I know some of you are getting the shakes from "Dave Fax" withdrawal, so here's a little exchange between Dave and I:
I faxed up
I was gonna ask this for the last Please Hold, but I had a number of other questions to send, and I was waiting for Brian Hibbs’ take on it. So, what is A/V’s stance on the Marvel Penguin House distribution deal? Here’s Mr. Hibbs’ take on it.
My question is: Are you/A-V, planning on trying to expand beyond Diamond (I know Diamond has been very-very good to you and A-V over the years,), or have you not thought about it at all?
(Insert “Mr. President, why not do nothing?” here.)
I mean, as Mr. Hibbs stated, most shops don’t order trades from Diamond if they can help it. Would it behoove A-V to investigate in trying to distribute through PRH, or some other book distributor? (Especially in light of how Diamond may be in the same position that Capital City was 25 years ago?)
MattAnd here was Dave's response:
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Anyway, when I was cleaning out the AMOC mailbag yesterday, I forgot to post the letter I sent to Hobbs when I paid him for the Batvark: PENISes I had him send Larry and Margaret:
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| Hot Damn, I'm funny... |
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The contest is something everybody forgot about, so we're working on figuring out who won.
And also while cleaning out the Ol' AMOC mailbag, I found a bunch of stuff I had to send Dave, and he responded to that:
The contest is something everybody forgot about, so we're working on figuring out who won.
Something to look forward to...
Rigamarole:
Gerhard is having an art sale.
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (ORDER NOW!)
Cerebus in Hell?:
Strangers in Cerebus Get your orders in by April, 22!
Order Sword of Cerebus in Hell? Volume 3 too!
Hemingway in Comics: https://www.booktable.net/ https://www.centuriesandsleuths.com/
Heritage has some interesting "Dave Sim" bits (okay, not so much this time...)
Next Time: Why an Aardvark part 1? Nope. Hobbs.
30 comments:
Dave's knowledge is, as usual, dated. He compares this deal to the Heroes World fiasco because that's the last thing he knows. His view of how comics readers are viewed dates from his own adolescence, but is no longer current.
Dave's been learning new words lately! Most recently it was "intersectional feminism"; now "cancelled". Of course, this is just his latest wording for his paranoid, zombie lie. Cerebus of course was never cancelled in any way; everyone defended Dave's right to do the comic he wanted; he finished the series exactly as he said; he continued to receive offers of work and invitations to conventions. But of course it's all the girls' fault!
Today's biggest laugh is when Dave says, "My business doesn't depend on Diamond, except for the fact that they and only they bring my goods to the marketplace." Oh, Dave!
Back in the '90s (I was on a very famous ... no, that's not right), a pal of mine worked at a bookstore, and contacted Dave to see about getting the phonebooks in the store. Dave just referred him to Diamond.
-- Damian
Reading the progressiveruin blog and Mike Sterling's tweets regularly, I get the idea that Diamond is not nearly as reliable at delivering the 9.8 goods to market as Dave thinks.
The Spider-Vark contest was won by Michael R. of Easton, PA. On page 26 of THE AMICABLE SPIDER-VARK, August 2020, there is a faux cover featuring Spider-Vark vs. The Iron Manticore. In the bottom left corner is a fake barcode. We tried to make the code real but it wouldn't work at that resolution and size, but the number is real. If you look it up it's for a package of Trojan Magnum Condoms. (Only the biggest and the best for the well-hung, stud puppy Spider-Vark.) For spotting this only a day or two after the issue came out Michael R. received a copy of the Virgin Batvark Penis.
It's funny to see how obsessed the most insecure homophobes (like Birdie here, and of course Dave himself) are with penises.
-- D.
Damian, using copy and paste to keep repeating the same criticisms of Dave over and over and over again is getting boring. Anyone that reads this blog saw it the first 20 times. Try to come up with new material.
I have to say, since David brought up BATVARK: PENIS that it's one of the more profound issues of CIH?
Yes, there are dick jokes aplenty, but the universal story of what men can and should do once they have lost their supposed prowess - sexual, artistic, or otherwise -- made reading that Cerebus #1 worthwhile.
[SPOILER]
Too, when will I ever read another comic again which employs the member of the most famous sculpture in the world to humorous effect?
We call em cocks where I come from.
All in bad taste and good fun, if Damian dislikes all the penis fun that's been going round CIH, then how 'bout using an image of Damian's face to block out all the images of all the penises. Hahahahaha. Joking!!!
Then we'll see what comes out Damian's mouth. Hahahahaha. Joking!!! All in bad taste and good fun. LOL!!!
On the idea of 'mint' - when I got my copy of the covers book through Amazon, it came damaged twice (dinged, really), but in both cases they replaced immediately, and third time was the charm. Obviously not ideal, but if you want a pristine copy, you can get it.
David B.: When Dave stops lying, I'll stop correcting him.
Michael R.: Okay, that made me laugh; thanks. I just tweak these Batvark Penis fans for being cockeyed.
-- D.
Damian, at the risk of starting another fight, I think you take all of this more seriously than just occasionally wanting to tweak us fans.
That being said, it’s surprising and refreshing to see that you have a sense of humor. That you can, for the most part, actually take an off-color joke with grace and poise. There’s hope for you yet.
Again, Matt fails to appreciate the medium (he's so pathetic... or so hey says)
The Annotated Cerebus would include *microprinted* annotations
Which can only be read with the official *CEREBUS* scanning electron microscope [$1000k] Pre-order now!
Er, isn't there some kind of VR thingamabob that could be exploited? ie. point it at the page and the annotations appear? And you guys call yourselves capitalists... #sheesh
No, they *can't* be capitalists; they're the ones actually doing the work. Capitalists have others do the work & then take most of the wealth for themselves.
Move fast and you can scoop Marvel and DC on the 'next big craze'? ie. digital makes old comic books 'reveal secrets'... #craze, I tell you! Craze!
When you think about it, talk about *financial leverage*, phew! Dave will love it! xD
Sample Dave notes/annotations:
For some reason this made me think of gargantuan hooters...
This did too...
Oh, and this one...
Brian W.: What you think of me troubles me not at all. For what it's worth, I assure you that I take very little of this seriously. "It's all just lines on paper, folks."
-- Damian
All very entertaining, still puzzling on a title...
The Bold and the Aardvark
Days of Our Aardvark
General Aardvark
The Young and the Aardvark
Damian, you wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of responding to my comment if it hadn’t troubled you in the first place, but that’s besides the point.
Your response to Michael R.’s penis joke was surprising . Shows that your thinking is not so rigid or as adamantine (Neil’s comment was “concrete”, I think) as I originally thought. You surprised me. Regardless of what you may think of me (whether it be pity or indifference) my point still stands.
You can take a gentle ribbing (no pun intended David), and not take too much offense by it, just like the rest of us. That’s an encouraging development. So, welcome to the club!
I think Annotated Cerebus volumes would be great.
I also think Cerebus in COLOR would be a pretty damn neat experiment. We've seen little bits of what that world would look like (covers etc), but never the interiors.
Jeff Smith's Bone was originally created in B&W, but moving to color volumes has extended that series' lifespan significantly.
(Of course, color is more expensive, and there is the question of whether or not there would be enough saleable interest to even do such a thing. Kickstarter maybe?)
Huh? Brian W., I think you're projecting (as you often do). Unlike you and a few others here, I don't go around with "WWDD?" uppermost in my head at all times. These comment threads always go the same: I say something impolitic, some bonehead takes offense, we fight for a while until I get bored and start deleting the email notifications unread. Nothing gets resolved -- but, in accord with Dave's "reading into the record", his lies and emotional rationalizations do not go unchallenged; he doesn't get to rewrite history according to how he feels.
If you refer to the club of people who can take being made fun of in good spirits, neither you nor Dave are in that club. I only got in as an Associate Member because I don't care what any of you think about me. As the old saying goes, "You'd worry a lot less about what other people thought of you if you knew how seldom they did." Some of y'all seem to have made Cerebus not a sometimes-enjoyable comic book, but a core part of your identity. And that's just weird, dude.
Don A.: I agree that annotated volumes would be great. People often compare Cerebus to Alice in Wonderland (hee hee hee! I knew I couldn't keep from laughing at that), but a difference is that the poems in Alice are delightful on their own, but the references in Cerebus are essential to understanding the book. You have to know comics and comics fandom -- and both of those have changed a lot in the past 40 years!
I disagree with you about colourizing Cerebus, though. I think it was created as and for black-and-white, and colour would ... well, not diminish it, exactly, but not add anything and sort of miss the point. (I don't support colouring old movies either.)
On the other hand, I thought the same thing about From Hell, but I just ordered Eddie Campbell's colourized version. So we'll see ...
-- Damian
It’s alright, Damian. You got joked on here and you wanna take a piss out of me in frustration. I get it. That’s projection.
Jeez, Brian W. You're worse at the psychology than Jeff S. Perhaps you should spend more time examining your own motivations and less time on other people's.
-- Damian
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”
I can see your motivations coming a mile away, Damian. I don’t need to examine my motivations to clearly see yours from far off.
You really never reveal much of yourself here anyway, just another edition of Damian Lloyd’s one man crusade. Took a while for me to figure that out. Now, there’s no mystery to what you say here. This thread might be the first time you actually acted AGAINST type.
The point is absolute creative freedom. It’s not just about feminism, stupid. Absolute creative freedom is the ballgame, Damian.
You don’t get that then you remain where you are now, Damian: perpetually butthurt.
Did not want to pick a fight here. (Yet, he persists.) But I have to call a spade a spade, Damian. I hope you’ll understand. But knowing you you probably won’t. Surprise me again.
When you said that you pitied me in a thread, Damian. That was actually the first time you acted against type here in my experience. Excuse me for that oversight.
I do pity you, Brian W. You have drunk deep of Dave's Kool-Aid. Tragically (or perhaps not, considering what you started with), you've discarded your own mind and imported Dave's wholesale. The result is, inevitably, that logic is not a high priority for you and the very way you perceive reality is tainted. Lord love a duck, you referred to CiH? as profound.
"Absolute creative freedom"? Gee, why didn't I think of that? Oh wait -- I did, decades ago. Indeed, on this very blog before you started inflicting yourself on it, I was already suggesting that Cerebus's legacy is as a proof of concept: that you can create exactly what you want, as well as you're able, and attract as big an audience as is interested, with no need for gatekeepers.
The part that broke Dave's brain (and I am far from the first to suggest this, in case you're worried your precious bodily fluids will be polluted by my one-man crusade) is that second-last part. He started putting out work that the audience didn't want to read. Of course, we must be wrong; how dare we, when he is so self-evidently right?
Still Dave continued his one-man crusade (basically: Girls wreck everything! Listen to me!), and completed Cerebus as he said he would, when he said he would. He continued to receive offers of work and invitations to conventions. If his reputation today is largely as a cautionary tale, that is largely of his own doing. But the work remains -- once again, as Allen Rubinstein said, "some of the all-time best and some of the all-time worst comics I’ve ever read".
-- Damian
I don't need your pity, Damian. I am not your victim nor your child, let alone anyone else's here for that matter. So save your liberal piety and condescension for someone else.
Contrary to what you claim, I have my own motivations for why I support Dave and his contributors. You confine your thinking to shallow concerns, primarily to supposed defects in Dave's thinking about feminism, sexuality, and religion.
To me those concerns are secondary to the primary one I alluded to before. Absolute creative freedom did not break Dave Sim. It liberated him.
Dave did not go insane. Rather fans like yourself got scared when he actually grew a conscience and found spiritual depths within his art, or to be more frank, when he found faith in God.
In so many words, Dave got serious about his craft and eventually began to fashion a new narrative out of the ashes of the old one, a narrative I think which read as a foreign language to his mostly secular audience at the time. I imagine you counted yourself among them.
Ultimately, Dave as the author created an ending to Cerebus which best suited his aims and his concerns, and no one else's. That's all that you can ask of an artist, Damian.
Did he lose fans once he got serious? Indubitably. But he kept his integrity -- and his sanity I would argue -- intact. The audience no longer staying for the show was not the point for Dave, fulfilling the promise he made to them in '79 to complete Cerebus by issue 300 was the point in my view. "Don't f^## it up!," he has said before. I think getting cold feet because fans didn't like what he created would have been one way to f### it up.
From where I am standing, many of those fans forgave him for finding fault with feminism as an ethos in Cerebus. They have never forgiven him for finding fault within himself as an artist, as an author, as a human being (and by extension the fault within ourselves).
Dave has never, to my knowledge, argued that what he perceives as reality is Reality. Only the shallow reader or spiteful fan has ever made that claim. Like he has said before, "No one ever agrees with me." He has argued instead that what he has said about things is how best he perceives reality to be, flawed and as limited he is -- as we all are I think -- as a human being.
I remember once asking Dave via fax a question about a particular passage of Scripture. I think it was in the book of Romans. It was something to the effect of Paul writing what people's spiritual gifts in the ecclesia could be.
Dave responded by dismissing those notions, saying that he was not a fan of Paul, stating that he sticks strictly to the Gospel of John and Revelations as far as he was concerned. He distilled his philosophy to this: I do what I think is right and say what I think is right. I won't know whether I was right until Judgment Day.
Damian, you can blather on about consistency and logic until the cows come home. But until you actually take a leap of faith, reconcile your views of Dave and of his output with the fact that Dave is (and, by all indications, shall remain) a "true front facing believer" of God, you will never understand the enduring appeal of his work despite indifference, slander, or the hoarse repetitive screeds of a spurned lover. You will remain tethered to and confined within your dull, myopic perception of reality.
That would be a pity.
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