Dave Sim: CAN5 Update

DAVE SIM:
Sorry I haven't been posting too frequently here.  As you can see from Sean's post that follows this, we have a lot of "irons in the fire" at the moment.  I'm hoping there's a breathing space up ahead, but I think that's measured in months, rather than weeks.  Hopefully not TOO many months.

My top priority right now is getting CEREBUS ARCHIVE NUMBER 5 prepped and that means starting with the text commentaries for the portfolio (because we run excerpts from the commentaries as part of the Kickstarter itself -- "If you want to read all of the commentaries, please pledge for a portfolio" -- so I need to see what parts of the commentaries I have available.  It's 23 pages single-spaced as a word document in 12 pt. type).

[And thanks to Eddie Khanna for saying that he liked the CAN4 commentaries: that's one!   :)]

That took several days and tends to be one of those "dentist appointment" things.  It's generally unpleasant to spend several days back in the 1960s and 1970s so I try to get it all done at once rather than enduring it for several weeks a few hours a day.  I AM looking forward to getting back to THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND, though. Hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Something we're going to be attempting that's a little different this time around is that -- for the Kickstarter video -- I'm tracking down "Origin of Jaka" clips from movies.  So this is a very weird 24-hour "3:16" fasting day since it involves basically watching 5 movies and marking where the "Jaka Origin" bits are.  I'm not sure how Kickstarter is going to feel about us illegally using film clips so I'm going to format them a couple of different ways to try to be as reassuring as possible (one possibility is of me narrating the dialogue as opposed to using the actual dialogue and using isolated images rather than the clip itself and then indicating where you can find the clips online).

It's really part of the overall exhaustive approach that we're trying to take to everything.  "This is the last time Dave Sim will say anything about the first ten pages of JAKA'S STORY, so here's exactly as exhaustive as he can be on the subject." It's the content equivalent of what Sean is doing with reproduction.  "Whatever we're doing, let's do it THOROUGHLY because we're only coming this way once."

Of course, trying to do all of this against the backdrop of the Feminist Theocracy makes it all singularly implausible if the eradication of CEREBUS is actually achieved either during our lifetimes or shortly after our lifetimes (which I would have to rate in the range 80-90% likelihood since there's no indication of the Feminist Theocracy budging from it's "zero tolerance: guaranteed eradication" approach to anything that isn't feminism).  But -- looking on the bright side -- not being a feminist, there really aren't any alternatives that I can see.  I get up and work twelve hours a day six days a week on -- hopefully -- working on that 20% to 10% possibility that I'm actually preserving something and not just prepping it for immolation.

What else are you going to do?

Rhetorical question.

And, looking on the REAL bright side: at worst, we're going to have to reproduce ONE page from GOING HOME from a printed copy and 38 pages from negatives.  The rest are from the original artwork which is always our best source.

And now here's Sean with a few thoughts on that: