Hi, Everybody!
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: I’m okay. How are you doing?
Dave: I’m okay, as far as I know.
Matt: [laughs] Last you checked.
Dave: Go ahead, are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Alright, okay. How are you doing with designing a contest that Michael R can’t win?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: With the Aardvark Short Sword & Flames?
Matt: I have notions. I gotta run it past Margaret, cause I was gonna let her be the other judge since she and I both already got a cover for free. We’re out, we can’t be in the running.
Dave: Okay. That’s a good plan.
Matt: And I was thinking of saying, if you already bought a cover you should be out, but then I was thinking, well, those people paid money and maybe somebody wants two. If I had a bought one, I probably would’ve said, okay I wanna be out, I don’t wanna take a chance of stealing it from somebody that wants it more.
Dave: Right, right. Speaking of which, Rich L of Peoria, I know you’re going to be listening to this, Rich, and I got your cover done. #30, subtitled “Rich’s #153”, and I got Rolly to email that. I think I got him to email it to you, so that you could have it on A Moment of Cerebus, but it also went out in the mail, so, Rich, anytime that you feel that you wanna pay for it, you send me a cheque, or use the Paypal. I’m really not worried about whether or not I’m gonna get paid by Rich L.
Matt: Okay..
Dave: Alright. Uhh… let’s see, so moving on from there… the photo of me that Jeff Seiler took. This is our Jeff Seiler never to be forgotten segment, which we start the Please Hold for Dave Sim with. And the longer I went without explaining the photo, the more stuff got mixed in with it, so this is another one where I wrote out what it is that I had to say. And I imagine everybody's looking at that photo on the screen right now, right?
Matt: Yes!
Dave: Yes. Or they will be, anyway! I don’t really hear from anyone. It’s very much along the lines of my other aphorism, if you leave your penis alone, your penis will leave you alone. One of the pluses of having that as standard operating procedure in your life, is that when I do hear from someone, it’s a read flag. It’s either a test, a punishment, or a reward. Alexa leaving a phone message that she lives in Toronto and she’d like to interview me for her podcast, and we’re going back to like 2010. As soon as I heard that, I’m guessing “test”. Is Dave Sim the unrepentant horndog that he was? Well, ya know, I hadn’t slept with anyone for 12 years at that point, so I decided to emphasize that fact, and called her and said, sure, as a matter of fact, why don’t I come down there and you can interview me at my hotel? You’ll get a podcast and I’ll get a CerebusTV segment. Metaphysics being what it is, like attracts like, and I’m sure that I could explain that any more thoroughly, but as soon as I did that, saying that to Alexa, that then kicks it up to a higher “is Dave Sim still the unrepentant horndog that we’ve known for years and years and years.” So, yes, metaphysics being what it is, like attracts like, next I hear from Jeff Seiler. He was coming to Canada to get all his stuff from the crazy Canadian lady’s house. Would it be okay if he visited? Uhh, fine, Jeff, you can live me a lift to Toronto because he was talking about being here at the same time that I was going to Toronto to do this podcast/CerebusTV segment. So that’s sort of a sign that we’re all pretty much on the same page. Anyway, when he was here I gave him the local nickle tour, including driving past the downstairs of 103 Queen St South, the former location of Now and Then Books. That’s where I met Deni when I was working downstairs at 103 Queen St South. As we’re driving past, and I’m just going to point and say, right when we’re past this building, look downstairs. The door downstairs that leads into what was the downstairs of Now and Then Books. But as we’re going past, the door was open, and I’d never seen that before, it had to have been probably 15 years since the last time that there had been a business down there? So, it’s like, uhh, okay, okay. This is a little different, the downstairs door is opened. I have no idea why the downstairs door is open, except in a metaphysics sense. So it turned out someone had bought the place and was renovating it, and found that out because we parked around back where I knew there we parking spaces for 103 Queen South. And I walked into the downstairs of 103 Queen St South for the first time since the Spring of 1977, and of course Jeff was thrilled, and that’s when Jeff snapped this picture of me, this is me standing about, I would guess, eight feet in front of the spot where Deni was standing when she said, “Hi, are you Harry?” The metaphysical structure of it, in retrospect, is Jeff’s at the end of the worst relationship in his entire life, and me on my way on Toronto to be interviewed by Alexis. The Deni door is closing for him, and opening for me, with a question mark. Well, no question mark as far as I’m concerned, Alexa is very pretty, of course, but we just do the interview and it’s goodbye. I don’t hit on her. I don’t come close to hitting on her. She’s in her 20s, I’m in my 50s. Sometimes you have to do these things, though. As near as I can figure out, the beings who have direct jurisdiction over us are omnipresent, but not omniscient. I actually got, a copy of a painting the ascension of the Virgin Mary, which illustrated that concept very well, which, we can get into at another time, and I’ll see if I can dig it up, scan it, and send it to you.
But it illustrates the fact that, the lower level angels, guardian angels, or whatever they are, are of a very different form from the upper guardian angels. The higher up you go, the less close you are to physical incarnation. So this is how the higher angels stay in touch with us through the lower guardian angels. All they can base their decision making on is observable action, because they can’t read your mind, unlike God and unlike the upper guardian angels if they’re inclined to do that, which most of the time they’re not. It’s like, just keep an eye on them, let us know what you’re doing, and if anybody’s doing anything interesting, let us know. Apart from that, just keep track of what they’re up to. So it does come down to observable action. Until I didn’t hit on Alexis, they had no idea what I was going to do, which is why I recommend reading scripture aloud, and on your knees praying out loud; it’s observable faith. Observable good decision making and choices. If you just do everything in your head, it’s like, “well I don’t actually pray but I’m always talking to God in my head”, that’s not observable, so I highly recommend if there’s an invisible guardian angel in front of me and behind me, as it says in the Koran, or the one angel on the one shoulder and the other angel on the other shoulder, do something that they can actually see, do something that they can actually hear, and you’ll make their job a whole lot easier, and they’ll make your life a whole lot easier.
So anyway, getting back to the story, I pressed Jeff into service as camera, and we ended up shooting a framing sequence of Alexa walking to the hotel and through the hotel lobby, and then that just cut to the two of us in one of the public areas with her interviewing me and me answering the questions. There’s a scene where I was the cameraman and I got Jeff to run up to Alexa and go, “Oh my God! You’re Alexa!” and she goes like, “Yeah?”, and he goes “Can you sign my Blackberry?” He had a Blackberry at the time. And she goes, “how can I do that?”, and he goes, “Just type your name into it.” So gingerly she takes his Blackberry between two fingers and then types into it and then gingerly, two-fingered, hands it back to him, and then she walks toward the camera sort of shaking her head, and shuddering. And behind her Jeff is staring at her “signature” and he’s like freaking out with joy, that, all I told him, just you’re really really thrilled that you got Alexa’s signature on your Blackberry. So we did it in one take, and Jeff was great. He was actually jumping up and down in the background. Knowing how bad his knees were by then, that was really performance above and beyond the call of duty. So there’s the story behind that photo that Jeff of me, and I’ve got another Jeff Seiler story, but it’s gonna be your turn next time. You’ve got another Jeff Seiler story for next time, right?
Matt: Yeah, yeah, I probably do. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: But your story, there’s a second part to it, is that what you’re gonna tell the next time it’s your turn?
Dave: Uh, what do you consider the second part to it?
Matt: So, when you and Jeff were in the basement of Now and Then Books, you walked in and saw the wallpaper and exclaimed, “I got it right!”
Dave: [laughs] Um, I forgot that part. Yes, that was in the “Cerebus Archive”, I was gonna look that up in the “Cerebus Archive” comic book where I actually drew the scene of Deni coming in, saying “Hi, are you Harry?” And I’m pretty sure I at least put in the world’s ugliest wallpaper, because, as you can see from the photo, it’s definitely over in the Oscar Wilde category. “One of us has to go.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Uhh… then, now we’ve got also a surprise question that came in late, and came in from Birdsong. So I’ve got the paragraph marked off here, “On a more serious note, I wonder if you ever discussed Steve Ditko’s withdrawal from all things comics fandom with him when the two of you were corresponding.” And, no, I didn’t. I’ll get to that. He says, “I’m just curious. Was he a very self-disciplined man who was devoted to his work and avoided as many distractions as he could?” Well, he definitely was that, but I don’t think that factored… I can only tell you what I know, and what I surmised from what I know. “Did he find the fans to be creeping morons?” [laughs] “That he couldn’t stand to be around? By all accounts, he was a polite man and would engage fans pleasantly if they happened to find him. I have to wonder if it was the numbskull that drove him ‘underground’.” Uh, what we know about the situation is that Steve Ditko went to one of the first comic book conventions. And I believe it was 1964? If it wasn’t 64, it wouldn’t be much later than 65, because comic book conventions definitely started in New York City, and Steve Ditko being an Aristotelian I think the… and this is where I’m surmising, knowing that Steve Ditko was an Aristotelian, and indirectly an Objectivist, it’s more like Ayn Rand and Steve Ditko were from the same Aristotle tree just kind of different approaches to it. My guess is that he found out about this comic book convention and went, “well, I’m a fan of comic books. I’ve been a fan of comic books for years, I work in the comic book field. I will go to this public event. And essentially, this sounds interesting to me. I’ve never been to an event focused on comic books. This sounds good.” I think that, my guess is that that ran afoul of his Aristotelian Objectivist objective reality trip-wires, probably in two directions. One of which was autographs. “You’re Steve Ditko, can you sign this for me?” and it’s, ya know a copy of “Spider-Man”. I mean, you have to remember, 1964, this is like year two of “Spider-Man” and everybody’s brains were melting who were, ya know, at that magic age for comic books getting in your blood. “Can you sign this for me?” And it’s like, “yeah, I can. I’m physically capable of it. Why would I do that?” Which, this is usually where I go, this would be so much easier to explain if people had read “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged”. I forget which one, do you know which one is the one with the architect Howard Roark in it?
Matt: Uhh…. I wanna say it’s “Atlas Shrugged” but I’m probably wrong.
Dave: [laughs] I know, it’s like a 50/50 thing. And I’m going, I can picture both of those titles and find Howard Roark. Anyway, it’s one of those, people who are Objectivists or Aristotelian, or adherent to the idea of objective reality can be determined, should be determined, and you should live your life according to objective reality. Something like an autograph is, “why would I do that?” For Steve Ditko, it’s, he drew comic books for a living, and the situation when you do the thing for a living, is you arrive at an agreement with whoever is paying you to do that thing, and then you do it in such a way that it’s as good a piece of work as you can possibly do. That’s the kind of architect that Howard Roark was. The fact that that’s all your concerned about is doing the best possible job that you can for the client that you’re doing it for, creates unbelievable problems in a society when it’s losing its way away from objective reality, and falling into a giant cesspool of subjective reality; Feeling. Because it’s, because you’re at the comic book convention, you’re here because it’s the place where comic book people are going, because it’s called a comic book convention, and someone is now asking you to do something where there’s no objective reason for you to do that. Whereas, on their side, it’s like, “no, you’re here. You drew this comic book and I have a pen. Can you sign it?” and it’s like “and can you sign it to me, can you sign it to Steve?” and it’s like, “uhh, well, I didn’t do the comic book for you, I did it for Marvel Comics. I got paid to do it.” And it’s like, “yeah, I know that, but it would just be like really really cool if you would just write your name on this and then personalize it to me.” So right away for someone who is an Aristotelian, an Objectivist, a personal believe in objective reality, as usually happens, you go somewhere just because this seems like an interesting thing to do, and let’s see what this is all about as a participant. Suddenly, you’re in an argument with somebody about something that you really, as far as you’re concerned, shouldn’t be having to argue with somebody about. It’s “I didn’t do that comic book for you. You’re arrangement, your connection to this comic book is that you paid 10 cents for it, or you paid 12 cents for it. Marvel Comics got some of that money, I got some of that money. But your relationship isn’t with me.”
The other one, apart from the signing, would have been the opinionating. “You’re the guy who draws ‘Spider-Man’. Here’s what I have to tell you. Like the Green Goblin really sucks.” Or something like that. And it’s like, “again, why are we having this conversation? You paid for the comic book, you got to read it, it’s all over and done. You have any complaint about it, or you want something changed in the comic book, write to the people who publish the comic book.” The other thing, “what’s Stan Lee really like?” [laughs] It’s like, “why are we having this conversation? Yes, I work with Stan Lee. He writes ‘Spider-Man’ and I draw it. Although that’s over in weird territory as well, because that’s completely changed from the objective reality way of doing a comic book, where you’re the writer, you type out a script, you give it to me, I take your script and I draw it, and I draw it in such a way that it is the best possible work that I can do drawing your script. It’s like now you’re changing it so that I’m half-writing and half-drawing the thing and then giving it to you and you’re rewriting it. And it’s like, mhmm, these are all Objectivist / Aristotelian objective reality tripwires, where you’re really muddying up the reality of the situation. I’m not muddying it up, I’m doing that I said that I was going to do, but you’re changing fundamental parts of this”. But at the same time, he’s going… ya know, I’m sure this is all flashing through Steve Ditko’s head, but he’s going , “what business is it of yours? You aren’t me. You aren’t Stan Lee. Why would I tell you what I think of Stan Lee?” and it’s like, “because that would be really cool. Because you’re Steve Ditko and I love your Spider-Man and I love Stan Lee’s Spider-Man and I wanna know what Stan Lee is really like.” But, but, so the reason that I came to these conclusions was because he only went to the one convention and I would assume from an objective reality standpoint, he just went, “this is unworkable. I mean, there’s no viable option of a way to do this.” I mean, I would say, just don’t tell them you’re Steve Ditko. Just pay to get into the place and then just walk around looking at comic books. Nobody knows what you look like, so you can be completely incognito. But that’s another objective reality tripwire. It’s like, “ I am Steve Ditko. Why would I pretend not to be Steve Ditko, or work to not have someone know that I’m Steve Ditko. You’re making sound like there’s something wrong with being Steve Ditko!” And it’s like, from an objective reality standpoint, that’s untenable. “If I’m going in there, everybody’s getting a name badge, and they’re writing their names on their name badges, well, okay, this is my name badge, my name’s Steve Ditko.” And it’s like, “Steve Ditko?!” Well, I mean, you can’t control that reaction.
So that was where it started, I’m pretty sure. I don’t think Steve Ditko had any background in science fiction conventions, which were the only precursors to comic book conventions at the time, and just experienced this, no, this is another one of those, why does the world react this way to someone who makes his decisions based on his determination of what objective realty is. Aristotelians don’t usually revisit decisions like that. It’s like, “uh, no, I went there. This was my experience. The experience seems to be baked in as an element of this, so this is just another one of those crazy environments that don’t really suit anybody who makes their decisions based on objective reality.” He did try to explain his reaction to fandom and to fans, cause he heard from a lot of them. Because people would find out that, well, he’s just Steve Ditko, he’s just in the Manhattan phone book. He’s not going to not be in the Manhattan phone book because people might contact him because he’s Steve Ditko. “Again, why would I pretend not to be Steve Ditko or do anything exceptional with my phone listings? Don’t put in my address, don’t put in my phone number?” So he heard from a lot of people and just… it was always a tripwire of, “this is my work. I do my work according to the agreement I reach with whomever it is who’s employing me at the time. That’s between me and him, and the representative of the company. And we keep working until he has tripped over so many objective reality tripwires that I no longer find this a tenable way to work, which, ultimately happened with Marvel Comics. But, what has that to do with you as the reader?” Like, to him it would be the same as going to see a violin concerto as an aficionado of the violin, and then writing a letter to the violinist telling him what he didn’t like about his virtuoso performance. First of all, how would you know? Have you ever played the violin? “Well, no.” [laughs] Well, then why would you think that you could have anything valid or interesting to say to the violinist? And it’s like, it’s just… Steve Ditko would have considered that clinically insane behavior for somebody going to a concert, so he considered it the same way with people who didn’t write and draw comics, but wanted to tell him what it is that he should do.
And that was exacerbated when he left Marvel, when he left “Spider-Man” and “Doctor Strange” at the absolute peak of popularity and the peak of the Baby Boomer years and went to Charleton Comics. It’s like, you can’t do that! You’re Steve Ditko! You do Spider-Man. Ya know, as Howard Chaykin said, “If Steve Ditko did it, it’s Spider-Man. If anybody else did it, it’s not Spider-Man, it’s just a corporate trademark somebody got employed to dick around on with that’s actually Steve Ditko’s.” And for him, it was, “well, no, it was the most sensible thing I could do. It was going from a situation where I used to get scripts from Stan Lee. Ya know, five page monster stories, or terror stories, or whatever.” I think they designed “Amazing Adult Fantasy” for Steve Ditko, because “these are Steve Ditko stories, nobody does stories like these like Steve Ditko. So let’s have a Steve Ditko title.” And it worked exactly the way Steve Ditko wanted it to work. Stan Lee typed out a script, and if it was a Steve Ditko story, put it in the Steve Ditko basket. Steve Ditko picked it up, took it home, drew it as only Steve Ditko could, brought it back in. We’re all done. And then having this whole Marvel style thrust upon him, when it did become untenable and he left, then it was, “okay, this is a far more comfortably working relationship that I got at Charleton. Joe Gill writes really good short stories, like Stan Lee really good short, twist ending stories. And I just go in and pick up the script, and draw the story, and by the time I bring it in, they’ve got four more scripts for me. This is perfect, this is a lot better than doing ‘Spider-Man’.” It’s like, [laughs] trying to explain that to comic book fans in he 1960s. “You left ‘Spider-Man’ and went to do Charleton twist ending stories?” If you want to read Steve Ditko talking about fans, just look at Robin Snyder’s inventory of Steve Ditko’s text pieces, text publications. Steve Ditko’s 30 page, 36 page whatever. Sometimes it’s a mix of comics and essays, and Steve Ditko will say exactly what he thinks of fandom per se, which, really had nothing to do with numbskulls per se, it had to do with people expressing opinions about things that they have no expertise about to someone who makes a living at it. But that’s just, as the British say, not on. It was, Steve would try and explain what it is that he’s reacting to, but it comes across as insulting because what he’s seeing is emotionalism. “We’re crying crocodile tears at you because we want you to do this. Instead of this thing we want you to do, you’re doing something else.” And it’s like, “yeah, this has nothing to do with you. This is what I do for a living.” You don’t go into a restaurant and go back and tell the chef what he did wrong with your food. “We can accommodate special orders to a degree, but I’m the guy cooking the stuff, and this is what it’s like. If you don’t like this cooking, go somewhere else.”
So, is there anything that you think that I’m missing there in answering Mr Birdsong’s question?
Matt: No. I’m experiencing a really weird metaphysical moment, though.
Dave: How so?
Matt: I got home from work and there was a box, sitting in my living room. And it’s from Tennessee from David Birdsong, he had told me he had a bunch of extra issues of “Cerebus” and he didn’t know what to do with them. I’m like, ah, just send them to me and I’ll take care of it. So I expected a box, but it was a large box, and I opened it up, going, okay, just to see what’s in it, and it’s a bunch of copies of “Spawn” #10 and like five, six issues of “Cerebus” that I either have. Either I need them, or I don’t need them, but I gotta look. But then, there’s a copy of, going back to the beginning of this call, “Oktoberfest Comics” #1, which has got an ad for Now and Then Books at 103 Queen St South, Kitchener, Ontario on the back, cause that’s who printed it. And then, and I’m not making this up, Dave, there’s a copy of issue 4 of “Imagine”, which has “Cosmix” in it by you, and a story by Steve Ditko! [laughs]
Dave: I think that’s the only time Steve Ditko and I ever appeared somewhere together in print?
Matt: That’s kinda what I thought. He did “The Summoning”!
Dave: There you go. It’s definitely got a comic art metaphysics vibe to it, I would say.
Matt: Oh, and it’s one of these, the box came, I’m like, I should do a video of me opening, put it on AMoC, cause it’ll be funny. And then I’m like, no, I’m gonna open it up just to see what’s in here, and I’m like, there’s a bunch of stuff in here that I want! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Like, it was all gonna go into the AMoC prize closet but, neh, most of it’s gonna go in the AMoC vault and the rest of it’s gonna go in the prize closet.
Dave: Well done, Mr Birdsong. Well done!
Matt: As he’s known in the AMoC editorial offices, “Dammit, Birdsong!” Cause he’s got a tendency to post stuff and not let me know that he’s posting stuff, so then I go to post stuff and there’s already a post.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he doesn’t put titles. He doesn’t put labels. Everything gets labeled so that if you like this particular post, you can click the label and get all the… like the Monday Report posts all get labeled “monday” so if you click it, here’s all the Monday reports.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Ya know, to make it internet-friendly to people. And invariably, he does the post, and then I go, and recreate the post, and ya know, leave what he put, but bookend it by me saying,”Dammit, Birdsong!” He thinks it’s funny. I know he does. Cause he sends me emails, going, “well, if you don’t have an aneurysm.”
Dave: That’s, I think it’s funny too. It’s Matt Dow Perry White to David Birdsong’s Jimmy Olsen.
Matt: His nickname, in the early days of my reign on AMoC was, “Superman’s Frenemy”.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I always thought it was, ya know… Sean Robinson was “Your Pal and Mine, Sean Michael Robinson.” Birdsong became “Superman’s Frenemy” and I couldn’t come up with one for Hobbs when Hobbs started posting. And then I just dropped all of that, and occasionally I remember and I go, oh yeah! And I type that in. But yeah, that was the nicknames for, ehh, about a year.
Dave: I would think that DC would want to jump on that, as a flashback to the 1960s. “Superman’s Frenemy” and whoever that would be. It could be really anyone from Lex Luthor to Jimmy Olsen.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Depending on how you write the psychology of it. Okay! “Question all the way from Russia, it’s not necessarily as impressive as you think. He emailed me.” Mikhail asks, “Hi Matt! Hi Dave! Nice to hear from you again. Dave, Cerebus has been translated into several languages.” Yes, “High Society” was translated into Italian, Spanish, and French. “Did the editors and translators communicate with you as I usually do?” And, no. No, definitely not. “And were there any other interesting stories related to the translated editions?” Uh, no, for the same reasons, because those were not so much negotiated at the publisher level as implemented at the publisher level. All three of them were publishers who were already doing translations of English language comics, and had expressed interest, “We would like to do ‘Cerebus’ and we want to start with ‘High Society’” and they arranged the translation. They arranged to do a font of my lettering style so that everything could just be typed in, and basically, I got a cheque and then somewhere down the road when they actually printed the books, then I got I think 10 copies of each book, and another cheque. And then all three of them went out of business.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] So, and pretty much all at the same time, so that was one of those, I hope that wasn’t my doing, but probably was. I’ll take the blame for everything back to the Suez Crisis, before that I wasn’t born. So in terms of interesting stories, this was a little closer to what I always pictured, doing translations. Where you, Mikhail, were already doing a translation of “Cerebus”, at least, like a few pages, and just said, “I am doing this” and kind of, “is this okay?” It’s like, yeah that’s fine! Keep going and we’ll see what happens, particularly online translations definitely weren’t the viable means of reading a comic in a foreign language 10 years ago that they are now. So, this seems to have a lot of potential to me. I’m hoping that X number of people in other countries and translators in other languages are looking at what Mikhail is doing, and going, “how did this happen?” and looking at how it happened, and going “Uh, can I do that?” And it’s like, I dunno, can you? Which is always the question. It’s not really a “May I?” If you think that you’re someone who has always been destined to be the person to translate “Cerebus” into Hebrew, let’s say, then, by all means, go ahead and do it. The only permutation on that that hasn’t happened yet that I don’t know if this would just be pouring sugar in the gas tank of the whole thing, but is the idea of consulting and debating translations, where instead of the situation that we’ve got now, with Mikhail’s just pedal-to-the-metal, put up translate new issue of “Cerebus” every week and post it, and then translate another issue and post it. Someone doing that in a workshop fashion, saying, “I am a translator in this language and I’m translating ‘Cerebus’ #1 and here’s my ‘Cerebus’ #1” and get a pool of translators to read it in the environment that they’re in and debate anything that needs debating. I’m sure there’s parts of “Cerebus” #1 in any given language that are very easy to translate. I mean, this is just how you would say this. And there are probably others where you would say, “uh, no, instead of this word, or the word that Dave is using here, I would use this word instead.” And probably there isn’t an objective reality about that, but it would depend on how persuasive anybody could be about the respective subject of reality on that. Like I say, I can picture that being sugar in the gas tank. “The idea is that we want to translate ’Cerebus’ into Hebrew, and we’ve just got this big ongoing turf war between these Hebrew translators and these Hebrew translators, and nobody can agree on what these 10 words in ‘Cerebus’ #1 are supposed to be translated as and the whole thing has completely ground to a halt.” Ideally, you would hope that there would be give on that, and they would say, “okay, we’re gonna talk about this for a little while, and then at the very least, at the end of the day, we’ll just flip a coin and say, okay. You call it in the air, it’s heads, we’ll go with your translation and not my translation.” To me, it would be, that would help avoid the people that think they’re better translators that they actually are, and can only be found out by other translators, who say, “no, you’ve managed to get Dave Sim to agree to be the official Hebrew translator, but actually your translations suck. And I’m trying to find a way not to say that they suck, but they suck. Here’s a Hebrew translation that doesn’t suck.” And if you post both of them online, and the majority of people go, “No, second guy’s right. Your translation sucks. His doesn’t.” You can help him instead of him helping you. So, that’s as far as I’ve gotten mentally on what’s the best way to deal with translations, but definitely one of the things that I want to see happen with the Russian edition is because it started with Mikhail, it’s Mikhail’s. It’s not a matter of if Alpaca decides that they can’t get along with Mikhail anymore and they want to just fire Mikhail and they’ll get somebody else to translate the rest of “Cerebus”, I wouldn’t do that. I would tend to side with the translator. Dance with the one what brung ya. And that’s something that didn’t enter into it on the translators in the other three languages, where I had absolutely no contact with them, and translators could have been fired and replaced by somebody else, and I wouldn’t even have known, because my agreement was just with the company. So, live and learn, as we go along.
Matt: So, Mikhail just found, in 2018 David Birdsong sent me the first two or three pages of “Cerebus” #1 translated into Russian that he found on a Russian torrent site. And he pretty much said, “I found these, looking around. Ya know, they’re kinda neat, but the site they’re on is real sketchy and there might be viruses and stuff, so don’t send people there.” And I shared them, and Mikhail found this, and went, “I’m the one that translated that back in 2013!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And when David found and sent them to me, he also sent it to Sean and Hobbs, and Sean looked at the metadata, cause it’s the internet, and went, “this is based on the Italian translation. The art files are saved in Italian!”
Dave: Huh!
Matt: So it’s just one big circle!
Dave: Hah! Comic art metaphysics in action. The birth of a Cerebus star system. And here’s what it looks like in real time. And you people have nothing better to do with your time? I’m sorry, I… your honour, I withdraw that remark.
Matt: To be fair, it’s Sean Robinson. When you send him a digital file of a foreign Cerebus, he’s immediately gonna try to figure out where that art came from.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Cause, maybe somebody got a copy of the negatives and maybe the original negatives got put on a boat that went to Japan and slowly made their way across Asia and you can get a hold of them to see what they actually look like.
Dave: Probably the real story is even more interesting than that one.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay! It must be Please Hold because Michael R, of the Easton, Pennsylvania R’s, asks, “Hi Matt!
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.” And yes, belatedly, let me wish everybody at A Moment of Cerebus, all of our American friends a happy 400th Thanksgiving. F colonialism, F whatever other prejorative that they’ve got for the pilgrims. The first Thanksgiving was in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621, and really that’s, you have to say, that’s really where America started, was the first Thanksgiving.If things went off the rails, and we can all agree they went off the rails with the relationship with Native Americans, you can’t fault the pilgrims in 1621 for inviting the local native tribes to a big Thanksgiving feast, as in, thank you God Thanksgiving. So having belabored that point, happy 400th Thanksgiving. “Here's a question for Dave but it may have something to do with your question for Dave.” I’m not sure that I understand that one, do you understand that one?
Matt: No!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I probably said I was gonna ask something and forgot what it was.
Dave: That’s something like that, yes. Well, I’ve got a picture here of Michael R with a hole in his head, so that could… that’s a teaser for an upcoming Weekly Update that’s got Michael R with a hole in his head. This could be related to that. “Hi Dave! I remember reading questions from the Cerebus comic book back in the day and fans asking if something would happen to you, what would happen with Cerebus' ending? I think I remember that Gerhard would finish the book without words. I'm sure there were a few other answers that I have forgotten. My question is: is there a notebook that Margaret doesn't have that you still possess that has the ending written down if something should have happened to you before you got to 300? All the best, Michael R.” Uh, no. There was… I don’t know if Michael’s misremembering or if I, far more likely, phrased something badly and made it sound as if that was the situation. There’s just, there’s no way that, depending on when that would have happened to me that Gerhard would have been able to take over, even if he had been inclined to. I mean, ya know, backgrounds are a very specialized thing. Of course, if he’s not the best background artist in comics, he’s definitely in the top three or four. Actually taking over and finishing a 6000 page graphic novel? Mhmm, no. There was a lot of shifting around in the last year, and I have, actually on the top shelf here in the rectangle office which used to be Gerhard’s office, a stack of material from that last year that I thought should see the light of day at some point, and decided now that “The Last Day” is on deck circle, the next “Cerebus” hardcover is gonna be “Form & Void”, because that’s been sold out for a long time, and “The Last Day” is down to the last 33 copies here in the Cerebus Archive. So, I pulled out all of that material, and a big stack of it was Gerhard’s pencils for the background on “The Last Day” and his computer modeling and sketches on top of the computer modeling. Backgrounds that I did where he was freezing up on doing backgrounds, and it’s like, okay okay, I’ll draw this one and then you just copy what it is that I drew, and that really didn’t help. I was trying to be as helpful as possible, but it wasn’t helpful. Anyway, all of that has been scanned and sent to Dagon James and you sift through this and decide which of these should be included with “The Last Day” remastered hardcover, and I’ll write captions on them or Gerhard will write captions on them. And then, I had no idea there was that much of Gerhard’s work in there. This was all just “I never want to think about that last year again for the rest of my life but I know at some point I’ll have to, I’ll just put all of these on one shelf.” And it’s like, oh, this is all of Gerhard’s artwork or a good chunk of it, like three quarters of it. So I got Rolly to scan it all and send digital copies and the actual tracing paper drawings to Gerhard, so if there’s a giant “Last Day” Gerhard background sale in the immediate future, that will explain that one.
But, no, the whole way that I did “Cerebus” the whole way along, the way that I ended up doing “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, it’s just the way I work. It’s one page at a time, and if I have to move stuff around, if I have to drop stuff, if I have to goose up the emphasis on this thing and sublimate the emphasis on this other thing, that’s something that I decide on the page that I’m working on, and then as soon as that page is done, I don’t revisit that. That’s just the way that I’ve always done comics. And there’s absolutely no way to roadmap that to say, okay, this is roughly what’s happening here. I mean, we’re far more in the situation now than we were with “Cerebus”, although we didn’t know at the time, is Dave Sim gonna live long enough to finish “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”? And in the case of SDoAR, there will be more written material. There will be available material. I would really like to get it done, because you’re just torturing future graphic narrative fans who are going, “this is really good. I’m so engaged with this and I just have to find out what happens next, and what happens next, and what happens next, and what happens next. And this is circling back in on itself, and then relating to this thing over here. I’m running out of pages, oh no, this is as far as he got.” And unfortunately if I don’t finish the mock-ups for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” that’s what the experience is gonna be, and then it’s all over to Eddie, and okay, here’s the “Caged Songbird” storyline, and here’s a correspondence box full of what Dave Sim had to say about this storyline. But that’s all me thinking out loud in type and then having done that, being able to say, okay, having said all of that, what’s the best, most central points of those, and let’s distill it down to that. And I won’t be here to do that, so it’s just gonna be this meticulously sculpted, fine-tuned, page by page narrative and then suddenly it goes blooey into all of these research materials. And anybody who wants to write and draw their own ending on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” based on that, I’m sure Eddie will be happy to give you the keys to the vault, and you can look at everything that was said, everything that was dug up and see what it is that I chose and what it is that I didn’t choose. No one would ever be able to do Dave Sim’s “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, because I have a very idiosyncratic way of thinking and a very idiosyncratic way of doing my work, so all I can do is cross my fingers, keep my nose clean, try and eat healthy, stay out of drafts, etc etc. And hopefully get to the end of this. This ties in with your later question.
Matt: Yes it does! [laughs] Very much so.
Dave: Yes it does, [laughs] but we’re gonna skip over that for a moment. Because we’ve got MJ Sewell, asks, “Dave, Hello! You've mentioned many times that you sold your comics collection years ago.” Uh, yes. When I moved out of my parents’ place in 1976 and was moving into a one room apartment. I sold all of my collection, like a complete set of “Justice League”, a complete set of “X-Men”, etc etc. And just hung onto the stuff that I found artistically inspiring. Barry Windsor Smith comics, Neal Adams comics, Bernie Wrightson comics. Probably more Warren Magazines than any DC or Marvel Comics, per se. “You also talk about all the free Indy/self-published/creator owned books you receive as gifts. Do you keep all of these and/or consider this a separate kind of "collection"?” And, yeah, it’s Cerebus Archive material. I wish, back in the day when I was getting tons and tons of indie and self-published comics that I had saved all of them. Back then, we didn’t even have longboxes, and that would be the most sensible thing to have done, which I came late to. This is what I do now, out back at Camp David there’s always a short box standing on its end, and any indie comics that I get, or self-published comics that I get from someone, I put them in there sequentially, so you can see when it is that I received them and if I wrote a letter to the person, which is not an infrequent occurrence now that not a lot of them come in. Ya know, making suggestions, or applauding individual strengths. And let me just get ‘er sideways onto Gary Boyarski, I got in “Jack Grimm” 7, 8, 9, and 10 today. Congratulations, Gary. And definitely coming along by leaps and bounds, nothing could have surprised me more than getting four issues of “Jack Grimm” in at once when it’s the fifth anniversary and he’s at issue 10. So, any letter that I send to somebody about the comic book that I sent, I’ll print out an extra copy of the letter outside of the correspondence archive, and put it in with the book itself, as well as whatever letter that I got from the individual. But yeah, that’s a separate kind of collection, because this isn’t a comic book that I picked for myself, this is a comic book that somebody sent to me because I inspired them to be a self-publisher or they found out about me after the fact and went, “I really have to send this comic book to this guy”.
So, back in the day, back in the Spirits of Independence and all of that time period, the “Guide to Self-Publishing”, I would be guessing that it probably be three or four longboxes of comics that I would have? And I really wish that I had those, but it just seemed completely unwieldy. It’s like, no, if I’ve got this many of these right now, imagine what I’m gonna have in 20 years. I won’t have room to store them. Well, you never know how temporary something is, that’s how temporary it is. And MJ signs off, “Cheers from bat-s crazy California” and yeah, I’ll go along with that. [laughs] I have to say, just when I think things can’t get any crazier out there, hearing about the fact that they’re not prosecuting shoplifting anymore, part of me goes, no, that’s just completely over into Looney Tunes territory, there is absolutely no justification for that. That’s actively dismantling civilization. On the other hand, what’s the actual situation on the ground in terms of, is this just a way of saying, “well, we have to do something about the homeless situation, and we have to do something about the hungry, and we have to do something about the, let’s call them at this point, the terminally addicted and if that’s well, okay, if you can’t afford to buy stuff, just walk in and pick up something that you think you need” and it’s very possibly, California could be on the cutting edge of that. I read the New York Post twice a week, it sounds like New York’s going, “Yeah that’s just crazy enough to work. Let’s not prosecute shoplifters, and what the heck, you can go in and just steal some food if you want to eat it, or if you’re going into a high-end luxury store like Burberry or Louis Vitton or someplace like that. Just grab a suitcase, to the pawn shop, get your $75 or $80 or whatever it is and go out and either buy enough drugs to kill yourself, or start getting yourself put back together.” I will probably be long dead before people either say, “boy was that ever a wrong path to take? What were we thinking of on saying that people can shoplift with impunity.” Or going, “yeah, remember back in 2020 when this was a really weird innovative idea that was going to dismantle civilization and now it’s just, ‘oh that guy just swiped a loaf of bread in front of me and in front of the clerk. Must be homeless! Or must be a drug addict.’” So, there you go! [laughs] Dave Sim’s current best thinking on bat-s crazy California.
Matt: My problem with the concept is, if you’re stealing food, okay, but does the store keep track of what got stolen, and then like go to the state and say, “hey, you owe us $85 in groceries” and get a tax break or something so that they’re not eating it? Or is it just a, “no, nope, you’re screwed”? [laughs]
Dave: I don’t know! I don’t know the answer to that. [laughs] You don’t know the answer to that. It’s like there’s the real earthy crunchy people running stores who are just probably getting completely in tune with this. “No, this is fine. This part of my cross to bear as a first world exploiter of the poor. Please, by all means, if you’re poor or drug addicted or homeless or whatever, please come into my store and steal stuff. You’ll make me feel a lot better.” And yes, there’s gonna be people who are gonna say, “well, okay, as a program, I’ll go along with this, but I have to be able to file as many made up invoices as I want to the state and get them to pay me back.”
Matt: I mean, I know there is a pizza joint in New York, I think it’s down in the subway, where you can buy a piece of pizza for yourself, or you can pay for two pieces and they’ll put a post-it note on the wall of ‘free slice of pizza’ and then homeless people can come in, pull a post-it note off the wall and get a free slice of pizza so that they’re not starving. And everybody went, “oh no, you’re not gonna make any money”, no, the guy’s making money hand over fist cause all the tourists come in, going, “I’m gonna buy five slices of pizza because I’m such a good samaritan.”
Dave: [laughs] Right! Right, right.
Matt: It’s one of these, it started off with there’s like 12, 13 post-it notes, and as soon as the story got out, the wall’s completely covered now, and he’s actually turning people away, going, “no, we literally have more free slices than we know what to do with.”
Dave: Right, right. Exactly. Exactly.
Matt: That’s a feel-good story. So I can see going, “okay, we’re just not going to prosecute criminals because, well, ya know, he’s down on his luck.” Well, yeah, I understand he’s down on his luck, but why is he down on his luck?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Why can’t he go to the manager and say, “hey, I’m starving, can I steal a sandwich.”
Dave: Right, right. I mean, there’s still bad seeds. They’ve got a program they developed in Kitchener a “better tent city” where instead of it being a tent it’s a really really really tiny house. Like, barely able to fit like a bed and a table and chair kind of thing, but it’s a house. It’s centrally heated, and it’s structurally sound, and it’s got a lock on the door. And this is something that, okay, you’re homeless, we’re gonna create these as fast as we can, and you can become a participant in this. And there’s always had a good handful of people, say three or four people that it’s just, uhh, no. You can’t get along with anybody, we’ve bent over backwards to provide you with the absolute minimum requirement for a sustenance and you’re just nothing but a troublemaker, you have been thrown out of the better tent city. At which point, I go, “right, you still need insane asylums. There still are crazy people, and there still are evil people. There’s just not as many crazy people and evil people as we think that there are, or as we used to think that there are. But you still need at least two floors of a building somewhere with really big guys who can make you be cooperative, because you won’t be cooperative anytime we try to help you to be cooperative, so consequently you’re gonna get stuck with Ivan here, who weighs like 400lbs and is covered in tattoos and just won’t take S from anybody. We’re working through these things. Everybody has the goodwill to work through them. It’s not gonna happen in our lifetime, but we’re already further along with the philosophy of it. Something has to be done for the terminally homeless, the pathologically drug addicted, besides just saying, “no, these people don’t deserve help.” Well, no, that’s certainly true, they don’t deserve help. But some of them, if you give them the help, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.
Okay! Moving on from there, Nadab Art asks, “Have you read anything by the British author G.K. Chesterton? I know you exclusively read the Bible and Koran,” and the newspapers! “So I won't try convincing you to read his stuff now. But I'm curious if you came across any book or other writings by him in the past.” I did a quick scan of my bookshelf, and no, I didn’t see any GK Chesterton there. There was a large article on it in the Epoch Times, which is a weekly newspaper produced by anti-communist Chinese people in collaboration with westerners. And it was a really interesting article, and he’s definitely a really interesting guy. One of those people that, if he didn’t have words for metaphysics as applying to human lives and human lives enacting themselves within the context of metaphysics, he certainly had enough examples within his life to go, “well, whatever it is, there it goes again.” And, who knows? Maybe if I get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done, there will be a period of time between that happy, happy day for me, and when I finally kick the bucket, and I can try to make up a list of things that I’m gonna do, like reading GK Chesterton. It was definitely a temptation. I’m always reading about authors I’ve never heard of in the Epoch Times culture section. GK Chesterton was one, they had a two or three part article on Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. I’m going, okay, [laughs] if you’re gonna start adding stuff in, you’re not gonna add “Paradise Lost” in right on the top. GK Chesterton sounded like one of those guys like Saki, who was the short story writer, O. Henry, that, yeah, this is the kinda stuff that I enjoy. Probably won’t get anything out of it in a creative motivating way, but after “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, maybe I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
Matt: [laughs] Oh, come on, Dave. Admit it. Anything you read from now until you’re dead is gonna somehow tie into the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. It’s all tied together!
Dave: Or everything else! I mean “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” started as “Glamourpuss”, which was, I just wanna trace pretty girls out of fashion magazines and ink them like Al Williamson, and oh what the heck, comic fans will never sit still for that, so I’ll just sort of talk about all of the photorealism, and what I think is really cool about them. But this won’t turn into some big elaborate thing like “Cerebus”, this is just gonna be having fun.
Matt: Uh-huh.
Dave: “Uh-huh”? [laughs]
Matt: Sure, Dave.
Dave: “Whatever you say, Mr Sim, sir.” [laughs] It’s… the only experience that I had, that I can remember, between finishing “Cerebus” and starting “Glamourpuss” was, like I would go to the library researching stuff. I’d go, wow, there’s a lot of really cool books in here I’d be really interested in reading. It’s like, no, you’re not reading anything that isn’t applying to what it is that you’re here to research, so just look at that. Right, right, just look at that. And after “Cerebus” was done, I went in and… what was is it? It was, “Cabaret” I’m even forgetting the name of the writer. It was the guy who wrote all of the “Berlin Stories” that the musical “Cabaret” was based on. If you’re looking for a good movie sometime to watch, I mean, not a good movie. “Good”, in quotation marks, but a good evil movie, the “Cabaret” adaptation that Bob Fosse did is absolutely amazing. The last time that I was in a hotel room, years and years ago, channel surfing and going, well, it’s just channel surfing addiction. I’ll just sit here for four hours channel surfing. And one of the movie channels had “Cabaret” on, and it was pretty close to the beginning, and it’s like, okay, end of channel surfing. Any movie that will get Dave Sim to stop channel surfing, that’s gotta be a good movie, objectively speaking. Oh, what’s his name? Anyway, it’s all based on his “Berlin Stories” and characters that he knew in Weimar, Germany before World World II. And it’s like, okay! I’m gonna read all of this. [laughs] Because there’s not that much of it. He didn’t write extensively about it. But reading “Berlin Stories” and then reading some of his correspondence and then reading books, a couple of other books about that time period that related to it, and it’s like, he’s gay. I knew he was gay! It’s like, there was a part of me, I’m watching “Cabaret” and I’m going, okay, he’s sleeping with Liza Minnelli, but I get the sinking suspicion that this guy is gay. Is that just me being a homophobe? It’s like, no, at the time that they made “Cabaret” the musical, at the time that they made the movie, it’s like, “uhh, no, we can’t make him gay, cause we’re just gonna be driving away box office doing that.” So, that was a moment of triumph. I knew this guy was gay! How about that, even through all of the Hollywood obfuscation. So, just making the point that, it is possible for me to do that. It’s like, I didn’t do that and go, now I have to do a graphic novel about “Berlin Stories”, and again, I wish I could remember the name of the guy. Michael York played him in the movie.
So, and then we finish off with the Matt Dow question. Is that the last…? Yes. “So now that I’ve read Volumes 1 and 2 of The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (plus the mock-ups of Volume 3 and Carson’s attempt at an ending, my question is: How much of the glamourpuss SDOAR narrative still “counts”? Like there’s two pages from issue seven:” “That I believe tie in to the bits of SDOAR that THIS Guy ruined”, Yes, the Charlie Brown Dave Sim.
Matt: I just call him Charlie Sim.
Dave: Charlie Sim? [laughs] There you go! “So, how much of glamourpuss still “counts”? (Also, I’ve started giving away PDFs of glamourpuss to anybody who wants them, I just tell them “If you wanna swing by cerebusdownloads.com and donate what they're worth to you, I won't stop ya!” And everybody says they’re gonna. So if a bunch of money has gotten donated, that’s why. And if NOTHING has gotten donated, it’s because all your “fans” are lying-rotten-no-good-rat-bastards!…” [laughs] And it’s like, okay, there was $1400 Canadian donated this month, at CerebusDownloads, of which, $571 is the Patreon money in US dollars, I get $571 a month from my Patreon supporters. So, thank you Patreon supports to keep me working on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, but there would be no way of telling without bothering Eddie Khanna who is in British Columbia, so he is incredibly soggy right now because it’s still raining in British Columbia. It’s turning into British Dystopia. We’re hoping that that’s coming to an end. There’s supposed to be a series of storms at the end of November, and then it’s gonna be over. But that would require Eddie having to go back and find out, okay, who paid for a download of one of the graphic novels, and who just donated. We could do that, I would say, $1400 Canadian is definitely a high-end CerebusDownloads amount for a month. Usually it’s $1000, $1100, almost completely predictable that it wouldn’t be more of that. And how much of it counts? I mean, it counts in the sense that the two pages that you reproduced there, where I’m talking about Stan Drake saying that Ward Greene conned Margaret Mitchell into writing a serial strip for King Features Syndicate, and that’s all I had to go on, was the interview that Shel Dorf with Stan Drake that was in “Comics Interview”, and that was when I went to the library and went, okay, let’s just get the basic fact on that. When did Margaret Mitchell write this soap opera for King Features Syndicate, and have they got anything on it in books about her? And they had three primary biographies of Margaret Mitchell, and check the indexes in all of those. No King Features Syndicate, no Ward Greene… actually, one of the books had a reference to Ward Greene as being in the preface and I read the preface all the way through, and there’s no Ward Greene in here. So it’s like, as soon as you try to solve a “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” mystery you get four more “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” mysteries. The two pages that you reproduced, I went and looked at my copy of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, the close-to-finished version, and basically those two pages are now about issues 174 to 200 and that’s really when my wrist gave out. And I suspect one of the reasons that my wrist gave out was, okay, if you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna take the two pages that you had done in “Glamourpuss” and turn them into 20 pages in “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, there’s no way you’re going to be able to draw this. So, in the interest of optimizing the possibility of Dave Sim finishing “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, we’re gonna have to disable his wrist so that he can’t draw, and we hope that he figures it out. And it’s like, mhm, too a degree, yes, I have figured it out. I’m still adding stuff in to the narrative, but I’m trying to be really really selective about what I add in. Stay on the point, don’t go into lengthy digressions, and I am getting better at that. The backstop is the fact that Eddie’s got all of the annotations online. It’s not as if research material that I had, that I didn’t have room for in a comics narrative is now lost to posterity. If you get addicted to this story, Eddie’s got… this is one of the reasons that I think it’s raining so much in British Columbia, is, if you’re looking for a short form way of understanding “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, reading the book, and then going to Eddie’s online annotations isn’t going to take you there. It’s just gonna take you deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
Matt: When I go to Charlie Sim, the first page, I’m like, that’s kinda weird, but alright. And then I took a picture, put it on the Cerebus Facebook group going, “does anybody else have this in their copy? Like, is this another misprint this, did the printer screw up somehow? Were the files corrupted, is this a mistake?” And then I got a couple of pages further down, and he’s all over the page, and I went, oh okay, this was a stylistic choice.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: And then, cause I’m hooked up to the internet, I typed in Margaret Mitchell, Ward Greene into Google and one of the first three links was a PDF of a book written by a woman and it’s all about the love affair of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh and their whirlwind romance and their life together and all this. And I went, I betcha Dave’s read this, but it says Ward Greene’s in it. So, I clicked the link and it downloaded the PDF of the book to my computer, and I’m like, okay, and I searched through the book using the find function and Ward Greene shows up on one page in a list of other literary characters that existed in Atlanta at the time. And I’m like, okay, having read “Glamourpuss” and the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” up to this point, Ward Greene probably should be on more than one page of this book.
Dave: Yeah, it’s, that’s one of those, if somebody writes a major book about Wendy and Richard Pini, and “Elfquest”, Dave Sim is probably gonna show up in a footnote [laughs] on one of the pages. Whereas if somebody wrote a book about Dave Sim and “Cerebus”, I’m pretty sure that “Elfquest” would probably get several pages. So that’s one of those…
Matt: It’s there’s this mountain of Margaret Mitchell and how much of the mountain are you gonna shove into a book before you go, “I’m at 400 page and that’s what gets me paid.”
Dave: Right! Or you’re not that thorough about it. There’s the one biography that’s really rather good, and then there’s the other two that are very very enthusiastic but not scrupulously researched.
Matt: And then, the next link I found was, the University of Georgia’s Margaret Mitchell archives, and I went, oh okay. And I’m like, Ward Greene’s listed, but where’s the material? And oh no, this the form you fill out online to submit to have the researchers copy everything and send it to you and you have to pay for it. And I’m like, well I can do that, I got some extra money. And I got as far as the “you have to agree to our terms and conditions” and I started reading the terms and conditions and went, this is the most draconian thing I’ve ever read, and now I know why Charlie Sim is in the book!
Dave: [laughs] That’s what it is! I don’t think it’s sustainable, but Margaret Mitchell was an obsessive about rights, because she got herself a good tanning from staging a play in her living room, while her parents were away, with her friends. Her father was a lawyer, and do you realize this is illegal for you to perform a play that you haven’t paid the playwright to stage and this was a primary trauma for her and everything became obsessive rights rights rights rights. Which is why, pretty much everything that isn’t “Gone with the Wind” if she got her hands on it, she destroyed it. Her brother, Stevens, who inherited all of her material, gave zero permission for anybody to reproduce anything having to do with Margaret Mitchell because that’s the way Margaret would’ve wanted it. The cracks in that facade are becoming huge, but it’s still at the point where a law firm is getting paid an annual retainer out of the “Gone with the Wind” earnings to crush anyone like an insect who dares to do anything with “Gone with the Wind” that they don’t approve. Which is why you ended up with a really bad sequel, and why you end up with nothing but absolutely 100% Margaret Mitchell positive content being approved.
Matt: Being approved, but there is also “The Wind Done Gone” which they tried to sue but they lost because it’s covered under parody and fair use.
Dave: Right! Right. Fair use is expanding at the same time that they’re trying to contract fair use, that there is no such thing unless the designated lawyer tells you it‘s okay, you are breaking the law and you’ll have to endure the full consequences of the law. It’s like, ahh, it’s 2021, it’s not 1940 anymore. You’re not gonna get away with that stuff. But I can talk about Margaret Mitchell without actually quoting Margaret Mitchell. Once I realized, okay, that’s the problem, okay, I can’t not talk about Margaret Mitchell because Stan Drake brought her up, and brought her up as the person who wrote, created “The Heart of Juliet Jones”. Okay, Stan Drake was in the passenger seat when Alex Raymond died, so this is relative, or at least potentially relevant information. I’m not trying to steal [laughs] Margaret Mitchell’s property from the lawyers that have inherited it. I’m just trying to say, okay, did she write “Heart of Juliet Jones”? And it’s like, I think she did, but I think this is the only way that the story adds up, and I have to explain why it is that I came to this conclusion. It’s like, I definitely have read far more about Margaret Mitchell than I would have ever been inclined to, including “Gone with the Wind” itself and her collected letters, and the Margaret Mitchell encyclopedia. Believe me, I would have been completely happy to have never heard the name Margaret Mitchell apart from in passing, for the rest of my life if Stan Drake hadn’t brought this up in a 1984 interview.
Matt: The spoiler alert for the people that hadn’t finished reading the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”…
Dave: Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert!
Matt: There’s still a couple of them, but the inference I take from the graphic novel I’ve read, based on the research Dave’s done, is that, if Margaret Mitchell was involved in “The Heart of Juliet Jones”, it’s because Ward Greene either genuinely out of concern for her, or seeing an opportunity and being a skeevy little jerk, kind of sort of blackmailed her because her ex-husband once she got famous supposedly was gonna write a book about “My life with Margaret Mitchell” and the fact she was deathly afraid of that man, as evident by the fact that she slept with a gun on the nightstand, and after he committed suicide, someone noticed the gun disappeared. So Ward Greene, getting a copy of the manuscript or hearing about the possibility of this manuscript, contacted Margaret Mitchell and said, “hey, I’ll do you a solid and keep this from getting printed cause I’m part of the Hearst Organization and ya know, Charles Foster Kane runs the world..”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: “And in return, could you maybe come up with a pitch for a comic strip, then we’ll give ya money and you’ll get more, you’ll supplement your income. And it’ll be all above board.” And I’m assuming that the research shows, because Charlie Sim won’t let us see it because Charlie Sim doesn’t want to get Dave Sim sued, and a lawsuit would come… trust me…
Dave: Uh, I’m not sure that it would. I mean, it’s the same experience that we’re having with Disney and Marvel and DC with “Cerebus in Hell?” People have different priorities now. The idea of suing somebody for unfair use of copyright material, that ship done sailed. We’re in the internet age now, where, no, if I’m interested in this, I want to know more about this, and I’m not really interested in what you as a lawyer want me to be allowed to read. And, I can’t imagine in our totally woke time period that there’s exactly millions and millions of dollars flying into the Margaret Mitchell account anymore. It’s like, people are getting far far more ambivalent about “Gone with the Wind” with every passing year and every passing day. I’m sure, if you really want to read “Gone with the Wind” you can download it on Kindle or whatever for nickels and dimes. But that means, that’s all that the Mitchell estate is getting, as opposed to the 50 years prior to the internet when “Gone with the Wind” was a license to print money. Like every year it sold X number of copies, more in some years than in other years, but it’s its own mystical kind of entity. Part of what Ward Greene was attracted to it by was the fact that it made the world sympathetic to the Confederacy, to the cause of the South. Which it did. I mean, if you watch the “Gone with the Wind” movie and you realize how obsessive so many women are to this day…
Matt: My sister-in-law is a giant “Gone with the Wind” fan. For the past few years, Paula’s sister, for around Christmas, we’ll go to Hallmark, and they’ll have the latest “Gone with the Wind” movie tie-in ornament and Paula will buy it for her sister. Cause her sister really likes “Gone with the Wind” and I’m like, are you sure she really likes… “Oh yeah, she loves ‘Gone with the..’”. I’ve never seen her watch “Gone with the Wind”, are you sure she likes “Gone with the Wind”? Oh yeah, yeah, she love “Gone with the Wind”.
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: It’s one of those, if she really liked it, I’d think that we would have seen it at her house at least once.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Like “hey, we’re not doing anything, let’s watch this long movie that came out in the 40s that everybody loved!” I’d be like, I probably seen it when I was a kid. All I know about “Gone with the Wind” is that at one point, Scarlett makes a dress out of the drapes because she doesn’t have enough money to buy a new dress, and Carol Burnett famously and fabulously parodied that scene, and that’s what I remember. [laughs]
Dave:Right, right. I’ve seen “Gone with the Wind” and I retained so little of it that it’s like ,okay, I’m obviously not the target audience for this. Colleen Doran was, and I assume still is, one of the world’s biggest “Gone with the Wind” fans. I hate to simplify it to Scarlett O’Hara wannabes, it’s like, Margaret Mitchell was appalled by the number of women who saw Scarlett O’Hara as a role model. [laughs] It’s like, she’s not a role model, she’s the most loathsome person that’s ever existed on the fact of the Earth! It’s Margaret Mitchell being, coldbloodedly, critical of herself and fictionalizing herself. All anybody cares about is, “did they get back together?” It’s like, get back together?! The guy raped her! [laughs] It’s like, “yeah, I know I love that scene”, it’s like, what do you mean you love that scene? Are you insane? But that’s right at the end of my section on Margaret Mitchell, in the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. One of the digressions that I had to get to. But the larger point is, there’s not tons of money coming in on “Gone with the Wind” anymore. They’re trying to figure out, I mean, if they’ve got Christmas decorations with “Gone with the Wind” themes on them, they’re going, “uhh, maybe this is a place where we can make some money.”
Matt: The question would be, how much of the movie does the Mitchell estate get royalties on and how much is it the studio that made the movie going, “hey, we own this in perpetuity and we can do whatever we want to it and Margaret Mitchell’s dead and it’s not like she can sue us” and the contract probably was very much “we’re giving you money to adapt the book and once it’s adapted, it’s ours.”
Dave: Right, right. I mean, that’s standard operating procedure. There’s probably a percentage just to keep the Mitchell estate happy and keep the legion of Margaret Mitchell fans from storming the barricades of whoever owns the movie now. I don’t know if Turner broadcasting owns it, or who it is ended up owning the “Gone with the Wind” movie, but yes, it’s not making exactly a fortune either. It’s like, the people that like that sort of thing, really really like that sort of thing. But it was the end of an era. The movie was 1939, the book was 1936. Defenses of slavery and defenses of the Confederacy were really coming to an end even at that point. This was a kind of a last hurrah. I’m just getting to that point now where Ward Greene is… Joe Connolly had died, so Ward Greene is the new general manager of King Features Syndicate. I mean, with all of his occult links and stuff like that, he definitely had this comic art metaphysics, all good things come to he who waits. And one of the first things on his desk is Disney is doing “Song of the South”, and King Features Syndicate is gonna do a comic strip adaptation of “Song of the South”, Uncle Remus and the Br’er Rabbit stories. And you can just see [laughs] newly minted general manager and unrepentant Confederate Ward Greene licking his chops at this “Song of the South” adaptation. So, instead of what they did with “Snow White”, which was just to do a series of comic strips adapting the “Snow White” cartoon, he starts a year ahead of time. It’s like, Disney is telling them “Song of the South” is coming out in 1946. It’s like, “we’ll, we’re gonna start in 1945 and we’re gonna do Uncle Remus and we’re gonna do genuine southern voices! And this isn’t just gonna adapt the film, this is gonna be carved in stone at King Features Syndicate as a comic strip that we stand by.” It actually lasted until 1972, the Uncle Remus comic strip. That’s Ward Greene’s comic art metaphysics in action.
Okay, we’re coming up on two hours, so I think… have you got anything more to add there, or?
Matt: Other than, apparently I’m getting pulled into weird Dave Sim comic art metaphysics. My Aunt collects Little Golden Books.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And she’s the oldest of my Mom’s siblings, and she’s got a couple hundred Little Golden Books, and it’s all pre-barcode. Any Little Golden Book that didn’t have a barcode printed on it is what she’s after, cause those are the older books that actually have value. So she was, I guess, buying online auctions of kid’s books, or going to rummage sales and buying boxes of kid’s books, looking for stuff she collected. And she’s got to be in her 80s now, and her kids, have flat out… she’s got five kids and all five said, “we do not want any of the Little Golden Books. This is your obsession, not ours. When you die we are going to get rid of all of them.” And she’s, I’m not gonna say end of life, but she’s closer to the end than the beginning, so she’s, “hey, you guys don’t want this stuff, I will offload it family members that do” And I have two little kids, so she came to visit my Mom and brought two boxes of Little Golden Books. And I was at my Mom’s house and she’s like, “oh yeah, Susie brought these.” And we’re looking through the boxes of books and one of them is a 1951 adaptation of “Song of the South”, the Br’er Rabbit stories as a kid’s book, and I’m like, we’re taking that and Paula’s like, why, I’m like, that’s worth money! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] How about that? How about that.
Matt: And the other book that’s in the stack, cause Paula was the one looking through them, she held it up, and I went yeah we’re taking that for definite too, was “Bugs Bunny and the Indians”.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I’m like, yeah?
Dave: That’s sick! That’s sick!
Matt: I’m like, that’s another one, that’s very much “Mulberry Street” and has been canceled, so yep, we’ll take that, cause when “Mulberry Street” got “banned” the half-priced book store pulled all their copies out of the children’s section and now they’re in the rare book section.
Dave: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: Because, as soon as they said you can’t buy it anymore, oh well, this copy that was $2 last week is now $50 because you can’t buy it anymore.
Dave: Right, right. [laughs] It’s the same thing as, if you try to eliminate fossil fuels, all you do is drive the price up and make it more lucrative for OPEC to sell their fossil fuels to new good-hearted green-minded people at much higher prices than you’d be paying if you just minded domestically and cared about mitigating the damage of fracking and whatnot. I don’t think the Russians are really too concerned about the harmful effects of fracking. They’re more interested in having Germany by the short and curlies, which they now have. We all need to pray for a nice warm winter in Germany, cause if it’s a cold one, oh boy, is that gonna be a cold war mess.
Matt: Again.
Dave: Okay. I guess that will do it for Please Hold for Dave Sim for December 2021.
Matt: Yes! Other than the secret message from Little Orphan Aardvark herself, but I record that after we’re done talking.
Dave: Okay! That’s good. That’s alright. Everybody get your decoder wheels out, and don’t forget to finish your ovaltine tonight.
Matt: [laughs] Yes. The best part is, I’m not 100% sure what this message is cause I typed it out and I don’t have the original English, I just have the code.
Dave: [laughs] Okay! Well, you get your decoder ring out as well. And get Paula to get her’s out, and it’s probably got something to do with “Bugs Bunny and the Indians”.
Matt: That book, I haven’t even looked at that book. That book’s probably gonna be so offensive!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. But it’s of it’s time period. You gotta be very careful cause you’re mortgaging your own culture, where if you let them do it now, okay, everything that you think should be preserved for posterity, “uh, no, we eliminated that in 2050 cause the right-thinking people just wouldn’t allow that to exist anymore.” And everything’s gonna be laundered down to the level of Little Golden Books
Matt: I’m trying to remember what the quote is, or where the quote’s from. One of George Carlin’s books, I think the first one, the preface is a quote from, I forget who. The book is I think “The Song of Bone and Sand”, but I could be wrong on that. But the quote is, “we won’t have meaningful communication until we can boil all communication down to seven words.” And if you know George Carlin… [laughs]
Dave: There’s a specific seven words that you can’t say on television, and you can still say it on the internet.
Matt: Yeah, but it’s one of those, cause it ties into the “1984”, “we’re gonna cancel everything and get the dictionary down to 100 words and the doublespeak is gonna be so great.” I understand that, yes, the Chinaman in “Mulberry Street” could be considered offensive to Chinamen. But at the same time, that book was written in what year?
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: If you put it in the cultural context of, “at the time” yes, it’s a horribly racist depiction today, but at the time it was fine. And yep, okay, “we at the Seuss estate apologize to anyone of Asian descent who is upset by this” but at the same time, Theodore Geisel’s dead. It’s not like he’s gonna make another book where the little boy who eats with sticks is gonna go off on a fun adventure and ruin the world for people. It’s not like there’s a new Seuss book coming out next month.
Dave: Yeah, and I really have trouble with all of that stuff, because it’s, well, Chinamen do eat with sticks. [laughs] I mean, that’s… at least, at some period in time, they looked like that, because otherwise he wouldn’t have drawn them like that. Something can be offensive but it can also be iconic at the same time. You can’t arbitrate, “okay this is iconic and this is offensive”. The more absolutist you get about these things, the more ridiculous you make yourself. It’s the same as, isn’t the hit play “Hamilton” cultural appropriation? Uhh, none of those people were black. What are black people doing playing these really famous…
Matt: Really white. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Really white, iconic pioneers of freedom as an absolute. It’s like, I would never try and cause grief about it because it’s ridiculous to score brownie points off of complete misapprehended viewpoints in the first place, but it’s like, can we just retire this whole cultural appropriation thing and just say, as long as “Hamilton” exists and as long as they’re selling tickets to it, there’s no such thing as cultural misappropriation. Just go F yourself. I have no interest in talking to you if you’re wanna say, “you’re not allowed to use this as a raw material.” It’s like, who died and left you king?! Okay, that’ll do it for now, Matt, so best wishes to Paula and Janis Pearl and…
Matt: The last thing I’m gonna say about that is, if anybody else really wants to hear more from Dave about cultural misapprpriation, pick up “Kurtz vs Kurtz” in 2022 from Aardvark-Vanaheim.
Dave: Yes! [laughs] I’m really happy with that one. It’s trouble on a stick, but…
Matt: It’s not shameless self-promotion if you can frame it right. [laughs]
Dave: Yes! Yes. And you said it, I didn’t. Okay,
Matt: Alright.
Dave: Have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave. Bye.
Dave: Buh-bye.
[line clicks]
Matt: Okay! Everyone who’s in the Little Orphan Annie Secret Society, it is time, once again, at the end of Please Hold for Dave Sim, for the Secret Message to the members of the Secret Society. Set your decoder wheels to 1 = 1. Are you ready? Aardvark’s counting on you. L, M, Z, Z, yin-yang, P, V, L, infinity. Space. D, E, skull & bones, Q, D. Space. D, Taurus, E, Taurus, Q, Taurus, Infinity, Taurus, Infinity, Taurus. Space. A, Z, A, X, Z, M, infinity, Taurus. Space. D, P, yin-yang, yin-yang, Z. Space. E, M, S, hashtag, Q, V. Space. Q, Q, M, F, heart, Q, M, copyright. Space. [sighs] Gotta write shorter messages. V, Z, Z, F, infinity. Space. Skull & bones, E, spade, Virgo. Space. Sagittarius, yin-yang, E. Space. L, Z, yin-yang. Space. Q. Space. V, Z, club. Space. M, E, D, D. Space. E, T. Space. Yin-yang, E, P, D, Z, yin-yang. Space. S, Q, S, Z, M. Space. T, E, M. Space. Hashtag, Z, M, Taurus, Taurus, Taurus, Capricorn.
Remember, Aardvark’s counting on you. And uhh, last month I think we tied this into the contest to get the 10/13 Cerebus Aardvark Short Sword & Flames cover and everybody that’s members of the Secret Society that sent in the correct translation got a point or something. It’s been a long month. So we’ll go… three points if you can remind me what I said last month, one point if you translate and you don’t, and five points if you’re not a member of the Secret Society but you send an email to Momentofcerebus@gmail.com saying “screw you and your circle, the little Asian kid in ‘Mulberry Street’ is a racist.” So anybody sends that, gets five points. And maybe next month, I’ll figure out how the contest works and who can win. Alright, last one out, turn off the lights. Don’t take any wooden nickles. Matt Dow, out!
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
The Waverly Press made "wax packs",
https://www.ebay.com/itm/257127266166each of the five packs has a card of the wax pack, and a new sticker card. They're $20 plus $7 bucks shipping. (More if overseas? I would presume...) Supplies are limited, so don't wait...
And speaking of the Waverly Press, the Kickstarter for the '82 Tour Book is in "prelaunch" status. Click here to be notified when it goes live.
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AND, Robert Jeschonek is back with Volume 2 of Legends of Indie Comics - Words Only. Dave was in Volume 1, and he's got another all star line-up for this one.
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Tim Gagne sent in:
Crownfundr for Nick Crane
Already net its goal but pretty cheap for a collection that finishes the story all these years later -
https://crowdfundr.com/nickcraine?ref=cr_3EI341_ab_18OUE1
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:
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
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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 October I-don't-know-what-dates-yet-teenth.*
*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:
- slabbed comics.
- BATMAN AND CEREBUS ILLUSTRATION DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #112 - #113 PAGE 17 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
Thanks to Steve for sending the link.
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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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Here's a thing:
.jpg) |
| Click for bigger. |
Here for USAians.
Here for Everbodyelseians.
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Next Time: Jen. It better be Jen...