Ah crap, he quit. That means I gotta do this...
TWO DAYS! Ya got TWO DAYS until the Form & Void Kickstarter ends. Eddie has made a helpful reminder:
Since we're talking about Please Hold, how's about another one of those neat Jesse Herndon Please Hold For Dave Sim transcripts?
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Transcribed Jesse Herndon (I owe him a Coke too...)
Posted without editing...
Part One:
Dave: Hello, Matthew!
Matt: Hi, Dave! How’s it goin’?
Dave: Good, how are you doing?
Matt: Pretty good, pretty good!
Dave: Alright. Are we recording?
Matt: We are recordin’.
Dave: We are recording or we’re ready to go?
Matt: We’re recording, we’re ready to go.
Dave: Okay, the first thing I want to specify is that this
is official Bill Ritter day across all of Cerebus fandom.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: What did Bill do?
Dave: Bill, it wasn’t what he did, it was what we didn’t do.
Bill is the most, again, #103 of anything’s done on Kickstarter and Sean and
David both dropped the ball on it so that he didn’t get the #103 card in the
Postcard from Hell #3. So I sent him a #103 out of 1 “Cerebus in Hell?” #1 and
there’s a couple of misprinted Postcards #3 that I have re-designated as my
authority as David Sim #103. And since we’re recording this on October 3rd,
I thought, well, okay that’s another thing I can give Bill. From now on,
October 3rd everywhere in Cerebus fandom is Bill Ritter day, which
is also a 103.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: It’s great having that kind of authority. I can change
numbers to other numbers just by saying “by the power vested in me as Dave Sim,
I hereby declare this to be, whatever it is that I declare it to be”.
Matt: [laughs] Reminds me of Cerebus’ third wedding!
Dave: Well, yes, it’s got elements of that to it. And it’s
very possible that Eddie Khanna could decide to revoke that entirely after I’m
dead and he takes over, he’ll just say October 3rd isn’t Bill Ritter
day anymore.
Matt: I don’t think Eddie would do that. I think Eddie’s
smarter than that. Whatever Dave said goes, unless what Dave said makes
absolutely no sense.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, well, maybe he’ll have another good purpose
for October 3rd that will be important to him. Anyway, we’re in
Steve Peters Week Two, right?
Matt: Yep!
Dave: Okay. I was going to ask, has Steve said anything
about the stories that are going to be in “Parallel Comicverses” #1?
Matt: Ahh, he’s vaguely alluded to it, but nothing specific.
I believe that’s the post he’s gonna send me for tomorrow, which isn’t gonna be
tomorrow cause tomorrow’s the Weekly Update. But basically, he came up with a
week’s worth of stuff and I’m like, you do understand that Ben Hobbs and
Margaret Liss and Dave have Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? But don’t worry,
I’ll just extend Steve Peters week as long as I want, cause I have that kind of
authority.
Dave: That’s right! That’s right. You’re the Matt Dow and
when you decide to do that, no one can say thee nay. It’s like, what, do you
wanna take over? Here, take it!
Matt: Yeah, there’s been a couple of comments of, ya know,
the blog’s unreadable. And I’m like, if you really wanna take over? If you
think you’re the William Shakespeare of Cerebus Blog Writers, go ahead.
Dave: There you go. There you go. Okay, I didn’t want to
give away the premise if Steve was keeping the premise secret.
Matt: He’s setup the premise of the issue is a fictional
future version of him dealing with the fandoms for his three favorite things,
which are Yes, Star Wars, and Cerebus. And he’s posted parts of the prologue
story. I think he’s posted the whole prologue story on his Facebook or the
Comicverse’s Facebook. He sent me a link to it and I was readin’ it, and I’m
like, I’m pretty sure this is public.
Dave: Okay. Yeah, the only thing I will add to that in that
case, so that I don’t preempt Steve, is that it’s definitely an ultra-feminist
future that I was speculating on in writing my story. When the female
supremacists have won.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: If that doesn’t ring a bell for you, then I might
already be stepping on Steve’s toes. So I’m just going to leave it at that.
Matt: Okay, I mean, all he’s said is that you wrote the
story and he hasn’t shared anything… I know that some of the Kickstarter
rewards are… your script calls for specific, like there’s supposed to be some
World Without Cerebus images and specific pages from specific phonebooks. But
it’s just a page from a phonebook but you, the bidder, get to choose which page
Steve parodies.
Dave: Oh, that’s pretty cool.
Matt: Yeah, I paid for the “Melmoth” one, cause… “Church
& State” has already gone. I think there was a “High Society” one, he’s
only got like 4 or 5 of them and “Melmoth” was one of them, I’m like, I’m on a
“Melmoth” kick so, okay, I’ll pay for that.
Dave: Alright, okay. You sent along the thing from Steve,
where he’s talking about.. he’s asking me, “On one of Matt Dow's recent
"Please Hold For Dave Sim" installments, you said that the Kitchen
brothers were the first to show you your record in the ‘2018 Guinness Book of
World Records’. Just for the record,” (nyuk nyuk nyuk) “I'd like it known that
I was the first to call you to congratulate you on your record...and you didn't
believe me! I probably should've told you in the phone call what I'm about to
tell you now, maybe you would've believed me then...though I did at least read
to you the entry from the Guinness book.” And it’s interesting, because I
hadn’t known the story of that, and it seems kind of comic-art metaphysics kind
of thing that he would’ve discovered it right after he had one of those
horrible signings for “Subspace Chatter” #1 where absolutely nobody shows up.
So it’s just you and the people working at the story trying to pretend this
isn’t upsetting on either side, or a real drag all around. It seems interesting
that he would find the entry in the “Guinness Book of World Records” right
after he had that particular unhappy experience for himself. It is interesting,
the Kitchen brothers didn’t show me my record in the “2018 Guinness Book of
World Records”, and they didn’t contact me about it, it just came up in
conversation at one of my human being day dinners. Which is, every six months I
pretend that I’m a human being and go and just have a human being day with the
5K Kitchens, five children Kitchen, in June and then with 3k Kitchens just
around Christmas. This was the one just around Christmas. They didn’t show it
to me in the book, they just mentioned, I think it was Jacob who was… Blair’s
oldest son had seen it in the “Guinness Book of World Records” I assumed in his
school library and remembered it long enough to mention that. It is interesting
because now I’m starting to wonder, was it in earlier editions of the “Guinness
Book of World Records” and Steve just happened to be the first person to see it
in the 2018 edition? I never thought of that but it does seem one of those
really odd, could only happen to Dave Sim and could only happen to Cerebus
fandom thing, that obviously what is really a watershed kind of thing as far as
the real world is concerned, Cerebus being in the “Guinness Book of World
Records” that it happened and nobody saw it for 2 editions? 3 editions? Or did
it not happen until 2018? So I’m just gonna throw that one out there as a
question, I [laughs] don’t want to make your personal quest harder than it
already is, because you’re already trying to find copies of the “2018 Guinness
Book of World Records”. It hasn’t been easy, so I can’t imagine trying to find
2017, and 2016, and 2015, to find out how far back this goes, will be any
easier. But that was just one of those things that occurred to me, was, okay
Steve Peters found it pretty late in the day for the “Guinness Book of World
Records” for 2018. Is that something that God was having a good laugh about?
Hey, this is really important to Dave Sim but nobody’s gonna find out about
this. The ‘Guinness Book of World Records” people don’t contact you to tell you
that you’re in the “Guinness Book of World Records”, they just put you in the
“Guinness Book of World Records”. Which led to another question in my mind, my
mind being a playground going, what in the heck was Steve Peters doing looking
in the “Guinness Book of World Records” after this really depressing signing
that nobody showed up at when he was at Barnes & Noble? I have to say, I
can’t think of a single situation apart from Cerebus and Dave Sim being in
there, that I would check the “Guinness Book of World Records”. Seems to me
like a really really odd thing, first of all, to own. I can’t believe anybody
would actually buy a copy of the book, and second of all, for somebody to
browse through it if you were in a bookstore or if they were in a library.
There’s just… talk about TMI. There’s the TMI book of all time, the “Guinness
Book of World Records”. So, there you go, those are the thoughts that occurred
to me.
Matt: Well, that’s…
Dave: Go ahead.
Matt: I was lookin’ for a copy of the 2018 and I went to the
half-priced bookstore, cause it’s half-priced books, it’s all they have is old
books. They have new stuff but most of the time it’s here’s a book from 20
years ago. When I found the Guinness Book I found a copy of “Comic Book Rebels”
and I’m like, I remember seein’ this years ago and it was a choice of either
buying that or Fantagraph’s ”The New Comics” and the difference in price was $3
so I got the “New Comics” because it was just that much cheaper. So I found
another copy of “Comic Book Rebels” and I’m lookin’ for the Guinness Book and I
asked the clerk, and they’re like, oh yeah, we send them back, we don’t keep
‘em. And I’m thinkin, but you’re a half-priced bookstore, that kind of your
bit, why are you sending them back to the publisher to be destroyed when that’s
what you do, you sell old books? We found the 2020, and I’m like, yeah it’s not
gonna be in there, and I flipped to the index and looked up Sim, nothing.
Looked up Cerebus, nothing. And finally looked up comics, and it said “most
consecutive issues written and drawn” and I’m like, okay, page whatever it was.
Flipped to page, yep yep, here’s the record, apparently every year they don’t
do everything but they’ll go back and forth. Like comics was 2018, they had a
big comics section. 2019, nothin’. 2020, big comics section.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: So that’s… So I’m like…
Dave: Have you looked at 2016 or have you ever seen 2016 or
2017?
Matt: Ahh, I’m just thinkin’, I betcha the library might
have ‘em. I can’t imagine they’d be gettin’ rid of… they’d buy a book and then
get rid of a year later. I don’t see the library doin’ that, so now I’m
thinkin’ I’m gonna have to go to the library, go to the kids section, see what
they have, and just start diggin’ through to see when it showed up.
Dave: There you go. Yeah. Like I say, these are just things that
I don’t really think about it very much, but definitely triggered some further
thoughts of, “hey, is any…”
PART ONE IS SENT BACK TO THE PUBLISHER
PART TWO SAME BOOK NEW SHINY COVER
Dave: As Steve mentions, yes, I did do up stickers for the
Guinness Book of World Records, or the Guinness World Record. Just found a
Guinness World Record graphic online and just had Studio Comix Press cobble
something together. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to incorporate that
with the Cerebus trade paperback on what I think is kind of a sensible
assumption that nobody’s heard of Dave Sim and nobody’s heard of Cerebus and
nobody’s heard of any of the individual books, but they have heard of Guinness
World Records so… it’s one of those things, all you gotta do is get ‘em to stop
and look at the cover for five seconds and if that peaks their curiosity, maybe
they’ll pick up the book and look at it. But I don’t think I have enough
confidence in that to print up enough stickers for all of Diamond’s inventory
and have Diamond put them on there. So it is something I have thought about. I
do have one Cerebus trade paperback with one sticker on the front of it. I
should probably auction that on one of the Weekly Updates. This is the only one
with a Guinness World Record sticker on it to date, anyone interested? I can’t
guarantee that this will be the only one to ever exist, but it’s probably going
to be the only one that says 2018.
Matt: Plus, it’s the first one, I mean. You’ll get the
collector of, “well I need…” Nate Oberstein will probably be the guy beatin’
everybody else up tryin’ to get it, cause, this is the one one edition.
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, as long as I write it on there,
that should help. Then the part of Steve’s letter, “So, my 50th birthday was in
2017. As you may recall, I share a birthday with Deni (and I've always wondered
what significance you find in that fact, since you always find significance in
any set of dates).” That’s a very good point. And yeah, this is the first time
this year that I knew that, because Steve bought one of the Neal Adams birthday
cards. So, definitely when I was writing out his birthday card to him and
noticed that it was September 30th, I went, well, that maybe doesn’t
explain a great deal, but it certainly fits as a jigsaw puzzle piece. I think
one of the things that occurs to me out of that, is in breaking up with Deni, I
think forward and backward in time, in puncture of time, which is how time
operates on the upper level, everything happens simultaneously. I think Deni
was definitely was a question mark to me not knowing that I was going to end up
being a devout monotheist. At least, I hope I end up a devout monotheist, I
have been one for almost 25 years now. Deni was definitely in the category of
Steve Peters spirituality versus God. First of all, taking Steve’s name, the
two sides of his name. Steve, on the one side, has always in North American
society, Steven has always been associated with Stephen King, who is the sort
of, definitely the Stephen King of… incorporating the infernal into the
commonplace and fictionalizing that. Becoming the central figure in that, in
our society. And that, I think has a larger resonance in our society, that you
can’t really do that with impunity, you are participating in that, if you’re documenting
that. Even if you think you’re fictionalizing that, you have no idea the extent
to which you’re fictionalizing that and the extent to which you are actually
over in the infernal. Which is part of the spirituality argument. If you
believe in spirituality divorced of God, in other words, you’re not religious,
you’re not a monotheist, but you believe a realm of spirit exists and you do
believe in being a spiritual person, I am persuaded now and I certainly wasn’t
persuaded at the time that I was with Deni and at the time after Deni, which is
when I started hearing from Steve Peters. I definitely used to think that, yes,
there is a spiritual component to life, but no, I don’t believe particularly in
God, I don’t believe in scripture, I don’t believe in churches, blah blah blah,
the whole “John Lennon - Imagine” kind of thing. I think that definitely Deni
came from that sort of a background as well, when was posed as a question, per
the great love of her life, at least before we met, was a guy named Steve who
was a Zen-Buddhist in Palo Alto or the San Francisco area. And… one of the
things that brought their relationship to an end was that they were filling out
a questionnaire or having a discussion about their future plans and what their
plans involved and Deni’s plan definitely revolved around being with Steve, and
Steve’s plan didn’t have Deni in it, which came as a colossal shock to her,
obviously. So that was one of those spirituality things where, is Zen-Buddhism
God oriented or is it spirituality divorced from God? So that was another
Steve, and then of course, in the comic book field around the time that I was
corrupting myself with Judith, along comes “Swamp Thing” with Steve Bissette.
So I was, if you get the logic of this, Steve beset. B-E-S-E-T. I was beset by
Steve. And that became another element of, am I going to be beset by Steve and
get swept into the infernal side of things, which Steve was very very fond of
and doesn’t think there’s any kind of harm or self-destructiveness in it. Or am
I going to beset Steve? Which, tended to be more of the way that things went,
particularly when he was persuaded to self-publish and his pathological
procrastination no longer worked because when you’re a self-publisher you don’t
have somebody telling you what to do, you only have yourself telling you what
to do. Which is why I always thought it was very amusing he came up with a
comic book called “Tyrant”. So, that’s the long way around, coming back to
Steve’s name, you’ve got the Steve side there which is potentially infernal,
potentially spiritual, potentially spiritual/infernal, potentially anti-God,
potentially Satantic, and then you’ve got the Peters side to Steve’s name,
which is, of course, the name of… “upon this rock I will found my church”,
Kepa-- Peter. Who… Peter is just a coined name focusing on that element of it,
that the Synoptic Jesus said, “upon this rock I will found my church”. So it
seemed to me like, okay, you can break up with Deni and no longer be married to
her, no longer have any contact with her, but nature adores a vacuum and nature
abhors a vacuum and I think that’s where Steve came into it. And it was a
question of, if you have Steve and here’s all of these contexts that Dave Sim
has for Steve and for the name Steve, who are the Peters in that Steve context?
Who are the, as Peter is to Jesus, and Peter was both a significant figure to
the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus. Who are the Peters for the Steve in
Dave Sim’s life? And that’s a very interesting question. And Steve Peters is
definitely one of the Peters who I wouldn’t say we’re on the same page, I think
Steve’s probably more of a monotheist now than when he started writing to me in
1990 and more of a monotheist than he has been all along, but relative to my
own viewpoints of what is monotheistic about spirituality? I tend to be a far
more of a purist than an absolutist that monotheism has to be directed towards
God and it has to involve scripture, it can’t just be, here’s something that
exists in the non-apparent world, consequently it’s the same thing as religion,
or it’s the same thing as God. So, there ya go. Very very long-winded
explanation why I think Steve Peters was born on September 30th and
why he has had this place in my life pretty much from the Biblical seven years
after I broke up with Deni, which was 1983. He didn’t show up in my life until
1990.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Got any questions on that one, or?
Matt: [laughs] Well, I was just, when you said that, the
question of, are you and Steve on the same page? I immediately thought, well if
you’re not on the same page, you guys might be in the same book but you’re
further along than he…
END BOOKE TWO
BEGINTH BOOKE THREE
Dave: …in which case, I would be considered the retrograde
person in that, I’m mistaking the suburb for the city, and that’s… well, that’s
what makes horse races, but I definitely think… as a matter of fact, while I’m
working on the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume Three right now where
there’s a definite link between Ward Greene, who wrote “Rip Kirby” and was the
general manager at King Features Syndicate, and Willie Seabrook, who worked at
King Features and was fictionalized by Ward Green as Jack Perry in “Ride the
Nightmare”, are both linked in 1919 to Alistair Crowley, the wickedest man in
the world, who, if you really stretch your definitions and you say, “well,
Alistair Crowley was a very spiritual guy”, well, I suppose you could put it
that way, but being at the point in the book where I’m documenting this link
between Ward Greene, Willie Seabrook, and Alistair Crowley, no, I think it’s
really really unhealthy stuff. Sincere apologies to Alan Moore and Steve
Bissette and anybody else who doesn’t agree with that. I’m not really sure
where, if you were gonna call it a book, where am I in the book and where is
Steve Peters in the book. That might be an interesting question for Steve.
Matt: ‘Kay. I will, I will definitely send him a message and
let him know, hey, watch the videos Saturday and if you’ve got somethin’… if
he’s got an answer and he sends it to me, I’ll send it up to you.
Dave: Alright, okay. And share it with all the A Moment of
Cerebus people.
Matt: Oh, definitely.
Dave: Okay, then we’ve got Dion Turner. “A question for next
time... which may have been asked in the past, if so put the ka-bosh on it and
send me on my way to a link. Were there any other authors that you considered
having counterparts adapted for Cerebus? In my mind there is an untold tale of
Cerebus the Barbarian where he meets Lovecraft and they are trapped in a town of
fish-people monsters.... or a Dunwich Horror scenario, giving Lovecraft a
twin.” Yeah that would be interesting. Lovecraft is one of those ones that I
think is way over there, if we’re in the same book, I hope I’m at the opposite
end of the book from HP Lovecraft. Just, again, really unhealthy kind of stuff
to be making up. I think my core concern about it and the thing that I would
caution anybody about on going the HP Lovecraft direction or the Stephen King
direction, any of those guys, my caveat would be, how comfortable are you with
the fact that you’re actually making this stuff up and that this isn’t being
fed to you and that whoever is feeding this to you, you don’t have screens
against who is feeding this to you? You could be doing things that are not only
extremely detrimental to human society in the long term, but detrimental to
yourself, because, I think you’re culpable for anything that you create. Which
is one of the reasons that the more praying I did and the more fasting I did
and the more scriptures that I read aloud, as just part of my day to day life,
the more aware I was of… there’s a lot of dead fall traps out here. But you
don’t really notice until you start doing that and you go, this is really a
scary thing to contemplate how many people don’t protect themselves at all. I
mean they don’t fast, they don’t read scripture aloud, they don’t pray, and
they gotta be walkin’ around in the same landmine field I’m walking around in
and very likely, it seems to me, getting themselves into all kinds of trouble
that, if they were aware of what they were actually doing, they wouldn’t go
anywhere near it. But it would be interesting, Dion, to have done that. I would
have been, I think, even hesitant at the time of… taking that kind of chance
with somebody like HP Lovecraft, who was so overtly, pedal to the metal, into
the whole infernal thing that even studying HP Lovecraft to the extent that I
studied Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald and Oscar Wilde, I would have
been worried about my own soul that understanding an individual that early,
where you read all of their works, all of their fictional work and then you
read all of their published letters that are available, and then you read as
many of the commentaries as you can. That’s far more waiting around in the Lake
of Fire than I would ever be inclined to do myself on my worst day. Although, I
did read Lovecraft at the time and boy, he was really good at that stuff. It’s,
no, just reading somebody’s work and immersing yourself in their work so that
you can do a good fictional version of them, those are two entirely different
things. I guess Mark Twain as well, Mark Twain would’ve been an interesting
character to fictionalize. I’m not sure that Mark Twain in toto is something
that I would’ve been interested in reading all of his works and then
fictionalizing him. I think “Huckleberry Finn” because that’s really the
enduring Mark Twain work, I probably would’ve been inclined to find a Mark
Twain character in “Huckleberry Finn” and then read and reread “Huckleberry
Finn”, and then read and reread all of whatever Mark Twain had to say about
“Huckleberry Finn” at the time that he wrote it and however many years after he
wrote it, that he was still talking about it. That would’ve been interesting.
Edgar Allen Poe? It’s like, nope, no, now we’re goin’ back the other way again.
It’s like [laughs] I don’t think you could study Edgar Allen Poe and all of
Edgar Allen Poe’s works and read all of Edgar Allen Poe’s letters without doing
serious damage to yourself and to your soul, although there’s Edgar Allen Poe
material that I like. I’m as big a fan of “The Raven” as anybody and definitely
“The Black Cat” by William Bernie Wrightson. A lot of that stuff, it was my
affection for Bernie Wrightson, and my love of Bernie Wrightson’s artwork that
dragged me over into territories where angels fear to tread. "Cerebus
unstuck in his own timeline like Billy Pilgrim in ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, set
primarily during Later Days (but including everything - especially ‘something fell’).....
this might be playing in with my wish to see Cerebus abducted by aliens.” Uh
yeah, I’m a big fan of “Slaughterhouse Five”. Particularly the microcosm,
macrocosm of him getting the diamond ring that was in a prison camp or in a
context where Jewish prisoners were enslaved and just finding the diamond ring
and when he was is abducted by the aliens he’s inserted into a giant diamond
with the young girl that they want him to mate with. And I think that ties in
with F Scott Fitzgerald’s “diamond as big as your wrist”, and in the comic book
world, we’ve got Diamond Comic Distributors, which is the context that we all
inhabit, to whatever extent we’re happy or unhappy about that, we’ve got about
the same say in that that Billy Pilgrim did. No, we’re all inside Diamond in
that aspect. So, there ya go!
Matt: As you’re going through the list of authors, I’m
goin’, I could see a Young Cerebus / Huckleberry Finn parody with Young Cerebus
and Bear on a raft goin’ down the river, and I’m like, a great Cerebus Jam
strip that got lost to the ages, but I could totally see that, and I could also
see an “Epic Illustrated” story with Cerebus dealin’ with Edgar Allen Poe
pastiche that, ya know, it’s this depressed guy and Cerebus is just like,
“leave me alone.”
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, it’s… by the time I had done doing
Oscar Wilde and realizing what that immersion effect is like, it was definitely
a matter of, I think F Scott Fitzgerald is either safe or relatively safe and
I’m hoping Hemingway is safe or relatively safe. I think that was the case, I
don’t think it was safe for them, I would not want to be carrying Scott
Fitzgerald’s baggage before God on Judgement Day and I wouldn’t want to be
carrying Ernest Hemingway’s baggage in front of God on Judgement Day. If I had
to pick between the two, I’d probably pick Scott, but I’m not really
comfortable with what I’m dragging before God on Judgement Day and I’m still
workin’ on that one. So, there ya go.
Matt: And the other thing is, you immersed yourself in Wilde
enough that Wilde came back for the next book, where you dealt with his death
because there was that much Wilde baggage that you picked up. I can’t imagine
you doing Fitzgerald or Hemingway when you were still drinkin’, I think you
woulda died.
Dave: [laughs] Well, I was still drinking when I was doing
Scott.
Matt: Oh, I thought you had quit before then.
Dave: No, no, I actually hadn’t. Because I was a binge
drinker, I would drink Friday nights excessively. I wanted to have the
experience of, okay, what’s it like to write hungover? So the parts of
“Beautiful and Damned” that I did I was parodying that I wrote on Saturday
mornings hungover from the night before, because I figured well, I better know
what this was like. Because obviously Scott Fitzgerald wrote a good chunk of
his oeuvre when he was hungover. But yeah, it was also a matter of, I couldn’t
leave Oscar Wilde just as the Oscar Wilde character in “Jaka’s Story”, and then
what was definitely compelled to do “Melmoth” and there are elements of Oscar
Wilde through the rest of Cerebus, that was one of the benefits of doing Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the last five years of the book that I will
be able to just keep it at this. Even though it was definitely the impulse to
revisit the characters, I didn’t say everything that I needed to say about
them, but if, ya know, you’re not God, you’re never going to be able to say all
that you need to say about another human being. You don’t even understand
yourself well enough to be able to examine yourself exhaustively. How can you
think that these people that you never actually met or knew, that you could
document in that way? So, uhh, yeah, it’s an interest…
PART THREE BECOMES UNSTUCK IN TIME
PART FOUR REBIRTH
Dave: Yeah, it’s an interesting effect. It’s certainly an
engaging process to try and understand somebody else through their written
work. But it is very limited. I think… my current thinking is, you’re always
better trying to improve yourself. First of all, because you don’t know how to
improve yourself except in the most cursory way, so anything that you can think
of that you think, yeah, I think this would be a better Dave Sim than the Dave
Sim that I am right now and the Dave Sim that I’ve been. I’m always trying to
do that and that’s really where most human effort is, I think, most fruitful.
What can I think of that I think would make me better, and do that and work at
perpetuating that. Don’t just visit it, try to live there. But as a writer
trying to understand other writers through their writing, is definitely an
addicting process. Probably a good thing that Cerebus wasn’t 500 or I would’ve
done a Cerebus “Huckleberry Finn” riff. I would’ve become very obsessed with
about, “how do you make a raft?” and “what were rafts like in Missouri at that
time?”
Matt: Yeah, then you’d be having me go visit my Dad, cause
he lives in Missouri, and then go to Hannibal and get all the reference you
can… ya know, it’d be “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” with Mark Twin.
Dave: There you go. It would be, just if you want to Matt,
you don’t have to do it. And then that’s sharing my addiction so that not only
am I addicted to doing this, now I’ve got you addicted to doing it.
Matt: But that’s how you got Eddie! Eddie started with…
Dave: Well yeah, Eddie was the tallest poppy. “You’re the
only one who writes to me about ‘Glamourpuss’ and the only one who writes to me
about this Alex Raymond stuff so” that seemed kind of ordained The same as I
had no idea that Carson Grubagh was reading “Glamourpuss”, as far as I knew,
everybody was just buying “Glamourpuss” and putting it in a stack and nobody
was reading their copy. So, you never know in those situations that, yeah, you
have a much bigger addiction to this than you’re aware of and you’ve generated
a much bigger addiction in somebody else than he’s aware of, and we’re still
slogging through that one.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: The.. this is yours here, where you’re writing, “if I
remember right, an iffy prospect, ‘Days of Future Past’ the third story in
‘Future Day’ was drawn by Gene the same time as Dave drew ‘Cerebus’ #1.” Is
that you writing that, or is that Dion Turner?
Matt: No, that’s me. That’s me.
Dave: That’s you. Okay. Alright. “If I remember the story
correctly, Dave was visiting Gene and they both had head colds and they had
their backs to each other while they were at their drawing boards with a thirty
gallon garbage can between them, and they just kept blowing their noses and
throwing the Kleenex over their shoulders.” It was actually worse than that. We
ran through all of the Kleenex in the house, and Gene & I both being poor
as church mice, then we switched to toilet paper? Yes, I think it was toilet
paper after that, so we both had toilet paper rolls that we were blowing our
noses on and then we ran out of toilet paper, or we got down to the point where
it’s like, [laughs] “no, we actually need toilet paper that we use as toilet
paper, too. We can’t use up all the toilet paper.” So then we were using up the
paper towels that they had in the house. And if you’ve ever blown your nose
every 40 seconds of every minute and a half with paper towels you know at some
point you have to go and get Kleenex. This is just out of control now.
Matt: Okay, I remember readin’ it in an old issue of
“Wizard” and then years ago, I’m like, I don’t need any of these! And as soon
as they were gone, I’m like, ahh crap, I should’ve gone through and… ya know,
there’s certain pages I know I’m gonna want out of this issue or that issue,
and that was one of ‘em. And I’ve looked, and I can’t even find what issue of
“Wizard” it was cause, for a while, the last page was, “this month in comics
history” and it was a December issue was, looking back on “Cerebus” #1 and
whoever had written it called you and you told the story and I’m like, that’s
amazing.
Dave: It was interesting. I mean, the fact that it stuck in
my head for that long. It was one of those, if this didn’t happen, if we
weren’t both sick as dogs for the whole week that I was up there and working on
“Cerebus” #1 I don’t think I would have remembered that as vividly as I did.
And I mean there’s some real comic-art metaphysics aspect to that. I mean, look
at the name of the story Gene’s working on. “Days! Of! Future! Past!” That’s a
real puncture of time thing. I think it was, whatever, again, over in the
direction of Steve Bissette and Edgar Allen Poe and all of those guys, whatever
malignancy Gene Day had inside of him and whatever malignancy I had inside of
me, and we were both far more horror/science-fiction/comic book fans than
anybody’s idea of a monotheist. I’m wondering if part of the sickness that we
were experiencing was that whatever was inside of Gene was contemplating
whether to move over to me or not. Having looked at this “Cerebus” #1, and
again, in puncture of time, forward and backwards in time, this seems to have a
lot of temporal depth to it. At the very least, I would think watching me draw
the cover to “Cerebus” #1, it would’ve been, ahh, I’m picking up something
about 26 years here, and it seems to be glowing in the dark, and this Gene Day
guy, even looking at the days of the past, with the background that Gene comes
from and the future days, I’m not seeing the same thing that I’m seeing in this
Cerebus thing. So, maybe it’s time to jump ship from Gene Day and inhabit Dave
Sim instead.
Matt: Could be, could be.
Dave: It’s all speculative. I forget who I was writing to
recently, and talking about… we know nothing more about the human soul than we
did 6000 years ago when we first got introduced to the concept in scripture. We
don’t know what a soul is, we don’t know where it is, we don’t know what it’s
physical properties are, if it even has physical properties. How it moves
around, if it moves around, what connection it has to us. Can it disconnect
from us and reconnect to others? So that’s, to me, another persuasive argument
in favor of, well, if I’m gonna be on a team, I want to be on God’s team and I
think reading the Koran aloud and reading the Torah aloud and reading John’s
Gospel aloud and reading Revelations aloud is… just, tells me, as more
nourishment for my soul than reading other stuff. So, as much as possible, I
try to do that, although I do have a lot of reading that I have to do for
“Strange Death of Alex Raymond” that is research material. Apart from that, it…
no, whatever time that I think I can spare in my life, I want to read John’s
Gospel aloud cause I think that’s what links us to God, that’s what links us to
the beneficent side of the universe and as entertaining as I find Edgar Allen
Poe and HP Lovecraft, and part of me would definitely like to re-read them, I
would like to re-read Stephen King’s “It”, no, if I have to weigh in the
balance of which one’s gonna help me on Judgement Day, no competition as far as
I’m concerned.
Matt: That’s, I mean, I have a collected Lovecraft book I
bought, I’m like, I’m gonna finally read Lovecraft! And I got like a third of
the way through it and I’m like, yeah, it’s good, but it’s like… there was one
story where as I’m reading I’m falling asleep every single night when I’m readin’,
I’m like, ya know what, I’m gonna put it away and I’ll pick it up when I’m
ready. And it’s been like a year now, and no, I’m just not ready.
Dave: Right. Yeah, I would [laughs] Not to make you
completely paranoid, but if you’re reading HP Lovecraft and you’re falling
asleep to the same part every time, that’s arguably one of those, here’s how we
get him, kinds of things. It’s like, here, HP, write this, and this and this
and this and this and this, and here, whoever ends up reading HP Lovecraft and
they get to this story, it’s going to hypnotically put them to sleep, and
that’s when all of the stuff that they’ve just been reading actually gets to
invade their soul and inhabit them. I’m not saying that I know that for a fact,
but I’m saying, ahh, I would worry about that. Given the subject matter, given
the effect, that’s one of those things that you’re playing with that you maybe
don’t want to be playing with.
Matt: That was, back in high school my buddy and I got
Lovecraft from the library and we’re readin’ “The Testimony of” I forget the
name, it’s a short little story. And we read it our loud, and it was hilarious.
I mean, spooky, but hilarious. And then we started reading “Into the Mountains
of Madness” and we got about 3 pages in and we looked at each other and went,
yep we’re done, we’re not gonna read this to each other anymore.
Dave: [laughs] I wanna get a good night’s sleep tonight, I’m
not gonna get to sleep reading this stuff.
Matt: It wasn’t even that, it was just… the description of
the creatures and it was so pedestrian, and ya know, it was about the size of a
barrel, and this and this, and I’m like, ya know, the actual words are very
pedestrian, there’s nothin’ creepy, there’s nothin’ spooky, but ya know, both
of us, our hackles are raised, this is just the scariest thing in the world.
And neither one of us can put it, can figure out what was freakin’ us out about
it, we’re just like, nope, we’re done. Take it back to the library, let’s read
somethin’ else.
Dave: Yeah. I think you kind of have to go by that, because
it is… that ties in with the question that we’ve explored here before, of,
“where do you get your ideas?” It’s like, if you don’t know where you get your
ideas from, you don’t know where that idea came from, and you don’t know exactly
how maligned that idea is, that ideas do not in and of themselves just as
ideas, have your best interests at heart. I don’t think! If you’re one of those
people that goes, “ahh it’s just a story. Ahh it’s just something this one guy
wrote.” Well, okay, if you’re 100% confident of that, you go ahead and adopt
that as your viewpoint, and pursue that in whatever direction you want.
Personally, I don’t think that that’s the case. As the longer I’ve been alive,
and particularly since I’ve read the Bible, which definitely always seemed like
a bad idea when I was reading Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe and HP
Lovecraft. “Ya know, I don’t really want to read the Bible, it’s just a bunch
of fairy tales and it’s just this complete scam” and it’s like, well, why don’t
you read it first before you decide that that’s what it is? You’re reading all
of this stuff and that’s what’s convincing you that the Bible’s just a bunch of
fairy tales. You might be on somebody’s video game and inside the video game
and just not registering just exactly how this is playing out. But, you know,
God gave you free will the same that he did me, so read what you want to read,
consume what you want to consume, and as the old saying goes, let the Devil
take the hi…
PART FOUR LETS THE DEVIL TAKE THE HI-C?
PART FIVE LETS THE DEVIL TAKE THE HAWAIIAN PUNCH
Matt: [laughs] Right.
Dave: Okay, now we’re… oh! Wait a minute, this is Eddie
Khanna’s one, this is actually picking up on what we talked about last time. I
was gonna grab this week’s Cerebus numbers from Diamond and I forgot to. Hang…
uhh, stay on the line!
Matt: Okay.
Dave: And you’ll just have to edit this part out.
Matt: Alright, will do.
[proceeds to leave the dead air in the video. Naughty,
naughty]
Dave: Okay, I’m back. So Eddie picked up on what we had
talked about on the last “Please Hold” about Diamond numbers and sent an email
to Matt Demory who’s my Diamond rep. “Questions come up about trying to promote
and move any remaining ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ titles Diamond still has in stock. We’ve
been advertising which issues are sold and which are still in stock, but we’re
wondering if there would be any concerns if we were to mention the exact
numbers of the remaining issues Diamond has left. I.e.” and then he cites the
number of “Canadian Vark”, and then the number of “Iron Manticore”… “or is that
information considered private and proprietary, only to be shared between
Diamond and the publisher?” And Eddie says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this
was the first time this question has been asked. You can’t say we do things the
usual way around here. Thanks, and best as always, Eddie.” And what he got back
from Matt Demory was, “Hi, Eddie, attached is the current inventory for Cerebus
single issues. We would prefer that exact quantities not be mentioned. We do
not make our exact inventory quantities available to retailers. That said, we
could say something like, ‘low stock’ or ‘almost sold out’.” So, bearing that
in mind, just going down the list, I would say if we’re talking about almost
sold out, almost sold out the “Sim City: That Issue After” the one that’s got
the Teenage Money-Nabbing Cerebi in the back, that I would describe as almost
sold out and the “Iron Manticore” one-shot is almost sold out. Those would be
the only ones in that category. Low stock? Low stock “Fornicators Inc” I would
describe as low. “Canadian Vark” I would describe as low. So, if you haven’t
got those and you’re one of those people who want to have a complete set of
“Cerebus in Hell?” #1s, those are the ones that, if you can go to your store
and say, “can you order me one of these?” I would say “Iron Manticore” first,
in the almost sold out, and then “Sim City: That Issue After” with Teenage
Money-Nabbing Cerebi in the back, that would be in that category and
“Fornicators Inc”. There’s always a bit of a delay getting the order to Diamond
and then getting the books back, so if you start now, I think I can say that if
you did this week, you’d probably get one. Week after that, less of a sure
thing.
Matt: Okay. The numbers for the “Vark Wars” #1 come in yet
on how many Diamond’s orderin’?
Dave: No! No, we’ve got… is this the latest one that I got
in? Yes! Yes, these are interim numbers, we get… because the numbers come in
every week, we’ll get one set of numbers when the retailers are starting to
order, and then another set of numbers when the final numbers are coming in.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: So, I can say that the numbers on “Vark Wars” are up
from “Colour Your Own”. I would say significantly up from the comparable
numbers from “Colour Your Own”? That is, when the first numbers were coming in
for “Colour Your Own” they were definitely the lowest that we’ve ever seen for
the first batch coming in, and then they had a bigger jump from there to the
subsequent numbers. “Vark Wars” is back actually up above what the numbers
would be for the first batch of numbers, so it’ll be interesting to see what
the numbers do next Sunday if they go up less the second time around, or if
they still go up substantially. And I think that’s all that I’m allowed to say.
Matt: Okay. I was just hopin’ that the numbers were up
cause, that’s the issue where okay, let’s try a gimmick of tying the issue into
when the issue’s released and the general pop culture, and see if we can, ya
know, ride that wave.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. We’ll see if that happened. I think
“Cerebus in Hell?” is in its own category of, I think the store owners have
“Cerebus in Hell?” buyers who don’t buy every one, which is one of the
drawbacks of not doing a continued story, but I wanted to trade that to the
plus side of, actually I’d like to have that for casual readers, that you don’t
have to buy every “Cerebus in Hell?” #1. If you miss one, it’s not as is you
can’t read the ones that you’ve bought after that because you’re missing part
of the continuity. Apart from the two issue Iron Manticore, yeah, you’d
probably want to read “Tales of Sophistication” before you read “Iron
Manticore” #1 and the same thing coming up with “Vark Thing” and “House of
Cerebus”. I try not to let it go beyond that. So if you just see the cover and
you go, “oh that’s a funny parody of that cover”, pick it up, read it. You’ll
probably get a few laughs out of it. It might refer back to another “Cerebus in
Hell?” #1, but not in any appreciable way that you’re not gonna get it
otherwise. Not in the way virtually all other comic books are, and certainly
the way “Cerbeus” itself was. If you don’t get issue 179, you don’t want to be
reading issues 180 and 181 until you do have your 179.
Matt: I’d buy “Amazing Spider-Man” and there was an issue
where Mary Jane’s leavin’, Peter’s gonna meet her at the airport to say
goodbye, but Spider-Man’s needed type thing. Ya know, the stereotypical Stan
Lee story. And the reason he’s needed is, Peter’s sister showed up and needs
help. And I’m like, Peter Parker has a sister? When in the hell did that
happen?!
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I went online and looked and apparently they
introduced that, yeah Peter had a heretofore, or previously unknown sister that
was put up for adoption and now she’s back in his life. Knows he’s Spider-Man,
she’s a spy, and I’m just like, there’s part of me that’s goin’, I need to go
buy these comics and there’s part of me that’s goin’, do you really care, Matt?
Do you really care that much?
Dave: [laughs] You’re getting old, Matt!
Matt: I mean, it’s..
Dave: You would’ve cared passionately 10 years ago. “Peter
Parker has a sister?! Oh my gosh!”
Matt: It’s one of those, I’m goin’, okay, she’s got a
sister, and they kind of draw her so she looks a little like Mary Jane, she’s
got red hair. For a second, I thought it was Mary Jane showed up and then
they’re like, oh no, this is, ya know. They stopped doing the “editor’s notes”,
there’s no more little Stan saying, “you remember Peter’s sister from blah blah
blah”, and I’m like…
Dave: Right.
Matt: Ya know, I understand, comics have changed, I’m
gettin’ old, but… I really miss the little Stan captions that said, this is
what’s going on, this is who that is, ya know. This is how it all ties together
so that you feel like you’ve got your $4 worth when you’ve bought the comic.
And invariably, that’s one of the things I like about “Cerebus in Hell?” ya
know, I pay my $4, I’m entertained. I don’t have to worry about, oh hey, I
missed “Giant-Sized Jingles”, is that gonna effect my ability to understand
what’s goin’ in in the “Iron Manticore”? And no, no it’s not.
Dave: Right. Right. Well, I think you’ve got the Stan Lee
caption for 2019, which is your cellphone and you just type into it “Peter
Parker’s sister” and there you go. There’s as much as is humanly known about
Peter Parker’s sister and you can immerse yourself in that if you want.
Matt: Yeah, I know, but that’s just a waste of my time.
Dave: Yep! Well, until Judgement Day we don’t know what’s a
waste of our time. Maybe Peter Parker’s sister was the key to everything.
Matt: [laughs] I really hope at the end of days, when we’re
all standin’ there in judgement, it’s, “you didn’t read that issue of
‘Spider-Man’. You’re goin’ to hell forever and ever and ever.”
Dave: That’s it. The whole build-up was towards Peter
Parker’s sister and being put up for adoption and her being a spy. “What do you
mean you don’t know her middle name?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, I wouldn’t be betting the mortgage on that one.
I do want to mention, cause I think that this is probably important for Cerebus
fandom, Cerebus readership, “Form & Void” has been out of print for years
and years, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I did a big
promotion with the Hemingway society in Illinois with free back issues that
they could hand out at their convention. And that ate up all the supply of
“Form & Void” and we haven’t been able to get “Form & Void” remastered
because it’s more important to do the earlier books than the later books. But,
and this is a huge but, the last couple of weeks, Diamond got “Form & Void”
back in stock. Where they came form, I don’t know. As Eddie Khanna said, “Form
& Void” is going for like $100 on eBay because all of the supply has been
eaten up. Amazon’s supply has been eaten up, everybody who has or had “Form
& Void” has sold it, anybody who’s got one isn’t letting it out of their
grasp even for a minute, but for the last two weeks, Diamond is showing
inventory for “Form & Void”. So, theoretically, Eddie’s already ordered a
couple of copies of it just to verify that it actually exists. If you’re
missing “Form & Void” and you’re trying to figure out how to get “Form
& Void” without paying $100 for it, now would be the time to go to your
comic store and go, “here’s the Diamond order code for ‘Form & Void’, can
you order me one of these?” And hopefully you can get one before these either
evaporate into the ether, which they have a tendency to do at the Star System
warehouse. Or, they do actually exist and you can get one before anyone else
gets one and they disappear that way.
Matt: Okay. So is “Form & Void” gonna get remastered if
it sells out?
PART FIVE SELLS OUT
PART SIX IS FOUND STUFFED INSIDE THE COUCH CUSHIONS
Matt: …If it sells out?
Dave: Uhh, well, yeah, it’s definitely been on the list of
the next book to do, particularly when I know that all of Hemingway fandom is
finding out about this thing. And actually, the guy I did the promotion with
has done a book about Hemingway in the comics and as a chunk of the “Form &
Void” in there, so it’s really becoming a cause celebre with Hemingway fandom,
which is obviously much much bigger than Cerebus fandom which is why you’re
seeing this kind of heat. I think some of them are contenting themselves with
buying sets of Cerebus and just, as long as it’s got the Hemingway issues in
it, they’ll just write off the other ones. But it’s definitely getting to be a
growing concern, but the problem is Diamond… if it’s a choice between
remastering Volume Three, ya know, “Church & State I” or Volume Four
“Church & State II” which is being printed, that should be in stores later
this month. We’re looking at a Diamond arrival date of October 9th.
Those are the ones that have to be done. Now, “High Society” is getting low.
“High Society” remastered. So I don’t have to phone Diamond and say, “would you
rather have ‘High Society’ or ‘Form & Void’” it would be, “what is this, a
trick question? No, we want ‘High Society’”. Then it’s, well, ya know, I can
only keep the price of so many cars in the bank at one time. So it was, get
“Jaka’s Story” back in print cause that was Volume Five, get “High Society”
Volume Two remastered, in print that’s Volume Four. I was hoping that then we
could get Sean started on “Form & Void” because it’s a particular favorite
of mine, but, nope, it looks like “High Society” might have to be done after
that and you can’t run too many 500 page books through Marquee Printing at the
same time. So, hopefully after “High Society” and I’m just waiting for Diamond
to pull the trigger on that one, and say, okay, this is the next one that we
want. And the question is, okay, do you want 1000, 2000, or 3000 copies of
“High Society” so you don’t have to worry about it for a few years. This is
strictly inside Cerebus fandom thing, you can’t get any further inside Cerebus
fandom than A Moment of Cerebus. So… [Cerebus voice] “Cerebus fans, you been
lookin’ for “Form & Void”? We’ve got copies at Diamond theoretically. Now,
order… now!”
Matt: Speaking of “High Society”, as of yesterday, it’s
available on Comixology for $13.
Dave: Is it?
Matt: Just throwin’ that out there for everybody that… ya
know, I put it on the blog yesterday, I’m gonna put it on again tomorrow and
for the next few days, add it to the rigamaroll of what’s goin’ on, but, yeah,
we got an email from Comixology that I got forwarded to me from, I think, Sean,
lettin’ us know, “hey, you guys can start tellin’ everybody as of the 2nd,
that ‘High Society” is available and…” it’s either $13 or $13.95? Somethin’
like that. I think it’s $13.
Dave: Well, that’s great, cause that’ll be… [indistinct]’s
Comixology-friendly version of it, which works like all of the other stuff on
Comixology, where you can actually drive around in there, instead of just
queuing up pages and reading them one at a time. If you’re one of those people
who just doesn’t like hauling 500 page books around, get “High Society” on your
phone and then it’s there every time you’ve got five minutes in the middle of
the day to… dip in and pick up right where you left off in “Cerebus: High
Society”.
Matt: Okay, everybody, buy two!
Dave: The last one that we’ve got here is… Margaret! Can’t forget Margaret.
“Notebook #16 was just seen last month, in Drinking at Dinner Time. Covering
Cerebus #122 through 125 it had 67 pages scanned.” I’ll take your word for it,
Margaret.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “On page 11 of the notebook, it looks like Dave did an
outline for Cerebus #123? Though this outline has mini-pages with nothing
really in them, just pages numbers above them and a name of the character.” And
then you sent me a fax of that page. I’m… in looking at it, anytime I did
something like that, where, okay, this is all of issue 123, but tiny. Tiny
little rectangles. Pages 1 through 20, and, as Margaret says, it just has the
individual character’s name on the page and the characters match the page up
through page 9, and then after that they don’t match it. I think that’s me
sitting and trying to write issue 123 and I’m not getting whatever it is that
I’m supposed to be getting on page 10, so let’s try doing real high altitude
mapping of the whole issue simultaneously by drawing 20 little rectangles on
the page and then writing the characters’ names underneath it. And let’s see if
that helps. And just looking at it, I don’t think it did. I don’t think it
helped at all if, no, why don’t you just sit down and focus on page 10 and when
you’ve got a usable page 10, then you can start writing down what it is that’s
gonna be on page 10. You’re not at the high altitude mapping stage here with
the second half of the book. You’ve only got the first half of the book and now
just becomes the hard slog of let’s come up with page 11, let’s come up with
page 12… maybe somewhere up ahead, you’ll get the clearer picture of 16, 17,
18, 19, or something like that. Which is great when that happens, but if it
doesn’t happen it’s just one. Page. At. A. Time. And Margaret had an
interesting thought here, “Oh, and Wayne Gretzky, the great one, was traded
from the Edmonton Oilers to the LA Kings in 1988 after the Oilers won the
Stanley Cup. Issue #123 is dated June 1989. Still on Dave's mind many months
later. Though to me don't know if Dave was more concerned with Gretzky's NHL
future (he never won another cup, though he did set a ton of records that will
probably never be broken).” And I agree with that one. “or with the similarity
with Dave never selling out to one of the big two.” I don’t know if I’ve ever
told this part of the Wayne Gretzky story that, in 1988 I was thinking, well,
however big Cerebus and Dave Sim ever get, I don’t think, and ya know, you can
extrapolate that as huge as you want in 1988, in Canadian terms, Dave Sim and
Cerebus will never be as big as Wayne Gretzky in Canada. It’s just the ultimate
absolute, carved in stone, Canada Canada Canada story that for this age will
never never be superseded or added to or supplanted. And what was interesting
was, right around the time that I was having this definitive thought in my
mind, like get used to it, Wayne Gretzky is Canada, I was walking down Charles
Street, just at the corner of King and Charles, and somebody came around the
corner of Queen onto Charles ahead of me. And… sort of like cut me off, like it
was one of those, wow, that’s a very un-Canadian thing to do. You don’t
actively pick up your pace when you’re turning onto Charles Street if
somebody’s coming across Queen, and sort of like jump ahead of them, and the
guy was wearing a sports jacket, or a… what do you call those jackets that
sports teams wear?
Matt: Uhh…
Dave: Anyway, one of those jackets that has a logo on the
back of it, and it’s like, this was such an arresting figure walking in front
of me, abruptly like this, that I went, well, he’s got something written on his
jacket? What’s written on his jacket? And it was Brantford Parachute Club. And,
of course, Wayne Gretzky is from Brantford, and I went, that’s really weird,
I’ve just been thinking the last couple of days about Wayne Gretzky as the
absolute Canadian story, and either when I went home, or wherever I was going,
the hot news story on CNN and everyplace else was Wayne Gretzky getting sold to
the LA Kings.
Matt: [laughs] Okay, that’s pretty weird.
Dave: That is weird! That was another one of those, when
that happens, you go, file that away in your mind and it’s like, I don’t think
I have to, I think that’s as deeply filed in my mind as I possibly could. One
of the things… and relating to Margaret talking about similarity to Dave never
selling out to one of the Big Two, one of the really interesting things in the
Gretzky trade/sale that got lost, I don’t know how many people know this one,
is the press conference was set up and nobody knew what the press conference
was about. But Wayne Gretzky’s having a press conference. Just before Gretzky
was going out for the press conference, Peter Pocklington, who owned the
Edmonton Oilers said to him, “If you want to call this off right now, you can.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And it’s like, Gretzky goes, “Ahh, well, you can’t
really do that, like it’s set in motion.” Well, if Peter Pocklington tells you
you can call this off right now, it’s your call to make, I’m not forcing you to
do this, that was a “Dave Sim never selling out to the Big Two” kind of thing.
I think Gretzky’s answer should have been, “well, great, let’s call it off.”
Matt: [laughs] We’re gonna have a press conference where we
announce nothing new’s happening!
Dave: That’s right! That’s right, it’ll be the Seinfeld news
conference about nothing!
Matt: Jay Leno, he did his first year as the host of “The
Tonight Show” after Carson retired and there was talk that they were gonna
replace him with Letterman, and then Letterman split off to CBS, and they had a
press conference to announce that Leno was gonna continue hostin’ “The Tonight
Show” and he came out and said, “we’re having a press conference to say I
didn’t get fired.”
Dave: [laughs] Right, right. No, it would’ve been… it was an
interesting moment, because I think if Wayne Gretzky would have done, would
have said, “ah no, if I can stay in Edmonton, I’ll stay in Edmonton” I think
the deciding issue was Janet Gretzky, because at that time she was still
theoretically still an actress and still had an acting career and that would’ve
been the big selling feature of going to LA., was, “I can play for the LA Kings
and she can get her acting career back going instead of being Mrs Wayne
Gretzky.” And of course the way it turned out, she just ended up being Mrs
Wayne Gretzky and as Margaret points out, Wayne never won another cup with the
LA Kings and I think that’s one of those, the right thing to do would’ve been
to stay in Edmonton. To be who you were in Canada in 1988 that you can never be
again after you’ve gone to LA.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay, we’re way past…
Matt: [laughs] Yeah, I was gonna say, we’re probably
getting’ close to prayer time, huh?
Dave: I’d forgotten how much I had to say about that one,
and I can’t not say what I have to say if Margaret asked the question. So,
there ya go.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Say hello to Paula, and Janis Pearl, and
Natasha/Bullwinkle for me and we’ll do this again next month, God willing.
____________________________________
Heritage, they got a bunch of neat Cerebus stuff. Including three pages of original art...
____________________________________
SPEAKING OF ORIGINAL ART:
My good friend Steve Swenson
 |
| He ALWAYS gets the thumbs up! |
sent me:
