Matt: Uh, better than most worse, than some.
Dave: [laughs] That’s a good one.
Matt: That's what my Dad uses all the time.
Dave: Isn't it funny? The older you get, the more you say your Dad's stuff.
Matt: Oh no, I've been saying my dad's stuff for 20 years, I just don't do it as often.
Dave: Okay. Ah, are we recording?
Matt: We are recording.
Dave: Oh-kay. So, Please Hold, and it's your turn to remember Jeff.
Matt: I was thinking about what was I gonna remember Jeff, or how was I gonna remember Jeff, and I got four different stories, and I decided I'm going to go with, the box of stuff I'm sending up to you I'm going to include the 41 or 42 pages of… to pause, and go rewind to explain what I'm talking about. Back when “Following Cerebus” was still following Cerebus, and it was coming out, but it was only coming out like once or twice a year, and the fan consensus was that Craig was just taking too damn long, and you know, why can't he get it on a schedule? Yadda yadda. I came up with the genius idea of, why don't we just do the Eisner-Iger studio and make an issue of “Following Cerebus” and then send it to Craig, and if he likes it, he can publish it. And I've said…
Dave: You actually thought of doing that?
Matt: I said this in the Cerebus Yahoo Group, and there was enough people going, “That's a good idea! Yeah, you should do that!” And we started putting something together, and it was going to be the fan issue where, okay, this is history of Cerebus fandom. Like, the Cerebus Fan Club and the newsletter and stuff, and it slowly turned into, why don't we do a round table of prominent Yahoos discussing the series, and we'll send that to Craig? And I went, that's not the idea I had but it's an idea so yeah let's go with this!
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And it slowly turned into, “Well, it was your idea, so you're gonna be the editor” and I'm like, I said I’d help edit, I never said I’d be the editor. And when Jeff…
Dave: They’ve already changed your idea on you.
Matt: Well, and Jeff stayed with me for a week in like the middle, of where it was one of these, he came to visit for a weekend, then it was January, It got 30 below on the warm days, and he was like, “I can't drive home in this. I have to stay.” I'm like, all right. So he slept on my couch for a week, and one of the things we did was we printed off these 42 pages of the round table discussion from the Yahoos, and started to try to edit it. And we got about, oh, I think three lines into it and Margaret Liss had said “prolly” instead of “probably” and we went, oh, this is a bad idea.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So, these 42 pages have Jeff's hand corrected notes of… you know, the other problem we ran into, and this ties into something that Chris Woerner had said in one of his books that you had sent me a excerpt of, was that the Yahoo group was doing this round table and nothing ever happened with it and he's gonna take his section and do something with it. And, well, the reason nothing ever happened was because it was an email chain, where people were sending an email, and then replying to the email in the email. So, you got a block of… a paragraph of text, and then later the same paragraph with someone commenting a sentence on it. and we're going, “No one's going to read this. We don't even want to read this, and we're doing this for free. No one's gonna pay to read this.” And in my email…
Dave: You'd have to print it on a Mobius strip.
Matt: I mean that's… it was one of these, it started with there was like eight of us, and we formed a separate Cerebus Yahoo Group and it was invite-only, and it was, okay, here's the topic, you know, discuss. Come up with something, post it, and then people will respond to your postings, type thing. And the first couple of questions I tried to do it, where it was, okay you know, here's what someone wrote and I will refer to what they wrote instead of responding in line, because it's going to be too confusing otherwise. And after like the second or third question, I just started going pass, pass, and finally I said, listen, I'm not taking my turns if I'm editing this. I'm just gonna read along and I will try to come up with something later. And I have all the emails in my email somewhere, and it's one of those, every now and then I think I should go back and look at that, and this little part of me goes, “Or you could, you know, bang your head against a brick wall. It's the same thing. It’s just one doesn't hurt as much.”
Dave: [laughs] Because you've already tried that a couple of times.
Matt: And you know, I think Tundis was one of the instigators of the questioning. So it was a broad scale, “What do you think of Cerebus the series?” And okay, here's three paragraphs from Margaret, and then here's two paragraphs from, I think, Larry Hart was one of the guys in it, or it was maybe was Jeff, and then here's Chris responding to Margaret and Jeff at the same time, and then here's somebody else responding to what Chris wrote responding. And it's like, it's just it's this Russian doll that never would end and the only way we could print it was if everybody had their own color and it was, “Okay, red then yellow then green then back to red.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: But that was…
Dave: Keep going! Keep going.
Matt: That was my genius idea though was of, you know, Craig's having trouble getting “Following Cerebus” done in a timely fashion, obviously it's because he doesn't have someone putting the issues together for him, and all he's got to do is go over it and go, “Yeah, okay, that works” and then printing it. I think shortly after that's when issue nine came out and we were all like, okay, this is, what, Dave doing that for Craig, and it's a good idea / bad idea. [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: It's a good idea, you got an issue about Neal Adams! It's a bad idea, it's like a triple sized extravaganza.
Dave: Right. Which is the other way that this doesn't work.
Matt: And that's my remembrance of Jeff, is that I have, I guess it’s these 42 pages, or 41 pages, and when I moved into the house I was cleaning stuff up, and I pulled them out and went, oh yeah, these. I don't need these! And I threw them in a pile in my room down in the basement, of, okay, this is stuff I can recycle eventually and they've sat there every day since then till today when I went, oh hey! They're still here! And I picked them up. I'm like, these are getting cleaned up and sent up to Dave and he can put him in a file folder and forget they exist until Eddie takes over and goes, “What the hell is this?”
Dave: [laughs] And then Eddie can revive “Following Cerebus” and it'll be a completely effortless process. That's the thing. Everybody always thinks that, you know, “Well, why can't this guy just get it together and get his fanzine done?” And it's like, well if you've never actually tried to do it on your own, even, as you say in this case, “We're trying to do… what's the easiest way to do a ‘Following Cerebus’?” and it's like, “We'll just have a bunch of Cerebus fans talking about Cerebus and the magazine will put itself together.” It's like, no magazine ever puts itself together and the more you try to try to simplify it ,the less properly it's going to work.
Matt: Well, somebody emailed me and asked if, because it was somebody I had sent the digital copies of “Glamourpuss” to, and they asked, “Is there digital copies of ‘Following Cerebus’?” and I'm like, technically, yes, because I was scanning them in.
Dave: Right.
Matt: And then today, David Birdsong sent me [laughs] a PDF. It's PDFs of issues 1 through 8, and 10 through 12. It's like even the guys that were scanning this and doing that good a job scanning it looked at issue 9 and went, “No, we're not gonna do that one.” [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] Wait a minute! That was a great issue.
Matt: I'm not saying it's not a great issue, but it's a really hard issue to scan into a computer without doing what Margaret did, which is ripping off the binding and breaking the spine so you can scan page by page, and even she gave up and sent me her copy when I told her I was starting to scan my copies.
Dave: [laughs] Yeah, there's just something that… that's fan versus collector, and the collector is going, “This? I can't bring myself to do this” and the fan’s going, “Well you pretty much have to” and that's when the whole thing breaks down, as well. So moving to Jeff Seiler part two, which is actually Steve Swenson's part one, hello Steve. Can you read the the notes on this Jeff Seiler, the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing? The ones around the outside?
Matt: So I only sent you the main photo, but he actually sent me nine photos where he went and took pictures all the way around to get it better and easier to read. And I looked at them, and I can translate most of it into English? So…
Dave: Is it…? Okay.
Matt: So I actually, when I got home I sat at the computer, looked at the photos, and opened up a Word document, and typed up what I'm pretty sure it says, and then I printed it out so that I can read it right now. Because I'm going to put the image to the whole thing up in the videos for this, it's “Best wishes to Jeff Seiler” and then in parentheses, “On the occasion of coming to Canada to get his stuff back” end parentheses, and then I believe in Jeff's handwriting it's, in parentheses, “Good stuff asterisk back” and then in parentheses, “7-8/9-11” Your signature is “Dave Sim 7/6/2011.” And then down in the lower right hand corner there's an arrow kind of pointing towards the signature and written across this little arrow is, “Mostly that guy or err um hmm dude, really nice hair” and then in parentheses, “J.A.S.” which is Jeff Allen Seiler. And then, “All of these are parenthetical by themselves, but he will die unloved, unmourned, and alone” and that one’s going up the right hand side of the image.
Dave: Okay.
Matt: And then, on the top of the image, written upside down so you have to turn the book over to read it, is “Good thing his creator didn't!” Also “It's a good thing that most people” and this is where I started having trouble because it's not a great photo, “It's a good thing that most people the or else he will read”, or “need this”, and “this” could be “his”, “will realize that I ran out of space even though I have a”, and then I'm not sure what it says and then it says, “for margins someday when you”, possibly “buy”, “this book and you all laugh, by J.A.S.” So I sent an email to Steve saying, hey, if you get a chance, could you take better pictures of those two sections that are hard to… or if you can translate it into English, what did Jeff write? But it's definitely Jeff's handwriting.
Dave: It is? Okay, I was gonna say, you know what his handwriting looks like, you've got 41 pages of corrections.
Matt: [laughs] I mean…
Dave: Okay it's a very weird thing for Jeff to do.
Matt: That's… what I'm thinking is, that because Steve says that it in his question, Steve says that it looks like it's two different pens for the image of Cerebus, and I'm thinking maybe Jeff went back and added more hair to it, unless you did.
Dave: Uh well, from what I can see on my copy, the thing that I was thinking was, it's odd because it looks like I'm doing um a Japanese brush pen brush strokes and then inking over top of them, which is, you know, not a bad way to do a fur texture. But I can't picture myself doing that with the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing because the paper is, it's just paper. It's not particularly thin, but not particularly thick and there's no way that you could do something with Japanese brush pen without having it soak all the way through to the other side. So that would be one of my questions for you, Steve, is, does it look as if the inks soak through to the other side? I think we've probably gone as far as we can with the rudimentary pictures that we're both referring to right now, so I think we'll defer this one to next time when I can look at a better photograph of it that you can get Alfonso to print out. And I’m not sure-- it might tell me more, it might just raise some different questions.
Matt: The other thought I would have is, because Jeff came up and you guys went down to Toronto for that podcast interview you did with, I forget her name.
Dave: Right, yeah I forget her name too.
Matt: Maybe when you guys were hanging out, you know, it was sitting around talking, maybe you grabbed a pen and just kept putting hair on, making the fur bigger, because it was good like waiting for food type thing.
Dave: Uh, that's possible. My impression is, that this was one of the things that Jeff was wondering about when he got here, was, “Do you have copies of the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing?” And it's like, yeah, not a lot of them, but I got some of them. I'll just give you one, don't worry about it. And then, started working on it. I mean the Jeff Seiler lettering is pretty fully developed. It's from the time period when I was um starting on Strange Death of Alex Raymond and I was doing a modified kind of Warren Magazine title lettering that they did, which I always liked. I think either Bill DuBay came up with that, or a letterer under Bill DuBay's instructions came up with the lettering style, but I always liked it. It's very very versatile, it works with a lot of different styles, and looks really good, particularly with a Photorealistic style. So that's why I decided to adapt that. I don't ordinarily do that on something that I'm personalizing to somebody. So whenever I was doing it, if we were just sitting out back on the porch possibly and, yeah I'll just doodle away at this while we sit here and talk before we actually do the the Kitchener tour of Dave Sim locations, and then go from there to Toronto. It is odd that it would be… from what Steve saying, it's obviously two different kinds of pens and that doesn't sound like me. It's possible that it's a ball point and then, I would occasionally use the ball point really lightly just to get the contours, and where everything's going to go, and then grab a… name slips my mind, the archival pen. Grabbed like a zero one, or a zero zero five, or both of them, archival pens and then start inking over the ballpoint so it's a more finished drawing and everything's, at least theoretically, where it's supposed to be. That I wouldn't be able to tell until I saw a better reproduction. If Steve could go to a a print shop, just Kinkos or something like that, and if you could get them to scan it at 700 dpi rgb, and then just send that scan to Alfonso, that would be probably the closest that we could get to what this actually looks like without actually sending it to me so that so that I could see it? It is strange. I can't think of too many people who, having gotten something this finished, would then sit down and, you know, write their own notes around the outside of it, unless Jeff had had a few by that point, which it was very possible he was here first, and then we went to Toronto and then from Toronto he went up to the lakehead to the crazy Canadian lady’s place to get his stuff. And depending on how that went, [laughs] which was probably from what I could gather, was no day at the beach. Jeff was still pretty shook about the whole relationship, and the ending on the whole relationship. It's very possible that, think having had a few fermented beverages, it suddenly seemed like a really good idea for him to write his own notes on it and the notes just degenerated by the time he got around to the left side of the title page. Now I'd be curious if Steve wouldn't find uh telling all of us how much he paid for it.
Matt: Well, I kind of want to know, not so much how much he paid for it, but where was the seller located? [laughs]
Dave: Right.
Matt: You know, did this get shipped out of Minneapolis? Did it get shipped from his Sister's place? Did it get shipped from Alabama or Arkansas, wherever his brother lives? I mean, like I said in in my fax, I'm not bitter. I mean that technically should be mine, but you know I'm not gonna fight about it, “You gotta send me this book you bought.” I mean, you paid cash money. It's yours.
Dave: Right. Right. I mean, Jeff also had a break-in in his storage unit. I think he had two storage cages at the apartment building, about six months, eight months before he died, and was trying to figure out how many things actually got stolen and how many he just can't find because he had a lot of things. So that's another one of those, you don't know. It ended up somewhere, with someone, and then it ended up on eBay at some point. But it's very difficult to get into any kind of finger pointing on that. Which is is one of those, the people who are going, “Okay, we all have to learn a lesson from this. Make out your will, and and get it done ahead of time.” Uh, yeah, there's that element to it. There's also at least start making a list of everything, starting from “these are probably the most valuable things that I own”, and at least get that to the lawyer that you plan to have making up your will for you, to say, “Um, okay, here's photocopies or photographs or scans of everything that's in my… these would probably go for a good buck on eBay, so I want to specify these are going to these people”, and then publicize it. Which is one of those, you know, you'd probably they'd have to send it to you, so that you have it on A Moment of Cerebus, and you can say, “Okay here's all the stuff in this person's estate that is signed by Dave, or has drawings by Dave on it, or is a piece of Dave's artwork, and here's who I would like to have end up with these.” And then, okay, at least there's a paper trail on that. Jeff got a start on that, but you can't work through the whole process of , “Okay, I have to get everything I own identified, and then specify who it's going to.” That's just gonna telescope up ahead of you, and you're talking about a years long process. [laughs] Most of the Cerebus fan base are not going to live that long, if that's what you're trying to do. So…
Matt: I always advocate, that if you don't have some specific fan in mind, just send it back to the Archive. You know, just leave notes of, okay, send it back to Aardvark-Vanaheim, and the problem I have with that is, on the one hand in general, yes, send everything back, but then you go to, like, how many copies of all 16 phone books is the Archive possibly gonna need? [laughs]
Dave: Right. Right. That's one of those where it would be, okay, does it have a sketch on it? How good a sketch is it? Who is it a sketch of? Because those day are gone where I would just sort of, as I did with Jeff, just arbitrarily go, okay, if I'm giving you this I might as well put a Cerebus head sketch on it for you, as well. This is my first experiment with doing ballpoint pen sketches and fully ink sketches on the current Kickstarter, and right now we're sitting at, I think, three full-size Cerebuses, three Cerebus arm and medallions drawing, and seven ball point pen. So I've asked asked Birdsong to keep me posted on that, so don't suddenly tell me, “Okay, now we're up to 50 on each of them” because then I might have to make another plan. But it's going to be a pretty finite resource, so that would be something I would be interested in, if that's what people would want to send back to the Archive. “Dave Sim did this sketch of Cerebus as Groucho Marx, or Matisse the Unknown Turtle, or any of my other greatest hit sketches, and here's the date that he did it, and I sent it back to the Archive because it's one of those, well, okay, there's a finite number of them and there ain't gonna be no more, or there will be very very few.
Matt: Well I know that Jeff has sent me photos that I'll be running, while we're talking because I have them, of he had a number of the later phone books that he took when Gerhard was in Minneapolis at a show, and he had Gar do sketches of Cerebus environments on the title pages, and there's a part of me going, well, you know if Jeff's collection did get broken up, and is now loose in the wind, that means that there's these four or five phone books with whatever it was Gerhard put in them, and you know, stuff like that, well yeah it'd be nice to get that back to the Archive. The other one I'm thinking of is Nate Oberstein, who has almost in a complete set of the phone books. Like, his set I could definitely see if he left it back to the Archive, it'd be okay, the whole set just stays together because they're all the phone books.
Dave: All of the printings, not just all of the phone books.
Matt: Yeah. He just sent me photos of them, because I always ask him, okay so what are you looking for? And he'll send me his spreadsheet, and I'm like, my brain doesn't work that way. I can't read spreadsheets very well.
Dave: Right.
Matt: If you give me a list of “I need these five phone books” I can tell people, okay he needs this printing of this book, this printing of this book, whatever. But if you give me a spreadsheet, and then I gotta figure out what it means, and by the time I figure it out, I just don't have the motivation to tell everybody.
Dave: [laughs] And that's, you’re tapped out for energy at that point.
Matt: Well, and the part I love about Nate's collection is, I mean he just sends the spines on on a bookcase, but like the second or third printing of “Guys” Eddie Campbell's not on the spine for some reason.
Dave: What?!
Matt: For some reason, the art has been shifted so it says “Guys”, and it has the number, and you can see a strip of the bar, but where Eddie would be has been moved.
Dave: Oh! Okay. All right. Yeah somebody doing a shortcut going, “We're just gonna slap the spine on this and not really worry about what's supposed to be under there.
Matt: The other one that I loved was Volume One, you know the first three or four printings are the spineless, where there's no author title or volume number, and then when that stuff starts getting put on, if you look at Nate's photos, because there's like 12 of them, you can see the evolution of, “Okay we're gonna move it up, we're gonna change the font a little.” I think the first one it says Dave Sim Cerebus, and then the next printing it's just Cerebus.
Dave: Right.
Matt: The number didn't show up till like Volume Five or printing five, I think.
Dave: I remember that! Yes, yes, it's all coming back to me now. Well, it's not all coming back to me, but some of it is.
Matt: [laughs] The stuff that you repressed because you didn't need to remember it. It's all coming back! “What year is it? Am I still an atheist? Am I dating somebody? Am I late for a date?”
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, yes, I would agree with you that, while Nate is still with us, if he hasn't gotten his will together, definitely as many photos as he can put together and chart these these variations. Because it's definitely not something that I kept track of, it was always, you know, well okay we have to fix this on the new printing and make a note of it. But once that got fixed or at least changed, “fixed” and then next time you go, well now no, now we got to do this thing here. And having to do it with, well at the start, two or three of them, “Church and State” one, “High Society”, and “Cerebus”, not necessarily in that order. And then, okay, now we're up to Volume 10. It was never a happy day around here. Okay, now we have to look at the last printing and go, “Do we want to change anything this time? Because it's going to be another six months or a year until we get another chance to get this right.”
Matt: The other one that threw me for a loop is, I knew that the first, I think, five volumes had spineless printings where there was no information on the spine. I didn't realize it went up to “Melmoth”. I didn't know that the first couple printings of “Melmoth” didn't have anything on the spines and every time I look at Nate's photos I go, oh, there's something I didn't see. Oh, there's some-- it's like, you know. That's one of the reasons why I really like it when Nate sends me a message of, “Okay, here you go, I organized stuff. Here's better photos.” It's like, oh wow, I can just stare at my phone for the next two, three hours going, huh, I wonder why they did-- I wonder why they-- I wonder, you know, it's one of those, I could write it all down and we could do a Please Hold where it's nothing but, okay so the third printing of Volume Seven, why did you guys--? And you'll be, “I don't know. I don't know, Matt.”
Dave: I don't know. I don't know. To the best of my recollection, as they used to say in in the Watergate case. Well I think that definitely calls for a, “You go, Nate!” Thank you for being the guy who was that obsessive about all of the printings, so that that information hasn't gotten entirely lost, either entirely lost yet, or entirely lost period.
Matt: Exactly.
Dave: Okay, yeah, then we got into the expanded lines on the sketch, um… “And Steve gave me a copy of Six Deadly Sins portfolio for my birthday.” Wasn't that nice of him?
Matt: Well, it was one of these, it showed up and like I looked at the calendar and went, well I'm just not gonna let anybody know I got this for a couple days because then it's my birthday.
Dave: [laughs] So, he just sent it to you. Just like that?
Matt: Yeah! That was, it was, “Do you have a copy of this?” No. “Well I'll send you one.” I'm like, well this works out
Dave: [laughs] “I'm not gonna argue with this!” Uh, “For my Birthday. When I posted it, Damien said about the “Envy” plate, ‘that road in the second one is weirdly twisty’. And Dave Kopperman replied, ‘The twisty road is definitely on the original and it's so specific that I feel like the effect was deliberate. I was originally going to say that the perspective might have gotten away from Dave, but the pattern floor on that final piece is pretty flawless.” Uh, I'm going to come down on Damien's side on this one. It's not, I wouldn't describe it as weirdly twisty, but I would describe it as strangely tilted, and that was a result of not knowing what I was doing, and not knowing how complicated what I was trying to do was. So that from my vantage point here, 41 years later, if I was sitting down with Dave Sim of 1981 and he was describing, “Well I want to do cobblestone. I want to do cobblestones that actually look like cobblestone.” I would know what he meant, but it would be okay, you mean fitted stones, interlocking stones but at an angle, which is usually how they are if you actually have a cobblestone road, which is what I was trying to do. And it's like, okay, the problem you're going to run into is you're going to have the perspective for the two different sides of the cobblestone, and then you're going to have another perspective on the top and bottom of the cobblestone. It's two separate vanishing points, and the biggest problem you're going to have is with the horizontal one at the horizontal lines, that, you can pick a vanishing point and say, okay it's way the hell and gone over here on the right, and then get a ruler and start laying in the parallel lines that will make up the top and bottom of the cobblestone, but the question you're going to have is how quickly are the cobblestones receding into the background? And that's going to be implied by the rest of the background, and you're going to need practically a slide rule to figure out, okay what rate are the cobblestones receding into the background? And consequently how far apart do the top and bottom lines need to be right here at the front of the illustration, or as physically describing at the bottom of the illustration? An inch up from there, two inches up from there. What I was misconstruing was, okay as long as I'm taking a long time to do it, this isn't a page that I have to get done for the next issue so consequently I can take pretty much as much time as I need for this, or I'm going to have, I forget how much time I allocated, probably a couple of days, three days per piece. By not solving the problem ahead of time, or by not understanding what the problem was, it was all I can do is add as much tiny little line detail as I can to them and try through the little line detail to create the effect that I'm picturing in my head. And it's like, uh, that's not going to work, because the eye registers the perspective on the lines, identifying and establishing where the cobblestones are, and only you after that and substantially after that goes, wow look at all those tiny little lines. Which is why Damien's saying it's weirdly twisty. Yes, it's… weirdly twisty is one way of saying it, weirdly tilted is a different way of saying it. Just looking at it, okay what's your impression of this? It looks as if the cobblestones are sloping down from right to left so that Cerebus is running on a much higher plane than the guy carrying the large statue. And it's like, well you know once you've gotten this far, if you want to proceed with doing authentic cobblestones and drawing each individual cobblestone, and rendering each individual cobblestone, it's going to take you a long time to do, and it's still going to look as wrong when you're done doing the road, if not wronger when you get the piece actually finished. I'm trying to fix it as I go along, where I go, well if I put the shadows in, the shadow on the figure, which was not something I was going to do. The shadow coming from Cerebus, and the shadow coming from the guy running. That didn't help matters. It did to a small degree, but the parallel lines are completely overwhelming any kind of effect that I could add to it, and I'm just killing my own lighting effects. Cerebus’ shadow is going off to the right, but I've got a very large brush stroke on the front of his snout, because the snout is blending into the cobblestones and when I put the 30% tone on that's not going to help. It would be a matter of sitting down and saying, okay here's all the problems that you're going to face trying to do actual cobblestones, and the odds are it's not going to be any better when you're done than when you started. So why don't you create a different effect? Just lose the cobblestone, but create a different texture in your mind that you can put in all the time that you're going to put in on the cobblestones, but do something else. Do a pebbled background, where it's irregular stones interconnecting which contrast with the fitted stones that make up the two sidewalks on either side, and put your time in on that. It's particularly glaring because the plate one I accidentally did the same thing, with the “Sloth” where it's Cerebus on the slave ship, and it's like well okay, there you did what you should have done on this one. which is, if I'm going to put in this kind of time, I need to design a background where you get full value for all of the pen lines going in there. Plate six, I tried to solve the problem there in “Pride”, and this would have worked with “Envy” plate, as well, which is if I use a larger pattern, do basically the same thing. Two-point perspective, and basically just make the fitted stones a larger pattern, not a smaller pattern, or a more intricate pattern. And it's like, the “Pride” plate isn't perfect either, but it's a lot closer to it than the “Envy” plate. So that's one of those live and learn… until I did the “Envy” plate I had never really done any picture where I was banking on putting in that much time on the detail, and going, the detail alone will make it worth the time that I'm putting in on it. And it's like, well, it's a theory, but no, you're going to find out the more time you put in on it, it's still going to completely suck, and depending on the person looking at it 40 years later, it's going to be weirdly twisty or weirdly slanted.
Matt: [chuckles] Well, but you did learn a valuable lesson from this, because when you got to “High Society” and you were in the lower city and there were cobblestone streets, you set the perspective much different, and you know put a lot of people and stuff around!
Dave: Right, yes. I mean, you do learn as you're going along, which is why my brain turned to cream cheese working on the commentaries for “Cerebus” #4, because it's like, oh man it's tough enough having to learn in public. “Uh okay, you don't want to do this anymore. You do want to do this and this is close but you still haven't got it right.” And having to live through that again and then describe, here's what I was trying to do, here's what I ended up doing, here's what I ended up learning from this. It's one of those, not one of my favorite things in the world to do, but I also understand for the sake of posterity, issue four is a very very popular “Cerebus” issue so write everything that I can possibly write about it while I'm here, this one time, saying okay here, when I look at “Cerebus” #4, this is what I see now, and got Rolly to email all of the commentaries to you, and all of the commentaries to David Birdsong, and I told him to take as much space as you need with it. This is commentaries on 22 pages, instead of 10 pages, so we can't be using the Cerebus Archive portfolios to date as as the pattern on this, and you just let me know how much room it needs to breathe. So it sounds like it's going to be six pages of commentary. As far as I know, he's got it all pasted up now so we're just about ready to go ahead with that one. But, yeah it's not a real good experience looking back at your own semi-professional work when you know you've been a professional cartoonist for as long as I have.
And we're sticking with Steve, Steve got a random copy of an issue of “Cerebus” that his daughter bought him while they were on vacation, and she found it in a resale shop. That's pretty impressive! I had no idea that the daughters were getting in on this, the “Oh, Dad will want this.” “I asked which issue and Steve responded it's 106, which got me to thinking what would have happened if the… uh, can't think of that three-headed monstrosity's name.” The three-headed monstrosity's name is Fred, Ethel, and the Little Fellow with the Hair, which is a very long-winded name, but that's as close as I came to an actual name for he/she/it, “had reached the moon in addition to / rather than Cerebus? Did the “real god” cause the tower to crack just where Cerebus was so Cerebus alone could continue the moonward journey?” Uhh, that gets a little complicated. Even at the time, as an atheist I understood, or thought I understood, it was my understanding of the nature of reality that expressions like the bigger they are the harder they fall, actually had physical properties to them. Where, yes it's a fact of existence, and a fact of creation certainly, as you know I'm now somebody who does believe that it is a creation, it's not just a manifestation, or a random series of events, that the bigger they are the harder they fall does apply. And that the tower that I was creating as a metaphysical concept, you realize, okay it starts as the circumference of the upper city of the Iest, and then as it's rising, its circumference is getting smaller and then that starts accelerating. And yes I considered it a a baked in property of the ascensions when it is the tower getting taller and taller and taller and then breaking off, and then basically taking off same as a rocket ship done, that this was the way of preventing oversized entities from completing the journey. You can get up just this high on it, and then as the circumference is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, that entity isn't going to be able to maintain its stability, and yes the tower will crack, and at whatever point the tower cracks an appropriate sized entity, if another entity went along for the ride, will be able to continue on. But it is a “this high and no higher” as opposed to the bigger they are entities who assume that the bigger you are, the higher you can get. So consequently bigger is better. And it's like, mmhm, bigger is not necessarily part of that dynamic. It's survival of the fittest, not necessarily the survival of the strongest, but survival of the most appropriate. The best fitted for the context. So yes, that was one of those, I don't know how to describe this, so I'm really glad that I only have to draw it, and you know with obviously with Gerhard's assistance but explaining to him, okay, this is the concept behind it. So this is what you're going to be drawing. At this point it's the tower is just tall enough and has extended just far enough that they're able to walk on either side of it and Fred, Ethel and the Little Fellow with the Hair can actually jump from one side to the other. But that's only going to exist for for a length of time. And then basically describing that as we went along, or probably actually did, you know, rough little sketches of, okay at this point this is the size the tower is getting, and this is the size of the the demon heads and skulls that are making it up. Does it sound like I answered the question?
Matt: Well it's a lot more thorough than my answer. My answer is the title of the comic isn't “Fred, Ethel, and the Little Fella with the Hair.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: So you know if there's two characters, and one of them's name is the title of the book, he's probably gonna make it.
Dave: Right, right. I mean that is one of those things, wouldn't that be a nice thing to find out, that you're in a comic book called “Matt Dow”? That you're not living in a comic book called “Paula Dow”? Or living in a comic book, whatever your boss's name is?
Matt: Years ago, like 20 years ago? Because i'm 43 now. So yeah, actually 23 years ago, the group I hung out with, we were going to the Wizard World Chicago or formerly the Chicago ComicCon, every year and like the second or third year, my friend who was an aspiring writer came up with a joke that “The Matthew Dow Show” has been renewed for another season, and like wrote a fake news article about the show, and included all of us, and sent it out, and because there were like six of us on this email thread, somebody responded with their version of it, and I was, I'm like, I'm not… I mean, because yes, I get it. You're pretending that we're all on a TV show, but you're on a TV show, and you're saying it's my TV show, which okay but that I'm the main character, and you guys are all the side characters. Why are you writing these fake articles? So I wrote one that said that my body was found dead and my friend took it way to the extreme. He had flowers delivered to the house to my mom, and my brother who was living there.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: No one called me for two weeks. Everybody was ignoring me, and then that's when I started every couple days sending out a list of Matt Dow sightings, because obviously it, you know, it's a fake death like Elvis thing. And after about two weeks we finally you know, ended the game. But yeah, no, it was you know, “your life's a TV show” and I'm like, really? Because I don't really do anything! Who wants to watch this all day?
Dave: It's more serious than the Elvis situation. There was never an Elvis show. I mean you know, he had to go to stadiums and stuff like that to be Elvis. It sounded like you just had to be Matt Dow, and there you go. They picked you up for another season. Somebody's gotta be watching! I mean, they're not just making these numbers up.
Matt: Well, and shortly after that the group of us had kind of broken up, and you know we weren't all hanging out together, and I was hanging out with other guys, and I realized that if my life were a TV show, it got canceled, and now I'm in somebody else's show as a side character that spun out of my show and it's one of those, it would be like if Kramer got his own show or Kramer had his own show and then like Seinfeld came along and it's, okay now Kramer's a side character on this other show. And it was weird because it was one of those you know I'm like wait a minute I'm supposed to be the star of this thing and all I do is sit back and watch everybody else, what's going on now?! [laughs]
Dave: Frasier is probably the better example.
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: [coughs] Excuse me. Where it's, uh okay, you used to be on “Cheers” and you were just one of the guys on “Cheers” but now you're on “Frasier” and “Frasier” is about you. And yeah, we have no idea. That really might be the case. I mean it's assuming that there are omniscient, and near omniscient, and quasi-omniscient beings, which I sort of take as a given, we have no idea what they think is the most interesting thing to watch. What's the the ratings blockbuster? It could be, you know, “Taylor Swift? Oh we got Taylor Swifts out the wazoo. We know exactly what they're like. They're not interesting, but ‘The Matt Dow Show’? Man, it’s just, year after year, it's just a a ratings blockbuster.
Matt: Especially the Christmas episode, where he watches the three-hour fake Yule Log.
Dave: Now, okay, and on that note! [coughs]
Matt: Now moving on!
Dave: We’re moving on, and as you say, “Okay, leaving Steve, Dan, one of my Death’s Dark Treaders, asks,” and hello, Dan. “Matt, How many of the 6,000 pages and 300 covers exist?” Uh, exists? That, I would have to put in quotation marks. My consideration would be particularly with the pages in, let's say, “Cerebus” #1, “Cerebus” #2, probably a fair number of those pages were bought by people who went, “Well okay I'll help the kid out. He's only asking ten dollars a page. Here's ten dollars for your aardvark page.” And you know, it just went the way of all flesh, because it's like, “Well I only paid 10 bucks for it. I didn't really buy it, you know, because I wanted it. I bought it to try and help somebody out. It got all buckled up on the way home in the car, or one of the kids colored on it, or something like that. Might as well just throw it out.” And that would not be a completely unexpected thing to have happen in 1978. Of the six… “How many of them does Dave possess?” Well, I look at it as, again, they're in the Cerebus Archive. There is about 3700 pages in the Cerebus Archive and about almost exactly 100 covers, so there's a lot… a lot higher percentage of the pages are in the off-site storage Cerebus Archive and a smaller percentage of covers in the same location. “Is Dave “satisfied” with scans or is there a reason to pursue the actual pieces?” The answer to that would be, if you know what you're looking at, you would definitely far prefer looking at the original artwork if you were having to make a particular assessment about it. As we'll see, a couple of questions from now when we start talking about Sean Robinson, Sean Robinson sees a lot more sharply than most of us do, and in terms of reproducibility. So, definitely if you had to have Sean Robinson telling you specific things about the “Cerebus” #4 original artwork, you could tell more from looking at the original artwork than he could tell from scans of the original artwork. I would have been in that category at one time, my eyesight isn't at that level anymore, so scans are fine for me. So it's more of a, I want to make sure that I'm hanging on to the artwork for the specific purpose of people who are seeing at that level and whatever their concerns and their focus would be 50 years from now, 100 years from now, which is very apt to be completely different from our own, just because they will have presumably have developed perceptions that are far in advance of our own that we couldn't predict, and wouldn't have any way of of anticipating ahead of time. That's particularly true of the painted covers. The painted covers look very different from the scans, and very different from the reproduction, because the computer does its best to find happy and accurate compromises of “this image has this much cyan in it, as much yellow, this much black, and this part has three percent more black than it does over here.” You can get reasonably accurate doing that, but as soon as you see the original cover, which is Gerhard painted it, and Gerhard was just trying to do the best cover that he could. “I'm mixing a magenta and cyan, a little bit of this, a little bit of black, or whatever, and then trying to find the colour that I'm picturing in my head. This is about as close as I can get. Here's the cover that I painted.” Once that went to the printer, and they were photographing it, and then separating it into its individual colours and making individual layers, plates out of it, here's as close as we could get. It's not really close. It's close if you haven't seen the original, but if you have seen the original, you go, well, it's not even close. Particularly if you own the original, and you can go, “Uh, no. I look at the original on my wall, you know, several times a day and every time I look at the printed comic book, it's like, no, this is just a rough approximation of it.” Which is why I tried not to sell covers, but the covers were the things that people wanted, and the covers were the things that people would pay the most for. So that situation is always going to exist. The same reason that it would be nice to say, hey, anybody that's got a painted “Cerebus” cover, if you're looking for a place for that to go after you die, the Cerebus Archive would be sincerely grateful about that. The odds are that's not going to happen because that is going to be something that is going to go for the most amount of money, and be the most desirable for exactly that reason. If you own the original painting for a “Cerebus” cover you're the only one who is going to see how it looks. A lot of the black and white covers, and painted covers that I did got stolen from my apartment when I was living over on Queen Street, which a very unhappy list of [laughs] trusted people who would be the likely suspects. “Trusted” in quotation marks. It’s… ex-girlfriends, somebody that I slept with and didn't keep a close enough eye on, somebody who was over for a party, a housekeeper, I had two or three housekeepers when I was there who would come in once a week. Somebody in New York when I was doing “Form & Void” and was wondering where Mary Hemingway's diary went, her handwritten diary, said, “Never rule out the landlord” that New York landlords tend to be barracudas. I don't know if that's a general tendency among landlords, just, you know “I don't make enough being a landlord of this building, so this is one of the job perks is being able to let myself into somebody's apartment and trying to figure out what can I take that they're not going to be able to trace to me.” So a lot of that stuff hasn't shown up on the market. It'll be interesting to see what happens now with the price is now moving up into the low and mid five figures. That usually does bring stuff out of the woodwork, where, “Okay I swore I was never going to sell the ‘Cerebus’ cover, but I can't afford to just own something that's worth $50,000. You know, I'm barely worth $50,000 myself. So as much as I don't want to turn this into cash, I'm gonna have to turn this into cash and just hope that this was at or close to the top of the market in my lifetime, because it's probably not going to be at the top of the market if you're talking open ended.”
Matt: So, when you and Gerhard split the company up, he got half the artwork, right?
Dave: Uh, no. No, the idea was we kept the artwork jointly, and because I wasn't selling artwork, Gerhard could sell whatever artwork that he wanted, and then would compensate me for my side of the artwork. So it'd be on a case-by-case basis, if this page was all background with a tiny little Cerebus in the corner, well okay, that's one kind of a deal. And this page over here, which is five panels of Cerebus in his costume using his powers, kind of thing, well okay. They're not buying that for the background. They're buying that for the Cerebus so that would be a different deal. And then just, he was welcome to make any deal that he wanted with anybody. Do you want to buy Cerebus artwork that Gerhard worked on? Just tell him which pages you're looking for, and he had a catalog of them. I had a catalog of them. You let me know who you sold it to, and how much for, and I'll just set it up. And Gerhard definitely decided he wanted his own pages. He wanted the, you know, here are… “These pages are mine.” And he basically took a number of pages. Came over and went through all of the artwork and a giant pile of pages and said, “Okay, now we're square. I got these pages, the Cerebus Archive gets those pages, and we never have to revisit this question again.” And it's like, well, okay, I don't think that's the best way to do it, but, no, that's the way Gerhard wanted to do it. So that's the way we did it.
Matt: So did he take any of the covers?
Dave: He took a giant pile of stuff.
Matt: Okay. [laughs]
Dave: It's like, I'm not gonna sit down and say, no you can't have that one, no you can't have that one. It's like okay, this is… I forget how long this was, this was actually 2014? 2015? So it was a good seven years after he had left, and it's like, okay, well, you know, I can tell by his tone that this is how he really wants this to go. This is really how he wants this to go, this is how this is going to go, and I think he asked, “Do you want to look at what I'm taking?” And it's like, no. No, if you think you're entitled to it, you take it. There was, he wanted to take the “Cerebus” trade paperback cover, and I went, ah, no, I'm hanging on to that one. That's the first trade paperback cover. He definitely took the “High Society” cover. It was one of those where… Sean would be actually the person to ask about it, because it's like, Gerhard scanned all of the artwork that he took, and virtually all of the artwork in the Archive has been scanned. There's some pages that still have to be scanned from “Latter Days”, I think it is about half of the book or something like that, but it's not a big priority right now. So Sean definitely knows these are the scans that we have, these scans came from Gerhard, these scans came from the Cerebus Archive.
Matt: I know that I had asked Sean about that one time, because Gerhard was doing a sale, like three or four pages, and I asked Sean, hey, do you have scans? “Oh yeah, before Gerhard sells anything, he made sure everything was scanned.” I'm like okay, but I just asked because you know you're saying that the archive has about 100 covers and I was thinking about like, well, there's 300 covers, and then I went, wait, no, because “Going Home” and “Form & Void” is all the photo covers. So those covers won't exist as covers.
Dave: Right. Yeah, I’d forgotten that part. That's, what, 240? Yeah 240 to 300, so some of them are covers in quotation marks, too. It's like, okay I did you know, the Spore cover, and it's got Spore and it's got the lettering, but it doesn't have the background. That's all computer generated.
Matt: Right.
Dave: So it's, it was definitely, I think these are the best covers that I can do under circumstances, was the conclusion that I came to, and sort of knew right from the beginning, if you're going to sell the covers, you definitely want it to be a cover. It's got to look like the comic book, but in black and white. And it's got to have a logo on it, because people want the logo on it, which is much easier to do at the stage where you're doing the pre-press, than it is when you're drawing the cover. It's like, the “Cerebus” #8 cover doesn't have a logo on it. The “Cerebus” #6 cover just says “The Aardvark” because it's like, okay, I've got a letraset “TheAaardvark” on here, but I really don't want to do an oversized logo, and get a stat done of it, which is going to be expensive, and then stick it on the cover, and then ink up to the logo all the way around. I really don't have time for that. I just want to get a cover done, the fastest and easiest way to do it. But being a fan and and one time art collector, I'm going, ehh, you're gonna regret this.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: Which is not true. I would be regretting it if I was selling covers, but because they're all just in the Archive, it's like, well, okay this is how I did them at the time, and this is why I did them this way. But, yeah, definitely, it's, you just have to check the Heritage Auctions catalogs where it's like, “Okay, this isn't the original logo.” They got a stat of a logo from a nearby issue and put it on, and made it look like it's from the original cover, but it's always more impressive when you go, “Wow! It's still got all of the paste-ups on it. All of the word balloons are on there. All of the captions are on there.” Even if the captions are almost brown because they're stats or whatever, it's, “Uh wow, that's an original cover!”
Matt: Well that was, Steve sent me a year or two ago, he's like, “I'm gonna mail you something. What's your address?” And so I gave him my address, and this package shows up, and I open it up, and I immediately emailed him going, this isn't what it looks, is it? And he’s like, “No, it's not what it looks like.” Because what was in the package was the original art to the cover of issue 80.
Dave: [laughs] Okay!
Matt: Of the giant stone Thunk holding up his fist to the reader, and I mean, it's black and white. There's no background. It's just your art, and but the upper corner says “Cerebus” #80, you know, cover type thing. And it's signed, but not by you, and it says “Merry Christmas”, and then it's the signature that looks like a forgery of your name, but not even close. And so Steve ended up calling me, and we talked about it, and I'm like, so what is it? And he’s like, “The nearest we can tell”, because he contacted Gerhard about it, Gerhard used to make full-size copies of the art, if he thought he might screw up. So…
Dave: Which he always thought he was gonna do! So it was sort of situation normal.
Matt: And that he said there were …because you guys were on, I think if i remember the story right, it was around the time when you guys were either in Florida or Hawaii, and it was, “I'm afraid I'm gonna screw up” so he ended up photocopying the entire issue and it was one of those, once he finished his work and he didn't need the copies, he would just give him away to people. So apparently you guys were at a show or something, and he gave away a “this isn't the cover but it's almost the cover.”
Dave: Right.
Matt: And Steve got a hold of it, you know, [??]track down the province[??], because it's on real thick board too. Like it could almost be illustration board, but it's light. It's not a heavy board and and I'm like, all right. So I have it and it's one of those, you know, there's that part of me that goes, if I had the money I would commission Gerhard to do a background on the cover, but not the original, do something completely weird and random, so when people look at they go, “That's not right.”
Dave: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, we would do the covers on the illustration board, and the way that it was reproduced at the time, the actual scanning when it was being photographed, when it got past the point where it was an upright camera that was taking the picture of it, and it became instead a computerized thing, where the cover had to wrap around a drum in order to get scanned. So when Gerhard got the cover done, I would draw it on the illustration board, he would ink it on the illustration board, and then he would paint it on the illustration board. He would have to peel up one of the layers on the illustration board and take a mailing tube and basically wrap, like peel up as much of the bottom of it as he could, and then hold it tight against the mailing tube, and then roll the mailing tube up the whole cover, so that it came off, and was now on something that could be rolled around the drum. And it's like, you have to have real confidence that this layer is on at the same density and with whatever the same adhesive is that holds these layers together, throughout the whole cover, because if there's a glitch part way up, you're going to have a giant hole in the middle of that cover that just took you a day or two days to to ink and then paint.
Matt: And that would explain why I have a photocopy!
Dave: Depending on the cover, would have been more heartbreaking or less heartbreaking because Gerhard would go, “Well, the cover sucked anyway, so now I got another chance at it. Can you just draw another one and I'll put the background on it?” But that never happened. That never happened. So, congratulations to the S172 illustration board people, that they were 100% consistent on that.
Matt: I just can't imagine spending all the time and effort to draw and paint the cover and then possibly rip it into pieces, so that we can make reproduction of it.
Dave: Uh, well, you gotta remember that this was a different time period. The same thing with all of the pages got FedExed to Preney because they were going to photograph it. I wouldn't want to get it photographed locally, because people hadn't been trained in, “You got to pick up all the detail on this” and it's like we would do full-size photocopies on the office photocopier of all of the pages, and it's like, okay, one of these times they're gonna lose the artwork, and you know FedEx is, or somebody is, and we're just gonna have to reproduce from the photocopies. It's gonna look like crap and people are gonna say, “Ew! Why does this issue look like crap?” Because this one got lost. But it never happened. But considering what the situation is now where, unless you really want to let artwork out of your personal custody, it doesn't have to be out of your personal custody. You scan it, and send it to somebody who's got a computer that can receive it, and there. That's as close as you're gonna get to it anyway, so you know, you go nuts. You remaster it to your heart's content, but my physical artwork doesn't go anywhere unless I'm sending it there.
Matt: Right.
Dave: So we covered that question, I hope we've satisfied Dan the Death’s Dark Treader with what we had to say on on the subject there.
Matt: The last little bit of that, was him asking what was the impetus for getting the art back, and it's I don't think so much you want the art back as, I'm going hey, if we can get all of an issue back into the Archive, that would be amazing, and that was a Matt impetus, less than a Dave impetus. Because it was, once it was, “Okay, we're gonna break up the gang if we win” then it was “Well, is Dave getting anything?” and that's when you kicked in the money.
Dave: Right, right. Which is another one of those, I have no idea what people will be looking for. Call it the Sean Robinson side of the Cerebus intellectual property. You want to satisfy those people by keeping as many of the originals as possible, because you don't know what they will be looking for specifically a hundred years from now. We may find out that there are implications of inked drawings that exist at a finer-tuned level than DNA, as an example. That, you know, DNA is going to look like an elephant's foot a hundred years from now, compared to, “Oh, this is what we can tell about the artist, just from these elements that are always going to be in his ink. Once we figure out what the density of his ink is, and this will tell us an encyclopedic level of knowledge about him on the day that he did this, because it's just programmed in there. They didn't know about this back when the Earth was still cooling, back in the 22nd century, but here in the 23rd century ? Yeah, we can tell you all of this kind of stuff, if we can get the artwork, or if we can have access to the artwork”, and most of the artwork is owned by whoever are the Elon Musks of the 23rd century. There could be a whole bunch of them that just go, “Uh, no, this is why I pay trillions of dollars for artwork, so that I'm the only one that finds out these thing. No, you can't bring your hand scanner in and go, ‘can I just scan over this page?’ It's like, no. No, that's my page. I've gotten a lot out of this page that I have no interest in sharing with anybody else.”
Matt: Right, okay, moving on!
Dave: [laughs] Now we’re gonna move on to Mike Sewall?
Matt: Yeah!
Dave: Okay, Mike Sewall asked, and hi Mike, “Hey Dave and Manly Matt – On A Moment of Cerebus Blog in 2017, there is a listing for Collected Letters 1990, Collected Letters 2004 Vol 3, and Collected Letters 2006. Do these still exist as digital files or (gasp!) real honest-to-goodness books?” They exist as digital files. That was in 2005, 2006, starting to scan… [coughs] excuse me, the letters in the Cerebus Archive and 1990 is really the the earliest year of collected letters where they exist as a separate commodity in the Cerebus Archive. And the idea was, okay this is one of the things that I'm going to be making a living off of, or Aardvark-Vanaheim's going to be making a living off of, I'm going to make a living off of Aardvark-Vanaheim, is doing Collected Letters. So all of these Collected Letters have to be prepped, and most of the letters are circa 1990 and between 1990 and 1998, 1997. Would have been typed copies that were photocopied before the letter went out to the recipient, and had the recipient's address on it. And you can't really print somebody's address on a Collected Letters thing, so this was one of the first jobs that Dave Fisher had back around 2006, 2007, when I was starting to go, okay how am I going to run this operation? So all of the 1990 letters got scanned and as far as I know Dave Fisher took the addresses off of them digitally. Collected Letters 2004 Volume 3 picked up from Collected Letters 2004 the book, all of the 2004 letters that didn't make it into the book, and Collected Letters 2006, which were the letters that picked up from those digital files. 2004 Volume 3, I think, extended through 2005, and then Collected Letters 2006 was the first, okay, it starts at January 1st 2006 and it goes to December 31st 2006. I think Dave Fisher got as far as those were scanned, but it was just in the process of taking the addresses off of the letters, and then was going to make up digital files of them and this would be just an ongoing process. As soon as 2007 was done, here's the digital files for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. This is what we're selling them for, we will send you a disk with all of Dave Sim’s letters from that year on it. And it was like, there was if not zero demand, very close to zero demand.
Which ties in to your next question, Mike, which is why was letters Collected Letters 2 so much different than Collected Letters 1? Trim size was, okay, Collected Letters Volume One didn't sell well at all, didn't sell through well at all. I'm sitting on a giant pile of them, and there have been absolutely no reorders from Diamond, and Diamond didn’t order very many of them. So it was, okay, I have to reformat this to something that fits those requirements. This is about how many I can picture Diamond ordering of these, this is about how many of the stores are going to order. So this is what the pool of money is. How much book is that going to buy me? And it was, well okay, I might be optimistic here, but it turned out that I was optimistic, even the book being that thin and that small, there still weren't large enough orders to sustain it. So that was the point where Collected Letters just was moved off the table. It was, this is a extremely specialized interest, and thank you, Mike, for being interested, and I appreciate you being interested in in the Collected Letters. I don't know, I assume that again that's another aspect of Cerebus fandom. The people who are interested in the letters that I write, and what it is that I had to say at a given time. The idea was that selling Collected Letters would finance the scanning, and then the the word searchability, when we had that function, to say, okay, here's all of Dave Sim letters from… well not all from like 1990 forward, but at least from 2006 forward, so here's, at this point, 16 years worth of Dave Sim’s letters. if I want to know what Dave Sim has had to say about Kevin Eastman, I just have to type in “Kevin Eastman” and it will say “Kevin Eastman was mentioned in all of these letters, and here's the designation this tells you what year it's in.” So consequently the digital file for 2006, and there's a reference in a March 12th letter, there's a reference in a July 17th letter. So someone doing a book on Kevin Eastman and wanting as much information as they could get on what has Dave Sim said about Kevin Eastman, okay,you don't need me for that, and you don't really need the Cerebus Archive for that. You just need these disks and at this point, you just need access to this cloud, and this will answer all of your questions. But not being able to make money at it, I can't really justify paying Rolly, you know, right now to do that much scanning. And paying Rolly or somebody else to remove all of the addresses on the letters, I eventually stopped putting people's addresses on the letters for the most part, and here's what I have written to everybody over the last 14 years or 16 years. I think it's still going to be a specialized thing all the way along where it probably won't happen. Might be a third administration, fourth administration, sometime in the late 21st century where somebody says, “We really kind of have to do this. I mean we keep we keep running into this same wall of , yes, we do have all of Dave Sim's letters and yes, he covered a wide range of subject. You've got a copy of Collected Letters 2004, you know how wide-ranging his letters were. And so yes, there's lots of information in there. Comics history from 2017, 2014, that has been ignored or forgotten, and we have it but we just don't have it in an accessible form.” I'm trying to figure out how to buy groceries [laughs], it's, I try to be as as courteous and as helpful to posterity as I can, but there are limits!
Matt: Well the three that he mentions, if I remember correctly, back in 2017 it was, those were add-ons to one of the Kickstarters, where if you…
Dave: Right! I think we got that far. I knew that we had that as an ambition, but the amount of money that came in from the Kickstarter, no, that was not anybody's preference. The people for whom it is a preference, it's like, “Wow! When's 2009 going to be available?” and it's like, uh, don't hold your breath because you got a lot of other stuff that we have to do here that makes money.
Matt: There's a link on the blog to the Cerebus Oversized Project, and the link is broken. It doesn't work, and I keep getting emails going, “Hey, what's going on with the Cerebus Oversized Project?” and it's like, I don't have the files. And I put out feelers to the rest of the Brain Trust of, okay does anybody have this stuff? And Sean's like, “I have all Collected Letters that were part of the Kickstarter and I have all of the Cerebus Oversized Project” but he's also moving, so all that stuff's packed away. And I'm like, no rush, but it's one of those, once I get the files then it's, okay, well, what do I do with them? Like I can give away “Glamourpuss” because these are somebody else's scans, I'm not put out by saying, okay here's a file that you can email me I give you the file, you download it, you do whatever you want with it. Like, once we get to the Cerebus Oversized Project, that was something that was trying to make money and it just kind of sort of failed I think because it was a lot of end user work instead of like the Kickstarters. It's, hey, here's the portfolios, here's the pages, here's the bonus prints, here's whatever, you know. All you have to do is pay us and we'll ship it to you. The Oversized Project was, okay, here's the file. You have to go do stuff, and I think that's where a lot of people were like, it's a good idea but I don't want to go to Kinkos and deal with them.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: So once I get the files, then it's gonna be, okay, well, what do we do with them? You know, do we give them to George to put on Cerebus Downloads as, okay you can buy whatever. Because the other one was it was the Humble Bundle model of pay what you want. Minimum payment but if you want to pay more we'll take it. And it's like, and I'm at work while I'm using 20% of my brain that I need to to continue to work, the other 80% will start running in circles of, “Okay, well, what do we do with this? What do we do with that?” It's like once I get the files, then it's going to be I'm probably gonna send a fax up of, okay, I got the files, what do you want to do, Dave? And you're gonna say, “I don't know. That's computer stuff. I don't do the computer stuff.”
Dave: Well, there's also the element to it of, because it's oversized and you have to say okay, what's the largest piece? That was actually Sandeep's thing that he came up with when he was trying to figure out how to make Aardvark-Vanaheim make money. And it's like, all of it sounds like a great theory, and it's like, yeah, let's give that a try. It sounds great. Uh, no. People definitely want, “I want you to print it and I want you to package it and I'll pay you way too much money to ship it to me, because I'm gonna want this thing. I think you're still going to end up going around in circles, but it's going to be a situation of, okay, what's the largest oversized thing in the Cerebus Archive, which should be in digital file form that Sean would have? How would you package that? I would assume it would be two very very large pieces of cardboard taped around the outside. At that point you can say, okay, this is what it's going to cost to ship that. It really doesn't matter how heavy it is, because the size is the thing that's going to establish how much it costs to ship. And at that point, it becomes okay, we can sell you a 10 piece package or a 20 piece package or a 30 piece package, and you just have to pay this amount of money to generate the 30 pieces. This much money to ship it, this much money to pay Rolly to package it, and this much money for the packaging, and if that's worth it to you, then that's great. If it's something that you'll have to save up for, that would make a lot more sense. Like don't order a 10-piece package and go okay, “I want all… however many there are, 75 of them or whatever it is.” Wait until you're buying all 75, because you're gonna save on the shipping cost. This is one of the criteria that we're trying to get to with the Kickstarters, particularly with the “Cerebus” #4, the one that we're doing right now, where it's like, okay, offer comic books. Offer scans of the “Cerebus” #1 pages, because by the time you're paying to ship a stayflat and 11 individual sheets of cardboard inside the stayflat and plastic to wrap it. Anything else that you add on to that, isn't going to add on to the shipping cost . With a ceiling on it. You will get past the ceiling, but the ceiling becomes much higher at that point, as opposed to shipping one comic book and backing board and plastic bag to someone, and if you can keep it under 200 grams it costs $5, and if it goes over 200 grams it costs $11. Well okay, let's figure out how to keep it to 200 grams. These are the variables that you have to keep in mind, but yeah definitely that was, sounds good to me. Sandeep did all of the scanning that he needed to do on the oversized pieces, and put together digital files offer this to people. All you have to do is take it to your local Kinkos and they'll print you one, and it'll cost you this much to get it printed. And that's just not how comic book fandom in general, or Cerebus fandom in specific, rolls. “We just don't do that. We will pay you the money, we who can afford it will pay you the money to do all of that stuff for us. We don't want to go to Kinkos and have to…” I think it's got a lot to do with questions. It's like, “The guy behind the counter is gonna ask me a question and I'm going to have no idea what it is that he’s talking about, and all of a sudden there's this five minute visit to Kinkos is turning into a half hour or 40 minutes.” And a half hour, 40 minutes of like writing the final exam in University and you didn't actually take the course.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] It's like, “This was really really unhappy. I don't want to do this. I will pay Dave Sim or Dave Sim and a couple of other people a lot of money to deal with all of this on my behalf, so that I just end up with the end product.”
Matt: Well, if the biggest size piece could be printed out and then rolled into a mailing tube and shipped, and be feasible that way, but then at the same time now you got to buy a crapload of mailing tubes and you got to make sure that when you're rolling them you don't roll them too tight and crink them or whatever. And that's where I, in my head, I’m going, well you know we could offer one oversized piece a year where it's okay you know, hey it's August 15th…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And the Kickstarter's up for Oversized Piece #1, and you know once we do Oversized Piece #1, that one's gone, and then next year we'll do Oversized Piece #2, and work our way down until the smallest ones. But it sounds like it's a lot of work and I mean not to be a crass jerk but where's Dave's cut? You know, I mean, everybody's getting a piece of the pie, how much of the pie is left over to go into AV, to keep the lights on and keep Dave fed and you know that kind of thing? And that's where I'm like, because as you were talking, I was thinking, well I could get the files and I could go to my copy shop and see how much would it cost to print the biggest piece, and okay, and how much would it cost to ship-- and it's like the law of diminishing returns kicks in of, like at a certain point the original plan of, “Here's the files, figure out what you want to do with them and just pay us $25 for the files.”
Dave: Right. It's, and I think what you're going to end up with at the end of the day, even if you figure out a way to do it, and you figure out a way for us to print the oversized pieces here, and probably print them individually, it would be, every time we get an order, we'll print one of these. Rolly goes over to wherever the place is, they've got the digital file, they print it out, we roll it up, put it in a mailing tube, you can buy mailing tubes at Canada Post of varying sizes, address it, put this postage on it mail it to the person, the person gets it, pulls out the oversized piece, puts it in the middle of their living room carpet, and goes, “Wow, that's amazing” and then rolls it up and puts it back in the tube and puts the tube in the closet and eventually is going to go, “I can't keep buying these because I'm also not inclined to keep pulling this out of the closet and unrolling it and putting it on my carpet and going ‘wow’. I want something that's sitting right there that I can go ‘wow’.”
Matt: Well, that's the one question I have with all the archive portfolios that people have bought, and all the bonus prints, and all that stuff, is, how much wall space do these people have where they're putting all this stuff up so that you can see it?
Dave: Right.
Matt: Like, I have all the portfolios, but they're on a shelf in my hallway outside my bedroom. Because when we bought the house, it's got these built-in bookshelves, and I'm like, built-in bookshelves?! I'm a bibliophile! This is the greatest thing in the world! And then we moved in, and I discovered that all my books are just a hair too big to stand up and I have to lay them down and I'm like, I'm a less enthused to live here for the rest of my life.
Dave: [laughs] Severely less enthused!
Matt: I have every Stephen King book, and they're all pretty much the same size, and when I bought it, I'm thinking, I can put all my Stephen King books on these shelves, and I moved in and I opened the box, and I put the first one on the shelf and went, oh this sucks. And so…
Dave: Like, how bad is it?
Matt: It's not… I mean I could get my brother, and my friend, we could pull the lumber out and rebuild the shelf so they're the right size, but at the same time, that sounds like work.
Dave: Yes. Yeah.
Matt: So, I just have all my books, all my Stephen King books, on this set of shelves sideways, and then because it's, what is it? One… it's six shelves. The top shelf is complete, it's the entire length. All of the other six have a divider right in the middle, and the top shelf is paperback size, which is fine because I have a bunch of paperbacks, but then they get slightly bigger as you go down, but not big enough.
Dave: Right, right.
Matt: But, I have a shelf, and I have all my portfolios on one, and below and I have all the stayflats,
because I used to keep the portfolios in the stayflats, and one day I went, you know you're paying a lot of money and you're not even pretending that you're going to look at these. You should pull them out. So I pulled them out, and it's one of those, I have an idea in my head for how I want to display this, but it involves going to the lumber yard, buying molding that's thick enough, and building a big fat thick frame kind of like a shadow box with a pop-up top so I can display all of them together stacked up and then just open the tap and pull the first one out and put it in the back and rotate through, so, okay, I can look at this page for a couple weeks, and then I'm bored of looking at it, I'll rotate it and then I'll look at the next page. And it's one of those, it's an idea I've had in my head since like the third portfolio and it's like, oh this is a great idea. I should totally go do this. And it's, yeah it means going to the store and taking measurements and cutting stuff and making sure everything then fits and looks decent because I don't want it to look like crap, you know?
Dave: Right.
Matt: I mean, I could just buy it an easel and put the portfolios stacked out an easel, and just tell the kids, don't knock over my easel, every five minutes.
Dave: Right.
Matt: But that's, like I said, I just, it's one of those things like, or some of the original art collectors who buy page after page after page, like what are you doing with all this stuff? You're telling me your entire house is wallpapered in a little gray aardvark?
Dave: Yeah, we're all in the same boat, really, because it's, you can't look at everything that you have. There is an internal satisfaction that you have it. You know that it's there, and it's like, I've got Barry Windsor Smith’s “Red Nails”, the Artist’s Edition, the oversized book, and what I decided to do was to keep it in the Rectangle Office because this is the only place with a phone, with a landline and anytime that I, and it happens very seldom, where I'm forced to actually phone a business to try and get an answer on something, and I’m put on hold, I don't mind being put on hold, because I can just pull out “Red Nails”, and go through it as slowly as… you know, it's like, take your time! You want to put me on hold for two hours, that's great, I have an excuse to look at “Red Nails” for two hours. But I've got lots of other stuff here that, yes, that would be really great if I could display that, but there's only so much display space, and that's where, on my part, that's when the obligation to posterity kicks in, where it's I don't know what is going to be important to who when, and how far up ahead, and to what extent, so all I can do is try and conserve as much of the stuff that I did, so that it's in the same condition that I had it, when somebody in 2097 goes, “That actually exists? They've actually got that at the Off-White House?” Or, “they have access to that? Man that is that is exactly what I'm looking for, and here's why that's exactly what I'm looking for.” And well okay, that's why I did all of this Cerebus Archive stuff, so that however few people there are that that becomes the situation they're able to do that. All I can do is try and extend that to, well okay, the Cerebus Archive portfolios aren't as good as the artwork, but it's as close as you're going to get to the artwork, and then adding in the commentaries, which, it would be nice if I had unlimited time up ahead and could say, okay just start at the early pages in the Archive and just write your commentaries on them all the way through. And it's like, man, if my brain turns to cream cheese just doing “Cerebus” #4, you can imagine what the effect is going to be if that's all that I do in my working life. Let's say, you know, God-willing Strange Death of Alex Raymond actually gets done.
Matt: I was thinking about that the other day, of, you know, okay, best case scenario, you get through the Strange Death, you have everything, all the I’s dotted, all the T's crossed, you know, you're as far along and it's as done as you're gonna be able to get it in your lifetime, and you still have time, what's the next project? And I know the answer is, “A long nap, Matt. A long nap.” But, at the same…
Dave: Well, that’s what I said about when “Cerebus” is done, and it's like, well, yeah, you sleep for two or three days, and then you realize you've got this massive pile of stuff that you have to deal with.
Matt: Well, and something I've noticed about you, Dave, and I mean it's not a bad quality for all of us fans, but it's just a weird quality for the regular people in the world, is, you kind of have this tendency to like, “Oh I'm gonna do this little project. It won't take very long.” Then, 26 years later.
Dave: Yes.
Matt: I mean, “I'm gonna do a comic book!” Okay, “I'm gonna do 300 of them!” Do you know how long it takes to do 300 comics? Yes, yes Dave does and it's, yes okay…
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: “Now I'm gonna do a short little thin 48-page book.” Okay, and applause for “Judenhass” because that it was exactly what you said it was gonna be, it did not explode, it didn't mushroom out. It stayed its own contained thing and then, it was, “I'm gonna do a book about photorealism, tied together with fashion magazine parody”, and that kind of spiraled away from you, and “Cerebus Archive” the comic series kind of started to spiral away. And like the Weekly Update, which started as a, “Hey, we're reprinting ‘High Society’ and here's what's going on with that.” And now you're on, like, what 412 or something like that? I mean it's, you know, even these phone calls started as a, “Hey I don't want to waste my time typing things. I want to save the wrist for important stuff. So how about I just call you, Matt?” It's like, okay! And here we are, how many years later? And it's, like I said it's not a bad thing for, like, Margaret. You know, Margaret, I'm sure is listening to this right now going, “Oh they said my name again!” And she’s either really happy, or really sad.
Dave: [laughs] If we mentioned Margaret, even if it's only to point out that she uses “prolly” instead of “probably” and, what's the other thing that Margaret does that irritates me? Is, uh, oh! “A couple issues.” No, it's “a couple of issues” and it's not just Margaret now. It's like, I went, okay, I just have to get used to it with Margaret. The newspapers that I get are doing it! “A couple this” and it’s like, it’s a “couple of this”. How functionally illiterate are you? You're a newspaper! And it's like, don't worry, Grandpa's gonna be dead before anybody has to worry about this too much. But, yes, that's one of those, I try to put my time where it seems the most sensible to put the time. And, you know, just the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, I was very pleased with myself that the “Bandar Rubies” section, I went, okay, just, here's what I'm going to do at “Bandar Rubies”, there's other stuff that I could do, but I'm not going to do it, because I want to get through these stories and just explain what it is that I think Ward Greene is doing, and why he was doing it. And then, because I did the logo for “Bandar Rubies” and had copies of the typeface that I printed out, and I hadn't properly thanked Larry Wooten for the Off-White House stickers which Rolly's been going through great gun. It's like, well okay, it's not really original art. It kind of is, but it's, my “Bandar Rubies” lettering I thought it came out really good. Here's what the black and white looks like. Stuff that would have just gone in Margaret's bag, and I went, well okay, here's stuff that I'll send to Larry Wooten. And came to “On Location with Rip Kirby”, which was a publication King Features did in 1949, and came to the cover, and looked at the cover images, and knew where most of them were from, and went, ohh! I know what he's doing here! And it's like, yeah, but you just got through “Bandar Rubies” without getting bogged down in these side things, do you want to get bogged down in this side thing? And it's like, of course the first two images, the image of Desmond, and the image of Rip Kirby on the cover of “On Location with Rip Kirby” are both from “Bandar Rubies”. And at that point, you sent me the fax saying, “I don't know if Benjamin Hobbs sent you the stuff on the ruby slippers starting out as the silver slippers, but here's my information” and I took that as a sign that, okay, I am going to get bogged down in “On Location with Rip Kirby” but hopefully not severely bogged down. But I did start off going, okay, there's six people on the cover, just head shots, here's the six. I can fit all six of them on one page, I just have to explain why it is that this image is significant, and why I'm pretty sure Ward Greene picked it out, and of course, I start explaining this on my laptop, and okay, now the whole first page is taken up with Desmond. And then the whole second page is taken up with Rip Kirby. But I did… and the whole third page was taken up with Honey Dorian, and the whole fourth page was taken up with Pagan Lee, and it's like, well okay, this thing that I wasn't gonna do it, that was then just going to be a page, is now going to be six pages, which is a week's worth of work. Take a lesson from this Stop doing that. You can put it in there in the annotations, and that's what keeps happening as well, is that I go, okay, I've gotten this far, now I have to explain something else. Well, just put it in the annotations, and that becomes something that Eddie has to do, and Eddie's looking at the Strange Death of Alex Raymond annotations eating up, he estimates, the next five years of his life.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: It's probably going to be longer than that. And, in a way I hope that there is time left to me after Strange Death of Alex Raymond, and in another way it's like, no, if I can just get this one done and then die the week after, I'm going to call that a win.
Matt: [laughs] I don't feel so bad anymore. I keep kicking myself because I have my secret project number one, I have secret project number two, and I'm not working on either one of them. I have five issues of “Cerebus in Hell?” that I'm working on in my head, and some of them, like “Vark Wars 3”, there's part of me going, do we really need a “Vark Wars 3”?
Dave: It would make you happy, I don't know if it would make you happy enough to warrant the amount of time that you're gonna have to put into it.
Matt: Well the problem is, is that I love the puzzle, and I figured out 90% of the puzzle, and the last 10%, I'm kind of like, ehh, I just don't care. And it's like, yeah, you do, otherwise you wouldn't think about it.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And then, like, I came up with an idea for a “LGBTQ, Etc People” sequel that, the premise I came up with was that, the Infernal Florida has the “don't say gay bill” so now they're the “L’BGQT, Etc People” because they can't say gay.
Dave: Oh! Okay.
Matt: And I sent it to the team and like, hey, I came up with this idea, and I got a couple of strips in mind, and you know I have a spine to the issue but it's one of those where it could be a team thing where we could all pitch in ideas together. And you know I even found a cover to parody, which is the, I forget, one issue of “Uncanny X-Men” but it's one of the first Kitty Prydes, and the cover is, “Welcome to the X-Men, Kitty Pryde. Hope you survive the experience.” And I went, okay, “Welcome to the L’BTQ Etc People, Batvark. Hope you survive the experience.” and kind of gave a quick synopsis, which is, Batvark’s in a bar, a guy hits on him, he says “I'm not gay” and gets arrested for saying gay.
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And the judge gives him community service with the L’BGTQ Etc People, where he's got to do 100 hours of community service with the D.A.R.E. program, the “dick attraction resistance education” and the strips I had on that one was basically it's they stand up in front of a class going, “Don't be gay” and then showing Gladiator movies and, all the guys that are curious, and all the kids that are curious suddenly become gay, because that's how the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program worked, of the cops come in, and say don't do drugs, and show people drugs, and everyone I know that went through the program does drugs.
Dave: Right. Right.
Matt: So there was jokes there, and I kind of typed it up, and I sent it to the guys, and Hobbs came back with, “Well, wouldn't it be funnier if the law was you have to say gay?” And I'm like, no, the apostrophe is what's funny.
Dave: Right. Yeah. Well that's the situation you get into with, there you're writing two different comic books. That's a little further down here, where it's like you sent me the transcript of the Brain Trust about the printer. We're just coming up to the printer, and it's like, my God, no wonder you people never get any work done! [laughs] This is just bantering back and forth. I'm so glad that I do not have internet access. I don't know where I would fit email and internet access. People fax if they have to, but only if they have to. People email even when they don't have to. Even when it's a really bad idea to do so.
Okay, we're gonna move on from there to Michael R! It just wouldn't be a Please Hold for Dave Sim with Michael R of Easton, Pennsylvania. “Hi Dave! Thank you for the "Quick and Dirty Portfolios" of Cerebus No. 4 6-7/78. Are any differences between the one you sent me and what is being offered on this Kickstarter?” And the only difference would be the commentaries. That was one of the things that I was reet chuffed about when I came out back to Camp David, and Rolly had picked up the the quick and dirty “Cerebus” #4s with the 2005 cover reproduction on top of them. I just went through them and I went, that's perfect, just exactly the way it is, particularly that it's a little rough hewn. But nothing could be more appropriate in in my book for “Cerebus” #4 than a rough hewn format. So if you've got one of the “Cerebus” #4 quick and dirty portfolios, and you want to save yourself a few bucks, we will be happy to email you the commentaries or even print just a set of commentaries for you, and send them to you. It was an exceptional circumstance because, as you said the last time that we did Please Hold, I have to do the Cerebus Archive portfolio the way I've been doing them all along, and you can't suddenly change that in mid-stream. Which is why I went, okay, I'm doing this only because it's “Cerebus” #4, and it is this specialty item. It's not part of the Cerebus Archive number sequence. Number 10 will follow Number Nine at some point, but this is just, hey, this is roughly the same format, but no, you don't have to own all of the Cerebus Archive portfolios in order to have “Cerebus” #1 fit in. If you're just interested in the absolute earliest history of “Cerebus”, this is as close to the earliest history of “Cerebus” with 22 pages that you could possibly get. That having been said, Dagon is pushing for an oversized hardcover of “Cerebus” #4, on amazing paper with silver side on it, all that stuff that he does, and it's like, mmhm, I don't know if I'm going to do that. Let's wait and see how 6-7/78 sells. Let's see how long it takes to do the fulfillment. Let's see if there's any further interest after that, because one of the other things Dagon's talking about doing is an anniversary edition of “Swords” Volume One, which would basically be an Artist’s Edition size where if we've got scans of the original artwork from #1, #2, #3, or #4, they go in full size and then they're just remastered pages turned sideways after that. Not the easiest thing in the world to read, but here you go, if you want the original artwork to 1, 2, 3, & 4 that we've got access to, here's the oversized edition. But qualifier on that one for me is, no, I don't want to print in Asia. If we can figure out a way to print it in North America, and price it accordingly, then we will do that, or I will definitely take it into consideration. I've got Marshall Rogers’ layouts for “The Name of the Game is Diamondback.” I've got a couple of Diamondback pages, so it would be a really interesting oversized book, and if we were gonna do one, I think, “Swords of Cerebus” Volume One would be the one that we would do. But this is why I only approve the next project, and have a planning stage for the project after that with Dagon, because Dagon would have 25 books all lined up. And it's like, oh, we can't do that. We've got to be as concerned about the fulfillment as with the, “Ooh, ahh, here's my money! When's it coming in?”
So, “My other question pertains to the last "Please Hold". You and Matt were discussing about video editing and the difficulties of it. Has there been any outtakes on your Weekly Updates which maybe you can put together to make a bloopers segment? It might be fun to watch. Michael R.” Uh, no, the closest to that was when I was recording the Weekly Updates, plural, for Chris Woerner's all-comedy book, “Rococo Coffee”. I had of excerpts flagged in the book while I was doing the Weekly Update, and [laughs] had a great deal of trouble getting through some of them without laughing. And I thought, well okay, all I have to do is is get one done where I'm not laughing, and then delete the rest of them, but just this once, let's not do that. So those all went to Dave Fisher. Usually I don't do that, because it's confusing enough for Dave Fisher to keep doing the Weekly Updates, The simpler I can make them, the better. So I just have a card that says, you know, Weekly Update start” and I hold that up to the camera, so it says start, and then I do my spiel, hopefully all in one clip. And then I've got another one that says “Weekly Update end” or stop, and that way when Fisher downloads them, it's like, “Okay, this is obviously this many Weekly Updates. All I have to do is start this one here, and stop it there, and I'm all done. And then stick a clip number one on the front of it, where I say “Weekly Update for Friday, July whatever.” I always lose track of the dates, because I'm recording a bunch of them at one time, and I don't know how far ahead Fisher is, how many times he had to substitute a promotion for a “Cerebus in Hell?” So I try to do a tight shot on my face, where you can't see whether my hair is growing out or it's been shaved recently, and say “Weekly Update for Friday, September 3rd” and then stop, and do another clip number one, “Weekly Update for Friday, September 10th.” “Weekly Update for Friday, September 17th.” And then I just do a bunch of those, and those go out with the actual Weekly Updates, and then Fisher just sticks them together. Just pick one on the front of it, and if one of them has a “Cerebus in Hell?” promotion, and so consequently you don't need a clip number one to that one, just throw that one away. But make sure that you throw that one away, otherwise you're gonna be going, “Where's the September 7th? I need the September 7th one!” so you're right! All of this stuff, it starts really really simple, and then gets really really complicated. And that's actually the simplified version of Weekly Update, where it's every month, every month and a half, I sit down and do, I try to do like five of them or seven of them, and then it's like, okay, now I don't have to worry about these for two months, three months. Same thing with the “Cerebus in Hell?” promotions. The old clips that Sean Robinson sends me. He tells me we're almost out of them. I do five of them, and that's it, or six of them. As he says, “Now we don't have to worry about these for another five and a half months.” There you go, that's what stuff is like behind the scenes here at the Off-White House!
That brings us to Isaiah, the printer, in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The short answer on that one is, even if, and it's a big if, he was able to compete with Marquis’ price on printing the trade paperbacks or “Cerebus in Hell?”, the really tough one for any printer to compete with is that Marquis Printing, their printing press, is just across the river from Plattsburgh, New York. And Plattsburgh, New York has a Diamond warehouse, which means all they have to do is load up all of the comic books that they've printed and then drive them across the border and deliver them to Diamond, and Diamond breaks them down from there, and ships them from there to all of their other locations, and of course to all of the locations supplied by the Plattsburgh warehouse. Particularly in this day and age, where fuel prices are going through the roof, that's very difficult to compete with. You know, to say, okay, this is the size of a trade paperback order that we would do, or this is how many comic books we print a month, can you get them from Richmond Hill to Plattsburgh, New York for free? Or if not for free, at least for a nominal charge of like $50 or whatever? And it's like, they couldn't do that ten years ago, let alone now.
Matt: Well, that was the, I believe his email, it's, I think it was specifically, it was, “Why, I saw you're doing Kickstarters, and we help with fulfillment” and it's like, yeah, but we're not regular Kickstarter guys who, “Okay, we got the money. Now what do we do?” It's always, “We have a plan before we get the money.”
Dave: Right. I think the only possible competition that he could present would be with Alfonso, at exactly that level of, “You're only going to be printing 100 of these, or whatever it is. So this is the price that that you're gonna wanna get.” The disadvantage there is, Alfonso's in Kitchener. So any dealings that we have to do with Alfonso, Rolly goes over there every Thursday, and then just drives back whatever it is, and you know we do the fulfillment from here. Again, you've got shipping costs from Richmond Hill, or Rolly's got to drive all the way to Richmond Hill and do the same thing that he's already doing with Alfonso, but instead of being able to do it every week, it would have to be, “Okay, we're going to do this every month, or every month and a half.” Very very difficult to compete with either of thos.
Matt: Well, and it was one of those, I got this back in April, and I kind of forgot about it, and then it was going through the inbox, oh yeah, there's this. And it's one of those, it's, yeah, it's probably not anything important, but at the same time, I'll send it to the Brain Trust and see what they say. And it went pretty much the way I thought it was gonna, which was, being jokey, being jokey, being jokey, Eddie coming in being kind of sensible, being jokey, being jokey, being jokey. [laughs]
Dave: [laughs] This is how Aardvark-Vanaheim runs, and I'm sure this is how our Aardvark-Vanaheim will always run, and thank God for sensible Eddie Khanna, who is always there to go, “Uh no, the man asked the specific question.” Yeah, he's actually, “It probably would hurt to forward to Dave just in case, since they are in Ontario, although I think all the responses here are probably more accurate in what the reaction will actually be.” Um, yeah.
Okay, so, then we move on to Colin Upton’s fax and that's-- or Colin Upton's email. You see, that's the problem, I send a fax to you to turn into an email for Colin, and then Colin wants to do email. So it's, fortunately it all gets slowed down at that point, so people learn, “Okay, if you're gonna hear back from Dave, you're probably going to hear back from him in three weeks or four weeks or something like that. It's not gonna be overnight or tomorrow.” So he was asking about the digest, and yes, when I said “could you do a digest?” I meant five and a half, by eight and a half inches. I'm not sure what we would print it on, but it's far more convenient to just do a sheet of copy paper folded in half, and there's a lot more possibilities with that for Alfonso printing that we can take a look at depending on how many copies of this of this sells. When Colin gets it done, and when we can hook that up with one of our own Kickstarters. So if you can just send Colin an email when we get off the phone and say, “Yes, Dave, when he said digest, he didn't mean mini-comic, he meant digest. Five and a half by eight and a half inches.”
So, reading through the rest of Colin's email response here, yeah I'm definitely not going to Toronto for TCAF. I didn't know that Conundrum Press, and I apologize for not knowing who Conundrum Press is, is going to be who is arranging his trip to Toronto. If you can work out some way to Kitchener as part of that trip, and you find a place to stay in Toronto, the mind boggles. Peter Birkamoe, as far as I know, is still the organizer of TCAF, so it might be somebody that you would want to talk to about the fact that you're coming all the way from Vancouver to TCAF. I would hope Peter Birkamoe had heard of Colin Upton, but I don't know if that's a guarantee. But, uh, yeah! Let's get your Dave Sim digest rolling, Colin, and just send me the pages or scans of the pages as you get them done.
Matt: I will let Colin know tonight about the sizing, and if, you know, depending on how he wants to get the pages to you, if he needs to email them through me, you know, I can get him to you. I’m willing to make things work, I'm also willing to not get involved, because, hey that's one less set of hands!
Dave: There you go! There you go. Okay, then we move onto, where is it here? Where did you go? Oh! “This email is for Mr Sim. My name is Nick and I'm one of the hosts for the MGTOW Chats podcast live stream. We did a couple of live streams dedicated to ‘Tangent’ back in 2018. I really enjoyed reading it and i had written…” Where did page nine go? It was here just a second ago. There it is. “…an article that went viral last year using excerpts about women and their infatuation with dogs. It would be a great pleasure to talk to you about ‘Tangent’ and how well it's aged and how you feel about it today.” I don't feel about things. I think. “The blowback for it, if it's changed you, or have you changed your views. Maybe discuss your social observations in 2022. My channels between YouTube and BitChute get about 2000 views. We aren't popular or anything, just guys chatting, but we have had some amazing guests on.” Yeah, this is Please Hold for Dave Sim. It's pretty much my only outlet for these kinds of things for exactly that reason, that it does tend to eat up time, and there's a sense of, well I hope somebody out there is enjoying this! But it's not really my kind of thing. Just me trying to meet the internet halfway.
Matt: [laughs]
Dave: I do appreciate the fact that he sent the email to you, I'm going to just treat it as a question on Please Hold for Dave Sim, and I would have to reread “Tangent” in order to say, this is what I disagree with now, or these are qualifications that I might or might not have about it. I know that I worked very very hard on that essay, and tried to cover as much as I possibly could cover, which I think I did. I think it was, okay, I'm not… this could be twice as long trying not to hurt people's feelings, but that's not really my purpose here. To express myself and express my ideas in such a way as to not hurt people's feelings, which is, I think, the problem that I predicted we were going to get into, and the problem that we've gotten into as a society, is we can either actually communicate with each other and just find out where the, “okay we'll just have to agree to disagree” points are. Or we can have absolutely zero communication and just have people nattering at us all the time about inclusivity, when they have a very short list of things that they include, and other things that they not only don't include but which they are specifically intent on having eradicated, and are really indignant that other people don't want to join with them in eradicating things that they disagree with and making sure that things that they disagree with aren't being communicated. My experience at this point, which is, “Tangent” was… trying to remember what year that was, 2008? 2009?
Matt: No! “Tangent” was like 2002, 2003.
Dave: Right, right. Earlier than that, it was before “Cerebus” was done. So we're talking about 20 years later, and in terms of… I certainly don't have any appreciable contact with human beings, because the thing that I was writing about in “Tangent” has become so ubiquitous that I think I'm discharging my obligation by subscribing to the National Post and reading that the six days a week that it comes in. The Epoch Times, which comes out once a week, I subscribe to that. I also get frequently the Globe and Mail for free, which is an extreme left-wing newspaper. Local Waterloo Region Record, which is an extreme left-wing newspaper. The Toronto Star which is way way over extreme left-wing stuff, and I just go, all right. This is the world as it's being presented to me as a, “This is what a newspaper is. This is what in 2022 is considered universally agreed upon statements of facts. This is what happened, this is what took place yesterday, and here’s us as journalists dispassionately and factually conveying the information to you as a reader.” And it's like, mhmm, no. This is all feminist psychosis stuff, which is fine. Anybody who wants to choose psychosis, we're certainly at the point of a society of going, “Just choose your personal form of psychosis and immerse yourself in it if you like that, and make sure that you never read anything written by anybody who doesn't share your psychosis.” So it's one of those, even if I thought to myself, well, maybe I should give comic book conventions the benefit of the doubt, or maybe I should give a comic book store signing the benefit of the doubt. It's, uh no. All I have to do is read that whole spectrum of newspapers, mostly headlines, articles where I go, okay, well, here's a new point of view on this. Let's see what passes for intelligent discussion in 2022. It's like, mhmm, no. I wouldn't walk across the street to discuss these subjects with these people, I'm certainly not going to fly across the continent, or endure the chaos at Pearson Airport in Toronto, so that I could go to another sensibly run airport, but still have to come back through Pearson at some point. It seems obvious to me what Justin Trudeau is doing there, which is, “Everybody needs to have a smaller carbon footprint, so if we can just make Pearson Airport as absolutely chaotic and badly run as possible, and get Air Canada to cancel 15% of their flights, and then 30% of their flights, and 40% of their flights because it's just structured in such a way that it's a really nightmarish situation, people will stop flying where they're going.” Justin Trudeau will still fly where he's going to go because he's the Prime Minister, and he's on a private jet. That doesn't make him happy, he's probably got a much larger carbon footprint than he wants to have, but this is really the way that he thinks, and this is the way mainstream “political thought”, is in Canada at this point, which is, “We have to just eradicate anything that has to do with fossil fuels, and to whatever extent possible fossil fuels themselves, and it'll be happily ever after for all of them.” And it's like, uh, again, I can't really say that I have a comfort level engaging in kind of any kind of discourse with people like that. It's just, no, look at the situation in Ukraine. Canada could have been in the situation of supplying Europe with the fuel that it needs to keep people from freezing to death this winter, and instead it was all this green virtue signaling, and it's like, well, okay, I think that's a bad trade-off. I think most sensible people, now that it's happened, go, “That's a bad trade-off. We shouldn't have ended up where we are, but we ended up where we are because nobody can talk to these people, because they're not interested in talking. They're just interested in forging ahead on their chosen path as misapprehended as it is.” Joe Biden canceled the KXL Pipeline on his first day in office, and is now going around begging OPEC to increase their production, because he can't get any more oil from Canada because everything that would have been coming online now, if he had not canceled KXL, is just not going to happen. So it's, I think that's the best I can do, Nick, in terms of saying, okay, 20 years later on “Tangent”, what do I have to say? And it's like, well, everything that I said was wrong with society, and going wrong with society, and all of the places where we were going off the rails we keep going further and further off of the rails. So 20 years later, I'm just going, well, I'm still waiting for common sense to make a comeback, and I don't really see that kind of common sense making a comeback. We'll see what happens with the midterm elections in the US in November, and that's usually the best that I can do. Read the newspaper, find out who's getting elected, what their policies are, and just go, well, okay. I'm not someone who's helping to drive this bus because nobody wants me to drive this bus, the people who are driving the bus seem to think that they're getting where they're going, and I think they just keep driving further and further into the wood and there's nothing I can do about that. There's nothing that anybody, I think, with a lick of common sense can do about that, or could do about that in 2022, or will be able to do about that, until these people go, “Okay, we were wrong. We can't just turn the whole world into the Jetsons overnight because we want the world to turn that way. The world is what it is, we have to deal with reality on its own terms.”
Matt: Okay, quick follow-up. When you're reading the newspaper, do you read the funnies?
Dave: Uhh… Actually there aren't funnies in, the National post doesn't have them. The Epoch Times doesn't have them. One Region Record does. Globe and Mail and Toronto Star both do. Why are you asking?
Matt: I just, it's, well you're working on the Strange Death of Alex Raymond, which is the history of photorealism in comic strips, and they don't really do photorealism comic strips anymore, but at the same time, I just, it's one of those, every time you mention reading the newspaper, and in the back of mind, I go, huh, I wonder if Dave rea-- cause I know you don't read the sports pages anymore, you stopped doing that.
Dave: No.
Matt: And it's like, I wonder if Dave stopped reading the funnies. I mean, it is mostly variations of Charles Schulz, I mean you're not gonna get somebody doing fantastic “Terry and the Pirates” style adventure strips, but it's one of those, it's something I've always kind of wondered of, well, does Dave look at, I don't know, “Pickles”? You know, I mean, I don't read the newspaper anymore just because it got thinner and thinner to the point where I'm like, I'm not paying for this because the local paper…
Dave: [laughs] Yeah there is that to it! I mean, the Waterloo Region Record, I'm paying like $2.50 for it, and I read it in about an hour at the most, and that's like, front to back. But with an extremely extreme left-wing newspaper, that's a small mercy. [laughs] It's like, I'll pay $2.50 for this if you promise never to make it any bigger than it already is. I do read the comic strips. What's the guy that does the one about the working world? “Dilbert” is in the Globe and Mail in the business section, and on the comics page in the Waterloo Region Record, and he's had a really successful track record lately. Strips tend to go like that. They're funny, and then they're sort of not funny, and then they're like, okay, I can understand how somebody would think that was funny, and then they'll just have a glistening little moment. “Blondie” is in the Waterloo Region Record, and they've had it since 1932 or something like that? They got “Blondie” really early on, and it's very strange looking at strips like “Blondie” trying to incorporate laptops and internet and and things like that into the punch line. It's you know, okay, that's sort of funny, but it's really not “Blondie”. I've got a mental image of what a good “Blondie” strip is, and most of these aren't in those categories. But you know, I have the respect that “Blondie” has been, I think, the top selling strip in terms of number of newspapers for decades. “Peanuts” and “Garfield” were really it's only competition. I can't say that I've laughed out loud at any of them. There was a “Dilbert” a week ago, two weeks ago, something like that, where yeah, I read it and I laughed out loud. Well, okay, I didn't completely waste my time. It's not a real time waster to read a page of comic strips, and it's interesting to see exactly what you're talking about, the “Peanuts”-ified element of comic strips. “What's the simplest drawing that we can do and still call it a drawing?” Wiley's strip, I forget what that one's called, and “For Better or Worse”, God bless them, they're still drawing exactly as detailed as they always have, but the strips are shrinking so far that those two strips I always have to get the magnifying glass out even just to read them, because the lettering is that small. And you know, with Lynn Johnston, I think it's the fact that Lynn Johnston hasn’t done the strip for years, so it's all reprints from when strips were much bigger. And God bless them for saying, “This is art. and we're not going to dumb it down completely just to satisfy this ever shrinking newspaper.” So there's the answer to that one. And Justin, I think Justin's our last one here?
Matt: I believe so.
Dave: Oh no, we got Margaret after that. “Hello, I've just begun my first reading of ‘Cerebus’ and I'm just getting to ‘High Society’ and am only a few chapters in. Dave, do you have any tips for a first time reader? I know people on the group have very in-depth conversations about the saga as a whole. I'm just afraid perhaps I would miss something if I weren't in the ‘right’ headspace. Appreciate you taking the time.” And I appreciate you taking the time, as well, Justin, up there in Miramachi, New Brunswick. And you wrote, “Is he asking if he should smoke weed before reading?” and it's like uh, that's very possible. And that certainly was one of the “attributes”of “Cerebus” back when it started, was it went really good for people who got stoned and liked reading comics when they were stoned. Which is, you know, the way that it was created, by somebody whose idea of a good working day was start off with a joint. My advice would be just read it yourself, because I can't say that Cerebus fans have a terrible track record for saying how you should read “Cerebus”, but they have had unhappy moments, like for years, it was, “You don't have to read the ‘Cerebus’ volume. Just start with ‘High Society’.” And it's like, well okay, but there's stuff coming up ahead, you know, ten years up ahead, eight years up ahead, where actually you're gonna have to know what happened in the “Cerebus” volume, but I’m not gonna tell you that because I don't wanna spoil people's appreciation while I'm creating this book, but I’ve always… go ahead.
Matt: I tested that theory. I gave Janice and her friend, the neighbor that moved to Florida, Elena, each a copy of “High Society” so they could be a book club pen pal thing. And I asked Janice about a week or two after Elena left, I'm like, so have you guys have been reading? She's like, “Yeah.” Like, how far are you guys into? “Like page nine.”
Dave: [laughs]
Matt: And I'm like, well, what does she think of it? “She doesn't know who any of these characters are, and she's really confused as to what's going on.” And I'm like, oh yeah, so like when Elrod shows up, if you don't have issue four, and issue seven, and issue 12, if you don't have the first three appearances of Elrod under your belt, you don't know what the deal is, and you're really confused. They have no idea who Lord Julius is, and I started to write up in my head of, okay, I'm gonna write a quick little primer of the first 25 issues so that I can give it to her, here's what here and I haven't actually gotten around to it because they both kind of gave up on the book because it was confusing to them. But I was starting off with as a Conan parody, because it's Cerebus, of, “Know ye, o princess, that from the time of the fall of the Black Tower Empire to the rise of the Sons of Isu, lived an age undreamt of.” And you know, basically parodying the Conan preamble, and it's one of those, I got as far as writing that in my head, going, yeah at this point I should just do that as a blog post, and put it up on A Moment of Cerebus of, “Okay, so you listened to all your friends that said skip Volume One, here's what you need to know to read Volume Two.”
Dave: Yeah, see, that doesn't work. That's one of those, “Cerebus” works on a percentage basis. I’ve got the sales figures here for July 3rd, and the “Cerebus” volume sold like 23 copies last week, and the rest of them were down around like seven, five, something like that. And it's like, the percentage of people who go, “Okay, I keep hearing about this Cerebus. I'll buy the ‘Cerebus’ volume and I’ll give it a try” and on a percentage basis, maybe 3% of them go, “That was really good. I want to keep going. I want to find out what happens to the rest of this.” And the rest of them go, “I don't get it. I really don't understand why people think this is good. I don't think this is good. I'm glad that other people think it's good, but I'm just gonna not read any more of this.” So it's one of those, I've never recommended listening to other people who recommend books, because I think people have individual taste. I didn't read Ayn Rand for years and years and years, because everybody just said, “Oh, don't bother. She's just a Nazi.” And it's like, oh okay, well I certainly don't want to read a novel by a Nazi. And then as soon as I read it, it's like I went, oh, okay, I know why they're calling her a Nazi and that's just one of those, I really should have read one of these earlier. “War and Peace”, I sat down with a notepad and went, okay, I understand this is really intricate, complicated stuff. So I'm gonna write down everybody's name as they show up, so that I'm able to keep track of this completely complicated book that the average person couldn't possibly get through. And it's like, oh no, this is effortless. This guy knows exactly what he's doing. I don't know where they came up with this “how complicated and difficult to follow this is” and the same thing happened with the Bible. It's like, “Oh it's just a bunch of fairy tales, you know, that priests made up so that they could get all the best food. You know, I'm god and I got all the chicks .” That kind of thing. It's like, oh okay, well, I'll save myself the trouble of reading the Bible. And when I read the Bible I went, uh, I don't really know what this is, but no, it's definitely not fairy tale. So my recommendation to people is, if you've heard about something, and you're interested in reading it, and you're one of those people that picks up things just to see if you like it, pick it up, see if you like it. If you don't like it, don't apologize, or don't feel bad, or don't think, you know, “There's some part missing in me.” It's just not your kind of thing. We gotta get over in that direction as a society of going, “This is this is not my kind of thing” and don't apologize for it. “This is my kind of thing” and don't apologize for it. It's like, you go find the things that you're interested in, and you'll be as inclusive with the people that you're willing to include in that, and God bless you! I hope you have a wonderful life. But don't tell me what I'm allowed to read, or what I'm allowed to say, or what people I'm allowed to associate with, because you're just making up stuff about these people because you don't agree with them. So anybody that you don't agree with is a Nazi and it's like, that's way way too simplistic. That's fine if you want to live that way, and you want to think that way, and that's how you want to run your life, but don't try doing that to other people who are open to, you know, I'm always interested in how other people have put the world together. I wouldn't be reading the Toronto Star, I wouldn't be reading the Waterloo Region Record if I didn't have that nature. At least you're finding out, well, okay, this is this seems sensible to these people. Because this newspaper is still going, these are the people that they're paying to fill it, with their journalists. So across the board, whether it's “Cerebus”, whether it's “Glamourpuss”, whether it's “Judenhass”, whether it's Strange Death of Alex Raymond, if you're reading books for entertainment, and for edification, pick it up, read a few pages of it, and either it's not your kind of thing, or in Janice and her friend's case it could be it's not your kind of thing right now. There's lots of stuff that that I read, or tried to read as a child or as a teenager and went, ah, no, this just isn't doing it for me, and then came to as an adult and went, oh, okay, I just wasn't ready for it.
Okay, moving on to Margaret. Where'd you go, Margaret?! You’re under here somewhere. It was a Notebook page, right?
Matt: Yep.
Dave: What was the Notebook page that she was talking about?
Matt: Oh, jeeze.
Dave: Oh there it is. “She described it thusly. Dave Sim’s eight Cerebus notebooks covered 70-79 and had 86 pages scanned in. Last July is when we last saw pages from it in layout for ‘Cerebus’ #73. Page 51 of the Notebook has a listing of issue numbers, dates, potential titles, and bits and pieces of what would be in that issue. Like issue 77, August, being called ‘Odd Transformations’ and the note, ‘Asleep and dreaming’.” And then you write, “And the comments were: Anonymous: The ‘issue three hundred’ is close enough to Odd Transformations to make me wonder if there was an intention to foreshadow something of ‘The End’ there. This is even before Alone, unmourned and unloved.” It's kind of tiny here for me. So I wrote issue 300 in in one of the…?
Matt: You wrote it near the line where it says “Odd Transformations”.
Dave: Okay, “Asleep and dreaming”. Right? Oh! And then there's ”issue 300” just over next to that.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: Mmm. If I did, I decided against it. Because I have a pretty good picture in my mind of “Odd Transformations”, and I think it was one of those, do I want to foreshadow Cerebus going towards the light in issue 300? And I think, if I'm thinking of the right one, “Odd Transformations” I think is the one with him walking towards a vanishing point, and chess pieces are flying towards him. And I think that was what I opted for instead, was thinking that, yeah I can foreshadow it, but how many… have you ever read an experience of that? Of someone having the near-death experience, or knowing of the near-death experience, and then actually dreaming it? And it's like, I couldn't remember any instance of that.
Matt: I only know of one, and that's Abraham Lincoln.
Dave: Really?
Matt: Abraham Lincoln apparently had a dream a few months before he was assassinated that he was in the White House, and it was full of people, and they were crying, and he asked a woman what was wrong, and she said, “The president has been shot.”
Dave: Mm, yeah, but that's not the going towards the light thing. That's what I'm talking about specifically. Gore Vidal had a dream that he was at the White House, he was the half-brother-in-law of Jackie Kennedy, and he was at the White House, and walked into a room, and Jackie was there and her front was covered in blood, and she said, “What's to become of me?” So, it's like, yeah, there are foreshadowing dreams like that, about death, and about death taking place. I'm talking about the after-death experience.
Matt: Other than in movies, where they have somebody in the story almost die, yeah, I don't… you're right. I don't think of any foreshadowing the “after.”
Dave: Right. I know I've never had that experience dreaming, and you know, having a lucid dream and going, “Oh my God, I think I'm dead because this is how they always describe, you rise up out of your body, and there's a bright light, and you go towards the bright light, and all of the people that you knew when you were alive are in the bright light.” So it was one of those, yeah, mm, you don't want to do something, particularly in foreshadowing, that you don't have any kind of precedent for. It would be interesting to find out if there are our precedents for that, of, “Yeah, I had that dream, and that's exactly what was happening in it ,and I consciously thought, ‘wow, I must be dead’.” Because that's certainly the experience that people have when they do have the near-death experience, is, “Oh my God, you know, I've read descriptions of this, and this is exactly what's happening!” Which is why I've really got a bee in my bonnet about, when that happens to you, instead of looking at the light or going towards the light, just kneel down and pray. And you might have to pray for, as it says in the Koran, a day or a part of the day, but that's gonna be your experience in the afterlife. You'll find out what you thought was a day, or a part of the day, was actually 700 years, or 1000 years, and now it's judgment day. So that's the best I can do on that one. And that brings it in for a landing at just about exactly three hours.
Matt: [exhales] We gotta stop being such chatty Cathys.
Dave: We've got to! We've got to. There's got to be a better way to build a railroad than this. I'm going to, maybe I have to [laughs] go completely backwards on what this was going to be in the first place, and say I'll type my answers and I'll just read them to you over the phone.
Matt: No…
Dave: No! That's not gonna work. Forget it, forget it. Okay, you have a good night, Matt.
Matt: You too, Dave! Talk to you next month.
Dave: Talk to you next month. Buh-bye.
