More Squinteye! More Squinteye, I say!

Hi, Everybody!

ATTRACTIVE COUSINS #1 IS NOW AVAILABLE TO ORDER FROM DIAMOND! (I think it's still a possibility.)

ALSO VARK WARS: WALT'S EMPIRE STRIKES BACK #1 IS STILL AVAILABLE TO ORDER! (maybe.)

High Society: Red State ORDER CODE MAR201420 , Blue State ORDER CODE MAR201419, Cerebus ORDER CODE MAR201421, None ORDER CODE MAR201418

And there are still Red State buttons for sale. (I apologize to David Birdsong and are Red State readers for not pimping this more, I'm not being political about this, just lazy...)

Hey look, Dave Sim art for sale.

And here's yer free CiH? More soon?
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So yesterday we did Squinteye the Sailor. I forgot to link to Tim's Squinteye post from back in the day.

And now: MORE SQUINTEYE! (This is pretty much all the rest of Squinteye there is...) (In case you're tired of him...)

From Guys:

 (Timely Time-line Matt, reporting for Temporal Control. According to Harrison Starkey/Richard George, the signing isn't for another four months. which means issue 203 takes place four months after issue 201. Dave has said he kept the timeline fluid so that nobody would ever really know how old Cerebus is, but here is the start of trying to nail Jello to the wall and figure out how long Cerebus was in the tavern. (I've been meaning to start digging into this mess for a few years now, sorry?))

 And then there's the return (and last appearance and incarnation of) The Roach:

 And then the signing itself:

 And then: The Guys Party pack:

I'm only including this, because it's the last of the three behind the scenes pages, and where else would I put it?

And from the long lost Yahoo Group 5 questions:

3. In "Squinteye The Sailor" the Popeye parody is obviously intended to be Squinteye, yet in the Guys Party Pack your illustrations in the notes section indicate you switched things around and now the Bluto parody is referred to as Squinteye. Why did you decide to do that? Does this reversal represent some new type of two-in-one-echo where roles are reversed? 

Dave: I had no idea what you were talking about and had to go and look it up. 

Yes, if you look closely at the dialogue of the Popeye character, he refers to himself as Pluto. What I was toying with was the idea that Cerebus' misspent life, culminating in his little sojourn on Pluto (which he keeps misidentifying as Juno) changed any number of things in the context of the world he left as compared to the world he came back to: one of them would be that his boyhood idol, Squinteye (the good guy), is no longer Squinteye, now Bluto (the bad guy) is Squinteye and Squinteye is Pluto which sounds like Bluto. It seemed to express a lot of what I was trying to get across about cumulative effects and the way that the lives of others can metaphorically seem to reflect our own and tell us valuable lessons. And also the fact that I think reality changes in minor ways that can leave you with the inescapable impression that you have been transported to another world entirely. Reading "Cerebus's" in Jo Duffy's introduction to "His First Fifth" in Epic magazine and thinking "Well, that's functionally illiterate. It's supposed to be `Cerebus'' no ifs ands or buts" and then realizing that I was the only one on the planet who still remembered when it was that way. So I wanted Cerebus to experience that but even more dramatically, with Squinteye (remember Cerebus' eye surgery on the way out?) having suddenly become Pluto and Pluto having suddenly become Squinteye. But in the cold literal-minded light of day all I saw that all I was letting myself in for was another lifetime full of "Is the Oscar of Jaka's Story the same Oscar as the Oscar of Melmoth?" style questions. So, I put them off-panel and no one needed to know that it was Bluto doing the Squinteye dialogue and Squinteye doing the Bluto dialogue. If I'm the only one who would get it (and I assumed I was the only one who would get it) then no one else needed to know.

A very sincere tip of the shiny metal helmet and thank you to Jeff Tundis for finding this when I absolutely couldn't.

Next Time: "HOBBS! WHERE ARE THOSE PICTURES OF SPIDER-MAN!!!" M. Monah Doweson