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.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
1/2024 2/2024 3/2024 4/2024 5/2024 6/2024 7/2024 8/2024 9/2024 10/2024 11/2024 12/2024
1/2025 2/2025 3/2025 4/2025 5/2025 6/2025 7/2025
Matt: Alright, that
one’s recording… And… that one’s recording. Alright, we’re good to go!
Dave: Alright. I’m gonna
start off by saying that I did hear from Dagon James that “Spawn” 10 is
shipping starting tomorrow, March 5th. So I’m gonna request that
everyone post to A Moment of Cerebus as you receive your packages of “Spawn” 10
because that’s gonna be the starting gun for the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter, as
far as I know.
Matt: Last I knew, he
was still getting a monthly salary from them basically, it was the knock-off
version of the Stan Lee deal of “you’ve created so many characters for us, we
have to keep you on salary otherwise you’re gonna start trying to get the
rights back to everything you created.”
Dave: Right, right. I
understand that, but that’s a very different thing from actually participating
in these kinds of things. Like, we’re all guessing, because these are all
secret contracts that all of these guys have, ya know, complete confidentiality
and that’s one of the things you’re signing, “you will not talk about A, B, C,
and D or you’re in danger of losing whatever it is.” But it does seem odd that
Chris Claremont doesn’t say anything about the “New Mutants” in the “Demon Bear
Saga” collection, and isn’t interviewed on the Blu-Ray and in both cases, it’s
what Bill Sienkiewicz has to say. [laughs] And Bill basically says, “the people
loved what I was doing really loved and the people who hated what I was doing
really really hated it” and it doesn’t seem like there’s too much more to add
to that. I’m preempting my own writing on that, so I’ll leave that alone.
Dave: Yes, yes, right.
Matt: So, conceivably
you could probably get it all for like $50.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. I
mean, the original run of “Metal Men” there was like three issues of
“Showcase”, and “Metal Men” #1 through I think it made it to 37 or something
like that? And they’re good, entertaining, goofy comic books. The different
characters are different metals. Gold is gold, Iron is iron, Platinum is
platinum, Mercury is the little stuttering guy, probably couldn’t do stuttering
characters anymore.
“Jeff Seiler ONCE AGAIN tries the ‘double dip’”, uhh I think this is
actually a triple dip at this point, cause I’m still answering his “New
Mutants” question from January. “I only get a coupla paragraphs on this month's
question?!?” Well, it’s a little longer than a couple of paragraphs, but yes.
It was much easier. “Well, then, here's question #2. (I was going to save this
to next month, but...): Okay, Dave, so ... last night, I said to my cat, out
loud, because, you know when you live with a cat, that's what you do:
"CAT! You get free food and fresh water every day, a relatively fresh
litter box every week, free rent, a warm place to live, a soft place to sleep,
high perches, more toys than you can count, and free rein (reign) of the
apartment.” And he’s got “free rein” r-e-I-n, and then, I think knowing where
I’m going with this, r-e-I-g-n in parenthesis. “Yet: "Why do you feel
compelled to bite and scratch me several times, daily." So, Dave, does
that question to my cat remind you of anything in particular? As an analogy, I
mean? And, yes, it's a softball question. You're welcome. But, really, a year
and change in to this social contract with my cat (I adopted him; I'm
responsible), I can't *wait* for him to grow up. Again, a familiar analogy?”
Uhh, yeah, I mean, if we really really want to get into this, I think when you
have a feral creature as a companion, the only thing that you can be viewed as
is a useful idiot.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] You
asked, so I’m not gonna sugarcoat it for you, but that’s what I see when I look
at that, is, well, if that’s what you do, that’s really all that you can
expect. It’s like, it’d probably be a much better idea if every once and a
while you just smack the cat in the face. Like, not enough to break tooth or
anything, but just enough to assert, just want to make sure you understand
who’s in the charge here. And the cat would, I think, probably up on that.
Either that, or cut your throat in the middle of the night when you’re asleep,
because it’s like, “he might hit me again, so I’d better kill him. I’m sure
somebody else will come along and feed me.”
Matt: There’s a mem of a statue of the goddess Bast, it’s a cat statue with an actual cat next to it, and the statue’s saying, “do they still worship us as Gods?” and the cat goes, “well, I crap in a box and they clean it.” And the statue goes, “good, good.”
So that Jeff’s question, moving onto “The Great Hero of Cerebus Twitter”
[applauds] “(freely admit, I made that up…)”, you say, “Brian West asks: Q for
Dave: As an artist who believes in and strives towards absolute creative
freedom what are the challenges you see today for artists who attempt to create
and thrive in an increasingly conformist and corporate culture, both in the
comics field and society as a whole?” Um, I’m so far removed from that. I mean,
a guy in his 60s who’s never owned a cellphone. It’s [laughs] very very
difficult for me to address the question in its own frame of reference. But
just from what I understand of what’s going on, I think probably the most
important thing relative to creative freedom and the challenges that artists
and writers are facing, I would say, finding a balance point of staying away
from social media, while using the internet to make money. I think, social
media has got to be so poisonous at this point that that’s really the intention
of social media, is to make everyone so, so self-conscious about you don’t want
to offend anyone because there’s a daily scapegoat who’s being ripped to shreds
before your very eyes. So if you’re looking at that on a 24/7 basis, and it
becomes one of the key elements of your… I like the COVID-19 term
“doomscrolling”. If you’re scrolling through your Twitter feed, which is
feeding you back “here’s all of the things that you’re interested in, and
consequently here they all are in 140 characters at a time, or 280 characters
at a time”, it’s going to really inhibit the creative side of you. The part
that goes, “here’s what I have to say. Here’s what I have to contribute that
nobody else has to contribute.” Social media is flypaper. In life, it’s always
a good idea to understand which things in the context of your life are flypaper
that you don’t want to get stuck to, and which things aren’t flypaper. Go for
stuff that isn’t flypaper and stay away from stuff that is flypaper, and try to
understand it in those terms. Don’t wait until you’re buzzing helplessly glued
to the flypaper to go, “maybe this flypaper was a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t
have joined Twitter. Maybe I shouldn’t be participating on Twitter.” Avoid
becoming a propagandist. There are writers and artists who create works that
are resonant works that inspire people, works that people look at and go, “I’ve
always known that, but I’ve never had that expressed that clearly before” and
that’s really valuable. Works that you go back and revisit because of that.
Because, here’s something I read when I was 20 and I just reread it when I was
40, and it’s not only telling me stuff that guided me getting here, but it’s
telling me new stuff that I wouldn’t have gotten when I was in my 20s and 30s.
If you try to make people happy and not offend anyone, and make sure you’re
making the approved people immaculate perfect people. All of your black
characters have to be immaculate and perfect. All of your gay characters have
to be immaculate and perfect. All of your female characters have to be immaculate
and perfect. Nobody’s going to be reading your work in 20 or 30 years because
it’ll be like reading Russian propaganda, or Nazi propaganda, or reading
Chinese Communist propaganda in this day and age. If this book, if this poet,
if this filmmaker is approved and lionized by the Chinese Communist party, it’s
almost a guarantee that he’s no good at what he’s doing. He’s just a
propagandist. He’s capable of fitting into that niche in 2021 and keeping
everybody onside who is pushing the buttons and is deciding what people are
allowed to see and what they aren’t allowed to see. I think it was Joseph
Stalin who was more fearful of writers than he was of armies or opposing
politicians, because he went, ya know, writer’s shape souls. It’s like, he knew
[laughs] he wasn’t shaping anybody’s soul and nobody who was working for him
was shaping anybody’s soul. They were just tyrannizing their minds and their
spirits and their physical person and people’s soul were completely
inaccessible to him. So it’s like, always try to be doing work that is intended
for other people’s souls and just accept the fact that the fascists, and the
tyrannists, the dictators, the commissars, the apparatchiks, are always, always
going to be the people who are in opposition to you, because you are more of a
threat to them than anybody else. So it’s, know that. Aspiring to be popular,
and to have popularity as the centerpiece of what you’re doing, you’re not
going to get very far if you’re not going to be very content with what you’re
doing. Just be as honest as you can and just try to say the things that
everybody else is afraid to say.
Okay, got bogged down on that one, we’re now down to the last one, RSS,
which, I believe, as you say, is Ralph, asks, “Question for Dave: Do you
consider anti-work and anti-ability (again, I've seen lots of both) to be
implicit in your consideration of the negative impact on society? Certainly
your own work/ability/success was impeded, at the very least.” Uh, I guess I
would answer the question in terms of ants and grasshoppers. The ants who
labour and provide for themselves, and the grasshoppers who basically fritter
everything away, and fritter away their own opportunities, and their own
security, and then run into a bad situation when winter arrives, or whatever.
The whole ant and the grasshopper thing. Through COVID-19 we’re arriving at a
new place as a society. The ants and the grasshoppers were both forced to stay
home and just watch TV, [laughs] and from what it sounds like just worse and
worse TV. Netflix going out and finding Scandinavian detective series and
things like that, so that we always have something new here because we don’t
have anything new here. Nothing new is getting made, so if you wanna watch
Netflix, well okay, what’s the least disinterested I am in the stuff that I
haven’t already watched? Is there anything that I want to watch again? That’s a
very new thing. We have arrived at the point that we started at in the 1950s
for the people who all wanted to live inside the television. Well, it’s like,
now you can. And not only can you live inside your TV, you can’t do anything
else. All you can do is stay at home. If you don’t get rid of your TV, you’re
going to spend a lot of time watching
TV. You’re going to spend, now, a whole year. I think we have to
cross-reference that and triage that with the fact that the fed can’t lower or
raise interest rates, because the interest rates are as a low as they can get
without going into the negative interest rates, and the specs on that from
places like Japan are not good. So if you can’t raise or lower interest rates,
you can’t raise them because you’re gonna eradicate whole chunks of your
economy of the people who are overextended, and if they suddenly have to pay
real interest rates like we used to, they’re out of the game. You also can’t
stop creating money. Like, all of the G7 countries are creating money out of
thin air. It’s borrowed money. We’re talking about debt that’s delusional, when
the US creates 4 trillion dollars, and then creates another 1.9 trillion on top
of that, just because [laugh] of the squeamishness of “we can’t really create
another 2 trillion, we’ll make it sound less. So we’ll make it 1.9 trillion.”
It’s like, a trillion dollars is, relative to a billion dollars, if you tried
to pay off a billion dollar debt, it’s going to take you years, if not decades.
Once you’re up to a trillion, and it’s compounding, you’re talking about
centuries, and not even plausibly centuries. So all of the debt, all of the
money, is delusional. We also know now that you can have a good 25 to 40% of
your economy wiped out. Literally, wiped out. Businesses that, they were
marginal to begin with or they didn’t have enough cash on hand, and they’re
gone! They’re not coming back. New York City is like a ghost town for
storefronts and stuff like that. That happens, and the stock market stays solid
It’s like, well, okay, this is one of the things that you’ve been paranoid
about since 1929, when does that happen again? When does it get wiped out? And
it’s like, it doesn’t! You’ve plugged all the leaks, but you’ve just stuffed
[laughs] bandages into some holes and rags into others and others you’ve got
chewing gum and spit, but the whole thing’s held together and you are able to
create money with impunity.
So, cycling around this, back to the question, it’s, I think we just have
to get used to the fact that, okay, we’re not talking about debt, and we’re not
talking about “we have to get the economy back under control, and we’ve got to
get spending under control. We need smaller government.” It’s like, the
government is the size of the government. Now it’s a matter of, well, why not
create 10 trillion dollars? Why not create 15 trillion dollars? But instead of
pumping it all in at the top, to make sure that the stock market keeps going,
and to make sure that you can have 0 interest rates, and to make sure that
you’re not putting taxes up, that’s the other one. You can’t raise taxes
because it’s like, you just came through a pandemic where half of your economy
is wiped out and the other one is just sort of staggering around, wondering
what happens next. You can’t tax those people more than they’ve already been
taxed. So, start creating money at both ends. It’s like, the same thing that
they’re doing with COVID-19, protect the most vulnerable. Okay, do the same
thing with money. It’s like, here’s the 100,000, 200,000, 2 million, 8 million,
15 million poorest people in the United States. Send them all the United States
government credit card, and tell them, okay, your credit card is prepaid up to
$25,000, $50,000, $75,000. Doesn’t matter! You just, you’re making numbers up.
That money is never going to exist. You could never print that much money. You
could never print a trillion dollars if Joe Biden ends up being president for
eight years, in eight years, you could probably print a quarter of a trillion
dollars? If you had every printing press in the United States running 24/7. But
it’s like, we don’t do that anymore. We don’t have to print money, we just have
to print credit cards, and put a coat on it, and there you go. This is how much
money you have to spend. Now, you don’t get anything else. We don’t have
government programs for you, and we don’t have things financed for you. Here’s
enough money for you to keep yourself alive, you can’t keep yourself alive now,
we can’t help you. That’s my theory, is that we have to just look at where we
are, we can’t get out of here anymore, we’re all socialists now. We are all
money printers. We’re all Venezuela. It’s just different degrees of being
Venezuela. The Canadian dollar is going up in value, which is really killing my
whole business model, because it’s based on the Canadian dollar being worth
substantially less than the US dollar. That’s just Justin Trudeau not printing
as much money as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have. It’s a really basic formula. They try to make it sound
complicated, but it’s just, Canada can print 10% of the money that the United
States prints because we’re 1/10ths the size. We’re 38 million people instead
of 380 million people. And it’s like, Justin Trudeau only spent 700 billion
dollars, only talking about a debt of a trillion dollars. If Joe Biden keeps
printing money, and he pretty well has to keep printing money, then it just
means that Justin Trudeau has that much more room on his credit card. He
doesn’t have to worry until he gets up to probably, what, 2 trillion? We’re up
to a trillion now, so you could probably double that in the length of time that
the United States will be getting up whatever numbers they get up to. It’s
like, they’re just numbers. They’re just numbers. It’s just a one now, and pick
the number of zeros that you have after it. It’s 12 zeros. Okay, well 12 zeros,
let’s go for 13. I’m at the point of, uh forget trillions, let’s g right to
quadrillions, what do you say? Ya know, everybody can have as much money as
they’ve ever wanted, and the ants can continue to be ants.
This is where I get back to my original point. The ants can continue to be
ants, because we’re ants. We work. We save. We try to keep our spending under
control. We try to have everything make sense. The grasshoppers don’t. However
much money you give a grasshopper, the grasshopper is just going to spend it,
and just wants to make enough money so all they have to do is stay home and
watch TV, and in Canada, smoke pot and drink beer, and whatever else. It’s
like, instead of trying to figure out how to turn a grasshopper into an ant, or
train them to be ants, or give them their own social worker to try and get them
to understand ant thinking, just forget it. They’re grasshoppers. Invent enough
money so that they can do what they’re already doing, and they will live very
very placidly, just plugged into their television and their cellphone and their
Twitter feed and you can stop worrying about them. It’s like, well, we just
gave them another $20,000, most of them, that should hold them. Most of the
homeless people are proving, when they do just give them a chunk of money, a
percentage of them don’t fritter it away. They’re instinct ants, they just
ended up homeless. Some of them had a divorce where they lost everything, or
whatever grisly story that they have. But, most of these people are just
looking for the most minimal kind of livelihoods. They have this circle of
friends, and they spend their money on what they spend it on. I think we’re
already there. I’m just saying, everybody’s acting as if somehow the G7 countries
are going to pay back the debt that they’re talking about. They couldn’t pay
back debt that they had a year ago before all of this hit. Where they think
that they’re going to g… where would Canada get a trillion dollars? A trillion
dollars for what? That’s a lot of maple syrup. That’s a lot of beaver pelt. It’s not going to
happen, it’s not going to happen.
Dave: Stamped office
copy? Like with a…
Matt: There’s a mem of a statue of the goddess Bast, it’s a cat statue with an actual cat next to it, and the statue’s saying, “do they still worship us as Gods?” and the cat goes, “well, I crap in a box and they clean it.” And the statue goes, “good, good.”
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Friend to the Blog, James Windsor-Banderas-Smith has a new Kickstarter for Papa Balloon & Cactus #5. He's got a few copies of one of Dave's variant covers for the previous issues as rewards. ACTUALLY, he found a bunch of copies of issues he thought were out of print, so I think you can get the whole series. He's got T-Shirts too.
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Our pals at Living The Line are getting it from "Diamond" (Or Whoever Owns Them Now):
Legal trouble. Lost inventory. But great books keep coming.
Hello everyone—
It’s been a wild few weeks at Living the Line HQ here in Saint Paul.
If you follow comics industry news, you may already know that our former distributor, Diamond Comics, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in January. Then, on May 16th, they were sold! End of problem, right?
Not only have we not been paid for any book sales since that sale closed… We've been refused access to our consignment inventory—books that legally belong to us and were merely stored in Diamond's warehouse.
Worse yet, they’ve now petitioned the bankruptcy court to sell that consignment inventory—including our books—without our consent.
This means we haven't been paid for books already sold, and we’re at risk of losing the rest of our inventory in their possession. For a small publisher, that’s an existential blow.
But we’re not taking this lying down.
Living the Line, alongside several other trusted publishers, has retained legal counsel and formally objected to this maneuver. We’re fighting for our rights in bankruptcy court. But legal battles, even righteous ones, are expensive, and we could use your help.
How You Can Help Right Now
1. Preorder My Gorilla Family (Iijima Ichiro)
Our September release is live! My Gorilla Family, sure to be one of the wildest books of 2025, will see wide release the first week of September.
Order direct from us (ships from St. Paul): https://livingtheline.company.site/products
Order through your local comic shop via Lunar Distribution: https://www.lunardistribution.com/home/search?term=My+Gorilla+Family
(We’re temporarily listed under our friends at Uncivilized Books — be sure to request it!)
2. Watch for Our New Book-Trade Distributor (Announcement Soon)
We’re onboarding with a new distributor for the wider book market. First out of the gate: reprints of UFO Mushroom Invasion (2024 American Manga Award Nominee, Best New Edition of Classic Manga) and MANSECT (2025 Nominee for the same category!). Sign up for announcements here: https://www.livingthelinebooks.com/mailing-list
3. Grab a Backlist Title Direct
Most of our inventory is frozen in the Diamond warehouse, but we have limited quantities of many titles on hand in Saint Paul ready to ship in 1–2 business days while supplies last. Browse what’s physically in stock here, including our much-beloved science fiction titles by Brandon Graham, Xurxo G. Penalta, Matt Battaglia, and Miel Vandepitte, and the stunning psychological fiction of Erik Kriek: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
4. Spread the Word
Know someone who digs beautiful, strange, unclassifiable graphic novels & manga? Please forward this email, share a link, or talk to your local shop. Every order and every share helps.
A Few of the Books We’re Fighting For
MANSECT — Koga Shinichi
Order MANSECT direct: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
FACE MEAT — Bonten Tarō
Order FACE MEAT direct: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
Thank you for reading, for caring about independent publishing, and for helping us fight the good (and occasionally slimy, mushroom-ridden) fight. We literally couldn’t do this without you.
With appreciation,
Sean Michael Robinson
Publisher, Living the Line
St. Paul, Minnesota
https://www.livingthelinebooks.com/
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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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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 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
- Page 5 of Cerebus #20
- Inside Back Cover art from Cerebus #3
- The covers to Issue #74 and #76
- other stuff
- CEREBUS #18 PAGE 4 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #181 PAGE 6 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #67 PAGE 5 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- BATMAN AND CEREBUS ILLUSTRATION DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
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:
.jpg)
If you wanna support "local" Canadian publishers...
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Next Time: Jen's in Scotland. So I probably have to work...
3 comments:
Forefathers good
Foreskin bad
Please add paragraph breaks to transcripts. This is unreadable.
Anonymous: okay. I'll get right on that, five bucks each. momentofcerebus@gmail.com to find out where to send the cash.
Manly
(There are paragraph breaks you schmuck...)
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