Monday 9 November 2015

Cerebus #23: Blurred Lines

Cerebus #23 (December 1980)
Art by Dave Sim
STEVE SWENSON:
Here's an interesting Cerebus oddity I recently purchased. There's not much Cerebus stuff I'm looking for, but oddities like this always strike a chord in my fan-boy heart! I ran offset printing presses for over 15 years so I've got a pretty good idea what happened here, but I'd like to someday get in touch with someone from Preney Print and ask them what sort of presses they were using around this time. I know Preney has been out of business, but maybe Sean or perhaps Gerhard knows a contact.

18 comments:

Anthony Kuchar said...

In response to what Dave said the other day about translations:

I know I read a lot of Japanese Manga. Has Dave or anyone approached a publisher like Shonen Jump or Kodansha to publish Cerebus in Japan? Comics/Manga is a huge market over there and they have an appetite for fantasy, highly detailed art styles, black and white, long-running series. The phone book format is very similar to a Jump issue.

China is also a possibility. And India has one of the biggest emerging periodicals publishing industries in the world.

Unknown said...

Hi Anthony: No, the idea isn't to work FOR a publisher. I tried that with the three European publishers. Publishers SOUND good but their instinct is for self-preservation (as is everyone's). The idea is to translate CEREBUS.

I can certainly see someone familiar with Manga (which is very different from comics) and a CEREBUS enthusiast (I'm pretty sure such a person doesn't exist now, but ALL of our planning is for a hundred years after I'm dead on the assumption that the political climate will have improved for CEREBUS by then) translating CEREBUS into Japanese.

You COULD, theoretically, do it. All it requires is using the computer translation technology, a Photoshop-savvy person and having a Japanese-speaking person who can check any glitches.

My suggestion in the case of EACH language would be to start with CEREBUS No.1. Pick a language. Have a website where Sean can supply you with the best reconstructions of the pages of CEREBUS No.1 as they become available. Delete the English captions and word balloons and replace them with the translations.

I doubt that that will be done in my lifetime with ANY language, but most of what I'm doing and will be doing for the rest of my life is establishing how I wanted things to work and things I would have done myself had I not had to devote all my energies to resisting a hostile political climate.

The only variable is whether CEREBUS continues uninterruptedly after I'm dead and finally surfaces into society after the Feminist Theocracy and all of its efforts to destroy CEREBUS have exhausted themselves OR if there's an Obliterated CEREBUS Age of however many decades or centuries before CEREBUS RE-surfaces. The only thing I know for certain is that I'll be long, long, long dead before either occurs.

Ultimately, the idea would be to translate every CEREBUS book into every language by this method. You don't tie up the rights with a publisher, you create the translation and make that a resource for anyone who is interested in publishing CEREBUS in that language to do so. Or it becomes strictly an "on-line" thing: you want CEREBUS in ANY language as a download for your iPhone? cerebusdownloads.com. The former, no money is made but the possibility exists of finding an "off-shore bunker" the Feminist Theocracy can't get to.

In the latter case money could be made but probably not much until, again, long after I'm dead when people are interested in DISCUSSING matriarchies and feminism. Right now -- and I assume until long after I'm dead -- we're only interested in IMPOSING matriarchies and feminism and destroying anyone who doesn't "toe the line".







Unknown said...

Barry Deutsch - I don't think feminists are evil. They're just monomaniacal, a "0"/"1" culture. To them there is only Feminism and Not Feminism. Anything that is Not Feminism, to them, needs to be destroyed. End of (their) story. I think the monomania is central: it originates from the fact that feminism is a castle built on sand. The closer you get to 100% of women out in the workforce -- and we're at 86% now -- the lower your replacement birth rate drops and the more obvious it becomes that your society is committing suicide.

Half the population is responsible for 100% of society's births. Until you figure out how to make men pregnant that's an inescapable core fact of our society. If you ignore that fact -- and we've been ignoring that fact for almost fifty years -- it becomes inescapable that Feminism is a society-wide death cult: self-eradicating.

No matter how many men you vote off the island, you can't vote central societal facts off the island.






Erick said...

Hi Dave,
as I said below on the Gerhard thread, I love the work and I have stuck around since the early 80's.
That being said, I disagree with your views on women and feminism, but in no way do i feel that you are harming anyone.
I do have a question though. You say that feminism is a society wide death cult. Which or whose society is do you feel is dying?

Anonymous said...

Erick, he's talking about birth rates. Please see https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2054.html

--Claude Flowers

Erick said...

Thanks Claude,
that shows that third world countries - unsurprisingly are getting busy at a much higher rate than developed countries. Getting busy in Burundi still does not answer the death cult of society question though.

Drew Woodworth said...

I think there is a link between the rise of feminism, industrialization, birth control, and more women working outside the home with the drop in fertility/birth rates. If trends continue, it will be difficult for society to recover from a non-replacement fertility rate. Hence, the death of society and, possibly, our species. Obviously, no one can predict the future and trends today do not necessarily predict future trends. It is something worth considering.

Erick said...

Hello Drew,
My answer to that would be to look at a now obscure figure from the 1970's, a man by the name of Paul Ehrlich. Writer of a a book called The Population Bomb. One of many books from late 60's early 70's foretelling the over population of the planet just about now.

Anonymous said...

I am taking my morning workbreak to respond, so this will by necessity be brief. Here is the most recent CDC information on American birthrates (from 2009):

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db136.htm

Overall and in all racial groups aside from "Non-Hispanic white," induced abortions outnumber natural fetal losses (i.e. miscarriages, stillbirth, etc.). Among "Non-Hispanic blacks," the ratio is 445,000 induced abortions per 615,000 live births. Factor in 192,000 fetal losses and you have more than half of 1,253,000 black pregnancies not resulting in live births.

To the extent that support for abortions is led by feminists, it can be said that feminist theory and legislation founded upon feminist principles impact birthrates.

--Claude Flowers

Drew Woodworth said...

Hey Erick,
I have not read the book, but I have read of it. It seems like Ehrlich was very wrong about our ability to produce food. I don't know if he was off much on his population models. Regardless, most reasonable people understand that negative population trends are fairly difficult to reverse/correct due to the lag in time for changes in behavior to become changes in outcome. However, it's impossible to predict with any accuracy because there are just too many unknown factors. Also, most current economic systems seem to rely on population growth so current trends have the potential to wreak economic havoc. I tend to be optimistic that mankind will figure it out.

Drew Woodworth said...

Even feminists agree with Dave... Sorta
I think feminists believe societies need to be more accommodating to women with children in order to solve the birth rate issue. Of course, they aren't really clear on what accommodations they want, exactly.

http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2012/12/07/falling-birthrates-the-threat-and-the-dilemma/

Erick said...

Hello Drew and Claude,
I thought I would just combine my response.
I think what may be happening with regards to declining birthrates and the rise of more women in the workforce and abortions is more a function of causality.
By that I mean those two processes undoubtedly contribute to the effect (declining birthrates) but are not of themselves or by themselves the reason.

If you just looked at the surface of the post WWII baby boom, then you would surmise that the women who held down jobs while the men where off to war had resumed being homemakers and had babies at an historic rate.

This would be false.

In fact the WWII baby boom was more of a return to the norm following the great depression. The rates of birth were actually higher in the time frame of 1900 to 1910 than that of the baby boom years of 1946-1964.

Feminism, abortions, women in the workplace played little to no factor during the great depression. I suspect that recession of a few years ago had the same effect of birthrate decline.

Nonetheless, population aging is a very serious matter, perhaps that is why the Chinese have also just removed the one child per couple provision.

The solutions vary from country to country but one of the most misunderstood and maligned ways is to encourage the dreaded I word. immigration.

Tony Dunlop said...

I check the Kickstarter page a couple of times a day and am wondering if it'll top 200 this time. Are we going to get another update, comparing where it is now vs. the same point in the previous campaigns? And how much of the difference in dollar amounts is due to Dave not being able to draw, i.e. no head sketches?

Drew Woodworth said...

I guess look at the data. US birth rates have fallen since mid-60s, flattened out in the seventies and have not really moved significantly since then. There was a minute dip during the "Great Recession", but nothing like the Great Depression or the 60's.

I think there are a lot of causes to the drop in fertility rate including but not limited to feminist theory, industrialization, birth control, abortion, etc. it is a complex issue and to try to prove causality from one or two things is a bit simplistic.

Robbie Foggo said...

Hi Tony,
It might even be because we're coming up to Christmas with people having to put money aside for gifts/ family celebrations/ travelling/etc. I know I'm trying to keep a few quid aside for the next few months.

It might be worth looking at the numbers compared to different times of the year?

Steve said...

True story:

I checked AMOC this morning before heading off to work; this topic had been posted but there were no comments yet. I wondered if anyone would comment on the cover, be interested in similar error issues, that sort of thing.

After getting home from work and visiting with the family for a bit I thought I'd check AMOC again.

"WOW! 15 comments - I'm not the only geek for stuff like this!" I thought to myself.

And then of course I read the comments ...

Ah well.

Y'all enjoy whatever it is you're hashing out up there.

Steve


ps -- as for Dave's "Half the population is responsible for 100% of society's births" ... uhm... well, for my wife and I it was a cooperative effort to begin the pregnancies which led to our children and it is a cooperative effort now to raise them.
100% of the parents in our household are 100% responsible for raising our daughters.

Anonymous said...

Dave won't know how families work in 2015 unless someone faxes him a picture of one.

Tony Dunlop said...

Steve, you expect us to be on-topic? That would be like actually discussing the storyline in Aardvark Comment back in the day. Not bloody likely!