Hi, Everybody!
I'm sending up the Faux for the October 2025 Please Hold on Wednesday, so if you haven't gotten your question(s) in yet, you might wanna get on that. And if you DID get your question(s) in, we're all set and you can leave me alone...
Anyways,
Mondays! (Since this is the two hundred and fifty-second one of these, it's time for a new costume (if you get that joke, you might need to schedule a colonoscopy...)
Okay, for people with bad eyesight who are gonna bitch...
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Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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Matt: Hello Dave!
Dave: Hello, Matt! How’s it going?
Matt: Alright! I’m doing okay.
Dave: You said a mouthful, here. “Is it September already?”
Matt: [laughs] Exactly!
Dave: Here we are. Here we are. So, are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Okay, good. First question I have for you, do you have any reports of the CAN9 arriving where they’re supposed to?
Matt: I have not heard anything yet.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: On tomorrow’s post, I will put a “hey if anybody’s gotten theirs, just, ya know, shout real loud.”
Dave: Yeah, yeah. I would appreciate it. I think we did not too badly in terms of the fulfillment, in terms of about two months from the time that the Kickstarter ended to the point where we actually shipped all of them out. And hopefully they will be arriving.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: Alright. Um. Let’s see, “Jen DiGiacomo had a question we didn’t answer last time that we said that we were gonna get to this time, so of course we start with Jeff Seiler and his phone question. We both know he sent one.” Yeah, he was a little late getting it done. The question just came in this morning? Was that just this morning? Yes, I think that was just this morning, and recorded it off of the answering service, and Rolly turned it into a digital file, and if you haven’t gotten it by now, you should be getting it reasonably soon.
Matt: Okay.
Jeff Seiler: Hello, Dave. It’s Jeff. My question for September is related to the book “The Last Day”. After having read that, I dunno, two or three times, one thing I noticed was the verisimilitude of old age that Cerebus goes through throughout the book until, of course, he dies. And I just wondered if you were drawing in on any personal family experience. As for that, I know you did that in other parts of the book, or maybe even AMOC. So inquiring minds want to know. And then you can cut it off here.
Dave: Alright. So the answer to Jeff’s question about the aging process and how it figured into “The Last Day” and personal experiences that I would have used as raw material for that part of “The Last Day”. I remember when my Great Uncle Jimmy was in hospital, I’m trying to remember when that was specifically. Mid-1990s, early 1990s? Anyway, they wanted to do an operation on I think his colon? It was gonna result in him having to have a colostomy bag, and that was just completely out of line as far as he was concerned. So, you have to kind of respect that, although my Aunt Ina was completely appalled that he wasn’t going to do this thing that was going to save his life because it was just too undignified for him,. But to me, you have to respect somebody who just says “Uhh, no. The dignity of my person runs deeper than that and it’s just not worth the sacrifice.” Anyway, when he was in hospital and he already made that decision that, no, he wasn’t going to have the operation and consequently was really just a matter of time before he was gonna die. He basically stopped eating. He would take liquids, but he was just a completely uncooperative patient. I was coming back from a convention and I believe that the hospital was in Mississauga, which isn’t too far from Pearson Airport. So I made a special point of arranging with [inaudible] Limousines to pick me up at the airport at the convention I was coming back from, and then drive me over to the hospital so that I could visit with my Uncle Jimmy, who was the older brother of my father’s mother, so my paternal grandmother. I do remember that visiting with him, a couple of things. One of the things was him asking me, “how did you get here? How did you get the hospital?” and me going, by, ya know, limousine. Because he knew how I traveled. I don’t drive, so if I got somewhere that far out of Kitchener, that’s how I got there. [laughs] He goes, “how did you get here?” I went, “by limousine!” And I realized that he was trying to impress the other guy in the semi-private room that he was in, with the fact that his grand-nephew came to see him in a limousine. And I thought, man oh man you made the decision not to continue living and you’re still trying to impress somebody, just with the fact that your grand-nephew came to the hospital in a limousine. But relative to Jeff’s question, while we were talking, I was sitting reasonably close to him because he was pretty hard of hearing by that point. And he had had some chocolate milk, and I remember him belching, and I could smell the chocolate milk, but not only the chocolate milk, but I could smell death in his breath. And it’s like I never smelled it before, but it was very very distinctive, and there was no question in my mind that that was what I was smelling, and I don’t think he lived more than four or five days after I visited him.
The other experience was watching my maternal Grandfather, Dave Reid, died, for whom I was named. He was in a hospital, but he was in a coma. His liver and kidneys shut down, and basically, we were all at my Grandmother’s place and I went, “this is crazy, we came all the way down from Kitchener. I didn’t come here to sit and visit with my Grandmother, my Grandfather is dying a few blocks away. I’ll take a cab, or if somebody wants to give me a lift over there.” So my parents and my Uncle Cliff, who was Dave Reid’s son, my Uncle, went over to the hospital. My Mother and I actually went into the room and stayed there until he died, and that was my first experience with actually watching somebody die, the whole death rattle and whatever else. So I think that the only other experience that I think would have an unconscious element to it of, “okay this is what I’m tapping into,” was when my Mother was in hospital, and she was on dialysis. And they’re very very strict in telling when you’re on dialysis you can’t smoke and you can’t drink, because it will dilate your circulatory system, and that explained why the people that I saw in dialysis, “why are their so many amputees in the dialysis unit?” That’s the explanation, people who can’t quit smoking and can’t quit drinking, even though they’re on dialysis, and essentially same thing that happened to my mother, she got gangrene in the big toe of her foot and that’s just what happens if you don’t follow all of the instructions. And gangrene definitely has a specific death smell to it, and it got to the point where she was at Grand River Hospital. The moment that I walked into Grand River Hospital, I could smell the gangrene. I think anybody who’s been in a hospital can smell gangrene, they just don’t know that that’s what it is, because it’s masked with disinfectant and whatnot. So that ties in with my answer to Jeff, which is, “The Last Day”, yes, it is about aging, and it is about the loss of capacity, but it’s far more about Cerebus’ personal last day, in extremis. We’re all gonna have one. I mean, we all have a last day, and no one knows when they wake up on any given day, “is this my last day or is this not my last day?” But it is fated to be that way. So that’s far more what I was documenting in “The Last Day” was, you’ve read all of these big chunks of Cerebus’ life, and that was 15 volumes ago, now it’s volume 16, and is the result of the bad decision making that Cerebus progressively made through his life, this is how you end up. You basically narrow down all of your options and all of your choices just say, well, okay, as promised, you’re alone, unmourned, and unloved, but you’re also going to die completely constipated because you’re so embarrassed about defecating in your drawers and having to wear a diaper that you’re eating massive amounts of cheese so that you won’t defecate. Here’s a good example of Cerebus’ brand of decision making. It’s like, well, okay, that works theoretically, but it’s one of those, how can you possibly see this as a solution? There’s got to be a much better way to do this, but Cerebus was always a shortest distance between two points is a straight line, where I am and where I am determined to go to, no matter how sensible it is.
Coincidentally this ties in with my commentary in Remastered Cerebus #2, which we are getting very very close to having the Kickstarter launch. Dagon is talking about, if not this week, next week. I think everybody’s got their “Cerebus” #2 covers colored and whatnot. In the commentary I wrote a while ago, it’s mostly about a Greek term in John’s Gospel that translates, “going under”, which is always translated in English as just “going”. And it’s like, well, okay. As I always have my... [audio missing] as “going under” and you translate it as going, whatever the concept is, you’re missing half of it. And the concept to me is, where death is best understood as a transit point, where you go from being physically incarnated, your soul encased in flesh, to your original state as a free floating spirit form. It’s a universal truth. To me, going under, “going under”, transit point from one nature of existence to another, is the structure of the universe, really the underpinning of God’s clockwork mechanism. So “The Last Day” isn’t just about Cerebus’ personal last day, although it is about Cerebus’ personal last day, and that transit point as can be seen from the prologue of “The Last Day”, the pseudo-scripture that I did, it’s also about the last day of the planet that Cerebus is on, and the solar system’s last day, of which that planet is a part. All planets die. Like all planets die, all solar systems die. They’re as finite as human bodies, they last billions of years longer. But planet Earth will one day reach a transit point where it will change from what it is now, a spinning orbital cosmological sphere, into a compressed lump of dark matter, when the Sun goes nova and collapses into itself and us with it, or goes nova and incinerates everything. It’s, to me, the same process, you either are a liberated spirit and go on from there, or that’s what you transit to is from you’re physically incarnated to your spirit self, to your spirit self collapsed within dark matter. It’s difficult to understand these things, but it’s certainly a distinction between a monotheist and the atheist, because to an atheist death is death. This is where everything comes to an end. Whereas, as a monotheist, as I say, you understand it as two different states of existence with a transit point in between them. And these primary, I will have a transit point, you will have a transit point, planet Earth will have a transit point, the Sun will have a transit point, the solar system will have a transit point. That’s just one level of physical existence. Let’s see if I can try and explain this, there are constructed transit points, in the sense something is built and is simultaneously in a sense something has an inherent nature it has acquired or assumed through longevity. And the example that I’m gonna use here, and this gets kind of intricate, but when do Jeff’s questions not get intricate? Years, as an example. Just what we call a year. This is 2021, which implies there was a January 1st, year zero. Which also implies there was a January 1st, year 100. Just as there was a January 1st, 2000. For a thousand years, by universal agreement, as close as we ever get on planet Earth to universal agreement, the year started with a one. Starting when the year 999 ended. Agreeing to something for a thousand years is metaphysically potent. One isn’t two, and two isn’t one. So January 1st 2000 was a transit point from one 1000 year long state of existence, to a brand new state of existence. A year after that happens, it’s January 1st 2001, and that’s another transit point, from the 20th to the 21st century. We have a thousand years that’s ended, and one year that has begun the next thousand years, and we can’t conceive, we can’t even picture that macro/micro relationship. Our third eye can’t iris open that far. A thousand years and one year. We don’t have remotely near the human experience personally of a thousand years. We know a year, but we sure as heck don’t know a thousand years. Bear with me on this. [laughs] A hundred years and one year, that’s different. That’s like, a hundred years is beyond our reach, but a man’s reach always needs to exceed his grasp. And a hundred years relative to my 65 years, yep, I have kind of a grasp of that. I know what one year is, I can sort of picture what a hundred years is. So, part of all of us, again this is rare instance of universal conscious on planet Earth, so part of all of us that’s attuned to God’s macrocosmic/microcosmic clockwork mechanism that we inhabit understands that January 1st 2000 to January 1st 2001 as a microcosm of the beginning of year numbering. Again, in a lot because we’ve transitioned from one state to another and we have a larger unconscious understanding of what it is that we’re experiencing. That one year, January 1st 2000 to January 1st 2001, represents microcosmically, the year zero to the year 100 AD. Like, we understand that at a specific level. January 1st 2001 to January 1st 2002 represents 100 AD to 200 AD. January 1st 2002 to January 1st 2003 represents 200 AD to 300 AD. So, again, by universal consensus, what the number of the year is, is pretty close to universal on planet Earth. By universal consensus but unconscious consensus, we understand we’re enacting all over again all of the years since the birth of Christ. January 1st 2015 to January 1st 2016 is the 1500s. January 1st 2017 to January 1st 2018 is the 1700s. So we also understand, and I’m finally getting to the point here, we also understand unconsciously and microcosmically, we’re about to catch up to ourselves. January 1st 2019 to January 1st 2020 is the 1900s. The point where we finally caught up to ourselves microcosmically, was the middle of March 2020, when the first universal lockdown took place. It was a supremely potent, metaphysical transit point. We died out of who and what we were, and spoiler alert, and never will be again into what we now have become and are completely unfamiliar with.
[silence]
Well, say something, Matt.
Matt: [sighs] To quote the imminent philosopher Martin McFly, “heavy.”
Dave: [laughs] Well, thank you. Well said. Well said.
Matt: [laughs] I mean that’s a perspective that I hadn’t had, and now I never will not have.
Dave: Well, good! See, that’s what you call your meme. Are you the one who calls them memes? Your whole family calls them different things, don’t they?
Matt: The kid says I say it wrong, and she gets real annoyed about it when I say it wrong. So now I say it wrong just to annoy her, because I’m a Dad and that’s how you do this thing.
Dave: That’s right!
Matt: Janis hates being called Jan. Just absolutely hates it. Which is fine, because we don’t call her that. But we know she hates it, so when she’s being annoying and we want to annoy her back, it’s “hey Jan” and like literally will stop whatever she’s doing to stare at me for five seconds, trying to become Cyclops and burn my face off with her laser vision, and then realize it’s not gonna happen and goes on with her life.
Dave: Who is that-- what are there other ones? Who says meme in your family?
Matt: I say meme, I’m trying to remember, Janis says it “correctly”, which is meh-may. I also say memm, it all depends on who I’m talking to and what my brain is processing it as.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Because I was reading it as silent E at the end. If I was smart I would start calling them M&M’s and see how many people go, “wait, where’s the candy?”
Dave: [laughs] Okay! So, there ya go, Jeff. That’s your answer to the question this time. Not really about the aging process, more about in extremis in all of its various form, and most particularly the transit point. If you want to read a few more observations on that, definitely pick up “Remastered Cerebus” #2 where I do talk a little bit more about the concept behind going under and how I think that applies. That’s what I see when I look at “Cerebus” #2 now.
Okay, are we gonna do Jen’s quest-- well, let’s not do Jen’s question. What’s the next one I’ve got here in my pile. Oh! Will Gray asks on August 16th, “Wondering how Dave is gonna take the Taliban victory since it contradicts his thesis in his essay ‘Islam, My Islam’.” [laughs] And you wrote, “Well there goes the next two hours…”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Do you think that it contradicts my thesis in “Islam, My Islam”?
Matt: I would have to reread “Islam, My Islam”, because it’s one of those, I vaguely remember the thesis, but it’s not one of those fore-brained things.I know that the fall of Afghanistan and/or the rise of the Taliban part 2, depending on your perspective, everything I’ve seen is, the writing was on the wall and nobody wanted to read it. Ya know, this was the only possible endgame based on all the decisions leading up to, “okay, that’s it, we’re out.”
Dave: Right. Right. Well, taking the wisdom of your “well, there go the next two hours”, I decided to type out my answer and make it as concise as I can make it because, yeah, this is just wrought with peril of wandering all over the landscape and forgetting where I started from. So, Will this is for you.
At the time that I wrote “Islam, My Islam”, I had no idea that part of the program was going to be mandated 10% representation by women in the Afghan legislature. That being completely undemocratic, everything from then on was doomed to failure, in my opinion. The foundation of democracy is that you run for office, and if get the most votes, you are elected, period. This wasn’t democracy, this was sociopathic feminism. The Operation Enduring Freedom forces faced the same problem in Afghanistan with Pakistan the United States had faced in Vietnam with Cambodia. The Taliban retreated to Pakistan whenever they were under extreme pressure. The same as the Vietcong retreated to Cambodia, which created the “widening of the war” problem. But with the greater complication that Pakistan was ostensibly an American ally. How do you invade an ally who’s sheltering enemy forces? The problem there being that any predominately Muslim country is always going to be in a fluid state between hardcore Islam and complete secular. The secular world is always looking for the next Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the Turkish Republic, who abolished the Caliphate and transformed Turkey into a modern secular state. But if you look at Turkey today, it’s far closer to hardcore Islam than Ataturk’s secular state. Same thing in Egypt. Nasser wanted to the transform the Arabian peninsula into a pan-Arabian secular Middle Eastern United States. Egypt is far more hardcore Islam than anything Nasser would recognize from his time period. Muslims are acutely sensitive to the moral corruption that accompanies secularization. Whoever most resembles prophet Mohammad and his followers who fled Medina in 622, and who fought pitched battles against pagan Arabs of Mecca, winning, then losing, then winning so that ultimately all of Arabia converted to Islam. That’s who Muslims are going to, a soul-deep level, favor. The Taliban look like Muhammad and his mujahideen vastly outnumbered by orders and magnitudes by the infinitely better-equipped Afghan National Forces, but destined for victory. Who is Mecca in this fight, and who is Medina? The Taliban leadership are trying to sound more modern, but the fluidity enters in there as well. The Taliban leadership are Mecca, the Taliban foot-soldiers patrolling the city are Medina. Do the foot-soldiers become more Mecca, or does the leadership become more Medina? “We prefer moral corruption to Islam” is not a persuasive argument to people who are historically Muslim. The civilization formally known as Christendom is a cautionary tale for Muslims. Their reaction is, “we can’t let that happen to us. We have to find favor in the sight of God by staying on the path of God.” The failure of Operation Enduring Freedom and the military humiliation of the United States reinforces exactly that instinct. Whoever is most severely devoted to God and following God’s word, and most sincerely devoted, can’t be defeated by people to whom God’s word is a quaint artifact embraced by ignorant, knuckle-dragging troglodytes and unfortunately that’s the situation in North America. Our perception of becoming more sophisticated, and becoming more worldly is, “well, religion, and God, and the Bible, that’s all just superstition so we have to turn our backs on that” and the more people that turn their back on that, the less likely, if you really want to get into a 20 year scrap with Muslims, that’s not gonna see it through, because your sincere belief in God, which I don’t think anyone could question, “well there’s got to be some US soldiers in Marines, and Air Force who are sincerely devoted to God.” Yes, unquestionably. But on a percentage basis, I think the Taliban are much better Muslims than the Operation Enduring Forces were Christians, and 20 years down the road you’re just going to find out, no, God favors those who exert themselves on what they perceive sincerely to be His path.
So, that’s as far as I’m going on that one, unless you’ve got any follow-up questions on behalf of the vast A Moment of Cerebus readership.
Matt: The only thing I know about Afghanistan, that I’ve learned in the past 20 years is that, military historians have gone back and gone, “yeah, going into Afghanistan is always one of those ‘oh this will be real easy’ and eventually it’s a ‘nope, nope. Run away, run away, run away’.”
Dave: Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: I mean, you name any great army in the history of mankind and they get to Afghanistan thinking, “well, we rolled over everybody else, they’re gonna roll for us” and it’s like, Afghanistan was apparently is the spot where everybody went “nope, you’re not coming in.” I don’t know if this is just it was terrain, or it’s just the people that decide to live.. I’m a huge fan of the Firesign Theater, a 70s comedy troupe. I’m sure you’ve heard of them, and if not, well, you don’t have a record player anymore, so you’re not going to. But their first album has four tracks, and the first track is “The History of the American Indian” and at one point in that track, the American government is talking to Indians going, “we’re amazed and marveled at how you survive in any God-forsaken wilderness we send you to, out there.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it sounds like Afghanistan is the God-forsaken wilderness that, if you can survive there, you can survive anywhere. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, I think one of the things that empires and larger countries admit in Afghanistan is exactly how unique the proportion the rural dwellers and the urban dwellers… which, the rural dwellers outnumber the urban dwellers by a large, large proportion. But there’s also a large nomadic population, that you don’t really find in too big places in the world, and nomads are very very difficult to convert to anything, because it really does firmly entrench the whole tribal perspective. If you read the biography of prophet Mohammad, you realize exactly how important the tribe is to Arabian culture and to Afghanistan and to most of the countries where Islam is the dominate faith.And in that construct, if you don’t kowtow to the tribe, then you’re definitely asking for trouble, and that was a lot of the history of Mohammad, was he’s been spoken to by angel Gabriel and has been told what to recite, and is reciting, and is getting followers. But really, all that saved him was his tribe, the Quraish, who were a very dominate tribe at the time, so consequently as long as the head of the tribe didn’t want Mohammad expelled from the tribe and didn’t want him shunned by the other tribe, with which they had alliances, it wasn’t going to happen. And that was the teeter-totter back and forth process of, no, he might be nutty as a fruitcake, but he’s entitled to advance his own religious faith. And if the leader of the Quraish hadn’t been a patron of Mohammad, that wouldn’t have happened. And that’s one of the things that’s overlooked by people not familiar with how tribes work in Afghanistan. I mean, Hamid Karzai was the first president and was definitely cooperative with the United States and with Operation Enduring Freedom, but when he stopped being president, he didn’t stop being important. Whatever tribe he represents is rock solid. So the heads of the different tribes negotiates with each other, and change and adapt based on which way they are tilting in favor or against something, and most of that is very very firmly entrenched in Islam. As long as United States was there with their full military and air support and all the rest of it, and money, too. Literally billions and billions of dollars, you could sustain it. But the moment that they weren't there, then it was just the most Islamic group in Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to roll over the less Islamic groups, which was the other tribes and the other cultures and the other cities that had decided “yes, we need to be more secular than this. We have to more Afghanistan forward from the second century.” That’s a split in Islam that Christianity went through in its own 1400, 1200, 1100 years into the experiment. But they’re still in the middle of it, and the strictest Muslim group is always going to steamroll the least strict Muslim group.
Okay! Here you go, Will. I hope you consider that an adequate answer to your observation. That’s the best I can do on that one.
And that brings us to Steve Peters. “Steve Peters asked: Hi Dave: Noting that Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is being released this Friday, September 3rd, I was wondering if you observe any comic book metaphysics at play. Looking at Gene Day's Wikipedia page, I see that he was born on August 13 and died on September 23. So the film is coming out pretty much exactly at the midpoint between those two dates.” And yeah, not following popular culture. I knew that “Shang-Chi” was in the works, because I would see it in the Heritage Auction catalogue as superhero movies that are upcoming. The date didn’t really register for me, and very cleanly observed, Steve! If you look at August 13th to September 3rd, and September 3rd to September 23rd, it’s pretty much two 21 day batches. Seven, seven, seven. So, thank you for lighting up my day today, when I read that one and I went, ya know, that’s right. I hadn’t even thought about that.
”While we're on the subject,” he continued, “can you tell us anything about Gene Day's Black Zeppelin? I see that it was published posthumously by Deni's Renegade Press, which leads me to think Gene and Deni were on pretty good terms.” Yeah, yeah they definitely got a long very well. “Black Zeppelin”, I pulled out the issues that I have in the Cerebus Archive. I only have them in the Dave Sim’s works, in which case, I have three copies of issue 1, issue 3, issue 4, and issue 5. Not having really looked at them in a long while, because you asked, Steve, I pulled them out this afternoon and read each of the issues, trying to go back to those days, “okay, what happened then?” And it’s very interesting because, evidently, I was far more of a driving force behind “Black Zeppelin” than I thought I had been. I thought all of this had happened after Gene had died and Gale and Joe Erslavas, and Dan Day and David Day, put it together with Deni and it really had nothing to do with me apart from my work that was gonna be printed in there. But reading Gale Day’s editorial on the inside front cover of the first issue, the idea of Aardvark-Vanaheim publishing “Black Zeppelin” definitely goes back to around 1978/79, which was when I was starting to think about publishing other books. Reading between the lines, it sounds like I said to Gene, “well, come on, you’re not going to do ‘Black Zeppelin’, why don’t you let Aardvark-Vanaheim do ‘Black Zeppelin’. You put it together and I’ll publish it, I’ll take 20% or something like that and give you 80% and you get it published.” The thing about anthologies is that they really don’t work, and it’s very difficult to get anthology people to understand that they don’t work. It looks like an easy process, everybody does a little bit of work and you put together a comic book of everybody’s little bit of work, and we’ll be able to go that much faster. We’ll more guys working on it. The thing is, you’re only as fast as your slowest contributor, whoever said, “yeah, I’ll do a four pager” and doesn’t get around to it until they get their four pages done you’re not gonna get the issue out. Gene did “Out of the Depths”, which was a digest sized comic, black & white cover, black & white interior, so it was definitely a fanzine, the comic book equivalent of “Dark Fantasy”. He had plans for “Black Zeppelin” and he had plans for a title called “Hellhound”. What happened was that you have the sharp awareness in the survivors, in this case, Gale, Danny, David, and Joe, where it takes a while for the shock to subside. Gene died in 82. And then you have to start asking, “what would Gene have wanted? We’ve got his whole legacy here in our hands, what are we gonna do about this?” What they had was the “Black Zeppelin” logo, and a great design that Gene had done. I had forgotten that Jim Waley, James Waley of “Orb” magazine and later of the Shuster Awards did the logo, and did a terrific job on it. And then you had basically finished pieces, four page strips, five page strips, and unfinished pieces, penciled stories that hadn’t been lettered, scripts that hadn’t been drawn. And that’s where you start getting into probems of going, “okay, which of these pieces are we going to use?” Gene’s own interest in “Black Zeppelin” and “Hellhound” and “Out of the Depths” subsided as another natural repercussion of doing anthology titles, that by the time that you’re waiting for your last contributor to get their part done, you’re talking years where the pieces that you do have on hand, the stories that Gene had done. “I’m doing this one for ‘Black Zeppelin’.” “Adriene All Alone” that I had did, “Oh hey, can I have that for ‘Black Zeppelin’?” Sure, you can have that for “Black Zeppelin.” But by the time, a year or two years has gone by, it’s no longer your best work. It’s now sort of an artifact of back in the semi-pro days and now I know how to do this better. Getting into the strange situation of, here’s “Gravedigger’s Banquet” which I wrote and penciled, and Gene inked, and then by the time you’re saying, “okay, time to put together ‘Black Zeppelin’ #1” and you’re looking at “Gravedigger’s Banquet” and you’re like, “well that’s from 1976. I pencil a lot better now and Gene inks a lot better now.” So then Gene redid “Gravedigger’s Banquet” in his more modern style. But then it’s two years after that, and that’s no longer Gene’s best foot forward and he wants something else to do be in “Black Zepplin”. Your interest and your level of enthusiasm starts to drop. Looking at the issues, I think one of the things that stood out for me on issue #1, that was where the printed “Adriene All Alone” where I even redrew the splash page because it’s like, “well, I can live with the rest of it, but this is a really lousy splash page compared to what I know how to do now. Just let me redo the splash pages.” But then, there’s a Charles Vess story in there, and Charles Vess talks about being at a Toronto convention in 1979 and Gene coming up to him and saying, “Dave Sim and I are doing an anthology title. Want to do a story for it?” and Charles Vess going, “sure! I’d love to.” And it’s like, “you actually said that you and I were working on this together?” I didn’t realize how… like I was still, in my own mind, this dopey irritating kid that Gene Day took pity on. And it’s like, no, Dave Sim and “Cerebus” opened doors with creators that Gene Day and “Black Zeppelin” don’t open. And I forget that, I forget how quickly that changed by 1979. #3, I just lettered a Bruce Conklin story that Gene did the script for, and it was not really my best lettering by the time that it came out, but I’m happy to have it. #4 a story called “Sequence” that got into dicey areas because I know Gene did the story sequence to be a completely silent story, and Joe Erslavas looked at it and said, “it doesn’t really work. It’s like, you sort of understand the point of the story without the words, but you kind of need…“ he thought, you kind of need words to really bring the story across. And it’s like, Deni asked me would I write it? Would I write captions for it? And it’s like, mhm, now we’re getting into dicey areas. This is an unpublished story by a guy who is now dead, who I know he didn’t want it to have words on it, and would I be willing to put words on it. It’s like, well, okay, Gale owns the story, and she’s living with Joe, and has delegated Joe to figure out how to get #4 put together, and it’s like, well, okay, I don’t think this is in exact service to Gene’s memory. But I can’t say that I can completely [inaudible], and they do want to get #4 done and they don’t want to write off “Sequence” as a story, so yeah, I went ahead and wrote captions for it. I don’t think I would do that now. I think I would say, “uhh, no, I distinctly remember Gene saying this is a silent story.” Basically, I think, he saw what I did with “Life’s End”, which had no words in it, and went, “I wanna do one of those. I wanna do a story that has no captions in it and puts across the idea.” Which brings us to #5, “Gravedigger’s Banquet” and “Life’s End” were both in there. “Life’s End” was a solo story that I did that Gene ended up inking, and “Gravedigger’s Banquet” I already described how that went with Gene pretty much redrawing it but retaining my script. What’s really weird is the back of issue 5, I think the wheels were coming off at Renegade Press at this point, because “Gravedigger’s Banquet” is in #5, and the inside back cover says “coming up in issue #6, the final issue of ‘Black Zeppelin’, ‘Gravedigger’s Banquet’.” So, don’t really know what happened there, the other thing I noticed was the first issue was April 1985, second issue was August 1985, third issue was March 1986, and fourth issue October 1986, or rather the four that I told you about, #1, #3, #4, and #5. Those four issues came out way too far apart to build a readership. It really was Gene Day’s “Black Zeppelin”. Here’s all of these guys that Gene Day worked with and wanted to do comics with. Once you used up the inventory, then Gene Day’s “Black Zeppelin”, I don’t think anybody just wanted it to be a brand name for another horror/science fiction fanzine anthology type. So, there you go, Steve! Thank you for your question on that one.
“Steve Swenson asked: Dave: the issues you and Bill Loebs signed ~~ how did that work? Did an authorized CGC rep witness your signing them and then transport them to Bill?” Uh, no. That’s not how that worked, and I’m gonna be curious to find out. I hope Steve will put it in the comments section and you will relay to me. Obviously, he’s seen the CGC graded issues that Bill and I signed. Were they signature series? Did CGC make them signature series? I faxed over to you one of the authentication certificates I did for one of the “Power Comics” hoping that CGC would allow that as validating a signature series book. I’m validating that, yes, I got this from Bill Loebs with his signature on it, here’s my signature on it, here’s a little colour picture of the cover so that you can see that the signatures are on there. I would hoping that they would make them signature series in that case, and the way that it worked was, Mike Jones, who is Bill Loebs’ assistant, phoned and asked, would I be willing to sign some books that Bill had a signed and that they were going to get graded. And I said, sure. That’s no problem. There was no CGC rep who witnessed Bill signing them, and there was no CGC rep who witnessed me signing them. But yeah, I was happy to do it. Mike, at some point, is coming up here to pick up the rest of the “Journey” comics that we’ve still got in the inventory, and I’ll be happy to sign all of those for him, and he can take them and get Bill to sign them, and then they can get those CGC graded.
Matt: I’d have to look at the video they did, I thought it was a yellow label or a gold label.
Dave: Right.
Matt: CGC… I follow Todd McFarlane on Twitter and Todd retweeted a tweet from CGC that Todd was at, I wanna say Diamond, signing a giant stack of a new “Spawn” comic, and CGC was there to witness it, and when you bought the issue it came with the witness form, so that you could send it in to get graded as a signature series book. And I responded to Todd’s tweet, going, “so how exactly does this work?” and never got a response.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But, presumably, CGC will allow, because I was told by my local comics guys that I talk to that do CGC stuff, that as soon as it gets witnessed, you have to send to send it in to get it slabbed, or else they consider the witnessing to be worthless, and it gets the purple label. And I’m going, well that doesn’t make a lot of sense. If their witness is there, ya know… I get why they want the book right away, but if you’re the creator and you sign 1000 books, and they witness you singing 1000 books, if you sell the book with the certificate, somebody should be able to send it in to get it graded as a signature book. So, I don’t know if maybe, because it’s coming from Bill to CGC, they’re like, this is a signature series because it’s coming from the creator, so it obviously has to be the creator’s signature.
Dave: Right. Or at least, the likelihood is so high that you can’t even consider that it wouldn’t be. The same as… I think a bunch of the old Comico people signed “Johnny Quest” copies that they had. And it’s like, well, okay, what’s the likelihood that somebody would sit down and try and figure out how to forge Diana Schutz’ signature on “Johnny Quest” and figure out how to forge Bill Loebs’ signature? The likelihood just seems being so completely remote. Which is why I was hoping… the best case scenario for me was, I send them this colour photo certificate and, “would you please slab this with the book in the back of the book, so that if it’s not a signature series, then at least it’s got the certificate in there. I don’t think that that’s something that they would do, or something that they were interested in doing. This sort of follows on to Steve asking, “have you considered 'hosting' a CGC rep for a signing, something of that nature.” Uhh, no. I really haven’t. Actually one of the few guys in Southern Ontario that is authorized to witness signatures, is Alfonzo at Studiocomix Press. So it’s not as if it would be impossible to do, and I’m not gonna admit to this, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t be possible for people to mail books to Studiocomix Press, “Cerebus” books that they want signed, or Dave Sim books that they want signed, and when one of them comes in, I’ll just get Rolly to take me up there with him, when he’s going up on a Thursday and just sign the book, Alfonzo can witness it and then send it back to whoever it is. We can then figure out what that was worth to drag Dave Sim away from the Off-White House, so he can sign a book up at the Fredrick Street’s Mall and then come back down here.
Matt: $10 a letter!
Dave: Yeah, [laughs] I never know what to do on that. It’s like, it’s no big deal once you get there, but it is one of those… I’m 65 years old and I’m trying to finish “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, and keep up with “Cerebus in Hell?”, and Weekly Update, and Please Hold for Dave Sim. Signing books for people is not really a top priority for me, unless I’m doing it for Dagon or something like that. He writes, “I have a few books I'd consider sending your way -- unfortunately not my 4 authentic #1 copies.” Four! He’s got four of ‘em! “which I sent to CGC just a few months ago. It would cost too much to do all over again… Thanks as ever for your time .” Sometimes you see… I’ve seen in the Heritage catalogue people who’ve signed slabbed books. Like, they signed the case, or they signed the top of the case where the description is. I don’t know what that does. What do you suppose that does? If you sign the case, does that devalue it?
Matt: Do you have to get it reslabbed in the case? [laughs]
Dave: No! That’s what I’m saying. Some people don’t do that, so like, forget it, I’m not reslabbing it, just sign my slab for me! And, as most of us figure out at conventions and signings, it’s a lot easier to just sign whatever somebody wants you to sign then to just sit there and argue with them. “I didn’t work on that.” And it’s like, just sign the book. You’ll just spend more time explaining why you’re not gonna sign the book than it will take you to just sign the book.
Matt: There was, 20 years ago around, maybe slightly less, I was going to the Chicago ComicCon every year for like 5, 6 years, and one year I found the Shadowhawk action figure from McFarlane Toys for like $3, so I bought it, and Jim Valentino was there, so I had him sign it. And of course, he’s thinking I’m gonna keep it in the package and put it on a shelf, so he signs the actual plastic that the toy is in, and I’m like, well, no, I was gonna open it and play with it, if you’d sign the card, I’ll keep the card. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it was one of those, I thought about it for about a month going, do I open or do I not? Do I open it, or do I not? If I open it do I save the plastic? Finally, I opened it, and went, yeah I should have left in the package. And I threw the package away because it’s worthless now!
Dave: I don’t know about that. You could be the only person who has genuine Jim Valentino plastic.
Matt: Well, not anymore, it’s been, like I said, 20 years! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] And it’s probably worth millions by now.
Matt: Well, that’s..
Dave: Genuine Jim Valentino plastic Shadowhawk wrap. Everybody else has their Shadowhawk signed, or their cards signed, you’re the only guy who got his signature on the plastic. Millions, I tell ya. Millions of dollars, you threw away.
Matt: [laughs] Ya know, it’s that’s kind of mentality that leads to hoarding and then when people die someone comes in and goes, “what is all this crap?!”
Dave: [laughs] And somewhere in the crap, there’s something worth millions! Literally millions of dollars but you overlooked it because you’re just not sophisticated that way. Or, unsophisticated that way. You don’t know your lowbrow culture like you’re supposed to.
Matt: Well, that’s… my friend, who got me into Cerebus, Nick, his uncle’s neighbor, and I understand this is already starting to sound like a made-up story, but I swear it’s true. His neighbor bought this house that a hoarder lived in. And the hoarder had two houses in town, and was at the other house and the hoard fell over and killed him. So the neighbor buys this house with everything in it, and it turns out the roof of the house leaks, so everytime there’s a really heavy rainstorm, the house sort of flooded. So he’s cleaning out this house so he can gut it, and fix it up, and flip, because that was his intention. “I’m gonna buy this house and flip it and make money” and it turned out that, no, you’re not gonna make a dime. But in the house, part of what this hoarder collected with VCRs. And he’s got like 100 of them, including, back in the late 70s Sears had their own brand of VCR video recording system. It was a console TV with the player built in. You’d go to Sears and rent the movie, come home and watch it, and there was no rewind. Once you watched the tape, you had to take it back to Sears, and they had a rewinder there. And my friend, Nick, is telling me, that the guy, not only does he have the console TV with the player built into it, he’s got the rewinder. I’m going, well, okay, it’s an obscure home video technology. It can’t be worth that much. And my friend’s going, “well you don’t understand. The rewinder was at Sears, so it’s worth hundreds of dollars in good condition.” Well, I’m like, is this in good condition? “No, it got flooded a couple of times.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But then, I’m on Twitter, and somebody’s talking about this obscure format, and there’s an eBay auction for the TV, with the player in it. And I’m like, oh okay, and I click the link, and I’m like, “free local pickup” and I’m like, huh, nobody’s gonna do that. And then I’m like, it’s located in town! It’s the one that my friend’s uncle’s neighbor is selling! I’m on Twitter, I’m going, I live in town, if anybody wants to buy this and arrange to pay me to store so you can come pick it up, I will do this for you. And nobody’s responded.
Dave: And there ya go.
Matt: But yes, somebody’s useless old crap is worth something to somebody, or as I said yesterday, one man’s trash is another man’s object that needs to be dusted.
Dave: Right. So, what did it go for? Did you follow the auction and find much it…
Matt: I haven’t gone back to look to see. I think the buy it now price was like $1000?
Dave: Wow.
Matt: Because, I mean, the console, the TV is probably big as your desk.
Dave: Right.
Matt: The desk in the square office. Because it’s a huge 1970s tube TV.
Dave: Right, right. [laughs]
Matt: And there are collectors, the problem is, as the guy on Twitter was saying, cause he is a collector, it would be worth buying to own it and say you own it, but it wouldn’t be worth buying to put the money into it to fix it up so it works, because the tapes didn’t age well, so even if you had a tape and you used it, it would probably break and never be usable again.
Dave: Right. And you really can’t take it back to Sears to get it rewound.
Matt: Well, that’s why you have to get the rewinder.
Dave: [laughs] Okay! Alright. Yeah, unbelievable but I heard it from you, so I will take it at face value.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And now we move on to Margaret. Margaret posted this, looks like it’s from my Notebooks, and said it was a, “sketch of the cover for ‘Anything Goes!’ #3”, then shared the Neal Adams cover. And then you pointed out the sketch was for page one of the story, and Mags said “you get what you paid for. Looks like the cover to me, just cause Dave didn’t draw the cover himself, doesn’t mean the sketch wasn’t used in the cover’s creation. Perhaps ask Dave next time you talk to him.” Which you were doing. And… where are we? “And if me being wrong actually creates some discussion on these posts, perhaps i'll continue to make up shit, eh?” Okay. The answer on that one is that you’re right. How the actual sequence worked, this was a benefit comic book for helping to raise money for Fantagraphics because Michael Fleisher was suing them over what Harlan Ellison had said about Michael Fleisher in the big Harlan Ellison interview. And I think what happened was, they went and found as many people as they could, as many big names as they could, to work on “Anything Goes!” and then put together the anthology out of what was coming. I said, yeah, I’d be happy to do, whatever it was, a three pager, I think? Three pager, maybe four pager.
Matt: Three.
Dave: Three? Yeah. “What’s the least I can get away with and still call it a story? I’m kinda busy here.” I think what happened then was they went, “okay, Dave’s agreed to do a Cerebus vignette, let’s talk to Neal Adams and say, ‘Neal, can you do us a Cerebus cover’.” And that’s what happened, Neal just said, “you want a Cerebus cover? Okay, I’ll give you a Cerebus cover.” And then he did the Cerebus cover and they sent it to me and said, “okay, here’s the cover, can you do a vignette around it?” And it’s like, mhmm. I guess so. I mean, it’s a gorgeous piece. It’s Neal Adams, and I was terrifically impressed that Neal Adams had actually done this picture of my character. But I was looking at it and going, hmm, can’t really picture a situation in which Cerebus would be dressed like that. I mean, it’s one of those… obviously a Conan riff where Conan would wear whatever was the local fashion in whatever city he happens to be in. And that was, this is what Cerebus has done. And Cerebus has also found the most bizarre looking sword I have ever seen in my life. I’m not sure if that sword… I mean, it looks really cool. It’s Neal Adams, so it looks really cool. I don’t know if a sword like that would even possibly work. So I decided to change that into a cheese slicer in my version, just figuring, whatever this is that Neal had Cerebus holding, looks more like a really really exotic cheese slicer than any kind of sword I ever heard tell of. But it is a gorgeous cover. I was a long time, mental meltdown, Neal Adams fan that I was. Seeing Neal Adams actually doing my character, [laughs] and going, wow! I draw Cerebus better than Neal Adams does! That’s the only thing that I draw better than Neal Adams does, but at least it’s one thing. So, there you go. That’s the answer on that one.
Matt: So, that cover for “Anything Goes!” 3 is a parody of Continuity Comics’ “Armor” #1.
Dave: Oh, right! Okay! Alright.
Matt: And if you look at the original “Armor” #1 cover, he’s wearing that armor, and has that sword. [laughs] So I kinda wonder if Neal got the call of “hey, Dave’s doing a Cerebus story, you want to do a cover?” looked at what was on his drawing board and went, okay, do that but shorter with long ears.
Dave: Could be, could be. Or a strange promotion. It’s like, “if I’m doing a free cover for Fantagraphics, I’m at least gonna promote ‘Armor’ at the same time.” That’s what… I was looking at it and I was going, why does that strike a chord with me, and where is the chord? And that’s why I thought he was doing a Conan riff of some kind. Oh, of course, it’s the Continuity character. It’s Armor. [sighs] How many years later is this? 40 years? Just goes to prove, if you live long enough, you will find out everything.
Matt: [laughs] But is it worth the effort?
Dave: Well, there’s no effort in this case, just like Matt Dow’s on the other end of the phone and he’s gonna tell stupid Grandpa what he hasn’t know for the last 40 years.
Matt: Yeah, but you had to go through the last 40 years to get here, that’s what I’m saying. The effort for 40 years to find out the answer to that question.
Dave: Matt, everything always comes back to the David Lee Roth quote. “The bad news is we’ve lost our way, the good news is we’re way ahead of schedule.”
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And that brings us to, “Jen DiGiacomo, who asked (in an email titleDave: ONLY IF you are short on questions for Dave...): ...otherwise happy to re-submit come September.” And here we are. “Hi Dave! It's Jen again.” Hi, Jen. “Since you have had to endure so many interviews over the years, and read through even more as you've meticulously researched a litany of literary figures, I am curious who you find to be the best interviewer based on personal experience *and* in a broader cultural sense.“ Um, in terms of personal experience, I think probably it’d be a toss up between Kim Thompson, who was, at the time that I did the first two part… Deni and I did the first two part interview for “The Comics Journal”. He was very, very well informed about “Cerebus”. At the time, that was 1982, he interviewed us in New York during the first American tour. Yeah, I would have to say, personal experience on that one, because an interview and an interview subject are always the matter of the time that it takes place and where the interviewer is in his interviewing career, and where you are in your creative years of being interviewed. And that was a happy mix of the two in 1982. Which is why it ended up being a two part interview. It was, he was well-versed enough in his subject that each subject lead to another subject, lead to another subject, lead to another subject, so that… “hey, I’m getting hungry, let’s go out and get some Chinese food!” Talking while having dinner and coming up with whole other areas that he wanted to get into, and me suggesting, well, if you get into that, it’s going to lead over to this. And it’s like, “oh that would be good, because that will hook up with this over here”, where it becomes not so much an interview than a collaborative communication exercise. In a broader cultural sense, that led me to over into, okay, in a broader cultural sense, it’s that hot button for me. And I went and dug out Norman Mailer’s “The Presidential Papers” and Norman Mailer’s “Advertisements for Myself”, where, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, but I knew they were in there somewhere. Something where I went, uh yeah, this is the Q&A format, so it’s pretty interesting stuff. If I had available reading time, probably something that I would like to go back and reread. One of them was the advertisement for “69 Questions and Answers”, which is really Norman Mailer’s introduction to this magazine piece that was called “69 Questions and Answers.” “Not very much need to be claimed for this interview, those who like to dialogue question and answers between a newspaper and an author may find it interesting. Lyle Stuart, an old friend and the editor of the Independent, (then called Expose’), sent me a list of 69 questions after I had agreed to do an interview with him. I glanced at the questions once during the day, and then later that night answered them more or less consequentially, a friend taking down my words. The only merit of the interview is that it was published in this spontaneous form.” And this is interesting, this ties in with what I was just saying. “Literally dialogues of the sort one sees in the Paris Review are invariable reworked by the author, who often spends years polishing his remarks. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact it can produce good writing. Hemingway’s interview in the Paris Review, issue 18, was perhaps the best piece of writing he’s done since the war. His prose has never been better.” Now there’s damning with faint praise! Your best writing is the Paris Review interview. “But here, for this interview, for what it is worth, may have a document of the way our most unsatisfactory hero was talking a month after ‘The Deer Park’ had come out - at least the way he was talking with his brain full of marijuana- he had turned on a half-hour before he had started to answer the questions.”
So, it’s very interesting. Lyle Stuart was obviously very very familiar with Mailer’s work, and very very familiar with the fact that Mailer was a difficult interview subject and would be a better interview subject if he just sent him 69 really rapid fire questions. So, there’s really good stuff in it. Even in terms of the way that it starts off. “What is the literary situation in America now? I think my attitude will come out as I answer the questions.” That’s Mailer being the typical subject. “Why? Because that is the way I answer questions. If you are giving advice to a young writer on the brink of fame, what would you say? Try to keep the rebel artist within you alive, now matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.” That’s really really good. As somebody who as at least partly reading Norman Mailer to find out, okay, how do I do this, that seemed to me very practical advice, which I continue to follow. The next one was “Advertisement for ‘Buddies’.” He introduces this, “What comes next is the fragment of a one - act play . It runs along for about ten minutes and then breaks off in the middle. I started to write it one afternoon and went along at good speed for two hours. Hardly a word has since been changed. That night, I started to smoke after seven days without cigarettes, went to The Ordeal which is legally called The Ideal Bar and is situated across the street from the White Horse Tavern, quietly went through eight or nine shots of blended whiskey, went home at closing, fell into a leaden bombed-out sleep and woke up at half past twelve in the afternoon with the mood of my play shattered beyond repair. I have not been able to find a new thought for it since. That action was as careless as anything I’ve done in a while, but in any case, the play probably would have run down sooner or later, for to keep its life, the situation would have to become more outrageous with every minute of stage action. Probably it could have been successful only by a major effort. Let us leave what was not done with the dependable remark that good beginnings to plays are easy to write.” And it’s a really good piece. It’s basically… Norman Mailer writing two sides of a discussion, one as a Russian, the other as an American, sort of optimizing the Russian bear and Uncle Sam, and what they would have to say to each other. But good textbook example of that’s exactly something that you don’t want to do, quit smoking for seven days, and when you get a gift like this from wherever your literary gift comes from, which none of us knows, you instantly go back to smoking. And then compound it by going out and drinking instead of sticking with your play, you kind of deserve to have lost something that might, might very well have turned out to be a real going concern. I think “good beginnings to plays are easy to write”, mhmm that’s true, but that’s sour grapes. I think Norman knew that he had lost something there and it was his fault that he lost it, and would try not to do that in the future.
The other one is Norman Mailer, “Presidential Papers”, and this is, “An impolite interview. In this dialogue, subjects grind by like boxcars on a two-mile freight. Never do so many intellectual items seem to be handled so quickly. It would be fatal if the cargo were fragile, or the mind of the reader. Done with elegance such an interview might be appropriate to a president. As done by Paul Krassner and myself it reads, if one may shift the metaphor, like the blow by blow of two strong club fighters going 16 rounds in a gym. Here is the schedule of our rounds: pacifism, the FBI, the sexual revolution, birth control, literary styles, totalitarianism, the new revolutionary, the aesthetics of bombing, masturbation, heterosexual sex, adolescent sex, sexual selection, homosexual sex, the sex of the upper class, and negro sex. What a fight! Considerately, the last round is devoted to mysticism.” It’s really good. It doesn’t really qualify as an interview, I don’t think, because Paul Krassner had his own credentials. It’s one of those, I can’t think of two more unlikely people to have a badminton discussion, which is usually what interviews are. I’ll, ya know, sort of lob something nicely over the net, he lobs back as carefully as well. But it was another one of those, particularly for the time period, if you want to see freedom of expression struggling to free itself from the immediate post-Eisenhower time period, “An Impolite Interview” is a good example. Starts off, “When you and I first talked about the possibility of doing an impolite interview, we kind of put it off because you said: ‘I find that when I discuss ideas, it spills the tension I need to write.’ Which seems like a very Freudian explanation. Does it still apply?” And Norman replies, “It does. Sure it does. I think putting out half-worked ideas in an interview is like premature ejaculation.” “Then why bother?”, and Norman says, “I got tired of saying not to you.” [laughs] “That’s all?” “I’m beginning to get a little pessimistic about the number of ideas I never write up. Perhaps the public is better off with premature ejaculation than no intellectual sex at all. I’m just thinking of the public, not myself.” And that’s just how it starts, and then it goes on for… how many pages is it… gotta be, 20 pages? So, yeah, for a kid growing up in the 1970s it was… and wanting to be a writer, it was, oh! Freedom of expression. Like, push the boundaries. Say the things that you’re not supposed to be allowed to say.
But those aren’t really high end Norman Mailer aspects where Jen’s asking about, in a broader cultural sense, best interviewer. The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that the best interviewer without parallel, I would have to say was Alex Haley, who, had his own creative career, wrote the book “Roots”, based on the fact that he wrote “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and I got my copy here. The back cover of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, this will give you an idea of… the reason that I say Haley is particularly important he brought out the natural eloquence that Malcolm X had, but he also knew that his job was to find the best parts of it and distill it so that it communicated Malcolm X to his best advantage. So it’s all quotes from Malcolm X on the back cover, one block of text. “I believe that it would be almost impossible to find anywhere in America a black man who has lived further down in the mud of human society than I have; or a black man who has been any more ignorant than I have been; or a black man who has suffered more anguish during his life than I have. But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest light can come; it is only after extreme grief, that the greatest joy can come; it is only slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.” “For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I know how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had. I know that my shortcomings are many. When I am dead, I say it because from the things I know I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form, I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say, that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with hate. He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of ‘hatred’ and that will help him to escape from facing the truth: all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race. Yes, I have cherished my ‘demigod role. I know that societies often have killed people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.” And significant paragraph here, this is from Alex Haley’s afterword. “After signing the contract of this book, Malcolm X looked at me, hard. ‘A writer is what I want. Not an interpreter.’ I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler, but he was the most electric personality that I have ever met, and I still can’t quite conceive of him dead. It’s still to me as if he’s just gone to some next chapter, to be written by historians.”
And there you go. That’s another example of the transit point, but in terms of in the 1960s, 1965, just the idea of these two men… Malcolm X knowing that his days were numbered, that he had a made a profound mistake of believing that Elijah Mohammad’s Nation of Islam really had anything to do with the Muslim faith. And having made the Hajj to Mecca and found out what Islam was about, and then returned to America and there’s the Nation of Islam Malcolm X, and then there’s the Muslim Malcolm X. He knew that he wasn’t gonna live very long. He knew that they were gunning for him, and the fact that just the sheer courage to remain as sharp as he did. And to become sharper and sharper, and for Alex Haley to become sharper and sharper, knowing this is it. He’s gonna get shot, we just don’t know when it’s going to happen. “How much of this can we get done?” But that was only part of what he was doing. It’s like, you’ve still got to bring in revenue even though you’re being hunted. Ya know, the book was a way to do it. You get a book on track, “okay, I’m gonna get this much money, Alex Haley will get this money. But, I have other things to do. I have to go out and make speeches, I have to make my impact felt. I can’t just sit down and write a book, so you have to write me.” Just a dazzling accomplishment. If you’re talking on the scale of one to 10, yeah I would definitely put Alex Haley, 10, 11, for they did.
Matt: Okay. Now, we all know the worst interview you’ve ever had to have been the five questions from the Yahoo group. [laughs]
Dave: Oh, no no no no. That was always… it’s really the same thing as Please Hold for Dave Sim. It’s one of the easier parts of my job, is [laughs] being asked questions, where I go, oh I know the answer to that! And not only do I know the answer to it, but we are all part of God’s clockwork mechanism and it’s functioning pretty smoothly here. It’s always interesting that I go, okay, here’s people living… scattered all over the United States and Canada and sometimes Europe, and all of them coming up with their questions separately, but as soon as I’m reading them, I’m going, okay I know how to answer all of these, and actually they interweave in the most amazing way. I mean, when I had that paragraph that I just read from Alex Haley saying, “it still feels to me as if he has just gone to some next chapter to be written by a historian” at the same time that I’m going, okay, trying to explain the death as a transit point. It’s like, you couldn’t intentionally sit down to hook those up any better.
Matt: I’m just thinking about Lenny’s multipart lawyer questions where it’s, your answer would be, “Okay, so, question one, 7. Err, Question one, C. Question one, D.” And I’m going back, rereading them, it’s like, you can tell when Matt started getting involved with the questions, cause that was where the wrong three paragraph preamble to get to yes or no, this.
Dave: Right. Right. Does Lenny ever post to A Moment of Cerebus, or the Facebook page, or anything like that?
Matt: He posts on the Facebook page, but he has his settings set so that if you’re not his friend, you can’t see it, and I’m not his friend on Facebook, so I don’t get to see it. It is hilarious every time it happens.
Dave: [laughs] Is there a reason you’re not Lenny’s friend?
Matt: Uhh, cause I use a pseudonym and I haven’t sent him a friend request. It’s one of those, it’s just I forget about Lenny and all of a sudden someone’s commenting, and I’m like, wait, what are they commenting on? Oh it’s content that I can’t see. Okay! Like, it’s like Lenny’s in his own private Cerebus group. [laughs]
Dave: [laugh] I can’t believe.. how do you people do this? How do you live in Facebook land?
Matt: [sighs] I don’t. I actually used to… the past few months I would go on break at work, and I would have my phone, and I would have something else, like a book or something, and it would be, okay I’ll just check my email quick and then I’ll just read my book for the 10 minutes I have for my break or the half hour I have for my lunch. And invariably, I would spend the entire time playing on my phone, and it got to the point where the past week and a half, my phone stays in my pocket of my coat at work, I’m just gonna pick up the book, and read the book. And I’ve been reading “Catch 22” because I love “Catch 22” and I’m like, I’m gonna reread this! And the chapters are short enough that I can get through a chapter in 10 minutes, or I can get through a couple of chapters during my lunch, and I’ve discovered that I really love that book again, and I’m not missing the fact that, “Hey, you got an email that doesn’t matter at all, that you’re gonna delete it the second you see it. You don’t need to delete it now, you can wait until 2:30 when you get outta work.”
Dave: Is that the fear of missing out thing?
Matt: [sighs] Part of it? Like, Mondays I know I’m getting a fax from you, and it’s gonna be the Monday Report, and I’m like, well I’ll read this now and when I get home I’m gonna post it up onto the blog, it’s like, why do I have to read it at 9:30 in the morning, I’m going to reread it at 3 in the afternoon when I’m putting it together into the blog. I can wait. It’s not the end… It’s not like the fax is gonna disappear and I’m never gonna see it again.
Dave: Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s human nature, I guess.
Matt: Actually, it’s not even human nature, it’s the animal nature that Twitter and Facebook and all these social media groups pay psychologists to figure out, “well, how do we get ‘em to hit refresh as many times as possible so they can see newer ads that we can paid for.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: It very much is the chimpanzee that they trained to smoke. Like, it seemed like a good idea when they did it, and now they have a chimpanzee that’s smoking three and a half packs a day.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, it’s like, what part of the rat hitting the lever are you not getting about this? We want you to want pellet, you already want pellet, and we get paid to sell you pellet.
Matt: Like, I have three Bibles, and I keep going, I should take the bible to work and read it on my breaks. And what stops me is, I’m gonna have to bring a notebook to write down the note of, alright, I read this. This is what I think about… and it’s like, it’s not gonna be one of these, oh you can read three or four pages on your 10 minute break. You can read one passage of one verse, and then you might run out of time before you’re done writing, and I’m goin’, we’ll stick with something light and fluffy. Light and fluffy at work, and if I’m gonna read the Bible it’s gonna be, okay, now it’s time to read the Bible.
Dave: Right. Right. What do other people do their 10 minute break? Are they all sitting there with their cellphones?
Matt: Yeah. They go in the break room. We have a PA system that they play the radio, but the radio is turned off in the break room because people want to talk or stare at their phones or whatever, and everything I go in the break room, I’m like, cause the volume knob is right there, and it’s like, the volume’s at zero. Nobody’s in the room, nobody’s coming in the room, so I’m like, ehh, screw it, and I turn it up to six so you can hear the music, and I walk out. And the next person to come in, it’s “oh this is too loud” and they turn back down to zero. And it’s a fun little game I play with everybody at work of, I know the people that don’t want to hear anything, and I know the other people are like, “hey we’re listening to good music and you walk into the room and all of a sudden it’s quiet.” Why not just have the music playing?
Dave: Right. Right. I’ll tell ya, it’s a whole new world.
Matt: [sighs] There’s some days where I’m at work, going, Dave’s sitting at the Off-White House all by himself doing whatever he wants, and I am so envious.
Dave: [laughs] Yep, in dead silence. Just trying to play it all of the [inaudible] of, I never know how the day’s gonna go. Well, I knew how today was gonna go. Please Hold day is, okay, read the questions, and if there’s something that you have to look up, you’d better look it up. This just one of those times when, even though much shorter questions, it’s like, okay, where are those Norman Mailer interviews, and which ones am I thinking of, and yeah. I would have to say Alex Haley, how do I do a Reader’s Digest on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”? And let’s do the Monday report trick of, you have one page to explain what you have to say about the Taliban, and if it spills over by two or three lines, you’re gonna have to cut the two or three lines, and I have very good instincts now of when, no, I think I’ve passed the bottom of the page, and time to start cutting. Speaking of time to start cutting, better start cutting, it’s time for me to go and get ready for a prayer time. So…
Matt: Okay! Well, it’s a pleasure talking to ya, as always.
Dave: I always enjoy it, I gotta tell ya, Matt. I always enjoy it, cause I don’t find out a lot about what’s going on out in the world except through newspaper filters, which is a completely different type of communication thing. But in terms of that real world where there are people who only get 10 minute breaks to do what they want, count your lucky stars that you’re doing what you want. You’re kind of swamped by it, but it’s all stuff that I’m interested in, so, yes, you are completely justified in being envious of me.
Matt: [laughs] It doesn’t happen often!
Dave: Have a good night!
Matt: It doesn’t happen often, but what it does. [laughs]
Dave: There you go. There you. Have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave! Talk to you again next month.
Dave: Alright. Buh-bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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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:
- Page 16 of issue #44
- Page 5 of Cerebus #20
- Inside Back Cover art from Cerebus #3
- The covers to Issue #74 and #76
- other stuff
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: If Jen's not back, I'm giving her parking space to Margaret...
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