: And now there is a
page on the website for the “Regency Edition”, it says that it is coming soon,
but it also, because of the widgets involved with selling things online, it
says it’s sold out. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Okay,
that’s what happened. I got a phone message from a Cerebus fan saying, they
clicked on it, they went for the clickbait, it took them to the website, and it
said that it was sold out. And it’s like I’m going, I don’t think that’s the
case, but I can’t 100% say as the publisher of Aardvark-Vanaheim, I’m not the
publisher of Waverly Press, that that isn’t the case. Anyway, the unnamed
Cerebus fan [cough cough] Jeff Seiler [cough cough] said, “I will pay you twice
as much for one of the ‘High Society: Regency Editions’ if you’re getting
some.” Ya know, besides the Cerebus archive copies. And it’s like, uhh, I’m way
ahead of everybody on this one, Jeff. It’s like, the Cerebus archive isn’t
gonna have any copies of the “High Society: Regency Edition” cause this is got
potential mess written all over it and I don’t want to be holding any of these.
But I did negotiate back and forth with Dagon, saying how many signed and
numbered copies can I get, and can I get the earliest copies? It’s like, you’re
the Waverly Press publisher, so this is your call, you’re the one who printed
up the extra 150, 200 copies of “High Society” to be made into hardcovers. If I
can just have the third three, I’ll live with that. But it’s just the first
three. We settled on 10, but they’re not coming here. Like I’m going to sign
all of the prints that go with it, and the tipped in plate for the book itself,
and the first 10 will be going directly from Waverly to Heritage Auctions. So,
Heritage Auctions will be auctioning the first 10.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: The idea being
that, that way I’ve got a hockey stick curve out of this, potentially. Like,
the Heritage Auction guys know what they’re doing, so I don’t know what I would
do with that. Would I start auctioning #10 and do a countdown? I’m inclined to
go that way, that you auction the #10 and people see what the 10 went for, what
the 9 went for, what the 8 went for. That’s where the hockey stick curve comes
in, cause they go, “okay, so the #1 is gonna for a lot more than this”, so
start getting your mind wrapped around that. But I don’t know if the Heritage
guys are gonna do that. If they would say, “no you go the other way. You
auction the #1, and then people go, ‘oh okay, so it will be a percentage of
that. This is the percentage that I am willing to pay’.” Like, my theory was
let’s say that there are 150 of them, let’s do 150 auctions. One a week, for
the next three years, because then you’re sort of like breaking it to them
gently. Every week a new one auctioned, and the first one’s probably going to
go for more than any of the ones after that, because that’s just the way
auctions online tend to work. But how much of a drop-off is there, and where
does it bottom out? And does it? And if it doesn’t, well, it’s gonna take them
a year to figure that out. Like “I keep waiting for the price to collapse on
these, so that I can afford one of them, but unfortunately the price isn’t
collapsing because there’s at least 250 people on the waiting list to get one,
who expressed interest, and there’s only 150 of them, or there’s only 200 of
them.” That seemed more sensible to me. I think that’s more the direction we’re
going to go in with the next hardcover’s going to be “Form & Void” because
that’s the book that I need to get back in print. That’s been out of print
longer than any the other trade paperbacks. So what I’m experimenting with is
going in the reverse order. Instead of telling Diamond, okay the next
remastered book is “Form & Void” will you guys take 1000. Yeah, they’ll
take 1000, but they’ll have to solicit for it first. And if they have to
solicit for it first, that’s essentially a three or four month process before
they find out, “okay this is how many we sold of the remastered edition through
the solicitations. That justifies the X number of copies above that, up to the
1000.” What I want to do is do the hardcover and whatever Aardvark-Vanaheim is
from Waverly Press for the hardcover when that sells, whatever issue of
“Cerebus” we can time for doing the Kickstarter at the same time, in this case
“Cerebus” #2, I think. If I combine the royalties on the hardcover and whatever
I can sell the #2 covers for through Heritage Auctions, then whatever I can
sell the first 10 hardcovers through Heritage Auctions for, and whatever the
royalty would be on the “Cerebus” #2 facsimile edition and new covers. I put
all of that money together, and I can just print 1000 copies for Diamond Comics
and maybe print a bunch just for Aardvark-Vanaheim to have and to send to a few
other people, without what has been the story of my life for the last 14 years,
always having to keep the price of a new car in the bank, because I never know
when I’m actually going to get to the printing bill part. And the printing
bills are just not getting smaller. They’re not getting big as fast as they
were last year, when I think there was like four or five price increases in one
year, but definitely the price of printing isn’t coming down. So it was has to
be... the 1000 trade paperbacks for Diamond really are just a service to the
comic book industry, to the direct market. If somebody’s wants a “Form &
Void”, here, Diamond’s got them, it’s a solved problem. 1000 copies at the rate
“Form & Void” sells is probably a ten year supply. 1000 copies of the
“Cerebus” trade paperback is probably a one year supply. So being able to pay
for the remastering, which is where Aardvark-Vanaheim’s Spawn 10 royalties
went, it’s, as long as the money’s here, now, then let’s use it. What’s the
best purpose of it, is paying Sean to remaster the remaining trade paperbacks.
So that’s what we’re working on right now. Sean has been paid for each of the
remaining six trade paperbacks, except for “Latter Days”. “Latter Days” will be
the last one, and that’s not really a problem because I’ve still got 750 copies
of “Latter Days”. So that’s a solved problem. Diamond will always be able to
get “Latter Days” and they only have to order 50 of them at a time, which is
what they prefer to do. They want this much for this long, we don’t want a
massive quantity of these, but we’ll work with you if that’s what’s necessary.
So, it’s really not a profit making side of it, the direct market. Because when
Diamond orders 50 copies of “Latter Days” and I send it to them, like the last
purchase order was, I think $800? $900 worth of “Latter Days”? And it cost $400
to ship them. So, [laughs] it’s like, yeah, kind of a tough way to make a
living here. Okay, let’s get our ducks in a row, but let’s put them in a
different row.
Matt: It does kind of
make sense to flip the usual script, because instead of waiting for Diamond to
want 1000, print 1000 and then they’re there and you don’t have to worry about
the problem of, “oh jeeze, we gotta print ‘Form & Void’ and we gotta print ‘Melmoth’
and they’re down to the last 7 ‘Jaka’s Story’s.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: Where it’s not
even having to print 1000 copies, it’s having to print 3000 copies of three
different books.
Dave: Right! Right.
That’s the problem. I mean, there are pluses, there are bright sides to it. The
printing technology is getting a lot better, so there’s a lot less waste. So
you can actually get a printing quote from Marquis, or at least I can, anyway,
for 250 copies of something. It’s reasonably expensive to print that few, but
it’s not impossible the way it was. Like Preney Print & Litho, no, you
can’t print less than 1000 comic books because we have to run the press for
this length of time until it’s printing clearly enough and we’d be throwing
away twice as many comic books as we’re actually selling to you. And even at
that point, it’s like, hmm, you’re getting some dicey printing out of this, but
this is part of the trade off. You’re just not printing enough copies to make
this worthwhile, what we’re doing.
Matt: So
all the books are remastered except for “Latter Days”?
Dave: No, there’s six
more.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: I’ve got my little
stack of stuff around here. One of the things I didn’t bring was the batting
order, but the next two are “Form & Void” and “The Last Day” will be
running out. The good news on both of those is that I do have the negatives for
both of those books, for “Form & Void” and “The Last Day”. Roly finished
scanning all of the Cerebus archive “Form & Void” artwork today, so that’ll
be going to Sean. Sean sent me a fax, saying the remastering is going really
really good on “Form & Void”. It’s very different, because it’s a black
& white book. Usually the biggest problem for him is what he’s doing with
the tone, and there’s very very little tone on it, but there’s a fair amount of
retouching of paste-up edges. Because a lot of the backgrounds it’s, Gerhard,
you’re going to be redoing the backgrounds repeatedly, so just do it once, and
shoot photocopies of it and paste it in. But Sean is definitely jazzed about
this one. He says this is gonna be an amazing, amazing looking book. Once I realized
that the scanning part is actually going a lot faster than I thought it would,
Roly has been able to scan all of the “Form & Void” artwork that Cerebus
archive has, just over the course of the last two weeks. Sean already had all
of Gerhard’s scans of Gerhard’s “Form & Void” artwork, so that’s just
designated with a G in Roly’s spreadsheet so he knows, okay, these are the ones
I scanned today. I labeled them. I stick them into Sean’s spreadsheet, and this
will tell us once he’s put in a few hours doing that process, then it’ll be,
okay, what pages are missing? Are any pages missing? And if there are missing
pages, he has to go through whatever, 300 negatives all stripped together on
the flats and cut those apart and separate them into the original negative and
find the four or five that are missing, because that’s next best quality for
Sean to work with. And then that, going, alright, we’re moving a little faster
on that then I thought we were going to, what’s my next stage? Because it was
like, once it was off my desk, it was gonna be a while before I heard from
anybody, cause everybody else was up to their eyeballs. But it’s like, okay, if
the scanning’s done, then the next thing I want Roly to do is to scan all of
the “Form & Void” tracing paper, which there’s a fair amount of “Form &
Void” tracing paper. So that was one of the things that he did today, and then
put them in plastic 11 by 17 covers with white backing boards. He’ll be
emailing those to Dagon, and it’s like, Dagon, here’s all of the “Form &
Void” tracing paper. Use it in the “Form & Void” hardcover in whatever way
that you want. I only make suggestions, I don’t want Dagon running
Aardvark-Vanaheim, Dagon doesn’t want Dave Sim running Waverly Press, but it’s
like, I went, why don’t you do tracing paper trading cards? Because people
haven’t seen all of the tracing paper, and why don’t you do three different
trading cards, which would be the standard size trading cards, which we’ve
already seen with Spawn 10 and “Cerebus” #1, large trading cards which would be
another 50% larger than the trading cards the original size, and then giant
trading cards which are only giant because trading cards are tiny little
things. So it’s like, why hasn’t anybody done a giant trading card? You can do
a giant trading card that’s almost the size of the hardcover, but it looks
exactly like a trading card, it’s just, whatever, 5 inches by 7 inches, and you
can see the tracing paper on it. So, I didn’t hear back from Dagon. I imagine
he’ll be mulling that one over for a while, like “giant size trading cards?”
Well, I’m not a hardcover guy, I’m not a trading card guy, so I’m going to come
up with very weird suggestions.
Matt: It’s not the worst
idea!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: He’s already doing
the postcards and technically a postcard is just a giant trading card.
Dave: Right! It just
looks like a postcard on the back. If you put a trading card back on that, you
just go, “whoa, dude! Giant trading card. Coolness!”
Matt: Part of it’s my
memory, but I remember as a kid having a giant coloring book that was huge, I
mean it was as tall as I was.
Dave: Right! Right,
because that’s what we’re talking about in this category. When you’re attaching
trading cards to graphic novels, you’re really scratching that inner seven year
old itch. And giant is just the absolute best thing with this [inaudible]. I don’t
know why, but “yeah, wow, look! Giant trading cards!”
Matt: I’m just thinking
about, you know, there’s at least two or three tracing papers out there that if
they were to be a trading card, yeah, as close to life size as possible please.
Like the background tracing paper that Gerhard did of the Sanctuary from one
panel of “Latter Days” that the actual panel is in shadow and you can’t see any
of the detail, but it was part of “Ye Bookes of Cerebus” show. And all the
Yahoos freaked out when we saw it, we were like, “can we get that as a poster?”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: “Ger, you were
just tracing to get your idea of what you were going to do with it. This isn’t
finished artwork, why are you putting so much detail?” and he’s like, “cause I
was bored.” [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. [laughs] It
wasn’t time for lunch yet! That’s when Gerhard did the thing for “Wizard
Magazine”, his working method, and it was like, right there in the middle of
everything, is, “is it time for lunch? Well, if it isn’t time for lunch yet,
might as well put in some extra time there.” Yeah, I got my, I did a, actually
very finished background where Jaka goes to the Inn that they have to find out
if she and Cerebus can stay there, with all of the birch trees in the
background. And that’s a good two feet by three feet, Roly had to find giant
plastic bags, which were like two backing boards wide, and it turns out it
would cost as much to get 250 of them as it would to get 40 of them, so he went
ahead and got 250 of them, so we don’t have a lifetime supply, but we got a
bunch of them. But yeah, it would be, why not do one two foot by three foot
trading card and make it an absolutely giant, here’s all of the detail that you
would be missing on something. I dunno, we’ll find out. Our minds are playgrounds
and the world is our oyster.
Matt: And I’m sure
there’s somebody listening to this, well not right now, when it’s actually up
on the internet, that’s gonna listen to this, going, “I hate you both. I hate
you both. I can’t afford that. I don’t have the wall space. I hate you both.”
Dave: [laughs] That’s
not my problem. This is one of the things that I have learned from Dagon, is,
it’s not our problem to figure out how everybody can afford this. Our problem
is to tempt everybody by going, “you’re really really going to want this” and
Dagon is also, like he’s very very focused on one and done. You get the book
done, and then the book is done. You don’t do the book again. You don’t reprint
it. You don’t try to figure out how to get a Brian Jones box set that he did
into every Rolling Stones fan’s hands. That’s not the situation from Dagon’s
point of view. That would be like #6 on his list if it was even on his list. #1
is doing the absolute coolest Brian Jones book with this material that you
could possibly do, and then everything else has to fit itself in around there.
Yeah, don’t look daggers at Matt Dow or Dave Sim, we’re just the Greek chorus
off to the side, singing possible choruses to the aria that Dagon James is
projecting across Cerebus fandom.
Matt: When he was doing
the “Secret History of the Counterfeit” book and he emailed me going, “is there
anything you can help me with to get material for this?” and I’m like, I gotta
talk to somebody else, but yeah, I’ll see what I got. And I emailed Margaret,
and it’s like, Margaret’s pulling up everything, sending it to me and Dagon,
and Dagon’s going, “oh wow, thanks. Oh wow, thanks. Oh wow, thanks.” and I’m
finding stuff and he’s going, “oh wow, thanks. Oh wow, thanks.” And then Eddie
got in on it and it’s “oh wow, thanks” and then when I got the initial proof.
He and Sean put together the initial proof and emailed it of, “this is a very
rough rough. This is just the rough, it’s not finished, it’s not polished, but
any notes?” and I started giving notes, and I signed my email at the end,
saying, “you did ask me to edit this. I understand it’s a rough, but you asked
for editor Matt and editor Matt, as the Yahoo Group learned, is not the kind of
person you want to invite to a party.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And Sean came back
with, “I said it was just a rough”, I’m like, I understand that. But the point
here is, you asked for feedback and I’m gonna be brutal.
Dave: Right, right,
exactly.
Matt: When the second
draft came, I’m like, there’s a couple little tweaks I would make, but other
than that, yeah, this is great!
Dave: Good stuff. I got
one more that we gotta do before we get to the actual questions. Keith
Callbeck, I forget the name of his podcast, out in Calgary, did an interview
with me, oh, a while back now. He sent me a fax updating me on a few things.
Sent me a very nice piece of Cerebus art, and I wanted to quote his second
paragraph, this just came in the mail today. “I have discovered that the most
pleasant place on the internet for talking about comics is the Official Cerebus
Facebook Group. Wonderful folks there, great discussion.” And it’s like, when
do you ever hear a really positive comment about anything having to do with the
internet? So I wanted to throw that out there. That’s Oliver, right? Like
Oliver…
Matt: Oliver and
Margaret, yeah.
Dave: Yeah, so, they run
a pretty tight ship, but they’re also pretty flexible and I think it was,
they’ve got the discussion group that we’ve been hoping was out there somewhere
since back in the Yahoo days.
Matt: Yeah. I mean,
everybody in the Facebook group is pretty good about not just posting extremely
tangential things. If it doesn’t have you, Cerebus, Gerhard or possibly Turtles
8, it doesn’t go up.
Dave: Right. Right. Good
plan.
Matt: I love taking
selfies in my Cerebus clothes and masks and stuff and putting them on there,
and then immediately I get like five likes, and it’s like, I don’t think they
realize that Ron Essler is me, but ya know.
Dave: [laughs] Well, you
keep mentioning it on “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, eventually it’s got to sink
in, right?
Matt: I Photoshopped a
photo of me wearing my black “He doesn’t love you, he just wants your money”
t-shirt, holding a copy of the remastered #1, and then another picture of me
where I’m wearing my blue “Cerebus for Dictator” shirt, holding the “Cerebus”
#1 and Photoshopped it so the two of us are together holding the same comic.
And I titled it, “a rare photo of Matt Dow and Ron Essler together.”
Dave: Just proving that
the one guy can’t be the other. Superman went and got President Kennedy to do
that, to pretend to be Clark Kent, in “Action Comics” #309. I’m sure you knew
that already.
Matt: Everybody that is
a Superman fan knows that one, because that’s the infamous issue from November
of 1963.
Dave: Right, right.
Okay, moving onto the actual question, “Dave it’s that time of year again” you
say. David Hartman asks, “Am I the only one who thinks that this would be more
viable as a t-shirt?” and he’s got the “Crossing Over” graphic. I think you
added, “I mean I can add it to the TeePublic shop if you don’t have any
objections” and it’s like, I don’t have any objections. How is the TeePublic
shop doing?
Matt: I owe you $62.75
for the past three months, and then on the 15th I’ll get paid for
whatever December’s sales were.
Dave: Okay, so, kidney
shape swimming pool time.
Matt: It’s one of those,
it’s weird because nothing nothing nothing, and I write the check out, then all
of a sudden, I get three emails from TeePublic saying, “you made a sale!” and
it’s $7 total. And I’m like, okay, and then nothing nothing nothing, it’s just
about the end of the month, and there’ll be a sale for something. Part of it,
TeePublic says you have to have 25 designs minimum before your store will do
better. And I’m going, great, but what 25 designs are we going to put on that
will fit all the products they have?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Like when I did
the “Batvark: Penis” stuff, I made sure the facemask was close enough that it
looks like Batvark’s face when you’re wearing it.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But then when
“Hermann” came out, the cover design doesn’t really lend itself to do that, so
it’s the cover. And then we did the “Hrm” edition virgin cover, and I asked
Hobbs and Birdsong about it of, hey do you have any notes? And Hobbs was going,
“you should make it so that it’s a clear background on the image, but only
printed in black t-shirts.” [laughs]
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: And I’m going,
okay, that makes sense, cause then I started playing around going, you know, if
you put the orange logo on an orange shirt, it’s not quite the same orange, but
at the same time it looks really really stupid and there’s part of me going, we
should put it up there cause somebody’s gonna think it’s funny and want to buy
it.
Dave: Right. Somebody
is, I mean, if it’s taking you three months to make $62 worth of royalties for
Aardvark-Vanaheim, well there’s plenty of room for playing around here. It’s
not like you’re gonna kill sales by making a wrong move. I mean, I look at the
“Crossing Over” thing and I go, if you printed that white on black, depending
on where you were printing it, it would look cool, but it was be a very strange
garment to wear. People going, “Crossing Over? Crossing over into what and who
are these two characters that I’m looking at? Are these even characters?”
Matt: Is this the
t-shirt for a Christian rock band?
Dave: Right! Right, or
transgendered people, or whatever! You know, it’s, “Yeah I want one of those,
I’m crossing over myself.”
Matt: Or is the kind of
shirt you can only wear when you’re going into or out of Canada?
Dave: [laughs] Which
you’re not supposed to do. We’re just starting to find out now, since the
pandemic began, we’ve just been letting everybody into Canada through the
airports without checking up on them. So they’re having a pilot project now,
why don’t we say like most other countries on the planet, you’ve got to have a
negative test in the last 72 hours or you can’t come into our country? And it’s
like, no, that sounds racist to Canadians. How can you tell nice Asian people
or nice black people they can’t come into your country just because they don’t
have a negative test. Well, because, theoretically, this is a pandemic. I mean,
you’re locking people up in their houses. Oh, let’s not get started on that.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: We’re just having
fun here, and I have learned a while ago, if you think that Dave Sim usually
doesn’t have the same opinions as everybody else, let’s not start talking about
COVID-19.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uhh, Margaret Liss
asks, the first one, “DC Bulletins vol 1 #1, an ad for now & then times,
did dave do the art for it? there is no signature that I can see, nor a credit
for it in the issue.” And indeed I did do the wretched piece of art that you see
before you. This would have been 1973, because I’m talking about “order Now and
Then Times #2”. In 1973, this is Dave Sim going, c’mon, if you squint a little
bit, it looks like an Al Williamson photo-realistic background. Doesn’t it?
Huh? Doesn’t it?! And it’s like, no it doesn’t. You’re using way too thick a
brush, and you’re using speedball pen nibs that are used for wide lettering,
and you’re trying to do an Al Williamson? I mean, God help you. Then I got my
magnifying glass out, so that I could actually read the copy. This is
definitely just typed on my typewriter, “Now and Then Books has the largest
stock of any back-issue comic book store in southern Ontario”. Well, [laughs]
you see, there were only two of them. There was Now and Then Books and Memory
Lane in Toronto, but just make it sound as good as you can. “With complete runs
of many Marvel titles from the early 60s to the present” and it’s like, what?!
Harry never had complete runs of Marvel titles. He had back issues and when he
opened in 71 he had a copy of “Fantastic Four“ #1 with the unheard of price at
the time of $50 on it. And it’s like, everybody was giving him a hard time,
“Harry, you can’t sell a ‘Fantastic Four’ #1 for $50.” “Well, it’s my
‘Fantastic Four’ #1, I don’t really want to sell it anyway.” “Literally
thousands of National comics books in stock from the 50s and 60s.” Thousands?
No. “Complete runs of Justice League, Superman, Batman, Action, Detective”,
complete runs?!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: No, I really don’t
think so. I’m wondering if what I was doing here, was going, “maybe I can tempt
people to actually drive all the way to Kitchener, Ontario to go, ‘okay, I’ve
at least got to see this. Complete runs of Superman, Batman, Action, Detective?”
“Showcase appearances of many of the more popular 60s characters.” That would
be a stretch, as well. I remember Harry maybe having “Showcase” with the first
Atom. I don’t think he ever had the one with Green Lantern, 22 to 24. “Pre-code
horror and crime titles at low prices”. At low prices because they were in
garbage condition.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: They were like,
you’d be overpaying to buy them for 50 cents. But, I was sitting in Harry’s
kitchen, drinking his tea and reading these 1940s crime noir comics. So I might
as well mention them. “Charlton, Dell, Disney, including many early issues.
More than 90% of our stock is Overstreet priced or lower!” Uhh, that was
probably accurate. Everybody was a little leery of Overstreet the first two or
three years they were there. It wasn’t as bad as Howard Rogofsky, but it was
still, ehh, you’re really pushing it. No comic book should go for that. “Visit
our store in downtown Kitchener or send a list of your wants.” [laughs] The
idea that Harry would get in a list of somebody’s wants and go, “well, I’ll
have to watch out for those. Let this guy know that, no, we haven’t had a
‘Batman’ #7 come in yet, but as soon as we do. “You will be advised of what we
have, the price and conditions available.” Conditions, plural. “We also buy
comics. Send a list of what you have to sell and conditions for an estimate. Include
a self-addressed stamped envelope. The best comics at the best prices with the
fastest service.” Ehh, real stretch on all of those. Then of course, the point
of the ad was plugging Now and Then Times #2. My assumption was, if you mention
a fanzine with all of these amazing names in it, more than 50 pages for $1,
everybody is going to want a copy of this. But then, that was at the same time,
Al Hewetson, as it says here, did a tribute to the late Syd Shores in the Now
and Then Times. He actually pasted up all the pages and sent them to us, then
agreed to plug Now and Then Times #2 in a Skywald magazine. “Psycho”,
“Nightmare”, or “Scream” I forget which one it was in, and I’m thinking, okay,
we’re gonna be rich! Because “Psycho” must sell to… however many people it
sells. Ya know, it’s a newsstand magazine, it probably was shipping 80,000,
100,000 copies at the time. And then we got orders for I think 12 copies? He
did a fair sized plug, and it had a cover reproduction and mentioned that
archaic Al Hewetson did this article on Syd Shores, so you should pick it up
for that alone. And just completely stricken, phoning Al Hewetson and saying,
“we only got like 12 orders.” [laughs] He went, “actually that’s really good!
Usually people don’t buy any copies of stuff that I plug.” So that was a real
eye-opener for the 17 year old Dave Sim, who just thought that anything that
gets plugged anywhere in the mainstream media, and that’s it, you’re just going
to become rich overnight.
Matt: [laughs] And you
learned!
Dave: Well, yes. Slowly,
I learned. Definitely not at the time that I put this ad together. Margaret
Liss asks the second one, “Poster of cover to #53 - one version just has the
art, called "Countess Michelle Poster". Another one has the art plus
text in red 'Like No Other Comic'.” Which, credit where it’s due, that’s… ohh,
don’t have the name slip your mind, Vice President at DC Comics… Richard
Bruning! Richard Bruning was the one who came up with “Like No Other Comic”. I
thought that was brilliant. I thought all we had to do was have a good graphic,
and again, we would be getting incredibly rich overnight. “I’m thinking the
like no other comic was sent to comics shops, but what about the no text one?
And which poster come first.” Umm, that’s a very good question. My memory isn’t
good enough on it, but I think the “Like No Other Comic” was the first one that
we did, and I think, what we always tried to do was to send the same number of
posters that the distributor ordered comic books. If you ordered 100 copies of
Cerebus every issue, then we would send you 100 of the posters. Please send
these to your accounts, which probably didn’t happen, or if it did, it didn’t
happen as reliably as it should. And Cerebus wasn’t really in that category.
It’s like, yes, good idea, comic stores like posters and people glom onto
posters, but they glom onto DC posters, and Marvel posters, and “Epic Magazine”
posters, and all of the major brands. They’re not going, “wow that’s a really
cool for poster for a comic I’ve never heard of that’s just this weird, funny
animal and this chick in her bedroom and not doing anything particularly
interesting considering that they’re in her bedroom.” So it really didn’t work
in that sense, and then I think after that it was, “wow that’s a really great
poster, I’d really like to get one of those. But why does it say ‘Like No Other
Comic’ on it?” It’s like, “well because it’s supposed to be an ad. It’s
supposed to be something that’s going to attract attention.” Well, all it did
was attract bad attention. “If you take that off, I would really like to get
one of those.” The comments on Facebook, “perhaps the Countess Michelle poster
was the one that came with Newsletter #10?” That’s very possible. I’m assuming
from that, that somebody has a Newsletter #10 that refers to the poster, or a
poster that everybody got and no mention of what the poster was, and that’s why
it could be a distinct possibility. Probably sent folded, so you might want to
check the one with no type on it and see if it’s folded down the middle, so it
would be possible to mail it comfortably to the Fan Club members. #2 is cut
off, “Someone got a copy of the Countess Michelle poster at a signing you did
in” and I turned to the next page, and… it doesn’t say in. So…
Matt: Uhh, how do I do
this?
Dave: [laughs] Quickly,
quickly. And efficiently!
Matt: Alright… with the
button…
Dave: It’s definitely my
1980s signature, I can’t…
Matt: Oh, Margaret’s
actual email to me says, “someone got a copy of the Countess Michelle poster at
a signing you did in” and that’s it. [laughs] So this is on Margaret, not on
us!
Dave: Okay, Margaret,
you’re driving us crazy! Oh, this is great. It’s everybody’s fault but ours.
The first half of the show is Dagon’s fault, and the second half of the show is
Margaret’s fault. That’s good.
Matt: This is what
Margaret gets for selling that tracing paper drawing you sent her
ex-girlfriend, who was her girlfriend at the time, of Ham Ernestway naked.
Dave: Did I do that?
Matt: Yeah! It was, how
do you learn to draw Ernest Hemingway? Well, first you gotta do a nude, and
it’s him sitting on the camp stool and he’s only wearing a hat and boots, and
obviously sitting so you can’t see any of his naughty bits. But you sent it to
Margaret for her girlfriend at the time. Years ago.
Dave: And Margaret sold
it?
Matt: I believe she
auctioned it on eBay.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: This is what
Margaret gets for getting rid of it. [laughs]
Dave: There you go.
There you go. Well, we’ll make this a “stay tuned for February” when Margaret
will let us know, what came after the “in”. Margaret Liss, “I probably had
more, but I’ve forgotten. Plus Dave did a two parter with the page from the
notebook I asked about. Thank you Dave for that!” You’re quite welcome. I was
walking to Wilf on the phone, Wilf Jenkins. And he’s sort of come back to visit
A Moment of Cerebus a few times now, and I was explaining to him about “Please
Hold for Dave Sim” and that it’s very easy for Cerebus Fangirl who has all of
the notebooks to find a notebook page and go, “oh this is interesting. I wonder
what this is about?” and just say, “uh Dave, can you tell me what this is
about?” and it’s like, I can! [laughs] But three of those are probably going to
take an hour and a half just to explain, and then everybody’s going to go, “oh
well, that wasn’t really much of anything! I usually listen to ‘Please Hold for
Dave Sim’ but, that was even overdoing it for me.” But, speaking of overdoing
it, I wrote next to Margaret’s note there, “Peter Nygard” who is a Canadian
fashion maven, billionaire as far as I know, and has gotten himself into Me Too
trouble, Jeffery Epstein style Me Too trouble. Possible underage girls at his
palatial estate on some island in the Caribbean, I think it is. Anyway, what
interested me about the story, going back to the pedophile thing. One of the
things that has happened to Peter Nygard out of this situation, and he’s a
flight risk, they had a piece on it in this National Post this morning, saying
that he has been denied bail because the same as what’s her name, “you’re a
flight risk. You have no shortage of ways to get away from justice and we don’t
want you getting away from justice.” But one of the things that had come up in
an earlier article that I was reading about him, was that his two sons are
suing him for statutory rape for having his girlfriend or wife at the time have
sex with them when they were underage. And it’s like, mm, that’s in that weird
Joseph Kennedy patriarch, Kennedy style thing of, I think we agree on that now
as a consensus that you don’t want to do that. That underage boys, like
underage girls, shouldn’t be having sex. But if you look at that one, I’m moved
to wonder, were the sons really traumatized by this, and are like piling on dad
with everybody else at this time, or is this a way of keeping some money in the
family by having them sue their father? Because there are enough Me Too
complaints against this guy that the empire’s probably gone at this point.
However many creditors he’s got, they’re circling like vultures and hyenas, so
there’s no way he’s going to be leaving his estate to his sons, so possibly the
only way for them to get money out of this and to hang on to some of their
father’s estate, is to sue him for statutory rape. How would you determine that
that was the case, or that wasn’t the case? And this is where I think you get
into these really really awkward areas, where it’s like, yes, this is a
completely unsavory thing that has happened in the past. The courts aren’t
competent to adjudicate this. There’s just too much stuff happening behind the
scenes. Another permutation of that one is, what’s the culpability of the wife
or girlfriend, who, at his behest, raped his sons? Obviously, the story would
be, “well he told me to do it, so I did it because I did what he told me to
do.” But is that a defense? Like, if you’re admitting that you did that, and
the two sons are both saying, “yes, she did that”, you have free will. I mean,
very possibly, if you’re shacked up with a billionaire, or you’re the trophy
wife of a billionaire, you know how the game is played and “if I want to keep
this going, then I have to do what he tells me” and it’s like, but, again,
that’s not a defense. This is why I don’t think we can let go statutory rape to
the extent that some people seem to be, and have been for generations, pointing
toward. “There’s gray areas here.” I don’t think there’s any gray areas in
that. Again, I have trouble wrapping my head around the fact, okay, if this guy
is a fashion billionaire, then he’s probably got a super-hot girlfriend, or a
super-hot trophy wife, and if you’re a 13 year old boy or a 14 year old boy,
gee, it’s like the old “Playboy” cartoon of the kid unwrapping a buxom girl in
a negligee on Christmas in front of his parents and going, “gee, you’re the
best Mom and Dad ever!”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s like, yeah, I
would think that that would be your reaction, but again, you know, I do have
this Cerebus fan said, “no, I was seduced by an older woman when I was underage
and it was severely traumatic and I haven’t got over it and I don’t think I will
ever get over it.” And it’s like, mm, I don’t know. Can you extrapolate that to
everybody and say that’s always going to be the case and we have to prosecute
these things?
Matt: And it’s also a
question of, ya know, the details of, was Dad drinking, was the trophy wife or
girlfriend drinking, were they making the kids drink? It’s one of those,
there’s sordid details that nobody has any need to know, but at the same time,
in a court of law, well, was everybody high on coke?
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Was this a giant
bacchanal party, suddenly the kid comes downstairs to get a drink of water, and
it’s “hey, you’re downstairs during the party, guess what, you’re in the
party.”
Dave: See, that’s the
same way that I think of this. In the courts, you can’t jump back and forth
between, “well no that encroaches on people’s privacy to ask questions like
that”. Or “you’re trying to slut shame by saying this is the person’s sexual
history”. It’s like, well you kind of have to. I mean that average person
doesn’t do this. Presumably! [laugh] Unless the entire culture is pretending,
“well, okay yeah, we all do this, but we all pretend that we don’t.” I don’t
think that that’s the case, but in which case, if you’re going to bring this up
in a legal proceeding, as the Emperor Claudius said in Robert Graves’ “I,
Claudius”, “Let all the poison lurking in the mud hatch out.” You can’t just
say, “okay, let’s examine this partly”, it’s like, no, if it’s this poisonous,
then you have to keep going. And if you’re going to put him in the newspaper,
if you’re not going to say, “well okay, this has got a publication ban attached
to it. You’re not allowed to talk about any of this.” It’s like, well, if it’s
in the newspaper, tell me what you have to tell me that’s relevant to the
story, otherwise you’re just, wink wink, nudge nudge, having a titillating
story. Okay, there ya go, that was another one of those, this is the
conversation that I’ve been having in my head since 1969, 1970, 1971, and there
still are no clear answers, or certainly not as many clear answers as our
society seems to be portraying to itself. It’s like, no, we know what’s right
and wrong. This is right, this is wrong. I can’t picture any jury sending,
however old the trophy wife is now, probably in her 50s or something like that,
are you going to send her away for the length of time you would send somebody
away for statutory rape of an underage teenager, and would you send a woman
away for the same length of time that you would send a man away, for the same
crime? And if you wouldn’t, or you don’t, then aren’t we into, “okay, if we’re
talking about equality, then you’ve got to have equality before the law.” If a
man did this, he gets the same crime as if a woman does this. I don’t think
we’re there, but we keep pretending we have very clear demarcations on this.
Matt: The thing about
these kinds of cases that always bugs me is, okay, they go to court, the jury
rules against her. How many years ago was this, and what if in the intervening
years she’s become a nun? Do we believe as a society in redemption, where
somebody can be accused of a terrible crime, and then actually do the time and
then be redeemed of, “okay hey I did wrong, but now I’m a better person. I
volunteer in a soup kitchen. I live in a one bedroom apartment that has 300
square foot, blah blah blah. I’m not living that life anymore.”
Dave: Right, right. And
that gets over into, well that’s not court of law stuff, that’s religion stuff.
That’s like repentance and atonement. Courts of law don’t really take that into
account, because they’re not really set up for that. They’re there to find probable
cause and beyond a reasonable doubt and this is what a jury of your peers has
concluded about this. But you have to have consistent sentencing. You can’t
say, “well okay, this person presents well.” The whole psychiatric thing. I
don’t think that you can replace religion and the idea of your responsibility
in the eyes of God with, like taking the court of law and psychiatry and fusing
them together and saying, “with these two we will be able to determine all
reality.” All you end up with is, not criminally responsible because the guy
did something crazy, so consequently he can’t be criminally responsible because
he was crazy. And it’s like, [laughs] I don’t think that that’s sensible
either. Again, I’m Dave Sim, everybody disagrees with everything that I have to
say. Okay, we’re going to move onto Jeff Seiler. I have a question from last
time, when I had Roly email you Jeff’s audio question. We you able to put that
in?
Matt: Yes! That actually
really amazing, I could put it into the podcast where it’s all audio real
easily.
Dave: Good!
Matt: The video, I
spliced the video where, “okay we’re going to do Jeff’s question”, put in
Jeff’s question, and then I’m like, eh screw it, and I just put in the rest of
the video where you read his question, because I can. [laughs]
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Because he was asking about, this time you will get the questions, and he was
saying he’s going to leave it as a phone message because it’s kind of a dicey
area in terms of the symbolism in “Cerebus”. He had just proofread “Form &
Void” and obviously I had just read “Form & Void” checking his corrections,
37 of Jeff’s corrections survived into the final mix and are now on their way
to Sean Robinson along with virtually all of Aardvark-Vanaheim’s Spawn 10
money, which must be starting to prey on Sean because Roly keeps checking and
Roly told me today, it’s still in Chicago. It’s been in Chicago for a week now,
so I don’t know what the situation with that, maybe “Form & Void” is a
Democrat graphic novel, so it got to Chicago and it has no idea that San Diego
isn’t Chicago. Or it does know, and it’s going, “ahh, I don’t really want to
leave Chicago.” Well, you have to! There’s a check in with you that’s supposed
to go to Sean Robinson. So, we will see when this eventually gets to Sean. At
least it’s still showing up on Roly’s radar screen. Anyway, the symbolism was
the opening of the tents when Cerebus and Jaka was having sex and I do the
close-up, pull back, close-up, pull back, of the tent opening, which is vaginal
in character. If you’re looking at the tent aperture, yes, that’s definitely
what I’m calling to people’s minds, and Jeff was wondering how intentional that
was anytime in the course of the 6000 pages that showed Cerebus in a tent or
sticking his head out of a tent. And it’s like, well, I wouldn’t call it
intentional, but if you’re a visual artist and a graphic novelist you do have a
pretty clear idea of symbolism in terms of, “hey, do you know what that looks
like?” But I think that’s not something that I invented, or that’s not
something that I did intentionally that isn’t there in a different kind of
intention. The same as the hot dog. The frankfurter. The Coney Island hot dog.
If you look at the hot dog, and you look at it objectively, it’s definitely
penile and vaginal. If I put a hot dog into a comic strip or a comic book page,
I don’t think that the culpability is mine, I think it’s, no, human beings do
that. Particularly men, when it comes to inventing things. They’ve usually got
penises and vaginas, their penis and interchangeable vaginas, on the mind. So
that’s where you get things like the hot dog, or the pop up toaster. [laughs]
It’s like, the toaster is definitely vaginal and the toast is definitely penile
and the fact that it goes, “pop” and leaps up out of the vaginal toaster,
again, I don’t think there’s a particular level of culpability there. Like,
“you dirty minded pervert.” It’s like, well, do we really want to do without
toasters just because we know essentially where they come from?
Matt: There’s, I think
it’s one of the “Naked Gun” movies, there’s a love scene where Leslie Nielson
and Priscilla Presley, they go into the bedroom and then it’s a series of stock
footage of, ya know, a rocket going off, and a train going into the tunnel, all
that stuff.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I think they did
that in a couple of them, and then there’s, I don’t know if it’s one of the
“Naked Gun” movies or a different movie, where it’s the guy and the girl and
they go into the bedroom, and all of the stock footage goes, and then it cuts
to them, sitting on the end of the bed eating popcorn, and she turns to him
going, “are we just going to watch stock footage all night, or are we going to
make love?” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because, they’ve
done that bit in a number of things of, “oh yeah, okay, it’s time for the train
to go in the tunnel” and whatever it was, I can’t even remember what it was
where they did, “are we just gonna watch stock footage?”, I’m like that’s the
perfect send-up. It’s one of those, it’s great, as long as you understand
what’s going on.
Dave: Right, right. Jeff
had another question. Actually, “First question for Dave for this month:”,
sorry we did them our of order, Jeff. We did the second one first. “you wrote,
in ‘Following Cerebus’ #6, that ‘aardvarks ... were a dramatically rare
occurance. Of course, much later on, I realized that this had much in common
with prophethood, which likewise occurred spontaneously ... and which I see as
being a core element of God's overall plan: That the actual nature of
individual beings is decided by God alone, that each soul is individual.’ So
Jeff gets to his question, which is, “So, was Cerebus' life and adventures and
misadventures a case of free will or was it God's or Tarim's or your plan?
(Palnu odds are that your answer is ‘Highest level God’s Plan. Lower level Dave
Sim’s plan. Lowest level Cerebus’ free will.’ New Sephran odds: ‘That’sa fine
question. We’ll get to it after lunch. Where’s my linguini?’…’)” I think, I’ve
been trying to figure out a way to explain how I see free will, and I keep talking
about enactment. That we’re enacting things that have been enacted before, but
we’re enacting them in slightly different ways. And everybody finds their own
spot in that spectrum. Let me try a different approach to it, which is, we’re
running our programming. Our DNA is running our programming and our programming
is running us. Each human being gets 23 chromosomes from their mother, and 23
chromosomes from their father. That’s two different programs, and those two
programs fuse into the 46 chromosomes that becomes a new program. A bit of one,
and a bit of the other, simultaneously. But it is still programming, it’s just
far more intricate and far more subtle and nuanced than the finest tuned
computer program, and this, in my view, was designed by God. And it’s designed
to proliferate wherever it arrives and to ultimately allow God to retrieve data
of all of the different possibilities of how that occurs, the 23 chromosomes
and the 23 chromosomes, making 46. As I did in “The Last Day”, what allows the two
neutrinos out of every hundred neutrinos to escape that duality, that binary
trap that starts with helium and hydrogen, and incarnates as psychical begins
and incarnates as the two hemispheres of our brain, etc etc. The idea being
that if God does choose at some point to create a counterpart to God, what sort
of a counterpart would God create, and what are the elements that they would
have? So, again, it’s definitely preordained, because again, only two out of
every hundred neutrinos escape and go back to God, and God is able to learn
from this barrage of experiences from everywhere in the universe. Here’s what
happens with that. Here’s the best way to do that, here’s the best odds of this
happening, and across unimaginable anecdotal examples of it. I actually
serendipitously found a newspaper clipping, I think it was from a column by
Colby Cosh where he’s talking about the part in the Lord’s Prayer, “lead us not
into temptation” and the parts that I clipped out, the paragraph is, “Led into
temptation. Some Protestant reformers more or less grasp benevolence at, yes,
God does lead some people into temptation. Deal with it you miserable
weaklings! Calvin for one came fairly close to this view. Bucer ran it into the
end zone and spiked it.” So, yeah, I think it looks like that to people who are
easily tempted, and remember that the Lord’s Prayer is the YHWH’s prayer, so
it’s, I think, an accusation directed at God. “Lead us not into temptation.”
You’re leading me into temptation and I have to suffer the consequences of it.
I don’t think that’s the case, I think when our program is running and is
running us, you’re always on the border between the two. You’re always drawing
towards yourself negative options that would take you down from where you are,
and you’re always drawing towards yourself positive options that would take you
up from where you are. And the choice is yours. This is one of the things that
goes into the programming. So that’s how free will works, is, you’ve already
made all of your decisions in the fourth dimension, and how you end up is how
you end up. Like, whenever Dave Sim is going to die, 2038 or whatever it is, I
will have made all of the decisions I have made since 1956 to the end of 2020
and I know what all of those are, and I know where they’ve led me. I know where
I was going around in circles and I know where I think I was making progress. I
have 17 more years, or however more years, of decisions to make. I’ve already
made all of them, and I end up where I end up. God willing, I will be one of
the two out of a hundred neutrinos. If I’m not, well, it’s gonna be because I
made wrong choices because everything got slowed down in physical incarnation,
so I have the illusion of living my life sequentially, when actually, all of my
life has lived simultaneously, cause that’s already happened. So if you apply
that to Cerebus, yes, Dave Sim, his programming was already written when Mary
and Ken Sim had sex in August of 1955 and their 46 chromosomes together went
into making up the individual who then made these choices from 1956 to 2020.
The biggest one so far, deciding, no I’m not an atheist, I’m a monotheist, in
1996. So, that was already carved in stone. Consequently, everything that
Cerebus did that I wrote Cerebus doing was carved in stone in the same way.
Cerebus is an atheist and ultimately becomes a monotheist. Not a very good
monotheist, but he does become a monotheist. Dave Sim was an atheist and became
a monotheist and hopes that he’s doing at least better than Cerebus did. So
that would be the answer to Jeff, “was Cerebus' life and adventures and
misadventures a case of free will or was it God's or Tarim's or your plan?”
It’s like, the free will enacted itself within the plan. God designed a
structure that makes it look like he’s leading us into temptation if you allow
yourself to be tempted and if you tempt yourself. Then it looks like, “okay the
deck is stacked here. I can never win at this game.” It’s like, well, you can,
you just have to apply yourself. You just have to make better choices, and the
more better choices you make, the more you understand what a better choice is,
and you stop making bad choices, is my view of how the whole thing works.
Matt: Right.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean, it’s one
of those… 20 years ago now, because it was one of those, I keep thinking I’m in
my 20s. No you’re 41. Matt. But my friend became a Lutheran pastor. When he was
9 years old he told his parents that was his goal, to become a pastor, and he
lost his way, but then I met him and he went into the seminary. And one of the
problems he had as a kid was, if God gives us free will, but God knows
everything, how it is free will? And they explained it to him, but it never
made sense to him, and I’m going, okay, so how’d you square that circle, type
thing? And he went, well, and he explained it to me one time, and it made
sense, but I’ve forgotten half of it.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So it’s one of
those, when people bring up free will vs determinant will, well, I look at it
as from God’s perspective there’s one possibility. There’s a straight line,
beginning, end. But we’re not God, we don’t have that perspective, so for us
there’s an infinite possibilities. We can go here, we can go there, while from
God’s point of view, it doesn’t matter where you go, you’re gonna end up at the
end.
Dave: Right.
Matt: It’s the
difference between standing in a maze and being the guy standing over the maze
looking at the maze. For all we know, we can go left or right, but from above
it’s, “well, if you go left, you’re not going to end well.”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: That’s where
you’re going to end up in the hospital, going, “what happened?” Well, you went
left when you should have went right.
Dave: Yes, yes. I mean,
William Seabrook, who is definitely way over on the other team, Aleister
Crowley kinda stuff, he picked up from a voodoo priestess in Haiti the concept
of fan-shaped destiny. That your destiny widens out the further along that you
go, because there’s always more options the further along you go in your life.
And it’s like, mm, no, I think that’s completely unhelpful and wrongheaded.
It’s far more a case of, the further along you go, the fewer options you have.
The better off you are having fewer options. I think that’s one of the things
that modern society teaches us is, the more options that you have, the more
difficult life is. When I’m getting my haircut in town, they have television
screens at each of the stations where you’re getting your haircut, so you can
watch whatever they’re watching. And when they bring up the menu of, here’s all
the things that you can pick from that you’ve got stored in this system, all of
these movies, all of these half hour comedies, and it’s like I’m going, my
brain would melt! I mean, I got off of this train back when there was only 70
television channels to pick from. How can you possibly pick what it is that
you’re going to watch tonight? And I read people saying that they’re going
through. They finished work, it’s eight o’clock at night, let’s sit down and
watch something on Netflix, and then they spend an hour and half scrolling
through all of the possibilities, and trying to figure out what they want to
watch and not really getting close to anything that they want to watch. And
it’s like, well, there you go. What you’re experiencing, what you’re enacting,
is running your programming and trying to tell yourself, yeah, yo don’t want to
do this. Any context that you’re in as a human being, where you just have this
bottomless, bottomless supply of choices, it can’t lead you anywhere good,
because there’s just too many choices. Which is why I got it down to scripture.
If I’ve got two and a half hours, read John’s Gospel aloud, because that’s the
best thing I can possibly find to subject myself to or bombard myself with. I
mean, modern society is about, what are you bombarding yourself with? Because
you can’t just participate in something. You can’t just, I think I would enjoy
this. I would like to read this magazine article. It’s, no, you’re going to
turn on the giant television and then you’re going to bombard yourself with
options. You’re just hurting yourself. Bombard is not something that you want
to do yourself. It’s like, “oh yes it is! That’s why I’ve got Disney+ and I’ve
got Netflix and I got this and I got this other thing. I like to have lots of
entertainment options.” And it’s like, well okay, as long as you understand
that you’re bombarding yourself and Dave Sim will now flinch completely away from
that because, again, that’s just a Dave Sim thing. I have absolutely zero
experience with that whole thing, except for when I’m at the barber and I’m
going, like I say, my brain would melt. How can you possibly look at all of
these different little squares on the screen, and go, which one am I going to
click on? And then watch it all the way through.
Matt: The problem I have
is, the situation is, you’re at the barber. How long does it take to get a
haircut?!
Dave: Uhh, well, this is
the thing. It’s like, I only see part of whatever it is. And I have no idea
what this is and I’m not curious enough about it to say, what are we watching
here? [laughs] It’s like, I watched part of “Mission: Impossible”, the one
where Tom Cruise is climbing up the Dubai tower, whatever it is. And I didn’t
know that that was what I was watching, until I read a newspaper article in the
National Post in the arts and life section, tearing Tom Cruise a new one for…
they really don’t like Tom Cruise, and they really need to do something about
Tom Cruise. Because he’s not with Nicole Kidman anymore and he’s not doing what
Nicole Kidman tells him to do, so consequently he’s a very very evil person.
But he’s also doing all of his own stunts in this thing. So it wasn’t until
there was this giant picture to go with this, “here’s what’s wrong with Tom
Cruise” article, and I went, oh! That’s what I was watching that time that I
got my haircut.
Matt: My grandpa had a
series of micro-strokes. And we figured this out after he died, or right before
he died. Cause his memory was going, and okay, he was getting older, but it was
really specific, like his short-term memory was almost nonexistent. And my Mom
was visiting him one day and it was, “hey Dad, what’re you watching?” He was
watching some movie from the 40s with Carey Grant that he’s probably seen 20
times. But it was on TV and he was watching it and he flat admitted to her, “I
have no idea, but it’s got Carey Grant in it.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It was
heartbreaking for my Mom, because on his bad days, he would start watching a
movie that he had seen before and 20 minutes in he’d forget what movie it was
and not know. “Well, it seems to be interesting”, so he’d keep watching it, and
it’s just like, that’s one of things I’m afraid of, as I get older, if my mind
starts to go and I’m watching “Star Wars” and I dunno what this is but it’s got
really cool explosions!
Dave: That’s where we’re
all going, is the thing. It’s like, yeah, I usually hope that there’s a line up
at the barbers so I can watch some of whatever it is and just have my toe in
the water of the 21st century. That’s about all that I want to have.
I watched “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, whoever that new director is that
everybody hates.
Matt: Michael Bay.
Dave: Right, right. And
I had no idea what it was, but it’s like, well, it’s Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles. Part of me wants to say, “I did a crossover comic with Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles”, ya know, just making conversation with everybody who’s waiting
to get a haircut and watching this. I just know they’d be going, “yeah sure ya
did, Grandpa. Like whatever.” [laughs]
Matt: The funny part
about that is, for Turtles 100 there’s… for Spider-Man 700 there’s a variant
cover where it’s a sideways skyline and Spidey’s swinging across it and the
buildings they listed the names of all the people that have contributed to
Spider-Man over the 700 issues.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Todd did a parody
of it for Spawn 312, and your name is in the skyline. So I got you two copies.
Dave: I appreciate that.
I would never have found out about that.
Matt: Then I found out,
looking online, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” #100 did the four Turtles going
across the skyline, and it has all of the people that contributed to the
Turtles. The problem is, I can’t find a good enough copy of the image to make
sure you and Gerhard were listed, because there’s more people on the Turtles
cover than there are on the Spawn cover.
Dave: How about that? We
got more people on your skyline than you’ve got on your skyline!
Matt: And then, in
Turtles 113, the artist shared an in-progress panel on Twitter where it’s
somebody in the temple from issue 8 from the beginning when the girl steals the
sands of time and starts everything, and I’m going, wait, they’re bringing
Cerebus back for another issue? [laughs]
Dave: They’re more than
welcome to. I don’t know if I even mentioned the fact that I talked to Kurt
Nelson at IDW? Did I mention?
Matt: You may have, but
it’s not striking any bells in the back of my head.
Dave: Okay, he’s the
foreign licensing guy for IDW.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Does that ring a
bell?
Matt: Vaguely. I think
this might’ve been in a Weekly Update.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: But go ahead,
cause if I forgot, that means Margaret didn’t.
Dave: [laughs] The thing
was, he was contacting me to say, “are we allowed to license ‘Turtles’ #8 to
our foreign accounts?” And I said, well the deal that I struck with Ted Adams
when he was there was anytime that you do a new printing of that volume of the Turtles,
I get $500. Just an arbitrary amount, just to make things as easy as possible.
I got one check for 500 and I never got one after that. And I said to him, I’ll
tell you what. Whoever is running IDW right now, and it’s not Chris Ryall, he
stepped down a while ago, I guess. I said, I’ll tell you what, you give me back
“Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. IDW has no stake in “Strange Death of Alex
Raymond” and as long as you have the Viacom account for Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles, you are welcome to license “Turtles” #8 anywhere that you want to. We
have a verbal handshake on that. He said, “it’ll take a while for me to get the
paperwork on this” and I said, I’m not really concerned about the paperwork. If
you can speak for IDW saying, “we have no problem giving you back ‘Strange
Death of Alex Raymond’, you don’t owe us anything on that and you’ll let us
license the Turtles wherever we want to license ‘Turtles’ #8”, that deal only
lasts as long as you have the contract with Viacom. If you lose the contract,
then Viacom would have to contact me directly and we’d work something out
between us with whoever would have the Turtles comic book account after that.
That’s where that stands, I’m very pleased with it and he said, “anything we
can do to help you with ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’, let us know.” And I
said I’ll be happy to do anything that you want me to do to help you with
“Turtles” #8 and they said they would be happy to help me with “Turtles” #8
when we get around to doing the Kickstarter with that through Waverly Press.
Matt: Did you know about
the cartoon, right?
Dave: Ahh, Cerebus in
the cartoon?
Matt: [laughs] This is
kinda funny. It’s not the most recent cartoon, it might not even be the past
two versions of the cartoon, but one of the versions of the cartoon, they
adapted the story from Turtles 8 without Cerebus at all.
Dave: Aghh!
Matt: But when the
Turtles travel through time and they land in the past, there’s an actual
African aardvark on the screen right when they land, and it’s a gray aardvark
that trudges off the screen to the right.
Dave: [laughs] Well, how
about that.
Matt: So they
acknowledge there was an aardvark involved, they just don’t use the right
aardvark.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: It was one of
those, I heard about it and I’m going, no, that’s not real. That’s not real.
Then I saw the clip and I’m like, that’s a deep cut easter egg for the fans
that most people will be like, “Okay, there’s an animal, who cares? Whatever,
let’s get on with turtles, let’s see some ninjas.”
Dave: Right. Okay, I
think we covered that one. Now we’re onto Michael R. What would “Please Hold
for Dave Sim” without Michael R? “Last month's " Please Hold …" you
talked about receiving $10,000 from a female SDOAR fan encouraging you to
continue with the book. And you had. Slowly. My questions are: 1- Are you
writing and creating new mock ups just to satisfy the one REALLY generous fan
or are you REALLY motivated to get the ball rolling and legitimately try to
finish SDOAR?” Um, as I said to Wilf on the phone when I was talking to him
about this, my first reaction to it was, I don’t have a taxi meter for that. I
have no idea how much “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” work I would do, until I
had earned the $10,000 and the fan in question said, “no, you’ve already earned
it! I’ve already gotten my dollar value out of it.” As Wilf said, “you can’t do
that, because then you’re killing Dave’s motivation to…”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Go ahead.
Matt: No, no, no, I’m
just laughing going, yeah no, I agree with Wilf on that one, I mean, if you get
the check and you say, “well okay what do you want for this?” and they say “oh
no, nothing”, well okay, you get nothing! [laughs]
Dave: That’s right! When
can you send me another one of these? [laughs] No, it doesn’t include mock-ups
because I wasn’t at that stage. I’m working on what I see Ward Greene having
done in “Rip Kirby” from about 1947 on, about the end of the first year, particularly
hot and heavy through 47, 48, 49. He was sort of an acolyte of William Seabrook
and was applying William Seabrook’s voodoo theories to the photo-realistic
comic strip. So what I’m doing is trying to document the best instances of
that, and essentially it’s a lot of reading the research materials. I spent a
good two or three years, 2014, 2015, 2016, where really all I did was typing
out commentaries on “Rip Kirby”. It’s like, ahh, I can’t do this, because
there’s no money in this. So this is the difference, this is what she brought
to the table is, oh okay. There’s no way that this $10,000 in the “Strange
Death of Alex Raymond” [laughs] but you give me the $10,000. Okay. So I spent
all of December, essentially reading the commentaries that I did and going,
okay, what’s the best material? What makes my case the best? And let’s type out
captions and let’s do preliminary annotations of the sections that are too
complicated to do as comic pages. This is too intricate a point, and it’s going
to take me a page and a half of annotations to even explain what it is that I’m
talking about here. I just came to the end of the first box of “Rip Kirby”
commentaries. There’s about six or seven of them, correspondence boxes, and I
just read through to the bottom of the “Terror on the Thames” Commentaries, and
the “Bleak Prospect” commentaries. I got to, out of the 100, 150 pages of each
of them, where it’s just “Rip Kirby” Panels photocopied out of the collections,
and then my captions explaining why this intrigued me and what I think Ward
Greene is doing here. And there’s really, really good stuff at the bottom of
the box. Up to that point, I had been putting three check marks on the best
pages, two check marks on the secondary pages, one check mark on the page where
ehh this is kind of a stretch. I don’t have any problem with this appearing as
an annotation, but I want people to see the one check mark. That it’s not
something that I think I really nailed something here. And then an X. If I put
an X on the page, it’s like, no, too big a stretch. What I thought I was seeing
I’m definitely not seeing five years later on. So it’s got an X on it. So
essentially, I have to bring in enough money to remaster all the trade
paperbacks and print all of the trade paperbacks and keep them in print and
hopefully move the archive along and do “Cerebus in Hell?” and all of those
kinds of things. So what it ended up being, “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” is
my hobby, at the end of the month. If I do a comic strip a day and everything
else I need to do just to keep Aardvark-Vanaheim going, it’ll take 24 days to
do an issue of “Cerebus in Hell?” and I will have five days at the end of the
month to work with “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. So this was the first time
where I went, okay, this is all I’m doing in December. Like apart from
necessary stuff, brush fires that I have to put out, fixing stuff that comes
in, answering correspondence, stuff like that. But really just working on
“Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. So it’s a big chunk of work and I still think
I owe Ms X [laughs] a little more than she’s gotten already, so I’m trying to
put in at least a half day every second or third day, now that I’m not in
December, now that I’m in January. But mock-ups are still a ways away. I have
to keep going back from the high altitude mapping, to going in on the really
fine detailed stuff, and just trying to make the whole narrative as
jaw-dropping as possible. And when I got to the end of this first box, there
was a bunch of stuff that I had forgotten, where, yes, my jaw dropped open, and
I went, okay, I thought I was done this section. These give categories with the
$10,000, now I’ve got some more work to do to just make sure everything is in
service to this jaw-dropping parts. Which leads to #2, “Isn't going to be weird
that Carson has a finished book published (very soon I've read, too) and you
are still attempting to finish SDOAR (I'm thinking) with you're ending?” Well,
I’m not really at the point of finishing SDoAR, I’m at the point of finishing
this very complicated middle section. I have to be satisfied with that. Carson
has done a very very different “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. Like, he’s
doing what he has done so far, like when he’s finished my mock-ups and
finishing all of the mock-ups that I did after that, and putting his finish on
it. I mean, Carson isn’t a monotheist, and he’s definitely a former monotheist
with absolutely no intention of ever going back anywhere near monotheism. Which
means he’s a pagan, which means his version of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”
is a very very pagan, but it’s a very interesting pagan treatment because
Carson’s an interesting guy. So, I think everyone’s going to enjoy what Carson
will have done and if they want to jump off at that point and go, right,
there’s only three volumes of ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’. The first two
and a half Dave Sim wrote and drew, and then wrote and mocked up, and then
Carson finished it. That will be a completely separate thing from what it is
that I’m doing. I don’t know if I will ever get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”
done because I’m being so scrupulously precise about it, but definitely, Carson
is 100% satisfied with what he has done. I think I’ve read what he has done,
unless he’s changing it or adding to it.
Matt: The tentative
plan, I don’t even know if he’s going to call it the “Strange Death of Alex
Raymond”, he might be calling it “The Strange Death of ‘The Strange Death of
Alex Raymond’.”
Dave: [laughs] Okay.
Matt: It’s gonna be
Volume One, Volume Two, completed versions of the pages you mocked up for
Volume Three, and then 46 pages of Carson tying it all together and giving it
an “ending”. I think in this ending, he’s saying, this is as far as Dave got,
this is where I see it wrapping up, but obviously is Dave goes on and does
Volumes Three, Four, and Five, or Six and Seven, however long it takes, ya
know. This is the path that you guys did together, this is where Carson gets
off, obviously, the opportunity is there for Dave to eventually finish the
book.
Dave: Or at least do
more of what it is he intends to do.
Matt: Yeah. I think
Carson has an ending, but I don’t think he’s presenting it as, “well this is
the end”, I think from the way he’s made it sound, is, its going to be, this is
a complete volume of everything we did together, my ending, and all of the
Cerebus fan and SDoAR fans are gonna know, okay this is as far as Carson got
when time, money, and interest ran out.
Dave: Right. I mean, I
hope that Carson would be open to the idea of if somebody else wants to take
what I’ve done and what is in print of what I did and what he did and his
ending, and contextualize it. I’m talking about, it would require a
photo-realist and photo-realists are as rare as hen’s teeth. But if they said,
“okay, I’ve got all three volumes. Dave’s volumes and Carson’s completion of
Dave’s volumes. I think that I can contextualize that and put a new beginning
on it and a new ending on it, and I think I can improve on what they did. I
think I will do a more satisfying ending.” It’s like, I don’t think that hurts
what I’ve done, and I don’t think that would hurt what Carson has done. Each
guy did what each guy did, and I think we want to avoid the, “no, I’m the one
who arbitrates this. This is the ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’.” It’s like,
no, this is my “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and I’ve got a tiger by the tail
and I’ve had a tiger by the tail since about 2008, so I’m just trying to not
end up inside the tiger.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I think Carson is
trying to not end up inside the tiger and we’re not going to find out if that’s
the case until we either get through our lives without ending up inside the
tiger, or end up inside the tiger.
Matt: I know one of the
biggest problems with the project was just there’s all this research, and
everytime you think, okay, you’re panning for gold in the river and everytime
you think okay, “the river’s run dry, there’s no more gold”, another nugget
turns up.
Dave: Yes, yes. And that
was years ago. Like that was, we’re not having that happen…
Matt: Well! So your
Christmas present, when it finally shows up, I’m gonna spoil it now because it
kinda ties into this, on Twitter, Comics in the Golden Age, which I think Evan
Dorkin retweeted this post and that’s how I saw it, or it might’ve been Brian
West. It was somebody I followed on Twitter follows Comics in the Golden Age,
and they shared that in December, it was on whatever date “A Christmas Carol”
was first published in 18whatever. Ya know, “A Christmas Carol” was first
published in 18whatever by Charles Dickens, and in 1946, King’s Features
syndicate published an edition of “A Christmas Carol” that was illustrated by
Hal Foster and had front and end papers in the book of Hal Foster doing all the
King’s Feature characters in a Christmas setting.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: And I went, well
that’s neat. I wonder if Dave knows about that? And I went on the internet, and
I found a copy for relatively cheap. I’m like, buy it, ship it to Dave!
[laughs]
Dave: Well, thank you.
Matt: You’re getting,
it’s not the fanciest version, the fanciest version I found has a slipcase and
I’m like, I can’t quite afford that. But you’re getting the next level down.
And I’m like it’s probably one of these, Dave’s gonna get it and be like, “ah
this is really neat” and then look at it and then it’s going to start kicking
more gold down the river.
Dave: It’s hard to tell.
What’s happening now is with the volume of research material that I’ve got,
these correspondence boxes that I’ve got, that I usually use for a month’s
worth of letters, although now I’m able to get two months worth of letters into
a correspondence box, and photocopies of newspaper articles and stuff like
that. I go looking for what I’m looking for because it’s the next thing that
I’ve got to talk about. It’s easier for Eddie to find it, than it is for me to
find it. So that’s usually what I do, don’t spend too much time looking for it.
Remind Eddie, ya know, ballpark what it is that I’m looking for and he’ll fax
it over. But, I never know what’s going to trigger a new connection. It isn’t
new material, but it’s new connections. This will probably tie in with, there
was a period of time when King Features Syndicate was licensing best sellers.
They had a deal with Book of the Month Club that part of the deal of an author
being a Book of the Month Club selection, which was a real payday for everybody
back in the 1940s when it happened, was that King Features would also do a
comic strip version of whatever it was. And Ayn Rand actually licensed, I think
it was “The Fountainhead”? On that basis. And I forget who it was who drew “The
Fountainhead”. There’s a website that a guy did that had all of the Book of the
Month selections that King Features had licensed and that they got their best
guys to draw, because it was probably a big payday for the guys as well. A lot
of newspapers are going to wanna get this comic strip adaptation and you’ll
probably make twice as much as you’re making on comic strips that you’re doing.
Hal Foster did one of those, he did “The Song of Bernadette”. I think this is
probably in the same sort of category, where they were going, “why are we doing
these where we have to pay them enormous amounts of money? Let’s do ‘A
Christmas Carol’, cause that’s in the public domain, so anybody can do ‘A
Christmas Carol’.” Then you get into the dicey thing of, “well if we show people
how easy it is to do, then all of these second stringers will start doing it.”
Like, that’s always baked in. But no, I have never heard of this, and
definitely look forward to seeing it.
Matt: I think, what year
did “Rip Kirby” start?
Dave: 46.
Matt: Rip Kirby, cause
the front end paper is everybody around a Christmas dinner table and it’s all
the King’s Features characters, and Rip Kirby is in there, so it’s a Rip Kirby
done by Hal Foster.
Dave: That’s
interesting.
Matt: And then on the
back end pages, it’s all the other characters they couldn’t fit into the first
scene on a sled going for a sled ride outside in the snow. Those were the two
images they shared on Twitter, and I’m like, wait a minute, is that Rip? And I
clicked bigger, I’m like, oh yeah that’s Rip Kirby. And I’m like, can I find a
copy? Cause I’m thinking, it’s going to be one of those, it was probably only a
limited run for the one year, no, I found one for like $25. 46? That’s what,
almost 80 years old?
Dave: Yeah. And
particularly something that I know a fair amount about this now, and I’ve never
heard of this.
Matt: And like I said,
it’s one of those, it showed up and going, ding! Okay. Find it. Buy now. Ship
it to Dave, and ya know. One of the good things about knowing the secret
location of the Off-White House. Ship it directly and then Dave will get the
mail, going, “what the heck is this?”
Dave: [laughs] That
would definitely have been my reaction if you hadn’t said something here. So I
appreciate that a great deal. We’ll move onto Michael R’s third question, “Will
Eddie Khanna get a little kick back from the $10,000 ? If only to offset his
personal expenses getting SDOAR Vol 1 FE to the 123?” and no, because I
definitely draw a line between the creative side. It would be nice if somebody
would approach Eddie with the same kind of thing. I’m hoping… do you still
promote the fact Eddie has copies of Volume One on…
Matt: I haven’t been,
but I didn’t know that Eddie still had copies available. I know he had some,
but I didn’t know what he was doing with it. I will send him an email double
checking however many he’s got and what he wants to do with them.
Dave: Right, right. It’s
one of those, that was Eddie’s decision. I thought it would be a cleaner break
to just say, look this book isn’t happening in any kind of commercial sense, I
will pay everybody back. It was only way to find out if this was remotely viable
in a commercial sense, and this was the way to find out, and it was, okay, now
the question is, how do I extricate myself from this and never go near the
thought of making money off of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” again? If
somebody else wants to, it’s the same thing as Carson’s version. Like, Carson,
by all means, you want to do a Kickstarter and offer all of the work, and try
and figure out a price that people can live with, and hopefully not lose too
much money on your own just because you want people to see it, by all means. I
mentally jumped off that train a ways back at the last end sharp end in the
track, and went, there are lessons that I learn where I go, just learn this
lesson. Giving you an example of that, when I went to the San Diego ComicCon in
1993 and I was sitting, having walked back and forth between the convention
center and my hotel, and back to the convention center and back to my hotel, I
was sitting in my hotel, going, remember this. You never ever ever want to go
to ComicCon again, under any circumstances, cause this is what it is. Don’t
picture a mythical ComicCon that doesn’t exist. Picture what ComicCon is and
never never revisit the question. And even when I was going to do the
California trip, I wasn’t going to ComicCon. It’s like, Sean and Rachel you
want to go to ComicCon with the boys, by all means, you do. I’ll just, ya know,
hang out at your house and read newspapers or something like that. I have
indoctrinated myself. No ComicCons ever under any circumstances. And trying to
make money off “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” is in that category for me. If
somebody else wants to say, “well I haven’t got $10,000, but I’m in for $5000,
here Dave here’s $5000 do ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’.” I will be delighted
to do “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” because somebody gave me $5000 to do it.
[laughs] But in terms of, how do I figure out where Carson and I can both make
five figures from doing a Kickstarter for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”?
There may be a way to do it, I have decided no, absolutely not, this just isn’t
possible. Always happy to be proven wrong, always be happy to stand on the
sidelines applauding when somebody somewhere figures out how to make a million
dollars off of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” without even breaking a sweat.
But I spent 12 years trying to figure that out and as far as I know, it can’t
be figured out. Michael R’s PS, “I happen to own The New Mutants graphic novel,
1-31, 38 and the Special Edition #1. I haven't seen The New Mutants movie but I
think Claremont/Sienkiewicz stories are touched upon in the movie. I read a
brief synopsis of the movie and this is what I read, ‘Five young mutants, just
discovering their abilities while held in a secret facility against their will,
fight to escape their past sins and save themselves’. And I have to admit, my
eyes popped open at sins. They actually referred to sins? So now I’m kind of
intrigued by that in terms of, what do the people who made this movie consider
a sin? So maybe somebody will be able to get the movie to me in some form, and
I would be very interested to see, should sins be in quotation marks there, or
should sins be capitalized, or it is Nancy Pelosi sins? [laughs] Which, to me,
are a completely different kind of sin, let’s not even go there.
Matt: One of the
characters is Colossus’ younger sister Illyana Rasputin.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: In the comics,
when she was a little go, ended up going to limbo and ended up living in limbo
with, I’m trying to remember the demon’s name. Belasco, I think his name is?
And basically she learned magic and has a demon self, so it could literally be
sins, depending on how deep into the source material they actually went with.
Cause I know she’s in the movie.
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Seiler did find a copy of the graphic novel and has FedExed it to me, but as we
all know, FedEx is turning more into snail mail the last of the while, just
because of FedEx shipping all of the vaccines and whatnot, which is definitely
a higher priority. So I haven’t seen the graphic novels, but I am looking
forward to reading it. Michael R goes on to say, “In the comic the only
‘secret’ facility was in Massachusetts where the White Queen ran her own school
of "new mutants " called The Hellions. I'm guessing that the story is
kinda based on that scenario, but I could be wrong.” So even Michael R hasn’t
seen “New Mutants” yet. There’s certainly, man oh man, I’ve read a couple of
newspapers in the last while. Both of them had “New Mutants” prominently as one
of the worst films of 2020, and quite emphatic about the fact that there not
many films as bad as this film. It’s like, well that’s interesting.
Matt: I haven’t seen it,
but I do know that, part of the problem was, Fox was making it and then they
did the Disney deal where Disney was buying them, and the movie got put a shelf
pending the Disney deal and they went back and did reshoots like a year later,
which, ya know, if you’re doing younger characters, a year could be a year.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: It’s not like
Harrison Ford where you can shoot something today and then shoot the next scene
and it looks the same.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So that might be
an issue. The other issue I know, it’s one of those, they’re planning on, “oh
this is the next movie in the line for the X-Men” well, there might not be more
X-Men movies until Disney decides what they want to do, so that might be a factor
of, yeah they’re setting up sequels that are never gonna happen.
Dave: Right, right.
Which, when I read about that, I’m going, wow! That’s a really really strange
situation to be in at that level, where you’re talking about close to 500, 600
million dollar budget. “Fun facts from the issues I read--- 1- The New Mutants
were created by Chris Claremont and Bob McLeod. I met Bob in 2019 at the P-Burg
Comic Con in New Jersey. I found out he doesn't live too far away from me. I
had a great conversation with him. He signed some books and I got a selfie with
him holding the New Mutants graphic novel which he personalized for me.” Well
that’s very nice. “2- Diana Schultz”, he’s got it spelled wrong, he’s got an L
in there, so it’s Diana Schultz. No, it’s Diana Schutz “( you might remember
her)”, yes, I do. “was a consultant for issue #10 December 1983. This was the
only issue she ‘appeared’ in.” That’s interesting, so I will watch for that
when my Jeff Seiler copy arrives. “3- S'ym appeared and cameoed in 4 issues.”
Aha! I didn’t know that one either. S’ym debuted in the “X-Men”, though, right?
He didn’t debut in…
Matt: Ahh, I believe it
was the “X-Men”. In “The New Mutants” series, when Colossus’ sister is in
limbo, S’ym is the demon she deals with a lot, if I understand correctly. It’s
one of those, I’ve only ever seen the parody version of it that appear in
Marvel’s parody comic “What The?!” where it’s Doctor Deranged and he’s at the
Sanctum Sanctorum and all the magical characters in the Marvel Universe are
showing up, complaining to him, and in the parody, she shows up, she’s like “my
demon is only appearing in black & white, and won’t stop drinking” and it’s
a very very obvious Cerebus parody. [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Alright.
Well, more and more interesting. Why didn’t they put that in the movie?
Probably would have been an Academy Award material in the case.
Matt: Problems with your
phone? [laughs]
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: Problems with your
phone, they couldn’t get a hold of ya? [laughs]
Dave: That could be it.
That could be it. It’s COVID-19. Roly and I, anytime anything goes wrong, we
blame it on COVID-19 now. “a- #14 April 1984 (Sal Buscema art), b- #17 July
1984 (Sal Buscema art), c- #29 July 1985 ( Bill Sienkiewicz art), d-special
edition #1 1985 (Art Adams art).” That’s going to be interesting to see
characters done by Sal Buscema, and then Bill, and then Art. Hmm. “4- I met
Bill Sienkiewicz at the Words & Pictures Museum in Northampton, Ma on
11/08/1997. I believe the museum was celebrating Heavy Metal's 25th
anniversary. You were there , too.” No, actually, it was “Heavy Metal”’s 20th
anniversary. And I’m just noticing as I look at that, that was Margaret
Mitchell’s 97th birthday. November 8th, 1997. “You were
there , too. The reason I drove from Queens, NYC to Words and Pictures was
because you were going to be there. You sat between Will Eisner and Stephen
Bissette.” Okay, now we got an old guy’s tussle going on here, because Will
Eisner wasn’t at the Words and Pictures museum. Joe Kubert was there, John
Severin was there, but it was only people who had worked on “Heavy Metal” or
who had worked on the 20th anniversary squarebound book. And the
only time I was sitting anywhere was when I was signing autographs and I was
between Joe Kubert and Muriel Kubert. I was actually on the end of the table,
the extreme right hand side. There’s a back cover on one of the issues of
“Cerebus”, me next to Joe Kubert and you can’t see Muriel Kubert because
obviously Muriel wasn’t a writer or an artist, but she and Joe were pretty much
inseparable. I offered to let her sit at the table next to Joe, and I would sit
on the chair she’s sitting in, and sign autographs there, but she declined
that. But it was very interesting, she definitely took me to task at one point,
because I kept talking about how old I was, and how old I felt, and I was 41 at
the time. And obviously she and Joe were a good deal older than 41 at the time,
and they were sitting there going, “ah I don’t remember talking about being old
when I was 40?” But then, I’ve felt old since I was 30. It’s like, after you
turn 30, it’s all over, and I can’t say that I’ve ever really changed my mind
on that. He says, “I also met Kevin Eastman and his wife Julie Strain. Julie
was dressed up as Vampirella. She must have stood at 7 and a half feet tall
with high heels.” Yes, Julie was very tall. I forget what her height was, but
“Heavy Metal” did a collection of Julie Strain material, photographs and stuff,
and the title of it was, whatever her height was, I think it was 6’5”? Julie
was 6’5”? And it was “Julie Strain: Six Foot Five and Worth the Climb.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “I also met Berni
Wrightson, who signed my friends Frankenstein book.” I forgot that Bernie
Wrightson had been there. Susan and I went out for dinner with Bernie Wrightson
and his wife, and I believe Bill Sienkiewicz. I offered to help Bernie
Wrightson self-publish if he was ever interested, and I think he took umbrage
at that because he had self-published “Bad Times Stories” way back when I was
14 years old, so I didn’t know how to get myself out of Bernie Wrightson’s bad
books, making it sound like I knew more than he did now, but I did know more
about self-publishing in 1997 than he would’ve known, I think. It’s one of
those, he wasn’t inclined to self-publish at that point, and probably didn’t
appreciate me mentioning that, but, he did confirm several studio stories for
me. So I was deeply grateful to him for that. “I had brought some stuff for you
to sign and the others ( maybe a few other people that I had forgot about)
except Will Eisner. I'm not sure why I didn't bring with me A Contract With God.
We had a brief conversation about it. Very gracious and humble.” Like I said,
Will Eisner wasn’t there. I would’ve remember Will Eisner being at the 20th
anniversary “Heavy Metal” party, I’m pretty sure. “I then moved probably 3
steps to my right and you were right there. You signed everything that I
brought, bought and received for free that day. I even got a sketch. I had
Tyrant for Stephen to sign. It would be the only time I would meet Will.” And,
I won’t keep repeating myself, if there’s some way to check this, the “Heavy
Metal” 20th anniversary November 8th, 1997. Was Will
Eisner there? I’d be happy to admit that I’m wrong, but I would have spent a
lot more time talking to Will than I did talking to a lot of the people that I
did there. “I had Grace and a camera with me that day but we didn't take one
single photo.” Isn’t that odd. The Words and Pictures Museum was a thing of
beauty. A gorgeous thing to behold. That was Michael Zulli’s idea, if I recall.
He said to Kevin, “you know, if you opened a cartoon art museum, then you could
write off all of the original artwork that you buy.” [laughs] And it’s like, I
think Kevin’s eyes lit up and didn’t realize, well, the amount of money that
you’re gonna be saving by being able to write off the artwork that you’re
buying, you’re gonna eat up a lot of that reconditioning this building in
downtown Northampton, and boy oh boy, Kevin never stinted on anything and he
sure didn’t stint on that. It looked like exactly what it was, a world class
museum for the late 20th century. Jesse Lee Herndon asks, “Hello
Dave,
Just to let you know, and for A Moment of Cerebus listeners/readers, I
have resumed transcribing all the past "Please Hold for Dave Sim"
recordings.” And I’m going, you’re kidding. I mean, that’s a lot of work. “Matt
will probably never have a day on the blog slow enough to ever post any of
them,” I don’t think that’s the case, Jesse. I think [laughs] Matt would be
delighted to do a “Please Hold for Dave Sim” text month.
Matt: Okay, what
happened is, he was sending them to me, and I was, okay, I’ll post these when I
get them, and then things were happening, there were auctions, and SDoAR wasn’t
coming out anymore, it was the end of the world. And so I got a couple up. And
then he sent me a bunch of the files, but he didn’t label what they were. So
then I gotta start reading it, while listening to the first part of the various
month’s “Please Hold” to figure out which one this. So that I can’t label it
correctly when I post it. And I’m like, okay, this is, a weekend when I’m not
doing anything else, I will take care of all this, and then I kept getting
busy, and lazy, and working my real job and stuff.
Dave: I don’t think you
have to, either of you have to apologize in any way. I find both of those tasks
unimaginably difficult.
Matt: He just sent me, I
don’t know how many. He sent me an email with a number of them, he’s done, I
think he’s almost all caught up.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: So of the, what
are we at, like a year and half now, I think? Two years?
Dave: Back to January of
2018, yep, two years.
Matt: Oh no no, it was
November of… was it November of 19? It was November was the first one, cause it
was when Stan Lee died.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Was the first one.
So I have them all and I sent him a message back saying, what’s probably going
to happen is, Tuesdays are just going to be “Please Hold” transcripts, until I
get them all up.
Dave: Maybe we should do
an unimaginably long book. [laughs] “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, here it is,
it’s 900 pages, and you and Jesse make all of the money off of it. Because I,
like I say, I just couldn’t imagine even doing this.
Matt: There’s a part of
me that was gonna get all the transcripts printed out. Go through, and make
sure there’s no, like he sent me a message saying, I talked to Carson and we
did it over a Zoom meeting and Zoom gave us a transcript. So he did a
transcript of the Zoom meaning because the Zoom transcript has got some
oddities in it, like every time I mentioned Eddie Khanna, Zoom thought I said
“Daddy”.
Dave: [laughs] I think
we have to leave that in. That’ll be something for the rookies to go, “wait a
minute, who’s this Daddy? What’s going on here?”
Matt: But I was thinking
of getting them all printed out and put them in a binder and send a copy to you
of, okay, here’s everything we talked about, so in the future, when somebody
asks a question we know we’ve answered, we can just go, “transcript #7, page 17.”
Dave: [laughs] Again,
that seems unimaginably Rube Goldberg-like to me right there. This is just blah
blah blah blah blah for way too long on the phone, and… wait do I know? I’m
just Dave Sim.
Matt: The fact that we
used to do them as just Youtube videos and they broken up into relatively short
pieces, cause my internet was slow and anything over 15 minutes would just kill
my internet for the weekend while it was trying to upload. Now I have new internet,
and no no, it doesn’t matter how long it is, within about 10, 15 minutes the
video will be up on Youtube once I start uploading them. But since I did the
podcast thing where okay you can listen to it in your car, Margaret loves cause
she listens to these on her way to and from work, and I’m going, I just don’t
see listening to myself that much. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But then again,
Margaret’s not us.
Dave: Right!
Matt: So it’s all new to
her!
Dave: Right, right.
Exactly, and I mean, if that’s the sort of thing that you like, that’s just the
sort of thing that you like. I’m not gonna quarrel with that. So he’s got
“Steve Swenson, Carson Grubaugh, and Wilf Jenkins interviews. Similarly,
shameless plug #2, I have resumed my Cerebus Fan Award-winning daily review
Youtube videos of Cerebus, having just begun "Form & Void". There
will be a Dave Sim & Cerebus dance party” [laughs] “at the end of one of
the upcoming episodes, I just haven't decided which one yet, perhaps for issue
300's, which will be, God willing, on February 22nd, my birthday. It only took
me 5 years to do it!” Yes, he is. I think he was the first Cerebus Superfan
Award winner?
Matt: That sounds about
right.
Dave: So, Jesse, my
hat’s off to you. The hats of future Cerebus fandom are off to you. Everybody
going, I can’t imagine anybody doing either of these, and congratulations.
“Okay, for questions, I was wondering, was Bran Mac Mufin in "the
light" during issue 300? There's a Pigt barbarian, but I don't recall if
you've ever said definitively if it was him or not. I know in Bran's case,
suicide meant being doomed to repeat life, but Ham was there too, and he did
kill himself (unless he got off on a technicality due to Mary's involvement).”
Um, yeah, that opens a number of cans of worms.
Matt: Before you answer,
I thought we asked this in the Yahoo group five questions, and the answer was,
if I remember correctly and I’ll have to double check and correct myself if I’m
wrong, is that no it wasn’t Bran because Bran committed suicide. But, like I
said, I could be wrong, and I’ll double check, but go ahead and answer and
contradict me. I don’t care. [laughs]
Dave: Okay! Like you
could argue that it’s Bran, or you could argue that it’s just one of the Pigts.
One of the questions… what I was documenting there was the fact that I’m deeply
suspicious of the whole near-death experience. The rushing towards the light, and
everybody that you know who had died is there to greet you. Maybe it’s just
that I can’t think of anybody that I knew who would be ushering me to Heaven.
It’s like, I can definitely picture a lot of people that I know who have died,
but I don’t picture any of them as having gone to their reward. I picture them
as having gone to the other place. Consequently, I think I said way back when,
my response to finding myself rushing towards the light, like looking down at
my corpse and then rushing through this tunnel of light and seeing anybody that
I knew in the course of my life, my question would be what Cerebus’ question
ends up being, where’s Rick? Which is just like a thought balloon over his head
and a picture of Rick in it, going, if I was going to Heaven I would assume
that Rick would be ushering me into Heaven because Rick was the most devout
monotheist in the storyline. And instead, it’s all of these people who you can
think a lot of things about all of those people in that group shot, but devout
and reverent wouldn’t be anywhere near the list. So, as I said, my instinct,
and I hope it would transcend the death experience, would be to just kneel and
start praying. Just recite my prayer and see what happens then. Close my eyes,
I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody that I knew while I was alive,
so no offense, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings who got sent here to
welcome me to where I’m being welcomed to, I think prayer would be a much
better idea. I do tend to think that because people who commit suicide but
don’t actually die and come back from near death experiences, I can’t think of
any instance where they said, they were looking down at their corpse and they
were rushing through the tunnel of light and seeing everybody that they knew
that already died. So I assume that it is possible for you to kill your own
soul by committing suicide, which is why I think suicide is a very very very
bad choice in a very very very large context. Not just in a very very large
context, but just a very bad bad risk to take. Which is why I consider medical
assistance in dying, which is what we call it in Canada, assisted suicide, you
would have to guarantee me that I could kill myself and blame it on you,
because you’re the one who actually injected me, or whatever. I don’t think
that’s the case. I think it’s a free will thing. Which is why it’s… my worst
nightmare is being in extreme agony and wanting to die, but not wanting to kill
myself and not wanting anybody else to take the rap for killing me. I think you
have to wear that. If you kill somebody, you have to wear whatever their
stature was with God in your debit column. “Since I'm not being morbid enough,
how do you figure the Roach died? Is this one of those "his life ended
with a whimper and not a bang" type things that seem to have been the case
for so many characters (and so many people in life)? His ending during
"Mothers & Daughters" was pretty definitive for him as a magical
being, but then he popped up just fine as FanRoach in "Guys". I do
suppose if you're ever in the market for another spin-off, "The Strange
Deaths of Cerebus Supporting Characters" could be fun (Silverspoon:
finally eaten by those cannibals. Mrs Henrot-Gutch: crushed by a squeaky wheel).
Speaking of spin-offs, is Cerebus In Hell? the same project as "Cerebus:
The Afterlife", which you mentioned in a newspaper interview you did circa
the Last Signing in 2010?” Uh, I was thinking of it at that point, but I was
thinking of it as a far more serious thing of, what would Cerebus’ soul be
experiencing in the Afterlife? How much of a punishment would he be subjected
to, just by virtue of the choices he made, and the consequences that were the
results of those choices. He was a centerpiece kind of figure in his world and
in his lifetime. And I never got far enough to actually draw anything, but I
was definitely picturing a Cerebus sort of at the bottom of the bottom most
circle of Hell and under this crushing weight, and just can’t even make a step
up from there. I never got far enough with it to say, “Cerebus in Hell?” is the
same project. “Cerebus in Hell?” was can I do David Malki’s “Wondermark” and do
it with Cerebus, and do it with Dante and Virgil, and have some fun just being
funny. Don’t really care if anybody else thinks I’m being funny, as long as I
think I’m being funny, and David Birdsong thinks I’m being funny, and you think
I’m being funny, and Sean thinks I’m being funny, and Benjamin Hobbs thinks I’m
being funny, we’re the ones putting in the hours on this, so, mission accomplished
as far as I’m concerned.
Matt: I’m not gonna lie,
everytime they’re like, “hey, we’re doing this issue” and it’s like, okay, for
me the high watermark of “Cerebus in Hell?”, the issue that every time I think
about it I get a smile on my face, is “Cerebus Woman”, because there is just so
much in that issue that makes me laugh out loud. And not just like chuckling,
just full on belly laughing, that I’m like, okay whatever we’re doing, that’s
my goal, that’s what I’m shooting for, that’s the bullseye. If I can make it as
funny to me as that is to me, we’ve won.
Dave: I appreciate that.
I thought that one was really funny. I think you’ll identify with the
experience, when you’re writing “Cerebus in Hell?” if it’s just absolutely
dropping into the laptop computer and it’s as if, it’s just stay out of the way
of it. This is going to write itself. The ones that are hard work are not
nearly as funny as the ones that are completely effortless.
Matt: The experience
I’ve had is, working on the two “Vark Wars” issues was, the idea pops in there,
and then I laugh, and then I turn it around in my mental hands like a Rubik’s
Cube and all of a sudden the pieces click together and I have to stop whatever
I’m doing and write this down right now, so I don’t forget. It’s transcendent
of, did I come up with this, or did I not come up with this? But it’s hilarious
either way.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: The one in “Walt’s
Empire Strikes Back” where it’s Batvark and Beatrice at the end, up at Cloud
City, and she says she wants to take the relationship to the next level, when I
thought of that, I was walking down my basement stairs to put a load of laundry
in the dryer, and I almost fell down the stairs I was laughing so hard.
[laughs]
Dave: Yeah, that’s a
good sign. If you’re laughing, you can’t really argue with that. This is why
I’m willing to go to jail over anything that I do in “Cerebus in Hell?”, it’s
like, you do comedy by doing stuff that makes you laugh. You’re making
connections in your head and you’re doing other stuff, and yeah, I have same
the experience. I always have a post-it notepad next to the chair in my
bedroom, and if I think of a gag, I think of a joke, and it’s like, it makes me
laugh. It doesn’t matter if I was just about asleep, [laughs] it’s like, no,
turn the light on, get up, and write it down on the post-it note and write down
enough of it that you’re not going to forget it. Because I’ve had that happen
too many times where I went, no that’s too funny. There’s no way I could forget
that. I wake up the next morning and I can’t remember it. People who really
think that you should never hurt anybody’s feelings for any reason, and if you
hurt somebody’s feelings you need to be destroyed, just have absolutely no grasp
of that. You do whatever you need to do to get you through. This is definitely
been an unusual 2020 and it’s turning out to be a pretty unusual 2021. Anything
that I do that gets me through, and one of the biggest things that gets me
through is just making myself laugh, of, that’s a funny idea. I can’t wait to
do that as a comic strip. I can’t wait for people to read that. The double plus
is, when I’m proofing an issue, and it’s been so long since I did it, like I
actually wrote and pasted it together a year ago, and now I’m getting the proof
copy from Studiocomix Press, and I’m reading it for typos and stuff, and I’m
make myself laugh again. It’s like, I forgot that one. I forgot that line,
that’s really really good. You just hope that there’s other people out there,
because what passes for humour these days, what feminists allow you to say to
be funny, is so constricted and so laundered, that it’s, wow, if I wasn’t funny
and I had to rely on all of these environments that feminists have absolute
dictatorship over. Man, it’s like, I’m sorry guys, I wish there was something I
could do to the fix that, but the people who are living over there have bought
into the whole idea of, “no, you can’t tell a joke that hurts anyone’s
feelings”. And it’s like, well, then you can’t tell any jokes, because a lot of
humour is cruel. So I just wanted to wrap things up and thank you for the,
[laughs] Bill Sienkiewicz photo of himself au natural. I gotta say, like Bill’s
not that much younger than I am, he was the youngest guy clinging to the field
after me, apart from Frank Miller. I think Frank and Bill were the two kids on
the block. He’s in his early 60s, late 50s. He’s looking pretty good there.
[laughs] There’s nothing you can do about what happens to human flesh once you’re
getting up into the fifth or sixth decade.
Matt: The fun part for
me is when it first came out, it was I think a Bleeding Cool article where
“Bill Sienkiewicz shared this reference photo he took for some series and the
internet is having a field day.” And it was one of those, okay, it was funny.
Well, then I forgot about it. Well now Steve Peters is going this “Comicverse”
story and everything Steve posts on Facebook or the Comicverse posts on
Facebook about the Comicverse, I like. Just because I know that’s how the
algorithm works. If it’s getting engagement from people, it’s more like to get
a suggested thing to other people.
Dave: Right.
Matt: By making sure
there’s eyes on Steve, it gets Steve a little bit of exposure. I mean not a
lot, but it does into the algorithm. And so I liked this post, without even
clicking on it, it’s just, okay hey it’s in my feed, I’m gonna like it because
it’s Steve. He’s a friend of the blog, as I say, everytime we do Steve Peters
week. He sent me a message saying, “hey I saw you liked the post, do you wanna
get in on this” and I didn’t click the link but I don’t really know what I’m
getting into, but sure! I’ll do anything for ya, Steve. We’re buddies. And he’s
like, “can you send me the photo?” and in the back of my head, I think I
remember something about this, but yeah, send me whatever it is I’m supposed to
draw. The photo came in and I went, my response is what I wrote, “what the
actual”…
Dave: Right.
Matt: I understand
taking a reference photo, but what story are you doing where there’s a naked
guy with a gun? [laughs]
Dave: Uhh, I think it’s,
well if you’re doing anything like a superhero, it’s skintight costumes, so you
pretty much have to. I don’t know if it was from something else, but I can say,
as a photo-realist, that’s not easy to do. Like, what Bill is doing is, first
of all the lighting. The lighting is perfect for what he’s doing, he knows
exactly the effect that he wants to create. Which is like building a pyramid
proposition and lighting it from above, and to get the shadow the way he’s got
it on his left hand, and to get the shadow on the gun, the hand holding gun,
and the forearm, and the bicep, and the shoulder exactly where it is, and the
shadow coming down the ribcage. There’s only so many spots where you’re going
to get all of those things happening together, so it’s, this is the one that he
got as close to as he was picturing as possible, but I can’t even imagine the
number of shots that he had to take to get to this one. But that’s something
you only know when you’ve been doing this. And Bill has been doing the
photorealism and the specific lighting that goes with that. It can’t be too
dark, but it’s gotta be dark enough, and it’s gotta be dark in all of the right
spots. So, you have to know what this is going to look like while you’re
posing, and while you’re taking a picture of yourself, which I assume he was
taking the pictures of himself with a timer.
Matt: I can’t remember
if he took the pic… cause he talked about it. After I got the challenge from
Steve, I posted the picture on Twitter and tagged Bill Sienkiewicz, saying,
“I’ve been asked to participate in the Sienkiewicz challenge. God I love
comics.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he responded,
going, well, I’m trying to remember exactly how he phrased it, but it was
something along the lines of “2020 was a hell of a year and now it looks like
2021 is gonna be more of the same.” [laughs]
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: And I found a
thing where he talks about, the reason he took the photo the way he did. It was
a specific artist’s style he was school of thought of, you strip everything
down so you don’t have to worry about distractions. Like the shirt doesn’t look
right or anything. And I think he had his girlfriend or wife take the photo,
I’m not sure. He had somebody else do it, but I’m assuming there was probably a
mirror involved of, did the pose, looked in the mirror, it looked good, okay
take the photo.
Dave: Yeah, you still
have the difference between where the mirror is and where the camera is. It’s
very hard to describe this to people who have never done this. I’ve done it
with “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” with myself as narrator, and saying, okay
I have to take a picture of myself. What do I want the picture to look like and
how do I twist myself into that configuration, so it looks like what I’m
picturing in my head? And I wish my wrist was in better shape so that I could
do one of these. Because it’s like, I looked at this and I could quite
cheerfully try to do an Al Williamson version of this, or I could also go,
let’s try doing a Mike Mignola approach to it. It would make a really nice
Steranko drawing. All different thought processes to get to that point, and I
wouldn’t be happy with it, because I’d be trying to make it look like somebody
I don’t draw as well as. It would make a great Neal Adams shot. I could
cheerfully spend a whole afternoon just taking the faxed photo and enlarging it
to different sizes. Where’s the ideal size for this in my eyes? And everybody’s
going to have a different perspective on that. What do I leave out? [laughs]
Well, apart from the obvious thing that I’m gonna leave out. Was the black
rectangle on there everywhere on the internet?
Matt: Yeah, yeah, the
black rectangle’s on the original photo that Bill shared.
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Matt: What I love is,
one of the pages Steve just posted, I forget which artist is that did it, but
they took this image and the drawing they did is Babe Ruth calling his shot.
Dave: [laughs] That
would work.
Matt: And I’m going, I
look at the original image, and I looked at this, I’m like, this doesn’t work.
There’s no way this works. And I’m looking at it, going, it works! Like, it’s
not just the image that Bill took, you can use it as any… cause that’s one of the
things that’s on the internet is, there’s probably like 30 or 40 different
artists that did. Some of them just added funny text and word balloons and
stuff, and other people went, no no, let’s take this image and actually try to
use it as reference for something.
Dave: Yeah, I mean, it’s
a credit to Bill Sienkiewicz’s inherent brilliance, that when he does stuff
like this, it’s like, I was reasonably happy with most of the photos that I
took of myself for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, but only reasonably happy.
It wasn’t something where I went, oh man that’s just perfect. That’s exactly
the curve that you want on the forearm, it’s exactly the curve that you want on
the bicep, it’s exactly the way that you want the shoulder to be, like this
completely separate shadow that’s just perfectly formed exactly where it is,
and dynamic. I mean it’s, yeah, if you have that level of brilliance, it
doesn’t matter whether you’re taking a picture of yourself or doing a pencil
drawing from it, you’re going to inspire other creative people to go, I have to
do this. I don’t know why this makes me want to create and makes me want to
participate, but well, there’s only one Bill Sienkiewicz. There’s only one guy
who walked into Continuity Associates, cold call, and showed his portfolio to Neal
Adams, and got the treatment that Neal Adams had gotten way back when from
Elmer Wexler of, he looked at what Bill was doing, walked over to the phone and
phoned Marvel, asked for Jim Shooter, and said, “I’m sending a guy over there,
don’t let him leave without work.” Which was completely selfless on Neal Adams’
part, I think I’ve probably talked about this before. Bill would’ve thought he
died and went to Heaven if Neal said, “here’s this drawing board right next to
mine. We’re gonna work together from now on.” Neal would’ve doubled his
productivity, and would never have had to correct Bill. It’s like, no, he knows
what he’s doing, he’s gonna do it a little differently from how I would do it,
but this is exactly the kind of guy that I needed at Continuity. It’s like, no,
this guy has his own career in front of him. It would be an act of cruelty for
me to subject and put him under my direction, when all he has to do is go out
there and figure out who he is and how he draws and what he wants to do. And that’s
why I was always curious to ask Neal, what was your reaction when you saw Bill
Sienkiewicz’s work? Because only you and Bill are at that level, so that you
would go, alright. Even somebody like Dick Giordano, who was brilliant, Neal
can look at Dick Giordano and go, “okay here’s Dick’s problems and we’ll work
around that.” But at that very high rarefied level, did he look at Bill and go,
“mm, not quite there, but 98%, 99%.” It had to have been, for him to just say,
I’m sending you over to see Jim Shooter, he’ll give you work. [laughs] Good
luck with the rest of your life. I’ll be watching for whatever you come up
with, whatever you and Jim Shooter come up with. Okay! We’re gonna wrap it
there.
Matt: Yeah. I’m looking
at the time, I’m like, wow, this one’s the longest one we’ve done. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] We gotta
start shortening these a bit, but that’s not really our call.
Matt: Well, the good
news, I shouldn’t say “the good news”, the good news for Dave is that as the
days get longer, the prayer time moves so that the window goes from after last
prayer to in between, where okay we have this window and that’s the window Matt
gets. [laughs]
Dave: Yes, yes. I could
always pull rank that way and say, I got a prayer time at 6:30 and call you at
ten til 6. Let’s answer these questions as fast as we can, cause we only got
half an hour here. We know how that would turn out.
Matt: I actually long
for the month where I send you the questions and when you call, you say, “okay,
you got the questions, just them up, here’s the answers. Yes, no, maybe, I
can’t remember, uhh, no.”
Dave: [laughs] We’ll try
that one of these months. Okay, have a good night, Matt.
Matt: Have a good night,
Dave. Thanks!
Dave: Take care.
Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye. And a
reminder to all of our viewers who actually get to see the videos, go to your
comic book store right now and get “Hermann” #1 and then at the end of this
month, go to the store and get “Cerebus in Hell? 2021” #1, which is a preview
of the whole year, but it’s also actually something that I’m not allowed to
talk about, but you’ll totally want to buy this one, because it’s probably one
of the smallest print runs since “Colour Your Own Cerebus”. And yeah, yeah, in
case anybody has been wondering on the audio side, the video side has got a
picture of Bill Sienkiewicz in… well, let’s just say, it’s something out of a
Tarantino flick, and if you go over to the Youtube, you’ll be able to see it
when I get it up on Saturday. Thanks once again for listening, and thanks once
again for holding everything so you can listen to me ramble like a moron while
we listen to Dave Sim. Goodnight, everybody! Last one out, turn out the lights.
My Kickstarter was unsuccessful. Thank you for adding it to the blog in the last several days.
I appreciate it.
I decided to just put the comic for sale on Lulu.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/fanny-kelly-and-hal-kolbeck/my-captivity/paperback/product-459wr8z.html?page=1&pageSize=4
If you can link this on AMOC Matt Allsion could use the help. https://crowdfundr.com/a2Yvxb?ref=ab_3UXdKBiCFCH3UXdKBiCFCH Bargain @ $10.
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