Hi, Everybody!
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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.
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Dave: Tight as a frog’s ass, and that’s watertight, as my Dad used to say.
Matt: Almost, but yeah, quite.
Dave: There you go.
Matt: Alright, we are recording.
Dave: We are recording! Oh-kay. I want to start off by talking about the Halloween Edition. We have had damages reported and the biggest problem that we’re having across the board with just about everything right now is just how completely unpredictable the mail delivery is. As a matter of fact, all of the delivery systems are a little bit wonky. I’ve had FedEx overnight package from Diamond that took like eight days to get here overnight.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Talked to Doug Sulipa about this, just in passing, I was talking to him about something else, and because all of his stuff is mail order, he started looking into it and going, “what is going on with the USPS and Canada Post?” And what it is, is kind of a perfect storm of everybody switching most of their purchasing, if it’s not Amazon then they’re doing it through USPS and Canada Post online, combined with the first Christmas where almost everything was having to be delivered through the mail that would ordinarily be delivered in person. Both USPS and Canada Post evidently have the same program, which is, you have the hub mail sorting plant, and they have the most staffing. So the rule is, if you find yourself in an overspill situation and you’re not a primary hub, if you’re like the Trillium Drive sorting plant here in Kitchener, and you’ve got just too many packages for your staffing, the immediate default position is to forward the overspill to the hub where they have more people to sort. And, like I say, we have this perfect storm, so consequently almost every post office had overspill, so every post office was sending their overspill to hub location. In Southern Ontario, Mississauga is the biggest hub, and in the US, Chicago is the biggest hub. And evidently, they were at the point where they had multiple tractor trailers parked on the property stuffed with mail that was overspill and they were, as the program is set up, dealing with everything on their plate and gradually moving the rest of this stuff into the actual sorting process. Which explains why a package that I sent to Sean Robinson between Christmas and New Year’s sat in Chicago for about three weeks and also explains how a purchaser of one of the Halloween Editions who got a damaged copy in Pickering, Ontario, which is maybe an hour and a half drive from Kitchener? It took three weeks to get to him. So, as they said in the movie “JFK”, we are through the looking glass into a brand new state of reality for people who rely on mail delivery. Doug Sulipa, obviously, a lot more than Aardvark-Vanaheim or Waverly Press, but we’re all seeing the same thing. The Spawn 10 packages are still in the same situation that they were when that Kickstarter came to an end. I’m ready to sign everything that I’m supposed to sign. We’ve done a workaround. Rolly just left me a phone message telling me that Alfonso at Studiocomix Press has printed the Spawn 10 poster set that people were ordering that I was supposed to sign. So that’s one of those, let’s not print that somewhere outside of Kitchener, if we can print it in Kitchener, because then it just has to be delivered by car, or Rolly just has to pick it up and I can sign it, and it gets back into transportation hell when I try mailing it to Waverly Press. So, we’ve had 7 out of the 54… actually 160 or so, Halloween Editions, and the AP Halloween Editions, out of the 160 that went out, we’ve had seven damages so far, but because of this slow down, it took three weeks, four weeks after they shipped for me to find out that they are damaged. And we’ve only had one of them actually come back in by mail. All of those will be replaced. That’s not a problem. I just want to make sure people are sending them back if they’re damaged, so that I can destroy the damaged copy, and we can keep this really really rare comic book that these people bought to the 54 numbered copies, and 106 artist’s proof copies. So, the situation there is, I have really no idea how bad the problem is. Did only seven of the packages get delivered, and all of the packages are damaged? That would be the worst case scenario. Or, did most of the packages get where they were doing, and they were fine, and we just have seven damages? One of the differences between Canada Post and the USPS is Canada Post does not have free tracking. Tracking of any package in Canada and internationally is very very expensive, so it makes a lot more sense for us to send the packages out, and if a package gets lost, or a package gets damaged, to replace it with the same number, or the same designation on it, than it is to try and pay for tracking on all of the packages. This is one of the reasons that the Halloween Edition was $75 Canadian, was I was going, okay, I’ve never done this. I want to experiment with this. But I have no idea how many moving parts there are, and how complicated this is going to get. And I want to have as much insulation packed in there so I’m not losing money on it. Right now I’m still waiting to find out, okay, like I say, how bad is the situation? I also want to reimburse everybody for the postage costs. If they’re having to send a comic book back here, that’s getting very expensive. It’s $20 US just to send one comic book to Canada, evidently, if you just send it by traditional mail. Well, the customer shouldn’t be eating that $20 just to get the 9.8 or better mint copy that they ordered. So I will be reimbursing people, just look at the mail charge on the package when it comes in. Okay, cut a cheque on Aardvark-Vanaheim US dollar account, and send that along with the replacement copy that I send back. But no idea how bad the situation is going to be, or how long it’s going to take me to find out how bad the situation is. Once we get some of those problems worked out, Rolly and I have been working on the best way to package the books so that there’s just no… well, you can’t say that there’s no way that they can arrive damaged. One of them was literally folded in half. You’d have to be a complete psycho to look at this package and go, “oh yeah, this package should be folded in half and just stuffed into a mail slot.” So, we’re getting “do not bend” stickers that I will be writing personally “please” on it, because I think we should still be polite to each other even when it’s something as basic as, you really shouldn’t be bending something that is this solid a package and you probably know that. But I will say “please don’t bend the comic.”
Matt: When I send out copies of “Vark Wars”, I was drawing an Iguana or Beer on the back of the package and writing, “Dear Mail Person, please please please, for the love of all that’s holy, do not bend.” I haven’t gotten any complaints!
Dave: [laughs] That’s good! That’s good. Yes, you have to remember, you are in the hands of these people, so be polite. Being a mail sorter, or a mail carrier, or any delivery person at this point, has not got to be the happiest occupation that you could possibly have, depending on the day and depending on how irate your devoted customers are. Yeah, I wanted to take care of that first. You sent me the Paul Slade question first, wasn’t it? “Hope everyone’s safe and well. It’s been a while since we had an update on remastering release of the phonebooks. I’m very curious to know where that program stands at the moment.” So, I’m gonna start with that one.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: I might be making a mistake doing that, but that’s what we’ll do. “Which volume is now at the front of the queue for release, and what’s the best estimate on when that release might come?” I didn’t have this list the last time that we did “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, now I do have the list of the books that need to be remastered and are in the process of being remastered. The one at the top of the list is “Form & Void”, which has been out of print for the longest time. Probably 2 years, 3 years? Because it was just, it’s not one of those books that sells very well, and I didn’t want to be bugging Diamond Comics to buy 1000 “Form & Void” when it was far more important to get “Jaka’s Story”, and “Cerebus”, and “High Society” back in stock down there. “Cerebus” and “High Society” in particular, those are always the priority books. I did get paid for the Spawn 10 Kickstarter by Waverly Press, Aardvark-Vanaheim got paid. That is probably the largest amount of money that will ever come in, ever ever again, the same way that Spawn 10 back in 1993 was as good as things were gonna get with Cerebus, and Dave Sim and Aardvark-Vanaheim and everything was downhill from there to issue 300. I think we’re in the same situation here. Spawn 10 Kickstarter is probably the best possible result that we could get in terms of sales and response, getting people interested in Cerebus even tangentially, and everything’s downhill from here. So, I made the judgement call to say, okay, since this is the last big chunk of money that’s ever coming in, I’m gonna send most of it, not all of it, to Sean Robinson for the remastering. So, all of the remastering is paid for. Obviously, Sean’s not going to be able to do it overnight, but it’s one of those, I don’t have to just watch the money trickling away as it always does and going, okay, six months ago I had enough money to remaster six trade paperbacks, now I don’t, so I have no idea where the money’s going to come for these other trade paperbacks. The list is, “Form & Void”, “The Last Day”, “Flight”, “Guys”, “Rick’s Story”, “Melmoth”, and “Latter Days”. “Melmoth” and “Latter Days” are at the bottom of the list, because I still have inventory on those, and pretty substantial inventory. I think there’s like 700 copies of “Latter Days” and 500 copies of “Melmoth”? Or something like that. So those are always in place, and obviously Diamond’s a lot happier with being able to just order 50 copies at a time. I don’t make a lot of money on the 50 copies. It’ll be an $800 order, which Rolly goes and gets out of the storage unit, and then takes over to Packaging Too, and they package it up according to Diamond specification, and send it out to Diamond by UPS. And do all of the customs and whatever other charges. So it usually costs for an $800 shipment of books, it’ll cost anywhere between $300 and $400 just to ship them. But I’m not really in the situation of expecting the trade paperbacks, or the direct market, or Diamond Comic Distributors to provide a livelihood for me. I want to make sure that anybody who does want to get Cerebus and starts reading Cerebus can get all of the trade paperbacks from Diamond. So, if I don’t make money on that, that’s fine, at least it exists as a possibility of, somebody is not going to be in the situation of getting up to volume 8, volume 9, whatever, it’s out of print, and now they’re going, “uhh, now what do I do? I’ve read 7 of these volumes, I want to keep reading.” And it’s like, well, it’s very very difficult to keep books that don’t sell very very well at all in print. So, getting back to Paul, your question, Paul. The front of the queue for release, well there ya go, I’ve given you the list of the titles and what order they’re going to be done in, and why they’re going to be done in that order. “What’s the best estimate on when that release might come?” There’s just way way too many moving parts right now in terms of how long it takes to get this done. Like I said, Aardvark-Vanaheim got paid for Spawn 10, and of course, nobody has their Spawn 10s yet. I still haven’t gotten the platinum covers to sign, Dagon hasn’t gotten anything from the printers that he’s using, in the way of proofs or anything like that, and what I’ve told him is I don’t want to be paid for the “High Society” hardcover until everybody, or most people, have gotten their Spawn 10 packages. Because I just don’t think that’s right. It’s not my fault, and it’s not Dagon’s fault, that these things aren’t working more quickly than they are, the printers are all getting swamped because everybody who is doing movies, and plays, and live performances, and song tests have now turned into on paper people or online people and are clogging up the works. We’ve got way too many publishers at this point relative to what we had as publishers before. So I have no idea how that turns out. I don’t know how badly I’m cutting Aardvark-Vanaheim’s throat saying, I don’t want want to get paid for the “High Society” hardcover until people are getting their Spawn 10 packages and everything’s going along fine with that. But I do want to adjust to the new reality, which is delivery is very very unreliable, and all the things have to be delivered multiple times. Something I have to sign has to be delivered here, Rolly has to package it, and then it has to go out to either Dagon James or somebody else who is going to be doing the packaging for Waverly Press. And, at a point where you never know if something is going to take weeks that should be taking days, and Waverly publishes a lot of stuff, and they have this experience with several of the book that they’re in the process of getting done that everything is just ground to a complete halt. So, in terms of when that release might come, to release is one question, when it would be made available is another question. When it would get shipped to you is another question, and when you would receive it is yet another question on top of all of those questions. All of which, all we can do is sort of shrug and go, beats the hell outta me, I have no idea how long it’s going to take to do these. We are discussing other possibilities. One of the things that Dagon has suggested, is, instead of doing Kickstarters where… well the next one is gonna be “Cerebus” #2, so instead of doing a Kickstarter for “Cerebus” #2, where the thing that you’re selling people doesn’t exist, and getting in all the money and then starting the process of making that thing exist, like apart from the artwork, I’m getting the covers done right now. Why not print all of the “Cerebus” #2s and just guess how many we’re going to need, and just put the rest of them on CerebusOverload and they’ll either sell at a very brisk pace or a not-so-brisk pace, but they will sell over time and we do have other place to sell them, and hope that that compresses the fulfillment end of things, where if instead of saying, “we’re going to be doing a ‘Cerebus’ #2 Kickstarter” we didn’t say anything and got the Kickstarter all done. Here’s all of these boxes of books, here’s all of the Gemini mailers that they’re going to go in, here’s everybody’s address that we’ve already been selling to. These books are all set to go. Michael R’s #26 is sitting in a Gemini mailer with Michael R’s address in Easton, Pennsylvania, it’s all set to go, all we have to do is announce it and Bob’s your uncle. Because, Michael R pays for it, it goes straight into the mail, and hopefully he gets it a week later instead of four months later. How workable that is, we don’t know. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. “Let’s do what we’re not doing, and what we decided to do will work better than what we are doing.” No, there’s no guarantee of that anywhere in our new COVID-19 reality, and our new universal online mail and FedEx and UPS reality where everything has to come in that way. So, the best that I can do is say I will be suffering along with everyone else. I would really be much happier having the insulation from the “High Society” hardcover. I’ve got the figures here somewhere… if you’ll just bear with me for a couple of a moments. Yes, there it is. So there was $30,000 profit, so yeah, $37,700. AV’s share was $15350. Obviously, I would be a lot more comfortable if I knew that that cheque was on the way to me, which is what Dagon was saying, “I’ll put this in the box with all of these samples of Spawn 10 stuff and High Society trading cards and Regency notepads and High Society Notebook, postcards, fine art prints, enamel pins, etc. etc. etc.” Yeah, that would really be the cherry on the top. But I just can’t, in good confidence, doing that when I know when it comes to, “well when are they going to get these hardcovers?” It’s like, I dunno. If you told me three months from now, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you told me six months from now, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you told me three weeks from now. We’re finally over this hump and now things are going to go a lot smoother, at least on a temporary basis. Because I don’t know that, I think I have to wait for my reward if everybody else has to wait for their reward.
“I realize the scheduling of these books is a complicated matter at the best of times.” Yes, indeed. “Relying largely on Diamond’s existing stock of each unmastered volume, but any indication you can give would be good to have.” So that’s the intel on that. Like I say, I’m also mentally getting into a situation where I would like to just print up 1000 copies of the new edition of “Form & Void”, which is done being remastered. That went very very quickly. I went and got the artwork from the off-site storage, as best I could. Mostly one handed, and definitely one-wristed, bringing the pages back here and then Rolly scanning them out back at Camp David, and then taking them back to the storage facility. That went very smoothly. Gerhard had already scanned all of his “Form & Void” pages, and that was one of those, okay, now I’m gonna find out the bad news. How many “Form & Void” pages are missing, because we never sold any “Form & Void” pages. I have the Cerebus Archive pages, Gerhard has the Gerhard pages, and anything that is missing is missing inexplicably, which is just one of the things that happens for some reason with this volume of artwork. So there was three pages missing. The two page spread of Jaka cutting Cerebus’ hair in the tent with Mary and Ham in the distant background. Those two pages are gone, and one of the pages from I think the issue before that is gone. As I say, there’s no explanation of where they would go. Artwork literally just disappears. Very very disheartening, but it’s one of those, probably just God’s way of telling me, “well, this is the drawback of doing a 6000 page graphic novel. You’ll never be able to keep all of those cats herded. I’ll tell you all about it on Judgment Day. I’ll explain the whole thing and you’ll understand, but sorry Dave, you’re just gonna have this absolutely stomach-dropping moment repeatedly everytime when you have to go and get the artwork and you’re hoping it’s all there, and it’s never going to be all there.” And it’s like, I’m already missing in my mind 2300 pages from the Cerebus Archive. How many more pages am I going to be missing? How many more pages is Gerhard going to be missing? Any page that just isn’t there, it’s a page that I don’t have for the Archive, and Gerhard doesn’t have to sell somewhere up ahead.
“I ask because it’s the remastered trades which interest me far more than anything else AV is putting out at the moment. I get the impression that the focus has now drifted away from that programme, which would be disappointing if true.” It hasn’t really drifted away, it’s just been not possible up to this point. Up until 2020, and up until the situation with Waverly Press, it was, the money that comes in basically just goes to pay bills and I would transfer out of the US account into the Canadian account. I haven’t had to do that since August 27, 2020 was the last time I transferred out of the US into the Canadian account. So that’s good news. It means that there is money for the remastering, which was always a priority. Remastering and keeping the books in print. But if you don’t have the money, you can’t do it. I’m not going to borrow money to bring “Form & Void” back into print. It’s a very very good book, I’m very very proud of it. Certainly far more proud of it than I am of “Cerebus” and “High Society”. But you can’t argue with the market. It’s like Paul McCartney saying, “’Flowers in the Dirt’ is a much better album than ‘Meet the Beatles’”. And it’s like, well you can say that until you’re blue in the face, but people would rather talk to you about “Meet the Beatles” and talk to you about the songs on “Meet the Beatles” than they want to talk to you about “Flowers in the Dirt”. It’s like, sorry, we’re throwing your flowers in the dirt because they’re your flowers. They’re not our flowers. So, like I say, the situation is now that that’s moving along, in the scanning stage, and with the three missing pages, all the “Form & Void” negatives that are on the flat had to be cut apart and Rolly had to find the missing three negatives for those three pages. I gave him the two issues to take home so he could be watching for pages that looked like that, while he was cutting the negatives apart, and then the notes that are in the back, those are all in the negative form. And there was a fair amount of back and forth between Rolly and Sean because we’ve got a scanner that’s actually built to scan negatives specifically. It is the best scanner on the market for scanning full size photographic negatives. Rolly would do two or three, and then email them to Sean, and it’s like it just wasn’t working. It was a shadow from the image on the negative that was being cast at the scanning process. So they went back and forth, I tried to remember, okay, the last time that we did this, it was Rolly’s Aunt, Karen Funk, who was doing the scanning. We ran into this problem. What is it that we did? So I tried to remember what I could remember of it, and sent Sean a fax about that, and two days later, whatever it was, he and Rolly got it sorted out, and the scans of the negatives came in absolutely perfectly. Sean is very very enthusiastic about “Form & Void”, it’s gonna be a really really gorgeous book. The remastering was a very different process, because it’s 100% black & white. That was Gerhard’s call. After he was done doing the F Scott Fitzgerald book, “Going Home”, and instead of doing all of his crosshatching, it’s like, “well I’ll do mechanical tones. Mechanical tones will go faster.” [laughs] And it’s like, uhh, I dunno, you might want to give Ken Steacy a phone call about that. Ken Steacy went through the same thing when he decided to go tone-heavy and it’s like, mm, it’s just a different set of problems. But! I’m perfectly happy to have that happen. I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job, and he did a wonderful job learning how to use all of these different grades of tone. “This is the 10%, this is the 20%, if I put this over here and that over there, it’s gonna look like a real sunset, and it’s gonna look like genuine shadows on the barge.” All of those kinds of things, but it’s like, “it might even have been faster for me to crosshatch all of this instead of cutting it all out and having it stuck in my hair and stuck on my shoes and stuck on my clothes.” It’s like, well. So, when “Form & Void” came along, he went, “let’s just do black and white. No tone! No crosshatching!” and he was very very fond of Mike Mignola’s work, which he’d started seeing intermittently and went, “like that! Let’s do that. Where it’s either black or it’s white, and if there’s any kind of crosshatching, it’s just a minor amount of crosshatching.” And it’s like, okay. [laughs] I’m more than willing to do that, but I think you’ll find out that that’s it’s own set of problems. But, it did have a certain number of pluses with it. Because there was no crosshatching to fuzz out, it was possible for Gerhard to photocopy backgrounds. Just keep the toner in the photocopier up to snuff and if Cerebus is standing in the same place for three panels and there’s just a bunch of tree branches in behind him, then you just draw the tree branches once, photocopy them twice. I usually recommended, “no, they either have to all be photocopies.” Well, they do have to all be photocopies if you’re duplicating the drawn one, because the drawn one is gonna have a different texture from the photocopy. I mean, even the black and white is going to fuzz out a little bit. So better that backgrounds all fuzz out at the same rate, and he understood that. “Okay, we’ll move ahead on this.” So, that because a different problem for the remastering, where Sean was doing more with touching up the paste-up line, where, okay, when I’m getting Rolly to scan these in this way, and then he’s importing them into his computer and starting to deal with the filtering and all the kind of stuff. It’s like, okay, this is very very different from dealing with the crosshatching, and particularly dealing with the shrunken tone and the stained pages, because these are the later pages, there’s not as much staining and just basic wear and tear on them. So, Sean’s gonna have, each one of these books that he finally sits down and does the remastering on, there’s gonna be a different set of problems. But I maintain he’s still the best pre-press guy in the business and he’s learned a lot more and he’s learned, okay, if something isn’t working for this page of “Form & Void” you have to figure it all out so that the rest of the pages go smoothly. Which they did, with interesting little quirky problems mixed in. Like the Grizz Beer, the Grizzly Bear that was Ham Ernestway’s favorite beer, so it was Cerebus’ favorite beer. He said that scanning it from the original art of the label, and then reducing it, and then digitally putting it on a small bottle, didn’t look right. And he’s still not really certain why that doesn’t look right, whereas if he took the scan of the reduced photocopy that we did and paste it in on Cerebus or Ham’s beer bottle, he could fix that, and make it look more plausibly part of the artwork than actually reducing the large original version. That’s something you’re not gonna know until you’re under the hood and you’re up to your elbows, and you’re going, “now why in the hell would that be?” And it’s like, well, it’s not really one of those ‘why in the hell would that be?’ you’re probably never gonna know that. You know that that is, so you have to deal with it on its own terms.
“Cerebus in Hell? doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ve been buying every issue anyway in the hopes that this will help to raise money for the continued remastering of the trades (which I think was the book’s original purpose?). “ Ah, yes, yes. Partly. “Cerebus in Hell?” went from, okay, this is something that will bring in money that Sandy Atwal and I can put together reasonably quickly, and if it’s selling 4000, 5000 copies, well okay, it’s not a fortune, but it pays me some money, it pays Aardvark-Vanaheim some money, it pays Sandeep some money, and maybe it’ll catch on. [laughs] It’s like, well no, completely the opposite, it didn’t catch on. It’s got its core audience of somewhere between 1800 and 2200 people. That got to the situation where David Birdsong is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, Benjamin Hobbs is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, I know Matt Dow is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, I really like “Cerebus in Hell?” It became a matter of, well, I’ll keep doing it. We’ll keep hoping that it sells better. I don’t think it’s going to, but I’m not gonna pull the plug this time as I did with “Glamourpuss”, well, we’ll just have to make it a hobby that we’re all going to have and do things like get issues done through July 2022, because that way, it’s well okay, I’m not really bothered that “Amazing Batvark” only sold 2200 copies, because I did it a year ago! [laughs] Who worries about what they did a year ago? I’ve got high hopes for this thing that will be coming out a year and half from now. What do you need to get up in the morning, and that’s one of those things that I need to get up in the morning, is, here’s something that I really really like doing, and I want to keep doing it, and it just doesn’t make enough money to warrant doing it. But definitely, major thanks to you, Paul, and everybody else who’s buying “Cerebus in Hell?” and really doesn’t like it. Where did I like it?
“Personally, I’m not interested in the remastered original issues either, but a lot of other people clearly are, so I’m hoping they might be helping to finance the future trades programme too. Is that the case?” Yes! Definitely, we’re in the situation now of, now that Waverly Press has done “Cerebus” #1 and “Spawn” 10. “Cerebus” #1 brought in, whatever it brought in. Like $50,000? And “Spawn” 10 brought in $95,000. Now the question is, okay, what’s going to happen with “Cerebus” #2? I have to say that Dagon is [laughs] a cockeyed optimist in a way that I haven’t been a cockeyed optimist in a long time, that he really thinks that it is possible to build a new audience for Cerebus. And it’s like, mmm, I think we’re too far into the feminist nightmare for that to happen. But I’m always willing to be proven wrong, and I’m certainly willing to do what I can do to help Dagon to try and attract new people, and one of the ways that I think is his theory of how this is going to attract people, is you have to be able to sell them a “Cerebus” #1 that isn’t going to cost them $800 and they don’t have to buy a whole trade paperback to go with it. They can just get “Cerebus” #1, and six months later, eight months later, you can offer them “Cerebus” #2 on the same basis. So it’s like, okay, it could take 5 years, 6 years, 8 years, for us to find out, okay, where’s the drop off point? Where do the new audience people and the Cerebus fans themselves go, “alright, I bought #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8. I’m all done. I don’t want to have a facsimile and a gold and a platinum version of all 300 issues.” It’s like, it was the same as Dagon said, we’ve had interest expressed for facsimiles of “Cerebus” #26 and 27. And it’s like, mm, I don’t think you can do that. I’m sure that they would sell very well, because again, it’s the beginning of “High Society” and I could do three or four “High Society” #1 covers, kind of thing. But you can’t do that when you just sold them #1 and getting ready to sell them #2, because now you’re backing them into the idea that they’re going to have to buy #3 to 25. Because they’re not gonna be interested in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 26, and 27. I already know that about comic book collectors and comic book fans. I think one of the elements with that is, if you’re buying as an investment, like someday you hope that what it is that you’ve bought is worth a lot of money. I was talking to Doug Sulipa, he pointed out that comic books go up in value, trade paperbacks tend not to. A lot of that issues from Overstreet, because Overstreet is obsessive and micro-manages the whole comic book value situation and has done since 1970. You’re just not going to move sideways into also the book collection. Consequently, almost all trade paperbacks are still going for cover price or less than cover price. Whereas comic books, depending on their rarity, which is one of the things we’re selling here, Dagon’s gonna be machine numbering the “Spawn” 10. We machine numbered the Halloween Edition. This is a comic book that if you get it encapsulated by CGC, it’s 1 of 54. The Cerebus audience and the market for Cerebus, however wide it is, it’s definitely wider than 54 people, and particularly something that’s attached to Spawn. Most of the Spawn fans don’t even know that these things exist, so I think it’s a good investment. Instead of hoping “Cerebus in Hell?” sells better somewhere up ahead, and it does intermittently. I mean, “Batvark: Penis” was this amazing hit for us. I think it was like 9000 copies in total sold? I’m almost ready to just do a new “Batvark: Penis” every month in addition to “Cerebus in Hell?” to pay for “Cerebus in Hell?” Or do a multiple “Batvark: Penis” covers for $100 each and only sell 50 of those. [laughs] Well, there you go, you have this extremely rare comic book. So, yeah, in terms of, “Batvark: Penis” was a major case infusion, and “Cerebus” #1 was a major cash infusion. What “Cerebus” #2 is going to do in terms of cash infusions, is a whole other question, and that’s why I’m saying to Dagon, we’re gonna do #2 and if #2 sells, like we’re not looking for “Spawn” 10 numbers, but if it sells at or close to “Cerebus” #1 numbers, there’s not a huge drop-off and there is a level of interest from new people, then we do #3. And each time we’re sitting down and looking at the numbers and going, okay, what we’re looking for is the exponential drop-off, where it’s like, “okay, we knew it was coming, here it is. #6 is the last one, or #7 is the last one.” But, yes, definitely that’s where excess revenue coming in are being able to move the other projects along, so that, yes, the remastering can be done. Yes, each of the new remastered trade paperbacks will also be a hardcover. That’s being put in place as well. I got a phone message from Todd Hignite at Heritage Auctions telling him that he will be getting the #1 out of 10, 2 out of 10, 3 out of 10, 4 out of 10, “High Society” hardcovers for Heritage Auctions to auction and leaving up to him how they were gonna do it, and it sounds like they’re gonna do a countdown. You will be able to bid on #10, #9, #8, #7, #6 and we’re hoping for a huge huge hockey stick curve on the #1 hardcover.
So, “I’ve already got a near-complete Cerebus collection in the original issues, plus all eight of the remastered trades, and it’s these trades which I’ve found to give the saga’s most satisfying reading experience. It’s also wonderful to see the art with Sean’s meticulous restoration and reproduction work, of course. I’m looking forward to Carson's expanded edition of SDoAR too, though I don’t think I shall bother with You Don’t Know Jack.” [laughs] It’s like, well, I’m really happy with “You Don’t Know Jack”. I enjoy rereading it from time to time. It’s never going to be the thing that I’m known for, but I’m really really happy with that. And I do think there are also two primary bodies of Cerebus fans. The people, like Paul, who are gung ho primarily on the remastered trades, and reading those. And the other people who went over to the trade side, “yes, I will get the Cerebus trades, they’re on my bookshelf, now I can sell all of my back issues.” and decided late in the day, “I really like having the back issues.” Some of the people who reread all of Cerebus once a year, which boggles my mind, but reread all of Cerebus once a year, their best reading experience is the Notes from the President, the comic, the letters page in the back, the previews, the whole time period ambiance. The story, as part of it, but that’s not what they would have the trade paperbacks for. We’re going to do what we can to keep both sides of the audience happy with that. And that having been said, I’m about five minutes away from my prayer time, so I’m going to hang up..
Matt: Okay!
Dave: And then I’ll call you back and we will forge ahead!
Matt: Okay. That works.
Dave: Okay, take care, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[time passes, presumably]
Matt: I just said to myself, oh crap! Because I turned off the ringer on my phone cause I’m talking to Dave and I don’t want to get notifications and stuff, and it just dawned on me, hey, Dave’s gonna call any second now, maybe I’ll want to hear that. [laughs]
Dave: Maybe you might!
Matt: Good timing. We’re back to recording, hi everybody, we’re back!
Dave: Hi, everybody. We are back. “And for fun, James Windsor-Smith, he who sent you the sketched Cerebus sketchbook has a Faceybook group called ‘Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.” He posted a homework assignment, draw a Batman black & white cover in your style. And here’s mine.” And there it is. That’s definitely as Matt Dow a Batman black & white cover as you could hope to find.
Dave: I might be making a mistake doing that, but that’s what we’ll do. “Which volume is now at the front of the queue for release, and what’s the best estimate on when that release might come?” I didn’t have this list the last time that we did “Please Hold for Dave Sim”, now I do have the list of the books that need to be remastered and are in the process of being remastered. The one at the top of the list is “Form & Void”, which has been out of print for the longest time. Probably 2 years, 3 years? Because it was just, it’s not one of those books that sells very well, and I didn’t want to be bugging Diamond Comics to buy 1000 “Form & Void” when it was far more important to get “Jaka’s Story”, and “Cerebus”, and “High Society” back in stock down there. “Cerebus” and “High Society” in particular, those are always the priority books. I did get paid for the Spawn 10 Kickstarter by Waverly Press, Aardvark-Vanaheim got paid. That is probably the largest amount of money that will ever come in, ever ever again, the same way that Spawn 10 back in 1993 was as good as things were gonna get with Cerebus, and Dave Sim and Aardvark-Vanaheim and everything was downhill from there to issue 300. I think we’re in the same situation here. Spawn 10 Kickstarter is probably the best possible result that we could get in terms of sales and response, getting people interested in Cerebus even tangentially, and everything’s downhill from here. So, I made the judgement call to say, okay, since this is the last big chunk of money that’s ever coming in, I’m gonna send most of it, not all of it, to Sean Robinson for the remastering. So, all of the remastering is paid for. Obviously, Sean’s not going to be able to do it overnight, but it’s one of those, I don’t have to just watch the money trickling away as it always does and going, okay, six months ago I had enough money to remaster six trade paperbacks, now I don’t, so I have no idea where the money’s going to come for these other trade paperbacks. The list is, “Form & Void”, “The Last Day”, “Flight”, “Guys”, “Rick’s Story”, “Melmoth”, and “Latter Days”. “Melmoth” and “Latter Days” are at the bottom of the list, because I still have inventory on those, and pretty substantial inventory. I think there’s like 700 copies of “Latter Days” and 500 copies of “Melmoth”? Or something like that. So those are always in place, and obviously Diamond’s a lot happier with being able to just order 50 copies at a time. I don’t make a lot of money on the 50 copies. It’ll be an $800 order, which Rolly goes and gets out of the storage unit, and then takes over to Packaging Too, and they package it up according to Diamond specification, and send it out to Diamond by UPS. And do all of the customs and whatever other charges. So it usually costs for an $800 shipment of books, it’ll cost anywhere between $300 and $400 just to ship them. But I’m not really in the situation of expecting the trade paperbacks, or the direct market, or Diamond Comic Distributors to provide a livelihood for me. I want to make sure that anybody who does want to get Cerebus and starts reading Cerebus can get all of the trade paperbacks from Diamond. So, if I don’t make money on that, that’s fine, at least it exists as a possibility of, somebody is not going to be in the situation of getting up to volume 8, volume 9, whatever, it’s out of print, and now they’re going, “uhh, now what do I do? I’ve read 7 of these volumes, I want to keep reading.” And it’s like, well, it’s very very difficult to keep books that don’t sell very very well at all in print. So, getting back to Paul, your question, Paul. The front of the queue for release, well there ya go, I’ve given you the list of the titles and what order they’re going to be done in, and why they’re going to be done in that order. “What’s the best estimate on when that release might come?” There’s just way way too many moving parts right now in terms of how long it takes to get this done. Like I said, Aardvark-Vanaheim got paid for Spawn 10, and of course, nobody has their Spawn 10s yet. I still haven’t gotten the platinum covers to sign, Dagon hasn’t gotten anything from the printers that he’s using, in the way of proofs or anything like that, and what I’ve told him is I don’t want to be paid for the “High Society” hardcover until everybody, or most people, have gotten their Spawn 10 packages. Because I just don’t think that’s right. It’s not my fault, and it’s not Dagon’s fault, that these things aren’t working more quickly than they are, the printers are all getting swamped because everybody who is doing movies, and plays, and live performances, and song tests have now turned into on paper people or online people and are clogging up the works. We’ve got way too many publishers at this point relative to what we had as publishers before. So I have no idea how that turns out. I don’t know how badly I’m cutting Aardvark-Vanaheim’s throat saying, I don’t want want to get paid for the “High Society” hardcover until people are getting their Spawn 10 packages and everything’s going along fine with that. But I do want to adjust to the new reality, which is delivery is very very unreliable, and all the things have to be delivered multiple times. Something I have to sign has to be delivered here, Rolly has to package it, and then it has to go out to either Dagon James or somebody else who is going to be doing the packaging for Waverly Press. And, at a point where you never know if something is going to take weeks that should be taking days, and Waverly publishes a lot of stuff, and they have this experience with several of the book that they’re in the process of getting done that everything is just ground to a complete halt. So, in terms of when that release might come, to release is one question, when it would be made available is another question. When it would get shipped to you is another question, and when you would receive it is yet another question on top of all of those questions. All of which, all we can do is sort of shrug and go, beats the hell outta me, I have no idea how long it’s going to take to do these. We are discussing other possibilities. One of the things that Dagon has suggested, is, instead of doing Kickstarters where… well the next one is gonna be “Cerebus” #2, so instead of doing a Kickstarter for “Cerebus” #2, where the thing that you’re selling people doesn’t exist, and getting in all the money and then starting the process of making that thing exist, like apart from the artwork, I’m getting the covers done right now. Why not print all of the “Cerebus” #2s and just guess how many we’re going to need, and just put the rest of them on CerebusOverload and they’ll either sell at a very brisk pace or a not-so-brisk pace, but they will sell over time and we do have other place to sell them, and hope that that compresses the fulfillment end of things, where if instead of saying, “we’re going to be doing a ‘Cerebus’ #2 Kickstarter” we didn’t say anything and got the Kickstarter all done. Here’s all of these boxes of books, here’s all of the Gemini mailers that they’re going to go in, here’s everybody’s address that we’ve already been selling to. These books are all set to go. Michael R’s #26 is sitting in a Gemini mailer with Michael R’s address in Easton, Pennsylvania, it’s all set to go, all we have to do is announce it and Bob’s your uncle. Because, Michael R pays for it, it goes straight into the mail, and hopefully he gets it a week later instead of four months later. How workable that is, we don’t know. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. “Let’s do what we’re not doing, and what we decided to do will work better than what we are doing.” No, there’s no guarantee of that anywhere in our new COVID-19 reality, and our new universal online mail and FedEx and UPS reality where everything has to come in that way. So, the best that I can do is say I will be suffering along with everyone else. I would really be much happier having the insulation from the “High Society” hardcover. I’ve got the figures here somewhere… if you’ll just bear with me for a couple of a moments. Yes, there it is. So there was $30,000 profit, so yeah, $37,700. AV’s share was $15350. Obviously, I would be a lot more comfortable if I knew that that cheque was on the way to me, which is what Dagon was saying, “I’ll put this in the box with all of these samples of Spawn 10 stuff and High Society trading cards and Regency notepads and High Society Notebook, postcards, fine art prints, enamel pins, etc. etc. etc.” Yeah, that would really be the cherry on the top. But I just can’t, in good confidence, doing that when I know when it comes to, “well when are they going to get these hardcovers?” It’s like, I dunno. If you told me three months from now, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you told me six months from now, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you told me three weeks from now. We’re finally over this hump and now things are going to go a lot smoother, at least on a temporary basis. Because I don’t know that, I think I have to wait for my reward if everybody else has to wait for their reward.
“I realize the scheduling of these books is a complicated matter at the best of times.” Yes, indeed. “Relying largely on Diamond’s existing stock of each unmastered volume, but any indication you can give would be good to have.” So that’s the intel on that. Like I say, I’m also mentally getting into a situation where I would like to just print up 1000 copies of the new edition of “Form & Void”, which is done being remastered. That went very very quickly. I went and got the artwork from the off-site storage, as best I could. Mostly one handed, and definitely one-wristed, bringing the pages back here and then Rolly scanning them out back at Camp David, and then taking them back to the storage facility. That went very smoothly. Gerhard had already scanned all of his “Form & Void” pages, and that was one of those, okay, now I’m gonna find out the bad news. How many “Form & Void” pages are missing, because we never sold any “Form & Void” pages. I have the Cerebus Archive pages, Gerhard has the Gerhard pages, and anything that is missing is missing inexplicably, which is just one of the things that happens for some reason with this volume of artwork. So there was three pages missing. The two page spread of Jaka cutting Cerebus’ hair in the tent with Mary and Ham in the distant background. Those two pages are gone, and one of the pages from I think the issue before that is gone. As I say, there’s no explanation of where they would go. Artwork literally just disappears. Very very disheartening, but it’s one of those, probably just God’s way of telling me, “well, this is the drawback of doing a 6000 page graphic novel. You’ll never be able to keep all of those cats herded. I’ll tell you all about it on Judgment Day. I’ll explain the whole thing and you’ll understand, but sorry Dave, you’re just gonna have this absolutely stomach-dropping moment repeatedly everytime when you have to go and get the artwork and you’re hoping it’s all there, and it’s never going to be all there.” And it’s like, I’m already missing in my mind 2300 pages from the Cerebus Archive. How many more pages am I going to be missing? How many more pages is Gerhard going to be missing? Any page that just isn’t there, it’s a page that I don’t have for the Archive, and Gerhard doesn’t have to sell somewhere up ahead.
“I ask because it’s the remastered trades which interest me far more than anything else AV is putting out at the moment. I get the impression that the focus has now drifted away from that programme, which would be disappointing if true.” It hasn’t really drifted away, it’s just been not possible up to this point. Up until 2020, and up until the situation with Waverly Press, it was, the money that comes in basically just goes to pay bills and I would transfer out of the US account into the Canadian account. I haven’t had to do that since August 27, 2020 was the last time I transferred out of the US into the Canadian account. So that’s good news. It means that there is money for the remastering, which was always a priority. Remastering and keeping the books in print. But if you don’t have the money, you can’t do it. I’m not going to borrow money to bring “Form & Void” back into print. It’s a very very good book, I’m very very proud of it. Certainly far more proud of it than I am of “Cerebus” and “High Society”. But you can’t argue with the market. It’s like Paul McCartney saying, “’Flowers in the Dirt’ is a much better album than ‘Meet the Beatles’”. And it’s like, well you can say that until you’re blue in the face, but people would rather talk to you about “Meet the Beatles” and talk to you about the songs on “Meet the Beatles” than they want to talk to you about “Flowers in the Dirt”. It’s like, sorry, we’re throwing your flowers in the dirt because they’re your flowers. They’re not our flowers. So, like I say, the situation is now that that’s moving along, in the scanning stage, and with the three missing pages, all the “Form & Void” negatives that are on the flat had to be cut apart and Rolly had to find the missing three negatives for those three pages. I gave him the two issues to take home so he could be watching for pages that looked like that, while he was cutting the negatives apart, and then the notes that are in the back, those are all in the negative form. And there was a fair amount of back and forth between Rolly and Sean because we’ve got a scanner that’s actually built to scan negatives specifically. It is the best scanner on the market for scanning full size photographic negatives. Rolly would do two or three, and then email them to Sean, and it’s like it just wasn’t working. It was a shadow from the image on the negative that was being cast at the scanning process. So they went back and forth, I tried to remember, okay, the last time that we did this, it was Rolly’s Aunt, Karen Funk, who was doing the scanning. We ran into this problem. What is it that we did? So I tried to remember what I could remember of it, and sent Sean a fax about that, and two days later, whatever it was, he and Rolly got it sorted out, and the scans of the negatives came in absolutely perfectly. Sean is very very enthusiastic about “Form & Void”, it’s gonna be a really really gorgeous book. The remastering was a very different process, because it’s 100% black & white. That was Gerhard’s call. After he was done doing the F Scott Fitzgerald book, “Going Home”, and instead of doing all of his crosshatching, it’s like, “well I’ll do mechanical tones. Mechanical tones will go faster.” [laughs] And it’s like, uhh, I dunno, you might want to give Ken Steacy a phone call about that. Ken Steacy went through the same thing when he decided to go tone-heavy and it’s like, mm, it’s just a different set of problems. But! I’m perfectly happy to have that happen. I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job, and he did a wonderful job learning how to use all of these different grades of tone. “This is the 10%, this is the 20%, if I put this over here and that over there, it’s gonna look like a real sunset, and it’s gonna look like genuine shadows on the barge.” All of those kinds of things, but it’s like, “it might even have been faster for me to crosshatch all of this instead of cutting it all out and having it stuck in my hair and stuck on my shoes and stuck on my clothes.” It’s like, well. So, when “Form & Void” came along, he went, “let’s just do black and white. No tone! No crosshatching!” and he was very very fond of Mike Mignola’s work, which he’d started seeing intermittently and went, “like that! Let’s do that. Where it’s either black or it’s white, and if there’s any kind of crosshatching, it’s just a minor amount of crosshatching.” And it’s like, okay. [laughs] I’m more than willing to do that, but I think you’ll find out that that’s it’s own set of problems. But, it did have a certain number of pluses with it. Because there was no crosshatching to fuzz out, it was possible for Gerhard to photocopy backgrounds. Just keep the toner in the photocopier up to snuff and if Cerebus is standing in the same place for three panels and there’s just a bunch of tree branches in behind him, then you just draw the tree branches once, photocopy them twice. I usually recommended, “no, they either have to all be photocopies.” Well, they do have to all be photocopies if you’re duplicating the drawn one, because the drawn one is gonna have a different texture from the photocopy. I mean, even the black and white is going to fuzz out a little bit. So better that backgrounds all fuzz out at the same rate, and he understood that. “Okay, we’ll move ahead on this.” So, that because a different problem for the remastering, where Sean was doing more with touching up the paste-up line, where, okay, when I’m getting Rolly to scan these in this way, and then he’s importing them into his computer and starting to deal with the filtering and all the kind of stuff. It’s like, okay, this is very very different from dealing with the crosshatching, and particularly dealing with the shrunken tone and the stained pages, because these are the later pages, there’s not as much staining and just basic wear and tear on them. So, Sean’s gonna have, each one of these books that he finally sits down and does the remastering on, there’s gonna be a different set of problems. But I maintain he’s still the best pre-press guy in the business and he’s learned a lot more and he’s learned, okay, if something isn’t working for this page of “Form & Void” you have to figure it all out so that the rest of the pages go smoothly. Which they did, with interesting little quirky problems mixed in. Like the Grizz Beer, the Grizzly Bear that was Ham Ernestway’s favorite beer, so it was Cerebus’ favorite beer. He said that scanning it from the original art of the label, and then reducing it, and then digitally putting it on a small bottle, didn’t look right. And he’s still not really certain why that doesn’t look right, whereas if he took the scan of the reduced photocopy that we did and paste it in on Cerebus or Ham’s beer bottle, he could fix that, and make it look more plausibly part of the artwork than actually reducing the large original version. That’s something you’re not gonna know until you’re under the hood and you’re up to your elbows, and you’re going, “now why in the hell would that be?” And it’s like, well, it’s not really one of those ‘why in the hell would that be?’ you’re probably never gonna know that. You know that that is, so you have to deal with it on its own terms.
“Cerebus in Hell? doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ve been buying every issue anyway in the hopes that this will help to raise money for the continued remastering of the trades (which I think was the book’s original purpose?). “ Ah, yes, yes. Partly. “Cerebus in Hell?” went from, okay, this is something that will bring in money that Sandy Atwal and I can put together reasonably quickly, and if it’s selling 4000, 5000 copies, well okay, it’s not a fortune, but it pays me some money, it pays Aardvark-Vanaheim some money, it pays Sandeep some money, and maybe it’ll catch on. [laughs] It’s like, well no, completely the opposite, it didn’t catch on. It’s got its core audience of somewhere between 1800 and 2200 people. That got to the situation where David Birdsong is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, Benjamin Hobbs is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, I know Matt Dow is a huge fan of “Cerebus in Hell?”, I really like “Cerebus in Hell?” It became a matter of, well, I’ll keep doing it. We’ll keep hoping that it sells better. I don’t think it’s going to, but I’m not gonna pull the plug this time as I did with “Glamourpuss”, well, we’ll just have to make it a hobby that we’re all going to have and do things like get issues done through July 2022, because that way, it’s well okay, I’m not really bothered that “Amazing Batvark” only sold 2200 copies, because I did it a year ago! [laughs] Who worries about what they did a year ago? I’ve got high hopes for this thing that will be coming out a year and half from now. What do you need to get up in the morning, and that’s one of those things that I need to get up in the morning, is, here’s something that I really really like doing, and I want to keep doing it, and it just doesn’t make enough money to warrant doing it. But definitely, major thanks to you, Paul, and everybody else who’s buying “Cerebus in Hell?” and really doesn’t like it. Where did I like it?
“Personally, I’m not interested in the remastered original issues either, but a lot of other people clearly are, so I’m hoping they might be helping to finance the future trades programme too. Is that the case?” Yes! Definitely, we’re in the situation now of, now that Waverly Press has done “Cerebus” #1 and “Spawn” 10. “Cerebus” #1 brought in, whatever it brought in. Like $50,000? And “Spawn” 10 brought in $95,000. Now the question is, okay, what’s going to happen with “Cerebus” #2? I have to say that Dagon is [laughs] a cockeyed optimist in a way that I haven’t been a cockeyed optimist in a long time, that he really thinks that it is possible to build a new audience for Cerebus. And it’s like, mmm, I think we’re too far into the feminist nightmare for that to happen. But I’m always willing to be proven wrong, and I’m certainly willing to do what I can do to help Dagon to try and attract new people, and one of the ways that I think is his theory of how this is going to attract people, is you have to be able to sell them a “Cerebus” #1 that isn’t going to cost them $800 and they don’t have to buy a whole trade paperback to go with it. They can just get “Cerebus” #1, and six months later, eight months later, you can offer them “Cerebus” #2 on the same basis. So it’s like, okay, it could take 5 years, 6 years, 8 years, for us to find out, okay, where’s the drop off point? Where do the new audience people and the Cerebus fans themselves go, “alright, I bought #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8. I’m all done. I don’t want to have a facsimile and a gold and a platinum version of all 300 issues.” It’s like, it was the same as Dagon said, we’ve had interest expressed for facsimiles of “Cerebus” #26 and 27. And it’s like, mm, I don’t think you can do that. I’m sure that they would sell very well, because again, it’s the beginning of “High Society” and I could do three or four “High Society” #1 covers, kind of thing. But you can’t do that when you just sold them #1 and getting ready to sell them #2, because now you’re backing them into the idea that they’re going to have to buy #3 to 25. Because they’re not gonna be interested in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 26, and 27. I already know that about comic book collectors and comic book fans. I think one of the elements with that is, if you’re buying as an investment, like someday you hope that what it is that you’ve bought is worth a lot of money. I was talking to Doug Sulipa, he pointed out that comic books go up in value, trade paperbacks tend not to. A lot of that issues from Overstreet, because Overstreet is obsessive and micro-manages the whole comic book value situation and has done since 1970. You’re just not going to move sideways into also the book collection. Consequently, almost all trade paperbacks are still going for cover price or less than cover price. Whereas comic books, depending on their rarity, which is one of the things we’re selling here, Dagon’s gonna be machine numbering the “Spawn” 10. We machine numbered the Halloween Edition. This is a comic book that if you get it encapsulated by CGC, it’s 1 of 54. The Cerebus audience and the market for Cerebus, however wide it is, it’s definitely wider than 54 people, and particularly something that’s attached to Spawn. Most of the Spawn fans don’t even know that these things exist, so I think it’s a good investment. Instead of hoping “Cerebus in Hell?” sells better somewhere up ahead, and it does intermittently. I mean, “Batvark: Penis” was this amazing hit for us. I think it was like 9000 copies in total sold? I’m almost ready to just do a new “Batvark: Penis” every month in addition to “Cerebus in Hell?” to pay for “Cerebus in Hell?” Or do a multiple “Batvark: Penis” covers for $100 each and only sell 50 of those. [laughs] Well, there you go, you have this extremely rare comic book. So, yeah, in terms of, “Batvark: Penis” was a major case infusion, and “Cerebus” #1 was a major cash infusion. What “Cerebus” #2 is going to do in terms of cash infusions, is a whole other question, and that’s why I’m saying to Dagon, we’re gonna do #2 and if #2 sells, like we’re not looking for “Spawn” 10 numbers, but if it sells at or close to “Cerebus” #1 numbers, there’s not a huge drop-off and there is a level of interest from new people, then we do #3. And each time we’re sitting down and looking at the numbers and going, okay, what we’re looking for is the exponential drop-off, where it’s like, “okay, we knew it was coming, here it is. #6 is the last one, or #7 is the last one.” But, yes, definitely that’s where excess revenue coming in are being able to move the other projects along, so that, yes, the remastering can be done. Yes, each of the new remastered trade paperbacks will also be a hardcover. That’s being put in place as well. I got a phone message from Todd Hignite at Heritage Auctions telling him that he will be getting the #1 out of 10, 2 out of 10, 3 out of 10, 4 out of 10, “High Society” hardcovers for Heritage Auctions to auction and leaving up to him how they were gonna do it, and it sounds like they’re gonna do a countdown. You will be able to bid on #10, #9, #8, #7, #6 and we’re hoping for a huge huge hockey stick curve on the #1 hardcover.
So, “I’ve already got a near-complete Cerebus collection in the original issues, plus all eight of the remastered trades, and it’s these trades which I’ve found to give the saga’s most satisfying reading experience. It’s also wonderful to see the art with Sean’s meticulous restoration and reproduction work, of course. I’m looking forward to Carson's expanded edition of SDoAR too, though I don’t think I shall bother with You Don’t Know Jack.” [laughs] It’s like, well, I’m really happy with “You Don’t Know Jack”. I enjoy rereading it from time to time. It’s never going to be the thing that I’m known for, but I’m really really happy with that. And I do think there are also two primary bodies of Cerebus fans. The people, like Paul, who are gung ho primarily on the remastered trades, and reading those. And the other people who went over to the trade side, “yes, I will get the Cerebus trades, they’re on my bookshelf, now I can sell all of my back issues.” and decided late in the day, “I really like having the back issues.” Some of the people who reread all of Cerebus once a year, which boggles my mind, but reread all of Cerebus once a year, their best reading experience is the Notes from the President, the comic, the letters page in the back, the previews, the whole time period ambiance. The story, as part of it, but that’s not what they would have the trade paperbacks for. We’re going to do what we can to keep both sides of the audience happy with that. And that having been said, I’m about five minutes away from my prayer time, so I’m going to hang up..
Matt: Okay!
Dave: And then I’ll call you back and we will forge ahead!
Matt: Okay. That works.
Dave: Okay, take care, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave.
Dave: Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[time passes, presumably]
Matt: I just said to myself, oh crap! Because I turned off the ringer on my phone cause I’m talking to Dave and I don’t want to get notifications and stuff, and it just dawned on me, hey, Dave’s gonna call any second now, maybe I’ll want to hear that. [laughs]
Dave: Maybe you might!
Matt: Good timing. We’re back to recording, hi everybody, we’re back!
Dave: Hi, everybody. We are back. “And for fun, James Windsor-Smith, he who sent you the sketched Cerebus sketchbook has a Faceybook group called ‘Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.” He posted a homework assignment, draw a Batman black & white cover in your style. And here’s mine.” And there it is. That’s definitely as Matt Dow a Batman black & white cover as you could hope to find.
Matt: As I tweeted at Todd McFarlane, I was supposed to draw it in my style, but I don’t have one, so I stole yours.
Dave: [laughs] And did you hear anything back?
Matt: Ah, no. I didn’t expect to, but ya know, it’s out there.
Dave: That’s right. The important thing.
Matt: Before we get into any other questions, I got an email from Dave Fillpot, who apparently has bought 50 pages of “Journey” artwork between issue 2 and 14 from Bill Windsor-Loebs’ art representative and he’s willing to get them scanned and sent into Bill so Bill can remaster and stuff. He also has the #5 cover.
Dave: Great!
Matt: So I thought I’d let you know that, when we do Bill’s week, we’re gonna have all sorts of fun stuff.
Dave: [laughs] I think so! I had no idea exactly what kind of volume of material William Messner-Loebs had produced over the years until I was talking to his assistant, Michael Jones. It seems that Bill was in the same category that I was. It wasn’t a matter of writer’s block, it was a matter of holding back writer’s flood. He’s got notebooks and sketchbooks full of stuff that nothing was ever done with. He did, at various times, have all of this in storage units, and I think Michael Jones is the first… second or third guy who has attempted to get all of this stuff in one place and figure out what’s going to be done with it. I think it’s one of those situations where Facebook is not exactly teacher’s online pet that it has been since it’s creation, but certainly in situations like Bill’s, I think it’s a huge huge part of making sure that his work stays in the public eye and people can continue to discuss it and continue to find out, again, just how much of it there is. I went and dug out my underground comix that I want to hit Bill with, going, “we’re you looking at the same underground comix that I was looking at?“ Things like “Slow Death” #3 with the Rich Corben story, “How Howie Made it in the Real World”, I think that’s in “Slow Death” #3. “Horrible Harvey’s House”, I want to photocopy some of Bill’s 1979 panels from “Abortion Stew” and the Corben panels and sometimes Jack Jackson panels that I go… it isn’t the best version of these guys, but you were definitely a top flight clone of these guys. Considering the time period, and considering how short a time you had been in the business at that point.
Okay, Rich L. [laughs] Rich was the one who sent in “ideas for t-shirt designs, a bit of philosophy at the end, and declaration of non-ownership. Hi. Hope your bone fragments are starting to settle into their new homes.” Hey, me too! It’s definitely turned into more of a forearm and elbow thing than a wrist thing, but it still gets tuckered out in a hurry. I’m having to learn repeatedly, yes, that’s a very good idea for a cover, but there’s just too many parts to it. Look at how long it takes you to draw any of this stuff, Grandpa. When the wrist and the forearm decide, okay, that’s enough for today. Ehh, you’re not getting a lot done. You should have the scans from Rolly sometime tonight of the two CereSpawn, “Cerebus” #2 covers that I’ve got on the go, and still hoping to make some good progress on that. “Feel free to share these with Dave. Something might tickle him. The tourist designs of places from the phonebooks and of Dave's environs seem like a really good idea the more I think about it and roll them around in my mind.” Yeah, I like all of the suggestions for t-shirts. I’m not sure that t-shirts are part of our new reality? I mean, in the same sense that concerts are no longer a part of our reality, and movies are no longer part of our reality, and plays are no longer a part of our reality. The idea behind a t-shirt as a promotional device is that people go out and mingle with lots of other people, so that on a percentage basis, and we’ve all had the experience of walking down the street, or going to the mall, or doing to some mass event before March of 2020, and seeing a comic book design or something on a t-shirt, and going, “wow, that really reinforces whatever that thing is for me.” I mean, even though I was a primarily Neal Adams “Green Lantern/ Green Arrow” fan, you see somebody walking down the street with a Green Arrow tunic on, and it’s like, hey, I know that! Or trying to come up with a design and I think, of the ones that Rich sent in, there’s a good few that I think would probably get a second look, which I think is what you’re looking for with a t-shirt, to have somebody go, “uh, I thought I knew what that is, but I don’t really know what that is. Can you tell me what that is on your t-shirt?” And getting some promotional value out of that. I still have high hopes somewhere down the line for the “Approval is an Authoritarian Construct” t-shirt, the parody of the approved by the comics code authority, that David Birdsong enlarged into a t-shirt. Back when I was shopping for groceries, I was always very happy to wear that one because I wasn’t wearing a mask. That’s come to an end. The owner of the grocery store said, “sorry, sir, you have to wear a mask.” And I said, do you agree with that? And he said, “no I don’t agree with that, but I don’t want to be fined.” And it’s like, mm, that’s way way too close to Beijing than Washington for me. “We will make you do the right thing by introducing these draconian punishments so that nobody’s personal opinion enters into… however informed a personal opinion enters into this is not a fact. The only thing that’s important is that we’re the government and we can fine you so much money that you will do exactly what we want you to do.” And it’s like, mm, if you’re gonna do that, I think you have to introduce that as legislation, and you’ve got to revisit that at least as often as Winston Churchill had to revisit his restrictions on human freedoms in England during the Blitz, during the battle of Britain, and throughout World World II. You can’t just dictatorially say, “No, this is what we’re doing from now on, we’ll let you know if that changes.” You can never trust government with that kind of power. So, you can, as long as they’re having to present it as legislation and say, “we want this to be a rule for the next 3 months, or the next 6 months.” And convince all of the opposition to go along with that. But you don’t want to do anything like that that’s longer than like 3 months or 6 months or just, “oh well! We still have no idea what this is or why it’s behaving the way it is, so we’ll just lock you down when we feel like locking you down, and de-lock you down a little bit whenever we feel like doing that.” Okay. Getting away from the topic here.
Matt: The only thing I have to add is, I actually got the “Approval is an Authoritarian Construct” printed on facemasks and every now and then when I go out I wear that mask and people look, and then they stop and look again, and I’m like, “yo, it says what it says, you didn’t read it wrong!”
Dave: That’s right. That’s right. Authoritarianism is a very very wide thing and the road to hell is always paved with good intentions, and I would never fault people who think that this is a good idea for the sake of everyone’s health, we must remove everybody’s freedom of choice, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and this is is all that you’re allowed to do. I mean, David Birdsong had his “Scamdemic 2020” facemask deplatformed or canceled by whatever the t-shirt outfit was that was doing it, and really without an explanation. I think I’d be very cautious about that. “No, you can’t call it a ‘scamdemic’ because that’s spreading disinformation.” And it’s like, well, if you have actual information about COVID-19 I wish you’d share it with us, because everybody seems to have a different opinion about it in the medical profession, and they’re all just trying to figure out how to stay onboard so that they don’t lose their jobs. And it’s like, when you have forced consensus like that, it’s not a democracy to me. I understand that there are other people who think it’s a core element of democracy, but I really don’t. Again, if people aren’t going out to mass events, so having something on a t-shirt, [laughs] it’s like, okay, the Uber driver who delivers your pizza might see your t-shirt, but apart from that, in a given week, who’s gonna do it? And it is a matter of, be aware that when these things get done, the online t-shirt place takes most of the money. The lion’s share of the money, and it’s still that amount of money being taken out of the Cerebus economy.
Matt: That’s one of the reasons why when I send the check, I send the list of, “this is what people bought. It was a magnet, or it was a shirt, or it was whatever, and this is the itty bitty little bits of the pie that they say you can have.”
Dave: Right, right. It’s one of those things where I don’t want to stand in the way of that, because I’m definitely not going to do Cerebus hoodies or Cerebus fridge magnets anytime soon and whichever one I did wouldn’t be the one that you would want. So definitely, I would recommend to Rich that he go through his list of t-shirts, and pitch one of them to you, and in any given month or any given fortnight, we could have a survey or something on A Moment of Cerebus. “What’s the next one that should get added to the online store that you think you would like to have?” And definitely pitch your personal favorite to Matt Dow, because if you’re the only one who suggests one that month, hey, it’s probably gonna become the next t-shirt, then you can get one.
Matt: What I really wanna do, is go back and get all of the “Cerebus in Hell?” covers and do individual shirts of individual covers, cause then it also is on magnets and all of that stuff, and there might be somebody who wants to have a collection of all the covers in little refrigerator magnets. And I’m like, it’s a really neat idea, but that involves getting Hobbs and Birdsong and Sean to, “hey, who’s got a good scan of this? And it’s gotta be a certain size.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then I put it on the site and we sell a whole bunch of them and then it peters down and it’s, “hey, we sold a magnet this month! That’s all we sold.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, I mean, David Birdsong was really keen on this, and it was only so many times you can try and hit paydirt with merchandising before you go, “this just isn’t going to happen.” As David Birdsong finally decided, let’s just do comic books. This is about comic books, if one of these things… as I said to him, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that if you do have a hit t-shirt that you come up with, a t-shirt that sells as many copies as “Batvark: Penis” did, that’s just gonna get you hooked. It’s like, you’ll never go, “well okay, I had my hit piece of merchandise. I’m a happy camper now.” It’ll be, “now I’ve gotta do it again.” Again, there’s only so many hours in the day, wouldn’t you rather do comic books than do promotion of comics?
Matt: I saw online, I think it was on Twitter, somebody has tweeted a picture of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Jerry’s holding a Superman action figure, one of the very first Superman action figures back in the early 40s. And almost every single response to it was somebody saying, “hey look, Joe, we’re not getting paid for this!” or “Hey look, Joe, we’re not getting a dime off this!” It’s one of those, a lot of people are like, “it’s a neat picture”, then everybody that knows Superman and Superman’s history is like, “that’s one of the saddest photos in the world.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: They could’ve made a lot of money off of Superman. They didn’t. But you could make a lot of money off of Cerebus on t-shirts and action figures and stuff, but then you’re not producing new work, you’re merchandising the one that you have. And I’m perfectly content to put stuff up on the TeePublic because it’s minimal work for me, and once a month they send me an email saying, “here’s your share of the profits” and I transfer it to my bank account, and then write you a check and send it up. Or if it’s a really small amount, “we’re gonna wait until next month and see if we can break double digits.”
Dave: Right. [laughs] Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s just the way that that works, and I can’t see any real reason not to do it. As the expression goes, for people that like that sort of thing, that’s just the sort of thing that they like. Which is not just whatever the t-shirt or whatever the hoodie or the fridge magnet is, it’s being able to go shopping for them. To say, “oh, I’m a Cerebus fan. What have they got here?” And just scanning through and going, “Oh, that’s actually pretty cool. That’s pretty cool.” That’s one of the reasons I think Dagon is being very helpful at Waverly Press, because he’s got a feel for that kind of thing. It’s like, I may come up with the idea of Regency Hotel notepads, but I’m probably not going to do Regency Hotel notepads. But for Dagon, it’s like, “well, I want to make not just a really cool ‘High Society’ hardcover, I want all of the stuff that comes with the Cerebus ‘High Society’ hardcover to be really really cool.” We’re on the same page with that one. You’ve gotta be careful because you start getting hooked on that kind of stuff, where he goes, “what about doing high end ‘High Society’ merchandise? Like doing a sort of beer steins that you would have in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel” And it’s like, yep, [laugh] I can see that too. But it’s like, okay, what do those cost per unit, and what does it cost for a display box to put them in, and how many people are going to be interested in that. And one of the things I pitched to him was, how many high end hotels are there that start with R? Like Regis hotel or something like that? They’re hurting for money right now. If they’ve got a monogrammed R bathrobe that they’ve got in all of their rooms, cause it’s a five star hotel, we’re willing to buy some of your R monogrammed bathrobes if you’re interested in selling them. What’s a good price? Kind of thing. Again, that’s another one of those things, I’ll come up with that, and I’ll suggest it, but I’m not about to go online and find five star hotels that start with R and where’s their head office and where’s the phone number for that, or the email address for that?
Matt: And then you get that little voice in the back of your head, going, “And we should ask if they only have small child sizes so it’s only Cerebus sized.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cause if you’re a real Cerebus fan, you don’t want a Regency robe, you want a Cerebus Regency robe! [laughs]
Dave: Three-foot tall, yes. Yes. I could back and put some bathrobes on him in “High Society”, we’ll just retcon it so we can drum up some sales. Okay, now we’re getting seriously silly here, so we’re gonna move on from Rich L’s t-shirt list, and where are we going next? We are going to… oh, I think Jeff Seiler was the next question that I got, because he left a phone message again, and you should be getting a digital file of the audio emailed to you by Rolly and Jeff had mentioned, Andrew Rilstone. Now there’s a name that I haven’t heard before, and he was saying, he does great online reviews, I guess, of Cerebus and had been talking about “Form & Void” coincidentally, which is good. We definitely want to be talking up “Form & Void” over the next while. And well, just listen to Jeff’s question right now, and we’ll come back and I’ll do my best to answer.
Jeff Seiler: Dave, it’s Jeff. I’m up late because it’s one of those nights where I can’t sleep, so. Here’s my question for you for February. Question for Dave for February. Reading Andrew Rilstone’s excellent commentaries on Cerebus, I got to his review of issue #260 and was reminded of how you used the panels and pages to illustrate Cerebus’ fear of dying in the tent in the blizzard. So, how low did you think you could go? How many panels to a page? Andrew rights, “A 10 by 10 grid: a hundred postage stamp sized panels.” Were you tempted to go smaller to further emphasize how far inside Cerebus’ head you were taking us? And was that intentionally meant to be juxtaposed against the big sweeping panels of “Mind Games I” in issue #20? Alright, so there you go. And yes, I have been drinking tonight, so I’m sorry for slurring words, but I think you have probably gotten the part.
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Dave: Okay. Yes, I was tempted to do smaller panels. The absolute smallest panels that I did in “Form & Void” in the transition from the end of the Africa sequence to Jaka & Cerebus in the tent. That was one of those, [laughs] I was already going, I think I’ve made it across the Niagara gorge on this tightrope and I can’t believe that I really am this far, I’m almost there. Let’s not get too adventurous, and end up falling into the drink with 28 feet to go. So consequently, it was, no, I think these panels are about as small as I would go. If I had had more room to maneuver, and I was already doing the really small panels because I was running out of room for the Africa sequence, I would have looked at, okay, what’s the next size down in terms of the panels and how much visual information can I get in there? Because it would certainly have contributed to what I was trying to communicate. Thank you, that you thought that I did communicate it. The sense of desperation in Cerebus at how this is going to go, them trapped in the tent in this major snowstorm, that it’s starting to occur to Cerebus, that this isn’t just a snowstorm, this is winter. It’s gonna go on for a long time. And illustrating that Cerebus lacked that Ernest Hemingway grace under pressure quality that Cerebus was probably no good at Petrou Pass either. It’s like, he remembers the realization dawning, “they’ve cut out supply lines, we’re trapped in here. They’re just gonna starve us to death. So this is what we all have to prepare ourselves for mentally. Anybody can figure out how to get us all out of here, that’s great. By all means, speak up. But apart from that, it’s like, how slowly can we starve to death?” And I’m sure Cerebus was not the most helpful individual that they had on site for that. As he was in the tent, just shutting down and blanking out, because those are the unreliable guys. There are guys that you can rely on in that situation, and there are guys that, “look, we don’t want to have to punch your lights out or knock you unconscious with something over the head. Sit down and shut up. We’re trying to actually discuss this on a masculine level and you’re just losing it.” So, yeah, it would have been very interesting to go even further into that, where, ya know, let’s say ridiculous extreme, 150, 200 panels on the page, and you have to scan across them, or you will be scanning across them really really quickly, because most of them are just little black squares. As you can see they’re not all little black squares, some of them have teeny tiny words next to them, or part of a sentence, and again, that would have been, if I had had the room for that, that would have communicated, okay, this is what happens when you’re one of those guys where you’re not like Kipling’s “If-”. If you can keep your head while all about are losing theirs, and ya know, blaming things on you. That sort of situation, if you can keep your head, this isn’t going to happen to you in this situation. You’re not going to be any happier than the guy who’s shutting down and freaking out, but at least if there is something that you’ve overlooked, you will find it. So, yes, it would have been very nice to have had the sense of, oh, come on, let’s just take another couple of pages, because it would really really, like it drags you even further into being part of Cerebus’ psychotic breakdown that you have to be two inches away from the page and scanning across as quickly as you can and realizing, this doesn’t seem even remotely real, and then gradually coming back to the panels that are an inch by an inch, and going, “wow, all of sudden this seems roomy! All of a sudden this seems like far more traditional comics than the last two pages that I did.” It wasn’t “Mind Game I”, but that’s a very good point, that “Mind Game I” was also us deep inside Cerebus’ head, but it was he was younger then and he was still in the invulnerable youth stage, where, in as much jeopardy as he was, and as much as what was going on he really had no idea what it was about or what he was going to do with it. Overall, because it pastes together into one big picture of Cerebus, well, there you go. That’s the macro youthful self-perception, as contrasted with the experience, we’re doing the same thing, going inside Cerebus’ head in “Form & Void” and that’s the micro immanent death perception. People, for whom the idea of their personal death is just the most horrible thing to contemplate, even though they know intellectually they’re going to die someday. The idea that that might be in the foreseeable future, and that it’s not going to be pleasant. Starving to death is not the best way to die, and particularly if you’re trapped in a tent with Princess Diana, [laughs] it’s like, well, she’s not going to be a whole lot of help! And try to figure out where you have the conversation about, look, if Cerebus blows his head off, you have to eat Cerebus’ flesh. It’ll at least keep you alive. Cannibalism, we have to talk about it because starving to death is, however far along in that process Cerebus has been before, it’s like, no, you’re not ready for that, so we have to have a couple of really unpleasant conversations here, that Princess Diana doesn’t want to have with anybody about anything. So, thank you for the question Jeff, and I’m looking forward to getting back to discussing the “New Mutants” in the series of letters. I’ve got one of them partway done, and there’s just lots of comic art metaphysics wrapped up in it, and it’s like, okay, I’m trying to keep these to about a page each. Don’t want to tax everyone’s patience, but as soon as I figured out how to get the next part down to a page, I will be faxing that to Matt, and Matt will be posting that, won’t Matt?
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Matt’s pretty good about that.
Dave: [laughs] That’s right! That’s one of Matt’s best things.
Matt: The first three you sent, because I had gotten them in the stretch where “okay, I’m not posing today, I’m not posting today, it’s the Weekly Update” and I’m like, you know, I’m just gonna save these three and the past Monday I did the Monday Report, and I’m like, “and since the fax machine’s working, here’s three more faxes!”
Dave: There you go. There you go.
Matt: In fact, I titled the post, “My Fax Machine is Smokin’”.
Dave: [laughs] What’s the online meme about GameStop? “Fax Machine go burr.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Ahh, let’s see, I think the next… yeah, then we went over to Gary Boyarski! The “Jack Grimm” creator, the pride of Saskatchewan here in Canada. I’m sure that he’s still working on “Jack Grimm” and moving it along, but if anybody is having to do a lot of home schooling with the kids, he’s got, like I think four kids? It’s, man oh man, if anything’s going to throw you off schedule, that’s gonna throw you off schedule. “Anyway, first up, a Please Hold virgin” as you put it, “This is my first time writing in for the Please Hold For Dave Sim. I confess, I haven't listened to them all either, so apologize if this one has already been asked. Here goes… Hi Dave, the Waverly Press reprinting was exceptionally well done, and I hear you have plans to do the same with issue two. Alot of people always ask when, if ever, the "young Cerebus" stories will ever be collected. Is that something you may consider for a future Kickstarter project? Either as single issues with multiple covers, or a one volume collection?” Boy, there’s a can of worms for you.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I always just fluff this off. I always just go, it’s really kinda too complicated. But this time, what the heck? It’s Gary Boyarski, he’s part of the “Cerebus in Hell?” team, he’s a self-publisher, he’s a Canadian, he’s a Please Hold virgin, Gary, this one’s for you. Okay, we’ve got most of the negatives from the Young Cerebus colour stories that were in “Epic Magazine”. What, I think, “Selling Insurance” is missing? I haven’t looked at it in so long. There’s three or four pages where we don’t have negatives for them, we don’t have original art for them, somebody may have original art for them, but it’s not in the Cerebus Archive. Gerhard doesn’t have them. If that’s the case, then we don’t know where they are. They’re colour stories, and they’re done magazine proportions, and they’re Gerhard’s colour stories. Like, you have to realize, when it comes to custodianship of a creative work, in my frames of reference, for those stories, I drew black and white characters. Cerebus and whoever else was in it, and indicated very very roughly what the background looked like, and Gerhard took it from that, and created all of the backgrounds, did all of the colour selections. Painted it, and that brings us to the next complication, which is, Gerhard’s colour methods, particularly at the time, are uniquely Gerhard’s colour methods. And the best way I can illustrate that one, is with Gerhard colouring two of Steve Bissette’s “Tyrant” covers. I think it was the cover of #1 where, again, he got a black and white version of the cover from Bissette, with the logo and all the type and everything on it, and hand-coloured it. And doing it with the Doctor Martin dyes. It was one of the colour pieces he did where everything pretty much went the way that he wanted it to go. Particularly with colour, and particularly with painting, you’re going to have a certain amount of fixing, where, “okay, I mixed this colour, and I started brushing it on, and no, there’s way too much, or there’s not enough blue in that green. There needs to be more blue.” If it’s a very light wash, then there’s no problem with adding in some more blue to that green and building it up until it’s the colour that you picture in your head. The process doesn’t work in the other direction. If you brush it on, and there’s too much blue in that green, you can’t take blue out of the green. I mean, there are techniques. You can try and soak it out by putting more water on there, but usually what you’re going to end up doing is mixing another colour that’s got lots of, or a fair amount of, opaque white in it, so that you’re painting out what you painted in. And then you’re definitely on a slippery slope of fixing the thing. Gerhard was, and I’m sure still is, very very good at fixing stuff. It’s like, total panic mode, because this was a really good cover up until 20 minutes ago, but now I think I’ve just ruined it. But, I’m already this far in, so I’ve gotta just keep going, and now I just fix it. Like I say, that was the #1 cover, went really smoothly, exactly what Bissette wanted, which was colour over black and white and then dropping the black and white cover back over top of the colour once it had been separated. This is what the “Tyrant” covers were supposed to look like. Then there was issue 2 or issue 3, where it was Tyrant hatching and biting the tongue of the Tyrannosaurus Rex or whatever it was, that was attempting to eat him. And that was one of those ones where it went off the rails, so consequently Gerhard was using more opaque colours, and as soon as you start using opaque colours on black and white, then you’re painting out Bissette’s drawing and turning it into a Gerhard painting. Now, I don’t remember if this was Gerhard explaining this to me, because I understood what the process was, but I do remember, I think, Gerhard explaining it to Bissette in my presence because Bissette was definitely, “uh, this isn’t what I was looking for. I just wanted color on top of black and white. I didn’t want a Gerhard painting.” And Gerhard explaining, “I can’t really control that.” And all I could do is try and back him up on it. It’s like, if you look at the Cerebus covers, a lot of the Cerebus covers are my black and white drawing, and Gerhard’s black and white background, and then wash colours, watercolours built up on top of it. Doctor Martin dyes, which are basically concentrated watercolours. It’s like, Steve, if you want Gerhard to colour your cover, this is what you’re gonna have to live with. It’s either gonna be something that worked all the way along, or something that he had to fix. And that cover was really really good. It wasn’t what Bissette wanted it to be, but it was a really really good cover. It was just more a Gerhard painting than it was a Steve Bissette drawing with Gerhard colours on top of it. That was kind of an unhappy situation all the way around. Okay, so bringing this back… now, having told you that, so that I can tell you this, which is explaining how this applies to the Young Cerebus stories. The same thing happened on the Young Cerebus stories. There are panels on those where it’s my drawing, and Gerhard’s background drawing, and Gerhard’s Doctor Martin dye colours on top of it. And there are parts of panels, and parts of pages, and whole pages where it went off the rails and it went from being a Dave Sim drawing and Gerhard drawing with watercolour on it, to turning into a Gerhard painting. It’s still gonna look really good; it’s Gerhard, he doesn’t do bad work. So you just live with it. I understand why that happened, and the average person isn’t going to know that. The average person just goes, “ooh, colour! Ooh Young Cerebus.” So the problem would be, if we were going to do a Young Cerebus collection or reprint the individual stories, because it’s colour, it would have to be, okay, here’s the original. This is what it looked like. This is Gerhard’s painting that is either Doctor Martin dyes on top of black and white, or parts of it are Gerhard paintings. And Gerhard looking at it with, say, Sean Robinson. Sean I don’t think has done nearly as much colour work as he’s done black and white, but the problem being with colour, you only get an approximation of it. If you scan it, it’s going to find a sort of muddy compromise between magenta, cyan, and yellow. In order to get this blue over here correct, this red goes sort of purple instead of red. So you have to have that in front of you when you’re looking at it, where, okay, let’s say we have the negatives. Which, actually, Bob Chapman at Graffiti Designs saved from Marvel Comics. I think they were going to throw out the Young Cerebus negatives and he got however many that they had. So I’m pretty sure that we’ve got the negatives from Bob Chapman now, and it would be a matter of, okay, here’s the original page, which is all ready. Do we know where those are? Not most of them, as far as I know. Here’s the negatives, Sean puts it on his computer screen, and goes, oh okay, here’s where the problems are. This part of this panel is way too red because of what the computer’s doing, and you would probably have to block out individual areas of the scan, the colour separation, and say, okay, we’ll remove this from the equation by blacking it out right now and then come back and revisit it, and figure out how to build it up into the colour that it was originally. Now, it’s also Gerhard’s material. So it’s like the person with the most expertise to tell you, okay, here’s the original art. We’ve got the original art to Gerhard from whoever owns it, and Gerhard’s sitting with the original artwork, and he’s looking at it on his computer screen, and going, okay, here’s the problems. Here’s what I’m doing, here’s all of the stuff that you would have to deal with separately. Here’s the opaque colour, this is light bouncing off of it, this isn’t light coming through it. Here’s the Doctor Martin dyes where the dyes worked as dyes, as watercolour. This is the light coming through it, this is a completely different effect. Now, having said all of that, it’s like, what’s Gerhard’s motivation to do that? And it’s like, because everybody wants the Young Cerebus story? No, that’s everybody who wants the Young Cerebus story’s motivation. What’s Gerhard’s motivation to do this? Like, if somebody wants to say, “these Young Cerebus stories are the most important part of Cerebus. This needs to be a full-size treasury edition on glossy paper and it has to be completely remastered to completely match exactly the way Gerhard did it originally almost 40 years ago.” Well, okay, if you’re willing to spend whatever that would be, $50,000, $75,000, to get that done, how much does Gerhard get? Like, you can’t say, “well, we’re gonna give $25,000 to Sean, and we’re gonna find a really good printer like Dagon’s San Francisco printer who’s doing the Regency Elf print is a genius with colour, but a very expensive genius. He’s going to work on this with Gerhard and he’s gonna get $15,000.” Well, you can’t at that point go, “well then, Gerhard, we’ll give you like $500 to do this.” It’s like, if it’s that important, then somebody has to stand up and say, “Gerhard, whatever you would ordinarily make in the next two months with your commissions and drawings and selling artwork and what not, we will triple that to get you to be a full participant in completely remastering the Young Cerebus stories.” We’re not in that category. [laughs] Like, unfortunately I have to keep reminding everybody, this is a universally hated comic book that really we’re just waiting for cancel culture to go, “no, we have to finish the job over here. It’s our jobs as Social Justice Warriors to make sure that, not only is this stuff not remastered and not done at an apex level, this person needs to be eradicated from society.“ I mean, that’s what I’m waiting for, I can’t say that I’m sure it’s going to happen, but it would surprise me if it didn’t. Like, we would have to have a major major shift from the way that our society has been going and the way our society is going. So, however much it sounds like, “yeah, we should do the Young Cerebus stories.” It’s like the IDW Covers Volume suffered because of that, because it was, “we’re not really getting traction with this. Like, we’ve announced we’re doing the Cerebus covers book and mostly there’s just snarling and sniping and it’s like, ‘let’s get this done just as quickly as possible and get it out there and then try and pretend we never had anything to do with this. Because we don’t want to run afoul of the political correctness and the cancel culture people.” Everybody, all of the mainstream companies are all on the run from cancel culture, and all of them are vulnerable to it. There’s absolutely nothing that you could launder down enough and make as much feminist propaganda that you would make yourself immune from cancel culture. So that’s the situation that we’re in. It would be nice before Gerhard dies, I mean he’s, what, 62 years old now? If that whole psychotic environment that’s running society would just sort of run out of gas or become completely disinterested in us and somebody would say, “yes, this is important enough that we have to get Gerhard to do this before he dies. We have no idea how many years he’s got left. So here’s my $25,000. Who else is gonna kick in another $15,000 to make sure that this job is done properly, while it can still be done?” And it’s like, again, we’re just not in that category. I’m very flattered that I have my patroness in New York City give me $10,000 and say, “you use that money for whatever you think is a good use for that money. And it’s like, well if somebody’s gonna do that, I’m gonna work on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, because there’s no money in that and never will be. Not in my lifetime, I don’t think. So, that’s one of those, well if somebody else does that and says, “I’ll give you $20,000.” It’ll be like, well, okay, I’ll stop doing “Cerebus in Hell?” or I won’t get to work on “Cerebus” #3 covers or CereSpawn covers. It’s like I’m doing those because that’s what people buy. People won’t buy Young Cerebus, people won’t buy “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. People won’t buy “Glamourpuss”, not in any kind of numbers. So, you have to face that situation. So, Gary, a Please Hold virgin, there’s the most thorough going explanation I can give you as to why I don’t think Young Cerebus is viable. You can’t just knock out this half-assed version of the Young Cerebus stories if you’re going to go ahead and do it. You have to go all in, or you have to say, “we’re just going to mess it up, we’re just going to vandalize it if we try and do it with half-measures.” That’s my best explanation of what the Young Cerebus Epic stories are made up of, and what would be the things in 2021, 2022, 2023, probably through 2030, where, no, political climate isn’t there, the money isn’t there, so it’s not going to happen. The “Epic Magazine” reproductions are not terrible, but they’re not great either. This would be a situation where, again, if you’re gonna do it properly, you have to have the original artwork and you have to have the digital scan, and you have to figure out, inch by inch, going across each page, how you’re going to solve each of those problems, to make sure that the colour looks the way that it’s supposed to. Somewhere up ahead, flying Gerhard out to San Francisco and putting him up in a hotel for a month and half to work on a daily basis with Dagon’s San Francisco printer and just saying, “here’s what we’re looking at, here’s what you would have to do” and working up the solutions first and then applying them to the actual process, and going, okay, after Gerhard has spent two weeks or a month in San Francisco going over all of this stuff, then we’ll be able to tell you, okay, this is how much it’s going to cost. And it’s like, it’s not going to happen. [laughs] That is just not going to happen, and it’s very sad, because 50 years from now, 60 years from now, people will be saying, “Boy, could you imagine if they had done this back when Gerhard was still alive and he could have had input on all of this?” And it’s like, yes, but, as is the case with everything having to do with Cerebus, everybody prefers feminism to Cerebus, and well, we’ve got these baked-in consequences. Open your eyes and look around. This is exactly the world that I was warning everybody about in “Cerebus” 186. So, there ya go, Gary Boyarski.
And Michael R, the pride and joy of Easton, Pennsylvania asks, “Hi Matt! Questions for Dave. Hi Dave! I'm not sure if this was ever asked of you about Cerebus' name. In the Latter Days phone book on page 15, Mrs. Gursky told Mr. Gursky that if he wasn't man enough to " Scratch my hitch! Maybe I'll go and see Fred!" And in parenthesis, "Cerebus was going by the name "Fred" since "Cerebus" had been dad's last name which -- for obvious reasons Cerebus didn't feel entitled to use anymore." So my questions are if Cerebus' dad's last name was Cerebus and Cerebus was using "Fred" because Cerebus wasn't "entitled" to use it anymore, was Cerebus' first name "Fred"?” No. And “What did his dad call him?” I haven’t been asked that specific question, so it’s good that you’re tacking into the heart of the storm, here, but anytime somebody asks about that, the illustration I use of Cerebus’ entire childhood was the old Warner Brothers cartoon where the stork gets drunk and delivers Bugs Bunny to the expectant gorilla couple as their new baby. And, of course, the gorilla mother just takes this baby like a duck to water because mothers always do. This is the beloved baby and there’s no such thing as a non-beloved baby, and the father gorilla looks at it [laughs], walks offscreen, comes back on with a giant club and is ready to kill it. And she’s like, “no, no no no no, you can’t do that sort of thing!” And then, from then on, it’s Poppa Gorilla having to put up with Bugs Bunny because the consequences of running afoul of Mrs Gorilla are just too extreme to contemplate. There ya go, that was Cerebus’ childhood. It’s like, look at this thing. I mean, not only is this thing shaming us in Sand Hills Creek that first of all we have this thing, and why do we have this thing? But you’re making it even worse by just not letting me take it out on an ice floe somewhere and wave bye-bye, and have to act as if this is my son. So, long winded answer that Cerebus’ father didn’t call Cerebus anything. I’m sure Cerebus’ father didn’t refer to Cerebus if he didn’t have to. It’s like, he was trying to find a way around Mama Gorilla and his thing was, “well okay, I’ll take it to Magus Doran, this looks like some sort of witchcraft blob thing, so maybe Magus Doran will be interested in it.” But yeah, I’m sure Cerebus just called himself Cerebus to try and maintain whatever tenuous link he could to his father, and that was the best it was ever going to be, is a tenuous link. He went out and became the Cerebus that we know, because he kept thinking if he just got rich enough and he just powerful enough and if he just got important enough, that he would come back to Sand Hills Creek, and he would be celebrated, and his father would go, “yeah, I was wrong all along. I should’ve been proud of my son that I wouldn’t give a name to.” And it’s like, mm, no, that’s not Sand Hills Creek. That’s one of those, not only wouldn’t he give Cerebus a name, he wouldn’t let his wife, Cerebus’ mother, give Cerebus a name. It’s like, no, you’re again you’re trying to make this into something human and it’s not. If you won’t let me kill it, at least we’re not going to refer to it. So, let’s see, I think I’ve answered that. So, go ahead.
Matt: Well, I think Michael’s forgetting in “Jaka’s Story” when Cerebus goes back to Pud’s pub the second time with Rick and Jaka, and Rick says, “Jaka, is it okay if Fred and I go home now?” And kinda makes a big deal of, “oh yeah, we’re gonna call you Fred now, so nobody knows who you are. And that, as far as I know, is when Fred first shows up in connection to Cerebus.
Dave: Oh yeah!
Matt: So, calling himself Fred decades later, it’s, well yeah, “I can’t go by name because I’m going to be in trouble for whatever, so I’m Fred.”
Dave: That’s it. It was really the only name that Cerebus ever got. I mean, referring to himself in the third person was one of those, it’s probably all that kept him alive in Sand Hills Creek, was referring to himself as Cerebus meant that he was linked to his father. However much his father wasn’t going to be a party to that, and it’s like, “mm, yeah, we can’t kill whatever this is either, because, yeah, Cerebus is a honoured name around here. Not as honoured as it used to be before the stork dropped off Bugs Bunny, but still honoured around here.”
Matt: I’m trying to remember in the few appearances, always in dreams, of Cerebus’ Mom, if she ever calls him anything other than “Cerebus” or “Dear”. Cause I know when he’s drunk in “Women” and Young Cerebus says, “Oh I don’t understand. Would Mom understand?” and then she shows up and drunk Cerebus goes, “Hello, Mum” and I thought she says, “Hello, dear”, but I’d have to look.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: And then, there’s the dream sequence later on when he’s in the quickgrass where his Mom shows up and says something to him, but I don’t think she says his name.
Dave: No. I think I was pretty careful about that. I mean, it’s one of those, if it was just the two of them, she would probably call him Cerebus just because this is all that you’re allowed to do in Sand Hills Creek. You’d better do it your husband’s way, because the consequences are just too severe to contemplate. She probably had more leverage with her husband than most women did in Sand Hills Creek, but that wouldn’t be saying much.
Matt: So, way back in 1993 when “Wizard Magazine” did their 10 year preview of 2003, and they did the ending of Cerebus, which always makes me laugh because they had the year wrong. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] They meant well! They meant well.
Matt: It’s one of those, I had you sign my copy and then I found two more copies, and everytime I find one for a dollar at a comic shop, I’m like, I will buy this because it’s funny. But their little blurb of “Cerebus finally ends” is that he dies at the hands of his long-lost brother. And that’s always stuck in my head is, ya know, I know it’s not canon, but it’s one of those, “does Cerebus have a long-lost brother?”
And then Wizard also published “Toyfair Magazine” which was about toys, and I was really into toys at the time so I was buying it. And they did an article on the Mego action figures, and in the late 70s they made a prototype of Doctor Strange, based off of the TV movie “Doctor Strange”.
Dave: Oh my gosh, okay.
Matt: So they sculpted it, so it’s got the head sculpt of the actor, and it looks very Doctor Strange-y. But because they couldn’t get the rights, or it was gonna be too expensive to produce the figure, only the prototype exists. But because they paid for the head sculpt, they reused it, [laughs] and I’m not lying or making this up, but Dave’s gonna think I am. They used the head sculpt on their 12 inch girl dolls for Jordache jeans.
Dave: Really?
Matt: So, Doctor Strange, the head sculpt exists on a figure, and in the magazine there’s a picture of the prototype next to the actual produced figure wearing jeans and t-shirt with the Jordache logo, and the caption was, “Doctor Strange, and his styling brother Fernando.”
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Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And for whatever reason, I decided that since “Wizard Magazine” says Cerebus has a long-lost brother, his long-lost brother’s name is Fernando, and he’s in the Estarcion version of Italy, just hanging out in cafes and drinking cappuccino. [laughs] And for years, I’ve gone, I need to produce an image of Fernando, where it’s basically Cerebus with a little pencil-thin mustache…
Dave: Right.
Matt: And a beret! [laughs] And constantly, every couple of months, Fernando pops in my head of, “oh yeah, Fernando. I’ve gotta do something with Fernando.” I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for years, and like at SPACE, we just got busy, and then we stopped seeing each other. It’s like, “oh yeah, Fernando! I gotta tell Dave about Fernando!”
Dave: One of these days, boy, and then we could use the ABBA song, “Fernando” and just sort of have that tinkling in the background in the cafe. “Meanwhile, on Wizard Earth, Fernando is chugging his cappuccinos in…”
Matt: When we started coming up with a parody of Spider-Verse called “Aardvark-Verse” and it’s okay, we’ll do a cover with all these different aardvarks. And I went through and I was scanning, here’s an image of Cerebus where he looks slightly different. At one point, I started to work on, okay, here’s an image from “Guys”, Cerebus is wearing like a turtleneck, all I have to do is somehow add a pencil-thin mustache to the snout, which of course goes back to the age-old problem that we’ve been having, you can’t put a mustache on that face.
Dave: No, no. That’s one of those, I would be more inclined to take the Doctor Strange head and put aardvark ears on it and put that onto a Cerebus body. And yeah, that would be the Cerebus of the Wizard Universe, and you could take the clips right out of the “Toyfair Magazine” and “Wizard Magazine” and that would explain that this was the Fernando who never got his moment in the spotlight of being the person who killed Cerebus in issue 300. And that’s why he’s just consoling himself with endless cups of cappuccino, because he coulda been a contender. He coulda been a part of comics history, instead of a bum, which is what I am. [laughs] Okay, I think we’ve got, I want to see that in the “Cerebus-Verse” book, you guys keep chugging away on that one, cause that was a hit movie. Anything that we can make fun of that’s a hit, that people will go, “Oh I know that!” We definitely want to be doing that.
Matt: We keep kicking around “Doctor Strangevark” and it always falls apart because we can’t find a good Steve Ditko “Doctor Strange” cover because there aren’t any!
Dave: Yes, yes, that’s one of the things. I think it would have to just be a panel from the… like, the original Doctor Strange is definitely Asian. They just had I think a half dozen pages in the platinum auction for Heritage Auctions. I don’t think it was from “Strange Tales” 110, but it was like pretty close to the beginning, and it’s like, no those are definitely Asian features. Somebody told Ditko, “ahh, knock it off. We really don’t want an Oriental looking Doctor Strange. Can’t you make him look more a like white guy?” And it’s like, “yeah, I can, but that’s not the character I was drawing. Why didn’t you say something earlier?” If he even asked that question. It’s like, no, you bring the pages in, you give them to Sol Brodsky, he gets Stan Lee, and you find out what’s going to happen in the comic book that you’re actually plotting and writing.
Matt: I mean, unless somebody was inking him and they just started inking him more Caucasian? [laughs]
Dave: Uhh, no, Ditko was always inking himself, I think. That would be interesting to find out what’s the earliest point where somebody inked “Doctor Strange”. That was one of the things where Ditko was always kind of off the Marvel reservation for exactly that reason. It’s like, what something looks like in the pencils isn’t necessarily what it’s going to look like in the inks, and by the time the inks come in you either have to leave it alone or you have to give it to John Romita Sr or somebody in the Bullpen and say, “mm, can you make this look the way Stan wants it to look instead of the way it actually looks here?”
Matt: Which is how Iron Man gets a nose. [laughs]
Dave: Yes! Yes. A poignant moment in comics history. Anyway, moving on to Jesse Lee Herndon, “Hi Dave, Hope you're doing well. I have three questions for you this month: As the unofficial transcriber” Yes, and thank you again for that, Jesse. “of Please Hold for Dave Sim, I must ask, what do you recall about the transcriber of Cerebus' commentaries in "Latter Days"? He is only referred to as "me", both in the text and on the covers. There's never any visual depiction, just like there had not been for the prior Legion of Substitute Wise Fellows who did the same job, and I presume that was so as for there to be just one less character to have to draw.” Uh, partly that, and partly the fact that the Amanuensis, particularly, with regards to the Torah and the Gospels, David’s Psalms, Revelation, that person is never credited. And there’s a lot of questions that that raises of, how much was this written by this person, and how much of this was just transcribed by this person? Particularly with John’s Gospel and Revelation, which definitely have the appearance of having been written, either written (small w) or “written” by the same Amanuensis which seems kind of unlikely, because there’s such a gap in time between when Revelation was first committed to parchment and when John’s Gospel was obviously first committed to parchment. John’s Gospel would’ve been definitely before the sack of the Temple by Rome in 70 AD and Revelation wasn’t sent down and transcribed until 98 AD. John, the “author” of both of those books, was very very very old at the time that Revelation was revealed to him. Which raises the question, was he actually the writer of it, or was there an Amanuensis, or was it somebody who was familiar enough with the person who wrote the very very idiosyncratic Greek of John’s Gospel and Revelation? And the two letters attributed to John. I think there’s two letters attributed to John, and they’re really just letter fragments, but you go, huh, well there it is, there’s that voice again. There’s that means of expressing that is just completely unique to this, and of course, if you’re a devout monotheist like I am, you go, well it’s the voice of God. The Johannine Jesus was the lamb of God, and as far as I can determine, John the Apostle was the lamb of the lamb, which I’ll be getting into in my Monday reports as we go along. But it definitely, you almost never even got the name of the person recording the biblical text. The only exception to that, that I can think of off the top of my head, and it’s just off the top of my head, would be the scribe who transcribed the Book of Isaiah, which is the longest book in the Hebrew Bible at 66 chapters. So it was a matter of, okay, if I’m going to do Cerebus fulfilling his destiny by reading the Torah and describing what he’s reading, whoever is going to be doing it, they’re not going to be an actual character in the book. They’re going to be as close as possible to the anonymity associated with the transcription of biblical text. It was just something that you didn’t do as the person who was just putting this into consumable shape. A prophet of God, or a prophet of the YHWH, is on a completely exalted a level above someone who’s just going, “there’s a better verb for that. This would be a good spot to switch verb tense. I would change this from a separate sentence to a subordinate clause.” It would be the difference between whoever designed St Peter’s, Michelangelo and whoever executed St Peter’s, and whoever was doing the plumbing. I mean, there’s plumbing, and then there’s St Peter’s, and those are two different things.
Uhh, let me see, “Since the Waverly Press remastered edition of it is coming soon,” “soon” in quotation marks. “what's the story of your personal copy of Cerebus #2? I remember seeing it in an episode or two of CerebusTV, and noticed how bad the condition is. It seems very "lived in". How did it end up in such a state, when your copies of surrounding issues (that I've seen in those videos) didn't look nearly as worn?” Uhh, that was a situation where I’m pretty sure Moyer Press was still doing the covers of “Cerebus” and Fairway Press was printing the interiors, and I’m pretty sure I got a call from Jeff Moyer saying, “are you sure you want the cover to look like this? Like I’ve run out a bunch of them, and I’m using your overlays, like I did all of the colour and tone in solid overlays on solid acetate over top of the reduced pnp of the cover. I really don’t think that you want it to look this way.” And it’s like, okay, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll come over and take a look at it. So he had a, as far as I recall, the interior of #2 had been delivered by Fairway Press, he was printing the covers, so he took one of the guts of #2, chopped it down on his cutting board to the right size, took one of his printed covers and chopped it down to the right size. We weren’t going to have the discussion about the size of this comic book, which was the big dust-up on #1. “I’m pretty sure this is what you want, is comic book size. But, what about the cover?” And when I looked at the cover, it was because I was doing the yellowish, more reddish-yellow background colour. Almost orange, a graduated orange, and it was going over top of black. It’s like, well okay, then I’ll just extend it over into the black so that I don’t have any gaps in the colour on the logo, and the black will just cover it up. What I didn’t realize was when you do a basically solid yellow on top of black, you get this really really sickly green. So I had this sickly green halo around everything, and it’s like, [laughs] yeah, I don’t want it to look like that. Why does it look like that? And it’s like, Jeff explained, and I explained I thought the black was just gonna cover it up. He said, “ahh, no, black doesn’t cover up yellow. If you’re printing yellow on top of black, it’s just this really really sick green colour.” So I paid Jeff whatever it was that I paid him to fix that, by taking that overlay and knocking out all of the yellow that wasn’t going right on top of the logo. So, sentimental attachment, that was always my first copy of “Cerebus” #2 and that was dodging a bullet. Okay, I didn’t have this catastrophic problem with the cover, which was a different catastrophic problem from the one that I had on #1, but it was still a catastrophic problem. So I always kept it as a sentimental attachment. There’s only one #2 that looks like this, and thank God for that.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I will pull it out and it’s the Off-White House library copy of #2, which is in the stack of the 300 issues. I’ll pull it out and I’ll get Rolly to scan it, and send it to you Matt, so everybody can see. Isn’t it nice that Jeff Moyer phoned about this, instead of every copy of #2 looking like this?
Matt: [laugh] How much did you guys fight over the cover to #1 is probably the answer to, “why he called”
Dave: Yeah, he knew that I wasn’t happy. Definitely, but it was from a printer’s standpoint, it’s not that big a problem. Like, if you want to look on the bright side, you’re getting more comic books for the money. [laughs] It’s like, it’s magazine size instead of comic book size but you’re still only being charged for comic book size. And it’s like, well, that’s not going to fly with a comic book fan, I didn’t do it as a magazine size, I wanted it to be a comic book. Well, okay. You’re not that big a customer, I will try and accommodate you, here’s a couple of potential solutions. You pick which one you want. The same as I got the only copy of “Cerebus” #1 trimmed to comic book size, because [laughs] that was Jeff going, “You can have this, where the margin around the pages goes practically right up to the right hand side of the page, and the left hand side of the page on every other page, or you can have it magazine sized where it doesn’t do that.” And it’s like, okay, lesser or two evils, I’m not happy either of them, but I’ll pick the magazine size. And it was one of those things, you recognize, okay, he’s going to accommodate me a little bit, but I can I see how much space “Cerebus” #1 is taking up in his print shop, and I can see how much this giant campaign he’s doing for a jean manufacturer or whatever is taking up. This guy’s going to get this attention, I’m not going to get this attention. It’s nothing personal, it’s just money talks, and your comic book isn’t speaking very loudly right now. And nothing against that, we’ll stick with it as long as we can.
“As someone whose only real Will Eisner experience is through a reprint of The Spirit #1 and his story with you and Gerhard in Cerebus Jam, what books of his should I start with? Obviously "A Contract with God" is the big one, but what others?” Well, first of all, I would suggest, if you can find low-cost copies of the Warren publishing and Kitchen Sink publishing “Spirit” magazines, that would probably tell you where your Spirit allegiances would lie. Different people like different parts of “The Spirit”, and both Jim Warren and Denis Kitchen adopted a position of, “we’re not gonna print these chronologically. We’re gonna print, here’s an early one. Here’s a wartime one. Here’s a post-war one. Here’s the Wally Wood Cerebus on the Moon stuff, so we’ll try to do as much of this so each person gets something that appeals to them.” That’s definitely, if you’re looking at Will Eisner as the guy who wrote the textbook on comic book storytelling, comic art storytelling, sequentially, I think you can of have to start with that, with the work that he did, “A Contract with God” forward, I would say your best bet would be to find descriptions of each of the books that he did as a graphic novel. “Alien Life Force”, “The Tenement”, all of the different books that he did. If you read it, and you go, “actually that sounds interesting. I’m interested in that time period and that kind of material.” Like I’m trying to remember what the book was that was his roman a clef of his experiences in the 1940s, the beginning of the comic book field. If that’s what you want to read, that’s the one that you want to read. Because it’s the one that comes the closest to autobiography. Kind of cleaned up, but definitely with a lot of stuff that, yeah, this is much closer to what it was like in the 1930s and 1940s before anybody was talking about what it was actually like and not just romanticizing the whole thing. That would be my recommendation. I mean “Fagin the Jew” was the last work that he did, so it’s very very interesting. It’s one of those, as a Jewish person who is writing about the “Merchant of Venice” character, Fagin, and different interpretations of him, and what Will saw in the Fagin the Jew character, and all of the research that he put into it, of going, alright, there’s this strain and there’s this permutation of. It’s definitely a very worthwhile book, but it’s also the only one of its kind. He didn’t really do that many thorough, thorough research pieces. I think that would probably be close to the top of my list, if I was in a situation of rereading Will’s work, “A Contract with God” always the title story in that one, just the fact that he came up with this whole new way of doing much longer comic book narratives and going all the way down to base two panel compositions, two panels to a page. One panel page, or a two page spread for emphasis. Smaller panels to move the story along. Completely stripped down. If you like “A Contract with God”, you will like pretty much everything Will did after that, because they’re all Will Eisner treatments. This is what he wanted to do when he was doing “The Spirit” instead of doing “The Spirit”, was to do actual literature instead of quasi-superhero material, costume character material. So, that would be my recommendation, is find a list of all of the books that are either in print or available, read the description on Amazon, or see if you can find descriptions for current publishers for each of them, and you’ll know it when you see it. You’ll read the description and go, “yeah, I gotta read this one.”
Matt: I own the “Contract with God” trilogy, which is “The Contract with God”, “Dropsy Avenue”, and I wanna say “The Lifeforce”? It was all collected in one volume…
Dave: Right.
Matt: Which, I mean, it’s one of those, I bought it cause “A Contract with God”! This is supposed to be the greatest graphic novel ever, and I read it, and I read it, and I’m like, this is really good, but the other two books that they put in are also as good. I got “Last Days in Vietnam”, which, if you know anyone who served in Vietnam, it’s one of those books that you’ll read it and go, “should I lend this to whoever?” and the answer is, depends on the guy.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Ya know, some guys would probably really like it, some guys would be like, “this is gonna take me back to a place I don’t wanna go back to.”
Dave: Because that’s also an autobiographic one. I mean, Will did spend a certain amount of time in Vietnam because he was doing “PS Magazine” for the Pentagon. So, he definitely had his own perspective on Vietnam which, you couldn’t really fault somebody for saying, “ah yeah, you were this privileged guy flown in by the Pentagon and given the VIP treatment”. That’s gonna give you a very different picture of the war of in Vietnam. But he’s very very honest about all of that. Sorry, I interrupted, go ahead.
Matt: I also have, I think I have “Invisible People.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: I have the “Will Eisner Reader”, which was a bunch of short vignettes and it was one of these, they were coming out with a bunch of Eisner stuff and I was just buying it, because that was back in my “more money than brains” days when I saw something in Previews and went, “that one. That one!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: He did an illustrated version of “Don Quixote”, I want to say “The Princess and the Frog”? And “Moby Dick”, and I can’t even remember what publisher it was that was doing them, but all three got solicited around the same time, and I’m like, “Eisner, I have to own this!” and I bought them, and they’re really really thin…
Dave: Right.
Matt: …Graphic novels, but at the same time, it’s “Moby Dick”. [laughs]
Dave: Yes. Yes. It’s the same as when Bill Sienkiewicz did “Moby Dick”. It’s like, yeah, it’s thin, and there’s only so much of “Moby Dick” you can get in here, but it’s Bill Sienkiewicz, it’s Will Eisner, it’s the same as when Will Eisner did Hamlet’s soliloquy. Okay, it’s not really the way I picture Hamlet’s soliloquy, but c’mon, it’s Will Eisner, it’s how Will Eisner pictured it. Yeah, there was, I think a lot of that came from the Kitchen Sink “Spirit” because one of Will’s conditions of giving Denis Kitchen the license to do the “Spirit” magazine was, “okay, I want to do new stuff in it as well. And it’s like, I want to do experimental stuff. I wanna do things that there’s absolutely no reason that you would want to publish this because it’s never going to make a nickel if you tell people what it is. But this is what I’m interested in writing and drawing. So ya know, that’s my quid pro quo.” There was enough of it that it did add up. Will was another one of those people that really had to rein himself in from starting 50 different graphic novels. It’s like, you have to look at how old you are, and go, okay, pick one, and finish that one. And when that one’s finished, pick another one, and finish that one. Yeah, I know you really really want to do this over here. Anything that you do that isn’t going to be part of the Will Eisner oeuvre, you’re going to have to make that tough call and go, “I can do a 3 pager, or a 5 pager, apart from that, but I can’t do 4 or 5 of these simultaneously.”
Okay, we’re almost at the last question. Oh no no, we’re not! We got three more questions. Yeah, two more pages of questions, Dan asked, “Hi Dave. I recently finished reading all of Cerebus.”, well thank you, “I kinda liked it. Anyway, I was going to ask, "Was the mention of Mary Hemingway (as opposed to Ernestway) on page 117 of Latter Days a typo, or something with a hidden meaning?" But then I checked and saw page 128 had it as "Ernestway." So I'll just ask the less interesting question, "How about that typo on page 117 of Latter Days?" It'd make for good small-talk, at least.” Uhh, yes. That wasn’t a typo, that was conscious, because it was in the same sense that when I was doing “Reads”, it was, here’s the real Dave Sim, and he’s the fictitious Cerebus storyline, and they’re going to merge and “Reads” is going to be the point where the one enters into the other and the other enters into the one. This was the same thing on the small scale, where when I read the part in Mary Hemingway’s journal about shooting the warthog and looking at the description of the warthog in her dream, it’s like, “mm, that really sounds like Cerebus as Rabbi.” So it seemed to be that that was, yeah, I’m gonna do the same thing, but I’m just going to do it as a throwaway thing that Mary Ernestway’s dream about Cerebus as Rabbi as a warthog is also Mary Hemingway’s dream. This is the meeting point between Mary Ernestway and Mary Hemingway. Thank you for an easy to answer question. [laughs] That’s one in a row, as they done say.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Ahh, Dave Kopperman asked, “Matt: I got a 'please hold-um' -” Oh, this is your saying “I got a ‘please hold-um’”?
Matt: No, no, that’s him.
Dave: Okay, alright. “I realized just a little while ago that "Glamourpuss" and Crumb's "Art & Beauty" are, on a fundamental level, twinned enterprises.” [laughs] Don’t try and tell Robert Crumb that, but thank you very much, because Crumb’s “Art & Beauty” is definitely far more better thought of in the comic book field than “Glamourpuss” is. “Both feature their respective creators doing their best pen & ink work of women, using photographic resources, and in both cases these pin-up drawings are paired with a somewhat ironic narration as if written by a third-person for a traditional lifestyle publication (ie, these aren't personal essays, but commentary written from the POV of a fictional or distanced persona). And as near as I can tell, the inspiration was similar for both artists - wanting to just do 'pure' drawing, and then contextualizing it with text and marketing it as a comic publication. It's a little difficult to figure out exactly when the two stand-alone Art & Beauty issues were released”, ahh, that would be an interesting question to try and research online. “or even if that was the first iteration, but I think it was in the early 2000's (2002-2003). Were you aware of it when you conceived of Glamourpuss or at any point during the lifespan of that book?” Well, I’ll answer that question first, no, I wasn’t really aware of it, in the sense that you mean, yeah, I wanna do this, what Robert Crumb is doing. “And on a higher level, as someone who really REALLY knows how to analyze linework, what's your take on the differences in approach between yourself and Crumb?” I think the difference would be is that Crumb was doing Crumb, so, in terms of my response to “Art & Beauty”, I was far more enamoured of his realistic illustration jazz musician stuff, because that seemed to come from a more ennobling side of Robert Crumb, who has a very very wide spectrum of perspectives on things. I mean, he is really accused of being comic’s most notorious racist because of “When the n-word”, and he didn’t use n-word, “take over the world”, that’s just Bob Crumb dealing with societal id. “Look, this is what I am hearing. Let’s put this down on paper and see how ridiculous it is. Because it’s unfortunate that we’re in a time period, a series of decades where standards of freedom of expression are eroding so rapidly that anyone could look at that story, and it’s high ironic tone, and the Angelfood McSpade stories had things like that, and look at what Bob Crumb did with the jazz musicians material that he did, and say, “this guy is a racist”. It’s like, that’s just completely beyond the pale. So I would say, “Art & Beauty” and any of the female drawing that Robert Crumb did, I always have this sort of creepy sensation that I’m sitting next to him while he’s masturbating. They are very very good drawings. I mean he’s very good at capturing and exaggerating very very slightly female physical attributes in the Bob Crumb style. You could look at it drawn by Bob Crumb, and you go, “I know exactly what that girl looks like.” If you told me, “that girl sitting down at the bus station right now.” I could take one look at the Bob Crumb drawing and go down to the bus station and go, that’s her right there. And that’s a remarkable, remarkable drawing aptitude to have. But, again, it’s the same as when I read his Devil Girl stuff and the fact that he created his own Devil Girl life-size statue and had sex with it. [laughs] And it’s like, okay, there are points where I get off the bus long before the last stop on the Bob Crumb road and that’s one of them, but at the same time, it’s like, you absolutely can’t fault it as sincere and idiosyncratic drawing. That’s different from me, where I looked at fashion magazines and looked for Al Williamson girls, because I wanted to trace photographs of girls who looked like Al Williamson girls and who were dressed like Al Williamson girls, and ink them as close to Al Williamson as I could. And that’s very very different. That’s not coming from me, that’s adoration of Al Williamson. Adoration of Stan Drake, adoration of Neal Adams, and what those guys could do naturally that I could only do by tracing. So, I would say that’s the biggest distinction there. I mean, I really really enjoyed what I was doing and I mean, if you’re tracing out of fashion magazines and you can’t help but read part of the fashion magazines, you do get that really chirpy, insincere strong independent woman voice thing that’s just begging to be torn apart. I mean, if you’re of a satirical bent, and I’m of a satirical bent, and Bob Crumb was always of a satirical bent, it’s like, I’m gonna have a lot of fun making fun of this. Not because I hate it, not because I want to belittle it, it’s because it’s funny! If you’re reading it and you’re used to reading actual thought, and you’re reading fashion magazine speak, it’s like, I wanna have fun drawing this stuff and I wanna have fun making fun of it. [laughs] And unfortunately there’s no market for that. It’s like, “no, I want her in a skin tight superhero costume flying around and kicking bad guys in the face and showing a lot of cleavage or I really don’t want to look at women. I don’t read fashion magazines, so I don’t want to read somebody making fun of fashion magazines, or drawing fashion and showing me a $2000 blouse. Or a $1500 sweater.” And it’s like, that’s part of the joke to me. Like, can you imagine that they charge $1500 for this and they actually get it? So, it’s one of those, if you find that funny, you find that funny. I found that funny and I think Bob Crumb found that funny.
And speaking of Mr Crumb, sir, Tony Dunlop asked, “Tacking onto Dave K's question: Has Dave read Crumb's (wonderful and surprisingly respectful, if not reverent) illustrated "Book of Genesis?"" Yes, I haven’t read it. I got a copy, I forget who sent me a copy of Crumb’s “Book of Genesis”, and it was one of those, well, I can’t really throw away the Bible, and it is the Bible, it’s the first 50 chapters in the Christian and Bible and the Torah. My experience with it was, Bob Crumb has a way of getting into my head, and I think getting into everyone’s head, and making them see things through his eyes. And it’s like, I have my own mental images of all of the characters and all of the stories in the Book of Genesis, the first Book of Moshe. I read it, I get there once a year, it takes me about a year for me to read through the Law and the Prophets, ten chapters at a time, and it’s like, I read parts of it and went, mm, no, if I read too much of Robert Crumb’s Rebecca, or Robert Crumb’s Esau, I’m gonna be reading the Bible and picturing Robert Crumb’s Rebecca and I like the Rebecca that I picture in the book of Genesis a lot more than I like Robert Crumb’s. But I do have the “Book of Genesis” on top of the book shelf in not the Rectangle Office, but the office where I do all of my work, and I have on top of that, an illustrated Bible that… ohh, that name slips my mind. I’ve been doing this way too long tonight. “Following Cerebus” guy?
Matt: Craig Miller.
Dave: Craig Miller, yes, thank you. Craig Miller found this oversized hardcover of an illustrated, extremely reverent Bible which is I think all of the Law and the Prophets, so I haven’t looked at that extensively for the same reason because I don’t want to be picturing it through that illustrator's eyes. I don’t really look at my Gustave Dore Bible illustration for the same reason , cause I don’t want to be picturing it through Gustave Dore’s eyes, but I’ve got that book on top of Bob Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” and that’s just one of those things that I had to do. I don’t really want Bob Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” surmounting anything else because he’s not a monotheist. He’s not a devout Jew. He’s not a devout Christian. He did all of that work on the “Book of Genesis” and it had absolutely no impact on him, although someone I spoke to recently who interviewed him, said, “I think it stopped him drawing. The ‘Book of Genesis’, once he got it done, he just didn’t want to write and draw anything else.” I don’t know if that’s true. But that’s the best answer that I can give you on that one, Tony, is I just couldn’t let myself see all of these episodes through Bob Crumb’s eyes. There is certainly a fair amount of sexual material in the first Book of Moshe, but you don’t really have to go too sexual with it, and [laughs] of course, you’re not gonna tell that to Bob Crumb. If he’s having to sit down and adapt the entire Book of Genesis, if he gets to something that’s even remotely sexy, he’s definitely gonna be getting the old t & a out and let’s really go to town on this. And it’s like, well that’s another one of those, well, definitely Judah did go with Tamar, his daughter-in-law thinking that she was a prostitute. [laughs] I don’t really have to see them doing that, because I don’t think that’s really the point of Chapter 38, I think. We’ll just leave it at that, and now that it’s 10 after 9, I think we’ll probably just leave it at that.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: Alright. Anything else that you want to throw in?
Matt: Ah, no. I did get a last minute question today from Steve Peters, relating to the “New Mutants” that I’ll fax up probably tomorrow, because it’s one of those you can answer it when you’re answering Jeff’s questions.
Dave: Okay. Did he send it in a form where you can just put it on the website as it is, so I can just say, plug Steve Peter’s chunk in here?
Matt: Uh, he just sent me a Facebook message, but like I said, I’ll copy it up and send it up as a fax, just so you can put it to the pile of next time you’re reading “New Mutants”.
Dave: Okay, alright.
Matt: It boiled down to, the character of S’ym… actually, I can look at this real quick. Alright, phone, let’s see if we can get this to work. Uhh... open this, open that. Steve. Okay, the question he had was, “Seeing the S’ym character as a foreshadowing of you being demonized within the comics community is an interesting interpretation. I had one of my own, could S’ym have been a reflection of yourself at the time, ie, pre-Bible Dave, Dave Sim the rockstar, Dave Sim the alcoholic, Dave Sim the guy who ‘groomed a 14 year old girl’. That story just reared its ugly head in a video posted in the Cerebus Facebook group, I’m still not really clear on what happened with that one, though I’m sure you’re repentant of that behavior now.”
Dave: Right, yes. We will be getting to that as well. It’s a very good point, it goes forward from there. What struck me was the S’ym, not only S’ym but S’ym having control of Limbo, and it’s like, [laughs] Wait a minute. If you’re talking about comic art metaphyics, I thought reading Ward Greene’s “Rip Kirby” was “this is really really beyond the pale. This is actually in here and I’m not actually making this up. It’s like, how did you think this was going to turn out?” [laughs] And then, reading “New Mutants” and going, “well how did you think this was going to turn out?” So we’ll leave that as a teaser, and yes, Steve, thank you for asking the question that will get covered. The last day or so I’ve been going, I’m not going to be able to keep this to a page, so let’s just type out everything that I have to say, and see how many pages it is, and see if we can all live with that, or if it’s, okay, now that I’ve typed it all out, let’s find the core of it. Let’s find the kernel of it and address that. So, there you go.
Dave: Alright. Good teaser to end on.
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Take care, buh-bye.
Matt: You too, bye!
Dave: Oh my gosh, okay.
Matt: So they sculpted it, so it’s got the head sculpt of the actor, and it looks very Doctor Strange-y. But because they couldn’t get the rights, or it was gonna be too expensive to produce the figure, only the prototype exists. But because they paid for the head sculpt, they reused it, [laughs] and I’m not lying or making this up, but Dave’s gonna think I am. They used the head sculpt on their 12 inch girl dolls for Jordache jeans.
Dave: Really?
Matt: So, Doctor Strange, the head sculpt exists on a figure, and in the magazine there’s a picture of the prototype next to the actual produced figure wearing jeans and t-shirt with the Jordache logo, and the caption was, “Doctor Strange, and his styling brother Fernando.”
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Matt: And for whatever reason, I decided that since “Wizard Magazine” says Cerebus has a long-lost brother, his long-lost brother’s name is Fernando, and he’s in the Estarcion version of Italy, just hanging out in cafes and drinking cappuccino. [laughs] And for years, I’ve gone, I need to produce an image of Fernando, where it’s basically Cerebus with a little pencil-thin mustache…
Dave: Right.
Matt: And a beret! [laughs] And constantly, every couple of months, Fernando pops in my head of, “oh yeah, Fernando. I’ve gotta do something with Fernando.” I’ve been meaning to tell you about it for years, and like at SPACE, we just got busy, and then we stopped seeing each other. It’s like, “oh yeah, Fernando! I gotta tell Dave about Fernando!”
Dave: One of these days, boy, and then we could use the ABBA song, “Fernando” and just sort of have that tinkling in the background in the cafe. “Meanwhile, on Wizard Earth, Fernando is chugging his cappuccinos in…”
Matt: When we started coming up with a parody of Spider-Verse called “Aardvark-Verse” and it’s okay, we’ll do a cover with all these different aardvarks. And I went through and I was scanning, here’s an image of Cerebus where he looks slightly different. At one point, I started to work on, okay, here’s an image from “Guys”, Cerebus is wearing like a turtleneck, all I have to do is somehow add a pencil-thin mustache to the snout, which of course goes back to the age-old problem that we’ve been having, you can’t put a mustache on that face.
Dave: No, no. That’s one of those, I would be more inclined to take the Doctor Strange head and put aardvark ears on it and put that onto a Cerebus body. And yeah, that would be the Cerebus of the Wizard Universe, and you could take the clips right out of the “Toyfair Magazine” and “Wizard Magazine” and that would explain that this was the Fernando who never got his moment in the spotlight of being the person who killed Cerebus in issue 300. And that’s why he’s just consoling himself with endless cups of cappuccino, because he coulda been a contender. He coulda been a part of comics history, instead of a bum, which is what I am. [laughs] Okay, I think we’ve got, I want to see that in the “Cerebus-Verse” book, you guys keep chugging away on that one, cause that was a hit movie. Anything that we can make fun of that’s a hit, that people will go, “Oh I know that!” We definitely want to be doing that.
Matt: We keep kicking around “Doctor Strangevark” and it always falls apart because we can’t find a good Steve Ditko “Doctor Strange” cover because there aren’t any!
Dave: Yes, yes, that’s one of the things. I think it would have to just be a panel from the… like, the original Doctor Strange is definitely Asian. They just had I think a half dozen pages in the platinum auction for Heritage Auctions. I don’t think it was from “Strange Tales” 110, but it was like pretty close to the beginning, and it’s like, no those are definitely Asian features. Somebody told Ditko, “ahh, knock it off. We really don’t want an Oriental looking Doctor Strange. Can’t you make him look more a like white guy?” And it’s like, “yeah, I can, but that’s not the character I was drawing. Why didn’t you say something earlier?” If he even asked that question. It’s like, no, you bring the pages in, you give them to Sol Brodsky, he gets Stan Lee, and you find out what’s going to happen in the comic book that you’re actually plotting and writing.
Matt: I mean, unless somebody was inking him and they just started inking him more Caucasian? [laughs]
Dave: Uhh, no, Ditko was always inking himself, I think. That would be interesting to find out what’s the earliest point where somebody inked “Doctor Strange”. That was one of the things where Ditko was always kind of off the Marvel reservation for exactly that reason. It’s like, what something looks like in the pencils isn’t necessarily what it’s going to look like in the inks, and by the time the inks come in you either have to leave it alone or you have to give it to John Romita Sr or somebody in the Bullpen and say, “mm, can you make this look the way Stan wants it to look instead of the way it actually looks here?”
Matt: Which is how Iron Man gets a nose. [laughs]
Dave: Yes! Yes. A poignant moment in comics history. Anyway, moving on to Jesse Lee Herndon, “Hi Dave, Hope you're doing well. I have three questions for you this month: As the unofficial transcriber” Yes, and thank you again for that, Jesse. “of Please Hold for Dave Sim, I must ask, what do you recall about the transcriber of Cerebus' commentaries in "Latter Days"? He is only referred to as "me", both in the text and on the covers. There's never any visual depiction, just like there had not been for the prior Legion of Substitute Wise Fellows who did the same job, and I presume that was so as for there to be just one less character to have to draw.” Uh, partly that, and partly the fact that the Amanuensis, particularly, with regards to the Torah and the Gospels, David’s Psalms, Revelation, that person is never credited. And there’s a lot of questions that that raises of, how much was this written by this person, and how much of this was just transcribed by this person? Particularly with John’s Gospel and Revelation, which definitely have the appearance of having been written, either written (small w) or “written” by the same Amanuensis which seems kind of unlikely, because there’s such a gap in time between when Revelation was first committed to parchment and when John’s Gospel was obviously first committed to parchment. John’s Gospel would’ve been definitely before the sack of the Temple by Rome in 70 AD and Revelation wasn’t sent down and transcribed until 98 AD. John, the “author” of both of those books, was very very very old at the time that Revelation was revealed to him. Which raises the question, was he actually the writer of it, or was there an Amanuensis, or was it somebody who was familiar enough with the person who wrote the very very idiosyncratic Greek of John’s Gospel and Revelation? And the two letters attributed to John. I think there’s two letters attributed to John, and they’re really just letter fragments, but you go, huh, well there it is, there’s that voice again. There’s that means of expressing that is just completely unique to this, and of course, if you’re a devout monotheist like I am, you go, well it’s the voice of God. The Johannine Jesus was the lamb of God, and as far as I can determine, John the Apostle was the lamb of the lamb, which I’ll be getting into in my Monday reports as we go along. But it definitely, you almost never even got the name of the person recording the biblical text. The only exception to that, that I can think of off the top of my head, and it’s just off the top of my head, would be the scribe who transcribed the Book of Isaiah, which is the longest book in the Hebrew Bible at 66 chapters. So it was a matter of, okay, if I’m going to do Cerebus fulfilling his destiny by reading the Torah and describing what he’s reading, whoever is going to be doing it, they’re not going to be an actual character in the book. They’re going to be as close as possible to the anonymity associated with the transcription of biblical text. It was just something that you didn’t do as the person who was just putting this into consumable shape. A prophet of God, or a prophet of the YHWH, is on a completely exalted a level above someone who’s just going, “there’s a better verb for that. This would be a good spot to switch verb tense. I would change this from a separate sentence to a subordinate clause.” It would be the difference between whoever designed St Peter’s, Michelangelo and whoever executed St Peter’s, and whoever was doing the plumbing. I mean, there’s plumbing, and then there’s St Peter’s, and those are two different things.
Uhh, let me see, “Since the Waverly Press remastered edition of it is coming soon,” “soon” in quotation marks. “what's the story of your personal copy of Cerebus #2? I remember seeing it in an episode or two of CerebusTV, and noticed how bad the condition is. It seems very "lived in". How did it end up in such a state, when your copies of surrounding issues (that I've seen in those videos) didn't look nearly as worn?” Uhh, that was a situation where I’m pretty sure Moyer Press was still doing the covers of “Cerebus” and Fairway Press was printing the interiors, and I’m pretty sure I got a call from Jeff Moyer saying, “are you sure you want the cover to look like this? Like I’ve run out a bunch of them, and I’m using your overlays, like I did all of the colour and tone in solid overlays on solid acetate over top of the reduced pnp of the cover. I really don’t think that you want it to look this way.” And it’s like, okay, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll come over and take a look at it. So he had a, as far as I recall, the interior of #2 had been delivered by Fairway Press, he was printing the covers, so he took one of the guts of #2, chopped it down on his cutting board to the right size, took one of his printed covers and chopped it down to the right size. We weren’t going to have the discussion about the size of this comic book, which was the big dust-up on #1. “I’m pretty sure this is what you want, is comic book size. But, what about the cover?” And when I looked at the cover, it was because I was doing the yellowish, more reddish-yellow background colour. Almost orange, a graduated orange, and it was going over top of black. It’s like, well okay, then I’ll just extend it over into the black so that I don’t have any gaps in the colour on the logo, and the black will just cover it up. What I didn’t realize was when you do a basically solid yellow on top of black, you get this really really sickly green. So I had this sickly green halo around everything, and it’s like, [laughs] yeah, I don’t want it to look like that. Why does it look like that? And it’s like, Jeff explained, and I explained I thought the black was just gonna cover it up. He said, “ahh, no, black doesn’t cover up yellow. If you’re printing yellow on top of black, it’s just this really really sick green colour.” So I paid Jeff whatever it was that I paid him to fix that, by taking that overlay and knocking out all of the yellow that wasn’t going right on top of the logo. So, sentimental attachment, that was always my first copy of “Cerebus” #2 and that was dodging a bullet. Okay, I didn’t have this catastrophic problem with the cover, which was a different catastrophic problem from the one that I had on #1, but it was still a catastrophic problem. So I always kept it as a sentimental attachment. There’s only one #2 that looks like this, and thank God for that.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I will pull it out and it’s the Off-White House library copy of #2, which is in the stack of the 300 issues. I’ll pull it out and I’ll get Rolly to scan it, and send it to you Matt, so everybody can see. Isn’t it nice that Jeff Moyer phoned about this, instead of every copy of #2 looking like this?
Matt: [laugh] How much did you guys fight over the cover to #1 is probably the answer to, “why he called”
Dave: Yeah, he knew that I wasn’t happy. Definitely, but it was from a printer’s standpoint, it’s not that big a problem. Like, if you want to look on the bright side, you’re getting more comic books for the money. [laughs] It’s like, it’s magazine size instead of comic book size but you’re still only being charged for comic book size. And it’s like, well, that’s not going to fly with a comic book fan, I didn’t do it as a magazine size, I wanted it to be a comic book. Well, okay. You’re not that big a customer, I will try and accommodate you, here’s a couple of potential solutions. You pick which one you want. The same as I got the only copy of “Cerebus” #1 trimmed to comic book size, because [laughs] that was Jeff going, “You can have this, where the margin around the pages goes practically right up to the right hand side of the page, and the left hand side of the page on every other page, or you can have it magazine sized where it doesn’t do that.” And it’s like, okay, lesser or two evils, I’m not happy either of them, but I’ll pick the magazine size. And it was one of those things, you recognize, okay, he’s going to accommodate me a little bit, but I can I see how much space “Cerebus” #1 is taking up in his print shop, and I can see how much this giant campaign he’s doing for a jean manufacturer or whatever is taking up. This guy’s going to get this attention, I’m not going to get this attention. It’s nothing personal, it’s just money talks, and your comic book isn’t speaking very loudly right now. And nothing against that, we’ll stick with it as long as we can.
“As someone whose only real Will Eisner experience is through a reprint of The Spirit #1 and his story with you and Gerhard in Cerebus Jam, what books of his should I start with? Obviously "A Contract with God" is the big one, but what others?” Well, first of all, I would suggest, if you can find low-cost copies of the Warren publishing and Kitchen Sink publishing “Spirit” magazines, that would probably tell you where your Spirit allegiances would lie. Different people like different parts of “The Spirit”, and both Jim Warren and Denis Kitchen adopted a position of, “we’re not gonna print these chronologically. We’re gonna print, here’s an early one. Here’s a wartime one. Here’s a post-war one. Here’s the Wally Wood Cerebus on the Moon stuff, so we’ll try to do as much of this so each person gets something that appeals to them.” That’s definitely, if you’re looking at Will Eisner as the guy who wrote the textbook on comic book storytelling, comic art storytelling, sequentially, I think you can of have to start with that, with the work that he did, “A Contract with God” forward, I would say your best bet would be to find descriptions of each of the books that he did as a graphic novel. “Alien Life Force”, “The Tenement”, all of the different books that he did. If you read it, and you go, “actually that sounds interesting. I’m interested in that time period and that kind of material.” Like I’m trying to remember what the book was that was his roman a clef of his experiences in the 1940s, the beginning of the comic book field. If that’s what you want to read, that’s the one that you want to read. Because it’s the one that comes the closest to autobiography. Kind of cleaned up, but definitely with a lot of stuff that, yeah, this is much closer to what it was like in the 1930s and 1940s before anybody was talking about what it was actually like and not just romanticizing the whole thing. That would be my recommendation. I mean “Fagin the Jew” was the last work that he did, so it’s very very interesting. It’s one of those, as a Jewish person who is writing about the “Merchant of Venice” character, Fagin, and different interpretations of him, and what Will saw in the Fagin the Jew character, and all of the research that he put into it, of going, alright, there’s this strain and there’s this permutation of. It’s definitely a very worthwhile book, but it’s also the only one of its kind. He didn’t really do that many thorough, thorough research pieces. I think that would probably be close to the top of my list, if I was in a situation of rereading Will’s work, “A Contract with God” always the title story in that one, just the fact that he came up with this whole new way of doing much longer comic book narratives and going all the way down to base two panel compositions, two panels to a page. One panel page, or a two page spread for emphasis. Smaller panels to move the story along. Completely stripped down. If you like “A Contract with God”, you will like pretty much everything Will did after that, because they’re all Will Eisner treatments. This is what he wanted to do when he was doing “The Spirit” instead of doing “The Spirit”, was to do actual literature instead of quasi-superhero material, costume character material. So, that would be my recommendation, is find a list of all of the books that are either in print or available, read the description on Amazon, or see if you can find descriptions for current publishers for each of them, and you’ll know it when you see it. You’ll read the description and go, “yeah, I gotta read this one.”
Matt: I own the “Contract with God” trilogy, which is “The Contract with God”, “Dropsy Avenue”, and I wanna say “The Lifeforce”? It was all collected in one volume…
Dave: Right.
Matt: Which, I mean, it’s one of those, I bought it cause “A Contract with God”! This is supposed to be the greatest graphic novel ever, and I read it, and I read it, and I’m like, this is really good, but the other two books that they put in are also as good. I got “Last Days in Vietnam”, which, if you know anyone who served in Vietnam, it’s one of those books that you’ll read it and go, “should I lend this to whoever?” and the answer is, depends on the guy.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Ya know, some guys would probably really like it, some guys would be like, “this is gonna take me back to a place I don’t wanna go back to.”
Dave: Because that’s also an autobiographic one. I mean, Will did spend a certain amount of time in Vietnam because he was doing “PS Magazine” for the Pentagon. So, he definitely had his own perspective on Vietnam which, you couldn’t really fault somebody for saying, “ah yeah, you were this privileged guy flown in by the Pentagon and given the VIP treatment”. That’s gonna give you a very different picture of the war of in Vietnam. But he’s very very honest about all of that. Sorry, I interrupted, go ahead.
Matt: I also have, I think I have “Invisible People.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: I have the “Will Eisner Reader”, which was a bunch of short vignettes and it was one of these, they were coming out with a bunch of Eisner stuff and I was just buying it, because that was back in my “more money than brains” days when I saw something in Previews and went, “that one. That one!”
Dave: Right.
Matt: He did an illustrated version of “Don Quixote”, I want to say “The Princess and the Frog”? And “Moby Dick”, and I can’t even remember what publisher it was that was doing them, but all three got solicited around the same time, and I’m like, “Eisner, I have to own this!” and I bought them, and they’re really really thin…
Dave: Right.
Matt: …Graphic novels, but at the same time, it’s “Moby Dick”. [laughs]
Dave: Yes. Yes. It’s the same as when Bill Sienkiewicz did “Moby Dick”. It’s like, yeah, it’s thin, and there’s only so much of “Moby Dick” you can get in here, but it’s Bill Sienkiewicz, it’s Will Eisner, it’s the same as when Will Eisner did Hamlet’s soliloquy. Okay, it’s not really the way I picture Hamlet’s soliloquy, but c’mon, it’s Will Eisner, it’s how Will Eisner pictured it. Yeah, there was, I think a lot of that came from the Kitchen Sink “Spirit” because one of Will’s conditions of giving Denis Kitchen the license to do the “Spirit” magazine was, “okay, I want to do new stuff in it as well. And it’s like, I want to do experimental stuff. I wanna do things that there’s absolutely no reason that you would want to publish this because it’s never going to make a nickel if you tell people what it is. But this is what I’m interested in writing and drawing. So ya know, that’s my quid pro quo.” There was enough of it that it did add up. Will was another one of those people that really had to rein himself in from starting 50 different graphic novels. It’s like, you have to look at how old you are, and go, okay, pick one, and finish that one. And when that one’s finished, pick another one, and finish that one. Yeah, I know you really really want to do this over here. Anything that you do that isn’t going to be part of the Will Eisner oeuvre, you’re going to have to make that tough call and go, “I can do a 3 pager, or a 5 pager, apart from that, but I can’t do 4 or 5 of these simultaneously.”
Okay, we’re almost at the last question. Oh no no, we’re not! We got three more questions. Yeah, two more pages of questions, Dan asked, “Hi Dave. I recently finished reading all of Cerebus.”, well thank you, “I kinda liked it. Anyway, I was going to ask, "Was the mention of Mary Hemingway (as opposed to Ernestway) on page 117 of Latter Days a typo, or something with a hidden meaning?" But then I checked and saw page 128 had it as "Ernestway." So I'll just ask the less interesting question, "How about that typo on page 117 of Latter Days?" It'd make for good small-talk, at least.” Uhh, yes. That wasn’t a typo, that was conscious, because it was in the same sense that when I was doing “Reads”, it was, here’s the real Dave Sim, and he’s the fictitious Cerebus storyline, and they’re going to merge and “Reads” is going to be the point where the one enters into the other and the other enters into the one. This was the same thing on the small scale, where when I read the part in Mary Hemingway’s journal about shooting the warthog and looking at the description of the warthog in her dream, it’s like, “mm, that really sounds like Cerebus as Rabbi.” So it seemed to be that that was, yeah, I’m gonna do the same thing, but I’m just going to do it as a throwaway thing that Mary Ernestway’s dream about Cerebus as Rabbi as a warthog is also Mary Hemingway’s dream. This is the meeting point between Mary Ernestway and Mary Hemingway. Thank you for an easy to answer question. [laughs] That’s one in a row, as they done say.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Ahh, Dave Kopperman asked, “Matt: I got a 'please hold-um' -” Oh, this is your saying “I got a ‘please hold-um’”?
Matt: No, no, that’s him.
Dave: Okay, alright. “I realized just a little while ago that "Glamourpuss" and Crumb's "Art & Beauty" are, on a fundamental level, twinned enterprises.” [laughs] Don’t try and tell Robert Crumb that, but thank you very much, because Crumb’s “Art & Beauty” is definitely far more better thought of in the comic book field than “Glamourpuss” is. “Both feature their respective creators doing their best pen & ink work of women, using photographic resources, and in both cases these pin-up drawings are paired with a somewhat ironic narration as if written by a third-person for a traditional lifestyle publication (ie, these aren't personal essays, but commentary written from the POV of a fictional or distanced persona). And as near as I can tell, the inspiration was similar for both artists - wanting to just do 'pure' drawing, and then contextualizing it with text and marketing it as a comic publication. It's a little difficult to figure out exactly when the two stand-alone Art & Beauty issues were released”, ahh, that would be an interesting question to try and research online. “or even if that was the first iteration, but I think it was in the early 2000's (2002-2003). Were you aware of it when you conceived of Glamourpuss or at any point during the lifespan of that book?” Well, I’ll answer that question first, no, I wasn’t really aware of it, in the sense that you mean, yeah, I wanna do this, what Robert Crumb is doing. “And on a higher level, as someone who really REALLY knows how to analyze linework, what's your take on the differences in approach between yourself and Crumb?” I think the difference would be is that Crumb was doing Crumb, so, in terms of my response to “Art & Beauty”, I was far more enamoured of his realistic illustration jazz musician stuff, because that seemed to come from a more ennobling side of Robert Crumb, who has a very very wide spectrum of perspectives on things. I mean, he is really accused of being comic’s most notorious racist because of “When the n-word”, and he didn’t use n-word, “take over the world”, that’s just Bob Crumb dealing with societal id. “Look, this is what I am hearing. Let’s put this down on paper and see how ridiculous it is. Because it’s unfortunate that we’re in a time period, a series of decades where standards of freedom of expression are eroding so rapidly that anyone could look at that story, and it’s high ironic tone, and the Angelfood McSpade stories had things like that, and look at what Bob Crumb did with the jazz musicians material that he did, and say, “this guy is a racist”. It’s like, that’s just completely beyond the pale. So I would say, “Art & Beauty” and any of the female drawing that Robert Crumb did, I always have this sort of creepy sensation that I’m sitting next to him while he’s masturbating. They are very very good drawings. I mean he’s very good at capturing and exaggerating very very slightly female physical attributes in the Bob Crumb style. You could look at it drawn by Bob Crumb, and you go, “I know exactly what that girl looks like.” If you told me, “that girl sitting down at the bus station right now.” I could take one look at the Bob Crumb drawing and go down to the bus station and go, that’s her right there. And that’s a remarkable, remarkable drawing aptitude to have. But, again, it’s the same as when I read his Devil Girl stuff and the fact that he created his own Devil Girl life-size statue and had sex with it. [laughs] And it’s like, okay, there are points where I get off the bus long before the last stop on the Bob Crumb road and that’s one of them, but at the same time, it’s like, you absolutely can’t fault it as sincere and idiosyncratic drawing. That’s different from me, where I looked at fashion magazines and looked for Al Williamson girls, because I wanted to trace photographs of girls who looked like Al Williamson girls and who were dressed like Al Williamson girls, and ink them as close to Al Williamson as I could. And that’s very very different. That’s not coming from me, that’s adoration of Al Williamson. Adoration of Stan Drake, adoration of Neal Adams, and what those guys could do naturally that I could only do by tracing. So, I would say that’s the biggest distinction there. I mean, I really really enjoyed what I was doing and I mean, if you’re tracing out of fashion magazines and you can’t help but read part of the fashion magazines, you do get that really chirpy, insincere strong independent woman voice thing that’s just begging to be torn apart. I mean, if you’re of a satirical bent, and I’m of a satirical bent, and Bob Crumb was always of a satirical bent, it’s like, I’m gonna have a lot of fun making fun of this. Not because I hate it, not because I want to belittle it, it’s because it’s funny! If you’re reading it and you’re used to reading actual thought, and you’re reading fashion magazine speak, it’s like, I wanna have fun drawing this stuff and I wanna have fun making fun of it. [laughs] And unfortunately there’s no market for that. It’s like, “no, I want her in a skin tight superhero costume flying around and kicking bad guys in the face and showing a lot of cleavage or I really don’t want to look at women. I don’t read fashion magazines, so I don’t want to read somebody making fun of fashion magazines, or drawing fashion and showing me a $2000 blouse. Or a $1500 sweater.” And it’s like, that’s part of the joke to me. Like, can you imagine that they charge $1500 for this and they actually get it? So, it’s one of those, if you find that funny, you find that funny. I found that funny and I think Bob Crumb found that funny.
And speaking of Mr Crumb, sir, Tony Dunlop asked, “Tacking onto Dave K's question: Has Dave read Crumb's (wonderful and surprisingly respectful, if not reverent) illustrated "Book of Genesis?"" Yes, I haven’t read it. I got a copy, I forget who sent me a copy of Crumb’s “Book of Genesis”, and it was one of those, well, I can’t really throw away the Bible, and it is the Bible, it’s the first 50 chapters in the Christian and Bible and the Torah. My experience with it was, Bob Crumb has a way of getting into my head, and I think getting into everyone’s head, and making them see things through his eyes. And it’s like, I have my own mental images of all of the characters and all of the stories in the Book of Genesis, the first Book of Moshe. I read it, I get there once a year, it takes me about a year for me to read through the Law and the Prophets, ten chapters at a time, and it’s like, I read parts of it and went, mm, no, if I read too much of Robert Crumb’s Rebecca, or Robert Crumb’s Esau, I’m gonna be reading the Bible and picturing Robert Crumb’s Rebecca and I like the Rebecca that I picture in the book of Genesis a lot more than I like Robert Crumb’s. But I do have the “Book of Genesis” on top of the book shelf in not the Rectangle Office, but the office where I do all of my work, and I have on top of that, an illustrated Bible that… ohh, that name slips my mind. I’ve been doing this way too long tonight. “Following Cerebus” guy?
Matt: Craig Miller.
Dave: Craig Miller, yes, thank you. Craig Miller found this oversized hardcover of an illustrated, extremely reverent Bible which is I think all of the Law and the Prophets, so I haven’t looked at that extensively for the same reason because I don’t want to be picturing it through that illustrator's eyes. I don’t really look at my Gustave Dore Bible illustration for the same reason , cause I don’t want to be picturing it through Gustave Dore’s eyes, but I’ve got that book on top of Bob Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” and that’s just one of those things that I had to do. I don’t really want Bob Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” surmounting anything else because he’s not a monotheist. He’s not a devout Jew. He’s not a devout Christian. He did all of that work on the “Book of Genesis” and it had absolutely no impact on him, although someone I spoke to recently who interviewed him, said, “I think it stopped him drawing. The ‘Book of Genesis’, once he got it done, he just didn’t want to write and draw anything else.” I don’t know if that’s true. But that’s the best answer that I can give you on that one, Tony, is I just couldn’t let myself see all of these episodes through Bob Crumb’s eyes. There is certainly a fair amount of sexual material in the first Book of Moshe, but you don’t really have to go too sexual with it, and [laughs] of course, you’re not gonna tell that to Bob Crumb. If he’s having to sit down and adapt the entire Book of Genesis, if he gets to something that’s even remotely sexy, he’s definitely gonna be getting the old t & a out and let’s really go to town on this. And it’s like, well that’s another one of those, well, definitely Judah did go with Tamar, his daughter-in-law thinking that she was a prostitute. [laughs] I don’t really have to see them doing that, because I don’t think that’s really the point of Chapter 38, I think. We’ll just leave it at that, and now that it’s 10 after 9, I think we’ll probably just leave it at that.
Matt: [laughs] Okay.
Dave: Alright. Anything else that you want to throw in?
Matt: Ah, no. I did get a last minute question today from Steve Peters, relating to the “New Mutants” that I’ll fax up probably tomorrow, because it’s one of those you can answer it when you’re answering Jeff’s questions.
Dave: Okay. Did he send it in a form where you can just put it on the website as it is, so I can just say, plug Steve Peter’s chunk in here?
Matt: Uh, he just sent me a Facebook message, but like I said, I’ll copy it up and send it up as a fax, just so you can put it to the pile of next time you’re reading “New Mutants”.
Dave: Okay, alright.
Matt: It boiled down to, the character of S’ym… actually, I can look at this real quick. Alright, phone, let’s see if we can get this to work. Uhh... open this, open that. Steve. Okay, the question he had was, “Seeing the S’ym character as a foreshadowing of you being demonized within the comics community is an interesting interpretation. I had one of my own, could S’ym have been a reflection of yourself at the time, ie, pre-Bible Dave, Dave Sim the rockstar, Dave Sim the alcoholic, Dave Sim the guy who ‘groomed a 14 year old girl’. That story just reared its ugly head in a video posted in the Cerebus Facebook group, I’m still not really clear on what happened with that one, though I’m sure you’re repentant of that behavior now.”
Dave: Right, yes. We will be getting to that as well. It’s a very good point, it goes forward from there. What struck me was the S’ym, not only S’ym but S’ym having control of Limbo, and it’s like, [laughs] Wait a minute. If you’re talking about comic art metaphyics, I thought reading Ward Greene’s “Rip Kirby” was “this is really really beyond the pale. This is actually in here and I’m not actually making this up. It’s like, how did you think this was going to turn out?” [laughs] And then, reading “New Mutants” and going, “well how did you think this was going to turn out?” So we’ll leave that as a teaser, and yes, Steve, thank you for asking the question that will get covered. The last day or so I’ve been going, I’m not going to be able to keep this to a page, so let’s just type out everything that I have to say, and see how many pages it is, and see if we can all live with that, or if it’s, okay, now that I’ve typed it all out, let’s find the core of it. Let’s find the kernel of it and address that. So, there you go.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Alright. Good teaser to end on.
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Take care, buh-bye.
Matt: You too, bye!
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TwoMorrows has a new book on Marshall Rogers. Does it include the Name of the Game is Diamondback? Do they talk to Deni? I dunno. You might if you buy a copy...
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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
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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.
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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.
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
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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. And if you're going to Edinburgh Fringe, Jen's doing her One Woman show Woman in the Arena, pretty much all month. If you go, "swordfish". And send pics...
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Up to 35% off July 16-20 and 24-27.*
*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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Heritage has (coming soon):
- Page 16 of issue #44
- other stuff
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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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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Got a message from Studio Comix Press:
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| Click for bigger... |
If you wanna support "local" Canadian publishers...
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April C. wanted a Cerebus Jam #1, and I only wanna do this ONCE, the AMOC Prize Box (comic box edition):
Following Cerebus #4Spawn 10 (90s original)(2)Swords of Cerebus in Hell? Hardcovers 8(2), 10glamourpuss #1 (fashion cover), 6, 22, 23(2)Zootanapuss #4 (#475/590)Cerebus Companion #2Swords of Cerebus #2(2nd print) #3 (2nd print)High Society 12th printFree CerebusCerebus World Tour Book 1995Cerebus Guys Party PackCerebus bi-weekly #1, 2(2),3,5,8,9,11,12(2),13,17,18(2),19(2),20,21,25,26Cerebus High Society: 1-11,14,15(2),16-19,21(2),22(2),23(2),24,25(2)Cerebus Church & State:1,2(2),3Cerebus: #0(gold signed by Dave and Ger),16(2),18,20,23,24(2),36-39,52,54-57,59,65(2),68,93(2),95,97,(2),115-117,165,167-169,172(2),173(2),180,184,193(2)194,195(2),196(2),197(2),198,200-203,215,235,236,238,239,245,254,255(2),256-263,264(2),265(2),266-272,273(2),274,275,276(2),277-282,284-286,288,291,294,298,#1(waverly reprint gold),
Obviously I'm not listing the Cerebus Jam April wants, and there's a bunch of Waverly Spawn #10 books in the OTHER AMOC Prize Box (along with postcards and stickers and whatnots. NO. I'm not going thru that one right now. I'm supposed to be in the Please Hold Editing Suite working on the many many videos and Audio. But, currently I'm downloading the CBZ files from the High Society Audio Visual Edition so I can get the jpgs so I have the covers to issues 26-29 for Dave's answer to Steve Peters question. (It's NOT procrastination if you can find a good excuse Margaret...).)
ANYWAY, I'm MORE than willing to trade any of this for Neat Stuff, but since mailing things is my Kryptonite, you're more likely to get me to do something by offering to trade any of this for money. The more you pay, the faster I get to the post office...
If you NEED/WANT anything from the Waverly Press/Aardvark-Vanaheim offerings, I guess you can ask and I'll go dig through the effin' box...
Email momentofcerebus@gmail.com if you're interested...
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Next Time: Jen? Me in a wig talking with a high pitched voice foolin' NOBODY that I'm Jen?
1 comment:
Outstanding!
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