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.
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Matt: Hi, everybody. Due to technical difficulties beyond my control, the first few minutes of this month’s Please Hold for Dave Sim got deleted by the app. It just stopped recording all on its own. I got two segments that were just four minutes long. Dave’s talkin’, I got nothin’. So, what Dave is talking about when this thing starts is Rich L of Peoria, Illinois wanting a Cerebus plush toy, and either Rich or Ben Hobbs found a place in China that can do a thousand Cerebus stuffed toys for $10,000. So the big question is, after Dave sells 200 of them, what do we do with the other 800? And… let’s begin!
Dave: …Vanaheim participating with this. We’ve got too many other things to do, but I did want to put out the suggestion of maybe there could be Cerebus fan consortium that would produce a Cerebus plush doll. I mean, Benjamin pretty much on his odd-knocky decided to go ahead and do “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers. I certainly wasn’t going to do “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers, but Benjamin’s been doing that. I can’t see why the most dedicated Cerebus fans interested in Cerebus plush toys, three or four of them couldn’t get together and say, “okay, we’re gonna figure out how we can do this” and they can do it with our blessing. What about you? Are you in the state of mind of wanting to be a partner in Cerebus plush toys?
Matt: Yes? Kind of?
Dave: Are you?!
Matt: I mean, it all depends on how much money I’d have to throw in.
Dave: Yeah. I don’t think Rich in Peoria is… he’s had some health concerns over the last while, so I don’t think he’s be doing any of the physical lifting and packaging and shipping and stuff like that. But, ya know, that’s one of those things, maybe he’s the money guy. I don’t know, how’s Rich doing in the money end of things? So, these are all possibilities. Like, I’m trying to be very open minded about the Cerebus intellectual property. If it’s something that I can’t picture Aardvark-Vanaheim doing on its own, and Cerebus plush toys seem to be in the category to me, I don’t want it to ever be ruled out as a possibility. So I’ll throw it out as possibility there, maybe you and Janis Pearl and Bullwinkle and Paula can be the packaging and wrapping Cerebus plush toys people. Have you got room for 850 Cerebus plush toys over there?
Matt: [clears throat] Yes-ish?
Dave: [laughs] There probably wouldn’t be room for Bullwinkle, then, but hey, it really depends on how devoted anybody is to the idea of a Cerebus plush toy.
Matt: At that point, it would turn into, either Paula is gonna decided to be on board with this, or I’m gonna have lots of signs saying “just don’t open that closet”.
Dave: Right. [laughs] And if you do, make sure you have alerted the authorities first. Okay! So, yeah, I wanted to get caught up on the Cerebus plush toys questions, particularly for Rich L, since he was the one that brought it up. By all means, keep looking into this, Rich, I’m sure Cerebus fandom would thank you if you were the person who was able to revive the Cerebus plush toy from… I don’t think that they have been done since the early 1980s? So…
Matt: So it was a thousand for how much?
Dave: Uhh, $10,000.
Matt: [grunts] Okay, everybody start digging through the couch cushions.
Dave: Yes. You can have a huge consortium. 150-- 2000-- uhh, 8000 Cerebus fans and their couch cushion money. Okay! So that takes care of that one. I wanted to say thank you to everyone who participated in the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter that just came to an end. I had everybody not to tell me how it was doing and see if that helped the result, if Dave Sim had no idea how the Kickstarter is doing, and arguably that happened, since it came out to $35,366. Evidently Dagon is going to be doing his IndieGogo follow-up things, so if you missed the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter while it was going on, you’re gonna have one more try on IndieGogo.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: And, I know what else I wanna get too far into this, one of the other things that’s going on right now, is I’m trying to come up with stuff for the Kickstarters and I’m gonna elbow my way in on Benjamin and Laura’s “Cerebus in Hell?” hardcovers Kickstarter and get them to offer a shrink-wrapped package of the first six “Cerebus in Hell?” volumes autographed. And we’re also talking about coming up with a giftcard. Well, not a giftcard, a greeting card, that would be like you could get a Cerebus birthday card, or a Cerebus Christmas card, or a Cerebus unrelated card, or something that’s totally related to Cerebus. Like “Happy Baby Throwing Day” card, and I’m gonna be asking Cerebus fans in general, if you can come up with a laugh out loud, or laugh my effing A OL, however that goes, birthday card or Christmas card idea, we would definitely be sending you some free birthday or Christmas cards because this is something that I would like to see ongoing with the Kickstarter. The whole collection of greeting cards available starting with like one or two for each Kickstarter and eventually getting to the point where, if you finally crack down… give up the ghost and go, “okay, I gotta have these Christmas cards”, we’ll have a whole collection of them for you available. So, that, I think covers everything from me pre-Please Hold for Dave Sim. How about you, you got anything else that we need to add in here, first?
Matt: The only greeting card that pops into my head is, Cerebus in Hell, saying, “kinda defeats the point, doesn’t it?” and a big banner over it that says, “Happy Arbor Day”.
Dave: [laughs] That would be good. See, that’s exactly the kind of thing that I’m looking for. I think we can do this the same way that Sandeep and I started “Cerebus in Hell?” which is the funniest ideas go first. So anybody’s got any idea, throw them out there. I think we’ll know when we hit the LOL card idea, because everybody will go, “oh, that one. That one. I would definitely buy that one.” Okay! So that brings us to, yeah, you said right here, “Is it really Please Hold time already?” These are coming up faster and faster, aren’t they?
Matt: It was last weekend, I wasn’t gonna work, because it’s the first weekend of October, I have to be ready for Dave, and I’m like, wait wait, no, the first is after Thursday, so I still got a week.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And still, it’s right here. “How I expected to open was, ‘We begin, I hope, with a phone message from Jeff Seiler.’ Obviously we most likely aren’t now.” Yes, this is our first Please Hold for Dave Sim without our traditional Jeff Seiler question leading off. I figured we’re mostly just gonna be remembering Jeff, but one guy who did send in questions is somebody who we couldn’t do Please Hold for Dave Sim without, Michael R. of Easton, Pennsylvania. Yes, so we’ll get to Michael’s question. I wanted to ask you, have you heard anything from Minneapolis or your contacts there? You said that there wasn’t even an obituary?
Matt: I’ve been looking, and I have not found one yet. Somebody on Jeff’s Facebook who went to Oral Roberts’ University with him said a post going, “did anybody hear anything?” and I commented, saying, I hadn’t heard anything but ya know, if anybody hears anything, let us know. And that’s all I’ve heard. I haven’t heard anything from anybody in Minneapolis yet.
Dave: Okay. Alright.
Matt: It’s my new, how did I phrase it to my Dad? My new understanding of Hell is I have to answer it everytime it rings cause I don’t know if this is gonna be a call about Jeff from somewhere in the world, or if it’s a spam call, and every single time it’s a spam call.
Dave: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, there you go, that’s 21st century Hell right there. Okay, I was gonna ask you, when Jeff was living in Wisconsin, how long was he living there and how far was he from you guys?
Matt: Um, I don’t remember how long, I think it was about a year, and then his prospects dried up and he got an invitation to come move to Minneapolis where it’d be cheaper. But he lived in Manitowoc, which is seven miles from my house.
Dave: Right.
Matt: It’s the next town over. What had happened was, for the people that don’t know, Jeff met a girl through Dave, which is one of those things that sounds like a good idea if you’re a Cerebus fan and sounds really bad idea if you’re Dave Sim. [laughs]
Dave: Uh, yeah, I’ll qualify that one that he didn’t relocated, but you keep going with the story and then I’ll chuck some bits in as well.
Matt: So, what had happened was, there was a teacher in Canada who used “Judenhass” in her classroom and wrote a letter to Dave saying “I did this”. And had all the kids write letters to Dave, basically discussing “Judenhass”, and Dave kindly responded to all the letters, and corrected all the grammar, pronunciations and misspellings, and there instead of their, which makes a lot more sense if you’re reading this.
Dave: Oh, I forgot that part. Thank you! [laughs] Keep going.
Matt: And then, because Jeff was in the beginnings of proofreading, because he had discussed proofreading with you, in specifically, he had sent 60 pages of “Collected Letters” Vol 1, hand corrected. Took the book, hand corrected the pages, ripped them out, and then mailed them to you, before you said, “Jeff, please knock it off.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: So you forwarded all these letters to Jeff as a, “hey, did I do okay?” or something to that effect. And Jeff was able to piece together who this lady was and what school she was at and sent a letter because there was another teacher that Jeff knew that did the same thing with “Judenhass” and basically just wanted to say, “hey, this is an idea and I like how you did it, this is how this other guy did it.” And they started writing letters to each other, and then they started talking on the phone, and then she said, “come live with me in Canada” and Jeff said, “okay.”
Dave: Right. I will interrupt at that point and say, I did tell Jeff, you don’t want to be hooking up through something relating to the Holocaust. [laughs] Because, this teacher, yeah, she did kind of the same thing with me, and said, “ya know, I really appreciate what you did for my class, and we’re going to be going to Stratford, Ontario where they have the Shakespeare festival and would you be interested in being my guest with my class at the Shakespeare festival?” And I politely declined because it just seemed weird to me. It was fine to have dealings with a teacher about “Judenhass” and her class about “Judenhass”, but that was starting to sound too much like a Holocaust date. So [laughs] I was very emphatic with Jeff, you don’t not want to hook up with somebody through the Holocaust. So, back to you, again.
Matt: So, Jeff, cause he was living in… I can’t remember if he was still in Texas, or if he had moved to Nebraska, or Missouri, but he was living further south than me. So, since I was on the way to Canada, he stopped by to say, “hey, I’m gonna stay at your place for the night. A quick little visit.” And he explained about what’s going on, and “okay I’m moving to Canada” and I’m like, uhh okay. Like, he had gotten rid of everything he owned except for what fit in his minivan.
Dave: Oh, I forgot that part! Okay.
Matt: So, all his worldly possessions are in his van, and he’s going to Canada to meet this woman he’s never seen. Ya know, she sent pictures and stuff, but he’s never seen her in person before.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he gets to the border, and they say, “purpose of your visit, business or pleasure?” and he says, “I’m moving here.” Which is a much different response than what the border guards were expecting. And they don’t look at your passport like they look at your passport when you’re visiting, when say you’re moving there. That starts a whole new ball of wax. And one of the rules in Canada is you can’t come in if you have a DUI or an OUI on your record going back 10 years. And Jeff had a DUI.
Dave: Yep.
Matt: So now Jeff can’t move to Canada because he’s not allowed in for 10 years after the date, and I think it was 14 months before he would able to get in. So he convinced the border patrol to let him come in for two weeks so that he could go to her place, unload his van, explain the situation… live there for two weeks, then had to come back, so he established himself in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. And he called me to say, “hey, I couldn’t get into Canada” and I’m like, what did you do? And he’s like, “I showed up at the border with a van full of everything I owned, including furniture and said I’m moving to Canada.” And I said, what are you stupid? You don’t do that!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And went, “So, what?” and I’m like, haven’t you ever seen “Hogan’s Heroes”? You don’t sneak everybody out of the camp the first day, you gotta slowly get into it! And he laughed so hard, he’s like, “repeat that again so I can write it down.”
Dave: Right. [laughs]
Matt: So, he had the two weeks…
Dave: It was an imperfect analogy, but funny, and kind of related to the Holocaust again.
Matt: And I forgot about the whole that he met her through the Holocaust thing, so when I said it, it was just a, hey no you don’t sneak everybody out of the camp at once, and now that we’re talking about, it kind of fits the through-line of, “hey Jeff, don’t date somebody you met through the Holocaust.”
Dave: Right, right. This is what I call metaphysics, where it’s all of these things resonate through this. So, keep going.
Matt: So, Jeff’s in Michigan, she comes to visit but it’s like an hour and a half, two hour drive one way from her place, but she’s coming on the weekends fairly frequently, then sort of not so frequently, and everytime she shows up, they’re together but she’s kinda pissed off about her personal life back in Canada. She’s got a couple of kids that she’s having problems with. And then, with like two months before Jeff’s gonna be sprung to be allowed into Canada, she doesn’t show up when she’s supposed to and he can’t get a hold of her and when he finally does , it’s “oh, I’m not coming. I’m breaking up with you.” Oh, in the meantime, during the two weeks he was in Canada, she took him to Ontario to talk to an immigration lawyer and paid the retainer which was like $2500, I think?
Dave: Something like that.
Matt: I mean, it was not pocket change. It was not, hey I can afford the Cerebus stuffed toy money. It was…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It was a significant amount of money.
Dave: Yes, yes. And a significant drive. If you don’t know, the distance between Sault Ste Marie, Michigan and Toronto, that’s kind of a commitment, as well.
Matt: So, during the 12 months Jeff’s in Michigan and she’s coming to visit, she’s paying money for the lawyer, and the lawyer is doing what they can to fix things, like Jeff had a traffic violation in Connecticut, and he had to get it taken care of before they’d let him in, and so he contacted Connecticut and Connecticut had no idea what he was talking about.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah. Keep going.
Matt: So, then, cause she’s giving him all of this money, and she’s not asking, she’s just, “oh okay, I’ll pay for that”, “oh, okay, I’ll pay for that.” But then when she shows up they’re having fights about money because, “you just want me for my money” and he’s like, “no, I don’t, I’ve offered to pay numerous times, you refuse every single time.” So finally, she breaks up with him , and it turns out she’s got a friend named Wally, and the only reason I remember this is because this story was going to be in “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” #5, and Jeff had written it up, and I said, I will draw it. And he’s like, “okay”, and what he had given me, there were some typographic errors… it didn’t read like Jeff, is the best way I can put it. Like, he repeats himself a couple of times, it was no polished and finished. And I’m like, you want to go over this once more? And Jeff said, “oh yeah, okay” and then I hadn’t ever gotten anything from him. But the reason the name Wally sits in my mind is cause when he told me about it, I’m like, okay, so Cowboy Wally, and he’s like, “what?” I’m like, “Cowboy Wally”, have you ever read the graphic novel by Kyle Baker? And he’s like, “no”, and I’m like, oh okay, find a copy, you’ll understand.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Cause in my head, in the story, whenever Wally shows up, it’s I’m just gonna trace Kyle Baker’s Cowboy Wally and that’s the guy she’s dating.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: So, her friend Wally, it turns out is more than a friend, and basically she was dumping Jeff for him, and Jeff, a lot of this is supposition on Jeff’s part that he told me, but this is what Jeff believed, is that Wally put the moves on her and stole her away. So Jeff’s basically in Michigan for no reason, cause now she’s not even coming to visit, so he comes to visit me, and okay, shows up at my apartment, comes in, sits on the couch and says, “I’m moving here”, and I looked at Paula and went, okay, and Paula looked at me like, “Not our place!”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I had to find a real polite way of telling Jeff, you can stay the weekend, but come Monday, you’ve got to find a spot. So I helped him find his first apartment, which it turned out, was one of the most expensive apartment complexes in the county. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have sent him there. And he lived there for a while. And then he moved to a place downtown in Manitowoc, which was a block away from the strip club where he had his fun adventure.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And he lived there for a while, and then things weren’t going good, he couldn’t find a job, he had gotten another DUI at the strip club.
Dave: Which was the “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” story, wasn’t it?
Matt: Oh yeah, that was… when he told me the story for that, I’m like, so is the end of the story, or is this the second story? Because it kind of sounds like it’s both.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: The short answer is, or the short version of the story, Jeff’s at the strip club. His bartender’s name is Larceny, and she swears that her brother’s name is Justice.
Dave: Right. I forgot that part, too! [laughs] That’s really resonant stuff.
Matt: So, Jeff has a couple of drinks, watches a couple of dances, decides to go home, and he has had a few beers. This isn’t sober Jeff going home, this is Jeff with a little bit of a nod on, and he gets in his van, pulls out of the parking lot, and the strip club’s on a corner. The East West street is both ways, but the North South street, if you turn North is one way going South. At the intersection it becomes two way, for the South of the intersection. So Jeff pulls out, heading West, is at immediately at the stop light, and as he gets on the road, there’s immediately a cop car behind him. And he panicked, and immediately turned right to get out of the way of the cop car, which didn’t have its lights and sirens on, it just was behind him. And turned right onto a one way, going the wrong way.
Dave: A criminal mastermind!
Matt: So the police officer, whose lights were off, suddenly had his lights on, and Jeff’s telling this going, “well you know where the club is, right?” I’m like, yes, let me guess, you got a tour of the police station and the county jail and the courthouse, right? And he’s like, “yeah” and they’re all within a block of the strip club, aren’t they? And he’s like, “yeah”.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because the police station is a block North of the strip club, and the jail and the courthouse is a block East and it was one of those, yep, okay, you’re not driving, and he didn’t blow zero, so “you’re coming with us”, took a block, booked him, took him two blocks, put him in jail for the night. And he called me the next day to say, “hey, this is what happened”, and I’m going, what were you thinking?!
Dave: There wasn’t a lot of thinking to it.
Matt: So he gets another DUI which means he can’t go to Canada for another 10 years.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And in the meantime, she is contacting him, saying, “come get your crap”, so there was a two week period where he hasn’t been sentenced yet, so he can get into Canada for two weeks, so that’s when he came to visit you, and on the way back, swing by her place and get all his stuff, and she had said, “I don’t want to see you, but I don’t lock my doors, so you can just come in and get whatever.” And he’s telling me that, and I’m going, so you brought somebody with you? “No.” What if she had answered the door with a shotgun, Jeff? “Well, I didn’t think of that, Matt.”
Dave: Right. Right. I can jump in at this point and say, yes, Jeff phoned to tell me that this was the situation and can he come by for a visit at the Off-White House. And it’s like, uhh, yeah, don’t really see the logistics on that, but if that’s what you want to do. This was definitely a relationship that really, really consumed him. You know, I would say “relationship”, but definitely he was all in on this. Which is another one of those bad resonances with the Holocaust. Whatever situation you’re in going into this, you’re not gonna be in the same situation coming out of this. And I remember he came here and it’s like, well okay, not a lot of people get to visit Dave and the Off-White House. What do you want to see? And the first thing that he wants to see was, anything that I had in the correspondence files from this Canadian teacher. [laughs] It’s like, oh man, there but for the grace of God, go I.
Matt: I should footnote here, for the audience at home, who’re going, “he what?” When Jeff communicated with her, she said that she had been writing letters to Dave, until Dave basically said “please stop” and got, quote according to her, “mean” and wrote a letter that offended her so badly that she set fire to all the letters that Dave had sent her.
Dave: Oh, I forgot that part too. Yes.
Matt: And Jeff, being Jeff, was what could Dave have said that would have made her set them on fire? To which, I say, well, Jeff, depends on strongly she didn’t understand what the word “no” meant.
Dave: Right, right. Okay, so…
Matt: The first thing Jeff wanted was the letters, and you said?
Dave: Ahh, basically, I said, you have to narrow it down a little bit. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of when all of these things are taking place. They’re kind of incidental to my own life, and it’s like he knew pretty much when it would have been happening, and it’s like, okay. I pulled out those correspondence boxes and started going through them, and went, yeah, here’s an 8 page letter, here’s a 7 page letter, and Jeff sat down and read them. And it’s like, uhh [laughs] this has come to an end. This is probably not something you should even be vaguely interested in, but there you go. There’s the letters. She was just one of those, on and on and on about whatever it was, and me going, this is in a completely different category from the professional interaction that we were having, which was, “can I teach your graphic novel ‘Judenhass’ to my class?” and I went, yes, by all means, no problem. I think I even sent her a class-sized set, so that everybody could have their own copy.
Matt: When I describe Jeff to people, and I’ll be talking about my friend Jeff, people are like, “what’s he like?” I’m like, for every story Jeff had that ended with, “and that’s how I got front row center at the Rolling Stones”, there’s two stories that end with, “and that’s why I called you for bail money.”
Dave: [laughs] Yep, yeah. I mean, cruel but fair. Cruel but fair.
Matt: I’m gonna miss him horribly, I mean we didn’t talk often, but when we did, it was always, ya know, worth it. That’s the best way I can put it. After he moved to Minneapolis, we only talked a handful of times, but every single time he called me, it was one of these, I’ll take an hour to talk to Jeff.
Dave: Yes, yes, unquestionably. He had this extensive background in so many different areas, that it didn’t really matter what you talking to Jeff about on the phone. He had something interesting and relevant to say about it.
Matt: The Rolling Stones story is where we said, you need to write these down and do a comic, and he went, “what?” And we’re like, the stories you’re telling us, you need to turn into a comic book. This is entertaining. And of course, the first story he chose was the first night he needed bail, and that became “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” #1.
Dave: Yeah, that was one of the regrets that I got, was on my list of things to talk to Jeff about was, do you still have the digital files for “Cerebus Readers in Crisis”, so that, maybe even just Print on Demand, we could do a collection of “Cerebus Readers in Crisis”. And I regretted that he didn’t keep going with that, because speaking as the sort of epicenter of Cerebus readers, they do have predilection for very interesting crises in their lives, wouldn’t you say that that’s an accurate description?
Matt: Yes.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: I mean, the year that I didn’t get to go to S.P.A.C.E. because Paula and I bought tickets on the discount airline that disappeared when we got to the airport. By the time we got to my Aunt’s place where we were spending the night because we weren’t going to Columbus, I went, yeah, this is a Cerebus Readers in Crisis. I can see all the mistakes I made, in the order I made them.
Dave: Right, and there you are.
Matt: [laughs] And that was why I’m in issue 4.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: I want to say that he had had to have digital files that he had given to the various contributors of their stories. Cause I think Steve Peters has a copy of his.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But when and if I get a hold of anybody and find out what’s happened with Jeff and his estate, I’m gonna say, this is a project Jeff worked on, if you have no interest in it, I would like the rights, Jeff’s share of the rights, just so we can do a collection and get it out there, cause that’s what he was working on, the past however many years.
Dave: Right.
Matt: He didn’t think he was gonna get #5 done before he got the collection done.
Dave: Right. Yeah, that brings up an interesting question, which is, I think A Moment of Cerebus and Cerebus fandom really had the lion’s share of Jeff’s attention after he retired, but absolutely no legal claim. I mean, this is where his heart and soul was, and I think there are more people here who are concerned about Jeff and concerned about Jeff’s memory, in the real world that just doesn’t wash. Family having a priority over everything else. So the fact that Jeff died in testate, whatever you can manage to find out, and whatever contact you can have in Minneapolis with the people who really have genuine participation in this, it’s gonna be completely on their good grace whatever we even find out about what’s going on. And I think that’s just one of those everything’s baked in that way. Ya know, people listening, it’s an arduous process. Once Jeff actually started down the road of starting to put a last will and testament together, you just find out how completely complicated your life is when ou don’t think of yourself as having a particularly complicated life. He got, I think a PBS pledge thing, a 95 page, count ‘em, 95 page “how to put together your last will and testament” with multiple choice questions, and I think he got all the way through that, and was actually going through all of his possessions, and just realizing… I think the lawyer said he was dragging his feet on getting the will put together, but I don’t think that it was so much that he was dragging his feet, is that there was just so much that he had to do once he started looking at everything that he had. [sneezes] Excuse me. One the first things was, he had a storage at his apartment building, and he went down to the storage, he had like three sections of the storage unit. All of the storage had been broken into. All of the padlocks had been broken off of each storage unit, and somebody has been living down. Someone had gone through everybody’s possessions and taken what they wanted to take, and was theoretically living there while they were doing it. When I heard that, I went, I’m not sure that that isn’t a cover story that whoever did it was, it was an inside job and they tried to make it look like a homeless person was living down there, and stealing everybody’s stuff. X number of things that Jeff had were missing. There were some rare books that he had down there. But with his bad hip and everything else like that, he still had to move most of his stuff back up to his apartment while he waited for the [inaudible] storage lockers to be made whole again. And it’s like, that was another one of those Jeff Seiler stories. This could only happen to Jeff Seiler. So, I don’t think that there’s too much that any of us can do, but I’m sure Jeff appreciates the efforts that you are making, trying to stay in touch with this, with the people in Minneapolis and the lawyer there.
Matt: I’m gonna try calling the lawyer and the building super. Those are the only two numbers I got. The name of his presumed executor was Aaron Cole, but he never gave me Aaron’s number, so I can’t get a hold of them, and I think the last time he called me I missed the call cause I was doing something and I didn’t call back right away cause it was late at night. And when I did get a hold of him the next day, he had been out to the movies and he couldn’t remember why he called me. And I’m like, you said it was something about more information from me. And he went, “okay, well, if you can’t talk, just text.” Cause that was one of Jeff’s problems near the end, was that speech was difficult.
Dave: Yeah, he was having such difficulty breathing most of the time, that talking wasn’t helping.
Matt: So, I’m planning on, once I get the podcast up on the internet, I’m gonna share a link to it on Jeff’s Facebook page so that hopefully people who know Jeff can listen to this, and listen to us reminisce about Jeff and if they know anything they can get a hold of me through the podcast.
Dave: Right. I think, at least, for the foreseeable future with Please Hold for Dave Sim, since we don’t have Jeff Seiler’s questions to kick around anymore, paraphrasing Richard Nixon, what we’ll do is, we’ll lead off each Please Hold for Dave Sim with Jeff Seiler recollected. And we’ll try and update people with whatever’s going on with the Jeff Seiler estate if we can find out about it. I think you can at least get that from the lawyer. I mean, lawyers are obviously very sticky about what they’re allowed to tell anybody about anything, but I think there would be no problem for her to give you “here’s what the public record has of the progress on Jeff Seiler’s estate” because everything has to be done by the book, according to Minneapolis, Minnesota law. At the very least, we’ll be able to let people know what’s happening with that.
Matt: Right.
Dave: Okay, so, that brings us back to Michael R. of Easton, Pennsylvania. “Hi Matt!Hope all is well with you and yours. Here's my question for Dave. Hi Dave! I'm back. It's been a busy summer at work and Grace and I are getting A LOT of stuff done at home.” Yeah, they’re doing a lot of renovations. I think a lot of people are doing that with the COVID-19 thing, they were already embarked on that, but the last time I was in touch with Michael and Grace, I think they had redone all of the floors. Which, if you’ve ever redone a floor, you know is no small task. “While I was winding down last week I decided to rewatch the Cerebus: High Society - Audio/Visual ‘issues’.” And for people who don’t know what he’s talking about there, that was the IDW project, which was me doing all the voices in “High Society”, acting it out basically as a radio drama, and George Peter Gatsis produced that. Basically, shepherded me through the whole process of recording, told me what recording device to buy, and then took the raw tapes of me doing all of that, and added sound effects, and etc etc. Michael goes on, “I am amazed and in awe with the work and effort that was made to get this done. From ALL your voices, the special effect backgrounds sounds and music make this over the top in production value REALLY good.” Yes, thank you, thank you for saying that. Part of me was happy that it was unsuccessful. That actually brings him to his question, maybe let’s see if this covers it. “My questions are: 1- Was there any feedback from this Kickstarter? I can't remember.” It wasn’t a Kickstarter, it was an IDW project.
Matt: It started as a Kickstarter.
Dave: What’s that?
Matt: It started as a Kickstarter. That was the first Kickstarter.
Dave: Was it? Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought they just solicited for it.
Matt: No, no, it was a Kickstarter because I have a copy, but my copy is all, “okay you backed it, here are the links to download it.” I don’t have a physical copy of the discs.
Dave: Okay. Alright. Um. Well, that sort of changes the complexion of my answer a little bit. Maybe you can plug in some information on that.”The goal was to raise money to make Cerebus Digital 6000 a reality. What has changed on making this a reality?” What changed on that was that IDW ultimately lost a lot of money on the Cerebus Audio/Visual Kickstarter. I think that when they solicited Diamond for it, that Diamond got orders for like 7 copies or something like that? So… “Any plans on creating another one?” No, again that was partly a situation on my side where, okay, that was “High Society”, am I really up to doing “Church & State” which is, whatever, more than twice the length of “High Society”, and am I up to being able to do all of “Cerebus”’s 6000 pages the same way. And it was one of those, uhh uhh uhh yeah, if it’s enormously successful. If this just becomes something that no household on the entire planet can do without, is Cerebus Digital “High Society”, then I’ll be happy to keep going. But it’s one of the those, I only have so much money coming in, so I always have to figure out what’s the thing that’s gonna bring in the most amount of money? And that’s pretty much the thing that I will do. So… so you got a digital copy of it?
Matt: Yeah. If I remember right, the Kickstarters were gonna remaster all the trades, or were gonna digitize all the trades, cause that was, you lost the negative printer. The printer that used the negatives, they all wanted digital offset printing, so you had to convert everything, and the first Kickstarter was “we’re gonna do the ultimate bells & whistles digital ‘High Society’”. So you got a digital version of the issue with cover, inside cover, the story, the back matter, then all the Notebook pages tied to those issues… I wanna say… what else was there in there?
Dave: I think there was all of the Collected Letters for the time period, as well.
Matt: Yeah. Like, if I remember, there scans of anything in the Archive that had to do with whatever issue it was, so there were her receipts that Deni had written out.
Dave: Right.
Matt: The phone record… cause that was when you got to the “how obsessive are we going to be about this, do you guys really need the phone bill for September 1982?”
Dave: Right! I mean, the Cerebus Archive isn’t complete, but where it has stuff, it definitely has stuff. This was [laughs] one of our first examples of going over the edge on that, or starting to go over the edge. But from my standpoint, it was, if this actually works, then that diversifies the Cerebus Archive so that X number of people now own it in digital form, and makes it far less easy for cancel culture, which I definitely saw on the horizon and was one of the first to experience, going, well okay. How throughout are those people going to be when they decide, “not only do we not consider Dave Sim a human being, we’ve decided that nothing Dave Sim ever produced or is associated with should be treated as something that should exist.” Ya know, “everybody over to the Off-White House, we’re going to have a big book burning and destroying everything connected to Dave Sim.”
Matt: The other thing with the Audio Visual that was really interesting and fascinating at the time is you got Deni to come back and read all the Notes from the Publisher.
Dave: Right.
Matt: That was one of those, when it was announced online, “either they’re making a bunch of money or Deni’s just really bored!”
Dave: [laughs] Or it’s like, well, ya know, Cerebus is the thing that she’s know for. So, yeah, to whatever extent you can cooperate on it, let’s cooperate on it. But, bottom line, I think it was overkill, which was kind of the same thing that happened to “Cerebus Archive” the comic book. It was, okay, I finished my 26 years and 3 months on “Cerebus”, now, one of the things that I want to do is explain the history of it as thoroughly as possible. This is where “Cerebus” came from. Like all stories having to do with individual human lives, when you go all the way back and say, “okay, this thing met with this thing met up with that thing and it lead to this thing over here. I will now work to explain that.” And it was… one of the “Cerebus” fans who seemed to be a spokesperson Cerebus fan said, “well, I’m not buying this until Cerebus shows up in it.” And it’s like, [laughs] well, I’m explaining where “Cerebus” came from. Cerebus isn’t going to be in for a good long while. Here’s the entire background of Dave Sim and his career choices and what was going on in his life, and it’s like, well, okay. With that attitude, “Cerebus Archive” the comic book just staggered along for 18 or 19 issues and it’s like, okay, this is no longer viable. Again, I have to make a living at this, and if it’s not something that enough people are gonna buy, and there were people actively recommending that people not buy this, well, okay, then the story will just have to remain in raw form in the Cerebus Archive, and Eddie Khanna gets stuck with it. Or whoever Eddie Khanna decides to pick to actually put all of this together. Well, there you go. There’s all of the raw materials. I was trying to do my best Reader’s Digest version of “so, how did ‘Cerebus’ come to be so successful? How did that whole thing get started?” Well, okay, I can’t do that in a conversation, but having finished my 26 years and 3 months, and Cerebus now being dead, I will do my best to answer that. And then, like I say, that staggered on for 3 years of bimonthly issues? Well, okay, I was gonna do my best, and now it’s just not gonna happen.
Matt: My problem with “Cerebus Archive” is that, when Jeff was visiting me one time, he printed off the first issue cause he had the files cause he was the online guy, trying to promote this book. And he printed it off, and said, “here, you need to read this.” So I have a bootleg of #1, and when I went to order it, the store that I used locally, the manager got fired-- the owner died, the manager was still running it, the family wanted to keep it open in his memory, and after a couple of years, they realized that running a comic book store is not the money-making opportunity they thought it was.
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right.
Matt: And so, they fired the manager, the previous owner’s nephew took over, didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know who to ask for help, and within a month, they… it got so bad that Paula went there for Free Comic Book Day and they didn’t have any new comics. Not free comics, any comics! They didn’t know how to do the Diamond order, so they weren’t ordering comics anymore.
Dave: That’s a tough way to run a business.
Matt: And… when the management changed hands, and I went down and they had a pile of statues that somebody had ordered and not bought and they were gonna donate them all to Goodwill cause they didn’t know what to do with them. And I’m like, first off, these are anime girl statues, Goodwill won’t accept them.
Dave: [laughs] As a matter of fact, they might call the cops on you!
Matt: Second off, these particular statues are probably an investment in the store’s income of probably a few hundred, if not a thousand dollars, are you sure you want to just give them away?
Dave: Right.
Matt: They had a… I’m trying to remember. They had something for a Marvel Superheroes game. It was Galactus. It was an exclusive thing. And they… that was in the pile too, and I’m like, that’s worth money. That is worth money! You guys need to actually figure… find a buyer and just sell it. Cause they were gonna give to me, and I’m like, as neat as it is, and as much as I want it, that’s worth a couple hundred dollars.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: That’s also when I stopped buying “Glamourpuss” because I wasn’t getting new issues of “Glamourpuss” because they weren’t ordering new comics for me.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So, I managed to get 1 and 3 on the secondary market, but that’s it, I only own issue 1 & 3. Once every couple of months, somebody goes, “hey is there any chance of getting a collection of this?” and it’s like, no.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, unless we did a Kickstarter and Kickstarted it, it’s just not gonna happen. There’s just, it’s not gonna happen.
Dave: Yeah, this always comes back to the same situation of, it’s just not that popular a thing. It’s Dave Sim, “Cerebus”. Which is why we’re taking the approach that we’re taking right now, which is, okay, “Cerebus” #1 seems to have juice to it. You can always sell “Cerebus” #1 in some form, and I think with the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter just ending, it’s like, it didn’t do as well as “Cerebus” #1, but it did pretty good. Now it’s a situation of, okay, how long is it going to take to do the fulfillment on it? And I’m not gonna take money on it until the fulfillment is done, because I stick to that rule until people are getting what they ordered in the mail. I’m not going to… Aardvark-Vanaheim is not going to take money on it. Then it’s, okay, I think Aardvark-Vanaheim gets a third, so it would be a little over $12,000 US. How long does it take the fulfillment to get done? Dagon’s talking about Marquis will be able to print them by the end of November, so, at that point you’re talking about, okay, so instead of $12,000, it’s $6000 a month, and if takes longer than October and November, then it’s gonna be proportionally less than that. This is not kidney shaped swimming pool in Hollywood time. It’s like, ehh, it’s enough money to keep going. So, definitely, we’re gonna be doing a Kickstarter for a remastered #3 and I’ll add in some new content to that one, and we’ll see, okay… the question always is, does it level off, and where does it level off? If we have a guaranteed $35,000 on each remastered issue, then we’ll keep going, but I can pretty much guarantee that isn’t gonna happen. That’ll be, we did well with #1, we did less well with #2, probably do less well with #3, at some point we go, “well, okay, we can’t really justify the time and energy and attention that we’re putting into this.” The ridiculously extreme becomes I could probably do better just… every day I get up to work, six days a week. I do a Cerebus sketchbook cover. I send those to Heritage Auction and they auction it off and they send me however much money came in on it. The one that I sent to them, I don’t even know what it was, I think it was at the time I was doing the wash Cerebus with the ink over the top, that went for $500. So it’s like [laughs], okay, I may find out, I’m just overthinking this. There’s no a large enough Cerebus fandom, there’s not enough Cerebus fans to really keep remastered editions and digitizing everything going, so that’s gonna be something that’s gonna happen when I die and Eddie Khanna takes over. [laughs] Grandpa in the meantime is just gonna do his Cerebus sketchbook covers and what else can I do? I’m gonna recreate the baby throwing page, because the baby throwing page is just money in the bank. And send all of these, one page at a time, to Heritage Auction. I’m trying not to do that, which is, it’s like, right now, Rolly is scanning all of the remaining artwork and I’m paying him his hourly rate to scan artwork and send the digital files to Sean and then I’m schlepping the pages from the off-site location to the Off-White House, Rolly’s taking them to Camp David, and scanning them, and then they go back again through the process. We still have “Reads”…
Matt: No, “Reads” should be done.
Dave: Well, “Reads” should be done, but this is where Rolly’s looking at Sean’s spreadsheet and going, “I’m not seeing these things on Sean’s spreadsheet” so it’s like, well, if it’s not on Sean’s spreadsheet so we’ll just keep doing them until we’ve done them so many times that they are now registering everywhere. As I said, all of the artwork has been scanned, all of the negatives have been scanned. The rare occasion, as we already had happened a little while ago, here’s a page where we don’t have the artwork, don’t have negatives, Sean will just have to remaster it from the printed copy.
Matt: I was gonna say, “Reads” got remastered, so it should be scanned, right?
Dave: Uhh, should be!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I just do as I’m told. [laughs] I don’t like arguing with Rolly and I don’t like arguing with Sean, or getting into situations where I’m in-between on a situation. I’m assuming that, if Sean gets a bunch of scans that he’s already got, then he will tell Rolly, “uh, I don’t need these” and helps me update the spreadsheet, and we’ll just keep going on whatever hasn’t been done. But that’s a good example of, this is not a priority. I’m a working guy at age 65, trying to make a living, and keep a roof on the Off-White House, and maintain all of the stuff until I did, but there’s just… there’s not a lot of money in any of this. There’s more money now than there has been. I mean, Dagon is the US dollar rainmaker with his Kickstarters. But I have to keep re-configuring and rethinking everything, because whatever worked six months ago, or a year ago, doesn’t work anymore. So, okay, now we’ve got to come up with another way to bring in enough money to pay the property taxes, pay the insurance, ya know, pay the heat and light bill, and all of those things like that there. Like I say, Dave Sim redrawing images from “Cerebus” #1, that’s really the only… and “Spawn” 10 and “Turtles” #8, and that’s it. That’s all “Cerebus” is as far as most people are concerned. And apart from that, we’ve got 349 people that participated in the “Cerebus” #2 Kickstarter and 129 people that participated in Cerebus Archive Portfolio #9 that we just did, and that’s it. I’ve been assuming all along that that’s just one of those, cancel culture steamroller things that it’s very very difficult to keep going when the political correct people, and I will call them feminists because I think that’s where the problem originates, make it very very difficult to make even a modest living at something. So, I want to, to whatever extent is possible, maintain everything for however many years I’ve got left, pass it on to Eddie Khanna and he will maintain it for however many years he has left. And maybe somewhere up ahead, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when there’s been a half-dozen presidents of Aardvark-Vanaheim, people will go, “Hey, maybe we should stop doing this. Maybe instead of trying to destroy ‘Cerebus’ and destroy Dave Sim’s memory, maybe we should actually look at it and see what’s actually here, as opposed to what the major cancel culture people tell us is here, that we automatically default to destroying.”
Matt: Well, the three things the fandom asks for the most, and it’s the list that we go over everytime this comes up, but I’ll do it one more time, just as a for the record, people want hardcovers and we know hardcovers are not feasible because we’re not Marvel. If you were Marvel, you could do hardcovers out the wazoo and it wouldn’t matter.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But you’re not Marvel, you’re Aardvark-Vanaheim. The next…
Dave: Which is, again, just to emphasize it like microscopic by comparison. It’s not just orders of magnitude, it’s, no, this thing has been destroyed in the comic book environment and we’re just darned lucky to have 120 people or 350 people who want to support it, as opposed to destroying it. Sorry, I interrupted, keep going.
Matt: The thing is a collection of “Cerebus Archive” comes up regularly, so my questions is, if the series continued, how many more issues do you think you would have done before you got to “here’s ‘Cerebus’ #1”?
Dave: Umm… I had already pretty much got to that in terms of, I think the issue that had…
Matt: The logo?
Dave: The first logo, yeah, the first logo design. The Cerebus icon that I drew for “Cerebus the Fanzine” for Aardvark-Vanaheim press. That was, okay, this is where Cerebus shows up for the first time, but there’s a fair amount of history there before you get to “Cerebus” #1, per se the comic book. And even when you get to “Cerebus” #1 the comic book, it’s just the splash page that I done, thinking, hey, I think everybody’s missing what the success is with “Howard the Duck”, that it’s a funny animal in the world of humans. Everybody was doing a lot of funny animal titles, but they were complete funny animal titles. Let’s try a funny animal in the world of humans, and see if that is the hot button. And trying to get Mike Friedrich at Star*Reach interested in that. So, that’s the problem, if you actually tell the story the way that it happened, people want this overnight success thing, and [laughs] it’s like, this has been limping along since 1977, providing a pretty good living. Like, a really good living in late 1980s/1990s. But, surfacing at that point, and then submerging again, so that it became a hand-to-mouth existence. So it’s one of those, when you ask about the “Cerebus Archive” in that sense, how long would it take to get to “Cerebus” #1? It’s like, I dunno. I tell, this is this part of the story and then the next part of the story follows that, the next part of the story follows that. And I’ll get to it when I get to it, and that’s an impossible sell even with the Cerebus fans, let alone sitting in some publisher’s office, going,” okay, we want to finance you doing this story.” It’s like [laughs] no, you probably don’t, because it’s not going to work that way. It’s the same situation with “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. I’m sitting down and doing it, I’m back to mocking up pages, I can average about three pages a week. Some weeks I only get one done, some weeks I only get two done. But it’s, I have to do it sequentially. I have to explain this thing, so that I can explain that thing, which then leads to this thing, which then brings in another surprise that I didn’t anticipate. All I could say if I was talking to “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” fans, which could be the situation after December 1st if the street date holds and the book actually becomes available, and has any kind of success. If I was talking to an Alex Raymond / Rip Kirby fan, [laughs] which there are almost none of those either, I could say, okay, you know the IDW collections, I’m working on “Bleak Prospects”, and I’ve worked all the way through “Bleak Prospects”, and I now have to do the Marcel character as Alex Raymond, explaining that. I’m figuring that would take two or three pages and then I have to talk about why the “Bleak Prospects” had some of the best rushed artwork Alex Raymond ever did, right up until the last two weeks, when all of a sudden it changed into bare outline inking and spotted in solid blacks, which persisted into “Terror on the Thames”. And here’s a couple of theories that I have about why that happened, but it’s this completely bizarre thing. At that point, everybody has shut down except me. [laughs] Because, it’s like, I’m the only one who knows what I’m talking about. And Eddie Khanna knows what I’m talking about because he’s been with me on this long, hard slog for the last 10 years, and that’s just how it has to be done. It’s the same way that I did “Cerebus”, one page at a time, and I focus on that, and now I go onto the next page, and unfortunately, when you have the knee-jerk reaction of, “well, this sucks”, then, okay, you just killed the thing, cause that’s the only way that it could possibly exist. I interrupted again! Now, go ahead, the third?
Matt: The third thing is a collection of “Following Cerebus”, which I know the rights for that are tied up with Craig Miller’s estate and John from Windmill is putting “Spectrum” up online, and someone goes, “you could ask him, ya know he’s the…” I’m like yeah, but everything I understand, that was Craig’s baby, not necessarily John’s.
Dave: Yeah, um. That gets into families, again. The intention that Craig Miller had was that Jennifer Miller, his daughter, would inherit everything that he had. But Jennifer was the object of an extremely adversarial child custody battle between Craig and his ex-wife, so, essentially I’m adopting the same posture, which is, from the printed copies of “Following Cerebus”, they could be remastered relatively easily. It’s very crisp printing. Then it would be Jennifer Miller’s. But I don’t think Jennifer Miller even goes by Miller anymore, she’s using her mother’s name. I’m not sure that her mother would even refer to Craig and what Craig did. And that’s unfortunately the situation with a family as default legal setting. Families are usually the worst custodian of anything, not because of any basic malice on their part, just complete disinterest. These are very specialized interests. The same thing with “Comic Art News and Reviews”. People are asked, “well, what about the earliest interviews that you did? Why don’t you do a collection of those?” and it’s like, well, because that belongs to John Balge’s estate, and as far as I know, John Balge died intestate, which means the family became the custodians of it, and basically end up, ya know, “how long are we going to keep renting John’s apartment and going through all of this crap? Let’s give away all of his clothes to the Goodwill, throw all of this stuff in the dumpster, take whatever insurance money he had or whatever, split it up among the family”, and that’s it. That’s John’s legacy. There’s nothing I can do about that. I gave copies of, as far as I know I’m one of the few people that has copies of “Comic Art News and Reviews”. I went to the funeral, and I gave custody of it to David Balge, and said, ya know, John didn’t want the material reproduced for some reason, but it exists, it’s now in your custody, and you have to make the decisions about it, and that’s really where that one was left. This is one of the reasons that I advocate, who is the biggest fan of your work? Leave it to him, because he’s the only one that’s gonna care enough about it to actually do the right thing with it. Which is to make sure that it’s maintained, he knows what it is that he’s looking at, and he will preserve it for future Cerebus fans. Families just don’t have that level of interest. It’s like, “this was whatever Dad worked on, so that,” in Jennifer’s case, “he didn’t have time to play Barbie with me”. So that’s the level of interest. “I don’t know about Cerebus, I don’t really care about Cerebus”, but unfortunately she is the custodian of “Following Cerebus”. I don’t think anybody would do anything about it, if somebody wants to scan all of “Following Cerebus” and put it on A Moment of Cerebus. But that’s the situation of, you can’t sell this, because there’s not enough people to buy it. How many of the 125 Cerebus fans who support all of these things would buy a collection of “Following Cerebus”. Most of them have “Following Cerebus”, they might be missing an issue or two, but that’s fine, they’ve got the original magazine.
Matt: So, last Spring when I was in lockdown with the kids cause they couldn’t go to school and I was getting paid to stay home and take care of them and do online schooling, I started to scan all the pages for “Cerebus Companion” 1 & 2 and “Following Cerebus” 1-12, because I’m like…
Dave: Get out of here, you didn’t!
Matt: I didn’t get all of them done before I had to go back to work in June, but I got “Cerebus Companion” 1 & 2 done and about half the issues of “Following Cerebus”?
Dave: Right.
Matt: And my intention is, I’m scanning it to that I can have it digitally, and then I was putting it through a digital reader that would make it so that it was converted to a text file so that I could find what I was looking for. Because, I invariably run into, which issue was that? Was it 4, was it 5? Was it 3, was it 2? So, my intention was, when I got it done, was to give copies to the few people that have asked, “hey, anybody know where we can get this?”
Dave: Right, let’s tackle the problem from that side. How many people want this, and at the very worst, I can pay Rolly to go find a photocopier with 10 cents a copy, 25 cents a copy. Here’s your pile of “Cerebus Companion”, “Following Cerebus” photocopies… Yeah, I don’t know what to do about it.
Matt: Well, the way I look at it is, it’s like the A Moment of Cerebus library. You can check out whatever you want, but it’s gotta come back. Nobody’s making money on this, you can borrow it. Already, it’s happened two or three times where somebody’s been looking for something from an old issue of “Following Cerebus” and I happened to have it scanned, so okay, here you go, here’s the file. Here’s pages relevant to what you want. Jon B Cooke from “Back Issue Magazine”… or “Comic Book Artist” magazine, they were doing a feature on Barry Windsor Smith, and he was looking for the interview you did with Barry Windsor Smith, I’m like, I have that!
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: That was one of the issues I hadn’t scanned yet, so okay, here, I’ll scan the pages that are in to this. Scanned the back cover, which has got the photo of the two of you from a convention. Scanned the next issue where it’s About Last Issue, where you correct Craig and John about what they said about that photo that was wrong, and send it all to Jon B Cooke, and we’re thanked in the issue of “Comic Book Artist”, I think it’s #25, where they have this big spread on Barry Windsor Smith. Nothing I said made the issue because the direction of the issue went in a different area, Jon says that, but we still get thanked by name, and I’m like, good enough for me!
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, I mean that’s one of those situations where I would think that if there’s somebody that should have all of “Following Cerebus”, it’s Jon B Cooke, because he’s like this lynchpin presence with the TwoMorrows magazine, of… if this comes up, here’s your best place to be able to research it. Same thing with all of the digital trade paperbacks. That get into funny areas of, okay, I don’t own the rights to “Comic Art News and Reviews”, and I don’t own the rights to “Following Cerebus”, but this is a scholastic angle. In terms of Jon B Cooke is one of those encyclopedic guys where, yes, if he’s gonna do something on Barry Windsor Smith, he’s pretty sure we would have something on that. Which we do! The problem being is that it’s not purely scholastic, because Jon B Cooke makes money off of “Comic Book Artist” and the other TwoMorrows publications. You can’t do that, because it’s, well now you’re taking something that somebody owns and giving it to somebody else to make money off of, when that hasn’t been licensed to them. And it’s like, can we all just get a grip here? [laughs] In terms of obsessing about these things? It’s like, anything in the digital end of things, yes, Jon B Cooke should have them, whatever he has. I would go as far as I would get Rolly to scan all of the “Comic Art News and Reviews” stuff and send it to Jon B Cooke because it is first generation comic history stuff. It’s things from the time period, 1970s, that I don’t remember that I wrote when I was 16 years, researched when I was 16 years old. Because we all know, you send somebody a digital file on something, most people don’t want to read stuff on their computer, so they’re gonna print it out on their printer anyway. Like, let’s deal with the situation as it exists, as opposed to this idealized, “you can’t transfer possession of something that you don’t own to someone in digital form unless they’re a university or a college, or something like that.” That’s just a little too pure for words, I think. So, that’s when Dave Sim goes, look, let’s deal with the situation that actually is. If you’re ever inclined to continue scanning all of your copies of “Following Cerebus” and “Cerebus Companion”, and God bless you if you are, yeah, just send them to Jon B Cookie. Here’s, not an encyclopedic history of “Cerebus”, but anything that you would be looking for is in here. You’ll be able to find it and TwoMorrows should have that. So, that’s my take on that.
Matt: The fun part of the project was when, I was missing issue #10 of “Following Cerebus” because I bought it along with four other comics and the bag never made it home.
Dave: Wow. A mystery!
Matt: So I said something, and it turned out Margaret had an extra copy, so I bought it from her, and then she sent me her copy of issue #9. By the way, [sarcastically] thanks for that, Dave.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Because, she was gonna scan her copies in and she got a second copy of #9 so she could break the spine apart so the pages would lay flat, and gave up scanning it halfway through, because what kind of crazy person would do this?
Dave: [laughs] Now we’re into the mental health thing, again.
Matt: Yeah! So sent me, she’s like, “well here, you can have this so you don’t have to ruin your copy” and I’m like, well, thanks for that, but at the same time, let’s do a book-length, extra, square bound edition for number 9, because this is a very interesting conversation with Neal Adams, but at the same time, wrap it up Dave, this is above 48 pages, I don’t wanna scan all this.
Dave: Right. Right. And that’s me being obsessive because, okay, if I’m going to visit the whole situation of Dave Sim and Neal Adams, I’m only going to visit it once and I’m going to exhaust it, because that’s the other thing that you have to do. It’s like, if you’re the only one who knows this stuff, then you’re gonna have to visit it all at some time. That brings us back to “Cerebus Archive” the comic book again, of I will do this, but if there’s not a market for it, [laughs] and all you’re going to be doing is irritating the people who are then are trying to preserve the material. Like you say, that’s a lot of scanning, to do issue 9 of “Following Cerebus”. Each of the “Following Cerebus”es is a lot of scanning, relatively to the level of interest.
Matt: When I was doing it, I got it down to the science of, put the black piece of construction paper behind the page I’m scanning, put it in the scanner, line it up, scan it, flip it to the other side of the opposite page, move the construction paper, scan that. So half the scans are upside down cause it’s just the easiest way to do it.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Then opening my Photoshop knock off, flip ‘em 180 degrees, realize the pages are at an angle for some reason, so now I have to slowly correct it so it’s straight.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It got to the point where if I scanned something and it scanned straight, I did a little happy dance.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It’s the same thing when I get the Monday Report. I trim the fax down so that the borders are taken off, so that the print’s a little big. All the images I put onto A Moment of Cerebus are 640 pixels wide, and when I’m cropping the faxes, if I hit exactly 640, you’d think I’d won the lottery.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. You couldn’t pay somebody to do that. You literally could not pay somebody to do that.
Matt: No, no… you could pay somebody, but that’s a Kickstarter that’s gonna need some seriously deep pockets backing it.
Dave: That’s right. That’s right, because nobody’s quite messed up in the head as Matt Dow when it comes to Cerebus and Cerebus-related things. I just realized I’ve got-- the prayer times are getting earlier and earlier. It’s 25 to 7, so I got about 10 or 15 minutes here, we’re gonna come full circle because Michael’s got a P.S. on his question, his series of questions, and I wanna cover that real quick. “I heard about the passing of Jeff Seiler on Saturday's AMOC. R.I.P. Jeff. I hardly ever interacted with Jeff. I can't remember a time that Jeff did not come to your defense on AMOC.” That’s very true! But there were also times when Jeff would give me grief on AMOC and everybody else would come to my defense. Jeff could be [coughs] (excuse me) could be accidentally irritating. I think we’re both in agreement on that. And one of the times that that happened was when we first started serializing “Cerebus in Hell?” online, which was going to be our chosen medium. And okay, Sandeep and I have been working on this for six months, now everybody is finally getting to see our hard work, and I hope people think it’s funny and I hope we get some LOLs and what did we get? Jeff Seiler correcting out punctuation and our grammar. Day after day. [laughs] And it’s like, if anything is gonna kill your humour, and your ability to appeal to people with humour, that’s gonna do it. And nothing I can do about that, it’s a free country. Michael goes on, “I'm pretty sure he commented on a comment I made here and there on AMOC. He did so with practically everyone.” Yes, that’s true. Jeff Seiler was your ideal participatory fan. You definitely want somebody who is always giving you more content online on a daily basis. And I had forgotten this part, “2- I did name his penguin, Pepe Lemieux, he had given to you.” And Pepe is still out back at Camp David, sitting on my old typewriter, because [laughs] there is no… I think Rolly went, “okay, I have no idea where to store Dave Sim’s original typewriter now that he’s not using a typewriter anymore and I don’t know what to do with Pepe Lemieux, so let’s put them both on top of the stool that we never use.” So I always see that out back at Camp David. If I remember next week, I’ll get Rolly to take a photo of Pepe Lemieux perched on top of Dave’s typewriter on the stool that Rolly and I never use. “3- In one of the CIH?s through on of the kickstarters, I believe, Jeff had pledged to have 4 pages drawn into an issue.” Yes, he did. “I remember correcting a misspelling of a N.Y. Yankee, Graig (not Greg) Nettles. I can't remember the issue and I can't if he misspelled it or you. I'm guessing Jeff.” And it’s like, uh, no, I was the one that misspelled that one, although I got the story from Jeff, and as you say, it was in “Super Cerebus Annual” #1 and I’m gonna forget all about this, because I’ve got a prayer time. Can you let Sean or Benjamin know that we need that corrected in the “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” volume, because I forgot all about that one, and if we correct it now, it will stay permanently corrected. Graig Nettles, not Greg Nettles. And it’s definitely in with the pledge strips.
And last salute to Jeff Seiler, for this Please Hold for Dave Sim. If you can go into those strips in the back of “Super Cerebus Annual” #1 and I think Jeff would want one last appearance for his cat. Not Yusef, not the cat that he had when he died, but Pud, who was the giant grey cat, the biggest cat in the state of Minnesota. If you can just scan that panel from “Super Cerebus Annual” #1. It was, I think, a good year or a year and a half after Pud died, that I found out where the name came from, which was Puddy Tat, the Sylvester name from the Warner Brothers cartoons. Jeff had shortened that from Puddy, to Pud. But he took Pud to [laughs] the veterinarian and they went, “uh, we can’t put down the name Pud.” It’s like, it’s not Pud, it’s Pood. And they went, okay, we’re gonna spell it “Pood”, because Pud means something else. So, consequently, Pud became Pood, even though, in all of our hearts and minds, it was actually P-U-D-, Pud. And that will do it for Please Hold for Dave Sim for October.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: [laughs] Alright! I’m off to my prayer time. Say hi to Paula, and Janis Pearl, and Bullwinkle, and we’ll do this again in November.
Matt: Yes, we will. And we’ll probably open with Jeff’s cat, because I have a Jeff’s cat story.
Dave: Okay! Good. We’ll just keep Jeff Seiler’s memory alive, at least in the beginning of each month, where neither of us are gonna run out of Jeff Seiler stories anytime soon.
Matt: Most likely. [laughs]
Dave: Okay. Have a good night!
Matt: You too! Have a good night, Dave.
Dave: You too, Matt. Buh-bye.
[click]
Matt: And that, my friends, is Please Hold for Dave Sim for October, 2021. Hope everybody had a good time. Hope we had some laughs, hope we all cried just a little bit. Just a little. And last one out, turn out the light-- ohh, wait, that’s right! There’s a secret message for members of the Little Orphan Aardvark Secret Society from Little Orphan Aardvark herself. Set your decoder bookmarks to code J-S. Alright, everybody got their pens ready? Remember, this is from Little Orphan Aardvark herself. Aardvark is depending on you. L, yin-yang, 5, hashtag, spade, K, 5. Space. A, spade, 0. Space. P, V, L, yin-yang, A, copyright. Space. D, spade, diamond. Space. L. Space. 0, 3, copyright, yin-yang, 0, 5, Aquarius. Space. 0, V, copyright. Space. Infinity, L, B, V, E, yin-yang, copyright. Space. E, yin-yang. Space. 0, V, copyright. Space. Hashtag, diamond, copyright, L, I, diamond, spade, spade, infinity. Space. 3, spade, yin-yang, Capricorn, 0. Space. 0, L, I, copyright. Space. 0, V, E, skull & crossbones. Space. Spade, yin-yang, copyright. Sagittarius, Sagittarius, Sagittarius! Remember, Aardvark is counting on you. And as soon as I mail out your decoder wheels…
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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The Kickstarter for the '82 Tour Book is in "prelaunch" status. Click here to be notified when it goes live.
And if you know your '80s Marvel Bullpen, and you can identify these fellas, you'll win an AMOC Prize Pack worth dozens of dollars:
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| Click for bigger |
EMAIL you guesses to momentofcerebus@gmail.com (Listen up you NEO-Seilers, ya gots to send the email to win, commenting on this post won't get you a prize.)
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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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Friend to the Blog Steve Peters is back with the next Tails of Sparky, #6, the next in the "Seasons of Sparky" series. Why you care (besides that Steve's a pal and does good comics...) is that he has a LIMITED number of
Tails of Sparkybus #6 Signed Variant
Signed by Dave Sim (Dave Sim 2025) on a tipped-in plate. It will also be signed by Steve Peters and numbered, and features a 6-page collaboration with Sim that will only appear in the variant.
It's limited to TWENTY-FIVE Steve says there are THIRTY-TWO, but he hasn't released them all yet, copies (So if you want one, maybe don't wait...)
Steve also has copies of Dave's variant covers to the two previous issues, so you can get the set if you missed out.
He's also got the Sparkybus prints Dave did that I had printed up.
You can't say I didn't warn ya!
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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 September 17-21.*
*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.
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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Next Time: Let's see if Jen's ready to do it...
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