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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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Matt: Well, we kinda sorta had to sneakily lie to her about why. Luckily, my brother’s birthday was the first, so it’s, “oh yeah, Granddad’s coming up to see Uncle Ben for his birthday.”
Dave: Good one. Good one.
Matt: So, it’s, they said it was the Student of the Year Award, but it’s actually called the Leivheim Award. It’s the grandchildren of the educator, he was on the school board, they named the school after him. He died in, I forget when they said it was, but they named the school after him in 1960, and so the grandkids of him got together and they’re donating… they donate, you get a plaque with your name, there’s a big plaque in the school they put a plaque on it, and then you also get $500 to be used for educational purposes.
Dave: Wow.
Matt: So yeah, she won a major award!
Dave: That’s impressive.
Matt: They’ve been doing it for 17 years and I’m like, “I graduated 30 years ago, what’s goin’ on, how come I didn’t get an award?”
Dave: [laughs] Well, they weren’t giving out awards for most memorizations of “Star Wars” movies at that time.
Matt: There were only three movies at that time! It was real easy!
Dave: [laughs] That’s right. That’s right. Are we recording here?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: We are recording, alrighty. Ah, let’s see, you start off by saying, “I presume that Seiler left a phone message, so we’ll lead off with that (as usual)”. Uh, I don’t think that he did. It’s like, I checked my video camera, which is where I record Jeff’s questions when he leaves them as a phone message, and there is no June phone message. There’s a May phone message, but we already covered that one. That was Oliver’s movie. We covered that in depth, even to Jeff Seiler’s most exacting standards. So that was a good thing. Theosis question, he did tell me, I think he downloaded the Wikipedia listing for theosis and then wrote his own commentaries on the Wikipedia listing and asked that I not read his commentaries until I read the Wikipedia listing and then drew my own conclusion, and then we can sort of match his conclusion to my conclusion. The only thing that I was able to gather about it right now, like I say, I couldn’t even find theosis in my laptop dictionary, which is pretty well exhaustive. And couldn’t find it in either of the physical dictionaries that I got. And I was thinking, well it would be just like Jeff that this would come in with 20 minutes until I’m talking to Matt and I have to digest all of this on the run, but fortunately, nothing came in the mail today, so it’s still in transit. So it looks like that one’s going to become a July question. I do have a nagging feeling that he did have a June question of some kind, and I think I might have deleted it as part of another phone message that he left, not knowing that it had his June question there. So, sincere apologies to Jeff, I was gonna phone him and say, “well what was your June question, not the theosis one, the package didn’t come in, what’s the other question?” [laughs] I was pretty sure he was gonna go, “well, beats [inaudible] outta me, how do I know? Once I ask a question I forget it. Same as everybody else in our age group.” Anyway, “speaking of Seiler, I remember that he once sent you a postcard of an American flag, and you kept it and left it in the sun so it faded”. Yes, in the front window of the Off-White House. “and you painted it again and again until it was more paint than postcard, and you asked him if he could send you another one.” Actually, could he bring up another one? That was when he was coming up for a visit, he was getting settled with, as he calls her, “the crazy Canadian lady”, and he brought a few postcards and a couple of stickers, and all of those faded. “And he sent you a full size (3 foot by five foot) flag, and when he told me, I found you a set of American flag car stickers, and sent them up.” Yes, those faded as well. “My question is, how many do you have left, or are you out?” And I don’t know who it was, it was either you or Jeff, who sent me physical three by five American flags on little American flagpoles that were actually made out of, I’m not actually sure what of, something that’s sort of cloth-like but far more plastic than cloth. And those haven’t faded. I got two of those, I think Jeff might’ve brought those up. It was like, let’s try a variety.
Matt: I think I sent them. I think it was…
Dave: You sent them? Okay, alright.
Matt: I found the flags on the poles, and then, I found a bigger flag on a pole, and I found smaller flags on a pole, and then I found the window decals, and I’m like, at a certain point, Dave will have enough American flags.
Dave: Yes, and, as it stands now, that flag has not faded. Old Glory is still glorious and still waving in the front window, about the same extent that the one on the moon is waving, and I’ve got a spare. I’ve got a backup sitting on the windowsill inside, in case anything does happen to the one in the window. And it does excite an occasional question or snarky comment in the neighborhood, because I live in a liberal Canada hotbed, Kitchener center, and people who are really really devout, bright red liberals in Canada are far closer to China than they are the United States, both heart, mind, and soul. So, I do get comments about, “so you’re from the states?” and I go, uh, no. [laughs] And then they go, “I think you have an American flag in the front window. Like, why would you have an American flag in the front window if you weren’t like a hated American?” It’s like, uh, I do that because the United States of America is the only thing standing between Canada getting invaded and conquered by either Russia or the Chinese Communist Party, and I do have a certain loyalty to the people who are keeping our democracy safe. Which is why I support whoever’s in the Oval Office, whether it’s Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, or Joe Biden. It’s gonna be up to them as to whether the truth north strong and free remains the truth north strong and free, and I’m extremely loyal to the people who are going to defend our democracy, which, as Groucho Marx said about Margaret Dumont’s chastity, “We have to defend this woman’s honour, which is more than she ever did.”
Okay, moving on from there, David Brown asked, “Hello. I enjoy your blog about Cerebus, and it appears to now be the semi-official home of Dave Sim.” That’s true. Definitely as close to official a home for Dave Sim online as you get. “Do you know if Mr. Sim still does sketch commissions for people? I've looked all over the site and cannot find any information about this. Would the best thing to do be to ask Mr. Sim directly about this by sending him a letter? Thank you for your blog, and any response that you have will be valued. Thank you. David Brown” And thank you David for asking the question. No, this situation that I’m in right now, trying to not have the wrist deteriorate any faster than it’s deteriorating and keep it as close to stable as I can get, when I do drawings, it has to be maximum bang for the maximum buck that I can possibly do. Which is why, when you see drawings by Dave Sim on A Moment of Cerebus, it’s gonna probably be either Spawn and Cerebus, or CereSpawn, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or “Cerebus” #1 and now “Cerebus” #2, because, sad to say, that’s still really all that Dave Sim is known for in terms of “hey, yeah, I’ll buy one of those.” So that’s one of the reasons that I’m going to be putting in some time on the “High Society” prints and having that as the perennial seller at Waverly Press’ CerebusOverload. In terms of sketches, no, however much money I would have to charge you in order to do a sketch, it would have to be on the basis of, well this is using up wrist on myself and I’m really really trying not to do that, and it’s only gonna be one drawing for one person. So, unfortunately, doing sketches doesn’t meet the criteria of, if I am drawing it has to be something, a lot of people will buy copies of. Again, Cerebus and Spawn, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or “Cerebus” #1. We’re hoping it extends to “Cerebus” #2, and then it extends to “Cerebus” #3. We’ll find out when we get to those Kickstarters. But, outside of that, I’m really not doing any drawing at all, but thank you very much for your interest on them.
Uhh, “Chad Lambert has a Cerebus in Hell? pitch: My pitch is simple: From the Cockles of Satan's Sack Comes… Jingles the Undead.” I like it already, although I was gonna do a picture of Satan with a word balloon going, “does a sack have cockles?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] I was wondering about that! It’s like, I know that you have the cockles of your heart, but I think we’re probably all in agreement, Satan doesn’t have a heart, so maybe his sack is where Satan keeps his cockles, and we’re not gonna go any further with the punchline on that one. “Jingles isn't a zombie... he's brought back to life a few minutes after he died (proving a minute in the infernal realm feels like a lifetime). He's not in the real world very long before immediately returning to Hell to share his tale of resurrection to no one who cares.” [laughs] There you go! That’s about the way the world is about resurrections in general, and we’re all on the same page now, “Hell? “ is a lot like here. “It would have brief cameos from both Cerebus and Possum At Large” Possum at Large, of course, Chad Lambert’s creation. “mainly because Jake T. Possum has experience bouncing back and forth from the infernal realm to our living infernal realm. Paper thin idea? Yep. But I can make it funny.” He says with a smiley face cheapy emoticon, which is actually just a colon and a parentheses. “Thanks! Chad.” So, yeah, hey, I’m in. I’m up. And this is a general rule about “Cerebus in Hell?” if you’ve got a “Cerebus in Hell?” concept and you want to pitch me on it, I’m always looking for more grist for the mill. We’re just coming down to, as far as I know, finishing up 2022. The earliest scheduled book, according to David Birdsong, would be October 2022, so it really means we’re only got to get the October, November, and December issues done. So, as far as I know, that’s what we’re doing. “Kurtz vs Kurtz” #1, “Hello Dolly” #2, and David Birdsong’s Romance book “Flailing in Love”, are all in the process of being done. So, kind of jazzed about that, but it’s a relentless process. It’ll be January 2023 before we know it, and the sooner I can get the January 2023 “Cerebus in Hell?” #1 done, the happier a campier I’m going to be. And it would certainly be more than swell to have Jake T Possum, Possum at Large, make a return visit to “Cerebus in Hell?”
Uhh, I think this is you writing here, going, “since this is how CiH? Is getting pitched now, Steve Swenson asked,” and I gotta turn over my page here, “Hiya Matt ~ Inquiring minds want to know: 1) When the phone books were originally released (so not considering the Remastered editions), were any changes in dialogue, art, etc made from the original issues?” And I think I’ve talked about this before, but [laughs] maybe not out loud. Maybe I just talked to myself about this. The only change that I remember being made in the books, whether it was “Swords of Cerebus” or the earliest trade paperback, was the page… the end of issue 35? I think the last page, the second to last page of 35, where Cerebus is changing into his Cerebus the Candidate duds for the first time. I wanted to represent that the Prime Minister and Astoria were still out in the next room talking, and Cerebus, having gone into a room to get changed, closes the door, and it amputates what they’re saying, and what I thought was clever was to do a line of dialogue from one of the two characters at the top of the page, and then cut it in half horizontally. And somebody at Preney Print & Litho, I don’t know who it was, looked at it and went, “oh my God, there’s lettering missing here. Bottom part of these words are missing.” So somebody went in and by hand put in what they saw as the missing lettering, and I thought, well you just couldn’t make that up, and just sort of shaking my head about it on a permanent basis, from the time that I saw the “High Society” trade paperback, I just left it in. So, I think it’s in probably the first three or four printings of “High Society”, and then finally I went, no, this is what it’s supposed to look like. We’re doing the Remastered version, so let’s fix everything. So at that point, I was fixing it. The only other thing that I can think of is, oddly enough, the Silverspoon strips, the “Prince Valiant” parody, which I say is a weird coincidence because that’s Steve’s next question, number two. Those were not included. I’m not sure how many editions of the “Cerebus” trade paperback came out that didn’t include the Silverspoon strips.
Matt: I wanna say it’s the first 10?
Dave: It’s a lot! It’s a bunch of them, again, anyway. So, yeah, it was, this book’s already getting pretty fat, and if I put in the Silverspoon strips, then I’m gonna have people saying, “well, why don’t you put in the ‘Cerebus Jam’ stories. Why don’t you put in this story, why don’t you put in that story, why don’t you do this one pager?” It’s like, mm, I’m not looking to have another “Church & State” headache on my plate, where it gets up over 600 pages. 500 pages will do it for me. So, there might be other instances and I’m just not thinking of it correctly, where changes were made from the individual issues to the reprinting, but not a lot of that happened, because there was so much proofreading and so much correcting that was done on the fly to get a book to the printer. We were like sharks, we’d feed constantly and we’d always have to be moving forward and that’s what we did for 26 years and three months. There really wasn’t time or inclination to fix stuff like that. So that’s the answer to Steve’s answer number one. “2) When the Silverspoons pages were originally printed in the Comics Buyer’s Guide (and I'm a lucky owner of a full set of these),” You sure are! [laughs] I know there’s a lot of Cerebus fans out there who, that’s really tough to get all of the Silverspoon strips and then the other one is Richard Bruning’s ads for “Cerebus” that ran in the Comics Buyer’s Guide. The Comics Buyer’s Guide was comics newspaper and comics newspapers were mostly just recycled. You had to be a completely obsessive fan to collect the Comics Buyer’s Guide, 52 issues a year for however many years it was going. I know John Tran in Toronto did that, and I saw his collection of Comic Buyer’s Guides complete, that he had bought from somebody. And it’s like, you’re insane! This is a Toronto sized house. It’s a very good sized house for Toronto, but this should be devoted to living space. This is insane. You’re very lucky that Sue is this tolerant of you. So, yeah, “I'm a lucky owner of a full set of these), were they paid for as full page adds or what?” No, they weren’t. That was really the trade-off was, Alan Light got a free full-page “Prince Valiant” parody for however many weeks that was, and I got the benefit of the entire Comics Buyer’s Guide audience going, “what the heck is this?” And there was, ya know, four or five lines hand-lettered at the bottom of each page, saying, “this is what this is. It’s a comic book. Go to your comic book store and say, ‘I want to subscribe to ‘Cerebus the Aardvark’ and I want to buy ‘Swords of Cerebus’.” "I can't exactly recall, but it may have been these strips and the recommendation of cat yronwode that led me to start reading Cerebus.” And, yes, I think that happened a lot. Again, the Comics Buyer’s Guide was the hub publication in a sense that Comics Journal never really was. The Comics Journal was definitely a specialized, avant garde publication. The Comics Buyer’s Guide was for people who liked comics, liked reading about comics, like seeing drawings of superheroes, and liked shopping for bargains, flea market style from people posting individual ads. So, yes, that was when I shifted gears from saying, “well, I’m gonna put Cerebus stories in as many indie anthologies as I possibly can.” Indie anthologies never came out. They would ask you for a Cerebus story, you do them a Cerebus story, and two years later, three years later, or never, that story would come out. So that was when I went, let’s do Cerebus somewhere that actually does come out and comes out on time. And that was really, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and that was it.
Matt: Right.
Dave: You were gonna say something?
Matt: No no no no, no no, I… I was thinking back to, and that’s when you decided to go monthly, and the whole ball of wax started getting… the freight train started speeding up on ya.
Dave: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it was as usually happens in that case, you come up with a bunch of ideas and you try them, and then you go, oh okay this is the one I should’ve tried from the beginning. At the same time when I was drawing “Cerebus” #1, I should have been doing a Cerebus “Prince Valiant” parody and sending it to Alan Light, and the whole thing would’ve started rolling a couple of years earlier. But, as the Germans say, we get too soon olt, and too late schmart. And that’s a truism. Steve’s third question, “Did DC contact you before reprinting the Spirit / Cerebus story in the final Spirit Archive edition?” And, no they didn’t. And I was kind of glad that they didn’t, because that’s one of the things that I had been trying to get more firmly entrenched in the comic book field, is the notion that, if you worked on it, you co-own whatever it is. And what you’re seeing there is Denis Kitchen finally coming around to that viewpoint and going, “anytime that I wanna reprint the Cerebus and Spirit story, because I’m the guy who decides what happens with Will Eisner’s work, I can reprint that anywhere that I want to and I don’t have to tell Dave Sim. I don’t have to get written permission from Dave Sim, even DC Comics doesn’t have to get written permission from Dave Sim, because that’s just not the way Dave Sim works. If you worked on it, you can reprint it.” And I really think we would have a lot fewer headaches in the comic book field if that was just the general policy, so we’re not giving scarce comic book dollars, scarce comic book creator dollars, scarce comic book publisher dollars, scarce comic book distributor dollars to lawyers to draw up agreements that really aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on anyway, unless people are going to actually conform to them. If you just go on the basis that if you worked on it you can reprint it because it’s your work, I don’t see where the downside is in that, although I do understand that we live in a very litigious society that really believes that lawyers have to be dragged in everywhere, or you’re just asking for a lawsuit. I think it’s exactly the opposite of that. The more you drag the lawyers in, the more apt you’re gonna have lawsuits. The more you say, “look, this is just me and you agreeing to do this. We can do that. We have free will, we live in a democracy, we live under the rule of law. You aren’t gonna rip me off, I’m not gonna rip you off. I can reprint my work, you can reprint your work, now we can just pay attention to actually creating work instead of spending all our time in lawyers’ offices and drawing up agreements and lawsuits and stuff like that. Okay, uhh, thank you for the three questions there, Steve. Those were… you didn’t know, but they were all interlocking questions that, it was good to cover that.
"Michael R. (the most famous thing from Easton Pennsylvania since they read the Declaration of Independence there in 1776) asked:” Did they do that? Did they read it there in 1776?
Matt: Yeah, I went on Wikipedia and Easton, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and I forget where the third place is, were the first three places that the Declaration was publicly read to, ya know, somebody on the corner reading it to the top of their lungs.
Dave: Wow. That’s terrifically impressive. And Michael R lives there! Huh. As Jimmy Stewart used to say, “well waddaya know about that?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: “Hi Matt! Hope all is well with you and yours.” Oh yeah, this was funny, “Thank you for keeping the peace on AMOC.” You don’t see yourself as keeping the peace at AMoC?
Matt: I see myself as waking up and going, “ehh, not today” and then going to work or something, and then coming home and going, “oh yeah, I have to deal with that thing.”
Dave: Oh, okay.
Matt: Lately, there’s an anonymous commenter who comes on and posts Nazi hateful anti-Jew, anti-black, anti-me, Carson, and Margaret, bullcrap, and I have to delete his comments. And it’s usually like seven, eight comments within five minutes, and then I lock commenting down so that I have to approve everything, and then he goes away for a couple of weeks, and then like Beetlejuice, he pops up again.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And on the one hand, I don’t want anybody seeing this crap, because it’s crap, I mean, it’s ya now. I’m trying to remember. One of them, I actually laughed about was something about me being gay and then wondering if my wife, and I’m thinking, “if I’m gay, how come I have a wife?”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: But, so on the one hand, it’s offensive crap, that, ya know, take it off, cause there’s not anything about Cerebus or Dave Sim or Gerhard or anything, and on the other hand approval is authoritarian construct and if I have to approve it that makes me an authoritarian.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: I lock it for a day or two, and then I’m like, I don’t wanna do this. This isn’t what I signed up for. Then I unlock everything, and everybody’s cool for a little bit, and then two, three weeks go by, and this guy shows up, and it’s, alright, back to lockdown.
Dave: So he sends like a bunch of them?
Matt: Yeah, he’ll comment on seven or eight different posts, and it’s always… it’s not like it’s, ya know… it’s usually one or two sentences and it’s ya know, like “Jews are evil, make them into lampshades”, I’m trying to think, one was “Gerhard’s right” and then something that was anti-Jewish, and I’m like, “Gerhard would never say something anti-Jew.” He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who has strong political opinions that he would tell anybody.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Ya know, Gerhard’s a nice guy, Dave’s a nice guy. The first one started with, Ben Hobbs managed to catch them and delete some of them, but one of them, it sounded like it may have been me being self-depreciating, and I’m like, no, that wasn’t me. Yeah, yeah, delete that one.
Dave: Right, right. Okay, yeah, I think that’s really all you can do is realize, this is just the Johnny Appleseed of hot buttons, sort of thing. He just goes hither and yon, scattering his toxic hot button provocations wherever he can find a place that they’ll let him do it. And that’s really the downside of freedom of expression, is you can’t shut down everything like that, but I think you can, at the least say, “well okay, here’s a funny one” or “here’s why I think this is a funny one.” And I think that’s one of the points that we have to get to is that, the people who are addicted to hitting everybody’s hot button, are actually pretty funny. Like, it’s a very funny thing to do, because it’s letting you and him fight. It’s not, “I want to pick a fight with you”, it’s “no, I just want to create friction and discord wherever I can.”
Okay, so, back to Michael R, yeah this was funny that he’s got this, the question about Jaka said to Cerebus, and then you tell him [laughs] okay, “Dave already talked about this in the introduction and here’s the quote from it.” But it’s interesting to visit the “Oh Goofo, what a mess.”"On October 26, 1921, [Zelda] gave birth to their daughter and only child Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald. As she emerged from the anesthesia, he recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool." And it’s like, that’s very self-revelatory, I think, of Zelda’s personality, but I think there was only one Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. One of the things that I would note is, if your wife has a nickname for you that’s “goofo”, that’s not a good sign.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Ya know, if it’s an affectionate nickname and a cute nickname, that’s fine, if it’s something that says, “you’re stupid and I’m smart” I would really be wary of that. But then, Zelda was quite a looker so there was very little that Scott was wary about. This has got another interesting resonant to it, I’m gonna skip down to, “I also found this about Fitzgerald in Wikipedia. "Fitzgerald worked on included two weeks' unused dialog work on loanout to David Selznick for Gone with the Wind (1939) for which he received no credit."" Yes, indeed. This seems to me, in comic art metaphysics terms, one of those things were, trying to figure out, okay, what was the largest metaphysics around here? And I think there was a large metaphysical impulse in the 1920s and certainly post-World War I, I don’t know which of those is the more relevant point, probably post-World War I, to try and find a female writer and a male writer, and that they would write together and by doing that they would bring about a great, not compromise… consolidation of the two gender viewpoints. Who could be better than an accomplished writer to do that? And it’s like, is that a rhetorical question? Cause we can do that. And I think that’s what happened with Scott and Zelda, and it just became an intellectual bloodbath with Zelda coming out definitely on the raw side of that one. I would agree that she went insane, but I would say Scott Fitzgerald drove her insane. That they were both, essentially, that’s what they got to the point of. Either Zelda was gonna drive Scott insane, or Scott was gonna drive Zelda insane, and Scott won that one cause Zelda is the one who ended up in the institution, not Scott. Which means he was able to appear less crazy than he was, and consequently had all of the doctors and the courts on his side, and Zelda wasn’t able to do that, and ended up institutionalized for the rest of her life. So, the “she has the hiccups” is the thing I hadn’t really noticed before. Because I think the same thing happened with John Marsh and Margaret Mitchell, where they were intended to be the writing couple, where John, as a intrepid reporter for the Atlanta Journal, and Margaret as the intrepid reporter for the Atlanta Journal, would write at each other and achieve this great gender balance stasis, because, who better than two intellectual writers to accomplish that? And it’s like, again, is this a rhetorical question? Because we can enact that, which they did with John Marsh and Margaret Mitchell, and John Marsh just became Margaret Mitchell’s galley slave. Basically, her chief of staff and major domo who takes care all of the “Gone with the Wind” translation business, while Margaret Mitchell sits around writing letters to people. And it’s like, that killed John Marsh. It destroyed his health. So, that was, ya know, Scott won Zelda lost, Margaret Mitchell won John Marsh lost. But both of them were colossal losses in the sense of, well, you’re looking at this as a way of finding a happy meeting ground between the genders. Uhh, that didn’t work so good. I do admire Zelda’s writing. I mean, even the fact that she’s coming out from under anaesthetic, and she says, “Mark Twain”. It’s like, that’s very lucid. She’s talking about how very deep she is in the anaesthetic, how drunk she is, because Samuel Clemens got the name Mark Twain from the steamboat terminology for how deep the water was under the steamboat on the Mississippi River. So, for her to say, “Oh God, Goofo, I’m drunk. Mark Twain” that’s terrifically impressive. That’s a high level of intellect and a high level of wit even when you’re really not in compos mentis. And, I dunno, maybe that was something that they signal to each other, Mark Twain was what you said when you realized you were drunker than you intended to be and drunker than you should be. But in terms of how that connects Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, with Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, Margaret Mitchell wrote a column for the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine, one of the last columns that she wrote, about disastrous instances of hiccups that lasted for days. Hours, weeks, or whatever. And, sure enough, as soon as she and John Marsh got engaged, she was now divorced from Upshaw and was marrying John Marsh, John Marsh got the hiccups, and got the hiccups for days or weeks on end and was almost destroyed by that. And it’s like, uhh, John, I would’ve taken the hint.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] This not really gonna pan out. Yeah, the fact that happened, mm, 1924/25, and in 1921, ya know, coming up from anaesthetic Zelda saying she has the hiccups. “I hope it’s beautiful and a fool. A beautiful little fool.” I think that’s… you could probably use that to describe all four of them, John Marsh, Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, and Zelda. So, yeah, and then that connects, of course, obviously to Fitzgerald doing the legendary two weeks of unused dialogue work on “Gone with the Wind”, it’s, okay, you beat Zelda, Margaret beat John Marsh, but Margaret beat you, because not only did you have to work on her book, adapting it for the film, you weren’t credited, and none of your work was used. Nyah, nyah, nyah, the women win, kinda thing. So it’s funny, yeah, and then you quoted the introduction, so I’m hoping by imparting the more esoteric observations, it’s like Michael isn’t going away empty on this. And to make sure he’s not going away empty on this, then [laughs] he commented about “Form & Void” 597, 598. “Cerebus is running through the snow storm and has a hallucination (or dream) of Rick. Rick's giving Cerebus directions on how to get over the ridge, then an older Rick appears and says to Cerebus, "We'll see each other once more after today." " The something (this is scratched out) around with the something (also scratched out) and something (scratched out again ) but as yet the something (scratched out for the 4th time) are something (scratched out the last time). " Come and see." Cerebus then said, " Oh S--T." "That's RIGHT." "Cerebus already SAW." [laughs] And, of course, then you email Michael the page that explains this is what was said, and then sent him Chapter the 14th. [laughs] Then Michael goes, “Sigh, you're good. That's why you run AMOC. Nothing ( except racist stuff ;) LOL!!! ) gets by you. Strike two. I'll quit while I'm ahead. Just tell Dave that I hope he had a great birthday. So, “Michael hopes you had a great birthday.”
And I haven’t reread Chapter the 14th, I don’t think, since I wrote it, and again, so Michael doesn’t go away empty handed, I do have actual biblical references in Chapter the 14th, “the Prophet Rick fulfilling the promise he had made in the sanctuary, appeared unto Cerebus in the spirit, speaking unto Cerebus and saying”, and being in the spirit is a term that John the Evangelist uses in Revelation to indicate that he’s not in his body, he’s in his spirit. “The waters about with the new and faithful, but as yet, the fishers are few. Come and see.” Now, what I’m doing there is actually fusing the Synoptic Jesus, and the Johannine Jesus. The idea of fishers, of men as fishers, that’s the Synoptic Jesus, that’s in Matthew 4:19, where he says to the disciples, “And I will make you fishers of men” as opposed to fishers of fish. Which is phrased slightly differently in Mark 1:17, “I will make you to become fishers of men.” And that would be an interesting discussion, just discussing what the difference in those comments are. The difference between “I will make you fishers of men” and “I will make you to become fishers of men”. Making someone to become something is different from making that person something. And then, “come and see” is from John’s Gospel 1:39, which he addresses to Andrew and the unnamed disciple who were following the Johannine Jesus and want to know where he is remaining, and he says, “be you coming, and you will see” and I translate it in the conventional sense of “come and see” which isn’t again what he’s actually saying. The concept of “be you coming, and you will see” is very different from the concept of “come and see”, and particularly as regards the Johannine Jesus. I’m just coming up on that point now, I’ll be starting my commentaries on Chapter 3 and it’s like, no, this is an important distinction. “I am arriving”, is different from “I have arrived.” Arriving is a process taking place. So, it’s interesting re-reading my work, and going, “oh wow, I didn’t know that I was that far along in my distinctions between the Synoptic Jesus and the Johannine Jesus, and fusing the two of them myself.” I got a good laugh when I got to the Chapter the 14th, verse 10. Come and see, and if Cerebus doth answer unto thee “drowning guys” then you know that it’s the actual deal. This is the Cerebus, because he has no idea what baptism is. Looking at what’s going on, it just looked like Jesus and his disciples were drowning guys. Which is another reference from the Johannine Jesus, the beginning of Chapter 4, which is oddly enough where I am in my reading right now. “As therefore knew the Lord that heard, the Pharisees that Jesus more disciples is making and is baptizing than John.” And then verse 2 is a subordinate clause, “Although, indeed Jesus, is not baptism, but the disciples of him.” That’s interesting. Again, although indeed Jesus himself did no baptizing, but his disciples did, is how it’s traditionally translated. It could be that, or it could also be, although in Jesus he not was baptizing, but the disciples of him. He only baptized his disciples. And that’s not conveyed by “although indeed Jesus himself did no baptizing, but his disciples did” which is why I always try to go back to the word for word, literal translation. Because the way it’s phrased, there’s two different meanings there. The way it’s traditionally translated, there’s one meaning. And anytime you close off a meaning to your translation, then you’re changing scripture, and you’re changing what is presumably, all of us monotheists believe, the word of God. So there you go! Like I say, Michael, didn’t want to see you go away empty, so… there’s some Hamburger Helper for your question.
And, where are we doing? I’ve lost my way here. Have I lost my way? No no no, we’re up to page six, so… seven would be the next one. Oh, right! Okay, Scott Fitzgerald, here we go. “Speaking of F. Scott, the New York Times reported:To help commemorate its 125th anniversary, The Times Book Review is highlighting some noteworthy first mentions of famous writers. You can find the full list here. Some of our favorites: F. Scott Fitzgerald: In 1916, Princeton admitted only men, and they would often play women’s roles in campus plays. The Times featured a photo of Fitzgerald in character, calling him “the most beautiful showgirl.” Uh, is this your comment, “Makes me wonder if he and Hemingway ever performed in a Cabaret together?”
Matt: Yeah, that was me.
Dave: That was you? Okay. Yeah, that’s one of those, I’m sure the Times was delighted to do that because it’s, hey, anything that’s LGBTQ or remotely related, and we were there first, this is the most important thing that we can possibly say about F Scott Fitzgerald at this point. And Scott really only has himself to blame for that, because he was one of the original androgynes. I mean, not literally androgyne, certainly not in the sense that Hemingway was, but he was a very pretty young boy at the time he was at Princeton, and sort of reveled in that. “This is my schtick. This is where I’m working from. All of the women are going to love me, because I identify far more with female stuff than most men do.” And not realize, ahh, no, you’re sneaking too far over into no man’s land, Scott. It would be nice if that would hold steady the way that you saw it, and the way you perceived yourself, but, no, the ground is very turbulent over there and you’re gonna end up somewhere that you’re not going to want to end up. And of course, that brought me to the, and I’m pretty sure I quoted this in “Going Home” annotations, from Gore Vidal’s “The Second American Revolution and Other Essays: 1976 to 1982.” One of the birds that came home to roost for Scott was the fact that his perception of homosexuality, which was not favorable, and that was nothing unusual in the 1920s, that his term for homosexuals was fairy or fairies. Again, that’s shifting ground, and by the time Gore Vidal is coming along and is an early champion of the normalizing of homosexuality, this really really rubbed him the wrong way. And I can read his essay “F Scott Fitzgerald’s Case”, over and over and never get tired of it, because it’s so artfully done. To me, it’s misguided, but beautifully phrased and definitely stacked in his deck. Here’s the paragraph that I considered relevant, he says ”There are very few youths as handsome as Fitzgerald who go unseduced by men or boys in the sort of schools that he attended.” And it’s like, mm, that’s one of those ones where if I was your college professor I would write in the margin in red ink, “prove?”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: This is Vidal’s prejudice, I would maintain, as a gay man that this was a verifiable truth that he was enunciating. That “there are very few youths as handsome as Fitzgerald who go unseduced by men or boys in the sort of schools that he attended.” I’m sure that that was Gore Vidal’s experience, but that’s got to be far more a homosexual than a straight experience. He goes on, “Zelda’s occasional accusations that Fitzgerald was homosexual have usually been put down to the fact that she was either off her rocker, or mounted on that rocker she was eager to wound Fitzgerald, to draw psychic blood.” That seems balanced to me. Yeah, that’s pretty much the two sides of that argument. “In a position paper which Fitzgerald may or may not have sent to Zelda when she was hospitalized, he wrote, ‘The nearest I came to leaving you was when you told me you [thought] that I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine’.” And then Gore Vidal goes on to say, “The answer to that one is, stay away from the Rue Palatine.” And it’s like, okay, I understand the compelled inference by the way that he’s saying it, the Rue Palatine was a hangout for homosexuals, and I think that was one of those, Fitzgerald was just being, ya know, Fitzgerald the handsome virile young author. To Zelda it looked like he was just flirting with everybody in the vicinity. You know, that’s one of those, okay if you’re walking through an area that’s primarily made up of gay men, and you’re in Paris, or you’re in France, that’s gonna look one way to your American wife than it does to them, and than it does to you. I had to close the book at that point, because it’s like, no, just watching Gore Vidal slice and dice people is definitely intellectual blood-sport and not worthy of my time and attention. The other one that stuck in my mind, was, there was a note in one of Fitzgerald’s notebooks, that was reprinted in the collection, the postmortem collection, “The Crack-Up.” And, I’m going, I don’t remember how he said it, but it was interesting. I’ve got to go through all of these notes until I find it, and I found it. It was an observation, “Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known” and it’s like, mm…. no. Again, it’s a nice idea, I understand what you’re talking about, but no, you don’t want to graft on female mannerisms to yourself and then take umbrage when people think that you’re gay, or your wife thinks that you’re gay. I think what he’s talking about is, certainly in any relationship when you’re in an intimate relationship with a woman, particularly if you’re married, you’re together for years on end, you certainly do come to note their particular mannerisms and you do notice that those mannerisms come to mind in specific situations. I’m thinking of when I was going out with Susan Alston, she had a puttering face that she put on. She was a great putterer because she was a great homemaker. So she had a specific face that was part in-thrust chin, out-thrust chin, eyes darting back and forth at whatever it is that she next had to fix, and whenever I’m puttering, like washing dishes or having to dust or clean or whatever else, those mannerisms do come to mind. I don’t see myself doing them, which I think where Scott went over the line that the various women that he was involved with, he would picture that, and sort of assume the mannerism himself. It’s like, no, it’s intimacy is one thing, projection is something else entirely, and you want to avoid that. It’s very nice to know somebody well enough to know unconscious mannerisms and to call those to mind and think of those when you’re doing something that they’re doing. But the actual phraseology, “Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known”, uhh, no, there you’re talking about the sum of your own being and existence. [laughs] And I would definitely avoid doing that, and don’t think Scott did avoid doing that. He thought that that made him a man of the future. The genuine superman who is coming up ahead who would do things like that, basically become some of the charming mannerisms of the women he had known. Again, there’s probably far more information on that one than you wanted, but as soon as I read the observation, then I thought, oh yeah, that’s the New York Times, alright. Here’s my take on it.
Matt: The funny part about that photo, to me, cause it’s the photo of Scott, and then the photo of Scott in drag, is I searched the photo, because I wanted to find a better copy of it to send, and it’s a promotional photo of a play called “The Evil Eye” that Scott wrote but he was banned from performing in it because of academic problems.
Dave: Yes, his marks weren’t high enough to be doing plays, and that’s one of those things where, okay, you’re going to school and eyes on the prize, the idea is to not fail, and try to get high enough marks so that you can graduate, and then you can do all of this stuff exclusively. I would have been exactly the same way. It’s one of the reasons that I dropped out in high school. It’s like, I just can’t pretend that all of this is as important to me as people want this to be. But yes, that definitely happened to Scott at Princeton, which he definitely got his revenge, because if he’s not the most famous Princeton student, he’s definitely the most famous failed Princeton student, where that’s… if I had to call to mind another Princeton graduate that people would heard of, no, nobody’s in the same category as F Scott Fitzgerald. And that’s one of those things, took a few decades to get there, from Scott Fitzgerald, sad story, drank himself to death, crazy wife. That’s all that this guy was, which is basically what Gore Vidal was trying to recover, “But let’s go back to thinking of Scott that way, because if this guy who calls homosexuals fairies turns out to be some great literary master, then almost everything that I’m working on is for naught.” And it’s like, well, it’s not for naught, but you can’t elevate homosexuality by destroying F Scott Fitzgerald, and that was one of the points I think Gore Vidal got to.
David Hartman asked, “I recently acquired a Cerebus phonebook (2001- 10th printing) for 8 bucks. I immediately noticed that the panel with Cerebus from the back (issue #1) is in sillhouette like the counterfeit, single issue. Anybody else notice this? Or know why?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. Do you know what he’s talking about?
Matt: Uhh, okay, in the counterfeit “Cerebus” #1, the number one telltale way to tell a real from a counterfeit, if you actually can open the books and look at them, is page 16 with the big dragon. The little Cerebus figure in the original is colored, he’s toned, but he’s also slightly, it’s a darker tone because he’s in shadow.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And in the counterfeit, he’s black.
Dave: Gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, that would be pre-remastering fault. To get the most thorough answer on that, you’d probably want to talk to Sean Robinson about the raw materials that he had to work with. I think that what he discovered that “Cerebus” #1 until he actually got to it, and was able to remaster it from the raw materials, was basically done pretty much as the counterfeit was. Just shot from the printed copy, that would be “Swords of Cerebus” and the early “Cerebus” trade paperbacks, and that seems to loop us back to the earlier question of “how long did this go on?” and it would not surprise me that the 10th print we were still doing that, just because everything was forward momentum. 2001? It was “264 issues done, 36 more to go, I hope I don’t lose my mind before we get there, and I have to stay focused on this, do the best possible job that I can.” In terms of priorities, “oh my God this picture of Cerebus with the dragon, he’s a silhouette instead of a toned figure. We have to work on this.” It’s like, mm, after March 2004, there will be plenty of time to work on this. In terms of remastering, 2004 wasn’t even the beginning of it. 2004 was when I started putting together the archive. Like boxes of papers from downstairs, and some of them have rising damp and the cardboard is rotting, and I have no idea what papers are in there, but I can’t stop working on “Cerebus” in order to go down and get all of those and rescue them because I don’t know what boxes need rescuing. That was the higher priority, again, people were buying the “Cerebus” trade paperback, I wasn’t getting bags and bags of mail from people saying, “why is Cerebus a silhouette on this page?” so, you fix the things that you think need fixing in order of priority, and when you’re talking about a 6000 page graphic novel, boy oh boy. [laughs] Is there a number of priorities, and I’m still doing that, to this day, “what’s the next thing that I have to do, and what’s the best way to do it?” And try and get as much of it done as possible in however much time I have left. My 60s, my 70s, if I keep going into my 80s. And then, okay, Eddie Khanna, over to you! This is how much I got done in 50 or 60 years, I hope you don’t have 50 or 60 years worth of work left to do, but it wouldn’t surprise me a great deal to find that out.
Okay, and JDG, Jen DeJackmo. Jackamo. I’m trying to learn how to pronounce that. It’s DiGiacomo. I think I got it now. “Does anyone know what year this Christmas card is from?” And, I can narrow it down as far as, it was the year after “Jack Frost Roasting on the Open Fire”, because that one, everyone thought was funny and I thought, okay, I have to live up to that one. And I thought this one was funnier. What if you merged “A Christmas Carol” with “It’s a Wonderful Life” so that you had equal parts one and the other? And ya know, the ghost of Jacob Marley, “Look Daddy, teacher says, when a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” And that one landed with a complete, dull thud. My Dad in particular, he was asking me, “Oh I don’t get it, what is the joke?” and it’s like, “Uh, it’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.” and I’m not sure if it’s truth, but my impression was my Dad didn’t know what “It’s a Wonderful Life” is. And it’s like, mm, then I didn’t know what really to say to you about it. I assumed everybody knew what “It’s a Wonderful Life” is, and Zuzu at the end, saying, “Look Daddy, teacher says, when a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” Uhh, so, um, like I say, it would be the year after “Jack Frost Roasting on an Open Fire”. I think “Jack Frost Roasting on an Open Fire” was, Karen McKiel was still there? So it would be 86, 87, 88? Somewhere in there? Siskel and Ebert are part of the punchline, and Gene Siskel died sometime after I did that card, and not long after I did that card, so if you look up birth and death dates for Gene Siskel, whatever year he died, it was the Christmas before that, that this card was. That’s as close as I can get to an answer on that one.
Matt: I think he died in 93?
Dave: 93?
Matt: I cut some of the, there’s back and forth between Jen and Margaret about the card, and Jen said that it mentioned Gene Siskel and he died, and she said what year that he died, and I thought it was 93.
Dave: Okay..
Matt: So it could be 92.
Dave: Right. Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. Whatever year it was, that’s all I could help with on that one.
Matt: Your Dad not knowing “It’s a Wonderful Life” kinda makes senses to me, but that’s because… so “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a beloved holiday classic that everyone has seen multiple times, but it was an absolute failure at the box office the year it was released. It just bombed horribly. And it bombed so bad, that when the copyright came up for renewal, the right holders went, “there’s no money in this” and they let it go in the public domain.
Dave: Really?
Matt: Enter UHF television where anything they can show on the TV for the cheapest amount of money is the greatest thing in the world, and it became a beloved holiday classic because every year at the Christmas they can show it and not have to pay anyone any money.
Dave: [laughs] See, you couldn’t make that up. It’s like, what fools these mortals be? Oh God. Yeah, yeah. And it was, it was what’s his name, made the film, I’m trying to remember the name of the director.
Matt: Frank Capra.
Dave: Frank Capra, yeah. And it’s like, that’s always seen as one of his major hits that, yes, this is the Frank Capra film everybody knows. Far more than, let’s say, “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” or “Mr Deeds Goes to Town” with the former being far more well known than the ladder, though probably not deservedly so. And now it’s like, “it’s Frank Capra. Everything Frank Capra did was brilliant. Let’s not be stupid about this.” It’s like, yes, but it wasn’t seen that way at the time. Capra had hits and misses, hits and misses, doing what he thought was the right things to do. I think what we’re probably hoping for is, someone somewhere, over the next 75, 100 years, will have a set of the Cerebus Christmas cards with the original envelope it came in, and the postmark on it, and until that happens, we’re not gonna know when the Cerebus Christmas cards were actually done. That was another one of those, “if you're gonna do Christmas cards, you gotta do them like in July or August, which is not the time that you wanna be thinking about Christmas cards, but you can’t suddenly start going, ‘hey, it’s beginning to be Christmas. Time to do a Christmas card.’ By then it’s too late.” And most of the time, it was, “yeah I thought of something, and I really wanted to do it and I did with this one, then I will do it.” But in terms of, “time to sit down and do a Christmas card.” I think only married cartoonists with kids did that, just because, well, Christmas is a big deal so the family’s gotta have a family Christmas card. Us grumpy, old, isolated, singleton, divorcee cartoonists, it’s like, forget about. I’ll go and buy a bunch of Christmas cards and I’ll go and write something funny in each one of them. And then this year David Birdsong bailed me out by sending me a bunch of “Cerebus in Hell?” Christmas postcards. So it’s like, okay, as I told him, this is a giant load off my mind in June, because this is when I would have to start thinking about doing the Aardvark-Vanaheim Christmas card and I really have no inclination to do that. There’s no money in Christmas cards, I gotta do something that makes money. I’m barely hanging on by my fingernails, ya know, and Merry Christmas everybody.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Go ahead.
Matt: No no no, I’m just laughing. [laughs]
Dave: Okay, alright.
Matt: I have the same thing every November, I’m like, “I should’ve done a Christmas card this year” and it’s like, “I got a week or two that I can actually get something done. Get it copied, then put in envelopes” then it’s like, do I have an idea? Yeah. Is it funny? Sure. Can I get it done in a week? No.
Dave: No, not in November. Once you’re into that Christmas maelstrom whirlpool, it’s like, no the steep drop into the inner whirlpool, everybody goes, “Oh right, November. I can’t get anything done in November. I can’t even think about anything about the… aside from the absolute essentials in November.” And I think once all of the lockdowns end, everybody’s going to go in November, “Boy, do I ever miss the lockdown.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s like, “I didn’t have to do all of this stuff, now I remember how Christmas used to be. Starts right after Halloween, two and half days later it’s here, and you didn’t get everything done the way that you were supposed to, and you feel like crap. So Merry Christmas, everybody.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uh, JDG also asks, “Ron Essler Reminder.” Hey, I’m starting to speak fluent Cerebus fan, I know who Ron Essler is. “If you are short on questions, I am curious about the "Cerebus Companion" referenced in The Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom #471 (Nov 26, 1982).” And, Margaret said, “Jen - what do you want to know about it? On the CFG site: "Cerebus Companion, Jerry Sweet's: published in a very limited edition by the author, Jerry Sweet. There is an electronic version at the above wraithspace website link. I have also have a PDF verision which is pretty large (18 mb) Jerry Sweet's Cerebus Companion (PDF). Right click and save as on link, 17.8 MB in size. It is a summary and discussion on Cerebus up through Jaka's Story. As far as I know it was never released in a book format." The wraithspace link is dead.” Aww! That’s so sad. I don’t even know what wraithspace is, or a link to it is, and it’s dead.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Aww. "But there is a PDF version on this facebook group under the files section. And Jen clarifies: Is this the same one as referenced in 1982? The copyright is 1989 on the file you mentioned (which I had printed out years ago) and it doesn't include interviews, unpublished artwork, photos, nor sketches. If it is different, then I'm curious what it morphed into. And Margaret mentions: Ron - when you ask Dave Jen's question, I wonder how much that news blurb has to do with the "Cerebus Collector" stuff from his fourth notebook - seems very similar.” Bingo, Margaret! Now you’re talking about what Cat Yronwode was talking about in 1982. “Albatross Four covers Cerebus issues #41 to 45 with 99 pages out of 108 pages scanned. A couple of the pages dealt with a never published title called Cerebus Collector. There is a contents listing on page 14.” And there ya go. I’m not gonna go through the whole contents listing, but yes, this was a reaction to a publication called “The Elfquest Gatherum” which I don’t believe Wendy and Richard published, I might be wrong about that. But, I think they did it through Fantagraphics, or is that just some weird fever dream that I had? Anyway, it was basically unpublished Elfquest stuff, interviews, couple of other things, raw materials. And I thought, “Hey, that’s a great idea! I’m gonna do one of those. I’m gonna do a Cerebus version, but instead of a Gatherum, I will do ‘The Cerebus Collector’. Here’s stuff that Cerebus fans would be interested in collecting, which they can’t collect, because there’s only one of them, and they’re in the Cerebus Archive.” And then I got the whole list done, and then I went, “Is anybody going to buy this?” It’s like how much of this stuff is generally of interest? And it was, well, there’s stuff here that’s genuinely of interest, it’s just of interest to how many people? Because, I don’t want to go and find a publisher for it, which means I’m going to have to publish it, and if I’m eating copies of “The Cerebus Collector” 15, 20 years from now, now is the time to make sure that that doesn’t happen by just saying, “Uh, no, I don’t think I’m going to do that.” The sketch that Margaret includes from the notebook, yes. The cover is done. I didn’t have time to go through and find it before we did this conversation here, but I did get the cover done to “The Cerebus Collector”. The bell-jar on the right, that’s got the prototype Cerebus stuffed toy that Sally Hitchens did, which was the only one that had white fur, because that was the only kind of stuffed toy fur that he had at the time. She would go out and get gray fur if we decided to go and ahead and do these. But this was just, is it possible to do a Cerebus stuffed toy that, ya know, six or eight inches high, whatever it was. It was very very cute, and it’s gone. I have absolutely no idea where the Sarah Hitchens prototype of the Cerebus stuffed toy went, and that’s one of those questions that gets attached to a 6000 page graphic novel. Where did it go? I wouldn’t have thrown it out. I don’t think I would have ignored it. I don’t think I gave it back to Sally “Sarah”. I don’t think she wanted it back. I don’t know, did Deni have it, and did Deni throw it out? So, it’s one of those, it did exist, it would be nice that it was at the Off-White House on its own pedestal like this with a bell-jar over top of it, but I haven’t seen it since the 1970s. Copy of “Cerebus” #1 on the wall. I can’t remember what the other two images are, I will go and check that. I know where the piece of artwork is. It’s in with, a basically the project would keep getting revised. One of the questions became, “well, okay, here’s all of this unpublished stuff. So it’s ‘The Cerebus Collector’, they want to collect all of the stuff, here’s the stuff that they don’t have, that if I do this book, it’ll only be in here.”
That got merged with the idea of doing a black & white volume 17 of the Cerebus trade paperbacks. Here’s a trade paperback with everything in it that isn’t in the trade paperbacks. Now, that, as Margaret knows and as Jen knows, that’s far easier said than done. If you do sit down and say, “okay, this is gonna be a volume that’s going to have everything in it that’s black & white, not the Epic stories or any of the other colour work. Just the black & white Cerebus stuff that isn’t in the trade paperbacks. How many pages does that work out to be?” And that becomes the same kind of question of, “look, I can’t even sell copies of ‘The Last Day’, or I can sell copies of ‘Latter Days’, but 50 copies will hold Diamond for, ya know, a year, eight months, or whatever before they have to order another 50 copies”. If I a do a trade paperback, volume 17 with all of the black & white material, and it turns out to be 400, 500 pages, first of all I have to pay Sean to remaster all of it. Then I have to make up a complete list, and I have to put it all in order, and then I have to solicit for it. Then it’s, okay, here’s how many that you sold. I think I can make more money doing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Spawn” and “Cerebus” #1 and “Cerebus” #2, and “High Society” prints. I can’t get out of that warm spot. This is like Mr Freeze in the old “Batman” TV show, everything is absolutely sub-arctic temperatures, except this little spot here, and that’s the box that I’m in. So, it’s one of those, I’ve got a stack of stuff that is, the last time that I visited this was when Sandeep was working with me on a part time basis but every week, and went, “no, this is good. Let’s put together a project of this. This’ll sell really well.” It’s like, well, okay, you start to put it together, and then it’s, okay when did this come out? [laughs] It’s like, I don’t know, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s. Well, you can’t do a book that said, “uh, this came out sometime in the 1970s, the 1980s.” It’s like, no we want to know exactly when it came out, and exactly why it came out. Well, in that case, it’s my work again. I can’t get this project off of my desk and onto anybody else’s desk without that somebody coming back and going, “well, what’s this?” and “when did this come out?” and “what do you know about this?” And it’s like, mm, no, Homey don’t play that no more. It’s, when it’s off Homey’s desk and it’s on your desk, then it’s going off onto somebody else’s desk and then it’s gonna turn into money, and then Homey gets his payday. This, “no, Homey, you gotta do all of the heavy lifting on this. We have no idea how it’s going to do.” No, that’s not going to happen. So, I’m not meeting anybody halfway on this. I’ll see what I can do, looking down the list… damn, there’s stuff in here that I know what it is, and then there’s others that I’m going, I have no idea what that is. If there’s stuff where I go, okay I know where that is and I know where there’s a copy of it, and I know where I can lay my hands on it, and get Rolly to scan it, I will do that and then email it to you. And you can put it on A Moment of Cerebus. But, believe me, this is not meeting anybody halfway and going, “hey, how ‘bout this? Isn’t it time that we published this?” It’s like, if there was an easy way to publish it, that would be fine…
Matt: I know Sean is chomping at the bit to do the miscellanea volume.
Dave: Uh-huh.
Matt: But he really, really wants to do it, but it’s a case of, finding the time, getting the resources, ya know, we only have a 25 year old printed copy of whatever. That’s gonna be a lot more work than, “oh hey, here’s the original art scanned in at 1200 dpi.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: But, he and I have talked about it in the past, and it’s a, “oh yeah, we really really really wanna do this.” And he really wants to do it right, not just slap everything together, and ya know, okay it’s good enough. He wants it to be SoDAR perfect. So I know it’s on his radar, but it’s one of those, he knows it’s a hill that’s gonna take forever to climb
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: And I know everybody listening to this wants a copy. But how many people are listening to this?
Dave: Right, right. Oh, nice segue, by the way, because that was one of the thing I’ve been mulling over and going, okay, one of the things I wanna try doing with A Moment of Cerebus and the Please Hold for Dave Sim, the next Kickstarter that we’re going to be doing is for Cerebus Archive #9 and we’re getting ramped up on that because the “High Society: Regency Edition” books have come in in North Carolina, print #1 is being printed and put with them, it’s going to be shipped out, which means, those books will start arriving in all of the pledge partners’ mailboxes who ordered one. [laughs] Way back when, when the Earth was still cooling. And that’s the signal that I want to use to do the next Kickstarter, when I’m doing a Kickstarter, is, okay, now you’ve got positive feedback. You’ve paid for this, you’ve waited for this, it finally came in. Now here’s the next project while you’re syked about the ownership of the thing that you waited on. So, Cerebus Archive #9, it’s like, okay, I want to offer something to the A Moment of Cerebus people, and not just the A Moment of Cerebus people, the absolute psychos that actually listen to Please Hold for Dave Sim all the way through. Coming up on the end of hour #2, and it’s like, you should get something for that! You should have some sort of reward for that level of interest and that level of dedication, however many of you there are. Five, six, nine? I’m hazarding a guess. Michael R and a handful of other people listen to all of this. So, I had Sean look up Cerebus Archive #8, and what did they go for? And pretty much what I remembered, it was $100 US and the Canadian dollar is appreciating like crazy, so it’s one of those, well okay $100 US was much better news when Cerebus Archive #8 came out than it’s gonna be on Cerebus Archive #9. But let’s leave that aside, what we want to do is something nice for the A Moment of Cerebus people who are actually listening to Please Hold for Dave Sim. What I’m going to do for Cerebus Archive #9, and because of the new add-on thing that you’ve got at Kickstarter, you will be able this time to be able to buy any of the nine Cerebus Archive portfolios that you’re interesting in getting. And what we’re gonna do with the pricing is, if you buy one portfolio, you pay full price. If you buy two portfolios, you get 5%. Three portfolios, you get 10% off. Four portfolios, you get 15% off. You see where I’m going with this. All the way up to 9 portfolios, at 45% off. You can buy nine Cerebus Archive #9, you can buy three #1s, you can buy one #1, one #2, one #3, one #9. It’s up to you. All it’s gonna have on the Kickstarter is the pricing. If you’re buying internationally or buying in the United States, or you’re buying in Canada, this is what you’re going to be paying, and this is the postage charge on top of it, for this many portfolios. You put in the comment section, or in your backer report, “these are the portfolios that we want”, those will be relayed to us here at the Off-White House, and Rolly, who is scrupulous about making sure everybody gets exactly what they want, will be collecting all of these, and saying, okay, each of the packages is going to be put together for each individual exactly the way they want it done. You can have the portfolios personalized to other people. You wanna be three of them for Christmas gifts, and you’re buying four including your own, hey guess what, you definitely get yours at a much lower price. I’ll be happy to personalize them to whoever you want me to personalize them to. “Merry Christmas, whoever.” “Happy Anniversary, Doris and Steve.” or whoever it is, on any of the portfolios. You just have to put that in the comments, or email that to Sean, he’ll relay that to Rolly, Rolly shows it to me while I’m doing the front labels, and I will make sure that everything gets done exactly the way you want it done. Getting to the Please Hold for Dave Sim side of this. If you are within the sound of my voice, and you still use physical cheques, you’re an old person like me. You actually prefer to use physical cheques. It makes you break out in hives to use Paypal and all that sort of stuff like that there. Send a cheque for, not $100, not $95, not $90, 85% US. Postage covered, to Aardvark-Vanaheim. And if you’re on our list, if you’ve ordered Cerebus Archive before and you’ve got a Cerebus Archive number, Rolly is going to know that. You just have to send a cheque and say, “this is my number”, and we will make sure that you get the number, and will make sure that you get it as soon as the Kickstarter is over. And this is only for the people who are within the sound of my voice. Or if you want to cheat and tell people that don’t listen to Please Hold for Dave Sim what the deal is, that’s fine too. But I am a guy that prefers physical cheques. If I get a cheque for $85, I don’t have to pay Kickstarter anything, I don’t have to pay Amazon anything. So consequently I can pass the savings onto you. And, ya know, this is for Michael R, #26. This is for Jeff Seiler, #301. Rolly and I have a bunch of the numbers memorized at this point. It’s not gonna be a problem getting you the number. You send in the cheque, you don’t even have to jump onto the Kickstarter. It’s like, no, we’ve got you covered. The discount for you extends from the $85. The 5% off that you’re gonna get on Kickstarter if you ordered two portfolios, you can take the 5% off the $85 if you’re ordering too. You take 10% off the $85. Again, you see where I’m going with this. The more portfolios we can sell at one time, the lower the shipping costs are. Cause we can put them all in one, or two, or three of the folders and tape the folder together and it will arrive in perfect condition. So that’s one of those, this should tell me, I think. See if you can back me up on this, Matt. This should tell me how many people actually listen to this.
Matt: Ehh, it’ll tell you how many people listen and still use checks.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: I can’t see people not wanting to take advantage of this. I mean, check, or I guess they could send a money order, maybe?
Dave: Yeah, I mean, where this usually washes up on the shoals is that Lee Thacker in England is sitting there, going, “Uh, I can’t do money orders. And I can’t do cheques. Why can’t I do Paypal?” and it’s like, uhh, that’s one of the drawbacks of being in England, that they, whatever it costs you to buy a money order, you’re gonna pay as much for the money order as you’re gonna pay for the money that you’re sending. It’s… the UK particularly since Brexit, they don’t want UK dollars leaving the UK, unless they’re getting a major cut on it, and unless they’re discouraging you from doing that. So Paypal is usually the only way to get the money here, if you’re in the UK. But again, ya know, in the UK, then you’re talking about, well okay, it’s gonna cost $45 to ship an $85 portfolio. If you want to throw that money in on top, in terms of shipping, and you want to go to CerebusDownloads and ya know, use the keystroke where you go, “here’s nine $10 donations” or “nine $10 Paypal payments” and then leave a phone message here, 519-576-0610, or relay an email by fax, saying “Dave, I’m paying you at CerebusDownloads, this is what I paid. This is what I wanna get.” You’re gonna have to do the heavy lifting on your end. There’s no way that this is going to be easy. That’s why Kickstarter works, because that’s the easiest that we can get it. This is the easiest I can get it, except for Lee Thacker. Lee is the only guy that takes it in the neck when I do stuff like this, and I sincerely apologize Lee. You’re gonna have to find a workaround on it. Everybody else, if you’ve got cheques lying around somewhere, you actually own envelopes, you know what a stamp is, you can write the Aardvark-Vanaheim address, and not even break a sweat, and then drop it in a mailbox. There you go! You’re all taken care of, even before the Kickstarter starts.
Matt: Okay, I will… I will… I don’t know if I’m gonna advertise this. It’s probably just gonna be, “there’s a special offer but listen, and if you hear it, you hear it.”
Dave: Yes. I mean, that’s sort of cheating as well, because there are people who’ll go. “Special offer? Special offer. Okay, I’ve never listened to this crap, but I’ll listen to it if it’s got a special offer on there somewhere.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: That’s fine. That’s… at least they’re tuned in enough on A Moment of Cerebus to check in from time to time. It’s just one of those, I keep trying to figure out, how do you reward the people who are actually the most ardent fans with something that they get for being the most ardent fans? And it seems like, well okay, it’s Please Hold for Dave Sim, coming up to the bottom of two hours. If you actually listen to this, and it’s like, some people just listen to podcasts as a matter of course, some people just are podcast kind of people and this is sort of like a podcast. But it’s far more of an inside kind of thing. We all know what we’re talking about, and we all know who each other is. These are the core audience of the core audience of the core audience, and something has to be done to say, “wow, thanks for being the only people who really, really, really care about this”. I mean really, really, really, really, REALLY care about this. Add as many “reallys” in there as you think are necessary to convey the concept.
Matt: The only other thing that I think you could offer would be, to go through the 3000 pages that Aardvark-Vanaheim still physically has the pages for, and pull out “Dave’s favorite page which isn’t necessarily the first ten pages of a graphic novel of one of the volumes” and make a print of that, and when you buy on the Kickstarter, and in the survey at the end it says, “is there anything else we need to know?” have everybody that listens put in “Swordfish” and they get a print of that, signed and numbered, to however many people say “Swordfish”.
Dave: Or, they get a nice picture of a swordfish. I mean, c’mon!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: No, that’s actually a good idea. I was thinking of that as well, because one of the pages that isn’t the first 10 of “Women”, which is what CAN9 is the portfolio for.
Matt: Wait, isn’t CAN9 for “Reads”?
Dave: Uhh, no. I don’t think so.
Matt: Cause CAN7… hold on a sec, let me do the m… [counts on all fingers and toes] CAN8 was “Women”, CAN9 is “Reads”.
Dave: CAN8 was “Women”, CAN9 is “Reads”.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Okay… why is that not ringing a bell with me? Cause it’s been a year and a half since I wrote all the notes on it. That’s right, no, that’s right. That’s…
Matt: Cause I missed out on 8 cause I was broke and didn’t have the $100, and I do have 7 and 7 is “Flight”. And it’s “Flight”, “Women”, “Reads”, “Minds.”
Dave: Okay. Uh, one of the ones that got missed on “Women”, in that case, because it wasn’t the first 10 pages in the Cerebus Archive, is the last page splash of Elrod as Snuff. The Death parody. So, I was thinking that’s probably something that people would want, and exactly what you’re saying, we can throw in an extra page without doing anything to the transportation weight. It’s still gonna cost the same amount to send it. So, yeah, let’s do a combination of those. If you mention “Swordfish” in your comment, you’ll get whatever the Swordfish bonus is, and you also get the opportunity to pay in advance for $85 instead of $100, and 5% on each of the progression of portfolios that you get. 5% off for two, 10% off for three, 15% off for four… do that math yourself. Write the cheque, and we’ll see if we can get together on this. And if there’s a reason why you would have participated in this, you are within the sound of my voice, you are listening to Dave & Matt, you are interested and you would’ve gone for the deal, “but…” Please let us know what the “but” is, so that if we can figure out a way to accommodate you, so instead of a “but” you’re actually included in all this, we will move heaven and Earth to make sure that you are included.
Matt: Okay. I will find a way of letting people know, without letting people know.
Dave: Right, and that’s gonna be your call, as well. How interesting do we want to make this, and how much do we wanna just make it, no, let’s just leave it at, here we are together, you had no idea that you were gonna get this special offer just by listening to Dave Sim blather for two hours, but because you consider that entertainment, [laughs] and you consider that a worthwhile use of your time, once a month, listening to Dave Sim blather for two hours, I think that you should get something special that somebody else doesn’t get, because they just don’t have the stomach for listening to Dave Sim blather.
Matt: [laughs] Okay. I’m game. Because I don’t have to do anything!
Dave: [laughs] As a matter of fact, yes, the less that you do, the more it’s gonna work the way that we want it to, theoretically, anyway.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay, well, do say hello to the Student of the Year for me.
Matt: Will do.
Dave: Say hello to Paula, and say hello to Natasha for me, as well.
Matt: Will do.
Dave: Okay. Have a good month, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave! And God-willing, the creek don’t rise, we’ll be back for July.
Dave: You never know. Sounds good. Take care.
Matt: Yep. Bye.
Dave: Buh-bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
The Pud's Tavern Logo shirt for my kid's dance team has dropped, unfortunately, they're only available to order until August 26th at 11:59pm. CST. More unfortunately, they'll only ship to my kid's high school. So if you want one, email me at momentofcerebus@gmail.com, and I'll work something out...
I bought one for Dave already. And if you need/want one bigger than 3X, lemme know and I'll see what I can do... I'm gonna probably make a stand alone Pud's Tavern logo on Merch in the AMOC Tee Public Shoppee
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Friend to the Blog, James Windsor-Banderas-Smith has a new Kickstarter for Papa Balloon & Cactus #5. He's got a few copies of one of Dave's variant covers for the previous issues as rewards. ACTUALLY, he found a bunch of copies of issues he thought were out of print, so I think you can get the whole series. He's got T-Shirts too.
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Our pals at Living The Line are getting it from "Diamond" (Or Whoever Owns Them Now):
Legal trouble. Lost inventory. But great books keep coming.
Hello everyone—
It’s been a wild few weeks at Living the Line HQ here in Saint Paul.
If you follow comics industry news, you may already know that our former distributor, Diamond Comics, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in January. Then, on May 16th, they were sold! End of problem, right?
Not only have we not been paid for any book sales since that sale closed… We've been refused access to our consignment inventory—books that legally belong to us and were merely stored in Diamond's warehouse.
Worse yet, they’ve now petitioned the bankruptcy court to sell that consignment inventory—including our books—without our consent.
This means we haven't been paid for books already sold, and we’re at risk of losing the rest of our inventory in their possession. For a small publisher, that’s an existential blow.
But we’re not taking this lying down.
Living the Line, alongside several other trusted publishers, has retained legal counsel and formally objected to this maneuver. We’re fighting for our rights in bankruptcy court. But legal battles, even righteous ones, are expensive, and we could use your help.
How You Can Help Right Now
1. Preorder My Gorilla Family (Iijima Ichiro)
Our September release is live! My Gorilla Family, sure to be one of the wildest books of 2025, will see wide release the first week of September.
Order direct from us (ships from St. Paul): https://livingtheline.company.site/products
Order through your local comic shop via Lunar Distribution: https://www.lunardistribution.com/home/search?term=My+Gorilla+Family
(We’re temporarily listed under our friends at Uncivilized Books — be sure to request it!)
2. Watch for Our New Book-Trade Distributor (Announcement Soon)
We’re onboarding with a new distributor for the wider book market. First out of the gate: reprints of UFO Mushroom Invasion (2024 American Manga Award Nominee, Best New Edition of Classic Manga) and MANSECT (2025 Nominee for the same category!). Sign up for announcements here: https://www.livingthelinebooks.com/mailing-list
3. Grab a Backlist Title Direct
Most of our inventory is frozen in the Diamond warehouse, but we have limited quantities of many titles on hand in Saint Paul ready to ship in 1–2 business days while supplies last. Browse what’s physically in stock here, including our much-beloved science fiction titles by Brandon Graham, Xurxo G. Penalta, Matt Battaglia, and Miel Vandepitte, and the stunning psychological fiction of Erik Kriek: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
4. Spread the Word
Know someone who digs beautiful, strange, unclassifiable graphic novels & manga? Please forward this email, share a link, or talk to your local shop. Every order and every share helps.
A Few of the Books We’re Fighting For
MANSECT — Koga Shinichi
Order MANSECT direct: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
FACE MEAT — Bonten Tarō
Order FACE MEAT direct: https://livingtheline.company.site/products
Thank you for reading, for caring about independent publishing, and for helping us fight the good (and occasionally slimy, mushroom-ridden) fight. We literally couldn’t do this without you.
With appreciation,
Sean Michael Robinson
Publisher, Living the Line
St. Paul, Minnesota
https://www.livingthelinebooks.com/
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TwoMorrows has a new book on Marshall Rogers. Does it include the Name of the Game is Diamondback? Do they talk to Deni? I dunno. You might if you buy a copy...
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Acquaintance to the blog Travis sent in:
My Kickstarter was unsuccessful. Thank you for adding it to the blog in the last several days.
I appreciate it.
I decided to just put the comic for sale on Lulu.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/fanny-kelly-and-hal-kolbeck/my-captivity/paperback/product-459wr8z.html?page=1&pageSize=4
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The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
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Our very own Jen DiGiacomo is part of a film production titled The Day Elvis Died. She'll never ask anybody here, but they're crowdfunding to finish the post production on the movie. (It's set in 1977, will a certain obscure Canadian cartoon aardvark make a cameo? (No. Elvis died in August. Cerebus wasn't published until December. Any appearance in the flick would be an anachronism that would ruin the movie for everybody. EVERYBODY!).) Here's the first trailer. And if you're going to Edinburgh Fringe, Jen's doing her One Woman show Woman in the Arena, pretty much all month. If you go, "swordfish". And send pics...
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Up to 35% off August 21-24, & 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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Heritage has (coming soon):
- Page 16 of issue #44
- Page 5 of Cerebus #20
- Inside Back Cover art from Cerebus #3
- The covers to Issue #74 and #76
- other stuff
- CEREBUS #18 PAGE 4 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #181 PAGE 6 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #67 PAGE 5 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- BATMAN AND CEREBUS ILLUSTRATION DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
Thanks to Steve for sending the links.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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Got a message from Studio Comix Press:
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If you wanna support "local" Canadian publishers...
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Next Time: Jen' still slayin' in Edinburgh, so I'm still takin' Manhattan...
1 comment:
Many thanks for this- the Fitzgerald chat was particularly interesting! I think it should be "latter" not "ladder " when Dave's discussing the movies or Frank Capra (to name another talented guy humorously eviscerated by Gore Vidal in print)
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