Hi, Everybody!
(Either I missed one, or Dave misnumbered this one...)
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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Matt: Alright, we’re
ready.
Dave: Okay, do you want to… I’ll just say a couple of words, and then you check to make sure it’s actually recording.
Matt: Okay! Yeah, it’s recording.
Dave: It’s recording?
Matt: It is recording.
Dave: Okay. Alright. We’re picking up where we left off last month, and notebook #21, page 172. I am never going to forget this now [laughs] because this is the one that goes on forever. To recap for people who missed the original explanations, this was coming up on “Reads” and Dave Sim autobiographical, which, of course, was a big centerpiece of “Reads”, fictionalized as Victor Davis, but also segue into Dave Sim, so this was really my first, okay how did Dave Sim come to be Dave Sim? What were the critical life moments that established who Dave Sim was? And this is what this page is made up of. I skipped one last time, because when I looking at that one, I was going, man! I don’t know if I can even explain that. Like, this is just a shorthand note to myself. So not having had much warning last month that I would be asked to discuss this, I thought, well, let’s give it another month and see if it gets any easier to explain, and guess what? No it doesn’t! But, at least I’ve had a month to wrestle with it. So it’s basically, “Christmas present cardboard boxes. Dad hits me, Mum takes his side.” What happened was my father worked in New Hamburg at a place called Hahn Brass. Hahn Brass had this antique filing cabinet in the basement, as I recall, it was in the basement just sort of there and at some point my Dad said, “I’d be interested in that.” I forget whether it was just, “oh yeah, we never use it. It’s an antique. We have modern filing cabinets now. So if you wanna just take it away, take it away” or if my Dad said, “you know, I’ll give you $50 for it, $25 for it” or whatever. Anyway, it got straightened out, and yes they did let him take the antique filing cabinet. Which consisted of two levels of three filing cabinet drawers all in wood, like I say it was an antique, but definitely a filing cabinet. Sort of, ya know, the handle that you pull out and the door of the drawer is the full size, and inside it’s half size, just like modern filing cabinets but a precursor of it. And then there was also a top layer that was flat file, two rows of flat file. I would guess maybe eight or nine of these flat files on each side and the same height as the filing cabinet drawers. And on top of that a finished wood top with a sheet of plate glass on top of it. So this arrived at the house, I’m pretty sure my Dad had to get somebody to give him help with it, like it wasn’t gonna fit in the car that he had at the time. So it was brought downstairs and it was like the antique bottom piece, which was the legs, and the file drawer on top of that, file drawer on top of that, the flat files on top of that, the [laughs] ornate top with the sheet of plate glass. I don’t know if you’re all still with me, but if you’re all still with me… anyway, so that was put in the basement in the section of the basement where I had my comic books. And I basically put comic books in it. The file drawers were… you couldn’t stack up too many comic books in them. You couldn’t stack them up to the top of the file drawer front, but you could stack them up as high as the half sides that filing cabinets have. I put smaller collections of comics in it, because, like I say, I couldn’t put all of my “Action Comics” in there, because I probably had 100, 150 of those, and it would just be too tall. To understand where this is going, you have to remember that this was pre-backing board. We had plastic bags through Robert Bell that actually fit comic books, but they were pretty expensive, like $3 for 100. So you’d only put your best comic books in those, the rest of the time we’d just use baggies, plastic roll bags and put the comic book in it, fold the plastic bag over the back and tape it on the back. And that’s what most of us used for our comic books, because that was a lot cheaper than buying Robert Bell’s plastic bags. So most of my comic book collection was not bagged in the sense that we know now, and not even bagged in the sense that we knew then. They were just loose comic books. But these file drawers worked pretty good for that, for my… Golden Age books that didn’t fit in any collection, I had like “Captain Marvel Adventures” #62, “Marvel Mystery” #31. Obviously, those are the ones that I had of those. “Marvel Family” #22 [sneezes] excuse me. So, that worked okay. That was really good, and it was actually a very nice thing to put comic books in. I don’t remember my father ever taking an interest in comic books. Like, I would show him an old comic book, if I got in “Marvel Mystery” #31, I would show it to him, because it was sort of his time period, but not really his time period. And of course, I found out later on that there was the embargo on comic books in the 1940s over World War II. So, although my father remembered having “Human Torch Comics, “Captain America”, “Superman”, “Batman”, whatever else, he could only have had those up until 1939, 1940, when they were embargoed. So there was a bit of a disconnect there of, okay my Dad’s remembering something that he’s not actually remembering. He would’ve been 10 years old when the embargo happened, so whatever he remembered of “Superman” and “Batman” and stuff like that, was pretty much just 1938, 1939. So, at some point, there was this Christmas present, where my Dad bought cardboard file boxes. Which were, I would guess, a foot and a half by a foot and a half file drawer and then in a cardboard sleeve. And he bought like six of these, and the idea was, that I would put my comic books in those and it was like, uhh well that’s not really going to work. They’re 3 feet deep, which made it look as if I could put my entire comic book collection in there, but that would require putting them in sideways and spine up and interior pages down. And like I say, most of my collection wasn’t in plastic bags. So it’s like, already having learned, no, condition when it comes to comic books is important. That was something that I didn’t know, but it was something that I was learning in the early 1970s. It’s like, no, I can’t stack them sideways, because that will damage the comic books. And it was weird having this conversation with my Dad, because like I say, he sort of had this grudging acceptance of his son being interested in comic books. Which links to a weird conversation that I remember having with my mother at some point, about my father’s antipathy towards comic books, and her saying something along the lines of, “well, you know, imagine if you were interested in green glass bottles.” And to this day, I really don’t understand what sort of point she was making. What my response was, and I don’t know how eloquent I was on the subject, was, well I would think if I had a son and he was interested in green glass bottles, I would have some level of interest in green glass bottles because he’s my son. Even if I had to fake the interest, it’s like, you… as parents. [laughs] And I’m sitting here going, why am I having to explain this to my mother. As parents, aren’t you sort of obligated to have some interest in your children’s interests? So, that’s kind of a digression away from it. But anyway, so I’m having this weird conversation with my Dad. Like he’s thinking he’s meeting me more than halfway by actually going out and buying me a Christmas present that will house my comic books. Well, okay, this is why that’s not going to work. I mean, I know you don’t follow any of this and we’ve never conversed about this, because you don’t want to converse with your son about comic books, but condition is very important and if I stack them sideways that’s going to damage the condition. And this put him into a kind of fine rage of, he’s meeting me more than halfway, buying me a Christmas present to house my comic books, which later I picked up on the fact he wanted the comic books out of this antique file cabinet that he wanted to use for something else, not for comic books, sort of thing. Which, if he had explained that to me, I would have said, well, okay, yeah, I’ll be happy to have a replacement of this, but these three foot deep, foot and a half by foot and a half, cardboard file drawers are not going to work. Because I’ll just be able to put like one small stack in the front of them, and as soon as I pull it open, it’s made out of cardboard, the whole thing tilts forward and it’s gonna spill out. The more I tried to explain why this wasn’t going to work, the more he was taking it as, I’m not appreciating this Christmas present that he’s buying for me for my comic books, and I’m telling him that he doesn’t understand things about comic books that makes this not a good or workable Christmas present. And he was getting far more worked up than I was aware of, and was, like, he had this wad of comic books in his hand that he was using to demonstrate how I was going to put them into these cardboard file drawers, ya know, stacked sideways. It’s like he was crushing them in his hand, and at the same time that I’m explaining to him about how condition in comic books is important, so I said to him, could you not like crush the comic books like that? And he just took the wad of comic books and smashed me upside the head, multiple times. Like I have to say, I am an advocate of corporal punishment. One upside the head from your Dad, I got that. Not frequently, but that was the signal that you had gone too far in some direction and whatever it is that you were doing, you would stop doing. And I’m a big advocate of that. But like I say, this was like hitting me multiple times until I dropped to the floor, at which point he kicked me. And it was like, okay, this was just way, way, way over the edge, and that was pretty much it for me and my parents. It was like, my mother was there I guess, supposed to be participating in this “discussion” and definitely gave me a withering look as my father stomped off, and she stomped off, which I understood. It was the look that said, “you‘ve upset your father. And it’s like, we don’t do that. You don’t upset your father under any circumstances because I have to live with that.”My Sister and my mother and I could be having a screaming argument at 5 o’clock at night after school, and as soon as you heard the car pulling up in the driveway, mutual agreement, everybody stops argument, everybody just calms down, everything is fine, because you don’t want to upset your father. So, the reason that that’s on the list, is that was a break point for me when I went, not only do I not love these people, I don’t really even like these people, my father and my mother. I’ve been pretending that I do and trying to have the appearance of a dutiful loving son, but at that point I was going, why am I doing this? Why am I pretending to feel something that I don’t feel? [laughs] The only thing that I was interested in remotely, at 282 Westmount Road East, former 282 Filsinger Road, in Kitchener, Ontario, was that section of the basement, that one quarter of the basement that had my comic books and the comic books in them. The comic books were good, the comic books I was interested in, the comic books I dearly loved, everything else was just, well I have to keep my comic books somewhere. I was fully aware of the fact, if my parents were in a car accident and both of them were killed, and whoever I would end up living with, probably either my Uncle Cliff and Aunt Veronica, or my Uncle Vic and Aunt Marilyn, my only concern was, where were my comic books going to go? I would be happy to go and live anywhere, as long as I have room for my comic books. Anybody doesn’t have room for my comic books, I don’t wanna live there. So, it was a real break point in terms of, I stopped pretending that I loved these people that I didn’t love. It’s like, I will portray being a responsible child, and I was a responsible child, I didn’t cause my parents any great amount of grief as a lot of children were doing who were in high school in the late 1960s, early 1970s. But that was just portrayal. The clock is ticking and as soon as I am out of here, that is gonna be it for me and these people. And that’s really how my life was after that. Once I had moved out, there was an expectation that I would have dinner with them. And it was, okay, how infrequently can I have dinner with you? And worked out to about a month I would get a phone call after about three weeks or so, “well, we haven’t see you for a long time. We gotta have dinner.” Well, okay, we’ll do that. But there was no circumstance where I ever went, gosh I can’t wait to see my parents. That’s one of those, I’m sure there are many people who had the experience that I did, but unfortunately for people like us, it’s a very very difficult world where people just go, “well of course everyone loves their parents.” It’s like, no. I didn’t hate my parents. I didn’t love my parents, and I didn’t like my parents. I just had absolutely no response to them. I finally broke with them in 2003 and went, that’s it. I’m just not doing this anymore. You people have a happy life, but I just can’t do this anymore. And they both died within a few months of each other in 2006, and my Aunt phoned me to say, “your mother died”. It’s like, oh okay, thank you for phoning and telling me that. And then a few months later, “your father’s dead.” Okay, thanks for telling me that. I had absolutely no reaction, zero reaction at all. I mean, I have memories of them. I quote my Dad a lot, he had a real memory for funny lines, but they weren’t his funny lines, it’s just he would hear a funny line somewhere from other guys and he would never forget it. They’re good funny lines, so I always use them.
Matt: Right.
Dave: So that’s that story. Do you have any questions, me having gone all that distance?
Matt: One of my thoughts when you were telling the story, when you were saying, ya know, if your parents had died, your biggest concern would be, “what happens to my comic books?”, was the either Richard George or Harrison Starkey line of, “it speaks of an obsession that borders on the pathological”. And I’m going, well, yeah, that sounds about right!
Dave: Yeah!
Matt: When I was a kid growing up, my Dad subscribed to “Amazing Spider-Man”, “Incredible Hulk”, and “Star Wars” for my brother and I, cause Marvel was doing, subscribe to two get one free. And for a year, we got comics in the mail. And so we had a stack of 36 comics, and we kept them in a shoebox, because, you know, you’re a little kid and these are important to me, I want to make sure they’re around. You’re not just gonna leave them sprawled all over the room, when you’re done reading them, you put them back in the shoebox. And it’s like, one of those, I could totally see, if my Dad had said “hey, you know, I got this nice file cabinet, you guys can, you know”. My brother and I, if we had took it over and he said, “hey I want it back”, it would’ve been, well what’re we gonna do? And if he said, “here, well try this” it’d be, well that’s not gonna work Dad, cause of exactly what you said. And I can see that my Dad probably would’ve been more understanding, but at the same time, I think there would’ve been a, “it’s my file cabinet, get your crap out of it.”
Dave: Right, right. Which… go ahead, finish your thought.
Matt: It’s one of those, I mean, like my Dad was in the Navy and he had a bunch of blue work shirts. They’re not uniform shirts, but it’s what he would wear when he was on the sub.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And, when I was in high school, I found them and I was wearing them. But I’m broader shouldered than my Dad was, so like I’m wearing them one day and the elbow ripped, and I’m like, ohh, I’m a dead man. And someone says why, well this is my Dad’s shirt and he doesn’t know I’m wearing it cause he’s in California and I’m in Wisconsin. But it’s like, I gotta find a way of fixing this, type thing. He never asked about it, and there was only one shirt that he liked and that one he got and went, “oh it’s ripped” and I’m like, yeah I did that, sorry. And he kinda gave me a look, but at the same time, it was one of those, “okay, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: But it’s one of those, every kid goes, oh yeah, my parents things are my things, until they discover that no, your parents’ things are your parents’ things.
Dave: Right. Like, there’s ancillary parts of the story. My Uncle Vic, who was the golden child of the family, my Dad’s older brother, was visiting, which he did very infrequently, and I don’t think my Dad ever figured out the fact that his older brother didn’t like him very much. Mostly because my Dad had a very condescending attitude toward my Aunt Marilyn. I mean, she marched to a different drummer, but he definitely condescended to her and my Uncle Vic, I think, definitely thought, “well Marilyn’s three times the person you are, don’t condescend to her”, but also knew, again, you don’t cross my father. Anyway, one of these infrequent visits from Uncle Vic, the subject of my comic books came up and my Uncle Vic said, “Can I see your comic book collection?” Again, like the way an Uncle would be. “I don’t see my nephew very often, this is what he’s interested in, can I see them?” and it’s like, uh yeah! Okay. And brought him downstairs and pulled out from the filing cabinet, and each of the file drawers, and I remember showing him “Captain Marvel” #62, and “Marvel Family” #22, and then, having given him the grand tour for however long that took, probably 20 minutes or a half an hour, we come back upstairs, and he goes, “well that’s amazing.” And my Dad goes, “yeah, isn’t it?” [laughs] And it’s like, what do you mean isn’t it? You don’t think it’s amazing, you think it’s deplorable, but because Vic thinks it’s amazing, you’ll probably that you think it’s amazing in front of Vic. It’s like, I can’t deal with you. I have no idea how things roll around in your head, but man oh man, there’s just no meeting place with you. I tried to figure him out in a number of different ways. His own father died when he was like 7, so he really had no background in having a father. He had a stepfather, my grandpa David, who was my grandmother’s second husband. But that’s a very different thing. Like, how you deal with a stepfather is very different from how you deal with a father. So, there ya go. That’s like [laugh] half an hour trying to explain, what, barely more than a line in this notebook.
Matt: Yeah, but Margaret’s gonna appreciate it. She’s gonna listen to this in her car on her way to work, going, “you’re kidding me! You’re kidding me!”
Dave: Well, this is the thing. I think if we have notebook 21 page 172 and somebody transcribes everything that Dave Sim has to say about this one page in his notebooks, it would be like, let’s hope that this is the only notebook page in that category so we never never never have to do this again. And having said that, now I have to go onto the next one, which was the the “pedophilia, 1969, 1970, 1971”…
Matt: We covered that last time.
Dave: Yeah, we got most of that done, but as always happens to me with my long-winded laborious explanation, just when I get to the point of it, that’s it, I’m done. I laid all of the groundwork. So, recapping and we can maybe just have a link so that people can back and hear all of the lead-in to this. The impact of it was, I’d written on the page, “Steven Dick, Craig Dawson, legal obligation” was the point, that Steven Dick, having had these two girls that he was babysitting say, “our Dad has really big penis, how big is your penis?” and him just being like embarrassed but finding this really really funny and just changed the subject, and me going, that sounds like it might be something other than just something that’s funny and a little bit embarrassing. There’s possible legal culpability here. Also, I just backed off and went, well, what am I going to do about this? I can’t really say to Steven, you should probably report this, like who would you report it to? His parents are nice Baptist people, they’re not apt to be having this conversation even with Steven, let alone with the neighbor, let alone with the police. So I backed off, even though I went, there’s probably a legal obligation here on my part, just because he told me this. But I seem to have talked myself into not doing anything about it, so, maybe I’m doing the wrong thing, maybe I’m doing the right. I don’t really know. This was why, when the situation came up with Craig Dawson, almost immediately afterward, and I have this confused thing of, I can picture Steve Dick in 1969 when I was grade 9, and I can picture Craig Dawson in 1971 when I would have been 15, having the conversation we had with him having sex with someone older than him. A woman past the age of majority. So I got this weird disconnect of going, could I have had that conversation with Craig Dawson when he was 13 or 14? Because, again, the legal obligation entered into it of going, he can’t legally have sex with a woman who’s passed her age of majority. And my primary reaction was, again, jealousy. It was, why can I find a housewife or a schoolteacher or whoever it was, who’ll have sex with me? And thinking, well, are these two different things? The situation with Steve Dick was in because of these little girls, and the situation Craig Dawson was in, because it was an older woman and he was an underage boy. Is that still pedophilic molestation? And it’s like, at the time, I was going, no that’s just a little girl thing. If it’s a little boy, it’s like, lucky little boy. A woman decided to have sex with you. Now we know that that isn’t the case, and usually we find out that it’s a schoolteacher who had sex with one of her male students that she got the hots for and yes, if she’s convicted of that then she goes to jail, because it is statutory rape. An underage boy can’t give permission anymore than an underage girl can, and you’re not supposed to have sex with a student because of the position of authority. So, it had a real impact on me that the Craig Dawson situation happened just after the Steven Dick situation, and I went, okay, it would be reasonably easy to look up Dawson in the Kitchener phone directory and look at, okay, how many Dawsons are on a street that feeds into Forest Heights Collegiate and phone and say, ya know, can I speak to Mr Dawson? Speak to Mr Dawson and say, I don’t want to tell you who I am, because, I think Craig would beat the crap out of me for telling you this, but he told me he had sex with a woman past her age of majority, and I think you probably have to look into that. And then hang up. On the assumption, again, that there’s no way that the call could be traced. But then, thinking about that, it was like, okay, I’m throwing a hand grenade into someone else’s environment. Assuming that his Dad takes a dim view of this, and wants Craig to explain it, and Craig doesn’t know who said this, then Craig’s in the nutcracker of having to identify whoever the woman was and then is her life being ruined? And at what point is there a real legal obligation there? And this sort of links up with, the reason that this was so important to me, was because it was, okay, in both those instances, I didn’t do anything, and legally, in terms of if you hear about a crime or a potential crime, you’re supposed to report it. Not having done that, what’s my personal legal culpability? And in all my experiences since then, it’s been guys always have to make those choices with other guys. That guys tell other guys about things that they did that are illegal, and it’s like, well okay that’s up to you. That’s got nothing to do with me. Which again, technically it does. If somebody tells you about a crime, then you’re supposed to identify it. And again, I just couldn’t get my brain wrapped around the fact that there could be anything wrong with having sex when you were a 13 or 14 year old boy, if you could find a woman willing to have sex with you. But then a Cerebus fan, year and years and years later, told me that he was in that situation where he got seduced by an older woman when he was 13 or 14 years old, and said that it was an extremely traumatic event in his life and he still isn’t over it, and he never will be over it. And I thought, okay, I have trouble picturing that, but I also realize fornication and adultery, carnal knowledge, are, to the extent that they just look like entertainment, usually pack a much bigger metaphysical wallop than that, and that’s what I’m not recognizing was, it wouldn’t just be a matter of 20 minutes of having sex with this woman. There’s all kinds of implications that go into that that you’re not aware of. When you do it, you will find out how bad the repercussion are, but you won’t find out unless you do it. And not being religious at the time, it was just, no, I’m not really getting this. Even though it’s illegal, I hope that some woman will do this illegal thing with me, because I don’t want to die a virgin. It’s like, there’s a number of years in the male life in the teenage years where you’re thinking, I really don’t wanna die a virgin. I’m not seeing any potential of me ever getting laid at any point in the future. So, there you go on that one. I’m hoping this will, at long last, bring an end to notebook 21, page 172.
Matt: [laughs] Hope springs eternal, right?
Dave: [laughs] It’s got to, at that! It’s got to. Okay, I don’t know if you’ve gotten an email from Roly today. Jeff Seiler left a phone message question, and I thought, hey, let’s see if this works. It’s recorded on my voicemail, so I’ll do exactly what I do with the Weekly Updates when I play a phone message. I’ll record it onto the memory stick, give it to Roly, have him email it to Matt Dow, and if this works, now you will hear Jeff Seiler’s phone message question. The first ever audio question on “Please Hold for Dave Sim”. If, on the other hand, it just becomes a complete pain in the butt for Matt, and he goes, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to put this sound in here.” I will paraphrase Jeff Seiler’s phone message question.
Jeff Seiler: Hi Dave, it’s Jeff. Just calling on Thanksgiving evening, and I gotta tell ya, as I was cooking my turkey and sweet potatoes and some other stuff, I watched the new Marvel movie, “New Mutants”. Most recent one to come out on disc. And I know that you know Bill Sienkiewicz and I think you know Chris Claremont who were the primary creators of the book, I think Bob McLeod worked on it too. But I gotta say, watching the movie, which is, kinda sort of, almost but not really, sucks. It’s not horrible. Certainly nowhere near one of the best Marvel movies, but I gotta say, both Claremont and Sienkiewicz, back on “New Mutants”, that was some pretty out there stuff. So I was just wondering if you had any insights into what they were trying to do. I mean, it’s pretty clear from the movie and remembering the books that they were into a lot of stuff about good vs evil. Ya know, God vs ungodly. But if you had any insights that you wanted to add to that, on the sort of not really inside but not outside looking in, just sort of at the edges looking in. If you know what they were trying to get across, and I thought it might be a good thing for you to talk about in your next installment of, you know, phone call to Dave Sim in December. Sorry, I got the burps. So, there’s that. Like I say, it’s not a terrible movie, it’s not a great movie, it’s just sort of in between, but I think kind of sort of is faithful to the books. So, there you go. Anyway, happy American Thanksgiving to you. Which, I know for you is another work day and I will talk to you when I talk to you. Take care. Hope you’re well, and be well. Goodnight.
[end of message. To delete this message press 7, to reply to it…]
Dave: …which Jeff left on American Thanksgiving. I count myself very fortunate that I probably get wished a happy American Thanksgiving more than [laughs] any Canadian on the planet, because everybody’s going, “wow, Dave isn’t having turkey or anything to do because it isn’t Thanksgiving in Canada. They already had Thanksgiving in Canada.” So anyway, Jeff Seiler left a message on Thanksgiving, and one of the things he was doing on Thanksgiving was watching the “New Mutants” film. Have you seen the “New Mutants” film?
Matt: I have not.
Dave: No? Okay. This is like the most recent one that’s out on DVD or streaming or whatever, right?
Matt: Yeah. It’s the latest X-Men movie, possibly the last X-Men movie before they relaunch the X-Men as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that’s where everybody’s eyes start to glaze over if they’re not really into the X-Men.
Dave: [laughs] Because it’s like, what do you mean? It’s not really the X-Men because there’s another… yes, yes. I remember my eyes glazing over when I read about it in the National Post, where Chris Knight was trying to explain this and his eyes were glazing over because he’s not really concerned. Anyway, so what Jeff was saying, was he saw it and it wasn’t the worst Marvel Comics movie ever, it wasn’t the best Marvel Comics movie ever. It had some good stuff in it, and some not so good stuff in it, but what he was asking was, “you know Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, what do you think they were doing in ‘The New Mutants’.” Okay, so you’ll either gonna chop all of that out and just put Jeff’s phone message, so we’ll just pick it up as if I’m answering. Okay! I would qualify that as, I knew Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont. They’re definitely both in the, I’m pretty sure, “Dave who?” category, where as soon as I stopped being a politically correct progressive, I ceased to exist for them for all intents and purposes. That having been said, I did look up in the Overstreet Price Guide that Bill drew “The New Mutants”, Chris Claremont writing, from issue 18 to 31. So, it’s about a year and an issue that they worked together on the title. I don’t think that I read “New Mutants”, I didn’t read “New Mutants”, I didn’t read the “X-Men” even when I was getting them free from Marvel Comics. Just, it wasn’t my kind of thing. Chris Claremont was the original inversionist feminist in the comic book field, with his, “is there any reason that this character can’t be a woman?” To which John Byrne, as far as I know, answered, “gee, no, Chris, apart from the fact that the character’s been a male for the last 30 years, I can’t see a single reason why the character couldn’t be a female” and that having been considered sarcasm at the time, now of course we’re in a time period where it’s a rare superhero that doesn’t have that happen to them. “Is there any reason we can’t turn this superhero into a woman? Or is there any reason that we can’t replace this superhero? Replace Iron Man with a female Iron Man?” The fact that everybody went along with this when Chris Claremont got the ball rolling, well, here we are now. This is what it leads to, I warned you about all this 25 years ago, and everybody just decided I was a misogynist. There you go. [laughs] I really don’t know how to amplify this. So I know that Chris and Bill would have been working Marvel style, which is Chris giving Bill a plot outline for the issue and saying, “this happen and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens.” And Bill drawing it, and then penciling it, and then sending it to Chris, and Chris putting all the dialogue and captions in, and then Bill inking it. We know now from what Frank Miller had to say about working on “Elektra: Assassin” and what Neil Gaiman had to say about working with Bill on one of the “Sandman” stories, that Bill definitely goes his own way with the stories that he’s working on. And whatever you told him to draw, he’s probably not going to draw that. He will draw something else. I don’t know if that goes as back as far as “New Mutants”. As far as I know, “New Mutants” was the book that he got onto after he stopped working regularly on “Moon Knight”, which, I think he did almost two years from #1 to 21 and I think he missed an issue that Denys Cowen drew, and then another couple of issues, and then somebody else did a fill in, and I think, essentially was he did, was he jumped to “New Mutants” because it was a much bigger payday. Everything Chris Claremont touched turned to gold, from the time that he started writing the “X-Men”, and getting onto a book that Chris Claremont was writing that had mutants in it, was, you were going to get really nice royalty checks out of that. So, because this is Jeff Seiler, because Jeff Seiler brought this up and was curious about it to want to know, what did I think Chris and Bill Sienkiewicz were doing on “New Mutants”? I’m going to make the offer, that if there’s a collection out there of the Chris Claremont/ Bill Sienkiewicz “New Mutants”, which would make sense to me [laughs]. I’m not running Marvel Comics and I have no idea what the cache of Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz is at this late date, but if there’s a collection, or if somebody can find reading copies of 18 through 31 on eBay for a reasonable price, either Jeff or someone else. And if somebody wants to get me an MP3, illegal or legal downloaded copy of the “New Mutants” film, I will make an exception in this case, and I will read the 13 issues and I will watch the film, and I will tell you exactly what I think of it. First of all, what I think Bill and Chris were doing in the comic book, and second of all, what they turned that into in the movie. So, there you go. That’s as thorough as I can be. Have you checked your email, do you know if you got it?
Matt: I got the email from Roly and there was a video file but my phone wouldn’t play it. But that’s my phone. It’s probably one of these, when I open it on my desktop computer, it’s probably gonna work just fine.
Dave: Okay. Cause sometimes you need an adapter. Like, these memory cards that I record onto are Sony, which are like propritary software that don’t really work with anything else, but you can buy an adapter. And it’s like, we don’t have time for that! [laughs] “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, Matt wants it done by Saturday at the latest, so if it gets to that point, ehh, forget it.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: You can figure it out if this ever comes up again.
Matt: The weird thing is, I owned two issues of “New Mutants” in my life, at one point. It was one of those, ya know, you buy a three pack of Marvel Comics and it’s random issues. It was like, there was two issues I wanted, and this issue of “New Mutants” and the “New Mutants” didn’t get added to my collection. It was sitting in a pile of crap in my Mom’s house when I was growing up there. It was one of those, I remember when we were moving, I found it and went, I don’t know if I threw it in with my comics, or if I went, ehh, this can go to St Vinnie’s. But I’m pretty sure the two issues I owned were 18 and 31.
Dave: Really?
Matt: I had two Sienkiewicz issues, or I owned one and my brother owned one, possibly. But 18 and 31 sound, like 18 I think I might have owned, and 31 sounds like another number where I’m like, either I owned that or my brother owned that one.
Dave: I did notice that it’s credited in the Overstreet Guide as the first appearance of the new Warlock. [laughs] And it’s like I’m going, okay, well we’re off to a running start with the monotheist having to address the debut of, not only is Marvel happy with just having one Warlock, this was the new Warlock, and I found it very gratifying that further down in the “New Mutants” listing, when I got to issue 95, it was the death of the new Warlock. And it’s like, well, okay, problem solved. Possibly, depending on where the new Warlock went from there.
Matt: They brought him back, cause they bring everybody back.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: One of the original New Mutants, and he’s one of my favorite Chris Claremont characters, cause it was Chris Claremont with “New Mutants” doing, “I’m gonna do the X-Men” and so these are young teens that are mutants with powers. Xavier’s gonna train them as the new generation of X-Men. And there’s Cannonball, who basically his legs turn into a cannon burst and he can fly, I’m trying to think who else was on the team. They were all, ya know, fairly cool, young teen hot mutants. And then there was Cypher, who had the mutant ability to read and speak any language. The most useless super power that anyone can think of.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And he died! Fairly quickly! [laughs]
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: They were out on a mission, and the ability to speak French did not save him from whatever killed him. And eventually he gets brought back, mixed in with Warlock and becomes a character called Douglock, because Cypher’s real name was Doug Ramsay, and the new Warlock is a techno-organic alien that, he’s not a machine but he’s not alive, he’s both, and they poured his dead techno-organic body on Doug’s grave, and it seeped down into the casket and they merged together and came back. Because, again, they all come back.
Dave: You just made all that up!
Matt: No, I did not. My encylopedic…
Dave: That actually exists. That’s okay. Alright.
Matt: No, no, no, the best part is, Dave, I own the action figure of Douglock!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: They came out with a New Mutants toy line that had three or four of the characters, and it was late 90s, early 2000s when Matt has more money than brains, and it was like, ahh the New Mutants figures, I’ll buy these! And I open them up, and I’m like, this is the stupidest toy in the world.
Dave: [laughs] Well, I appreciate you being able to admit that at this late date that there were better uses for the money. It always reminds me of the Legion of Substitute Heroes that they introduced in “Legion of Super-Heroes”, the ones that their super powers just weren’t quite up to Legion of Superheroes standards. And somebody did a cartoon in the fanzine, “Legion Outpost”, which was the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and their new candidate, going, “I’m sorry, Arm Fall Off Boy, your power is just too weird even for us.” But that was his super power, his arm would fall off.
Matt: I swear he’s come back a couple of times.
Dave: [laughs] No doubt. No doubt.
Matt: I’m trying to, I can’t remember what his name is, one of the Legion guys, he had the ability to turn into metal, but he was immobile, and it’s a completely useless power, until the issue where he’s helping the Legion and he turns into metal and they push him out of a spaceship and he falls on the villain and that’s how they save the day.
Dave: Da-da-dah! Again, you’re just making this up. You’re just messing with the old man here.
Matt: No, I’m not. I can’t remember… Immobile Lad? I’m trying to remember what his name is…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: He’s a real Legion of Substitute… cause, one of things with the Legion of Substitute Heroes was that, if I remember correctly, it was all fan submissions. A lot of them were fan submissions of, ya know, you’re a huge Legion fan…
Dave: Oh, I forgot that part! Yes
Matt: Here would be the Legion character you would add if you could write it, and of course, it’s Matter Eater Lad. He can eat anything.
Dave: Right, right, yes.
Matt: And then what?
Dave: [laughs] And he actually made it into the Legion. I remember Matter Eater Lad chewing his way through mountains and stuff like that. Yeah, I had forgotten that. They used to fill up the letters page in the “Legion of Super-Heroes” with best suggestions for future Legion of Super-Heroes, because it was a legion at that point, because when it started it was only three of them. But by the time they got rocking and rolling, they needed a much bigger clubhouse than the little rocketship standing on its nosecone. Okay, we’ve got… I thought this was funny when you wrote about Margaret, “She’s got other illustrated AV questions. ‘no hockey makes Margaret go crazy’. Instead of going to see the Bruins, she’s organizing her Cerebus collection.” Well, if you’re asking me personally, that’s a much better use of Margaret’s time.
Matt: What happened is, she’s posting all this stuff in the Cerebus Facebook group because she’s going through the collection, and one of them was, “going through the collection, part 1975”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And she’s like, “hey, Ron, can you ask Dave?” and I’m going, you sure want a lot. And she’s like, “well, I can’t go to hockey, I’m gonna go through the collection and I’m gonna have questions.” Well, I can’t argue the point.
Dave: No. No, you could try but it’s not gonna get you anywhere. She calls you Ron? Where’s the Ron come from?
Matt: Okay. The secret origin of Ron Essler.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: This is one of those stories, it’s kinda like your box story, it’s got a little bit of backstory to it, so I’ll make it quick. Years ago, when I was living at my Mom’s house cause I was a kid, when I was growing up, there was a liquor store next door and the liquor store went out of business. And then, the Society of St Vincent de Paul bought it and turned it into their store. The way it worked is the delivery answer to the liquor store was now their drop off where you could drop stuff off that you were donating to the society of St. Vinnie.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Living next door, I’d get off the bus, and I’d have to walk past them. One day, I walked past and there was this table and it’s like the kind of desk table that they have in kindergarten? You know, it’s maybe 3 foot by 2 feet? Just a little rectangular table
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it looked like a really, really skeevy 70s bachelor apartment coffee table, is the best way I can describe it. And that’s with me going, I can put this up in the clubhouse I have in the attic where I hang out with my friends and we’ll have a little table that we can use.
Dave: We’re kind of into skeevy!
Matt: To be fair, my attic had 1970s wood paneling up in it, so it totally fit the decor of the room.
Dave: Totally!
Matt: So, I bought it for $1.50. Brought it up in the attic, and my friends and I were hanging out, and we’re just goofing around, and for some reason, I was laying on the floor, and written on the bottom of the table was, scribbles from a little kid and stuff, and this kid, Ron Essler, had written his name twice. So we’re goofing around, drawing on the bottom of the table, cause it’s my table, I paid for it, I can do whatever I want with it. And one of my friends wrote, “Ron Essler is a giant dork”. And on the other Ron Essler before they could do whatever they were gonna put, I put “Ron Essler is a fine, upstanding American citizen who is gay. If you’d like to hook up with Ron, and you’re gay, please leave your name and number” and put a bunch of a lines, then of course, my friends started writing guys that we don’t like, that we think are gay, we’re writing their names.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I completely forgot about it. It’s one of those, we did it and okay whatever.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Years later, I was playing this computer game on my tablet and it was a really stupid game, but it was one of those, it was the beginning of tablet games where, you’re not going to win this. There’s no goal to it, you’re just… the best example is FarmVille. You make a digital farm, and you’re playing this game where you have a farm and you have animals and you have to rescue the animals from disasters, and yadda. And you can’t win the game. You’re going to play this until you die, or until you get a life, one or the other. So the game I was playing was called “My Singing Monsters”, where you make a little monster, and it makes a noise, and there’s other monsters who make other noises, and when you get them together they sing a song. And you get…
Dave: Now that part, you’re making up. I gotta get used to this. Matt’s never making up stuff but just…
Matt: It sounds stupid, and the game itself, it was one of these… I don’t even know why I downloaded it, but I started playing it and I’m like, okay, you know. The monsters were kind of cute. I think Janis was old enough that I was letting her look at it and she thought it was neat.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I’m playing this game, and there was a Facebook button, and part of the game, once a game, you can get a diamond, and you use the diamonds to speed stuff up and the more diamonds you have, the better, but you can only get one a day, so if you use it, you have to wait 24 hours. Well, there’s a Facebook button, and if you press the button, you get another diamond. And I’m like, I want a free diamond, so I press the button, and it’s “share on Facebook that you’re playing this stupid game”, well I didn’t have a Facebook account.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I’m like, alright, I’m not going to do this. And it locked the game up, and you couldn’t do anything in the game until you registered your Facebook account.
Dave: Of course!
Matt: I was so mad! Because years earlier I had tried to make a Facebook for Janis and a stuffed zebra that the way that they made it, it had very angry eyebrows, and I called him Henry the Pissed Off Zebra, and I wanted to make him a Facebook page, because I thought it was funny. Facebook told me the name “Henry Zebra” seemed made up and they weren’t going to let me make a Facebook page.
Dave: That Mark Zuckerberg, he’s just such a killjoy.
Matt: So I ended up making one for myself and getting annoyed and sending them a very nasty, very profane letter saying “please delete my account, because I effin hate you” type thing.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So, I’m stuck having to make this Facebook account, and I’m like, I need a name, I’m not using my name. I’m like, Ron Essler! He’s a fine, upstanding American citizen! [laughs]
Dave: Who’s gay! [laughs]
Matt: Well, well… so I made the profile and it’s “describe yourself so people can find you” and I put, “Ron Essler is a fine upstanding American citizen who’s on Facebook.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it was a secret. Like, if you knew me, and you knew about Ron, you could send me a request and I would accept it, and I kept it on the downlow, no pictures of me. My first profile picture was the picture Steven King used on the Richard Bachman books.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, alright.
Matt: It was very much a… also, when I made the account, what’s your name, and they had gender, and it was “male, female, no answer” and I clicked “no answer” and it wouldn’t accept it, and I got really mad so I clicked “female”.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So, after about six months I decided to come out and be like, okay, I will admit to the world, Matt Dow is Ron Essler on Facebook. So, you know, tell my Dad, tell my brother… and I added Paula as a friend and all this stuff. But of course, as my father constantly complains to me, is that he keeps forgetting I’m a, as he says, “you’re a little asshole sometimes and I keep forgetting that” and I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, “well I keep getting notifications, ‘Ron Essler has updated her status’ and I’m like, who the hell is this bitch? Oh wait, that’s my son!”
Dave: [laughs] ”Ron Essler, she’s my boy!”
Matt: Well, after I, “came out” on Facebook that I am me, I’m going through and it’s, “how do you know this person”, you put that you’re related, your brother, sister, cousin, whatever. So for my brother, I put that he was my pet.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because, this is what I’m doing. So when I joined the Cerebus Facebook group, ya know, it was one of these, “Margaret, Ron is Matt, just so you know”. So, of course, whenever she tags me, it says Ron.
Dave: Okay. [laughs] Alright.
Matt: Usually, if I’m quoting from Facebook, I change it to my name or else I just delete the Ron part, but yeah, everybody always goes, “well what’s with Ron Essler?” and I’m, well you have to ask me on Facebook or I won’t tell you, and they’re like, “why not?” and I’m like, because it’s a really funny story but I’m only going to tell it once!
Dave: Right. I can understand that. Well, thank you., I hope you didn’t leave anything out of that.
Matt: Ah, no, that’s pretty much it. I needed a fake name and okay what fake name do I got that no one can track back to me? There’s only five guys that know about Ron Essler.
Dave: Man. Matt Dow disguised as a fine, upstanding American citizens. [laughs] Female! Fine, upstanding female American citizen.
Matt: When I finally came out, I put a picture of myself. I took a picture of me wearing a black shirt and I put a caption on the picture that says, “if Facebook asks, my name is Ron. Also, I’m a girl.”
Dave: Okay. See, I had to ask and shouldn’t known, if Margaret’s calling Matt “Ron”, there’s gotta be a story behind this of some kind. Okay, getting to Margaret’s [laughs] actual question. “Could you add to your list o’things to ask Dave about. How did people obtain this certificate?” and it says, “Official ‘Swords of Cerebus Supplement’ voucher. Company Name:. I purchased a copy of ‘Swords of Cerebus’ #6. You own me a copy of the ‘Swords of Cerebus Supplement’. I understand that the supplement is free and contains issues 25 of ‘Cerebus’. The supplement is due to arrive at your store in early December and I can present this voucher for my copy.” I think what happened with that was, we had a number of distributors at the time. There was more than just Diamond Comics Distributors at the time of “Swords” Vol 6, and we notified them that this was going to be happening. And as far as I know, all of the distributors or virtually all of the distributors just said, “yeah that’s fine, we’ve got records of who bought ‘Swords of Cerebus’ Vol 6, and how many copies they bought.” We would send each of the distributors the same number of supplements that they had ordered of “Swords” vol 6, and it would be up to them to go, “okay how many of them go to this account, how many go to this account”, and then up to the accounts to go, “okay, who did we sell these to, so that we can get them their supplements?” [coughs] Excuse me. What happened was, one of the distributors, and there’s a likely candidate who was actually one of the smallest distributors but the most trouble of all the distributors. We had more trouble of him than we ever got out of Diamond or Capital City, and he said, “well, I would have to have something to send to the stores telling them” exactly what the message reads. But I think I came up with a suggested text, saying here you can do this. You can put your company name here, and then send it to each of your stores, and the distributor or somebody who worked at the distributor basically took exactly my text, which was telling them how to put it together, and phrased it so that it sounds like it’s a fair person, “I purchased a copy of ‘Swords of Cerebus’ #6” and then changes to, “is due to arrive at your store in early December”. I’m assuming that we sent this to each of the distributors just in case anybody else had problems with this, and to the distributor who definitely had a problem with, “you can’t just send me supplements, you have to send me a voucher that I can send to my accounts.” This looks like the one that he put together, because it is basically just typewritten. The Cerebus looks as if it was just photocopied out of the book and this isn’t something that we would send out as an Aardvark-Vanaheim communication. So, wherever it is that you found it, Margaret, I think it was somebody’s backroom at one of the stores that was an account of this distributor and they got their certificates in and went, “well, why don’t you just send me the supplement?” And I’m sure the distributor ultimately did just send them the supplement. Or might have said, “nobody gets a supplement unless we get a voucher”, in which case, probably they had a lot of disappointed customers. That’s the best I can do on explaining that one, is I think it’s an artifact of the time period when there were at least half a dozen direct market distributors and all of them tended to function in different was. They had different priorities, different things that the other distributors just it was water off a duck’s back and for them it was, “no, we insist that you have to do this.” And the easiest way to deal with that was, whatever any distributor wanted, we will work with them on it in order to keep everything running smoothly. “Cerebus 1991, cardstock cover. 8 pages. Promo stuff for Aardvark-Vanaheim in 1991. I’m not sure who AV sent this out to, but it would seem comic shops would be a target audience for it. If anyone has any info or if Ron could put it on the list to ask Dave during his call, it would be appreciated.” Thank you, Ron, for putting that on there.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That was a trade show thing, as I recall. I think it was for Diamond Comic Distributors, where part of the Diamond trade show was, the retailer came to the trade show and each of them got a bag with whatever the publishers wanted to give to each retailer. And didn’t really have anything to give the retailers. 1991 was, well, okay, this is what we’re going to be publishing. I think it had whatever the latest trade paperback was.
Matt: Margaret posted the whole thing, it’s one page it’s a double page spread of the first volume, “Church & State I”, “High Society”, and maybe “Church & State II”?
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then there was two individual pages, one of them was about the fact that the book, “this is the independent comic that’s on racks this month and has been on racks for however many months and will still be on racks for the next year.”
Dave: [laughs] Well, that sounds like me going, I don’t know what else to tell you about this.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s a 300 issue storyline, it started in 1977, this is 1991. We’re going to 2004. I can just keep saying that over and over. Yeah, it was basically, here’s what you probably want to order if you have no idea what Cerebus is, but it was one of those, again, Diamond had the same problem of, “what do we get all of the publishers to do that will get the most bang for the buck? That will get the retailers ordering more of whatever it is?” And anything that you’re gonna come up with that’s gonna work for Marvel and Dark Horse and whoever else was still going at that time, Eclipse. Whatever they’re going to say, “hey, we’ll give this to the retailers and this’ll really goose up sales” wasn’t gonna work with Cerebus and wasn’t gonna work for Aardvark-Vanaheim. I mean, what you’re looking at there is basically the equivalent of the solicitation that we did for #299 that, it’s a great jumping on point for new readers.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: There’s only one more issue to go. I’ve been trying to explain this since 1977, nobody gets it, whatever. I think we still got a box of those 1991s around here somewhere, where it was, well okay as long as we’re printing up enough for Diamond, and Diamond will tell you this is how many retailers are going to show up. So this is how many that you have to print, and you have to ship them by such and such a date. I think, in this case, it was… I wouldn’t ordinarily have done it, because I wasn’t going to the trade shows after having a certain amount of experience with trade shows, or I wasn’t geared up to the self-publishing promo that we did for the trade shows in 1993. It was still just Cerebus. But I think, unless I’m misremembering, that year Diamond was doing a trade show in Toronto, so it was, yeah okay, we can just print these at Preney, get them shipped to Kitchener and we’ll drive them down to Toronto and leave them with somebody who’s coordinating the Diamond Comics trade show and they can give them out to whoever they want to give them out. I might be misremembering that, but yeah it was… Criticizing myself at the time, I think I could have done more to try and get new retailers excited, but definitely by 1991, it was, you’re either a Cerebus store or you’re not a Cerebus store, and if you’re not a Cerebus store, you might be one of those stores that’s happy enough to order Cerebus for their one Cerebus customer. Which was better than the people that just went, “we don’t buy independents. We buy” well, they wouldn’t have been buying Image in 1991, that hadn’t started yet, but “these are the independents that we buy, and they all have to be superhero kind of things. ‘Elementals’ and that kind of thing.” But no, we didn’t send them out, they all went en masse, as far as I know, to wherever Diamond was doing their trade show in 1991 for Diamond to give out to the retailers. Okay, moving on, Michael R! It wouldn’t be a “Please Hold” without Michael R of Easton Pennsylvania, asks, “Hi Matt! Hope your injured finger feels better. Hi Dave! With all the success of the Spawn Kickstarter, any plans for a “Cerebus in Hell?’ CereSpawn issue? Might as well.” That’s not really the way that “Cerebus in Hell?” works, although its an interesting idea.
Matt: I had an idea. I thought about something. I’ve had an idea for probably a year now, I just gotta find a cover to parody.
Dave: That’s one of the problems, is, this is what I was start to explain, you can pick up from there. It usually starts with the cover. Either you, or Benjamin Hobbs, or David Birdsong, or Gary Boyarksi, or Lee Thacker comes up with a parody cover and then I take that and just start riffing on it. So go ahead, you pick up from there.
Matt: The idea I’ve had for a while is, using Spore. Take the image from the back cover of whatever issue that was, “Ye Verily, Even on the Back Cover, Men Will Call Him Spore!”
Dave: [laughs] Right. 277? 276? Somewhere around there.
Matt: My initial idea was, take that, and okay we’ll do a Spawn parody cover. Find an icon Spawn cover that we can parody, with Spore, that’ll work. And after the Spawn 10 Kickstarter started, you know we really ought to do the “Cape Ends 500 Yards” Cerebus as Spawn, as Cerebus, and Batvark as Spore, and both of them trying to cash in on the Spawn 10 thing. So the whole issue is the two of them, the static image, but it’s them, one camp is doing their Spawn parody, the other camp is doing their Spawn parody, and whoever can get it done first is gonna make the 80 grand. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You know, in their minds!
Dave: Okay, yes. Yeah, yeah, of course that brings up the other problem with “Cerebus in Hell?” which is how far ahead I am…
Matt: Right.
Dave: …on “Cerebus in Hell?” I just finished my part of the May 2022 issue and I’m trying to talk myself down off of the ledge, and go, a year and a half ahead, Dave? That’s pretty good. Considering that nobody else, I think, knows what they’re doing in the comic book field much past March or April of 2021. We’re very much ahead of the curve on it. That ties in with something else in a later question, so I won’t get to that quite yet, but yeah, that’s the way it would happen. If you figure out a Spawn cover that it would work with, and you can figure out how to get either the “Cape Ends 500 Yards” or Spore, that would certainly be interesting crushed down to “Cerebus in Hell?” panel size.
Matt: Well, I think at that point, it would be a splash of the full Spore, and the rest of it is just him cut off at the knees, because that’s what it would…. To me, it would be hilarious is that it’s, “I’m Spore” and everybody’s at knee level. [laughs]
Dave: Right, right. All you can see is sort of the claw hands.
Matt: One of the gags I thought of was, one of them is trying to be a “McFarlane Faithful”, so our version of Hell has to match McFarlane’s Hell, so the winged devils are all very upset because, Cerebus or Batvark, whichever team they’re on, is insisting that they cut off their noses because all of the demons in Todd McFarlane’s Hell have no noses.
Dave: Okay. See, I didn’t even know that. That’s good.
Matt: It’s one of those gags where it’s like, I can see at least getting two or three strips out of that. And then I’m going, Matt, you still have to write the Avengers parody you suggested!
Dave: Right, right. And the next “Vark Wars”! You’re getting into George Lucas territory of how long it takes you to get these out there.
Matt: The A Moment of Cerebus gag for, I believe, “Hermann” is… or no, no, I’m sorry, it’s “Spider-Whore”, which is, “maybe Mr Dow should get finished with the 25th Vark Wars” and I’m going, that’s a little too on the nose, guys, that’s not funny! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean, I laughed, but at the same time, oh yeah. I guess I gotta start taking the notebook with me to work and try to come up with funny things while I’m working.
Dave: Well, we try not to point that out, that… I’m a real overachiever because I know as soon as you lose lead time you never get it back again. I’m really looking forward to David Birdsong’s “Giant Sized Public Defenders” and I’ve actually started putting Fred Murdock into corners of “Cerebus in Hell?” panels. It’s not time for him yet. Sometime in 2022. Only if Dave Sim stops producing issues, so you guys can start getting some in them. I think Benjamin Hobbs has actually given up on actually writing or drawing “Cerebus in Hell?” he’s just doing virgin covers and auctioning them off, which is probably the far more sensible thing to do than hoping you’re going to come up with a “Cerebus in Hell?” coming book that sells more than 1800 copies. Or at least where the sales go up, so you get a royalty on it, cause if the sales go down, nobody gets paid.
Matt: I got the collections of “Marvel Zombies” where it’s Marvel Zombies, the superheroes as zombies. And it was kind of a fun series, but I pulled them out because, what they did was Arthur Suydam did parody covers where it was classic Marvel covers as zombies.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And in the back of the collections, they have small reprints of the original covers and so I opened it up and I’m like, “that one, we did that one, we did that one, ooh, we didn’t do this one, we didn’t do this one.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I’m looking at them like, one of them is a “Daredevil” cover from the Frank Miller era with Elektra. Not the one where Elektra dies, but a different one, but it’s a giant head shot of Daredevil, and I’m looking at it going, can we do a Cerebus that big and have it look good?
Dave: Ehh, I think that David Birdsong is up to doing anything like that at this point. It’s a good idea, it’s almost like we’re edging towards Marvel cover family feud. What’s the most common cover when you have this as the adjective for it? And that’s off in the future somewhere. Yeah, we’re definitely milking the whole Marvel iconic cover thing for all its worth.
Matt: I also have the “Batman: 50 Years of the Dark Knight” that reprints a bunch of covers, and every now and then I flip that open and I’m like, alright, ya know. That’s how I got “Poet in the Family” was, I flipped it open and it has that cover in it, and I’m like, okay that’s definitely one that we have to parody because it is iconic and I can see a way of doing it that will actually be funny.
Dave: Right.
Matt: You guys took it in a whole different direction that’s even funnier! [laughs]
Dave: Well it was, those are the hoops that we jump through, which is, you’ve got to pass both of those tests. There’s gotta be times when you guys are going, “c’mon, we’ve done every iconic comic book cover.” Until something like that happens, where you go, “oh no, that one’s perfect”. And it was, it’s certainly something I would never have come up on my own, so it’s really the Dave Sim start me up thing. All you have to do is get me the parody cover, and I’ll start riffing on it. I’m not really good at coming up with covers on my own, but once I’ve got one. The “Poet in the Family” in particular cycled through my pile for a while before I went, ahh I think I’m starting to get a picture of what I’m gonna do with this. And then, once I started on it, and particularly when I came up with the thing of each one being a full pager, and being far more a Chekov play, but “Cerebus in Hell?” with the Batvark cousins. All we can do is make ourselves laugh. If we make ourselves laugh, presumably there’s an audience out there. It might only be five other guys like us, and 1800 other people going, “Dave Sim is ruining his legacy in comics by doing this stuff. How can he possibly do these things?” Well, I think they’re funny, you think they’re funny, Sean thinks they’re funny, David Birdsong thinks they’re funny, Benjamin Hobbs thinks they’re funny, that’s what we go with. If it makes you laugh, then you can’t say, “oh well, I can’t do that.” Well, no. If it’s funny, it’s funny. You can’t censor yourself on comedy. Like you say, the thing of, here’s critiquing Matt on getting caught up on “Vark Wars”, and he laughs. And if you laugh, well, it’s funny. Why is it funny? Cause it’s true.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: You said to Michael, “he’s referring to the middle finger of my left hand. I broke the tip of it last Friday” and I was gonna turn that into a question and ask you, why did you do that?
Matt: I was at work for Thanksgiving. They came and said, “do you wanna work Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the Saturday, and that Sunday?” and I said yes, because Thanksgiving and Black Friday I get eight hours of holiday pay and then, if I work, I get eight hours of time and a half. So it’s technically double time and a half if I work eight hours.
Dave: Right.
Matt: We worked on Thursday, we shut the plant down, turned the lights off, turn the air compressors off, locked everything up, went home. Showed up Friday morning, and there was a third shift guy coming in for first shift hours, so he had unlocked the plant and turned everything on. I went to the pressure tester I was supposed to run. First off, I helped Tim fire up his pressure tester, cause he was having problems. So then I’m in a rush because I’m trying to make right and make my boss happy, cause I don’t want to get talked to for, “hey, we’re paying you double time and a half and you’re not producing parts.” So I grabbed the first part, I put it in the pressure tester, and the part gets held by three clamps, that they’re pneumatic and there’s a safety screen that when the light curtain’s broken, they can’t move. But apparently, there was residual air in the solenoid, cause when the part hit the clamp, it triggered, and pinched my finger between the fixture for the machine and the part. And soon as I felt pressure, I yanked my hand away and went, oh God, this is really really really gonna hurt. But first thing’s first, go get my hand under cold water cause I don’t have an ice pack handy and it’s closer to get to the sink than it is to get to the refrigerator where the ice packs are. But I’ll put it under really cold water, that’ll help. And then, I went back to work. And then we were having problems with the machine, so we ended up calling a supervisor and he said, “try this, try this” and when I was talking to him, I’m like, oh by the way I hurt my finger. I’ll take pictures with my phone and send them to you so we can get it documented. And he’s like, “okay fine.” In the meantime, a different supervisor, a guy I was sending text messages saying I was having problems with the machine and oh yeah by the way I hurt my finger, and he’s like, “do I need to come in?” And I had the guy respond, Matt says you can come in if you want, and then I sent a picture of my finger, and his response was, “I’ll be there in 20 minutes.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] So it was an accident?
Matt: Yeah, it was an accident. It was 100%… they’re investigating how it happened because by all accounts it was an impossible situation. It should not have been possible for this clamp to fire the way it did.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I finished working my eight hour shift, and we did an accident report, we had to call a 24 hour nurse hotline, and they said, “we recommend that you go and get checked out” and I’m like, I will after work. And after work I went to the walk in clinic, walked up, and they said, “what are you here for?” and I held out my hand, and I went, I hurt my finger at work and I need to get it checked out. And they sent me to the orthopedic side of the walk in clinic, where I had to go through a bunch of a rigmarole and answering questions I don’t know the answers to. Then they took me back, and they looked at it and went, “yeah we’re gonna take an x-ray” I’m like, alright fine. Went and got probably the first x-ray I remember ever getting in my life and came back into the examination room and the doctor came in and pulled the x-rays up on the computer, and went, “oh, yep, you broke it.” And I’m like, and he zoomed in the picture and you can see, it’s the picture I sent you where the tip of my finger is cracked off inside my finger.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I’m like, 41 years without breaking a bone and I finally broke a bone that I know of. I may have screwed up my ankle in the past and might’ve broke something there, but I have never officially been documented with a broken bone. I used to pride myself on, I’ve made it this far without breaking anything and now the tip of my finger’s broke. And they’re like, “well, we can’t do anything cause it’s the tip. We put it in a splint, we can wrap it up real good” cause they’re like, “does it hurt?” I’m like, it only hurts when I touch something cause ya know, it’s tender. “Well we can wrap it up” and I’m like, no, no, I don’t think that’s necessary. I mean, it’s broke, but it’s not gonna get worse if I don’t do anything, other than the nail might fall off. And they’re like, “yeah so if you want, we can wrap it up, otherwise no.” I’m like, no, no, I’m fine. And then they ask me, “do you need any restrictions when you go back to work?” I’m like, no, no, I’m fine, I can and work. I know for definite I can work. And he’s like, “really?” I’m like, I just worked for eight hours after doing this.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Basically, they’re going, “well how did you work, cause you can’t grab the part?” I’m like, well I can’t put my finger under the part cause I’m worried the clamp’s gonna do it again, so I’m pinching the top of this 50 pound part between three fingers on each hand and then setting it in and hoping that it doesn’t slip out of my fingers. Everybody at work’s going, “that’s real nasty”, and I’m like, it doesn’t hurt. They’re like, “oh it looks horrible” and I’m like, it doesn’t hurt. And they’re like, “what do you mean?” and I started tapping my fingertip, the pad of my finger with my other finger, going, yeah, I don’t feel anything. And this guy I’m talking to is just screaming like he’s going to puke because it’s so gross what I’m doing, and I’m just like, well, what do you want me to do? It’s broke, but I’m not gonna miss out on double time and half, and time and a half, and double time.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: I’m working for the next two days after this happened. Went into work on Monday and gave my boss, who wasn’t there at all for any of this, my return to work slip and he’s like, “okay”, he’s looking it over, I’ve got no restrictions, I can work. Anything that I can normally do, I can still do, I just gotta be careful with my finger and I am. And then I gave him the receipt because the supervisor that filled out the accident report is like, “I’m not gonna send you for a drug test, I trust that it was truly an accident. You weren’t horsing around, you weren’t goofing around. Ya know, this wasn’t you trying to get hurt. So I’m not gonna make you take a drug test.” And when I went to the clinic, they said, “do they want a drug test?” and I said no! But if you wanna give me one, I’ll take one, cause I know I’m gonna pass. And they’re like, “well yeah we’ll give you one anyway just to be safe”, so when I get all done with the doctor’s appointment, they’re like, “now you gotta go to the ER and pee in a cup” and I’m like, you can’t do it here? They’re like, “no, that part of the clinic’s closed”, and I’m like, really? And they’re like, “yeah, you gotta go the ER.” So I drive across town to the hospital and go to the ER and I walk up and they’re like “can we help you?” and I’m like, yeah, I’m supposed to come here and get a drug test, and they’re like, “we don’t do that here. We do this at the clinic.” And I’m like, well they sent me here. The nurse makes five phone calls and as she gets done with the last call, it pops up on her computer, “oh yeah, this guy’s coming in for the drug test, give him the drug test” And she’s like, “I’m really sorry but we’re backed up, it’s gonna be a couple of hours” and I’m like, okay! So I pull out my phone, and I’m sending Paula a test saying, hey I’m at the ER waiting on a drug test, they said it’s gonna be a couple hours, and I got that far in typing, when they walked up to me with a nurse and said, “she’s ready to take you right now”, and I’m like, okay! [laughs] So I went, peed in a cup, took a breathalyzer test, which I passed because, as I said to the nurse, wow that drink I had five years ago finally got out of my system.
Dave: There you go.
Matt: They gave me a receipt saying, he was here for 11 minutes and this is why, and I turned that into my employer. Gave it to my boss, going, here’s the receipt for my drug test that you guys said I didn’t need but they gave it to me anyway. And then when I talked to our safety supervisor, “oh no, you had to take a drug test, that’s mandatory. We require that any time there’s an incident.” And I’m like, alright, whatever. Again, I know I wasn’t gonna fail it. But…
Dave: And you’re getting paid, just to take a drug test.
Matt: Yeah. The workman’s comp insurance is paying for my doctor visit and the x-rays and all that, and I got paid for 8 hours because I was at work for 8 hours. I pretty much discovered, breaking my finger, that unless I lose a limb and am physically incapable of working, I’m going to finish my shift before I go to the hospital.
Dave: Exactly. See…
Matt: Because…
Dave: I… go ahead.
Matt: No, no, no, because I’ve worked with places where people have gotten hurt and it’s a minor injury, but they’re like, “oh I should probably go and get checked out” and it’s like, no no no, I’m gonna finish my shift. I don’t get paid if I go to the hospital.
Dave: Right. “See he’s referring to the middle finger of my left hand. I broke the tip of it last Friday.” I didn’t know it was an accident and that’s why I asked, why did you break the tip of you finger? It’s like, people will talk, Matt, when you do things like that, so…
Matt: When I called my Dad, I got sympathy from him, he was going, “you were picking your nose, weren’t ya?” I’m like, no, Dad, I don’t pick my nose with my middle finger.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: That’s one the big ones, Dad, I use my pinky like a normal person.
Dave: [laughs] I’ll tell ya, we never get through a “Please Hold”…
Matt: A “Please Hold” without me bringing up my Dad! [laughs]
Dave: And man oh man, it’s always something out of left field. Speaking out of left field, Jeff Seiler asks, “Question for Dave: When you started mentally plotting out the course of Cerebus' life, did you envision that "in the end everybody dies", er, " no, in the end everybody is dead" (everybody being many major, influential characters), or was that more of a fluid plan as the series progressed? And, other than for structural expediency, why did Cerebus live so long when no one else did?” Well, my theory is that this is a baked in quality with aardvarks, that they do live that long and Cerebus had a particularly long lifespan and to have that be discovered as the series progressed. One of the reasons I used Woody Allen as a major character at the end of the book, was because I did have reference for what Woody Allen looked like over a span of 50 or 60 years, and to have Cerebus not really aging at the same pace that Konigsberg was. It just seemed to me like a nifty way to communicate Cerebus’ lifespan. I don’t know if I cursed myself with that. I’m 64 years old and the hair on the top of my head is still coming in brown, which I think might be God’s way of saying, “oh ha ha ha, see how you like it, having to live much longer than you probably want to, because you did that to Cerebus.” Kinda hoping that’s not the case. This is really not my kind of world, this was really not my kind of world back when I did 186 and “Tangent” and it’s getting to be less and less my kinda world as we’re going along. But I think it’s very possible I did curse myself in exactly that way, that by the time I die, 2020 is probably going to look sane.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Which… I mean, just reckon with that. 2020 being a time you look back on and go, “remember when COVID-19 first hit? Wasn’t everything just so relaxing and so easy to deal with?” As opposed to what things are like in, I dunno, how long am I gonna live? If I live 100 years, that’s 2056. If I live 90 years, that’s 2046, and that’s still a chunk of years from now. Although, they’ll probably still go pretty fast. Cause, when I look back at, ya know, Margaret sends the 1991 brochure and 1991 seems like a little while ago. It’s 30 years, remembering what I did with the 1991 promotion, it boggles my mind to think that that would accelerate, so that if I live another 30 years, if I live to be 94, I’m going to be looking back at COVID-19 and going, it all seems like sort of yesterday. 1991, 2000, 2015, 2020, 2030, 2040. I definitely got my first glimmering of that when Will Eisner bought me dinner for having completed the 300 issues and I remember him saying, “everybody I knew is dead.” It’s like, yeah, I couldn’t think of any Golden Age names that Will Eisner would have known well or even tangentially that weren’t dead and hadn’t been dead for some time. I’ve got my two little black phone directories and they’re definitely full of dead people now. I’ve never sat down and said, well maybe I’ll go through and put a check mark, let’s see how many people who are in my little black phone directory are dead now. Cause that’s [laughs] apt to be at least a little depressing, but definitely I notice it anytime I’m flipping through looking for a phone number. Murphy Anderson’s dead, Will Eisner’s dead, Archie Goodwin’s dead, Marshall Rogers is dead, that only becomes greater and more so. So, thank you, Jeff, for that real day brightener question! Right here towards the end.
Matt: [laughs] It’s one of those things about Cerebus getting really old that, ya know, it’s kind of shocking to read “Latter Days” and see how old he gets, but then you remember that in “High Society”, and not even “High Society” in issue 20, in “Mind Games”, when Cerebus is talking to Po, and he’s like, “you sound pretty good for a 187 year old” and it’s like, the groundwork was there. That’s one of the fun parts I find in “Cerebus”, that you didn’t cheat. It’s one of those, you made the point and we all missed it, and then when you brought it back, it was, oh wait a minute.
Dave: This was there all along, yes.
Matt: One of my all time favorite callbacks, and I don’t think anyone’s ever really commented on it, is that Cerebus, he’s a barbarian, he’s freelance, he’s a kitchen staff supervisor, he becomes the ranking diplomatic representative, he becomes prime minister, he becomes the Pope, and how do we show that he’s come so far and gained such enormous power as Pope? With a tall pointy hat. Status, son, you can’t argue with status. [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, it was one of those, I did a post a while back, about a really clever callback and it was Cerebus with the hat and it’s the page where he’s wearing the hat and he scratches his ear and the hat almost falls off. And then I did the panel of Elrod saying that, going, again, the series is just full of these really clever bits that when they first happen, it’s that was a funny bit, and then 50 issues later… [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, that happens to me as well. I mean, we’re not getting ready in terms of this is gonna happen tomorrow, but we’re pretty sure that the next Kickstarter is gonna be “Cerebus” #2, the same way that we did “Cerebus” #1, the regular facsimile, the gold, and the platinum edition. So I was rereading “Cerebus” #2 and I had forgotten about the zombie army that attacks Cerebus after he joins up with the Borealans. And it mentions that they have black blades and obviously they all have blank eyeballs, and I’m going, wait a minute, that’s Elrod two issues before Elrod.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And I didn’t do that consciously. Or I don’t think I did that consciously. So that’s one of those, whatever this comic art metaphysics is about, it is definitely backwards and forwards in time, coupled with, “where do you get your ideas?” Well, I don’t know where that came from. Why would I do that unconsciously when it makes far more sense that I would do that consciously? Well, that’s comic art metaphysics. Things are being expressed through me that I have no idea of consciously, but which are very significant and very resonant on a completely unconscious level. But only unconscious relative to what I consider consciousness, which is physically incarnated consciousness, which, to me, is probably closer to a dream state. When you die and you pass on to the next world, I think it’s going to be a lot like waking up from dreaming. Dreaming makes a lot of sense when you’re dreaming, and as soon as you wake up, you go, “how could I have possibly have thought that that makes sense? That’s not what that house looks like. That’s not who that person is. That person’s been dead for five years and I was acting as if it was completely normal for them to be alive.” I think what we consider a wakeful state here, is “wakeful” in quotation marks. Wait until you actually wake up on Judgement Day and we’re all in for a lot of surprises, I think. Uhh, is it Brian or Byron? Uh Brian asks, “(on a post Carson did about SODAR with roughs from you, I’m not sending the images because I got enough in here…): Can you ask Sim how his wrist is for me and if he's able to draw regularly again? Is this new artwork in this post?” Um, no, it wouldn’t be new artwork. The wrist, I definitely pushed it too far with the Spawn 10 covers. I’ve been waiting for it to bounce back and it’s not terrible but I think all I really accomplished with all of my drawing at shoulder height and using the magnification and lowering the pneumatic seat so it’s only 14 inches off the ground, I did manage to make the wrist not hurt while I’m drawing. But that’s different from having the wrist not hurt, and there’s definitely a sense of having used up a certain amount of the wrist doing the Spawn covers. The four Spawn covers was pretty likely too much so now I’m having to get out my mental slide rule and go, well okay, how much do I figure is left in the wrist and what’s the best uses for the wrist? So the latest on that is, I was going to do two or three “Cerebus” #2 covers and I had already done one, where basically I got Alfonso at Studiocomix Press to do a blue-line on drawing paper of “Cerebus” #2, 11 by 17. Very very light blue, and then basically penciling a bit of it, inking it as if I was inking a blue penciled “Cerebus” #2. It looks really good. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Sean said that he was very impressed with it. Dagon really likes it. So I was going to do a couple of more covers, but looking at the actual revenue from the covers on Spawn 10, I have to wait and see what the auction results were at Heritage Auctions when they auctioned the covers, so that I have to say, well okay, is that enough money to use up that much wrist? Which, that’s one of the questions that you don’t get to ask yourself until you push your wrist too far and then have to sort of assess, okay where am I? Definitely, there’s more pain in the forearm now, which I think was mostly the net effect out of drawing at shoulder height, and drawing at the absolute extension of the wrist, and of the fingers and thumb. That whatever that does or will do or did to whatever it is in my wrist and forearm, it moved it down to the forearm and elbow area. And so I’ll be watching the next time that I draw, to go okay, is that something that doesn’t effect the drawing but effects the wrist and forearm and elbow? And I’ll have to make that assessment independently. One of the things is, Spawn 10 was the only possible book that could have the kind of payday that it did. I’m pretty sure “Cerebus” isn’t in that category. “Cerebus” #2 is not gonna sell in the quantities that Spawn 10, I don’t think. I would be happy to be pleasantly surprised. Dagon is finding new customers wherever it is that he’s finding them and it would be nice if that happened. If we did a new “Cerebus” #1 cover with the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter, and we managed to get above what we did on “Cerebus” #1, but logically, you have to assume, #2 is always gonna sell less well a #1. But in terms of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, I had another weird thing happen just in the last week where a longtime Cerebus patron, and we’re talking about going back 40 years, and a female, not Margaret Liss. [laughs] That’s the default thing. Okay, female Cerebus fan, Margaret Liss. Not, there’s, a conservative estimate, about five or six female Cerebus fans, even at this point. And this Cerebus fan, who I’m not going to identify, was one of the people that bought “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One from Eddie Khanna, and has been reading it and rereading it and rereading and just, like, trying not to dump on Cerebus. She says, “it sounds like I’m insulting your 6000 page masterpiece. I’m not doing that, but I really think ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’ is the best thing you’ve ever done.” And sending a check for $10,000 so that I would work on the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. Ahh, so, that has to be factored into the mix of, well okay, I assumed that the only place I could make money is Spawn 10 covers. Real money, the only place I could make real money is Spawn 10 covers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles covers, and after that, it’s all over for grandpa. Nobody’s going to be paying five figure amounts for whatever else I could possibly do. So this one through me for a looping of going, well, okay, I think this is… I’ve been trying to talk myself into being a year and a half ahead on “Cerebus in Hell?” That’s good enough. You don’t have to maintain that or try and improve on that. Well, I got the last “Cerebus in Hell?” done the 24th, the 25th of November, and the commitment that I have with myself is anytime that that happens, and I didn’t have other things that I had to do, the remaining days of the month, I would devote to “Strange Death of Alex Raymond.” So that’s what I was already doing when the check came in. And I had to send the check back, because it was made out to Dave Sim. It’s got to be made out to Aardvark-Vanaheim. But, it’s, okay, how much of my time does $10,000 buy working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”? And that’s another one of those mental slide rule things, I don’t know. I was thinking, I’m tired of just barely having enough money to pay the bills, so from now on, I’m doing stuff just that will make money. So this was an enormous surprise, very gratifying, and I have been able to put in, already, five full days on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” basically just building from where I left off with the SDoAR mock ups that Brian would have seen that Carson would have posted. So, I’m looking probably for at least another two weeks, just refining that, where I’ve got the section which is “Bleak Prospects” and the photo shoot for “Life” magazine is one section and I’m just smoothing that out and getting it as concise as I can and typing in the annotations that go with it, the online annotations. So I what I’m going to be doing is working through that, basically, here’s where I see Ward Greene’s voodoo and here’s the best examples of it in these stories, and then commenting on those exhaustively. “The Doll’s House” is early on with the Ward Greene voodoo so it was a pretty simple maybe 15 pages to explain exhaustively the one after Margaret Mitchell’s death that I’ve been working on. “Peril in the Snow”, the annotations alone are 41 pages and there’s probably a good 25 pages just saying, this is what I’m seeing here. I know exactly that I’m seeing. Describing what I’m seeing to people that think in terms of metaphysics and don’t think in terms of comic art metaphysics and the use of comic art metaphysics as a form of voodoo. It’s a very very laborious process saying, I have to describe this precisely and I have to do it in simple enough language and I have do it as concisely as possible. With something like “Peril in the Snow”, 41 pages of annotations is as concise as I can get. The compromise on that is, when this gets turned into a graphic novel, whether it’s Carson who turns it into a graphic novel or someone else turns it into a graphic novel way off in the future, you can just read the graphic novel, and if you don’t want to read all of the annotations, you don’t have to read all of the annotations. But all of this stuff is very very extensive, very very deep rabbit holes that it’s very very difficult not to go too far down them, and that’s the experience that Eddie Khanna and I have both had. Working on that part of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, the advantage is, I can do it almost all left handed typing. Left handed typing slows me down enough that I already have to think very very hard about the way I’m phrasing things and going through the same text five times, ten times, fifteen times, and going, no, that’s still not what it is that I’m trying to say, or it’s not simple enough, or it’s not concise enough, or it doesn’t build very carefully on the previous point. So I have to rewrite it, and rerewrite it, and rerewrite it. But gradually, that whole section, which is give different parts, including “The Doll’s House” commentaries and “Peril in the Snow” commentaries and “Bleak Prospects” commentaries. The big one, [laughs] see, the giant size commentary is going to be on “The Caged Songbird”, but I knew that all along. Eddie knew that all along. So I have to build up to that. Here’s “The Doll’s House” which is reasonably easy to explain in a short number of pages. Here’s “Peril in the Snow” which takes a much larger number of pages. And here’s “The Caged Songbird” which is the mother of all, here’s what Ward Greene was doing, here’s how Ward Greene transformed our society through comic art metaphysics voodoo. Believe it or not. So there you go, Brian! Thank you for saving the longest answer for last, although it probably has competition from the comic book cardboard file boxes. Any final thoughts there, Matthew?
Matt: Ahh, I’m going, ten grand?! WOW!
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: Ten grand, WOW! [laughs]
Dave: Oh yes, yes! And it was at the end of the letter. It’s like she had taped the check to the end of the letter and it was a five page letter, and it was, “here’s where I started first reading, admiring your work” and that was the first paragraph, and then it was “and then I went on to this stage” and then flip it over, and onto the next stage, and I went, [laughs] I think this is one of those, “it’s taken you 40 years, but you’ve finally pissed me off so badly I am never ever ever reading your work again under any circumstances!” And I went, ahh okay, I’ll read the rest of this letter some other time, and it wasn’t until I was actually back in the house, like Roly drops off the mail at Camp David and it wasn’t until I was in the Off-White House that I went, well okay, if she’s been here for 40 years and she can write a six page letter telling me exactly, exactly how much of a jerk I am, and how badly I pissed her off, I only deserve exactly what I get. You get to the end of the letter, and here’s a check for $10,000.
Matt: I’m glad you’re still working on the book cause, like I said, when I read the first volume, I sent Eddie an email going, “that’s great! When do we get Volume Two?” [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, well, one of the things that $10,000 buys you is, I got Alfonso to print up one of the rough copies of Volume Two, and signed it to her, and Roly FedExed it to her today, so she should have it tomorrow, along with some of the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” tracing paper. She said “don’t send me any artwork, I’ve got artwork”. One of the first things she bought was a hand colored “First Fifth” back in whenever that was, 1984. And she’s got that on the wall, that’s fine, that’ll do her for artwork. And it’s like, well, no, c’mon, $10,000! [laughs] I can’t just say, well okay I’ll work on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” for two weeks and then I’ll go back to doing my Turtles cover. I don’t really know what order I’m going to be doing stuff in, but, yes, it is very gratifying to say, I don’t know how limited the time is that that will allow me to work on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, but I think we can say probably more than until the end of this week, kind of thing.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Right. [laughs]
Matt: Speaking of the Turtles and their covers…
Dave: Yes?
Matt: Kevin Eastman’s doing a massive auction of his Turtles archive stuff, like, through Heritage. One of the things they’re selling is, one of the micro series, the entire issue, all of the original art.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: And! I mean, like graded copies of their pre-Turtles work. The “Gobbledygook” they did a couple issues of, and the one thing that jumped out at me, that I went, okay you have more money than brains temporarily, and I bid on it and completely got blown out of the water cause I knew it was gonna go for a lot more than I could pay, was Kevin Eastman’s original preliminary cover to Turtles 8.
Dave: Really?
Matt: I keep getting emails saying, “track your bids” and I’m like, I just don’t want to see how much I’m losing by, so I’m not looking anymore. But last I looked, it was a couple weeks ago, and it was already up to three or four hundred bucks. But it’s all the Turtles, and Renet, and Cerebus, of, this is what the covers gonna kinda look like, and I’m like, I would love to get that! Ah, it’s not gonna happen. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: But I’m thinking, I hope he sent ya a copy, and I’m sure he didn’t.
Dave: It’s interesting because, I can’t just do the front cover. If I’m gonna do the Turtles 8 cover, it’s a wrap around. If I tried to just do the front cover, there’s only three turtles, and people are gonna go, “wait a minute, where’s the fourth turtle? I’m buying the Turtles I get four turtles.” But, what’s interesting is, the front cover’s gonna be a lot easier for me to do. Again, the same process where Alfonso printed out blue-line of the Turtles 8 cover and I’m just re-penciling some parts of it, like I’m putting a helmet on Cerebus, the same helmet he’s got on in the story. Doing more things with lighting, using the villain on the back cover as the light source for everything on the whole wrap around. Every time I look at the two parts, the front and back cover, my wrist just starts throbbing, going, “we’re not actually doing all of that, are we?” and it’s like, ahh, I’m not sure, because if there’s any other maximum Dave Sim payday short of actually selling Cerebus artwork, which I don’t wanna do, I want to preserve the Cerebus archive. Doing a updated version of the cover for “Turtles” #8 has gotta be at or near the top of the list, but if there’s anybody else out there with very very deep pockets who is a huge fan of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, and is going, “why is Dave doing all of these other” as they would see it “crap, when he could be working on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’?” I am willing to be tempted.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] If you want to send me a check and say, “Dave, stop working on that crap and work on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’, here’s X number of dollars.” I will be happy to develop my own internal taxi meter that goes, okay, that much money buys you this much time on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and buys you a, like I say, rough copy of Volume Two and some “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” tracing paper, and probably, being kept in the loop on what it is that I’m doing. This patroness, I have already told her, if you want I can tell Eddie Khanna to do a senate investigations sized document dump of everything that we’ve got on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, including all of our correspondence on it, but there’s no spoiler warnings in there. You’re gonna read stuff that if you’re trying to read the book sequentially is going to spoil stuff for you, and this also evolved and changing thinking on my part. Things that I wrote three or four pages about to Eddie Khanna saying, here’s what I think is going on here. Once I got it out of my system, once I got three or four pages written, I went, uhh no that’s not it, but I needed to get that out of my system so I could get to what is it. I think there’s two correspondence boxes which are an inch thick each on “The Caged Songbird” and that doesn’t include all of the printouts from Wikipedia of everything that Ward Greene references in “The Caged Songbird”, so whether she would want to go for that, that would also be on the table for any other deep-pocketed “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” patron. You want everything? I’m sure Eddie could put together two or three thumb drives that would have all of the material on it, and you’d probably be reading it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then seeing what I did with it, hopefully, as I’m able to get further along on the book.
Matt: Okay. Well, that’s not me! [laughs] I got pockets, but they got holes and moths in them.
Dave: [laughs] I wasn’t hinting, Matt! “Why don’t you sell all of your possessions and certainly all of the money so I can work on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’?” Ah, believe me, I couldn’t afford me, so I’m right with you on that.
Matt: I was thinking about getting you business cards printed up that have Cerebus’ head on it and say, “Have Hand, Will Write.”
Dave: [laughs] Well, I’ve been thinking of getting that done. Actually I’ve been thinking of getting mailing labels done. It would seem like such a great luxury to have Cerebus mailing labels with space to write an address in on those rare occasions when I send something out on my own, or when Roly sends them out, instead of Roly still writing out “Cerebus, Box 1674, Station C, Kitchener, Ontario” on all of the packages. It’s like, yeah, I’m not destitute or anything but there’s better uses for the money. I think I’d like the time period where I could afford mailing labels and maybe even actually printed envelopes.
Matt: Well, you know, you could go out and get a stamp that’s got Cerebus and the address, and just stamp the boxes.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. Or Roly could. But it’s one of those, well, right now, there’s other things to be done. I think we’re finally coming to a breathing space after Spawn 10, which is now moving ahead. I just approved the Spawn 10 Halloween and Grandma covers, the final version, for Sean, so that was the last jigsaw puzzle piece missing for Waverly Press. The printer wasn’t going to print the other 18 covers, or whatever it was, until they had all of the covers in house. So that was what the delay was on that, but, we’re finally full speed ahead on that end of things, as well.
Matt: I got an email from somebody going, that all of the Cerebus and Spawn and High Society stuff has been removed from the Waverly’s website. “What’s going on?” So I sent a message, and I got a response, of, “oh yeah, you know.” How I phrased my message was, is something going on? You doing a site update or have you and Dave had an Alan Moore/ Steve Bissette falling out and that’s the end of it? And I got a response of “no no no, it’s a site update. New stuff and everything will be back in a week or two.” and I’m going, okay, that’s what I figured, but then I responded to the first email I got, going, oh no no, you didn’t hear it from me, but oh yeah, big falling out, they’re never gonna speak again” and then I put a couple line breaks, and then I’m like, nah I’m just messing with you, it’s a site update. [laughs] And then I signed off and put in parenthesis, “(the look on your face)” [laughs].
Dave: Uh-huh. Ya see, you’ve gotta be careful about doing that, because…
Matt: Because it’ll blow up in my face and your face and everyone else’s face!
Dave: Exactly! Because that’s how the internet works. Anything in proximity, if somebody said it, doesn’t matter if it was a joke, we don’t have jokes anymore. [laughs] Not if somebody doesn’t want it to be a joke. If they don’t think it’s a joke, it’s not a joke. But, no, we’re forging ahead. It’s an amazing learning experience just over the course of “Cerebus” #1 and Spawn 10 and everything has to be rethought constantly. I’ve never had that experience before of, most of “Cerebus” was done as, okay this is how we’re doing it. We don’t revisit this. This is how we can stay on a monthly schedule. If we’re always revisiting this, and changing how we do things, changing how we do things is going to take the place of getting the book out every month. So having had pretty close to 26 years of that, of falling behind when we went to get caught up in Hawaii, this is very very different, where it’s, “this worked last time. We’re not sure if this is working this time. But this seems to be working, let’s try more of this.” And this is the time period now, now that Spawn 10 Kickstarter is over and the IndieGoGo Spawn 10 Kickstarter is over, now we’ve got this interregnum period where the fulfillment is done, and the next time we need to have hard answers, yes, we’re all done theorizing about the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter, this is how it’s going to go, needs to be decided when everyone is getting their Spawn 10 packages, because that’s the way that it works the best. You’ve waited a while, here’s the thing that you’ve been waiting for, we’re ready to do another one, and here’s exactly how that one’s going to go. And there’s a lot more decision making on Dagon’s part, because he’s the fulfillment guy, and he’s the one having to make sure that everybody gets what they’re getting. I make suggestions and if it’s something that meshes with what he thinks is going to work, then that’s the way that we’re going to do it. If it doesn’t, then that’s not the way that we’re going to do it, and I’m fine with that. Part of the ambition was to be as hands off as possible with the Waverly Press Cerebus stuff, so that I’m actually working on other material. I’m spending my time doing creative stuff and everyone else is putting in the time doing the stuff that I can’t do that other people can do. And that’s really the new standard operation procedure. It’s the same as, I don’t go out shopping to stores to buy something. I tell Roly, can you go and get me this thing? And he goes and gets it and puts it on my personal tab that I pay him. It doesn’t make sense for me to do something that Roly can do, because Roly can’t sit down and do a “Cerebus” #2 cover. If he could, that would be great. Tell you what, Roly, I’ll go and pick up the mail today. You sit down and draw this “Cerebus” #2 cover.
Matt: [laughs] If only you could tag team with somebody else, of, okay today it’s your day to draw, I’m gonna do something else.
Dave: Yeah, it’s very interesting, looking at the right wrist that all of this is balanced on. And it’s, uh yep, there it is right there, and this is me up here, and never the twain shall meet. Okay, we’re gonna cap it there, Matthew. Say hi to Paula and say hi to Janis Pearl and say hi to Natasha for me.
Matt: Will do. And God willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll do this again next year.
Dave: Next year?! Oh God, that sounds horrible. Oh God! Okay. Well, maybe it’ll be better than this year. Couldn’t be… well I won’t say that either.
Matt: Yeah yeah, it could be worse, but we’re hoping for better. [laughs]
Dave: That’s right, that’s right. Okay, have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too! Have a good night, Dave.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Okay, everybody, I’m gonna quickly show the audio-visual people my hand again, cause people hadn’t seen it. Still has the burst capillaries on the middle finger, but the bruising, compare it to my other fingers, it looks really good. And then on the other side, yeah, the nail’s black, but most of the bruising’s gone. It looks a lot better, so thanks for all the well wishes, I really appreciate it. And again, see everybody again next year, or in January, however you want to look at it, and for you fine folks on the audio side, picture a really bad looking finger. Alright. Goodnight, and God bless!
Dave: Okay, do you want to… I’ll just say a couple of words, and then you check to make sure it’s actually recording.
Matt: Okay! Yeah, it’s recording.
Dave: It’s recording?
Matt: It is recording.
Dave: Okay. Alright. We’re picking up where we left off last month, and notebook #21, page 172. I am never going to forget this now [laughs] because this is the one that goes on forever. To recap for people who missed the original explanations, this was coming up on “Reads” and Dave Sim autobiographical, which, of course, was a big centerpiece of “Reads”, fictionalized as Victor Davis, but also segue into Dave Sim, so this was really my first, okay how did Dave Sim come to be Dave Sim? What were the critical life moments that established who Dave Sim was? And this is what this page is made up of. I skipped one last time, because when I looking at that one, I was going, man! I don’t know if I can even explain that. Like, this is just a shorthand note to myself. So not having had much warning last month that I would be asked to discuss this, I thought, well, let’s give it another month and see if it gets any easier to explain, and guess what? No it doesn’t! But, at least I’ve had a month to wrestle with it. So it’s basically, “Christmas present cardboard boxes. Dad hits me, Mum takes his side.” What happened was my father worked in New Hamburg at a place called Hahn Brass. Hahn Brass had this antique filing cabinet in the basement, as I recall, it was in the basement just sort of there and at some point my Dad said, “I’d be interested in that.” I forget whether it was just, “oh yeah, we never use it. It’s an antique. We have modern filing cabinets now. So if you wanna just take it away, take it away” or if my Dad said, “you know, I’ll give you $50 for it, $25 for it” or whatever. Anyway, it got straightened out, and yes they did let him take the antique filing cabinet. Which consisted of two levels of three filing cabinet drawers all in wood, like I say it was an antique, but definitely a filing cabinet. Sort of, ya know, the handle that you pull out and the door of the drawer is the full size, and inside it’s half size, just like modern filing cabinets but a precursor of it. And then there was also a top layer that was flat file, two rows of flat file. I would guess maybe eight or nine of these flat files on each side and the same height as the filing cabinet drawers. And on top of that a finished wood top with a sheet of plate glass on top of it. So this arrived at the house, I’m pretty sure my Dad had to get somebody to give him help with it, like it wasn’t gonna fit in the car that he had at the time. So it was brought downstairs and it was like the antique bottom piece, which was the legs, and the file drawer on top of that, file drawer on top of that, the flat files on top of that, the [laughs] ornate top with the sheet of plate glass. I don’t know if you’re all still with me, but if you’re all still with me… anyway, so that was put in the basement in the section of the basement where I had my comic books. And I basically put comic books in it. The file drawers were… you couldn’t stack up too many comic books in them. You couldn’t stack them up to the top of the file drawer front, but you could stack them up as high as the half sides that filing cabinets have. I put smaller collections of comics in it, because, like I say, I couldn’t put all of my “Action Comics” in there, because I probably had 100, 150 of those, and it would just be too tall. To understand where this is going, you have to remember that this was pre-backing board. We had plastic bags through Robert Bell that actually fit comic books, but they were pretty expensive, like $3 for 100. So you’d only put your best comic books in those, the rest of the time we’d just use baggies, plastic roll bags and put the comic book in it, fold the plastic bag over the back and tape it on the back. And that’s what most of us used for our comic books, because that was a lot cheaper than buying Robert Bell’s plastic bags. So most of my comic book collection was not bagged in the sense that we know now, and not even bagged in the sense that we knew then. They were just loose comic books. But these file drawers worked pretty good for that, for my… Golden Age books that didn’t fit in any collection, I had like “Captain Marvel Adventures” #62, “Marvel Mystery” #31. Obviously, those are the ones that I had of those. “Marvel Family” #22 [sneezes] excuse me. So, that worked okay. That was really good, and it was actually a very nice thing to put comic books in. I don’t remember my father ever taking an interest in comic books. Like, I would show him an old comic book, if I got in “Marvel Mystery” #31, I would show it to him, because it was sort of his time period, but not really his time period. And of course, I found out later on that there was the embargo on comic books in the 1940s over World War II. So, although my father remembered having “Human Torch Comics, “Captain America”, “Superman”, “Batman”, whatever else, he could only have had those up until 1939, 1940, when they were embargoed. So there was a bit of a disconnect there of, okay my Dad’s remembering something that he’s not actually remembering. He would’ve been 10 years old when the embargo happened, so whatever he remembered of “Superman” and “Batman” and stuff like that, was pretty much just 1938, 1939. So, at some point, there was this Christmas present, where my Dad bought cardboard file boxes. Which were, I would guess, a foot and a half by a foot and a half file drawer and then in a cardboard sleeve. And he bought like six of these, and the idea was, that I would put my comic books in those and it was like, uhh well that’s not really going to work. They’re 3 feet deep, which made it look as if I could put my entire comic book collection in there, but that would require putting them in sideways and spine up and interior pages down. And like I say, most of my collection wasn’t in plastic bags. So it’s like, already having learned, no, condition when it comes to comic books is important. That was something that I didn’t know, but it was something that I was learning in the early 1970s. It’s like, no, I can’t stack them sideways, because that will damage the comic books. And it was weird having this conversation with my Dad, because like I say, he sort of had this grudging acceptance of his son being interested in comic books. Which links to a weird conversation that I remember having with my mother at some point, about my father’s antipathy towards comic books, and her saying something along the lines of, “well, you know, imagine if you were interested in green glass bottles.” And to this day, I really don’t understand what sort of point she was making. What my response was, and I don’t know how eloquent I was on the subject, was, well I would think if I had a son and he was interested in green glass bottles, I would have some level of interest in green glass bottles because he’s my son. Even if I had to fake the interest, it’s like, you… as parents. [laughs] And I’m sitting here going, why am I having to explain this to my mother. As parents, aren’t you sort of obligated to have some interest in your children’s interests? So, that’s kind of a digression away from it. But anyway, so I’m having this weird conversation with my Dad. Like he’s thinking he’s meeting me more than halfway by actually going out and buying me a Christmas present that will house my comic books. Well, okay, this is why that’s not going to work. I mean, I know you don’t follow any of this and we’ve never conversed about this, because you don’t want to converse with your son about comic books, but condition is very important and if I stack them sideways that’s going to damage the condition. And this put him into a kind of fine rage of, he’s meeting me more than halfway, buying me a Christmas present to house my comic books, which later I picked up on the fact he wanted the comic books out of this antique file cabinet that he wanted to use for something else, not for comic books, sort of thing. Which, if he had explained that to me, I would have said, well, okay, yeah, I’ll be happy to have a replacement of this, but these three foot deep, foot and a half by foot and a half, cardboard file drawers are not going to work. Because I’ll just be able to put like one small stack in the front of them, and as soon as I pull it open, it’s made out of cardboard, the whole thing tilts forward and it’s gonna spill out. The more I tried to explain why this wasn’t going to work, the more he was taking it as, I’m not appreciating this Christmas present that he’s buying for me for my comic books, and I’m telling him that he doesn’t understand things about comic books that makes this not a good or workable Christmas present. And he was getting far more worked up than I was aware of, and was, like, he had this wad of comic books in his hand that he was using to demonstrate how I was going to put them into these cardboard file drawers, ya know, stacked sideways. It’s like he was crushing them in his hand, and at the same time that I’m explaining to him about how condition in comic books is important, so I said to him, could you not like crush the comic books like that? And he just took the wad of comic books and smashed me upside the head, multiple times. Like I have to say, I am an advocate of corporal punishment. One upside the head from your Dad, I got that. Not frequently, but that was the signal that you had gone too far in some direction and whatever it is that you were doing, you would stop doing. And I’m a big advocate of that. But like I say, this was like hitting me multiple times until I dropped to the floor, at which point he kicked me. And it was like, okay, this was just way, way, way over the edge, and that was pretty much it for me and my parents. It was like, my mother was there I guess, supposed to be participating in this “discussion” and definitely gave me a withering look as my father stomped off, and she stomped off, which I understood. It was the look that said, “you‘ve upset your father. And it’s like, we don’t do that. You don’t upset your father under any circumstances because I have to live with that.”My Sister and my mother and I could be having a screaming argument at 5 o’clock at night after school, and as soon as you heard the car pulling up in the driveway, mutual agreement, everybody stops argument, everybody just calms down, everything is fine, because you don’t want to upset your father. So, the reason that that’s on the list, is that was a break point for me when I went, not only do I not love these people, I don’t really even like these people, my father and my mother. I’ve been pretending that I do and trying to have the appearance of a dutiful loving son, but at that point I was going, why am I doing this? Why am I pretending to feel something that I don’t feel? [laughs] The only thing that I was interested in remotely, at 282 Westmount Road East, former 282 Filsinger Road, in Kitchener, Ontario, was that section of the basement, that one quarter of the basement that had my comic books and the comic books in them. The comic books were good, the comic books I was interested in, the comic books I dearly loved, everything else was just, well I have to keep my comic books somewhere. I was fully aware of the fact, if my parents were in a car accident and both of them were killed, and whoever I would end up living with, probably either my Uncle Cliff and Aunt Veronica, or my Uncle Vic and Aunt Marilyn, my only concern was, where were my comic books going to go? I would be happy to go and live anywhere, as long as I have room for my comic books. Anybody doesn’t have room for my comic books, I don’t wanna live there. So, it was a real break point in terms of, I stopped pretending that I loved these people that I didn’t love. It’s like, I will portray being a responsible child, and I was a responsible child, I didn’t cause my parents any great amount of grief as a lot of children were doing who were in high school in the late 1960s, early 1970s. But that was just portrayal. The clock is ticking and as soon as I am out of here, that is gonna be it for me and these people. And that’s really how my life was after that. Once I had moved out, there was an expectation that I would have dinner with them. And it was, okay, how infrequently can I have dinner with you? And worked out to about a month I would get a phone call after about three weeks or so, “well, we haven’t see you for a long time. We gotta have dinner.” Well, okay, we’ll do that. But there was no circumstance where I ever went, gosh I can’t wait to see my parents. That’s one of those, I’m sure there are many people who had the experience that I did, but unfortunately for people like us, it’s a very very difficult world where people just go, “well of course everyone loves their parents.” It’s like, no. I didn’t hate my parents. I didn’t love my parents, and I didn’t like my parents. I just had absolutely no response to them. I finally broke with them in 2003 and went, that’s it. I’m just not doing this anymore. You people have a happy life, but I just can’t do this anymore. And they both died within a few months of each other in 2006, and my Aunt phoned me to say, “your mother died”. It’s like, oh okay, thank you for phoning and telling me that. And then a few months later, “your father’s dead.” Okay, thanks for telling me that. I had absolutely no reaction, zero reaction at all. I mean, I have memories of them. I quote my Dad a lot, he had a real memory for funny lines, but they weren’t his funny lines, it’s just he would hear a funny line somewhere from other guys and he would never forget it. They’re good funny lines, so I always use them.
Matt: Right.
Dave: So that’s that story. Do you have any questions, me having gone all that distance?
Matt: One of my thoughts when you were telling the story, when you were saying, ya know, if your parents had died, your biggest concern would be, “what happens to my comic books?”, was the either Richard George or Harrison Starkey line of, “it speaks of an obsession that borders on the pathological”. And I’m going, well, yeah, that sounds about right!
Dave: Yeah!
Matt: When I was a kid growing up, my Dad subscribed to “Amazing Spider-Man”, “Incredible Hulk”, and “Star Wars” for my brother and I, cause Marvel was doing, subscribe to two get one free. And for a year, we got comics in the mail. And so we had a stack of 36 comics, and we kept them in a shoebox, because, you know, you’re a little kid and these are important to me, I want to make sure they’re around. You’re not just gonna leave them sprawled all over the room, when you’re done reading them, you put them back in the shoebox. And it’s like, one of those, I could totally see, if my Dad had said “hey, you know, I got this nice file cabinet, you guys can, you know”. My brother and I, if we had took it over and he said, “hey I want it back”, it would’ve been, well what’re we gonna do? And if he said, “here, well try this” it’d be, well that’s not gonna work Dad, cause of exactly what you said. And I can see that my Dad probably would’ve been more understanding, but at the same time, I think there would’ve been a, “it’s my file cabinet, get your crap out of it.”
Dave: Right, right. Which… go ahead, finish your thought.
Matt: It’s one of those, I mean, like my Dad was in the Navy and he had a bunch of blue work shirts. They’re not uniform shirts, but it’s what he would wear when he was on the sub.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And, when I was in high school, I found them and I was wearing them. But I’m broader shouldered than my Dad was, so like I’m wearing them one day and the elbow ripped, and I’m like, ohh, I’m a dead man. And someone says why, well this is my Dad’s shirt and he doesn’t know I’m wearing it cause he’s in California and I’m in Wisconsin. But it’s like, I gotta find a way of fixing this, type thing. He never asked about it, and there was only one shirt that he liked and that one he got and went, “oh it’s ripped” and I’m like, yeah I did that, sorry. And he kinda gave me a look, but at the same time, it was one of those, “okay, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: But it’s one of those, every kid goes, oh yeah, my parents things are my things, until they discover that no, your parents’ things are your parents’ things.
Dave: Right. Like, there’s ancillary parts of the story. My Uncle Vic, who was the golden child of the family, my Dad’s older brother, was visiting, which he did very infrequently, and I don’t think my Dad ever figured out the fact that his older brother didn’t like him very much. Mostly because my Dad had a very condescending attitude toward my Aunt Marilyn. I mean, she marched to a different drummer, but he definitely condescended to her and my Uncle Vic, I think, definitely thought, “well Marilyn’s three times the person you are, don’t condescend to her”, but also knew, again, you don’t cross my father. Anyway, one of these infrequent visits from Uncle Vic, the subject of my comic books came up and my Uncle Vic said, “Can I see your comic book collection?” Again, like the way an Uncle would be. “I don’t see my nephew very often, this is what he’s interested in, can I see them?” and it’s like, uh yeah! Okay. And brought him downstairs and pulled out from the filing cabinet, and each of the file drawers, and I remember showing him “Captain Marvel” #62, and “Marvel Family” #22, and then, having given him the grand tour for however long that took, probably 20 minutes or a half an hour, we come back upstairs, and he goes, “well that’s amazing.” And my Dad goes, “yeah, isn’t it?” [laughs] And it’s like, what do you mean isn’t it? You don’t think it’s amazing, you think it’s deplorable, but because Vic thinks it’s amazing, you’ll probably that you think it’s amazing in front of Vic. It’s like, I can’t deal with you. I have no idea how things roll around in your head, but man oh man, there’s just no meeting place with you. I tried to figure him out in a number of different ways. His own father died when he was like 7, so he really had no background in having a father. He had a stepfather, my grandpa David, who was my grandmother’s second husband. But that’s a very different thing. Like, how you deal with a stepfather is very different from how you deal with a father. So, there ya go. That’s like [laugh] half an hour trying to explain, what, barely more than a line in this notebook.
Matt: Yeah, but Margaret’s gonna appreciate it. She’s gonna listen to this in her car on her way to work, going, “you’re kidding me! You’re kidding me!”
Dave: Well, this is the thing. I think if we have notebook 21 page 172 and somebody transcribes everything that Dave Sim has to say about this one page in his notebooks, it would be like, let’s hope that this is the only notebook page in that category so we never never never have to do this again. And having said that, now I have to go onto the next one, which was the the “pedophilia, 1969, 1970, 1971”…
Matt: We covered that last time.
Dave: Yeah, we got most of that done, but as always happens to me with my long-winded laborious explanation, just when I get to the point of it, that’s it, I’m done. I laid all of the groundwork. So, recapping and we can maybe just have a link so that people can back and hear all of the lead-in to this. The impact of it was, I’d written on the page, “Steven Dick, Craig Dawson, legal obligation” was the point, that Steven Dick, having had these two girls that he was babysitting say, “our Dad has really big penis, how big is your penis?” and him just being like embarrassed but finding this really really funny and just changed the subject, and me going, that sounds like it might be something other than just something that’s funny and a little bit embarrassing. There’s possible legal culpability here. Also, I just backed off and went, well, what am I going to do about this? I can’t really say to Steven, you should probably report this, like who would you report it to? His parents are nice Baptist people, they’re not apt to be having this conversation even with Steven, let alone with the neighbor, let alone with the police. So I backed off, even though I went, there’s probably a legal obligation here on my part, just because he told me this. But I seem to have talked myself into not doing anything about it, so, maybe I’m doing the wrong thing, maybe I’m doing the right. I don’t really know. This was why, when the situation came up with Craig Dawson, almost immediately afterward, and I have this confused thing of, I can picture Steve Dick in 1969 when I was grade 9, and I can picture Craig Dawson in 1971 when I would have been 15, having the conversation we had with him having sex with someone older than him. A woman past the age of majority. So I got this weird disconnect of going, could I have had that conversation with Craig Dawson when he was 13 or 14? Because, again, the legal obligation entered into it of going, he can’t legally have sex with a woman who’s passed her age of majority. And my primary reaction was, again, jealousy. It was, why can I find a housewife or a schoolteacher or whoever it was, who’ll have sex with me? And thinking, well, are these two different things? The situation with Steve Dick was in because of these little girls, and the situation Craig Dawson was in, because it was an older woman and he was an underage boy. Is that still pedophilic molestation? And it’s like, at the time, I was going, no that’s just a little girl thing. If it’s a little boy, it’s like, lucky little boy. A woman decided to have sex with you. Now we know that that isn’t the case, and usually we find out that it’s a schoolteacher who had sex with one of her male students that she got the hots for and yes, if she’s convicted of that then she goes to jail, because it is statutory rape. An underage boy can’t give permission anymore than an underage girl can, and you’re not supposed to have sex with a student because of the position of authority. So, it had a real impact on me that the Craig Dawson situation happened just after the Steven Dick situation, and I went, okay, it would be reasonably easy to look up Dawson in the Kitchener phone directory and look at, okay, how many Dawsons are on a street that feeds into Forest Heights Collegiate and phone and say, ya know, can I speak to Mr Dawson? Speak to Mr Dawson and say, I don’t want to tell you who I am, because, I think Craig would beat the crap out of me for telling you this, but he told me he had sex with a woman past her age of majority, and I think you probably have to look into that. And then hang up. On the assumption, again, that there’s no way that the call could be traced. But then, thinking about that, it was like, okay, I’m throwing a hand grenade into someone else’s environment. Assuming that his Dad takes a dim view of this, and wants Craig to explain it, and Craig doesn’t know who said this, then Craig’s in the nutcracker of having to identify whoever the woman was and then is her life being ruined? And at what point is there a real legal obligation there? And this sort of links up with, the reason that this was so important to me, was because it was, okay, in both those instances, I didn’t do anything, and legally, in terms of if you hear about a crime or a potential crime, you’re supposed to report it. Not having done that, what’s my personal legal culpability? And in all my experiences since then, it’s been guys always have to make those choices with other guys. That guys tell other guys about things that they did that are illegal, and it’s like, well okay that’s up to you. That’s got nothing to do with me. Which again, technically it does. If somebody tells you about a crime, then you’re supposed to identify it. And again, I just couldn’t get my brain wrapped around the fact that there could be anything wrong with having sex when you were a 13 or 14 year old boy, if you could find a woman willing to have sex with you. But then a Cerebus fan, year and years and years later, told me that he was in that situation where he got seduced by an older woman when he was 13 or 14 years old, and said that it was an extremely traumatic event in his life and he still isn’t over it, and he never will be over it. And I thought, okay, I have trouble picturing that, but I also realize fornication and adultery, carnal knowledge, are, to the extent that they just look like entertainment, usually pack a much bigger metaphysical wallop than that, and that’s what I’m not recognizing was, it wouldn’t just be a matter of 20 minutes of having sex with this woman. There’s all kinds of implications that go into that that you’re not aware of. When you do it, you will find out how bad the repercussion are, but you won’t find out unless you do it. And not being religious at the time, it was just, no, I’m not really getting this. Even though it’s illegal, I hope that some woman will do this illegal thing with me, because I don’t want to die a virgin. It’s like, there’s a number of years in the male life in the teenage years where you’re thinking, I really don’t wanna die a virgin. I’m not seeing any potential of me ever getting laid at any point in the future. So, there you go on that one. I’m hoping this will, at long last, bring an end to notebook 21, page 172.
Matt: [laughs] Hope springs eternal, right?
Dave: [laughs] It’s got to, at that! It’s got to. Okay, I don’t know if you’ve gotten an email from Roly today. Jeff Seiler left a phone message question, and I thought, hey, let’s see if this works. It’s recorded on my voicemail, so I’ll do exactly what I do with the Weekly Updates when I play a phone message. I’ll record it onto the memory stick, give it to Roly, have him email it to Matt Dow, and if this works, now you will hear Jeff Seiler’s phone message question. The first ever audio question on “Please Hold for Dave Sim”. If, on the other hand, it just becomes a complete pain in the butt for Matt, and he goes, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to put this sound in here.” I will paraphrase Jeff Seiler’s phone message question.
Jeff Seiler: Hi Dave, it’s Jeff. Just calling on Thanksgiving evening, and I gotta tell ya, as I was cooking my turkey and sweet potatoes and some other stuff, I watched the new Marvel movie, “New Mutants”. Most recent one to come out on disc. And I know that you know Bill Sienkiewicz and I think you know Chris Claremont who were the primary creators of the book, I think Bob McLeod worked on it too. But I gotta say, watching the movie, which is, kinda sort of, almost but not really, sucks. It’s not horrible. Certainly nowhere near one of the best Marvel movies, but I gotta say, both Claremont and Sienkiewicz, back on “New Mutants”, that was some pretty out there stuff. So I was just wondering if you had any insights into what they were trying to do. I mean, it’s pretty clear from the movie and remembering the books that they were into a lot of stuff about good vs evil. Ya know, God vs ungodly. But if you had any insights that you wanted to add to that, on the sort of not really inside but not outside looking in, just sort of at the edges looking in. If you know what they were trying to get across, and I thought it might be a good thing for you to talk about in your next installment of, you know, phone call to Dave Sim in December. Sorry, I got the burps. So, there’s that. Like I say, it’s not a terrible movie, it’s not a great movie, it’s just sort of in between, but I think kind of sort of is faithful to the books. So, there you go. Anyway, happy American Thanksgiving to you. Which, I know for you is another work day and I will talk to you when I talk to you. Take care. Hope you’re well, and be well. Goodnight.
[end of message. To delete this message press 7, to reply to it…]
Dave: …which Jeff left on American Thanksgiving. I count myself very fortunate that I probably get wished a happy American Thanksgiving more than [laughs] any Canadian on the planet, because everybody’s going, “wow, Dave isn’t having turkey or anything to do because it isn’t Thanksgiving in Canada. They already had Thanksgiving in Canada.” So anyway, Jeff Seiler left a message on Thanksgiving, and one of the things he was doing on Thanksgiving was watching the “New Mutants” film. Have you seen the “New Mutants” film?
Matt: I have not.
Dave: No? Okay. This is like the most recent one that’s out on DVD or streaming or whatever, right?
Matt: Yeah. It’s the latest X-Men movie, possibly the last X-Men movie before they relaunch the X-Men as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and that’s where everybody’s eyes start to glaze over if they’re not really into the X-Men.
Dave: [laughs] Because it’s like, what do you mean? It’s not really the X-Men because there’s another… yes, yes. I remember my eyes glazing over when I read about it in the National Post, where Chris Knight was trying to explain this and his eyes were glazing over because he’s not really concerned. Anyway, so what Jeff was saying, was he saw it and it wasn’t the worst Marvel Comics movie ever, it wasn’t the best Marvel Comics movie ever. It had some good stuff in it, and some not so good stuff in it, but what he was asking was, “you know Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, what do you think they were doing in ‘The New Mutants’.” Okay, so you’ll either gonna chop all of that out and just put Jeff’s phone message, so we’ll just pick it up as if I’m answering. Okay! I would qualify that as, I knew Bill Sienkiewicz and Chris Claremont. They’re definitely both in the, I’m pretty sure, “Dave who?” category, where as soon as I stopped being a politically correct progressive, I ceased to exist for them for all intents and purposes. That having been said, I did look up in the Overstreet Price Guide that Bill drew “The New Mutants”, Chris Claremont writing, from issue 18 to 31. So, it’s about a year and an issue that they worked together on the title. I don’t think that I read “New Mutants”, I didn’t read “New Mutants”, I didn’t read the “X-Men” even when I was getting them free from Marvel Comics. Just, it wasn’t my kind of thing. Chris Claremont was the original inversionist feminist in the comic book field, with his, “is there any reason that this character can’t be a woman?” To which John Byrne, as far as I know, answered, “gee, no, Chris, apart from the fact that the character’s been a male for the last 30 years, I can’t see a single reason why the character couldn’t be a female” and that having been considered sarcasm at the time, now of course we’re in a time period where it’s a rare superhero that doesn’t have that happen to them. “Is there any reason we can’t turn this superhero into a woman? Or is there any reason that we can’t replace this superhero? Replace Iron Man with a female Iron Man?” The fact that everybody went along with this when Chris Claremont got the ball rolling, well, here we are now. This is what it leads to, I warned you about all this 25 years ago, and everybody just decided I was a misogynist. There you go. [laughs] I really don’t know how to amplify this. So I know that Chris and Bill would have been working Marvel style, which is Chris giving Bill a plot outline for the issue and saying, “this happen and then this happens and then this happens and then this happens.” And Bill drawing it, and then penciling it, and then sending it to Chris, and Chris putting all the dialogue and captions in, and then Bill inking it. We know now from what Frank Miller had to say about working on “Elektra: Assassin” and what Neil Gaiman had to say about working with Bill on one of the “Sandman” stories, that Bill definitely goes his own way with the stories that he’s working on. And whatever you told him to draw, he’s probably not going to draw that. He will draw something else. I don’t know if that goes as back as far as “New Mutants”. As far as I know, “New Mutants” was the book that he got onto after he stopped working regularly on “Moon Knight”, which, I think he did almost two years from #1 to 21 and I think he missed an issue that Denys Cowen drew, and then another couple of issues, and then somebody else did a fill in, and I think, essentially was he did, was he jumped to “New Mutants” because it was a much bigger payday. Everything Chris Claremont touched turned to gold, from the time that he started writing the “X-Men”, and getting onto a book that Chris Claremont was writing that had mutants in it, was, you were going to get really nice royalty checks out of that. So, because this is Jeff Seiler, because Jeff Seiler brought this up and was curious about it to want to know, what did I think Chris and Bill Sienkiewicz were doing on “New Mutants”? I’m going to make the offer, that if there’s a collection out there of the Chris Claremont/ Bill Sienkiewicz “New Mutants”, which would make sense to me [laughs]. I’m not running Marvel Comics and I have no idea what the cache of Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz is at this late date, but if there’s a collection, or if somebody can find reading copies of 18 through 31 on eBay for a reasonable price, either Jeff or someone else. And if somebody wants to get me an MP3, illegal or legal downloaded copy of the “New Mutants” film, I will make an exception in this case, and I will read the 13 issues and I will watch the film, and I will tell you exactly what I think of it. First of all, what I think Bill and Chris were doing in the comic book, and second of all, what they turned that into in the movie. So, there you go. That’s as thorough as I can be. Have you checked your email, do you know if you got it?
Matt: I got the email from Roly and there was a video file but my phone wouldn’t play it. But that’s my phone. It’s probably one of these, when I open it on my desktop computer, it’s probably gonna work just fine.
Dave: Okay. Cause sometimes you need an adapter. Like, these memory cards that I record onto are Sony, which are like propritary software that don’t really work with anything else, but you can buy an adapter. And it’s like, we don’t have time for that! [laughs] “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, Matt wants it done by Saturday at the latest, so if it gets to that point, ehh, forget it.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: You can figure it out if this ever comes up again.
Matt: The weird thing is, I owned two issues of “New Mutants” in my life, at one point. It was one of those, ya know, you buy a three pack of Marvel Comics and it’s random issues. It was like, there was two issues I wanted, and this issue of “New Mutants” and the “New Mutants” didn’t get added to my collection. It was sitting in a pile of crap in my Mom’s house when I was growing up there. It was one of those, I remember when we were moving, I found it and went, I don’t know if I threw it in with my comics, or if I went, ehh, this can go to St Vinnie’s. But I’m pretty sure the two issues I owned were 18 and 31.
Dave: Really?
Matt: I had two Sienkiewicz issues, or I owned one and my brother owned one, possibly. But 18 and 31 sound, like 18 I think I might have owned, and 31 sounds like another number where I’m like, either I owned that or my brother owned that one.
Dave: I did notice that it’s credited in the Overstreet Guide as the first appearance of the new Warlock. [laughs] And it’s like I’m going, okay, well we’re off to a running start with the monotheist having to address the debut of, not only is Marvel happy with just having one Warlock, this was the new Warlock, and I found it very gratifying that further down in the “New Mutants” listing, when I got to issue 95, it was the death of the new Warlock. And it’s like, well, okay, problem solved. Possibly, depending on where the new Warlock went from there.
Matt: They brought him back, cause they bring everybody back.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: One of the original New Mutants, and he’s one of my favorite Chris Claremont characters, cause it was Chris Claremont with “New Mutants” doing, “I’m gonna do the X-Men” and so these are young teens that are mutants with powers. Xavier’s gonna train them as the new generation of X-Men. And there’s Cannonball, who basically his legs turn into a cannon burst and he can fly, I’m trying to think who else was on the team. They were all, ya know, fairly cool, young teen hot mutants. And then there was Cypher, who had the mutant ability to read and speak any language. The most useless super power that anyone can think of.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And he died! Fairly quickly! [laughs]
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: They were out on a mission, and the ability to speak French did not save him from whatever killed him. And eventually he gets brought back, mixed in with Warlock and becomes a character called Douglock, because Cypher’s real name was Doug Ramsay, and the new Warlock is a techno-organic alien that, he’s not a machine but he’s not alive, he’s both, and they poured his dead techno-organic body on Doug’s grave, and it seeped down into the casket and they merged together and came back. Because, again, they all come back.
Dave: You just made all that up!
Matt: No, I did not. My encylopedic…
Dave: That actually exists. That’s okay. Alright.
Matt: No, no, no, the best part is, Dave, I own the action figure of Douglock!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: They came out with a New Mutants toy line that had three or four of the characters, and it was late 90s, early 2000s when Matt has more money than brains, and it was like, ahh the New Mutants figures, I’ll buy these! And I open them up, and I’m like, this is the stupidest toy in the world.
Dave: [laughs] Well, I appreciate you being able to admit that at this late date that there were better uses for the money. It always reminds me of the Legion of Substitute Heroes that they introduced in “Legion of Super-Heroes”, the ones that their super powers just weren’t quite up to Legion of Superheroes standards. And somebody did a cartoon in the fanzine, “Legion Outpost”, which was the Legion of Substitute Heroes, and their new candidate, going, “I’m sorry, Arm Fall Off Boy, your power is just too weird even for us.” But that was his super power, his arm would fall off.
Matt: I swear he’s come back a couple of times.
Dave: [laughs] No doubt. No doubt.
Matt: I’m trying to, I can’t remember what his name is, one of the Legion guys, he had the ability to turn into metal, but he was immobile, and it’s a completely useless power, until the issue where he’s helping the Legion and he turns into metal and they push him out of a spaceship and he falls on the villain and that’s how they save the day.
Dave: Da-da-dah! Again, you’re just making this up. You’re just messing with the old man here.
Matt: No, I’m not. I can’t remember… Immobile Lad? I’m trying to remember what his name is…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: He’s a real Legion of Substitute… cause, one of things with the Legion of Substitute Heroes was that, if I remember correctly, it was all fan submissions. A lot of them were fan submissions of, ya know, you’re a huge Legion fan…
Dave: Oh, I forgot that part! Yes
Matt: Here would be the Legion character you would add if you could write it, and of course, it’s Matter Eater Lad. He can eat anything.
Dave: Right, right, yes.
Matt: And then what?
Dave: [laughs] And he actually made it into the Legion. I remember Matter Eater Lad chewing his way through mountains and stuff like that. Yeah, I had forgotten that. They used to fill up the letters page in the “Legion of Super-Heroes” with best suggestions for future Legion of Super-Heroes, because it was a legion at that point, because when it started it was only three of them. But by the time they got rocking and rolling, they needed a much bigger clubhouse than the little rocketship standing on its nosecone. Okay, we’ve got… I thought this was funny when you wrote about Margaret, “She’s got other illustrated AV questions. ‘no hockey makes Margaret go crazy’. Instead of going to see the Bruins, she’s organizing her Cerebus collection.” Well, if you’re asking me personally, that’s a much better use of Margaret’s time.
Matt: What happened is, she’s posting all this stuff in the Cerebus Facebook group because she’s going through the collection, and one of them was, “going through the collection, part 1975”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And she’s like, “hey, Ron, can you ask Dave?” and I’m going, you sure want a lot. And she’s like, “well, I can’t go to hockey, I’m gonna go through the collection and I’m gonna have questions.” Well, I can’t argue the point.
Dave: No. No, you could try but it’s not gonna get you anywhere. She calls you Ron? Where’s the Ron come from?
Matt: Okay. The secret origin of Ron Essler.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: This is one of those stories, it’s kinda like your box story, it’s got a little bit of backstory to it, so I’ll make it quick. Years ago, when I was living at my Mom’s house cause I was a kid, when I was growing up, there was a liquor store next door and the liquor store went out of business. And then, the Society of St Vincent de Paul bought it and turned it into their store. The way it worked is the delivery answer to the liquor store was now their drop off where you could drop stuff off that you were donating to the society of St. Vinnie.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Living next door, I’d get off the bus, and I’d have to walk past them. One day, I walked past and there was this table and it’s like the kind of desk table that they have in kindergarten? You know, it’s maybe 3 foot by 2 feet? Just a little rectangular table
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it looked like a really, really skeevy 70s bachelor apartment coffee table, is the best way I can describe it. And that’s with me going, I can put this up in the clubhouse I have in the attic where I hang out with my friends and we’ll have a little table that we can use.
Dave: We’re kind of into skeevy!
Matt: To be fair, my attic had 1970s wood paneling up in it, so it totally fit the decor of the room.
Dave: Totally!
Matt: So, I bought it for $1.50. Brought it up in the attic, and my friends and I were hanging out, and we’re just goofing around, and for some reason, I was laying on the floor, and written on the bottom of the table was, scribbles from a little kid and stuff, and this kid, Ron Essler, had written his name twice. So we’re goofing around, drawing on the bottom of the table, cause it’s my table, I paid for it, I can do whatever I want with it. And one of my friends wrote, “Ron Essler is a giant dork”. And on the other Ron Essler before they could do whatever they were gonna put, I put “Ron Essler is a fine, upstanding American citizen who is gay. If you’d like to hook up with Ron, and you’re gay, please leave your name and number” and put a bunch of a lines, then of course, my friends started writing guys that we don’t like, that we think are gay, we’re writing their names.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I completely forgot about it. It’s one of those, we did it and okay whatever.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Years later, I was playing this computer game on my tablet and it was a really stupid game, but it was one of those, it was the beginning of tablet games where, you’re not going to win this. There’s no goal to it, you’re just… the best example is FarmVille. You make a digital farm, and you’re playing this game where you have a farm and you have animals and you have to rescue the animals from disasters, and yadda. And you can’t win the game. You’re going to play this until you die, or until you get a life, one or the other. So the game I was playing was called “My Singing Monsters”, where you make a little monster, and it makes a noise, and there’s other monsters who make other noises, and when you get them together they sing a song. And you get…
Dave: Now that part, you’re making up. I gotta get used to this. Matt’s never making up stuff but just…
Matt: It sounds stupid, and the game itself, it was one of these… I don’t even know why I downloaded it, but I started playing it and I’m like, okay, you know. The monsters were kind of cute. I think Janis was old enough that I was letting her look at it and she thought it was neat.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I’m playing this game, and there was a Facebook button, and part of the game, once a game, you can get a diamond, and you use the diamonds to speed stuff up and the more diamonds you have, the better, but you can only get one a day, so if you use it, you have to wait 24 hours. Well, there’s a Facebook button, and if you press the button, you get another diamond. And I’m like, I want a free diamond, so I press the button, and it’s “share on Facebook that you’re playing this stupid game”, well I didn’t have a Facebook account.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I’m like, alright, I’m not going to do this. And it locked the game up, and you couldn’t do anything in the game until you registered your Facebook account.
Dave: Of course!
Matt: I was so mad! Because years earlier I had tried to make a Facebook for Janis and a stuffed zebra that the way that they made it, it had very angry eyebrows, and I called him Henry the Pissed Off Zebra, and I wanted to make him a Facebook page, because I thought it was funny. Facebook told me the name “Henry Zebra” seemed made up and they weren’t going to let me make a Facebook page.
Dave: That Mark Zuckerberg, he’s just such a killjoy.
Matt: So I ended up making one for myself and getting annoyed and sending them a very nasty, very profane letter saying “please delete my account, because I effin hate you” type thing.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So, I’m stuck having to make this Facebook account, and I’m like, I need a name, I’m not using my name. I’m like, Ron Essler! He’s a fine, upstanding American citizen! [laughs]
Dave: Who’s gay! [laughs]
Matt: Well, well… so I made the profile and it’s “describe yourself so people can find you” and I put, “Ron Essler is a fine upstanding American citizen who’s on Facebook.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it was a secret. Like, if you knew me, and you knew about Ron, you could send me a request and I would accept it, and I kept it on the downlow, no pictures of me. My first profile picture was the picture Steven King used on the Richard Bachman books.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, alright.
Matt: It was very much a… also, when I made the account, what’s your name, and they had gender, and it was “male, female, no answer” and I clicked “no answer” and it wouldn’t accept it, and I got really mad so I clicked “female”.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So, after about six months I decided to come out and be like, okay, I will admit to the world, Matt Dow is Ron Essler on Facebook. So, you know, tell my Dad, tell my brother… and I added Paula as a friend and all this stuff. But of course, as my father constantly complains to me, is that he keeps forgetting I’m a, as he says, “you’re a little asshole sometimes and I keep forgetting that” and I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, “well I keep getting notifications, ‘Ron Essler has updated her status’ and I’m like, who the hell is this bitch? Oh wait, that’s my son!”
Dave: [laughs] ”Ron Essler, she’s my boy!”
Matt: Well, after I, “came out” on Facebook that I am me, I’m going through and it’s, “how do you know this person”, you put that you’re related, your brother, sister, cousin, whatever. So for my brother, I put that he was my pet.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because, this is what I’m doing. So when I joined the Cerebus Facebook group, ya know, it was one of these, “Margaret, Ron is Matt, just so you know”. So, of course, whenever she tags me, it says Ron.
Dave: Okay. [laughs] Alright.
Matt: Usually, if I’m quoting from Facebook, I change it to my name or else I just delete the Ron part, but yeah, everybody always goes, “well what’s with Ron Essler?” and I’m, well you have to ask me on Facebook or I won’t tell you, and they’re like, “why not?” and I’m like, because it’s a really funny story but I’m only going to tell it once!
Dave: Right. I can understand that. Well, thank you., I hope you didn’t leave anything out of that.
Matt: Ah, no, that’s pretty much it. I needed a fake name and okay what fake name do I got that no one can track back to me? There’s only five guys that know about Ron Essler.
Dave: Man. Matt Dow disguised as a fine, upstanding American citizens. [laughs] Female! Fine, upstanding female American citizen.
Matt: When I finally came out, I put a picture of myself. I took a picture of me wearing a black shirt and I put a caption on the picture that says, “if Facebook asks, my name is Ron. Also, I’m a girl.”
Dave: Okay. See, I had to ask and shouldn’t known, if Margaret’s calling Matt “Ron”, there’s gotta be a story behind this of some kind. Okay, getting to Margaret’s [laughs] actual question. “Could you add to your list o’things to ask Dave about. How did people obtain this certificate?” and it says, “Official ‘Swords of Cerebus Supplement’ voucher. Company Name:. I purchased a copy of ‘Swords of Cerebus’ #6. You own me a copy of the ‘Swords of Cerebus Supplement’. I understand that the supplement is free and contains issues 25 of ‘Cerebus’. The supplement is due to arrive at your store in early December and I can present this voucher for my copy.” I think what happened with that was, we had a number of distributors at the time. There was more than just Diamond Comics Distributors at the time of “Swords” Vol 6, and we notified them that this was going to be happening. And as far as I know, all of the distributors or virtually all of the distributors just said, “yeah that’s fine, we’ve got records of who bought ‘Swords of Cerebus’ Vol 6, and how many copies they bought.” We would send each of the distributors the same number of supplements that they had ordered of “Swords” vol 6, and it would be up to them to go, “okay how many of them go to this account, how many go to this account”, and then up to the accounts to go, “okay, who did we sell these to, so that we can get them their supplements?” [coughs] Excuse me. What happened was, one of the distributors, and there’s a likely candidate who was actually one of the smallest distributors but the most trouble of all the distributors. We had more trouble of him than we ever got out of Diamond or Capital City, and he said, “well, I would have to have something to send to the stores telling them” exactly what the message reads. But I think I came up with a suggested text, saying here you can do this. You can put your company name here, and then send it to each of your stores, and the distributor or somebody who worked at the distributor basically took exactly my text, which was telling them how to put it together, and phrased it so that it sounds like it’s a fair person, “I purchased a copy of ‘Swords of Cerebus’ #6” and then changes to, “is due to arrive at your store in early December”. I’m assuming that we sent this to each of the distributors just in case anybody else had problems with this, and to the distributor who definitely had a problem with, “you can’t just send me supplements, you have to send me a voucher that I can send to my accounts.” This looks like the one that he put together, because it is basically just typewritten. The Cerebus looks as if it was just photocopied out of the book and this isn’t something that we would send out as an Aardvark-Vanaheim communication. So, wherever it is that you found it, Margaret, I think it was somebody’s backroom at one of the stores that was an account of this distributor and they got their certificates in and went, “well, why don’t you just send me the supplement?” And I’m sure the distributor ultimately did just send them the supplement. Or might have said, “nobody gets a supplement unless we get a voucher”, in which case, probably they had a lot of disappointed customers. That’s the best I can do on explaining that one, is I think it’s an artifact of the time period when there were at least half a dozen direct market distributors and all of them tended to function in different was. They had different priorities, different things that the other distributors just it was water off a duck’s back and for them it was, “no, we insist that you have to do this.” And the easiest way to deal with that was, whatever any distributor wanted, we will work with them on it in order to keep everything running smoothly. “Cerebus 1991, cardstock cover. 8 pages. Promo stuff for Aardvark-Vanaheim in 1991. I’m not sure who AV sent this out to, but it would seem comic shops would be a target audience for it. If anyone has any info or if Ron could put it on the list to ask Dave during his call, it would be appreciated.” Thank you, Ron, for putting that on there.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That was a trade show thing, as I recall. I think it was for Diamond Comic Distributors, where part of the Diamond trade show was, the retailer came to the trade show and each of them got a bag with whatever the publishers wanted to give to each retailer. And didn’t really have anything to give the retailers. 1991 was, well, okay, this is what we’re going to be publishing. I think it had whatever the latest trade paperback was.
Matt: Margaret posted the whole thing, it’s one page it’s a double page spread of the first volume, “Church & State I”, “High Society”, and maybe “Church & State II”?
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then there was two individual pages, one of them was about the fact that the book, “this is the independent comic that’s on racks this month and has been on racks for however many months and will still be on racks for the next year.”
Dave: [laughs] Well, that sounds like me going, I don’t know what else to tell you about this.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s a 300 issue storyline, it started in 1977, this is 1991. We’re going to 2004. I can just keep saying that over and over. Yeah, it was basically, here’s what you probably want to order if you have no idea what Cerebus is, but it was one of those, again, Diamond had the same problem of, “what do we get all of the publishers to do that will get the most bang for the buck? That will get the retailers ordering more of whatever it is?” And anything that you’re gonna come up with that’s gonna work for Marvel and Dark Horse and whoever else was still going at that time, Eclipse. Whatever they’re going to say, “hey, we’ll give this to the retailers and this’ll really goose up sales” wasn’t gonna work with Cerebus and wasn’t gonna work for Aardvark-Vanaheim. I mean, what you’re looking at there is basically the equivalent of the solicitation that we did for #299 that, it’s a great jumping on point for new readers.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: There’s only one more issue to go. I’ve been trying to explain this since 1977, nobody gets it, whatever. I think we still got a box of those 1991s around here somewhere, where it was, well okay as long as we’re printing up enough for Diamond, and Diamond will tell you this is how many retailers are going to show up. So this is how many that you have to print, and you have to ship them by such and such a date. I think, in this case, it was… I wouldn’t ordinarily have done it, because I wasn’t going to the trade shows after having a certain amount of experience with trade shows, or I wasn’t geared up to the self-publishing promo that we did for the trade shows in 1993. It was still just Cerebus. But I think, unless I’m misremembering, that year Diamond was doing a trade show in Toronto, so it was, yeah okay, we can just print these at Preney, get them shipped to Kitchener and we’ll drive them down to Toronto and leave them with somebody who’s coordinating the Diamond Comics trade show and they can give them out to whoever they want to give them out. I might be misremembering that, but yeah it was… Criticizing myself at the time, I think I could have done more to try and get new retailers excited, but definitely by 1991, it was, you’re either a Cerebus store or you’re not a Cerebus store, and if you’re not a Cerebus store, you might be one of those stores that’s happy enough to order Cerebus for their one Cerebus customer. Which was better than the people that just went, “we don’t buy independents. We buy” well, they wouldn’t have been buying Image in 1991, that hadn’t started yet, but “these are the independents that we buy, and they all have to be superhero kind of things. ‘Elementals’ and that kind of thing.” But no, we didn’t send them out, they all went en masse, as far as I know, to wherever Diamond was doing their trade show in 1991 for Diamond to give out to the retailers. Okay, moving on, Michael R! It wouldn’t be a “Please Hold” without Michael R of Easton Pennsylvania, asks, “Hi Matt! Hope your injured finger feels better. Hi Dave! With all the success of the Spawn Kickstarter, any plans for a “Cerebus in Hell?’ CereSpawn issue? Might as well.” That’s not really the way that “Cerebus in Hell?” works, although its an interesting idea.
Matt: I had an idea. I thought about something. I’ve had an idea for probably a year now, I just gotta find a cover to parody.
Dave: That’s one of the problems, is, this is what I was start to explain, you can pick up from there. It usually starts with the cover. Either you, or Benjamin Hobbs, or David Birdsong, or Gary Boyarksi, or Lee Thacker comes up with a parody cover and then I take that and just start riffing on it. So go ahead, you pick up from there.
Matt: The idea I’ve had for a while is, using Spore. Take the image from the back cover of whatever issue that was, “Ye Verily, Even on the Back Cover, Men Will Call Him Spore!”
Dave: [laughs] Right. 277? 276? Somewhere around there.
Matt: My initial idea was, take that, and okay we’ll do a Spawn parody cover. Find an icon Spawn cover that we can parody, with Spore, that’ll work. And after the Spawn 10 Kickstarter started, you know we really ought to do the “Cape Ends 500 Yards” Cerebus as Spawn, as Cerebus, and Batvark as Spore, and both of them trying to cash in on the Spawn 10 thing. So the whole issue is the two of them, the static image, but it’s them, one camp is doing their Spawn parody, the other camp is doing their Spawn parody, and whoever can get it done first is gonna make the 80 grand. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: You know, in their minds!
Dave: Okay, yes. Yeah, yeah, of course that brings up the other problem with “Cerebus in Hell?” which is how far ahead I am…
Matt: Right.
Dave: …on “Cerebus in Hell?” I just finished my part of the May 2022 issue and I’m trying to talk myself down off of the ledge, and go, a year and a half ahead, Dave? That’s pretty good. Considering that nobody else, I think, knows what they’re doing in the comic book field much past March or April of 2021. We’re very much ahead of the curve on it. That ties in with something else in a later question, so I won’t get to that quite yet, but yeah, that’s the way it would happen. If you figure out a Spawn cover that it would work with, and you can figure out how to get either the “Cape Ends 500 Yards” or Spore, that would certainly be interesting crushed down to “Cerebus in Hell?” panel size.
Matt: Well, I think at that point, it would be a splash of the full Spore, and the rest of it is just him cut off at the knees, because that’s what it would…. To me, it would be hilarious is that it’s, “I’m Spore” and everybody’s at knee level. [laughs]
Dave: Right, right. All you can see is sort of the claw hands.
Matt: One of the gags I thought of was, one of them is trying to be a “McFarlane Faithful”, so our version of Hell has to match McFarlane’s Hell, so the winged devils are all very upset because, Cerebus or Batvark, whichever team they’re on, is insisting that they cut off their noses because all of the demons in Todd McFarlane’s Hell have no noses.
Dave: Okay. See, I didn’t even know that. That’s good.
Matt: It’s one of those gags where it’s like, I can see at least getting two or three strips out of that. And then I’m going, Matt, you still have to write the Avengers parody you suggested!
Dave: Right, right. And the next “Vark Wars”! You’re getting into George Lucas territory of how long it takes you to get these out there.
Matt: The A Moment of Cerebus gag for, I believe, “Hermann” is… or no, no, I’m sorry, it’s “Spider-Whore”, which is, “maybe Mr Dow should get finished with the 25th Vark Wars” and I’m going, that’s a little too on the nose, guys, that’s not funny! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean, I laughed, but at the same time, oh yeah. I guess I gotta start taking the notebook with me to work and try to come up with funny things while I’m working.
Dave: Well, we try not to point that out, that… I’m a real overachiever because I know as soon as you lose lead time you never get it back again. I’m really looking forward to David Birdsong’s “Giant Sized Public Defenders” and I’ve actually started putting Fred Murdock into corners of “Cerebus in Hell?” panels. It’s not time for him yet. Sometime in 2022. Only if Dave Sim stops producing issues, so you guys can start getting some in them. I think Benjamin Hobbs has actually given up on actually writing or drawing “Cerebus in Hell?” he’s just doing virgin covers and auctioning them off, which is probably the far more sensible thing to do than hoping you’re going to come up with a “Cerebus in Hell?” coming book that sells more than 1800 copies. Or at least where the sales go up, so you get a royalty on it, cause if the sales go down, nobody gets paid.
Matt: I got the collections of “Marvel Zombies” where it’s Marvel Zombies, the superheroes as zombies. And it was kind of a fun series, but I pulled them out because, what they did was Arthur Suydam did parody covers where it was classic Marvel covers as zombies.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And in the back of the collections, they have small reprints of the original covers and so I opened it up and I’m like, “that one, we did that one, we did that one, ooh, we didn’t do this one, we didn’t do this one.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I’m looking at them like, one of them is a “Daredevil” cover from the Frank Miller era with Elektra. Not the one where Elektra dies, but a different one, but it’s a giant head shot of Daredevil, and I’m looking at it going, can we do a Cerebus that big and have it look good?
Dave: Ehh, I think that David Birdsong is up to doing anything like that at this point. It’s a good idea, it’s almost like we’re edging towards Marvel cover family feud. What’s the most common cover when you have this as the adjective for it? And that’s off in the future somewhere. Yeah, we’re definitely milking the whole Marvel iconic cover thing for all its worth.
Matt: I also have the “Batman: 50 Years of the Dark Knight” that reprints a bunch of covers, and every now and then I flip that open and I’m like, alright, ya know. That’s how I got “Poet in the Family” was, I flipped it open and it has that cover in it, and I’m like, okay that’s definitely one that we have to parody because it is iconic and I can see a way of doing it that will actually be funny.
Dave: Right.
Matt: You guys took it in a whole different direction that’s even funnier! [laughs]
Dave: Well it was, those are the hoops that we jump through, which is, you’ve got to pass both of those tests. There’s gotta be times when you guys are going, “c’mon, we’ve done every iconic comic book cover.” Until something like that happens, where you go, “oh no, that one’s perfect”. And it was, it’s certainly something I would never have come up on my own, so it’s really the Dave Sim start me up thing. All you have to do is get me the parody cover, and I’ll start riffing on it. I’m not really good at coming up with covers on my own, but once I’ve got one. The “Poet in the Family” in particular cycled through my pile for a while before I went, ahh I think I’m starting to get a picture of what I’m gonna do with this. And then, once I started on it, and particularly when I came up with the thing of each one being a full pager, and being far more a Chekov play, but “Cerebus in Hell?” with the Batvark cousins. All we can do is make ourselves laugh. If we make ourselves laugh, presumably there’s an audience out there. It might only be five other guys like us, and 1800 other people going, “Dave Sim is ruining his legacy in comics by doing this stuff. How can he possibly do these things?” Well, I think they’re funny, you think they’re funny, Sean thinks they’re funny, David Birdsong thinks they’re funny, Benjamin Hobbs thinks they’re funny, that’s what we go with. If it makes you laugh, then you can’t say, “oh well, I can’t do that.” Well, no. If it’s funny, it’s funny. You can’t censor yourself on comedy. Like you say, the thing of, here’s critiquing Matt on getting caught up on “Vark Wars”, and he laughs. And if you laugh, well, it’s funny. Why is it funny? Cause it’s true.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: You said to Michael, “he’s referring to the middle finger of my left hand. I broke the tip of it last Friday” and I was gonna turn that into a question and ask you, why did you do that?
Matt: I was at work for Thanksgiving. They came and said, “do you wanna work Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the Saturday, and that Sunday?” and I said yes, because Thanksgiving and Black Friday I get eight hours of holiday pay and then, if I work, I get eight hours of time and a half. So it’s technically double time and a half if I work eight hours.
Dave: Right.
Matt: We worked on Thursday, we shut the plant down, turned the lights off, turn the air compressors off, locked everything up, went home. Showed up Friday morning, and there was a third shift guy coming in for first shift hours, so he had unlocked the plant and turned everything on. I went to the pressure tester I was supposed to run. First off, I helped Tim fire up his pressure tester, cause he was having problems. So then I’m in a rush because I’m trying to make right and make my boss happy, cause I don’t want to get talked to for, “hey, we’re paying you double time and a half and you’re not producing parts.” So I grabbed the first part, I put it in the pressure tester, and the part gets held by three clamps, that they’re pneumatic and there’s a safety screen that when the light curtain’s broken, they can’t move. But apparently, there was residual air in the solenoid, cause when the part hit the clamp, it triggered, and pinched my finger between the fixture for the machine and the part. And soon as I felt pressure, I yanked my hand away and went, oh God, this is really really really gonna hurt. But first thing’s first, go get my hand under cold water cause I don’t have an ice pack handy and it’s closer to get to the sink than it is to get to the refrigerator where the ice packs are. But I’ll put it under really cold water, that’ll help. And then, I went back to work. And then we were having problems with the machine, so we ended up calling a supervisor and he said, “try this, try this” and when I was talking to him, I’m like, oh by the way I hurt my finger. I’ll take pictures with my phone and send them to you so we can get it documented. And he’s like, “okay fine.” In the meantime, a different supervisor, a guy I was sending text messages saying I was having problems with the machine and oh yeah by the way I hurt my finger, and he’s like, “do I need to come in?” And I had the guy respond, Matt says you can come in if you want, and then I sent a picture of my finger, and his response was, “I’ll be there in 20 minutes.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] So it was an accident?
Matt: Yeah, it was an accident. It was 100%… they’re investigating how it happened because by all accounts it was an impossible situation. It should not have been possible for this clamp to fire the way it did.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I finished working my eight hour shift, and we did an accident report, we had to call a 24 hour nurse hotline, and they said, “we recommend that you go and get checked out” and I’m like, I will after work. And after work I went to the walk in clinic, walked up, and they said, “what are you here for?” and I held out my hand, and I went, I hurt my finger at work and I need to get it checked out. And they sent me to the orthopedic side of the walk in clinic, where I had to go through a bunch of a rigmarole and answering questions I don’t know the answers to. Then they took me back, and they looked at it and went, “yeah we’re gonna take an x-ray” I’m like, alright fine. Went and got probably the first x-ray I remember ever getting in my life and came back into the examination room and the doctor came in and pulled the x-rays up on the computer, and went, “oh, yep, you broke it.” And I’m like, and he zoomed in the picture and you can see, it’s the picture I sent you where the tip of my finger is cracked off inside my finger.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I’m like, 41 years without breaking a bone and I finally broke a bone that I know of. I may have screwed up my ankle in the past and might’ve broke something there, but I have never officially been documented with a broken bone. I used to pride myself on, I’ve made it this far without breaking anything and now the tip of my finger’s broke. And they’re like, “well, we can’t do anything cause it’s the tip. We put it in a splint, we can wrap it up real good” cause they’re like, “does it hurt?” I’m like, it only hurts when I touch something cause ya know, it’s tender. “Well we can wrap it up” and I’m like, no, no, I don’t think that’s necessary. I mean, it’s broke, but it’s not gonna get worse if I don’t do anything, other than the nail might fall off. And they’re like, “yeah so if you want, we can wrap it up, otherwise no.” I’m like, no, no, I’m fine. And then they ask me, “do you need any restrictions when you go back to work?” I’m like, no, no, I’m fine, I can and work. I know for definite I can work. And he’s like, “really?” I’m like, I just worked for eight hours after doing this.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Basically, they’re going, “well how did you work, cause you can’t grab the part?” I’m like, well I can’t put my finger under the part cause I’m worried the clamp’s gonna do it again, so I’m pinching the top of this 50 pound part between three fingers on each hand and then setting it in and hoping that it doesn’t slip out of my fingers. Everybody at work’s going, “that’s real nasty”, and I’m like, it doesn’t hurt. They’re like, “oh it looks horrible” and I’m like, it doesn’t hurt. And they’re like, “what do you mean?” and I started tapping my fingertip, the pad of my finger with my other finger, going, yeah, I don’t feel anything. And this guy I’m talking to is just screaming like he’s going to puke because it’s so gross what I’m doing, and I’m just like, well, what do you want me to do? It’s broke, but I’m not gonna miss out on double time and half, and time and a half, and double time.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: I’m working for the next two days after this happened. Went into work on Monday and gave my boss, who wasn’t there at all for any of this, my return to work slip and he’s like, “okay”, he’s looking it over, I’ve got no restrictions, I can work. Anything that I can normally do, I can still do, I just gotta be careful with my finger and I am. And then I gave him the receipt because the supervisor that filled out the accident report is like, “I’m not gonna send you for a drug test, I trust that it was truly an accident. You weren’t horsing around, you weren’t goofing around. Ya know, this wasn’t you trying to get hurt. So I’m not gonna make you take a drug test.” And when I went to the clinic, they said, “do they want a drug test?” and I said no! But if you wanna give me one, I’ll take one, cause I know I’m gonna pass. And they’re like, “well yeah we’ll give you one anyway just to be safe”, so when I get all done with the doctor’s appointment, they’re like, “now you gotta go to the ER and pee in a cup” and I’m like, you can’t do it here? They’re like, “no, that part of the clinic’s closed”, and I’m like, really? And they’re like, “yeah, you gotta go the ER.” So I drive across town to the hospital and go to the ER and I walk up and they’re like “can we help you?” and I’m like, yeah, I’m supposed to come here and get a drug test, and they’re like, “we don’t do that here. We do this at the clinic.” And I’m like, well they sent me here. The nurse makes five phone calls and as she gets done with the last call, it pops up on her computer, “oh yeah, this guy’s coming in for the drug test, give him the drug test” And she’s like, “I’m really sorry but we’re backed up, it’s gonna be a couple of hours” and I’m like, okay! So I pull out my phone, and I’m sending Paula a test saying, hey I’m at the ER waiting on a drug test, they said it’s gonna be a couple hours, and I got that far in typing, when they walked up to me with a nurse and said, “she’s ready to take you right now”, and I’m like, okay! [laughs] So I went, peed in a cup, took a breathalyzer test, which I passed because, as I said to the nurse, wow that drink I had five years ago finally got out of my system.
Dave: There you go.
Matt: They gave me a receipt saying, he was here for 11 minutes and this is why, and I turned that into my employer. Gave it to my boss, going, here’s the receipt for my drug test that you guys said I didn’t need but they gave it to me anyway. And then when I talked to our safety supervisor, “oh no, you had to take a drug test, that’s mandatory. We require that any time there’s an incident.” And I’m like, alright, whatever. Again, I know I wasn’t gonna fail it. But…
Dave: And you’re getting paid, just to take a drug test.
Matt: Yeah. The workman’s comp insurance is paying for my doctor visit and the x-rays and all that, and I got paid for 8 hours because I was at work for 8 hours. I pretty much discovered, breaking my finger, that unless I lose a limb and am physically incapable of working, I’m going to finish my shift before I go to the hospital.
Dave: Exactly. See…
Matt: Because…
Dave: I… go ahead.
Matt: No, no, no, because I’ve worked with places where people have gotten hurt and it’s a minor injury, but they’re like, “oh I should probably go and get checked out” and it’s like, no no no, I’m gonna finish my shift. I don’t get paid if I go to the hospital.
Dave: Right. “See he’s referring to the middle finger of my left hand. I broke the tip of it last Friday.” I didn’t know it was an accident and that’s why I asked, why did you break the tip of you finger? It’s like, people will talk, Matt, when you do things like that, so…
Matt: When I called my Dad, I got sympathy from him, he was going, “you were picking your nose, weren’t ya?” I’m like, no, Dad, I don’t pick my nose with my middle finger.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: That’s one the big ones, Dad, I use my pinky like a normal person.
Dave: [laughs] I’ll tell ya, we never get through a “Please Hold”…
Matt: A “Please Hold” without me bringing up my Dad! [laughs]
Dave: And man oh man, it’s always something out of left field. Speaking out of left field, Jeff Seiler asks, “Question for Dave: When you started mentally plotting out the course of Cerebus' life, did you envision that "in the end everybody dies", er, " no, in the end everybody is dead" (everybody being many major, influential characters), or was that more of a fluid plan as the series progressed? And, other than for structural expediency, why did Cerebus live so long when no one else did?” Well, my theory is that this is a baked in quality with aardvarks, that they do live that long and Cerebus had a particularly long lifespan and to have that be discovered as the series progressed. One of the reasons I used Woody Allen as a major character at the end of the book, was because I did have reference for what Woody Allen looked like over a span of 50 or 60 years, and to have Cerebus not really aging at the same pace that Konigsberg was. It just seemed to me like a nifty way to communicate Cerebus’ lifespan. I don’t know if I cursed myself with that. I’m 64 years old and the hair on the top of my head is still coming in brown, which I think might be God’s way of saying, “oh ha ha ha, see how you like it, having to live much longer than you probably want to, because you did that to Cerebus.” Kinda hoping that’s not the case. This is really not my kind of world, this was really not my kind of world back when I did 186 and “Tangent” and it’s getting to be less and less my kinda world as we’re going along. But I think it’s very possible I did curse myself in exactly that way, that by the time I die, 2020 is probably going to look sane.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Which… I mean, just reckon with that. 2020 being a time you look back on and go, “remember when COVID-19 first hit? Wasn’t everything just so relaxing and so easy to deal with?” As opposed to what things are like in, I dunno, how long am I gonna live? If I live 100 years, that’s 2056. If I live 90 years, that’s 2046, and that’s still a chunk of years from now. Although, they’ll probably still go pretty fast. Cause, when I look back at, ya know, Margaret sends the 1991 brochure and 1991 seems like a little while ago. It’s 30 years, remembering what I did with the 1991 promotion, it boggles my mind to think that that would accelerate, so that if I live another 30 years, if I live to be 94, I’m going to be looking back at COVID-19 and going, it all seems like sort of yesterday. 1991, 2000, 2015, 2020, 2030, 2040. I definitely got my first glimmering of that when Will Eisner bought me dinner for having completed the 300 issues and I remember him saying, “everybody I knew is dead.” It’s like, yeah, I couldn’t think of any Golden Age names that Will Eisner would have known well or even tangentially that weren’t dead and hadn’t been dead for some time. I’ve got my two little black phone directories and they’re definitely full of dead people now. I’ve never sat down and said, well maybe I’ll go through and put a check mark, let’s see how many people who are in my little black phone directory are dead now. Cause that’s [laughs] apt to be at least a little depressing, but definitely I notice it anytime I’m flipping through looking for a phone number. Murphy Anderson’s dead, Will Eisner’s dead, Archie Goodwin’s dead, Marshall Rogers is dead, that only becomes greater and more so. So, thank you, Jeff, for that real day brightener question! Right here towards the end.
Matt: [laughs] It’s one of those things about Cerebus getting really old that, ya know, it’s kind of shocking to read “Latter Days” and see how old he gets, but then you remember that in “High Society”, and not even “High Society” in issue 20, in “Mind Games”, when Cerebus is talking to Po, and he’s like, “you sound pretty good for a 187 year old” and it’s like, the groundwork was there. That’s one of the fun parts I find in “Cerebus”, that you didn’t cheat. It’s one of those, you made the point and we all missed it, and then when you brought it back, it was, oh wait a minute.
Dave: This was there all along, yes.
Matt: One of my all time favorite callbacks, and I don’t think anyone’s ever really commented on it, is that Cerebus, he’s a barbarian, he’s freelance, he’s a kitchen staff supervisor, he becomes the ranking diplomatic representative, he becomes prime minister, he becomes the Pope, and how do we show that he’s come so far and gained such enormous power as Pope? With a tall pointy hat. Status, son, you can’t argue with status. [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, it was one of those, I did a post a while back, about a really clever callback and it was Cerebus with the hat and it’s the page where he’s wearing the hat and he scratches his ear and the hat almost falls off. And then I did the panel of Elrod saying that, going, again, the series is just full of these really clever bits that when they first happen, it’s that was a funny bit, and then 50 issues later… [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, that happens to me as well. I mean, we’re not getting ready in terms of this is gonna happen tomorrow, but we’re pretty sure that the next Kickstarter is gonna be “Cerebus” #2, the same way that we did “Cerebus” #1, the regular facsimile, the gold, and the platinum edition. So I was rereading “Cerebus” #2 and I had forgotten about the zombie army that attacks Cerebus after he joins up with the Borealans. And it mentions that they have black blades and obviously they all have blank eyeballs, and I’m going, wait a minute, that’s Elrod two issues before Elrod.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And I didn’t do that consciously. Or I don’t think I did that consciously. So that’s one of those, whatever this comic art metaphysics is about, it is definitely backwards and forwards in time, coupled with, “where do you get your ideas?” Well, I don’t know where that came from. Why would I do that unconsciously when it makes far more sense that I would do that consciously? Well, that’s comic art metaphysics. Things are being expressed through me that I have no idea of consciously, but which are very significant and very resonant on a completely unconscious level. But only unconscious relative to what I consider consciousness, which is physically incarnated consciousness, which, to me, is probably closer to a dream state. When you die and you pass on to the next world, I think it’s going to be a lot like waking up from dreaming. Dreaming makes a lot of sense when you’re dreaming, and as soon as you wake up, you go, “how could I have possibly have thought that that makes sense? That’s not what that house looks like. That’s not who that person is. That person’s been dead for five years and I was acting as if it was completely normal for them to be alive.” I think what we consider a wakeful state here, is “wakeful” in quotation marks. Wait until you actually wake up on Judgement Day and we’re all in for a lot of surprises, I think. Uhh, is it Brian or Byron? Uh Brian asks, “(on a post Carson did about SODAR with roughs from you, I’m not sending the images because I got enough in here…): Can you ask Sim how his wrist is for me and if he's able to draw regularly again? Is this new artwork in this post?” Um, no, it wouldn’t be new artwork. The wrist, I definitely pushed it too far with the Spawn 10 covers. I’ve been waiting for it to bounce back and it’s not terrible but I think all I really accomplished with all of my drawing at shoulder height and using the magnification and lowering the pneumatic seat so it’s only 14 inches off the ground, I did manage to make the wrist not hurt while I’m drawing. But that’s different from having the wrist not hurt, and there’s definitely a sense of having used up a certain amount of the wrist doing the Spawn covers. The four Spawn covers was pretty likely too much so now I’m having to get out my mental slide rule and go, well okay, how much do I figure is left in the wrist and what’s the best uses for the wrist? So the latest on that is, I was going to do two or three “Cerebus” #2 covers and I had already done one, where basically I got Alfonso at Studiocomix Press to do a blue-line on drawing paper of “Cerebus” #2, 11 by 17. Very very light blue, and then basically penciling a bit of it, inking it as if I was inking a blue penciled “Cerebus” #2. It looks really good. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. Sean said that he was very impressed with it. Dagon really likes it. So I was going to do a couple of more covers, but looking at the actual revenue from the covers on Spawn 10, I have to wait and see what the auction results were at Heritage Auctions when they auctioned the covers, so that I have to say, well okay, is that enough money to use up that much wrist? Which, that’s one of the questions that you don’t get to ask yourself until you push your wrist too far and then have to sort of assess, okay where am I? Definitely, there’s more pain in the forearm now, which I think was mostly the net effect out of drawing at shoulder height, and drawing at the absolute extension of the wrist, and of the fingers and thumb. That whatever that does or will do or did to whatever it is in my wrist and forearm, it moved it down to the forearm and elbow area. And so I’ll be watching the next time that I draw, to go okay, is that something that doesn’t effect the drawing but effects the wrist and forearm and elbow? And I’ll have to make that assessment independently. One of the things is, Spawn 10 was the only possible book that could have the kind of payday that it did. I’m pretty sure “Cerebus” isn’t in that category. “Cerebus” #2 is not gonna sell in the quantities that Spawn 10, I don’t think. I would be happy to be pleasantly surprised. Dagon is finding new customers wherever it is that he’s finding them and it would be nice if that happened. If we did a new “Cerebus” #1 cover with the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter, and we managed to get above what we did on “Cerebus” #1, but logically, you have to assume, #2 is always gonna sell less well a #1. But in terms of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, I had another weird thing happen just in the last week where a longtime Cerebus patron, and we’re talking about going back 40 years, and a female, not Margaret Liss. [laughs] That’s the default thing. Okay, female Cerebus fan, Margaret Liss. Not, there’s, a conservative estimate, about five or six female Cerebus fans, even at this point. And this Cerebus fan, who I’m not going to identify, was one of the people that bought “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Volume One from Eddie Khanna, and has been reading it and rereading it and rereading and just, like, trying not to dump on Cerebus. She says, “it sounds like I’m insulting your 6000 page masterpiece. I’m not doing that, but I really think ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’ is the best thing you’ve ever done.” And sending a check for $10,000 so that I would work on the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. Ahh, so, that has to be factored into the mix of, well okay, I assumed that the only place I could make money is Spawn 10 covers. Real money, the only place I could make real money is Spawn 10 covers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles covers, and after that, it’s all over for grandpa. Nobody’s going to be paying five figure amounts for whatever else I could possibly do. So this one through me for a looping of going, well, okay, I think this is… I’ve been trying to talk myself into being a year and a half ahead on “Cerebus in Hell?” That’s good enough. You don’t have to maintain that or try and improve on that. Well, I got the last “Cerebus in Hell?” done the 24th, the 25th of November, and the commitment that I have with myself is anytime that that happens, and I didn’t have other things that I had to do, the remaining days of the month, I would devote to “Strange Death of Alex Raymond.” So that’s what I was already doing when the check came in. And I had to send the check back, because it was made out to Dave Sim. It’s got to be made out to Aardvark-Vanaheim. But, it’s, okay, how much of my time does $10,000 buy working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”? And that’s another one of those mental slide rule things, I don’t know. I was thinking, I’m tired of just barely having enough money to pay the bills, so from now on, I’m doing stuff just that will make money. So this was an enormous surprise, very gratifying, and I have been able to put in, already, five full days on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” basically just building from where I left off with the SDoAR mock ups that Brian would have seen that Carson would have posted. So, I’m looking probably for at least another two weeks, just refining that, where I’ve got the section which is “Bleak Prospects” and the photo shoot for “Life” magazine is one section and I’m just smoothing that out and getting it as concise as I can and typing in the annotations that go with it, the online annotations. So I what I’m going to be doing is working through that, basically, here’s where I see Ward Greene’s voodoo and here’s the best examples of it in these stories, and then commenting on those exhaustively. “The Doll’s House” is early on with the Ward Greene voodoo so it was a pretty simple maybe 15 pages to explain exhaustively the one after Margaret Mitchell’s death that I’ve been working on. “Peril in the Snow”, the annotations alone are 41 pages and there’s probably a good 25 pages just saying, this is what I’m seeing here. I know exactly that I’m seeing. Describing what I’m seeing to people that think in terms of metaphysics and don’t think in terms of comic art metaphysics and the use of comic art metaphysics as a form of voodoo. It’s a very very laborious process saying, I have to describe this precisely and I have to do it in simple enough language and I have do it as concisely as possible. With something like “Peril in the Snow”, 41 pages of annotations is as concise as I can get. The compromise on that is, when this gets turned into a graphic novel, whether it’s Carson who turns it into a graphic novel or someone else turns it into a graphic novel way off in the future, you can just read the graphic novel, and if you don’t want to read all of the annotations, you don’t have to read all of the annotations. But all of this stuff is very very extensive, very very deep rabbit holes that it’s very very difficult not to go too far down them, and that’s the experience that Eddie Khanna and I have both had. Working on that part of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, the advantage is, I can do it almost all left handed typing. Left handed typing slows me down enough that I already have to think very very hard about the way I’m phrasing things and going through the same text five times, ten times, fifteen times, and going, no, that’s still not what it is that I’m trying to say, or it’s not simple enough, or it’s not concise enough, or it doesn’t build very carefully on the previous point. So I have to rewrite it, and rerewrite it, and rerewrite it. But gradually, that whole section, which is give different parts, including “The Doll’s House” commentaries and “Peril in the Snow” commentaries and “Bleak Prospects” commentaries. The big one, [laughs] see, the giant size commentary is going to be on “The Caged Songbird”, but I knew that all along. Eddie knew that all along. So I have to build up to that. Here’s “The Doll’s House” which is reasonably easy to explain in a short number of pages. Here’s “Peril in the Snow” which takes a much larger number of pages. And here’s “The Caged Songbird” which is the mother of all, here’s what Ward Greene was doing, here’s how Ward Greene transformed our society through comic art metaphysics voodoo. Believe it or not. So there you go, Brian! Thank you for saving the longest answer for last, although it probably has competition from the comic book cardboard file boxes. Any final thoughts there, Matthew?
Matt: Ahh, I’m going, ten grand?! WOW!
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: Ten grand, WOW! [laughs]
Dave: Oh yes, yes! And it was at the end of the letter. It’s like she had taped the check to the end of the letter and it was a five page letter, and it was, “here’s where I started first reading, admiring your work” and that was the first paragraph, and then it was “and then I went on to this stage” and then flip it over, and onto the next stage, and I went, [laughs] I think this is one of those, “it’s taken you 40 years, but you’ve finally pissed me off so badly I am never ever ever reading your work again under any circumstances!” And I went, ahh okay, I’ll read the rest of this letter some other time, and it wasn’t until I was actually back in the house, like Roly drops off the mail at Camp David and it wasn’t until I was in the Off-White House that I went, well okay, if she’s been here for 40 years and she can write a six page letter telling me exactly, exactly how much of a jerk I am, and how badly I pissed her off, I only deserve exactly what I get. You get to the end of the letter, and here’s a check for $10,000.
Matt: I’m glad you’re still working on the book cause, like I said, when I read the first volume, I sent Eddie an email going, “that’s great! When do we get Volume Two?” [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, well, one of the things that $10,000 buys you is, I got Alfonso to print up one of the rough copies of Volume Two, and signed it to her, and Roly FedExed it to her today, so she should have it tomorrow, along with some of the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” tracing paper. She said “don’t send me any artwork, I’ve got artwork”. One of the first things she bought was a hand colored “First Fifth” back in whenever that was, 1984. And she’s got that on the wall, that’s fine, that’ll do her for artwork. And it’s like, well, no, c’mon, $10,000! [laughs] I can’t just say, well okay I’ll work on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” for two weeks and then I’ll go back to doing my Turtles cover. I don’t really know what order I’m going to be doing stuff in, but, yes, it is very gratifying to say, I don’t know how limited the time is that that will allow me to work on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, but I think we can say probably more than until the end of this week, kind of thing.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Right. [laughs]
Matt: Speaking of the Turtles and their covers…
Dave: Yes?
Matt: Kevin Eastman’s doing a massive auction of his Turtles archive stuff, like, through Heritage. One of the things they’re selling is, one of the micro series, the entire issue, all of the original art.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: And! I mean, like graded copies of their pre-Turtles work. The “Gobbledygook” they did a couple issues of, and the one thing that jumped out at me, that I went, okay you have more money than brains temporarily, and I bid on it and completely got blown out of the water cause I knew it was gonna go for a lot more than I could pay, was Kevin Eastman’s original preliminary cover to Turtles 8.
Dave: Really?
Matt: I keep getting emails saying, “track your bids” and I’m like, I just don’t want to see how much I’m losing by, so I’m not looking anymore. But last I looked, it was a couple weeks ago, and it was already up to three or four hundred bucks. But it’s all the Turtles, and Renet, and Cerebus, of, this is what the covers gonna kinda look like, and I’m like, I would love to get that! Ah, it’s not gonna happen. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: But I’m thinking, I hope he sent ya a copy, and I’m sure he didn’t.
Dave: It’s interesting because, I can’t just do the front cover. If I’m gonna do the Turtles 8 cover, it’s a wrap around. If I tried to just do the front cover, there’s only three turtles, and people are gonna go, “wait a minute, where’s the fourth turtle? I’m buying the Turtles I get four turtles.” But, what’s interesting is, the front cover’s gonna be a lot easier for me to do. Again, the same process where Alfonso printed out blue-line of the Turtles 8 cover and I’m just re-penciling some parts of it, like I’m putting a helmet on Cerebus, the same helmet he’s got on in the story. Doing more things with lighting, using the villain on the back cover as the light source for everything on the whole wrap around. Every time I look at the two parts, the front and back cover, my wrist just starts throbbing, going, “we’re not actually doing all of that, are we?” and it’s like, ahh, I’m not sure, because if there’s any other maximum Dave Sim payday short of actually selling Cerebus artwork, which I don’t wanna do, I want to preserve the Cerebus archive. Doing a updated version of the cover for “Turtles” #8 has gotta be at or near the top of the list, but if there’s anybody else out there with very very deep pockets who is a huge fan of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, and is going, “why is Dave doing all of these other” as they would see it “crap, when he could be working on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’?” I am willing to be tempted.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] If you want to send me a check and say, “Dave, stop working on that crap and work on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’, here’s X number of dollars.” I will be happy to develop my own internal taxi meter that goes, okay, that much money buys you this much time on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and buys you a, like I say, rough copy of Volume Two and some “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” tracing paper, and probably, being kept in the loop on what it is that I’m doing. This patroness, I have already told her, if you want I can tell Eddie Khanna to do a senate investigations sized document dump of everything that we’ve got on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, including all of our correspondence on it, but there’s no spoiler warnings in there. You’re gonna read stuff that if you’re trying to read the book sequentially is going to spoil stuff for you, and this also evolved and changing thinking on my part. Things that I wrote three or four pages about to Eddie Khanna saying, here’s what I think is going on here. Once I got it out of my system, once I got three or four pages written, I went, uhh no that’s not it, but I needed to get that out of my system so I could get to what is it. I think there’s two correspondence boxes which are an inch thick each on “The Caged Songbird” and that doesn’t include all of the printouts from Wikipedia of everything that Ward Greene references in “The Caged Songbird”, so whether she would want to go for that, that would also be on the table for any other deep-pocketed “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” patron. You want everything? I’m sure Eddie could put together two or three thumb drives that would have all of the material on it, and you’d probably be reading it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and then seeing what I did with it, hopefully, as I’m able to get further along on the book.
Matt: Okay. Well, that’s not me! [laughs] I got pockets, but they got holes and moths in them.
Dave: [laughs] I wasn’t hinting, Matt! “Why don’t you sell all of your possessions and certainly all of the money so I can work on ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’?” Ah, believe me, I couldn’t afford me, so I’m right with you on that.
Matt: I was thinking about getting you business cards printed up that have Cerebus’ head on it and say, “Have Hand, Will Write.”
Dave: [laughs] Well, I’ve been thinking of getting that done. Actually I’ve been thinking of getting mailing labels done. It would seem like such a great luxury to have Cerebus mailing labels with space to write an address in on those rare occasions when I send something out on my own, or when Roly sends them out, instead of Roly still writing out “Cerebus, Box 1674, Station C, Kitchener, Ontario” on all of the packages. It’s like, yeah, I’m not destitute or anything but there’s better uses for the money. I think I’d like the time period where I could afford mailing labels and maybe even actually printed envelopes.
Matt: Well, you know, you could go out and get a stamp that’s got Cerebus and the address, and just stamp the boxes.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. Or Roly could. But it’s one of those, well, right now, there’s other things to be done. I think we’re finally coming to a breathing space after Spawn 10, which is now moving ahead. I just approved the Spawn 10 Halloween and Grandma covers, the final version, for Sean, so that was the last jigsaw puzzle piece missing for Waverly Press. The printer wasn’t going to print the other 18 covers, or whatever it was, until they had all of the covers in house. So that was what the delay was on that, but, we’re finally full speed ahead on that end of things, as well.
Matt: I got an email from somebody going, that all of the Cerebus and Spawn and High Society stuff has been removed from the Waverly’s website. “What’s going on?” So I sent a message, and I got a response, of, “oh yeah, you know.” How I phrased my message was, is something going on? You doing a site update or have you and Dave had an Alan Moore/ Steve Bissette falling out and that’s the end of it? And I got a response of “no no no, it’s a site update. New stuff and everything will be back in a week or two.” and I’m going, okay, that’s what I figured, but then I responded to the first email I got, going, oh no no, you didn’t hear it from me, but oh yeah, big falling out, they’re never gonna speak again” and then I put a couple line breaks, and then I’m like, nah I’m just messing with you, it’s a site update. [laughs] And then I signed off and put in parenthesis, “(the look on your face)” [laughs].
Dave: Uh-huh. Ya see, you’ve gotta be careful about doing that, because…
Matt: Because it’ll blow up in my face and your face and everyone else’s face!
Dave: Exactly! Because that’s how the internet works. Anything in proximity, if somebody said it, doesn’t matter if it was a joke, we don’t have jokes anymore. [laughs] Not if somebody doesn’t want it to be a joke. If they don’t think it’s a joke, it’s not a joke. But, no, we’re forging ahead. It’s an amazing learning experience just over the course of “Cerebus” #1 and Spawn 10 and everything has to be rethought constantly. I’ve never had that experience before of, most of “Cerebus” was done as, okay this is how we’re doing it. We don’t revisit this. This is how we can stay on a monthly schedule. If we’re always revisiting this, and changing how we do things, changing how we do things is going to take the place of getting the book out every month. So having had pretty close to 26 years of that, of falling behind when we went to get caught up in Hawaii, this is very very different, where it’s, “this worked last time. We’re not sure if this is working this time. But this seems to be working, let’s try more of this.” And this is the time period now, now that Spawn 10 Kickstarter is over and the IndieGoGo Spawn 10 Kickstarter is over, now we’ve got this interregnum period where the fulfillment is done, and the next time we need to have hard answers, yes, we’re all done theorizing about the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter, this is how it’s going to go, needs to be decided when everyone is getting their Spawn 10 packages, because that’s the way that it works the best. You’ve waited a while, here’s the thing that you’ve been waiting for, we’re ready to do another one, and here’s exactly how that one’s going to go. And there’s a lot more decision making on Dagon’s part, because he’s the fulfillment guy, and he’s the one having to make sure that everybody gets what they’re getting. I make suggestions and if it’s something that meshes with what he thinks is going to work, then that’s the way that we’re going to do it. If it doesn’t, then that’s not the way that we’re going to do it, and I’m fine with that. Part of the ambition was to be as hands off as possible with the Waverly Press Cerebus stuff, so that I’m actually working on other material. I’m spending my time doing creative stuff and everyone else is putting in the time doing the stuff that I can’t do that other people can do. And that’s really the new standard operation procedure. It’s the same as, I don’t go out shopping to stores to buy something. I tell Roly, can you go and get me this thing? And he goes and gets it and puts it on my personal tab that I pay him. It doesn’t make sense for me to do something that Roly can do, because Roly can’t sit down and do a “Cerebus” #2 cover. If he could, that would be great. Tell you what, Roly, I’ll go and pick up the mail today. You sit down and draw this “Cerebus” #2 cover.
Matt: [laughs] If only you could tag team with somebody else, of, okay today it’s your day to draw, I’m gonna do something else.
Dave: Yeah, it’s very interesting, looking at the right wrist that all of this is balanced on. And it’s, uh yep, there it is right there, and this is me up here, and never the twain shall meet. Okay, we’re gonna cap it there, Matthew. Say hi to Paula and say hi to Janis Pearl and say hi to Natasha for me.
Matt: Will do. And God willing and the creek don’t rise, we’ll do this again next year.
Dave: Next year?! Oh God, that sounds horrible. Oh God! Okay. Well, maybe it’ll be better than this year. Couldn’t be… well I won’t say that either.
Matt: Yeah yeah, it could be worse, but we’re hoping for better. [laughs]
Dave: That’s right, that’s right. Okay, have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too! Have a good night, Dave.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Okay, everybody, I’m gonna quickly show the audio-visual people my hand again, cause people hadn’t seen it. Still has the burst capillaries on the middle finger, but the bruising, compare it to my other fingers, it looks really good. And then on the other side, yeah, the nail’s black, but most of the bruising’s gone. It looks a lot better, so thanks for all the well wishes, I really appreciate it. And again, see everybody again next year, or in January, however you want to look at it, and for you fine folks on the audio side, picture a really bad looking finger. Alright. Goodnight, and God bless!
Rigamarole:
The Kickstarter ends in three days.
Acquaintance to the blog Travis sent in:
My Kickstarter was unsuccessful. Thank you for adding it to the blog in the last several days.
I appreciate it.
I decided to just put the comic for sale on Lulu.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/fanny-kelly-and-hal-kolbeck/my-captivity/paperback/product-459wr8z.html?page=1&pageSize=4
And Tim Gagne sent in:
If you can link this on AMOC Matt Allsion could use the help. https://crowdfundr.com/a2Yvxb?ref=ab_3UXdKBiCFCH3UXdKBiCFCH Bargain @ $10.
I'm selling bootleg Cerebus trading cards featuring my art, coloring by Hobbs, and unused art of MY characters by Dave. $10 a set for 11 cards plus TWO HANDDRAWN cards (by me). Email momentofcerebus@gmail.com and I'll explain how to pay.
The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. More on this as I'm allowed to post stuff...
Our very own Jen DiGiacomo is part of a film production titled The Day Elvis Died. She'll never ask anybody here, but they're crowdfunding to finish the post production on the movie. (It's set in 1977, will a certain obscure Canadian cartoon aardvark make a cameo? (No. Elvis died in August. Cerebus wasn't published until December. Any appearance in the flick would be an anachronism that would ruin the movie for everybody. EVERYBODY!).) Here's the first trailer.
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Up to 35% off July someteenth.*
*Sale dates are not final and therefore subject to change.
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You can get all 16 volumes of Cerebus, many of them Remastered for $99CANADIAN at CerebusDownloads.com (More if you want the Remastered Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing...)
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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Next Time: Jen.
2 comments:
Paragraph breaks would really help the transcripts. I gave up trying to read it.
I just checked the backlog, and it appears I do start adding proper paragraphing with the March 2021 PHfDS. So just two more weeks of the wall of text, I assure you.
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