Hi, Everybody!
Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
Here's where I'm at (blue link means it's been posted):
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Well...it appears we didn't do one then. Dave was sick and not feeling it.
SO: Please Hold For Dave Sim 3/2022
SO: Please Hold For Dave Sim 3/2022
Please Hold for Dave Sim 3/2022
Dave: …So we’ll get in a probably about 30, 35 minute session now and then the last prayer time is seven thirty something? I was gonna check that when I went downstairs, so we might be doing two sessions, or we might be doing three sessions.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: [laughs] It’s one of those things that it’s the guiding.. the guardrails of my life, Muslim prayer time, and everybody else, apart from Muslims, are blithly unaware of it. So…
Matt: The problem is, everytime I Google it, I go, I Google “prayer times, Kitchener” and it gives me the times, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not the site that Eddie uses that he sends you those times. So they’re not the right times.
Dave: Mm, well, they should be. Or they should be close, anyway.
Matt: Or my phone’s automatically adjusting and adding an hour!
Dave: That’s possible! That’s possible, as well. Okay, uhh, you’ve got a Jeff Seiler story, you said.
Matt: [sighs] I do, but unfortunately, I went back in email to 2005 trying to find a written copy of Jeff’s version of the story, and my email doesn’t go back that far anymore.
Dave: Uh-oh.
Matt: So, I have the story, but it’s from memory, and as we know, memory is 100% perfect, never wrong
Dave: Especially about Jeff Seiler!
Matt: Back in 2005, at the Small Press Alternative Comic Expo I exhibited for the first time, and all the Yahoos got together, and we all hung out and had fun, and that’s when Jeff told the story that became “Cerebus Readers in Crisis” #1. And he also told us the story about sitting front row center for the Rolling Stones.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And we went, “you should write these down, these would be great comic stories” and Larry Hart said, “yeah I’ll draw them if you write them down.” And then, on that Sunday when everybody was getting in their rental cars or on the shuttle bus to go to the airport, and Paula & I were packing up our car to drive back to Wisconsin, Jeff found a stray puppy. I forget her name, it was a young lady who, from Ohio, who had come to the hotel where SPACE was at because one of the cooks in the kitchen, she was communicating with him and they were madly in love. She was coming to visit so they could spend the weekend together, type thing, and showed up and found out, A) he had to work, B) he wasn’t single, C) 90% of what he said was a lie, and she was broke. She had no money to get home.
Dave: Oh my gosh.
Matt: Because it was one of these like, “come live with me” type thing. So she showed up and it’s like, “oh no, we’re just gonna hook up and then you’re gonna leave and I’m never gonna talk to you again.” And Jeff being Jeff wasn’t gonna let this lady in waiting who was a damsel in distress, just lie. It was “okay, what can we do to help her out?” And he’s going to all the Yahoos, explaining the situation, kicking up the money for bus fare, and I’m like, we’re going north to go home. I’m sure it’s on the way, she lives north, we’re going north. It’s not like it’s going to be the end of the world, yeah, I can just give her a ride home. And as Jeff Tundis and Jeff Seiler are walking away, Tundis turned to him and said, “Effin’ Magnifyer”.
Dave: [laughs] And that’s where the name came from!
Matt: And that’s where the name came from. Meanwhile, I got in the car with this strange woman that I had never met, who obviously doesn’t have a whole lot of life experience and does not make good life choices, and my girlfriend and I are driving her home. Yeah, she lives north but she lives northeast and we were kinda going northwest to visit my friend, so it’s, okay, we’ll take her along with us, and after about five minutes in the car, I’m like, nope, we’re gonna take her home and then go see my friend.
Dave: It was that much of a lady in distress, was it?
Matt: [sighs] She gave us the entire story of what had happened to her, and how she got there, and all I could think of was this is a woman who makes poor life choices. Like, if we stop for gas, don’t let her out of your sight, because she will come back with a new husband.
Dave: [laughs] I guess Paula was terrifically impressed as well, in the same sense.
Matt: We were in the front of the, this lady, I can’t even remember her name, I want to say it was Lisa but I’m sure that’s just my memory inserting a name. But yeah, she was sitting the back, and I’m like, okay, so what happened? So it was one of these, Jeff told the story and the story didn’t sound believable because it was Jeff.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I mean, you’re like, no, that’s not what happened. And, no no, that’s exactly what happened, you wouldn’t believe it if it didn’t happen to you. And she started telling the story, and she was being very, she got more agitated as she described what happened with this guy at the hotel, and I’m like, okay, I don’t want her to take it out on me, I’m driving a car. I don’t want her taking it out on Paula because, ya know, they’re “sisters”, she shouldn’t get mad at Paula for what happened with this guy, but at the same time, this woman’s mildly insane, hence the getting on a bus to come be with this guy and finding out that, “oh yeah, no, this was just a hit it and quit it, I never want to see you again.”
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Like I said, about five minutes into the drive, it was, nope, nope, we’re gonna take her right home, and then of course, it’s Columbus, and Columbus doesn’t clearly label things, as evidenced by Jeff’s story about missing the exit for the hotel one year with Gerhard in the car and they started driving north away from Columbus into a state forest and there’s no turn around.
Dave: Right.
Matt: [laughs] And as they were driving, it was starting to rain and Gerhard politely said, “hey, I’m getting wet because this window won’t close.”
Dave: [laughs] But he took a while saying it because he’s a polite Canadian.
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Going like, “I can get sort of wet”, and then it’s like, “well, even Canadians don’t like to get soaked.”
Matt: If I remember right, it was about 10 minutes of rain before Ger went, “Hey, Jeff, this window doesn’t close” and I’m just thinking, if it had been me I would have been like, we gotta stop the car, I’m switching to the front seat.
Dave: Right. Okay, well, great Jeff story, so…
Matt: I wish I his version of it because he had sent an email to the Yahoo group about, “this is what happened at SPACE!” and like a short little eight paragraph story of “this is what happened over the weekend” turned into I think 30 or 40 paragraphs because it was, “oh and then I met this girl and I didn’t want to leave her in the lurch” and that’s when I piped up with, yeah, thanks Jeff.
Dave: [laughs] Speaking as the lurch.
Matt: [laughs] Yeah!
Dave: Okay, we’re gonna start off with the fax that I got from the screenwriter. Ahem. “Hello Dave Sim, I’m a screenwriter who grew up reading Cerebus Comic Books and I would love to know what is happening with these characters. Are the rights by any chance available for a screenplay/film/tv? Thank you for your time and the many pages of joy and entertainment. Best,” and I blacked his name out because I don’t know if he’s a well enough known screenwriter that he wouldn’t want his name bandied about. The short answer to that one is, the less you want to buy, the more likely it is that I would be willing to lease it to you. As an example, if you wanted to do a screenplay for film or TV that was “Death’s Dark Tread”, “Cerebus” #4 and you were gonna take what I did there and expand it to 90 minutes, then that would be one amount of money that I would have in mind for taking out an option on that. If you wanted the rights to all 6000 pages, then that would definitely be a different amount of money that I would be thinking of, that would be largely unimaginable in our age of truly truly truly inflated and getting more inflated all the time dollar. Dollar inflation casualty, if you said a billion dollars for all of “Cerebus” for a renewal option I wouldn’t do it. Because a billion dollars might be what we’re paying for a loaf of bread in a another seven years or so. And that would close off options for anybody else. So that’s really the short answer on that one, is if you’re thinking as a screenwriter wanting to take out an option on a “Cerebus” intellectual property, don’t have eyes bigger than your stomach. What kind of a screenplay can you do logically about a given chunk of the story? This is something that I think I could probably keep saying until I’m blue in the fact, but Hollywood people are not going to register what I’m saying because Hollywood doesn’t work that way. “You’re a comic book guy, so you should be happy to take whatever amount of money we’re gonna give you for whatever it is that we’re interested in.” And that would be, as far as I was concerned, just making an enormous amount of trouble for myself, because, let’s say in typical Hollywood fashion, “well, I want to take an option on the ‘Cerebus’ volume, the first 25 issues.” Well, okay, you’re not going to get the first 25 issues comfortably into a 90 minute film, even if you were doing a streaming mini-series and you were doing 12 episodes, you would still be having to get two issues into each episode or taking enormous chunks of the story out just because you don’t have room for them, and then stitching the rest of it together. Which then , if that mini-series turns into an enormous hit, then you’re gonna wanna do “High Society” after that, and if you’ve left all of these giant chunks on the floor that apply to “High Society” in your “Cerebus” volume movie, then that’s really not gonna work. So…
Matt: The best way to describe this is an actual real world thing that happened, of Peter Jackson made “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy of each of the three books as its own movie, and he dropped enormous amounts of the book to make those three movies. And then when he too “The Hobbit”, which is a short book, he added all this stuff that got cut out of the books to pad “The Hobbit” book into three movies. So if you’re gonna do “Cerebus”, maybe don’t do Peter Jackson.
Dave: [laughs] Right, right. Like, “we’ll wait until we get to ‘Melmoth’ and then we’ll put all of the ‘High Society’ and ‘Cerebus’ stuff that we didn’t do in the ‘High Society’ and ‘Cerebus’ movie in ‘Melmoth’.” So, yeah, the slightly longer answer to that is, ya know, send me your screenplay on spec, but the odds of somebody doing that are really slim, as well. So, it’s one of those, this is probably not something that is possible to do except in the conventional Hollywood sense, which doesn’t make sense for me, because it would be exacting a logistical problem. Thank you for being such a popular media junkie that you had that perfect example right there handy like that there.
Matt: Well, it is kind of the classic blunder of, “okay, the books are too long, we’ll cut ‘em down to make it work”, and then it’s “oh there’s this prequel book. Hey, we have all this other material we can throw in!”
Dave: There you go. There you go. Hollywood won’t take no for an answer. Okay, so moving on from there, pile of questions for February, we begin with a missive from the far flung isle of Easton, Pa. It wouldn’t be Please Hold for Dave Sim without a Michael R question. What you talkin’ about, Michael R? “Hi Matt! Hope all is well with you and yours. I hope you enjoyed your vacation. Here's my question for Dave. Michael. Hi Dave! I hope you're on the mend and feeling better.” Uh, yes, I am! This is the first time having been sick for three weeks that I’m not bouncing back as fast as I usually have and that presents the question of, is this just the more severe version of whatever it is that you had before, or are you just getting old? And one of these times, you ain’t gonna bounce back. Which, extending that to its logical conclusion, one of these times my solution for being sick, which is go to bed and sleep until you don’t feel sick anymore. One of these times I’m just not gonna wake up. You know that you’re getting to that age when people don’t say, “oh, he died so young.” [laughs] It’s like, they don’t say that about 65 year old people. It’s like, “yeah okay, he didn’t live to be 90 or anything like that, but yeah, 65 years, don’t be greedy.”
Matt: The problem I have with that is, celebrities have died recently that are in their 60s, and I’ve seen more than one tweet of “so and so died, oh it was so soon!” and I’m going, that dude was 67!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Like, have a little perspective, it’s not like the guy was 27 joining the 27 Club, he had another 40 years!
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen that a few times lately. There is a contingent of people who are still doing the 65 is the new 20. [laughs] You do that as long as you think you can get away with it, cause you’re not gonna get away with it for very long. So, getting back to Michael’s question, “Since you have had drawing limitations now, have you co--”, oh! “I started a reread of the Cerebus Archive comic books. A big thing I noticed while you were getting to Cerebus' beginnings of the comic book was that you had written many short stories for money in the 1970's. So, my question is: Since you have had drawing limitations now, have you considered to be a hired gun freelancing short stories again like you did in the past and recently with Richard Starking's Elephantmen? I'm sure you must have many ideas for short stories and I'm still sure that your mind for short stories is sharper than when Alex Raymond had to get his series seven number two brush to the finest point. Michael R.” Then you’ve added, “I’ve kinda wondered this too. Why not turn to prose? Like, why not ‘Fall and the River’ as a novel? Or maybe a true crime novel set in the mid-80s comic industry? Or you know, not.” Yes, that’s definitely a not, because I’m 65 years old. It’s not like I’m looking for new things to do that would satisfy me creatively. I’m a good 15 years older than Russ Heath was when I interviewed him and asked him about, or someone had asked him in another interview about, what creative challenges does he picture for himself in the future, and he was going, “creative challenges? I just wanna get my gold watch and retire.” And in my case, it’s really, I hope I can get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done but at age 65 and feeling the clockwork ticking down, it’s I hope I have enough time left to do that. If I have enough time left to do that, and I’m still able to do “Cerebus in Hell?”, yeah, it would be interesting to do one-shot comic books. Here’s a story idea that popped into my head, this is maybe not the best drawing that I’ve ever done, but I did develop a technique with, what was his name, Brian John Mitchell, who was a mini-comics guy. He wrote a script, and I did a master drawing for it, and then shot different parts of the master drawing and put his text on the facing page, and actually, I think, the last award that I got was a SPACE award runner up for the mini-comics category for the story that I did with him. Yeah, that would be interesting and enjoyable as a thing to do, but “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” is still… I’m learning how to get it under control. Parts of it are still telescoping on me, where once I start explaining it, then it’s, okay, these people no frame of reference for what you’re talking about, Grandpa, this is something that you have been thinking about in your own mind on an ongoing creative basis and you’re gonna have to explain all this before you actually get to the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” punchlines that apply. Tying that in with age 65, nobody’s gonna say, “well, he went so young”. Go ahead.
Matt: Well, I’m just thinking, ya know if you were to die tomorrow there would be a contingent of us going, “it was too soon! He still had three volumes of SDoAR to finish.”
Dave: Right. [laughs] Right. And I am noticing now, like I just came to an end of a section in “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” just before I get into the actual Ward Greene/Alex Raymond collaboration, the meeting point between the two of them. It’s a real jaw dropper, the last eight or 10 pages that I’ve done, it’s, let’s get full value out of this, because this is a real jaw dropper. As as it was with “Cerebus”, I would get to a section like that and then go, okay, well if I’m gonna get hit by a bus before I get this done, this would be the time to get hit by the bus, if God’s looking for suggestions. So, that’s the answer to your question, Michael. I’m really… I have managed to close down that part of my brain that goes, hey, that would make a great short story! Or that would make a great one act play, because I’m definitely past that point permanently? That we don’t know. It would be very interesting if I could, with the assistance of my Patroness and hoping that “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” Carson’s Version is still able to generate $1000 a week to keep me doing “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. It’s nice to think that I could stay at the pace that I’m at now, which is three pages a week, four pages a week, and, okay, 52 weeks in a year, that’s still 200 pages. So the whole works right now that everybody has read is, ya know, only about 200 pages, 250 pages. So theoretically, I should have “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done in another year or another two years, but this is really a riding the tiger subject that has been completely unpredictable all the way along in all of its aspects, and I’m really not anticipating that changing. So there ya go. Thank you for this month’s question, Michael R.
Matt: So, the work you’re doing is it like, are you just doing mock-ups, is it a script, or is it like a weird amalgamation of, some stuff’s a mock-up, some stuff’s just in script form, and some stuff you’re actually drawing and inking?
Dave: Uh, no. It’s all mock-ups. I take an 11 by 17 piece of paper, which is just a piece of paper, and as I did back in the “Cerebus” days put a sheet of Letratone on it and then mark the corners that tells me this is where 10 by 15 is, and then take a blue pencil and hook up those four sides so there’s pages I’m working on. And then I take the previous pages’ page mock-up and put it next to it on the drawing board, and then go, okay, what does this page look like? And then, I start typing, I read the previous page, sometimes the previous two or three pages to get the whole thrust of what I was doing, and then I have the laptop there, and then I just start typing what I have to say next. It’s in the form of captions. And one of the things that I’ve learned now is, okay, what is the punchline of this? This is the thing that I want to convey. Write that caption, and then figure out, okay, how many captions do I need to lead into that, to have that have the most impact without really belabouring the point? So, that’s what I do, and then I print out the captions and then cut them off of the printed out pieces of paper, and put double-sided tape on them, and then put them on the blank page, spacing them out and then going, okay, what illustrations best illustrate what I’m saying in these captions. I usually have a completely different picture in my mind of the page while I’m typing it and while I’m thinking about it, once the captions are on there, then that says, uh no, what I was picturing as the illustration, that’s not the illustration for what I’m saying in the captions, enhancing what I’m saying in the captions. So that has to be a different illustration, and what illustration is that? And sometimes, and actually now most of the time, I go, okay, I know exactly what the picture is going to be, I just don’t know what size the picture is going to be. And that’s when I come upstairs and photocopy whatever it is that is the illustration and then put that on the page with the captions and then gradually start moving everything around, going, okay, this needs to be about 50% larger, and instead of the caption being up here in the corner, I’m gonna move it down so that it’s at this place on the picture that I’m working with. The eye will start there because that’s the caption, and then it will look at this image, which is what I want everybody to look at next, and then read the “Rip Kirby” word balloon or whatever it is that I want them to read next. Sometimes the process takes most of the time just staring at the page, and going, okay, what is it that best enhances what I’ve got in the captions, and how big does the “Rip Kirby” panel or whatever have to be, and staring it, and staring at it, and staring at it going, okay, well, let’s try 140%. And then doing 140% and sometimes that solves the problem, and sometimes it’s, mhm, no, I still got a next caption to go to, and that’s too large. That’s gonna carry the eye in the wrong direction. In which case, I go, okay, 120 wasn’t the answer, let’s go back to 100, and let’s… sometimes, it’s , let’s do the same image twice, and shove that up into the corner, put the captions further up on both of them. And if that’s the solution, well, that’s the solution. So the thing that I’ve learned with being able to get up to momentum to the Patroness’s assistance, is don’t try and do the whole page all at once. “Cerebus” pages I would try and rough in the whole page, instead of doing that, just do these three caption and just do the top third of the page, and then solve the middle third, and then solve the bottom third. And then, when that process finally finishes, and sometimes it takes a day, sometimes it takes two days, where I’ve got all of the images, I’ve got all of the captions, and then I start reading the captions with the images and going, there’s a better way of phrasing that. So, because I’ve got the Kubert font, I’m not hand-lettering, I can change the phrasing. Sometimes it’s, okay, I’ve figured out what the problem is. I’ve got this one caption that’s this long, and do I break it down into four captions that are two words each, I can put those on a nice gentle curve through the panel and that’s what I’ve been missing, is something that conveys the staccato quality of the subject matter, which one caption doesn’t do as easily or as effectively as little captions. Sometimes just two words in each little caption with a period at the end, which always drove Jeff Seiler ballistic, because it’s not proper grammar. It’s like, it’s not proper grammar, but it’s really good comic storytelling for what I’m trying to convey here.
So, that’s the break point with that, and now I have to interrupt for my prayer time. But we can get right back to this if you’ve got more questions about… but yeah, that’s what I’m doing right now is mocking up individual pages with photocopies and captions on them, with double-sided tape. And once I’ve got everything in place, and I’ve read through the page, and yes, there’s no way that I can see to improve this, this is conveying what I want to convey. Then I take packing tape, transparent packing tape which is two inches wide and then I put that across the whole page. Takes about five or six strips to go down the whole page, it means that the mock-ups will probably eventually rot because I have no idea what… like, packing tape is not designed for archival quality. So, I’m sure the double-sided tape will be bleeding through and turning brown. The point isn’t to create mock-ups that will survive into the ages, it’s to create mock-ups that everything stays where it is supposed to until Rolly gets here on Thursday, so he can scan them, and then send them to the Patroness and Eddie Khanna and Sean Robinson and Benjamin Hobbs if it’s page that features stuff that he drummed up for me on the internet. Okay, I’m going to run along, and I will call you right back.
Matt: Okay! Take to you then!
Dave: Talk to you then.
Matt: Bye.
Dave: Bye-bye.
[musical interlude]
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: I’m back! I’m back. Okay, did I explain that thoroughly enough for you, how the mock-up process is going?
Matt: Oh yeah! The reason why I ask is cause you had sent a fact talking about doing dead-hand photorealism for the death of John Marsh sequence…
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I posted that along with something from Eddie that explained what was going on with SDoAR, cause people are going, “oh, I thought Dave abandoned it”, no, Dave’s got someone paying and he’s working on it. And somebody went, “I still don’t understand. What exactly is Dave doing?” and it’s like, okay, I’ll ask!
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, that was one of those things, I got a fax from Sean when he got the dead-hand photorealism pages going, “How’s the wrist with all of that drawing? You know the pages look great” and that’s another one of those, well, I’ll tell ya. I got all of the tracing paper and photocopies and everything, buffalo-clipped together, and I could explain all of the theories behind dead-hand photorealism, because that was a long time evolving and one of those things that I can only do over maybe a two or three page stretch, and all of the stuff, if I got it scanned by Rolly and sent to you would explain. Okay, this is the theory that I came up with, it works pretty good, but it’s like, it’s still hell on the wrist. It’s like, explaining all that isn’t getting “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done! So, I’ve gotten more into the habit of when one of the guys, whether it’s Birdsong, or Benjamin Hobbs, or Sean, asks me a question, I just write, too long a subject. I can’t do that. Maybe it would make a really interesting subject if I ever get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done and I’ll be happy to talk about it then, but mhmm no, right now Grandpa is still running out of steam and better that he should use his steam to keep mocking up these pages. I’ve got about, I would guess, probably about 100 pages done? The last time that I counted them, there was like 86, I think, and that was weeks ago, so if I’m not at 100 pages, I’m pretty close at 100 pages. But that introduces another problem, where it’s like, the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” audience is an “audience” as far as I know right now. Like Jim Rugg is a huge fan of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, “work of genius, etc. Etc. Etc.” And I fall back on Al Williamson’s thing of, “if I invented a cure for cancer, we can call me a genius. In the meantime, let’s just say that I’m a really good comic book artist.” But most of the books, most of the “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” books, I think, are just being bought by people who go, “okay, I’ve heard a lot about this, so I should probably get a copy”, but it just goes in their pile of stuff that they’ve bought, comics, graphic novels that they’ve bought that they’re really looking forward to reading at some point, but they never quite get around to that because they spend all of their time updating their Facebook page and following stuff on Twitter and whatever else. It’s just a 21st century thing.
Matt: Well, it’s… there’s a number of people that have come out of, they bought the book, they’ve read the book, and everybody says it’s fascinating, even the people that go, “but Dave’s completely wrong.” Like, Erik Larson takes issue with the page where you say that it’s ridiculous to think that Alex Raymond would have pressed the wrong pedal, and Erik Larson was going, “no”, like he went and found a study from Britain that… I think it was from Britain, where they prove that, yeah, no, a majority of accidents are somebody panics and the pedals are too small and close together, that’s why there’s accidents. And specifically, I believe, he found one that had something about the early Corvette. And him and Shannon Wheeler were talking about it on Twitter, or else Facebook, going back and forth, and Oliver found it, so it went to Oliver’s column, and Oliver’s like, “well, I don’t know if we want to put this in there” and Sean and Carson and I were like, no, no, no, we’re putting this in there. Actual discussion of a plot point of the book by people in the industry who are known in the industry is always gonna be a good advertisement of the book of, if you wanna know what they’re talking about, here’s how you get the book.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And it’s one of those… like I said, everybody thinks it’s fascinating, but my biggest problem is, I read the complete Carson version, and then my friend lent me the fourth volume of “Rip Kirby” and I started reading it and all I can see is horizontal, thick lines! [laughs]
Dave: All you see is what?
Matt: The horizontal stripes from sharpening his brush in the strip.
Dave: [laughs] Right! Right.
Matt: And it’ one of those, it goes back to the Cerebus line of, “once a thing is seen, it can’t be unseen” like I’m trying to read the story, I’m trying to get into it, I’m trying to get some enjoyment, and I was like, nope! Cause it works out where there are one or two panels of the horizontal lines, and then two or three strips where okay, it’s just fine brushwork and then, back to horizontal, and I’m like… you did crack that code and it’s one of those fascinating things that once you know it, ya know, you’ll look at Alex Raymond’s work… I kinda wanna go back to my “Flash Gordon”s and see, hey are there a bunch of stripes every two weeks?
Dave: Right, right. Uh, well, my larger point is that, there’s not a large enough audience for me to go, well if I’ve got another 100 pages, I really have to get it out to everyone. Sean has agreed to remaster the mock-ups, which, that’s gonna be a task and half, because it’s like, “well, are you gonna straighten all the stuff that’s supposed to be right angles and isn’t right angles? What font were you using for this block of text here?” It’s like, I don’t know! I’m just trying to get it done. I’m not trying to figure out how to preserve something that I did 30 years ago, I’m trying to just get this done. After I’m dead, whoever wants to deal with that stuff is welcome to deal with that stuff. And if we did that, if Sean remastered all of it, and went and got the photos that I’m getting by fax from Benjamin Hobbs and went, okay, I will sharpen this and then replace it where it is on this page and figure out all the reductions and enlargements and whatnot. And then we get that all done, and we do a 100 page book of “Strange Death of Alex” volume 3, and it sells like 9 copies, because everybody who read Carson’s version, it’s like, “well, that’s enough for me.” And it’s like, I really don’t have any confidence in there ever being a large enough constituency of people who go, “Uh, no. If it’s the next thing Dave Sim has done, I’ve gotta read it and I’ve gotta have it. Win, lose, or draw.” It’s like, I’m just not in that category, which is why it’s if I did do something it would be probably Cerebus Archive style portfolios, but instead of 10 pages, we’d print on both sides so you’d get 20 pages of “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”. But even there, for Cerebus Archive we’re down to 140 people who will buy those. I don’t want to take time away from doing “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” in order to produce 9 portfolios for the only 9 “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” fans who are vastly outnumbered by the people who go, “okay, we have to tear this to shreds because this is Dave Sim. We absolutely can’t have Dave Sim being approved of on anything.” So it’s, for Jim Rugg and the other 8 people that think it’s a work of genius, I wish there was some way for me to get it to you. If any of the people are indescribably wealthy and you wanna give me $8000 to just do a quick and dirty hundred pages for you, and get them printed at Studiocomix Press and then done at a local book binder, as I did with my Boston patron with “Cerebus” remastered pages that haven’t come out in the portfolio. It’s like, yeah, I can do that, but that doesn’t get done on its own, and you end up using up whole days that… I’m 65 years old, I just want to get “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” done.
Okay! Moving on to MJ Sewell. “Hey Dave and Matt, Sorry to hear you are ill. Feel better.” I will take that as a direct order, Mike. “The Moment of Cerebus site mentions on Saturday, 19 November 2011 (from Cerebus TV, it also hints) a book about to be published called Dave Sim's Last Girlfriend by Dave Sim & Susan Alston, Simon & Schuster, $16.99. Goodreads lists this book with a cover photo of Dave and Susan kissing in a sunset, and another cover I found is a badly drawn cartoon of Dave spanking Susan as she is bent over his lap (ankles tied). Listed as first published August 7, 2012, 160 pages, then says lower down that it was published on April 26, 2016, by BOOM! Studios. It is only listed on odd foreign sites and not available to buy anywhere. Question – does this exist or is it just an elaborate goofy hoax?” Uhh… [laughs] I’m not the person to ask about it, because it’s not my book. Going through the block of text that you have here, and before I do that, I should say that I remember being in a bar on Queen St, I think it was the bar at the Sheraton. I used to stay at the Sheraton across from city hall, and I was in the bar with Chester Brown and Joe Matt, and the subject came up of, “I Have to Live with This Guy” which was a book that TwoMorrows did that was about the wives of cartoonists talking about those cartoonists. They weren’t all cartoonists, Stan Lee’s wife did a section, as I recall. But I had the unhappy distinction of being the only ex-husband in “I Have to Live with This Guy”, which kind of refuted the title. It’s like, no, you didn’t have to live with this guy! [laughs] As a matter of fact, you left! But Joe Matt, who is just this absolute vulture for gossip, is going, “well you’re going to buy it, aren’t you?” And it’s like, no. And he goes, “you’re not gonna buy it? How can you not buy it? There’s this whole section on her living with you. You have to know what it says! Don’t you have to know what it says?” It’s like, no, I don’t have to know what it says. I hadn’t really had to explain it before, like I saw the ad for the book and went, oh great. [laughs] Another nail in Dave Sim’s coffin, but there’s plenty of room. Everybody grab your hammer, grab your nail. And I went, it’s ungentlemanly and unchivalrous to dispute a woman’s version of events, and if I read it, I would go, okay, I have to correct some of this because this is gonna get read into the historical record, then it’s carved in stone. “Deni said that this happened, Deni said that he said this therefore that’s what happened, that’s what he said.” Well, that’s the downside of being a serial adulterer, a serial philanderer. Even having a civil wedding service at city hall instead of in a church, it’s, well, okay. This is what’s going to happen to you, is, coupled with your chivalrous impulse a whole different version of you from certainly how you perceive yourself and certainly what you would think of as objective reality, is going to exist, and you’ll just have to accept that.
So, with my book with Susan, which, that’s another one of those, “By Dave Sim and Susan Alston” it was our faxes back and forth. Most of my communication with Susan was by fax or by phone because she lived in Northampton and I live in Kitchener. So there was long stretches of at least three weeks or four weeks where we wouldn’t see each other, so this is, at least, a historical record in that sense that, yes, these are faxes that I wrote, these are the faxes that she wrote. Everybody can make their own assessment about them. “Goodreads lists this book with a cover photo of Dave and Susan kissing in a sunset” yes, that was on Martha’s Vineyard, actually. We vacationed with two other couples in a very very nice, not at the beach house, but on Martha Vineyard house right next to Carly Simon’s mansion, was about a two minute walk away. And it’s like, man oh man, I don’t remember Carly Simon having too many hits but if it pays for a chateau like that, good on Carly Simon. Oh, and one of the days or two of the days we were at the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, we were joined by April, Kevin Eastman’s ex-wife. [laughs] And I will always remember April’s quote was, and there’s no way that I can clean this one up, “Revenge is a bitch, and I am a motherfucker.” [laughs]
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: So, uhh, that’s, when I see that picture of Dave and Susan kissing in a sunset, those are the two most prominent and distinctive memories of that vacation. Well, I should qualify that, because Hurricane Edward also came bearing down on us, and never had that experience before, being on a house near the beach and watching television telling us where Hurricane Edward is now, and it looks like it’s probably going to touch down on Martha’s Vineyard. And it did, but it really just stripped the beach away. The beautiful white beach that we had been sitting on was just… there was no sand anymore, just land dropping off to nothing. But it was really just a severe thunderstorm where we were, as we experienced it. So I’ve actually got a t-shirt that says, “Labor Day Weekend 1996. Martha’s Vineyard. Hurricane Edward. Just a D.” Let’s see, “and another cover I found is a badly drawn cartoon of Dave spanking Susan as she is bent over his lap (ankles tied)”. Mhmm, no, her ankles weren’t tied. I just had them, drew them together. It was a cartoon that I did for Susan that she used to have on her fridge. So, a good conversation piece, I guess, for anybody coming to visit Susan in her kitchen. So that’s the book where, again, I’m not going to dispute anything that Susan says about the relationship. I don’t know if it’s just the faxes, in which case, there’s really nothing to dispute. This is what you wrote Dave, and this is what she wrote back. If she’s gonna do, if she did, or is doing commentary in between, that’s another thing. So, I think it’s one of those, she would probably be well served trying to do this through A Moment of Cerebus so that the however many of the 142 people who buy my stuff would be interested in this. She could sell 80 or 90 copies on a print on demand thing. I think it’s probably one of those, she has completely moved on at this point from where she was in 2011. We broke up in 1998, so, I have no idea if any copies of it exist. Like you say, “it’s been coming soon for a decade now”, so I think everybody’s in the same situation of, “how do we even theoretically make money off of this?” I was contacted by Denis Kitchen who I think was repping the book for Susan and he wanted to know if they had the permission to print my faxes. And same as everything else, it’s like, no, you don’t need permission if you think that you need a Dave Sim raw material in your creative work or biographical work, you’re the better judge of that. But I did say to Denis, I think the problem you have is that you would have to explain first of all who Dave Sim is, and has been obliterated by the feminists. I was one of the first cancel guys, so, it’s very very difficult when you completely canceled somebody’s entire existence, to then try and sell a book called “Dave Sim’s Last Girlfriend.” Well, “who the hell is Dave Sim?! And why should I care, and why should I care that this was his last girlfriend?” So there, that’s as interesting as I could be on that one, and moving on…
Matt: Uhh, before we move on…
Dave: I knew you weren’t gonna let me get away all clean on that one. Go ahead.
Matt: I remember in, I think it was somewhere in “Form & Void” the individual issues where you got the letter from Blake Bell, saying, “I’m doing a book about comic book creators and their significant others, and would you like to participate?” and your response was, “I am the guy who proves you don’t have to live with the guy. Are you sure you want to do this?” I can’t remember what it issue it was, but I remember it was the inside front cover, and then years later I was at the half-price book store and I found a copy of “I Have to Live with This Guy” And it was like five bucks, and I’m like, well, you know, it’s a train wreck, but it’s not my train wreck, so we’ll buy a copy and we’ll see how bad this is.
Dave: [laughs] Right.
Matt: And the book itself is really really interesting as far as like, you get John Romita’s wife talking about being with John Romita and John Romita being John Romita. I think Roz Kirby was interviewed for it. And it was one of those, if you like comics and the history of comics, yeah, there’s something there for you. But there’s also this section where it’s, “hey, this is the woman who used to be married to a guy that she’s not married to anymore!” [laughs]
Dave: Right. It stands out. One of these is not like the other.
Matt: As far as Joe Matt’s thing of, “well, you’re gonna buy a copy?” the best answer would have been of, “hey, once you survived the plane wreck, you don’t go back to see the instrument panel.”
Dave: Yeah, yeah. And it’s, I don’t really remember my personal relationships with any kind of vividness because it was, everything I had to focus on intently, getting “Cerebus” to work and doing the individual component parts of it, that’s what the relationship was for, was to get away from that and just… I have vivid recollections, but they’re vivid snapshot recollections. Most of the time it was just, uh, yeah, it was really nice to have a girlfriend, but this was pre-Bible, and this is no way to live. You really shouldn’t be doing this. I remember being on Susan’s sun porch and smoking, because that was where I smoked, and thinking, this is only here temporarily, so don’t get too used to this, and that was always the situation I was in, in my relationships. And it’s like, well, don’t do that. From the moment that I figured out I’m not a husband, that should’ve been it. And I’ve said this before in this forum and elsewhere, that I should’ve made the decision in 1983, well, it’s not a matter of the marriage to Deni was a train wreck, it’s just I was married for almost five years and figured out, no, structurally, marriage is not for me. It’s not a matter of I need to find somebody that I’m more compatible with. No, I’m a loner, and a loner creative guy, it’s probably the worst choice for boyfriend, or husband, for any woman. And that I did, when I figured that out in 1998, that was the complete break. My [laughs] relationships with women now really amount to, can I have that half-decaff and half-regular with mocha sweetener, thank you. And apart from that, just, female neighbors, sticking to Henry Higgins’ mother advice to him, because he was completely unsocializable in “My Fair Lady”, “Restrict your conversation to the weather, and your health.” So, that’s what I tend to do, and that’s the most successful female relationships that I have. I do remember, I did buy Adele Mailer… Adele Morales was her maiden name. Norman Mailer’s ex-wife. I think it was his second wife. She wrote a tell-tall autobiography and I bought it, and I forget what the situation was, but it was right there, it was pretty expensive, but it’s like, okay, well, I haven’t got any new Norman Mailer books so I will read Adele Mailer’s book about Norman Mailer. And I remember hitting the section where they’re in their Brooklyn Heights apartment and entertaining Edmund Wilson, who was towering American literary critic of the 20th century. He knew F Scott Fitzgerald, and I actually printed a long chunk from him doing a parody of F Scott Fitzgerald which is just, deadly deadly accurate. And here it is, the set-up, Edmund Wilson was coming over for dinner, and I’m going, what did Edmund Wilson and Norman Mailer have to say to each other? And all she remembered was, partway through the meal, Edmund Wilson got a piece of spinach stuck in his teeth, and it was really really gross. And it really put her off her own dinner. And I went, Dave, it serves you right. You just paid, whatever it was, like $40 for this book and this is what you’re going to get out of it. Don’t buy a book by one of Norman Mailer’s ex-wives to find out anything significant about Norman Mailer.
Now we’re done with that subject!
Matt: Yes we are!
Dave: Alrighty! And Margaret Liss, who has been The Cerebus Fangirl for so long now, how long has she been The Cerebus Fangirl for so long now? That I’m starting to wonder if she’ll ever become a Cerebus Fan Woman! Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck. I think she might go right from Cerebus Fangirl to Cerebus Fan Grandma. “So in the Notebook post for Thursday, I asked this: Hey Ron, Matt, Boss man, could you ask Dave if he just singed this in July of 2012 and it was actually drawn earlier, or if it was drawn in 2012 and used elsewhere in reference to this.” And I see the reproduction there. Yes. That was drawn earlier, that was me doing the extremely old Cerebus, but not “The Last Day” Cerebus, just going, okay, Cerebus is going to get older and start putting on weight in places that he doesn’t want to put on weight, and start sagging in places that he doesn’t want to sag. And what will that look like? And this was me basically doing it as a nude. I believe this is on tracing paper. Basically, let’s take this drawing where he’s nude, and then figure out, okay, what is his clothing going to look like on top of it? Actually this says “The Last Day”, but I think it was an early drawing where I was going, okay, I want this to be plausible, but the further along I got with it, the more I went, no, this is an old Cerebus, or really old Cerebus, or as Margaret says “old old Cerebus” in the Notebooks. He’s “The Last Day” Cerebus. This is his last day of being alive, so this is the maximum erosion in his physical attributes that he’s going to be. So at that point, “why aren’t there any sketches of old old Cerebus in the Notebooks?” was because I went, in order for him to look that old, “Last Day” old, I think I just have to free form cartoon and just say, okay, as long as all of the parts are there, you’re just going to put as many wrinkles and as many sags and have the limbs as withered as possible. Like as you can see from the art here, it’s not really withered, it’s sagging, the bicep is sagging and the tendon that goes from the upper arm to the chest is becoming far more pronounced than the actual armpit. That was one way of thinking of it, but as you can see, I just went to town on “The Last Day” and went, uhh no, this is the same as Sergio doesn’t pencil his stuff because it’s Sergio. You know where everything needs to roughly go, you’re just going to get rid of the spontaneity that you’re looking for by penciling it ahead of time. Just dip your pen, and just start going to town. So that’s the answer to those two sides of that question.
Then our old friend Jason Trimmer. Yes! I hope Jason Trimmer is still married, he was newly married a few years back and I hope he’s still at the Ohio art gallery that he was working at, and I hope everything’s going smoothly for him there. “Hi Matt and Dave,I know this question will cover some ground that has been discussed recently, but it's something I've been wondering about and this might be a good chance to sum things up, again. 2021 was the year I updated my phone book collection with all the digital remasters currently available, and filled in those trades I hadn't previously owned. I think it's worth restating what a fantastic job Sean Michael Robinson did with the remastered versions.” Yes. [applauds] “They are beautiful! They prompted my re-reading the first half of the series. Naturally, I wished Melmoth had a remastered edition and I long to have a complete remastered set of trades on my shelf. Hey - who doesn't?” Uh, 90% of the world! [laughs] 99.99999% of the world, really doesn’t. “The recent news that Waverly Press would be doing a remastered edition of "Form and Void" was interesting. I'm fine paying $70 for a Waverly edition, but that seems a bit high for the direct market. Maybe I misunderstood and $70 was just for the Waverly version and the retail price for a direct market version would be lower. Either way - does Dave think this is the most feasible way forward for getting the remastered editions out there, given the current state of the direct market, and the place of the Cerebus trades in it? How far out is he comfortable extrapolating? Is it just one volume at a time, or is there a grand plan for getting the remaining collected editions in print? Thank you both, Jason Trimmer.” And you go, “Heh. This’ll be good.” Okay, the most condensed version of that is, when a trade paperback sells out, which it doesn’t very often, then it’s a matter of, Waverly Press is going to do a hardcover and a deluxe softcover, I think, of “Form & Void”. I have to, in soliciting for “Form & Void” through Diamond Comic Distributors, well, “Form & Void” doesn’t exist as far as Diamond or the direct market or the comic book field is concerned, so consequently what I’m having to do is fire blind on how many of these is Diamond gonna get orders for when it’s solicited? And Eddie’s just sending in the solicitation for it now, so it should be three months or so before we have final orders. How many more copies on top of the actual ordered copies is Diamond interested in getting? And the quote that we had for Marquis printing 300 copies of the softcover, they had a cost of $19 Canadian for each of them. 300 is probably pushing it, I would be very surprised if Diamond even sells even 50 copies of “Form & Void” even though they haven’t had it for years and years and years. And on top of that, if they get orders for 50 or 100, they’re not gonna want another 900 so that they have them always in stock. So, consequently, I just picked the number $70 out of the hat, because at 60 off, Diamond would be paying $28 a copy for the softcover. So that would mean that I’d be making $8 and whatever the exchange rate is on each copy that they sell. It’s a hockey stick curve. It’s like, you have to except the fact that no new people are going to be interested in “Form & Void”. It would be nice if they were, but that’s gonna be decades after I’m dead that “Form & Void” would be of interest to anyone. So… what’s that?
Matt: The only upshot to selling “Form & Void” right now that I see, is it’s a two-prong. On the one hand, it’s been out of print for long enough that Cerebus collectors are seriously trying to find this book. So a new printing might sell just on the it’s been out of print for so long it sells for $100 on eBay or whatever. The second prong is that it was mentioned in “Hemingway and the Comics”, which was a book about Hemingway in the comics, and Sean had done some remastered covers so that they could solicit, say whether Hemingway appeared. And so, contacting the guy that wrote that might help drum up some interest from the Hemingway people?
Dave: Okay, dealing with the second one first, Eddie suggested, “can we get him to write the introduction?” and it’s like, uhh, [laughs] I wasn’t very kind to Ernest Hemingway in “Form & Void” so I have no idea if he’s even just in barely Dave-tolerant category just because of that. “I have to include it because it’s obviously a big work that features Hemingway in the comics, so I can’t absolutely cancel it, but I’m gonna have a very very brief contact here, and then that’s over with.” The other thing is, nobody in the comic book field knows “Form & Void” is going for $100. Only Cerebus fans that are looking for it know that it’s going for $100, and the ones that are looking for it aren’t people who are listening to this. [laughs] Or reading A Moment of Cerebus because they’re just Cerebus fans. “I’m not interested in 21st century Dave Sim, I absolutely loathe and despise ‘Cerebus in Hell?’ I might buy ‘Strange Death of Alex Raymond’, but probably not. I just wanna get ‘Form & Void’ so that I can complete my Cerebus trade paperback collection.” And for a lot of the people, “then I can actually read the whole story. Like I’ve stopped at ‘Going Home’ and I can’t keep reading until I get that book.” They’re not gonna find out that it’s been published, they will just be shopping on eBay and trying to talk themselves into paying $100. I have to keep emphasizing how much Dave Sim is capital L larivv[???]! You don’t, nothing that Dave Sim does goes viral, no one is going to find out about this because the cancel culture people who are running out society are very very good at going, “no, this guy is shut down. You are not going to hear from this person, because as Justin Trudeau puts it, he has ‘unacceptable views’.” And the cancel culture people and the feminists and Justin Trudeau are the people who have elected themselves the arbiters of whose views are acceptable, and whose views are unacceptable.
Matt: Well, I mean, if Brian and I can get the word out, it might get a couple hundred extra copies. I mean, I don’t see a print run of 500 or more being feasible. I mean, 500, I see the Diamond ordering that way they got a couple hundred extra, right away, for reorders. Because didn’t it take like a decade or two to get out of print?
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, but it’s going to come down to a conversation with Tim Lenaghan at Diamond Comics, which is one of the few things that I’ve got going for me in the comic book field, if he’s still in the position that he’s in, that he’s moved up to a much higher level at Steve Geppi Enterprises, and he used to be my rep and Diamond and became the supervisor for the reps and the head of the purchasing department. [sneezes] Excuse me. So when it came time to do another printing of the “Cerebus” trade I could phone time and leave a phone message saying it’s Dave Sim, I know you’re dreading hearing from me cause if you’re hearing from me, I’m hacking around for you to take 1000 copies of a book that you probably can only sell 20 copies a year of, but here I am! So, I’ve been putting off that phone call and that conversation where it does get the point where I can say, okay, Diamond solicited for “Form & Void” softcover at $70 a copy, the sold 70 of them, how many more copies are you comfortable buying? And please, Tim, I’ve known you for years and years and years, and you’ve always been a stand up guy. If the answer is, “Dave, I just have to say ‘no’. We can’t sell these, nobody is interested. It would be nice if we could single-handedly uncancel you, but we can’t uncancel you. All we would be doing is putting a bunch of unsaleable books in our warehouses, and we’re not in a situation of being able to do that.” So, you know, I’ve called in so many favors of Tim and Matt Demory keeping Dave Sim in a ballgame that we know Dave Sim isn’t in anymore, and I’m just not going to do that anymore. The worst that happens is there’s these gaps. I don’t know if the situation is what Matt Demory says it was where he did finally check the trade paperbacks that had sold out from Diamond and he said, “okay, system’s supposed to automatically kick out a purchase order when the quantity gets down to such and such. It’s a tripwire and it will get a purchase order to you.” He says, “I can tell looking at this it hasn’t been doing that. You’ve got like four or five books here that are down to zero, or down to very very low numbers, so I’m gonna have to go in annually and figure out what quantities we’re gonna order of these.” And he ordered, probably about eight books? Seven books? That most of them were “Cerebus in Hell?” trade paperbacks, “Latter Days”, and “Melmoth” and across the whole thing, I mean, Rolly went and got all of the books from the storage unit, brought them back to Camp David, and it’s a pretty big pile of books. And then he takes them over to Packaging Too and they repackage them to Diamond specification which are very very exacting and then send them by UPS. But the total purchase order was $2500 US. I would imaging between Rolly’s going over to the storage unit, and Packaging Too, their labour charges for repackaging these in specific boxes, and what UPS is gonna charge to get them to Diamond, probably most of the $2500 is gonna be gone. It’s like, there’s no… [laughs] “and then suddenly, the Cerebus trade paperbacks just starting selling like gangbusters!” It’s like, mhmm, no, it’s not going to happen. So, getting back to Jason, your question, “when can I get the remastered ‘Melmoth’?” When I’ve sold the last, I forget however many copies of “Melmoth” there are. 157? Diamond just ordered like 34. So there’s probably another four or five years supply of “Melmoth” before we get to the remastered stage. I mean, it’ll get remastered, but getting turned into a book is a whole other category. The next one will be “The Last Day”. “The Last Day” is the next one after “Form & Void”, but we don’t wanna be doing Waverly Press bells and whistles hardcovers back to back just because if you have to pay that kind of a price for “Form & Void”, you’re not looking to pay a price like that for “The Last Day” three weeks after that. So those’re… go ahead.
Matt: I know cause my good friend Jesse Lee Herndon asked me when’s the “Form & Void” remastered Waverly Press coming out, and I’m like, I don’t know. I can ask? Soonish? And I asked Dagon, and Dagon’s like, “it’s gonna be a couple of weeks, but when I get the link ready, I’ll send it to you so you can know.” I’m like, I just wanted to know like within a month? Like it sounds like it’s coming up real soon…
Dave: Yeah, and then let me interrupt… go ahead.
Matt: It sounds like it’s gonna be real soon! [laughs]
Dave: Well, it’s, that was, I thought the solicitation had already gone in, and we were waiting for the numbers, because we have to take the numbers from Diamond and however many charity numbers Tim Lenaghan’s willing to give me, and the Waverly Press numbers and put that all together into one print run. So, we’re gonna have an awkward situation where the “Form & Void” Kickstarter is going to be done, but the actual fulfillment on it is going to be even slower than Waverly Press is ordinarily. So everybody’s gonna have to be patient with that. And speaking of having to be patient, it’s my last prayer time.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: So I will be back momentarily.
Matt: Alright, that works!
Dave: Talk to you later. Buh-bye.
Matt: Bye.
[musical interlude]
Matt: Hello again, Dave!
Dave: Hello again, Matt! Okay, moving on, are we moving on or did we leave something dangling last time?
Matt: No, no, I think we pretty much answered it. I mean the problem I have when people say, “$70 for a Cerebus trade? That’s outrageous!” is, I struggle to explain, you have to cut at least half the price off, because that’s what Diamond pays, and then cut off another 10 or 20% and that’s what Dave gets, and then you gotta cut off 50% of that to pay for the printing. So it’s like a “Cerebus in Hell?” you make a dollar. [laughs] People don’t understand that…
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, it’s and the price increases on paper are just getting absolutely outrageous. When I found the solicitation hadn’t gone in for “Form & Void”, it’s like my biggest concern wasn’t wow, this is gonna delay the whole thing for three months, it’s three months probably translates into another 6 to 9% paper increase. And it’s not just that the price of the paper is going up, you can’t get it anymore. Alfonso’s having that problem, so it’s just, welcome to the 21st century.
And then, Steve Swensen sent in, “Hey Matt, OK, just to be a real pisser: Why carrots?” [laughs] Uh, carrots because they’re about the only vegetable that I can live with. I would qualify that by saying, if I had something to cook on, which I don’t, I could include corn in that, frozen corn, I like that. But eating frozen corn out of a bag like a popsicle, mhmm, I’m thinking no. Broccoli I actually like if it’s got a good cheese sauce with it, but that’s the same thing as eating salad with really fatty salad dressing. It’s like, mhmm, no you don’t like salads, you just like the gloop that you can put on salads that makes them somewhat palatable. So that’s the answer to “why carrots”. The only other fruits and vegetables that I eat are bananas and apples, granny smith apples, because they remind me of the sour green apples that we used to eat down at the apple orchard down at the bottom of Filsinger Road way back when. So I used to have before every meal ABC, apple or banana, and carrot. “Why carrots on Monday?” That’s because that’s the day after the sabbath, where I’ve already fasted for 24 hours, then eat at midnight and then read John’s Gospel at three o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the morning, caffeine powered by a small bottle of Diet Coke. And then I have my, Monday’s one of my caffeine days, Wednesday’s the other, where I have the Diet Coke and then eight o’clock in the morning I go and get the New York Post and the Waterloo Region Record and pick up a large coffee, half decaff, half regular, and some cookies, and [laughs] notably as I told you the one time, two prestige chocolate cakes because I was hideously jealous of you getting yet another birthday cake! You’ve got so many people under that roof, that especially it’s like you’re having birthday cake every other day of the week.
So, because it’s a caffeine powered day and this answers “Why not carrots on some other day? Why 3lbs of carrots on Monday?” is, by the time I’ve had the Diet Coke and then the large half decaff, half regular coffee, I am motoring pretty good. And put on top of that, then I read the New York Post halfway through, all of the news, all of the business, skipping the sports. Like I say, I’m motoring pretty good, and if you’ve ever read the New York Post, or if you’ve ever read any New York newspaper, it’s like, how do these people live like this? It’s like, all of these atrocities taking place on the subway, particularly with the no bail thing, or dramatically reduced bail, and just putting criminals back on the street repeatedly no matter how long their rap sheet is because then they show you a picture of a cell on Riker’s Island that’s supposed to hold three people and is holding 12 people, [laughs] and it’s like, okay! I’m motoring pretty good, and this is also getting my cardio way up there, so good time to just stick carrots in your mouth because you barely notice that you’re eating this giant franken-carrot and you’re getting healthy! The three pounds of carrots is, at least for the time being, I decided I would rather take my carrots like medicine. Three pounds on Monday, and then I have six carrot free days from then on. I did have a couple of monster, monster franken-carrot bags that were practically bursting and the carrots were probably three inches around, and the following week I would have one of the carrots on Thursday, one on Friday, one on Saturday, and skip Sunday, and okay, I will now eat the rest of my carrot on Monday. But the franken-carrot situation for some reason has settled down. [laughs] Temporarily, where they’re still franken-carrots. They’re still like way way bigger than anything that I knew as carrots when I was growing up. But like I say, there are weeks where just, man, I can’t even eat this like just a Bugs Bunny carrot. I have to chop this up and eat the individual sections because it’s just too big to get the carrot into my mouth.
“3lbs of carrots EVERY Monday?” Yeah. If you skip one of the Mondays, and I did skip when I sick, so that was like at least three or three Mondays, it’s like, mhmm, anything that you’re taking as medicine to keep you healthy and you skip one Monday, you skip another Monday. Mhmm. You’re just asking for trouble. Pretty soon it’s like, gee, when was the last time I had my carrot? I also eat pineapple. I eat cans of pineapple. I can live with that. Very very sweet, very tasty, and very healthy with no calories. “Is there a similar vegetable you eat on other mornings?” And, no. [laughs] That’s the whole point. Grandpa will eat his carrots, but carrots are the only ones that he can live with. There’s no way that Grandpa is gonna eat five pounds of squash, or anything like that, just to change things up. Carrots are the only ones that I can live with.
“And by the way Dave, I really enjoyed what you did with POT8,” Thank you. “for me at least the "remembered fun" aspect of the project shows through.” Well, thank you. Yes, that’s definitely the situation of revisiting the one time that as a working bar band going bar to bar to bar, Cerebus got to play the stadium with the Rolling Stones. And it’s like, man, oh man, oh man, look at all the people. “Matt -- ComicLink has 2 Cerebus pages up for auction, FYI. And the mercenary money-hungry capitalist in me wishes I'd bought all the extra POT8 Canadian you'd bought; I'd own almost 10% of the copies in existence… Steve.” And it’s like, well, that’s exactly what I’m doing here, is, everybody will now have a chance to think about it, that, okay, this is what happened this time. Me doing the dance with the ones that brung ya, which is the AMoC core people, the same ones listening to this right now. Okay! Here’s a rarity that nobody is going to hear about because of the La Rivv [??] thing. If the feminists cancel you, you stay canceled, but hey, guess what? You can’t completely cancel me, and it means that I can do a rare Turtles publication that those core people will be able to get. And hey, by all means, if you want to buy 10, and sell 9 of them to pay for the 10th one and whatever else you can get out of it, there you go.
“Which leads me, Matt, to wonder, how many more “Pieces of Turtles 8” are there? Is a second issue in the offing? A third? When will you get the Turtles bit from the original ‘Guide to Self-Publishing’, the bit about the autographed photo?” And, the answer to that one, in sequence, is I don’t know how many more “Pieces of Turtles 8” there’re gonna be, because from the moment at the beginning of January where I said this is what I’m doing, and all you’ll have to do is say Swordfish and you can get the Canadian edition at CerebusDownloads, to the fulfillment on the American edition, which should be coming up. David Birdsong says there are fewer than 20 people who didn’t get their surveys in, and those are coming in pretty steadily, and Rolly’s all set to package and mail them. That’s still January to probably mid-March in order to go from, hey let’s kick this off, to, okay that one’s all done. So, with the idea that the big “Turtles” 8 Kickstarter is coming in January of next year, how many more can I get done in between? Because it also requires stopping doing “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and putting in two full days on a “Pieces of Turtles 8”. So, I did get from David Birdsong, he got Kevin Eastman’s book “Artobiography” which has scans of “Turtles” 8 pencils in it, and sent it to me so that we can steal that and put some of those… I just got those in this afternoon, and I skipped through them and there’s definitely some interesting stuff to talk about there. And I’ve got other, because I’ve been thinking about Kevin and Turtles for this wrong, since January intensively, I do have other things that I want to do. I wanna devote a page to Pete Laird specifically. I’ve also dug out Comics Buyer’s Guide coverage of the Toronto summit, which has some photos that people haven’t seen since 1988 when they were exclusive to the Comics Buyer’s Guide. I’ve got photos of us at the Metropolitan Hotel in conference taken by Helen Finley, so I’d like to put those in there. I also… one of those weird things where Chris Woerner’s new book came in, and one of things that he had was every year in January he does the celebrity deaths from the previous year, and there’s always at least one or two people on that list where I go, oh man, I had no idea, you’re kidding? Batton Lash was one, and I went, nobody Bat Lash was dead! Yeah, that’s a sobering thought, I’ll be carrying that one around with me for a little while here. And this year it was Julie Strain died, Kevin’s ex-wife, the Penthouse model and actress, etc etc. It’s like, whoa. That’s a very weird thing to read about, the death of one of Kevin’s ex-wives as a celebrity. So, I’ve only got one real Julie Strain story and it involves Julie Strain and Susan Alston and me, so… I have been thinking, well, yeah, that’s not really “Turtles” 8, maybe I shouldn’t put that in there. It’s like I went, well, no, I think I will put it in there now, it’s just a page. Nobody likes it, that’s fine. If it doesn’t go in the Turtles Kickstarter, the big huge Turtles Kickstarter, that will be no surprise. But it’s a very vivid memory, it’s one of my most vivid memories of Northampton, so there’s a teaser on that one.
Just finding things here and there where I’m going, oh right right, I’ve got that. Like my penciled Turtle for “Matisse, the Unknown Turtle” print that I did with Kevin in the first Kickstarter back in 2012. So I think that print will be the center spread, and then I’ll add some sketches and stuff of what went into that one. I’m not sure I’m gonna do the bit about the autographed photo. It’s like, that was definitely one of those civilian stories that, yeah, okay, consolation that people know who the Turtles are but they don’t know who Kevin Eastman is. But it exists on its own. I’ll have to go back and see how long the anecdote is and what I would do as a picture for it.
Okay! I did want to thank you for dotting the T’s and crossing the I’s on the “Crowded Room” announcement, Apple TV’s official announcement, because Dave Sim knowing absolutely nothing about Hollywood, and movies, and television and stuff like that, called Akiva Goldsman of “A Beautiful Mind” an Academy Award winner “Keith Goldman” in my [laughs] release to you, because I was just copying it from the phone message, and one name’s the same as another. I knew Tom Holland as a name because he’s been showing up in my New York Post on page six and Cindy what’s-her-name’s column of gossip, and if Granpa’s reading a name then you know this guy is incredibly, incredibly smoking hot as actors go. And you finished off with, “I don’t know who the redacted person that contacted Aardvark-Vanaheim north about using Cerebus is, but this is AppleTV Plus’s announcement, so hopefully they’re listed in there.” Uh, no. Not a chance. I was kind of making a joke about that, because the person who contacts you to get something from you to use as a prop is not part of the production. The fact that he’s just getting to this, ya know, contacting someone for a prop with two weeks to go before filming, that tells you about how important that job is in the Hollywood and TV context. It’s like, everything else gets taken care of before they get down to that. And then it’s this guy’s job to contact the unwashed. When I did return those phone calls, I usually ask the guy, how many productions have you done this on? And then he’ll just rattle off five or six, and then it’s like, mhmm. They do it for a little while, and then they either move up in the pecking order, or they give it up, because it’s like a high pressure job. “You only have two weeks and you better get this for us because the cameras start rolling in two weeks.” So I thought, just to make him look like a bold-faced name, I thought I would black out the name on my press release.
And now, that’s it. We’re all done now. I’ve been fasting all day and usually I get to eat right after my last prayer, and now half an hour after my last prayer. So I’m gonna run along. Best to you, best to Paula, best to Bullwinkle, and best to Janis Pearl as always.
Matt: Okay. And we’ll, God willing the creek don’t rise, do this again next month!
Dave: Yes, or intervention from Walt Disney World for whatever it is that Dave Sim that keeps contracting that puts him in bed for a couple of weeks. Talk to you next month, then, Matt!
Matt: Talk to you next month, Dave. Bye!
Dave: Bye-bye.
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The Latest CiH? Kickstarter is LIVE!
And since you're thinking of Kickstarters, Our Friends at Living the Line have a new one for Brandon Graham Pillow Fight and Other Delights.
And, coming in February, The 1982 Tour Book (click the link to be notified on launch).
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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AND, Robert Jeschonek is back with Volume 2 of Legends of Indie Comics - Words Only. Dave was in Volume 1, and he's got another all star line-up for this one.
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Tim Gagne sent in:
Crownfundr for Nick Crane
Already net its goal but pretty cheap for a collection that finishes the story all these years later -
https://crowdfundr.com/nickcraine?ref=cr_3EI341_ab_18OUE1
The Help Out Bill Messner-Loebs Go Fund Me, or buy Rodney Schroeter's book with proceeds going to Bill. OR(!) you could buy Bill's book with the Dave backcover. I have discovered links:
Wanderland (Paperback but slightly more expensive...I dunno why...)
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
The site offers UK shipping, so PRESUMEABLY it's printed and shipped there(?).
And Journey Complete:
And if you wanna see how the book looks in Real Time...
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Our very own Jen DiGiacomo is part of a film production titled The Day Elvis Died. She'll never ask anybody here, but they're crowdfunding to finish the post production on the movie. (It's set in 1977, will a certain obscure Canadian cartoon aardvark make a cameo? (No. Elvis died in August. Cerebus wasn't published until December. Any appearance in the flick would be an anachronism that would ruin the movie for everybody. EVERYBODY!).) Here's the first trailer.
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Up to 35% off October 22-26.*
*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.
- And a proof of a new Cerebus in Hell? issue tied to the Kickstarter
- BATMAN AND CEREBUS ILLUSTRATION DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
- CEREBUS #112 - #113 PAGE 17 DAVE SIM COMIC ART SALE
Thanks to Steve for sending the link.
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Oliver' Simonsen's Cerebus movie: The Absurd, Surreal, Metaphysical, and Fractured Destiny of Cerebus the Aardvark it's currently available on "Plex", "Xumo", "Vimeo On Demand", "Tubi". If you're in Brazil..., "Mometu", "Nuclear Home Video".
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Latest from our friends at Studio Comix Press:
SPECIAL NOTE
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And for October:
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Next Time: Mondays!
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