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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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[guitar music]
Matt: Hello!
Dave: Hello, Matt!
Matt: How’s it going, Dave?
Dave: Good. How’s it going with you?
Matt: Uhh, today was day 15 at work since my last day off, so, tired but otherwise okay.
Dave: I guess! 15 days in a row!
Matt: Well, a guy just retired, his record was 131.
Dave: 131?!
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Without a day off?
Matt: Without a day off, 131 days straight.
Dave: Man, oh man…
Matt: I bought him a Punisher watch as a reward for, “hey, you’re putting one in for the team” and his 14 year old son stole it.
Dave: [laughs] So, you’re not going for the record yourself, are you?
Matt: Ehh… no? I’m just… they come and ask on Tuesday when I feel good, and then by Friday, I’m like, “what did I agree to?”
Dave: [laughs] They probably know that, too. This is, “go and ask Matt on Tuesday, cause he always forgets.”
Matt: It’s not just me, it’s everybody on Tuesday is going, “oh yeah, sure, we’re full of pep and vim and vigor” and then by Friday we’re like, “what did we agree to? This is a bad idea.”
Dave: Really. Really. It’s like, Tuesday you’re just thinking about the money.
Matt: Tuesday you’re recovered from the weekend.
Dave: Right. Right. Okay, are we recording here?
Matt: We are recording, but before we get started, I want to say, Happy Canada Day.
Dave: [laughs] Well, thank you! [laughs] Man, a Happy Canada Day to you, as well. I still think of it as Dominion Day, but that’s just Dave Sim. Until everybody signs the constitution, I don’t think we have a country, we’re just Her Majesty’s Dominion of Canada and muddling along as best we can.
Anyway, we’re gonna start off with Jeff Seiler, which is becoming something of a tradition here. His theosis letter finally came in, the one that we were supposed to be dealing with last month. It came in, I think, mid-June? So, it was definitely one of those snail mail delays, where it’s definitely snail mail, it’s not escargot mail. I’m gonna suggest that people listening to this, if you really want to follow along on all of this, check out the Wiki article, Wikipedia, theosis. T-H-E-O-S-I-S. As Wikipedia pages go, it’s pretty short. Very concise, very easy to digest. And if you don’t want to do that, I think you’ll probably pick up on the idea, just from the context. So, basically, Jeff sent me the Wikipedia article and then literally put his own thoughts on a separate piece of paper, and folded it all up, and folded another piece of paper over it, and taped it all together. So I would not read his thought before I read it, so I wouldn’t be influenced by what he had to say, and then I wouldn’t be tempted to read his thoughts, because it definitely took a while to get all of that tape sliced off of there so that I could read his thoughts. But we’re gonna start with his thoughts. “Hi Dave, some of my own thoughts on theosis as defined in the Wiki article. First point, theosis is also defined as ‘deification’ or ‘transformation into a ‘likeness or a union with God’. As I read and reread about the various elements of theosis, I began to think that the whole concept and its practices at least skirts near to being ‘joining gods with God’, the pagan and Greek practices that were expressed in the Torah as being anathema to God. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me’ , Exodus 23. The second point, under the section on deification, the quote from Maximus the Confessor, ‘makes man God to the same degree as God Himself became man’ … ‘so that we may consort with God and become gods.’” Jeff points out, “I also think that Maximus misinterprets St. Paul in Ephesians 2:7 at the end of that quote, or it was a specious interpretation at best. Point three, under the section on patristic and historical teaching, I think that the last paragraph about a common analogy for theosis makes sense.” Which doesn’t mean that it’s true, just makes sense to Jeff Seiler, and it made sense to me. “Point four, the section on ascetic practice discusses hesychasm,” and I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. H-E-S-Y-C-H-A-S-M. Jeff writes, “I find that to be more difficult to either agree or disagree with. I think asceticism is an important element of religion, but not to the degree that Palamas asserted, that one can become deified, or open to it, by asceticism. In my mind, the self-sacrifice, the self-denial, does not lead to deification. It doesn’t make one like unto God Himself. Asceticism is a form of worship of the one true God, but should not be done for the purpose of deification.” And again, that’s Jeff’s opinion, and that’s an opinion that I share, but that doesn’t mean that it’s true and it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with people that actually believe that. There’s a lot of nuances there. “Point five, under Western attitudes, paragraph three notes that hesychasm, as a form of asceticism, is meant to lead to deification. In paragraph five, Pace spoke of, ‘the vagaries of Hesychasm’ and ‘heresies and a resurrection of polytheism’. Again, joining gods with God. Point six, but as we see in the last section before the wrapping up, even Pope John Paul II came around to acceptance of Eastern Church’s theology, or ‘theology’, accepting ‘deification’ or deification. Ultimately though, there is one God only and one God of Abraham, and ‘thou shalt have no other gods before it’. My thoughts in summary.” And that was Jeff.
So I replied to Jeff on that, “Hi, Jeff, your theosis letter finally came in. So, this is, God willing, what I’ll be saying on the July Please Hold for Dave Sim after our Greg Burr[?] observation and encouraged everyone to read the Wikipedia listing. I don’t see anything in this condensed Eastern Orthodox Christianity For Dummies that couldn’t be directly inferred from John’s Gospel.” And I should probably backtrack and say, this all came up because a very close friend of Jeff, the only person besides me that he knows to be genuinely religious, converted to an Eastern Orthodox form of Christianity, and was the one that sort of turned Jeff on to the idea of theosis. [coughs] I wrote, “The Johannine Jesus is accused of ‘making yourself God’. Whether he descents from the accusation or confirms it depends on how you infer his answer. But his answer can definitely be read both ways. If there’s a fault there, it’s in the framing of the question.” And I actually did, I went and found the passage, which is John 34-35, where Jesus is saying to the Jews where they’re about to stone him, “Many works I showed you a fine out of the father. For which sort of them work me you are stoning? Answer to him the Jews, about fine work not are we stoning you but about blasphemy, because you man being you are making yourself God. Answer to them the Jesus, not is it having been writ in the law of you that I said gods you are? If those he said gods toward whom the word of the God occurred, and not is able to be loosed the scripture. Whom the father sanctified as he sent forth into the world, you are saying that you are blaspheming because I said son of the God I am? If not, I am doing the works of the father am me, not be believing you doing. If however I am doing and if ever to me not you may believe, to the works believing in order that you should know and may be knowing that in me the father and I the father.” [laughs] I’ve got all of these books stacked up around me with notes in them because they lead in all these different directions. When he says, “not is it having been written in the law of you that I said gods you are” he’s referring to Psalm 82:6, which does indeed say “ye are gods”. Now, the very subtle distinction there, and this is where you get into the borderline between Judaism and Christianity, and, you know, that’s my territory, is technically, and certainly according to orthodox Jews, David’s Psalms are not the law. They’re not in the law in the prophet, they’re wisdom writings, or pseudographic… graphica… grapha, or whatever they’re called, this is not formally part of the law in the prophet, so that would be a distinction where, because he’s saying, “Not is having been written in the law of you that I said gods you are?” Well, no, it wasn’t written in the law, it was David’s Psalms and in the same sense that “is David a prophet?” is another one of those open questions, which, prior to David there was King Saul, who was the first King of the Jews. “Is Saul among the prophets?” is one of those open-ended questions. I would say, no, Saul wasn’t among the prophets. Being a King is very different from being a prophet. But there are nuances there, as well. So, getting back to my response, “Whether he descents from the accusation or confirms it, ‘making yourself God’, depends on how you infer his answer. But his answer can definitely be read both ways. If there’s a fault there, it’s in the framing of the question. ‘You are making it sound as if you think you’re God’, would be the more accurate Orthodox Jewish sentiment. The phrasing of ‘you are making yourself God’ compounds the heretical blasphemous sense by technically affirming that self-deification is possible and was being accomplished. But it’s hardly the Johannine Jesus’ fault if someone, besides him, says that that’s what he’s doing, and ergo, that’s who he is.” The part that Jeff had quoted from the Wikipedia of Maximus saying, what is it here, “Makes man God to the same degree as God Himself became man, so that we may consort with God and become God”, I can only go along to a degree with the first part of that. “Makes man God to the same degree that God himself became man.” Seems to me the most forensically satisfying theologically, because it doesn’t presuppose knowledge of that degree, just theoretical incarnation reciprocity. Ergo, a theoretical meeting place for Roman Catholics and Muslims. The extent of the degree, again, talking about the degree, okay, let’s talk about the extent of the degree, becomes the article of faith, while coupling the article of faith to the omnipotent capability. In other words, God is capable of becoming man. Whether he did or not, is another question about everyone’s pay scale but God. Allahu akbar. Roman Catholics would say, “yes, we believe that God became man.” Muslims would say, “we don’t believe that God became man, but we do believe that God has the capability of becoming man because God is omnipotent so that would definitely fall into the category of omnipotent.” Human beings have very limited capabilities. But a lot of those limitations are, I think, self-limitations, resulting from a deficiency in aspiration. If you choose to be a godly person, you can always make yourself more godly, which seems to me a worthwhile goal. If you make yourself more godly on a day by day basis, you will, over time, bring yourself to greater proximity to the attributes of God than you were when you started, while not yourself attaining to a state of being God, which is, I infer, is what the Johannine Jesus did. You can bring yourself into greater proximity of Minneapolis by walking from St. Paul to Minneapolis, without, you know, becoming Minneapolis yourself. And Islam, I infer, that the Paraclete the Johannine Jesus promises to send is Muhammad, with his definitive prohibition on joining gods with God, is, it seems to me, the corrective of that. But you can overdo the corrective, which seems to me an Islamist vice. Just because you can’t be God, doesn’t mean you can’t actively aspire to me more like God, by adopting more godly behaviors and choices. Edward Pace’s “The vagaries of hesychasm” seems to me really to just be undiplomatic phrasing. Anything which has to do with the disposition, attributes, and aspirations of the soul in the afterlife would qualify as a “vagary” because, A, we don’t know what the disposition, attributes, and aspirations of souls generally, and souls specifically even are, or, B, what the disposition, attributes, and aspirations of souls generally and souls specifically are in the afterlife. That’s about as vague as you can get. So consequently calling those vagaries sounds pejorative, but it’s accurate. I think if the Western Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches just separated their ideologies into a distinct, “what we know” and “what we believe” compartments, they’d find out that what they “know” is basically the same, and what they “believe” is a matter of subjective individual assessments of what each individual believes to be the more persuasive argument inferred from scripture. Nice to see, on my part, that Pope John Paul II seems to have gotten that. Ideally, it seems to me, the next step is to follow the Johannine Jesus, “loose you the divine habitationess” instruction. At least to the extent that Roman Catholics are made comfortable worshiping in Eastern Orthodox churches, and Eastern Orthodox congregants are made comfortable worshiping in Roman Catholic churches. Visiting an alternative inference isn’t, I don’t think, heretical or blasphemous.
So, there you go. That was… and it’s interesting, I agree with Jeff on the citation of the Ephesians 2:7, which is actually… I went and looked that up. And Ephesians 2 is definitely not by works but by grace Paulian teaching, which is definitely a really big thing in Christianity, and you can see how the nuances apply there. If you’re saying, “everyone is saved because of belief in Christ Jesus by grace” and again the actual Greek term is “undeserved kindness”, and not by anything that we do, not by works, and if you start with the assumption that Christ Jesus is God in the flesh, then you are building basically a structure where, “well, if God by grace can make all Christians Jesus, or full participants in Jesus, and Jesus is God”, then essentially you can… [laughs] the next step is to say, “well, all Christians are God.” Which, seems to me a bridge too far, but that’s definitely the Muslim part of me speaking, and the Jewish part of me speaking, but I can certainly see the Christian argument. If our spiritual stature in the sight of God is completely driven by grace, doesn’t matter what we do, doesn’t matter who we are, or what choices we make, we are only saved by God’s undeserved kindness, then… yeah, it’s very easy to see a tic-tac-toe in there that says, “ergo, all Christians are God.” And, as I say, I just see that as being a bridge too far.
Okay! So, uh… there you go. Have you got anything to contribute before we get back to Cerebus Land?
Matt: Well… I’m trying to remember that name of the psychological condition. Way back in the early 90s, at the formation of Image when Peter David and Todd McFarlane were feuding in the fan press, and then there was, I think it was Philadelphia there was a convention where they were gonna debate and finally settle it once and for all who was right. And Peter David’s preparation, there was, I forget what the psychological condition is, but it basically boils down to, I-I’m… I’m trying to remember… Switzerland loves peace, I love peace, therefore I am Switzerland.
Dave: Right.
Matt: At the debate, Peter David gave the definition of whatever the term is, and I can’t remember what it is, and made his points, and then pointed at Todd and went, “I give you Switzerland.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: It’s one of those, I remember reading the articles about it, going, I still don’t understand what the problem was other than Peter David didn’t think giving artists books to write themselves was a good idea if they couldn’t write.
Dave: Yeah, which is one of those, well it depends on what you’re looking for from your comic books. I remember following that as well, because Peter was a weekly columnist in the Buyer’s Guide which pretty much gave him a leg-up on everybody else in terms of channeling the zeitgeist and saying, “here’s where we are as a medium and I don’t think we want to go much further in this direction because it’s an inherently bad idea.” Well, it’s only an inherently bad idea if you think words and pictures need to be balanced in comics. “Good comics have a good balance of the words and pictures, bad comics have page after page of pin-up art.” And it’s like, well, again, if what you like is really really cool pictures of superheroes derived dramatically, the essence of them being Art Adams’ viewpoint of what superheroes look like and what’s the coolest that you can make them look like, then extrapolate that into Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and the rest of the Image guys, it’s… well, if that’s what you’re looking for from comics, you’re definitely gonna find that a lot more at Image than you were going to find it anywhere else. It was a giant essence of what Marvel Comics had become, where Marvel Comics was going, the creative editorial choices that Marvel Comics was making. And then [laughs] that whole part just got up and left, and that put everybody on their back foot because it’s like, “well, okay, if we don’t have that anymore, then I think we have to denounce that, cause otherwise you’re saying whoever and whatever is left at Marvel is now second rate and Image Comics are first rate.” And as somebody who really didn’t have a dog in that fight, it’s like, it doesn’t matter to me what Marvel Comics is or whether Marvel Comics is just become permanently second best because Todd and Rob and the rest of the guys left. Well, I have to say, the idea of all of Marvel Comics, which had become very very self-important by that point, getting a custard pie in the face from Todd McFarlane, hey, how’d it go, Todd! It’s not very often that you can completely transform the perception of a field and, ya know, lob a custard pie into the face of the central conceit of that field, hey great! But at the same time, I understood Peter’s argument. It’s like, we don’t wanna get to the point where we decide that just drawing page after page of pin-ups and then throwing some captions in is a good foot forward for the comic book field generally. As it turned out, I think Todd and the Image guys won their point. Marvel Comics is far more like Image Comics now, than it was back in the early 1990s, the late 1980s. So that means the zeitgeist wasn’t going in the direction Peter David thought it needed to go. It was headed over toward Papa Todd McFarlane’s waiting, happy arms.
Matt: But, getting back to the original point, because, ya know, I kinda sorta did that thing I do…
Dave: [laughs] You did indeed.
Matt: The problem with the idea of “you and I and everyone on Earth being God” is that makes God totally schizophrenic as, ya know, there’s Dave God, Matt God, Matt’s Kids God, Matt’s cat is God. It’s where you get to the idea of, well, if we’re all God, or various phases of God, it kinda falls apart, because God is God. The whole idea here is, ya know, God over here, everything else over there, and there’s a connection, but ya know, it’s not like… I’m not my father. I come from my father. There’s a lot of my father in me, but there’s also a lot of my mother in me, too.
Dave: Right, right. I mean the… and that was, one of the things that I think was corrected by Jesus’ incarnation, was… God understood exactly where they were going with this, I mean it was a real deal around that time period, which, ya know, we call Year Zero. Ya know, Julius Caesar was being declared a god. That was when you were a really good Caesar and you had a lot of military victories, at that point, the Roman senate and reflecting the population went, “okay, this is no longer a man, this is god. He’s one of the gods.” Because they had a pantheon. So, it’s like, well, what’s the difference between having somebody in the pantheon and saying, “well okay, now we’ve got this human being that’s in the pantheon.” Hercules, ya know, in Greek mythology, wasn’t a god, he was a human being but he had superhuman powers, so consequently he becomes like an honorary god. The interaction with god. Which is where, I think God clarified matters. You have to get to the point where all of that is hatching out that way, and where Greek philosophy, which is permeated with that, that the obtainment of deification is a human capability by what he essentially did with John’s Gospel. “In beginning was the word, the beginning was the Logos”. It’s like, the Greeks and the Romans were both trying to figure out, “where does man stop and where does God begin and how do we get in on this action so we can make ourselves into gods?” And it’s like, mm, no. “I’m God, and there was the Logos.” The Greeks know what a Logos is, the word. An archetypal word. But they had… this completely messed them up that, “well, wait a minute, you’re not saying the word is the God, the word is the Logos.” No, it’s not. The word “in beginning was the word, and the word was toward the God and God was the word. This was, in beginning, toward the God. All through him came to be and part from him” etc etc. It’s like, “I will let you do what you’re doing, Greeks and Romans, for 3000, 4000 years, which is going to lead to a specific untenable place, then I’m going to correct that.” Which, I think, that he did. What the Logos is, what the Logos’ relationship to Jesus Christ, and what the Logos’ relationship is to John the Baptist, both as human individuals and as iconic manifestations, which is my perception of it. Before the Big Bang, there was an equivalent of the Logos. There was an equivalent of Jesus Christ. There was an equivalent of John the Baptist. That’s why those hatch out in our world, and I assume hatch out in every other habitable world in the universe. That’s what you don’t understand, that there’s God, and all of this other stuff, Jesus Christ, and John the Baptist, in their prototypical forms relative to the Big Bang. “I’m God, I can’t really explain that to you because you’re human beings. You’re pretty simple constructs. But, I can incarnate them so that you basically at least get away from what the Romans and the Greeks were doing. It’s like, mm, paganism is only going to take you so far. But you can definitely attain to a much more accurate perception by working all the way through that, and now is the time where, okay, I’m going to present Jesus Christ so that your soul at least understands what the discussion is. This discussion that’s going on everywhere in the universe where, okay, you’re misapprehended up until this point, and then you go, ‘oh, okay! Well, this is true, but I can barely comprehend the truth of it.’ Well, of course, because you’re not God, and you’re not the Logos, and you’re not Jesus Christ, and you’re not John the Baptist. Get over yourself,” sort of thing.
Matt: Right…
Dave: And that’s one of those, then you get to the point where people are going, “well, I’m gonna rebel against God. It’s like I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in the Roman Catholic faith, I don’t believe in the Pope. I don’t believe in priests, I don’t believe in scripture. I believe in, ya know, rocks having personalities, and I believe all animals of manifestations of God. My dog or my cat is as much God as God is.” It’s like, well, okay, that’s what happens when you get too far away from this spectacular gift we were given 2000 years ago. But there’s nothing you can do about that. Those are the sort of people who go, “we’re going to crush COVID-19.” It’s like, you don’t even have an idea of what COVID-19 is. “We’re going to turn back climate change.” You don’t even understand what weather is, how is it you’re going to change the climate and figure out how to adjust the climate? If you don’t put human vanity subordinate to these larger forces that exist, God, the Logos, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist… you’re down here, below those. If you don’t have that, then it’s like, yeah, this waste basket is God. AOC is God. Joseph Biden is God. Everybody makes their own decisions. Joe Biden decides that he’s a really good Catholic, but he also thinks that abortion is the cat’s pajamas. It’s like, well… [laughs] okay. At some point, the Pope and the hierarchy of the Vatican are going to go, “uhh, we’re gonna instruct the priests in your diocese not to give you communion, because, no, you’re not a good Catholic. You don’t arbitrate what is and isn’t a good Catholic.” And it’s like, that’s all kind of over there from where I am, but… again, interesting. It’s the same, the relationship between Pope Francis and Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau, as Catholics, has about the same level of interest for me as whether Peter David or Todd McFarlane is right. [laughs] It’s like, that’s all over there. That’s hair-splitting that I think I have far clearer thinking than that about what our priorities and what’s just a wrong way to go.
Matt: The Niceian Council is the thing that always makes me laugh when I think about Catholicism, cause it’s like, you had a meeting, and the point of the meeting was to determine whether or not Jesus was God, and instead of worrying about that, you could have been thinking about what he said and what his lessons were, and like, let’s do what he told us to do!
Dave: Right, but at the same time, it was important. I mean, it’s not as if God went, “okay, I’m gonna give them Jesus Christ, so that this will turn most of them back onto a much better path. The Jews won’t turn into Greeks completely, and the Jews won’t be completely assimilated by the Romans. It’ll go the other way around, the Roman Empire will collapse inside of five centuries because what I’m giving them is true and what the Romans and the Greeks have been doing, has been… it’s interesting, and cleverly nuanced, but it’s inherently false.” So, yeah, like I say, that’s all sort of over there from where I perceive myself as being, relative to religious faith. As far as I’m concerned, all we have is scripture. When I’m reading scripture aloud, and John’s Gospel, I’m enunciating truth. I don’t understand it, because I’m a human being. I have only the most rudimentary concept of what the Logos is and things like that, but it at least turns you on to this better path, but God knew, “okay, I made their brains, too. I made their minds, and I made their soul.” The Niceian Council is very very heavyweight thinking for the time, to say, “we have to establish this. We have to figure out to what extent Jesus Christ was man and to what extent he was God, and arbitrate that.” [laughs] And it’s like, well, okay, you’re throwing a custard pie in your own face, as far as I’m concerned because it’s like, no, that’s the point of the education is that you don’t know. You’re not the arbitrators of that. You can be saved by that. You can subordinate yourself to that, which is, again, the whole concept of Islam is submission to the will of God, not figuring out the will of God, not negotiating the will of God, arbitrating the will of God. “I’m the Pope, I’ve listened to all of you guys talk for the last two weeks, and I’m telling you, these guys are right, and the rest of these guys are anathema, are now expelled from the church, and if they don’t shut up, they’re going to prison.” [laughs] It’s like, well, okay, but ya know, that’s not the way that you establish truth. You decide that John’s Gospel is truth. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was toward the God and God was the word. This was, in beginning, toward the God, all through him came to be and a part from him came to be not however one. Which has come to be in it…” There, that’s good. That’s very healthy for you, and very healthy for your soul. But, you’re not an arbitrator of that. You participate in that by saying, “this is a good use of my time to read this aloud and to do it regularly.” That’s Dave Sim’s unique take on it. Once you’ve been given that, the Roman Catholic church is gonna be a far more beneficent entity than, as example, the Roman Empire, could ever be. Or more than Greek philosophy on its own could ever be. But that’s why I participate in that. And that’s why, if people are looking for recommendations, it’s like, read scripture aloud. Canadians, [laughs] I understand that you really really like hockey. But that’s the Greeks in you. That’s the really bad path. The number of two and a half hours, and three hours, that you’ve devoted to watching hockey games throughout your life, it would serve you far better, it would serve society far better, it’d serve people’s spirits far better, if you had just read John’s Gospel aloud for the two and a half hours. “But I like hockey more than that.” [laughs] Well, okay! But that’s a vice. However the hockey game’s going to turn out has nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with your soul, and nothing to do with the world, and where we are, and how we can improve. There’s better uses for your time.
Matt: Well, now that we’ve killed Margaret by saying that hockey isn’t as a good… [laughs]
Dave: Well, it’s one of those, well, look at it! How do you see this as possibly beneficent towards the human soul? A bunch of guys sliding around on skates, racking up their knees because the human knee was never meant to go in the directions that they’re going in, because you want to put a little round piece of rubber into a net and everybody goes berserk? It’s like, berserk is good, but go berserk about important things, don’t go berserk about completely brainless things. So, but that’s just my recommendation. I still don’t read anything in the newspaper. I mean, I know the Montreal Canadiens are going for the Stanley Cup because it’s on the front page of every Canadian newspaper. It’s on the front page, I’m gonna find out about it, but it’s like, I have no idea how the series is going, I couldn’t care less how the series is going, I’m just glad the Toronto Maple Leafs got knocked out so that I’d have no residual interest in this completely brainless, spiritually bereft choice of occupation. Okay, now I am going to switch gears. Gosh, that’s like 45 minutes I spent on that.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: So, we’ll have the natives getting restless out there. “When are we going to talk about Cerebus?” I’m looking at your cartoon here, it’s great, with the Turtles and Cerebus. So you did hear from Josh Evans?
Matt: Uh, yeah. He’s a member of the Cerebus Facebook Group and he’s been posting everytime he gets a new one, he posts it, and people are like, “when does this end?” and he’s just like, “yeah, you’ll see.”
Dave: Right. Right. Cause, I got a fax from him, which is really saying something. Somebody who sends emails and has no idea how to fax, if they go to the trouble of figuring out how to send a fax so that they can contact Dave Sim. He wanted to know if I was interested in his collection, and I’m certainly interested in having copies for the Archive, if somebody wants to download those as digital files. But I was thinking, when we do get to the “Turtles” #8 remastered version, that would make a really good card set, of Josh Evans’ collection of Turtles and Cerebus images by other cartoonists. That gets into a potential problem area of, do these cartoonists want people to know that they did a Cerebus with the Turtles, or was that just something, “here, I’ll do the commission for you, but please don’t tell anybody that I went anywhere near the Dave Sim Cerebus third rail.” I put it out there as, if Josh wants to do, or the guys on the Cerebus Facebook want to do it, let’s hunt down everybody who did one of these, and say, “are you cool with Waverly Press doing a card set of these in association with the remastered ‘Turtles’ #8?” And if Josh is listening to this, I don’t know if he’s that much of a Cerebus fan that he listens to Please Hold for Dave Sim, if he’s listening, he’s asking about the original art for the “Turtles” Cerebus covers that I’ve been sending you progress reports on. The wrist has been a little techy lately so I haven’t gotten any more done on the latest “Turtles” cover. Are those covers going to be for sale? And, yes, those covers will be for sale, the bad news is they’ll be at HA.com, that’s where you’re talking about the 20% buyer’s fee that they charge, which is definitely a lot of money, but that’s why I do it through HA.com. This is the Turtles. The only open question now, is the Turtles Kickstarter going to be bigger than the “Spawn” 10 Kickstarter? Because I’ve only got two big paydays, apart from that, I’ve got [laugh] 123 Cerebus fans who are willing to spend quite large amounts of money staying complete on all of these things.
Matt: Yeah, we are nuts.
Dave: [laughs] And some of you are more nuts than others, which benefits me because it’s like, this is the last 123 people I’ve got to make a living off of with Cerebus.
Matt: When the Kickstarter ended, the blog post I did for that day was, “the Kickstarter’s ended, and the deal is the two guys who bought all nine get to pick a bonus page, and if it were me, these are the two I’d pick.”
Dave: There you go!
Matt: Which would be the third and fourth page of the Death of Death from issue 151.
Dave: Oh that’s right, you’re a big fan of that…
Matt: It makes me laugh every time. [laughs]
Dave: Flawless comedy, as far as Matt Dow is concerned. Do you know if anybody’s picked the pages yet?
Matt: I have not heard. Eddie and Sean, possibly just Eddie, sent out the backer surveys and Kickstarter had a hiccup, and everybody that submitted them got an Error 404 computer error and had to redo it. But Kickstarter, last I heard yesterday, was that they had fixed it and you can submit your survey now, so everybody please submit your survey.
Dave: Yes, that’s one of those things that we’re learning, this is not Sean Robinson’s first rodeo by any stretch of the imagination at this point, is you don’t wait for that last report to come in before you actually do your fulfillment. I’ve gotta say, the Cerebus fans are very good about the report. Or they have been over the last few Kickstarters where, by the end of the first week, you don’t have all of the reports, that’s never gonna happen, but we are getting like 90% inside of the first week, and sometimes 75% of them inside of 24 hours, which is good. But at that point, my philosophy is, that’s when we start doing the fulfillment and we will babysit the stragglers and babysit the people where even four months later you’re still having to email them, going “you paid for these. This is sitting right here. We’re ready to send them to you. All you have to do is send in your report.” And finally you’ll hear from them, but it’s only the rookie Kickstarter people who go, “oh, we’ll wait until all of the reports to come in.” No, you definitely don’t want to do that. You don’t wanna wait for all of the reports to come in.
Matt: I’m pretty good about, once the Kickstarter ends and I get the email of, “okay, here’s the survey” I start reminding everybody of, “hey, fill out your report! Fill out your report!” Ya know, I’ll be the substitute teacher who reminds everybody, “hey, this is due on Friday. It’s due on Friday! Tomorrow’s Friday!”
Dave: Who’ll then go, “can you tell me when this is due, again?” after five days.
Matt: Somebody just posted on the Facebook Group, going, “so how do I get a copy of the Regency Edition of ‘High Society’?” and I’m like, ya don’t? It was limited? Sorry?
Dave: Uhh, let me correct you on that one. One of the things that I got Dagon to do was to send the #1 to 10 copies to Heritage Auctions for them to auction. So, I’m not a hardcover guy, so I will pass on having #1, 2, and 3 in the Cerebus Archive in favor of what I figure is going to be the amount of money that the #1, 2, and 3 will go for on Heritage Auctions.com. So I would recommend people watching on there. I know that Dagon just faxed me today that one of the “High Society: Regency Editions” a couple of weeks back went for $500 on eBay.
Matt: Too rich for my blood! [laughs]
Dave: Too rich for my blood, as well! I mean, I’m Dave Sim. I wanna make the… the ”Spawn” 10 money is the last big payday in my entire life, apart from “Turtles”, so that money is still just sitting there and I’m just gonna make it last as long as I can. I still get Rolly to go out and buy me $1 tuna at the Dollarama store, because there’s no point in paying $2 for a can of tuna when you can get the same can of tuna for $1. If that buys me another six months or a year of keeping Aardvark-Vanaheim and Cerebus and “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” going, it’s a little saltier than the sodium-free tuna that I used to buy, but that tuna is like $3, $4 a can, so… yeah, I’ll eat slightly saltier tuna.
Matt: [laughs] You’re killing yourself, Dave! You’re gonna die early from all the sodium.
Dave: It’s too late for me to die early! I’m 65 years old. If I kicked off tomorrow, nobody is gonna go, “oh he died so young, he had so much life left in him.” It would be, “I’m surprised he was still able to feed himself and walk around and stuff like that. Good for you, grandpa!”
Matt: Now that I’m 42, I can’t be like, “well, ya know, I’m gonna die young” no, I’m officially old. I will die old! It happened!
Dave: Yes, yes. It’ not pleasant getting to that age, but very little is pleasant about getting to that age. So, moving on to Margaret Liss, “You probably have some Seiler related business you wanna talk about” and we already did that, “but I forgot to send up Margaret Liss’s question for last month (BAD INTERIM EDITOR! NO “SWORDFISH” FOR YOU!) So we gotta do that first, or really soon thereafter: Margaret Liss wants to know, they’re two tracing paper drawings you sent her. Where are they from, and what are they for?” The one at the top, is a, someone had sent me an indie comic that they had done, and this was still at the time when the wrist was functioning reasonably well. And it was good work, it was good rendering, good finish. But what they didn’t really seem to have figured out was depth of field, so what I did was I took one of the panels from the story or the comic book that they sent me, and enlarged it, and basically took the tracing paper and traced their panel and then changed it, so that the wall that you see on the left is in perspective. They had it as a flat wall with the flat character next to it, and the cart and the horse in the background. But not depth of field. Everything was pretty much on the same level. So this is my way of saying, “here’s your core problem that I can see. If you can solve this, you’ll make a great deal more progress.” I traced it onto the tracing paper because it was easier than trying to copy it by sight, and then changed it on the tracing paper, and then photocopied the tracing paper and sent that to them, so that they weren’t sort of like freaking out, going, “what is this strange onion skin paper? It’s so thin. I don’t understand what he’s doing here.” It’s like, no, that’s not what I want to get you to see, I just want you to get to see, here’s your panel, and here’s my version of the panel. Here’s things that you need to work on. So, consequently, because I sent them the copy, I didn’t need to send them the tracing paper, and it just went into a general tracing paper holding pen. The one below it, that was for Tomkar Awards here in town. Tomkar Awards did the Cerebus Superfan awards and also did the Howard E Day awards, the Gene Day awards, for SPACE. And one of the times I was in there, going over what I needed in the way of awards from Tom, Tom was doing an award that was a Conestoga Wagon award, or a Conestoga something or other, which is really big in Waterloo region, everything is Conestoga. He needed a drawing of a Conestoga wagon with a driver and horses and would I be willing to do that? And it’s like, yeah, do you have [laughs] excuse me, “do you have a picture of the Conestoga wagon and a team of horses?” And yes, of course he did. Can I turn it into a graphic? And it’s like, yeah, you know, “cross my palm with silver, memsahib.” How much is your customer willing to pay for this? He contacted the customer, the customer said, “I’ll pay” whatever it was. And it’s like, well, okay, I’ve already got the photograph of the wagon and the team of horses, I just need to turn it into a drawing. Yeah, that’s not terrible money for that time period when I was still buying back Gerhard’s Aardvark-Vanaheim shares, and it’s like, yeah, anytime I can make another $100 or $200, I’m gonna go for it. So, there you go. That’s what those two are.
Moving on from page two, to page three. I can’t believe we’re an hour into this and we’re just onto page three!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “Michael R., the “insert witty about his hometown and his relationship to it here” of Easton, PA asks: Hi Matt! I hope you enjoy your 4th of July holiday! Question for Dave!” And yes, I hope everybody has a very happy fourth of July. Sorry it’s happening on Sunday. “Hi Dave! With this CAN9 Kickstarter coming to an end and TMNT #8/Cerebus #2 on the horizon, the monthly CIH? books coming out every last Wednesday of every month, is the[re] something that you brainstormed or planning to brainstorm that you might want to mention?” I just contacted Dagon James to basically let him off the leash. Unleash the hounds! Unleash your inner Dagon James, for the “Form & Void” remastered slipcased hardcover, essentially, there has just been too many instances all the way along with this, where there’s stuff that Dagon wanted to do and suggested, and I went, “Ehh, I don’t wanna do that. No. Let’s forget about that”, where Dagon just went ahead and did it. The latest one was the “High Society” foil card of my parody of the first Conan movie poster with Cerebus instead of Conan, which Dagon did as a foil card. And those came in a week ago, a week and a half ago. And it’s like, those look really cool. I’ve actually got them out on my office desk where I do all of my work, [laughs] along with the lenticular CereSpawn with the glowing green eyes, and it’s like, “there you go, Dave! Both of those are things that you would go, ‘mm, that’s really tacky. I don’t want Cerebus involved in something tacky like that.’ and they’re both really really cool.” So, no idea what Dagon James is going to come up with for the “Form & Void” remastered slipcased hardcover, my recommended name for it is the “Ham Ernestway Deluxe Edition”, but he’s off his leash, and he will be coming up with everything he can think of to entice you into buying one of those. We’re gonna do it the same way, well, slightly different from the “High Society: Regency Edition” where that began with, I’m doing 1000 copies of the remastered “High Society” for Diamond, you can do the hardcovers, you pay for the interiors, and you can use them for your hardcovers, but you have to wait until I give Diamond the solicitation, you have to wait until Diamond does the solicitation, then you have to wait for Diamond to come up with their purchase order of how many they’re willing to purchase, after they’ve sold a few copies. And then you can do your “High Society” hardcover, which, I think, six months? Eight months? It’s like, we’re not doing that this time. This time, the hardcover’s driving the bus. Let’s do the hardcover, and however many hardcovers you decide to do, we’ll subtract that from 1000, and Aardvark-Vanaheim will print softcovers. We’ll get them in here, I’ll have, whatever 800 “Form & Void” remastered softcovers, then I’ll send Diamond the solicitation, Diamond can go through their whole process, and six months later say, “this is how many softcovers we want, and yes we will take whatever, ya know, 500 of them, 400 of them.” And Rolly will just get stickers done of the Diamond order code and whatever the new price is going to be for the new softcovers, and sticker them however many Diamond orders and ship them from here. But that’s going to be, here’s some more money that we can get from the “Form & Void” remastered, but, like I say, the hardcover will be the one driving the bus. Even though, I’m not interested personally, even to the extent that, again, the first ten “Form & Void” hardcovers, and all of the bells and whistles that Dagon comes up with. Just imagine, with all the experience he’s had with bells and whistles up to this point, what he’s going to come up with for the “Form & Void” remastered edition. And all of those will go, the #1 to 10, to Heritage Auctions for auction and that’ll be another nice chunk of money. And then, somewhere down the line, the softcovers will be available through Diamond in comic book stores.
So that’s the current one. “Cerebus” #2, that’ll be the next individual comic book. I think Benjamin Hobbs is going to be doing his “Cerebus in Hell?” volume three, volume four hardcovers before that. That’s one of those, I’m gonna have to talk to Dagon and talk to Benjamin, and go, “you guys are gonna have to figure out who’s going first on the Kickstarter, because Kickstarter is one of those, I don’t wanna do a new Kickstarter until people are getting their Kickstarters.” So CAN9 will be the opening whistle on that. If you get your CAN9 portfolio in the mail, that will be the signal that either “Cerebus” #2 or the “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers are the next one on the horizon. Speaking of the “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers, Benjamin Hobbs and Laura are moving! They’re not only getting married in four weeks, they’re moving. These people are gluttons for punishment when it comes to things eating your life that have to go off like clockwork. So, at the moment, Benjamin is also in the middle of doing the fulfillment for the volume one, volume two, “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers, and his office and the corner where he’s doing all of the fulfillment will be the last thing broken down and moved over to the new accommodations, and he’s saying, “This is probably the worst idea to do in the middle of a fulfillment” and I can’t help but agree with that. Best of luck to Laura and Benjamin, with moving house, doing “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcover fulfillment, and getting married, all in less than four or five weeks. So, thank you for the question, Michael R. I would keep going from there, but then I’d be doing the same thing that Dagon always wants to do, “hey, what about if we do this?” It’s like, no, we’re going one project at a time!
Matt: He just emailed me today going, “okay, ‘Form & Void’ is happening. Any ideas?” and it’s like, yeah? No? Can ya give me a minute?
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I basically gotta pull my “Form & Void” off of the shelf and do to “Form & Void” what I did to “High Society”, which is read it, and then read it again, and then read it again, and then read it again, and get to the point where I never want to see this phonebook again, and then the Kickstarter will go live.
Dave: There you go. Yeah, I mean, what’s good stuff that Cerebus fans will love to go with this hardcover? Dave Sim, his eyes glaze over as soon as you say slipcase. I mean, it’s, Jeff Seiler said, “My ‘High Society: Regency Edition’ came in, and the slipcase is all scratched.” And it’s like, Jeff, you’re a very good customer. I said I’ll take the slipcase off of mine, which is fine, and send it to you. It’s not big deal. I’ve now got this orphan… I got copy #100 for the Cerebus Archive. So slipcase has gone to Jeff Seiler. The slipcase will be coming in here. We’re out back at Camp David and Rolly’s going, “Uhh, what’s the ‘High Society’ book about?” and it’s like, “That’s the one that has Jeff Seiler’s slipcase on it. I’m going to be getting a scratched slipcase come in at some point that we’re going to put on it.” Dagon informs me that Marquis still hasn’t done the new slipcases, there will be replacement slipcases available for anybody who get a scratched slipcase, and again, Dave Sim’s eyes are glazing over as soon as you say, “Slipcase.” I might do it with the “Cerebus in Hell?” softcovers, somewhere up ahead go, “What don’t I bag and board these with the golden age bags and golden age boards, which they fit perfectly, and then get a slipcase for the first 10 volumes of ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ Hey! For those of you who love slipcases, and you didn’t get a slipcase with your ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ hardcovers from Benjamin, here you go! Here’s something else you can get a slipcase with.” I’m trying not to be that jaded and that much of a serpent in the garden, but I do have to admit to a combination bemusement and amusement of people who are at the opposite end of the slipcase spectrum from me, where their brains just start going off like a fire alarm, “slipcases?! I want me a slipcase!?” And like I say, I’m just a guy that glazes over at that point.
Jesse Herndon. Oh, I forgot that. Yeah, man, we got… you wanna talk about a way too long Please Hold for Dave Sim. Jesse Herndon, I’ve got his three page letter? Is it? Yes, three page letter. He sent me a bunch of books and they came in this week. I actually saw Rolly pulling into the driveway and came out so I could just get the mail from him, and got the mail, and there was a box, and it’s like, “who’s the box from?” and he showed me the box and it’s Jesse Lee Herndon. It’s like, man, I have no idea what’s in the box, and I look at the postage. $66! $66 in postage! And Rolly goes, “yeah, it’s pretty heavy. It’s books or something.” And that’s what it was, it was books. And it’s like, not only is Jesse sending me these free expensive books, he paid $66 for them to get here! This boggles the mind of the dollar tuna guy going, $66? What would I spend $66 on personally? I come up empty. I come up empty. So, Rolly took the box out back, because opening boxes is one of those things that my wrist doesn’t do well, so he opened it up and there’s all my books, when I came out back to talk to him about the rest of the stuff. And it’s like the one on the top was a book, “F Scott Fitzgerald: I’d Die for Your and Other Lost Stories”, and Jesse writes, “I got you the hardcover on this one (which I know now you dislike)” and it’s like, well, I don’t dislike hardcovers. I don’t think “Cerebus” and my work needs to be in hardcover, but as long as it’s somebody else’s hardcover, particularly if I didn’t pay for it, yeah that’s great, thanks for the hardcover. “because it was just as cheap or cheaper than the softcover for some reason.” Dave’s smelling remaindered on this. Somebody talked themselves into the fact that F Scott Fitzgerald is incredibly hot right now and people are just gonna eat this hardcover for breakfast, and by the time the softcover was coming out, the hardcover wasn’t moving, so consequently that’s when you end up getting hardcovers that cost less than the softcover. “Anyway, sorry it took so long to get to you.” No, that’s fine. “Hopefully you find some interest in the stuff that’s collected within. Apparently, the short tales “Thank You for the Light” and “The I.O.U” are among the most recently discovered ones in there.” Well, again, I don’t have time for reading, but I did see the book and I grabbed it right away, because there is a… and I do have to take issue with the publisher, “I’d Die for You and other lost stories”. Like, shouldn’t the “lost” be in quotation marks? Because if you’ve got this giant hardcover with them in them, they’re not lost anymore, you’ve found them! Why don’t you call it, “I’d Die for You and other found stories by F Scott Fitzgerald”?
Matt: [laughs]
Uh, so, I grabbed it, because I do remember from my Scott Fitzgerald research that there’s a story where the title character is a cartoonist. And it’s like, well, okay, as far as I’m concerned, there’s got to be some comic art metaphysics in there somewhere that I’d be interested in. I forget what the story was called, and I forget even where I read about it. It might have been in “F Scott Fitzgerald: A to Z”. It was called, I believe, “They’ll Never Grow Old”, or it was a line of some kind from the song, “Might as Well Be Walking on the Sun” Was it even called “Walking on the Sun”? I don’t know, because again I don’t know where I saw it. But it is a story that, at least, theoretically exists, and I thought, “okay, I don’t remember what the title was, but it might be in here.” So I did flip the book open right away, and flipped to the list of story titles, and went through them as fast as I could, and went, “Uh, no. No. No. Uh. It might be in here, but no, none of these is ‘You’ll Never Grow Old’ or ‘Walking on the Sun’ or whatever the line was. I would recognize the title if I saw it. I was pretty sure.” So, kinda disappointed in that. I might break down and read “Gracie at Sea” from 1934, which starts on page 57. This was… Scott met George Burns and Gracie Allen somewhere in Baltimore in 1934, when they were on tour, and I guess they said, “you should write something for us.” And he went, “Well, I’d love to” and they went, “well, ya know, write us a screenplay. We’re going to Hollywood where we’ve made a couple of movies already. They’re doing really well.” And it’s like, well, that sounded like something Fitzgerald, “Yeah, that sounds really interesting. These are nice folks, I know the whole George Burns and Gracie Allen concept. What’s so difficult about writing a movie?” And it’s like, I read the first couple of paragraphs of the introduction. “The scenario, or screenplay synopsis is a short story in form. It’s really characterized and thought out. ‘Gracie at Sea’ tries hard to be the sort of farce that Burns and Allen were already becoming known for. That is to say with Burns the straight man and Allen the Dumb Dora. But Fitzgerald couldn’t keep himself from real fiction writing. When George is described in the first paragraph as, ‘a fundamentally loathsome and self-obliterating man’ it’s clear this isn’t just a cinematic ‘vehicle which will carry Burns and Allen’s stuff’.” It’s just so Scott Fitzgerald to go, “Well, okay. I’ll write you a screenplay, but I’ll write it as if I’m writing a Scott Fitzgerald short story, and then you make it into a movie.” So that was definitely lead balloon city. I don’t know how much of a lead balloon it is, but I think I will be convulsed with laughter if I do get around to reading the 12 page “Gracie at Sea”. And then he also sent, what Jesse was responding to was me saying, after the “New Mutants” thing that I did with Jeff Seiler it’s like, what do you think Bill and Chris were doing here? “Well, okay, I never read ‘New Mutants’ and I’ll try and tell you what I think that they were doing there.” And I hadn’t really picked up on the fact everybody went, “Ooh! Ooh! Do that again! And what else would you like to do? And it’s like, I didn’t even qualify it as, if I had the time for this, which I really don’t, but the Jeff Seiler “New Mutants” thing was a one-off, just because it had this weird glamour about it. So, Jess sent me like all three volumes of Neal Adams’ “Deadman”, like the latest editions, and theoretically the complete “Deadman”, which I never read much past the “Strange Adventures” serialization. I read the Batman/ Deadman crossovers in “Brave and Bold” and I’ve still got pretty much all of those. I don’t think I’m missing any of those. So, I might do that. It’s one of those, “c’mon Dave, they’re graphic novels. That’s really just a big comic book. I’m sure you could read all of Neal Adams’ ‘Deadman’ in pretty short order, and if there’s something in there where you go, ‘okay, this was why Jesse Lee Herndon was provoked into sending these to me’ again, comic art physics in action.” It’s probably going to be pretty interesting, but right now I’m just coming off of four days, end of “Cerebus in Hell?” month, just finished “Hell-o Dolly” #1, my side of it, and four days left at the end of June. So, pedal to the metal, 12 hours a day, not doing anything else besides mocking up pages for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and it’s like, mm, no, I can’t be doing these sort of entertaining things. Like, yeah, there’s no problem with reading the 12 page “Gracie at Sea”, but if I combine that with reading and the other one Jesse sent me was the “Flaming Carrot Comics” omnibus, which I also said I’d be interested in reading. If I do “Deadman” and “Flaming Carrot” and “Gracie at Sea”, and the other book that Jesse sent me, then it is adding up. It’s like, I’m 65 years old, nobody’d be surprised if I died next week of COVID-19 or whatever else, and I would really like to get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done. Just in mock-ups, not drawn, and not published, just posterity will judge me very harshly if I never get my “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done and even if I can only get five, or six, or seven pages a month, assuming I’ve got another 15 or 20 years left, possibly I could get to the point where I do get it done. So, but at the same time, it’s also great that Jesse sent these to me, because now they are in the Cerebus Archive. So, if this is just a “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Rebellious streak that I’m having and it’s gonna wear off in a couple of weeks, or three weeks, or whatever and I’m gonna go, “yeah, what the heck, Dave. Just read ‘Deadman’ and tell Jesse and everybody else what it is that you’re seeing in it at the age of 65 that you probably didn’t see in it when you were 12 years old when you were first reading it.”
The other book that he sent, which is interesting, is “Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks.” “Probably not going to be a page turner, as it’s the collection of what is widely considered some of the most oddball Golden Age comics to be found. It’s worth a read as a comics fan, though, as it’s really unintentionally wacky, and as I said on the Please Hold question a while back, there’s a sort of “Chasing Fletcher Hanks” backup story that brings things around full circle in a comic art metaphysics manner that I think you’ll appreciate.” Same sort of deal, it’s one of those, yeah, if “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” was done, and I’m 75 years old, and I’m really just reading the newspaper and sleeping now because I’ve got everything done, I very possibly will read it and I’ll go, “wow, I really should have read this like 15 years ago when Jesse sent it to me because this is a really interesting jigsaw puzzle right here. This is why Jesse was sending it to me.” But, again, even if that doesn’t happen, it’s very nice to have this variety of material in the Cerebus Archive.
The other thing that Jesse was talking about, and here we go completely native, “I’m currently finishing up work on the most recent Please Hold for Dave Sim transcript. I do that, I go through spurts where I transcribe a bunch, then I wait for Matt to post them. He starts to, then gets busy posting actual new news and such to AMoC and stops entirely, so I get bored and stop transcribing for a few months. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. I just did April, May (the Diamond Seminar story had me howling), and now June. I now send them straight to Matt and, what I believe is my only reader, Margaret. She asked me recently if I had sent you copies of them, and I said I hadn’t, so I don’t know if she has done so herself or not. If you ever want me to print the transcriptions and send them to you for the Cerebus Archive, I could do so gladly anytime. I may even go a little nutso and go back and transcribe all nearly 400 Weekly Updates just for posterity! And if I had them all (I only kept digital copies of season 2 onward), I’d transcribe all of CerebusTV! (As Jim Carrey says in “The Mask”, somebody stop me!)” [laughs] And it’s like, yes, we have to put a stop to this guy. There’s got to be better uses for your time, but that’s not our call to make, that’s his call to make.
Matt: One of the reasons I haven’t really been posting the transcripts is cause we kicked around the idea of doing it as a book, and it’s on deck of, okay, when I get a little bit of free time, I’m gonna take the transcripts, listen to the Please Hold and ya know, make any corrections necessary, and then okay, this one’s in the can, and build up however big a book it’s gonna be. Hopefully it’s not gonna be one of these where, you know, by the fifth one, okay, we’re done. The book’s done, we don’t have anymore room, so now it’s gonna become volume one of however many. I’m sure it’s gonna be at least two volumes right now, and if we keep doing this is gonna end up being, ya know, three, four, five volumes. But that’s what’s holding Matt back is, “why give this away for free if we’re gonna sell it as a book?”
Dave: Uh, my answer to that would be, you’re talking about the 123 obsessive Cerebus/ Dave Sim fans, where you could do videos of them, just like a puppet show, with them moving across the screen, and go, “Here’s Please Hold for Dave Sim, the animated film” and they’d buy that! Just because that’s how they are. They gotta have everything. My sense of this is, I think maybe the better use of time, since they are transcribed, and presumably it’s reasonably accurate transcription..
Matt: The early ones are little wonky, where it was hard to hear, or he wasn’t sure of the spelling, or it was hard to hear so he guessed, but I think the later ones the audio got better and I think they’re more verbatim.
Dave: Okay. But, my larger point is, why not make them word searchable, so that, again, if you’re talking about the Cerebus Archive, Kevin Eastman is always the example that I use. Someone is interested in everything Dave Sim has had to say about Kevin Eastman. In that case, it would be a matter of, as long as it’s word searchable, if Jesse is doing all of these transcripts, then you just have to go, “okay, I’ve got this database of the transcriptions of all the Please Hold for Dave Sim. I’m gonna type in the search term ‘Kevin Eastman’ and let’s see what comes up. And just see what lights up.” I think you would be doing an enormous favor for future researchers who are interested in that kind of connection. Like, someone who’s writing a book about Kevin, or someone who’s writing a book about the Turtles, ya know, the whole history of it, they’re gonna be interested in talking about “Turtles” #8 because Kevin makes no secret of the fact that it’s one of his favorite “Turtles” issues if not his absolute favorite “Turtles” issue, but they’re not going to want to go and interview everyone connected with it. It would be convenient for them to just go, “okay, here’s Please Hold for Dave Sim 175, 200 hours of transcription. Type in ‘Kevin Eastman’. Please spit out all the references to Kevin Eastman. Here they come, okay. I have now done all of my research for ‘Turtles’ #8.”
Matt: Well that’s something I think if I published the book digitally, it’ll be searchable. I believe.
Dave: Right.
Matt: That’s one of those where it’s like, this is gonna be more than just, okay I can get this done in a weekend.
Dave: Well, yes! [laughs] It’s like, and then Jesse, like, transcribing all of CerebusTV and all of the Weekly Updates? It’s… I’m completely undeserving of any kind of fandom attention like that. So, it’s so really good that I do have a Jesse Lee Herndon, and I do have a Margaret Liss, and I do have a Matt Dow, because the world wouldn’t be big enough for more than one of each of those. If Cerebus does get preserved into the future, it will be your doing. The other thing that Jesse came up with, I don’t know if people will remember that one of Jesse’s first contacts was when I was doing quick sketches back in the drawing days and the CerebusTV days and he wanted Cerebus as a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. Jesse is a huge Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan, so I did a whole C-Minus Kid doing air guitar and rocking out to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers theme song, having been chastised for not taking Jesse Lee Herndon, the devoted Cerebus fan, seriously enough. Now, in answer to my request for concepts for future “Cerebus in Hell?” issues, Jesse has also sent along the “Mightily Misanthropic Power Aardvarks”, and has even incorporated the sketch that I did, which is basically just a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers mask, helmet, which looks like Cerebus. And I looked at it, and went, that’s really good. It’s like, yeah, that’s a big chunk of the “Mightily Misanthropic Power Aardvarks” right there. So, moving to the next stage on that one, Jesse, you’re the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers fan. Give me a distilled, somewhere between an elevator pitch and a Reader’s Digest article on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers… go ahead.
Matt: The one thing about the Power Rangers that, this is one of those things were anyone else would be like, “yeah, okay, it was something with the Power Rangers, nobody’s gonna care”, but this is a Dave Sim flashing light is, in the original Japanese version of the show, it was… I forget the name of the genre, but it’s basically a five man team every time. Whatever the show. Voltron, whatever. It’s five people, one of them’s a girl, the rest are guys.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So, one woman, four men. When they brought the show to America, because in America that doesn’t fly anymore, by the 90s we were progressive enough that, no, you can’t just have the token girl, you have to have more than one. They changed the Yellow Ranger from a man to a woman. But the way they film the show is, these are American kids, acting, doing stuff, and then they “morph” and it’s footage from Japan, so the female Yellow Power Ranger becomes obviously a male. [laughs] So it’s one of those…
Dave: Well, we’re not allowed to say that anymore, either. [laughs]
Matt: Well, we got more progressive. [laughs]
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: But, it’s funny, because the Pink Ranger, who’s a girl, has a little skirt so that you can’t see her crotch, because it’s Japanese TV, but the male Yellow Ranger, you can see his bulge, well in the American version it’s still a Yellow… there’s no skirt. And everytime, cause I used to watch the show, and everytime I’m like, why did they think no kid would notice this? [laughs]
Dave: Right, right. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s writing itself. The first thing I think of is trans-Rangers, and that’s what happens when you morph from an American female character into a male Japanese character. Is that racist? Is that anti-trans? Jesse even writes, “It’d be a great way to parody the traditionally PC aspects of the source series (“we’ve got one character from every race!” “yeah, but you made the black guy the Black Ranger and the Asian girl the Yellow Ranger”)”, which is like, yeah, that’s racist. You can’t literally do black and yellow. It’s black isn’t black, and yellow isn’t yellow, it’s gotta be Black and Asian, although, Black now has a capital on it in progressive newspapers, I’ve noticed. It used to be that Black people were lower-case b black people, but now they’re capital B Black people, and I go, “why aren’t white people capital W White people?” [laughs] I know the answer to that! It’s like, “you racist! You Nazi!” So, yeah, Jesse, if you can just give me a Reader’s Digest on all of that kind of stuff, so that I know exactly what it is that I’m making fun of, I think this is gonna be like shooting ducks in a barrel.
Matt: The part I love about the Power Rangers is the Black Ranger was Black, the Yellow Ranger was Asian, the Red Ranger had a very dark tan, and the Pink Ranger was a white girl, and then the Blue Ranger was the nerdy guy that you know could never laid.
Dave: [laughs] And we’ll lead you right up to that particular fountain, but we’ll let you drink from that yourself.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Yes, Jesse, definitely. The other suggestion that he had was a “From Hell” parody, which, yeah, he says, “Possibly a tougher sell with the cover, as the only “memorable” ‘From Hell’ cover being the first issue’s, with the top hat and grapes. I switched those out for a more Cerebus-oriented buggid o’scotch and raw potatoes.” And reading that, I thought, it would be very interesting to have the Whore of Babylon take on “From Hell” with people exploiting dead whores and mutilated whores, which, I suspect is probably gonna catch up with Alan and Eddie if it hasn’t done already. This is not suitable material for entertainment, although it was a brilliant cutting-edge graphic novel 30 years ago, and 15 years ago, and 10 years ago. We are definitely now in Alice in Wonderland territory, where the boys could end up getting canceled just for, “you did this 30 years ago, and you had no idea how bad this was, and we didn’t know how bad this was. But now we know how bad this was, so you are officially canceled and you are now toxic third rails that can never be touched, just like Dave Sim and Cerebus.”
Matt: Have you seen the remastered version of “From Hell” yet?
Dave: No, no, Jesse was mentioning that they put like colours on it?
Matt: Not only did they… this is comic book metaphysics at work. So this week, Sean and Carson Grubaugh got invited by the American Library Association to a virtual talk with Eddie Campbell about graphic novels.
Dave: Oh, really?
Matt: And not only did they colorize it, but Eddie went back and redrew panels and pages, and fixed things that have bothered him about it. He’s like, “if we’re gonna remaster it, let’s remaster it right.” So I watching the video of it, and I believe he says at one point, one of the girls, they had autopsy photos, and they were really bad photos, and since then, somebody’s turned up better copies of them or digitally enhanced copies, so he went back and redrew it so that that particular murder looks a lot better than it did at the time.
Dave: [laughs] Better being a relative term when you’re talking about autopsy photos of mutilated prostitutes.
Matt: Right! [laughs]
Dave: Again, I’m kinda glad that I at least don’t have any mutilated prostitutes in my oeuvre that I’m particularly aware of.
Matt: Eddie did tell Sean that the next time he talks to you, to say that Eddie says hi, and I’m like, “I’m gonna be talking to Dave in less than a week!” So, Eddie says hi! [laughs]
Dave: Hi, Eddie! [laughs] How are you doing. It’s bloody Eddie Campbell! That was how I always thought of him, and when he would phone, or I would phone him. It’s like, it’s bloody Eddie Campbell. Well, it’s bloody Dave Sim. So, I hope it sells a bunch of copies. I mean, seriously, “From Hell” is a classic. We’re all wandering around in this strange worldwide feminist store-chamber that’s just getting more and more feminist and more and more store-chamber. Folks, this is what I warned you about 25 years ago. This doesn’t get better. Ya know, read about Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution. It was Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution, but it was mostly Chairman Mao’s wife’s cultural revolution, and once it gets going, it’s… man, they devour all of the oppressors, and then the oppressed start turning on each other, and it only takes a few years, but the casualty rate in China, it was in the millions. It’s like, I laugh about it because it’s like, well, you might as well. If you really think that, “well let them eat Dave Sim for breakfast, but they’ll leave us alone”, it’s like, read a book about the cultural revolution. Read a history of the 1917 revolution in Russia. It doesn’t go that way. You either, everybody sticks together and we all have the same rights, or don’t be surprised, they will be at your door tomorrow, and you’ll just be going, “how did we get here?” Well, by not saying anything when it wasn’t you that they were coming for.
Okay. Jesse also wanted to know about, “Last time, you also mentioned the Cerebus Collector, which, among other items of note, would have had a different cover for Cerebus #18. I'm curious about that, because the only Cerebus cover in the whole series that I absolutely detest happens to be the cover to issue 18 (it's just pictures from the issue cut and pasted together), and the IDW covers book doesn't mention an alternate one was considered. What's the story behind that? (Please, please do not go and dig out the cover and have Rolly scan it or anything! I'm just curious about the story of there being two potential covers as it's something I never knew.)” That was one of the pitfalls of doing the cover before I actually had the story fully written. Fluroc, I think, was the name of the city, and they kill everybody in the city. And Cerebus is wandering around in the city, and somebody has survived, and they’re inside the walls and turning up intermittently and causing a lot of trouble for Cerebus, so that Cerebus spends a lot of time trying to figure out who it is and how he can get them. And I had the cover, and it’s the foreground is just Cerebus with a club or a sword or whatever, and in behind him, you can see, it’s a worm’s eye view, and you can see the ceiling, and somebody’s sticking out of the ceiling. And as I wrote the story, I was writing all of the stuff about Cerebus running his plague scam, which was pretty funny, I thought, so I started riffing on that more, but that was eating up a lot of pages, and I was going, “well, when do I get to this person who’s hiding on the walls and jumping out here and there?” And it’s like, I went, I’m not going to get to that. I’m looking at, I’ve got this page, and this page, and this page done, I’ve written the Cerebus doing his people dying in the city of a plague riff, and the issue is almost done, there’s only like four or five pages left over. And it’s like, that was the point where I went, well, okay, now I have to admit to myself that I’m gonna need a new cover, because if I do a new cover, because if I do that cover, then people are gonna go, “oh, that’s a really good issue, but what is this thing with this guy coming out of the ceiling or sticking up over the railing? No scene like this anywhere in the comic book.” And that is when I went, I really don’t have time to do a new cover, so I think this is just gonna be our tribute to Jim Warren magazines issue, where Jim Warren would do that from time to time, the cover would just have a selection of three or four panels from inside the issue. And he was also very fond of the tone yellow as a background, which, I kind of like it as well, particularly if you drop a magenta on top of it, so you end up with this sort of warmish, orangeish-reddish colour on the word Fluroc. So that’s the story on that one. There wasn’t another finished cover, there’s a sketch for the cover, and that was one of those things where I went, “ahh, well doing a thing called Cerebus Collector, nobody is going to see the sketch or the original ‘Cerebus’ #18 storyline. So that’ll be a good thing that I can put in the Cerebus Collector.”
So there you go, another part of Please Hold for Jesse Lee Herndon. I mean, Please Hold for Dave Sim. “Lastly”, wait, he’s not done yet, “Lastly, I ended up with copies of a pair of ashcan comics known as the Independent Comic Book Sampler, published in 1989 by Geoff Miller. It's like a two issue bio/single page showcase for indie creators and comics. Some future big names in it, but overall nothing too memorable (I got it for the Tick and Flaming Carrot bits). Cerebus is suspiciously absent. However, there's a bit in the back of issue 1 which does mention you. I've scanned it for the Facebook Group, but here's a transcription of it, "The Wave of the Future? At a recent 'summer conference'” Did he get that wrong? No, they got it right. It’s “Summit conference”, “held by Dave Sim, several creators expressed an interest in publishing mini-comics for 1989. Sim himself is quoted as saying, 'Mini-comics are the wave of the future.' He revealed plans to release a bi-weekly Cerebus mini-comic series in December. Mirage Studios also announced the possibility of mini-comics featuring TMNT by Eastman & Laird, Commandosaurs by Laird and Bissette, Melting Pot by Eastman and Talbot, and Puma Blues by Murphy and Zulli. These ground breaking efforts might finally convince fans that minis are fun and collectable." This sounds very similar to Cerebus Bi-Weekly, but mini-comics? Was this ever a real consideration for you that you can recall? Next we'll be finding an interview from the 90s where you float the idea of Cerebus POGs! Thanks and take care, Jesse.” That was one of those things that came up at the summit where I think that was Scott McCloud’s idea, because he was already doing “Zot!” mini-comics. And it was a good idea, that if some of the bigger name indie people did mini-comics. Not ashcans, actual mini-comics that were folded down, 8 and a half by 11 sheets, down to really small size, four and a half by five and a half. The reason that I called it the wave of the future was, this is very possibly the entry point for aspiring cartoonists, and yes, we should try and provide a launching pad by saying, “here, established creators do this. You, as a non-established creator can do this, and maybe you just stay in mini-comics, but at least it’ll be a creditable environment.” I never got around to doing it. I think the only people who did it were the people that were already doing it, which was Scott McCloud with his “Zot!” mini-comics. I don’t think there was a “Melting Pot” mini-comic, or “Puma Blues”. Pretty sure there wasn’t a TMNT. So it would’ve been a good idea, it’s probably something I should’ve paid more attention to and actually done, but you do have the problem there of, okay, how do you get these to the people who want them? We couldn’t unilaterally do mini-comics and turn around and say to Diamond and Capital City and all of the other distributors, “you now sell mini-comics, because we need you to get these to the stores, so that they start building a mini-comic environment.” The comic book field really doesn’t work that. You can’t force things down the throat of the distributors, or down the throat of the retailers, which is part of what we would be doing. The same as if I decided to do Cerebus postage stamps, which would be the same as mini-comics, but each one would have a different panel on it, and it would be, ya know, a block of eight is this comic book story. Great! Very innovative idea. You could do vanity stamps in Canada, but you can’t just turn around and tell Diamond, “Okay, you need a new section in your catalogue for vanity postage stamps and stores, you’re gonna have to figure out something in your display space, where you can display the Cerebus vanity stamp format.” So that was really where that floundered, was, no place for it, and more that needed to be done elsewhere in order to keep everything chugging along than trying to figure out how to get mini-comics in a dominate situation in comic book stores. Lot of comic book stores do carry mini-comics, but they carry only local mini-comics, which is a service to their local cartoonists.
Okay! That’s it for Jesse Lee Herndon. “ Steve Swenson, “I got nothing to insert here” asks:
Hiya Matt - OK, once more into the britches,” Nyuk nyuk nyuk. “let's revisit Silverspoons! 1) Was the absence of Cerebus' tone in the first two CBG episodes an oversight?” Uh, I had forgotten that! Yes, yes it was. “2) Did you provide CBG with proofs / film negatives? It's pretty obvious there's a tear clear across the bottom third of Episode #2 in CBG but the Bi-weekly reprint is fine.” No, I actually sent them the original. That was, at a time, where it was expensive enough to put these things on illustration board and mail them to somebody. Doing a PMT or doing film of it was, mm, no. I’ve got different priorities here for the money, so, it actually took a while to get a couple of the originals back from Alan Light, who, I think didn’t quite understand that just because Dave Sim mailed them to you, and wants you to publish them in Comics Buyer’s Guide, that doesn’t mean that he wants you to have the originals. “3) The art on these pages seems...less refined? Less fully developed? Inked differently? Elaborate profusely, please.” That’s very true. That had more to do with the fact that I was discovering at the time exactly how difficult Hal Foster’s “Prince Valiant” style is to do. One of those things that, you look at it and go, “okay, pretty basic, textbook stuff.” Until you sit down and start trying to do Cerebus panels that look like Hal Foster panels. So, yes, the first couple of pages I was actually trying to do Hal Foster and I’m not getting up from this drawing board until this page looks like as close as I can to a Prince Valiant page, so somebody thumbing through the Buyer’s Guide goes, “Hey, Prince Valiant!” or, “No, it’s not Prince Valiant, but what is it?” And ya know, got curious from that. And the further along I went, it was, I can’t be putting in more time on the Comics Buyer’s Guide strips than I am on actual “Cerebus” pages, which was something I didn’t anticipate. It’s like, okay, so it’s another page that I have to do, four of them in a month. Big deal, I’m doing 22 pages or 20 pages a month already. No, you’re doing 20 pages, 22 pages of Dave Sim, you’re not doing 20 to 22 pages of Hal Foster. Same thing happened with Silverspoon’s appearance in issue 52. It’s like, mm, in order to turn this into a plausible Hal Foster parody, I would have to be able to draw like Hal Foster, and this guy really knows how to draw. He doesn’t fake anything, he doesn’t use clever tricks to fool you into thinking there’s more detail there than there actually is. Every detail he puts in comes up exactly the way that it’s supposed to. So that was certainly where I developed my reverence for Hal Foster as a comic creator, where it’s one of those, just because you can see it, doesn’t mean that you can do it. I had the same experience doing the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund comic book cover where it was Frank Miller on the front and me on the back doing a mock-up of it. So it’s like, okay, well I have to do something that looks like it was done by Frank Miller in his “Sin City” style, maybe his “Ronin” style. How difficult can it be? [laughs] It’s like, well, until you start actually trying to do it, it’s like, this is a lot more complicated than it appears to be. Same sort of deal, I will revisit Frank Miller somewhere up ahead, as I did with “Sim City” and “The Issue After: Sim City”, but I will be doing it with a lot more reverence. “ 4) The title strip logo - was this cannibalized from design ideas you'd been working on? It's a kalunker, so glad it wasn't used more often.” Again, it was, I want this to look like a Prince Valiant logo, but with Cerebus instead. And once you start unpacking the Prince Valiant logo and going, “okay, what’s an easy way to do this?” There isn’t an easy way to do this. That’s why it looks so good, because there’s a lot of work put into it with the idea that this isn’t going to get revisited. This is the “Prince Valiant” logo, and this will be used in perpetuity, because Hal Foster didn’t want to come back and redo the logo x number of times.
And Mike, “ who’s helping out William Messner-Loebs, let me know: Matt, We started listing Dave and Bill's books on ebay.” And then we got the link for that. “I'm not sure if you wanted to help spread the word. Thanks, Mike.” So, as you wrote, “just another plug for that.” And yes, I got a phone message from Mike. Boy, that took a long time to get those books from Michigan, to Kitchener, get them signed, get the Aardvark-Vanaheim signature verification certificate done for them, and send those to CGC and have them come back from CGC to Michigan. I couldn’t believe it, I got the phone message this morning, and I had a phone message I’d been dreading having come in, and it’s just Mike Jones going, “Ahh, the books came in, we’re gonna have them up on eBay.” What he didn’t say, and what I’m curious about, is we sent the Aardvark-Vanaheim signature verification certificates, which look like a CGC case, I’ve got the one here in front of me for “Power Comics” #1. “Power Comics Company, 1977, first printing. Signed by William Messner-Loebs, January 17th 21.” Yes indeed. “Signed by Dave Sim, February 4th, 21.” And it says, “A Boy and his Aardvark by Dave Sim. Nightwitch Rising by Bill Loebs.” Bill actually was just one of the guys who worked on it, but this is a CGC/Overstreet kind of thing. So that’s where I got the references from. “First Dave Sim aardvark, not Cerebus.” What I wanted CGC to do was to put the certificate inside the case with the comic book on the back. And Mike didn’t say whether they did that, or did they send back the certificates, so that Mike and Bill will be able to send the certificate, along with the book, to anyone buying them. So now we’re… Go ahead.
Matt: They do have a Youtube video, where it’s the two of them with the books. I haven’t watched the whole thing, but I will watch it all to see if I can see where the certificates are, and I’ll let you know.
Dave: Okay. Because, we’ve got the digital files. Alfonso printed the certificate that can either be treated just as a certificate, but they’re also adhesive labels, so you can peel off the back and actually stick your verification certificate onto the back of your CGC case and it’s not the same as signature series, but it does have a picture of the book with the signatures, so you know, when you look at the book in the case, “Yep, that is Dave Sim’s signature on this book, exactly the way it is on this book, and this is Bill’s signature exactly the way it is on the book.” If they didn’t do that at CGC, and if Bill and Mike aren’t doing that, I will be happy to send one to anybody who does buy one of the graded copies from CGC that they buy on eBay. Each certificate has a serial number on it. This one is #000-000-007. So, we’re gonna keep doing this. Probably not on a regular basis, but anytime that we need something that needs verification, like the Wilf Jenkins copies, all of those have signature verification certificates, here’s Dave Sim’s signature, here’s Wilf Jenkins’ signature. Yes, this is a Wilf Jenkins copy. So, opportune timing that that’s all just happening today.
“Margaret posted about the Mylar negatives to the cover of issue #104 you sent her, which prompted John G. to ask: This cover production process is literally “The Making of Cerebus #104.” Thumbs up. But can anyone confirm whether Dave or Bob Burden drew the Carrot here? I guess this issue was drawn in Georgia when the Canadians (Dave and Gerhard) invaded the U.S. to visit Bob, but I don’t know if the Flaming Carrot on the cover was drawn by Dave or Bob (?).” Yes! That was the ten days that shook Atlanta. Dave Sim and Gerhard trying to get Bob Burden psyched for the fact that it’s just comics. You did the first like five, six page Carrot story over a weekend, now you’re having trouble doing an issue a year. It’s just comics. We’re gonna come down there, we’re gonna buy a couple of drawing boards, and in ten days, we’re gonna produce a 20 page comic book. Comic art metaphysics on that one, was the day that we left, October 19th, 1987, was the huge stock market crash, one of the biggest stock market crashes in history and it was also Karen McKiel’s birthday, which I didn’t know until I got back. So, I don’t know if those two were related, but there you go.
“To which Dave Kopperman responded: John: That's a good question that hadn't occurred to me - I'd just assumed it was Burden. Obviously it's Gerhard's colors, but there's a couple of things that make me think the linework might be Dave - notably, the hands are less articulated with sausage fingers (Burden really drew almost absurdly detailed hands). Comparing line is sort of tough, because Dave has always been an expert mimic, though Burden generally favored a very heavy brush (I'm assuming) line. The drapery on the figure could really go either way. I'm basing this on looking at the original reproduction in the covers collection. Possibly the notes in the original issue might clarify? So who drew #104’s Carrot on the cover?” And the answer to that was, yes, it was me, and the reason that we did that was, we’re already traveling light, because we’re just going down for the ten days. Like Bob Burden said, it was like a bank job. It was, okay, we wanna get down there, we wanna order the illustration board from whatever art store Bob orders most of his art paper from, and buy a couple of drawing boards, pen nibs, and stuff like that. We don’t want to be buying all of Gerhard’s Doctor Martin colours, and either hauling them all the way down there… [coughs] excuse me. Or buying a $300, $400 set of colour dyes and just leaving them with Bob Burden. No offense against Bob, and we don’t want to be hauling them back on the plane, because Gerhard’s already got them here. So, the cover was done here. The interior pages were done in Atlanta, and yes, I drew the Carrot, I drew Cerebus, and Gerhard did the cover painting on it.
And, let’s see, “Which segues nicely into a question I had. I recently found a large number of early Flaming Carrot issues, and the “first” Renegade Press issue (#6 I believe) lists you as the president, and Deni as the publisher. I assume this was an issue that was more or less in the can when the split happened, and that’s why you’re listed, but was this a one time thing, or did ALL the former AV titles that jumped to Renegade have you as president in their “first” issues?” And, I dunno! [laughs] I really don’t know. Thanks to the Wilf Jenkins collection, I now have a set of each of the other titles that Aardvark-Vanaheim published, and a couple of them do have the Renegade Press issues. But, I don’t know the answer to that. So, what I’m gonna do is make this a contest. Anybody who does have all of those, and can answer the question, was I listed as the President of Renegade Press, just in “Flaming Carrot”’s first Renegade Press issue? Or was I listed as President of Renegade Press in any other of the other non-Cerebus issues? And Bob Burden has finished signing all of the copies of “Flaming Cerebus” #1 and has asked me to phone him so we can talk over some stuff, and then he will be mailing out Aardvark-Vanaheim’s copies, there’s like 30 of them. Anybody who can answer that question definitively, before Please Hold for Dave Sim in August, I will send them one of the autographed by Dave Sim, autographed by Bob Burden, “Flaming Cerebus” #1, and a certificate of authenticity.
“And have you seen this: (Unfortunately, I can’t get it big enough to read. I’ll try to get a better copy if you haven’t seen it.)” No, I had never seen it, but I was definitely aware of all of these photographs and all of these panels, and went, when was this done and why was this done? It looks like it’s a King Features Syndicated promo for “Rip Kirby”, and it’s Alex Raymond showing how a “Rip Kirby” story is produced. And sort of, well, not sort of, actually quite literally hoking it up with the fact that he’s doing, this is Beulah Bestor, one of his favorite models, modelling for Honey Dorian. It really, really wasn’t necessary. That’s one of the things where Alex Raymond becomes very suspect for me. You can see that he’s doing a panel of Honey Dorian talking to her new suitor in the “Flies to Honey” storyline. And he’s using Beulah Bestor as the model for Honey, and that’s Ray Burns, his assistant, modeling for the new suitor, and it’s… the panel isn’t even really close to how they look. And is not really any different from anything else that Alex Raymond drew, which is why I maintain it was just, he really wanted pretty young girls, and Beulah Bestor was definitely a very pretty young girl, in his studio, in her swimsuit. The cover story being there that he has to be able to see the musculature, so if she won’t pose in the nude, then she can wear a swimsuit. But, you’ll notice that Ray Burns isn’t wearing like swimming trunks. Why is it that you don’t need Ray Burns’ musculature? He gets to sit there in a suit, and she gets to sit there in a swimsuit. It’s like, I’m sorry, Alex, this is just not flying with me.
Matt: [laughs] And what did Mrs Raymond have to say about this?
Dave: Well, I think that’s the thing, that she’s probably bitten her tongue almost all the way through, because, when you look at it and you go, no, here’s a panel with Honey Dorian where you just made up off the top of your head, and here’s the one where you got Beulah Bestor to model for her, there’s no difference. And I don’t really see what it is that you’re supposed to be getting artistically out of this. Ya know, the mansion that they had, a way way disproportionately large house on Mayapple Road in Stamford, you can just imagine what Helen Raymond, as a very good, devout Catholic would be thinking with two or three kids who were all, seven, eight, ten years old, and here comes this girl to model for my husband in his studio in her swimsuit. It’s like, mm, the only thing that saves you with that is, you just don’t understand art, dear. It’s for the cause of “Rip Kirby” being that much better of an artistic achievement. And it’s like, she must have known. Like, knowing Alex, knowing when he lying, knowing when he was stretching the truth, when he was being disingenuous, which all wives know with their husbands. It’s like, when you’re an emotion-based being, you know when he’s telling you the truth, and you know when he’s hedging his bets. But, she was also a good Catholic, so there was absolutely no danger that she was gonna divorce him for that. You’re a good Catholic, you will just have to deal with this as best you can, and clench your teeth, maybe have a chat with the priest if it’s really really bothering you. But, yeah, it was a bad omen of where Raymond was gonna end up relative to his marriage and relative to adultery, and he should’ve known that. He should’ve known, if you can do “Rip Kirby” without Beulah Bestor, and the Legion of Substitute Beulah Bestors coming over and changing into their swimsuits, you’re gonna be better off doing that, at least for the sake of your marriage, and at least for the sake of Helen Raymond’s peace of mind. The last thing she wants is a pretty, 20 year old, hanging around in your studio in her swimsuit, when Helen Raymond, at that point, was in her, whatever it would have been [inaudible] 1949, she would have been, late 30s? Mid-30s? Like, you just don’t do that, but you’re Alex Raymond, you get what you want because you’re the breadwinner. Ya know, the discussion is over. Very very sad to see, but also, very nice to see, okay, this is where all these photos were done, and what they were done for. If you can fax that to me in pieces, or fax the text to me in pieces, I’d be curious to read Alex Raymond’s rationalization in his various captions here.
Matt: Okay. I found it online, and I’ll talk to the guy that posted it, of, do you have this or is this something you found online? And I will chase it down.
Dave: Okay, well I would appreciate it, because, yes, this is something I hadn’t seen. I’ve seen… all of these photos are in the “Rip Kirby” collections from IDW and they’re all professional photos. You can definitely tell a professional photo from just somebody taking a snap. And it’s like, why do these professional photos exist? What were they used for? It’s like, well, okay, this is definitely one of the things these were used for. This would be a way for Ward Greene and Alex Raymond to promote “Rip Kirby” and get a Hearst newspaper and King Features subscribing newspapers, to run this as a full page. Or it would be very easy to chop this up and run it as a series, or something like that. So offer it to any newspaper that’s already subscribing to “Rip Kirby”, and hope that this generates more interest.
Well, there we go. That’s another two and a half hours!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Two and a half hour Please Hold for Dave Sim. That’s a long time for anybody to hold anything!
Matt: As Lilly Tomlin used to say, “whatcha holdin’ now?” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] I’m holding my water right now, and I’m hoping I will be able to alleviate that in the next 10 or 15 minutes. Anyway, I appreciate your help with all of this, Matt, and I can say, so far we’ve had five people who have Swordfished their way to a discount on the CAN9 portfolios, and I think there’s probably gonna be a few more because of all of the delays in the mail.
Matt: I sent mine last week, I think?
Dave: Uh-huh. Yeah, the thing is, it’s a Thursday to Thursday thing. Rolly only picks up the mail on Thursday. So…
Matt: I sent it directly to the Off-White House, cause I know the secret location of the Off-White House.
Dave: Oh, okay! And that hasn’t come in, so yeah. It used to be like a clockwork, anything from the US took a week and one day to come in, and lately it’s, like I said, the Jeff Seiler theosis letter, he was shooting to get it to me for last month’s Please Hold and I’m pretty sure it didn’t come in until at least the second or third week of June, and that was another one where he’s got the Off-White House address, so I knew it was coming in.
Matt: All my envelope has is a sheet of paper and two checks, and I was at the post office and went, “Is this enough postage?” Because I had two 55 cent stamps. The nice lady was like, “No, you need another dime stamp, it’s a dollar 20, and I’m like, “okay!” [laughs]
Dave: Really? A dollar 20? Used to be able to buy 10 comic books for a dollar 20. Ah well. But, that’s what happens when you get old like me. Alright! Thanks again, Matt, say hi to Paula, and Natasha, and Student of the Year Janis Pearl.
Matt: Will do!
Dave: Talk to you again next month.
Matt: Yep! God willing.
Dave: Bye bye.
Matt: Bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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. Four days to go!
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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:
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Wait a minute...I don't owe Zipper a favor...
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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.
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Up to 35% off August 24, & 29-31.*
*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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- 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
And ComicLink (remember ComicLink? Seiler brought us ComicLink. R.I.P Jeff.) has:
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Next Time: Is Jen back?
MINI SHORT SWORD6093532/18034
MINI SWORD6020190/76764
MINI LONG SWORD6078442/18031
SWORD, NO. 186295400/66964
MINI TAIL, NO. 16 6469726/79973
EPAULETS 6446193/2526
MINI UPPER PART, NO. 68406463580/76382
