Hi, Everybody!
Jesse Lee Herndon has caught up to Dave and I on the Please Hold Transcripts, And since I'm out of Proto-Strange Death of Alex Raymond pages, I may as well start knocking out these transcripts.
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Matt: I’m pretty sure it was a joint thing of, “well, we don’t want the cat getting into everything.”
Dave: [laughs] That’s always a great motivator. Let’s rearrange out lives around the cat.
Matt: Well, the cat has suddenly developed anxiety apparently, if you touch him near his tail, he tries to bite you.
Dave: Hmm.
Matt: And he has other physical symptoms that Paula looked up online and went, “oh yeah, they say his anxiety and the solution is to prescribe cat Xanax” and I’m like, or, we just let him die and get a new one!
Dave: [laughs] See, they don’t find that funny. [laughs]
Matt: [grumbles] This is the cat that we paid way too much money for that has cost us more and more every day.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And now he’s got anxiety. He’s probably picking up on the fact that he’s not as welcome as he used to be.
Matt: It doesn’t help that every morning…
Dave: They’re very sensitive, cats.
Matt: Well, it doesn’t help that, every morning I wake up and he’s, “hey, it’s time to feed me, isn’t it?” and I’m like, technically, but you don’t need to stand on my chest and ask.
Dave: Really?
Matt: He’ll wake me up ten minutes before my first alarm and just be, “are we getting up and getting food?” It’s like, no, we’re gonna cuddle for 10 minutes. Shut up and just purr.
Dave: There you go. That’s your job, cat. Anyway, your fax, you’ve got the 6:49 prayer time and the 8:07, and the Kitchener Masjid, which is where Eddie Khanna gets my prayer times for me, is 7:48 and 9:09. So it’s pretty close. I think they’re just figuring if you’re asking about the prayer times in Kitchener, you probably want to know what the prayer times are locally, so they’re translating it for you.
Matt: Oh no no. When I time in “Muslim prayer times”, it gives me mine, and then I have to type in Kitchener, and it changes them.
Dave: But it’s, like I say, it’s still giving you an hour earlier so it’s Central time. You are Central time, right?
Matt: I am Central time, but when I do prayer times and it gives me mine, it’ll be Central time, but when I type in Kitchener, it’ll be Eastern time. The probably I have, though, is I’ll type it in and I get, it’s Google, you get a million results and it’s not like the top ten all match.
Dave: Right. Right. Well, as I say, it’s too close to be a coincidence. It’s off by one minute on the actual prayer time for the evening prayer, and then off by two minutes on the night prayer, which probably has a lot to do with the fact it goes time zone to time zone like minute by minute. I used to get the prayer times for Ramadan, and it’d be Toronto prayer times which say that Guelph is three minutes ahead and Waterloo is four minutes ahead.
But enough of that! We will press on…
Matt: I emailed Eddie to double check the prayer times, and he just sent me the spreadsheet, and I’m thinking, I just wanna know for one day for a two hour window.
Dave: Yeah, they’ve got stuff on there I don’t even know what it is. It’s an [skip] or something, and I know they’ve got sunrise in there, which is different from the morning prayer, the morning prayer is about an hour before sunrise. So, I’m getting more focused on it, Ramadan’s coming up on Saturday.
Okay, you say here, “we begin here with your Seiler story.” For a long time now, I’ve been going don’t clean up a giant pile of crap next to the telephone, because the Jeff Seiler story is in there somewhere. It used to be on the floor with a couple of Cerebus trade paperbacks, proof copies that I was gonna send to Heritage Auctions and kept postponing doing that until I finally went, okay. I either have to send them to Heritage Auctions or file them away. I can’t remember which one that I [skip] there’s a letter from Jeff Seiler, January 3rd 2017, which coinkidinkily the time period that I’m working on the commentaries for “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” right now. “Dave, hope this is a welcome addition to your SDoAR research. John Henry Holliday was born August 14th, 1851 in Griffin, GA, and died in his hotel room in Glenwood Springs, CO on November 8th, 1887.” And Jeff’s put a box around November 8th because, as we all know, November 8th is Margaret Mitchell’s birthday. Well, maybe we don’t all know that, but we’ll give everybody the benefit of the doubt. “John Henry was born with a cleft palette, which was surgically fixed by one of his uncles, Dr. John Styles Holliday, after whom he was named. His middle name came from his father. At age 20, John Henry earned a degree in dentistry and set up practice in Atlanta, but soon after was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed his mother when he was 15. It also killed his adopted brother, and would eventually kill him in 1887. His only sister died at the age of six month. ‘Doc’ moved to the southwest to try to [skip]. Saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Texas, became fast friends with him, and joined him in the gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ. From ‘Legends and Lies’ by Bill O’Reilly, page 215, Doc’s cousin, Mattie Holliday, who lived to be 100 served as the model for the character Melanie in Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’. Doc and his cousin Mattie (who would become Melanie in more ways than one) were first cousins, and very very close. Romantically so, but were discouraged by relatives because they were first cousins. They corresponded throughout Doc’s life, but Mattie/Melanie burned the letters after Doc died. Shortly after, being discouraged from courting Mattie, Doc left for the southwest, and 10 years later, Mattie entered a convent and joined the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, taking the name Sister Mary Melanie. From Tombstone Times.com, written by Susan Ballard, ‘she was said to be the model for the saintly Miss Melanie in ‘Gone with the Wind’. This is certainly not as far-fetched as it sounds. Phillip Fitzgerald, the uncle-in-law of Robert Kennedy Holliday, one of Doc’s uncles, was the great grandfather of ‘Gone with the Wind’ author Margaret Mitchell. But wait, it gets better! Of the eight children born to Robert Kennedy Holliday and his wife, one was one Margaret Anne “Mattie” Holliday, Sister Mary Melanie.’ Finally Dave it should be noted in “Gone with the Wind’, Melanie marries her first cousin, Ashley Wilkes.” Then he’s got marked here, “Uh, Wikipedia says, ‘distant cousin’. Dave it was real fun doing this research. I hope that it comes as a surprise to you. As always, I remain yours true and after every project, Jeff.”
Matt: Wow!
Dave: How bout that one? It’s a great story, but the problem that I have with a lot of these stories is, it takes so much time to explain the whole set-up that you can’t really use up graphic novel pages at that kind of rate. So I’m trying to figure out if there’s someway to just take the nut out of that one and turn it into three or four captions, which is a major part of my job description these days. But, yeah, how about that one? Just Jeff surfing the net on his own and going, “Huh. I wonder where this leads to? I wonder where this leads to.”
Matt: Like I keep saying, everything’s gonna end up in SDoAR.
Dave: [laughs] Well, yeah, there’s a quality to that, as well. I usually split my time between SDoAR and “Cerebus in Hell?” and I’ve started writing “The Aversion”, I think Birdsong came up with that one. It’s “The Avengers” cover with instead of the Vision, Dante, but a giant Dante which sort of times in with the 60 foot Dave Sim that’s been spotted around A Moment of Cerebus lately. Birdsong has gotten… I’ve asked him for, can you do the cover, but sort of like squish everybody together and put Prances in his borderline bobby costume in there instead of the Dante & Virgil in the foreground. But smoosh them all together so they fit in a third of page, so I can get three panels on the page, and I’ll just start writing it that way. And it’s a lot easier doing a 24 page book than a 48 page book, which is what I just did on the last one. Let’s not do that again real soon. But anyway, the fact that I haven’t gotten the panel mock-up from Birdsong means I’ve been working exclusively on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond” and dividing my time between pasting up the pages, which is going really slowly right now, it’s like there’s at least two or three sections that are probably three pages each, stretch it to four pages just to let it breathe a little bit, if it requires that. But I’ve been able to get a page done starting about 10 o’clock in the morning, and getting it done about 2 in the afternoon, and then filling in the rest of the day, coming into the clubhouse turn. I mean, probably not the clubhouse turn, but it certainly feels like it because for years and years and years most of my research at the end of the research period was reading “Rip Kirby”[skip] in a caption or word balloon, and I don’t know what that is. I don’t know if that exists, or if Ward Green just made that up. Let’s go down to city hall and log onto the internet and go to Wikipedia and Joe Friday, just the facts ma’am. All I want to know is what this is. Does this exist, or does this not exist? And you’d be amazed at the number of things in “Rip Kirby” that actually exist that you’d think, “well no, it’s just something Ward Greene made up to plug in a hole.” It’s like, no, he didn’t do that a whole lot and I think he thought that he would get away with it just because he didn’t anticipate the internet coming along. That you would have people who are not nearly as well-read as Ward Greene, like myself, going, “I have no idea what that is, but instead of going, ‘well, I’m not going to go all the way down to the library and look it up on a file card and try and figure out if somebody’s got this in a book somewhere’ you can just type it in and it’ll take you to whatever is the closest approximation of what you’re asking about.”
And it’s literally, by the time I got to the end of that, it’s like a two inch high stack of screenshots that I would come back and print out, because I have to have print. I wouldn’t just have it in the digital file here, I’ll look at it on the laptop, no, it’s gotta be, it’s all here, but it was all in scattered piles around the office. And it’s like, okay, somewhere up ahead, I will be caught up enough on this, and be actually doing Ward Greene’s internal references in “Rip Kirby” that relate to other things. I’m gonna have them all right here, but I’ve got them in, like I say, just in scattered order. So I’m gonna have to sit down and put them in order, like alphabetical order and just type out a list on the laptop. This is what I was looking for, it says it right at the top, of the Wikipedia page, and this is the part where I figured, okay, this is what Ward Greene was talking about. Sometimes it’s the first page, sometimes you gotta dig down like three or four pages or whatever. But, I actually have a nice correspondence box full of screenshots, and anything that I see in “Rip Kirby” as I’m going through, oh there’s one! There’s one, what’d that turn out to be? I don’t remember what it was but I do remember that I did do a… well, now I can look that up. Same thing, I separated all of my Ward Greene primary source material here. This came out of an actual newspaper that Eddie Khanna found online. This was in a book Eddie Khanna excerpted it, and separating that from my correspondence with Eddie where there’s a lot of blue skying in there of “it could be this, it could be that, I’m not sure how this ties in”, and it’s like no. Let’s have the purely factual Ward Greene stuff over here, put all of that in chronological [skip] all the way back to physical records, which we were able to get from School of the South, Suwanee, TN University college that Ward Greene went to for one year. And they needed all of that material before they were gonna let him in. And all of the correspondence with his older brother Earl, who went to the same school. And son of a gun, it’s Tennessee, so they’ve still got it however many years later, going back to whatever it was, 1911? 1912? And all the way up through their remarkable alumnus, the guy who Walt Disney is actually making a movie of [skip] and that was written by Ward Greene, our alumnus, and letters [laughs] from the dean at that time going, “Is there a possibility of us getting a showing at the university of ‘Lady and the Tramp’?” It’s like, “well, I’ll give you the address of the Disney people, you can write to them, but they’re kinda bogged down right now getting Disneyland whipped into shape before they open that one”, which was pretty much the same time as “Lady and the Tramp.” That’s… all of his school history is there, and all of the different, I don’t know why they would have that item in column somewhere, but Eddie found it, and it’s 1961, it’s referring to Ward Greene, so that’s more grist for the mill. And that’s all done! All of that is in chronological order, and now I’m working on my correspondence with Eddie, which is about two and a half inches tall, and basically, okay, this was already culled from the original correspondence, why did I hang onto this? Read through the small print and go, okay, I know why I’m onto this, this line right here. So type that line into a master sheet that will eventually go with the correspondence. So anytime where I run across something, there was something about that, something about that, where is that, where is that? Go down the list until you find it there, and that will take you right there. As I say, not really a clubhouse turn, but coming into the clubhouse turn.
Matt: And I feel bad for having 300 emails in my inbox.
Dave: [laughs] Well, you have to remember, picture what it’d be like if you were looking at 14 years worth. I mean, this is going back to 2008 a lot of this stuff. I’ve always had to be thinking all the way along, it’s not just a matter of getting all of this stuff, and hanging onto all of this stuff, it’s how are you going to find this stuff when you need to find this stuff? Right now, it’s, like I say, it’s working really good. First half of the day is, I know this part of the story, it’s really just how interesting can I make this look? I already know what it has to say. It’s caption, caption, caption, caption. Not this. Like Jeff Seiler’s story, this is two really interesting pages, how do I get this down to three captions, which has been what so much of the work has been.
So, anyway, we’re gonna move on.”Then if there are no Canadian surprises”, you say…
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: We turn to Jen DiGiacomo’s picture-heavily question. “Does anyone have a signed version of ‘Cerebus Aardvark Berserk’ poster? The flavor text is from Cerebus Archive #1. I have the black and white print from the aforementioned Cerebus Archive, that was when you were doing prints for rare artwork. A color version I have from a few years back, and a signed color version, #18 out of 500, that I acquired last year. I’m try to verify the signature from the early days of ‘Cerebus’ and ideally would like to compare it to anyone’s signed copy.” I guess this, you said the discussion on the Facebook Group got hot and heavy, and then you pulled out some highlights on that. And answering the question as best I can, this was the first time that I had done a poster, and certainly the first time that I ever even contemplated signing my name 500 times to something. I don’t have a lot of specific recollections about the poster, but I think there’s some very sensible conclusions that I can come to that this was definitely a rookie mistake
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] The second issue of your comic book that you sold 2000 copies of, there aren’t 2000 Cerebus fans. It’s Jim Friel and Harry Kremer, and Phil Sueling are all trying to find Cerebus fans with the comic books that you sent them, but they don’t already exist, and certainly not to the tune of 500 posters, or whatever. I forgot to check and see when I was searching for those at the time. But Harry would’ve gotten the earliest ones here in town. [laughs] Poor, long-suffering, Harry. I can just picture him when I came in and went, Harry, I’ve done an Aardvark Berserk poster, how many of them do you want? And it’s like, “uhh, can I say none? Or can I just say one for me?” Posters are a completely different thing from a comic book, which is another thing that I didn’t know at the time. Downstairs where I worked at Now and Then Books they had one of those poster things. Are you old enough to remember posters being sold in head shops where you would be able to sort through them because it was like a V shaped thing, with the posters in, uh, backed by cardboard and with a plastic wrapping around them, and is this ringing a bell at all?
Matt: Are you talking about the ones where it’s the posters are all in like frames that you can swivel and page through like a giant book? Or are you thinking of…
Dave: Oh okay, no, see, that’s later. That’s the same thing, that’s where this came from. Yeah.
Matt: So you’re saying it’s the posters shrink-wrapped on cardboard and they’re in a display box basically and you page through it like back issues of comic?
Dave: Right. Except that it’s not shrink-wrapped, it’s just oversized plastic. They’ve got really cloudy and fingerprints all over and everybody fell for the same thing. Somebody obviously sold it to Harry, who couldn’t sell them either. It’s like, “here, you know, you’re going to have all these great posters, you go through there’s like this Doors and there’s…” who’s the guy that did the S posters?
Matt: Uhh…
Dave: Oh, Roger Dean! “Roger Dean, and Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, and just imagine, you’re going to get rich because now everybody’s already going to come in to buy records at your record store, and they’ll be able to buy posters too.” And it’s like, in the entire length of time that I worked downstairs, nobody even looked at the posters, let alone bought the posters.
Matt: [laughs] And now they go for thousands of dollars.
Dave: [laughs] I suppose they do! I suppose they do. Probably not in the condition they were in by the time they were thumbed through by everybody. But, Harry gave it the old college try and put 11 by 17 Aardvark Berserk poster in with his posters, and I could even see by that point. Okay, it’s not gonna sell, but at the same, I’ve got 500 of them. Live and learn. So, getting back to Jen’s question, 18 out of 500, that’s very early in the process. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t sign all of them. Like, as soon as I got them, which is what I do now. If I said I’m gonna sign something, and they come in from Studiocomix Press, sit down and put your head down, sign them all, okay now you never have to do it again. Don’t do that “well, I’ll sign a bunch of them now and a bunch of them later” cause you won’t, which is, I think, what happened with these. I never actually signed 500 of them. Looking ahead, what’s the latest number that we got, which is 420. I’m surprised that I got to that point. Really surprised. I must have decided, okay, yeah, just sit down and do them because you can’t sell them unsigned and they’re not really selling anyway, but whatever it is you’re gonna do with them, you’re gonna need them signed. So you can see, the one that Jen had, #18, is, I would have to see it a little closer, but it looks like I’m actually doing that either with a drawing pen, like a Hunt 102 pen nib on there, or one of the Rapidograph pens that I did lettering with, and I’m being really really careful about it. It’s one of those, if you haven’t done it before and you get the prints in and go, okay, time to sign them, it’s like, oh, I should have left myself a lot more space than this. A lot of being that I was trying to do a Barry Windsor-Smith print with the BWS style border and I had a BWS print, so I knew, well, okay, this is how much space you leave around the outside for the signature. Except, again, not having done this before, it’s like, well, mine goes all the way back to Barry Smith, it doesn’t say Barry Windsor-Smith, it says Barry Smith, and it’s horizontal. He has a horizontal signature, and as you can see, I don’t have horizontal signature I have two vertical signatures. So, as far as I know, this was the first and only time that I basically took my Dave Sim signature where the Dave goes on top of the Sim and went, well, I’ll just have to put it next to the Sim instead of on top of the Sim. Which, I was really not happy about, and didn’t really know how to do that, which I think accounts for, was it Sean that was saying that the D doesn’t look right?
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah! Yeah. It’s the D didn’t look right because I was going, well if it’s not on top of the Sim, how am I going to do it so that it looks like a drawn signature instead of just writing out the letters D-A-V-E-S-I-M? And it’s like, well maybe I can do this with the D! And it’s like, yeah, that looks okay, but I’ve gotta do that every time out. And it’s like, well, I at least gotta do it as far as #18. It would be interesting to find out, if people have numbers closer together than that so that I can see where I finally went, oh hell, forget it. Which it looks like Dion Turner’s #170 out of 500. By the time I was signing my name for the 170th time, and I would imagine by that point not only was I not getting Harry Kremer going, “ooh! Ooh! Can I have all of them? Can I have all 500?”, Jim Friel didn’t want them and Phil Sueling didn’t want them. Probably bought a few just to be polite, but not enough for Dave Sim to be writing home about these happy days are here again. So, 170 out of 500, I’m not sure if I didn’t either do all of them or a bunch of them, and give them to Harry, or gave them to somebody else, and said, here, they’re just clogging up the studio and everything I trip over them, a bunch more of them have bent corners and I know how that goes. That was another thing, it wasn’t even on particularly good cardstock. I just printing it on the same paper that the “Cerebus” covers were printed on, because I know how much that cost. So, here’s how much it’ll cost to do 500 posters. So you can see, by the #170, it looks like I’ve switched to just an ordinary ballpoint. It’s like, I’m not gonna work at doing either a Hunt 102 which requires dipping and then testing it before you actually do the signature or the Rapidograph where you have to test it so that you make sure it’s not gonna have an air bubble in it just when I’m trying to write my name and then I have to write my name over where the air bubble was. With a ballpoint pen, it’s just straight ahead kind of stuff. Which is what we’ve got with 170. By the time we’re up to 420, when you’re asking about “did Deni sign these?” No, Deni didn’t sign any of them. I definitely, looking at them, yes, they’re all my signature, but it’s just… I was still at the time of, well, want to make all of the signatures look as good as I possibly can. Not knowing what that’s like when you’re getting up around 420, it’s like, oh hell, I don’t care what it looks like. Just Dave Sim, Dave Sim, Dave Sim, Dave Sim, trying to remember which number was the last number that I wrote. The one of the ones that Margaret had, did I sign that upside down?
Matt: That’s the way it looks in the photo.
Dave: Doesn’t it, though? And it’s like, what is that all about? That’s like 271.
Matt: Maybe you were doing them 10 at a time and one poster was upside down and you just went, “well, you’re getting an upside down signature!”
Dave: [laughs] Hey, that’s a good theory. I’ll go for that one. I’ll go for that one. I wonder if she had to pay as much for it, because it’s the rare upside down signature. But, yeah, that was… I must’ve decided it’s faster signing them writing my signature than it is printing “Dave Sim”, all as individual letters, and I just want these done now, and I will get them done, and as I say, give them to Harry or give them to Harry and somebody else. And it’s a solved problem for me. I never have to worry about this damn poster again. Which of course ended up in exactly the situation that you would expect where, I sure wish I had one of those posters for the Cerebus Archive, or three of them. And I did have some very generous people who did volunteer to send me theirs, and very pleased to have them in the Cerebus Archive, but it is still the world’s ugliest poster. Barry Windsor-Smith definitely makes those Gaelic borders look a lot easier than they are to do, especially for an amateur, who’s going, well why is it over this far? Well, because you’re just trying to draw it freehand and then ink it, instead of using tracing paper and making sure everything is meticulously spaced so it always ends up where it’s supposed to go. You’ll notice that I never did another one of them.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It was… I got Gerhard to do a couple of them by taking[??] then, he went, “ahh, I’m never doing another one of those here.” There’s only one BWS, who never gave up on that, and obviously went, “no, it looks really good, so I’ll just have to bear down and figure out how to do this.” And he could figure it out. Everybody else just goes, “well, I ‘ll just look at you doing it.” [laughs] “You know how to do. I don’t know how to do it.” The last one, “to Cliff, thanks, Dave Sim” I would suspect that that one was from the convention where we debuted them, where we are definitely off to the stratosphere here. Not only do we have issue #1 and issue #2, we’ve got this Aardvark Berserk poster, which everybody is going to be absolutely dying to have. It definitely has the look of being signed at a convention. Because I was signing books at the time, just went, oh right, this is a problem, I’ll just have to fake it as best I can and try and squeeze the Dave Sim signature into the completely limited amount of space when I’m not really thinking in that frame of mind. Whatever I just signed had plenty of room on it, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get this into three eights of an inch worth of space, kinda thing.
Matt: I do enjoy the arrogance of youth cause in 2005 when I went to SPACE the first year as an exhibitor, I went, I’ll do a poster! And I drew an 11 by 17 image, and [laughs] I’ll make 250 copies of this! And then I made a second one and made 250 copies. And I think I came home with 500 copies. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] How bout that! Isn’t that weird how that works?
Matt: And they sat in the closet of my room in the apartment that Paula and I had for about two years and finally, it’s “hey, we’re going to SPACE, are you gonna take those posters?” No, we’re gonna recycle these!
Dave: Yes. We are all done. We have learned our lesson. Because it really is like an albatross around your neck from then on. You always know that they’re there. You always know that you’ll never be able to sell them for anything. Although, that’s obviously not the case anymore with the Cerebus Berserk poster. I would hate to find out what people are paying for them now. Did anybody tell you?
Matt: Uh, nobody said anything, but I will ask now…
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And we’ll come back with, this is what… as I lovingly referred to Jeff when Seiler would post that he’d gotten this or that, would be, some Yenta with more money than brains!
Dave: Yes. Yes, it’s one of those, it is a rare item. I mean, there’s not a lot of Cerebus stuff between issue 1 and 2. There’s the Aardvark Berserk poster, and there’s the flyer that I took to the convention that had Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja and Cerebus drawing that he did that I ran in issue 2 on one side, and another BWS knock off on the other side. Which I keep thinking, I was looking, always looking for something else, I found the art nouveau book that had the status from that picture that I copied really really badly, so it was one of those, oh hey, that’s where I got it! Flipping through this art nouveau book, looking for the specific art nouveau, I can’t remember what it was that I was looking for, but it’s like, that’s not what I was looking for but that would make a good blast from the past for A Moment of Cerebus at some point. But yeah, it’s an albatross around your neck. Never did it again. When we did the full sized prints for the Cerebus Archive portfolio’s bonus prints, it’s like, okay. [laughs] How many have we got orders for? That’s how many we’re gonna print, and we’re not gonna print them until we’ve got all of the orders in because Grandpa really doesn’t like tripping over posters. It takes him back to a much much stupider and much younger Grandpa.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Ah, next is Kevin Parr, who asked, “Hi… Matt? Saw your blog. Longtime Cerebus reader (ordered first phonebooks in late 80s with my paper route money). I’m looking for trades of the main Cerebus book volumes 13-16. Does AV still function as a company?” [laughs] Uh, well, depending on the day, you’d have to take a vote on that one.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It’s, define function, define company? “Can I send Dave a check for the four volumes the way we used to?” No, you can’t do that. “Of course I’m sure they’re long out of print and that answers my question but… you never know, so I thought I’d ask if you knew.” And it was, you answered, “Kevin, this is indeed the Manly one. In answer to your query, I dunno. I believe so, but volumes 14 & 16 are out of print. I’m pretty sure Dave doesn’t have any. Volume 14 ‘Form & Void’ is currently being Kickstarted for a remastered edition. It ends tomorrow.” And thank you, everybody who participated in that. Very very good result for a non-”Cerebus,” non-”High Society” book.
Matt: I gotta interrupt.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Somebody, Al posted a comment asking if there was gonna be an IndieGogo after the Kickstarter for anyone that missed the Kickstarter. And I asked Dagon, and he said he hadn’t thought about doing one, but he’s gonna whip something together and it’ll go live probably by Saturday. So if you missed out, you got one last chance to give Dave money.
Dave: Isn’t that funny? I thought that too, but again, late. It’s like, wait a minute, there’s a post-game party of some kind on this that we used to do. I thought it was GoFundMe, but no, it’s IndieGogo. You’re right. So, yeah, I guess there’s people out there who, that’s what they count on. You gotta have a post-game show for us folks, because we’re never gonna be there when you want us to be there.
Matt: I had somebody else that sent a post saying, “hopefully there’s gonna be overstock on Cerebus Overload because they couldn’t afford it yesterday”. And it’s like, I, I know it, alright, here’s the deal. I will buy an extra one, you buy it off of me for what I pay, and you can get one. And I sent him the email and I’m looking at the clock, going, this is getting near the end of the campaign. With an hour to go, he emailed me back, and I’m like, okay. That’s the deal. So I bought a second one, and Travis owes me money.
Dave: Okay, great. Great. Yeah, there was like eight people that bought three of them? And it’s like, well, okay, I’m definitely not gonna argue with that. I appreciate any support at all. But getting back to the question, yeah, we still go exclusively through to the comic stores because the whole model doesn’t really work anymore in terms of revenue. Diamond is still a just-in-time company in a just-in-case environment that it seems to have turned into since the pandemic, and one of the things baked into just-in-time distribution is they want to order small quantities. When the initial shipment is done, when the book’s printed and Marquis is done, they ship it across the border from Quebec to Plattsburgh, NY. Diamond warehouse in Plattsburgh, and then it becomes an internal thing with Diamond, where Diamond just factors it into “we’re always moving tons and tons of books around United States between our warehouses. If you can get it to the warehouse, which is the situation in Plattsburgh, then we’ll take it from there.” So that’s a very different situation from, “can we get 13 copies of ‘Melmoth’?” It’s like, yeah, you can get 13 copies of “Melmoth”, but it’s gonna cost me just about as much to ship them from Packaging Too because Packaging Too has to repackage them to Diamond specifications and Rolly has to take them over to Packaging Too. So it’s really more of a service to the direct market, where all of this came from. I don’t want to abandon the stores, and I don’t want to abandon the direct market. But it’s really a juggling act in terms of, this happens with Eddie Khanna sort of nudging Matt Demory at Diamond, saying, “Can you make it all one shipment? Like instead of saying ‘can we have 15 copies of ‘Swords of Cerebus in Hell?’ volume 1 and 25 ‘Melmoth’? We’ll let you know if we want other books.’ If you can make them all one shipment, then that’s gonna cost less. So if you can do that, that would be great.” But again, that’s not just-in-time distribution. The last shipment, which was about, I think it was worth of books, probably about 8 books? No sooner got that done than another purchase order comes in for 15 copies of “Swords of Cerebus in Hell?” volume 2. So it’s really, I have great and unwavering loyalty for the comic book stores who are doing the best that they can to keep this sideshow going, and Diamond who are labouring tirelessly to keep this whole thing going. So it’s like, okay, I will figure out places to make money, and then this will just be, well okay, this isn’t making money, but if I’ve got “Melmoth” in stock, then I’ll send you however many “Melmoth” that you want, and I’m not even going to really consider this is how much money I’m going to get in 30 days, and this is so much money I have to pay Packaging Too. It hasn’t gotten really bad yet. I think the worst was three quarters of the money went to shipping? But that’s just what happens when these things change, and when they change, they change in a hurry. $100 a barrel oil, that hasn’t even hit yet. We’re sort of dead man walking, waiting to find out how that hit.
So the short answer for you, Kevin, is really, because I’m not really making money off of these, I would rather lose money or not make very much money having you go to your local comic store in Lawrenceville, NJ, or whatever store’s closest to you in Lawrenceville, and just say, “can you order me a copy of this Cerebus trade paperback?” The only ones that Diamond is out of right now is “The Last Day” and “Form & Void”, and that is one of the things that we’re right in the middle of right now, because the Kickstarter’s come to an end for “Form & Void”, so now it’s a question of, okay, how many softcovers do we need for Diamond? And that gets into, okay, this is just not working anymore in terms of, in order to solicit for the book for Diamond, I have to come up with a cover price. And in coming up with a cover price, I have to know how many copies I’m going to get. And Diamond can’t tell me how many copies I’m going to get until it’s been solicited and it’s been in Previews. So that was where I had to go, okay, well I’ll have to get ridiculous with this and go, it’s $70. Because the quote that we had from Marquis was for $26 books. Which turns out to be, no, that was including Dagon’s hardcovers and was averaged out between the hardcovers and the softcovers. The hardcovers were more expensive than the softcovers, so the price actually came down for 300 copies I think it was $14? $16? So, right now, we’re exactly he way you didn’t used to conduct business, where you kept everything close to the vest on your side. It’s like, now it’s moved up from Matt Demory to Tim Lenaghan who is up at sea suite level at Diamond, as they call it. Okay, Tim, well, here’s the numbers. We got quotes for everything from 300 copies up to 3000 copies. This is how much it’s gonna cost to do them. You pick the number that you like, in terms of, okay, I don’t know if Diamond is still this way. Steve Geppi used to talk about the clean 10. “If we can get a clean 10% on everything coming through here, we’re laughing.” So that’s what we’re doing. Diamond gets 10%, the publisher gets this percentage, 40%, and the stores get 50%, and Diamond get their clean 10 in the middle. Like I said, I don’t know if that’s still the case. But it’s like, well, okay, you tell me where you see a clean 10 for you, and a good 40% for Aardvark-Vanaheim, and can you live with that quantity? Cause it’s like, “Form & Void” is not flying off the shelves. I get the sales figures every week from Eddie Khanna, who faxes them and downloads them from Diamond, and it’s like, it’s still “Cerebus” and “High Society”, and every once in a while something else sells. I’m not gonna lie to Diamond about it. This is as close as you can get to a charity gig as possible. I’m asking you to buy a 75 year supply of “Form & Void” if I’m gonna make some money off of it and you’re gonna make some money off of it. So that’s a decision for Diamond to make. I try not to approach them with this too frequently, and everytime I do, there’s been another 6 to 9% paper increase in price that Marquis has had to pass on to their customers, cause that’s what the paper mills are charging them. If they can get the paper! The paper isn’t even guaranteed that you can get it. So long-winded explanation as to why I don’t want to sell you the books that we do have. We do have a few of them. We did some of the signed & numbered copies that we had with the “Pieces of Turtles 8” Kickstarter that just ended a little while ago, and have sold a bunch of those. But that was like, well okay, this is David Birdsong’s first Kickstarter, here’s what I can offer you to offer on a Kickstarter, and that’s what he gravitated to. But the unsigned copies, it’s, no, I consider those Diamond. I’m much happier when Diamond orders 8 or 10 different books in minor copies, so it’s one shipment, but they’re not really set up for that. They’re set up for, the computer system tells them, it’s got tripwires, it says, “okay, you’re down to the last 10, now you need another 20 based on how they sold over the last two months or three months or whatever.” But the tripwires aren’t working so good anymore because it’s like, “you’re not selling enough of this. You probably shouldn’t carry it anymore.” Well, you can’t do that if that’s what the computer’s telling you about 70% of the stuff that you’re selling. You’ve still got to keep X number of things in stock. They obviously still wanna have all 16 volumes of Cerebus, it’s just getting really really complicated to do that. As I say, I think I’m meeting everybody halfway by going, alright, I’m not making any money on this, but here, this is something that is here for the stores so that they know that I’m not competing with them. And here’s something that they can offer to their customers, like you, Kevin, that that’s what the books are doing here. They’re doing here so that they can go from here to the STAR system warehouse in Oliver Branch, MS, and then from there to your local store, and into your own hot little hands.
Matt: [laughs, then silence]
Dave: You sounded like you were gonna say something.
Matt: Nah, I was just laughing! [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Oh okay! Yeah, it’s… I would probably laugh too if I was watching it on television. It’s something else when this is what your livelihood has come down to.
Matt: It’s one of those, yeah, if you sold the books direct, you make more money in theory, but in actuality shipping’s gonna eat the profit no matter who you’re selling the books to. And in the long run, it’s better to order through your local store through Diamond, because that way it’s like you said, it trips the tripwire of, hey, we’re selling books again!
Dave: Yeah. And it is, ya know, Diamond amortizes a lot of shipping, because they’re already shipping whatever, four or five boxes to each store that they’re still supplying through UPS. The one time I was at Diamond, when they were still in Timonium, and at an appointment I was meeting with Bill Schanes. The receptionist’s name is Ann, and it’s like, it was very interesting to sit there, and actually see the Ann! Because when you call a Diamond switchboard, it’s “Diamond Comics distributors, this is Ann, how can I direct your call?” And to watch somebody doing that, ya know, however many hours a day, and, wow that’s really really impressive. And I told her that. And every once in a while I call the switchboard just so I can say, Ann, I’m just so glad you’re still there.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] “Diamond Comics distributors, this is Ann, how can I direct your call?” But sitting in the reception area, I don’t know if they still have it now that they’re in Hunt Valley, but when they were in Timonium, they had this giant eagle sculpture sitting in their reception area. I mean, this thing was huge! And it’s, wow, I have no idea what that is. I’m just sitting here waiting for Bill Schanes to be ready to meet with me, and I’m looking around at the thing. I look at the label underneath it, and it was from UPS. A customer aware for Diamond Comic distributors, because they were, I dunno if they still are, the second biggest customer for UPS after the US Postal Service.
Matt: [laughs] Wow.
Dave: [laughs] That’s a “wow”. That’s a “wow”, yes. Nobody else is crazy enough to use UPS to this extent, but it’s like, it was a match made in heaven as soon as Steve Geppi had eliminated all of his competition, and it was all under one roof, “we are really really cozy with UPS because that’s how we can guarantee that all of these stupid comic books get to their stupid comic book buyers every Wednesday everywhere that the English language is spoken.” A match made in heaven, no question about it.
Matt: My friend Kevin just left the comic book field. He was working at a store in Oshkosh and he needs more money because the rent’s going up, and so he found a different job that’s not comics retail. But he used to call me once a week, and be like, “today’s adventure in comics retail!” And invariably, now they’re getting their Marvel books from Random/Penguin House, like Diamond built how to ship comics. They know what they’re doing. They’ve done it long enough. Yes, stuff still gets damaged, but it’s not as bad. He was saying, there was one week they got 25 packages from Random/Penguin House and one of them, he opened up the box, and it’s full of bubble wrap and one comic book.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it’s a one in 75 variant cover that’s dinged! So it’s damaged and it has to go back, and apparently they got so many complaints about damages, that it went from, “okay, send it back, we’ll give you the credit or we’ll give you a new one, or whatever”, to “you have to fill out this form online, and we’ll give you credit, and send you a new one”, to “we want pictures of the damage to prove that it’s damaged.” And he’s like, “okay!” and so he’s going through all the form, and the owner of the store is getting madder and madder about this and taking it out on him, and he’s like, “this is what they want me to do. What do you want me to do?” and he’s like, “I’m gonna deal with them!” And then the owner started dealing with them, and after three days, it was, “okay, you can go back to dealing with this, but this is ridiculous. You gotta fill out the form, you gotta send the pictures, they gotta be really good pictures, they gotta be, ya know, yadda yadda yaddas” and at a certain point it was like, if you guys packed stuff better, we wouldn’t be doing this.
Dave: Yes. Yes. And I could see that coming from a mile off, because it’s like, these are civilians. So it’s like, “well, you know, comic books! Throw them all in a box. Get them there, bob’s your uncle.” And it’s like, damages, they don’t understand. Unless it’s in pristine mint condition, it’s damaged. It’s like “that’s not damaged! It’s a little bend! Go to Barnes & Noble, go anywhere, they’ve got tons of books that are sitting out.” Yeah, it’s like they do, that’s because those people don’t care. They’re not collectors who want everything in pristine mint. So I don’t know how that’s going to end, but I think it ends unhappily for Random/Penguin House, because they’re not gonna give. It’s like, “Comic Book Guy on ‘The Simpsons’ is not running this publishing company. We are the world’s biggest publisher of the books, and we are not Comic Book Guy!” And it’s like, well, if you’re not Comic Book Guy, you’re going to be fielding so many of these calls, that you’re going to be getting so many damages back, you’re gonna end up losing more money than you actually make.
Matt: The thing I’m waiting on is for them to say to Marvel, “no more variant books. We’re not gonna ship 12 different covers where we keep getting complaints because the one in 125 variants that we’re sending are getting damaged because there’s not enough of them.” Everytime he called me with a horror story, I would just laugh like, my job can be bad, but it’s never like opening up a box and discovering that “hey, this thing that somebody wants to give us money for, we can’t sell them or we can’t sell them at full cost, we have to give them a discount.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And I’m going, the worst part about my job is that we’re just behind. I gotta work the weekend because we’re behind. As I said to one of the owners, I’m like, hey, you guys are screwed because we’re behind, but for me, it’s a windfall of hey, I can work as much as I want.
Dave: That’s right. It’s like Lucy and Ethel, but instead, keep those chocolates coming! Every chocolate that I put in the box, that’s money in the bank for me.
Matt: Sorta, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, if one of those, in the long run it’s bad for the company, but in the short run, hey, I’m gonna make bank now because eventually they’re gonna say, nope, we’re not doing overtime anymore. And I’ll be like, well, I’m getting close to retirement, so I don’t care. Cause it’s gonna be 20 years before we get caught up.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. Getting back to the stores and Random/Penguin House, it’s like, Steve Geppi could show them what they’re doing wrong, but he always comes out on top because he doesn’t do that. “Uh, no, you have no idea how much money and time I’ve invested in figuring out how to make this work. If I can ship 4000 books to Chuck Rozanski at Mile High Comics, who is the most finicky condition guy on the planet, if I can ship 4000 books to Chuck and I only get 100 of them back every week, then I have solved the problem.” And it’s like, they really don’t grasp that. “Uh, what’s so difficult about this? It’s packing books.” It’s the same thing with Amazon. I’m sure Amazon gets far more graphic novels and comics related stuff back as damaged, and going, “what are you talking about, damaged? This isn’t damaged!” Yes it is, it’s spine break. See the colour on the spine next to the staple? There’s a little white line there that shouldn’t be there, that makes that book an 8.5 instead of a 9.8, end of story. And it’s like, “what are you talking about, end of story?” Well, if you tried to do this for six months, or a year, or two years, however long they’ve been doing it now, and you start seeing how many returns you’re getting, you’re gonna have to play it the other way. You’re gonna have to go, “okay, what do we have to do to make this work?” and they’re not gonna do that. Because as much as they’re making on Marvel stuff, they make that much more money on all this stuff over here, where nobody’s that picky about it. So again, it’s like, no, the tail doesn’t wag the dog with Penguin/Random House. The tail wagged the dog with Steve Geppi and Diamond Comic distributors until you figure out how to create a happy tail, and then, okay, now I’m the dog again. But until I figure out how to make a happy tail, okay, we’re getting way too far into completely bent metaphors now.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I think we’re gonna move on. We’re gonna move on to the next question instead. “The pride of Easton, PA, Michael R, or the scourge of Easton, PA, zipper. Kind of depends on how you feel about his question.” I don’t feel about questions, I think about questions. “Hi Matt! Here's some questions for Dave. Hi Dave! I have a few questions about the POT8 comic that has been offered. 1- Now that POT8.2 is being made, will it be offered in a quick Swordfish Canadian version then a U.S. version Kickstarter?” And I’ll start that off by saying, I just talked to Alfonso a couple of hours ago, and as far as we know, all of the “Pieces of Turtles 8” books, the American edition, have been printed, and I will be signing them tomorrow, or at least starting to sign them depending on when Rolly is able to get them and put all of the post-it notes on it as to who gets what number, who want unsigned, etc etc etc. So good news on that. Alfonso said we got the last five spoonfuls of toner, evidently, his paper problem has been solved temporarily, now he’s got a toner problem, where he can’t get toner anywhere. But he made sure that while he was scraping the bottom of the bottles, it was for “Pieces of Turtles 8”. Anyway, trying to answer Michael’s question about “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” will it be offered in a quick Swordfish Canadian version? Yes. Then a US version Kickstarter. I’m not announcing it today, because we haven’t sent out “Pieces of Turtles 8”, and those haven’t started arriving. I got the check from David Birdsong. Thanks, David. Sometime in the last few days, and I’m hanging onto that. That’s not gonna get deposited until everybody is getting their “Pieces of Turtles 8”.
But this comes to a conversation point, and since you’re the only guy that I’m actually talking to, you’re gonna have to think fast on this one. Last time we did it a week, wasn’t it a week that we said the Swordfish edition was gonna be available?
Matt: It was a week, yes.
Dave: It was a week? Okay. What do you think about going shorter on that, or going longer on that?
Matt: If it’s gonna be the same deal as last time, with the similar price point of $25 for one or $100 for 10, with the half off if you buy them in bulk… shorter probably would be a really bad idea? Longer would probably be slightly better. Cause I bought 10 of them, and I sold eight of my 10. And it wasn’t even like I sold eight of my 10 having to beat the drum trying to sell them, it was, oh yeah I got eight of them for sale, and within two days I had the money and I was shipping them out. I gave Josh even one for free, because if there’s one guy on the planet who needs this book, it’s him.
Dave: [laughs] That’s right. That’s the same as Steven Gouge with the “Spawn” 10. It’s like the world’s biggest Spawn collector. If there’s anybody gets one of these, or the rare one of these, this is the guy. I actually had some tracing paper with CereSpawn sketches on them, and was going, I should send these to Heritage Auctions or do something with them. And it’s like, oh hell, Rolly, just wrap them up and send them to Steven Gouge. He’ll be happy as a pig in you know what. And what the heck, he definitely spent a fair amount of money on the “Spawn” 10. Okay, I hear what you’re saying about going longer, not a lot longer, but longer.
Matt: Like two weeks. Like two weeks, I would think would be… 14 days gives everybody enough time to get the word out. It was one of those, the week ended and I started getting emails from major Turtle collectors going, “we just heard about this” and I’m like, well, I can help ya, but the ninth guy in line is gonna be real sad.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then I told everybody, the American Kickstarter is coming and soon as I hear about that, I will beat the drum and get the marching band together so everybody understands what’s happening, and it sounds like that worked. The numbers were way up on the American edition, I believe, right?
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Way up being a relative term, I think that…
Matt: Compared to the Canadian.
Dave: Yeah. But not compared to what “Turtles” sells ordinarily. I think there’s a lot more Turtles collectors out there, which brings me sort of to the other part of my point here, which is… if we went shorter, what I find kind of funny about this, and this actually skips ahead to another question in some ways, it’s this hiding in plain sight thing. I mean, they already know, okay, we did “Pieces of Turtles 8” and then everybody found out about that late, so that like you said, you bought 10 of them, and you had no problem selling them. You got them for whatever $12.50 Canadian, and you were able to sell them for $25 US. That’s definitely being the stock market average these days. Double your money overnight. And part of me is thinking, this is reminding me of Dan O’Neill with the “Air Pirates” and the Mouse Liberation Front headquarters, where Disney was driving themselves insane going, “where are these people? We have to find these people and hold them to account for what they’re doing with the mouse. You can’t do anything with the mouse unless we say so, and look at this, they’ve done a whole comic book, and where are these people?! We have to hunt them down. Get the Disney detectives looking for them.” And the whole time, [laughs] Dan O’Neill at the Mouse Liberation Front headquarters had the address and phone number in the San Francisco phonebook. So, all they had to do was look up Mouse Liberation Front headquarters in the San Francisco phonebook and go, “that’s where they are!” And they never did that. They never found them that way. So there’s hiding in plain sight, and then there’s ridiculous hiding in plain sight.
Matt: Well, didn’t the description in the phonebook say “Secret Headquarters”? [laughs]
Dave: Yes, I think it even did! I think it even had “secret headquarters” on it. So that’s one of those where I’m going, alright, you know now that you could buy 10 of these and sell them in a couple of days. So since we’re all Air Pirates here, we’re all part of the Mouse Liberation Front, if you’re hearing my voice, you’re one of the really core of the core of the core of the core of the Cerebus audience, and everybody definitely treats that as a completely mysterious thing. “I just heard about this. How can I get in on this?” Alright, having missed out on “Pieces of 8”, it’s not like we’re making “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” a secret. I mean, Michael knows about it. You know about it, you’ve obviously mentioned it on A Moment of Cerebus, right?
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Like, a lot? Or just I know they’re just coming down the pipeline?
Matt: Well, it was the Josh Even / Matt Dow fax that started it with your picks for variant covers, and then the follow-up to that when there were two or three posts about, okay here’s the initial, here’s the next fax, here’s the next, I got one more fax to put up, which is the ultimate, the last fax from you about this topic, where I had sent everything everyone had said, and you went, “yeah okay, I don’t care.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: Cutting to the quick, it was, “yeah, I don’t care about that”, which okay, hey, I send it up north and when Grandpa says “I don’t care about this, guys”, well, then we know, okay, we can kick it around the war room as much as we want, but at a certain point, Grandpa doesn’t care.
Dave: Well, yeah, but it’s also still something you can do. I didn’t say you can’t do this. It was Grandpa doesn’t see Grandpa-sized amounts of money in this, so if you kids really want to do this, go ahead.
Matt: To be fair, I have not posted that fax yet, because it was one of those, the Kickstarter’s coming to an end. I haven’t even sent it to Josh yet to let him see, okay, this is what I did, this is Dave’s response, this is the lay of the land. We’re not saying no, we’re not saying yes go do this, you can make the decision to do it but understand you’re only gonna get rah rah go team from up north, we’re not gonna get a okay, 36 Weekly Updates and faxes back and forth, and all this. It’s one of those, this is Dave’s plan, if you wanna get on Dave’s plan, here’s what the plan is. Any other plan Dave will fully support morally, but he’s not supporting it financially.
Dave: And he’s not gonna use up time on it, has more to do with it than anything else. It’s like, I am pedal to the metal on “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, and looking forward to taking some breaks on “Cerebus in Hell?”, trying to figure out what to do with 227 pictures of Cerebus with the Turtles, or Cerebus with a Turtle, and the Turtles with the really nice Gerhard sewer. I mean, that’s not something you’re gonna hear me say all the time, but it’s a really nice Gerhard sewer that he put in behind the Turtles. It’s like, it’s great, but as far as I’m concerned, and as far as Josh Even is concerned, is this something that is worth investing time in going, okay, what do we cut this down to from 227? And what do we cut it down to, and which ones do we pick, and how do we tie this into Hero Alliance? It’s like, I’m more than happy to sign off on it, which, like you say, it’s one of those, it’s a much happier day when it’s Dave Sim going, yeah, let’s go full bore on this. I’ll send you as many posts as I did on “Trailblazers” and try to make them as interesting as I possibly can. Yeah, I could do that, but there’s only so many hours in the day, and this is where I’m putting the hours in. This is sort of the closest I can come to that. Here’s seven that I’m gonna pick out, pitch these people on the deal, if they just go either “no” or “I’m not really getting this”, with the one guy going, “yeah! I mean, what are you talking about? Of course I want to do this! I have to print stuff and put it out on my table at comic book conventions. Are you kidding? Having my cover on a Cerebus / Turtles thing?” That’s exactly what you want. “This will stop somebody in their tracks, and go, ‘Oh what’s this?’ Even if they’re not interested in anything else on my table.” Okay, that was idea that I had in mind. If you don’t get that, okay, I’m not here to talk you into it. I’m not going to type out a 10 page explanation of why I think this is a good idea for you. I would like to do something with this, if only for Josh’s sake. I think this would be really cool. I don’t think anybody’s gonna bother him about printing his collection of Cerebus / Turtles pictures, it’s like, how much has he got sunk into this? How great are these pieces by X number of guys? You’re never gonna see this again. So, Viacom’s got lot more on their plate right now, post-pandemic, and everything else, trying to figure out how to keep their business model functioning. They’re not gonna be concerned about this. Nobody’s concerned about that kind of stuff anymore, I don’t think. So, getting back to what I’m saying…
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: …is, what if we just made it two hours? You can only get “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” the Canadian Swordfish edition, we’re going hardcore Swordfish on this. It’s like, not only do you have to have the Swordfish password, but you’ve got to be right there in this two hour window. And buy as many of them as you can possibly afford to buy, and then turn around and jack up the price and sell it to everybody else that didn’t even find out about the two hour window. Why shouldn’t we do that? Why shouldn’t we do that for the people who are gonna go, “yeah are you kidding? If there’s only two hours and you tell me three weeks ahead of time when the two hours are, hey, I’m there.” This is Michael R’s question, Michael R will be there, right?!
Matt: We’re hoping! I mean, my first thought was well, we should make it four hours because it’s four Turtles, and then the little voice in back of the head went, well it’s “Turtles” #8, so how about eight hours? And then another little part went, no, no, two hours makes sense cause if you’re not there at noon, you’re not getting one.
Dave: Right, right. Me having made that pitch to you now, what do you think of that idea?
Matt: [sighs] I think Margaret Liss is gonna be driving across the border with a hockey stick and your name in her… I mean, high sticking, Dave. She’s gonna high stick ya. I’m just saying.
Dave: She’s gonna get a two minute or five minute penalty, depending on how severe the high sticking is, I’m not concerned about that.
Matt: [laughs] I mean, I can see lots of people being real unhappy, but if I have enough money on my credit card, it’s not gonna be a problem for me.
Dave: Right.
Matt: It’s gonna be a problem for the… I take it back. It will be a problem for me, because when I go to the post office to mail the media mail, I always draw a Turtle head or a Cerebus head wearing a Turtle mask and say, “please do not bend, fold, or mutilate” and the lady at the post office thinks it’s hilariously awesome and loves that I do that.
Dave: Oh, cool.
Matt: Oh yeah yeah, no, everybody gets this head sketch on their package, at least one, probably two, because I’m very adamant of, and I’m polite, on the back, I always put, “dear postal person, please please please do not bend, fold, or mutilate”.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Because they ask, “is there anything fragile?” and I’m like, well, it says right there. They’re going, “well okay, yeah, what is it?” It’s a comic book, and they look at me like, “how is that fragile?” and I’m thinking, you don’t know!
Dave: [laughs] Right. Right! No, you’ll just have to take my word for it. This has to get where it’s going as if it was a Ming Dynasty vase of some kind. You ever watch “The Simpsons” with Comic Book Guy?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Trying to explain it to them. Okay, I’ll tell you what, we’ll leave that for the time being as, I haven’t even signed “Pieces of Turtles 8” yet, and Rolly hasn’t packaged them, let alone mailed them, so we’ve got that window of opportunity, there will be plenty of warning time to say, okay, we’re coming up on the point where we have to decide about this. Get some feedback on A Moment of Cerebus as to, what’s the shortest that you think that we should do, and what’s the longest that you think that we should do? It’s like, the way I look at it is, it was the same thing as I had a bunch of mailing labels for different people to send them a proof copy of “Pieces of Turtles 8”, to say, this is coming up as a Kickstarter, you might want in on this. Dealers, that I know, would want in on that. And then I went, no, why not just sell it to the people who are actually always showing up instead of alerting the people who are never here? Which, you know, nothing against them, it’s like pretty much everybody on the planet except 85 people are never here. You can’t really blame the entire planet full of people for not listening to Please Hold for Dave Sim because there might be something that they could buy that they could double their money on.
Matt: I mean, I can’t make the decision for the Cerebus fandom because I’m supposed to be Cerebus fan, Dave, I’m fighting for the fans, when at the same time, it’s like, hey, ya know. The first one, it was quote unquote “Swordfish”, we’re not supposed to talk about it and I kept hinting strongly that you really need to listen to this month’s Please Hold, and for a week, and finally at one point I was like, there’s this exclusive thing that you can only get at this time, and it goes bye-bye tomorrow, and if you don’t get one, don’t complain to me. And totally blew the Swordfish part out of it, and still the first one only had how many?
Dave: Uhh, yeah.
Matt: At a certain point, it’s the same thing with the IndieGogo thing for the “Form & Void” Kickstarter. Like, I’ve been talking about this for two weeks, every post I can. Like, hey, there’s a Kickstarter. Hey, “Form & Void”’s coming back to print! Hey, you can get it from Diamond next month, but if you want the other cover or a hardcover or have it signed by Dave & Gerhard, you gotta go now. And the next day after it ends, what do I get? “Hey, I just heard about this.”
Dave: Right, right. I mean, you intentionally bought the 10 copies so that you could have them for the people that you knew were going to do that. Which is what happened.
Matt: It’s one of those, as I always think about when these things happen of, I can lead a horse to water. I can get the horse right up next to the river, but sticking their heads in doesn’t get any water down their throats if they don’t want it.
Dave: Right! Right. It’s like what is my obligation in terms of relocating horses to water and then how do you force feed them the water? It’s like, if you want to drink, go and get a drink! I’m not your mother horse, I’m not your father horse, I’m not your Grandpa horse.
Matt: [laughs] I mean…
Dave: Let me get even stranger here. What if “Pieces of Turtles 8.2” has a $50 cover price instead of $25, and everybody who goes for the Swordfish deal gets them for $25 for a single copy, and still gets the 10 copies for $125, but it’s got a $50 cover price. Then you can turn around and go, well it’s got a $50 cover price on it. You want one?
Matt: [laughs] The only concern I have is that the first one was “Superman” #75, which nobody knew what it was, nobody knew what a big deal it was, and when the slow news day have it when they said, “oh by the way, we killed Superman”, everybody wanted a copy.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I’m afraid that 8.2 could turn into “Adventures of Superman” 500 where they announced, months ahead of time, “hey, he’s coming back in this one, it’s just like 75! Do you want a copy? Do you want 10 copies? Do you want 20 copies?” And that book is in quarter bins across the country now because everybody wanted a copy, and there were enough copies for everybody! On the one hand, I don’t want to price gouge too badly, cause what happens when, it’s only two hours and 8000 people buy 10 copies each?
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: On the one hand, Dave would be very very happy. [laughs]
Dave: Yeah, and part of what Dave would be very very happy about is Cerebus fans being able to buy something for $12.50 Canadian, and turn around and sell it a week later for $50 US. Or two weeks later. Or three weeks later. It’s “Pieces of Turtles 8” has even hit the Turtles market per se, in the way that it’s likely to. Maybe not next week, and maybe not six months from now, but pretty soon it’s going to be, “how do I get one of these?” Well, it’s like, you just have to keep your eyes open. People who have them, but they’re not selling them right now. I’m gonna leave it at that, in terms of, I think this is worth talking about. Because, again, there’s at least, I would say, two weeks? 18 days, 19 days, before people will be getting their “Pieces of Turtles 8” in the mail, which is when I will be comfortable saying, okay, now we can start talking about 8.2, the Canadian version, which will be the same deal. There’s just two buttons at CerebusDownloads, here’s one copy, here’s 10 copies. [laughs] I dunno! What if I said, okay, here’s three buttons. You can get one for $25, 10 for $125, or 50 for I dunno, what does the price go down to at point? It’s one of those, until you close off any of those rabbit holes, we’re just completely surrounded by rabbit holes on this thing. It’s brand new to you today, and it’ll be brand new to anybody else who’s listening to this and I’m probably talking about it way too much.
So we’ll move onto part 2 of the question, “Will all the POT8 versions be offered again in the future TMNT/Cerebus #8 Kickstarter?” I don’t think so. “ OR will they be offered in the TMNT/Cerebus #8 Kickstarter in a different form like a complete single volume separate from the remastered TMNT #8 comic?” No, I don’t think so on that one. “OR will they be combined into 1 HUGE HC book combining all the "pieces" with all the remastered TMNT/Cerebus #8 comic book content?” And I don’t think so on that one, and by way of explanation, it’s, when I realized that “Turtles” #8 is 45 pages long, it’s like, well, the natural thing is to do a 48 page comic book and just have three pages of additional material. And I’ve got more than that to say about “Turtles” 8, Kevin and Peter, the Northampton summit, various other things where it’s like, I don’t have to go too far into the Cerebus Archive mentally, or start shuffling around through stuff, before it’s like, yeah, there’s stuff that I have to say about this that I would really like to say and have people read it. But I can’t just write everything that I have to say, and then if Waverly ends up doing the “Turtles” 8 Kickstarter, then it’s, well, okay, probably most of this will be this isn’t Dagon’s idea of what this should be. Here, this should be in the “Turtles” 8 remastered edition. This should be in there, this should be in there, that shouldn’t be in there, that shouldn’t be in there, that shouldn’t be in there. Well, okay, that’s Dagon’s call to make as the guy who’s publishing it. But as the guy who is remembering “Turtles” 8 as one of the participants, no, all of that stuff should be in there. This is the top of the line, this is what I have to say about “Turtles” 8, and Kevin and Peter, and okay, we’ll just make this for the core audience. Again, that’s where the whole Swordfish idea came from. I could probably do one of those a week for the next year, and the absolute core Cerebus fan would go broke buying them, but “yeah, as long as Dave has more that he has to say about Kevin and Peter, I’m a Cerebus completeist. ‘Turtles’ 8 is probably the biggest deal, that would be competition between that and ‘Spawn’ 10 as to this is how the comic book field knows Dave Sim’s work, knows Cerebus, I gotta have this. First of all because I’m a completeist and I’ve got to have all of this stuff, but second of all because I’m curious. What does Dave Sim have to say about this? What is the when you kick Dave Sim in the middle of the night and go ‘Kevin and Peter?’ what does Dave Sim come up with?”
So I can’t picture that all of this will be collected in any form. It’s just, here you go. Here’s what I have to say. I don’t think I’m at the bottom of the barrel with 8.2, which 8.2 is already done. 16 pages filled up in a hurry. But I’ve thought of a few things since then, yeah, I’d like to talk about that too. There might be an 8.3, I don’t know. But at some point, then it’s going to be, this is the remastered “TMNT” #8 comic, what are we gonna do? It’s really gonna come down to how many covers are there, because that’s just the way the game is played. I would definitely like to not have as many covers as there were on “Spawn” 10. I would like to have a finite number of covers, but depending on what comes up… I mean, Josh Even’s collection, those 227 pictures there’s at least 34 top of the line pictures there. Which gets into well there’s different ways to do this. We can do them as postcards. Yeah, we can do them as postcards, we can do them as giant postcards, we can do them as prints. That’s one of the reasons that I threw all of that up ahead to January of next year, so that it’s like, well, okay, I just wanna do Turtles stuff right now. I don’t want to be figuring out, okay, where do you cross the line from pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered on “Turtles” 8. That’s a question for November, December 2022, right now it’s just, here’s a 16 page thing that I’m doing. Here’s the first things off the top of my head, oh I’ve got to put this in. Oh I’ve got to put this in. I have to keep reminding myself to do the story about the autograph. “Donatello? Who the hell are Kevin and Peter?” I keep forgetting to even go and look at the “Guide to Self-Publishing”. Where is that? And how long is the actual story? So, already, if I’m gonna do that, that’s gotta be in 8.3, and I’m not really worried about it right now. I’m trying to get everybody full value for their money, which I think happened with “Pieces of Turtles 8”. I’m not somebody who troubles themselves about somebody who turns around and selling something for twice what they pay for it. It’s almost impossible to make money in 2022 unless you’re somebody way at the top of the mountain, and none of us are way at the top of any mountain. So, okay. Every once in a while, you do get something where, yeah, I think it will probably be able to make some money off of this if you’ve got enough walking around money to buy 10 of them for $125. [laughs] As Eddie Khanna said, “wow, you really won’t be undersold.” And yeah, happy days, bargain “Pieces of Turtles” 8 warehouse. Line up over here.
Matt: The only problem with Josh’s collection that I sent you was that, Oliver was doing his Sunday column where he goes around the internet, grabs all of the Cerebus related stuff he can find, sends it to me, and I make the column, and post it. So I have this file on my external hard drive of all the images he sends me, and when it was time to send Josh’s collection, I’m like, open it up. Oh there’s a picture of a Turtle. There’s a picture of a Turtle. And sent it to you, and you named one of them, I forget which one it is, and I sent the fax to Josh, and Josh came up with, “I don’t think I have that one” and I’m like, oh that’s right, there’s a couple that Oliver just found that he sent. These aren’t for Josh, these are somebody else’s. I’m not gonna look to figure out which one’s which. I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.
Dave: Right, right. Or just go, that’s somebody else’s bridge, which is what I did, was to say, no, I can see this opening up into, what sort of fresh hell is this? And it’s like, well okay, you walked into this with your eyes open, Grandpa. Don’t complain to me. That’s why I sort of went, no, this is how I’m doing it, if we can contact these people directly or indirectly, “hey, are you up for this? If you’re not, that’s fine.” We’ll only have two people that are interested and they’ll know that when 8.2 is ready to be done. Okay, do we even have the decision that we have to make on this?
Matt: One of the things I think’s gonna end up happening is if a couple of guys do variant covers of 8.2 and sell out of them to the point where it’s like they’re going back to print like an original “Turtles” comic from the 80s of “they’re gone, we need more”, maybe some of the other guys that have passed on it will come back to, “well, I guess I can do one” and then okay, hey, go to town. We’ll give you the PDF, you can go to your local printer, you can go through Alfonso. The deal’s there, but there’s no hard feelings for people saying no, and there’s no hard feelings for people coming back afterward going, “oh hey, I guess I wanna make some money.”
Dave: Yeah, and the other thing on my side, of course, is like, I know there’s a lot of people really doubt this Dave Sim lariV thing, the anti-viral. Dave Sim things go out about three inches and then drop to the floor and die. Well, it’s like, I think this is a good case in point, where theoretically we could have 227 variant covers if this was a viral thing. Because it’s lariV, we will be lucky to have two or three, and it’s like, I think that makes my case for, no, when you’re canceled in our society, you stay canceled. You’re going to have to do a lot of hustling to keep your head above water. You’re never gonna be rich because canceled is canceled in our society. It’s like, “oh no, it’s not like that! Oh everybody has so much respect for you. Everybody always has nice things to say about you.” And it’s like, it’s lariV, it doesn’t go anywhere. One of the backers going, “hey I remember talking to you 10 years ago about hardcovers and it’s like ‘over my dead body, you’ll have to wait until Eddie Khanna takes over and see if he wants to do hardcovers’ and now here I am buying a hardcover.” And it’s like, yeah, because I’m down to a handful of things that I can do that will actually make money. I am still being starved to death by the feminists. Let’s not kid ourselves what is actually going on here. But we can have some fun with it, which is what I’m doing here, let’s have some fun with lariV. Let’s have some fun with other cartoonists who have done Cerebus and Turtles pictures, let’s see what happens with 8.2, we’re not there yet, we’ve got plenty of time to run around like chickens with our head cut off at A Moment of Cerebus screaming about how many different skies are falling because of Dave Sim, which is one of our favorite things to do around here.
Matt: [stammers]
Dave: Okay, moving onto “MJ Sewall asks: In the backup story to Matt Wagner's Mage in 1984-86, the Grendel storyline unfolded as diary passages with visuals telling the story, no dialogue balloons. Question: Did Grendel: Devil by the Deed text block style/format inspire Jaka’s Story in any way? Thank you for all you do. M J Sewall” And, [laughs] “Matt’s guess, no. But what do I, whoa, Deja vu!”I don’t know how to answer that question because I remember that I had “Grendel: Devil by the Deed”. I actually had two copies of it, the hardcover signed by Matt Wagner, signed and numbered, I forget which numbers that I had. And I’m pretty sure that I got them from Diana Schutz, cause she’s Matt Wagner’s sister in law. I would have to say, I wasn’t really interested. It was nice to have because obviously everybody knows Matt Wagner’s “Mage”, everybody knows Matt Wagner’s “Grendel”, it just wasn’t my kind of thing. But they definitely sat in the closet with me looking at them everytime I went into that closet back at Penthouse Six, and went, oh yeah, I’ve got them! I should pull those down and look at them. Oh yeah, these are signed! Yeah, they’re hardcovers. They’re number whatever out of whatever. So I never actually read it, but depending on when I got them from Diana. Diana and I were like sort of an item from Halloween 1992 until the beginning of 1994? If I got them then, then, no, it didn’t influence “Jaka’s Story”. If I got them from her sometime before that, depending on how long before that, it’s very possibly, although I didn’t read them, I saw what Matt was doing in them, and subconsciously it stuck with me. And I went, yeah, I should do something like that, but not registering consciously just, yeah that’s what I’m gonna do on “Jaka’s Story”. So that’s as close as I can get to an accurate answer on that one.
Matt: Okay.
Dave: I don’t have the books anymore, either. I forget who I gave them to, it was somebody that was an absolute raving Matt Wagner fan, and there’s a lot of those. So I thought, really, this guy is so sold on “Mage” and “Grendel” like a big part of his world revolves around it, I feel bad owning them and not even reading them, so I should probably just give them to this guy. Which is probably not something that I would do now. No, that’s Cerebus Archive material, so I will be hanging onto that even though it’s not something that I’m personally interested in.
Then it’s “Borgy Borgonia” who asks “Hey, Dave! You mentioned the Cerebus books will be PD,” is that print on demand?
Matt: Public domain.
Dave: Public domain! Thank you. “…in the future, but is it ok to use the character of Cerebus now under a Creative Commons license? Just asking for clarity, if ever. Matt sez: it’s okay. Dave’s not gonna sue anybody.” Yeah, you’ve been around here for a while. This is not your first rodeo. “The long standing policy is that anybody can use Cerebus in an original creative work. (Matt just asks you send Dave three copies for the Archive…)” See, there you go. You never even had to see my lips move.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: And Dave Kopperman asks, “Matt, Okay, got one: Is there a comic that Dave regards as the artistic and philosophical heir to Cerebus? That is to say, a work that both expresses the creative vision and ambition of the author but also grapples with their answers to the “big questions” in a compelling way? Maybe ‘heir’ is the wrong word, since I don’t necessarily mean something that came out after Cerebus was completed (after all, Dave’s work was highly influential during the run). So maybe from the last forty years. I’d nominate Finder by Carla Speed McNeil and Paul Chadwick’s Concrete. Matt’s guess: Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog series which ran for 290 issues." I didn’t know that! You would think they would’ve hung on for another 10.
Matt: I knew it was a long running series, and I had to Google it, I’m like, why would they stop 10 away from 300? Then I’m like, oh wait, it’s a licensed comic, Sega and Archie parted ways and Sega took Sonic to IDW and they started over with a new number one.
Dave: There you go. Okay, alright.
Matt: Reading the Wikipedia article, apparently one of the writers sued them about characters he created, so they had to retcon stuff out. And I got to that part of the article, and I went, and that’s why they were missing them 10 issues. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] There you go. “We’ve had enough of this fun, we are out of here. Here IDW, you can deal with this.” I would hesitate to answer the question. Definitely I have a lot of copies of “Finder” by Carla Speed McNeil, she’s definitely in the category of a very very talented cartoonist. Not a very very talented female cartoonist. In any person’s language, she has the chops, and definitely “Finder” I haven’t look at it in a long time, but I definitely have fond memories of it, and I did know that she got better and better and better as she went along. I know that she took an extended break when she had a child. Wasn’t that it?
Matt: Um, not sure…
Dave: Okay. I think that’s what happened. I always wondered, did she ever go back to it? Because I think it was a finite story. It was “Finder” started here, and it ended somewhere up ahead, and I wondered if she ever got there. There’s probably better if she was a really good mother to her child than “Finder” got done, but that’s personal opinion. Definitely Paul Chadwick’s “Concrete”, was very very popular, I enjoyed it when I read it. It was very very sweet. There was no hard edge to “Concrete”, although it sounds like something that should have a hard edge to it with a name like that. But I think that the overall answer to the question would be, the comic book field turned its back on me, and I turned my back on the comic book field. Which is really, I hung onto the stuff that I liked. I’ve got Paul Chadwick’s “Concrete” in “Dark Horse Presents” and various other places. I’ve got Carla’s “Finder” back issues. I would have to pull them all out in my unsorted pile and find out how many of them I’ve got and how far back they went, but that was at the point where I really went, I’ll tell you what. Let’s leave this alone, and I’ll go over here and do my tribute to comic strip photorealism. Because it’s, this is something that I enjoy and appreciate at least as much as everything my so-called friends in the comic book field were doing. It’s like, well, okay, I found out I have no friends in the comic book field, or I’ve got five or six friends in the comic book field. Let’s just call it a day and I’ll go over here. I never knew Alex Raymond. I only met Al Williamson once, I talked to him on the phone once. Never met any of the other photo-realists. Al McWilliams. So I’ll just go from a standing start, and I’ll do this. And the comic book field can continue to do whatever the comic book field is gonna do. That’s really the situation as it stood 14 years ago, and as it stands now. It’s like, well, okay. I can’t do anything about this, so this is my reaction. No offense against the comic book field. This is how they decided to behave towards me, and this is how they continue to behave towards me, and my interest in the comic book field is about the same as their interest in me, which is virtually nil, apart from, oh yeah, this is stuff that I liked back when, when I thought these people were friends of mine.
Okay, I have to go for my prayer time, and then we will get to finally with Brian West.
Matt: Okay!
Dave: Talk to you in a little while, Matt.
Matt: Alright, talk to you then. Bye Dave!
Dave: Bye-bye.
[clickedty]
Dave: Guess who? Guess who? It’s Dave Si-- it’s Grandpa again!
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Okay…
Matt: During the break I was reading, I have a Gustave Dore collection by Dan Malan, and I found out that apparently an albatross is a symbol of good luck!
Dave: [laughs] Depending on who you are, I guess. We won’t tell the Ancient Mariner, it’ll be our little secret.
Matt: It’s an Ancient Mariner engraving, and it’s the sailors are feeding an albatross, and the footnote is that the bird is a symbol of good luck. I’m like… doesn’t sound like it to me, but okay!
Dave: Yeah! What the heck. If Gustave Dore says so, and Dan Malan says so, who are we to say thee nay? Okay, finally, Brian West sent in, “Good morning, everyone! Noticed that the subscriber level for Cerebus YT channel is near 1500. Normally when a channel hits a milestone number of subscribers they celebrate the occasion in some shape or fashion. Now, I know the Cerebusonline YT is Small potatoes, compared to other channels subscription numbers. But, maybe we can mark 1500 subscribers in some shape or fashion? Maybe give away a free copy of a future CIH? or gift bag of Cerebus related items? Just an idea.” Okay, we’re gonna have to talk about it. And thanks to David Birdsong. There you go, that’s about my reaction to it. 1500 subscribers, and Cerebus going, “yep.” But there’s so much that I don’t understand about this. What does it mean… this is the Weekly Updates, right?
Matt: This is YouTube channel the Weekly Updates get put to, yes.
Dave: Okay. But there’s other things on there besides the Weekly Update?
Matt: I don’t believe so. I think it’s strictly just the Weekly Updates.
Dave: Okay. And there’s 1500 subscribers. Does that just mean people who clicked on it?
Matt: No. So, as an example, when we do Please Hold, I put it up on the podcast site as one… I think all of the audio, and it goes up as a two hour or however long audio file that people can listen to, wherever they listen to podcasts. But I also take it and make videos that go up on YouTube, because before the podcast that’s how I did it, and people have said, they prefer the shorter version. Like, every time we switch topics, I record on two devices, and I’m basically switching the tape from one to the other, so that each video is only like half an hour long, or shorter.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: So, when they go up on YouTube, I have a channel, and if you wanna see the videos as soon as they get posted, you hit subscribe, and you’ll get a notification from YouTube of, “hey, there’s a new video”. So almost 1500 people have gone on YouTube to the Cerebus Online and hit subscribe so that every week when the Weekly Update gets uploaded and goes live, they can see it right away. I’m a subscriber, cause that’s how I get the link to put it up on A Moment of Cerebus.
Dave: Okay. [laughs] I think I’m starting to picture how this works.
Matt: On YouTube I only subscribe to like five things, cause, in general, I got on YouTube to either upload one of these videos, or just watch random music videos when I’m doing something else and I don’t wanna listen to my music collection, I wanna listen to that one Rolling Stones song that I don’t own.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So I subscribe to Cerebus Online, Sean Robinson & Carson Grubaugh’s Living the Line YouTube channel, I’m trying to think what else. For a while there, I kept getting subscribed to Stupid Videos for Kids, because I’d let my kids watch YouTube on my phone and the end of every video is “like, share, and subscribe”, so you’re supposed to like the video, which created engagement, share it so that all your friends can see whatever stupid video you watched, and then subscribe so that you get informed when there’s new stupid videos to watch.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: The kids are watching… it’s people opening bags of toys, where it’s a blind bag. You don’t know what you get until you open it. And the next thing I know, I’m getting notifications of, “hey, there’s a new video from stupid toy thing” and I’m like, you guys hit the button, didn’t you? And my 10 year old, or my I think she might have been 8 at the point was going, “well, yeah, they said…” Okay, when someone on the internet tells you to do something, you don’t have to do it. When Mom & I tell you to do something, you have to do it.
Dave: [laughs] Internet! Mom! Internet! Dad! Let’s draw a distinction here, which you ain’t oft to do.
Matt: It took a couple tries before she understood that, you don’t have to do what the people in the videos say. Another one where Paula’s going, “well, you’re letting her just watch whatever?” I’m like, it’s kid’s videos! She’s not gonna see anything inappropriate! And then the next month in time was the article about somebody made a Peppa Pig video that halfway through it Peppa starts talking about committing suicide. It’s like, oh okay, now YouTube has to have a special kid’s section, and it gets policed…
Dave: Oh my God…
Matt: Because, evil stupid people do ever stupid things. And I’m going, okay, well you can watch YouTube, but I’m gonna be sitting next you going, no, no that one. No, not that one. No, not that one.
Dave: Yeah. Do you suppose maybe Peppa Pig is just a little down?
Matt: [laughs; stammers]
Dave: Sorry, I’m interrupting. You’re trying to explain this to me. Keep going, keep going.
Matt: So on our calls you’ll notice I never say those three words, like, share, subscribe, because I don’t care.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: If people want to watch these videos, here’s the video. If people want to share the video, go to town.
Dave: Knock yourself out!
Matt: If people wanna click subscribe so they get the video, a few hours earlier than they’d get it through A Moment of Cerebus, great. Like I have 64 subscribers, cause I looked after Brian sent this, and went, ya know, if we put the videos up on Cerebus Online, Swordfish would be a much bigger thing than it is now.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Because subscribers don’t necessarily mean views, it means people that are interested in whatever your channel is. Meanwhile, the Weekly Update videos, you might only get 100 people watching the video, but if it goes through when I embed it into the blog, they’re watching it on the blog, I don’t know if that counts towards the views on the channel.
Dave: Right.
Matt: So it’s one of those, it’s the metrics of how do you judge the engagement on the internet, which, if you care, and Brian kind of cares, that’s a way to measure your metric. If you’re Matt, and you don’t really give a crap about any of this, other than talking to Dave, recording it, getting it out for people to see, for Jesse Herndon to eventually turn into text that I can post so that people can read it. Because, “what did Dave say? The audio is crap, Matt.” Well, okay, now we have the transcripts. So it’s one of those, I don’t care about the metrics, so the most popular podcast was the one I did with Wilf Jenkins, like, for some reason…
Dave: [laughs] Really?!
Matt: Out of all the Please Hold stuff that I’ve put on the Anchor podcast channel, that one had like 400 unique listeners, and like everything else is like in the low hundreds. Like 800, maybe in the 90s, and everytime I post something and I… cause it pops up, like, “well, you care about this, don’t you?” No, I don’t. I’m only podcasting because it’s convenient.
Dave: Right. Right. The subscribe thing is just, YouTube tells you there’s a new video if you subscribed to whatever it is.
Matt: Yes.
Dave: Okay, we got as far as what your kids watch, what are the other, I think there’s two that you subscribe to?
Matt: Well, it was Sean & Carson do videos, and they do a lot of videos. And I’m gonna, “Hi, my name is Matt, and I pretend to watch your videos.” [laughs] It’s one of those, they post a video, and it’s like two hours, and I’m going, okay, and I’ll watch this in the background while I’m doing something else and you can’t do that when Carson’s drawing and you need to see this. Or when they’re discussing Cerebus, it’s like, nope, I actually have to pay attention to that.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: Or like, one of the things Carson does is Formalism Friday where he’s got another artist that comes and they discuss technique and the formal applications of theory of stuff, and then they draw stuff! And they’re fascinating, but I don’t got two hours to watch that. I work, I do a blog, I mean, I have a life.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: I don’t have 21st century brain where I can do three things at once. I have 1980 brain where, we’re gonna watch this now, and the rest of the world can go away until it’s over.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: Like Paula will watch TV shows on her phone while she does the dishes, and I tried to do that once, and it went very poorly for me. It was like, wait what? Pause. And my hands are wet and I don’t wanna touch the phone with my hands wet. I’m like, let’s just listen to music while I do the dishes.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: So, like, uhh Comic Kayfabe has I have no idea how many subscribers but because they put the videos up on YouTube on a fairly regular basis. Channels will go, “okay, we’ve gotten to like 10,000 subscribers, so here’s a special video that we’ve wanted to do but we were waiting for a special occasion.” It’s one of those, I can see, when Cerebus Online hits 1500, you can do something special. I don’t know how you’d find that out.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Short of me sending you a fax of, hey, you just hit 1500, or having Dave Fisher monitor it and let you know, I mean… Dave Sim is the low-tech internet guy. We do this as easy as it is for us, because this is how… we wanna get the information out, but it’s not like we’re putting lots of production value into these things.
Dave: Right. Umm, is there someway that Brian West could do it? Or is there somebody interested enough in knowing when it hits 1500 to go, “how do we go two way on that and say,’ congratulations, you’re our 1500th subscriber!’?”
Matt: I think the only way to know who the subscribers are is to have access to the account and to get a notification saying, you have a new subscriber, ya know, whoever. So it would probably be a Fisher thing, which, I don’t know if, you can talk to him, but I don’t know if he’s that interested.
Dave: I don’t even talk to him! He used to come like a thief in the night and pick up the Weekly Updates from Camp David and then I figured out with Rolly that Rolly can just take it off of the stick and put it on his phone and send it to Fisher. It’s like, well that’s a lot easier for Fisher than to come over here. I can’t remember the last time that I talked to him for more than five minutes. I don’t know if he knows that side of it. Like how that works, but I’m perfectly happy to go, yeah, here’s a gift package that we will give to subscriber #1500. Obviously, there are people who know how to scam the system and go, “well, I know how to wait until it hits 1499 and I’ll be the 1500 and just override everybody else.” But I don’t think anybody’s that interested in the Cerebus universe to even do that. I would say, Brian, as soon as you can figure out how to do something that way, is there a way to acknowledge subscriber #1500. Can you go back through channels and just say, hello, Mr YouTube, we’re coming up on 1500 subscribers and we’d like to be able to send a gift pack to our 1500th subscriber and if there’s privacy concerns, can we send it to you and you send it to them?
Matt: I mean, I guess I’ll send an email to Fisher saying, hey, this is something that’s happening. Cause basically, it’s, whoever’s got the password to get into the YouTube account, which I’m assuming it’s Fisher, and you’ve probably got it written down someplace that you’ll never find it.
Dave: [laughs] Right! Yeah, that’s exactly how that one goes.
Matt: You probably have a file on a disc somewhere of, here are all the passwords for everything you need to know, and dip, Eddie will find it one day when he goes to the digital archive and go, “oh, that’s what that password was that we changed four times.”
Dave: Uh yeah, it’s written down in my little phonebooks that I’ve got. I’ve got two little black books with phone numbers in them, and yeah, I’m sure it’s not only four passwords ago, it’s probably three servers ago that, hey Grandpa knew what that was called! It’s called a server.
Matt: Like I said, I’ll let Fisher know and see, I mean, if he’s not busy, and he wants to monitor it, just let us… send me an email with this is the 1500th person, and they’re gonna get an amazing Weekly Update prize pack.
Dave: Right. Well, not amazing, but…
Matt: No-no! No!
Dave: It’ll be something. What was the ones at the Academy Awards? Like $137,000 value of the swag bags what everybody got?
Matt: I don’t know. All I know about the Oscars this year is that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for talking about his wife that has no hair, and I only know that because it went totally viral on social media and you couldn’t escape from it. I stopped watching the Oscars decades ago because I just don’t care.
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, I found out about it yesterday morning, because it was too late on Sunday to make the Monday papers, but as soon as I got the Tuesday papers, it’s like, everywhere, and it’s man oh man, is that a can of worms in terms of, okay, who’s right? Who’s wrong? What are the consequences? And it’s like, this is right in the heart of consequence territory where, if you do something wrong, you have to pay the price. And it’s like, well, probably not if you’re Will Smith. But you didn’t hear that from me.
Matt: Well, no, getting back to the prize pack, it’s gonna be amazing, cause you’re gonna put a copy of “Amazing Batvark” in it!
Dave: Oh, okay! Alright.
Matt: That way, it’s truth in advertising. It’s an “Amazing” prize pack. See? It says “Amazing” right here!
Dave: [laughs] That’s right. And everytime we use the word amazing, we get to call it an amazing prize pack. Okay, so the 1500 subscribers is the stuff that you’re posting, which is the Please Hold for Dave Sim, and the Weekly Updates, and…
Matt: No, well, it’s only the Weekly Updates, because I have my own personal channel I put the Please Hold stuff on.
Dave: Oh okay, that’s where the 64 subscribers are.
Matt: Yep, that’s where my 64, those beautiful lovely people, who I’m sure a third of them are Russian bots that just subscribe because it’s part of some Russian campaign.
Dave: Right. Right. Uh, okay. I’m starting to grasp this somewhat. I’m astonished that 1500 people watched the Weekly Updates, or even wanna know about the Weekly Updates. It’s a weekly update! Unless Dave’s been sick and hasn’t done them in a little while, it’s every Friday.
Matt: Well, it’s the promos once a month for the upcoming issues of “Cerebus in Hell?”
Dave: Oh okay.
Matt: You’ve done Weekly Updates for like the Kickstarters in the past where you’ve talked about upcoming things, so I can see 1500 people wanting to know about what phonebook’s coming up next, or… cause, remember, the Weekly Update started with “High Society”’s getting reprinted and it’s all screwed up and we have to go digital and this is a headache. And then when your hand went, it went, “okay, I’ll do a video, because I don’t need the hand for that.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: I keep reminding people that the Weekly Update and Please Hold for Dave Sim started as this is something that Dave’s gonna do to save time and energy and it just becomes a habit. Ya know, because this is from the guy that went, “I’m gonna do a comic book!”, and then, 26 years later…
Dave: Yeah, or more to the point, the guy who said, I’m just gonna do a fun photorealism comic with pretty girls in it and just talking about all the stuff I like about photorealism and it’s like, here I am in this James Joyce’s “Ulysses” of graphic novel documentaries. How did this come about? I really have to be a lot more careful. If I ever actually through “Strange Death of Alex Raymond”, never do this to yourself again.
Matt: I hate to tell you this, but I think it’s your personality, Dave. I think if you start another project after “Strange Death”, it’ll be, “oh, I’m just gonna do a 24 hour comic” and three years later…
Dave: Right. I’ll be up to page 975. Okay, well, the 1500 subscribers is interesting. That’s an angle that I didn’t know subscribed, so at the very least, these people get notified when something new goes up on.. is it called the Cerebus channel? Or what’s it called?
Matt: I believe it’s Cerebus Online.
Dave: Cerebus Online.
Matt: Is the name of your YouTube channel.
Dave: Huh. How bout that?
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: See, you live long enough, you will find out everything.
Matt: The part I like, is when you click on the name it pulls up the main page where there’s an image, I think it’s from the cover of the first phonebook, and then there’s buttons for here’s Cerebus on Twitter, here’s Cerebus on Facebook, here’s Cerebus on Blogger which links to A Moment of Cerebus, and I’m going, oh! Okay, that makes a little more sense, because I never really click on that. I get the notification of “hey, here’s the new video” and I click on the link and I go to the video and watch it and go, okay, copy the URL to put into a blog, embed in a blog post, okay, here’s Friday, here’s Dave’s Weekly Update, here’s any links that are germane to whatever Dave’s talking about, here’s the rigmarole that I keep putting on every post that I keep forgetting. When I make a post, the screen is my post. That’s all I see.
Dave: Right.
Matt: Once I post the post, it goes up on the blog and there’s a sidebar to the blog with links to the Remastered Phonebooks, links to the upcoming “Cerebus in Hell?” so you can order it, links to what “Cerebus in Hell?” is in stores now… so for “Giant Size Public Defenders” I keep putting the link in the actual blog because I gotta remind people, order the book. Order the book, order the variant if you want the variant. And then, when I look at the blog, I’m like, oh yeah! Birdsong puts that over on the side for me so I don’t have to put it in every post. I should maybe stop doing that.
Dave: [laughs] Okay, well… we’re all learning as we go along, theoretically.
Matt: The issue that Matt has with doing Please Hold, is that I went to the podcast format. So okay, I recorded the audio on the podcast. And I used to record, also record it, just as a video so that’s why I was doing the Please Hold strips, because I put the camera so it’s showing the strip. And the entire video, that’s all you see, unless I dangle something in front of the camera. Real low tech, real, okay I figured out something that works, I’m not gonna stop this because it works. Well it got to the point where I’m doing the podcast on both of the electronic devices I use, because that way I can switch tape, when we’re done talking about this, we’re gonna talk about something else. I can start the second one, stop the first one, save it, so that they’re shorter little clips. It makes it easier in life, but there’s no more video. So what do I put up on YouTube? Well, I found a video maker program, and in theory, I upload the audio, I put up an image or two and bob’s your uncle. But unfortunately, cause this is a really neat thing and it’s a new toy for Matt to play with, it’s, well I can put up a bunch of images! Like when we talked about Neal Adams doing “Tarzan”…
Dave: Right.
Matt: …I went online, found all the covers he did and put them up for that segment! So instead of it being, hey I got this new program that’s gonna make the video and it shouldn’t take me that long, it’s now, hey this is gonna take all day because you’re gonna screw around looking, hey what did Dave talk about? Oh, Google it, find it, download it, upload it into the video program, okay when Dave’s talking about “Grendel”, here’s the image of what book Dave’s talking about.
Dave: Right. Okay, I’m getting a clearer picture now. I’m thinking that one of the things we should do, somebody’s complaining about the sound quality, because it’s all just done by phone, right?
Matt: Right.
Dave: If we did Please Hold on Wednesday from now on, instead of Thursday, I can take my recorder, my professional recorder that I did “High Society” Audio Digital on, and record myself on that, and then just give it to Rolly and say, can you email this to Matt Dow?
Matt: Yeah, we could try that.
Dave: And the other thing that we can do is that instead of you having to go back and forth between your two machines, you just say,”Grandpa, have to stop. That’s a half an hour” and then we pick up from there. “Okay, Grandpa, this is the new one.” Cause I know how to hit record on the recorder that I’ve got, the only thing that I know how to do. A) turn it on, and B) how to click on record so that it’s got a flashing light that says it’s now ready to go, and when I hit it again, now it records.
Matt: I mean, I’m game to try it. I mean, if it’s one of those where it doesn’t work out, we’ll still have the back-up of Matt recording it the way Matt records it. The big thing is the podcast limits me to 60 minutes, after 60 minutes, it goes, “okay, you’ve recorded an hour, you’re done.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: That’s why I have two of them. Cause, it used to be, I’d go for about 55, almost 60, and then I’d stop and switch to the other one, and then I realized, hey wait a minute, this is just like a four track recorder, where okay, I can take device one, record until we’re done with that topic and then when we switch, stop it right away and start the other one, that’s way it’s a smaller clip, it uploads to the internet faster, it’s easier to edit it when I do the videos, yadda yadda yadda.
Dave: So is the half hour the cut-off?
Matt: The cut-off is at 60 minutes.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: At 60, and it gives me a flashy red warning of, “hey, you’re getting close to 60 minutes”, and that’s usually when I’m like, and that’s why I’m hitting record on the other one.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And the sound quality… for your end, part of the problem is, you’re on speakerphone, I’m on speakerphone, and we’re doing it over the phone and at a certain point you can’t improve that quality.
Dave: Right.
Matt: I talked to my tech guy like, hey I do a podcast, and here’s what I do. And he’s like, “you’re doing this over the phone?” I’m like yeah, he’s like, “you can’t record a phone call and make it sound good. It’s just physically impossible.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: You have two guys with digital devices, playing around, yadd-- you know. Going, and then I’m going, at a certain point, it’s not worth, cause Jen offered to buy podcasting equipment and I’m like, that’s very kind of you, but there’s nothing that’s gonna make Dave sound better on my end, cause it’s a phone call. If we did the recorder part, then I presumably I can cut me out of your recordings and cut you out of my recordings, and mesh the two together. But that also sounds kind of like work.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, it all eats up time, no matter what it is that you’re doing. But we’ll make that a tentative plan for next month, which is gonna be May, because this is actually April, even though this is March.
Matt: But I’m probably not gonna get it up on the internet… well, I take that back. I can probably get the audio portion up tonight, because I’m usually pretty good about, oh okay, I just gotta chop the last 10 seconds off of each clip and then put them all together. And then listen to the last 10 seconds to make sure that it switches without sound… when Jesse Herndon does the transcripts, he’s like, “yeah, you repeat yourself a little bit there” and I’m like, yeah, cause I’m not going to spend… I’m not an audiophile, splicing the tape as close together as I can so no one notices. It’s, well, hey, If I can get it, I get it. If I can’t, it’s better to repeat something than cut something off.
Dave: Right, right. These 64 subscribers deserve nothing but the best.
Matt: [laughs] And I’m sure I only have 64 subscribers because it’s people that were going to the blog and discovered that “hey, he uploads the videos as he gets them done, and he doesn’t post to the blog until the last video’s uploaded, so I can get a jump start on the two hours by subscribing, because I get that notification and I can start watching the first video before the sixth video’s done.” Which…
Dave: Ah-ha!
Matt: I mean, if you got that big a FOMO for me and you talking, okay!
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: I’m not gonna tell people not to subscribe, but I’m not the kind of person saying, oh yeah, you need to watch all the crap videos that I put on the internet, cause it’s mostly these. Every now and then I’ll record something like, oh I can put this on YouTube, and I put it on, and like, if people are subscribing for Dave, they don’t want to see the video of Matt’s wife playing with the kids’ slime.
Dave: Oh, I don’t know! [laughs] We never know. That’s probably gonna go viral before I do. Okay! We’re gonna wrap it up there, Matt. I appreciate you walking me through all of this 1500 subscribers thing. We’ll see what Dave Fisher or Brian West or both of them can come up with on that.
Matt: I mean, it’s, as best as I can understand it, is as best as I can explain it.
Dave: Okay. Alright! Thanks again for another great Please Hold for Dave Sim. And say hi to Paula and Bullwinkle and what’s the other one’s name? Janis Pearl!
Matt: Yeah, whose birthday is tomorrow.
Dave: Is it really?
Matt: Yep! She turns 11.
Dave: How old is she gonna be?
Matt: She’ll be 11, and she’s only got about a little less than 24 hours before she official turns 11, cause it’s 6:09 at night, which means she’s got until 6:09 at night to piss me off bad enough that she doesn’t turn 11.
Dave: [laughs] And you get all the birthday cake, in that case!
Matt: Ah, no, we had the party last weekend, so the cake is in the fridge and I haven’t touched it. Paula keeps going, “hey, you know Janis, you can offer the cake to your Grandma. You can offer cake to somebody else.” And she’s like, “I do! Nobody wants it!” I’m like, oh great, I’m gonna eat another damn birthday cake.
Dave: [laughs] Have a good night, Matt!
Matt: You too, Dave!
Dave: Talk to you next time. Buh-bye.
Matt: Talk to you next time, bye.
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| Like the logo? I stole it... |
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).
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...
Over on the Facebookees, Mike Jones shared that Dave has a five page Strange Death of Alex Raymond story in YEET Presents #68. Ya gotta back them on Patreon to get it. Here's the post if you're not sure if you wanna give 'em five bucks:
YEET Presents #68 is almost here!
Our Halloween Special is at the final step at the printer and should be in the mail soon. Dave Sim, William Messner-Loebs, Mike Gustovich, Mike Royer, Shane Luttrell, Marcello Mitch Rosmini, Josh Holley, Bryan Fraze, Robb Cox, Eddie Morgan, Len Mihalovich, Ken Phillips,Steve Shipley, Ronald Currell, Doug Curtis, Trish Ellis and more. For $5.....order now.
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| Click for bigger obviously... |
I guess the deal is:
Get every new issue of "Yeet presents" in your mailbox and never miss the thrills and the fun only this magazine can give you! Remember we need your physical address (you'll be asked after you pledge), this is no digital thing, it's a real, professionally printed magazine! :)
Five bucks in the US, $6 in Canada, and $10 outside them two. The link has all the details.
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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
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
Studiocomix Press is working hard to upgrade our website to create a better experience for everyone. In the process of this, you are able to simply create a new a Studiocomix account and stay tuned to all of our amazing updates, you won’t miss out on all the comic news around here. Visit our website or email us at info@studiocomix.com to leave your feedback.
And for October:
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Next Time: Jen! Hey, Jen! There's NEW SDOAR pages in Yeet Presents #68! Jen! Ya gonna post tomorrow?
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