Sunday, 8 September 2013

Eight Days Of Dave - Day 8: The Dave Sim Fund

DAVE SIM:
Hi Tim - I think what I'm going to do is just blather -- since this is our first time doing "after the issue" -- and leave it up to you if you want to run the whole thing all at once or dribble it out.  Issue 2 of The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond took about two and a half months. I hope I get faster but I'm not counting on it.

THE DAVE SIM FUND

Well, you know, I'm always open to donations. As you can see from my After Dead Dave plans, I really do see everything as belonging to the most devoted Dave Sim / Gerhard / CEREBUS fans. The way I structure things mentally is to spend as little as possible. I pay myself about $1,000 a month. I pay all my bills and the company's bills. Apart from that I don't really spend money. I consider it insulation from having to sell or relocate all the material that I think the fans deserve, when the time comes, to see in its natural habitat (as it were). "Cash in limbo". If I don't need it to pay bills, it's there to buy some more time way up ahead. Five more days that the house doesn't need to be sold and all the files and correspondence relocated.

I've had people send me envelopes of cash. Seriously. I got $270 from a guy in Australia. That's $270 I didn't have to take out of "cash on hand". I declare every penny. You can write a cheque to Aardvark-Vanaheim if you want to sustain the company or to Dave Sim if you want to sustain me.

I mean, we're all -- however many of us there are and there's no way of knowing -- in this together. Whatever you contribute now, you may never live long enough to see the house because you may not outlive me. But for x number of people, it's OUR thing. If A Cerebus fan gets to see the house someday because of what THIS Cerebus fan donated...

I don't know why we are that way, but that seems to be the way that we are.

To me it's not much different from buying my self-published work. It goes directly to me and makes it possible for me to keep going and to preserve the whole works for...well, I don't know. For whoever.  In the same way that if there had been an Alex Raymond House, five generations of Alex Raymond fans would have had to preserve it before I got to see it. And if you're an Alex Raymond fan, that would be reason enough.

Okay, I've been awake since 1 am and it's now 6:45 pm so I'm running out of caffeine power.

Next time I'll try to make it over to the Kickstarter site for an update.

But, really, I have to get serious about this: six days a week, twelve hours a day for at LEAST the next three years.

Hope a bunch of you are inclined to stick around through the much bigger breaks in communication.

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