HARDtalk: The Virtual Tour #17

Does your past history with The Comics Journal colour your perception of the offer from Fantagraphics Books to reprint Cerebus, or are you happy to ‘forgive and forget’?

I don't really think forgiveness is mine to give.

I mean, to me, it's "of the dust of this world".  Everything is going to reduce itself to dust when the sun goes nova however many billions of years from now.  We're here to enact our own lives as individuals as far as I can see.  I make my choices and say what I have to say and do the work that I think is the work I'm supposed to be doing.  Billions of years is a long time.  The comic-book field turning on me in the early Internet years and eviscerating my career.  That might not even make it to mid-21st century.  Or it might still be discussed in the 25th century.  We're enacting a lot of stories and we're disposed to drawing morals, carving them in stone and deciding, okay, we've got THAT one worked out.  No, in that case, I think God would have designed the earth to last a few hundred years (as I assume there exists cosmological constructs that DO only last a few hundred years for that reason -- they're enacting and working out pretty simple stuff).  We're here for billions of years because we are incredibly intricate enactments.  F.Scott Fitzgerald's marriage to Zelda, I think is with us for the long term and we're going to keep revisiting it and revisiting it over hundreds and hundreds of years -- maybe even billions of years -- and probably change our minds, collectively, back and forth hundreds and hundreds of times.  "Scott and Zelda" will be a shorthand for that enactment and maybe a thousand years from now it will serve as the foundation for a valuable insight we wouldn't have otherwise attained to.  "Dave Sim and The Comics Journal" could be in  the same category.  If it was set in motion to be crunched down to an almost infinite number of nuances over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, I'm not going to arrive at a definitive conclusion however long I live, personally, so it's not something that I consider in that way.  MUST! RESOLVE! THINGS! WITH! TCJ!

It was a surprise that Kim would suddenly start talking about publishing CEREBUS, and that could have been entirely unconscious on his part.  His spirit wants the enactment to, you know, ENACT.  And I've always thought  that public negotiation is a good idea if only because it gives people who have never negotiated a contract an idea of what's involved. But how unlikely was that to ever happen? REALLY unlikely which is why I never tried to make it happen.  Pretty exceptional circumstances.  How many publishers BESIDES Fantagraphics would have even countenanced public negotiation?  I can't think of too many to whom I would have even suggested it.  So, my spirit may have had that as a core idea and that was why I suggested you do a Virtual Tour.  Very possibly -- even very LIKELY -- Kim and I are just bystanders to what it is that our spirits want to discuss.

It's becoming a very familiar sensation in my life, at this point.

We're now headed off to CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE for a question from Gabriel McCann in Australia (...and AMOC is headquartered in the UK... It's a Commonwealth thing! Totally!):

If you found yourself in heaven who would you choose as people that you would like to spend the rest of eternity with? Not just real people but also fictional characters like comic book personalities that you could interact with for the rest of existence.

Hit the link to CANADIAN COMICS ARCHIVE, and I'll see you on Monday for more HARDtalk.

HAVE YOU GOT A QUESTION FOR DAVE SIM?
Already signed up for the HARDtalk Virtual Tour are Bleeding Cool, Millar World, Terminal Drift, Canadian Comics Archive, The Comics Journal, The Beat and Mindless Ones. Add your question for Dave Sim at one of these fine websites before 10 October and if your question is chosen (they'll need to be tough, interesting questions!) you'll receive a personalised, autographed copy of a Cerebus back-issue, with a Cerebus head-sketch by Dave Sim!