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| "Suitable for framing" |
Yup, time for another one of these:
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| (Technically, the one with Eddie is next, but I've done that one.) |
Please Hold For Dave Sim 8/2019, the transcript:
By Dave Sim and Matt DowTranscribed by Jesse Lee Herndon
Posted without review...
Part One:
Matt: Hi, Dave!
Dave: Hi, Matt. Have fun at the beach, Paula.
Matt: Oh, she will. Ahh. So! Before we get started, I am recording right now, I’ve got everything set up, but..
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Before we go to anything on the itinerary, what I was gonna start off with last month but you didn’t call me cause you weren’t there, was congratulations on being halfway up the month! Cause, with “Church & State II” now you guys have eight remastered phonebooks and eight yet to go. And I posted something about it, ya know, congratulations Dave you’re halfway up, and somebody commented goin’, “actually, they’re the thick phonebooks” so it’s 198 issues so you’re like three-quarters of the way up now. Or two-thirds of the way up.
Dave: It all depends on how you look at it. My viewpoint is always there’s still a whole lot of mountain yet to go. But thank you from up here at Ice Station Zebra, which I call it.
Matt: [laughs] I did a post about it, like, oh yeah, it’s halfway up, and most of the phonebooks left are the thin ones, and then that’s when somebody commented, and I’m like, oh, that’s even better! And then David Birdsong took.. there was a commission from 2010 of Cerebus climbing the Demon Skulls, I think you did Cerebus and somebody took it to Gerhard and had him put in the Demon Skulls. And David Birdsong took it and put in the “Please Hold for Dave Sim” so that that’s this month’s teaser image.
Dave: Well, that’s good. I gotta tell you that I liked your Batman vs Beer, Iguana vs Cerebus drawing, there. Death from above!
Matt: [laughs] David Johnson had commented on… he had sent somethin’ in, and it was kinda full of inaccuracies and I was going through answering questions, pointing stuff out, and at one point, he had asserted that I had said or done something that I did not say or do and in my response, which I posted, said, anybody who can find the part where I said this I will give you Batman vs Cerebus vs Iguana vs Beer. So, immediately, I went, that’s gonna be next month’s image.
Dave: Well, there you go. If that were Batman he would be copyright 2019 DC Comics, but I’m not sure that’s really him. I mean, look at him! Does that say Batman to you? I didn’t think so.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: You’re painfully honest.
Matt: Oh the problem that I have with the image was I was doin’ it yesterday, actually, and I’m like, I got the panel of Cerebus vs the Spirit and I printed it out really big, flipped it so that when I trace it it’ll be the right way, and I traced it up, put it on the page, I started inkin’ everything, and I’m like, this is great! This looks great! And then I got to Cerebus’ arm where he’s grabbin’ the shirt, and I’m like, I’ve completely lost all detail of what this is supposed to look like. I’m lookin’ at the original, goin’ I didn’t trace any of that, apparently!
Dave: [laughs] That’s the tricky part of it, when you’re doing a gray fist and a gray arm grabbing onto a gray costume. You better start thinkin’ ahead of time, what you’re gonna do here, cause this is no time to improvise. Anyway! We got a ton of questions here, so let’s get to our ton o’ questions. Starting with… oh, wait a second, Grandpa forgot his magnifying glass, he’ll be back in a sec.
Dave: I’m back. This one came in a little bit tiny from Eddie Khanna for the Please Hold. “Did Dave Sim address somewhere I missed it, but what is the deal with the Cerebus Downloads files and all the restorations? Years ago when I bought the whole set I was given the impression that the files would be updated as books got restored but it doesn’t seem like that has happened. Am I just misinformed? They still look like the old scales, not nearly as nice as what I’ve seen posted here as samples.” That’s very possible, I guess. Cerebus Downloads is completely under George Gatsis’ jurisdiction. So if you have any problem or anything you think has been misrepresented, you definitely want to talk to George about it and I think it’s turned out to just being George hadn’t substituted the new restored digital files for the old unrestored digital files. Like, I’m in territory with here that I’m completely unfamiliar with, because I know at one time you could get all of the digital downloads in every different imaginable format, and from what I understand now you just get them in PDF. But I really don’t know what that means, so, once again, it’s one of those, Cerebustech@gmail.com is the email address and any complaints for things that you want rectified or something that you think you got promised and you want to get what you were promised, George is the guy to talk to and then if for some reason you do not get total satisfaction from George Peter Gatsis you can always leave a phone message for me, 519-576-0610, and just leave a detailed complaining phone message with all of the particulars of what you think you should have and what you don’t have, and obviously you want it and you want it now. So, I will do my level best, leave your contact information, and I will give George a call and talk to him about your individual situation and we will make everything all better for you. That’s my commitment on [indistinct], but right now, I think that it’s just, we’re all having to juggle way too many balls at the same time and trying to keep them up in the air and updating CerebusDownloads.com with the latest digital restored versions just has not been top of mind for any or all of us but as soon as somebody complains like this… and if you could have a contact name and contact information, I promise you either somebody will get back to you insistent in making it all better, or you phone and leave me a message at 519-576-0610 and I’ll contact everybody involved and we’ll make it all better for you.
Matt: I think..
Dave: I’m hoping that that covers that one.
Matt: I think the problem there is, if you downloaded stuff six months ago and then the files got updated, you have the old files and just a matter of gettin’ people the correct files. And I don’t know what the procedure for that stuff is. As you said, it’s George’s ballywick at that point. Contact the people, goin’, hey we got the new version of this, ya know, do you want a copy?
Dave: Yeah it does seem that there were some glitches, like it guess it says that “Guys” has been restored and “Guys” hasn’t been restored, so that shouldn’t say that, and I can certainly understand if somebody bought the $99 package and they got “Guys” and they’re lookin’ at it, and they’re going, “this doesn’t look remastered to me, this looks like the old really dumbed down scans.” That’s one of those communications problems. That’s why I’m saying, if you as an individual have any kind of complaint along those lines, complain to George, and if you don’t get satisfaction out of George, complain to me, and then I will complain to George, and somewhere along the line we will get you everything that you understand you were supposed to get in the deal. And, let’s see, there was another thing in Eddie’s fax… Oh! On the credits page of the website it states Dave and Deni met December 16th, 1976. They married October 6th, 1978, separated August 20th, 1983, and divorced August 1986. And Eddie goes, “I think the divorce date is the wrong year. I’m pretty sure you were already divorced one month before the cover date of my first issue of Cerebus”. I don’t remember what Eddie’s first issue of Cerebus was, but I think what happened there was, back in the 1980s, if you had a no-contest divorce, which is what Deni and I had, we settled all of the terms between ourselves, and didn’t go to a court of law to get it sorted out. All you had to do was live apart for three years and you were automatically divorced, and then you got a certificate in the mail, saying, “congratulations, you’re divorced!” And I think that’s what happened there. So that’s why divorced, August…
Part One divorces
Part Two elopes
Dave: And, moving onto Jesse Lee Herndon, our transcription guy. Where, this is the part where you go, “thank you thank you thank you, Jesse”.
Matt: Oh yes, thank you thank you Jesse. [laughs]
Dave: No, no, no, there was three of them.
Matt: Oh! Thank you thank you thank you? Jesse.
Dave: That’s good. Alright, “here’s a question for Dave I’ve not seen asked, in ‘Latter Days’, Cerebus becomes a fan of ‘Rabbi’ by Garth Inniscent, which was based on ‘Preacher’ by Garth Ennis. Were you ever a reader of that series, or was it just chosen as a topical thing to give something for Cerebus to obsess on?” I thought it was a weird kind of idea, to turn a Christian minister into the psycho that Preacher was, and that was just me riffing on the idea, and going, does this become less palatable and less politically correct if the character is a Rabbi instead of a preacher? No, I was never a reader of the series. I think somebody gave me a few issues to read and my only real connection to it was Garth Ennis and I were the American guests at Ozcon the one year. Course, I’m not American, but when you go to England or you go to Australia, if you’re from anywhere near the United States, you’re one of the American guests. So he and I actually traveled together, I forget how we traveled, whether we went by train or whether we went by plane, because part of Ozcon was held in Sydney, and the other part was held in Melbourne. So they had to transport the guests from one to the other during the week in between the two conventions. And we got to spend a fair amount of time together and had a pretty good time. I don’t think he was remotely familiar with Cerebus and I wasn’t remotely familiar with Preacher or his other work. But he was very interesting, very intelligent guy and mostly talked about personal stuff. I think he had, either had, I think he had a girlfriend in Australia? This was a way for them to spend some time together in Melbourne, if I’m remembering the correctly. Anyway, he was in a long distance relationship and I was in a long distance relationship at that time with Susan Alston, but not as long as his long distance relationship. I do think it was England and Australia. So that was just sort of a, well, I’m tell you, I’m not gonna do too much with Preacher here, it’s gonna have far less to do with “Preacher” than it has to do with Superman as messiah, Superman as Rabbi, but definitely a nod and a tip of the Dave Sim cap to Garth Inniscent.
Okay, and then we’ve got Jeff Seiler. “Dave, having just gotten about a page and a half into what Matt posted of the essay by Stan Drake about layouts of any given page. High altitude mapping? I’m wondering, how much time would you routinely take after lining the panels and staring at the page? And yes I know that you did layouts in your notebooks, but still, before you figured out the angles, density, lightning, etc. I mean I own that framed, thank Tarim, original art page on which Krull is talking to his minions. On that original art page, the rain is mostly blue, the positioning of the characters is remarkable, although the panel structure would get, heh, a bit better through the years. I am seriously interested in how long it would took you to lay out a page. Thanks, and yours beyond everything, Jeff Seiler.” And I’m pretty sure that the page that Seiler just bought is Cerebus page 380, or page 16 of issue 17 if you’re going by that, and pulled out the Cerebus volume to take a look at it. And, at that time, I wouldn’t have spent too much time laying out the page, because it’s really just imparting a lot of information in a hurry, so it’s really just handwriting all of the dialogue, roughly where the word balloons were going to go, and then putting the characters into the leftover space. And looking at page 380, I would have to say my obsession with that because Krull is basically me doing Conan and it definitely trying to do the Frank Frazetta Conan, which involves saying okay, here’s Conan painted by Frank Frazetta, what would that look like in pen and ink? And then trying to figure out, okay, if he’s going to be wearing these robes, which Conan ordinarily wouldn’t be wearing, who’s the best guy to be picturing while I’m doing the robes part? Because I’ve got the bottom half of Conan’s face on two of the panels on the page that Jeff and then a close-up in the last panel. And my decision was definitely Jeff Jones. If I was trying to figure out how to put robes and clothing and fancy stuff on Conan in order to be as compatible with the old Frazetta look, that’s what I would be doing, and I’m not particularly happy with what I was doing? One of the reasons I brought in Dirty Fleagle and Dirty Drew bout a year later, that was definitely one of those Daffy Duck, “Let’s try that again!” But this time, let’s really try to figure out what Jeff Jones looks like, let’s get out mind off of Frazetta and get our mind onto Jeff Jones. So, I would say, very little time on that page in terms of the layout, how long did I take to layout the page, because I was mostly picturing, okay, how do I do a Jeff Jones texture? And the brushstrokes on the folds in the clothing are just way way too close together for Jeff Jones. He was far more of a minimalist when he was inking that kind of stuff. So, it’s really a matter of looking at my Jeff Jones black and white folds and stuff and just not quite getting it. I got it a little better with issue 27 when I was doing Dirty Drew and Dirty Fleagle. But, there really isn’t a typical layout page. Sometimes the layouts go very very quickly, and you definitely want to jump in and start inking as soon as you possibly can, and sometimes it’s just not coming together in terms of moving the characters through the panels and getting them to say what they have to say. This one, like I say, is two separate problems, just, I want to move them from point A to point B, explain some of the background on the characters, and then get Cerebus back in as quickly as possible. Okay! So, that one’s a little more specific to your actual page, Jeff, and less specific to how long does it take me to layout a page but there you go, that’s the answer.
And then we got Jesse Lee again. Regarding the last Please Hold for Dave Sim, Jesse Lee said, “Great, the Onliu all being Yosmite Sam is an idea that gets funnier every time I think about it. Makes me wonder if Elrod's "race" from Melvinbone, if they had existed, would've all been Foghorn Leghorns.” And then you and Seiler go at it. What that would sound like, "Now, listen, I say listen son, I'll have the flapjacks, pancakes that is. I'd also, I say I'd also like some bacon, that's the bit from the bottom of the pig, pork son, the OTHER white meat...", "I, I say, I hate to interrupt, and pardon me for doing so son, but the chef just told me, informed me that is, that we're having a shortage of bacon at the moment. We're all out, son. Would, I say would y'all like some of the sausage? It's bovine. Cow that is? Moo, son, moo..." Matt, you write a pretty good Foghorn Leghorn, here.
Matt: Thank you!
Dave: And Jeff goes, “Nice try, Matt, with the bloviating bovine. But, "Ah thaank I can do ya one bettah. That is, Ah say, that is, Ah say, Ah've gotta little ol' piggy right out'chere. He's just *dyin'* to sit up on all y'all's dinner table! He's a cute, a*dore*able little ol' piggy, and he's, (now, stay, Ah say, stay with me here), a*vail*able! Approachable, that is! Yuuum, yum!" You write two different Foghorn Leghorns. Jeff’s is more Senator Claghorn, yours is definitely more Foghorn Leghorn but both really good.
Matt: Well, thank you, thank you very much.
Dave: Take a bow! Don’t…
The end of, ah say, the end of part two
Part three hatches
Matt: The bit that you were…
Dave: Okay, and then we’re onto the 2020 California tour, it’s not a tour! Let’s just get that established at the outset. It’s a sales trip. There’s a very very big difference between a tour and a sales trip. I don’t think anybody has actually done a sales trip. At least, a creator hasn’t. Marvel used to have, and DC both used to have reps on the road all the time going from store to store and hyping the books and trying to get sales up. So, here are all the responses to Carson’s post. David Birdsong says, “perhaps the Gofundme account could help to raise funds for the trip, but being restricted to just one state probably means limited fan support. Perhaps a sponsor could be found but your guess is as good as mine as to who and how. The Kickstarter is another good idea but you would have to offer something unique. The art on “You Don’t Know Jack” is very very good and some of it would make nice prints but prints did very well with when Dave was doing with the Cerebus Archive Kickstarters. Maybe you, Carson, and Dave could do an all new jam piece just to raise funds for the trip. We’re limited to something very specific in which we don’t get the confusion that came with the earlier campaigns.” What we’re trying to avoid here is Carson really having to do anything, because Carson is really not remotely sold on the idea of doing a sales trip and it’s definitely going to interfere with his teaching schedule. I guess, his semester isn’t over until July 10th, and what I’m talking about doing is starting just after Ramadan next year, which would be May 24th/25, somewhere around there and going through to San Diego. So, the idea of Carson having to do extra drawings for having to sell artwork or whatever else to help pay for this, that’s just not going to happen, and I don’t think Cerebus, or Carson, or Dave Sim are in that Gofundme sweet spot where you just go “hey we started a Gofundme page! Please, just everybody pile on and start giving us money.” That’s probably not going to happen. But I think what is probably going to end up happening is wherever I am come July 10th, Carson will then join in if he’s interested and that will be between July 10th and San Diego, which would be I think the 23rd next year. Somewhere around there, anyway. So, as far as I know, that’s the situation that we’re sitting at. Maybe Carson will get in on the Modesto stop cause he’s in Modesto, couple of points around there. Right now Rolly is working on the map and I asked him specifically today, how’s the California trip coming along? And last week it was looking like there were three different scenarios of how it was going to be doing, how it could be done, one starting in the North and going straight down to San Diego with a bunch of side trips. Another one that started in San Diego and went back the other way. And then one that is panning out the best as he’s actually mapping it out, is starting in Sacramento and then going North in an arc and then coming back through that arc to the bay area, San Francisco, Oakland… All the points around there, and pretty much that’s where everything picks up steam because all of the stores are much closer together and there’s more stores. That’s the big reason to do California, is because San Francisco down to San Diego, a bit of an exaggeration, it’s just one big city. Strip malls get smaller, and then strip malls get bigger, and then we find out that you’re in another city and then the strip malls get smaller again. So, that’s really the situation that we’ve got. Rolly just making an educated guess at this [indistinct] that it looks like it would be about 40 days. And I asked him is the 40 days including me taking Sunday off for the Sabbath? And he said, that’s not figured in but that can be figured in. The other thing that he’s figuring in is the 13 major print newspapers that are still being published in California and where those are relative to different stores. So the next time we’ll be asking for everybody’s opinion and what does this look like to you and who figures that they can help with this section, and who figures they can help with that section, is when Rolly gets a sequential list of store number 1 through store number 185 and here’s what it looks like on a map. And then we just start breaking it down. We’re guessing somewhere between 4 and 5 stores a day? That might be optimistic depending on how things go, how busy the store is, and we’ll be emailing people with a tentative schedule. Tentatively, this is when Dave Sim will be coming to your store. And at some point we’re going to need a lot of volunteers, maybe like a half dozen trading off with each other, keeping this all updated on a daily basis. I’m not going to develop any computer skills that I don’t already have and I have very few computer skills, but I will be phoning and saying, “okay I was supposed to get to 4 stores today, and I only got to 3 stores today, so please notify the stores as soon as possible that I’m not coming today, but as far as I know, I will be coming in tomorrow.”
Okay, this ties in with Tony Dunlop saying, “hmm. Apparently nobody in California thinks Dave is a misogynist” [laughs] And it’s like, no, I definitely know better than that. Excuse me, if we’re talking about any given state in the union that the majority of the people are going to think I’m a misogynist it’s going to be California. I think the difference is with comic book stores and comic book store owners and comic book store managers and comic book store ordering people, sometimes those are the same person and sometimes they’re different people… I don’t think you can be a successful store owner and allow your person politics to interfere the way individuals allow their person politics to interfere. I don’t think you could stay in business if you had to agree with everybody’s political opinions whose work you sold and whose work you sold to other people. You just can’t have those kinds of litmus tests as a retailer of, “I’m sorry if those of you are interested and those are the comic books you want to read. I’m not gonna supply you with those.” It’s like, “I’m here to supply comic books. Tell me what comic books you want, you pay your bill on time, and it’s all good.” So this is one of the reasons that I’m doing it this way, is I don’t want to…, I certainly have no interest from anybody in the whole trigger warning set-up. Here is Dave Sim at this convention or here is Dave Sim at this store and you have to trigger warn people that Dave Sim is not a feminist and Dave Sim doesn’t pretend to be a feminist. So, if you are a feminist and you are extremely sensitive about your feminism and you get very very easily offended if someone says anything that isn’t toeing the feminist line, then you really don’t want to talk to Dave Sim and we want to warn you at the door that that is the situation. Or warn you at this booth, or whatever. You have to acknowledge that Dave Sim isn’t a feminist, and he’s perfectly entitled to say things that are not feministic if you want to talk to Dave Sim. So, this is why I’m doing it this way, where it’s… I’m going to the store and I’m talking to somebody at the store. It doesn't matter to me whether it’s the owner, or the manager, or the person who orders graphic novels, that’s what I’m interested in, just saying, this is what I’m doing, here’s a copy of it, this is what it looks like, here’s a promotional video for it. Here’s the prequel to it, “You Don’t Know Jack” #1 & #2. Look at them, they’re done, it’s a not a matter of “oh I wonder if that’s even gonna come out”, it’s like, no, it will come out because it’s already done. These are just advanced copies and particularly as it looks right now, it’s going to be an art catalogue. That’ll be the first form that “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One and “You Don’t Know Jack” 1 & 2 and the “Hermitage Awesomes Catalogue” with the “You Don’t Know Jack” artwork probably will be all in one package, maybe with the two “You Don’t Know Jack” issues as individual comic books. And it’ll basically, I’m just walking in and saying, here’s what I’m going to be selling, here’s the idea behind it, and asking them “do you want a copy for yourself? Do you know anybody who would want a copy?” and, because it’s an art catalogue what I want to do is each person who gets an art catalogue I wanna have their email address and their phone number so that I can contact them directly, or someone can contact them directly if anytime a piece of artwork from that catalogue is being offered. One of the problems that I’m…
Part Three has a problem
Yo, Part Four solves it
Dave: One of the problems that I’m getting into is there are not enough deep-pocketed Dave Sim art buyers and Dave Sim patrons that I can just do one giant auction that takes place over 48 hours. It’ll just evaporate everybody’s money on whatever it is that they think that they can afford and the rest of the pages will just go for $100 or $200. I’m not doing that. It’s basically I’m going to be selling my pages that are in the catalogue, Carson’s going to be selling his pages there in the catalogue. Carson, you want to do all your pages at once, and do them all over one weekend? That’s up to you, it’s your pages. If you want to wait until San Diego to auction them, you wait until San Diego to auction them. We get all the way to San Diego and it doesn’t look like the price of the artwork is going up or anybody is particularly interested, well, we’ll do it sometime after San Diego. But the important thing… well, there’s two important things here. One, we really would like to get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One printed and available for the people who have been waiting for it for eight years, which is a relatively small handful of people. The way of doing that is to say, okay, here’s the expenses. It’s going to cost about what an art catalogue would cost. Probably in the $50 to $75 range, because we don’t know how many that we could sell. If we knew ahead of time that we could sell 500 of them, that’s fine, then it’ll be a lot less than that. But, since we’re going to be doing it as a Kickstarter and probably selling them directly to the retailers the first time around, again, on the basis of do you want one of these? Do you want one of these? Okay, we’ll register you on the list. Now you’re part of the group that’s going to be able to bid on the artwork. You don’t have to bid on the artwork, but you’re allowed to because you bought one of these. So, essentially, there’s that, and then there’s, okay, all of these people, ya know, the Patreon people who have supported me every month for the last number of years and a number of people who are definitely waiting and waiting and waiting for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” #1. Okay, here’s the best way that I can picture to do this to make sure that we take care of that audience first. After that, then we get into that situation of is it an IDW book or is it a Ted Adams Clover Press book? And basically, what I’m looking to do is to say, can it be both? Can we do a joint production, the first joint production of IDW and Clover Press? But I’ve only had one conversation with Chris Ryall at IDW about this. I haven’t talked to Ted Adams, and when I asked Chris, “when was the last time you talked to Ted Adams”, it was months ago. So, it’s like, okay, alright, I don’t think this is all going to get sorted out in a hurry, but I want to keep some forward momentum going here. So, “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One in its first form as an art catalogue can be made to exist sometime in the next three or four months, and then X number of people will be getting it as Kickstarter supporters. This is what they’re buying, and this is what they get. And then however much money I can bring in on that that’s not Carson’s money, Carson gets his cut, he can do whatever he wants with his cut. I will take the money that I get and use that to theoretically to print off 185 copies of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One The Art Catalogue, so that I can say to people, here I can sell you one of these right now. You can buy it as a store owner, you can buy it as an art collector, you can buy it for one of your best customers, you can buy it for your favorite Alex Raymond customer, your favorite Flash Gordon fan. Whatever it is. I just want to make sure that I’m not getting trapped in this, well, it’s a Marvel and DC store. All they do is buy Marvel and DC. It’s like, I don’t think anybody just buys Marvel and DC in this day and age. I know that it looks that way to the avant garde stores but this is the problem. I’m in no man’s land between the Marvel & DC stores and the avant garde stores. The avant garde stores hate me because I’m an evil misogynist and Gary Groth hates me and Fantagraphics hates me and Drawn & Quarterly hates me, and consequentially they all have to hate me. So it’s like, alright, so it’s very difficult to make a living off of you guys, but it doesn’t seem to be any more difficult for me to go into a Marvel & DC store where I don’t even think they know who I am, let alone hate me because of my political views. If they do, that’s fine. I’ll be the one using up six to eight weeks of my life, and everybody just slams in the door in my face. “No, I absolutely don’t want Dave Sim anywhere near my store under any circumstances.” Okay, I’ll live with that. But I really don’t think that’s the situation. I think that’s histrionic extremest leftist politics.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: How ‘bout that, I did that all in one breath!
Matt: [laughs] Have you been rehearsing.
Dave: Not formally rehearsing, but there is this kind of… what everybody else things reality is just getting so weird that I have to keep revisiting reality a lot. Like, going, okay, 185 guys operating business in a pressure cooker situation where you’re three bad decisions away from being driven out of business. I don’t think your biggest concern with a guy walking in the front door of your store is whether or not he hates women. That seems to be the consensus with the general comic book field. Which is why I really don’t… I’m pretty sure I’m not going to Comic Con. It would be pointless to go to Comic Con, because that is one of those environments that’s like that. Unless I can set up something where, okay, they’ve gotta have warning signs up around. Trigger warnings, Dave Sim is inside here, he’s not a feminist. He’s not willing to pretend to be a feminist. So enter at your own risk, kind of thing. It’s like why would Comic Con do that? So I think it’s more a matter of, by the time I get to San Diego, or by the time Carson and I get to San Diego, he joins on July 11, I think I’ll probably have a list of open minded people that I can meet with about things like, “You Don’t Know Jack” television show. Like, here’s the title where we’ve got the audio done. Sean and Stephanie here in town did all the audio and we have a finished version of it and now it’s over to Oliver Simonsen to do the actual animation on it. And the titles tell the whole story for the “You Don’t Know Jack” the television show. Okay, I’m gonna be, theoretically or possibly shopping a television show around California. Probably not selling it in Sacramento and probably not selling it points North from there or [indistinct] cities. But by the time getting down to San Francisco, getting down to Los Angeles, I’m assuming there would be people who will be interested in at least seeing the titles for the “You Don’t Know Jack” television show. And then somebody wants to do “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” the movie, well, if they’re willing to keep themselves confined to Volume One, that’s fine. But I don’t want to get into the George RR Martin situation of, ya know, okay, Volume Two of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” came out and meanwhile they’re doing a television show where they’re doing Volume Three or Volume Four or Volume Five. No, that’s not gonna happen, for exactly the reasons that I don’t think you wanted that to happen with “Game of Thrones”. But I’m sure George entertained himself to a great extend, going, “well this will be funny”. How do you do a condensed television show of a book that hasn’t been written yet? I don’t want to do that with “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. Definitely if somebody says, “well, sell me one of your art catalogues which has the whole of Volume One it. I’ll read through the end of Volume One and I’ll let you know what kind of option money I’d be willing to give you for Volume One with an option on Volume Two, and an option on Volume Three.” That kind of thing. But in terms of… and the same thing with singing autographs. If you know that Dave Sim is coming to California, and you know that Dave Sim is coming to every comic store in California, and you follow that tentative schedule on A Moment of Cerebus, “hey, it’s my lunch hour, I think I’ll go over to whatever the name of the store is and hang around outside with my copy of Spawn 10 and Turtles #8 and see if I can get Dave to sign them for me.” It’s like, “sure, I’ll be happy to sign them for you.” Somebody wants a complete set signed? I dunno! Have you got a car? You wanna give me a lift to the next stop? You might get some jittery autographs, but sure, I’ll sign your whole set of Cerebus while you drive me to wherever it is 70 miles down the highway. Buy me lunch, however it is. I’ll stay very very loose on this. What I’m trying to do is put a floor under it, which is… okay, let’s say IDW doesn’t want to give me any support whatsoever. Clover Press doesn’t want to give me any support. Heritage Auctions doesn’t want to give me any support. Diamond Comic Distributors doesn’t want to give me any support. Well, okay, fine! I’ll figure out how to do this without any help from anybody, cause I just wanna find out how many copies of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” the Art Catalogue I can sell people. I don’t really even know how much help I need with that. I’m gonna have Rolly look into the bus. Nobody wants to give me a ride? That’s fine. Okay, I’ll take the bus. I have no problem with that. I might end up sleeping in a couple of bus stations. That’s fine! It’s an education process. Okay, California, top to bottom, virtually everybody absolutely loathes and despises Dave Sim because that’s what good right-thinking people do. So Dave Sim just has to take the bus or take a cab or walk or mooch a ride off of Oliver Simsonsen and his small co-horde of friends and he ended up not selling anything from the top of California all the way down to San Diego and then I flew home. The end.
Matt: [laughs] The one comment about making it into a documentary, all I’m thinkin’ is, it’s gonna be the weirdest version of ”The Incredible Hulk” TV show anybody has ever seen.
Part Four hitches a ride to slow sad piano music
Part Five begins
Dave: Yes! I mean, it could be just about anything. That’s one of the reasons why I’m just talking about going to California, having a sensible route to follow and then just see what happens. “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One I think is a really phenomenal piece of work. Like, I’ll say that about my own work and I think it’s very very interesting. There’s no question about it that… I’m guessing a percentage… 85%, 90% of the comic book field wants to make sure that it is completely destroyed before it even exists and it’s like, again, no, that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible. I think that when I’m talking to individual store owners and individual graphic novel buyers and managers and shake hands, and “here’s what I’ve got to show you”, takes about half an hour, and, ya know, if you want to buy these sample copies you can look at them at your leisure. And here’s the idea about… behind what I’m doing. Because, ya know, Heidi McDonald’s not gonna talk about it. Tom Spurgeon’s not gonna talk about it. Except in deprecating, “Dave Sim the sick twisted misogynist is going to be going to California”. Obviously, that’s not going to sell copies of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One. But me going in in person, I hope that it will. I hope that on average I can get every store to take two copies, or three copies.
Matt: Well, I mean, that’s… that’s not the worst idea in the world.
Dave: Uhh, it could be! That’s one of the things. Anytime that… I always do this, I don’t know what it is in my nature. I always do something that nobody’s ever done before. It can sound like a really good idea until you’re actually trying to do it and then you find out, okay this is why this doesn’t work. One of the reasons that I’m calling it “The Death of a Comic Salesman Sales Trip” is either this will be the death of my career and probably the death of the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” even as a concept, and I’ll know that by San Diego. Or, it works like gangbusters and then I have to do it all over the United States.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Then I gotta go do this in the tri-state area in New York, and I gotta do the mid-west, ya know, Illinois and Indiana, and crash on your couch. And that’s the way… I’ll die there. He ended up doing this for the 8 years it took to publish all four or five volumes of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and then he pitched over and died somewhere outside Waco.
Matt: [laughs] Well, I hope that part doesn’t happen, but, yeah, that… I mean..
Dave: It’s not a bad way to go, I’ve been to Waco.
Matt: If you have to go to every comic book store in America, I mean, let’s hope this doesn’t create a rash of fans going, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna open up a store in the middle of Pigsucker, Arkansas, so that Dave’s gotta come!”
Dave: Well, that’s… that would actually be a fun thing from my perspective. I mean, I’ve only taken a few quick looks at the map but it looks like Eureka, California is the northernmost store and the least accessible for in terms of… it’s going to be hours and hours and hours to get there. But if I’m gonna do every store in California, I don’t want to get into, “every store in California but four”. This store, or that store. That becomes part of the adventure, is okay, what was the weirdest part of the trip? And the four and a half hour bus ride up to Eureka and then then four and a half hour bus ride back down might end up being exactly that. But the other thing is, the most isolated the store is the more pull it’s got from the geographic area. Like, in San Francisco, there’s a comic store virtually every few blocks relatively speaking, which means that’s where a lot of their customer base is gonna come from. Either from them selling comics that that customer likes, or that customer going, “ahh they’re the closest store to me, so that’s the store that I go to”. If you’re the only comic store in California for 400 miles around, you’re gonna be pulling a lot of people from a lot of different locations, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that those are where I get the best sales, because they’ve got a wider audience that they pull from, where they go, “ahh yeah, I think I should probably have four or five of these, just picturing the guys who only come in every six months or every three months because they life 300 miles away.”
Matt: Right.
Dave: So… I’m just looking down the list, and… oh! [laughs] And then Dave Kopperman said, “this really ought to be a documentary.” And then Sean chimes in with, “I really hope you guys rent a car with a backseat large enough to fit Werner Herzog and a boom operator!” That’s not quite as funny as you might think because Peter Ventrella, who is doing a documentary about… it’s called “Rise of the Renegades”, which is really about all of the origins of indie comics back in the 1980s. And definitely really wanted to interview me and I said to him, as I’ve said to everyone who calls me about being in their comics documentary, “you do the documentary, and you get it into a finished form, and then you tell me how much tape I’ve got and where I am in your movie, and I’ll give you a half dozen quotes that will work perfectly for [indistinct]. And of course, with documentary filmmakers that goes over like a complete lead balloon, it’s like, “no, I’m not asking you to make my movie with me. I am asking to be able to interview you for my movie.” And it’s like, okay, what you don’t understand is you’re talking about turning the Off-White House upside down with all of your camera equipment and I answer all of your same dumb Cerebus questions that I’ve answered a 150 times before with different people and you shoot 2 and a half hours, 3 hours of footage, using up 2 and a half, 3 hours of my life, and then you pick a 30 second clip out of that, and then there’s my representation in your film. It’s like, no, that’s not worth 3 hours of my time. So the difference in this case was that Peter went for it! He said, okay, that’s what we’ll do, he’s working on the film, I think he’s still shooting it. He’s still shooting things in San Diego this year and he’s going to put together the film and then say, okay, here’s the part where you would be in there. He’s actually interviewed Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette, Scott McCloud, about Dave Sim and sent me the footage of them talking about Dave Sim. So now he’s getting jazzed for when I mentioned to him that I was planning this California trip, right away he wanted to film it. [laughs] So, it’s like, okay, you’re still not going to be interviewing me, but this is at least something I can pitch the stores on. If you guys want to be in potentiality this guy’s documentary, we’re gonna provide you with signed waiver forms saying that you allow all of the footage of you talking to Dave Sim and your store will appear in the movie. We’re also, Peter and I, talking about… like I’m looking at this footage of Bissette and Rick Veitch and… who else? Oh jeez. Alex Robinson, talking about me. Richard Bruning, who used to do the advertising for Cerebus and then became a DC executive. So he’s got this amazing clip of Richard Bruning talking about me coming to DC to try and license Cerebus and talking about that. So, I started going, ya know, this would make a really interesting Canadians saved American comics documentary that you could pitch to Canadian television stations. So that’s really what we’re looking at doing now. I’ve looked at all the footage, he’s going to send me transcripts of all of it, and then basically I’m just going to rough together my own, here’s these guys talking about Dave Sim and Dave Sim talking about these guys. It’s got that really weird Canadian quality to it, cause it’s like, “ahh, these are all American comic book artists? This guy worked at DC and he knows who this Canadian is? And he thinks that this Canadian has some kind of importance?” So, that’s on the back burner right now. That’s one of those things that I was going to be throwing together in the next while.
Matt: Okay. I look forward to whatever comes of that! Cause, that sounds like a couple of hours of my life I’m gonna enjoy.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I don’t know if it’ll be a couple of hours, like one of the things is, Steve Bissette trying to explain Dave Sim is like, man oh man, have you got an editing job on your hands.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: All of my clips are just going to be, okay, I’ve gotta say this in about 15 seconds or less, 20 seconds or less, and maybe we can just splice this together into a half hour television show. I was saying to him, at the very worst, like the Rogers TV in the local cable outlet, used to be like, just really a [indistinct] cable sort of channel, and now it’s like an actual official television channel! It’s like the Kitchener cartoonist who saved the American comic book field. At the very least I think we could get them to run it. I think we can get them to run it.
Matt: Well, you gotta remember Dave, this is the world of DVD where everything that they film is gonna end up on the 4 disc complete ultra edition.
Dave: Right, right. And God bless ‘em all. Here’s my complete DVD. Here’s the 15 seconds of me talking about Steve Bissette and here’s my 2 and half hours talking about Steve Bissette and we’ll see which one people will want to buy.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Wondering what their level of inter…
Part Five finishes burning to the disc
Part Six streaming now
Matt: Well, that’s… I mean, if the California trip becomes a documentary, I mean, that… that’s one way you could fund it!
Dave: Ahh, yes. Yes, I mean, that’s another thing, now I’m pitching “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One the Movie, “You Don’t Know Jack” the television show, and Dave Sim “Death of a Salesman Sales Trip” the documentary. I’m hoping there’s a few bucks in there somewhere. At least enough to pay for staying at Motel 8 or whatever. That’s one of the things that we’re looking at doing is saying, if I go to Motel 8 and we go… if I promise to only stay at Motel 8 from Sacramento all the way around California, and this is what I’m promoting, what kind of a room rate can I get? We’ll see what they’ve got to say.
Matt: [laughs] Well, good luck!
Dave: Thank you! Okay, I think that covers all of the tour stuff, at least so far. It’s like definitely it’ll all be on A Moment of Cerebus, I think we want to set something up where, as much as possible in real time the whole four weeks or six weeks, however long it ends up being, you can just click on A Moment of Cerebus and find out where Dave is today and what he’s doing. That’s one of the things we’re going to be pitching to media outlets. Ya know, if you’re not really sure that this is something that you want to have in your newspaper, click on A Moment of Cerebus, that’ll tell you how we’re doing so far, and here’s you over here. We’re gonna be there a week from Tuesday.
Matt: Okay. This is a lot of thinkin’.
Dave: [laughs] Well, as one of my… as I told, Eddie Khanna was here, that’s still one of my favorite lines. Well, there’s two favorite lines from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. One line is Butch Cassidy’s line of “I’m a man with a vision and the rest of the world’s wearing bifocals” and the other one was Sundance’s line which was “You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay, and throwing your postcard towards space… yeah, I’m trying to figure that one out. What can we do to launch your [indistinct] euphemism postcard into space? If I try and throw it, I’m pretty sure my right arm isn’t into throwing arm stuff, but it might be interesting to do a series of clips of a springboard of some kind. We can make a springboard long enough to actually launch your postcard into space. Interesting question. Let’s leave that one open for the time being…
Matt: I seriously meant it as a joke, and Benjamin Hobbs ran with it, and I’m like, okay! [laughs]
Dave: That’s what I’m thinking! If we could get other people to run with it as well. Let’s start a separate thread of, if you had to launch Matt Dow’s postcard into space, how would you do it the most economical and the greatest elevation possible and Dave Sim promises to give it a try?
Matt: I didn’t send the part of… because it became a thing where somebody said something about “please don’t launch me into space”, and then Ben responded with, “well, seven and half good hands we might be able to get you a couple of feet up”.
Dave: [laughs] There was another good line in here. Where is the… Ahh, I’ve got them out of order… [dead air] Nah, I’m not gonna find it. Too much dead air, we can’t have dead air on…
Matt: I can edit anything out!
Dave: That’s true! [laughs] True. Okay… [dead air again] I keep thinking that I’m… I liked your line about “the kids keep claiming that they need to eat. They’re not gaining weight and every time I look there’s more LOL dolls”.
Matt: That’s true.
Dave: It is. I can picture that.
Matt: That’s…
Dave: Now, do you know what you really… when you really have to start to worry, is when the dolls start gaining weight.
Matt: [laughs] That’s possible!
Dave: See, cause they’re claiming they need to eat, they’re not gaining weight, but the dolls are getting fatter and fatter. [hums Twilight Zone theme] Okay, moving on from there, Margaret has a question. “How have you been doing?” I think I’ve been doing pretty good, actually. I’ve got the Off-White House pretty much cleaned up and all of the stuff filed away where it’s supposed to be so that I can find it and as far as I know tomorrow will be a full, uninterrupted day [knocks on wood] knock wood of working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume Three, pages 2, 3, 4, and 5. And Margaret wants to know, “any chance of a Collected ‘Cerebus Archive’ as a Kickstarter one of these days?” Ya know, that’s something that is possible. And you mentioned about digital “Glamourpuss” and she’s talking about digital “Cerebus Archive” would be good as well, although I’d like a nice trade I can put on the shelf for easy reference. That would be a situation of first of all finding all of them, which, there’s two or three external hard drives that have everything on them, theoretically. So we have to first of all find out if all of “Glamourpuss” and all of “Cerebus Archive” are on there. And then getting those put together into book form and doing a prototype through Studio Comixpress. It’s one of the big advantages, is that I can do just one book to test. They just did “Church & State” Volume Two for me to proofread and for Sean to proofread and for Eddie Khanna to proofread. And once I have a prototype on those, then it would be a matter of trying a Kickstarter, but probably doing a Kickstarter where I would say, this is how many of these we would have to sell in order to sell them for this price, as opposed to what we do with the postcards or the Cerebus Archive, which is, if we get in $80 we’ll go ahead and do it. So everybody knows that they’re going to get whatever it is that we’re promising to do. In this case, it would be a matter of going, okay, Alphonso, how much is this going to cost me per unit to do 100 of these? Or 150 of these? And how much will it cost me to do 75 of these? How much is it gonna cost me to do 50 of these? And how it would work is, everybody can pledge for the book and if we sell 50 of them, it’ll cost this much. And if we sell 75 of them, it’ll cost this you this much. So if we sell 100 of them, it’ll cost you this much. And it’ll cost you less the more that we sell, and if we only sell 8 of them, well, okay, then we’re not gonna do it. Or, we can do them for $50 each, or $60 each, the same thing that I’m doing for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” art catalogue. If I can only sell 10 of these, I will make 10 people very happy and they will be willing to pay $50 or whatever it is for this product. That’s up ahead, that’s not really a priority. Our priority right now is “Church & State” Volume Two, me working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, me getting “Cerebus in Hell?” #1s done, and Sean doping restoration and Sean doing the final tweaks on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” #1. So, all of these things are back-burner stuff, but pictures… I do picture it happening somewhere up ahead that we would do more of these projects where, okay, we can only sell 10 of them, or we can only sell 20 of them, but in that case we just make it a really spiffy package, and you sign it 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20, or whatever, and the people involve just understand, okay, that’s why it’s gonna cost…
Part Six indiegogone
Part Seven kickstarted
Dave: And, let’s see, we are getting.. are at the last [indistinct] questions? I think we are. Ahh… Please Hold for Dave Sim, this was from Steve, “Other than the in the wild pages of original art, what items are you missing from the archive that you’d like examples of? I.e., posters, interviews, pins, buttons. You know, the ephemera.” I think probably the best way to tackle that question is to me to say, Margaret, if you get a chance to print out a list, or if you’ve got a list, of all of your Cerebus stuff, and you can send it to me on the next Please Hold for Dave Sim, or the Please Hold for Dave Sim after that, or the one after that. I’ll go down the list and say, yeah, I’d like one of these, I’d like one of these. I’d like one of these. And if Margaret, as this is imposing upon Margaret but let’s try imposing on Margaret. She doesn’t want to go [indistinct], she doesn’t wanna go [indistinct]. What do you consider the rarest Cerebus item in your collection? Where it’s like, definitely in that case, you wouldn’t mind willing those to the Cerebus Archive, that would be great. But we can also keep people on the lookout for Cerebus Archive copies, that would be pretty cool as well. I think the rarest things that I’ve got in the ephemera category is the hologram pendant from 1979, I’ve got four of those in the original boxes. One of them is in a cracked box and the pendant itself got cracked, so it’s not in very good shape. But the other three are pretty much in the same condition they were when I got them 40 years ago. Okay, you mentioned, I feel like this was asked before. Yes, I don’t think that that was an optical illusion on your point, I think it was asked before. And I’m trying to just find a more relevant way to answer the question, which is, okay, let’s talk about the things that I know exist because Margaret’s got them. And then I’ll tell you, yeah, I would really really like to have some of these. I guess one of the things that I’ve got somewhere, and I think it’s just the matchbook cover, is the Now & Then Books Cerebus matchbook. Which is Cerebus from the cover of #15 with the two torches, one in either hand, which was pretty funny, and Harry had those on his matchbook. That’s one of those Kitchener things. If you’re ever digging through a drawer, and you go, “oh, I didn’t know I had those”, the Cerebus Archive would definitely be interested in having those.
Ahh, let’s see, then Jeff Seiler getting silly, “So, I have a question for Dave Sim. How come you never call me ‘darling’, darling, anymore? You never even, I say, you never even call me by, I say, by my nomenclature. Name that is.” Okay, that actually ties in with a “Cerebus in Hell?” concept that I came up with that I figured was the next step in society’s normalization of LGBTQ-Etc. Which is forcing anyone like Jeff with a degree in psychology to be gay, trans, bi, intersect, and/or queer, 10% of the time, on the assumptions that that’s normal and not being gay, trans, bi, intersect, or queer, at least 10% of the time, is aberrational and homophobic, psychologically. Ergo, antithetical to psychologically health, ergo, disqualifying the holder of the degree from holding that degree. But I think the fact that Jeff Seiler would ask me “how come you never call me ‘darling’, darling, anymore?” probably helped him out with that. The other things is, all those photos of him in the Carmen Miranda get-up…
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: We want to make sure that Jeff Seiler, come what may, continues to hold his psychology degree, no matter where they move the goalposts on who you have to be and how you have to behave in order to hold a psychological degree.
Matt: [laughs] That’s pretty good.
Dave: Well, thank you! It’s using up a “Cerebus in Hell?” strip concept, but I figure what the hell, if you’re not going to use up a “Cerebus in Hell?” workable concept for Carmen Miranda, who are you going to do it for?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! And coming in to our final [stammers]… glide pattern… you can tell that my tongue [indistinct] has just about had enough. And Travis Pelkie sent in, “Hey Matt, I was reading some recent issues of Mad Magazine after hearing it’ ending”. I didn’t hear that! Mad Magazine is coming to an end?
Matt: Yeah. They’re… I think there’s two or three more issues, and then they’re ceasing publication, but it’s gonna come back in some form. What had happened was, they went… I wanna say, bi-monthly, and then I think they’re were going quarterly? And when they went quarterly, they relaunched it with new numbering so you can get a Mad #1 and they’re put to like issue 7 or 8.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I guess sales aren’t there, and… so DC’s canceling Mad, but there’s talk that, oh they’re gonna bring it back in some form or another in the near future.
Dave: Well, I hope so. Anyway, “I was reading some recent issues of Mad Magazine after hearing it’s ending, and in the new #7 in the Avengers parody by writer Ian Boothby and artist Gideon Kendall, this appears on the first page” and I was very, very impressed that Cerebus got mentioned as part of a Spider-Ham gag. That’s really great. Ian Boothby is either Canadian or he lives in Canada. I know, he was a Cerebus fan and he used to send me his amateur comics. He was out in Vancouver someplace, so it’s nice to have a nod from somebody... I’m trying to guess the last time that I saw comics from Ian Boothby, and boy it’s gotta be going back a good 15, 20 years, and that’s probably conservative right there.
Matt: [laughs] Well, cool!
Dave: Okay! Well, Matt, you didn’t get to say very much this time.
Matt: Well, I did have a second question I was gonna ask at the opening, but I’ll ask it now. So how was your summer vacation?
Dave: How was my summer vacation? It wasn’t really a vacation, it was… something that forced me to focus, so it was really good from that standpoint that I took this giant pile of Ward Greene material, research material, and went through it, and went, okay, you have to get this down to the size of one correspondence thought. Which is like an inch thick. You’re gonna go through all of the Ward Greene material, and you can put whatever you want in that box, but it has to fit in the box because it’s going over to the hotel with you. And that worked really, really good. Because there I am in the hotel with my laptop, my box of Ward Greene material, and reading it, and going, okay, I have to distill this down to a couple of pages. And sure enough, that’s what I did and I was started on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume Three. And that worked so well that I went, okay, this time, Eddie, bring over the Cerebus Archive #8 page copies that I have to comment on, and same kind of deal. I just couldn’t get past my Oprah Winfrey block, but, if that’s all you’ve got in the hotel room with you, buddy, you’re gonna find a way to do this. And sure enough, I broke through that, and at this point, David Birdsong is starting to put together the notes on Cerebus Archive #8. So that’s very possibly going to be part of the next Kickstarter. Or the next Kickstarter after that.
Matt: Well, cool! I’m glad the desolation could cause focus.
Dave: Yes, it was one of those things… I gotta find a way to do that more often. I’m thinking I’ll just get on our new LRT in Kitchener and go from one end of the town to another and back, and okay, this is what you have to work on because this is all that you brought with you. See if that works. Right now, having been able to get the first page of Volume Three done, now I’ve got a lot of design work that’s going into what I thought was pages 2 & 3, and turned out to pages…
Part Seven was the New Blood
Part Eight takes Manhattan
Dave: Oh, I have missed some questions! I stopped with Margaret Liss and I missed Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. He’s got four quick questions, first one, “would you consider SDoAR postcards promoting the release of the book?” Probably when the general release is done through the stores. Yes, that’s a very good idea. Like the postcards from hell for “Cerebus in Hell?”, no that’s a different thing entirely. That’s just trying to bring in some revenue for the guys actually working on “Cerebus in Hell?”, so different thing entirely, but yes, very good idea. “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” postcards with cover reproductions. “How about postcards promoting remastered Cerebus phonebooks?” No, that’s in a separate category. That’s one of those, as long as I can keep the price of a new car in the Aardvark-Vanaheim American dollar account, which I managed to do for the last three years until I finally eviscerated that amount paying for printing on “Jaka’s Story” which is now all paid for. The cheque, I just deposited the cheque for “Jaka’s Story”, so now I have to keep that intact in the American dollar account so that I can pay for “Church & State” Volume Two, which hopefully should be sometime in the next two or three months. But that’s as much as I want to do on the trade paperbacks is keep that money there and proofread them like crazy, in between the time that Sean has finished remastering them and when the printer’s going to get a hold of them. I’ve already proofread Volume Two once, and just waiting for the corrected version to reread and correct “Church & State” Volume Two. It’s a gorgeous book, Sean did an absolutely amazing job. All of those things where you go, “I didn’t know all of that detail was in there. Man I drew it, and I didn’t know all that detail was in there!” Thank you, Sean!
Matt: He posted a preview and he had the before & after and there’s the one, I think it’s a dream sequence where Cerebus pushes open a door and there’s just a big black blob. And in the remastered, it’s a lion’s head!
Dave: That’s right. That’s good I’d completely forgotten that. When I’d looked at it, I went, “that looks a lot better.”
Matt: When I read… when he posted it, and I read the post and I had that flashback to “Latter Days” when Cerebus is messing with the Three Wise Fellows and he’s gettin’ them agitated about Mickey, Walt, and Donald, and then just sittin’ back and seein’ what happens, and “oh look, it’s a lion’s head!” [laughs]
Dave: There it is. That’s right. That’s right. The fourth question Michael R. had “it’s going to be in the mid-90s today with the heat index hovering around 100 degrees in Easton, Pennsylvania, how is the weather in Kitchener?” And the weather today in Kitchener started off perfect. High 70s, clear, dry, and then it just started getting hot, hot, hot about mid-afternoon, which ties in with… where was that question? That’s another one that I missed. Somebody asked…
Matt: Cory Forrester, I believe.
Dave: Asked about the air conditioning. “Does the Off-White House have air conditioning?” Yes, it does, and I’ve got the air conditioning on, but it’s just about time to turn it off. I only have to put it on for a couple of hours a day. They were trying to sell me a new central air, when they sold me the new furnace, and it’s like, uhh, no, no this is Canada. You don’t need to replace your air conditioner nearly as often as you need to replace your furnace. Thank you, no, I’ve never had problems with the central air as we had it installed in the early 1990s. And David Birdsong, “Hi Dave, a bit off-topic but it’s the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. I was two months shy of my 4th birthday so I have no memory of it. If my math is right, you were 13 at the time. Do you have any memories of that day you can share?” Uhh, the biggest memory that I have of the moon landing was that my cousin Neil who wasn’t actually my cousin Neil, that was one of those weird 1950s/1960s suburbanite things where the couple… Mark and Shirley Humbee, were high school friends of my parents and close friends all the way into their period of having kids and they decided we would call their kids cousins and they would call us cousins. Even though there was absolutely no blood relationship whatsoever. So my “cousin” Neil was visiting, and we were obsessively playing Monopoly. I do remember that. We had our table setup in the rec room where the television was, and Neil and I were just playing Monopoly game after Monopoly game after Monopoly game. And watching the moon landing coverage on television like everybody else we have… photographs of our television, like a giant white blob in the middle of it, because everybody tried to take a picture of the television when Neil Armstrong stepped down off the ladder. And it’s like, that doesn’t work, you can’t take a photograph off of your television, but nice thought. Certainly, we were told repeatedly, and told emphatically, that this is a historical thing happening, so try and remember the moon landing. And apart from the failed attempt to take a picture of Neil Armstrong stepping off of the ladder, that’s the only thing I’ve filed away mentally that’s stuck with me. Just remembering me and Neil playing monopoly nonstop for… however long he was here, a week or something like that. And apart from that, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He admitted that he messed that up. It was supposed to be “that’s one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind” and I think he kinda jinxed that one, cause I think that’s where feminism came from. If he had just gotten it right and said ”a man” then the mankind would’ve had a different connotation to it. But it just meant that, yep, that’s exactly what happened. One small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind, which usually includes women.
Matt: Right. Somewhere around here I’ve got a newspaper reproduction from the moon landing that I bought at a museum, cause it was on clearance, and I’m like, “ohh, I’ll buy this and save it forever” and I’m sure it’s folded up in a box someplace.
Dave: Yeah, that tends to happen. It tends to happen. You don’t think that you’re gonna do that, and then you just find out that well, this is why these things are rare. Because most of the time when they are preserved they’re preserved accidentally. It’s very very rare that you have a complete obsessive like someone like Edgar Church who saved the Mile High Collection, there specifically he kept a perfect condition copy of each comic book from the 1930s on.
Matt: Everybody…
Dave: Okay, we’re gonna call that a wrap, Matt.
Matt: No, that’s fine by me! I’ve got… yeah, it’s just about time for me to prepare for my… I’m goin’ to the doctor tomorrow and I gotta do stuff. So I’ll leave it at that.
Dave: Okay. Alright. And you didn’t even get to go to the beach today.
Matt: Oh no, that… I have to fast for this appointment, so even if I went I couldn’t enjoy it.
Dave: [laughs] Okay.
Matt: I reminded Paula that you were gonna call, and she’s like, “oh well even if you could…” and she was like, “okay fine I’ll go without you” and then she thought about it and she was like, “wait a minute, you have to fast, don’t you?” I’m like yeah, “even if you went you couldn’t enjoy it”. I’m like, that’s why I’m not goin’.
Dave: There you go. There you go. Although you could’ve enjoyed the human fellowship, it’s not just stuffing things in your face.
Matt: Nah, see I’m a big fan of cartoon misanthropes, so there’s a reason for that.
Dave: [laughs] There you go. Okay, well, when they get back from the beach, you say hi to Paula, and Natasha, and ahh…
Matt: …Janis.
Dave: Ah, Janis Pearl! Okay, alright.
Matt: I gave you the five second Grandpa moment of, “he’s got two kids and I know one of their names.”
Dave: There you go, and I usually forget Bullwinkle and I remember the other one. Okay. Alright, we’ll talk to you again…
Part Five begins
Dave: Yes! I mean, it could be just about anything. That’s one of the reasons why I’m just talking about going to California, having a sensible route to follow and then just see what happens. “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One I think is a really phenomenal piece of work. Like, I’ll say that about my own work and I think it’s very very interesting. There’s no question about it that… I’m guessing a percentage… 85%, 90% of the comic book field wants to make sure that it is completely destroyed before it even exists and it’s like, again, no, that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible. I think that when I’m talking to individual store owners and individual graphic novel buyers and managers and shake hands, and “here’s what I’ve got to show you”, takes about half an hour, and, ya know, if you want to buy these sample copies you can look at them at your leisure. And here’s the idea about… behind what I’m doing. Because, ya know, Heidi McDonald’s not gonna talk about it. Tom Spurgeon’s not gonna talk about it. Except in deprecating, “Dave Sim the sick twisted misogynist is going to be going to California”. Obviously, that’s not going to sell copies of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One. But me going in in person, I hope that it will. I hope that on average I can get every store to take two copies, or three copies.
Matt: Well, I mean, that’s… that’s not the worst idea in the world.
Dave: Uhh, it could be! That’s one of the things. Anytime that… I always do this, I don’t know what it is in my nature. I always do something that nobody’s ever done before. It can sound like a really good idea until you’re actually trying to do it and then you find out, okay this is why this doesn’t work. One of the reasons that I’m calling it “The Death of a Comic Salesman Sales Trip” is either this will be the death of my career and probably the death of the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” even as a concept, and I’ll know that by San Diego. Or, it works like gangbusters and then I have to do it all over the United States.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Then I gotta go do this in the tri-state area in New York, and I gotta do the mid-west, ya know, Illinois and Indiana, and crash on your couch. And that’s the way… I’ll die there. He ended up doing this for the 8 years it took to publish all four or five volumes of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and then he pitched over and died somewhere outside Waco.
Matt: [laughs] Well, I hope that part doesn’t happen, but, yeah, that… I mean..
Dave: It’s not a bad way to go, I’ve been to Waco.
Matt: If you have to go to every comic book store in America, I mean, let’s hope this doesn’t create a rash of fans going, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna open up a store in the middle of Pigsucker, Arkansas, so that Dave’s gotta come!”
Dave: Well, that’s… that would actually be a fun thing from my perspective. I mean, I’ve only taken a few quick looks at the map but it looks like Eureka, California is the northernmost store and the least accessible for in terms of… it’s going to be hours and hours and hours to get there. But if I’m gonna do every store in California, I don’t want to get into, “every store in California but four”. This store, or that store. That becomes part of the adventure, is okay, what was the weirdest part of the trip? And the four and a half hour bus ride up to Eureka and then then four and a half hour bus ride back down might end up being exactly that. But the other thing is, the most isolated the store is the more pull it’s got from the geographic area. Like, in San Francisco, there’s a comic store virtually every few blocks relatively speaking, which means that’s where a lot of their customer base is gonna come from. Either from them selling comics that that customer likes, or that customer going, “ahh they’re the closest store to me, so that’s the store that I go to”. If you’re the only comic store in California for 400 miles around, you’re gonna be pulling a lot of people from a lot of different locations, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that those are where I get the best sales, because they’ve got a wider audience that they pull from, where they go, “ahh yeah, I think I should probably have four or five of these, just picturing the guys who only come in every six months or every three months because they life 300 miles away.”
Matt: Right.
Dave: So… I’m just looking down the list, and… oh! [laughs] And then Dave Kopperman said, “this really ought to be a documentary.” And then Sean chimes in with, “I really hope you guys rent a car with a backseat large enough to fit Werner Herzog and a boom operator!” That’s not quite as funny as you might think because Peter Ventrella, who is doing a documentary about… it’s called “Rise of the Renegades”, which is really about all of the origins of indie comics back in the 1980s. And definitely really wanted to interview me and I said to him, as I’ve said to everyone who calls me about being in their comics documentary, “you do the documentary, and you get it into a finished form, and then you tell me how much tape I’ve got and where I am in your movie, and I’ll give you a half dozen quotes that will work perfectly for [indistinct]. And of course, with documentary filmmakers that goes over like a complete lead balloon, it’s like, “no, I’m not asking you to make my movie with me. I am asking to be able to interview you for my movie.” And it’s like, okay, what you don’t understand is you’re talking about turning the Off-White House upside down with all of your camera equipment and I answer all of your same dumb Cerebus questions that I’ve answered a 150 times before with different people and you shoot 2 and a half hours, 3 hours of footage, using up 2 and a half, 3 hours of my life, and then you pick a 30 second clip out of that, and then there’s my representation in your film. It’s like, no, that’s not worth 3 hours of my time. So the difference in this case was that Peter went for it! He said, okay, that’s what we’ll do, he’s working on the film, I think he’s still shooting it. He’s still shooting things in San Diego this year and he’s going to put together the film and then say, okay, here’s the part where you would be in there. He’s actually interviewed Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette, Scott McCloud, about Dave Sim and sent me the footage of them talking about Dave Sim. So now he’s getting jazzed for when I mentioned to him that I was planning this California trip, right away he wanted to film it. [laughs] So, it’s like, okay, you’re still not going to be interviewing me, but this is at least something I can pitch the stores on. If you guys want to be in potentiality this guy’s documentary, we’re gonna provide you with signed waiver forms saying that you allow all of the footage of you talking to Dave Sim and your store will appear in the movie. We’re also, Peter and I, talking about… like I’m looking at this footage of Bissette and Rick Veitch and… who else? Oh jeez. Alex Robinson, talking about me. Richard Bruning, who used to do the advertising for Cerebus and then became a DC executive. So he’s got this amazing clip of Richard Bruning talking about me coming to DC to try and license Cerebus and talking about that. So, I started going, ya know, this would make a really interesting Canadians saved American comics documentary that you could pitch to Canadian television stations. So that’s really what we’re looking at doing now. I’ve looked at all the footage, he’s going to send me transcripts of all of it, and then basically I’m just going to rough together my own, here’s these guys talking about Dave Sim and Dave Sim talking about these guys. It’s got that really weird Canadian quality to it, cause it’s like, “ahh, these are all American comic book artists? This guy worked at DC and he knows who this Canadian is? And he thinks that this Canadian has some kind of importance?” So, that’s on the back burner right now. That’s one of those things that I was going to be throwing together in the next while.
Matt: Okay. I look forward to whatever comes of that! Cause, that sounds like a couple of hours of my life I’m gonna enjoy.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I don’t know if it’ll be a couple of hours, like one of the things is, Steve Bissette trying to explain Dave Sim is like, man oh man, have you got an editing job on your hands.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: All of my clips are just going to be, okay, I’ve gotta say this in about 15 seconds or less, 20 seconds or less, and maybe we can just splice this together into a half hour television show. I was saying to him, at the very worst, like the Rogers TV in the local cable outlet, used to be like, just really a [indistinct] cable sort of channel, and now it’s like an actual official television channel! It’s like the Kitchener cartoonist who saved the American comic book field. At the very least I think we could get them to run it. I think we can get them to run it.
Matt: Well, you gotta remember Dave, this is the world of DVD where everything that they film is gonna end up on the 4 disc complete ultra edition.
Dave: Right, right. And God bless ‘em all. Here’s my complete DVD. Here’s the 15 seconds of me talking about Steve Bissette and here’s my 2 and half hours talking about Steve Bissette and we’ll see which one people will want to buy.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Wondering what their level of inter…
Part Five finishes burning to the disc
Part Six streaming now
Matt: Well, that’s… I mean, if the California trip becomes a documentary, I mean, that… that’s one way you could fund it!
Dave: Ahh, yes. Yes, I mean, that’s another thing, now I’m pitching “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One the Movie, “You Don’t Know Jack” the television show, and Dave Sim “Death of a Salesman Sales Trip” the documentary. I’m hoping there’s a few bucks in there somewhere. At least enough to pay for staying at Motel 8 or whatever. That’s one of the things that we’re looking at doing is saying, if I go to Motel 8 and we go… if I promise to only stay at Motel 8 from Sacramento all the way around California, and this is what I’m promoting, what kind of a room rate can I get? We’ll see what they’ve got to say.
Matt: [laughs] Well, good luck!
Dave: Thank you! Okay, I think that covers all of the tour stuff, at least so far. It’s like definitely it’ll all be on A Moment of Cerebus, I think we want to set something up where, as much as possible in real time the whole four weeks or six weeks, however long it ends up being, you can just click on A Moment of Cerebus and find out where Dave is today and what he’s doing. That’s one of the things we’re going to be pitching to media outlets. Ya know, if you’re not really sure that this is something that you want to have in your newspaper, click on A Moment of Cerebus, that’ll tell you how we’re doing so far, and here’s you over here. We’re gonna be there a week from Tuesday.
Matt: Okay. This is a lot of thinkin’.
Dave: [laughs] Well, as one of my… as I told, Eddie Khanna was here, that’s still one of my favorite lines. Well, there’s two favorite lines from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. One line is Butch Cassidy’s line of “I’m a man with a vision and the rest of the world’s wearing bifocals” and the other one was Sundance’s line which was “You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay, and throwing your postcard towards space… yeah, I’m trying to figure that one out. What can we do to launch your [indistinct] euphemism postcard into space? If I try and throw it, I’m pretty sure my right arm isn’t into throwing arm stuff, but it might be interesting to do a series of clips of a springboard of some kind. We can make a springboard long enough to actually launch your postcard into space. Interesting question. Let’s leave that one open for the time being…
Matt: I seriously meant it as a joke, and Benjamin Hobbs ran with it, and I’m like, okay! [laughs]
Dave: That’s what I’m thinking! If we could get other people to run with it as well. Let’s start a separate thread of, if you had to launch Matt Dow’s postcard into space, how would you do it the most economical and the greatest elevation possible and Dave Sim promises to give it a try?
Matt: I didn’t send the part of… because it became a thing where somebody said something about “please don’t launch me into space”, and then Ben responded with, “well, seven and half good hands we might be able to get you a couple of feet up”.
Dave: [laughs] There was another good line in here. Where is the… Ahh, I’ve got them out of order… [dead air] Nah, I’m not gonna find it. Too much dead air, we can’t have dead air on…
Matt: I can edit anything out!
Dave: That’s true! [laughs] True. Okay… [dead air again] I keep thinking that I’m… I liked your line about “the kids keep claiming that they need to eat. They’re not gaining weight and every time I look there’s more LOL dolls”.
Matt: That’s true.
Dave: It is. I can picture that.
Matt: That’s…
Dave: Now, do you know what you really… when you really have to start to worry, is when the dolls start gaining weight.
Matt: [laughs] That’s possible!
Dave: See, cause they’re claiming they need to eat, they’re not gaining weight, but the dolls are getting fatter and fatter. [hums Twilight Zone theme] Okay, moving on from there, Margaret has a question. “How have you been doing?” I think I’ve been doing pretty good, actually. I’ve got the Off-White House pretty much cleaned up and all of the stuff filed away where it’s supposed to be so that I can find it and as far as I know tomorrow will be a full, uninterrupted day [knocks on wood] knock wood of working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume Three, pages 2, 3, 4, and 5. And Margaret wants to know, “any chance of a Collected ‘Cerebus Archive’ as a Kickstarter one of these days?” Ya know, that’s something that is possible. And you mentioned about digital “Glamourpuss” and she’s talking about digital “Cerebus Archive” would be good as well, although I’d like a nice trade I can put on the shelf for easy reference. That would be a situation of first of all finding all of them, which, there’s two or three external hard drives that have everything on them, theoretically. So we have to first of all find out if all of “Glamourpuss” and all of “Cerebus Archive” are on there. And then getting those put together into book form and doing a prototype through Studio Comixpress. It’s one of the big advantages, is that I can do just one book to test. They just did “Church & State” Volume Two for me to proofread and for Sean to proofread and for Eddie Khanna to proofread. And once I have a prototype on those, then it would be a matter of trying a Kickstarter, but probably doing a Kickstarter where I would say, this is how many of these we would have to sell in order to sell them for this price, as opposed to what we do with the postcards or the Cerebus Archive, which is, if we get in $80 we’ll go ahead and do it. So everybody knows that they’re going to get whatever it is that we’re promising to do. In this case, it would be a matter of going, okay, Alphonso, how much is this going to cost me per unit to do 100 of these? Or 150 of these? And how much will it cost me to do 75 of these? How much is it gonna cost me to do 50 of these? And how it would work is, everybody can pledge for the book and if we sell 50 of them, it’ll cost this much. And if we sell 75 of them, it’ll cost this you this much. So if we sell 100 of them, it’ll cost you this much. And it’ll cost you less the more that we sell, and if we only sell 8 of them, well, okay, then we’re not gonna do it. Or, we can do them for $50 each, or $60 each, the same thing that I’m doing for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” art catalogue. If I can only sell 10 of these, I will make 10 people very happy and they will be willing to pay $50 or whatever it is for this product. That’s up ahead, that’s not really a priority. Our priority right now is “Church & State” Volume Two, me working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, me getting “Cerebus in Hell?” #1s done, and Sean doping restoration and Sean doing the final tweaks on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” #1. So, all of these things are back-burner stuff, but pictures… I do picture it happening somewhere up ahead that we would do more of these projects where, okay, we can only sell 10 of them, or we can only sell 20 of them, but in that case we just make it a really spiffy package, and you sign it 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20, or whatever, and the people involve just understand, okay, that’s why it’s gonna cost…
Part Six indiegogone
Part Seven kickstarted
Dave: And, let’s see, we are getting.. are at the last [indistinct] questions? I think we are. Ahh… Please Hold for Dave Sim, this was from Steve, “Other than the in the wild pages of original art, what items are you missing from the archive that you’d like examples of? I.e., posters, interviews, pins, buttons. You know, the ephemera.” I think probably the best way to tackle that question is to me to say, Margaret, if you get a chance to print out a list, or if you’ve got a list, of all of your Cerebus stuff, and you can send it to me on the next Please Hold for Dave Sim, or the Please Hold for Dave Sim after that, or the one after that. I’ll go down the list and say, yeah, I’d like one of these, I’d like one of these. I’d like one of these. And if Margaret, as this is imposing upon Margaret but let’s try imposing on Margaret. She doesn’t want to go [indistinct], she doesn’t wanna go [indistinct]. What do you consider the rarest Cerebus item in your collection? Where it’s like, definitely in that case, you wouldn’t mind willing those to the Cerebus Archive, that would be great. But we can also keep people on the lookout for Cerebus Archive copies, that would be pretty cool as well. I think the rarest things that I’ve got in the ephemera category is the hologram pendant from 1979, I’ve got four of those in the original boxes. One of them is in a cracked box and the pendant itself got cracked, so it’s not in very good shape. But the other three are pretty much in the same condition they were when I got them 40 years ago. Okay, you mentioned, I feel like this was asked before. Yes, I don’t think that that was an optical illusion on your point, I think it was asked before. And I’m trying to just find a more relevant way to answer the question, which is, okay, let’s talk about the things that I know exist because Margaret’s got them. And then I’ll tell you, yeah, I would really really like to have some of these. I guess one of the things that I’ve got somewhere, and I think it’s just the matchbook cover, is the Now & Then Books Cerebus matchbook. Which is Cerebus from the cover of #15 with the two torches, one in either hand, which was pretty funny, and Harry had those on his matchbook. That’s one of those Kitchener things. If you’re ever digging through a drawer, and you go, “oh, I didn’t know I had those”, the Cerebus Archive would definitely be interested in having those.
Ahh, let’s see, then Jeff Seiler getting silly, “So, I have a question for Dave Sim. How come you never call me ‘darling’, darling, anymore? You never even, I say, you never even call me by, I say, by my nomenclature. Name that is.” Okay, that actually ties in with a “Cerebus in Hell?” concept that I came up with that I figured was the next step in society’s normalization of LGBTQ-Etc. Which is forcing anyone like Jeff with a degree in psychology to be gay, trans, bi, intersect, and/or queer, 10% of the time, on the assumptions that that’s normal and not being gay, trans, bi, intersect, or queer, at least 10% of the time, is aberrational and homophobic, psychologically. Ergo, antithetical to psychologically health, ergo, disqualifying the holder of the degree from holding that degree. But I think the fact that Jeff Seiler would ask me “how come you never call me ‘darling’, darling, anymore?” probably helped him out with that. The other things is, all those photos of him in the Carmen Miranda get-up…
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: We want to make sure that Jeff Seiler, come what may, continues to hold his psychology degree, no matter where they move the goalposts on who you have to be and how you have to behave in order to hold a psychological degree.
Matt: [laughs] That’s pretty good.
Dave: Well, thank you! It’s using up a “Cerebus in Hell?” strip concept, but I figure what the hell, if you’re not going to use up a “Cerebus in Hell?” workable concept for Carmen Miranda, who are you going to do it for?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! And coming in to our final [stammers]… glide pattern… you can tell that my tongue [indistinct] has just about had enough. And Travis Pelkie sent in, “Hey Matt, I was reading some recent issues of Mad Magazine after hearing it’ ending”. I didn’t hear that! Mad Magazine is coming to an end?
Matt: Yeah. They’re… I think there’s two or three more issues, and then they’re ceasing publication, but it’s gonna come back in some form. What had happened was, they went… I wanna say, bi-monthly, and then I think they’re were going quarterly? And when they went quarterly, they relaunched it with new numbering so you can get a Mad #1 and they’re put to like issue 7 or 8.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I guess sales aren’t there, and… so DC’s canceling Mad, but there’s talk that, oh they’re gonna bring it back in some form or another in the near future.
Dave: Well, I hope so. Anyway, “I was reading some recent issues of Mad Magazine after hearing it’s ending, and in the new #7 in the Avengers parody by writer Ian Boothby and artist Gideon Kendall, this appears on the first page” and I was very, very impressed that Cerebus got mentioned as part of a Spider-Ham gag. That’s really great. Ian Boothby is either Canadian or he lives in Canada. I know, he was a Cerebus fan and he used to send me his amateur comics. He was out in Vancouver someplace, so it’s nice to have a nod from somebody... I’m trying to guess the last time that I saw comics from Ian Boothby, and boy it’s gotta be going back a good 15, 20 years, and that’s probably conservative right there.
Matt: [laughs] Well, cool!
Dave: Okay! Well, Matt, you didn’t get to say very much this time.
Matt: Well, I did have a second question I was gonna ask at the opening, but I’ll ask it now. So how was your summer vacation?
Dave: How was my summer vacation? It wasn’t really a vacation, it was… something that forced me to focus, so it was really good from that standpoint that I took this giant pile of Ward Greene material, research material, and went through it, and went, okay, you have to get this down to the size of one correspondence thought. Which is like an inch thick. You’re gonna go through all of the Ward Greene material, and you can put whatever you want in that box, but it has to fit in the box because it’s going over to the hotel with you. And that worked really, really good. Because there I am in the hotel with my laptop, my box of Ward Greene material, and reading it, and going, okay, I have to distill this down to a couple of pages. And sure enough, that’s what I did and I was started on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume Three. And that worked so well that I went, okay, this time, Eddie, bring over the Cerebus Archive #8 page copies that I have to comment on, and same kind of deal. I just couldn’t get past my Oprah Winfrey block, but, if that’s all you’ve got in the hotel room with you, buddy, you’re gonna find a way to do this. And sure enough, I broke through that, and at this point, David Birdsong is starting to put together the notes on Cerebus Archive #8. So that’s very possibly going to be part of the next Kickstarter. Or the next Kickstarter after that.
Matt: Well, cool! I’m glad the desolation could cause focus.
Dave: Yes, it was one of those things… I gotta find a way to do that more often. I’m thinking I’ll just get on our new LRT in Kitchener and go from one end of the town to another and back, and okay, this is what you have to work on because this is all that you brought with you. See if that works. Right now, having been able to get the first page of Volume Three done, now I’ve got a lot of design work that’s going into what I thought was pages 2 & 3, and turned out to pages…
Part Seven was the New Blood
Part Eight takes Manhattan
Dave: Oh, I have missed some questions! I stopped with Margaret Liss and I missed Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. He’s got four quick questions, first one, “would you consider SDoAR postcards promoting the release of the book?” Probably when the general release is done through the stores. Yes, that’s a very good idea. Like the postcards from hell for “Cerebus in Hell?”, no that’s a different thing entirely. That’s just trying to bring in some revenue for the guys actually working on “Cerebus in Hell?”, so different thing entirely, but yes, very good idea. “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” postcards with cover reproductions. “How about postcards promoting remastered Cerebus phonebooks?” No, that’s in a separate category. That’s one of those, as long as I can keep the price of a new car in the Aardvark-Vanaheim American dollar account, which I managed to do for the last three years until I finally eviscerated that amount paying for printing on “Jaka’s Story” which is now all paid for. The cheque, I just deposited the cheque for “Jaka’s Story”, so now I have to keep that intact in the American dollar account so that I can pay for “Church & State” Volume Two, which hopefully should be sometime in the next two or three months. But that’s as much as I want to do on the trade paperbacks is keep that money there and proofread them like crazy, in between the time that Sean has finished remastering them and when the printer’s going to get a hold of them. I’ve already proofread Volume Two once, and just waiting for the corrected version to reread and correct “Church & State” Volume Two. It’s a gorgeous book, Sean did an absolutely amazing job. All of those things where you go, “I didn’t know all of that detail was in there. Man I drew it, and I didn’t know all that detail was in there!” Thank you, Sean!
Matt: He posted a preview and he had the before & after and there’s the one, I think it’s a dream sequence where Cerebus pushes open a door and there’s just a big black blob. And in the remastered, it’s a lion’s head!
Dave: That’s right. That’s good I’d completely forgotten that. When I’d looked at it, I went, “that looks a lot better.”
Matt: When I read… when he posted it, and I read the post and I had that flashback to “Latter Days” when Cerebus is messing with the Three Wise Fellows and he’s gettin’ them agitated about Mickey, Walt, and Donald, and then just sittin’ back and seein’ what happens, and “oh look, it’s a lion’s head!” [laughs]
Dave: There it is. That’s right. That’s right. The fourth question Michael R. had “it’s going to be in the mid-90s today with the heat index hovering around 100 degrees in Easton, Pennsylvania, how is the weather in Kitchener?” And the weather today in Kitchener started off perfect. High 70s, clear, dry, and then it just started getting hot, hot, hot about mid-afternoon, which ties in with… where was that question? That’s another one that I missed. Somebody asked…
Matt: Cory Forrester, I believe.
Dave: Asked about the air conditioning. “Does the Off-White House have air conditioning?” Yes, it does, and I’ve got the air conditioning on, but it’s just about time to turn it off. I only have to put it on for a couple of hours a day. They were trying to sell me a new central air, when they sold me the new furnace, and it’s like, uhh, no, no this is Canada. You don’t need to replace your air conditioner nearly as often as you need to replace your furnace. Thank you, no, I’ve never had problems with the central air as we had it installed in the early 1990s. And David Birdsong, “Hi Dave, a bit off-topic but it’s the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. I was two months shy of my 4th birthday so I have no memory of it. If my math is right, you were 13 at the time. Do you have any memories of that day you can share?” Uhh, the biggest memory that I have of the moon landing was that my cousin Neil who wasn’t actually my cousin Neil, that was one of those weird 1950s/1960s suburbanite things where the couple… Mark and Shirley Humbee, were high school friends of my parents and close friends all the way into their period of having kids and they decided we would call their kids cousins and they would call us cousins. Even though there was absolutely no blood relationship whatsoever. So my “cousin” Neil was visiting, and we were obsessively playing Monopoly. I do remember that. We had our table setup in the rec room where the television was, and Neil and I were just playing Monopoly game after Monopoly game after Monopoly game. And watching the moon landing coverage on television like everybody else we have… photographs of our television, like a giant white blob in the middle of it, because everybody tried to take a picture of the television when Neil Armstrong stepped down off the ladder. And it’s like, that doesn’t work, you can’t take a photograph off of your television, but nice thought. Certainly, we were told repeatedly, and told emphatically, that this is a historical thing happening, so try and remember the moon landing. And apart from the failed attempt to take a picture of Neil Armstrong stepping off of the ladder, that’s the only thing I’ve filed away mentally that’s stuck with me. Just remembering me and Neil playing monopoly nonstop for… however long he was here, a week or something like that. And apart from that, one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He admitted that he messed that up. It was supposed to be “that’s one small step for a man and one giant leap for mankind” and I think he kinda jinxed that one, cause I think that’s where feminism came from. If he had just gotten it right and said ”a man” then the mankind would’ve had a different connotation to it. But it just meant that, yep, that’s exactly what happened. One small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind, which usually includes women.
Matt: Right. Somewhere around here I’ve got a newspaper reproduction from the moon landing that I bought at a museum, cause it was on clearance, and I’m like, “ohh, I’ll buy this and save it forever” and I’m sure it’s folded up in a box someplace.
Dave: Yeah, that tends to happen. It tends to happen. You don’t think that you’re gonna do that, and then you just find out that well, this is why these things are rare. Because most of the time when they are preserved they’re preserved accidentally. It’s very very rare that you have a complete obsessive like someone like Edgar Church who saved the Mile High Collection, there specifically he kept a perfect condition copy of each comic book from the 1930s on.
Matt: Everybody…
Dave: Okay, we’re gonna call that a wrap, Matt.
Matt: No, that’s fine by me! I’ve got… yeah, it’s just about time for me to prepare for my… I’m goin’ to the doctor tomorrow and I gotta do stuff. So I’ll leave it at that.
Dave: Okay. Alright. And you didn’t even get to go to the beach today.
Matt: Oh no, that… I have to fast for this appointment, so even if I went I couldn’t enjoy it.
Dave: [laughs] Okay.
Matt: I reminded Paula that you were gonna call, and she’s like, “oh well even if you could…” and she was like, “okay fine I’ll go without you” and then she thought about it and she was like, “wait a minute, you have to fast, don’t you?” I’m like yeah, “even if you went you couldn’t enjoy it”. I’m like, that’s why I’m not goin’.
Dave: There you go. There you go. Although you could’ve enjoyed the human fellowship, it’s not just stuffing things in your face.
Matt: Nah, see I’m a big fan of cartoon misanthropes, so there’s a reason for that.
Dave: [laughs] There you go. Okay, well, when they get back from the beach, you say hi to Paula, and Natasha, and ahh…
Matt: …Janis.
Dave: Ah, Janis Pearl! Okay, alright.
Matt: I gave you the five second Grandpa moment of, “he’s got two kids and I know one of their names.”
Dave: There you go, and I usually forget Bullwinkle and I remember the other one. Okay. Alright, we’ll talk to you again…
El finny
Thanks again Jesse!
The Rigamarole:
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Cerebus in Hell?
6 comments:
Yeah yeah, Dave, everyone hates you, whine whine whinge whine ...
Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics was once interested in publishing a finished SDOAR, at least in the form roughly resembling its glamourpuss presentation at the time gp ended. That's what started that weird non-exchange between Kim Thompson & Dave in the tcj.comments for a month or so. "Tell Dave we'll publish Cerebus trades." "Tell Kim not unless they start with Form & Void."
Thanks, Jessie & Matt, for posting the transcript!
"Yeah yeah, Dave, everyone hates you, whine whine whinge whine ..."
Damian, I have the solution to Dave's woes (with a bit of help from "Strange Brain Parts" (the YT channel)); do you think he deserves it?
Or am I asking the wrong person...
I'm afraid, RSS, that I am not familiar with "Strange Brain Parts", though I see it offers "Comic book reviews and in-depth histories of comic book characters," so I guess you are asking the wrong person.
-- Damian
They're so much alike, it's not a wonder they don't get along...
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