And then in Part two, Dave's answering machine gets another question from Jeff Seiler:
Part three: We FINALLY get to the questions I sent Dave:
Hi, Dave!
Please Hold Time!
Before we get to Seiler’s phone question, I need to run this month’s strip (you’ll see why in a second). As I said on FaceItBook: “First Dylan went Electric, now, Dow goes Digital!” I drew the four panels, didn’t letter them, or color Iguana grey. I didn’t even draw them in order. Then I scanned that into the television with the typewriter attached and assembled everything in my photoshop knock-off. The Unbeddable Vark comes from a card Ben sent me.
Here’s that:
So we should probably pause and wish Ben and Laura all the best and whatnot seeing as how they’re gonna be hitched when the videos go up on the YouTube on Saturday.
Mazel Tov, congratulations, all the best, and “May all your camels have straight teeth”. (And from the three time “winner” at Love):
Dave answered this in part two.QUESTIONS!!!!!!Jeff Seiler wants to know something so secret he can only leave a message on your phone and not send it to me to send to you. Like everybody else does… Jeff?
Hi, do you know if “the last day and form and void” will be reprinted soon or if there are already some copies available, could you please tell me where I could find them ?
Thanks in advance.
A fan of your website from Italy.
Part five: Dan asks:
Hi Dave.
Did the continent of Africa always
exist within the world of Cerebus, or was it retroactively added in later? My
guess is that it's former for a couple reasons. The first being The Judge's
mention of not being able to swing a dead cat in Jerusalem, and the second
being Pud Wither's attempt to call Oscar a sodomite. If those places (Jerusalem
and Sodom) didn't exist beforehand, how else could the characters reference
them?
-Dan
Dave actually answered this in April:
Dave: Here we are, I didn’t dream that part. “Last second question. Hi Dave, I have two questions this time.” This is from Dan. “#1 did the continent of Africa always exist within the world of Cerebus, or was it retroactively added in later? My guess is that it’s the former for a couple of reasons. The first being the Judge’s mention of ‘not being able to swing a dead cat in Jerusalem’, and the second being Pud Withers’ attempt to call Oscar a ‘sodomite’. If those places, Jerusalem and Sodom, didn’t exist beforehand, how else could the characters reference them? Ahh, I’m being rhetorical. Actual second question below.” Uhh, let’s deal with the first question there. I would turn that question around and say, did Africa exist before people inhabited it, or is Africa a result of sentient and cognizant beings knowing what that is? Which, at a microcosm level, yes, Jerusalem isn’t technically in Africa, but it’s very very close to Africa, and Sodom wasn’t in Africa, but it, too, is very very close to Africa. How much of our reality is a creation of sentience? And a creation of rational thought, and was the world completely different when beings didn’t have the level of sentience that we do? And didn’t have the memory that we do? That consequently, if you changed a lion’s environment on a regular basis, I don’t think the lion would register the fact that its environment had changed. It deals with reality and a constant now, all animals, I think, only deal in reality with a constant now. They don’t have memory in the sense that we do. The highest levels of their consciousness are “here I am right now, this is what I’m looking at, these are the things that my instincts are telling me to do next. Do this thing, don’t do that thing.” Cause it’s one of those, whenever I get onto that discussion I always come back to Neal Adams’ expanding Earth theories, that the Earth is actually getting bigger and the fact that anytime they try to build a model of a tyrannosaurus rex, an animatronic model, that moves as a tyrannosaurus rex moves, the head snaps off. Neal’s theory being, well, gravity wasn’t in the time period of the dinosaurs, the same that it is now, because the Earth is actually expanding, so there is more gravity now than there was back then. And it’s like, I have a great deal of trouble trying to get around that assertion, to say, “well no, I still think it’s crazy that people would think the Earth could have expanded in the distant past.” But we have to remember the Earth’s been here for 15 billion years, and all we really know about it, even at the most lunatic extreme of archeology and whatnot, is maybe 5000 years? 10,000 years? Really pushing it, 20,000 years. 20,000 years compared to 15 billion? There’s a lot of room in there for the Earth to have been a number of things that all traces have just vanished. I mean, one of my theories is just… oil must be something very different from what we think it is. It’s not just residue of dead dinosaurs. I don’t think there’s enough dinosaurs who could die in a single place to create the pools of oil that exist in Northern Alberta, that exist in Texas, that exist in Saudi Arabia. So, to me, it’s got to be something else that happened sometime in the last 15 billion years that produced this, that Mother Earth, the YHWH, really really doesn’t like, because it’s a really really unhappy memory. And if you dig it out of the ground and you make it into a liquid that powers vehicles, I think it probably communicates very very explicitly what it actually is, and it’s something that the YHWH really really would like to just forget and eradicate from the Earth’s history. Which is why environmentalists are so pathological about carbon and so pathological about fossil fuels. Part of them must know that wind and solar are never going to do it on their own, and if you’re not going to add nuclear or something like that into the mix, you’re just kidding yourself. And I think it’s because the YHWH has occupied all women’s minds with, “we have to get rid of oil. And I’m not going to tell you why we have to get rid of oil, but we have to get rid of oil. Make up as many cover stories as you possibly can, but bottom line, we have to get rid of oil and replace it with anything else. There you go, there’s another thing that Dave Sim believes and nobody else believes.
And Randall Head
asks:
I read last year that your hands were crippled up to the point where you cannot draw. Was that true? How are they now?
Part six Friend to the Blog, and runner of a new Kickstarter for his band, The Fright Watch, Steve Peters asks:
I wanted to ask about Superman as comic
book messiah. Though comparing Superman to Jesus is nothing new, someone
brought it up recently and I started thinking about it in ways I hadn't before.
It occurred to me that he died and rose from the dead IN OUR LIFETIMES. He was
"born" long before we were, but we were witnesses to his "resurrection".
It had to have been a momentous thing to have been alive when Jesus died.
This got me thinking about a scene from
the movie Waking Life. A character mentions that sci fi author Philip K. Dick
wrote that we were living in the year 50 A.D. in the events of the Book of
Acts. Jesus was crucified just recently, and his return is imminent. The
passage of time over the last 2000 years is an illusion created by the demiurge
to fool us; in reality we are still living under Roman rule. It also got me
thinking that Supeman's death is a reenactment of the Jesus story, a ripple
through time that repeats itself, like Alan Moore's idea that the Ripper
murders resonate forwards and backwards through time.
I also realized that like Jesus,
Superman had Jewish "parents"---Joe and Jerry instead of Joseph and
Mary. Any thoughts about the Superman story being a reenactment of the New
Testament?
Superman is Moses. Quit trying to make him a Christian, Goyim! But seriously, Superman DOES have Moses’ backstory (to a point), so any modern-day addition of Christian symbolism is… I dunno. Steve didn’t ask ME…
If you'd like to get a copy of Parallel Comics #1 that Dave was recommending, here's the Paypal link (U.S. only; contact awakeningcomics@gmail.com for shipping outside the States):
https://py.pl/1RF0FH
Greetings! If it's going to be quite some time before the remaining/unpublished remastered traditional volumes of Cerebus will be available through Diamond, is it possible to use Kickstarter to fund limited printings of them just for backers as is done with the CANs? I understand that multiple projects are already in the crowdsource queue, but would you consider testing this out with Melmoth, perhaps, after the Waverly F + V hardcover?
Part eight, Jen DiGiacomo asks:
Dateline: February 18, 1983
A letter from one Dave Sim was
published in Comics Buyer's Guide #483 and reads as follows, "I
am interested in trading Cerebus original artwork for pre-1942 DC
superhero comics starting with Action no. 1 (anyone interested in the
artwork for two complete issues? three?) If this offer tempts anyone, please
let me know, okay?"
Did anything ever come of this? What
precipitated your offer? And have your negotiation skills improved since
1983?
jennifer digiacomo
And this
article:
So, those two yahoos introduced on page 240 of High Society (Can you be-e-lieve it? Wo!!): are they based on actual people you met at a convention? Or just a couple of yahoos?This page, and these guys:
John
Glismann asks:
CEREBUS FEEDS THE WORLD (?)
July 13th will be the twenty-sixth
anniversary of the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia which raised a
lot of money for African famine relief. This upcoming date got me thinking
about a Note from the President in Cerebus #74 (May 1985). In the Note, Dave
wrote that he was donating a Cerebus story for a “comic book benefit for
Ethiopian famine relief which should be out in the fall...”. I could be wrong,
but I don’t think that ever happened.
People of a certain age will remember
that in the mid-‘80s African famine relief was a very popular cause for a time.
It got worldwide attention when the musician Bob Geldof put together “Band Aid”
in late 1984. Shortly thereafter, there was the “We Are the World” song in the
U.S. and then the Live Aid concerts.
The comic book world did its part as
well, with Marvel putting out “Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men” with a cover
date of December 1985. D.C followed in 1986 with “Heroes Against Hunger.” Even
a company called Tiger Comics (which I don’t remember existing at all) put out
a benefit comic in 1987 called “Phantasy Against Hunger.” There are literally
dozens of writers and artists credited in these books, but no Dave Sim. That
“Phantasy Against Hunger” comic seemed more independent, and even had one page
of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (although not drawn by Eastman and Laird),
but no Dave and no Cerebus.
Does anyone know what happened here?
Apparently Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson were the driving forces behind the
benefit books from the Big Two. I’m not sure if Dave had a friendly
relationship with them or not. Dave has always been known to be generous with
his time and aardvark to help friends and worthy causes (see the Anything Goes
story, AARGH, C.B.L.D.F., etc.). Or did a Cerebus story benefiting famine
relief come out in some form and I just missed it? Just wondering...
2 comments:
On Cerebus' changing height, I'm reminded of this passage from "A Christmas Carol":
"It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost [of Christmas Present] (which Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible he could have done in any lofty hall."
Thanks to Dave and Matt for taking the time to discuss my question about Kickstarting (paperback) remastered editions of the remaining Cerebus volumes. I expected the "basically, no" answer, but I sppreciate Dave's reasoning. I want to point out, though, that new editions of the Cerebus trades, in any format, shouldn't be conflated with or compared to tangential items like Swords of CIH? hardcovers or a book of Please Hold... transcripts. These aren't works of equivalent value in the overall project.
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